Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

EPILOGUE247the Middle East is not only a congeries of nation-states with internal histories,but a set of thick interactions with dominant global powers. But so, too, has theinternational order been crafted by Middle Eastern politicians and publics, aswhen the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) expelled the French fromthat country in 1962 and established a new relationship with the former metropole.European colonialism did not end because that was what then FrenchPresident Charles DeGaulle wanted. It ended because Middle Eastern politiciansand publics ceased being willing to cooperate with it, and because theyhad gained the tools to stand up to it (through urbanization, industrialization,better education, better communications, more organizational capacitythrough political parties, and more advanced technology, including militarytechnology). The end of large-scale direct colonialism in the 1950s and 1960sushered in an era of North Atlantic neoimperialism, with economic penetrationnow the major expression of domination, along with occasional, targetedmilitary interventions. It also initiated a wave of unprecedented Middle Easternimmigration into Western Europe that has had a profound impact on Europeanpolitics and even foreign policy. As a result, the meaning of Frenchnessitself is being renegotiated.Bonaparte’s expedition was not, as many historians have seen it, an aberrationin an otherwise Eurocentric career. He was pioneering a form of imperialismthat deployed Liberal rhetoric and institutions for the extraction ofresources and geopolitical advantage. As emperor, he continued to take a keeninterest in Levantine trade. His vision of an imperial France with valuableoverseas possessions was realized by later French governments. Even his premonitionof the end of the Ottoman Empire, and the way European powerswould carve it up, was vindicated during and after World War I. In his oftencruel and cynical way, Bonaparte was inventing what we now call “the modernMiddle East,” an arena of North Atlantic military and economic hegemonywith a hybrid culture and political institutions. The similarities of the Corsicangeneral’s rhetoric and tactics to those of later North Atlantic incursions intothe region tell us about the persistent pathologies of Enlightenment republics.As Edward Said wrote, the enterprise was “To restore a region from its presentbarbarism to its former classical greatness; to instruct (for its own benefit) theOrient in the ways of the modern West; to subordinate or underplay militarypower in order to aggrandize the project of glorious knowledge acquired in theprocess of political domination of the Orient . . . with full recognition of itsplace in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its ‘natural’ role as anappendage to Europe.” 9 A binary opposition of Western hegemony and Middle