The Origins of The Right of Intervention

Related:

Some History On The Emancipation of Moroccan Jews.

The Weaponization of Refugees And Migrants + The Strategic Significance of The Middle East During WWII.

Napoleon And Islam: How The Emperor of Europe Saw The East.

The European Information War In The Muslim World Prior To WWII.

The history of European and Western military and political interventions in the Muslim world did not begin with Iraq or Libya. 

Before the creation of Israel, the justification given by European powers to intervene in the Middle East was to protect minorities, specifically Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire that were coming under attack.

France and Europe, along with Russia, decided to intervene in Syria in 1860 to stop the massacre of Orthodox Christians by Muslims. 

Unlike the Armenians who endured Ottoman slaughter during WWI with few, if any, international condemnations, the victims of these massacres had a powerful foreign patron in Russia in their corner, as well as several European empires that wanted to see the Ottoman empire reprimanded and its laws regarding non-Muslims drastically changed.

An excerpt from, “Europe and the Islamic World: A History” By John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens; Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Princeton University Press, 2013, Pg. 302-03:

The faith-based community, or “millet,’ was a product of modernity, stemming both from the internal evolution of Ottoman society and from European intervention. It proceeded from the emancipation of collectivities, not individuals, and led to political sectarianism. The ‘Treaty of Paris of March 30, 1856, recorded the “generous intentions” of the sultan “toward the Christian populations.” It was difficult for Europeans to acknowledge that the rights granted to the Jews in the Ottoman world were greater than those they possessed in much of Europe.

Incidentally in the Hatt-i Hümayun, the Europeans imposed the right of foreigners to possess property in the Ottoman Empire. The reformers took the opportunity to push through their economic program: the abolition of tax farms in favor of direct taxation; incentives for public utility projects, particularly highways; the institution of a public budget that the state would pledge to respect; and the creation of banks and financial institutions. “To reach these goals,” they wrote, “we will seek the means to take best advantage of European science, art, and capital, and to put them into practice one by one.”

For some Europeans, the emancipation of the Christians was a step toward Islam’s disappearance, which would inexorably occur with historical progress. Curiously, this view can be seen as the counterpart to the discourse of free-thinkers on the disappearance of religion in the modern world. It was supported by the steady decline of the independent Muslim powers and the higher rate of population growth of Christian societies, including those of Eastern Christians. Some clerical circles therefore imagined the Christian East rising up from the ruins of the Islamic world.

The Muslims had a related view, seeing the edict of emancipation, missionary work, and the various sorts of European interference as demonstrations of a vast conspiracy destined to destroy Islam, with the Eastern Christians rep resenting its vanguard. Within that context, the Syrian provinces, which had lagged behind in reforms, constituted a realm where tensions between the different religious communities were likely to develop. The events of 1860 in Lebanon and Syria, where a social emancipation movement of Christian peasants sparked violence between Druzes and Maronites, and then a massacre of Orthodox Christians in Damascus, caused an enormous stir in Europe, where the image of Islam became inextricably linked to that of the massacre. In France, Napoleon III decided to intervene and obtained a European mandate for what we would now call the “right of intervention.” Closely overseen by the other European powers, the operation culminated in a conference of ambassadors, who decided to create a semiautonomous Mount Lebanon in the empire, with a Christian governor named by the Porte in agreement with the great powers, and a council elected by the community. The constitution of an autonomous Greater Syria on the model of Egypt was envisioned. Napoleon III sounded out Abd al-Qadir, who had distinguished himself in the defense of the Christians of Damascus, to learn whether he would consent to assume the leadership of an Arab kingdom of Syria, but the exiled emir refused. The British proposed handing over the leadership of that Syrian entity to a reformist Ottoman vizier, but the vizier’s circle was intent on defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.