To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  In none of the key areas, therefore, had the revolution of 1908 reversed the decline. And by 1912 the Committee of Union and Progress itself seemed a spent force, reliant on an increasingly authoritarian army and responsible for the alienation of Britain and France. Political parties, themselves offshoots of the Committee, entered the lists as its opponents. In November 1911 the Liberal Union was formed, pledged to the ideals of 1908 and 1909, ideals to which the Young Turks themselves seemed increasingly hostile. In January 1912 the Committee of Union and Progress exploited its hold on the provincial administration to ensure a triumphant, albeit corrupt, success at the polls before the Liberal Union could organize itself. With its parliamentary position shored up for the time being, it pushed through an amendment to article 35 of the constitution, allowing the Sultan to dissolve parliament, and so swinging the balance of power from the chamber to the executive. Such cynical manipulation of the constitution infuriated a group of junior officers with liberal links, who in July 1912 threatened a coup. The Sultan appointed a fresh government, without Young Turk members, and with a fixed determination to root the Committee of Union and Progress out of politics altogether. Using the weapon provided by the Committee itself, the government dissolved parliament under the amended article 35. The Young Turks had a foothold neither in cabinet nor in chamber.

  The Committee saved itself from political extinction by playing the patriotic card. The outbreak of the first Balkan war at the beginning of October 1912 diverted the government’s attention from domestic affairs, but also at first persuaded the Young Turks not to react until peace had been restored.

  However, by December the Turkish army in the Balkans had fallen back almost to Constantinople. It seemed possible that the government would confirm Turkey’s loss of Adrianople in an effort to get peace. On 23 January 1913 a hotheaded army officer of Macedonian origins, and (since he was only 31) a Young Turk in more than name, Enver, stormed into a cabinet meeting at the head of a group of soldiers. The minister of war was shot dead and the grand vizier forced to resign. Another Unionist, Djemal Pasha, took over the 1st army based at Constantinople. Enver then asked the Sultan to form a coalition government with Mahmut Sevket at its head. The external crisis presented by Adrianople had provided the Committee of Union and Progress with the means to resuscitate its domestic fortunes.

  Even now, however, its hold on power was far from assured. Enver had acted out of frustration with the military situation rather than in pursuit of political self-advancement.15 Only three Unionists were in the cabinet, all of them moderates, and the new grand vizier was tolerant rather than supportive of the Committee. Adrianople fell on 26 March. Conspiracies against the government abounded; in Cairo the ousted grand vizier, Mehmed Kamil Pasha, was believed to be in cahoots with the British. The Young Turks’ policy was, in the circumstances, prudent. They harped on the theme of national unity; they formed a committee of national defence to mobilize the country’s war effort. Opposition to the government, therefore, smacked of betrayal. Kamil’s return to Constantinople on 28 May to head a coup and Sevket’s assassination on 11 June played into the Unionists’ hands. The coup was crushed, Djemal imposed martial law, the Liberal Union was suppressed, and four more members of the Committee of Union and Progress were brought into the government. The new grand vizier, Mehmed Said Halim Pasha, was himself a member of the Committee; Djemal became minister of public works, and Mehmed Talaat minister of the interior. The appointment of Enver as minister of war in January 1914 brought together the triumvirate—Enver, Djemal, and Talaat— most associated with Turkey’s entry into, and prosecution of, the war. Enver purged the officer corps in a reasonably successful attempt to remove the army from politics. The Committee itself—reputed to consist of about forty members—drew the strings of patronage into its own hands. The recovery of Adrianople in July 1913 gave the new government at least some consolation in foreign affairs, greater authority with the army, and success where its predecessors had failed.

  The fact that it had taken five years for the Young Turks to assume power made it easy for foreign observers to underestimate the hold which they now exercised on Turkish politics. Those five years, although characterized by coups, assassinations, and defeats, proved vital in shaping the Committee of Union and Progress’s attitude to power. First and foremost, the young and inexperienced officers and bureaucrats of 1908 had served an apprenticeship in the exercise of government. Secondly, the Unionists’ interpretation of modernization had been defined. In shedding its liberal support, the Committee had become a leaner but more compact body. But equally, its desire to westernize and to secularize, through the emancipation of women, through the reform of education, through the introduction of civil law, distanced it from the more conservative interpretations of Islam. Turkey remained Muslim—in some respects it became more so—but a division between faith and state was inaugurated. Pan-Islam was associated with the Hamidian regime. The Committee’s aim was to centralize the state’s administration. In their political philosophy, therefore, both Islam and Ottomanism— the universality of one and the multinationalism of the other—took on subordinate roles.

  What replaced them in importance was Turkish nationalism. The loss of European Turkey and the inability to ensure the loyalty of Greeks or Armenians helped restate the Islamic identity of the empire by reducing the influence, as well as absolute numbers, of Christians. But Muslims too, most notably at the empire’s peripheries in Albania and the Yemen, resisted the revival of Ottomanism through centralization. Therefore the setbacks of 1908–12 put the weight on the Anatolian heartland. All three—Djemal, Talaat, and Enver—hailed from the lost territories; yet their response to defeat was positive rather than negative. What was left them was racially and culturally more homogeneous. What it lacked was a sense of identity. This they endeavoured to provide, through language and literature, through youth movements, through ‘Turk Ocagi’ (the Turkish Hearth Society).

  The origins of this movement were intellectual and academic. The study of a decaying culture of a backward society had flourished among exiles in France; it had assumed an increasingly political texture in response to European nationalism. Ziya Gokalp, its principal spokesman and a member of the Central Council of the Committee of Union and Progress, was a student of Le Bon and Durkheim, and professor of sociology at the new University of Istanbul. But if its bottom was western, its bulk was eastern. Its most vociferous advocates included a disproportionate number of Tatar, Azeri, and Uzbek exiles from Russia. After the 1905 revolution the Turkic peoples of the Russian empire hoped for greater autonomy. At first censorship was slack—250 journals were published by Turkic groups in Russia between 1905 and 1917—but as controls were reimposed so the focus of agitation moved across the Caucasus to Constantinople. This flight from the repression of a Christian power highlighted the fact that the Tatars and others were Muslims as well as Turks. Therefore Turkish nationalism provided a third way, at once both an alternative to and a synthesis of westernization and Islam.

  Gokalp defined nationalism in terms of culture and sentiment. His aim was to get the average Osman to identify less with the cosmopolitan stock of the empire’s administrative and business world and more with the illiterate Anatolian peasant. Thus, ethnic and political limits were not clearly drawn. Thus too, the distinction between Turkism and pan-Turkism became confused. Turkism’s basic proposition suggested that, by being racially more united, the state would gain in vigour what it had lost in size. Pan-Turkism, on the other hand, was openly irridentist and expansionist. In its most extreme forms Magyars and Finns, Tamils and Chinese, were numbered as Turkic peoples. The Young Turks never went this far. But the thrust of their message was nonetheless visionary, its penumbra romantic. Gokalp directed the Turk’s gaze not to the west but to the east, identifying Turks with Tatars, with the populations of the Russian Caucasus, of Azerbaijan, Turkestan, Persia, and Afghanistan. ‘For the Turks,’ Gokalp wrote in 1911, ‘the fatherland is neither Turkey nor Turke
stan; their fatherland is a great and eternal land: Turan.’16

  The implications of pan-Turanianism, or even of Turkish nationalism, for Turkish policy in 1914 should not be exaggerated. Turkey did not enter the Great War with the intention of turning Gokalp’s cultural reveries into political reality. Nor could the Committee of Union and Progress publicly define Turkification so narrowly that it excluded non-Turkish Muslims (such as the Arabs) or non-Muslims of other races (such as Armenians or Greeks). At a secret meeting of the Committee of Union and Progress in August 1910, the Young Turks declared their resolve to uphold Muslim supremacy and to ensure the dominance of the Turkish language, but in endorsing those objectives Talaat (who, one observer concluded, had no commitment to any religion, including Islam)17 stated that their objective remained that of ‘Ottomanizing the Empire’.18 Both Ottomanism and Islam continued to coexist with Turkism. For those reluctant to embrace the new thinking, Turkification carried a measure of intolerance and xenophobia. But its purpose was consolidatory, not revisionist. A common religion and a common language would serve the Young Turks’ objective, a stronger and more united Turkey that could stand on its own feet, and so preserve itself from economic subordination, territorial partition, and nationalist irridentism.

  Such objectives could not, however, be achieved independently of the great powers. Turkey’s survival, in which the powers were mildly interested, was not the same as Turkey’s recrudescence, in which they were not. Not only would the latter threaten their own established interests, it also seemed inherently improbable of fulfilment. To the external observer there was little reason to expect the new government of 1913 to be any more stable than its predecessors. Furthermore, its espousal of Turkification, and its employment of the metaphors of French Jacobinism, suggested excesses which did not appeal to liberal sensibilities. Turkey, rightly, had no faith in the concert of Europe to protect its interests. It needed an ally—an ally for whom Turkey’s strength would be an asset, not a threat. The trouble was that, while Turkey itself was still weak, such an alliance held little appeal to any potential partner.19

  In 1908 it had been Britain that had inspired the Committee of Union and Progress in its political reforms, and which had provided a possible break with the pro-German policies of the Sultan and of the army. But, in so far as British responses were positive, they were swayed not by Turkey as a European power but as an Asiatic one. ‘I think’, wrote Sir Arthur Nicolson in January 1911, ‘that this Pan-Islamic movement is one of our greatest dangers in the future, and is indeed far more of a menace than the “Yellow Peril”.’20 With a large Muslim population in India, and indeed elsewhere in the empire, it behoved Britain to cultivate good relations with the Caliphate. Moreover, in Mesopotamia and in the Persian Gulf British interests in Ottoman stability took on a more practical form. The British India Steam Navigation Company had the shipping rights on the Euphrates and the Tigris; they, and other British and Indian companies, had—in 1906—79 per cent of the total Gulf trade; and—a growing concern now that oil-burning warships were under construction—the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Shell (which although Dutch had a minority British interest) owned 75 per cent of the shares of the Turkish oil company. Germany’s construction of the Baghdad railway and an increase in German shipping in the Gulf represented a converging challenge to the complacency of British business in the area. But Germany was less of a challenge to Britain in Asia than was Russia: in 1903 it preferred to see the former, not the latter, on the Mesopotamian littoral. In seeking protection for its interests, Britain maintained that it was buttressing the status quo; remarkably, in meeting most British desiderata in 1913 and 1914, both Germany and Turkey agreed.

  But what set the overall tenor of Turkish-British relations was not the success of British concerns in Mesopotamia but the death of Turkey in Europe. Sir Edward Grey regarded the Concert of Europe as the best device for managing Turkish decline without triggering Turkish partition; he also felt that the demise of European Turkey might consolidate Turkey in Asia. Thus, British support for Ottoman grievances over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzogovina involved financial compensation, not the return of territory. Apart from the Concert of Europe, the other—and progressively more important—plank to British foreign policy was the solidity of the Triple Entente. Russia was Britain’s ally; Russia was also Turkey’s putative foe—at least on its northern frontiers. Russia had fought Turkey in 1828, 1854, and 1877; it was a sponsor of the Balkan states, a coadjutor of the Armenians in eastern Anatolia, and an interested party in the fate of the straits and Constantinople; it was also frightened by pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism. Such a combination of interests was potentially lethal to Turko-British rapprochement. Britain’s policy was determined by the needs of the Entente, not of empire. In 1910 the India Office’s commercial and strategic priorities in Mesopotamia were subordinated to the Foreign Office’s fear that a forward policy in the region would increase Turkey’s reliance on Germany. In 1911 Britain did not restrain Italy in Tripoli for fear of driving that country back into the arms of the Triple Alliance.

  Britain’s military and naval weakness in the region was a driving factor in its diplomacy. Even in the 1890s Britain realized that it could not prevent Russia seizing the straits without exposing itself to France in the western basin of the Mediterranean or in the channel. The Defence Committee therefore concluded in 1903 that the strategic position would be no worse if Russia had free access to the eastern Mediterranean, and in 1906 the Committee of Imperial Defence made it clear that Britain was bereft of coercive powers in relation to the straits. In reflection of these views, Grey expressed sympathy with regard to Russia’s ambitions in the area, thus fomenting Izvolsky’s bargaining with Aehrenthal over Bosnia-Herzogovina. Therefore, the Anglo-Russian entente had a European as well as an Asiatic naval dimension, even if the first was never part of the formal agreement. Much of the ire of the Foreign Office over the Admiralty’s plans to withdraw from the Mediterranean was concerned specifically with the role of sea-power in giving stability in an area where Britain’s ambivalent diplomacy left it unable to play a more positive role.21

  One indirect substitute for the erosion of British naval power in the eastern Mediterranean was the British naval mission established in Turkey in 1908. Fisher favoured the incorporation of Turkey as a fully-fledged member of a formalized entente, and Churchill took a similar line when he entered the Admiralty. But the navy for which Britain assumed responsibility had been deemed ‘practically non-existent’ in 1904: in 1908 vegetable gardens grew on the decks of its obsolete vessels. British naval advisers, perhaps also reflecting Fisher’s advocacy of flotilla defence for enclosed home waters, urged the Turks to acquire torpedo boats rather than more sophisticated and demanding ships. But maritime inadequacy in the face of Italy in 1911 and Greece in 1912 made the Turks determined to have Dreadnoughts. The tensions which therefore emerged were exacerbated by Constantinople’s conviction that the completion of the two ships it had eventually ordered from British yards was deliberately delayed. Nonetheless, in 1913 Vickers secured a thirty-year contract to upgrade and maintain Turkey’s dockyards, and in May 1914 a third ship was ordered from Armstrongs.22

  This most obvious, if fraught, symbol of Turko-British co-operation was also vulnerable to Entente concerns. The Russians were less relaxed about Turkish naval power: for them its focus was the Black Sea, where their own fleet was still weak and unmodernized. The fact that Turkey’s naval ambitions in 1913–14 were directed not against them but against Greece complicated the situation rather than resolved it. The British also maintained a naval mission in Athens. The Greeks were as resistant as the Turks to the idea that torpedo boats would suffice, and ordered a battle cruiser from Germany in 1912. Britain favoured the Greeks rather than the Turks, but they were determined not to allow either party to play off the great powers against each other in its search for domination of the Aegean. In Greece the case for a pre-emptive attack before Turkey received its Dreadn
oughts was vitiated by exhaustion after the first Balkan war. In Turkey the determination to recover the forfeited islands of Chios and Mytilene was held in check by the fact that the Dreadnoughts had not arrived and by the vulnerability of its position in Thrace.23

  At its best, therefore, British policy towards Turkey was cautious, not warm. Its worst was represented by Sir Gerard Lowther, ambassador in Constantinople from 1908 to 1913. Lowther was slow to gather information on the Committee of Union and Progress, and when he finally did so he saw it as an aggressive and chauvinistic organization, committed to Turkish nationalism. Lowther emphasized the splits in Islam, Shi’ite versus Sunni, Arab versus Turk, and did not therefore share the fears for Muslim loyalty in the British empire; when the Young Turks spoke in a western voice, he bracketed them with the Terror of the French Revolution. In July 1913 Lowther was replaced by Sir Louis Mallet, an orientalist and an advocate of improved Turkish relations. But by 1913 British foreign policy was even more set in the mould of European policies, and of its Entente commitments. Mallet’s desire to rebuild Ottoman strength was bridled by his belief that it must be done in conjunction with the other powers; he feared that unilateral action would trigger the very scramble for territory that it would be designed to avoid. Mesopotamia could still be resolved as a local issue; but it could not be the vehicle for a broader Turko-British alliance. Thus, on three occasions—in 1908,1911, and 1913—the Turks sought an agreement with Britain, and on all three were met with coolness. On the last, in June 1913, Turkey offered Britain a defensive alliance. But Turkey was seen as too weak and the proposal too challenging to the European powers for its risks to be acceptable to Britain.