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.

In the early years of the Palestine Mandate, the British developed an apolitical citizenship —without reference to or input from the figure of the political and civil national. This was legislated through the 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council. The British meant for their legislated construction of nationality and citizenship to transcend ethnic nationality and offer rights in a socio-communal sense based on religious grouping. In stark contrast during the first decade of the mandate the Palestinian Arabs advocated a citizenship imbued with practices of political and civil rights in their demands to the government. Palestinian popular groups and leaders demanded the government give all nationals of Palestine an equal status and an equal combination of political, civil and social citizenship rights for both Palestinian-born Arabs and immigrant Jews under the mandate. This paper seeks to explore how the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs used a discourse of rights linked to the ever-present anti-colonial demand for an independent, democratically-elected government responsible to a parliament which would be charged with offering such rights to its nationals. The Palestinian national leadership used their arguments against the mandate to show the clear contradictions between citizenship in the liberal democracy of Britain and the mandate administration’s concepts of colonial citizenship. The paper will historicize the variety of processes in Palestine related to the development of the concepts of Palestinian citizenship and nationality. It is based on the Palestinian press, and records of social and political organizations and their leaders. The Palestinians conceptualized themselves as native nationals rather than legal citizens, according to the history of nationality prior to the end of the Ottoman Empire. The differences between the two statuses were clear in their interpretations of national political and civil rights that they repeatedly asked the British to give. By contrast, the Palestinians and indeed the Arabs of the former Ottoman provinces felt that nationality was a primordial status received by right of birth and language, and which came with the right to self-determination. These themes will be shown in the colonial era of the mandated Middle East, along with a brief summary of the impact of Palestinian citizenship on Arab emigrants and how their reactions contributed to the furthering of the counter-discourses and practices of civic identity from 1920 to 1930.

As colonial educator Arthur Mayhew disingenuously articulated, there were fundamental contradictions and ambiguities inherent in civic education in the context of colonial trusteeship. He noted that colonial education departments, including the Mandates, were unclear as to if their pupils were to become leaders of their own nations, and when. (Mayhew 1938, p 41) The process of implementing government funded systems of education occurred simultaneously with the troubled formation of the polities themselves, bringing conflicting ideals of identity into the classrooms, particularly in the Mandates for Mesopotamia(Iraq) and Palestine. The system of schools the Mandatory authorities sponsored was designed to function like those of the British colonies: to produce a limited, elite class of petty civil servants as well as a contented, rural class of tribesmen, mothers and farmers. These Government Schools, which provided education for Arab boys and girls, were controlled by Departments of Education under the auspices of British-run administrations. Although British civil servants generally occupied the upper echelons of the educational bureaucracy, staff, administrators, teachers and students were overwhelmingly Arabs, creating dueling notions of educational policy as well as the type of citizen the schools would graduate. Accounts of education in the Mandate for Mesopotamia overwhelmingly focus on the dialectic between secular and sectarian notions of citizenship. In contrast, histories of education in the Mandate for Palestine focus less on religious affiliation and more on the repression or promotion of Palestinian nationality. Yet both populations experienced British rule, shared legacies of Ottoman reforms and possessed significant religious, socioeconomic and political diversity. This paper will compare and contrast conceptions of citizenship and national affiliation by employing a close reading of government-produced documents, such as syllabi, reports, and government gazettes, as well as counter-narratives seen in banned textbooks,memoirs, letters, newspapers and diaries. By comparing Iraq and Palestine from 1920-1932 my project will explore the regional context of citizenship without a narrow focus on either a solely Palestinian or Iraqi identity, allowing for continuity between Ottoman and Mandate methods of education. My paper will seek to answer the following questions: what type of citizen were the Government Schools of the Mandates intended to produce? What government were they to accept and what nation were they to belong to? How did the experience of government education shape the types of citizenship which eventually became most resonant for the inhabitants of the region?

The years between 1936 and 1939 in French-Syria witnessed the expansion of public space accompanied by the flourishing of the debates around the constituents of proper Syrianness. The Franco-Syrian treaty (1936) which promised independence to the country within the next five years, in particular the controversy over the two fundamental articles of the treaty—the continuing protection of minorities in Syria, and the establishment of a united Syria- reveal instances of negotiation over proper Syrianness, through (non)violent confrontation of rivalling political groups. Anti-treaty political movements that usually emerged in the autonomously administered regions in French-Syria, and the colonial and Arab nationalist responses towards their respective political projects were formative in redefining the markers of Syrianness. The peculiar characteristics of the anti-treaty political movement in north-eastern Syria (whose inhabitants and the pioneers of the movement were Kurdish and Christian ex-refugees from Turkey) contributed greatly to the substantiation of the most fundamental notions in the Syrian-Arab nationalist ideology, namely minority–majority, religion–ethnicity, territory–region, and autochthony–refugee-ness, all of which were inherited in the post-colonial period with unwanted memories. This presentation will, firstly, introduce the contentious political debates around Syrianness and the tripartite power struggle between the pro-treaty France, Arab nationalists, and the Francophile Syrians supported by the local French officers between 1936 and 1939. It will, then demonstrate the ways in which the contest over the constituents of a proper Syrian citizen in the 1930s have fashioned the terms of belonging and sense of being of north-eastern Syrians from different ethnic religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds in the post-colonial period.