State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey

Orthodox and Muslims, 1830-1945

Benjamin C. Fortna, Stefanos Katsikas, Dimitris Kamouzis, Paraskevas Konortas, Benjamin C. Fortna, Stefanos Katsikas, Dimitris Kamouzis, Paraskevas Konortas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136220524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Tracing the emergence of minorities and their institutions from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War, this book provides a comparative study of government policies and ideologies of two states towards minority populations living within their borders.

Making extensive use of new archival material, this volume transcends the tendency to compare the Greek-Orthodox in Turkey and the Muslims in Greece separately and, through a comparison of the policies of the host states and the operation of the political, religious and social institutions of minorities, demonstrates common patterns and discrepancies between the two countries that have previously received little attention.

A collaboration between Greek and Turkish scholars with broad ranging research interests, this book benefits from an international and balanced perspective, and will be an indispensable aid to students and scholars alike.

1 The Ottoman Empire and after

From a state of “nations” to “nation-states”

Benjamin C. Fortna

Introduction

For the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century with its still wide swathes of territory stretching from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf and its seemingly endless procession of confessional, ethnic and linguistic groups, the innovation of states based on national identity represented a mortal threat, as indeed, it did to other imperial structures of similarly diverse composition. None of the major empires, the Romanov, the Hapsburg and the Ottoman, would survive the early decades of the twentieth century. What set the Ottoman case apart from the others was the direct involvement of the Western powers in the process of imperial dismemberment. When even its erstwhile allies began to help themselves to portions of Ottoman territory whose integrity they had recently promised to protect—the French seized Tunisia in 1881 and the British helped themselves to Egypt the following year—it was clear that the external environment was turning increasingly hostile to the empire's existence.

On the internal front, itself increasingly complicated by the changing international situation, national identification and organization presented formidable challenges to the Ottoman system of communal relations. The new national impetus not only disturbed the lived reality of late Ottoman existence but also, in ways both subtle and brutal, inevitably affected the way we view the transition from empire to post-empire. In other words, it shaped—and continues to shape—both the history and the historiography of that period.

This introduction is intended to offer an overview of the minorities question in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman context in order to set the stage for the more substantive chapters that appear in the following pages. I begin with a brief discussion of the main subject of this volume, namely the parallel (but far from identical) trajectories of the “Greek minority” in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, on the one hand, and the “Muslim minority” in Greece on the other. I then reflect briefly on the term “minority” in its Ottoman context, before turning to a cursory attempt to situate the Ottoman state's approach to its varied population. I conclude by highlighting the problematic nature of rigid categories and definitions that hamper our ability to see the fluidity of linguistic, cultural and even religious identities in the imperial context on the eve of the nation-state era.

The relationship between the “Greek minority” in Turkey and the “Muslim minority” in Greece is normally considered in binary terms. This is natural enough given the more or less reciprocal way in which the relevant governments considered the groups in question, most visible, for example, in the case of the population exchanges, and in the subsequent histories of these groups.¹ We have come to think of them as prime examples of the processes of “othering” on which nation states increasingly depended as they tried to forge coherent polities out of the remnants of multi-national, multi-confessional, multi-ethnic and multilingual empires.

From the point of view of the nation states that eventually—but perhaps not inevitably—emerged as a consequence of the demise of empire, the persistence of these groups in the recently constituted national midst became a “minority problem.” Out of the multifaceted imperial dynamic of communal relations, there developed what came to be seen as a largely symmetrical, reciprocal relationship between what had recently become the normative national “majority” and its newly fashioned, othered “minorities.” This binary depended—and for many still depends—on the constructing of some rather rigid boundaries of identification. But one of the main points I hope to make here is that the creation, construction and invention of these boundaries—and their embedding in mental, social, political and legal frameworks—required varying degrees of elision, simplification, distortion and even amnesia in order to succeed.

It is important to see that the interrelated processes of self-definition and othering took place against a much more varied, complicated and by no means predetermined backdrop of intercommunal and proto-national interaction. In this volume we focus on only one of the many parallel sets of relationships that existed in the Ottoman context, namely, that between and among “Greeks” and “Turks” as the empire gave way to the nation state. The superimposition of this nationally defined structure over the Ottoman system is one of many legacies of late Ottoman Empire. Legacy is a subject that has been much discussed in the Ottoman context.² It is a crucially important but also rather slippery construct, given the many ways in which the past is subject to reinterpretation in light of subsequent developments. Here we come to a central problem facing all who would take up the crucial but difficult task of crossing the formidable barriers of periodization between the imperial and the post-imperial. Such traversing is crucial for reasons that should be clear to all of us and yet equally difficult given the silences, obfuscations and sometimes willful misappropriations associated with nationalist historiography of almost every stripe. It pervades many facets of our investigations: terminological, thematic and chronological.

Terms

For example, we are here concerned with the question of “minorities” but such a label was itself a creation of the national era. In the pre-modern Ottoman context the term itself did not exist, only coming into use very late in the empire's lifespan. Instead, communal differences within the pluralistic Ottoman concatenation of peoples were expressed in terms of religious confession and to a much lesser extent regional and ethno-linguistic identification. The subject of the non-Muslim communities (millet or cemaat) has been much discussed and debated;³ what is clear is that the notion of a clearly articulated bilateral majority-minority relationship did not exist as we now know it.

The subject of “minorities” only really became a major issue with the almost universal proliferation—and success—of nationally organized states in the modern period. The category of “minority” in the sense we use it today is, naturally enough, determined by our own political and historical context. In other words, during the pre-modern era, the lack of automatic association between a particular people and “their” state made it much less important to be concerned about the status of particular groups of the population, “national” or otherwise (e.g., defined by religion, ethnicity or language or some other categories such as class or status).

A look at some dictionaries helps us to see when this term and presumably therefore the concept began to appear. The term that eventually emerges in Ottoman Turkish to represent “minority” in the sense we understand it generally and in particular in the context of this volume is “akalliyet” (or its variants “ekalliyet” and “aqalliyet”). Now there were other, different ways in which Ottoman Turkish referred to what we have come to think of as minorities; “cemaat” being the more usual term. But they generally refer to any one of the various groups that constituted the empire's population, usually the non-Muslim communities. Minority as an established group that stands in contrast to the preponderance of the population and distinguished from them by the existence or more usually the absence of the same legal status and rights did not yet exist. The term akalliyet is relatively late to appear in Turkish-language lexicons. It does not occur in Meninski's dictionary of the late seventeenth century, Naci's of the 1880s, James Redhouse's (1890) or again in the 1911 version, Şemsettin Sami's Kamus-i Türki (1899–1900), Ali Nazima's lexicon of 1901 or Şemsettin Sami's Dictionnaire Turc-Français of 1911. None of these dictionaries contains the term “ekalliyet.” By contrast, dictionaries designed to provide Ottoman Turkish equivalents of European languages offered the Turkish equivalent somewhat earlier. Thus Şemsettin Sami's Dictionnaire Français-Turc of 1905 lists “akalliyet” as the last of several definitions for “minorité.” Shortly following the foundation of the republic, Commander A. Vahid Bey from the Turkish Navy published A Condensed Dictionary: English-Turkish (Constantinople, 1924). There the term “minority” generates the Ottoman-Turkish equivalents “sabavet” (childhood), “sugar-i sinn” (minor age), and, finally, “aqalliyet.” In this entry Vahid Bey goes even further and explains “rights of minorities” as “aqalliyyetlerin houqouqou.”⁴ Dictionaries cannot adequately reflect linguistic practice or social understanding, but they provide a clear indication that the concept of minority in its current sense was only beginning to come into use in the early years of the twentieth century.

The state

Another factor complicating a simplistic view of the “minority question” is that the Ottoman state's approach was itself changing over the course of the nineteenth century and especially in the first decades of the twentieth century. For example, after the Constitutional or “Young Turk” Revolution of 1908, the new government quickly busied itself with trying to rationalize and homogenize the imperial administration by effacing many of the regional differences and breaking down the various barriers (“national” or otherwise) that had accrued over time. This was essentially an attempt to remove what has been referred to as “empire of difference”⁵ with a linguistically, politically and in many cases ethnically homogeneous bureaucratic structure that would cement loyalty to the empire qua nation state led by a core group who were animated by Muslim (and later Turkish) nationalism. In the event this attempt was firmly rebuffed by many of the groups that it had hoped to attach more firmly to the center. The rejection of the Albanians and many of the Arabs was particularly damaging, given their shared religious identity with the Turkish nationalists but pointed up the difficulties in eliminating distinctions made on religious, ethnic or linguistic grounds during what would later be seen as this period of imperial to national transition. In the process, many of the realities of the period would be rather starkly exposed, including the contrast between the expanding nationalist rhetoric and its diminishing geographical horizons, between the weakness of the state's ability to maintain a far-flung empire and its strength in dictating a range of social, cultural and economic policies, and between the relatively small size of the public sphere and its relative domination, in rhetorical terms at least, by the state.

Peoples

It is important to underscore the remarkably complicated and diverse nature of the Ottoman population. The situation in Macedonia was without doubt the most difficult demographic and, with the advent of nationalism, political problem facing the late Ottoman state. Certainly it was the best known, becoming something of a byword for the complex conglomeration of peoples, languages and faiths in the empire. The competition in and over Macedonia, whether relatively peaceful in the form of linguistic and educational jostling or much more violent in the form of increasingly politicized gang violence (çetecilik), came to symbolize the difficulties inherent in maintaining the authority of the supranational Ottoman state. The inherently incompatible nationalist aspirations created an increasingly intractable problem for the multinational empire. But even in parts of the empire far removed from the Balkans, the demographic situation was far from simple. On the other side of the empire, in the Ottoman provinces that would become Iraq, for example, the diversity of the population was remarkable. An Ottoman official sent into internal exile there in the 1890s counted eight ethnic, twenty confessional and five linguistic groups among its population.⁶ Interestingly for our consideration of the minority question, the report he sent to Istanbul states that those attached to the state in terms of language and religious rite are “in the minority while those opposed are in the majority.” Neither ethnic nor national identity figures in his calculation of what was for him the prime issue, namely, affiliation with the state which he regards as being based firmly on communitarian and linguistic factors, a point which further suggests that we need to approach the issue of majority-minority with caution.

There are further reminders that the eventual “solution” to the demographic and political problems of late imperial rule was far from inevitable, even relatively late in the day. It bears emphasizing that the centralizing, nationalist, secular state was far from a foregone conclusion. In other words, what later came to be seen as a clear trajectory towards the eventual appearance of the modern Turkish state actually emerged out of a far more nuanced late Ottoman context than is generally acknowledged. For example, the trend towards centralization, strong though it undoubtedly appeared, was neither predetermined nor universally supported. In fact, one of the important factions active in the opposition movement that grew up during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) called itself the League of Private Initiative and Decentralization; the idea that the empire could be saved by recourse to regional autonomy was supported by a number of factions, not least the Armenian revolutionary organizations.⁷ Even after the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) were in power after the revolution of 1908, their centralizing agenda was not unopposed. The formation of the Liberal Entente in 1911 and their emerging political success led to the CUP's strong-handed tactics during the “Big Stick” elections of 1912. It is interesting to speculate as to what would have transpired in the aftermath of a counterfactual victory for the Liberals that may well have produced an attempt at a decentralized empire that could have afforded a degree of regional autonomy for the main ethno-national groups in the empire, such as the Rum (i.e., the “Greeks”) and the Armenians.⁸

If we were to explore other supposed certainties of the transition from empire to republic we would see that a much more blurred, nuanced picture emerges. Such notions as secular thought, ethno-linguistic definitions or even the very notion of what constituted the “nation” in the context of the late Ottoman Empire all prove problematic when we examine the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration
• 1 The Ottoman Empire and after: from a state of “nations” to “nation-states”
• 2 Elites and the formation of national identity: the case of the Greek Orthodox millet (mid-nineteenth century to 1922
• 3 Millet legacies in a national environment: political elites and Muslim communities in Greece (1830s–1923)
• 4 Nationalist infiltrations in Ottoman Thrace (ca.1870–1912): the case of the Kaza of Gumuljina
• 5 A minority in a state of flux: Greek self-administration and education in post-Lausanne Istanbul (ca.1923–30)
• 6 The policies of Turkey toward the Ecumenical Patriarchate: the single-party era (1923–45)
• 7 Hostage minority: the Muslims of Greece (1923–41)
• 8 The Ankara Agreement of 1930 and the minorities: reconciliation, normalization or instrumentalization?
• 9 “Tax me to the end of my life!”: anatomy of an anti-minority tax legislation (1942–3)
• 10 Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index