When World War I ended in 1918, the winners, principally Britain and France (for the US electorate had decisively rejected President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy in November 1918), set about redrawing the map of Europe and the Middle East to suit their own interests and advantage.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll look at how they created the circumstances for World War II and made a pullulating mess of the Middle East which still suppurates today.
First a bit of context. In 1914 the European landmass was dominated by empires: the German stretching from France into western Poland, the Austro-Hungarian from Germany to the Balkans, the vast Russian empire from eastern Poland to the Pacific, and the immense, crumbling Ottoman empire from Thrace on the Balkan shore of the Black Sea through Turkey to the countries of today’s Middle East.
By contrast the empires of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands were overseas settler colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, except of course for Ireland.
Why David Cameron was easily the worst prime minister of my lifetime - Alex Kane
Feeney on Friday: How Britain and France re-drew the map of the Middle........