Weird ASB scenario- Turkey 1935 ISOTs to world of 1905

[raharris1973]

What if the Republic of Turkey of August 1935, after Ataturk have had a good 15 years working their project of republicanization, secularization, and Turkish national homogenization, is suddenly ISOT back 30 years in time to August 1905?

The Republic of Turkey is suddenly the legal inheritor of Abdulhamid’s Ottoman Empire, extending from Libya to Iraq and Bahrain, and Albania to Yemen. Local leaders are looking to the Sultan/Caliph for guidance, and find Ataturk, an old and sick Republican President dictator.

Does Turkey revise its ideology yet again to fuse the Republic with the old empire? How? A cosmopolitan Ottoman Republican identity? A modernist Islamic identity?

Or do the Republic’s leaders disclaim responsibility for the downtime empire,

A) treating it with complete indifference and neglect, while local power holders do what they will and great powers intervene as they will?

B) literally treat the downtime non-Turkish empire as ‘found property’ to be literally auctioned off to the highest foreign bidders, so most likely, British, French, Germans, Italians, Zionists, in exchange for hard currency, weapons, debt settlements. Very, very cynical, by possibly realpolitik.

C) Devolve power over the southern Arab provinces and Libya peacefully to ideologically parallel Arab officers’ secret societies like Al-Fatat or Istiqlal, in exchange for a foreign policy alliance. Try some other solution with the excess European territories.

D) in combination with C or B above, retain the basic character of the 1935 Turkish Republic while expanding its borders onto some, but not all, downtime lands including: Mosul-Kirkuk in Iraq, Alexandretta-Antioch in Syria, and possibly the whole Aleppo region, Rumelia at least as far as west Thrace and Salonica, if not Macedonia and Albania also.

Also, the Republic would be controlling Kars-Ardahan in the Caucasus, which is legally Tsarist Russian in 1905. Can the Turks make their own claim and rule stick over the long term? In the short-term, with the R-J war defeat, and internal revolution, Russia is not in a great position to fight for Kars-Ardahan, but with a few years recovery time, a revenge/reoccupation campaign could be quite dangerous to Turkey in any form it takes.

As Ataturk is going to be dead by 1938 I think, Ismet Inonu is going to be the leading Turkish figure holding the bag. But Ataturk should get a chance to voice his thoughts and preferences before he dies.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

Attaturk's original ideology went beyond secularism to outright anticlericalism/anti-islam. I am unsure if he wanted his country atheist, but he definitely wanted his country and his people irreligious. When he took the Kurdish regions, he moderated on the Islam issue because it helped glue the Kurds into the country. Recall that he'd at first promised not to abolish the caliphate when he gobbled up the Kurdish areas.

Kemal's ideology was that Turkey should abandon imperialism and stick to the areas which were of the Turkish race (which he included Kurds as a subset of). He wanted a European country and to not be burdened by anything too eastern or Islamic. If the empire or Republic was too large, it would have too many non-European elements and too many non-Turkish elements. Plus, in 1905 the Turks still have the Ottoman Balkans.

My guess is maintenance of the Caliphate (too significant to abolish) but imposition of French-style laicite in core areas. For ideological reasons, he may look to France for support in reforming his country.

The offer by Herzl to the Sultan to help pay off the empire's debts in exchange for official support for Zionism may play out very differently. Historically the Sultan responded "hey try Mesopotamia instead" (which isn't that crazy an idea given that Iraq had just 2.4 million people in 1905.). To an extent, and in some elite circles, Jewish immigration was associated with modernity and economic development at the time. Attaturk could potentially respond with "you can come in, but you have to accept Ottoman citizenship and you have to disperse yourselves in a few different spots like Palestine and Iraq" with a general goal of bringing European-minded people into the Empire.