Peace at Home, a Minor Intervention Abroad? Explaining the Turkish-Iranian Border Revision of 1932

Abstract

Although historians of Turkish foreign policy have emphasized Turkey’s pro-status-quo stance during the interwar period, the international and regional political context of the time sometimes offered states the opportunity to make revisions to the existing order. Cross-border rebellions represented one such opportunity. Turkey was among the countries which saw border amendments as an option, despite a nation-state discourse and ideology emphasizing the ‘inviolability’ of the existing borders. This article shows how Turkey, unable to suppress the cross-border Ararat Rebellion in the late 1920s and early 1930s, opted for a military operation on Iranian soil and successfully demanded a revision to its supposedly well-established ‘Qasr-e Shirin borders.’ The article identifies three major factors that conditioned Turkey’s exceptional approach to its Iranian border in the 1930s: the historical factor of Ottoman-Iranian relations, the new territoriality of nation-states, and the Soviet Union’s influence on the region. It critically employs the memoirs of key Turkish political elites active in the resolution of this dispute, Turkish newspapers, and archival documents. It contributes to our understanding of early republican Turkish notions of territoriality while building on recent scholarship which questions the assumption of early republican Turkey’s strict non-revisionism and disinterest in the Middle East.