On May 16, 1916, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot sealed the anticipated partition of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between London and Paris. For a long time, this agreement was reduced to an arbitrary drawing of borders, drawn with a ruler on a map that its authors knew little about.
This is the wrong object because what Sykes-Picot instituted, and which has survived him, is a method: organizing a space according to external zones of influence, fragmenting local decision-making centers to prevent any autonomous consolidation, and framing the sovereignty of future States by structural dependencies (economic, security, financial).
Unnamed Protectorate
Since the Arab Spring and the fall of the Mosul “caliphate” in 2014, a diagnosis has emerged: Sykes-Picot is dead, carried away by the collapse of states. However, the borders inherited from 1920 have, against all expectations, survived a century of wars, occupations and insurrections without breaking. Lebanon retains its borders despite fifteen years of civil war, Iraq, despite three wars and an occupation and Syria, despite thirteen years of conflict, remains a unitary state in the eyes of international law.
This resistance indicates that these routes remain useful to the system which produced them, as a formal framework within which external control over the most sovereign functions can be exercised, without direct administration. This is precisely the thesis that I defend in a note published by the Thomas More Institute: we must not confuse the border, a cartographic line, and sovereignty, the capacity for autonomous action. The concept which accounts for this, I call it “unnamed protectorate”.
Unlike the 1920 mandate, backed by an explicit international legal framework and therefore contestable as such, the contemporary protectorate draws its strength from its absence of name: no treaty violation is identifiable, no responsibility can be assigned, no sanction can be activated. A protectorate that names itself is exposed to international law, a protectorate that does not name itself becomes legally indefensible for its beneficiaries themselves and, therefore, almost unassailable for those it targets.
Competing tutors
Lebanon has offered an illustration of this in recent days: on July 5, Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed on Fox News that Christian villages in South Lebanon had “asked to be annexed” to Israel to escape Hezbollah. Fifteen of these localities, as well as the mayor of Rmeish and the Œuvre d’Orient on site, immediately denied the claim. Ultimately, the accuracy of the statement does not matter: what matters is its structure.
Posing as the protector of a population that one does not really consult is a protectorate without a name, a guardianship which is exercised through the language of protection before being exercised by force, and which does not need, to come into being, either a treaty, nor a mandate, nor even a response.
What has changed in a century is the number of tutors. The Franco-British mandate was bilateral, Syria in 2026 sees Turkish, Israeli, Russian, Iranian and that of the Gulf monarchies superimposed on the same territory. This pluralization does not free local actors: it condemns them to constantly arbitrate between competing guardians, like the Iraqi government, forced to learn in May that its own territory had served as a base for Israeli strikes without its knowledge, and that its American ally knew it.
Restore a capacity for autonomous action
It can also be read, more discreetly, in the fate of Christian minorities in the Levant, whose presence or exodus continues to measure, better than any institutional statistics, the real solidity of these balances of protection.
For France, the former mandatory power over Syria and Lebanon, this lucidity is not an academic exercise: it involves its policy. The planned withdrawal of the United Nations interim force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) by 2027 will be the first test. Replacing a symbolic presence with a commitment to clear objectives requires stopping thinking in terms of the institutional reconstruction of fragile states, to identify the precise sectors – border security, energy resilience, protection of critical infrastructure – where a capacity for autonomous action can actually be restored.
One hundred and ten years after Sykes-Picot, the challenge is not to deplore a legacy that it would be futile to try to erase. It is to accurately name the mechanisms by which it continues to structure the present, so that the sovereignty that France went to greet in Damascus ceases to be a formula, and becomes, patiently, a fact.
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