Book Review: From Empire to Republic
Change and continuity during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic
Zürcher, Erik J., The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (I. B. Tauris, 2010).
Hanioglu, M. Sükrü, Ataturk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Tezel, Yahya Sezai, Transformation of ‘State’ and ‘Society’ in Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, Roma Publications, (Ankara: Roma Publications, 2005)
Periods of turbulent change, especially when they involve the political or social transformation of societies, pose interesting challenges for historians. The French Revolution is still being debated among historians, and it will possibly continue to be debated as long as the ideological underpinnings of the French revolution, modernity and nationalism, remain relevant to our contemporary world. Certainly, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the First World War, which led to the formation of the Turkish Republic was a period of such change. Turkish historiography was severely handicapped in analysing this period as the historical narrative became harnessed to the legitimization of the nationalist project. Since the 70’s, and especially in the 80s, as interpretations and myths of official historiography came under closer scholarly examination, one of the recurring questions was if Turkey was the legitimate and natural inheritor of the Ottoman Empire or whether the new Republic was the Phoenix reborn out of a national liberation war?
The question of change and continuity from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic is a central theme of the three books reviewed here, although the question is approached from quite different directions. Erik Zürcher is acknowledged by Turkish historians as one of the first to draw attention in his Ph.D. thesis, published as The Unionist Factor. The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement[1], to the continuity between the Young Turk period in the late Ottoman period and the early Republic. In the Preface to The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building[2], Zürcher describes his findings as follows:
‘My conclusion was far-reaching and ran counter to everything that was and is sacred in the official historiography of the Turkish republic. I attempted to show that the national resistance movement after World War I was not only built on the remnants of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), but that the CUP leadership actually planned and organized the resistance and launched Mustafa Kemal as its leader.’
In a later work, Turkey. A Modern History[3], Zürcher augments his continuity thesis by proposing the periodization of 1908-1950, during which both the CUP and the Republican People’s Party held power, as the ‘Young Turk Period.’ This argument is taken even further more recently by Fatma Göçek who suggests that the ‘Nationalist Period’ covers the period 1902-1982, starting with the 1902 Congress of the Ottoman Opposition Parties in Paris, and ending with the neo-liberal policies applied to the economy under the Presidency of Turgut Özal.[4] Both of these periodizations are in stark contrast to that of nationalist Turkish historiography, premised as it is on the complete break with the Ottoman past following Mustafa Kemal’s landing in Samsun on 19 May 1919. This is regarded as a landmark date, following which Mustafa Kemal takes the leadership of the Ottoman armies and civil defense organizations in Eastern Anatolia to conduct the successful National Struggle that would lead to the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
In this volume, Zürcher includes a collection of articles and papers written between 1992 and 2007 where he continues his critique of nationalist historiography while at the same time exploring different social and political aspects of the period. The articles have been updated with recent advances in Turkish historiography as Zürcher has combined and revised a number of articles prior to their publication in this volume. Zürcher’s use of memoirs and autobiographies -important sources in developing a more complete picture than offered by nationalist historiography, is now supplemented by more recent research from historians that have had access to a number of state archives. For example, Zürcher’s use of the Dutch legation reports on the uprising in April 1909, against the government of the CUP, throws new light on the event. Among the causes appears to have been the friction within the officer corps between those trained in military schools and those who had risen through the ranks, and the widespread discontent of the troops.[5] Discord within the Young Turks, and the fact that Unionist were out of touch with public opinion are also listed as factors having contributed to the climate in which the insurrection took place. This offers a more nuanced explanation of the event when compared with the customary narrative that religious fundamentalists took to the street against the modernization steps of the CUP. The volume includes a review of Kazim Karabekir’s memoirs, a critique of Bernard Lewis’s Emergence of Modern Turkey[6], the standard bearer for the nation-state building paradigm, essays on the social history of the World War experienced through the eyes of the common soldier, social history form the bellow, and others, 21 articles in total. Each one representing a valuable contribution to the understanding of the era.
One of the historians frequently mentioned by Zürcher in his articles is Şükrü Hanioğlu, although Hanioğlu’s book reviewed here, Atatürk - An Intellectual Biography, is not referred to as it is more recent. Hanioğlu considers the question of continuity between the late Ottoman period and the new republic from the perspective of ideas that shaped the elite military corps that held political power between 1908 - 1918, conducted the National Struggle between 1919-23 and eventually molded the ideology and public institutions of modern Turkey. Mustafa Kemal, is set within that historical context, as Hanioğlu traces his rise to become the leader of the National Struggle but also how the ideas Mustafa Kemal gleaned from the West developed over the years; and the way Mustafa Kemal and the Young Turks moved from Ottomanism to an ethnic-based nationalism, as they witnessed the loss of territory to nationalist movements.
The narrative is captivating as Hanioğlu takes us on a journey that starts from the benches of the military academies in Salonika and Monastir to the prestigious Royal Military Academy in Istanbul, where young cadets are indoctrinated by the German military theorist Colmar von der Goltz in the vision of Das Volk in Waffen[7]. The journey continues, through the Nationalist Struggle, to the Grand National Assembly in the 1920s and 30’s where the ideology of the new state is shaped and codified. Goltz’s vision, of a military elite as the vanguard destined to lead a nation to statehood, had found a fruitful ground with the Ottoman officials.
These ideas of the Young Turks, tending increasingly towards nationalism, are complemented, argues Hanioğlu, with the mid-nineteenth-century German philosophy, Vulgarmaterialismus, a vulgarized version of the doctrine of materialism, fusing popular notions of materialism, scientism and Darwinism into a simplistic creed that upheld the role of science in society.[8] The combination of these strands, military elitism, nationalism in the form of Turkism, positivism and scientism with a shot of social Darwinism, would be the guiding principles for Mustafa Kemal during the transition from empire to republic, and define the nature the republic would take. The numerous thesis that under instructions from Mustafa Kemal would become the ideology of the new state, such as the ‘sun-language theory’ which asserted that Turkish was the original language of mankind, and the ‘history thesis’ that maintained civilization had spread from Central Asia by the migration of Turkish tribes, can be understood in light of the amalgam of ideas derived from popular theories prevalent in the West. These provided Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the blueprint for nation-building.
This volume of Hanioğlu goes a long way in explaining the intellectual formation of Ataturk and how in turn this shaped modern Turkey. But how complete is it? Can Ataturk’s intellectual profile be drawn without reference to some of the cataclysmic developments that occurred as the Ottoman Empire gave way to the Turkish Republic? As Zürcher reminds us ‘all too often in the field of Turkology we forget that the modern state of Turkey was built on ethnic cleansing on a massive scale’.[9] On such issues Hanioglu is silent, as if Mustafa Kemal had no views on the subject, or somehow these did not reflect on his intellectual formation. Mustafa Kemal was not one of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, but he was part of the ruling CUP, a high level military officer and a commander of the Syrian front during World War I. Akçam, uses a quote from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian genocide as the title of his book, A Shameful Act[10]. This may have provided Akçam, the first Turkish scholar to describe the massacre of the Armenian population in Anatolia as genocide, with a little body armor. On the other hand though, at an artisans gathering in Adana, Mustafa Kemal is reported to have said: ‘Armenians have no right in this prosperous country. The country is yours; the country belongs to the Turks. Historically this country was Turkish; therefore it is Turkish and will remain Turkish forever. The country has finally been returned to its rightful owners. The Armenian and the others have no right to be here.’[11] These views would be echoed by the Minister of Justice, Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, in 1930: ‘those that are not of pure Turkish blood have only one right in this country; the right to be servants, the right to be slaves.’
The pogrom of the Jews of Thrace that took place in 1934 was part of a covert government policy to clear Thrace from minorities. The military suppression of the rebellion at the Kurdish-Alevi town of Dersim during 1937-38 was a much more violent act. The demand of the rebellion was for an end to the Resettlement Law of 1934 aimed to forcibly relocated people for purposes of ethnic assimilation. The policy to assimilate Kurds, through forced migration of families to western Anatolia, and the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslim minorities, went hand in hand throughout Ataturk’s presidency. It is a legacy Mustafa Kemal left that has marked the ideology and public institutions of the Turkish state to this day.
Tezel, in the Transformation of 'State' and 'Society' in Turkey, goes back further into Ottoman history than either Zürcher or Hanioğlu to evaluate the influences that contributed to the emergence of modern Turkey. The opening lines of the Introduction informs the reader that ‘Turkey is a marvelous country to travel and explore’ giving the impression that this may be a tourist guide for the ‘outsider visiting Turkey, to help them make a better sense of their experience, if they have a sense of curiosity that transcends lying on the beach.’ Leaving aside what the curious tourist may make of the book, and reading on, it turns out to be a valuable compact narrative of the Ottoman Empire since the 14th Century to the present day Turkey, peppered with a number of searching and controversial questions and views.
As the title implies, the focus of the book is on the reforms in the late-Ottoman period and the formation of the Republic. Tezel bases his analysis in the context of the ‘modern Islamic problem’ as viewed by the West, and the corresponding attempt of the ‘Jacobean modernizing elite’ to resolve the problem through a Westernization paradigm. The Kemalist political and cultural revolutions that established a Western-oriented Republic are seen as the culmination of the modernizing reforms that were initiated early in the 18th century, and gained momentum in the 19th century: ‘Mustafa Kemal’s vision was clearly the continuity of the reform programme initiated in the Tanzimat era.’[12] While discussing the reforms that were initiated by the Tanzimat (Regulations) era after 1839, Tezel argues that Abdülhamid who reigned between 1876 and 1908 was ‘not an Islamist reactionary as he is portrayed in some European and Turkish works on him.’ On the contrary, that he was a product of the reform movement and appreciated the progress of the West. Abdülhamid created a large administrative organisation to govern the Empire that would become the foundation for the state apparatus of the new Republic. Also that Abdülhamid’s reign was to be remembered as an era of prosperity, where big strides in the educational field were made. This sounds like the rehabilitation of Abdülhamid, the bogeyman of nationalist historiography, or at the very least a more balanced view of the situation during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.
Tezel discusses the nation-building modernizing paradigm as may have been viewed by officialdom who considered themselves to be the ‘custodians of the state,’ without which society would be unable to preserve its political and cultural existence. To demonstrate the validity of this assessment, Tezel suggests an alternative counter-factual scenario, and asks what would have happened in the event that the ‘commanders who set upon the road to organize and wage the National Struggle had evaporated suddenly and ceased to exist?’ His hypothetical answer is that it would have left the Turkish population ‘reduced to a periphery similar to that of Palestinians in Palestine and Israel.’ This argument tends not to take into account the fact Turkey was the inheritor to a large empire that spread over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for over five centuries. Even under the rule of the CUP (1908-1918) it remained a geographically large empire, and one that had Pan-Turanist expansionist policies. Greece which occupied western Anatolia after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I would prove no match for the military forces in Anatolia and the regional ‘Defense of National Rights’ societies formed after the Mondros Armistice - just as the Palestinians and Arab forces were no match for Israel in 1948, yet the threat is overstated in Israeli official historiography.
Tezel’s view on primacy of the officials is largely based on his assessment of the active players in the National Struggle, where he sees no other forces except officials. Tezel argues that there was no ‘peasant insurrections’ as there was no national cry for land by the peasantry who appropriated large areas of cultivated land following the departure of Armenian and Greek peasants. Neither were there peasant uprisings against foreign occupation, in fact the only opposition put up by the peasantry was against officialdom. The middle classes had to be dragged into the defense societies, the Ulema, as a religious aristocracy maintained by the state, played no role, and the working classes were barely visible during the National Struggle. In brief, the era was marked overall by the singularly passive role of the masses. This left the officials as the only force to organize and wage the National Struggle.
Is it possible that Tezel is underestimating the grass-root organizations that developed in Anatolia and Thrace after the Armistice? Tanör describes in Congress Movements in Turkey (1918-1920)[13] many different types of local and regional defense organizations that spontaneously formed in response to the Armistice – local elites and the local bourgeoisie usually led these. Certainly to coordinate and centralize the resources of these organizations required the breadth of experience that only the military leadership possessed at that time. It was Mustafa Kemal’s ‘uniqueness,’ to quote Tezel, that he had the vision to base the integration of the defense organizations and the military forces on a new constitutional government, which assumed the role of the Grand National Assembly. In this process, as they were incorporated in the new state, the grass root organizations lost their original, often quite democratic structures,
It is worth noting that Tezel has remained consistent with the argument he put forward in 1970, when he challenged the anti-imperialist credentials of the new Republic, based on the case study of the Chester Concession.[14] In his book Tezel reiterates the argument that in spite of the statements at the Grand National Assembly in 1921, to the effect that the GNA represented an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist polity, the new state in fact actively sought foreign investment.[15] Following from this point, in his concluding chapter Tezel debates the nature of the transformation that took place in the creation of the Turkish republic and poses the question: ‘Can we refer to the Turkish political transformation in terms of a Turkish Revolution?’ Tezel’s views on to the historical role of officialdom as “state custodians’ leads him to answer this in the negative.
How to explain then the radical changes that took place in the Turkish political system that replaced the constitutional monarchy with a republic, abolished the Caliphate and embarked on a series of civil, legal and social reform programmes that resulted in a modern nation-state. Tezel’s thesis is that ‘this transformation was spread over a period of more than two hundred years and took place almost totally within the societal realm of the officialdom, without any significant interference of the non-official sections of society, without peasant insurrections arising from problems of land control, and/or “bourgeois insubordination” arising from conflicts over the use of free floating resources or participation in political decision making.’[16]
He concludes that there was no ‘episode of revolutionary transformation in Turkish history,’[17] and argues that attempts by Marxists and some non-Marxists to classify the Turkish case in terms of a universal category of ‘revolution’ suffers from a methodological failing, that of reification of analytical results. For Tezel, the National Struggle was used by the secular republican faction of officials as a historical opportunity to ‘culminate the previous transformative moves towards a rational-legal polity by the establishment of a secular republic.’ The discontinuity he sees was in the establishment of the secular state that replaced the religious state. In this sense, for Tezel the Turkish revolution was a cultural one.
Tezel’s political conclusion is that ‘the raison d’etre of the Jacobin tradition of custodianship of the Turkish state is no longer there’. Given how topical this subject was at the time when his book was published, and since then as well, this prognosis I feel was aimed at the 'tourist lying on the beach'.
Dario Navaro
London, 21 April 2013
[1] Zürcher, E. J., The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905-1926 (BRILL, 1984)
[2] Zürcher, Erik J., The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (I. B. Tauris, 2010).
[4] In Kieser, Hans-Lukas, ed., Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities (I.B.Tauris, 2006), pp. 99.
[6] Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3rd Revised edition (Oxford University Press Inc, 2001)
[10] Akcam, Taner, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Macmillan, 2007
[12] Tezel, Yahya Sezai, Transformation of ‘State’ and ‘Society’ in Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, Roma Publications, 19, 1 st pub (Ankara: Roma Publications, 2005) pp 122
[14] Yahya Tezel, “Birinci Büyük Millet Meclisi Anti-Emperyalist miydi? Chester Ayrıcalığı”, Ankara Üniversitesi, Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Dergisi, C.25, No.4, 1970, s. 289
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