Beyond Kurdistan, however, the case for separate new nations becomes much less clear, despite the ethnic and sectarian horrors that torment the region today.

For one, no matter how artificial they originally were, the post-Ottoman states have proven surprisingly resilient. Consider Lebanon, a country of some 18 squabbling religious communities that survived a bloody, multi-sided civil war from 1975 to 1990 and has repeatedly defied predictions of its imminent demise. Despite—or perhaps because of—that strife-filled history, Lebanon remains an island of relative stability amid the current regional upheaval, even as it is being overwhelmed by more than a million Syrian refugees fleeing the chaos next door.

“The rulers of those countries that were formed along admittedly artificial borders initially have put plenty of effort into building a sense of nationalism. The question is how much it took?” says Michele Dunne, a former senior State Department official who is now a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “It may not be as strong as in a country that had a sense of itself for centuries, but it still may be there.”

Indeed, even in battered and tattered Iraq and Syria, nationalist feelings remain very much alive. “If any country passed through what Iraq has passed through in the last 12 years, it would have been dismembered by now,” said Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s vice president and a former prime minister. “What kept the country going was the will of the people.”