Armenia's Borders Are Wrong

At the risk of mobilizing all of Turkish and Azerbaijani wrath, Armenia's borders are wrong. Today, the Republic of Armenia is here, in the rugged mountains of the South Caucasus. It's a pretty small, landlocked country, covering just under 30,000 square kilometers. It's bordered by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. Living inside those borders are roughly 3 million people, yet when you look at In Armenian history, there is an immediate and pretty striking feeling that something is off with both of these numbers. There is still a real sense of disconnect between what Armenia is on paper right now and what it used to be across not just hundreds but thousands of years. Modern Armenia represents only about 10-15% of the historical Armenian homeland. Mount Ararat, the central symbol of the nation, and the mountain featured right in the middle of their national coat of arms, sits outside of the country entirely. Across a border inside modern Turkey. Not only did their land used to be bigger, their population did too. And even in those that remain, the vast majority lives outside of modern Armenian borders. While 3 million people live in the homeland, if you will, around 8 million Armenians live scattered across the globe. There are large communities in Russia, the United States, France, also other parts of of the Middle East And this global dispersion isn't an accident, it wasn't just simple migration. It was the direct consequence of how Armenia's borders shrank, how its people were driven from their ancestral soil and how international politics repeatedly failed them. Armenian roots in the highland plateau go back a very long time to the bronze and iron ages. They are tied to the ancient states of Hayasa-Azzi, Nairi and the kingdom of Urartu, names that most of us don't really know about. By 782 BC, the Urartian king Argishti I founded the fortress of Erebuni, It makes their capital one of the oldest cities in the world. which is modern day Yerevan. When Urartu declined, it became the satrapy of Armenia under the Persian Achaemenid Empire. But the real territorial high point came a little later, with the ancient kingdom of Armenia. Around 190 BC, King Artaxias I unified the Armenian highlands and established a strong Hellenistic kingdom. A century later, under his grandson Tigranes the Great, Armenia became an empire. At its peak, Tigranes' domain covered about 900,000 square kilometers. His realm stretched from the Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Caspian, taking in parts of what is now Syria, Lebanon, and the Mediterranean. and northern regions in Mesopotamia, Cappadocia and Cilicia. The population under his rule reached an estimated 10 million people. The Armenian army numbered over 100,000, backed by an elite cavalry called the Ayruzi and very strong archers who earned the respect of Roman chroniclers at the time. Even after Tigranes lost the war against the Roman Republic and gave up his foreign conquests, in 66 BC, the core kingdom of Greater Armenia remained huge. As an independent state and later a Roman client kingdom ruled by the Arsacid dynasty, Greater Armenia encompassed around 300,000 square kilometers and held still 4 million people. It was during this period that King Tiridates III, in around the year 300, Armenia adopted Christianity as its official religion, becoming the first nation in history to do so officially. In the year 405, they invented the Armenian alphabet, creating a very unique written identity that allowed the people to endure even when their kings lost control of the land. That political independence didn't last though. Located between major rival world powers, Armenia was repeatedly invaded, partitioned and annexed. Like in 387, when Rome and Sassanian Persia split it between them. By 428, the Persian Sassanians deposed the last Arsacid king. They turned eastern Armenia into a governed province known as Marzpanat. The Arab Caliphates moved in during the 7th century and turned the area into an administrative province known as Armenia. But then came the Middle Ages, when the Armenians managed to rebuild a kingdom of their own. In 885, Ashot I founded the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia, which won recognition from both Baghdad and Constantinople. They built a capital of Ani, known for its Fine churches and beautiful architecture. But in 1045, the Byzantine Empire annexed it too, and only a few decades later, the Seljuk Turks swept through Anatolia, defeating the Byzantines in 1071 and overrunning Greater Armenia along the way. Interestingly, the Seljuk invasion triggered a pretty dramatic shift in Armenian geography. It sort of forced them to pick up their country and move it somewhere else, quite literally. Armenian refugees led by Prince Ruben So, let's get started. First of all, let's talk about the history of the Armenian Empire. The Armenian Empire fled to the southwest, into the Taurus Mountains and the coastal region of Cilicia along the Mediterranean Sea, where one of the previous polities had also reached before. There they set up the Armenian Principality of Cilicia, which became the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia in 1198. This was an entirely new Armenian state, outside that historical core territory. Covering about 40,000 square kilometers with a population of over 1 million people, it became a key ally of the European Crusader states at the time, but when those states collapsed, they were kind of left isolated and without any friends in the region, so in 1375, the Egyptian Mamluks conquered the capital at Sis and brought down the last sovereign Armenian state of the medieval period. Back in the historical homeland, the land was torn apart by successive waves of invaders includ ing the Mongols and the Timurids. By the 16th century the Armenian homeland was for a lly d ivided between two competing powers: the Ottomans in the West and the Persians to the east. The border moved back and forth for over a century through brutal wars In 1604, Shah Abbas I of Persia used a scorched earth policy in the Ararat Plain and he forcibly deported around 300,000 Armenians to Iran so that invading Ottoman troops would find nothing to eat. I think it's the first instance of population displacement for the Armenians and unfortunately the first of many to come. Thousands died along the way and the population permanently changed the demographic balance of the Ararat Valley and Nakhichevan. In the early 19th century, the Russian Empire also pushed south into the Caucasus. In 1828, they took East Armenia and kind of a little bit of the opposite happened. Tens of thousands of Armenians migrated from Iran and the Ottoman Empire into the Russian-controlled zone, slowly rebuilding an Armenian majority around Yerevan. Meanwhile, West Armenia was still under Ottoman rule. Ottoman Armenians lived as kind of second-class citizens. Under the millet system, they were subject to heavy taxes and discrimination. During the late 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, Armenians in the east provinces pushed for civil reform and safety from attacks by nomadic tribes and also local officials. But instead of granting reforms, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II Order the Hamidian Massacres between 1894 and 1896, killing between 200 and 300 thousand Armenians. When the Young Turks took power in 1908, hopes for equality were big, but they quickly faded away, especially after the 1909 Adana Massacre, A decisive catastrophe came during WWI, suspecting that Armenians would side with the Russians. The Ottoman government carried out the Armenian Genocide, starting in April of 1915. Able-bodied men were rounded up and killed, while women, children and older people were sent to brutal death marches into the Syrian desert. Between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were systematically murdered. This ended more than 2,000 years of continuous Armenian existence across West Armenia. It razed entire communities and destroyed thousands of historic churches, schools and other cultural sites. When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, the Russian troops holding parts of East Anatolia walked away. Facing advancing Ottoman troops, Eastern Armenians made a desperate stand at the Battle of Sardarapat in 1918, stopping the Turkish advance just miles outside Yerevan and they declared the first independent modern republic of Armenia. Overcrowded with thousands of starving, sick refugees from the West, yet on the first anniversary of the Republic in 1919, Prime Minister Alexander Khatisian declared the unification of East and West Armenia into a single state. And the international community appeared ready to back this claim. In 1920, the victorious Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Sevres with the Ottoman government, and the treaty recognized Armenia as a free, independent state with a much larger territory. President Woodrow Wilson of the US was asked to draw the official boundary between Turkey and Armenia. Wilson himself had personally outlined self-determination and security for non-Turkish people in point 12 of his famous 14 points. In November of 1920, he presented his Arbitral award, establishing what became known as Wilsonian Armenia. We can still find the maps, some said to have been even drawn by the US president himself depicting the projected borders for this Armenian expansion. It would have given the First Republic an extra 103,000 square kilometers from the Ottoman lands, providing direct access to the Black Sea through the port of Trabzon and making Making the country not landlocked anymore. Historians estimate the pre-war population of that awarded area at about 3.5 million people. 49% were Muslim, 40% were Armenia and then a smaller share were Greek. It was expected that with 815,000 Armenian refugees returning from the Caucasus, Russia, Iran and the West, the total population would stabilize around 3 million. Giving Armenians a clear majority in this new state. There was also a proposal at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to create an even larger state of 330,000 square kilometers, covering both the highlands and reaching into the historical Cilicia. This would bring it up to 4.3 million people, 2.5 million of which would be Armenian. In August of 1920, those Armenians in Cilicia even declared an autonomous republic under French protection. It didn't last long. None of these plans came into reality. Wilsonian Armenia remained entirely on paper. The US Senate refused to approve an American mandate over the territory in 1920 by a vote of 52 to 23, wanting to avoid foreign military obligations at the time. In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk rejected the Treaty of Sèvres and built a powerful nationalist army. In 1920, they attacked the First Republic easily pushing through Kars, occupying Alexandropol and forcing the Armenians to surrender. At the very same moment, the Soviet army moved into Armenia from the east. Caught between annihilation and Soviet rule, the Armenian leaders chose to hand over power to the Bolsheviks in early December. Under the Treaty of Alexandropol and later Treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921, Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey fixed the borders of Armenia. Turkey kept the former Russian territories of Kars, Ardahan and Surmalu, taking away the medieval capital of Ani and Mount Ararat. Nakhichevan was made an autonomous territory under the protection of Soviet Azerbaijan. In 1921, the Soviets also assigned Majority Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh to Soviet Azerbaijan to please Baku, despite protests from Armenian communist leaders. Soviet Armenia entered the USSR as a tiny, landlocked remnant of a country. Throughout the 20th century, movements emerged to challenge those losses and recover some lost lands. After World War II, Stalin himself tried to use the defeat of the Axis to annul the Treaty of Kars and demand the return of some territories from Turkey. Between 1946 and 1948, the Soviets even brought around 100,000 to 150,000 Armenian diaspora repatriates to Soviet Armenia to help repopulate the region. Going against their usual trend of population displacements, Stalin was ethnically Georgian, a fellow Caucasus neighbor, so maybe he felt some type of affinity towards Armenia because of that. But the plan ran straight into the Cold War. The US and Great Britain backed Turkey, the Truman Doctrine came into effect, Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and so western support for these Armenian claims just went away. Also, after Stalin died in 1953, even the USSR dropped these In the 60s and 70s, Armenian frustration took new forms. In the diaspora, political parties like the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, also known as the Dashnaks, pushed the concept of a united Armenia, demanding the lands outlined by the Treaty of Sèvres along with Nagorno-Karabakh, Nakhichevan and Javakheti in southern Georgia. In 1988, the Karabakh Movement began, demanding that the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast be transferred from Azerbaijan to Armenia. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, this turned into a full-scale war. Armenian forces won at first in 1994, and for nearly 30 years, the de facto Republic of Artsakh functioned as a part of Armenia, which a lot of people saw as the first step towards a united country. But just recently, another conflict saw Azerbaijan regain what is effectively total control over the territory. So, what would a modern, united Armenia look like if it existed today? If you take the standard territorial goals of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, combining what is now Armenia with Wilsonian Western Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Nakhichevan and Javakheti, the total area would cover about 182,000 square kilometers, more than six times the size of Armenia today. The total population living on those combined territories today is around 9 to 10 million people, but if that total Armenians would number only about 3 million, which would make them an ethnic minority within their own country. The remaining 6-7 million are Kurds, Turks and Azerbaijanis, a result of decades if not centuries of migration, displacement and elimination. Even if every single Armenian living in the global diaspora returned to the homeland immediately, I think Armenians would still struggle to form a stable majority across that entire territory. Because of these realities, official leaders in Yerevan have had to balance history with survival, recognizing that a small, modern Armenia just can't fight its larger neighbors and recover those lost territories. And so, at least for now, its borders remain, arguably, wrong.