Colonial Projects and Schemes Toward the Arab Homeland: From the Campbell-Bannerman (1907) to the Greater Middle East (2004)

Abstract

The study posits that the West recognized at an early stage the importance of the Arab world because of its geographic location, oil wealth, economic potential, and civilizational weight, in addition to the role of Islam as a spiritual force, which led it to seek to limit the region’s power by fragmenting it and maintaining a state of division. This effort was facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the fragmentation of Arab forces, and the occupation of Iraq. The study examines the most prominent Western projects and policies aimed at reorganizing the region, beginning with the Balfour Memorandum and extending to the Greater Middle East Initiative. It also highlights the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, and the division of the region that resulted from them, in addition to the Treaty of Sevres, the San Remo Conference, and the sharing of mandates and oil among the Allies, as well as attempts to integrate the Middle East within regional frameworks such as the Tripartite Declaration of 1950. Following the decline of British and French influence and the United States’ inheritance of their role, particularly after the failure of the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956, the United States proposed the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957 and linked the region to military and economic agreements to confront communism, culminating in the Greater Middle East project.