Prelude to conflict: communal interdependence in the Sanjak of Alexandretta 1920–1936

Abstract

In the late 1930s, Kemalist Turkey exploited anxiety over the growth of fascism in Europe to coerce France into ceding the Sanjak (district) of Alexandretta,1 a tiny piece of territory it held under mandatory control in the northwestern corner of Syria. Various historians have dutifully chronicled the story of Ankara's irredentism and Paris' appeasement, detailing the sundry diplomatic ploys, subterfuges and deceptions each employed in an attempt to legitimize an illegitimate act.2 Virtually all commentators have vilified (correctly, I may add) the cession of the Sanjak as an unconscionable and an illegal deal struck between two governments who showed little concern for the integrity of international law or the wishes of the local residents. At the same time, though, these historians base their analyses of the Sanjak affair upon a subtle but powerful perception of the paramount role of ethnicity in Middle Eastern politics. For most, Alexandretta is a code word for Arab-Turk animosity. Because of its collage of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities, the 'inevitability'3 of conflict there is assumed without question. As a result, historians present the Franco-Turco-Syrian struggle of the late 1930s as a large-scale version of the domestic conflict understood to have plagued the Sanjak for decades. A thoughtful inquiry into the pre-1936 history of that region reveals the error of that assumption. High diplomacy comprises only half the history of Alexandretta during the 1920s and 1930s, the far less significant and explosive half. Inside the Sanjak, more than 200,000 people, representing at least 21 linguistic and religious communities, participated in a novel and successful experiment at communal compromise and co-operation. For 15 years, from 1921 to 1936, 'traditional rivals' like Turks and Armenians fashioned a thriving and workable relationship within an artificial administrative framework thrust upon them by foreign powers. The essential feature of this relationship, it will be argued, was the trade-off between the maintenance of traditional political power in exchange for across-the-board economic prosperity. Residents of the Sanjak created patterns of economic interdependence that simply would not function in an atmosphere of widespread ethnic hatred and mistrust. Years seemed to pass so uneventfully in this period that Arnold Toynbee could assert that 'the Sanjak had been happy in having scarcely any history.'4 During those years, of course, the Sanjak did have a history, a history marked by the evolutionary disintegration of the inter-ethnic coalition. But even then, the coalition did not fracture along ethnic lines but along economic divisions within ethnic groups. Prosperity fostered the growth of new classes of financially secure artisans and modern-educated youth dissatisifed with the apportionment of political power. At first, the established