An Armenian Mediterranean by Kathryn Babayan & Michael Pifer

Author:Kathryn Babayan & Michael Pifer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Intertwined Histories: The Balkans

The decade between the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913 and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 witnessed a series of cataclysmic events that would alter the face of the “Middle East,” geographically and demographically. These events are: the Armenian genocide (1915); the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which divided the remaining provinces between British and French colonial endeavors; the Balfour Declaration (1917), promising southern Syria (to which the British ascribed the Biblical name “Palestine” in 1881) to the World Zionist Organization to become a state for the European Jewish population; and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey according to the provisions of the Lausanne Treaty (1923). It is notable that all four events had an important dimension of altering the demographics of different parts of the region based on sectarian divisions. While Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration are often discussed as decisive in the making of the modern Middle East, the legacies of the Armenian genocide and the Lausanne Treaty are largely ignored. This chapter brings into context these two events to shed new light on the process of racialization of populations in the wake of nationalist movements, and demonstrates the conditions that turned the diverse Ottoman Muslim population into a demographic majority that constitutes the country’s citizenry under the label “Turk;” in particular, it highlights the predicament of this for Anatolian Armenians. From a wider perspective, the process of racialization and the conditions that led to the formation of a demographic majority out of a diverse Ottoman population left behind a complex legacy that drastically altered the demographic make-up of the region and continues to influence sectarian politics in the two areas.

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