Foreign Policy Research Institute A Nation Must Think Before it Acts The Fall of Empires and the Formation of the Modern Middle East

The Fall of Empires and the Formation of the Modern Middle East

Abstract

The collapse or weakening of six empires over a 53-year period furnished the precondition for the rise of what we offhandedly call the modern Middle East. But if we mean “modern” as a concept of political sociology rather than a shorthand way of saying recent or contemporary, we must conclude that a “modern” Middle East is still straining to be born. We see that through an integrated analysis that explains not how the post-Ottoman Middle East arose, but why it took the shape it did.

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