To what extent can some problems in Middle Eastern politics be blamed Essay

To what extent can some problems in Middle Eastern politics be blamed on colonial or imperial intervention - Essay Example he colonial and imperial powers.2 This essay therefore seeks to assess to what extent the currently witnessed problems in the Middle East can be traced to the colonial periods. It takes into account that despite that fact that colonial rule in the Middle East ended many years ago, the tendrils of its legacy evokes the currently domestic problems in those states.3 This paper unearths the political institutions, systems and governing policies instituted by the colonial and imperial powers as a way of assessing the root causes of the modern problems in the colonized states in the Middle East. Baxter and Akbarzadeh noted that the so called â€Å"Middle East† was largely a westernized invention, right form its leaderships style to its forms of governance inclusive of the territorial boundaries.4 After the First World War, the colonial masters- Britain and France - drew arbitrary boundaries which later were developed to give birth to the current Middle Eastern countries. At first the colonizers-the British and the French barely noticed that their arbitrary created boundaries sliced through cultures and to a greater extend forced antagonistic tribes into one national bed.5 The created boundaries were intentioned for easy control of the colonized by the colonizers. The structure of the Middle East states, created by the colonial powers had a bigger share to blame for the turmoil political atmosphere in the region. This is because the British and the French organized their colonies to consist of disparate groups who had no previous history of being governed as one entity.6 A good example of such states created from disparate groups is the current Iraq which was formed as a product of merging three Ottoman provinces that had little factors in common. This lack of commonality created lines of political weaknesses in their merger as one entity. Put differently, the European and Soviet imperialist created perilous situations that in one way or another encouraged and flamed