The 2017-2018 lecture begins with the year 1914 and looks at the political history of the Middle East as a geopolitical object. This follows on from Professor Henry Laurens' work published in 2017 and entitled Les Crises d'Orient (1768-1914). The aim of this lecture is to show that the source of violence lies more in geopolitics than in culture. In this respect, the most eloquent example with contemporary echoes is that of William II's Germany, which encouraged a vast jihad project against France and England, known as the " jihad made in Germany ". Despite the work of German emissaries
to Afghanistan, the project failed.
In a way, the Great War could be seen as an Eastern crisis with a multi-continental dimension. As far as the causes of the war are concerned, some historians, such as Pierre Renouvin, have made a distinction between the immediate causes, such as the diplomatic management of the crisis caused by the Sarajevo bombing, and the "deeper" causes ( ), such as Franco-German hostility due to France's loss of Alsace-Lorraine, Anglo-German naval rivalry and the assertion of nationalism in all European countries. For the question of the East, the chronology abandons the 1914-1918 delimitation, and refers to a ten-year war
(1912-1922), from the Balkan wars to the Greco-Turkish war, or even eleven years if the Italo-Ottoman war of 1911 is taken into account.
The main thesis had already been developed nearly a century ago by the British historian Arnold Toynbee : the Eastern question is represented by the confrontation, in this part of the world, of Western powers around different economic, strategic, colonial interests, etc. At the same time, the question of the Westernization of societies, and thus the adoption of the universal model of the nation-state, came to the fore. What had been considered communities in the generic sense of the term before 1914 became minorities from 1919 onwards. In other words, the vocabulary of the 1919-1920 treaties on Central and Eastern Europe was applied to the Near East.