Download PDF | The Ottoman Road to War in 1914 The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge Military Histories) by Mustafa Aksakal, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
234 Pages
The Ottoman Road to War in 1914
Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War in late October 1914, months after the war’s devastations had become clear? Were its leaders “simple-minded,” “below-average” individuals, as the doyen of Turkish diplomatic history has argued? Or, as others have claimed, did the Ottomans enter the war because War Minister Enver Pasha, dictating Ottoman decisions, was in thrall to the Germans and to his own expansionist dreams? Based on previously untapped Ottoman and European sources, Mustafa Aksakal’s dramatic study challenges this consensus. It demonstrates that responsibility went far beyond Enver, that the road to war was paved by the demands of a politically interested public, and that the Ottoman leadership sought the German alliance as the only way out of a web of international threats and domestic insecurities, opting for an escape whose catastrophic consequences for the empire and seismic impact on the Middle East are felt even today.
MUSTAFA AKSAKAL is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, American University, Washington, DC. His dissertation won the Bayard and Cleveland E. Dodge Memorial Prize for Best Dissertation in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.
Acknowledgments
I am delighted to acknowledge the support of a large number of individuals. They have offered a great deal of their time, expert knowledge, and words of encouragement. Margaret Lavinia Anderson and M. Sikri Hanioglu generously provided all. Professor Anderson read several versions of the manuscript at various stages, and I could not possibly thank her adequately for her many observations and constant prodding; I owe her a debt of gratitude. Professor Hanioglu taught me much of what I know about the late Ottoman period, first as my teacher at Princeton, then as a colleague, and always as a friend. Hew Strachan’s support of this project improved it in key respects. Cemil Aydin, Ussama Makdisi, and Yiicel Yanikdag read individual chapters; their insights have greatly enriched the end result.
I am grateful to Justin McCarthy for allowing me to adapt his maps from The Map Project, The Middle East Studies Association of North America, CD-ROM (Tuscon: University of Arizona, 2003). The stimulating environment provided by my colleagues in the Department of History at American University made writing the book’s final stages both intellectually engaging and pleasant. Professor Robert Griffith has been a most considerate department chair. My former colleagues in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University could not have offered a more supportive surrounding.
There is a long list of friends and colleagues who humored me by listening to winding stories about the late Ottomans not once but on many occasions. Their comments have contributed in ways immeasurable: Bassam Abed, Marc Abramson, Fikret Adanir, Holger Afflerbach, Feroz Ahmad, Cemil Aydin, William Blair, Harry Bone, Michael Cook, Robert Crews, Christopher DeRosa, Michael Doran, Howard Eissenstat, Edward Erickson, Yasser Freij, Stephen Fritz, Mustafa Gencer, Fatma Miige Gocek, Hasan Kayali, Janet Klein, Sinan Kuneralp, Peter Laipson, Frederick McKitrick, Annika Mombauer, Wolfgang Mueller, Dean Owens, Katherine Parkin, Michael Provence, Michael Reynolds, Dominic Sachsenmaier, Joshua Sanborn, Saliba Sarsar, James Sheehan, Peter Sieger, Kenneth Stunkel, Ronald Suny, Haydar Tas, Baki Tezcan, Mesut Uyar, Eric Weitz, Friedrich Wesche, and Ipek Yosmaoéglu.
Since arriving at the Ottoman archives in 1999 with only a faint idea of what direction my research would take, I have benefited from the financial support of numerous institutions. I extend my deep gratitude to these institutions and to the individuals who undertook the unenviable task of selecting this project among others for support. These institutions are Princeton University — where I thank in particular the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Graduate School, and the Center for International Studies — the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Institute of Turkish Studies, the Monmouth University Grant-in-Aid program, and the College of Arts and Sciences, American University, and its dean, Dr. Kay Mussell. Without their support I could not have traveled and benefited from a number of archives and libraries and their superb staffs: the Ottoman Archives of the Turkish Prime Ministry, Istanbul; the Archives of the Turkish General Staff, Ankara (ATASEB), and, in particular, its director, Colonel Dr. Ahmet Tetik; the Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv, Freiburg i.Br.; the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office, Berlin; the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde; the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and, in particular, Dr. Christopher Murphy and Dr. Levon Avdoyan; the Library of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, Ankara, and, in particular, Mr. Omer Imamoéglu of the periodicals reading room; the Atattirk Library, Istanbul; Firestone Library at Princeton University; Widener Library at Harvard University; the Monmouth University Library; and the American University Library. My editor at Cambridge University Press, Michael Watson, has been as efficient as he has been patient.
Any author is painfully aware of the burden that writing a book brings on one’s family, so much so that not only gratitude for their understanding but apologies seem called for in equal measure. I thank my parents, Servet and Mevliide, my siblings, Ozgiir and Yesim, and my other parents, Ziad and Naila, for their constant faith in my endeavors. My son Gabriel and now his sister Clara have mastered the art of welcome interruption. Above all I am grateful to my wife, Layla, who has not only read the manuscript line by line and pointed in new directions, but whose loving companionship has provided me with nourishment and happy cheer throughout all stages of this book.
Author’s note
Is it Istanbul or Constantinople? This is a question that may prove vexing to the uninitiated reader, who would be well within her right not to stop there but to ask further. Is it Turkey or Ottoman Empire, Porte or Sublime Porte, Turks or Ottomans, Middle East or Near East, or even the politically neutral eastern Mediterranean? There seems to be no convention without its own set of pitfalls. Historians working in European history have remained true to the parlance of the period, and they have stuck to “Constantinople,” “Turkey,” “the Porte,” “Turks,” and “the Near East.” For historians working in Ottoman history and with Ottoman Turkish language sources, however, this usage, by definition, represents European and, worse, imperialist perspectives. Historians working with Ottoman sources point out that the usage inside the “Well-Protected Domains” (Memahk-i Mahruse) was quite different. It was the Family of Osman (Al-t Osman), and later the Sublime Ottoman State (Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye), not Turkey, and not an “empire,” that governed the multiethnic, multi-religious, and multi-lingual society of Ottomans, not Turks.’ Its highest offices were accessed through the famous Exalted Gate or Sublime Porte (Bab-1 Ali).
And yet, even in this usage the Ottomanist must concede deficiencies. In its own international correspondence, written mostly in French, the state itself used “Constantinople” and “Turquie.” In the nineteenth century it insisted on being referred to as an empire with an emperor, as in “Sa Majesté Impériale le Sultan” and “Sa Majesté le Sultan Empereur des Ottomans,” on par with European powers. Its own paper money designated the issuer as “Banque Impériale Ottomane.”” Much more important, it seems anachronistic to speak of an “Ottoman government” and an “Ottoman cabinet” in 1914 when the major players had explicitly repudiated “Ottomanism” and were set on constructing a government by and for the Turks, and when major dailies and books freely used “Turks” (Ttirkler) and “Turkey” (Tiirkiye). And if Turkish-speakers referred to the capital as Istanbul among a variety of names, about half of the population spoke other languages and used different names. The Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal undertook an official name change from Constantinople to Istanbul in 1930.
Since labeling and categories are no trivial matter in reconstructing decision-making, perceptions, fears, and hopes, I have tried to offer the necessary nuance without also adding muddle; otherwise, I have used the following, inadequate conventions: Ottomans and Ottoman Empire, Istanbul and the Porte, and the Near East. Where I have cited Ottoman published (primary) works I have sought to provide translations of titles in the notes and bibliography. For Ottoman dates, whether expressed in the lunar ficri or the solar rumi calendars, I have included Gregorian equivalents.
Introduction: pursuing sovereignty in the age of imperialism
The Ottoman Empire’s expulsion from Europe, where it had been a major power for more than four centuries, marks one of the major turning-points in modern history, one whose consequences for Europe and the Middle East we have still to absorb. Among the stages of this expulsion — the Balkan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the occupation of the Ottoman capital by the Entente Powers in 1918, the empire’s subsequent and comprehensive dissolution in 1922 — the government’s decision to intervene in an intra-European war in 1914 played a crucial role. Yet the decision is a puzzling one, since the conflict between Europe’s two alliance systems was one in which the Ottomans had no immediate stake.
Given the war’s disastrous consequences and its human cost for the entire Middle East, it is not surprising that the decision taken by the leadership in 1914 has been roundly blasted by historians and memoirwriters alike. In these accounts Enver Pasha, the war minister, a hawk in thrall to Germany, more or less single-handedly pushed the empire into a war it did not want. Alternatively, intervention has been ascribed to the hare-brained ideas of a tiny inner circle of the Young Turk leadership who had hijacked Ottoman policy — either because they were corrupted by German gold, blinded by German promises, pressured by German diplomats, or moved by voracious personal ambition, megalomaniac expansionism, or naiveré, attributable to their “below-average” intelligence.’ In short, instead of welcoming the war as a reprieve from international pressures and remaining aloof from the bloodshed enveloping Europe, Enver and the men around him had sped up the “Sick Man”’s demise by entering the fight on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary on October 29, 1914.
And yet, from a global perspective, the Ottomans’ entry into the First World War can be seen as a reaction against the principal historical forces of the time: the steady expansion of European economic, political, and military control. This book argues that Ottoman leaders in 1914 made the only decision they believed could save the empire from partition and foreign rule. Envisioning outright foreign control in the Near East required no great stretch of the imagination. By 1900, Europe’s territorial control, not least thanks to tools produced by the Industrial Revolution, extended to some 85 percent of the globe’s surface, rendering the Ottoman Empire one of the globe’s last holdouts. For the Ottomans, the path to international security ran through an alliance with one of the Great Powers. By 1914 a general consensus had emerged around this vision, even if its implementation became subject to personal disagreements and rivalries among the top officials. For reasons that will become clear, the choice of ally fell on Germany.
While its military and political leadership became convinced that the world had entered an era in which states and peoples could survive only through the demonstration of military power, the Ottoman Empire did not leap into war at the first opportunity. In fact, much of this book, and perhaps that is its main surprise, examines the great lengths to which the Ottomans went to stay out of the war. Once it became clear, however, that their alliance with Germany would not survive further delay, they embarked upon war confident that only the battlefield could bring the empire the unifying and liberating experience it so desperately needed.
Though the Ottoman Empire was an agrarian empire in the traditional mold, in the last decades it had been faced with the growth of the same kinds of nationalisms that beset the Habsburgs and would eventually overtake the empires of the “New Imperialism.” But the Ottomans had to confront the ground-shaking forces of anti-colonial nationalism during the high noon of European imperialism, mixing geopolitical danger with domestic vulnerability. The Ottoman state thus had to come to terms with subject populations who increasingly felt themselves to be different precisely in an age when other empires, those backed by powerful industry, were spreading. Unlike the New Imperialists to the west, however, for the Ottoman leaders the survival of the state and the survival of the empire were one and the same.
To be sure, by 1914 the Ottoman Empire had become a perforated society, with perforations running along ethnic and religious lines. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the empire had endured dramatic shifts in its external boundaries, a vast remapping that truncated its territory and generated waves of migration, leading to the major blurring of its internal social boundaries as well. In fact, it is impossible to categorize the questions surrounding the empire’s nationalities as belonging exclusively to either the domestic or the foreign realm of politics. By 1914, the empire’s military security, or rather its vulnerability, had also become a function of the empire’s demographic situation.
The question of whether the Ottomans could have saved the empire by employing, before nationalism became too virulent, “correct” domestic policies, thereby preserving its multi-ethnic and multi-religious, even cosmopolitan, character is now unanswerable. To us, the possibility that it could have done so carries tremendous appeal, since it would have spared the region the ugly, often bloody and murderous, process of disintegration and the subsequent, often equally horrific, process of nation-building. In 1914, however, Ottoman observers needed only to look at recent history, whether across the globe or at home, to conclude that military power alone could prevent dismemberment and colonial status. Even so, the empire’s military, political, and intellectual leaders were not engaged solely in a campaign of self-defense; they firmly believed that the militarization of society and its institutions, which they based on European models, were the only road to an Ottoman modernity.
In 1914, the Sublime Porte faced four main foreign policy challenges, each in turn carrying a set of crucial domestic implications: the Armenian reform project in eastern Anatolia, the Aegean islands question, a loan agreement with one or more of the European governments, and the Liman von Sanders Affair. From the Ottoman perspective, these challenges posed life-or-death questions, and they tended to come from the Entente: Britain, France, and Russia. The archival evidence shows that for the tsarist government in St. Petersburg the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the Liman von Sanders Affair of December 1913, the possibility ofa Greek—Ottoman War in 1914, and the July Crisis were all seen in the context of Russian intentions to seize control over Istanbul and the Ottoman Straits.
Once the war raged in Europe, the Entente governments, as we shall see, issued in writing a promise that they would protect the empire’s territorial integrity in exchange for its neutrality, an offer the Ottoman leadership turned down. Rejecting the promise was not simply a matter of misplaced suspicion, however. Writing from Paris on August 11, 1914, the Russian ambassador, A. P. Izvolskii, reported the prevailing views in the French foreign ministry. Foreign Minister Gaston Doumergue and his colleagues had discussed Ottoman fears that the European war might precipitate the Russian seizure of Istanbul and the Straits. In the discussion, Doumergue suggested issuing the Entente guarantee of territorial integrity in order to “calm” Ottoman nerves. “According to the views of Doumergue,” Izvolskii wrote, making such a guarantee now “would not prevent us from solving the Straits question in line with our thinking at war’s end.” Others in the French foreign ministry took yet a more aggressive line and argued that it would “be more advantageous for us to include Turkey on the side of our enemies and in that way to finish her off” for good.”
Were the Ottomans privy to exchanges such as this one, exchanges that spelled out explicitly the empire’s partition? We know that this was so on at least some occasions, though the archives have remained silent as to whether the Sublime Porte’s intelligence services succeeded in obtaining the exchange above. One occasion on which they did acquire such information was a note of August 6, 1914, penned by the Russian ambassador at Istanbul, M. N. Giers. In that note, Giers was proposing to his government that the empire be kept neutral until “that point in time when circumstances permit our own firm entrance into the Straits.” From the Ottoman perspective it was of little consolation that S.D. Sazonov, the Russian foreign minister, steered a policy aimed at later rather than immediate annexation of the Straits.*
Hence, when the Entente in August and September 1914, after much diplomatic wrangling, issued its guarantee of territorial integrity for the duration of the war, it should come as no surprise that the decision-makers in Istanbul treated the Entente promise as an empty one, a diplomatic hoodwink intended to buy time and to prevent the conflict from spreading.”
On the eve of the Great War, it was modernizing ideology that dominated the Ottomans’ political and military leadership. Becoming modern meant the establishment of a sovereign, economically and politically independent state that enjoyed full membership in the international state system and access to international law. In theory, the Ottoman Empire had been a member of the Concert of Europe since 1856, when the Ottomans were signatory to the Treaty of Paris ending the Crimean War. In reality, this Great Power status and membership in a system whose mandate it was to preserve peace by defending the international status quo had not prevented the empire from suffering a series of territorial and diplomatic losses that left the country utterly demoralized and in financial ruin.° Since 1878 alone, these territorial losses included: Cyprus (British administration under Ottoman sovereignty, 1878); Ardahan, Batum, and Kars (to Russia, 1878); Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia (all gaining independence, 1878); Bosnia-Herzegovina (Austro-Hungarian occupation, 1878; Austro-Hungarian annexation, 1908); Tunisia (French protectorate, 1881); Egypt (British occupation, 1882); Crete (Great Powers impose autonomy, 1898); Kuwait (British protectorate, 1899); Bulgaria (independence, 1908); Tripoli (Italian annexation, 1912); Dodecanese Islands (Italian occupation, 1912); western Thrace (to Bulgaria and Greece, 1912); Aegean islands, including Chios and Mitylene (to Greece, 1912); Albania (independence, 1912); Macedonia (partitioned among Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia 1912-13). And although the Great Powers did intervene on behalf of the Ottoman Empire at the Berlin Congress of 1878, following the war between the empire and Russia, they did so because they feared Russian expansion, which suggested to the cynical that when Western and Russian interests coincided, European concern for Ottoman integrity would cease.
Until the beginning of this period of staggering losses, perhaps as many as half of the empire’s subjects resided in its European provinces, collectively known as Rumeli G.e. land of the Romans). The Balkans thus formed an integral, if not crucial, part of the empire’s economic, political, and cultural life. By the twentieth century, Rumeli had shrunk significantly; it now represented but one-fifth of the empire’s total population. ’
The state’s massive reform programs of the nineteenth century proved unable to reverse the slippage in the empire’s international footing. Beginning with its military and bureaucratic reforms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman state implemented policies designed to regain its rank as one of the most prosperous and orderly states in the world, a proud position it had occupied in the sixteenth century. With Western European powers now in the driver’s seat, however, by the mid-nineteenth century the empire’s statesmen had embraced both the principle and the work of reform, not because reforms were forced on them but because they believed in these measures as the best way of regaining strength and stability. This reform movement grew from inside the empire in response to the pressures and challenges posed by the European Great Power system. Thus these reformers initially adopted European methods and techniques not with resentment or hostility but with a great deal of respect and even admiration. In this effort to fit into the emerging international society of states, the Sublime Porte hired European technical experts to reform its army, bureaucracy, and law. These reformers also sent their own technocrats to learn new methods in Berlin, London, and Paris. Nor did these reformers adopt European methods out of a sense of humiliation or “Eastern inferiority”; while other Asian and African states engaged in the same drive for modernization, so did various European governments. The Spanish and Swedish governments, to choose western European examples, also sent officers for training to Berlin, London, and Paris. Further to the east, Bulgaria, Greece, and even Russia all participated in this process of acquiring new skills and technologies.®
This embrace of European-based reforms gradually gave way to the conviction that Western arguments for reform were simply tools of European imperialism. The new Ottoman leadership of the twentieth century viewed Great Power diplomacy as a fixed game: the Great Powers were the House, and you could not beat it by playing by the rules. In the face of these territorial losses, diplomatic defeats, and severe economic difficulties, the generations of pro-European reformers were eventually replaced by increasingly radical, younger leaders who believed that diplomatic history had taught a single lesson: only military power could preserve the empire.
This new generation of leaders organized itself as the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress and succeeded in 1908 in toppling the regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r.1876—1908/9). In what became known as the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) compelled the regime to reinstate the Constitution of 1876 and to call for general elections for a new chamber of deputies. With a bloodless revolution, empire-wide elections, and the opening of the chamber in 1908, the Ottoman Empire, it seemed, had transformed itself into a liberal, constitutional monarchy. While the revolution’s aftermath saw the birth of a lively press and the expressions of high hopes for “union and progress” and “liberty, justice, and brotherhood,” as so many postcards and placards proclaimed, the years that followed were also marked by deep crises of internal violence, including the massacre of 20,000 Armenians in the Adana region in 1909, wars in North Africa and the Balkans in 1911-13, and continued financial insecurity. Finally, in the context of the Balkan Wars, the CUP seized near-authoritarian control over the state apparatus in 1913 and continued to tighten its grip through the war years.”
In selecting the sources for this study, I have mostly avoided reliance on the main secondary publications appearing in the war’s highly charged aftermath. These studies too often misportray Ottoman intervention as the work of a single individual, War Minister Enver Pasha, who has gone down in history as dazzled by Prussian military prowess and dreaming ofa pan-Islamist/pan-Turkist empire stretching from the Bosporus to Central Asia. I have equally avoided reliance on political memoirs. While these sources undoubtedly offer a wealth of information on the late Ottoman period more generally, they aim at deflecting responsibility and shifting blame elsewhere when considering the question of the Ottoman entry into the war. To illustrate the point we may turn to the memoirs of Halil Mentese, the speaker of the Ottoman chamber of deputies in 1914, who participated in the alliance negotiations with Germany and the subsequent decision-making that paved the way for intervention. Halil looks back approvingly on the decision for war, surmising that there existed no other option. This perhaps was no surprise, since he had supported the war very publicly in 1914. And yet his memoirs, published in 1986 with an excellent introduction by Ismail Arar, also claim that the Ottomans entered the war “accidentally” and that no orders for attacking Russian forces in the Black Sea were ever issued.'° As we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the archival evidence fully contradicts this point.
In the middle of the July Crisis, on July 13, 1914, and about two weeks after the assassination of the Habsburg heir apparent Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the grand vezir and foreign minister, Said Halim Pasha, dispatched a confidential note, written in his own hand, to War Minister Enver Pasha, conveying the strong possibility of the outbreak of war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Said Halim beat the alarm bells based on information from an “authoritative” and “high ranking” source in the German foreign office itself. The contact had revealed remarkable news: “I can tell you confidentially that next week war will break out between Austria and Serbia ... We hope that the war is no longer avoidable, because it is perhaps the final chance for Austria to deal with Serbia. But one does not have full confidence that Vienna will demonstrate the energy necessary for this decision.” '' While the note exposes the attitudes of at least some in Berlin during the July Crisis, it also demonstrates that those plying the Ottoman rudder were by no means benighted as to the real possibility of a major European war in late July 1914.
In hindsight, these gathering war clouds on the European horizon offered the empire a precious opportunity for domestic reform. In Turkey, Yusuf Hikmet Bayur made this point forcefully in his monumental History of the Turkish Revolution, published between 1940 and 1967 in more than five thousand pages. Bayur drew not only on the vast document collections made public by the European governments after 1919 but also on the unpublished Ottoman archival material, newspapers, and political memoirs.‘? On the basis of this rich documentation, he concluded that the Ottoman government led by the “triumvirate Talat-Enver-Cemal” had entered the war “without any compelling reason.”’?
Bayur was the grandson of the former grand vezir and CUP arch-rival, Kamil Pasha, and he criticized harshly the attempts of successive CUP governments at reorganizing the state’s administrative, financial, and military apparatus after the two Balkan Wars. In mid-1913, the then grand vezir and war minister, Mahmud Sevket Pasha, had enlisted British, French, and German officers and technical specialists into the state’s service. Mahmud Sevket had hoped both to improve and modernize the state’s institutions and to establish more cordial foreign relations with the European powers in the process. Writing from the perspective of the new Turkish Republic established in 1923, Bayur found such policies terribly imprudent, because, in his view, they had only fueled the imperial rivalries in the region. Leaders such as Enver, Said Halim, and Talat (the interior minister), Bayur surmised, failed to understand the effects of their policies because they were men who lacked the skills and abilities of true statesmanship. In Bayur’s words, they were “below-average” and “simpleminded” individuals. '*
Finally, Bayur accused the CUP leadership of chasing “ideals like Turanism [i.e. pan-Turkism] and pan-Islamism”’” and entering a world war unnecessarily and with calamitous consequences. Their course stood in stark contrast to Turkey’s splendid isolation during the Second World War. Once the navy had mined the Straits — the southern one, the Dardanelles, connecting the Mediterranean and the Sea of Marmara, and the northern one, the Bosporus, connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea — and closed them first to warships in August 1914 and then to all traffic in late September, the German government would have “treated [the Ottomans] with kindness and would have provided each and every type of support” to the Istanbul government in exchange for this invaluable service of cutting off British and French supply lines to Russia.'° Thus even Bayur implicitly endorsed a policy that sided with Germany, although not an alliance and intervention. Whatever the majority of historians and memoir-writers may have claimed after the war, as we shall see, the sources examined in this study strongly suggest that it was not only Enver Pasha who supported the option for war in 1914."
Nonetheless, Bayur’s work has remained unique both inside Turkey and beyond for its comprehensiveness and its use of all the published European archival material. His access to the then-restricted and uncatalogued archives of the foreign ministry permitted him to shed light on Ottoman decision-making as well. It is not surprising that Bayur’s study quickly became the standard historical account of the period in general and on the question of the Ottoman entry into the First World War in particular. Its influence can also be seen in the extensive military history publications of the Turkish General Staff, which followed Bayur very closely, focusing on both Western imperialism and the Ottoman leaders’ alleged secrecy and incompetence.'® As a result, historiography has judged strongly the leaders whose actions led to the empire’s entry into the war.'” The war minister and deputy commander in chief, Enver Pasha, in particular, has frequently been presented as “selling out” the country to Germany and forcing the Ottomans into war.””
The history of the late Ottoman period has been shaped by what we now know about the war and its outcome. The war’s relatively long duration, for instance, led historians like Bayur to depict the Ottoman decision for war as a death wish. This understanding fails to recognize that despite the intense militarism and armaments race in Europe, many contemporaries believed that a general war, if it broke out at all, could last no more than “a matter of months,” and that it would be concluded by a negotiated peace rather than decisive military victory of one side over the other.”’ If the Ottoman leaders could plausibly have expected a shorter confrontation, room must be allowed for the possibility that they were seeking not the grandiose creation of a Muslim empire in Central Asia and elsewhere, as has been charged, but rather a long-term alliance with a Great Power, and, in particular, with Germany. From that alliance, Ottomans could hope for a period of stability, a period marked by international security and economic advances.
But perhaps what accounts most for the deep entrenchment of the reigning view on the Ottoman decision for war is what has been referred to as “imposed historical amnesia”~* or a “post-war amnesia”~’ in the Turkish historiography of the early republican era. Following the Turkish War of Independence (1919-22) and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey (1923), Turkish historiography embraced vigorously the precepts of the nation-state and sought a complete break with the Ottoman Empire even as the republic continued to rely on the political, social, and institutional structures of the late Ottoman period.
In 1914 the July Crisis and the possibility of war between AustriaHungary and Serbia seemed to offer an escape from what many Ottomans perceived to be a dead end. With the support and guidance of the German Empire, Ottoman leaders hoped to carry through the kind of radical transformation they deemed necessary for the creation of a modern, sustainable state. Wartime, some of these leaders believed, presented a suitable, even ideal, environment for the realization of such drastic changes. The Young Turks intended to transform the empire into a politically and economically independent, modern country by removing foreign control and cultivating a citizenry that would be loyal to the state. These individuals imagined that conditions of war could offer an appropriate pretext for the expulsion of foreign businesses and the nullification of fiscal and legal exemptions for foreign nationals, the so-called “capitulations” (their actual cancellation on October 1, 1914, announced on September 9, produced massive public celebrations). Wartime, moreover, presented the state with additional tools for the mobilization of the citizenry behind the Istanbul government.**
Resituating the decision for war in the psychological climate of prewar society makes it possible to see Ottoman intervention as the product of wider political trends rather than of the immediate pressures of the July Crisis. Feroz Ahmad has remarked that the CUP leaders, civilian and military alike, were united in their strong desire to achieve full independence and were prepared to go to war for this cause: “Thus Turkey’s intervention in 1914 was not the result of collusion between the Germans and the war party. It was mainly determined by the nationalist aspirations of the [CUP] which Enver Pasa came to personify.”*° If we follow Ahmad’s lead that Enver’s actions reflected the wider circles of Ottoman leadership and society, then the empire’s entry into the First World War must be re-examined in light of the prevailing political arguments circulating on the eve of the war.
Scholars who have maintained that Enver single-handedly shoved the empire into war have inadvertently provided evidence to the contrary. The Turkish historian Tuncer Baykara, for example, has pointed out how the ignominious defeats in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, which forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Ottoman Muslims to seek refuge in Asia Minor, created a deep sense of violation and a call for revenge. From a geography textbook published in 1913, Baykara quoted this revealing passage: “In 1912 the Balkan states formed an alliance against Turkey [Tiirkiye]. After fierce battles, Turkey lost all of Rumelia [the Ottoman provinces in Europe] except for Istanbul, the Straits, and Edirne Province ... Much innocent Muslim and Turkish blood was shed during this period. Women and children, indiscriminately, were cut up and butchered [Resildi, bigildi]. Villages were burnt and razed. Now, in Rumeli, under every rock and beneath the soil lie thousands of dismembered bodies, with eyes gouged out and stomachs slit ... Itis our children’s and grandchildren’s national duty to right this wrong, and to prepare for taking revenge for the pure and innocent blood that has flowed like waterfalls.”°° This passage conveys just how deep-seated was the need for revenge and how accepted was the idea of an Ottoman forward, offensive action. The fact that in attempting to regain some of the lost territory the Ottoman armies had fought alongside some of the same Balkan states during the Second Balkan War in early 1913 they had fought against in the first did not change the situation. By July 1914, bellicose notions of revenge, retribution, and recovery had become embedded in Ottoman identity.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the political, military, and intellectual elites in the capital embraced and promoted the ideologies of anti-imperialism and social Darwinism, the belief in struggle and war as the only avenues to Ottoman liberation increasingly acquired currency. A number of historians have acknowledged this aspect of the Ottoman decision for war in 1914 by appropriately referring to the entire period from 1914 as a “war of independence.””’ Enver Pasha shared these values, but he differed from his many like-minded contemporaries in important respects: he held the office of war minister and he considered himself to be the ultimate leader and hero of the movement opposing European imperialism. Enver’s grandiosity, however, in no way lessens the fact that his contemporaries shared in his Weltanschauung and his strategy.
The story of Enver’s death in 1922 while fighting alongside the Muslims of Central Asia against the Red Army has contributed to the close association of Enver Pasha, and indeed the decision to enter the First World War, with pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism. It should be remembered, however, that by 1922 Enver had been discredited, even ostracized, by the new Turkish leadership forming in Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal. In a letter from Moscow, dated April 21, 1921, Enver’s strong opposition to Western imperialism persisted unabated: “I am pursuing today the same purpose that I pursued before and during the Revolution of 1908, during the Tripolitanian War, the Balkan Wars, and the First World War. And this purpose is very simple: to organize and bring to action the Islamic world of four hundred million people ... and to save it from the European and American oppression which enslaves it.”** After his escape on board a German submarine during the war’s final days, Enver found a new, Islamic constituency in Central Asia and adjusted his language and politics accordingly, but this shift was a result of his changed circumstances rather than long-held convictions.
Enver’s foreign policy ambitions have frequently been depicted not only as pan-Islamic but, at different times, as pan-Turkic dreams as well. It has been claimed, for example, that “Greed rather than necessity drove the Ottoman Empire into the First World War. Its war aim was to realize the imperialist vision of the powerful minister of war Enver Pasha: a tangled web of grievances and revanchist hopes geared toward reassertion of Ottoman imperial glory and unification of the Turkic peoples within an expanded empire.””” Such conclusions overlook the fact that the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, backed by a wide circle of German scholars and politicians, promoted pan-Islamist ideology to a much greater extent than Enver ever did. To these Germans, pan-Islamism meant the fomentation of revolution in the imperial territories of the Entente, while Germany played the role of liberator.*” It is important to take note, therefore, that Enver considered inexpedient the declaration of a “holy war” by the Ottoman sultan as urged by Berlin in 1914. Enver, perhaps more accurately attuned to the illusory nature of a global, pan-Islamic revolution, reminded Berlin that the declaration of jihad would necessarily have to be directed against all “infidel” powers, including Germany, and hence could not be an option. He therefore suggested that rather than declaring jzhad, Sultan Mehmed V (Resad) would “call upon all Muslims to take up arms against the powers of the Triple Entente.”’’ Nonetheless, some two weeks after the Ottoman entry into the war, on November 14, 1914, the highest-ranking religious official, the sheiyhtilislam, proclaimed jthad to a crowd gathered outside the mosque of Mehmed the Conqueror.
Rather than the pursuit of pan-Islamist or pan-Turkist objectives, examination of the official documentation and the political literature of the time suggests that the Ottoman leadership viewed the war as a “historic opportunity” of a different kind. Shortly after the attack on Russia across the Black Sea that finally brought the Ottomans into war on October 29, 1914, the German general and reformer of the Ottoman army, Colmar von der Goltz, sent a congratulatory telegram to Enver Pasha. “Bravo,” Goltz exclaimed, “Old Turkey now has the opportunity ... in one fell swoop, to lift itself up to the heights of its former glory. May she not miss this opportunity!” ’* To the Ottomans, the alliance with Germany and the war held out the promise of regaining, if not “former glory,” as Goltz had put it, then at least the empire’s security and independence. ’*
Throughout their wartime partnership with Germany, the Ottomans made it clear that they were acting in the deliberate pursuit of their national interests. When the Ottoman navy minister, Cemal Pasha, and Enver rejected a sum of money Berlin had offered to finance an expedition against the Suez Canal in early 1915, Enver declared the amount sadly wanting, and he aired some of his general views about the German—Ottoman alliance: “If Germany supports Turkey materially and financially, it does so for its own advantage. If Turkey accepts [German aid] and thereby ties its fate to that of Germany, then it, too, does so exclusively to its own advantage. There can be no illusion about that.” ** Similarly, Enver complained about the fact that General Otto Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission in the Ottoman Empire, took decisions without consulting the German ambassador, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, with whom Enver enjoyed much better rapport. Having reminded the German side that both Germany and the Ottoman Empire were acting out of self-interest, Enver continued: “everything has to remain orderly in this ‘deal.’ The German Empire’s representative here is the German Embassy and not Liman.”””
Addressing the “unspoken assumptions” of the European leaders on the eve of the First World War, James Joll in a now classic essay pointed to the importance of the intellectual climate affecting policy-making elites and their decision-making, and the historian’s methodological difficulties in reconstructing that intellectual climate.*° In the Ottoman case, publications appearing during the period preceding the First World War shed light on key aspects of the intellectual baggage that influenced political decision-making in 1914. These publications reflect the patriotic-militarist attitude that belies the generally accepted explanation of the Ottoman entry into the First World War, namely that it resulted from Enver Pasha’s underhand collaboration with the Germans while the majority of the Ottoman leaders preferred neutrality. Given the ideas promoted by the Ottoman elite in their publications and the forceful language in which they were advanced, the entry into the war emerges as a continuation rather than a new chapter in Ottoman political thinking.
To emphasize this climate of opinion is not to downplay the vulnerable position the Ottoman Empire certainly occupied in the international order of the early twentieth century. Had it not been for the heated domestic climate that is reflected in the contemporary literature, however, the Ottoman leaders might have behaved differently during the July Crisis. An alternative course of action could have aimed at collaboration with the Triple Entente, but it would have required willingness to engage with these powers and confidence that their interests were reconcilable. That willingness, however, could not be found in the climate of the late Ottoman period.
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