Middle East 3/3

By Louis Perez y Cid
Many believe the Middle East is chaotic, but they forget one essential thing: the borders have held remarkably well.

The Middle East is often portrayed as a land of permanent divisions. Wars, revolutions, coups, foreign interventions.
For a century, the region has seemed to be in constant flux. And yet, one fact remains.
The borders have changed very little.
Those drawn after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, often criticized, often contested, are, for the most part, still there.
A century of crises has not been enough to erase them.
This is the paradox of the Middle East: everything moves, except the lines.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the European powers redrew the region.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, followed by the mandate system, gave rise to new states: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. These borders were criticized from the outset.

They corresponded neither to tribal realities, nor to religious balances, nor to the political aspirations of many populations. They were perceived as artificial.

And yet, they would endure.

One explanation lies in the very nature of the emerging states.
Even fragile, even contested, they quickly became concrete political realities: administrations, armies, capitals, and national interests.
Over time, these structures took root.
Changing a border does not simply mean moving a line on a map. It means challenging an entire state apparatus. And this comes at a cost.

A second explanation is external. After 1945, the international system underwent profound changes with the creation of the United Nations.

A principle is gradually taking hold: the inviolability of inherited borders.
Even imperfect, even contested, they are considered a lesser evil compared to the chaos that their widespread questioning would cause.
The major powers, whether the United States or the Soviet Union, have often preferred to stabilize existing states rather than redraw the map.

A third reason is more profound.
Redrawing borders is like opening Pandora's box.

Because if one border is challenged, why not the others?
In a region where identities are multiple—religious, ethnic, and tribal—any territorial modification risks triggering a cascade of claims.
Better an imperfect order than total uncertainty.
In other words, borders also hold because no one really knows what to replace them with.

This does not mean that borders are immutable. They are contested, crossed, and sometimes ignored. In Iraq and Syria, during the expansion of the Islamic State, some borders even seemed to disappear.

But these challenges remain temporary. The lines eventually reappear.

As if, despite everything, they were more resilient than the regimes that occupy them.

The Middle East gives the impression of permanent disorder. But this disorder is often internal: civil wars, political rivalries, and sectarian clashes.
States falter. Regimes fall. Societies transform.

But the territorial frameworks persist.

The borders of the Middle East were drawn in a context of domination and strategic calculations. They were contested from their inception. They remain imperfect.

And yet, they hold.
Because they have become political realities. Because the international system protects them, and because challenging them would open up even greater uncertainties.

A century later, they are still there.

And perhaps this is another lesson of history: it is not always the fairest borders that endure, but those that no one truly dares to question anymore.

For a long time, Europeans viewed the borders of the Middle East as fragile lines, inherited from another age, hastily drawn by vanished empires.
Contested borders, debated, sometimes ignored. Borders that were said to be artificial.

But in recent years, even in Europe, the question has resurfaced.
With the war in Ukraine, what was thought to be a given—the stability of borders—is no longer entirely secure. Territorial disputes, which were thought to be relegated to other regions of the world, are reappearing in the heart of the continent. Like Greenland, for example.
Behind this conflict, a simple reality re-emerges: borders never hold on their own. They hold together because of a balance political, military, and diplomatic support underpins them.

When this stability falters, the lines become open to debate once again.

What the Middle East has demonstrated for a century, Europe is rediscovering today: borders, even imperfect ones, are not simply lines. They are compromises.

And when the balances that sustain them crumble, borders cease to be self-evident and revert to what they have always been: human decisions, and therefore fragile.