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8 Germany and the Ottoman Borderlands THE ENTWINING OF IMPERIAL ASPIR ATIONS, REVOLUTION, AND ETHNIC VIOLENCE Eric D. Weitz The borderlands of Eastern Europe into the eastern Mediterranean, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, constituted the prime area of German imperial ambitions. The interlocking German elite of bureaucrats and businessmen, officers and diplomats, intellectuals and pastors, kaisers and chancellors, had their gaze fixed tightly on Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Through all the political upheavals of modern German history, the German elite thought of Eastern Europe as the place for German territorial expansion and population settlement and the Ottoman Empire as the prime site of German imperial influence abroad. The widely strewn territory of the Empire, including its European, Anatolian, and Middle Eastern lands, would provide investment opportunities and markets for the German economy and, no less important, a place for Germany to assert its Great Power stature and contest British, French, and Russian power. In seeking to exert its influence in the Ottoman Empire, Germany confronted two pressing, interlocked problems: the ambitions of other powers and the political and national conflicts that increasingly dominated domestic Ottoman politics. Germany had to contend, first of all, with the aspirations of the other powers, great and minor, in the eastern Mediterranean . In the nineteenth century and into World War I, Britain, France, Russia, and AustriaHungary , along with a dozen minor countries from Bulgaria to Italy, had each their own claims on Ottoman territory, their own desires to exercise powerful influence in the region. Germany sought to block all of them and become the only foreign state on which the Ottoman rulers, sultans, colonels, or pashas, could rely. It deployed a combination of classic Great Power diplomatic chess moves complemented by eminently modern cultural and economic Germany and the Ottoman Borderlands 153 politics designed to demonstrate to the Ottoman elite the superiority of German ways of waging war, business, and science. Second, Germany had to contend with the internal, domestic conflicts within the Ottoman Empire. Germany wanted, above all else, stability in the Empire, a prerequisite to the pursuit of its imperial aims. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it had to face the political discontent that led to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and to conflicts among the myriad ethnicities and religious groups within Ottoman territory. In the heyday of Ottoman power and of empires generally, managing diversity was not a terribly difficult problem. Like most empires and in line with general Muslim political practice, the Ottomans granted Christians and Jews a great deal of autonomy in their communal affairs. Jewish life in particular thrived in the Ottoman Empire, especially in comparison with Europe. However , in the age of nationalism and imperialism, with activists of various population groups staking out national claims and demanding independence or at least autonomy, population diversity became a huge problem for Ottoman rulers and, in turn, their German suitors. The international and domestic issues that Germany encountered were, in fact, inextricably entwined, so much so that they made large swaths of the borderlands very dangerous and violence-prone in the modern era. In this meeting place of the Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, and German empires and their successor states, international conflicts tended to heighten communal tensions and make regimes more suspicious of populations that might be linked to compatriots across their borders. At the same time, ethnic violence often provoked the intervention of the Great Powers. Every move for national independence by, say, Bulgarians or for the expansion of national territory by, say, Cretans and Greeks became an international crisis that sometimes erupted in warfare. Every land grab by Imperial Russia or countless others invoked the response of the Ottoman military and then the other powers. Often social grievances, those of Serbian or Bulgarian or Armenian peasants, for example, took on national hues, resulting in an explosive mix of social, national, and imperial conflicts . Almost invariably, this entwining of international and domestic factors had disastrous consequences for minority populations, whether Christians in predominantly Muslim lands or Muslims in predominantly Christian lands. Germany encountered, utilized, and exacerbated this maelstrom of imperial, national, and social conflicts. The one constant was Germany’s determination that the Ottoman Empire be a site where it could exercise its power and reap strategic, economic, and cultural benefits. Germany’s abiding commitment to the exercise of imperial power in the eastern Mediterranean ran together with the determination of the Ottoman rulers—both sultans and, after 1908, Young Turks—to...

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