For example, there are the constant reminders that external powers most notably, the United Kingdom and France established the existing borders. Resistance against the so called Sykes Picot order nurtured the founding myths of many states and political movements in the region.

Unlike Lebanon during its 15 year civil war, no regional power today would be able to contain Syria s war within its borders. As a result, it is much more likely that Syria s disintegration would call the entire post World War I (or post Ottoman) Middle Eastern state system also called the Sykes Picot system into question.

A couple of weeks later, Erdoğan himself unleashed a furious anti Western diatribe at Istanbul s Marmara University. In his speech, nbsp he compared the West s interference in the Middle East today with the British officer Lawrence of Arabia s involvement in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I, and blasted the nbsp Sykes Picot Agreement, which has since defined the Middle East s political map.

No such hope currently exists for the Middle East, whose contemporary political borders were largely established by Britain and France during WWI, when the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges Picot negotiated the division of the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, the creation of Israel harks back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whereby the subsequent British mandatory power in Palestine supported the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.

NEW DELHI As the West begins to gear up for the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Middle East is being convulsed as never before by the legacy of the Ottoman Empire s breakup. Look no farther than Syria, where one part of that legacy the Sykes Picot Agreement, which divided the Levant into British and French spheres of influence even while the Great War still raged is coming to a brutally violent end.

The Middle East named for its geographic position between Europe and East Asia was under Ottoman rule for 400 years before the Allied powers, after defeating the Ottomans in World War I, partitioned the region into distinct political units that, under the Sykes Picot Agreement, fell within spheres of influence carved out by the United Kingdom and France. But, in response to these new divisions, an Arab awakening shaped by pan Arabism and support for Palestine was occurring.

The contemporary map of the Middle East was drawn by the victorious Western imperial powers, Great Britain and France, during and after WWI. While the war was still raging, they signed an agreement drafted by the diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François George Picot, which delineated their respective spheres of influence across the Levant an agreement that entirely disregarded the region s history, ethnic and religious traditions and affiliations, and the will of local populations.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the great powers of the day, Britain and France, carved out successor states in order to ensure their control over the Middle East s oil, geopolitics, and transit routes to Asia. Their cynicism reflected, for example, in the Sykes Picot Agreement nbsp established a lasting pattern of destructive outside meddling.