Alawite state following decolonisation

What if instead of being part of Syria following decolonisation a Alawite state had been formed? This Alawite state would include the Latakia and Tartus governorates of Syria.
Political-map-of-Syria-showing-cities-towns-and-provinces-Ezilon-Maps.jpg
 

Philip

Donor
I think the difficulty here is that it leaves Syria landlocked. It's not impossible. Jordon ended up landlocked, but by a different path.
 
I think the difficulty here is that it leaves Syria landlocked. It's not impossible. Jordon ended up landlocked, but by a different path.
Why is Syria being landlocked a difficulty?

Jordan is not landlocked, it has coast line in it's south-west, between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
 
What if instead of being part of Syria following decolonisation a Alawite state had been formed? This Alawite state would include the Latakia and Tartus governorates of Syria.

When the French first took control of the Mandate of Syria, they chopped it into 5: Lebanon, Alawite, Druze (more-or-less Jabal al-Druze in the south), Damascus, and Aleppo. The states (or at least, their elites) fairly quickly decided that they wanted to unify, and France let them...except for Lebanon, which they wanted kept as a separate, Christian majority state.

The easiest way I guess would be to make France prevent the states from unifying. I suspect that after a couple decades separate, they'd get to the point where their elites didn't want to reunify them.

This will have huge implications for Arab nationalism, by the way, and could well butterfly the Lebanese Civil War.
 
Perhaps it would help if Alexandretta / Hatay State became part of Syria thereby preventing it from being a landlocked country instead of Turkey.

A Druze state being formed in this aTL would also be interesting though doubt it would be viable.
 
Perhaps it would help if Alexandretta / Hatay State became part of Syria thereby preventing it from being a landlocked country instead of Turkey.

A Druze state being formed in this aTL would also be interesting though doubt it would be viable.
The Druze really didn’t want a Druze state. It was the Druze who lead the great Syrian revolt
 
The urban population of this so-called "Alawite State" was mostly composed of Sunnis and Christians, who also owned the fields in which the mostly-rural (and mostly-peasant) Alawite toiled. Honestly, the only thing that the Alawites had going for them was the fact that they even existed. In power, wealth, and literacy they were resoundingly outclassed by the equally "native" non-Shia populations living among them. At least in Lebanon the Christians had a more reasonable chance of dominating their state by virtue of the community's intrinsic factors (mercantile wealth, large population, politically mobilized/organized by the Church institution) and being favored by the French. The Alawites had basically none of these advantages (there are historical religious/cultural divisions between the "Alawites of the mountains" and the "plains Alawites"-- the former saw the latter as domesticated peons, the latter saw the former as wild and destitute. Both were partly right)

An attempt by the French to create a Lebanon-style "Shia refuge" in the Alawite lands is likely to fail since the Alawite community is unlikely to take and keep power in the short-term (the process by which Alawites took over Syria OTL took around 20 years). Instead, power will likely fall to the urbanites, who (as the participation of Damascus in the 1925 Great Syrian Revolt showed) are generally supportive of pan-Syrian nationalism and will likely push for closer links, if not outright unification, with the rump Syrian state.
 
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