Sarah D. Shields. Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xi + 306 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-539331-6.

Reviewed by David Getman (Rice University)
Published on H-Empire (November, 2011)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed (Elizabeth City State University)

A "Travesty of Self-Determination": The Inscription of Turkish Identity in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, 1936-39

Sarah Shields’s Fezzes in the River is the second book-length study in English of the 1936-39 contest between French-occupied Syria and Turkey over possession of the former Ottoman Sanjak (province) of Alexandretta, known since 1939 as the southern Turkish province of Hatay.[1] Broadly, Shields argues that the trend of European diplomacy toward appeasement in the 1930s rapidly eroded the willingness of France and the ability of the League of Nations to guarantee the right to self-determination in the Sanjak--extended to its residents by the League as a corner of France’s mandate for Syria in 1920--against the irredentist ambitions of neighboring Turkey. In addition to offering a valuable reexamination of international relations in the troubled years leading up to the Second World War, however, Shields also attends to the impact of those relations on the delicate balance of post-Ottoman identity politics among the Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Circassian residents of the Sanjak itself. What emerges is a painstaking reconstruction of the violent “dismemberment” of a deeply intercommunal and “cosmopolitan society” in the Sanjak through its reinscription as ethnically Turkish in the name of regional stability, international peace, and, ironically, the principle of national self-determination (p. 244).

Shields’s contribution to the historiography rests on her assertion that the Sanjak of the 1930s was not, as Yücel Güçlü has argued, home to any ethno-linguistic majority population, be it Turkish or otherwise. Rather, she argues, the network of overlapping affiliations that characterized the Sanjak’s urban centers, “where people often spoke more than one language, where Kurds married Turks, Arabs married Kurds, and the church steeples were easily visible from neighboring minarets,” represented a living antithesis to the prevailing European assumption that “the language of a territory’s population indicated a distinct ethnic identity” that could be defined as “national” (p. 7). As Shields demonstrates, however, it was precisely the polyglot and cosmopolitan character of Sanjak communities that enabled French and Turkish negotiators to barter with the Sanjak’s sovereignty in 1921, 1937, and 1938 despite their ostensible commitment to self-determination as members of the League of Nations.

In her introductory and concluding chapters, Shields offers an overview of the “Sanjak question” from 1920 to 1939, focusing on the ideological assumptions and political concerns that would drive the region’s transition from an Ottoman province to a corner of France’s mandate for Syria in 1920, an independent entity in 1937, and finally, a province of Turkey in 1939. With its linguistic, cultural, religious, and economic ties to the Syrian city of Aleppo, the inclusion of the Sanjak as a part of France’s mandate for Syria in 1920 was considered to be in conformity with the League’s commitment to providing for minority representation within ethno-linguistically defined national entities. When Turkey demanded a “special administrative regime” for the Sanjak’s Turkish-speaking communities as a condition of the Franco-Turkish agreement of 1921, however, the compromise was viewed as an expression of the League’s commitment to stabilizing international relations through territorial settlements, rather than an encroachment upon Syrian national sovereignty (p. 20). The renewal of Turkish claims to the Sanjak after the 1936 announcement of Syria’s pending independence came at a delicate moment in European relations in which, Shields argues, “France judged the cession of the Sanjak a small price to pay” for a Mediterranean ally in the event of a second Great War (p. 246). Accordingly, French administrators began to work collaboratively with Turkey to coerce Sanjak residents into formally identifying themselves as Turkish, rather than Syrian, as a means of legitimating yet another transfer of sovereignty before the League of Nations and the international community.

As Shields notes, official Turkish documents pertaining to the Sanjak question remain closed to scholars. Shields has made innovative use of familiar source materials from French government archives, League of Nations documents, and British and United States government records, however, to reconstruct Turkey’s efforts to inscribe Turkish identity upon the largely reluctant residents of the Sanjak over the book’s seven chronological chapters. Although largely excavated from the accounts of French administrators, League officials, and scattered Turkish documents, Shields consistently foregrounds the daily experience of Sanjak residents and reads deeply for evidence of shifting perspectives on individual and communal identity. Her inclusion of a broader set of international perspectives also lends weight to the argument that European interests and not the principle of national self-determination ultimately determined the fate of the Sanjak. Nevertheless, the absence of a more thorough examination of how League of Nations officials in Geneva perceived events in the Sanjak or reacted to what Shields describes as a “travesty of the League’s stated principles about self-determination” is a missed opportunity (p. 11).

In the first chapter, Shields describes a series of cafe brawls, street fights, and public demonstrations during which the ethnically diverse communities of the Sanjak often resorted to headgear in order to signify their support or rejection of Anatolian nationalist sentiment, on the rise in the Sanjak since the early 1920s. With the announcement of Syria’s pending independence in 1936, Shields demonstrates, pro-Turkish activists transitioned their protests, from symbolically casting their fezzes into the river to more direct and even violent coercion, only to have their European-style brimmed hats knocked from their heads by anti-Turkish or pro-Syrian demonstrators in return.

In the second and third chapters, Shields illustrates how Turkish officials capitalized on the violent clashes provoked by Turkish agents in order to compel the League of Nations to intervene and France to acquiesce to their demands in the Sanjak. Although French officials were confident in their case for the Sanjak, riotous demonstrations accompanying the arrival of the League’s International Mission of Observers in January 1937 raised international concerns that “disputes over revisionism, irredentism, ethnic minorities, and the efficacy of the League of Nations” had the potential to erupt on a global level (p. 76). It was precisely these concerns, Shields argues, that hastened the private agreement between France and Turkey to recognize the Sanjak as a “distinct entity” independent from the new state of Syria and to turn the organization of its government over to the League within a month of the mission’s arrival.

Chapters 4 and 5 compare the international contests between France, Turkey, and the League over how the political identity of Sanjak residents would be defined in the context of the political mobilization taking place in the streets of the Sanjak itself between pro-Syrian and pro-Turkish activists seeking to maximize their proportional representation in the coming parliamentary elections. Although Shields leaves little doubt that the “bloody spectacle on the Sanjak stage” that ensued was primarily a product of Turkish aggression, she argues that the League’s insistence upon a “proportional representation system” of government--under which Sanjak residents would be required to register as belonging to one of seven ethno-linguistic communities--opened the way for Turkey’s coercive tactics (p. 10). Determined to use the registration process to manufacture a Turkish majority, Shields argues, Turkish agents imported Turkish registrants, flooded the Sanjak with pro-Turkish propaganda, and bribed, coerced, and intimidated non-Turkish residents into adopting a pro-Turkish affiliation. Fearing the collapse of their relations with Turkey, she demonstrates, French administrators overlooked Turkey’s campaign of intimidation and even blocked pro-Syrian retaliation within the limits of maintaining a minimum of order in both the Sanjak and an increasingly enraged Syria.    

In chapters 6 and 7, Shields documents the registration process itself. By the arrival of the League of Nations Electoral Commission in April 1938, Shields illustrates, French administrators had become fully committed to realizing a Turkish majority in the Sanjak. Under the gaze of the bewildered, though impotent, Electoral Commission, French officers turned a blind eye to the increasingly violent intimidation of non-Turkish residents, suppressed anti-Turkish activism, replaced anti-Turkish officials with Turkish agents, and declared marshal law. Frustrated by the failure of even these measures to gain a Turkish majority, Turkish officials accused French administrators of permitting the intimidation of Turkish registrants, denounced the Electoral Commission and the League as French instruments, and threatened to occupy the Sanjak militarily in order to ensure the completion of the registration process without foreign interference. 

When the commission finally resigned in disgust on June 23, France and Turkey privately negotiated a new Franco-Turkish Treaty of Friendship within a fortnight in which France acknowledged “a preponderance of the Turkish element in the Sanjak” in exchange for Turkey’s agreement to forego an alignment against France in any future war that might occur (p. 231). With international relations stabilized, the way was opened for Turkey to formally absorb the Sanjak as the sixty-third province of Turkey within a year. For Shields, however, the exodus of 80 percent of the Sanjak’s Christian population along with thousands of anti-Kemalist Turks and Arabs to Lebanon and Syria during that period speaks to the bankruptcy of self-determination as either a guiding principle for the international community or a foundation for Turkish government in the new province of Hatay.

Notes

[1]. The first book-length study of the “Sanjak question” is Yücel Güçlü, The Question of the Sanjak of Alexandretta: A Study in Turkish-French-Syrian Relations (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Printing House, 2001).

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Citation: David Getman. Review of Shields, Sarah D., Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II. H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. November, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34429

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