The King-Crane Commission of 1919, a diplomatic delegation sent by members of the Paris Peace Conference to ascertain the political desires of ex-Ottoman Empire inhabitants, has been the subject of controversy in modern Middle Eastern history. The Commission wrote a final report which scholars, especially of the Israel-Palestine conflict, have appropriated for their favoured historical narrative. These often reductive interpretations of the Commission’s well-known findings range from ‘prophetic’ and ‘accurate’ to ‘biased’ and ‘ill-informed’. The Commission members themselves have frequently been the subject of either denigration or praise because of their findings, being labelled as disparately as ‘wise’, ‘naïve’, and ‘anti-Semitic’. Less well known than the Commission’s official report are the dissenting opinions by two of the Commission’s ‘technical experts’, George Montgomery and William Yale. When these dissenting opinions, along with the generally ignored personal papers of Commission members, are taken into account, a more complex picture of the Commission, and of American thinking about the Middle East in 1919, begins to emerge. In hopes of creating a more accurate, fair, and useful assessment of the King-Crane Commission, I believe that a deeper understanding of its participants’ mindsets and the discursive pool from which they drew their ideas is needed. In this paper, I aim to elucidate the dominant discourses governing the thinking of the main King-Crane Commission members. Specifically, I will compare the writings of George Montgomery and William Yale with the text of the King-Crane Commission report and carry out a closer reading of their differences of opinion than has yet been done. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor and Ernesto Laclau, I will focus on the dissent within the Commission not as an end in itself, but as a point of departure for an analysis of the competing discourses which governed the members’ thinking. Discourses that are reproduced to varying degrees in these texts include those concerning the comparative qualities of the region’s races and religions, as well as the Middle East’s place in the Commission members’ differing conceptions of modernity and proper governance. The varied opinions within the Commission are an excellent window into the range of American attitudes towards a region in which the United States would slowly become more embroiled during the ensuing 90 years. In a sense, it is an event from which a historian can gauge the competing ideas within an emerging geopolitical force in the early days of empire.

We usually evaluate the policies of Western powers in the Middle East through formal discourse - diplomatic and consular reports - or through academic descriptions and travelogues. They carry stereotypes, and usually presuppose a rational analysis, implementing systematic decisions. On the other hand, we can know, mostly through private correspondence or diaries, how foreign diplomats actually behaved with local populations, whether they really entered in personal relations, and how their preconceptions influenced these interactions. In the case of Iran, I propose to examine two sets of documents from French and from British diplomats living in Iran immediately after World War I: G. Ducrocq, H. Hoppenot and his wife (diaries and private correspondence) – CJ Edmonds & CW Baxter (diaries, memoirs and correspondence). Questions I will be addressing in this paper include: Who did they meet mostly in Iran: other Europeans? Westernised elite members of Iranian society? Or people from ordinary Persian society unfamiliar with European culture? To what extent did Western expatriates display sympathy or antipathy towards Iranians? Problems of language and social manners might have limited occasions of meeting, but other factors should be examined such as aesthetic understanding, religious commitment, ignorance or curiosity for other beliefs and ways of life. Even though these diplomats were not the main decision makers, to what extent did their personal views interfere with their official activities and reports, especially in times of disagreement with the decisions of their government?

The presence, as of 1882, of German instructors in the Ottoman army had consequences which transcended the diplomatic calculations, both German and Ottoman, which had prompted their appointment. At least some of the instructors, and most notably Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, the “Father of the Turkish Army”, viewed their Turkish hosts, and their own role in the Ottoman Empire, through a prism of ‘militaristic’ notions foreign to conventional diplomatic discourse of the period: a social Darwinist belief in existential competition between nations, rather than cabinets; war as the test of fitness for survival; and military success as a reflection of the moral qualities embedded in a nation of which the army was merely an expression. In Goltz’s case, a marked admiration for the ‘warlike’ moral qualities of the Turks persuaded him that the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ might yet have a considerable future in western Asia and North Africa, and, from 1899, would lead him to advocate a military alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, to be directed against the British Empire. This belief in an Asiatic revival, encompassing, besides the Turks, the ‘Yellow Race’ of the Japanese and the Chinese, was complemented by anti-modernism and cultural pessimism about Germany and the West in general. Based upon Goltz’s extensive publications and surviving correspondence, together with similar materials from other personalities, the paper will seek to explore the moral qualities which Goltz identified as ‘warlike’, with specific reference to the Turks. It will examine the place of the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘nation’ in his thought, and how he applied to them to the Ottoman Empire, a non-national state. It will ask why he believed that an Ottoman Empire stripped of its European provinces would be better placed to expand in Africa and western Asia. It will further ask how far his views on war, army and nation, and also his positive image of the Turks, were representative of established thinking within Germany, and among other German officers with Ottoman experience, and how far these views may have influenced official German policy towards the Ottoman Empire. Finally, it will ask to what extent Goltz’s ideas may have been internalised by his Turkish military pupils and admirers.

The Middle East policies of the European powers during World War I and even more so during the war’s immediate aftermath have attracted a fair share of scholarly attention and continue to do so given the seminality of that period for the region’s political fate up to the present day. Traditionally, when studying the decision making processes underlying these policies, scholars have looked at foreign policy-makers’ actions as being shaped by rational assessments of their states’ (perceived) national and imperial interest based on strategic, economic, and political (including domestic) considerations. This paper suggests a different line of enquiry, taking an interest in the less immediately obvious pre-conceived notions, prejudices and preconceptions about the region, its peoples and its social institutions that some of these European foreign policy-makers might have harboured and, wittingly or unwittingly, brought to bear on their decisions. I intend to put this approach to the test by examining the deliberations of the British War Cabinet’s Eastern Committee, which was formed in March 1918 as an interdepartmental body with the task of formulating recommendations for Britain’s policy towards the Middle East. Headed by Curzon, its importance grew as the war came to an end and the committee started drawing up the policies Britain was to pursue at the impending Peace Conference. With this task accomplished, the committee was dissolved shortly before the conference began in January 1919. The minutes of the committee’s meetings together with various related papers form a very rich but focused and clearly delimited repository of texts for analysis. Thus, taking its methodological cues from critical discourse analysts such as T. A. van Dijk and N. Fairclough, while also drawing on writings by A. Calder, R. Irwin, J. Massad and E. Said, the paper intends to shed light on how romanticising notions of Middle Easterners as well as contemporary discourses of civilisation, religion, culture, history, race, language, nation and modernity might have delimited the thinking about the Middle East and Britain’s role in its future of influential politicians, military men and ‘experts’ such as Curzon, Balfour, Montagu, Smuts and Cecil. By training the searchlight of the histoire des mentalités on foreign policy makers and their ‘contending visions of the Middle East’ this paper pursues a twofold aim. It hopes to enrich the practice of diplomatic history by suggesting further layers of analysis while also contributing to the debate about the ‘history and politics of Orientalism’.