THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE BETWEEN SUCCESSORS: THINKING FROM 1821 TO 1922

Christine Philliou

I. Introduction

In the past twenty years, mention of the Ottoman past has entered the fray of current events and popular discussions about history rather more than in the several decades before. Unfortunately, the occasion for this renewed relevance of Ottoman history has been the ethnic vio- lence and foreign, oft en United States, military intervention in the ‘Balkans’ and the ‘Middle East–indeed a kind of modern rendition of the nineteenth-century ‘Eastern Question.’ In such discussions people oft en search for the origin of current problems in the fi rst round of the Eastern Question—the era of transition between the Ottoman and post-Ottoman spaces, which, in this schema, is the First World War broadly speaking—in fact from the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 through the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922, or most broadly speaking, from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the same endpoint in 1922. Indeed if we take that frame in and of itself, the Balkans and the Middle East are the regions that emerged out of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, leaving what is now Turkey the ‘rump’ state, the fi nal successor that would not have been if not for the Mustafa Kemal-led Turkish national movement.1 In popular narratives there are both distinctions and parallels between the formation of the Balkans and the Middle East out of the Ottoman Empire. On one level, Balkan states emerged piecemeal as independent entities on the Great Power negotiating table, out of the coincidence between particular international and geopolitical con- junctions and local, oft en apparently ethnic or sectarian confl icts (the ‘Bulgarian Horrors;’ the Ilinden Uprising, etc.). Th e states of the Middle East took shape within a shorter period and for the most part emerged

1 See von Hagen, Mark and Karen Barkey, eds., Aft er Empire: Multi-ethnic Societies and Nation-building: Th e Soviet Union and Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997). 30 christine philliou from Ottoman sovereignty not as independent states but as British or French Mandate authorities out of the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Versailles. Th ere is good reason that this has become the pop- ular conception of the transition from Ottoman to post-Ottoman space, or, less politely, of the fi nal disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and we continue to see the legacies of this period, not simply in the ethnic violence that has gone on there recently but in the incidence of foreign intervention and occupation that continues there. On another level, in scholarship on the formation of the Balkans and the Middle East the two are analysed as constructs formed in the European imagination out of this transition from Ottoman to post- Ottoman space. Edward Said opened this discussion regarding the ‘Orient’ and Maria Todorova has examined analogous processes of imagination and discourse with regard to the Balkans.2 Both areas were/are perceived by outsiders in the ‘West’ as backward and stagnant, in part, as the narrative goes, thanks to centuries of Ottoman rule, and both Said and Todorova make fascinating connections between the production of knowledge and discourse and the formulation of politi- cal policies toward the two regions in the twentieth century and beyond. Th e work of Said and Todorova, and indeed the entire historiogra- phies they have generated, complicate and question modern narratives and political projects regarding the Middle East and Balkans, but in doing so reinforce the Middle East and Balkans focus for our atten- tions. Th is Balkans-Middle East axis has become the natural delinea- tion in the popularly remembered Ottoman Empire—with the Balkans being characteristically Slavic and Christian and the Middle East char- acteristically Arab and Muslim—whether it be to criticize or uphold the power relations that created these regions.3 I open with this Balkans- Middle East axis not in the hopes of off ering new insights on the popu- lar history nor on the voluminous and excellent scholarship that has been published regarding these events and regions. Rather, I refer to this popular frame for conceptualizing the post-Ottoman space so as to contrast it with the one that we, as scholars focusing on the Ottoman

2 See Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); and Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3 Th is is not to deny that there are important populations of non-Slavs and non- Christians in the Balkans or of non-Arabs and non-Muslims in the Middle East, nor that there are many scholars working on the history and experiences of these pop- ulations, but only to delineate the popular understandings of the respective regions.