Discussion: Balkan Answers for Armenian Question

Very lucid and realistic approach. Fascinating.

Reading this, I made out a quick TL on the subjet:

The POD is on 1840's Oriental Crisis: the European powers didn't sabotage Muhammad Ali's rule over the Levant. Egypt grows crazy and manages to substitute the Ottoman Empire as the new Middle Eastern regional power even as a nominal part of the OE, restraining real Ottoman power to Anatolia and the Balkans.

As the instability in the OE grows a group of nationalists overthrow the Sultan establishing a westernizer Sultan. TTL's "Crimean War" develops like a mix of OTL's Crimean War and OTL's Turkish Independence War. Russia, Austria and Greece invade Turkey to support the old Sultan as Britain, France and Egypt go support the legality of the new one.

Russia is better in TTL's "Crimean War" (actually, Anatolian War) and the diplomatic agreement to end the war between Turkey, the Khedive, Britain, France and Russia will lead to an independent Armenia (Russian-occupied Anatolia), a buffer-state between the Khedivate (highly influenced by the British and the French), the Ottomans and Russia, a "Caucasian/Anatolian Switzerland" pending to the Russian side. Egypt will also agree to host Russian merchants in its Levantine ports.

In the Balkans, this smaller Ottoman Empire would call for an earlier and faster modernization and will develop an earlier sense of Young Turk's "Turkishness", instead of the 19th century Ottomanism. Bosnia and the Romanian Principalities will probably go free, but Muslim Albanians and Turkish Dobrudjans will limit the loss of the Turkish "Lebensraum", specially with the major influx of Anatolian Turks and Circassians to this new Ottoman Empire. Bulgarians and Greeks will eventually be loud minorities, but nothing more than that.

What do you guys think?
 
Mmm, very interesting…. to this to have been accomplished it would have been necessary a more audacious attitude by Tsar Nicholas, who OTL was fearful of the possibility of global war because of the Ottoman pro-Russian alignment (and concessions over the Straits)……A pseudo-Crimean war waged on Anatolian soil resulting in a stalemate would entail several butterflies elsewhere (Balkans), but I think creating such Greater Armenia (if I have understood right, a buffer between Russia, OE and Khedivate, consequently a territory stretching from Caucasus to Cilicia, note that in my TL a buffer ONLY between Russia and OE would need far less land), with the large-scale deportation of Muslims this would imply, IMHO would create more additional problems than solving the already existing ones. Of course, if the Muslim majority of Eastern Anatolia is reduced by mass forced transfer, these populations could have been relocated to Balkans (opposite to OTL)…., strengthening Ottoman position there….or accelerating further Balkan Crisis…

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About British position, do you think BE would change sides (turning pro-Khedive from pro-Sultan) because TTL realignments?
 

katchen

Banned
I'd be more inclined to a different POD. Austrian intervention in Russia's offensive against Turkey in 1853 gains them Wallachia and Galatai (Galatz and a treaty establishing the Danube as an international waterway up to the Iron Gate, as well as a border along the Siretul River with Moldavia, which the Russians are permitted to keep. Independent Romania is butterflied away.
The British do not confine their invasion to the Crimea, but also land at Novorossisk, thereby relieving the Muslim Circassians. Later, the British also land at Sochi, in Abkhazia and at Sukhumi, and at Poti, in Georgia. British troops march to Tblisi, where they help set up a Georgian kingdom. In the meantime, the Chechens rebel against the Russians and the British are in a position to help them. And the Persian Empire invades Azerbijan, retaking Baku, which they lost in 1828, and pressing on to Machkachkala, Daghestan. When the Crimean War ends, the Russians not only lose their Black Sea fleet, but are thrown out of the Caucasus entirely, back to the Terek and Kuban Rivers with the Christian Ossetes either living under Georgia or being oppresed by a Muslim Chechen Emirate and other emirates of Balkaria, capital, Nalchik, and Circassia, capital, Sochi, all protected by Great Britain. And now the Armenians, the Kurds, the Alevis of Turkey, the Yezdis of Iraq and Turkey, the Alawites of Iraq, the Shiites of Iraq, the Sunni Arabs of the entire Mideast, the Christians of Lebanon, the Druse, and the Christians of the Balkans, are all restless wondering when it will be their turn to have their own state, even if it means fighting one another, as well as the Ottomans.
 
There are, but they've all been banned in the internecine ethnic flame wars of yesteryear AH.com

There are so many things I cannot understand in this forum…. Up to now, the discussion has been about the fate of the Armenians long before the events around WWI….but I see the very word ”Armenian “ is almost taboo in AH….

I can understand many people find this subject (Armenian PODs) uninteresting….but not that members think this thread will end up in hate speech… This is exactly what people who want to doom this kind of thread to failure want.
 
There are so many things I cannot understand in this forum…. Up to now, the discussion has been about the fate of the Armenians long before the events around WWI….but I see the very word ”Armenian “ is almost taboo in AH….

I can understand many people find this subject (Armenian PODs) uninteresting….but not that members think this thread will end up in hate speech… This is exactly what people who want to doom this kind of thread to failure want.

It's not so much the word "Armenian" so much as it is the phrase "Armenian genocide" that's all hush-hush, though perhaps less so with so many bans of loud members on both sides of that discussion.
 
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