Former Minister of Tourism and Culture of Turkey Erturul Gunay, a seasoned politician who served as a minister in Recep Erdogan’s cabinet when he was still prime minister, made an intriguing statement to Zaman. “I am one of those representatives of the former government who said at the very beginning that we should not interfere in Syrian affairs. I said that we should stay away from problems in Syria, that we should continue to play the role of arbiter in the region,”said Gunay. - The answer I received at that time did not inspire fear. The issue was supposed to be resolved within 6 months - this was the answer to our concerns and recommendations. It has been 4 years since I received such an answer. I note with sadness that the issue will not be resolved even in 6 years. I am afraid that the negative consequences will be felt for another 16 years, since in our east - as some members of the government already say, and even so it can be seen - a second Afghanistan has arisen.
In foreign policy, one should not be guided by imaginary heroism. Heroism, ignorance and obsession in foreign policy, whether you like it or not, sometimes produce results comparable only to treason. You may be guided by excessive patriotism, but if you look at foreign policy through the prism of fanaticism, not knowing your own geography and history, and try to compensate for all these shortcomings of yours with heroism and courage, then your blow against the wall will be such that the consequences of their severity can be compare with treason. The Unity and Progress Party (İttihad ve terakki, political party of the Young Turks of 1889-1918 - IA REGNUM) is an example of this. I cannot argue that the members of this party were not patriots, but if they were not patriots and wanted to end the Ottoman Empire, they would have done the same. Therefore, we should move away from the Syrian problem as soon as possible. I will not call what we observe today "neoittihadism". I believe that neocemalism will also be a kind of benevolence. What they do is called imitation. Imitation of something is never like the original and always looks funny. Yes, it's funny. But when those who run the state find themselves in a ridiculous position because their imitation has failed, they do not stop there and make the country pay dearly for it. The state cannot be governed by following the lead of imaginary heroism, which is fueled by insatiable desires, ambition, anger and especially ignorance. Those who are at the head of the state must have some knowledge. At the very least, they should know their own history. Without the necessary education, they, making big but wild speeches, are capable of upsetting the international balance, and ill-considered attacks around the world lead to disaster. We found ourselves involved in a process that leaves people without a homeland and home. Ittihadist policy led to the fact that the empire, already moving towards its end, fell too quickly and many territories were lost. In fact, the Unity and Progress party seized power in the country during a certain crisis, and its leadership, although not devoid of idealistic views and patriotism, nevertheless had no experience. Anger and ambition prevailed over ability, experience and knowledge. The Ottoman Empire, which was then in their hands, decreased territorially as much as we could not even imagine. This is the very lesson that we must learn from history. This lesson is already 100 years old."
Gunay compared the current ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the Young Turk political party, which since 1876 tried to carry out liberal reforms in the Ottoman Empire and create a constitutional state structure. In 1908, the miltodurks managed to overthrow Sultan Abdul Hamid II and carry out half-hearted pro-Western reforms, but after Turkey's defeat in the First World War, they lost power. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. Gunay also suggests the possibility of a transition in modern Turkey from "neoittihadism", the name means "Erdoganism", to "neo-Kemalism", which can also be accompanied by either the collapse or the loss of part of the territories of already modern Turkey. The ex-minister uses the method of historical parallels, which is not welcomed by science, since there is no complete repetition of events and phenomena in the historical process. But the principle of the similarity of the political situation and the alignment of social forces, the generalization of the previous historical experience in its comparison with the current one helps to identify or at least designate the so-called "vertical" and "horizontal" trunks in Turkish history.
Our attempt to identify the historical parallels indicated by Gunay does not pretend to be a classical type of research, we are aimed only at giving the problem raised a certain scope, which would give food for topical reflections. In any case, Gunay makes it clear that the fate of the "Unity and Progress" party is closely connected not only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and that "ittihadist lines" are clearly visible in the activities of modern political parties in Turkey, in particular, the ruling AKP. So what are they?
Let's start with the first illegal Young Turkish party "Unity and Progress", which was created in Geneva in 1891. By that time, the Ottoman Empire was going through a deep economic and political crisis. The efforts of the early Turkish reformers, the “new Ottomans,” to bring the country out of the crisis were unsuccessful. The task was not easy. The best minds of the empire predicted a fatal outcome. “In the mouths of major Ottoman dignitaries,” writes the modern Turkish historian J. Tezel, “then the question more and more often sounded:“What happened to us?”. The same question was contained in numerous memoranda of representatives of the Ottoman provincial authorities, sent by them to the name of the padishah.
The Turkish state was a conglomerate of nations and peoples, in which the role of the Turks was not so significant. For various reasons, one of which is the peculiarity of the empire, the Turks did not want, and could not absorb various nationalities. The empire did not have internal unity; its individual parts, as evidenced by numerous notes of travelers, diplomats and intelligence officers, were noticeably different from each other in ethnic composition, language and religion, in the level of social, economic and cultural development, in the degree of dependence on the central government. Only in Asia Minor and in the part of Rumelia (European Turkey), adjacent to Istanbul, did they live in large compact masses. In the rest of the provinces, they were scattered among the indigenous population, which they never managed to assimilate.
Let's note one more important point. The conquerors called themselves not Turks, but Ottomans. If you open the corresponding page of the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia published in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, you can read the following: “The Ottomans (the name of the Turks is considered mocking or abusive) were originally the people of the Ural-Altai tribe, but due to the massive influx from other tribes they completely lost its ethnographic character. Especially in Europe, today's Turks are mostly descendants of Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and Albanian renegades, or descended from marriages of Turks with women from these tribes or with natives of the Caucasus. But the problem was also that the Ottoman Empire, having seized huge chunks of territories inhabited by peoples with more ancient history and traditions, drifted more towards better developed outskirts. The cities of the Balkan Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt were not only centers of provincial power, spiritual education and worship, but also centers of crafts and trade, in which even Constantinople surpassed. By the beginning of the 19th century, at least half of the inhabitants of cities with a population of up to 100 thousand people - Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Tunisia - were artisans. Their products were of high quality and were in demand in the markets of the Middle East and beyond. The country existed in this regime for a long time.
Therefore, the Ittihadists were at a crossroads. Some of them pursued the goal of preserving territorial and national unity in the face of the threat of the collapse of the empire, about which only a lazy one did not talk in European political salons at that time. Another part was determined to work in a new direction. But which one? There were two options. First: to rely on impulses from Europe and to intensify the policy of "Westernization", moving away from the Arabs and Persia, who had noticeable historical and cultural roots, while integrating into "Christian Europe". Moreover, the empire already had some kind of historical experience of tanzimata behind it - the name adopted in literature for the modernization reforms in the Ottoman Empire from 1839 to 1876, when the first Ottoman constitution was adopted. Unlike previous reforms, the main place in Tanzimat was occupied not by military, but by socio-economic transformations designed to strengthen the central government, prevent the development of the national liberation movement in the Balkans and weaken the dependence of the Porte on European powers by adapting the existing system to the norms of Western European life.
But the western vector of the empire's development, as modern Turkish researchers write, in the historical perspective led to a crisis primarily of the Ottoman Islamic identity, and the consequences of the adaptive capabilities of the Ottoman Empire inevitably ended with the formation of new national states on its European territories, the transformation of the empire into a “new Byzantium”. As the modern Turkish researcher Turker Tashansu writes, "in the historical development of Western Europe, modernization took place in parallel with the process of the formation of national states," and "the influence of the West on Turkish society reached such a level that even in intellectual circles, the historical development of Europe was perceived as the only model." In these conditions, the direction of the reform course for the Ittihadists acquired a fundamental significance. They seriously studied the experience of the emergence of the United States of America in 1776 during the unification of the thirteen British colonies that declared their independence, and spoke about the possibilities of forming "Middle Eastern Switzerland".
As for the second option, it assumed a more complex, more archaic and dramatic set of actions associated with the departure from the ideology of Ottomanism to the experience of Turkization, but the problem of pan-Islamism was hanging over them. Recall that the Turkization of Anatolia began in the second half of the 11th century, but this process was not completed until the fall of the Ottoman Empire, even despite the elements of civil war and violent methods - deportations, massacres, etc. Therefore, the Ittihadists were divided into the western and the so-called eastern wings, which were united in strategy - the preservation of the empire in any form - but differed in tactics. This circumstance at different stages had a noticeable impact on the policy of the Ittihadists in solving ethno-confessional problems. It is one thing to rush to Europe on the wings of the ideology of Eurocentrism, and another thing to delve into the problems of the “Turk kimliga” (Turkish identity). These were the main vectors of the geopolitical prospects of the Ittihadists, which predetermined the further course of events, and not, as some Russian and Turkish researchers assert, that everything was predetermined by the circumstance of the seizure of the leadership of the Ittihad Veraki party by the “Turkish Jews” (devshirme), who originally set themselves the goal of crushing the Ottoman Caliphate and achieved their goal. Everything is much more complicated.
In 1900, Ali Fakhri, a representative of the western wing of the Ittihadists, published a small book calling to rally around the party, in which he built a priority series of solutions to ethno-confessional problems: Macedonian, Armenian and Albanian. But first, it was necessary to destroy the main enemy - the regime of Sultan Abdul-Hamid, for which it was necessary to unite efforts, first of all, of internal national political parties, which also declare their national interests. By the way, the Armenian party "Dashnaktsutyun" not only participated in some foreign events of ittihadists, but also financed their activities at one time. In July 1908, the Ittihadists, led by Niyazi-bey, raised an armed uprising that went down in history as the "Young Turk Revolution of 1908".
“The ethnic and religious diversity of the Turkish population creates powerful centrifugal tendencies. The old regime thought to overcome them with the mechanical burden of an army recruited from some Muslims, wrote Leon Trotsky at the time. - But in reality it led to the disintegration of the state. During the reign of Abdul Hamid alone, Turkey lost: Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Tunisia, Dobrudja. Asia Minor fatally fell under the economic and political dictatorship of Germany. On the eve of the revolution, Austria was going to build a road through the Novobazarskiy sandzak, paving a strategic path for itself to Macedonia. On the other hand, England - as opposed to Austria - directly put forward the project of Macedonian autonomy … The dismemberment of Turkey is not expected to end. Not national diversity, but state fragmentation gravitates over him like a curse. Only a single state, modeled on Switzerland or the North American Republic, can bring inner peace. The Young Turks, however, strongly reject this path. The fight against powerful centrifugal tendencies makes the Young Turks supporters of a "strong central authority" and pushes them to an agreement with the quand meme sultan. This means that as soon as a tangle of national contradictions unfolds within the framework of parliamentarism, the right (eastern wing) of the Young Turks will openly side with the counter-revolution. " And, we add on our own, it will undermine the western wing.
Then only a blind man could not see this, which was not the Dashnaktsutyun party and some other Armenian political parties. Without going into the details of this problem, we note the following facts. From August 17 to September 17, 1911, the Sixth Congress of the Dashnaktsutyun Party was held in Constantinople, which declared "a policy of secret and open terror against the Russian Empire." At the same congress, it was decided "to expand the autonomy of the Armenian people recognized by the constitution to the borders of Russia." In 1911 in Thessaloniki "Ittihad" concluded a special agreement with the "Dashnaktsutyun" party: in exchange for political loyalty, the Dashnaks received "control over local administrative institutions in their regions through their bodies".
The report of the tsarist military intelligence also indicated that “the Dashnaks, together with the Ittihadists, expect a political coup in Russia in the next 1912, and if it does not take place, then the Caucasian organization of the Dashnaktsakans will have to act in accordance with the instructions of the Baku, Tiflis and Erivan Central Committees, which stand for preventing the Russian government from interfering in the Armenian question”. The intrigue was that the leaders of the Armenian political movements simultaneously sat in two parliaments - the Russian State Duma and the Turkish Mejlis. In Russia, the Dashnaks entered into specific relations with the Russian cadets and Octobrists, the governor of the Tsar in the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov. In the Ottoman Empire, they worked closely with the Ittihidists, hoping in the future to play the cards of two empires at once - the Russian and the Ottoman.
We agree with the statements of the famous Azerbaijani historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Jamil Hasanli, that in the “confrontation between the two empires, certain Armenian forces considered the possibility of creating a“Great Armenia”. However, its first geopolitical contours were laid not by Russian politicians or generals, but by ittihadists, who promised the Dashnaks to implement, under favorable circumstances, a program according to which the vilayets of Western Armenia - Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Harput and Sivas - would be united into one administrative unit - the Armenian an area "governed by a Christian governor-general appointed to this post by the Turkish government with the consent of the European states." These were the outlines of the geopolitical project of the losing western wing of the Ittihadists, who, by the way, entered into contact with St. Petersburg through military intelligence.
However, as Pavel Milyukov writes in his Memoirs, “the Turkish Armenians lived far from the eyes of Europe, and their position was comparatively little known,” although “for forty years, the Turks, and especially the Kurds among whom they lived, systematically crushed them as would follow the principle that the solution to the Armenian issue consists in the total extermination of Armenians. " Indeed, attacks on Armenians became more frequent throughout almost the entire Ottoman Empire, who defiantly greeted the Ittihadists, who allowed them to carry arms, promised constitutional and other freedoms. At the same time, Milyukov reports that after "the English philanthropists and consuls carefully summed up the digital results of the Armenian pogroms," he witnessed in Constantinople the development of a project by the secretaries of the Russian embassy to unite six vilayets inhabited by Armenians (Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Harput and Sivas), into one autonomous province”. At that moment, Dashnaktsutyun announced its withdrawal from the union with Ittihad.
Thus, in the words of one French publicist, the political evolution of the Ittihad ve terakki party was determined by the fact that, “acting as a secret organization, having committed a military conspiracy in 1908, on the eve of the 1914 war it turned into a kind of supranational body,“the triumvirate of Enver- Talaat-Jemal ", which dictated decisions to the parliament, the sultan, and the ministers," without being part of the state. “The drama is yet to come,” Trotsky writes prophetically. "European democracy with all the weight of its sympathy and assistance stands on the side of the new Turkey - the one that does not yet exist, which has yet to be born."
Before World War I, the Ottoman Empire was still one of the largest powers of the era with a territory of approximately 1.7 million square kilometers, including such modern states as Turkey, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and part of the Arabian Peninsula. From 1908 to 1918, 14 governments changed in Turkey, parliamentary elections were held three times in conditions of acute internal political struggle. The old official political doctrine - Pan-Islamism - was replaced by Pan-Turkism. Meanwhile, paradoxically, in the military sense, Turkey demonstrated amazing efficiency - it had to wage the war on 9 fronts at once, on many of which it managed to achieve impressive successes. But the end of this period is known: the complete bankruptcy of the Young Turkish regime and the collapse of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire, which once amazed the world with its power.
