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Back in the days when this columnist used to take groups of American students to Turkey, the “study abroad” trips always included a stop at Gallipoli. The course I prepared for students was about different political ideologies and identities in Turkey rather than just an overview of the country’s history. During our visits to Gallipoli, as a result, I would take my small group of students with me to shadow a Turkish tour group visiting the Gallipoli battlefields and cemeteries, quietly translating for my students whatever the Turkish tour guide was telling his group.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate how a diverse group of Ottoman soldiers, fighting under the orders of a Muslim empire in 1915, were transformed into brave Turks fighting for the Turkish nation-state. The Turkish tour groups, almost all sporting a distinctive baseball-style cap issued to such tours, listened attentively as their guides described the heroic sacrifices of the young “Turks” fighting to defend their homeland. I would then have my students go through the Ottoman cemetery and note the birthplaces of the soldiers buried there – cities such as Aleppo, Kirkuk, Jerusalem, Mosul, Diyarbakir and, once in a while, proper Turkish locales such as Erzurum and Samsun.
The Ottoman Empire still enjoyed a significant amount of ethnic diversity in 1915, of course, and there is no way that the Kurdish, Arab, Circassian and other soldiers in Gallipoli saw themselves as “Turks” fighting to defend a Turkish nation-state. They more likely viewed themselves as Muslims defending against Christian invaders from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Today, a Kurd from Aleppo whose grandfather died wearing an Ottoman uniform in Gallipoli would simply be an outsider at best, and an enemy of the Turkish nation at worst.
The same Turkish nationalism that defined away the identity of many who fought for the Ottoman Empire, however, had the virtue of thus at least limiting its ambitions to the territory it controlled. Whatever his faults and sins, Kemal Ataturk was no imperialist – he sought to control only the territory that the Treaty of Lausanne accorded him in 1923, preferring to prudently match his ambitions to his means. He also sought to bury his people’s enmity with Europe, despite all the bitterness and devastation that World War One had left in people’s mouths. I would thus also show my students a plaque at Gallipoli attributed to Ataturk in 1934:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ... You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
Whether or not Ataturk really said this matters little, of course. The sentiment expressed in the inscription exemplified Kemalism’s attempt to make peace with Europe and the past, in order to move forward towards the future. Although modern Turks still harbored plenty of suspicion towards Europeans (often referred to as the Sèvres complex), they were able to put these emotions behind them, join NATO and associate themselves with the European Community. In the process, they also worked hard to shed an Ottoman imperialist past and the religion-based politics of their forefathers.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in contrast, seems enamored with a completely different vision. A hundred years after the end of World War One, Mr. Erdogan increasingly speaks of reclaiming Ottoman glories, traditions and even lands. In the case of northern Syria, he seems well on his way towards imperial (re)conquest. His ambition to lead the Sunni world has put him on a collision course with Saudi Arabia. He has thrived on stoking his people’s distrust and animosity for the West, accusing especially the Americans of all manner of things. His new subjects, such as the Syrian Arab opposition groups, fight his enemies just as any number of such groups did for various Ottoman sultans. His Syrian Arab proxies fly the Turkish flag along with their newly redesigned Syrian flag, which replaces the old flag’s three stars with the Arabic Shahada proclaiming one God and Mohammed as his prophet.
In all of this, one must wonder if Mr. Erdogan is leaving out the good aspects and only taking the absolute worst from Ottomanism and Turkish nationalism. Ataturk’s prudence and aversion to irredentism gets replaced with Ottoman imperialist dreams, while the Ottomans’ decentralization and liberal attitude towards different ethnic groups and their languages and cultures gets overshadowed by Turkish nationalism’s insistence on “one nation, one land, one state.” Under Mr. Erdogan, Ataturk’s willingness to make peace with Europe gets overshadowed by an Ottoman-style desire to compete with the West, even though the Turkish state’s relative power lags far behind what the Ottomans could muster. In the process, refined Ottoman diplomacy also gets dropped in favor of a much coarser modern populist style of confrontations with foreign leaders.
He might have combined the liberal elements of Ottomanism with the prudent limits of Kemalist nationalism. Instead, we can all look forward to an irredentist, ambitious amalgamation of Islamism and intolerant nationalism.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate how a diverse group of Ottoman soldiers, fighting under the orders of a Muslim empire in 1915, were transformed into brave Turks fighting for the Turkish nation-state. The Turkish tour groups, almost all sporting a distinctive baseball-style cap issued to such tours, listened attentively as their guides described the heroic sacrifices of the young “Turks” fighting to defend their homeland. I would then have my students go through the Ottoman cemetery and note the birthplaces of the soldiers buried there – cities such as Aleppo, Kirkuk, Jerusalem, Mosul, Diyarbakir and, once in a while, proper Turkish locales such as Erzurum and Samsun.
The Ottoman Empire still enjoyed a significant amount of ethnic diversity in 1915, of course, and there is no way that the Kurdish, Arab, Circassian and other soldiers in Gallipoli saw themselves as “Turks” fighting to defend a Turkish nation-state. They more likely viewed themselves as Muslims defending against Christian invaders from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Today, a Kurd from Aleppo whose grandfather died wearing an Ottoman uniform in Gallipoli would simply be an outsider at best, and an enemy of the Turkish nation at worst.
The same Turkish nationalism that defined away the identity of many who fought for the Ottoman Empire, however, had the virtue of thus at least limiting its ambitions to the territory it controlled. Whatever his faults and sins, Kemal Ataturk was no imperialist – he sought to control only the territory that the Treaty of Lausanne accorded him in 1923, preferring to prudently match his ambitions to his means. He also sought to bury his people’s enmity with Europe, despite all the bitterness and devastation that World War One had left in people’s mouths. I would thus also show my students a plaque at Gallipoli attributed to Ataturk in 1934:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ... You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
Whether or not Ataturk really said this matters little, of course. The sentiment expressed in the inscription exemplified Kemalism’s attempt to make peace with Europe and the past, in order to move forward towards the future. Although modern Turks still harbored plenty of suspicion towards Europeans (often referred to as the Sèvres complex), they were able to put these emotions behind them, join NATO and associate themselves with the European Community. In the process, they also worked hard to shed an Ottoman imperialist past and the religion-based politics of their forefathers.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in contrast, seems enamored with a completely different vision. A hundred years after the end of World War One, Mr. Erdogan increasingly speaks of reclaiming Ottoman glories, traditions and even lands. In the case of northern Syria, he seems well on his way towards imperial (re)conquest. His ambition to lead the Sunni world has put him on a collision course with Saudi Arabia. He has thrived on stoking his people’s distrust and animosity for the West, accusing especially the Americans of all manner of things. His new subjects, such as the Syrian Arab opposition groups, fight his enemies just as any number of such groups did for various Ottoman sultans. His Syrian Arab proxies fly the Turkish flag along with their newly redesigned Syrian flag, which replaces the old flag’s three stars with the Arabic Shahada proclaiming one God and Mohammed as his prophet.
In all of this, one must wonder if Mr. Erdogan is leaving out the good aspects and only taking the absolute worst from Ottomanism and Turkish nationalism. Ataturk’s prudence and aversion to irredentism gets replaced with Ottoman imperialist dreams, while the Ottomans’ decentralization and liberal attitude towards different ethnic groups and their languages and cultures gets overshadowed by Turkish nationalism’s insistence on “one nation, one land, one state.” Under Mr. Erdogan, Ataturk’s willingness to make peace with Europe gets overshadowed by an Ottoman-style desire to compete with the West, even though the Turkish state’s relative power lags far behind what the Ottomans could muster. In the process, refined Ottoman diplomacy also gets dropped in favor of a much coarser modern populist style of confrontations with foreign leaders.
He might have combined the liberal elements of Ottomanism with the prudent limits of Kemalist nationalism. Instead, we can all look forward to an irredentist, ambitious amalgamation of Islamism and intolerant nationalism.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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