Between 1618 and 1648, Europe, especially its central regions, lived through the Thirty Years’ War: a combination of religious conflicts, dynastic ambitions, and territorial disputes. This war, which splintered into several wars that resulted in the deaths of millions, either in conflict or because of famine and disease, reduced population growth in many of the countries involved, none more than Germany, and took an immense economic and cultural toll.
The war only ended once the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. This treaty’s reconfiguration of the Holy Roman Empire has come to be seen as the gateway to modern Europe, which it reshaped through the nation-state system, a process that is broadly considered to have laid the groundwork for modern international relations.
With Westphalia having delineated the borders of states, it also curbed rulers’ capacity to impose, within those borders, this or that religious loyalty on their subjects.
In the decades and centuries that followed, Europe’s major historical transformations were associated with the “weapon” of conferences that, despite not exclusively leading to outcomes that align with just and progressive convictions, heralded a transition from one era to another. That was the case for the Congress of Vienna that redrew post-Napoleonic Europe in 1815, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 which divided Africa among European powers, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in which the Treaty of Versailles was signed and the League of Nations proposed, and the Yalta and San Francisco Conferences of 1945, which respectively deliberated the post-World War II order and established the United Nations.
It may be said that the Levant, along with other Arab countries like Yemen, Sudan, and Libya, is undergoing a phase that urgently calls for a transition, under the auspices of an international conference, from one era to another. Wars are ravaging several countries and ripping them apart, leading to severe demographic, economic, and cultural decline.
While many intertwined factors can help explain these wars, one factor applies to all these countries: the failure to build sovereign states and national communities that unite these countries’ various sub-groups based on a reasonable degree of consensus. These domestic disputes, with their propensity for ballooning and spilling over, have cast a heavy shadow on borders and on relations with the outside world, as we can clearly see in most of these war-torn countries.
It is becoming clear that the question of statehood, societies, and national communities has been the ultimate impediment and that resolving it is a necessary step on the path to ending the bloodshed and to achieving any other noble goal. Regional forces do not have the capacity to accomplish this on their own.
If our region’s state of affairs calls for a conference that results in an Arab Westphalian Treaty to fix states’ borders and creates frameworks for managing group relations, such a task appears extremely complex in light of globalization, even if globalization has receded in recent years. Indeed, the task combines two requisites: less unified states - that is, less centralized - and more unity in the geographic and political region they share, the Middle East.
For example, the future of Iran, which is currently navigating immense upheaval whose outcomes remain highly uncertain, concerns and impacts many countries in the region; the same is true for the prospect of a clash between Israel and Türkiye in Syria, as well as the construction of the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which could raise the specter of another cross-border crisis. All of this uncertainty surrounds us as we confront formidable challenges that cannot be addressed within the framework of a single state and its instruments. Alongside the Palestinian question, there is the Kurdish question, which itself spans four countries.
There are also challenges regarding poverty, the environment, pollution, desertification, and rivers, almost all of which flow beyond the borders of the countries they spring from. Of course, there are other cross-border challenges as well: smuggling, capital flows, terrorism, labor, migration, and asylum. For its part, the wider world, especially Europe, will also be impacted on many levels, especially at present, but not exclusively by migration and asylum.
As for those who might reject the idea of international intervention to introduce calm and change the regional system that has given our volatile relations, they are the same people who spent decades deriding the Sykes-Picot Agreement, only to discover that the “fall of Sykes-Picot” would give rise to more states, not fewer - let alone the dream of a single state.
It goes without saying that Israel’s engineering of absolute havoc, first and foremost through its genocidal war in Gaza, will not end without major international intervention that includes binding steps.
The tragedy, however, is that proposing such initiatives today is much like delivering a sermon; such initiatives seem like a Platonic form with no equivalent in the material world. The world, particularly under the current US administration, is also on a trajectory going in the opposite direction. We are watching the law of the jungle blossom and broaden before our eyes, which explains the Israeli government’s assault on the very notion of negotiation with its recent strike on Qatar.
The initiatives that do emerge are intermittent, short-lived, and ad-hoc approaches to the issues at hand, with some of them mirroring real estate dealings perfectly and explicitly. In turn, Europe’s current political and economic weakness completes this grim picture before us.
At the very least, however, it might be a useful yardstick for reminding ourselves that a repeat of what unfolded four centuries ago seems impossible in our part of the world.
