He was in no doubt, for example, that the idea of national self-determination, launched upon the world by Woodrow Wilson after 1918, was not only absurd, but also destructive and immoral. It was destructive because, the world not being composed of distinct nations, the idea that all nations had the right to self-determination could only lead to violence and discord in domestic politics. The Wilson doctrine was, for Kedourie, also immoral because it purported to justify the overturning of settlements that had been long in place, and achieved only with great difficulty. It was a doctrine that claimed the right to subordinate existing moral and legal commitments to the capricious and uncertain operations of power and will.

The politics of the Middle East, at the centre of Kedourie's scholarly interests, could hardly fail to provide him with endless mat-erial for sardonic observation on human folly. The romantic fantasies of Lawrence of Arabia and the confident cynicism of civil servants in European chancelleries were similarly implicated in the emergence of unstable and -dangerously despotic states ruled by some currently dominant elite. Such elites were quick to pick up the fashionable ideological talk they encountered among Western intellectuals, and no less skilled in exhibiting the political ruthlessness necessary to exploit the collapse of feeble traditional structures, such as those of Ottoman rule.

We have since been living with make--believe states mimicking European institutions such as parliaments and elections, states no less rickety because they are skilled at supplementing oriental despotism with elements of European bureaucratic efficiency.