The Young Turk Legacy and Nation-Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk's Turkey (review)

After two centuries of relentless decline, the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the close of World War I. For decades, fragments of the vast Empire had reappeared as nation-states representing their respective ethnic majorities. Belatedly, the Turkish people set aside their devotion to a dynasty and a religion to join these new nation-states. Led by modernist visionaries, such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Ismet Inönü, the Turkish Republic gradually evolved into a multi-party democracy based on secularist institutions.

This is the reassuring paradigm of most accounts of the Turkish Republic through the mid-20^th century. During the very pinnacle of the Age of Nations, a period of exceptional calamity and destruction, observers had yearned for an example that confirmed, rather than contradicted their hopes for a progressive, but resolutely rationalist, future of states democratically representing peoples. The Turkish Republic seemed to fulfill this promise better than most, at least by the proclamations, if not the policies, of its political leaders.

As it happens, both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic are far more interesting, far more complex, and far more intertwined, than the detractors of the first and the admirers of the second would suggest. In this volume of 21 papers, Erik J. Zürcher summarizes the results of three decades of scholarly research, much of it his own, but no small part the work of others, on the closing decades of the Empire and the initial decades of the Republic. Each paper is concisely focused on a counter-mythic dimension of the transition from Empire to Republic: the historical obfuscations of Atatürk's Speech of 1929, the modernist paradigm as exemplified by Bernard Lewis' Emergence of Modern Turkey, the social background and education of Ottoman revolutionary elites, alternatives to the official history of the War for Independence, the institutional groundwork of Ottoman reformers that provided the foundations for the Republic, the predominant role of Ottoman officials from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the War for Independence, the transformation of Anatolia both by population movements and the devastation of wars, the specific social background of the Ottoman architects of the Armenian genocide, the recruitment and experience of Ottoman soldiers during war after war, the importance of Sunni Islam in both the Empire and the Republic, and the views and memories of participants in the War for Independence who were purged by Atatürk and Inönü.

The complexity and richness of these topics explode the ideology of modernist historiography, baring the overlapping political and institutional landscapes of the late Empire and early Republic. Comprehension through discovery replaces instinctive praise and condemnation. The bright aura of the nation-state set aside, missed opportunities, political fables, unwilled social transformations, and measured institutional successes appear out of the shadows. This collection of concise, penetrating, and learned analyses of different periods and problems is not for beginners, but for those with some background in Turkish and Ottoman studies. It provides stimulating and refreshing reading.