Elizabeth's World
When Queen Elizabeth II passed away at the ripe old age of 96, the whole world flocked to her funeral. His reign went through the transformations of decolonization and the reduction of Britain to the status of a second-order power.
Few dissenting voices about her historical role are raised because over the decades the queen had cemented the'image of sober leadership' who had been able to accommodate the demands of modernity with the prestige of the monarchy. Among the many rulers who thronged to pay their respects to the deceased queen's casket, some of them owed the royal family and the queen herself, much more than others.
The legacy of the British Empire shaped the contemporary world, drawing boundaries, defining the lingua franca of communication, bringing legal and educational models, but it also created dynasties.
When the queen to the throne back in 1952, Britain, emerging half-destroyed from the bombings Germans during World War II, had lost the crown jewel, India, five years earlier, still retained decisive influence in many areas of its former colonial empire.
British Empire that his predecessors had ruled, at the height of its expansion,between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was very different: first, it was powered by steam and coal, dominated by the textile and steel industry, which needed Indian labor, South African mines, and cotton from the American states.
Middle East at the heart of the game
Today as then, richest deposits And accessible to fuel the global economy are located in a region literally shaped by the British Empire, the Middle and Near East, at that time ruled by monarchies born under the British umbrella on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
The war-torn economy and the political demands of the population to establish a robust welfare state, no longer allowed the deployment in forces of its overseas army and Royal Navy to exert its influence over those highly strategic areas in the global competition with the socialist countries.
If the British army had retreated from the sands of the Middle Eastern deserts, it was precisely the monarchy at that stage to maintain ties with the Persian Gulf states and regional monarchies, even after the end of the Empire, which in those areas deployed "indirect rule" in the form of protectorates.
Over the course of his reign, his power waned. in the region, in a period of difficult decolonization but in which the monarchy played a more important role than usual. The new queen was immediately tested by the crises that shook the empire in its hottest region.
Crises in the early years of the reign
The sacred march on which the Arab nation insists will carry us on from one victory to the next ... the flag of freedom that flies over Baghdad today will fly over Amman and Riyadh. Yes, the flag of freedom that today flies over Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad will fly over the rest of the Middle East.
In July 1952, a few months after his accession to the throne, the Egyptian-Sudanese monarchy of Faruq I was overthrown by the military coup of the "free officers" led by Gamal Abd el-Nasser. During the war the country remained formally neutral, but was forced at the end of the conflict to declare war on the Axis powers, thus reaffirming its ties to the British Empire.
A year after his accession to the throne, in 1953, in Iran, country never formally annexed but since the 19th century part of its sphere of influence, Prime Minister Mohammed was overthrown Mossadeq and then tried in Tehran military court for his decision to nationalize Iran's oil industry, still controlled by the Anglo-Saxon hydrocarbon majors. It was the time of the "Seven Sisters."
The coup was obviously woven together by multiple actors with support on different sides of the Atlantic to maintain the Western monopoly on resources and to counter Soviet influence in the country at a time of very high geopolitical tension (the Korean War was being fought in those years, in 1956 the Soviets were sending tanks into Hungary), but helped legitimize the Shah of Persia in public opinion a few years later, in 1959, when he received him as an official guest at court.
The influence of the British royal family as a factor in British foreign policy has been fundamental and cross-cutting to support the kingdoms that ruled Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and the Gulf Emirates.
The current Jordanian ruling dynasty, the Hashemites, is actually a family that came from the Arabian Peninsula and launched the revolt of the local populations against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, enjoying the support of Britain with the promise of an Arab state encompassing the entire British Middle East.
In reality, Abdullah I, received only Jordan, a strip of desert between the Dead Sea and Saudi Arabia, populated mainly by nomadic Bedouins and lacking significant resources. Jordan became independent but with profound British cultural, economic, and political influence, from which he inherited a British-style bureaucracy and the customs of the elites.
Both monarchies incurred the wrath of Arab nationalism that exploded after World War II: Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist just before Elizabeth's coronation in 1951, while Iraqi King Faisal II was killed in a bloody coup in 1958 that brought Pan-Arab Baathist officers to power on the heels of what happened in Egypt and Syria.
Permanent ties
Although Elizabeth's long reign saw most of the Middle East move away from London's rule, a handful of British-created monarchies survive still, often seen as bastions of stability in a region in constant conflict.
Some of these faltered when the turmoil of the so-called "Arab Spring" broke out a decade ago, but protests did not overwhelm hereditary monarchies but mainly the Arab Republics such as Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, where civil wars or changes of government, permanent or temporary, have broken out.
Although the days of imperial pomp and gunboats are a thing of the past, The region's emotional and economic ties with Britain run deep and have a major impact on London's role as the financial and cultural capital of the globe.
London's skyline has been reshaped by real estate projects in which Arab sovereign wealth funds have invested and managers of the monarchies' royal assets, contributing to the explosion of real estate values in the city's fashionable neighborhoods.
Scions of royal lineages from across the Middle East are sent to study at British universities which reinforce their social status at home and in return pour millions of pounds into the coffers of UK academies, funding even more vital since they no longer have access to European research funds after Brexit. Emirs, sultans and kings to accredit themselves as leaders of their respective armed forces still attend the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst.
The Premier League maintains its status as the most beautiful league in the world, not only because of the competitive drive of its players and the passion of England's fans, but because of the billions of pounds that enable teams to buy the big guns.
Ultimately a relationship of gratitude and mutual benefit, where on the one hand maintaining ties with London allowed the elites of the former colonies to enter the good salon of globalization, protect their regimes with Western weapons, and find profitable investments for oil rents, while on the other hand Britain was able to retain its centrality on the global financial scene, access to cheap energy sources through its energy giants and its geopolitical prestige even after the traumatic end of its colonial empire.
The British royal family has played an essential role by establishing personal relationships that surpass those of the countries part of the Commonwealth themselves. In fact, Elizabeth has done much more: she has given a myth to imitate for Arab kingdoms with invented borders, founded by local tribal leaders and without dynastic or religious legitimacy given by descent from Muhammad or some ancient Islamic empire.
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