Diminished Sovereignty and the Impossibility of “Civil War” in the Modern Middle East

The famous historian of the U.S. South C. Vann Woodward once described the “irony” of southern history. By irony Woodward meant that southern U.S. states were subjected to a most un-American history of defeat and occupation after the U.S. Civil War. He noted that the southern experience was similar to that “shared by almost all the peoples of Europe and Asia.”1 Indeed, many, if not most, wars in the modern non-West, from the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century to the Lebanese civil war of the late twentieth century, have been inscribed on a larger, global canvas of empire and imperialism. This canvas has defined the meaning, the duration, the stakes, and ultimately the resolution, or lack of resolution, of such conflicts.2 Just before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, a great sectarian crisis unfolded between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. This crisis witnessed unprecedented massacres of Christian subjects in several locations across Ottoman Syria. It occurred during a period of major European military, political, and economic intervention in the empire, and when the Ottomans themselves were attempting a historic shift from an empire with legally inferior non-Muslim subjects to a Muslim state that pledged, for the first time, to not discriminate against its subjects on the basis of their religious affiliation.3 My juxtaposition of this Ottoman crisis with the American Civil War is, I admit, curious given the incommensurability of the tragedies at opposite ends of the world. The sectarian crisis that afflicted the Ottoman Empire was utterly different in its scale, duration, and intensity from the sectional crisis that haunted the United States. There was little interest among Ottoman imperial administrators in the idea of U.S. segregation or in race theory. They did not look to the U.S. as a model in the manner that German colonialists in Togo, as Andrew Zimmerman has brilliantly described, appropriated Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.4 Finally, to the extent that historians of the Ottoman Empire dabble in comparisons, they typically think of the Austro-Hungarian or Russian multiethnic and multireligious empires, never the United States. All these points I concede from the outset.

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