The General Director of Casa Árabe, Eduardo López Busquets, will provide an analysis of how the Middle East region was involved in World War I. He will comment on a series of events whose importance in the war’s developments has not been sufficiently studied. On the one hand, there was the Turkish-Italian War of 1911, which took place in modern-day Libya, considered the precedent of the breakout of World War I. On the other hand, there was the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which led to the definitive dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. This would have not been possible without the prior Arab revolt encouraged by the British archeologist who became a soldier, Lawrence of Arabia. This agreement, along with the later Balfour Declaration of 1917, would do away with the aspirations of creating an Arab state.

The contemporary history of many Arab states is the legacy of the geopolitical map resulting from that dispute. The civil war in Syria cannot be properly understood without knowing about the events that preceded World War I. For their part, neither Saudi Arabia nor the Gulf States would exist as they do today if they had not formed part of the British colonial policy after the war. Turkey’s role in the region is also marked by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which took place when the war came to an end.