A Peace to End all Peace (6 page)

The British government sent out a new ambassador, Sir Louis Mallet, who was sympathetic to the Young Turks. He too, however, was uninformed about what was happening in Constantinople. Where his predecessor had detected Jewish and German control, Mallet sent dispatches to London that radiated a misleading optimism about the Porte’s intentions. Like the previous ambassador, Mallet failed to understand what the C.U.P. leaders believed Turkey’s interests to be.

In London the Cabinet persisted in accepting Lowther and FitzMaurice’s mistaken notion that the C.U.P. was a monolithic body. Lowther and FitzMaurice had reported that it was controlled by Talaat and Djavid, while according to later reports—followed by most historians—it was ruled by a dictatorial triumvirate of Enver, Talaat, and Djemal. In fact, as the German archives now show, power was wielded by the C.U.P.’s Central Committee of about forty members, and especially by its general directorate of about twelve members who functioned as a sort of politburo, in which personal rivalries abounded. Decisions of the Central Committee were reflected in the positions taken by party members in the Cabinet and in the Chamber of Deputies.

The C.U.P. encompassed a variety of opinions, and was rife with faction and intrigue. There was, however, a consensus about the nature of the threat that the Ottoman Empire faced and about the nature of the policy that ought to be adopted to counter it.

I

The Young Turk outlook on current affairs was colored by the trauma of continuing territorial disintegration. The provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina (in what is now Yugoslavia), nominally still Turkish, were formally annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1908—a troubling move that provided the background in 1914 to the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and the outbreak of the First World War. Italy, a latecomer to imperial expansion, made no secret of her designs on Ottoman territory and, on a flimsy pretext, attacked Turkey and in 1911–12 captured the coast of what is now Libya, as well as Rhodes and other islands off the Turkish coast. At about the same time, Albania revolted against Ottoman rule, raising a serious question as to whether the empire could hold the loyalties of its non-Turkish subjects.

Meanwhile, in the First Balkan War (1912–13) the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia) defeated Turkey and annexed almost all of the territory the Ottoman Empire still held in Europe. In the Second Balkan War (1913), the Ottoman Empire managed to regain some territory in Thrace, immediately across the water from Asiatic Turkey; but that looked to offer merely a brief respite in the empire’s continuing disintegration. In Constantinople, the band of Young Turk adventurers who had seized power and who ruled the empire as the Sultan’s ministers, feared that their domains were in mortal danger and that the European predators were closing in for the kill.

Only a short time before, the nations of Europe had divided up the African continent among themselves. Some of them were now hungry for new conquests. There were not many directions in which they could look. Much of the surface of the globe was already taken: a quarter by the British Empire and a sixth by the Russian Empire. The western hemisphere fell within the ambit of the Monroe Doctrine and thus was shielded by the United States. The Middle East was the only vulnerable region left. There were rumors of French ambitions in Syria; of Italian and Russian designs further north; and of rival Greek, Bulgarian, and Austrian claims to the west. Beyond the campfires, the C.U.P. leaders could sense the animals in the dark moving in for the attack.

II

The C.U.P. leadership was convinced that its program of freeing the empire from European control—a program that British statesmen, among others, either did not know about or did not understand—would precipitate the attack. Ambivalent in its attitude toward Europe—scorning it as non-Moslem, while admiring its modern ways and achievements—the C.U.P. intended to throw off the shackles of Europe in order to imitate Europe more closely. The Young Turks seem to have had no coherent plan for bringing European economic domination to an end, but they wanted, somehow, to do it.

A vital item on the C.U.P.’s internal agenda was the modernization of transport and communications. European interests were willing to supply the networks and systems which the Ottoman Empire lacked, but of course wanted to own them, preferably on the basis of exclusive concessions. The C.U.P. leaders, like other Ottoman leaders before them, wanted the European technologies to be introduced but were determined to avoid European ownership or control. During the nineteenth century, Turkey had created her own postal service, even though it coexisted within the empire alongside postal services maintained for themselves by various European powers.
¹
Rejecting an offer from a British company, the Ottoman Empire also created its own telegraph network.
²
A few telephones were in use in Constantinople and Smyrna in 1914; a foreign group had been given a concession to install a telephone system in Constantinople in 1911, but had not made much progress.
³

The coming of the steamship had put Ottoman maritime traffic largely in the hands of foreign interests.
⁴
Such as they were, the empire’s few railway lines were also in foreign hands.
^*
There were few roads and still fewer automobiles to make use of them: 110 in Constantinople and 77 elsewhere by 1914. The traditional form of transportation was the caravan of camels, horses, mules, and animal-drawn carts—and it could not compete against the foreign-owned railroads. The usual speed of a mixed caravan was between two and three miles an hour, and its daily stage was only between fifteen and twenty miles.
⁶
Railroad speeds were at least ten times greater, and the railroad cost of transporting goods was perhaps only 10 percent of the caravan cost.
⁷

The C.U.P. dilemma lay in wanting to switch from caravan to railroad without allowing the empire to pass into the control of the Europeans who owned the railroads. Europeans already exercised an economic preponderance which the C.U.P. resented but could do nothing about. Turkey was in the unequal position of being able to supply only natural resources and having to import her manufactured needs. Industrialization was necessary in order to redress the balance; but the Porte had no program to achieve it. The empire could supply only unskilled labor; as the Europeans constructed railroads and other types of machinery, they brought along Europeans to maintain them. Technical training for the local population was what was needed; again the Porte had no program to provide it.

Europeans also shared in the control of what is at the heart of a political entity: its finances. Because the Porte had defaulted on a public debt of more than a thousand million dollars in 1875, the Sultan was obliged to issue a decree in 1881 that placed administration of the Ottoman public debt in European hands. A council was created for the purpose and was given control of almost one-quarter of the Ottoman Empire’s revenues. It wielded exclusive authority over the customs duties on such basic items as alcoholic spirits, stamps, salt, and fish.
⁸
The Sublime Porte was no longer master even of its own Treasury or Customs House. The C.U.P. wanted to take back control in these areas, though it had no refinancing program to propose.

Bitterly resented by all Ottoman leaders were the Capitulations, the concessions that provided Europeans with a privileged economic position within the empire and which placed them for many purposes under the jurisdiction of their own consuls rather than of the Ottoman courts. No Turkish policeman could enter the premises of a European or American without the permission of the latter’s consul. The C.U.P. wanted to cancel these Capitulation privileges.

Another ground for C.U.P. resentment was that the European powers had, on occasion, violated Ottoman sovereignty in intervening in defense of Christian minorities and Christian rights. The European disposition to do so posed a threat to the C.U.P.’s secret agenda, for the Young Turks proposed to assert their power not only against foreigners but also against other groups inhabiting the empire. This ran contrary to what they had pledged in 1908. The public program of the C.U.P. had called for equal rights for all the many religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups that resided within the empire. Once in power the C.U.P. showed the dark side of its nationalism by asserting instead the hegemony of Turkish-speaking Moslems over all others. The Turkish-speaking and Arabic-speaking populations of the empire were roughly equal—each about 10 million people, or about 40 percent of the total population apiece—yet in the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies there were perhaps 150 Turks as against only about 60 Arabs. (The figures are not exact because it is not clear in every case who was Arab and who was Turk.) The remaining 20 percent of the population, including the important Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Jewish communities, was discriminated against even more severely than were the Arabs. According to the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1910–11), the Ottoman Empire at the time was inhabited by twenty-two different “races”, yet “no such thing as an Ottoman
nation
has ever been created.” If ever there were a chance of creating one, the C.U.P. leaders threw it away by excluding 60 percent of the population from its purview.

Talaat, Enver, and their colleagues were nationalists without a nation. Within the empire (as distinct from the steppes to its east), even those who spoke Turkish were often of non-Turkish origin. Sir Mark Sykes, a British Member of Parliament who had traveled extensively in Asia, began one of his books by asking: “How many people realize, when they speak of Turkey and the Turks, that there is no such place and no such people…?”
⁹
The ancient homeland of the Turkish peoples, Turkestan, was in the possession of Russia and China. More than half the Turkish peoples of Asia lived either there or elsewhere outside the Ottoman Empire, so that the Czar could lay greater claim to speak for the ethnic Turks than could the Sultan. Enver Pasha was later associated with the dream of reuniting all the Turkish-speaking peoples and domains of Asia, and certainly the idea was familiar to him in 1914—intellectually it was in the air—but, as of then, it did not enter into his plans. A small man, much addicted to theatrical gestures and to large programs that began with the prefix “pan-,” Enver was also supposed to harbor pan-Islamic ambitions. His treatment of Arab fellow-Moslems shows that this, too, was a slogan that he did not translate into policy.

In the view of the C.U.P. leadership, Europe would not let the empire survive in any event—and certainly would not allow the C.U.P. to carry through its program—unless one of the Great Powers could be induced to become Turkey’s protector. Thus the search for a European ally was the urgent and overriding item on the C.U.P. agenda. Djemal Pasha was pro-French, but when eventually he heard that Enver had proposed an alliance with Germany, he approvingly commented that “I should not hesitate to accept any alliance which rescued Turkey from her present position of isolation.”
¹⁰

III

All shades of opinion within the C.U.P. were in agreement that the most urgent item on Turkey’s agenda was to secure a powerful European ally. The Young Turks believed that one of the European blocs or indeed any one of the leading Great Powers—Britain, France, or Germany—could protect the Ottoman Empire against further encroachments on its territory. Other than Russia, the countries that were most likely to invade the Ottoman Empire were powers of lesser strength: Italy, Austria-Hungary, Greece, or Bulgaria.

Djavid, the pro-British C.U.P. Minister of Finance, had already appealed to Britain. His appeal had been made in 1911, at the time of the initial Italian attack on Turkey. Churchill was the only senior Cabinet minister who had wanted to respond positively. Arguing that Turkey’s friendship was more important than Italy’s, Churchill wrote to the Foreign Secretary that Turkey “is the greatest land weapon wh the Germans cd use against
us
.”
¹¹
At the end of 1911, when Djavid wrote to propose a permanent alliance with Britain, Churchill wanted to send an encouraging reply, but the Foreign Office would not agree to his doing so.
¹²

Between May and July 1914, with increasing urgency the C.U.P. leaders secretly approached three other European Great Powers in search of an ally.
¹³
Djemal, the Minister of Marine, who was pro-French, made overtures to France but was rebuffed. Talaat, in desperation, approached Russia—which was like asking the chief burglar to become chief of police—and his proposal, too, was rebuffed. Finally, the C.U.P. leaders conferred together at the villa of the Grand Vizier and authorized Enver, who had served in Berlin, to approach Germany with a request for an alliance. Enver made his approach on 22 July 1914. His proposal was turned down by Hans von Wangenheim, Germany’s ambassador in Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic isolation was complete; no Great Power would agree to protect it.

The Ottoman War Minister was quite open in explaining to the German ambassador why the Young Turks were seeking an ally. Enver explained to von Wangenheim that the domestic reforms planned by the C.U.P. could be carried out only if the Ottoman Empire were “secured against attacks from abroad.”
¹⁴
He expressed his belief that the empire could be secured against such attacks only by “the support of one of the groups of Great Powers.”
¹⁵
Apparently he was unable to persuade the German ambassador that the Ottoman Empire had anything of sufficient value to give in return.

The government of Britain, meanwhile, was unaware of the flurry of Turkish diplomatic activity and did not realize that the Porte was urgently seeking a Great Power alliance. A few days after the German ambassador in Constantinople rejected the Ottoman proposal, British ministers received their first intimation that a war crisis might arise in Europe that could involve Britain. Between 23 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia, and 4 August, when Britain unexpectedly found herself at war alongside the Entente Powers (France and Russia) and against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), few thoughts were spared for the Ottoman Empire; but to the extent that they were, the common assumption was that Germany might attempt to entice the Ottoman Empire into an alliance.

British leaders at the time never suspected that it was the other way around: that Turkey was seeking an alliance with Germany, and that Germany was reluctant to grant it. Even after the war was over, when it was discovered that Talaat and Enver had sought the alliance, details of how the Ottoman Empire and Germany forged their alliance remained obscure. Contemporaries and a number of historians blamed Winston Churchill, who was said to have driven the Turks into Germany’s arms; but the still-emerging evidence from diplomatic archives tells a different and more complex story—which began in 1914, on the eve of a sudden war crisis that neither Churchill nor his Cabinet colleagues had foreseen.