Turkish Foreign Policy since 1774

William Hale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136238024
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This revised and updated version of William Hale's Turkish Foreign Policy 1774-2000 offers a comprehensive and analytical survey of Turkish foreign policy since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the Turks' relations with the rest of the world entered their most critical phase.

In recent years Turkey's international role has changed and expanded dramatically, and the new edition revisits the chapters and topics covered in light of these changes. Drawing on newly available information and ideas, the author carefully alters the earlier historical narrative while preserving the clarity and accessibility of the original. Combining the long historical perspective with a detailed survey and analysis of the most recent developments, this book fills a clear gap in the literature on Turkey's modern history. For readers with a broader interest in international history, it also offers a crucial example of how a medium sized power has acted in the international environment.

1 Foreign Relations of the Late Ottoman Empire, 1774–1918

The Turkish republic was established in 1922–4, when the monarchy and the Islamic Caliphate were abolished, and Ataturk and his colleagues set out to create a new nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Constitutionally and territorially, the transformation marked a clean break with the Ottoman past. Nonetheless, the attitudes of the new state’s rulers, as well as its citizens, were inevitably shaped by the experiences of the Ottoman period or what they learnt of them either formally or informally. Rather than attempt a full history of the Ottoman Empire’s foreign relations during the last 150 years of its existence, this chapter attempts to summarize those aspects of the story that played an important role in shaping later attitudes. It starts by giving a brief sketch of the structure of the Ottoman state, as it affected its foreign policies, as well as the international system and the options available to late Ottoman policy-makers – some of which still affect confront their successors. A narrative section then attempts to illustrate these points by sketching in the main events in the foreign relations of the Ottoman Empire during the period. The concluding discussion assesses the implications of these events in forming later attitudes and policies.

The Ottoman State: Dilemmas and Change

The central problem faced by the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was both an internal and an external one. At the zenith of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Sultan’s government had ruled over a vast territory stretching from Hungary to the Crimea and from Tunis to the Persian Gulf, and had been the hegemonic power in the eastern Mediterranean. By the 1770s, in the west, Hungary and Transylvania had been lost to the Hapsburg Empire, while north Africa was ruled by local dynasties over whom Ottoman control was normally not much more than nominal. Nonetheless, the Ottomans still had formal sovereignty over a huge territory. Unfortunately they lacked the power to control it effectively internally or to protect it against external enemies. During the sixteenth century, the Empire had been equal if not superior to any of the European states in military, technological and economic advances, and administrative efficiency. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century it had fallen well behind the major European powers in all these respects. In effect, it was neither a great power nor a minor one, but a former great power in gradual eclipse, whose future became a continuing problem both for its own rulers and the leading European states.

In 1912, Count Johann von Pallavicini, the Austrian ambassador in Istanbul, suggested to his government that ‘Turkey was not, and is not now, a state in the European sense of the word’.¹ Setting aside the counter-claim that the Hapsburg monarchy was itself something of an anachronism, Pallavicini’s judgement would certainly have been true a century earlier. The Empire had been what is described as a ‘tributary state’, in the sense that the ruling class of army officers and state bureaucrats had no specific socio-economic foundation but extracted surplus from all sectors of the economy – agriculture, trade and industry.² It was ‘tributary’ also in the sense that those who exercised power in most of the Empire were tributaries, rather than the obedient servants, of the central government. While officially invested with power by the Sultan as governors or military commanders, they could often exercise it independently and by process of bargaining and manoeuvre with other local power-holders. In effect, the Empire could be seen as a series of local satrapies. In 1864, following a series of partial earlier reforms, and as part of a wide-ranging programme of reform known as the Tanzimat (‘reorganization’) a new law on provincial administration introduced a centralized system on the Napoleonic model. This provided in theory for a hierarchy of trained officials taking their orders from the centre and remitting regular revenues to it.³ Nevertheless, in practice, and until the end of the Empire, state power remained dispersed and unreliable in outlying regions. In Istanbul and the other main port cities it was also limited by the capitulations – the special arrangements under which foreigners resident in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed fiscal and legal privileges. Since the European consuls frequently gave out citizenship of their states to members of the Christian communities who were natives of the Empire and were originally Ottoman citizens, these concessions came to have considerable importance: by the 1880s, resident ‘foreigners’ had come to account for as much as 15 per cent of the population of Istanbul.⁴

This administrative weakness was compounded by ethnic and religious heterogeneity. Westerners often referred to the Ottoman Empire as ‘Turkey’, and its people as ‘Turks’, but the Turks themselves preferred to speak of their Empire as the ‘exalted Ottoman state’ and its rulers as ‘Ottomans’ (even if they were not of the imperial dynasty) reflecting its lack of ethnic identity. Population figures for the Empire in the nineteenth century are often guesswork, since the government failed to carry out a population census in the accepted sense. However, from the 1830s, local officials were supposed to keep registers of the population in their districts, and calculations of the entire population were issued, based on these admittedly incomplete statistics. On this basis, it would appear that in 1844 (the first year for which we have remotely complete figures) the population of the territories actually, rather than nominally, controlled by the Sultan, was somewhere around 26 million. Of this about two thirds was Muslim (Turks, followed by Arabs, Kurds, Muslim Slavs and Albanians) and the remainder Christian (Slavs, followed by Armenians, Greeks, Christian Arabs and Albanians) with a small Jewish community.⁵ By 1885, following territorial losses to the empire in the Balkans, which reduced the total while increasing the percentage of Muslims, the population had fallen to around 17–18 million, of which about 72 per cent was Muslim, but it then rose to around 21 million by 1906. In 1914, after the loss of virtually all the Empire’s territories in Europe during the Balkan wars, the population had dropped back to 18.5 million, of which about 81 per cent was Muslim. Since the Ottoman government classified its citizens by religion (that is, as Muslims or Jews, or adherents of the different Christian denominations) we have no breakdown of the population by ethnic groups, but it would appear that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ethnic Turks only accounted for about 45–50 per cent of the population, and a lower proportion before that.⁶

The Ottoman state was largely non-assimilative and lacked the technical, economic and institutional resources to integrate its diverse populations into a single political community, even if it had wanted to. Hence, its society remained highly diverse. Its subject peoples retained their own languages and religions, with some degree of formal political autonomy. Non-Muslims could be seen as second-class citizens, in that they could not serve in the army and were subjected to special taxes, but were not subjected to forcible conversion. Each religiously defined community, or millet, had its own hierarchy, led in theory by its religious head, or milletbaşi (thus, the Patriarch of Constantinople for Orthodox Christians, the Chief Rabbi for Jews, and so on) and administered its own courts for personal status cases, as well as educational institutions.⁷ Until the nineteenth century, this diversity did not pose too serious a challenge to the Empire’s territorial integrity, since the vast majority of Ottoman citizens accepted traditional authority and identified primarily with local communities based on residence or kinship. If they saw themselves as part of a wider ‘imagined community’ then it was that of the religiously-based millet, not the ethnic or territorially-based nation.⁸ However, modern ideas of ethnic nationalism began to affect the Greeks and Serbs in the early nineteenth century, and later spread to the Romanians, Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs, and Armenians. Since Christianity and Islam were still the primary markers, most Muslims remained loyal to the Ottoman state until its end, although a successful nationalist revolt broke out among the mainly Muslim Albanians in 1910, and an embryonic nationalist movement had begun among the Ottoman Arabs just before the First World War. Left to itself, the Ottoman army could normally defeat a national rebellion by a single ethnic group, since the proto-nations were mostly geographically dispersed and often mutually hostile, but it could not do so if the rebellion were supported by one or more of the major European powers, or if a number of ethnic groups or emergent nations combined against it. Hence, the Empire was subjected to a process of gradual territorial dismemberment and ethnic cleansing.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rebellions by the Christian minorities sporadically triggered off ruthless and brutal reactions by the Ottoman authorities which naturally aroused righteous indignation on the part of European statesmen and writers – as on the occasion of the massacres on Chios in 1822, the ‘Bulgarian horrors’ denounced by Gladstone in 1876, and the massacres and deportation of virtually the entire Armenian population of Anatolia in 1915. What western opinion almost entirely ignored was the fact that the Muslim populations of the Balkans, Crimea and Caucasia suffered equally appalling atrocities at the hands of the emerging Balkan nations and advancing Russian armies, and in far greater numbers. Welldocumented calculations by Justin McCarthy and others show that between 1827 and 1922 around 5 million Muslims in Greece, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans were killed, while about another 5.4 million were expelled and took refuge in the Ottoman Empire. A large proportion of these victims of Greek and Balkan chauvinism and Russian imperialism were ethnic Turks, but their numbers also included millions of Slavic Muslims and Crimean Tatars, plus the Muslim minorities of the Caucasus (Muslim Circassians, Abkhazians, Chechens, Azeris and Muslim Georgians) many of whom had not been under Ottoman rule, but fled to the Ottoman Empire since they recognized it as a ‘kin state’.⁹

Of course, two wrongs do not make a right, and atrocities by one side cannot justify counter-atrocities by the other. At the same time, it is clear that the massacres and expulsions of these Muslim communities had profound effects on the Empire. First, the influx of refugees tended to enhance the effect of territorial contraction, by increasing the Muslim share in the total Ottoman population. Second, it created a profound sense of injustice and deep hostility towards those nations that had been responsible for it. By the 1920s, around one third of the population of what became the Republic of Turkey was probably composed of refugees or their descendants, creating a strong sense of shared suffering and solidarity. Third, it had important effects on the attitudes of the Ottoman rulers. What looked to Europeans like an effort to prop up a crumbling, corrupt and sometimes brutal empire, was seen by Ottoman governments and their Muslim subjects as a perfectly legitimate attempt to protect their own people against slaughter and exile, in the face of indifference or outright hostility on the part of the European powers.

The primary aim of Ottoman Sultans and statesman was to preserve their state and to protect its Muslim populations in these unpromising conditions, and this was almost the sole goal of the Tanzimat reforms. Apart from the attempted administrative modernization referred to earlier, reform and strengthening of their armed forces was naturally a major focus of attention. After a false start between 1789 and 1807, the construction of an effective modern army began with the destruction of the Janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826, and had begun to yield results by the 1840s. Hence, as Feroze Yasamee suggests, after a period of pronounced decline between 1768 and 1839, Ottoman power began to revive after that date. After a system for conscription of Muslim males was introduced in 1869, the strength of the standing army was raised to around 200,000 by the 1870s, and 470,000 by 1897. During the First World War, some 2.7 million men were mobilized, although the maximum strength of the army probably failed to exceed 650,000 at any one time. Modern weapons and tactics, and an officer corps trained in both, also increased the Empire’s military strength. As a result, the Ottoman army could still win battles (especially defensive ones) and even wars. Its main deficiencies were its almost total reliance on imported weaponry, its lack of logistical backup and modern transport, the financial weakness of the state and, above all, the sheer number and strength of its potential enemies compared with the relatively small size of the Muslim population and the immense length of frontiers it had to defend. Hence the government had to resort to diplomatic manoeuvring, rather than risk unaided military resistance to any major European power.¹⁰

Ottoman Diplomacy: Aims, Methods and Policies

Careful diplomacy was thus the key to Ottoman survival. As has been suggested in the Introduction (pp2–3), it rested on exploiting the balance of power between the main European states – Russia, Britain, France and Austria, with Germany emerging as a major power in the last part of the nineteenth century – and their mutual fear that if either one or a coalition of powers destroyed the Ottoman Empire, this would provoke a major war with their rivals. In this way, the Empire lasted much longer than most European observers had expected. In effect, the Empire served as a classic example of how a relatively weak state – the supposed ‘sick man of Europe’ – could survive even in the heyday of European imperialism.

Since ‘the eastern question’ was a major focus of concern in nineteenth century diplomacy, the history of the policies of the major powers towards it has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Unfortunately, this has not been the case on the Ottoman side. Hence, while we have relatively abundant information on the diplomacy of the main European states, and the effects of Ottoman decline on their relations with one another, we have little direct information about what Ottoman governments thought or planned in the foreign policy field – and then only for the last quarter of the nineteenth century.¹¹ Most of what we know about the policies of Ottoman governments thus has to be inferred from their actions, or from what European diplomats believed and reported at the time.

Ottoman foreign policy was also affected by the institutional resources available to it. Until the last years of the eighteenth century, the Empire had no permanent diplomatic representatives abroad, although temporary diplomatic missions were frequently sent abroad for specific purposes. This defect was remedied during 1793–6 as permanent embassies were established in London, Vienna, Berlin and Paris, to be followed in due course by other capitals. Besides representing their government, the staff of these embassies were also supposed to find out about western technical and administrative advances, and thus came to play a major role in pushing forward the Tanzimat reforms. Originally, there was no separate foreign ministry: foreign policy was decided at the centre by the Grand Vizier (Sadr-i Azam) and its administration by the office of the ‘Chief of the Scribes’ (Reisülküttab) an assistant to the Grand Vizier, who also had responsibility for a variety of other functions. In 1835, however, his foreign policy and diplomatic responsibilities were transferred to a new Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Umur-i Hariciye Nezareti). The ministry continued to handle relations with the non-Muslim millets within the Empire until the 1880s. In the meantime, the post of foreign minister came to be one of the most important in the state, as leading statesmen of the Tanzimat interchanged this appointment with that of Grand Vizier. The Grand Vizier thus joined the foreign minister as an important determinant of foreign policy. At other times, a forceful and determined Sultan could take over the reins, reducing the foreign minister to relatively minor status: this was certainly the case during the reign of Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909).¹² Overall, however, the Ottoman Empire seems to have built up a reasonably effective foreign policy structure, not so different from those of other autocratic monarchies at the time, and probably more effective than other parts of the Ottoman state bureaucracy.

As an active foreign policy maker, Abdul Hamid II evidently had a low opinion of the way it had been conducted. Having suggested that every state needed a ‘fundamental goal’ and a ‘policy which accords with its circumstances and position’,¹³ he regretted that:

The Ottoman empire has no definite and decided goal and policy: in every question the person in power acts in accordance with his own opinion, and in the event of failure successor blames predecessor and predecessor successor, and in the process the sacred interests of the state suffer.

In fact, the Sultan probably did his predecessors as well as himself something of an injustice, since late Ottoman foreign policy was arguably more consistent and effective than he suggested. From around the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ottoman statesman had evidently recognized that the Empire could not win a war for territory with the major European powers unless it was supported by one or more of the others. They hoped that in the long run they could restore the Empire to its former strength by modernizing state structures and the economy, and by rebuilding its army and finances, but to do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A note on spellings
• List of abbreviations
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Foreign relations of the late Ottoman Empire, 1774–1918
• 2. Resistance, reconstruction and diplomacy, 1918–39
• 3. Turkey and the Second World War, 1939–45
• 4. Turkey and the Cold War, 1945–63: the engagement phase
• 5. Turkey and the Cold War, 1964–90: global shifts and regional conflicts
• 6. Turkish foreign policy after the Cold War: strategic options and the domestic and economic environments
• 7. Turkey and the west after the Cold War I: Turkey and the United States
• 8. Turkey and the west after the Cold War II: Turkey and the European Union
• 9. Turkey and regional politics after the Cold War I: Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans
• 10. Turkey and regional politics after the Cold War II: Russia, the Black Sea, Transcaucasia and central Asia
• 11. Turkey and regional politics after the Cold War III: the Middle East and the wider world
• 12. Conclusions and prospects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index