Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire by Jason Goodwin, Owl Books, 351 pp.; $15, paper
Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey by Nicole and Hugh Pope, Overlook Press, 373 pp.; $16.95, paper
In the horrifying dispatches from the Balkans over the past decade, and the reams of punditry and “news analysis” that followed, one piece of conventional wisdom appeared again and again, virtually unchallenged: the wholly negative role ascribed to the Turks in the history of the region. Every reporter seemed familiar with the Battle of Kosovo (1389)—where, the New York Times insisted in a endlessly repeated subordinate clause, the medieval Serbian nation went to its death. “Premodern state-formation in the Balkans,” intoned William W. Hagen in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, “was short-circuited by the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the region during the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.” The 500-year Ottoman period in the Balkans was dismissed as a bad memory, an era of ethnic and religious bastardization, habituated corruption, and vectorless violence from which the Balkan states began to emerge in the nineteenth century only after a protracted struggle of national liberation. The Muslims of the Balkans, both Turks and Slavs, found themselves defined as outsiders, the illegitimate progeny of a long historical violation. The Republic of Turkey alone is left to absorb the blame for the Ottoman legacy.
But what would happen if instead of seeing them as separate and distinct, we were to study the history of the Balkan states and of modern Turkey together? It might be useful to think again of the states surrounding the Black Sea as linked through the legacies and rivalries of their common parents, the great pre-World War I empires of the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Romanovs.
Such a book has not yet been written. It is of great interest, however, that after several books about the Balkans were published during the 1990s, a new book about the Ottomans and a new book about modern Turkey appeared in bookstores. Jason Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire is, unfortunately, a grave disappointment; Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey, by Nicole and Hugh Pope, on the other hand, in many ways succeeds in presenting a readable interpretation, particularly of the last three decades of Turkish history.
Characterizing all peoples according to certain essential and unchanging national qualities, Goodwin casts the Turks as shamanistic warrior nomads, at odds both with peasant agricultural societies and with urban, orthodox Islam. For Goodwin, the Ottoman genius was to wed the warrior nomads’ (supposed) lifestyle of indiscriminate raiding to the eclectic wizardry of frontier folk religion, raising a roof under which could be sheltered all manner of disaffected medieval adventurer. In time, however, this original, animating spirit of the Ottomans was first tamed, by the guardians of right religion and the counselors of efficient administration, and then cynically subverted by power-hungry dynastic sycophants, until it became a sham of grotesque pomp and opulence and came crashing down around them.
Sometimes this tale can seem highly entertaining, as in Goodwin’s description of Sultan Mehmed II at the siege of Constantinople, or of the cosmopolitan multinationalism of the empire, or of the dogs of the capital city’s streets. It is the kind of entertainment, however, that leaves a vague sense of emptiness, such as you might experience after seeing Disney’s Pocahontas, when you remember it was supposed to have been based on a true story.
Choosing the colorful anecdote over careful analysis, Goodwin does not explain the reasons for the empire’s success. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans he accounts to Providence—but the modern reader needs help in understanding the means by which Providence worked. In the Middle Ages, the great commercial routes linking Europe with the Caucasus, Iran, the Persian Gulf, and the prosperous towns of northern Syria led through Constantinople and the Balkans. The Danube flowed into the Black Sea, and a great highway ran from Constantinople to Buda via Adrianople, Sofia, Niš and Belgrade. The best route to China began with a sea journey across the Black Sea from Constantinople to the Crimea. Thus the Ottoman crossing of the Dardanelles into Europe in 1352 was not the turning point it may seem to us, who divide Europe from Asia so readily at the Straits. Once it had taken Brussa and Nicaea, the Ottoman Empire was naturally to become a Balkan state and a European power, as the Byzantines had been before them.
The defeat of the Balkan princes at Kosovo and the formation of the Ottoman province of Rumeli, encompassing the eastern Balkans, preceded the Ottoman conquest of the other Turkish principalities of the Aegean coast. In imperial protocol the governor of Rumeli was the most important Ottoman provincial official, ranking above and meriting a greater income than his counterparts in all other Ottoman provinces, including Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire was thus, for the first two hundred years of its existence, a Balkan-Anatolian state built upon a solid agrarian and commercial base.
The turning point in Ottoman history came rather when, in 1517, Sultan Selim I attacked the Mamluk Empire and conquered Syria and Egypt. Following as it did the victory over Safavid Iran at Chaldiran in 1514, the defeat of the Mamluks resolved the eastern Mediterranean war that had raged since the late fifteenth century, in favor of the Ottomans. With the conquest of Rhodes (1520), Belgrade (1521), and Iraq (1534), the Ottoman Empire held a virtual monopoly of the great Eurasian trade routes of antiquity.
But the conquest of the Islamic heartland in 1517 fundamentally altered the character of the Balkan-Anatolian empire. Muslims now formed the majority of its population. The conquest of Mecca and Medina gave the sultans the prestige of guardianship of the holy places and management of the pilgrimage, but also laid on them the burden of protecting Islamic tradition. The Ottoman dynasty played a prominent role in maintaining the Holy Cities as a public demonstration of its piety, and over the next four centuries the Ottoman presence in Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina symbolized its leadership of the Islamic world. Hastening to a three-page description of the accession ceremony of Selim’s successor Suleyman the Magnificent, Goodwin mentions the momentous campaign of 1517 in a single sentence at the end of chapter seven.
Of Goodwin’s many mistakes, some are simply factual—the Young Turk revolution occurred in 1908, not 1906, for example. Others result from ignorance of such works as Leslie Peirce’s The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Cornell, 1993), perhaps the most important book on Ottoman political history of the last decade. His neglect of recent literature enables Goodwin to preserve an Ottoman Empire where Mongols are still called “Tartars,” converts to Islam have “turned Turk,” Ottomans are “free with lives” and disdain firearms for “traditional” weapons like bows and arrows, and where the sultan retreats into indolence in the harem while his empire declines due to its tendency to see “wealth as plunder” to be piled up in “glittering heaps.” Goodwin’s Ottoman Empire is drawn in large measure from Euro-American fantasy.
By contrast, Nicole and Hugh Pope’s Turkey Unveiled usually avoids cliches. The authors, who are journalists, have lived in Turkey for nearly a decade, know Turkish, and use Turkish sources. About 60 percent of the book is devoted to events since the military coup of September 12, 1980. The greatest contribution of the book is its reporting of the contents and attitudes of Turkish public opinion and the Turkish press. The authors interviewed numerous public figures, including former President Turgut Ozal, current Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, rightist political leader Alparslan Turkes¸ Chief of the General Staff Dogan Gures;, Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani, novelists Yasar Kemal and Orhan Pamuk, and many others. Most standard histories make Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the central character of the Turkish national story. One of the most important world figures of the twentieth century, Ataturk was an Ottoman general who led the Turkish nationalist forces in the war of independence (1919-1922) and became the first president of the Republic of Turkey. Following recent scholarship, the Popes place Ataturk in a somewhat broader context, that of the Young Turk revolution and the extraordinary violence and human misery of World War I. They devote almost an entire chapter to the Armenian massacres of 1915. Their balanced description points out the differences between this event and the Jewish Holocaust to which it is often compared, and suggests a more apt comparison to the expulsion of Turks from the Balkans in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.
Ataturk and the nationalists emerged victorious only after the Allies, who had partitioned the country and occupied Istanbul, forcing the sultan to sign a treasonous peace, were forced to withdraw, and the Greek army, which had invaded western Anatolia, was defeated. A brutal population exchange between Greece and Turkey completed the upheaval. When a Kurdish revolt against the Republic broke out almost immediately, Ataturk crushed it and imposed a one-party state.
The Popes briefly describe the revolutionary reforms carried out by Ataturk under single party rule between 1923 and his death in 1938. The Islamic courts and academies were closed and the number of ulema limited by law; new civil, commercial and penal codes were written; the international calendar and Western weekend were adopted; the veil was discouraged and the fez outlawed; a modified Roman alphabet replaced the modified Arabic script then in use; women were given full privileges of citizenship and family names adopted; and the state adopted a centralized planning model for the national economy. Impressed with the early results of the Soviet industrialization program, the economic policy makers resolved the debate within Kemalist circles after 1929 in favor of state control, including five-year development plans. The Turkish central government directed economic development by means of state economic enterprises that became industrial conglomerates.
The Popes move quickly on, however, to the less well-known events of the 1940s. Ataturk’s successor, Ismet InOnu, managed to avoid involvement in World War II almost to the end, and subsequently oversaw the transition from single party authoritarianism to multi-party democracy. In the elections of 1950, he was defeated and went graciously into opposition.
The emphasis of the book on the period after 1950 reveals the Popes’ political preferences. Adnan Menderes and his Democrat Party, the victors of 1950, put together a coalition of business and religious interests, using it to move away from central planning and toward a market-oriented Turkish economy, and to build strong ties to the United States. Turkey accepted Marshall Plan aid beginning in 1947, became a member of NATO in 1952, signed an agreement to base thousands of American troops on Turkish soil, and applied for admission to the European Common Market.
The Popes clearly sympathize with Menderes, whose government fell to a military coup in May 1960, drawing a straight line between him and the economic liberalism and pro-American stance of Turgut Ozal in the 1980s. They show that Menderes’s populism pointed up the crucial Turkish social divide, between the educated bureaucrats and officers who always presumed they knew what was best for Turkey, and the basically enterprising, mostly devout, ordinary citizens. They successfully evoke a sense of historical remorse about Menderes’s execution, and point out that it was Ozal who finally gave him a public burial and monument.
The Popes’ evaluation of Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s stresses the spiraling pattern of terrorism and political violence between leftists and rightists, secularists and Islamists, and the parliamentary paralysis of the late 1970s that ended in the 1980 coup. (The Cyprus conflict, which broke open in these years, takes up a separate chapter.)
The coup and its leader, General Kenan Evren, receive generally sympathetic treatment. In terms reminiscent of the 1980s all around the world, Evren hoped to banish the established politicians, whom he blamed for the mess Turkey had gotten itself into, and start over, with a new constitution and fresh faces. Significantly, he gave the reins of the Turkish economy to Ozal, a technocrat who had represented Turkey to international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF before the coup and who advocated a free-market solution to Turkey’s economic problems.
Ozal, who became Prime Minister when elections were held in 1983, and served as President of the Republic from 1989 until his death in 1993, is the real hero of the Popes’ book. They attribute the serious problems of Turkey in the 1990s—graft, the huge gap between the richest and the poor, very high inflation, human-rights abuses, the rise of politicized Islam—to Ozal’s untimely death and inability to complete his economic program. The example of the East-Central European states since 1989 might suggest, however, a more complex explanation that brings together traditional patterns of Turkish political life and the structural changes of the Ozal privatization process.
Turkey Unveiled went to press before the Susurluk scandal broke. In November 1996, near the town of Susurluk in northwestern Anatolia, a truck and a speeding Mercedes collided head on. Riding together in the Mercedes were a notorious underworld figure, a former beauty queen who was his mistress, the deputy police chief of Istanbul who had led anti-guerilla units in the southeast, and a Member of Parliament. The MP and the truck driver survived the wreck. The investigation into the crash, which pursued the obvious question why these individuals were occupants of the same car, revealed close connections between organized crime, state-sponsored death squads, and the highest levels of the Turkish government. Although their interrelationships may have existed before 1980, the structural innovations of the Ozal years exacerbated trends in Turkish society that made them particularly acute.
For one thing, although the army returned to the barracks and martial law was lifted gradually throughout the country in the late 1980s, the new constitution of 1982 gave a significant, on going role in the executive branch of government to the military leadership through its seats on the National Security Council. This has allowed the army to meddle in politics without the necessity of another coup d’etat. And Ozal operated under a tacit arrangement by which the generals allowed a basic restructuring of the Turkish economy and the abandonment of Kemalistetatism in return for a free hand to suppress a Kurdish nationalist revolt in the southeast. The abuse of human rights in Turkey that the Popes lament is directly linked to this war effort.
For another, as suggested above, the Turkish political system functions by means of the relationships of a patron and his clients. One of the principal advantages of public office is the opportunity of the office bearer to distribute privileges through the patronage network. The wide-open, unregulated business environment encouraged by Ozal in the 1980s provided great opportunities for profit to both legitimate and illegitimate commercial interests. Ozal’s program of gradual privatization of state economic enterprises has introduced the possibility of huge profits, as a sizable portion of Turkey’s industrial capacity went on the auction block. This became a tempting target for organized-crime syndicates, which have invested in the process of bidding and sale.
A very rapid transformation produced a class of nouveau riche in Turkey by the mid-1990s, who were generally more conservative and more religious than the populace at large, and often well-educated, especially in technical fields. Members of this new economic class began to demand a greater voice in local and national politics. With electoral success, they began to reap the benefits of the old patronage system, delivering the rewards to a widening group of political neophytes, much to the resentment of the old elites. Since the late 1980s, the practice of using a small, discretionary slush fund at the disposal of the prime minister has grown into a huge means of rewarding clients, or of bribing potential clients. Tansu Ciller came under heavy criticism for her use of this fund, but its creation and careful nurturing were the work of Turgut Ozal, who was notorious for nepotism.
On the other hand, the transition to the market has also hastened the economic dislocation of the lower classes. Since 1980 Turkey’s largest cities, Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Adana, have become swollen by vast squatter settlements, whose populations are increasingly willing to consider novel political alternatives in the hopes of ending their frustrations and bettering their lives. The Islamist Prosperity Party and its successor, the Virtue Party, dominated by the new rich and heavily subscribed by the urban poor, rode this wave in the mid-1990s. The same trend could be seen in the national elections of May 1999, when rightist nationalists won the second largest group of seats in parliament.
None of this will seem extraordinary to those familiar with developments in East-Central Europe, the Balkans, Russia, and the Caucasus since 1989. Turkey Unveiled invites this comparison. Turkey’s economic and social development in this period parallels the former communist states of East-Central Europe better than it does the states of the Islamic Middle East, whether oil states like Shiite Iran or Sunnite Saudi Arabia, or non-oil states like Egypt. Like the states of East-Central Europe, Turkey is experiencing the painful transition to the world market economy; like them its politics is dominated by entrenched bureaucratic elites who face challenges from strong religious and nationalist political movements.
Of course, Turkey is an Islamic country and political dissent is sometimes expressed in a peculiarly Islamic idiom. Yet even Turkey’s Islamists work from thoroughly Republican, democratic assumptions about the political process. When a newly elected female parliamentary deputy arrived in Ankara in May 1999 to take the oath of office wearing a headscarf, she challenged the secularist orthodoxy of Republican Turkey not with Koranic ideology but with human ideals of freedom of conscience that emerge from Turkey’s own experience of the liberal democratic tradition.
Thus the decision by the European union in December 1997 to place Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia on its priority list for expansion but not Turkey came as a disappointment. The EU partly rectified that mistake two years later, accepting Turkey to candidate status. Significant economic difficulties remain to be resolved concerning Turkey’s eventual integration into the EU, but its Europeanness need not be questioned.
Douglas A. Howard is professor of history at Calvin College. His book, The History of Turkey, is forthcoming from Greenwood Press.
NOTE: For your convenience, the following products, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase: • Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, by Jason Goodwin • Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey, by Nicole and Hugh Pope
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