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POINT OF NO RETURN? PROSPECTS OF EMPIRE AFTER THE OTTOMAN DEFEAT IN THE BALKAN WARS (1912–13)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2018

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan
Ramazan Hakkı Öztan*
Affiliation:
Ramazan Hakkı Öztan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland; e-mail: ramazan.oztan@unine.ch
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Abstract

In late 1912, the Ottoman imperial armies suffered a series of quick defeats at the hands of the Balkan League, comprising Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, resulting in significant territorial losses. The Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912–13) often stands at the center of teleological accounts of a neat and linear transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. These teleological readings see the Ottoman defeat as a historical turning point when Ottoman elites turned nationalist, discovered Anatolia, and embraced the Turkish core. This article contends that such approaches frame late Ottoman history in anticipation of the later reality of nation-states, and overlook the messy and historically complex nature of the collapse of empire and the emergence of the nation-state. Although the defeat was certainly shocking for the Ottoman ruling elite, I argue that it initiated an era of debate rather than one of broad consensus. Similarly, the defeat neither marked the end of the Ottoman Empire nor heralded the coming of the Turkish Republic, but rather reinvigorated the Ottoman imperialist project.

Keywords

Balkan WarsnationalismOttoman EmpireTurkish RepublicYoung Turks
Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 65 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Peter Sluglett, Alp Yenen, Murat Kaya, Alex Balistreri, Eyal Ginio, Jeffrey Culang, and the anonymous IJMES reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

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6 This literature was certainly subject to healthy attempts at revisionism through which scholars have concluded that Ottoman patriotism became less secular after the defeat. Hasan Kayalı, for instance, has argued that secular Ottomanism became increasingly Islamist after the Balkan Wars as the CUP began to promote “Islam as the main pillar of its ideology”; Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, 142. Erik Jan Zürcher has similarly pointed out that the Ottoman defeat led to the rise of what one may frame as a “Muslim nationalism”; Zürcher, “The Vocabulary of Muslim Nationalism,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 137 (1999): 81–92. Yet, I see such analytic approaches to the postwar context as equally problematic because they highlight a form of liminal identity that still anticipates the inevitable emergence of nationalism.

7 For challenges to this traditional mode of interpretation that inform the present study, see Yektan Türkyılmaz, “Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1915” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2011), 41–116; Boyar, Ebru, “The Impact of the Balkan Wars on Ottoman History Writing: Searching for a Soul,” Middle East Critique 23 (2014):147–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ginio, Eyal, The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and Their Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 One of the master texts of this Unionist genre is Talat Pasha's postwar memoir. See Bolayır, Enver, ed., Talat Paşa'nın Hatıraları (Istanbul: Güven Yayınevi, 1946)Google Scholar.

9 Naturally, this narrative of defeat could be seen as the extension of the notorious “decline thesis” in Ottoman historiography. See Quataert, Donald, “Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes Towards the Notion of ‘Decline,’” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sajdi, Dana, “Decline, Its Discontents and Ottoman Cultural History: By Way of Introduction,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sajdi, Dana (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), 1–40 Google Scholar.

10 Aydemir goes on to frame World War I as an opportunity that taught him more about Anatolia, the real Turkish homeland. Aydemir, Şevket Süreyya, Suyu Arayan Adam (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1967), 54 Google Scholar.

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25 On the emergence of women's societies in the postwar era, see Serpil Atamaz, “Fighting on Two Fronts: The Balkan Wars and the Struggle for Women's Rights in Ottoman Turkey,” in War and Nationalism, 303–10.

26 Tunaya, Türkiye'de Siyasal Partiler, 3:583.

27 Ali Nüzhet, Mirliva Mehmed, 1912 Balkan Harbinde Süvarinin Harekatı, Tayyare İstimali, Harb Tayyareciliği Hakkında Neşriyat-ı Esasiye, Osmanlı ve Düşman Süvarisinin Gördüğü Hidemat (Istanbul: Resimli Kitab Matbaası, 1331 [1912/13])Google Scholar; Yüzbaşı, Mehmed Arif, Balkan Harbinde Makineli Tüfenkler (Istanbul: 1329 [1911])Google Scholar; Suad, Yüzbaşı Ahmed, Balkan Darü’l Harbine Dair Tedkikat-ı Coğrafiye ve Mütala'at-ı Sevkü’l-Ceyşiyye (Dersaadet: Mühendishane-i Berri-i Hümayun Matbaası, 1330 [1911/12])Google Scholar.

28 Köroğlu, Ottoman Propaganda, 49. See also Çetinkaya, Y. Doğan, “Illustrated Atrocity: Stigmatization of Non-Muslims through Images in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars,” Journal of Modern European History 12 (2014): 460–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Çetinkaya, “Atrocity Propaganda and the Nationalization of the Masses in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars (1912–13),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 759–78.

29 Hochwächter's, Gustav von Mit den Türkei in der Front im Stabe Mahmud Muchtar Paschas (Berlin: Mittler, 1913)Google Scholar was translated as Türklerle Harbe (Istanbul: Hürriyet Matbaası, 1331 [1913]), and Ashmead-Bartlett's, Ellis With the Turks in Thrace (London: n.p., 1913)Google Scholar was translated as Esbab-ı Hezimet ve Felaketimiz (Istanbul: Kitaphane-yi İslam ve Askeri, 1329 [1913/14]).

30 For a bibliography of publications in Ottoman Turkish on the Balkan Wars, including these memoirs, see Eren, İsmail, “Balkan Savaşına Ait Türkçe Eserler Üzerine Bibliyografya Denemesi,” İ.Ü. Tarih Dergisi 27 (1973): 111–22Google Scholar.

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35 One of the best examples of these factional accounts is the memoir by Ahmet Reşit (Rey), the Minister of Interior in late 1912 and early 1913. For Rey, the CUP was the prime cause of the defeat in the Balkan Wars, due to a range of policies adopted by the Unionists since 1908. See Rey, Ahmet Reşit, Gördüklerim—Yaptıklarım (1890–1922), Canlı Tarihler Series (Istanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1945), 147–66Google Scholar.

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55 Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 125, 134.

56 Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, 134–35.

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73 Scholars often tend to evoke the notion of a “return to Anatolia” in pinning down a linear development of genocidal ideology and policy. This approach is often the result of what is called “escalation bias” in genocide scholarship. See Türkyılmaz, “Rethinking Genocide,” 15.

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109 Ginio, The Ottoman Culture of Defeat, 229.

110 Ryan Gingeras, “A Last Toehold in Europe: The Making of Turkish Thrace, 1912–1923,” in War and Collapse, 371.

111 Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, vol. 1, İçtima Senesi 1, Devre: 3, 23.

112 Geertz, Clifford, review of Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony , by Rudolf Mrázek, American Anthropologist 106 (2004): 420 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 See Ertunç Denktaş, “Ayastefanos Rus Anıtı (1898–1914)” (Master's thesis, İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, 2011).

114 The defeat in 1878 was in many ways similar to the one in 1912, for it also resulted in massive influx of Muslim refugees into the Ottoman Empire topped off with significant territorial losses and a heavy war indemnity that wrecked the Ottoman finances. Although such facts easily avail themselves to a tragic narrative, they should caution us to the narrative function of these cycles of defeat and the motific repetitions readily deployed by historians. In discussing the legacy of the defeat in 1878, for instance, the existing scholarship often notes that the war made the Ottomans a more Asian and Muslim empire, thereby situating the Ottoman defeat in 1877–78 within a broader tragic narrative. See, for instance, Fortna, Benjamin C., “The Reign of Abdülhamid II,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey: Turkey in the Modern World, ed. Kasaba, Reşat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4:47Google Scholar.

115 Hasan Kayalı, “Ottoman and German Imperial Objectives in Syria during World War I: Synergies and Strains behind the Front Line,” in War and Collapse, 1118.

116 Arar, İsmail, Osmanlı Mebusan Meclisi Reisi Halil Menteşe'nin Anıları (Istanbul: Hürriyet Vakfı Yayınları, 1986), 182 Google Scholar. The Great Powers, fearful of Ottoman gains, had declared at the beginning of the hostilities that they would be the guarantors of the territorial status quo in the region, regardless of the actual result of the war. The Great Powers reneged on such promises, however, after the Ottoman defeat.

117 Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, 130.

118 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in A Question of Genocide, 34.

119 Alp Yenen, “The Grand Vizier's Last Visit to Berlin: Young Turk Imperialism at the Eleventh Hour of World War I” (paper presented at the Second European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman, and Turkish Studies, 14–17 September 2016).

120 See Zürcher, Erik Jan, “The Odd Man Out: Why Was There No Regime Change in the Ottoman Empire at the End of World War I?,” in Turkey between Nationalism and Globalization, ed. Riva Kastoryano (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 21–35 Google Scholar.

121 See Özoğlu, Hakan, From Caliphate to Secular State: Power Struggle in the Early Turkish Republic (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011)Google Scholar; and Watenpaugh, Keith David, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 160–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 Boyar, “The Impact of the Balkan Wars,” 150.