In the 1920s, Christian refugees from Anatolia were prominent in the post-Ottoman states under French mandate, especially in the cities of Aleppo, Beirut, and to a lesser extent Damascus. French mandatory policy towards them was founded on a paradox. To justify extending assistance to them, it was necessary to conceptualize refugees as, precisely, refugees: a specifically needy and enduringly separate group. (The term ‘refugee’ had limited application in international law in the 1920s, covering only certain specific stateless groups.) But to extend that assistance to them effectively, it was necessary to integrate them ever more closely into the society and institutions of the new states—most notably, by granting them Syrian and Lebanese nationality. This was a key part of the process whereby refugees went from being destitute inhabitants of camps to being settled residents of new districts. Nationality in the new states was itself being defined in this period: who it should cover and what advantages it should confer on them were subjects of sharp debate. For some Syrian nationalists it was self-evident that Syrian nationality should not be conferred on the refugees, most of whom were Armenian or other Christians who had fled Anatolia in or after 1915. By granting them that nationality, it was argued, the French were undermining the unity of the Syrian nation. In Lebanon the position of refugees was somewhat difference, but not uncontested. Objections to ‘nationalizing’ the refugees were themselves a way of spreading an understanding of what the Syrian and Lebanese nations were, and what (more tangibly) nationality meant in the new states. But these objections, too, ran up against an awkward truth: the Christian refugees who had arrived in since 1915 and continued to arrive in the 1920s, and the nationalists who objected to their settlement, had all been Ottoman citizens just a few years earlier. There was nothing self-evident about the definition of nationality in Syria and Lebanon. This paper addresses the role the refugee question played in the development of Syrian and Lebanese nationality during the 1920s. It is based on archival research in France and Syria, and Syrian and Lebanese press sources.