Featured Middle East article:
 Visit
the beauty and history of Iran
Iran
is a fascinating and beautiful country, currently opening up to tourism
once again. According to recent media reports, the U.S. is opening up its
travel links to Iran, visas are now readily available ... read
more |
Defining the Middle East
All Over Again by David Hulme
Defining the Middle East has
long been an awkward task. Robert Kaplan, writing in the NYT, believes
it should include a much greater area and that the Mumbai terrorist attacks
lend credence to his position. Certainly, there is confusion over what
comprises the region. Standard textbooks in Political Science and International
Relations can't seem to agree. Here's a selection:
In The Foreign Policies of
Middle East States (2002), Hinnebusch and Ehteshami have a map labeled
"The Middle East (the Arab League plus Iran, Israel and Turkey)." There
are 22 countries in the Arab League. They stretch from Mauritania in the
far west of Africa to Oman, east of Saudi Arabia. The League includes Sudan,
Djibouti and Somalia, the Comores in the Indian Ocean and three observer
states Eritrea, India, and Venezuela. To be fair, the Arab League's observers
were added in 2003, 2006 and 2007.
The map in Politics in the
Middle East (2000) by Bill and Springborg shows an area that stretches
from Morocco (including Western Sahara) to Pakistan. It excludes Somalia
and Djibouti and includes Turkey, Israel, Iran and Afghanistan.
The cover on State, Power
and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (2004) by Roger Owen,
shows Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran,
part of Afghanistan and part of Pakistan. Inside, there's a 20th century
inter-war map of the Middle East, showing an area from Morocco to Iran
and from Turkey to Sudan.
Monte Palmer's The Politics
of the Middle East (2006) has a map bounded on the west by Egypt and Sudan,
on the east by Iran, on the north by Turkey on the south by Yemen. In his
written definition of the Middle East, Palmer says,
The Middle East is generally
defined as the vast geographic area that embraces North Africa and much
of Western Asia. As indicated on the adjacent map, it is bordered on the
south by the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, on the north by Greece and
Eastern Europe, and on the northeast by Afghanistan, Russia, and the newly
independent states of Central Asia. The latter could reasonably be considered
part of the Middle East, for most are Islamic in character and many have
strong cultural and ethnic links to Turkey and Iran. Much the same could
be said of Afghanistan.
And according to Politics
and Change in the Middle East (2008) by Anderson, Seibert and Wagner, the
term Middle East raises some problems for it originates in recent Western
military usage and uses present national boundaries that cut across historically
significant cultural and geographic divisions. The reference to the region
as part of the East reveals a European bias; from a larger perspective
of the whole civilized area stretching from Western Europe and East Asia,
the so-called Middle East is located toward the West and has close cultural
ties with the Mediterranean region as a whole. Despite these problems,
we shall follow the more or less established convention and define the
Middle East as the region bounded on the north west by Turkey, on the southwest
by Egypt, on the southeast by the Arabian Peninsula and on the northeast
by Iran. It must be remembered that this division is arbitrary, and the
bordering regions such as Afghanistan and the Sudan and North Africa have
much in common with their "Middle Eastern" neighbors.
Finally, let's consider Fred
Halliday's view in The Middle East in International Relations (2005):
It was in this context, of
Ottoman retreat and inter-European rivalry, that the modern concept of
the 'Middle East' was born. Hitherto other, more specific, terms had been
used--the 'Near East' referred to those Arab areas that border the eastern
Mediterranean, the 'Levant to the same, 'Asia Minor' to the Turkish landmass
that divided the Arab world from Russia. 'Araby' was a half-political,
half-literary term, sometimes denoting the Peninsula, sometimes the Arab
East as a whole, sometimes an imaginary zone of Amirs, harems and tents.
Coined by the American Admiral Mahan in 1902, the term 'Middle East' reflected
a new awareness of the unity not only of the Ottoman domains, but all those
wider areas, former Ottoman provinces, Arabia and Iran, which lay between
Europe and India and the Far East: the 'Middle' distinguished it from these
areas. 'Middle East' became indeed the term used in the languages of the
region itself….. Yet despite its apparently general acceptance, this was
not a term universally used in the west, where some foreign ministries
still continued to use 'Near East' to distinguish these countries from
Arabia and Iran. Only after 1945 did the term 'Middle East' acquire a quite
general and the national currency. In Russia the western sense of the term
was never adopted: there the distinction was between … 'Central East,'
that is those countries which bordered Russia and later the USSR--Turkey,
Iran, Afghanistan--and.... Near East, in effect the Arab world.
Quite a range of definitions.
On this basis, Kaplan's new/old Greater Near East may have traction.
top
About the Author: David Hulme
holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Southern
California with an emphasis on the Middle East. He's the author of "Identity,
Ideology and the Jerusalem Question" and the blog, Causes of Conflict.
He is president of Vision Media Productions and chairman of Vision.org
Foundation. Please email at dhulme@vision.org. |
