Periodization, dividing the past into periods that can be clearly identified and that differ from one another in a recognizable way, is a subject for interminable discussion. The same goes for the identification of the landmarks and turning points that are supposed to separate the periods. What makes this activity such a debatable issue for the historian is the obvious fact that each turning point and each landmark is both the start of a new development and the culmination of an earlier one.
Nevertheless, periodization, however arbitrary and subject to the personal preferences of the historian, is an unavoidable and even indispensable tool to give shape to the past, which would otherwise consist of an undifferentiated mass of facts and figures. The very title of this book implies that there is such a thing as modern history (or even modern Turkey) and hence is the result of periodization.
For periodization to be a valid instrument, it has to comply with two separate demands. First, it must have explanatory value. Like comparisons, periodizations in principle are unlimited in number, but they only serve a purpose if they allow us to partition the stream of events in such a way that important developments become visible. Second, periodization should reflect the actual developments of the period under description. It cannot be a wholly inductive process. This begs the question of which developments the historian sees as important enough to warrant basing his periodization on, or in other words, which among the great mass of facts he recognizes as ‘historical facts’.
Of course, in any given field there are traditional divisions that have become so widespread that the innocent reader tends to accept them as historical facts in themselves, not to say natural phenomena. It is not surprising that this tendency is especially strong among students using a textbook. Such a book, after all, is all too often supposed not to argue but to give indisputable facts.
In some ways this book follows the traditional periodization of Turkish history; in some ways it does not. It is better therefore that I discuss this aspect of the book with the reader and give the reasons for the way it is structured, rather than suggest that it is in some way the unavoidable work of history itself.
This book is divided into three parts. This division represents what the author considers the basic periodization of modern Turkish history. In the first part of this book, describing the first phase of the emergence of modern Turkey in the nineteenth century, the dominant development is taken to be the growing influence of Europe in the Ottoman Empire and the reactions it brought about in the Ottoman state and society.
The European influence was exerted in three different, but interrelated spheres: the incorporation of a growing part of the Ottoman economy in the capitalist world system; the growing political influence of the European great powers, which expressed itself in attempts both to carve up the Ottoman Empire without causing a European conflagration and to dominate it while maintaining it as a separate political entity and finally, the impact of European ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, secularism and positivism.
These three forms of growing European influence were intertwined and have interacted in many subtle ways. This is also true for the Ottoman response to this European challenge. In the nineteenth century two strands can be discerned in this response: one is formed by the attempts of the central state and its servants to strengthen the state apparatus and centralize the administration of the country, and the other by the reactions of the different parts of the population of the empire to the pressures to which it was exposed. In the course of the nineteenth century these reactions gradually led to a parting of ways between the Christian and Muslim subjects of the sultan.
These developments constitute the framework within which the events of the nineteenth century history of the Ottoman Empire will be described in the first part of this book. They also form the basis for its periodization. Now what exactly does this periodization look like?
The first question to come to mind in this context is what we should take as the starting point for a ‘modern history’ of Turkey. Different answers are possible and valid in their own way, but the most traditional solution in this case seems to be the best: to start from the period of the French revolution and its aftermath. Economic incorporation into the capitalist world system had increased significantly in the late eighteenth century and gathered speed in the first quarter of the nineteenth, the Napoleonic wars led to increased involvement of the Empire in European politics and diplomacy, and the revolutionary ideas of nationalism and liberalism reached the Levant for the first time.
The problem with a further general periodization for the nineteenth century (and, indeed, for any other period) is that the three forms of European influence and the different reactions from within the Ottoman Empire ran parallel to each other in a general sense, but developments were not necessarily simultaneous in all fields. Nevertheless, due to the interrelated character of these developments a fairly uniform periodization seems possible:
• The period from the French revolutionary wars to the end of the 1830s saw the growing economic incorporation of the Balkan provinces and the emergence of Greek traders as a dominant factor; much closer involvement of the Ottoman Empire in British and Russian politics; the emergence of the first nationalist movements; and the first serious attempts at reforms in a Western mould.
• Characteristic of the period from the end of the 1830s to the mid-1870s, which internationally was the time of British economic and political hegemony, were the fast expansion both of trade and of loans to the empire after the imposition of a free-trade regime in 1838; British and French support for the continued existence of the empire; ongoing and (at least on paper) far-reaching reforms in the realms of law, education, finance and government institutions, starting with the Reform Edict of 1839; the replacing of the palace by the bureaucracy as the centre of power, the start of the Ottoman constitutional movement and the beginnings of a Muslim reaction against the privileged position of Christians; the period ended with a deep economic and political crisis in the years 1873–8.
• The period from the mid-1870s to the constitutional revolution of 1908 saw much slower economic expansion, at least until the end of the century, but also the first serious direct foreign investment in the empire; ongoing administrative and technical reforms, but a suppression of nationalist and liberal ideologies and a reorientation on the Islamic heritage of the empire; the palace replaced the bureaucracy as the main power centre again. Towards the end of this period, both international economic incorporation and internal political opposition gathered pace again.
The second part of the book is dominated by the attempts of the ‘Young Turks’, a group of modern-educated bureaucrats and officers, who became active in the 1890s and organized the constitutional revolution of 1908, to modernize and so strengthen state and society on the basis of a positivist and increasingly nationalist set of ideas. The fact that the second part encompasses the years from 1908 to 1950 reflects the belief that, despite the break-up of the empire in 1918 and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, politically, ideologically and economically, there is a great deal of continuity.
Under the ‘Young Turks’, Turkey went through the same political cycle twice, first under the regime of the Committee of Union and Progress (from 1908 to 1918) and again when ruled by the ‘Kemalists’, the Association for the Defence of the National Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia and its successor, the People’s Party. In each case the cycle consisted of a liberal and pluralist phase (1908–13 and 1919–25 respectively), followed by an authoritarian repressive phase, which combined an effective one-party system, political, economic and cultural nationalism and modernizing and secularizing reforms (1913–18 and 1925–50 respectively). Any sub-periodization for the Young Turk era is of necessity based on political developments, since these, including a world war, the break-up of an empire and the establishment of a new national state, dominated the scene to such an extent that a separate periodization based on, for instance, economic developments would be meaningless. A separate discussion, for example, of the growth of an industrial and commercial bourgeoisie in the Ottoman Empire and the early republic is meaningless without reference to the disappearance of the Armenians and the Greeks, which was caused by political and ideological developments, not by any underlying law of economics.
It follows from the above, that the description of the Young Turk period is subdivided basically between:
• 1908–13: a period when ways were sought to revive the Empire on the basis of a number of competing ideologies and political programmes;
• 1913–18: the one-party rule of the Committee of Union and Progress and the victory of Turkish nationalism;
• 1918–22: the period in which the Young Turks re-established their rule through a successful war of independence, and in which the national resistance movement gradually took on a character of its own;
• 1922–26: the critically important postwar period in which the structure of the state was changed and the one-party state established once again;
• 1926–45: the heyday of Kemalism, and
• 1945–50: the gradual transition to democracy, culminating in the peaceful removal from power of the Republican People’s Party.
The third part of this book, entitled ‘A Troubled Democracy’, deals with the period since 1950. This title is self-explanatory. In contrast to the Young Turk period, this was for the most part an era of genuine democratic pluralism and the growth of mass politics. At the same time, it was an era punctuated by three military coups (in 1960, 1971 and 1980) and from the late 1960s onwards, Turkish parliamentary democracy was constantly under attack from the left and the right. The third part of the book has been subdivided as follows:
• 1950–60: the rule of the Democrat Party, characterized by the political and military integration of Turkey into the Western alliance; rapid economic development (especially of the countryside); growing financial dependence on the United States; and a downgrading of the secularist tendencies of previous governments.
• 1964–80: the ‘second’ Turkish Republic, after the introduction of a much more liberal constitution in 1961, which allowed the emergence of movements and parties which veered much farther from the political centre. At the same time, the new constitution legalized the interference of the army in political matters. Economically, this was the period in which a heavily protected import substitution industry was built up, and both capitalists and trade unions gained importance. At the same time, millions of Turks migrated to Europe as industrial workers or their relatives. In the 1970s the world economic crisis led to social instability and political extremism. The period of repression after the military coup by memorandum of 1971 was brutal, but did not alter the course of events fundamentally.
• Following the military coup of 1980, the power of the armed forces was used to suppress all existing political and trades union formations, and to introduce a new economic policy, aimed at export-led growth and a free internal market, cutting wages and subsidies. Even after the gradual liberalization from 1983 onwards, political life had to take place within the limits of the very restrictive constitution of 1982. Internationally, Turkey came to be even more closely linked to the United States. From 1991, the patterns of pre-1980 politics re-established themselves and the structures built up after the 1980 coup were gradually dismantled, but the main socio-economic trends were not changed.
The above is offered for consideration in order to justify both the scope and the structure of this book. It is clear that a second question remains to be answered: What does the author understand ‘modern history’ to be in a methodological sense?
The discerning reader will have noticed that traces of several major historical theses can be found. The whole concept of European influence and Ottoman reaction owes a debt to Toynbee’s ‘challenge and response’. Much of the description of the effects of the growing economic integration of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey into the European economy is based on the work of scholars who support and apply Wallerstein’s version of the dependency theory to explain how Turkey came to occupy a subservient place on the periphery of a capitalist world system. Historians who are informed by the concept of modernization see developments in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as a struggle between people inspired by a rational Western system, which, once set in motion, progressed inexorably and irreversibly, on the one hand, and traditionalists and reactionaries who stood in the way of progress on the other. Their work has sometimes been found enlightening where the ideological and political transformations are concerned, even if the underlying premise of Western superiority is distasteful. From a theoretical point of view this book is eclectic, and intentionally so. I feel that an academic textbook such as this should represent the state of the art in the field where the actual results of research are concerned, but that the theoretical models employed by scholars in obtaining these results, being after all no more than the historian’s tools in his attempts to describe what happened, should not be allowed to put our interpretation of the past into a straightjacket.
Where this book does claim to be a ‘modern history’, is in the attempt to present an integrated view of the history of Turkey in the last two hundred years, putting as much emphasis on socio-economic developments as on political and ideological ones. The only field that has been left uncovered in its entirety is that of the arts (architecture, literature, visual arts, music), not because they were deemed unimportant, but because the present author feels he lacks the competence to deal with them adequately. The book in no way has any pretensions to being an original piece of research. It does, however, aim to present the state of the art where published research in this field is concerned. This is felt to be of special significance since it is one characteristic of the study of Turkey’s modern history that the textbooks used in coursework lag far behind the detailed results published in articles and monographs.
In one respect this book is anachronistic. It purports to be a history of Turkey in the modern world. But until 1922, any modern history of Turkey really is a history of the Ottoman Empire. So the history of the empire has been included in this handbook as far as it is relevant for an understanding of the emergence of modern Turkey. I see no alternative to this approach because Turkey cannot be understood without reference to its Ottoman past, but author and reader alike should be aware that there is a problem here. Nineteenth-century Ottomans certainly did not see themselves as part of the prehistoric phase of any Turkish Republic.