What if Sykes-Picot hadn't been signed?

As much as they might fear or loathe the messenger, there is at least one stated goal of the murderous Islamic State with which many in the Arab world agree: the effective final dismantling of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It was that agreement, penned in secret by two mid-level British and French bureaucrats in early 1916, which served as the framework for the imperial carving-up of the Middle East and the establishment of the artificial borders that have proved so untenable today.

To appreciate fully the depth of Arab bitterness over Sykes-Picot, one must recall another secret agreement forged just a few months before. In October 1915, with the British war effort going badly almost everywhere, the chief political administrator in British Egypt, Henry McMahon, had finalised a pact with Emir Hussein, the ruler of the Hejaz region of Arabia, to raise an Arab revolt against the Ottomans in exchange for a future independent Arab nation comprising virtually the entire Middle East.

But under the later Sykes-Picot Agreement, most Arab lands of any economic or political value were divided between the British and French. Needless to say, no mention of this revision was made to Hussein. After the double-cross was revealed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, enraged Arab nationalists sparked anti-western riots in a nearly unbroken arc from French-controlled Morocco across to British-controlled Iraq. Underway in the Middle East today is a sweeping repudiation of the artificial nation states imposed by Sykes-Picot.

What might have happened if the British hadn’t implemented Sykes-Picot, but had instead upheld their promise of Arab independence? It would almost certainly not have created—at least not in any lasting way—the unified Arab nation of Hussein’s imaginings. One of the paradoxical strengths of the Ottoman empire had been its very lack of central authority, a system whereby the empire’s far-flung ethnic and religious minority homelands enjoyed an extraordinary degree of self-rule. The result was a chasm of experience and history across the Arab world—Beirut in 1919 was as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as any European city, even as slavery was still practised in Arabia—that would have quickly defeated the ambitions of Hussein or any other aspirant to a unified Arab nation. With the added pressure of modernisation creating distinct political and economic powerbases, the result would have been an inevitable fracturing of the region into its component parts.

Perhaps not surprisingly, much of that fracturing would have occurred along the fault-lines long recognised by the Ottomans. Without the British-imposed concoction of Iraq, the Shia-majority Basra region would have become an independent oil-rich enclave similar to Kuwait, while the Sunni-majority region of Baghdad became its poorer neighbour. An independent Kurdish nation would have arisen, comprising modern-day northern Iraq and eastern Syria. In “greater Syria,” by contrast, political evolution would have led to the creation of a larger and more cohesive nation; a Syria consisting of its current incarnation, along with Jordan—cut from whole cloth by the British—and Palestine.

That, of course, leaves the question of Israel. But given that the Balfour Declaration—the 1917 British proclamation that encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine and provided the seed for the future state of Israel—would not have even been conceived without the pre-existing Sykes-Picot plan, it’s a question rendered redundant. That said, Jewish emigration to Palestine had long preceded the Balfour Declaration, and it’s quite conceivable that a Syrian government in Damascus, anxious for international Jewish capital and technological prowess, would have granted a kind of condominium status to a Jewish-dominated Palestine, similar to that now existing between China and Hong Kong.

This leaves one more great irony. In the wake of Sykes-Picot, Hussein was derided by much of the Arab world as a useful fool to the European imperialists. His diminished status played perfectly into the hands of his longtime and far more conservative regional rival, Ibn Saud, who overthrew Hussein in 1924 and established the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Without Sykes-Picot, the moderate Hussein and his western-leaning sons might still  have been in power when oil was discovered in Arabia in 1938, and the region became the strategic centre of the universe.

None of these alterations would have been simple or necessarily peaceful, but without the artificial template of Sykes-Picot, they would have been local problems sorted out by local powers in an organic way. Instead, Sykes-Picot spawned a century-long culture of grievance in the Arab world; a climate of bitterness and suspicion that has now fairly relegated the west to the sidelines as the regional map is torn apart.