The Young Turks

Podcat Transcript

The 19th-century Ottoman Empire was in decline and was often called the “sick man of Europe”.

The Ottomans, like Qing China and Imperial Russia, had failed to implement the forces that modernized European nations.

A group known as the Young Turks developed a strong admiration for the west were determined to modernize their country. In the process, things went very off course.

Learn more about the Young Turks and how they changed Turkey on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

At its height, the Ottoman Empire was a marvel.

The Ottomans ruled a vast territory encompassing a wide range of ethnicities and languages, had a highly functioning bureaucracy, and an elite military equipped with modern gunpowder weapons.

A prolonged, gradual deterioration, characterized by financial ruin and the loss of influence, marked the Ottoman Empire’s struggle for survival throughout the 19th century.

Two events stand out that were representative of the decline of the Ottoman world that gave rise to the Young Turk movement.

In 1838, the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Balta Liman with the United Kingdom. The treaty granted the British a series of wide-ranging economic capitulations from the Ottomans, effectively turning the Ottoman Empire into a British free-trade zone, where British merchants enjoyed immunity from Ottoman laws.

This imposing restriction on Ottoman sovereignty was difficult for many in the Ottoman world to accept.

The second crisis occurred in 1853, when Russia sought access to the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, drawing the Ottomans into the Crimean War.

The war dramatically revealed the decline of the Ottoman Empire. European nations intervened to prevent the Russians from completely dismantling the weakened Ottoman state and, more crucially, to deny Russia the strategic advantage of a warm-water port.

At its height, the Ottoman Janissary corps was the envy of the European world. It was a well-trained, formidable force, fiercely loyal to the Ottoman Sultans, and on the cutting edge of artillery and gunpowder technology.

The Crimean War illustrated that the Ottomans were now dependent on European powers for their survival.

The Ottomans, reacting to Europe’s unchecked interference in their affairs, initiated a series of reforms known as the Tanzimat Reforms to regain their power. This modernization platform was similar to China’s Self-Strengthening Movement.

The Tanzimat reforms aimed to modernize the Ottoman Empire by integrating European enlightenment principles. These reforms sought to overhaul the bureaucracy, revolutionize the legal system, establish secular education, and secure “honor, life, and property” for all Ottoman subjects.

Tanzimat military reforms went beyond simply adding advanced weapons into the Ottoman military, which was necessary. They aimed to organize the military into a new professional army modeled on the Prussian army.

To the ordinary Ottoman subject, these reforms felt like more of the same European control over their lives. Ottoman religious leaders began to push back against the reforms, and through their influence, the reforms failed to gain the necessary momentum.

The conflict between secularists and Islamic leaders stalled the movement.

The harshest criticism actually came from the Young Ottomans, a diverse group who stood for freedom and enhanced political opportunities for all Ottoman citizens, not imperial subjects. This proved to be a vital distinction, as citizenship entails a set of responsibilities and rights, while subjects were expected to be obedient.

In 1876, the Young Ottomans and sympathetic members of the Ottoman bureaucracy led a constitutional revolution in the Ottoman Empire. A palace coup ousted Sultan Abdul Aziz. While at times a progressive reformer, Aziz’s rule further deepened the Ottomans’ debt to European powers.

The coup installed a new Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, with the constraints of a new constitution that curbed his powers and created a representative parliamentary government.

The Young Ottomans’ optimism was short-lived.

Only a year into the Ottoman constitutional age, the Sultan abruptly suspended the constitution and began governing as an autocrat. He governed as a somewhat progressive autocrat, seeking to expand education and technology within the empire, yet he was an autocrat nonetheless.

Opposition to the autocracy began to grow in the Ottoman bazaars. Many of the most vocal opponents to the Sultan’s rule were exiled. The loudest opposition came from the Ottoman Society for Union and Progress, more commonly known as the Young Turk Party.

The Young Turks were founded by exiled Ottomans living in Paris; they were largely young Ottomans eager to bring modernity to the Ottoman Empire.

According to historian Tamim Ansary, the name was chosen as a way for the “young to thumb their noses at the old guard…for among traditional muslims, older was always regarded as better.”

The Young Turks platform was simple: they advocated a representative system with universal suffrage, legal equality, freedom of religion, and the secularization of the Ottoman state. Perhaps the most controversial plank in their platform was their call for the emancipation of women.

Urbanization had brought limited opportunities for women in the Byzantine and Islamic heartland of Turkey. The Young Turks believed that women were an essential part of a new Turkish future, one in which they raised well-educated Turkish citizens.

The traditional practice of excluding women from domestic spheres under the Ottoman sultans was not compatible with the Young Turks’ social vision.

To promote this effort, the Young Turks called for the establishment of compulsory education for Turkish women, including the establishment of a formal women’s university.

Despite persistent calls for reform, the Young Turks could not institute change from abroad. In 1908, with aid from high-ranking government officials, the Young Turks initiated a coup.

Their initial effort was to force Sultan Abdul Hamid II to reinstate the 1876 constitution, but in 1909, they formally dethroned him and replaced him with a Sultan they knew they could control, his brother, Mehmed V.

Sultan Mehmed V was a perfect choice; he had a dynastic claim to the throne, but the elderly Mehmed lacked the will and experience to institute autocracy like his brother had.

With the coup, they began implementing their platform, which called for the secularization of schools, courts, and legal codes. They also called for free elections with competing parties, religious freedom for all, and Turkish as the official language of the nation.

The call for Turkish as the official language created problems, as the Ottoman Empire had always been highly diverse, including Arabic-, Greek-, and Armenian-speaking communities.

The Young Turks were laying the foundations of Turkish, not Ottoman, nationalism. The Young Turks began their post-1908 coup intending to create a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic Ottoman Nationalism, but after a series of defeats, they pivoted to a singular Turkish nationalism.

The pivot to Turkish nationalism was the work of a small militant faction of the Young Turks, the Committee for Union and Progress.

The Committee’s ideas of Turkish nationalism quickly gained momentum, as it seemed more reflective of the modern European nation-state that had routinely subdued Ottoman interests. They advocated for the creation of a focused European-style Turkish state that stretched from the Bosporus to Central Asia.

The transition from Ottomanism to a more focused Turkish nationalism created significant challenges for non-Turkish populations with the Turkish state. The most prominent example was the experience of Armenians.

In 1913, there was another coup, often called the Raid on the Sublime Porte. It was a dramatic seizure of power carried out on January 23, 1913, by members of the Committee of Union and Progress during the turmoil of the First Balkan War in 1912, which led to the loss of most of the Ottoman territory in Europe.

The government was now led by a committee of three known as the Three Pashas: Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha.

After the Ottomans’ defeat in the Second Balkan War in 1913, the movement towards autocracy accelerated. The defeats in these conflicts were embarrassing for the new government.

With the loss of the Balkans and their mostly Christian population, the Three Pashas focused on a new target, the state’s Armenian Christian population.

The government had promised an effective and efficient state modeled on European systems, but it had failed to subdue areas far weaker than itself. The Ottoman response was that defeat must have been a by-product of treason and betrayal by people whose loyalty and sympathies lay elsewhere.

After blaming and exiling many Greeks from the Ottoman state, the focus turned to the nation’s two million Armenians. The Armenians had a powerful trading community in the nation’s urban areas and had long occupied rural agricultural regions without incident.

Armenian economic influence in Constantinople’s markets was profound; by some estimates, they controlled more than 80% of imports into Ottoman markets.

However, their political and economic influence was far weaker in the countryside after the Young Turks’ ascension.

Armenians found themselves persecuted during the surge of Turkish nationalism and the loss of key territories. The Ottoman entrance into WWI only exacerbated the situation.

As Turkish nationalism gained prominence, Arab and Armenian groups intensified their demands for autonomous communities to be established within the Ottoman Empire. This ties in to the events I covered in the episode on the Great Arab Revolt.

The Armenian community within the Ottoman Empire was strongly affected by the Ottoman military defeats in World War I, especially those against the Russians. This was because there was a perception that Armenians maintained close ties with the Russians due to the presence of Armenian populations in Russian territories.

The Three Pashas seized the defeat as a pretext for the Dispatchment and Settlement Law of 1915, which allowed for the mass deportation of Armenians. By April of 1915, Armenian leaders and intellectuals were being arrested, and almost all were executed.

There were reports of mass killings in Armenian-populated areas. The London Times reported on October 8, 1915: “Armenians were thrown over cliffs, their women violated and abducted, their children frequently Islamised”.

The destruction did not stop with the murder of people, but also focused on cultural destruction, as and estimated 2,500 Armenian churches were destroyed in Ottoman lands.

After the death and forced migration of the Armenians, a 1927 estimate held that the number of Armenians had cratered from a peak of two million in 1913 to less than seventy thousand only 14 years later.

The estimates of the killing vary; the official Turkish government stance is that there were three hundred thousand deaths, and the Armenian estimate is 1.5 million people.

The narrative, put forward by the Turkish government to this day, is that the killings were not part of a systematic effort but were part of a period of crisis in which the Ottoman Empire was fighting for its survival and during which millions died across the social and religious spectrum.

The Young Turk movement came to a swift end after the Ottoman Empire sued for peace at the Armistice of Mudros in 1918.

After the signing of the Armistice of Mudros, the three Pashas fled Constantinople to avoid arrest and prosecution for their role in the war and the Armenian persecution.

In early November 1918, with Allied forces about to occupy the capital, they secretly boarded a German submarine that carried them across the Black Sea to safety, eventually making their way to Germany

The Ottoman government sentenced the Three Pashas to death in absentia on July 5, 1919, following a series of postwar courts-martial held in Constantinople. The military tribunal convicted the three Pashas for their roles in leading the empire into World War I and for orchestrating the mass deportations and killings of Armenians.

The Three Pashas were all hunted by Armenians who pledged to avenge the killings under the code name Operation Nemesis.

Two of the three died at the hands of Armenian gunmen, the third died in battle against Russian communists in Central Asia.

In 1923, the Ottoman Empire officially ended and was succeeded by the new Republic of Turkey. It was led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who implemented many of the modernization reforms originally advocated by the Young Turks.

The Young Turk movement began with a dream of establishing a modern, multiethnic Ottoman nation. However, it fell into nationalism and ended with three men fleeing on a submarine into the night.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Research and writing for this episode were provided by Joel Hermansen.

Today’s review comes from JoeProlv on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write:

Love the chance to learn something new every day

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