The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria.

• Author: Rabo, Annika
• Position: Book review

The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria

By Benjamin Thomas White

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 239 pages, ISBN 9780748641871.

ETHNIC and religious minorities and concomitant majorities--do not just exist sui generis. They have to be constructed or invented. It is not self-evident who is included in which category and who is excluded. It is only once these categories are accepted and used by people that they appear as natural and even eternal. This basic argument in White's book is not new or startling for readers familiar with today's mainstream research on ethnicity and social classifications. None the less, it is an argument well worth reiterating, not least because of its contemporary relevance for politics in the post-Ottoman empire in general and in Syria in particular. White does this by investigating the actual emergence of concepts such a 'minorities' and 'majority' during the French mandate in Syria.

White's initial research plan was to study minorities in Syria during the French mandate and the way they were used--and even created--by the mandate power in order to understand the mutual confrontation between imperialism and nationalism. Most historical research on this period in Syria--the period when Syria was both fragmented into various smaller parts and finally united--underlines the complex interplay between the French mandate power, the Syrian nationalists, and the 'minorities.' This research, Whites argues, uses terms like 'minorities' and 'majority' not as broad descriptive terms, but as terms with analytical force. White, however, noticed that in texts produced during the mandate the term 'minority' was not frequently used until the 1930s. With this realization his whole project took a different turn. How did the term emerge?

White, like others, argues that the classificatory scheme majority-minority/minorities is closely linked to nationalism with the founding idea of one people with a common and shared culture through a common language, religion and history. World War I brought about the final dismantling of the multi-national, multi-religious and multi-linguistic Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in Europe and in the Near and the Middle East. With the creating of nation states linguistic, religious, or ethnic minorities were created as well. Borders in Central and Eastern Europe, on the Balkans, in Anatolia and the Middle East created people who found...