Eastern demands may complicate Sudan junta’s strategy

Significance Burhan’s decision responds to renewed threats by the Council of Beja Nazirs (CBN) to blockade Port Sudan unless the eastern track of the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA) is annulled. This poses a problem for Burhan, whose other partners in government, the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), oppose any deviation from the JPA. Impacts Fears that Sudan’s ports will remain susceptible to stoppages will deter foreign investment and shipping into Sudan. SRF leader Yasir Arman’s return to the protest movement underscores the fragility of the SRF’s alliance with the coup leaders. The committee may drag out consideration of the eastern question, to avoid controversy while the coup leaders try to win wider support.

The Chase in the Desert

As the French expedition came to a disastrous end for France in 1801, a civil war broke out in Egypt. The strife in 1801–11 was not only an early example of the coalescing of global imperial struggles and local animosities, it was also one of the earliest instances of surrogate wars in the Levant. This chapter considers this civil war and its constitutive role in imperialism in the Levant—the imperialism of both British and French, and of both the Ottoman Empire and, in due course, an Albanian soldier in the name of Mehmed Ali. It details Mehmed Ali’s rise as the governor of Egypt in times of this civil war, and how the peculiar circumstances of violence in the 1800s would affect the later phases of the Eastern Question.

Introduction

The Introductory chapter discusses the overarching question of the book: how did it all begin? Since when did the self-defined Great Powers of the nineteenth century––Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia––come to assume responsibility for providing security in the Levant. Why? The Introduction traces the answer of these questions to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and maintains that Great Power interventions in the nineteenth-century Levant need to be considered not only in reference to their immediate causes, theatres, and implications. It is essential to take into account the continuity that European and Levantine actors saw in regional affairs from the late eighteenth century through until at least the mid-nineteenth. There is a need to foreground the persistent patterns or cultures of security within which violence was generated and sustained, and how the quest for security acted as an organizing principle of international relations. It also discusses the importance of considering these interventions in the fabric of the Eastern Question. It invites the readers to view the latter not only as a European question, as the existing literature has us believe, but also as an Ottoman question, whereby the agency of the Ottoman ministers and other local actors was more central than has been documented.

A New Era?

During the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15, a new international order was established in Europe in order to prevent Europe from returning back to the horrors of the general war. This chapter questions wherein this new order the Ottoman Empire was placed, and whether the beginning of a new era in Europe necessarily meant the same for the Ottoman world. It does so with a fresh focus on the negotiations between the Powers and the Ottoman Empire over the ‘Eastern Question’ during the Congress of Vienna, the ‘Greek crisis’ of the 1820s, and the Navarino intervention of 1827, when the joint Russian, British, and French fleets destroyed the Ottoman navy.

Return of the Ashes

The so-called second Eastern Crisis of 1839–41 came to an end with an intervention in Ottoman Syria on the part of the Quadruple Alliance (Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia) and the Ottoman Empire. Yet the intervention saw a fierce opposition from France and Mehmed Ali Pașa of Egypt, under whose control Syria was at the time. This chapter explains why and how Russia gave up her privileged position in Istanbul and agreed upon the 1840 intervention, and why France objected to the idea of Great Power intervention in the Ottoman world. It concludes by highlighting the intricate policies adopted by the Quadruple Alliance and the Sublime Porte to corner the French and Mehmed Ali. The latter two were indeed diplomatically persuaded in the end and even came to review their discourses over the ‘Eastern Question’.

Dangerous Gifts

From Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility of bringing security to the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to ‘liberate’, ‘secure’, and ‘educate’ local populations. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of these imperial security practices. It questions how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox—an ever-increasing demand for security despite the increasing supply—ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, freeing the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and also foregrounding the experience and agency of the Levantine actors: the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter’s economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law from their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.

Crossing the Mediterranean

This chapter discusses that the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 epitomized a discursive practice in the Levant. European Great Powers of the time looked to supply security beyond their imperial territories by military expeditions, allegedly for the benefit of the locals even if against the will of the regional sovereigns—in this case, the Ottoman imperial rulers. The architects of the 1798 occupation, Bonaparte and Talleyrand, portrayed their expedition as a ‘service’ the Ottoman Empire. But, in reality, the 1798 expedition was the outcome of decades long debates in France. It ultimately resulted from a diverse set of geostrategic, political, economic and financial determinants that defined the Eastern Question in the late eighteenth century. What exactly did the Eastern Question pertain to before the nineteenth century then? And how did 1798 relate to it?

Old Enemies

Intra-elite rivalries were among the major relational dynamics of the Eastern Question in the nineteenth century. Yet few of them rested on personal acrimonies and grudges, and endured through time and circumstances in the same manner as the rivalry between Mehmed Ali Pașa of Egypt, and the Ottoman grand admiral Hüsrev Pașa. Tracing the previously unrecorded nuances of the story of the two men, this chapter demonstrates the links between the Greek crisis (1821–32), the French invasion of Algiers (1830), and the empire-wide civil war between Cairo and Istanbul that struck the Ottoman world (1832–41) and swiftly became a transimperial quandary. It questions how personal rivalries could drive an entire empire into a civil war. Or was there more at stake here? By addressing these questions, the chapter documents the origins of one of the most infamous episodes of the Eastern Question.

Epilogue

Even though each armed, legal, and administrative intervention considered in this book had diverse specific properties unique to its immediate context, the Epilogue makes a series of general remarks about the continuity the historical actors saw in the affairs of the Levant, the dynamic and intersubjective nature of the Eastern Question, and the Levantine agency in its unfolding in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It considers what these historical ordeals tell us about the Levant and the wider world today, drawing links between past and civil wars with the contemporary discursive practices that continue to haunt the Levant as well as the wider Middle East today.

An Untimely Return of the Eastern Question?

When the news of the 1860 civil war in Syria and the ‘massacres’ of the Christians by the Druze reached Paris, the French foreign minister, Édouard A. Thouvenel, proposed the courts of the other Great Powers an intervention in Syria. He appealed with an emotional vocabulary arguing that theirs was a responsibility towards humanity. Even though Thouvenel’s call received endorsement on the part of first Russia and then Austria, Prussia, and Britain, the Sublime Porte objected to the intervention plan. The Ottoman ministers believed that it would be a violation of existing treaties and an infringement on the sultan’s sovereignty. This chapter places under scrutiny the 40 days of tug of war between Paris and Istanbul, when they looked to influence European public opinion by means of propaganda and active lobbying. The legal, economic, religious, and strategic undertones of the intervention plan and the counter-intervention propaganda not only testified to the intersectoral aspects of the Eastern Question. Seen together, they also disclosed how ‘humanitarian’ the ensuing intervention actually was.