• DOI:10.1080/07075332.2002.9640981
• Corpus ID: 153471013

The Resilience of a Frontier: Ottoman and Iraqi Claims to Kuwait, 1871–1990

@article{Sluglett2002TheRO,
  title={The Resilience of a Frontier: Ottoman and Iraqi Claims to Kuwait, 1871–1990},
  author={Peter Sluglett},
  journal={The International History Review},
  year={2002},
  volume={24},
  pages={783 - 816}
}

• P. Sluglett
• Published 1 December 2002
• History
• The International History Review

of the obvious paradoxes of modern Arab history is the contradiction between the desire for unity shown by various Arab states at different times since the First World War, and their insistence on preserving the frontiers with which the colonial powers endowed them either before or after the treaty of Lausanne. Only three major realignments of frontiers have occurred in the Arab world since the First World War: the transfer of Asir from nominal Yemeni control to Saudi Arabia in 1932; Syria's loss of the sanjak of Alexandretta to Turkey in June 1939 as the result of a dubious plebiscite; and the union between North and South Yemen in May 1990. Attempts to unite two or more states have been shortlived, and usually rancorous. The best known is the United Arab Republic of Egypt, Syria, and, briefly, North Yemen between 1958 and 1961; other attempts have been made to unite Libya with Tunisia, Egypt with Sudan, Libya with Sudan, and Iraq with Jordan. This article explores one example of the paradox: the intermittent, but persistent, claim of Iraq to Kuwait, and Kuwait's equally long-standing assertion of its sovereignty.1 In the more egregious claims of twentiethcentury Arab nationalism, the Arab world is one: in the words of the Baathist slogan, umma 'arabiyya wahida, dhat risala khalida, one Arab nation with an eternal mission. The frontiers between Arab states, placed arbitrarily, or cunningly, by the imperialists should, and can, be disregarded. In addition, Iraq's claim to Kuwait, though often stated in such terms, has been buttressed by appeals to historical evidence. Three times in the twentieth century in 1938, 1961, and 1990 Iraq laid claim to Kuwait, on the general grounds that Kuwait had been illegitimately detached from it as the result of Britain's design to weaken it and to preserve a long-standing relationship with Kuwait's 'feudal' regime. As Malik Mufti notes, making noise about Kuwait is the ctimeworn tactic of