The Middle East is a term of European, chiefly British, origin, with a wide and rather inexact scope. Its maximum definition comprises the countries along the southern and eastern coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea, from Morocco to Turkey, plus Sudan, the countries of the Arabian peninsula, Jordan, Iraq and Iran. The terminology itself is not universally accepted: the description ‘Near East’ is often preferred in continental Europe and sometimes on the American continent, while some seek to maintain a distinction between the Asian and African components. Still others consider the term insufficiently specific, and indeed the countries included in any of these definitions have no particular sense of forming a geo-political unity (although all, with the exception of Israel, Turkey and Iran, are members of the League of Arab States, and, with the notable exception of Israel, Islam is the dominant religion throughout the region). The terminology is driven by strategic considerations which, in the European context, go back to the days of colonial expansion. The Middle East was of tremendous strategic importance to Western powers even before the development of oilfields in the 1920s and 1930s. This was primarily because it was, particularly after the opening of the Suez canal in 1869, the route to Asia, and because expansion through Turkey or Iran was the best hope for Russia to achieve year-round access to the high seas.
Consequently the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which had controlled most of the southern Mediterranean littoral, led to major intrusions of political control, mainly by Britain and France, from the late 19th century onwards. One result of this was the creation of a series of national states with little natural cultural homogeneity or genuine national identity, a prime example being Iraq. After 1945 the tensions in the area grew enormously because of three factors: the increasing dependence of Europe on Middle Eastern oil reserves; the anti-colonial movement, combined with periodic upsurges of pan-Arabism; and the creation of the State of Israel from Palestinian territory (see Arab–Israeli Conflict). As these problems interacted over the post-war years two further elements entered. Firstly, the Israeli–Arab conflict came to be partially a surrogate theatre for Soviet– American cold war antagonisms, with each side rivalling each other to develop client states. Secondly, and rather later, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, also tied to the Israel/Palestine problem, exacerbated the existing set of tensions, but also presented both sides in the cold war with a serious threat, either to the oil reserves, in the case of the West, or to its own territorial integrity, in the case of the Soviet Union. The end of the cold war was thought to offer some hope for a more peaceful future in the region, and some progress was indeed made, but the region’s internal sources of conflict proved sufficiently enduring for the Middle East to remain the world’s principal source of insecurity. Indeed, this would be likely to remain so even were there to be some sort of solution to the endemic Israeli–Arab problems.
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