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.

[stevep]

Dec 26, 2023 16:51:53 GMT raharris1973 said:

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.

  Not sure what Ataturk would do as he was a significant military supporter of the old imperial regime until it was defeated but turned against it afterwards and sought to modernize Turkish society - as well as the widespread ethnic cleansing that occurred under his watch.  It might be that he would given up most of the old empire as too much of a burden although probably seeking to keep Iraq due to its oil and some border areas that have a significant Turkish population - albeit probably not a majority.  What happens to the rest would in that case be very up in the air.

  That's for the Asian part of the empire.  Just noticed that the ISOT is to 1905.  Which gives the empire a good chunk of the southern Balkans including Albania and places like Thessaloniki, which happens to be his birthplace so he could be pretty reluctant to give up a lot of that.

  1935 Turkey will have a big tech lead over the rest of the 1905 world in many areas but with the old imperial regime suddenly gone, albeit there might be a member of the Ottoman dynasty in some 1905 part of the empire that could become a claimant and a lot of down-timers might initially at least question the right of Ataturk's government to what it rules directly let alone the rest of the empire this could get complex.