Owen, Roger. "The End of Empires: The emergence of the modern Middle Eastern state" In State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, 3rd ed., by Roger Owen, 5-22. London: Routledge, 2004.

Owen, Roger. "The End of Empires: The emergence of the modern Middle Eastern state" In State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, 3rd ed., by Roger Owen, 5-22. London: Routledge, 2004.

• At the turn of the 20th Century, the Middle East was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled for 400 years over territories from southern Europe to North Africa and West Asia. This left the states of the Middle East with a legacy of Ottoman administration and bureaucratic culture (5).
• In response to threats from Europe, the Ottoman Empire underwent a series of reforms from the 18th Century onwards that were designed to resistant European expansion. These reforms allowed the Ottomans to keep up militarily, administratively, and economically with Europe, but at the cost of European encroachments into Ottoman economics and politics and the rise of nationalism among the Empire's peoples, particularly the Christian Armenians and Maronites (5).
• The reform process within the Ottoman Empire intensified during the turn of the 20th Century, as a series of wars saw the Ottomans lose their Balkan possessions and lose a war against Italy for Libya and the Dodecanese islands. In 1908, a revolution brought the Young Turks to power, a group that promised major reforms but also articulated a Turkish nationalism that alienated Arabs and other imperial minorities (5-6).
• Prior to WWI, there was little support for Arab nationalism, as, even though they disagreed about imperial politics, all Muslims recognized the Ottoman Sultan as the religious leader of Islam. Most Muslims also saw the Ottoman state as necessary to avoid European colonial domination. Support for Ottoman rule was the strongest in areas most threatened by European encroachment, as in Palestine due to an influx of Zionist settlers (6).
• The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War resulted in the region being carved in mandates between Britain and France: Syria and Lebanon to France and Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq to Britain. In a concession to Arab demands for autonomy and American support for the principle of self-determination, these mandates were granted some basic representative institutions to prepare the Arabs for independence (6).
• Palestine was a special case, as the passage of the Balfour Declaration gave the British Mandatory government there the responsibility to both prepare that territory for self-governance and to establish a Jewish home in that territory (6).
• The establishment of British and French rule in the Middle East sparked a number of revolts, including in Iraq in 1920 and in Palestine against both British rule and Jewish settlement in 1920. In Syria, the French mandate had to be enforced a war against the Kingdom of Syria and a subsequent rural revolt from 1925 to 1927 (6-7).
• In Egypt, the refusal of the Paris Peace Conference to accept the Egyptian delegation after Britain's occupation of that country in 1914 sparked a massive revolt in 1919 that led to Britain to recognize Egyptian independence in 1922 (7).
• In Anatolia, several European powers tried to establish spheres of influence. These efforts were rebuffed militarily by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established the Turkish Republic in 1923 (7).
• Persia was at risk of being dominated by European forces after the First World War, until Reza Shah used his army to force the British, Russians, and assorted tribal forces from Persia and reestablished sovereignty (7).
• By the end of the 1920s, the French and the British had established themselves as the dominant powers in the Middle East, controlling that region's natural resources alongside the USA. Turkey, Egypt, and Iran, while independent, had to recognize British and French power and emerging states, like the Saudis on the Arabian Peninsula, had to seek British support (7).
• There were only three official colonies in the Middle East: French Algeria, British Aden, and Italian Libya. European powers exercised varying degrees of direct power throughout all the countries of the region, however. All of these territories had some colonial administrative structure (8-9).
• Upon assuming colonial control of these states, European colonial administrations sought to impose recognized borders, catalog the peoples within those borders, establish ranks of citizenship and areas of jurisdiction and control, and to establish agreements with neighboring states for the joint administration of these borders (9-10).
• Although the full trappings of a modern administrative bureaucracy and legal system were only introduced under colonial rule, many states had these precursors in the Ottoman administrative and legal systems. They also often followed Ottoman administrative divisions or focused on major Ottoman cities (9).
• A core feature of colonial states was that their politics were deeply influenced by developments in their colonizers over which they had no control. This stunted the growth of fully representative government, as national politics were overridden by arbitrary dictates from the colonial power (14).
• Colonial legal and administrative systems sought to distinguish between different categories of citizens, especially on religious and ethnic grounds. This could be seen in separate legal systems for Arabs and Berbers in Morocco, tribal courts in Transjordan, and separate administrations for Druze and Alawites in Syria (13).
• These colonial regimes usually had major exceptions in legal equality for Whites and for religious minorities, the latter as dictated by the conditions of the League of Nations. The focus on religion was especially intense in the Middle East, with these minorities receiving special representation; this was taking to an extreme level in Lebanon (10).
• European settlers, particularly in French colonies, also existed under a special legal order with special political bodies, a system of reserving the best land for White settlement, and special White-only trade unions (16).
• These colonial and quasi-colonial states were constructed with an emphasis on security, with on average 2/3 of government revenue being spent on policing and security. Most of this was spent on police forces, with most colonial states having small and poorly equipped armies designed for internal deployment, the assumption being that any major security threats would be taken care of by the colonial master (10).
• This emphasis on security meant that expenditure on education, healthcare, and welfare was minimal. Social spending was concentrated on education and local technical institutes ended up producing the highly educated professional who would lead anti-colonial struggles in the 1920s and 1930s (10).
• Colonial governments tried to secure an alliance with large landowners or rural sheiks, both groups that were identified as having conservative interests that aligned with those of the colonial state. These groups could be expected to maintain security and collect taxes in rural areas where the colonial government did not have the resources and they could be expected to dominate the democratic electoral systems introduced during the 1920s, especially once the elections were changed from direct election to selection of representatives in local elections (12-13).
• In return for their political support of the colonial regime, landlords and rural sheiks received legal and political control over peasants, special tax exemptions, and the political influence necessary to benefit from colonial infrastructural projects and land reform (13).
• National politics and political ambitions focused on the most effective control of the colonial status apparatus and its benefits. This resulted in a shifting of political thought towards an imagined national community. This power was nearly monopolized by educated urban professionals, who formed the mass of political activists across the Arab world (14-15).
• Colonial economic policies were set by the colonial power and they were subject to strict austerity measures that limited public expenditure on things other than security and some infrastructure projects. Their currencies were controlled by the monetary policies of the colonial power and, until 1930, they were under commercial treaties that prevented them from setting their own tariff rates (13).
• Colonial powers generally tried to give their own companies and commercial interests preference in their mandates and colonies, especially through the exploitation of oil. The League of Nations provisions for Syria, Palestine, and Iraq made this more difficult there, as these nations were not permitted to be included in any mercantilist markets (14).
• In its Middle Eastern possessions, the British tried to install constitutional monarchies, feeling that these monarchs could be used to support the British position against any threats by populist and nationalist politicians. This plan worked effectively in Egypt, where King Fuad repeatedly dismissed parliamentary majorities of the nationalist Wafd party (16).
• This system could also backfire, however, as in some places the powerful monarch became head of the nationalist movement, as in Morocco under Muhammad V and Hassan II, or in Jordan under King Hussein (16).
• The defeat of France and Italy in the Second World War and the subsequent emergence of the USA and USSR as global powers led to the decline of imperial rule in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Holocaust also sent the Zionist movement into overdrive and increased agitation for Jewish statehood. This began with the independence of Syria and Lebanon in 1943, followed after the war with Jordanian independence in 1946, British withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, and Libyan independence in 1951 (17).
• The situation was different in Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa, all of which had been fully reoccupied by Allied troops in the last years of the Second World War. The independence movement there started moving with the Free Officers coup in Egypt in 1952, leading to the withdrawal of British forces in 1954 and the independence of Sudan in 1956. The outbreak of nationalist violence in Algeria led France to grant independence to Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, although it retained control of Algeria until 1962 (17-18).
• In some countries, there was a brief transitional period where colonial authorities organized elections, while in many French and British soldiers remained after formal independence had been granted, only living years later (18).
• The newly independent states faced enormous issues of poverty, illiteracy, and religious and social divides. This created a sudden economic problem, as new states struggled to implement their nationalist economic programs of welfare spending and investment, as well as raise modern armies, in an atmosphere of administrative disorganization (18).
• The first independent governments were usually dominated by the same social groups that dominated politics during the colonial period: educated urban professionals and rural landowners. This led to accusations that these new governments were uninterested in correcting the social injustice and economic inequality of the colonial regimes. In many states these grievances were championed by the army, which seized power in Iraq in 1936 and 1958, Syria in 1949, Egypt in 1952, and Sudan in 1958 (18-19).
• The exceptions to this trend are most prominent in Morocco and Jordan, where monarchies managed to become stable institutions; in Tunisia, where a one-party state took hold; and Lebanon, which had a confessional democratic system (19).
• Newly independent states also faced issues of legitimacy because their nationalist ideas conflicted with the ideologies of Islamism and Arabism, which rejected contemporary national borders and desired a larger political entity united all Arabs or all Muslims (19).
• The Turkish Republic was first created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during a period of European military expansion into Anatolia, to which he led the armed resistance. His government based in Ankara, called the Grand National Assembly, had to convince regional bureaucrats to recognize his authority rather than that of the British-backed government in Istanbul. He succeeded in gaining this recognition by 1922 (20).
• The majority of this first government, however, still recognized the Sultan as the Caliph. To force his own secular ideology, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created the People's Party and made sure it won the 1923 elections. With its support, he abolished the caliphate in 1924 (20).
• Mustafa Kemal Ataturk used his new political party, renamed the Republican People's Party, to push through a number of major reforms that laid the groundwork for a modern, secular state. He also used the party to isolate his political opponents, including those in the military by declaring that commissioned officers could not participate in politics (20).
• Following a Kurdish revolt in 1925, Turkey passed a law severely restricting all political activities outside of the Republican People's Party. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk tried to transform the party into a national organization with mass membership, a project that secured it massive electoral majorities. He also introduced a set of guiding principles for party rule: republicanism, nationalism, secularism, popularism, statism, and permanent reform (20).
• Control of the Turkish state remained with the Republican People's Party after Mustafa Kemal's death, as its candidate, Ismet Inonu, won the 1939 presidential elections and was then appointed head of the party, demonstrated the unity of state and party structures (21).
• By the 1940s, a variety of groups opposed to Kemalist rule had organized, including Islamists in rural areas and urban industrialists who wanted more economic freedom. Growing dissatisfaction with the government's economic management, coupled with pressure for reform from Turkey's American allies, led the Republican People's Party to concede defeat to the Democratic Party in the 1950 elections (21).
• After kicking British and Soviet forces out of Persia in the early 1920s, Reza Khan engineered the deposal of the previous Qajar monarchy and his own election as emperor in December 1925. Although his government did fund secular education as a way to edge out religious authorities, the Pahlavi dynasty protected massive economic power of the rural landowners and mullahs because it depended on their political support (21-22).
• Iran was reoccupied by the British and Soviets in 1941, during which they deposed Reza Shah in favor of his son, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. The occupation saw a period of limited political pluralism, as Iranian political interests could seek support from multiple power centers, including the British, the Soviets, and the Shah (22).
• The multiple sources of political authority during this period made the political system very unstable as the British and Soviets rarely agreed on the Iranian leadership, resulting in extremely high government turnover during the occupation (22).
• Following the nationalization of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was reelected Prime Minister in 1952 on a wave of nationalist sentiment. However, foreign and domestic opposition to this program led to his overthrow in a monarchist coup in 1953 backed by the British and the USA. This ended the period of political instability in Iran (22).