Post by raharris1973 on Dec 12, 2023 0:59:11 GMT
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.
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.