World War I and Middle East

World War I and Middle East

Introduction

The fate of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War was a major issue of international relations in the Middle East in the first third of the 20th century. Each of the great powers sought to derive maximum benefit from the defeat and the subsequent partition of the Ottoman Empire. The most active in this process were the United Kingdom and the United States. They played a major role in determining the future of the once mighty empire. Of course, the main question, which stood in the negotiations of the great powers in the war and after the war - is the question of the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Important part of this issue is the fate of Armenia. There was the idea of ??an independent Armenian state.

First World War effects on Middle East (esp. Ottoman Empire)

The participation of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War is part of a decade of almost continuous war which extends from 1912, the beginning of the First Balkan War in 1923 to the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the war between the Allies and Mustapha Kemal and paves the way for the construction of the Turkish Republic.

For more than a century and a half, the Empire is worked by forces that reach their climax with the First World War, which led to its collapse. He did not survive the final shock of modernity. Since the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was in decline. Its deep structures are not adapted to the dynamics of modernity that is built in the West. The expansionist European powers, simulating and centralizing nationalist ideas to push the Empire moved too fast, too sharp not to cause his death.

The Empire will always try to catch the West suffering the consequences of the gap does not end with digging to the European powers. The combined policies of the European powers and the various minority nationalisms tends to disintegration of the Empire retreated gradually to an exclusive identity, Muslim and Turkish Anatolian centered on the focus. The desire to catch stirs the most radical modernist projects led by an elite in the West and eager to tackle the reality Ottoman structures apparent major European nations.

The Balkan wars at the end of the First World War 1912-1918

The Revolution of 1908 accelerated the decline of the Empire in Europe and Africa. Bulgaria declared its independence and was annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. While the Greek irredentism strengthens Albania left the Empire in 1911 and Italy takes the same year of Tripolitania. The situation in the Balkans continues to deteriorate. The weakening inside and outside the Empire stirs the appetite, and an alliance is set up between Serbia and Bulgaria in March 1912 and with Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro in May, under the watchful eyes of the powers Europe. In October 1912, war was declared against Turkey by the Balkan Entente and runs to his ...