Contemporary Post-Ottoman States

Viewed from a certain dimly lit perspective, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing collapse of communism in eastern Europe marked “the end of history,” but events after 1989 showed, if anything, rather the return of history and, indeed, of politics in post-Ottoman lands. In the Middle East, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the lopsided war for Kuwait’s liberation, which was made feasible by the collapse of Iraq’s Soviet supporter, seemed to mark the death not of socialism but of Arab solidarity, leaving a void into which Islamism grew. In Turkey, the collapse of the neighboring superpower lessened the military-dominated Kemalist state’s immunity from questioning, similarly aiding the rise to prominence of religiously minded political parties. In the Balkans, the discrediting of communism had a more immediate effect by removing the ideological basis for the established order and encouraging freer consideration of identities other than class-consciousness. There the fall of the wall also raised a question that many found unnerving: if ideological foundations could crumble so quickly, would borders achieved through the revanchist programs of the post-Ottoman era also be subject to collapse? This trend took its most destructive form in the most unnatural country, Yugoslavia, where questions of the nation and religious identity blended together to bloody effect, but such questions revived elsewhere as well, showing that they had survived in suspended animation during the communist decades not only in Yugoslavia’s constituent republics but in neighboring states as well.