OnDecember2 1978, in a weekly report to President Carter, his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzeziński spoke of a " arc of crisis " stretching from Bangladesh to Aden via Islamabad.
The expression soon found its way into the mainstream press, more in the form of " growing crises ", particularly on the cover of Time magazine,January 15 1979. OnMarch 1 1979, George Lenczowski published an article in Foreign Affairs, " The Arc of Crisis: Its Central Sector " defining the Middle East as its central part.
Although the Muslim world had been both an issue and, to some extent, a player in the Cold War, the jolt that shook the region in 1979 - Islamic revolution in Iran, the Israeli-Egyptian Washington Treaty, the reversal of alliances in the Lebanese civil war, the storming of the American embassy in Teheran, the Mahdist insurrection in Mecca, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the second oil shock - was very much a novelty. A new player, to be defined later, was emerging: political Islam or Islamism.
The following year was part of this movement : near-civil war in Syria and Iraq, Iraq-Iran war, coup d'état in Turkey.
While contemporaries interpreted all these events through the prism of the Cold War, they in fact heralded what was to dominate the end of the 20th century and the first decades of the next. Ten years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new world was emerging.
The aim of this symposium is to consider the events of 1979 both in terms of their immediate emergence and the redefinition of the Middle East they imposed.