Authors

Kima Saribekyan¹;  ¹ Pazmany Peter Catholic University, Hungary

Discussion

The declaration of the First Republic of Armenia in 1918, despite the difficult conditions, was one of the most important events in the history of the Armenian people. After centuries of loss, national statehood was restored.Considering the importance of nation-building processes in the Levant and Mesopotamia after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, this paper explores how the emotional and ideological landscape affected Armenian leadership’s position in balancing between nationalists aspirations and its foreign policy.  This study situates Armenia within the broader context of geopolitical realities, highlighting ideological narratives which shaped public sentiment and Armenia’s foreign relations during its brief independence.
 The ideological narratives of those times can be traced through speeches of political leaders such as Aram Manukian, Hovhannes Katchaznouni; leaders of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and Simon Vratsian in terms of national survival and national stability. And besides the official speeches, the correspondence with Western powers like France and Great Britain in the period of 1918-1920 often invoked the emotional complexity of the Armenian foreign policy.
In parallel, after World War I Armenians initiated a campaign for Armenian sovereignty of Cilicia, however, it was impossible to accomplish their goal without the intervention of French troops, which entered Cilicia in 1919. On October 24, 1916, within the confines of the French Embassy in London, Boghos Nubar Pasha, the founder and initial president of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (1866-1928), and the leader of the Armenian National Delegation in Paris from December 1912, was presented with the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
The Armenian populated areas of the Ottoman Empire would thus come under the control of two of the Allied powers of the Great War. Nubar recalled that the French had indicated their willingness to grant autonomy to an Armenian state under their control, but emphasized that "the Armenians should earn the right to the liberation of their fatherland, by providing volunteers for a planned expedition in Asia Minor." Consequently, an agreement was reached to establish the Legion d'Orient.
Therefore, this  period can be characterized as a period of tensions between the Armenian ideological aspirations, which were connected to the emotional factors of post-Genocide nation-building and the pragmatic realities of the geopolitical situation in the region.