If the increase in our knowledge of the past makes it more difficult to generalize about it, it should make it easier for us to generalize about the forms in which that knowledge is transmitted to us.
—Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Hayden White
A critical literature has recently begun to reassess late Ottoman history in an attempt to move beyond the teleological approaches that have long subjected it to the subsequent reality of nation-states.Footnote 1 Termed “methodological nationalism,” teleological approaches to the late Ottoman era read history with knowledge of its outcome—that is, the disintegration of the empire, the emergence of nation-states, and the processes of demographic homogenization that have characterized this transition.Footnote 2 Teleology remains a broad methodological problem in the discipline of history. But it particularly plagues the study of late imperial spaces as scholars continue to map out genealogies of national origins at the expense of persisting imperial realities.Footnote 3 In the historiography on the late Ottoman Empire, the period between the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the end of World War I (1918) has emerged less as an Ottoman story than as a national one, framed as “a prelude” to distinct national histories.Footnote 4
Teleology is particularly salient in the study of Turkish nationalism. Scholars have long struggled to conceptualize how Ottoman elites came to terms with the transition from empire to nation-state. In explaining how and when the Ottoman ruling class and Ottoman intellectuals turned nationalist, existing accounts tend to highlight the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912–13). This experience, it is asserted, shattered the Ottomanist project of coexistence and opened space for the ascendancy of Turkish nationalism.Footnote 5 Scholars have argued time and again that the defeat in the Balkan Wars was a turning point in late Ottoman history because it illustrated that the Ottoman Empire was no longer a viable option, that its collapse was evident and inevitable, and that the Ottoman ruling elite accordingly abandoned the idea of the empire and began to embrace Turkish nationalism.Footnote 6
I argue that the way scholarship has reconstructed the impact of the Balkan Wars on the Ottoman ruling elite amounts to a tragic narrative that foreshadows the end of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 7 This tragic narrative, with its paradigmatic elements, themes, and plot structure, first began to crystallize in the contemporary accounts written by members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) at the end of World War I. These accounts not only had explicit redemptive functions vis-à-vis the end of the empire but also set the narrative parameters of late Ottoman historiography, such as a characteristic emphasis on the Eastern Question.Footnote 8 In this sense, the Balkan Wars not only resulted in a military defeat for the Ottomans but became the backbone of a commonplace narrative of defeat.Footnote 9
Some of these themes were picked up and reworked to perfection from the mid-1920s onwards as the Ankara government began the process of dismantling Ottoman institutions. Works that came to be liberally quoted—often out of context—such as the autobiography of the influential Turkish intellectual and biographer Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, became particularly instrumental in the consolidation of this clear-cut trajectory from empire to republic. Writing in 1959, Aydemir famously argued that “the Ottoman Empire had already collapsed as a result of the Balkan defeat,” well before the outbreak of World War I.Footnote 10 The existing historiography eagerly embraces Aydemir's framework, approaching the Balkan Wars as part of what İzzettin Çalışlar later framed as a “ten-year war,” which conceptually ties the Ottoman defeat to the birth of the Turkish Republic.Footnote 11 The late Ottoman era has accordingly been tailored to explain “its failures,” such as the defeat in the Balkan Wars, in a narrative continuity that foreshadows the success stories of the resistance movement and the nation-building process led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk beginning in 1934). By continuing to reify this republican narrative of origins, scholarship has repeatedly failed to question what Christine Philliou calls “the depth of hegemony held for so many decades by the Kemalist paradigm.”Footnote 12 I argue accordingly that although the Ottoman Empire survived the Balkan defeat in late 1912, it was the Turkish Republic that delivered the empire's historiographical end.
DECONSTRUCTING THE TRAGIC NARRATIVE OF DEFEAT
Scholars of late Ottoman history often proceed within a “pregeneric plot structure” that anticipates the empire's eventual downfall and the emergence of nation-states.Footnote 13 This overarching narrative, fed by generations-long historiography, not only determines the way we order historical facts but also forces us to present imperial collapse as inevitable. In this predetermined plot, the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars fulfills a crucial narrative role, which, once evoked, not only makes it easier to explain the transition from empire to nation-state but also consolidates the republican narratives of origin.Footnote 14
This narrative pattern has become so ubiquitous in the existing literature that scholars have essentially duplicated one another, achieving what Hayden White has called a set of “motific repetitions.”Footnote 15 Woven with it is a set of themes and details intended to create tragic effects. For instance, in framing the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in October 1912, scholars first highlight how “swift” the advances of the Balkan armies were into Ottoman Thrace, thereby illustrating how fragile the Ottoman Empire had become during its final years. They then note that those who defeated the empire so quickly were all former subject nations of the Ottomans, suggesting implicitly that Constantinople had long lost the binds that tied it together as an empire.
Although the Balkan advances were swift and the Ottoman collapse seemed imminent, the enemy was still checked by the Ottoman defense line at Çatalca. This point provides the crucial context for scholars to declare the demise of the Ottomanist project for good. Because the defense lines were only a few miles from Istanbul, the city's residents could hear the cannons thundering. Amid the commotion, the Ottoman ruling elite was busy discussing whether to move the capital somewhere safer in Anatolia. If this latter point does not convince the reader of the empire's impending tragic end, what would? To be sure, one could throw into the narrative mix, as Falih Rıfkı Atay did in his Batış Yılları (Years of Demise), how the Ottomans began to seek comfort in news of small-scale victories, found hope in the continued resistance in the fortress cities, including Edirne, Yanya (Janina), and İşkodra (Scutari), and consoled themselves with false rumors of rapid countergains.Footnote 16 In doing so, one creates a perfect metaphor of a failed imperial revival, while suggesting that regular Ottomans in the streets knew deep down that the end had come.
One could then easily describe in broad strokes the defeat's disastrous effects on the Ottoman treasury and thereby highlight the impossibility of an Ottoman recovery. In the end, the loss of large swathes of European territory meant the loss of a tax base that had contributed around one-fourth of the empire's annual tithe.Footnote 17 For added tragic effect, one could also describe how the retreat not only was accompanied by many officer casualties, but also forced the army to abandon expensive equipment and ammunitions behind enemy lines.Footnote 18
Yet, no tragic narrative of defeat is complete without a hint of human suffering. It has become customary, as Isa Blumi has noted, “to evoke the refugees in order to fit narrative conventions expected to reinforce the myths of the modern state's inevitability.”Footnote 19 Thus, one could mention how the fiscal and military burdens of the Balkan defeat were exacerbated by the influx of Muslim refugees whose resettlement Istanbul could not afford.Footnote 20 One could alternately mention that the influx of Muslim refugees and the loss of the majority-Christian territories in the Balkans reduced the Ottomans to an Asiatic state—read Muslim and Turkish.
One could certainly consolidate the tragic narrative of defeat further by zooming in on the Young Turks, and in doing so introduce to the narrative its hero or villain—depending on one's political orientation. In the end, the CUP, which had lost its political supremacy in Istanbul prior to the war, managed to capitalize on the defeat and regain power by staging a successful coup d’état in January 1913.Footnote 21 In introducing the CUP, one might start by mentioning the loss of Balkan cities such as Salonika. After all, the city had long served as the headquarters of the CUP, and, due to its multiethnic and multireligious character, its loss implies the end of Ottoman coexistence. Alternatively, one could suggest that the Balkan provinces constituted the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, and for the Young Turks who mostly hailed from the region, its loss meant that the empire was no more. From there it is a small leap to suggest that the Balkan defeat was a wake-up call for the Young Turks who—seeing no other available option—began to invest their meager energies and funds in Anatolia. If one chose to explain the later ethnic cleansings and genocide with reference to the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars, one could certainly suggest that the defeat fueled the CUP cadres with a desire for revenge, not only creating an aura of pessimism and humiliation but also making the Young Turks psychologically ready to initiate a program of homogenization.Footnote 22
In deconstructing this tragic narrative of Ottoman demise, the point is neither to debate the historicity of some of these facts nor to deny the disastrous military, social, economic, and political consequences of the Balkan Wars. It is rather to caution how our eagerness to construct a tragic narrative of defeat determines the way we order historical facts and prevents us from evaluating the Balkan defeat on its own terms. This article instead suggests that the transition from empire to nation-state was a messy process, as equally confusing to contemporaries as it should be to modern historians.
One way of capturing this complexity is by emphasizing the diversity of positions and ideological orientations in postwar Ottoman society. As James Gelvin has argued, it has become customary “to emphasize unity and downplay diversity when writing about the evolution of nationalist sentiment in the modern Middle East.”Footnote 23 In discussing the legacy of the Balkan defeat, the existing literature continues to deny room for divergent historical voices and policy options that existed in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. By focusing only “on the Turkish-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire, thus omitting other Ottoman ethnic groups from the discussion,” the scholarship has fallen into the teleological trap of methodological nationalism.Footnote 24 As a result, scholars have inadvertently homogenized historical diversity, constructing what I call “a narrative of consensus” on the impact of the war. However, as I will show, more than anything else the Balkan Wars ushered in an era of political uncertainty and reshuffled debates over the future of the Ottoman Empire. The postwar era was characterized less by broad consensus than by debate and disagreement.
CONTESTING THE PAST AND SHAPING THE FUTURE, 1912–13
Although the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars, which resulted in significant territorial losses, was not the first loss that the Ottomans endured, it was certainly the most documented and debated. The war led to the expansion of the public sphere, with associations and societies increasing in number and public lectures, conferences, and rallies becoming more frequent across the empire.Footnote 25 A flurry of publications with varied scope, purpose, and circulation began to debate the war itself and, by extension, the nature and future of the empire.Footnote 26 Some accounts were entirely technical, devoted to the discussion of topics such as the use of machine guns and airplanes in the war.Footnote 27 Others were purely a product of wartime propaganda, itself a major component of modern warfare. The Association for the Publication of Documents (Neşr-i Vesaik Cemiyeti), for instance, was established with the purpose of publicizing the atrocities of the Balkan nations vis-à-vis the Muslim communities.Footnote 28 This domestic sphere was complemented by the accounts of foreigners such as Gustav von Hochwächter, a German officer, and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, an English war correspondent, which resonated both in the empire and abroad.Footnote 29
Yet, the majority of works on the Balkan Wars were apologetic accounts written by the high- and middle-ranking officers who had served in the disastrous war and were eager to “set the narrative straight.” Falling into this category are memoirs by senior Ottoman officers such as Abdullah Paşa, Mahmud Muhtar Paşa (Katırcıoğlu), Pertev Bey (Demirhan), and Zeki Paşa, as well as by junior officers.Footnote 30 These accounts sought first and foremost to propose answers to the questions of what caused the defeat and who should be held responsible. In doing so, they tended to attribute the Ottoman defeat to lack of military preparation and noted the Ottoman army's failure to meet the original mobilization plans, leaving it outnumbered and poorly supplied, in addition to terrible weather conditions, inefficient transportation, lack of drilling, desertion, and war exhaustion.Footnote 31 For example, Mahmud Muhtar Paşa, the commander of the III Corps of the Eastern Army, concluded that “what defeated us was not the Bulgarians but our mismanagement.”Footnote 32 Much of this criticism focused on Nazım Paşa, the Ottoman commander-in-chief who opted to implement an offensive strategy early in the campaign even as the previous Ottoman war games had required an initial strategic withdrawal until the mobilization was complete.Footnote 33 Nazım Paşa readily rejected the claim as a baseless Unionist lie.Footnote 34
While many of these officer accounts naturally varied in content, they often revealed factional alignments within the Ottoman army and ruling elite.Footnote 35 Many Ottoman officers such as Mahmud Muhtar Paşa and Ali Fethi (Okyar) ended up responding to one another and engaging in a fierce debate, exposing the depth of the factional disputes to the broader Ottoman public.Footnote 36 Particularly for those who vehemently opposed the CUP, the politicization of the army corps and factionalism among the officers became an important motif in explaining the Ottoman defeat. These accounts, with a strong anti-CUP bent, often noted how the Unionists had historically tapped into the army to maintain its political supremacy, directly intervened into civilian politics, and silenced the opposition through purges, unjust promotions, and tactics of intimidation. These practices, they argued, destroyed any semblance of unity of purpose across the officer cadres. In the vocabulary of the opposition, the Unionists therefore became synonymous with the politicization of the military.Footnote 37
Kamil Pasa, the Ottoman grand vizier, was one such anti-Unionist who argued early on that for the prior decade or so the officers had been more interested in politics than in training the army.Footnote 38 Abdullah Pasa, the commander of the Eastern Army during the Balkan Wars and a well-known anti-Unionist, similarly pointed out that the Constitutional Revolution in 1908 and the counter-revolution one year later deeply politicized the army and destroyed any semblance of unity of purpose among the officer corps, as it eventually manifested itself in the Balkan defeat.Footnote 39 Captain İzzettin (Çalışlar), who served during the war as a junior officer, confirmed such division, noting how the officers with Unionist leanings fiercely challenged the high-ranking commanders.Footnote 40 Rıza Nur, an infamous anti-Unionist who had also served in the war as a surgeon, took such allegations one step further. He argued that on every front during the war Unionists such as Talat Bey actively deterred Ottoman soldiers from fighting and urged them to desert.Footnote 41
While the anti-CUP faction highlighted politicization of the army, the Unionists tended to blame the policies of the cabinet of national unity (i.e., the Great Cabinet). Featuring many elder statesmen, the Great Cabinet assumed power in July 1912 after increased pressure from the opposition pushed the CUP from power. The cabinet spent the next few months trying to dismantle CUP networks throughout the empire, an effort that continued unabated even amid the Balkan Wars.Footnote 42 Embittered by this experience, the Unionists often highlighted the policies of the Great Cabinet in accounting for the defeat. In depicting the postdefeat climate in Istanbul, Mehmed Cavid Bey, a high-profile Unionist, wrote that “there is neither excitement, nor a sign of life across the country. A defunct government is ruling over a dead nation . . . busy hunting down the Unionists.”Footnote 43 According to one account, Yusuf İzzettin Efendi, the Ottoman heir apparent, shared this perspective and criticized the diplomatic naiveté of the grand vizier, Kamil Paşa.Footnote 44 Talat Bey, another key Unionist, also blamed the Great Cabinet for believing in the false promises of the Great Powers and criticized the anti-Unionists for lack of foresight. In particular, he singled out Nazım Paşa's decision to disband close to 100,000 troops on the eve of the Balkan Wars as the main reason for the Ottoman defeat.Footnote 45 This was a popular Unionist way of placing blame on the opposition.
Such factionalism and fragmentation among the Ottoman political elite determined how one framed the loyalties, or lack thereof, of the Ottoman combatants on the ground amid the war. Ottoman “Albanians,” an important component of the Muslim millet in the empire, were often the focal point of these public debates. Ottoman officers who served on the Western front, such as Ömer Seyfettin, readily questioned the loyalty of the Albanians, making them scapegoats for the broader military catastrophe and helping to consolidate an image of the treacherous Albanian.Footnote 46 Rıza Nur contributed to this image through his description of how Hasan Tahsin Pasa, an Ottoman Albanian who commanded the VIII Corps, handed over control of Salonika to the Greeks without even putting up a fight.Footnote 47 So did those with closer ties to the CUP, such as Hüseyin Kazım, who highlighted the role the Albanians played right before the outbreak of the war in consolidating the anti-CUP coalition. Those opposed to the CUP, by contrast, argued it was the CUP that held responsibility for the wartime conduct of the Albanians, as their heavy-handed pacification of the 1909 and 1910 rebellions destroyed any semblance of Albanian attachment to the Ottomanist cause.Footnote 48
Similar differences of opinion existed among non-Muslim soldiers. Although the Ottoman mobilization plans for the Balkan Wars projected that non-Muslims would make up one-fourth of the Ottoman army, many evaded conscription.Footnote 49 As for those who did not, Ottoman and German officers readily noted their lack of loyalty, describing how Ottoman Greek and Bulgarian soldiers switched sides in the conflict's early phases.Footnote 50 Among the non-Muslims who were deemed loyal, some were accused of friendly fire.Footnote 51 Before the outbreak of hostilities, Ottoman bureaucrats expected shifts in allegiance, and accordingly enacted a range of precautionary measures over time, including but not limited to arrests, detentions, and exile, particularly for Ottoman Greek and Bulgarian subjects who lived in proximity to strategic infrastructure.Footnote 52 Yet, ethnoreligious markers did not neatly align with categories of loyalty and treachery. İsmail Hakkı (Okday), an Ottoman officer who fought in the defense of Yanya (Janina), for instance, praised in length the service of Armenian soldiers:
The registers for casualties list many names of Armenians. They collected many glories and honor in Yanya. We should keep them in high esteem and never forget their service during a war that turned so disastrous. The Armenian soldiers were equal to their Muslim comrades in courage and resilience, suffering equally from hunger and miserable wartime conditions.Footnote 53
Accounts by officers who took part in the conflict varied greatly, reflecting both factional alignments and complex realities on the ground. In the face of desertion by some non-Muslim soldiers during the Bulgarian siege of Edirne, for instance, Lieutenant Hüseyin Cemal noted that “for now” (şimdilik) the officer corps had lost their trust in non-Muslim soldiers, except Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia who continued to serve faithfully.Footnote 54 Ottoman Jews illustrated a similar commitment to Ottomanism. The Crier, a Jerusalem-based newspaper, for instance, announced “a prayer service in the synagogue for the victory of the empire over its enemies,” and Liberty, another Jerusalem paper, called for greater volunteer participation in the war effort.Footnote 55 As the war went on, the same newspapers “celebrated the Jewish men who fell in battle and offered tales of new Jewish martyrs who had spontaneously risked their lives for the cause of their country,” while collecting donations from Jewish émigrés across the world for the Red Crescent Society.Footnote 56
As for the Ottoman literati in Istanbul, intellectuals such as Mehmet Akif (Ersoy) explained the defeat on religious grounds, arguing that “all the Islamic nations that had so far collapsed did so due to the lack of stringent application of religious principles.”Footnote 57 He noted that Islam has negated the primacy of ethnicity (kavmiyyet), and that only a religious bond (rabtiyye-i diniyye) could hold together the empire's diverse populations of Albanians, Kurds, Circassians, Bosniaks, Arabs, Turks, and Laz. This renewed emphasis on the primacy of Islamic bonds was not limited to Istanbul. As Eyal Ginio has illustrated, it was part of the discursive staple of the Muslim intelligentsia across the empire at the time.Footnote 58
More secular responses also existed. Pointing out that the defeat exposed the shocking extent to which Ottoman patriotism and love for motherland was lacking, Satı Bey (al-Husri) argued for the promotion of a state-based patriotism premised on a shared Ottoman past and an outlook for a joint future.Footnote 59 In challenging what he called a recently emergent discourse using race (ʿırk) and language (lisan) as alternative sources of social bonding and political cohesion, Satı Bey highlighted the importance of Islamic solidarity, arguing that the Ottoman populations embodied a shared Oriental ethos and nature (müşterek bir Şarklı ruhu . . . ve şimesi) that cut across linguistic and ethnic boundaries.Footnote 60
In advancing such Ottomanist positions, Satı Bey directly challenged particularistic notions of Turkism that had recently found an effective outlet in the journal Türk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland).Footnote 61 Established in 1911, the journal attempted to cultivate Turkish national consciousness by printing literary pieces and publicizing developments in different parts of the Turkic world.Footnote 62 Immediately after the Ottoman debacle in the Balkan Wars, the journal struck a different tone. The November 1912 issue was devoted entirely to tackling the general theme of national awakening. Akçuraoğlu Yusuf, the journal's raison d'etre, framed the Ottoman defeat as a slap in the face (şamar) that, within a period of three weeks, helped the Ottomans uncover the internal enemies whom they had been unable to detect for the past three years.Footnote 63 In advancing such notions, Türk Yurdu, as well as a lesser-known journal entitled Büyük Duygu (The Great Yearning), interpreted national revitalization in narrow ethnic terms.Footnote 64 Yet, other periodicals, whether located in Istanbul or Cairo, continued to discuss national revival in a more Ottoman Islamist sense.Footnote 65
Independent voices without any institutional attachment also existed. Naci İsmail (Pelister), for instance, who wrote under the pseudonym Habil Adem, published his Londra Konferansındaki Meselelerden: Anadolu'da Türkiye Yaşayacak mı? Yaşamayacak mı? (From the Issues in the London Conference: Will Turkey Exist in Anatolia or Not?) after the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars. Presenting it as a translation of a work by a certain imaginary professor named Jones Hull—a strategy to escape government censorship—Naci İsmail promoted an ethnic-centered definition of the nation, and argued that religious affiliation should not factor as a criteria for membership. For Naci İsmail, Ottomanism was an attempt to fuse different Muslim and Christian elements, but treacherous acts of the Bulgarians and Greeks during the Balkan Wars proved to him that it had failed.Footnote 66 Naci İsmail accordingly engaged in a lengthy attack against the cause of civic Ottomanism and its Islamist derivative.Footnote 67
As Falih Rıfkı (Atay) noted, the postwar era was a period of “indecision and experimentation” (kararsızlık ve araştırma hali), a time when Atay himself had admittedly lost his hope in Ottomanism, disliked Turkism, and criticized Oriental manners while defending Westernism.Footnote 68 The uncertain political climate after the Balkan Wars led to the emergence of a vibrant and versatile public sphere wherein intellectuals and politicians openly discussed the future of the empire. Although this era of debate and compromise was marked more by political fluidities and experimentation than by ideological consistency, scholars have presented it in a clear-cut teleological fashion. I contend that certainties from the republican period have covered over complex late Ottoman realities and homogenized multiple positions and contradictory agendas of the late Ottoman elite. The next section zooms in on one such homogenizing analytic theme—“the return to Anatolia,” the so-called Turkish core—which scholars have regularly deployed to craft neat and singular transitions from empire to republic.
RETURN TO TURKISH ANATOLIA? BEYOND THE REPUBLICAN NARRATIVE OF ORIGINS
Existing scholarship has long emphasized the Ottoman elite's discovery of Anatolia, with its long-forgotten peasantry and untapped Turkish core, as an important outcome of the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars. Ebru Boyar, for instance, has argued that for Ottoman intellectuals Anatolia was “the only territory which was left to them.”Footnote 69 More recently, Ümit Kurt and Doğan Gürpınar concluded similarly that “the only remaining option [in the aftermath of the war] was to establish a cult of racial nationalism and Islam in the rechristened Turkish homeland, Anatolia.”Footnote 70 Taner Akçam has maintained that the Young Turks, particularly after the loss of the empire's core European provinces in the Balkan Wars, began to see Anatolia as a laboratory for carrying out a program of demographic engineering in a bid for national revival.Footnote 71 Fuat Dündar goes even further by claiming that the loss of the Balkan Wars was intentional because beginning in 1911 the Unionists became singularly focused on the Anatolian core.Footnote 72 This emphasis on a “return to Anatolia” is a crucial component in existing accounts of the impact of the Balkan Wars, standing at the crux of the broader teleological goal of establishing a clear turning point from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state.Footnote 73 I argue that the scholarship's emphasis on a “return to Anatolia” often serves to consolidate, if not reproduce, the broader republican narrative of national origins that formed a posteriori, as the Ankara government gradually consolidated its power by creating its own prehistory.
Writing from the republican perspective in the late 1920s, Halide Edib (Adıvar), an important literary and political figure of the time, wrote that
the Balkan defeat leading to the final withdrawal of Turkey from the Balkans was a blessing in disguise, no one realized at the moment. Consciousness that all the Anatolian manhood, the energy, and the resources of the empire spent hitherto on the Balkans would now be spared, dawned only gradually upon Turkish minds.Footnote 74
As Halide Edib implies, this narrative became sharper only with time, particularly during the Kemalist struggle in Anatolia beginning in the early 1920s.Footnote 75 Back in 1918, however, when the Turkish Republic was far from the horizon, Falih Rıfkı published Ateş ve Güneş (Fire and Sun) (1918), a contemporary account of the Ottoman defeat in World War I, in which he elaborated on the heroic nature of the Ottoman war effort. In a preface to a later edition, Falih Rıfkı admitted his dislike of Ateş ve Güneş in clear preference for Zeytindağı (Mount of Olives) (1932), which essentially came to replace Ateş ve Güneş by re-evaluating the late Ottoman era through republican certainties.Footnote 76 Accordingly, Zeytindağı shied away from framing the Ottoman war effort as a glorious attempt, portraying it instead as an utter waste of Anatolia's manpower, with Anatolian soldiers essentially “lost in a gamble.”Footnote 77 This theme was further elaborated later in Suyu Arayan Adam (The Man Searching for Water) (1959), Şevket Süreyya Aydemir's autobiography, which continues to be an oft-quoted text in the literature on the Balkan defeat. In this work, Aydemir, too, framed his personal experiences as an Ottoman soldier as a portal to his discovery of Anatolia, where the peasantry and townsmen, forgotten by Istanbul, suffered from characteristic poverty and ignorance.Footnote 78
The point here is not to argue that the notion of a “return to Anatolia” never existed, but rather to caution against the dangers of decontextualized readings of this notion. In fact, the suggestion that the Ottomans should focus their energies on Anatolia had a long history stretching well beyond the Balkan Wars. David Kushner, for example, has noted that the territorial losses of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 had already initiated a debate on Anatolia, led by the likes of Şemsettin Sami.Footnote 79 For Sami, though, who was later credited as one of the founding fathers of Albanian nationalism, the emphasis on Anatolia did not come at the expense of broader Ottoman loyalties.Footnote 80 The war with Greece seems to have revived this debate. In late 1897, Colmar von der Goltz, an influential officer in the German military mission to the Ottoman Empire, pointed out the necessity for the Ottomans to reduce their territorial reach in order to increase state capacity. He suggested that the empire should focus its efforts on Asia and Africa, highlighting the long-term benefits of the empire's “reconstitution on the basis of Turkish–Arab partnership.”Footnote 81 In the aftermath of the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, Goltz Paşa, facing a new set of circumstances, seems to have changed some of his views. In an article published in the newspaper Balkan a day after the revolution, he argued that “Turks had the great right to be in Macedonia,” noting that many Turkish villages existed in the region right beside Greek and Slavic ones. Accordingly, he recommended that the Ottomans enhance their military power in order to maintain their Macedonian territories.Footnote 82
Similar emphasis on the possible benefits of shrinking the Ottoman territories can be found in Yusuf Akçura's 1905 article “Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset” (Three Types of Policy), published in the Cairo-based journal Türk. In the article, Akçura considered whether civic Ottomanism, pan-Islamism, or pan-Turkism would best suit the Ottoman Empire as a policy alternative (meslek). In comparing and contrasting these policy choices, Akçura asked “does the real interest of the Ottoman state lay in protecting its current borders?”Footnote 83 Discarding the Ottomanist option, Akçura portrayed both pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism as having many advantages and setbacks. He suggested that while pan-Islamist policies would alienate non-Muslims, pan-Turkist pursuits would necessitate the separation of non-Turkic Muslims from the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 84
One year later, in September 1905, Akçura published another article in the journal Şura-yı Ümmet (the Council of Ummah), this one on the Russian Revolution. Titled “Rusya İhtilaline Dair” (About the Russian Revolution), the article applied the Marxist notion of class struggle to political developments in Czarist Russia after the turn of the century. Akçura saw societies as composed of multiple classes pitted against one another in a constant power struggle: “those classes that do not enjoy power often suffer costs and, as opportunities present themselves, these classes try to capture power.”Footnote 85 It would be difficult to argue that Akçura had turned Marxist, but clearly class as a category of analysis came to dominate his historical interpretation. Akçura's comfort with a new analytic terminology shows that he had adjusted himself to the new vocabularies that emerged after the Russian Constitutional Revolution of 1905.Footnote 86 Yet, the new arrangements brought about by the counter-revolution in 1907 would eventually push Akçura away from the political scene in Russia to Crimea. He would remain there until late 1908, awaiting another set of political opportunities that came in the form of the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution (1908).
Similar discursive shifts occurred among other intellectuals of the period, including a friend of Akçura, Ahmed Ferid (Tek). Schooled together with Akçura in the War College in Istanbul, Ahmet Ferid was one of the few Ottoman intellectuals to engage in a public debate with Akçura over his “Three Types of Policies.” Ferid noted that Akçura's approach was theoretical (kat'iyyet-i mantıkıyye), and he himself believed in the necessity of sticking to the practical benefits of Ottomanism.Footnote 87 By the summer of 1912, however, Ferid had established the National Constitutional Party (Milli Meşrutiyet Fırkası) together with Akçura as the first nationalist political platform in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 88 In a subsequent address to the Türk Ocağı (Turkish Hearth), a nationalist organization, he defined the boundaries of the Turkish homeland as the lands stretching from Edirne to Rize and from Rodos to Süleymaniye—that is, what he called “four strongholds that were the iron spikes of the national borders”—a homeland that excluded Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians.Footnote 89
Following the same line of argument amid the Balkan Wars, Ahmet Ferid asked Hüseyin Cahid (Yalçın), the editor of the daily Tanin (Resonance), a newspaper known for its close ties to the CUP: “they will inevitably drive us out of Rumelia; so, instead of being exiled, would it not be better if we just left Rumelia and gather in Anatolia instead?” In response, Hüseyin Cahid wondered how difficult it would be for Ahmet Ferid to carry out such policies if he were at the helm of government.Footnote 90 Clearly Hüseyin Cahid and other Unionists such as Ahmet Şerif continued to see Ahmet Ferid's National Constitution Party and its program as detrimental to the principles of Ottomanism. After the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars, however, Hüseyin Cahid changed his views, arguing that the loss of Macedonia and Albania enabled the empire to rid itself of revolutionaries with unyielding secessionist ambitions. Accordingly, Hüseyin Cahid asked for reform to ensure brotherly coexistence between Turks, Arabs, and Armenians in the post–Balkan War era.Footnote 91
Ideas and discourses are bound to transform in the face of novel political challenges, and become functional in justifying the new political order. The emphasis on framing it otherwise results in teleological accounts where nationalism becomes an inevitable next step. With this in mind, it is important methodologically to emphasize the plurality of options in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. Otherwise, our accounts highlight only the successful—those “whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution” where “the blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers are forgotten.”Footnote 92 In cautioning against the inevitability of nationalism, the next section explores the prospects of empire after the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars by rereading popular notions of revenge. As Cengiz Yolcu has pointed out, “Ottoman revenge” embedded within these notions the expectation that although the Balkans had been lost, “one day the ‘heart’ of the empire would and must be taken back.”Footnote 93 In a similar vein, I suggest that the Young Turks who hailed from the Balkans maintained their faith in the empire and dreamed of plans for a Balkan Reconquista.Footnote 94
POSSIBILITIES OF THE EMPIRE: OTTOMAN IRREDENTISM ON THE EVE OF WORLD WAR I
On 12 November 1912, after news spread of the capture of Salonika by Greek forces, Mehmed Cavid Bey entered the following in his diary: “Throughout the night, half asleep and half awake, I constantly conjured the image of the Greek and Bulgarian flags flapping in the Salonika port. A Turkey without Rumelia and an Ottoman government without Salonika is both unbelievable and unbearable.”Footnote 95 For some, this was certainly not the case. Amid the defense of Edirne in January 1913, for instance, Major Kazım (Karabekir) delivered an address to a crowd of Ottoman officers. Much to the surprise of the attendees, he argued that Macedonia had been an obstacle in the way of Ottoman progress (esir-i terakki) and that they should devote their full energies to Anatolia. The Balkans, he asserted, were never their real homeland.Footnote 96 Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi (Çığıraçan) noted that such notions were commonly articulated and circulated as people came to terms with the Ottoman defeat: “[They say that] the island of Crete was a troublemaker to begin with! Not only were we not benefitting from the island, we were spending funds to keep it under our control. Albania, too, kept draining funds instead of yielding any proceeds.”Footnote 97
Such rationalizations of the Ottoman defeat were certainly not without their critics, nor did they lack counternarratives. Hüseyin Cemal, for instance, who was one of the officers in attendance at Major Kazım's early 1913 address, noted that many Ottoman commanders and officers were ready to work eagerly towards the goal of retrieving all the territories that the empire had lost during the Balkan Wars.Footnote 98 İbrahim Hilmi maintained a similar position. After having heard many different justifications for the Ottoman defeat, he described how as he laid out the map of the Balkans in front of him and examined forests, pastures, produce, rivers, and mountains—the natural and human resources of the region that could readily enable national revival in a matter of twenty years—the defeat put him to tears.Footnote 99 Maps proved important tools for articulating notions of Ottoman revenge and irredentism in the postwar climate. Hüseyin Cemal ended his account of the Ottoman defeat by asking his fellow Ottomans to examine maps and thereby explore the empire's possibilities:
Oh, Ottomans! Grab a map, and look how the bells now ring and the Muslims suffer in Sofia and Silistra, places where one could have heard the Muslim chants once upon a time! Iran is broken into pieces . . . why are they separate from us? Examine the map with care . . . Oh, Ottomans! Iran, India, Afghanistan . . . what a secret ideal, and what a sweet one!Footnote 100
Although Hüseyin Cemal's irredentism encompassed a larger Islamic world, with clear tones of Muslim anti-imperialism, there were also more restrained forms of Ottoman irredentism. A famous map titled “İntikam” (Revenge), published by Balkan Muhacirleri Cemiyet-i İslamiyesi (the Society of Muslim Refugees from Rumelia), only focused on the lost Ottoman territories in the Balkans.Footnote 101 In the coming years such “maps of revenge” continued to be reproduced in different forms with varying territorial visions.Footnote 102 Ali İhsan (Sabis), then an officer close to Enver Bey, was extremely clear as to what this notion of revenge meant. In the preface to his famous postwar pamphlet (1913), he noted that “as part of the lessons learned for the future, we need to study this disaster which has loomed so dark in our history, and reconquer Rumelia within a matter of five to ten years.”Footnote 103 In a different pamphlet Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi laid out a similar plan: “our national goal is to wage war upon Bulgaria and its allies within the next five to ten years, eliminate our enemies by declaring ‘revenge or death,’ and take revenge on the four traitorous Balkan governments by recovering our territories.”Footnote 104
Such irredentist notions were not merely simple remarks uttered in passing, reflective of romantic wishful thinking, but rather part of a larger discursive transformation that placed the reinvigoration of the Ottoman Empire at the forefront of postwar calculations. Most pamphlets published after the Balkan Wars expressed the aim of educating Ottoman youth about the defeat and inculcating in them a sense of revenge in order to achieve an Ottoman restoration. A pamphlet penned by Doctor Abdullah Ahi (Tuncer), for instance, declared that the duty of Turkish youth was to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors by striving to gallop their horses in the prairies of Adrianople, Salonika, Kosovo, and Bitola (Manastır), and in the fields of Scutari and Vienna.Footnote 105 For Ottoman literati who articulated Ottoman irredentism, history provided many such stories of imperial revival. Celadet Bedirhan and Kamuran Bedirhan cited the example of Hannibal of Carthage's defeat of the Roman armies in a series of battles that expanded his control up to the gates of Rome—echoing the Ottoman defeat by the Balkan League. Whereas Carthage reveled in the pleasures of victory, Rome persevered until it managed to destroy the armies of Hannibal.Footnote 106 The theme of imperial revival was popular among Ottoman publicists, who looked to the prior Japanese, Prussian, and French revivals.Footnote 107
What sustained dreams of Ottoman restoration was expansive Ottoman mobilization on the home front and the empire's transnational relevance. Ahmed Cevad's well-known Kırmızı Siyah Kitab: 1328 Fecaii (Red and Black Book: Disaster of 1912), for instance, likened the empire to a çınar (plane tree), one with admitted ills and troubles. Yet, he continued to believe in the Ottoman war effort, noting the countless civilian sacrifices and arguing that the children of the fatherland (evlad-ı vatan) were ready to water the çınar with their teardrops and keep it warm with the flames of their heart—in other words, to restore the empire.Footnote 108
The Ottoman reconquest of Edirne from the Bulgarian armies in July 1913 seems to have confirmed such notions of an impending Ottoman restoration and become, as Eyal Ginio has argued, “an emblem of the rejuvenation of the Ottoman nation.”Footnote 109 On 26 March 1914, when a public ceremony was held to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Bulgarian attack on Edirne, Ahmed Rıza Paşa, the commander of the Second Army Corps, reminded the attendees how the Ottomans had conquered many territories throughout history, and warned that the conquered had now united to reclaim those lands from the Ottomans. “Instill in the minds of your children, your relatives, and your friends the sentiment of vengeance,” Ahmed Rıza declared, so that the Ottomans may “return once more to the glory of former days.”Footnote 110 Two months later, in a 19 May 1914 address to the Ottoman deputies, Halil Bey (Menteşe) similarly declared the necessity of maintaining the memory of the Ottoman Balkans, asserting that many brothers and parts of the homeland still waited to be saved across the current borders.Footnote 111
This brief survey of the emergence of irredentism suggests that the Ottoman Empire not only continued to be a politically viable entity in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars but also that the defeat revived irredentist reflexes among the ruling class. As Clifford Geertz noted, “writing the history of the immediate pre-present, the time just before ‘now’ began, raises awkward and unsettling problems of perspective.”Footnote 112 In framing the postwar Ottoman context, the existing scholarship has suffered from a similar presentist bias, and has not appreciated the possibilities of the empire in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars.
CONCLUSION
The entry of the Ottoman Empire into World War I on the side of the Central Powers led the Unionist regime to undertake extensive wartime propaganda. One such initiative took place on 14 November 1914 when the Ottomans blew up a Russian monument erected on the outskirts of Istanbul in Kalatarya (Şenlikköy).Footnote 113 Commemorating the Russian soldiers who lost their lives during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78, the monument, erected there in 1898, not only symbolized Russian superiority over the Ottomans but also stood as a humiliating reminder of the Ottoman defeat.Footnote 114 Its destruction in the fall of 1914 was as symbolic as the monument itself, for the Young Turks had defied an emblem of tragic defeat just as they entered World War I. For the Unionists, as Hasan Kayalı has argued, the war was an opportunity “to reconstruct the empire and to consolidate its authority and legitimacy damaged by secession, annexation, and military defeats.”Footnote 115
I have suggested that the broader desire to restore the empire and reassert its former glory was a clear consequence of the Balkan defeat. The CUP spent the year after the defeat not in a senseless campaign of imperial self-destruction, but rather building alliances at home and abroad, for they had learnt the heavy price of diplomatic isolation and lack of domestic support during the Balkan Wars.Footnote 116 The Unionists sought to ink an alliance first with Austria-Hungary in February of 1914, then with Russia in May, followed by overtures to France in July, but only reaching success with Germany in August. They similarly sought an alliance with Bulgaria, and signed treaties with the British over the Trucial States. The Unionists even began to toy around with decentralization by courting the long-time decentralist Prince Sabahaddin into their cabinet.Footnote 117 In doing so, the CUP tried to reinstate the Hamidian equilibrium in a bid to restore the empire.
As for the Young Turks, instead of advocating a return to Anatolia, they were “empire-preservers”Footnote 118 and even imperialists in the sense that they continued to seek territorial expansion. In March 1918, for instance, when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, the Young Turks were happy to be able to retrieve the territories lost to the Russians in the Caucasus back in 1878. Similarly, when Talat Pasha visited Berlin in September 1918, he pushed for a settlement that projected territorial expansion in the Balkans, however symbolic.Footnote 119 To be sure, the Young Turk leadership was eventually unsuccessful in the restoration of the empire and in early November 1918 fled the imperial capital, but even then the Ottoman Empire continued to be politically relevant. Unlike its Russian and Austro-Hungarian counterparts, the Ottoman dynasty actually survived its debacle in World War IFootnote 120 and Ottomanism maintained its relevance and appeal well into the early 1920s.Footnote 121
Whereas the collapse of the Ottoman order was a messy and drawn-out process, the scholarship continues to prefer “conceptual clarity” by framing the end of the empire in neat terms that maintain narrative consistency.Footnote 122 With the Balkan Wars standing in as a clear turning point, the existing literature continues to project a singular trajectory of historical development towards the nation-state. In doing so, scholars neatly pin down an ideological transformation in the wake of the Balkan Wars, foreshadowing the eventual reality of the Turkish Republic. Such a teleological approach has essentially homogenized diverse Ottoman reactions to the Balkan defeat by reducing policy variations and disagreements to irrelevance. In challenging such accounts, I have emphasized the versatility of postwar Ottoman debates by highlighting the factionalized nature of the Ottoman political establishment and complex realities on the ground.
The existing literature has also stressed the theme of a “return to Anatolia” as an important consequence of the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars. Although some contemporaries came to terms with the defeat by tapping into the Turkish core in Anatolia, such notions were neither peculiar to the post–Balkan War context nor final. In this article, I have instead highlighted the emerging discourse of Ottoman irredentism in the postwar era, not only as a way of challenging teleological bias but also to illustrate that the Ottoman Empire continued to constitute a viable future.
Challenging teleology is well beyond a simple methodological concern. Singular ways of remembering the past are central to how an emerging political order positions itself as the ultimate destination in a national history and justifies its ascendant political class. In this sense, late Ottoman scholarship's broader emphasis on a “return to Anatolia” as the clear consequence of the Balkan defeat has often consolidated republican narratives of national origins. As a result, the Balkan Wars have emerged less as an episode in Ottoman history than as a constitutive part of Turkish liberation historiography, wherein they have, in the form of a tragic narrative of defeat, delivered the empire's historiographical end.
