Norwegian scientist and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, "made it happen." Wikicommons/Henri Van der Weyde. Some rights reserved.I was wading the beaches of Thessaloniki when news reached me of the centennial of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This is the contentious British-French compromise from 1916 over spheres for influence in the Middle East that imposed new borders in the power vacuum left by the defeated and disintegrated Ottoman Empire. Increasingly, analysts can be heard claiming this a root cause of current conflicts and state failures. They hold the borders of Syria and Iraq that the Sykes-Picot Agreement created were “unnatural”. Therefore, in their view, the post-conflict political order must redraw borders to become more “natural”. The implication of “natural” borders is that they should contain a monolithic group identity.
There, on the beaches of Thessaloniki, it struck me how very dangerous the thought of “natural” borders is. It certainly turned very dangerous right there in Thessaloniki, in the years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In Greece and Turkey, it was also thought that the new political order imposed in 1923 following the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire should be “natural”.
Greeks and Turks in the ‘wrong’ place
Unfortunately, according to their novel idea of the state as a “nation”, the Greeks in Turkey and the Turks in Greece were in the wrong place. In Thessaloniki, Turks were forced to move to make room for the Greeks that had to leave Turkey. What was intended to be the democratic principle of national self-determination that rose of out of the ruins of the defeated empires in World War I, turned to forced ethnic removal on a vast scale: an estimated 1.5 million Greeks from Turkey and 500.000 Turks from Greece. Force made these nation states “natural”.
