The sick man of Europe finally succumbs

In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai, China’s premier on the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ was Zhou’s answer.

Zhou was not simply being enigmatic. His answer had a great deal to do with the enormous consequences that flow from cataclysmic events such as revolutions and wars, which influence the course of peoples and nations in ways that cannot be easily foreordained or traced. The Great War led to the dissolution of three European empires — Russian, Austrian and German — from which emerged unimaginable consequences for the future of Europe and indeed the world.

A fourth empire, that of the Ottomans, also suffered the same fate; but it was on the periphery of Europe and its fall did not merit the same attention as the other doomed European empires. However, the fall of the Ottoman empire mattered a great deal to the peoples of the Middle East, and it can be rightly said, in the manner of Zhou Enlai, that only now are we witnessing the true enormity of the aftershocks of its dissolution.