The Fourth Annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture

From Ottomanism to Nationalism

The Turkish revolutionary elite, including those that emerged from the Young Turk committees to lead the Kemalist movement, grew out of an intellectual milieu in the last decades of the nineteenth century that exalted science, rejected religion, and borrowed freely from Western sociology in an effort to overthrow the autocracy of Abdul Hamid II and to preserve the Ottoman state. Neither liberals nor constitutionalists, the Young Turks were etatists who saw themselves as continuing the work of the Tanzimat reformers -- Mustafa Reshid Rasha, Mustafa Fazil Pasha, Midhat Pasha -- and the work of the Young Ottomans. According to Sukru Hanioglu, the historian of the early phase of the movement, “The Young Turk movement was unquestionably a link in the chain of the Ottoman modernization movement as well as representing the modernist wing of the Ottoman bureaucracy.”¹⁹ Influenced by the ideas of Darwin, Claude Bernard, Ludwig Buchner, even the phrenology of Gustave Le Bon (who “proved” that intellectuals have larger craniums by doing research in Parisian millinery shops), “the Young Turk ideology was originally ‘scientific,’ materialist, social Darwinist, elitist, and vehemently antireligious; it did not favor representative government.”²⁰

Most analysts argue that there was a shift in the Young Turk movement from an Ottomanist orientation, in which emphasis was on equality among the millets within a multinational society that continued to recognize difference, to a more nationalist position in which the superiority of the ethnic Turks (which was implicit in Ottomanism itself) and their privileged position within the state was more explicitly underlined. Earlier, Ottoman westernizers had hoped to secure western technology without succumbing to western culture, somehow to preserve Islam but make the empire technologically and militarily competitive with the West. Reform had always come from above, from westernizing statemen and bureaucrats, a response to a sense that the empire had to change or collapse. Within Ottoman society the Muslims were the least prepared to adopt western ways. Rather, there was uneven development of the millets, and, as Hanioglu proposes, “superwesternization in the Ottoman capital was led by non-Muslim inhabitants and followed by Muslims.”²¹ I have argued elsewhere that the visibility of better-off Armenians in the capital and towns appeared as an intolerable reversal of the traditional Muslim-dhimmi hierarchy that, in turn, increased resentments toward Christians.

The social hostility generated by the Muslims’ inferior status in the industrial and commercial world targeted Armenians in particular as those who were Ottoman but suspiciously sympathetic to Europeans....

Whatever resentments the poor peasant population of eastern Anatolia may have felt toward the people in towns -- the places where they received low prices for their produce, where they felt their social inferiority most acutely, where they were alien to and unwanted by the better-dressed people -- were easily transferred to the Armenians.²²

If one thinks of nationalism as the primary identification with the nation, rather than with supranational communities, like religion or empire, or subnational communities, like tribes, clans, or regions, it can be argued that nationalism was quite weak among Turks in the late Ottoman Empire. The word “Turk,” which referred to the lower classes of rural Anatolia, was in the nineteenth century contrasted to “Ottoman,” a term usually reserved for the ruling elite. But at the turn of the century Young Turk nationalists, like Ahmed Riza began to substitute Turk for Ottoman.²³ Ottomanist views were dominant among the first generation of Young Turks, and attempts were made by both Young Turks and Armenian revolutionaries to join in a common struggle. After Damad Mahmud Pasha, brother-in-law of Abdul Hamid, fled to Europe with his two sons, he made an agreement with the Dashnaks and published an open letter urging joint action. The Dashnak newspaper, Droshak, wrote: “Dashnaktsutiun would not accept the re-establishment of the Constitution of Midhat as a solution of the Turkish problem, but look to a democratic federative policy as the way out.” The Armenian party “would fortify the Young Turks if first it received a guarantee that the situation of the peoples would be bettered.”²⁴ The more liberal Young Turks believed that an alliance with the Armenians would reap a favorable response in Western Europe. But the dual issue of an alliance with the Armenians and inviting European intervention to secure the end of autocracy in the empire led to a major split among the Young Turks. This incident illuminates the ultimately unresolved tension among Young Turk activists between their ecumenical Ottomanist impulses and the growing influence of an exclusivist Turkish nationalism.

On February 4, 1902, the First Congress of the Ottoman Opposition opened in Paris. The nationalist minority at the Congress, led by Ahmed Riza categorically rejected foreign intervention and special arrangements for the Armenians in the six eastern Anatolian vilayets, while the majority led by Sabahaddin Bey favored such concessions as a basis for an Armenian-Turkish alliance. When the majority came out in favor of mediation by the Great Powers to implement the treaties that the absolutist regime refused to execute, the minority essentially broke with the rest of the movement. Efforts by the majority to appease the minority failed. The Armenian delegates submitted a declaration that the Armenian committees were ready to collaborate with the Ottoman liberals to transform the present regime; that outside of common action, the committees would continue their own efforts with the understanding that their actions are directed against the present regime and not against “the unity and the organic existence of Turkey;” and that their particular actions will be directed toward implementation of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin and the Memorandum of May 11, 1895 and its annex.²⁵

Tensions and suspicions were high between the Armenians and the Turkish opposition, and the Armenians could conceive of collaboration only with the guarantee of special reforms in the east guaranteed by Europe. For many Turks this was an outrageous demand. As Ismail Kemal, a member of the majority, put it: “I recognize you not as an independent element but as Ottomans. You have rights as Ottomans. [However,] you do not have the right to bargain with us and make offers as if you were [representatives of a] state.”²⁶ After this statement, the Armenians walked out of the congress. Only later, after the Armenians sent a letter to Sabahaddin Bey stating that they “were ready to participate in all efforts to overthrow the present regime” and that “they did not oppose the establishment of a constitutional central administration that would execute” special reforms for the six provinces, was a compromise reached between the majority and the Armenians.²⁷ The Young Turks even agreed that an Armenian was to sit on their central committee. Ominously for the Armenians, however, the minority at the Congress actually represented a powerful, even dominant tendency, within the Young Turk movement that controlled most of the committees and the newspapers.

In the years after the Paris Congress a Turkish nationalism based on linguistic ties among Turkic peoples and notions of a common race grew among Turkic intellectuals, like Yusuf Akcura, outside of the Ottoman Empire and influenced those within. After the 1908 coup that brought the Young Turks to power, a number of small nationalist organizations were formed that put out occasional newspapers or journals -- Turk Dernegi, Genc Kalemler, Turk Yurdu, and Turk Ocagi. But ideas of a Turkish nation were not limited to Ottoman Turks or Anatolian Turks. They were intimately connected to a Pan-Turkic ideal that celebrated the ties between all the Turkic peoples, stretching from Anatolia through the Caucasus and Central Asia. This was expressed most vividly in Ziya Gokalp’s famous poem “Turan:”

The fatherland for Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan,

The fatherland is a vast and eternal land: Turan!

Many of the Turanists argued for a purified Ottoman Turkish language, freed of Arabic and Persian words, that would serve as the language of this Turkic nation and also serve as the official language for the non-Turkic peoples of the empire, those that made up the Ottoman millet. The Young Turk government passed resolutions making Turkish the official language of the empire, requiring all state correspondence to be carried on in Turkish, and establishing Turkish as the language for teaching in elementary and higher education, with local languages to be taught in secondary schools.

Turkish nationalism, Pan-Turanism, Pan-Islam, and Ottomanism were all part of a complex, confusing discussion among Turkish intellectuals about the future of the Ottoman state and the “nation.” The supranational ideal of Ottomanism that posited a multinational empire-state in which different peoples were treated equally never sat comfortably with the growing emphasis on Turkish language and Turkism. The nationalists criticized the thrust of the Tanzimat reforms and the position of the Ottomanists. Gokalp tried to clarify the differences:

If the aim of Ottomanism (Osmanlilik) was a state, all the subjects would actually be members of this state. But if the aim was to construct a new nation whose language was the Ottoman language (Osmanlica), the new nation would be a Turkish nation, since the Ottoman language was no other than Turkish.²⁸

The Young Turk government moved steadily away from Ottomanism toward Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turanism. After the coup of 1913 and in the first years of the World War, a more virulent form of expansionist nationalism inspired the triumvirate that now governed the empire. As Feroz Ahmad writes:

Pan-Turanism, like Pan-Islam, was an expansionist ideoogy which suited the mood of the Young Turks, then in full retreat at the opposite front [in Europe].... Turkish nationalism, centered around the Turks in Anatolia, was in the process of development in 1914. It was to emerge out of the defeats of in World War I, only after Pan-Turanism and Pan-Islam had proved to be mere dreams.²⁹

The shift toward nationalism and Pan-Turanian expansionism presented the Armenian political leadership with an extraordinarily difficult choice -- remaining in alliance with the Young Turks or breaking decisively with the government. The Dashnaktsutiun decided to continue working with the Young Turks, while other groups, notably the Hnchaks, rejected collaboration. When war broke out in 1914, the Ottoman Dashnaks pledged to fight for the empire and Ottoman Armenians joined the Ottoman army, while across the border Russian Armenians volunteered for the tsarist army. The Young Turk leaders’ suspicions about Armenians as subversives intensified with the initial defeats of the Ottomans in the Sarikamish campaign of the winter of 1914. In the context of imminent collapse of the empire in 1915, with the Russians threatening in the east and the Australians and British landing at Gallipoli, the Ottoman government decided to embark on a radical solution of the the Armenian problem. Beginning in the first months of 1915 they demobilized Armenian soldiers from the Ottoman Army, at first organizing them into work brigades and then forcing them to dig their own graves before being shot. As rumors spread of Turkish violence against Armenian villagers, Armenians in Van organized to protect themselves in April. Their activity was painted as a revolutionary uprising, and fighting broke out in the streets. The advancing Russians took the city, but those Armenians who lived behind Turkish lines now became the targets of a massive campaign to remove them from the region. The argument often employed by Turkish leaders to the Western and German diplomats who inquired and protested against the treatment of the Armenians was that the precarious condition of the empire and the requirements of self-defense of the state justified the repression of “rebellion.” One of the Young Turk triumvirs, Talaat Pasha, revealed in a telling interview with the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, the complex of reasons that influenced the decision to eliminate Anatolian Armenians.

“I have asked you to come to-day,” began Talaat, “so that I can explain our position on the whole Armenian subject. We base our objections to the Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our enemies.”³⁰

Though some Armenian historians have argued that the Genocide was the final stage in a long history of Turkish oppression and massacre of Armenians, with the implication that mass murder was part of a widespread and popular exterminationist mentality, my own sense is that the intensifying hostility toward Armenians need not have reached the proportions of a genocide, save for the initiation and encouragement of the state in the context of war. Rather than a long-planned and carefully orchestrated program of extermination, the Armenian Genocide was more a vengeful and panicky act of suppression that turned into a opportunistic policy to rid Anatolia of Armenians once and for all, eliminate the wedge that they provided for foreign intervention in the region, and open the way for the fantastic dreams of a Turanian empire. When the archives are opened, and if they have not been cleansed of incriminating documents, I would not be surprised to find not a single decision to deport the Armenians but a series of decisions, one more radical than the other, that fed on each other until demobilization and sporadic executions and repressions turned inexorably into a massive program of physical extermination.

Nationalism at the end of the Ottoman period reinforced and essentialized differences between the peoples of the empire. Religious distinctions were transmuted into national and racial differences, far more indelible and immutable than religion, by both the Armenians and the Turks. At the same time economic competition in a hard economic environment and struggles among Turks, Kurds, and Armenians over the limited resource of land intensified interethnic tensions. Stereotypes on both sides had long existed, but changes in relative status, particularly the perceived reversal of the Muslim-dhimmi hierarchy, created the kinds of fear and anxiety about the future than political entrepreneurs could exploit. Ultimately the launching of genocidal violence in 1915 came, not from the accumulating tensions, but from the initiative of the state. When the Young Turk government decided to demobilize Armenian soldiers, attack the villages around Van and then the city itself, arrest Armenian intellectuals and parliamentarians in Istanbul (April 24, 1915), and order the deportations of their Armenian subjects, the state removed all legal restraints on violence toward Armenians, indeed, encouraged theft and murder, punished those who protected the Armenians, and created a cycle of violence that grew from the local to the whole of eastern and central Anatolia. Again, here too, Talaat is as effective a witness as the victims of his crimes. In posthumously published memoirs he states:

The Porte, acting under the same obligation, and wishing to secure the safety of its army and its citizens, took energetic measures to check these uprisings. The deportation of the Armenians was one of these preventive measures.

I admit also that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere. In some places unlawful acts were committed. The already existing hatred among the Armenians and Mohammedans, intensified by the barbarous activities of the former, had created many tragic consequences. some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested. I confess it. I confess, also, that the duty of the Government was to prevent these abuses and atrocities, or at least to hunt down and punish their perpetrators severely. In many places, where the property and goods of the deported peole were looted, and the Armenians molested, we did arrest those who were responsible and punished them accordining to the law. I confess, however, that we ought to have acted more sternly, opened up a general investigation for the purpose of finding out all the promoters and looters and punished them severely....

The Turkish elements here referred to were shortsighted, fanatical, and yet sincere in their belief. The public encouraged them, and they had the general approval behind them. They were numerous and strong....

Their open and immediate punishment would have aroused great discontent among the people, who favored their acts. An endeavor to arrest and to punish all those promoters would have created anarchy in Anatolia at a time when we greatly needed unity. It would have been dangerous to divide the nation into two camps, when we needed strength to fight outside enemies.³¹

There is much we yet need to learn about the ordering and organization by the center of the Genocide, but the witnesses -- diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries -- and the victims have left a documentary record of the genocidal effects of the state’s policies that only the most callous and deceitful of people can deny.

By the end of the war ninety percent of Ottoman Armenians were gone, killed, deported to the deserts of Syria, or refugees in the Caucasus or Middle East. The number of dead is staggering -- somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 killed in the more conservative estimates -- and the event shocked European and American opinion. Armenians were now seen as historic victims, the “starving Armenians,” pitiful refugees to be fed and protected by the West. In the 1930s writers spoke of the Armenian “holocaust,” and in the early 1940s when he invented the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin applied it to two twentieth-century events -- the Turkish deportation and massacres of the Armenians in 1915 and the German annihilation of Europe’s Jews.