The New Old World (71 page)

Neither consistently modern nor robustly traditional, the Tanzimat regimes were also fiscal failures. Tax-farming, officially disavowed, lingered on; rather than increasing, public revenues declined. Capitulations—extra-territorial privileges granted to foreigners—persisted. Foreign borrowing ballooned, before finally bursting into state bankruptcy in 1875. Two years later, Ottoman armies were once again thrashed by Russia, and in 1878—after a brief constitutional episode had fizzled—the Empire was forced to accept the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and the autonomy of most of Bulgaria. For the next thirty years, power swung back from the bureaucracy to the palace, in the person of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who combined technological and administrative modernization—railways, post offices, warships—with religious restoration and police repression. With the loss of most of the Balkans, the population of the Empire had become over 70 per cent Muslim. To cement loyalty to his regime, the sultan refurbished the long-neglected title of caliph, broadcasting pan-Islamic appeals, and topping up the ranks of his administration with Arabs. But no amount of ideological bluster, or fabrication of tradition in the approved Victorian style, could alter the continued dependence of the Empire on a Public Debt Administration run by
foreigners, and a European balance of power incapable of damping down the fires of nationalism in the Balkans.

There a broad swath of Ottoman rule still extended to the Adriatic, in which various insurgent bands—most prominently, the Macedonian secret organization IMRO—roamed the hills, and the cream of the army was stationed in garrison towns to hold what was left of Rumelia, the rich original core of the Empire, its ‘Roman' part. Here opposition to the Hamidian reaction had become widespread by the turn of the century among the young of all ethnic groups, not least Turks themselves. In 1908 rumours of an impending Russo-British carve-up of the region triggered a military rising in Monastir and Salonika. The revolt spread rapidly, and within a couple of weeks had become irresistible. Abdülhamid was forced to call elections, at which the organization behind the uprising, newly revealed to the world as the Committee of Union and Progress, won a resounding majority across the Empire. The Young Turks had taken power.

The Revolution of 1908 was a strange, amphibious affair. In many ways it was premonitory of the upheavals in Persia and China that followed three years later, but with features that set it apart from all subsequent such risings in the twentieth century. On the one hand, it was a genuine constitutional movement, arousing popular enthusiasm right across the different nationalities of the Empire, and electing an impressively inter-ethnic Parliament on a wide suffrage: an authentic expression of the still liberal
Zeitgeist
of the period. On the other hand, it was a military coup mounted by a secret organization of junior officers and conspirators, which can claim to be the first of a long line of such episodes in the Third World in a later epoch. The two were not disjoined, since the architects of the coup, a small group of plotters, gained Empire-wide support, in the name of constitutional rule, virtually overnight—their party numbering hundreds of thousands within a year.
⁸
Nor, formally speaking, were the objectives of each distinct:
in the vocabulary of the time, the ‘liberty, equality, fraternity and justice' proclaimed by the first were conceived as conditions of securing the integrity of the Empire sought by the second, in a common citizenship shared by all its peoples.

But that synthesis was not—could never be—stable. The prime mover in the revolution was the core group of officers in the CUP. Their over-riding aim was the preservation of the Empire, at whatever cost. Constitutional or other niceties were functional or futile to it, as the occasion might be, as means: not as ends in themselves. But if they were not liberals, nor were they in any sense anti-colonial, in the fashion of later military patriots in the Third World, often authoritarian enough, but resolute enemies of Western imperialism—the Free Officers in Egypt, the Lodges in Argentina, the Thirty Comrades in Burma. The threats to the Ottoman Empire came, as they had long done, from European powers or their regional allies, but the Young Turks did not reject the West culturally or politically: rather, they wanted to enter the ring of its
Machtpolitik
on equal terms, as one contestant among others. For that, a transformation of the Ottoman state was required, to give it a modern mass base of the kind that had become such a strength of its rivals.

But here they faced an acute dilemma. What ideological appeal could hold the motley populations—divided by language, religion, and ethnic origin—of the Ottoman Empire together? Some unifying patriotism was essential, but the typical contemporary ingredients for one were missing. The nearest equivalent to the Ottoman order was the Habsburg Empire, but even it was considerably more compact, overwhelmingly of one basic faith, and in possession of a still respected traditional ruler. The Young Turks, in charge of lands stretching from the Yemen to the Danube, and peoples long segregated and stratified in a hierarchy of incompatible confessions, had no such advantages. What could it mean to be a citizen of this state, other than simply the contingent subject of a dynasty that the Young Turks themselves treated with scant reverence, unceremoniously ousting Abdülhamid within a year of taking power? The new regime could not escape an underlying legitimacy deficit. An awareness of the fragility of its ideological position was visible from the start. For the Young Turks retained the discredited monarchy against which they had rebelled, installing a feeble cousin of Abdülhamid as a figurehead successor in the Sultanate, and even trooping out, in farcical piety, behind the bier of Abdülhamid when the old brute, a King Bomba of the Bosphorus, finally expired.

Such shreds of a faded continuity were naturally not enough to clothe the new collective emperor. The CUP needed the full dress of a modern nationalism. But how was this to be defined? A two-track solution was the answer. For public consumption, it proclaimed a ‘civic' nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what their creed or descent—a doctrine with broad appeal, greeted with a tremendous initial outburst of hope and energy among even the hitherto most disaffected groups in the Empire, including Armenians. In secret conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims or Turks.
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This was a duality that in its way reflected the peculiar structure of the CUP itself. As a party, it had won a large parliamentary majority in the first free elections the Empire had known, and with a brief intermission in 1912–13, directed the policies of the state. But its leadership shunned the front of the stage, taking neither cabinet posts nor top military commands, leaving these to an older generation of soldiers and bureaucrats. Behind a façade of constitutional propriety and deference to seniority, however, actual power was wielded by the party's Central Committee, a group of fifty zealots controlling a political organization in origin modelled on the Macedonian and Armenian undergrounds. The term ‘Young Turks' was not a misnomer. When it took over, the key leaders of the CUP were in their late twenties or thirties. Numerically, army captains and majors predominated, but civilians also figured at the highest level. The trio who eventually occupied the limelight would be Enver and Cemal, from the officer corps, and Talat, a former functionary in the post office. Behind them, publicly less visible, but hidden drivers of the organization, were two military doctors, Selânikli Nazim and Bahaettin
Ş
akir. All five top leaders came from the ‘European' sector of the Empire: the
coxcomb Enver from a wealthy family in Istanbul, the mastiff Talat and the clinical
Ş
akir from today's Bulgaria, Nazim from Salonika, the slightly older Cemal from Mytilene.

The CUP was soon put to the test of defending the Empire it had been set up to renew. In 1911 Italy seized Libya, the last Ottoman province in North Africa, Enver vainly attempting to organize desert resistance. A year later, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria combined to launch a joint attack on the Ottoman armies in the Balkans, which within a matter of weeks had all but swept them out of Europe. The CUP, which had been briefly dislodged from power in the summer of 1912, escaped the odium of this massive defeat, and when its enemies fell out with each other, was able to regain at least the province of Edirne. But the scale of the imperial catastrophe was traumatic. Rumelia had long been the most advanced region of the Empire, the prime recruiting-ground of Ottoman elites from the time of the
devshirme
to the Young Turks themselves, who kept their Central Committee in Salonika, not Istanbul, down to 1912. Its final loss, not even at the hands of a great power, reducing Ottoman domains in Europe to a mere foothold, and expelling some 400,000 Turks from their homes, was the greatest disaster and humiliation in the history of the Empire.

The effect on the CUP was twofold. The Empire was now 85 per cent Muslim, lowering any incentive for political appeals to the remaining quotient of unbelievers, and increasing the attraction of playing the card of Islam to rally support for its regime. But though the leaders of the Committee, determined to keep hold of the Arab provinces, made ample use of this, they had before them the bitter lesson taught by the Albanians, who had seized the opportunity offered by the Balkan wars to gain their independence—a defection by fellow-Muslims that suggested a common religion might not be enough to prevent a further disintegration of the state they had inherited. The result was to tilt the ideological axis of the CUP, especially its inner circle, in an increasingly ethnic—Turkish, as distinct from Muslim—direction. The shift involved no cost in outlook: virtually to a man, the Young Turks were positivists whose view of matters sacred was thoroughly instrumental.
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Nor were they disposed to accept a diminished station for the Empire. Expulsion from Rumelia did not inspire a defensive posture, but an active will to avenge defeats in the Balkans, and recoup imperial losses. ‘Our anger is strengthening: revenge, revenge, revenge; there is no other word', Enver wrote to his wife.
¹¹
The lesson the CUP drew from 1912 was that Ottoman power could be upheld only by alliance with at least one of Europe's Great Powers, which had stood aside as it was rolled up. The Young Turks had no particular preference as to which, trying in turn Britain, Austria, Russia and France, only to be rebuffed by each, before finally succeeding with Germany on 2 August 1914, two days before the outbreak of the First World War.
¹²
By now the CUP occupied the foreground: Enver was minister of war, Talat of the interior, Cemal of the navy. The treaty as such did not commit the Empire to declare war on the Entente, and the Young Turks thought to profit from it without much risk. They banked on Germany routing France in short order, whereupon Ottoman armies could join up safely with the Central Powers to knock out Russia, and garner the fruits of victory—regaining a suitable belt of Thrace, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, Libya, all of Arabia, territory ceded to Russia in the Caucasus, and lands stretching to Azerbaijan and Turkestan beyond.

But when France did not collapse in the West, while Germany pressed for rapid Ottoman entry into the war to weaken Russia in the East, much of the cabinet got cold feet. It was only after weeks of disagreement and indecision that Enver, the most bellicose
member of the junta now in control, succeeded in bouncing the government into war in late October 1914, with an unprovoked naval bombardment of Russian coastal positions in the Black Sea.
¹³
However, the Ottoman navy, even manned by German crews, was in no position to effect landings in the Ukraine. Where then was Young Turk mettle to be displayed? Symbolic forces were eventually sent north to buff out Austro-German lines in Galicia, and half-hearted expeditions dispatched, at the prompting of Berlin, against British lines in Egypt. But these were sideshows. The crack troops of the army, led by Enver in person, were flung across the Russian border in the Caucasus. There, waiting to be recovered, lay the three provinces of Batum, Ardahan and Kars subtracted from the Empire at the Conference of Berlin in 1878. In the snow-bound depths of the winter of January 1915, few returned. The Ottoman attack was shattered more completely than any comparable offensive in the Great War—fewer than one out of seven survived the campaign. As they straggled back, frostbitten and demoralized, their rearguard was left exposed.

In Istanbul, the CUP reacted swiftly. This was no ordinary retreat into the kind of rear where another battle of the Marne might be fought. The whole swathe of territory extending across both sides of the frontier was home to Armenians. What place could they have in the conflict that had now been unleashed? Historically the oldest inhabitants of the region, indeed of Anatolia at large, they were Christians whose church—dating from the third century—could claim priority over that of Rome itself. But by the nineteenth century, unlike Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks or Albanians, they comprised no compact national majority anywhere in their lands of habitation. In 1914, about a quarter were subjects of the Russian, three-quarters of the Ottoman Empire. Under the tsars, they enjoyed no political rights, but as fellow Christians were not persecuted for their religion, and could rise within the imperial administration. Under the sultans, they had been excluded from the
devshirme
from the start, but could operate as merchants and acquire land, if not offices; and in the course of the nineteenth century they generated a significant intellectual stratum—the first Ottoman novels were written by Armenians.

Inevitably, like their Balkan counterparts and inspired by them,
this intelligentsia developed a nationalist movement. But it was set apart from them in two ways: it was dispersed across a wide and discontinuous expanse of territory, throughout which it was a minority, and it was divided between two rival empires, one of which posed as its protector, while the other figured as its persecutor. Most Armenians—about 75 per cent—were peasants in the three easternmost Ottoman provinces, where they numbered perhaps a quarter of the population. But there were also significant concentrations in Cilicia, bordering on today's Syria, and vigorous communities in Istanbul and other big cities. State suspicion of a minority with links across a contested border, latent popular hostility to unbelievers, and economic jealousy of alien commercial wealth made for a combustible atmosphere around their presence in Anatolia. Abdülhamid's personal animus ensured they would suffer under his rule, which saw repeated pogroms against them. In 1894–6, anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000 died in massacres at the hands of special Kurdish regiments he had created for ethnic repressions in the east.
¹⁴
The ensuing international outcry, leading eventually to the theoretical appointment—it came to nothing—of foreign inspectors to ensure Armenian safety in the worst-affected zones, confirmed belief in the disloyalty of the community.