The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  But although the strategic argument, for the value of a geopolitical bulwark against the wrong kinds of Islam, is now standard in European columns and editorials, it does not occupy quite the same position as in America. In part, this is because the prospect of sharing a border with Iraq and Iran is not altogether welcome to many within the EU, however vigilant the Turkish army might prove. Americans, at a greater distance, find it easier to see the bigger picture. But such reservations are not the only reason why this theme, central though it remains, does not dominate discussion in the EU as completely as in the US. For another argument has more intimate weight. Current European ideology holds the Union to offer the highest moral and institutional order in the world, combining—with all due imperfections—economic prosperity, political liberty and social solidarity in a way no rival can match. But is there not some danger of cultural closure in the very success of this unique creation? Amidst all its achievements, might not Europe risk falling into—the very word a reproof—Eurocentrism: too homogeneous and inward-looking an identity, when the advance guard of civilized life is necessarily ever more multi-cultural?

  Turkey’s incorporation into the EU, so the case goes, would lay such fears to rest. The greatest single burden, for present generations, of a narrowly traditional conception of Europe is its identification with Christianity, as a historic marker of the continent. The greatest challenge to this heritage long came from Islam. What then could be a more triumphant demonstration of a modern multi-culturalism than the peaceful intertwining of the two faiths, at state level and within civil society, in a super-European system stretching, like the Roman Empire of old, to the Euphrates? That Turkey’s government is for the first time professedly Muslim should not be viewed as a handicap, but as a recommendation for entry, promising just that transvaluation into a multi-cultural form of life the Union needs for the next step in its constitutional progress. For its part, just as the new-found or restored democracies of the post-Communist East have benefitted from the steadying hand of the Commission in their journey to normalcy, so Turkish democracy will be sheltered and strengthened within the Union. If enlargement to Eastern Europe repaired a moral debt to those who lived through Communism, inclusion of Turkey can redeem the moral damage done by a complacent—or arrogant—parochialism. In such dual atonement, Europe has the capacity to become a better place.

  In this self-critical mode, a historical contrast is often drawn. Christian Europe was for centuries disfigured by savage religious intolerance—every kind of persecution, inquisition, expulsion, pogrom: attempts to stamp out other communities of faith, Jewish or Muslim, not to speak of heretics within the faith itself. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, tolerated Christians and Jews, without repression or forcible conversion, allowing different communities to live peaceably together under Muslim rule, in a pre-modern multi-cultural harmony. Not only was this Islamic order more enlightened than its Christian counterparts, but far from being a mere external Other of Europe, for centuries it formed an integral part of the European system of powers itself. Turkey is in that sense no newcomer to Europe. Rather its entry into the Union would restore a continuity, of mixtures and contacts, from which we still have much to learn.

  1

  Such, roughly speaking, is the discourse of Turkish entry into the EU that can be heard in chancelleries and chat-rooms, learned journals and leading articles, on platforms and talk-shows across Europe. One of its great strengths is the absence to date of any non-xenophobic alternative. Its weakness lies in the series of images d’Epinal out of which much of it is woven, which obscure the actual stakes in Turkey’s suit to join the Union. Certainly, any consideration of these must begin with the Ottoman Empire. For the first, and most fundamental difference between the Turkish candidature and all those from Eastern Europe is that in this case the Union is dealing with the descendant of an imperial state, for long a far greater power than any kingdom of the West. A prerequisite of grasping this descent is a realistic understanding of the originating form of that Empire.

  The Osmanlı Sultanate, as it expanded into Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, was indeed more tolerant—however anachronistic the term—than any Christian realm of the period. It is enough to compare the fate of the Muslims in Catholic Spain with that of the Orthodox in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. Christians and Jews were neither forced to convert, nor expelled, by the Sultanate, but allowed to worship as they wished, in the House of Islam. This was not toleration in a modern sense, nor specifically Ottoman, but a traditional system of Islamic rule dating to the Umayyad Caliphate of the eighth century.2 Infidels were subject peoples, legally inferior to the ruling people. Semiotically and practically, they were separate communities. Taxed more heavily than believers, they could not bear arms, hold processions, wear certain clothes, have houses over a certain height. Muslims could take infidel wives; infidels could not marry Muslim women.

  The Ottoman state that inherited this system arose in fourteenth-century Anatolia as one Turkic chieftainry competing with others, expanding to the east and south at the expense of local Muslim rivals and to the west and north at the expense of the remains of Byzantine power. For two hundred years, as its armies conquered most of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the Empire it built retained this bi-directionality. But there was never any doubt where its strategic centre of gravity, and primary momentum, lay. From the beginning, Osmanlı rulers drew their legitimacy from holy war—gaza—on the frontiers of Christendom. The subjugated regions of Europe formed the richest, most populous, and politically prized zones of the Empire, and the theatre of the overwhelming majority of its military campaigns, as successive sultans set out for the House of War to enlarge the House of Islam. The Ottoman state was founded, as its most recent historian Caroline Finkel writes, on ‘the ideal of continuous war’.3 Recognizing no peers, and respecting no pieties of peaceful coexistence, it was designed for the battlefield, without territorial fixture or definition.

  But it was also pragmatic. From the outset, ideological warfare against infidels was combined with instrumental use of them for pursuit of it. From the perspective of the Absolutist monarchies that arose in Western Europe somewhat later, each claiming dynastic authority and enforcing religious conformity within its realm, the peculiarity of the empire of Mehmed II and his successors lay in its combination of aims and means. On the one hand, the Ottomans waged unlimited holy war against Christendom. On the other hand, by the fifteenth century the state relied on a levy—the devshirme—of formerly Christian youths, picked from subject populations in the Balkans, themselves not obliged to become Muslims, to compose its military and administrative elite: the kapı kulları or the ‘slaves of the sultan’.4

  For upwards of two hundred years, the dynamism of this formidable engine of conquest, its range eventually stretching from Aden to Belgrade and the Crimea to the Rif, held Europe in awe. But by the end of the seventeenth century, after the last siege of Vienna, its momentum had run out. The ‘ruling institution’ of the Empire ceased to be recruited from the offspring of unbelievers, reverting to native-born Muslims, and the balance of arms gradually turned against it.5 From the late eighteenth century onwards, when Russia inflicted successive crushing defeats on it north of the Black Sea, and revolutionary France took Egypt in a trice, the Ottoman state never won a major war again. In the nineteenth century its survival depended on the mutual jealousies of the predator powers of Europe more than any inner strength of its own: time and again, it was rescued from further amputation or destruction only by the intervention of rival foreign capitals—London, Paris, Vienna, in one memorable crisis even St Petersburg—at the expense of each other.

  But though external pressures, potentially ever more ominous as the technological gap between Ottoman and European empires widened, might in principle have continued to neutralize one another long enough to allow for an effective overhaul of state and society to meet the challenge from the West—the example of the
Porte’s rebel satrap in Egypt, Mehmet Ali, showed what could be done—the rise of nationalism among the subject Christian peoples of the Balkans undermined any diplomatic equilibrium. Greek independence, reluctantly seconded by Britain and France from fear that Russia would otherwise become its exclusive patron, shocked the Sultanate into its first serious efforts at internal reform. In the Tanzimat period (1839–76), modernization became more systematic. The palace was sidelined by the bureaucracy. Administration was centralized; legal equality of all subjects and security of property were proclaimed; education and science promoted; ideas and mores imported from the West. Under successive pro-British viziers, the Ottoman order took its place within the European state system.

  But the reformers of the time, however secular-minded, could not transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule. Three inequalities were codified by tradition: between believers and unbelievers, masters and slaves, men and women. Relations between the sexes altered little, though by the end of the century preference for boys had become less frequent among the elite, and slavery was—very gradually—phased out. Politically, the crucial relationship was the first. Ostensibly, discrimination against unbelievers was abolished by the reforms. But disavowed in principle, it persisted in practice, as they continued to be subject to a poll tax, now disguised as payment for draft exclusion, rom which Muslims were exempt.6 The army continued to be reserved for believers, and all significant civilian offices in the state remained a monopoly of the faithful. Such protection of the supremacy of Islam was, however, insufficient to appease popular hostility to reforms perceived as a surrender to European pressures and fashions, incompatible with piety or the proper position of believers in the Empire.7 Quite apart from unseemly displays of Western ways of life in the cities, unpopular rural taxes were extended to Muslims, while Christian merchants, not to speak of foreign interests, flourished under the free trade regime conceded by the reformers to the Western powers.

  Neither consistently modern nor robustly traditional, the Tanzimat regimes were also fiscal failures. Tax-farming, officially disavowed, lingered on; rather than increasing, public revenues declined. Capitulations—extra-territorial privileges granted to foreigners—persisted. Foreign borrowing ballooned, before finally bursting into state bankruptcy in 1875. Two years later, Ottoman armies were once again thrashed by Russia, and in 1878—after a brief constitutional episode had fizzled—the Empire was forced to accept the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and the autonomy of most of Bulgaria. For the next thirty years, power swung back from the bureaucracy to the palace, in the person of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who combined technological and administrative modernization—railways, post offices, warships—with religious restoration and police repression. With the loss of most of the Balkans, the population of the Empire had become over 70 per cent Muslim. To cement loyalty to his regime, the sultan refurbished the long-neglected title of caliph, broadcasting pan-Islamic appeals, and topping up the ranks of his administration with Arabs. But no amount of ideological bluster, or fabrication of tradition in the approved Victorian style, could alter the continued dependence of the Empire on a Public Debt Administration run by foreigners, and a European balance of power incapable of damping down the fires of nationalism in the Balkans.

  There a broad swath of Ottoman rule still extended to the Adriatic, in which various insurgent bands—most prominently, the Macedonian secret organization IMRO—roamed the hills, and the cream of the army was stationed in garrison towns to hold what was left of Rumelia, the rich original core of the Empire, its ‘Roman’ part. Here opposition to the Hamidian reaction had become widespread by the turn of the century among the young of all ethnic groups, not least Turks themselves. In 1908 rumours of an impending Russo-British carve-up of the region triggered a military rising in Monastir and Salonika. The revolt spread rapidly, and within a couple of weeks had become irresistible. Abdülhamid was forced to call elections, at which the organization behind the uprising, newly revealed to the world as the Committee of Union and Progress, won a resounding majority across the Empire. The Young Turks had taken power.

  2

  The Revolution of 1908 was a strange, amphibious affair. In many ways it was premonitory of the upheavals in Persia and China that followed three years later, but with features that set it apart from all subsequent such risings in the twentieth century. On the one hand, it was a genuine constitutional movement, arousing popular enthusiasm right across the different nationalities of the Empire, and electing an impressively inter-ethnic Parliament on a wide suffrage: an authentic expression of the still liberal Zeitgeist of the period. On the other hand, it was a military coup mounted by a secret organization of junior officers and conspirators, which can claim to be the first of a long line of such episodes in the Third World in a later epoch. The two were not disjoined, since the architects of the coup, a small group of plotters, gained Empire-wide support, in the name of constitutional rule, virtually overnight—their party numbering hundreds of thousands within a year.8 Nor, formally speaking, were the objectives of each distinct: in the vocabulary of the time, the ‘liberty, equality, fraternity and justice’ proclaimed by the first were conceived as conditions of securing the integrity of the Empire sought by the second, in a common citizenship shared by all its peoples.

  But that synthesis was not—could never be—stable. The prime mover in the revolution was the core group of officers in the CUP. Their over-riding aim was the preservation of the Empire, at whatever cost. Constitutional or other niceties were functional or futile to it, as the occasion might be, as means: not as ends in themselves. But if they were not liberals, nor were they in any sense anti-colonial, in the fashion of later military patriots in the Third World, often authoritarian enough, but resolute enemies of Western imperialism—the Free Officers in Egypt, the Lodges in Argentina, the Thirty Comrades in Burma. The threats to the Ottoman Empire came, as they had long done, from European powers or their regional allies, but the Young Turks did not reject the West culturally or politically: rather, they wanted to enter the ring of its Machtpolitik on equal terms, as one contestant among others. For that, a transformation of the Ottoman state was required, to give it a modern mass base of the kind that had become such a strength of its rivals.

  But here they faced an acute dilemma. What ideological appeal could hold the motley populations—divided by language, religion, and ethnic origin—of the Ottoman Empire together? Some unifying patriotism was essential, but the typical contemporary ingredients for one were missing. The nearest equivalent to the Ottoman order was the Habsburg Empire, but even it was considerably more compact, overwhelmingly of one basic faith, and in possession of a still respected traditional ruler. The Young Turks, in charge of lands stretching from the Yemen to the Danube, and peoples long segregated and stratified in a hierarchy of incompatible confessions, had no such advantages. What could it mean to be a citizen of this state, other than simply the contingent subject of a dynasty that the Young Turks themselves treated with scant reverence, unceremoniously ousting Abdülhamid within a year of taking power? The new regime could not escape an underlying legitimacy deficit. An awareness of the fragility of its ideological position was visible from the start. For the Young Turks retained the discredited monarchy against which they had rebelled, installing a feeble cousin of Abdülhamid as a figurehead successor in the Sultanate, and even trooping out, in farcical piety, behind the bier of Abdülhamid when the old brute, a King Bomba of the Bosphorus, finally expired.

  Such shreds of a faded continuity were naturally not enough to clothe the new collective emperor. The CUP needed the full dress of a modern nationalism. But how was this to be defined? A two-track solution was the answer. For public consumption, it proclaimed a ‘civic’ nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what their creed or descent—a doctrine with broad appeal, greeted with a tremendous initial outburst of hope and energy among even the hitherto most disaffected groups in the Empire, including Ar
menians. In secret conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims or Turks.9 This was a duality that in its way reflected the peculiar structure of the CUP itself. As a party, it had won a large parliamentary majority in the first free elections the Empire had known, and with a brief intermission in 1912–13, directed the policies of the state. But its leadership shunned the front of the stage, taking neither cabinet posts nor top military commands, leaving these to an older generation of soldiers and bureaucrats. Behind a façade of constitutional propriety and deference to seniority, however, actual power was wielded by the party’s Central Committee, a group of fifty zealots controlling a political organization in origin modelled on the Macedonian and Armenian undergrounds. The term ‘Young Turks’ was not a misnomer. When it took over, the key leaders of the CUP were in their late twenties or thirties. Numerically, army captains and majors predominated, but civilians also figured at the highest level. The trio who eventually occupied the limelight would be Enver and Cemal, from the officer corps, and Talat, a former functionary in the post office. Behind them, publicly less visible, but hidden drivers of the organization, were two military doctors, Selânikli Nazim and Bahaettin Şakir. All five top leaders came from the ‘European’ sector of the Empire: the coxcomb Enver from a wealthy family in Istanbul, the mastiff Talat and the clinical Şakir from today’s Bulgaria, Nazim from Salonika, the slightly older Cemal from Mytilene.