The Challenge of Nationalism and the Last Efforts to Save the Empire

The attitude of non-Muslim subjects toward the sultan's authority became a crucial factor in the last decades of the empire. Since the founding of the Ottoman Empire, Christians and Jews had enjoyed state protection and legal autonomy under their religious leaders.

Nonetheless, they had remained “second-class” subjects, forced to pay extraordinary taxes, not regarded as equals to Muslims in the courts, barred from holding senior administrative and military posts (unless they had converted to Islam), and prohibited from building new places of worship, even though they were allowed to restore the old ones. In the nineteenth century, several new factors contributed to the rising alienation of the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire: the internal crisis and general lack of security from extortions of provincial authorities, the aggressive propaganda of the European states who presented themselves as natural protectors of Ottoman Christians, and the ambitions of young educated members of the Greek, Slavic, and Armenian minorities who had acquired “the germ of nationalism” along with Western-style education and found their inferior position within the Ottoman state no longer tolerable, even though it is worth noting that in the same epoch, various forms of discrimination were still experienced by religious minorities all across Europe, to mention only Jews in Russia and Catholics in Britain.

To some Ottoman leaders, the Serbian and Greek uprisings of the early nineteenth century were the best proof that Christians should not be trusted and that the state administration and army should be recruited exclusively from among the Muslims. Needless to say, such policy put in motion a vicious circle and further strengthened the alienation of non-Muslim elites. Yet, a group of intellectuals, known as the Young Ottomans and including a journalist Ibrahim §inasi and the famous writer Namik Kemal, developed a program which envisioned the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a liberal parliamentary state, where Muslims and non-Muslims would be equally represented in the parliament and where the main criteria of citizenship would be loyalty to the state, and not one's ethnic or religious identity.

Ibrahim §inasi openly admitted that his main inspiration was the United States of America, where citizens swore their allegiance to the Constitution, irrespective of their nationality and religion.^[1866]

The Young Ottomans were soon joined by an influential statesman, Midhat Pasha, who succeeded to persuade the young new sultan, Abdulhamid II (18761909), to proclaim the first Ottoman constitution on December 23, 1876. However, the hopes of reinvigorating the state by its liberalization were soon dashed by military defeat in a new war against Russia (1877-1878), when the Russian troops, entering Bulgaria and Eastern Anatolia, were greeted as liberators by a large section of Ottoman Christian subjects. The dismayed sultan suspended the constitution, exiled Midhat Pasha, and for the rest of his reign turned to the policy of pan-Islamism, hoping to base his rule on the support of Ottoman Muslims, Turkish as well as Arab, Kurdish, or Albanian.^[1867] This policy, symbolized by the harsh repressions of the revolting Armenians in Eastern Anatolia in the 1890s, worked for some time; but in 1908 Russia and Great Britain announced their wish to interfere in Ottoman Macedonia with no respect for Ottoman sovereignty. In response, a conspiracy of military officers and bureaucrats, known as the Young Turks, grasped power and forced the sultan to restore the constitution of 1876. Although the Young Turkish revolution was initially supported by a large part of non-Turkish subjects, who hoped for a liberalization and federalization of the state, it soon turned out that the new leaders aimed at unifying and disciplining Ottoman society by means of compulsory education in Turkish and turning all Ottoman subjects into Turks, hardly a popular policy among non-Turks and non-Muslims.

The revolution also did not rescue the state from further military defeats. The lost war over Tripolitania (1911-1912) deprived the Porte of its last province in Africa, and the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) resulted in the loss of almost all Ottoman territories in Europe and a massive migration of Muslim refugees into Anatolia.

The decision to join the Central Powers in World War 1 brought new horrors and atrocities, when in the face of a Russian invasion of Eastern Anatolia in 1915, the Young Turkish government resolved to resettle and partly annihilate its Armenian population. The British invasion of Hejaz, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq was accompanied by Arab insurrections, encouraged and sponsored by the Entente. As a result, by November 1918 the Ottoman government controlled only Anatolia, and—according to the Treaty of Sevres, imposed on the Porte by the winning powers on August 10, 1920—even there its sovereignty was to be limited.

In defiance of the harsh peace conditions imposed by the Entente and the occupation of Istanbul by the allied troops, a Turkish nationalist movement, headed by Mustafa Kemal, emerged in Central and Eastern Anatolia. The Greek military intervention, encouraged and armed by Great Britain in the hope of crushing Turkish nationalists, was successfully defeated in the war of 1919-1922. Kemalist victory restored Turkish sovereignty in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, but simultaneously signified the end of the Ottoman Empire as the government of the last sultan, Mehmed VI Vahideddin (1918-1922), was accused of collaboration with the occupiers. On November 1, 1922, the sultanate was abolished by the decision of the Great National Assembly in Ankara, and on October 29, 1923, the Republic of Turkey was officially proclaimed.

The long agony of the Ottoman Empire during the calamitous wars extending almost without interruption from 1911 until 1922 was preceded by the gradual erosion of the sultan's political legitimacy, first among his non-Muslim subjects, then among the Muslim Albanians and Arabs, and finally, among the Turks.^[1868] To the dynasty's credit, it must be said that the Ottomans outlived their main imperial rivals, the Romanovs and the Habsburgs on the throne, by almost five and four years, respectively. The era of ascending nationalisms proved fatal to most of the Eurasian empires, so it is rather unlikely that a more liberal and tolerant policy could have saved the Ottoman Empire, just as it did not save the Habsburg double monarchy, despite its impressive efforts at liberalization from 1867.⁵⁶ It is only today that we look at the supranational and multireligious structures of the past with less distaste and with more sympathy, looking for inspiration on how to live in the globalized, post-nationalist world.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

The Challenge of Nationalism and the Last Efforts to Save the Empire

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