East: Near, Middle, Far
Sep 7th, 2008 by MESH
From MESH Admin
This wire service article from the New York Times of April 27, 1952 is evidence of how the National Geographic Society once unsuccessfully tried to define the Near, Middle, and Far Easts “in terms of logical geographical divisions.” It is amusing now to read the rationale for the Society’s insistence on centering the Middle East in… India. (Read the article for details.)
The motive was a desire to save the term Near East from oblivion. Middle East, which the British had embraced after the First World War, had pushed Near East aside in discussions of contemporary politics. In 1946, the term Middle East struck a deep root in America, with the founding of the Middle East Institute in Washington. The new institute began to publish the Middle East Journal the following year. Likewise, the New York Times regularly referred to the region as the Middle East. This caused some consternation in official circles, since Near East remained the preferred term of the U.S. State Department. (Even today, the region comes under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.) The article does indeed suggest that the National Geographic Society was following the State Department’s lead.
Needless to say, the “logical” division proposed by the Society, which would have pushed the Middle East thousands of miles eastwards, failed to reverse the tide of popular usage. In August 1958, the State Department finally gave up, as announced by the New York Times in an article headlined “‘Near East’ is Mideast, Washington Explains.” The National Geographic Society took a bit longer. Its January 1959 map of the region skirted any admission of defeat, by employing this evasive title: “Lands of the Eastern Mediterranean (Called the Near East or the Middle East).” But ultimately the Society too gave up the fight. (Follow the evolution of its maps of the region here.)
And so we are not called NESH.
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3 Responses to “East: Near, Middle, Far”
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This leaves me feeling somewhat anachronistic, since I have my undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton. It’s even more the case since my diplomas are in Latin, and attest that my degrees are in the study of Asia Citerior, which is Asia Minor—apparently the closest thing in Latin to the Near or Middle East. Roman Asia Minor was defined as that part of Asia lying to the west of the Euphrates River. Of course, my studies in Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies department covered a lot more than that, including, for example, courses on Egypt and Iran. So I’m afraid my diplomas shortchange me, declaring me an expert on only part of the area I studied. Caveat emptor.
Martin Kramer is a member of MESH.
In the late 1980s, I took a graduate course entitled “From the Near East Question to the Middle East Problem.” As the Cold War order began to collapse, the professor joked that perhaps he should add “and Back to the Near East Question Again” to the course title. The distinction to my mind rests on the territories—in the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia—that went out of play geopolitically after World War One. That left the narrower area called the Middle East, centered around the Arab-Israeli and Arab-Iranian fault lines, as an arena of active international politics. With the reactivation of the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia, however, it seems to me reasonable to refer once again to the Near East as a distinct and coherent—only broader— geopolitical subsystem.
Malik Mufti is a member of MESH.
The National Geographic Society’s attempt to salvage Near East in April 1952 was probably a direct rejoinder to an official British determination affirmed in the House of Commons by the British Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Davies ten months earlier, in July 1951. Davies:
(To which a needling member replied: “Can the hon. Gentleman say that there is nothing eastern that is any nearer than the Middle East now?”)
This has become the canonical definition of the Middle East, as attested by the products of mainstream cartography in America and Europe.