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Overview
Drawing on a wealth of rare archival material, Turnaoğlu presents the first complete history of republican thinking in Turkey from the birth of the Ottoman state to the founding of the modern republic. She shows how the Kemalists wrote Turkish history from their own perspective, presenting their own version of republicanism as inevitable while disregarding the contributions of competing visions. Turnaoğlu demonstrates how republicanism has roots outside the Western political experience, broadening our understanding of intellectual history. She reveals how the current crises in Turkish politics—including the Kurdish Question, democratic instability, the rise of radical Islam, and right-wing Turkish nationalism—arise from intellectual tensions left unresolved by Kemalist ideology.
A breathtaking work of scholarship, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism offers a strikingly new narrative of the evolution and shaping of modern Turkey.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691210131 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2020 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Formation of Turkish Republicanism
By Banu Turnaoglu
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17274-3
CHAPTER 1
Shaping the Empire
THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN WORLD had inherited a long tradition of government, beginning with the magistracies of the ancient citystates and culminating in the monarchies of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. A second tradition came from the Arabs, who spread the Islamic type of government from the Arab Peninsula to North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Central Asia, and northern India. From the eleventh century onward, these lands were invaded by the akincis (raids) of the Turks from Central Asia, Berbers from the Sahara and the High Atlas, and Arabs from the Libyan Desert, who brought with them their own nomadic cultures, which transformed Mediterranean societies and forged new states. The most dramatic outcome of the process was the formation of the Ottoman state, which successfully combined and blended the three traditions of Mediterranean monarchy, Arabo-Islamic governance, and Turco-Asian nomadic culture in its government. Although Ottoman state philosophy had little in common with its Western counterparts during its formative years and the classical imperial period (1453–1789), it shared many similarities with Eastern (for example, Indian, Persian, and Chinese) governments and with the political, social, and moral thought of the East, at least until the nineteenth century.
European Renaissance and Reformation observers often described the Ottoman regime as an atrocious tyranny where the people stood relative to the sultan as slaves to a master. François de La Noue wrote that "[T]he Turkish kingdome [is] a terrible tyranny, whose subjects were wonderfully enthralled: their wars destitute of all good foundation: their politique government being well examined to be but a basenesse: their ecclesiastical regiment to be none." Similarly, Paul Rycaut portrayed Ottoman sultans as spreading the "cruelty of the sword in the most rigorous way of execution, by killing, consuming and laying desolate the countries." The impact of this experience shaped the conception of "Oriental despotism." In his The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu described despotism as an Oriental regime exclusively to be encountered in Asia. Ottoman society epitomized a typical Oriental society and political system, bound to be ruled by a despot because of its peculiar manners, customs and the warmth of its climate, which enervated the people, rendering them slaves.
This way of viewing the Ottoman state persisted in Europe for centuries. Ernest Gellner saw the Ottoman Empire as a "slave soldier" state, whose protection and security depended on the sultan's slaves. For Max Weber, this dependency, in contrast to Western European states, was an aspect of the way in which power was exercised in the Ottoman state. The state was the personal property of the sultan, evolving out of patriarchalism into patrimonialism as its personnel expanded beyond the monarch, his kinsmen, and household to encompass a professional army of secretaries and soldiers. Until recently, this Eurocentric view of Ottoman politics dominated Western and even Turkish academia.
This conception of the Ottoman state, however, is neither accurate nor coherent. Classical Ottoman political thought rejected tyranny and acknowledged checks on the sultan's conduct and limitations on his rights. It saw legitimacy as resting on the provision of justice and the maintenance of order. This deeply conservative vision began to alter with the advent of Westernization during the eighteenth century. Although the state philosophy had carried elements of a republican government since its foundation, Ottoman thinkers of the classical period did not see this as an alternative to monarchy. The word "republic" (cumhuriyet) appeared as a political category, but little attention was paid to republic as a type of government until the French Revolution, and there was certainly nothing that could be mistake for a republican tradition.
Early Stages of Ottoman State Formation
The emergence of the Ottoman state from a small principality (beylik) to a world-leading empire is still very poorly understood not least because of the scarcity and inadequacy of early written sources. Until the twentieth century, historical studies relied heavily on borrowings from legendary accounts, including fifteenth-century frontier narratives such as that of Âsikpasazâde,histories by Oruç Bey and Nesrî, and anonymous folktales. Herbert A. Gibbons's controversial book The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire initiated the modern debate over the rise of Ottoman power, presenting the religious conversion of the Christian populations in Byzantine Bithynia to Islam as the major reason for the demographic, cultural, and institutional origins of the Ottoman state. In response, Paul Wittek argued that early Ottoman society inherited the traditions of the Islamic military frontier organization, and the Islamic tradition of gaza, an ideology of holy war in the name of Islam (jihad), which provided a dynamic spur for conquest and innovation. Until recently, Wittek's gaza thesis continued to be the most prominent account of the foundation of the Ottoman state, among both Anglophone and Turkish historians.
In the 1980s, a revisionist historiography has criticized the Wittek thesis for downplaying much of the relational and cultural dynamism of the region, and offering a simplistic account of the rise of the Ottomans, their ethnic and religious force and ability to overwhelm through gaza. The Ottomans did not see the defense and extension of Islam as their primary purpose, but implemented strategic and tactical ways to exert their power. Heath Lowry and Colin Heywood insisted that gaza/gazi in Turkish language meant at the time akin/akinci ("flow"/"those who flow"), and that the process of state-building cannot be reduced to a gaza movement. Rather, it must be understood as a series of moments when contenders for power had at hand minimal organizational structures but numerous social relations and ties, which they could deploy to influence, control, and increase their social and cultural resources. State-building and the consolidation of power were the results of complex activities, combining the formation of strategic alliances with different groups, intermarriage, and religious conversion. The centralized state was an accumulation of these networks.
Ottoman Political Thought in the Classical Age
The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II (r. 1451–81) was a key event in the Ottoman transition from a state into an empire (Devlet-i Âliyye; Sublime State), a robust political entity with a centralized administrative system, strong army, and ruling elite. During the reign of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66), the Empire developed across Western Asia, reaching as far as the Danube in the North, the Euphrates in the East, and the Balkans in the West, and experienced its "Golden Age." It became a formidable war machine. The sixteenth and early seventieth centuries saw the Mediterranean and Black Seas encircled, the Safavid Empire pushed back, and the Arab world added to the Empire together with the Maghrib as far as Morocco. This expansion generated a sophisticated political, philosophical, social, and cultural synthesis.
NIZAM AS THE BASIS FOR STATE POWER, SOCIETY, AND MORALITY
Central to Ottoman classical thought was the conception of nizam ("order"). It denoted the conservation of custom, tradition, and law, and referred to a category of ethics, politics, and morality. Its origins lay in neo-Aristotelian theory, taken up by medieval Islamic theorists and later transmitted to the Eastern world. Like its Indian counterpart dharma, nizam contained a caution or warning against the consequence of the disturbance of tradition. All things — human beings, society, politics, and the cosmos — had an internal and ideal nizam, which must be in harmony with the metaphysical or spiritual order.
The preservation of the nizam was the primary duty of the state. This notion of the state was inherited from Plato and Aristotle, transmitted through the works of al-Farabi, al-Miskawayh, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd and in Sassanid-Persian views on statecraft and Islamic legal precepts. Through the Ottoman genius for government and administration, these different elements were blended into a new dispensation with a distinctive character. The state apparatus was constituted as the outcome of the contract between the rulers and the ruled. As in the Turko-Islamic states, the simultaneous separation and harmony between the rulers and the ruled in Ottoman society was essential to the effective functioning of the state. The society was seen essentially as a political and moral entity, divided into four segments (warriors, bureaucrats, agriculturalists, and merchant-guild members), and grouped into two components. The first group, the askeri or the ruling class, included officers of the court and the army, civil servants and ulema, while the second, the reaya, comprised Muslim and non-Muslim taxpayers — that is, agriculturalists and merchant-guild members. To maintain nizam, both the reaya and askeri had to perform the duties and obligations assigned to one another: the reaya's duty was to produce wealth, while the askeri's duty was to protect them. A sharp separation between these groups was necessary for the operation of politics and successful functioning of society. If traders or agriculturalists were to become soldiers or soldiers to become traders or artisans, society would begin to disintegrate. In other words, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the institutional basis of the Ottoman constitution included a balance between the rulers and the ruled. The ulema and the Janissaries played a major role in curbing the arbitrariness of the monarch and preventing the regime from becoming despotic.
The sultan-monarch was responsible for orchestrating and upholding the nizam and protecting the reaya from harm and from the arbitrariness and oppression of the askeri. This essential feature of the sultan's relationship with society was determined by his primary duty to God. His duty to society was part of the universal covenant between man and God, as encountered in the Qur'an: "Is one who knoweth that what is revealed to thee from thy Lord is the truth like one who is blind? But only men of substance take heed, those who abide by the covenant [ahd] of God, and break not the tryst" (Qur'an 13:19–20).
This verse warns a ruler that should he abuse his power, and rule for his egoistic enjoyment and not the common good of the people, he would become a tyrant. This notion of an anti-patrimonial and anti-despotic state was derived from the early Islamic state as it existed under the Prophet Mohammed and his immediate successors, the four caliphs. The Islamic polity was a self-governing political community ruled by the caliph, a nonhereditary, elective sovereign subject to the Shari'a law. The members of this state were all regarded as equals, and treated as freemen, not slaves. The Qur'an stated that "the noblest among you in the sight of God is the most godfearing of you" (Qur'an 49:13), and one tradition, although not one to be found in authoritative collections, has the Prophet say that "people are equals like the teeth of a comb." These features of the Islamic conception of rule resembled the government of an Italian republican city-state, although the medieval Muslim state did not feature the concept of republic (cumhuriyya) in its early incarnation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the early Islamic state led Ottoman intellectuals to conceive the origins of the Ottoman state as republican, and in the twentieth century this early state form came to be idealized by the ulema and the clerics, who believed that monarchy was a deviation from the pure Islamic state.
The resources of the early Islamic state had increased dramatically with its conquests outside Arabia, generating a transition from caliphate rule to rule by kingship (malik), sultanate, or monarchy. Mohammad's way of ruling (sur'a) almost disappeared. During the period of classical Arabic thought (ca. the ninth to twelfth centuries), the concept of djumhurriya was recognized as a category but seldom featured in political writings. Arab intellectuals directed their attention to the study of ancient Greek political philosophy, not the republican philosophy of ancient Rome. Blending elements of the early Islamic state with Plato's Politeia, a concept translated as al-madina al-fadila ("a virtuous state"), Al-Farabi defined the ideal state as a religious community bound by common faith in revelation and ruled by a "philosopher king," whose power was granted by divine authority. In writings throughout the following centuries, Arab authors and observers employed no specific term for res publica, although they were aware of the republican regimes of Renaissance Italy. They described the Venetians, for example, as having "a king from among themselves (malikuhum min anfusihim) called the Doge (al-Duj)," and the Tuscans as having "no king ruling them but rather notables (akabir) arbitrating among them." But there was no substantial analysis of the operation of the republican city-states.
The Arabic terms djumhur and djumhurriya were transmitted to Ottoman Turkish by dragomans, Ottoman Christian translators of the Sublime Porte, mostly Greek in origin. From the fifteenth century, the Ottomans sent envoys to the Republic of Venice, which later became its great rival in the Mediterranean. In search for Turkish equivalents of res publica or Repubblica di Venezia, the dragomans discovered the Arabic words djumhur and djumhurriya and changed them to cumhur and cumhurriya or cumhuriyet. Cumhur came to mean "the mass of people, or the public." The Turkish suffix yet modified it to carry the sense of collection of people living in a specific place, without the connotations of the Republic as a particular form of government. In their letters to Venice, the Ottomans generally referred to the rule of the Doge or the Signoria (Venedik Beyi), rather than to the form of government. Neither republics nor a republican tradition featured in Classical Ottoman political thought, or throughout the Ottoman and Arabic worlds. Until the nineteenth century, the term cumhuriyet appears rarely, and solely as a term to refer to the Christian enemy, but following the French Revolution cumhur or cumhuriyet began to appear widely in Ottoman documents. Yet, neither egalitarianism nor the anti-despotic and anti-patrimonial features of the early Islamic state were entirely forgotten during the Classical Age.
Ottoman sultans adopted grandiose titles from East and West to enhance their almighty image: shahanshah (king of kings) from the Sassanids, Khakan from the Mongols, Caesar from Byzantium, and caliph from the Abbasids. The sultan was the head of government, the Divan-i Hümayun, and his power was exercised by the Vezir-i Âzam (grand vizier), who was responsible for supervising the chancery and issuing the sultan's decrees and letters. The sultan appointed his officers, vezirs (viziers), kazaskers (military judges), defterdars (the treasurers), and nisancis (the chancellor), and presided over the Divan (council), ministries, or boards. These officers were his kuls (servants or slaves).
Kul had a different connotation to its European equivalents. In contrast to the Western notion of the slave deprived of rights and privileges, Ottoman kuls were legal persons who could hold even the highest offices in the sultan's household. Kuls were recruited to serve the sultan as ministers, provincial governors, or soldiers, and were paid through the Treasury or by the allocation of fiefs. The kul system was inherited from the Abbasid Empire, which had created armies of slave troops and used trained slaves (mamluks) in the administration. The purpose of the mamluk institution was to avoid the development of a blood-nobility and maintain a well-trained group of officials unconditionally loyal to the ruler. During the fifteenth century, the Ottomans introduced the devsirme system, comprising cohorts of boys from Christian households located mainly in the Balkans, who were forced to convert to Islam and pledged to create loyal ties only with the sultan and the state. The majority of these captives formed the Janissary corps (the sultan's personal infantry troops), qualifying through years of manual labor, while future members of the bureaucracy were educated in the Palace School (Enderun). This kind of slavery did not mean subjection to the arbitrary power of a master. A slave of this kind was not a person dominated by the master's will and transformed into his property, and hence without personal liberty in the Western sense.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Dramatis Personae xiii
Introduction 1
Revival of Turkish Interest in Republicanism 3
Republicanism as a Political Tradition 4
1 Shaping the Empire 12
Early Stages of Ottoman State Formation 14
Ottoman Political Thought in the Classical Age 15
Ottoman Perceptions of Decline during the Seventeenth Century 23
The Turn to the West 29
Conclusion 32
2 The Age of Transformation in Ottoman Political Thought: The Reigns of Selim III (r. 1789–1808) and Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) 34
Reactions to the French Revolution 34
The New Order and Reforms of Selim III 40
The Reforms of the Absolutist Sultan Mahmud II 43
Conclusion 49
3 The Tanzimat Era and the Republicanism of the Young Ottomans 50
The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism and the Reform Movement 51
Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık) 54
The Political Thought of the Young Ottomans: Liberalism, Islamism, and Radicalism 56
Conclusion 84
4 The Positivist Universalism and Republicanism of the Young Turks 86
Comte’s Universalism: Uniting the Occident and the Orient through Positivism 88
The Young Turks’ Idealism, Republicanism, and Positivist Universalism 92
Humanity in Two Senses 103
Reactions to Ottoman Positivist Universalism 112
Conclusion 113
5 The Political Thought of the Young Turk Revolution 115
Political Activism and Reorganization of the Young Turks 115
The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 118
The New Vision of the Ottoman State and the Impact of French Republicanism: Liberty, Equality, Justice, and Fraternity 126
Conclusion 137
6 Political Thought in the Balkan Wars: The Rise of Authoritarianism, Militarism, and Nationalism 138
The Shift toward Authoritarianism 139
The New Theory of War 141
The Shift from Universalism to National Idealism 147
The New Formation of the State as a War Machine 160
Conclusion 163
7 Ottoman Political Thought during World War I 165
The Conceptualization of the War and Public Opinion 165
The International Turn (1914–17) 169
The Social and National Turn (1917–18) 180
Conclusion 194
8 The War of Independence (1919–22): Road to the Independent Turkish Republic 196
Hâkimiyet-I Milliye (National Sovereignty) and İrâde-I Milliye (National Will) 197
The Political Language of War Propaganda 207
Conclusion 217
9 The Victory of Radical Republicanism 219
Abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate 220
The Proclamation of the Republic 235
Conclusion 241
Conclusion The Ideology of the Early Republic 243
Bibliography 253
Index 283
What People are Saying About This
"This is truly a work of depth, narrative power, and substantive importance. Turnaoğlu ably and deftly argues that approaching Turkish republicanism exclusively in Kemalist terms would be a serious mistake, showing instead how it represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual debates and discussions."—M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, author of Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography"This boldly argued and beautifully written book offers the most comprehensive account of this topic available. Turnaoğlu is aware of her mission as both a scholar and public intellectual, and is not afraid to challenge popular ideologies and myths about history and global values in Europe as well as Turkey."—Cemil Aydin, author of The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought