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At the height of the Ottoman Empire, the imperial power of the Ottoman's expand across seven continents. The Empire consisted of Christians, Jews, and Muslims each with different sects of their own. However, the basis of their control was in a "Turkish core" and a "Muslim shell." The beginning of the documentary opens with the Ottoman loss of the Balkans at the end of the Balkin war. This was the beginning of the end of the Empire.
With the developments of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire was not able to keep up with the constant pressure to change from the outside, and the resisting forces from within the empire. Despite the empires desire to unify the people of the Middle East, their power was overturned by the newly created nation-states. These nation-states consisted of peoples of similar religions and ethnicities who, with the help of Western Europe became sovereign nations.
However, the struggle for sovereignty came at a great cost and for many nations in the area, the struggle is still taking place today. The second part of the documentary focuses on the broken Middle East that resulted from the fall of the Empire. The broken aspect that the Middle East has inherited can, to some extent, be attributed to the nationalism of the nation-states. The priority each nation placed on the success of their race/culture is one of the reasons for the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of Middle Eastern conflict of today. Whole populations uprooted, nationalistic tendencies became genocidal, and millions have been killed for the sake of ethnic cleansing.
People sometimes reference a cycle of government, where totalitarianism and revolution/anarchy seem to alternate back and forth, and sometimes democracy slips its way in. I'm curious if the conception of a nationalistic nation state is inevitable in situations like the post-Ottoman Middle East, or if there is a way for democracy to slip its way past nationalism as well.
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