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.
|
