“In the Unbreakable Stream of a Wide, Monolithic Movement:” A History of the Turkish Concept of Sovereignty, 1908-1925 By Necdet Emre Kurultay Course: HIST 449, Honours Graduating Essay Instructor: Dr. Robert Brain A graduating thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in The Faculty of Arts History Department We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard Supervisor: Dr. Pheroze Unwalla Committee Members: Dr. Robert Brain and TBA University of British Columbia April 21, 2020 K u r u l t a y | 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...…………………………………………..….………3 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………..………….…...……...4 CHAPTER I: Training Tortoises and the Concept of Sovereignty………………………………………………………………..…………..…...17 CHAPTER II: Politics of Sovereignty in a New Makam…………..…………...……40 CHAPTER III: Sovereignty in a State of Exception................................................56 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….……...…...73 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………..….77 K u r u l t a y | 3 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Pheroze Unwalla, for all the support and guidance that he has given me throughout the year. I am particularly grateful for the help he has provided me in editing and commenting on the many thesis drafts I have sent him over the course of this past year. I can safely say that, in the end, he certainly made me a better writer. I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to Dr. Robert Brain. Ever since I took his course on Politics and Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Europe back in 2016, he has adamantly supported my intellectual growth as a scholar. Our conversations made me think not just about my subject on a deeper level, but also about the relationship between writing history and theory. I also thank Dr. Coll Thrush and Dr. John Roosa for always making sure that I was the best scholar of history that I could be. I would also like to thank Dr. Steven Taubeneck for being a mentor and helping me to become a better thinker. Moreover, I thank my friends for taking the time to read and edit my work throughout the year and for their help in enduring these times of crisis together. Above all, however, I would like to thank my family for always encouraging me and my intellectual pursuits. I would never have been able to write this thesis without their love and support. Finally, I want to express my deepest love and gratitude to the wonderful Begüm Görgüliçten for always being there whenever I needed her the most. I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my late grandmother. K u r u l t a y | 4 Introduction On October 31st, 1918, the commander of the British Black Sea squadron Admiral Calthorpe and the Ottoman Minister of the Navy Huseyin Rauf Bey signed the Armistice of Mudros on board of the HMS Agamemnon, thereby officially bringing the hostilities between the Entente and the Ottoman Empire to an end. For Erik Jan Zürcher, a scholar who has established himself as one of the foremost authorities on the history of modern Turkey, the Armistice “really amounted to an Ottoman capitulation.”1 Indeed, “the 25 articles contained provisions such as the military occupation of the Straits, control by the Entente of all railway and telegraph lines, demobilization and disarmament of the Ottoman troops, except for small contingents needed to keep law and order, surrender by all Ottoman troops in the Arab provinces and the freeing of all Entente prisoners of war in Ottoman hands (but not the other way round).”2 Furthermore, and perhaps worst of all, Article 7 stipulated that “each member of the Entente has the right to occupy any place in the Empire if it considered its security to be under threat.”3 The wartime leaders of the Empire, the Triumvirate of Pashas and the members of their Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), had already left the country by the time that the Armistice was concluded.4 1 Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 133. 2 Zürcher, 134. 3 “Mondros Ateşkes Antlaşması,” in Devletlerarası Hukuku ve Siyasi Tarih Metinleri, ed. Nihat Erim, (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1953), 520. 4 The origins of this movement can be traced back to 1889 when four students in the Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Şahane (Military Medical College) in Istanbul, Mehmet Reşit, İbrahim Temo, Abdullah Cevdet, İshak Sükuti, founded the İttihad-i Osmani Cemiyeti (Ottoman Unity Society). It is notable that of these four students, only one was ethnically Turkish—the others came from Albanian, Kurdish, and Circassian backgrounds respectively. This would reflect the multi-national character of the movement when it later expanded to such an extent that by 1896, it was forced to relocate its headquarters due to increasing pressure from Abdülhamit II’s intelligence organization, the Hafiye Teşkilatı. Now based in Paris, the Society was renamed İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress) to reflect the unity of its multi-national membership, even if prominent members of the CUP somewhat contradictorily called themselves les Jeunes Turcs in French circles. With mounting dissent against Abdülhamit II’s regime—especially due to the Armenian Crisis of 1894-1896, in which the newly formed Hamidian Regiments massacred some 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians—the CUP’s numbers grew significantly. Another factor that accounted for this trend was the mounting discontent within the army between 1906 and 1908 due to significant K u r u l t a y | 5 This move made sense, given the fact that the Entente had announced its intentions to bring the CUP leaders to trial as far back as in 1915.5 The new Ottoman government, under the leadership of the Grand Vizier Ahmet Izzet Pasa and Sultan Mehmet VI, acted in accordance with this proclamation; given its weakened position, however, the government failed to pursue the Unionists and indeed they never appeared in court. Except for the military leader of the Triumvirate, Enver Pasha, all members of the CUP leadership were assassinated by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation by 1922 as part of the so-called “Operation Nemesis.”6,7 The immediate aftermath of the First World War thus signified for the Ottoman Empire a crisis of sovereignty. As Bernard Lewis—another eminent name in the field of modern Turkish history—writes, “There was indeed little room for hope. Exhausted by eight years of almost continuous warfare, the once great Ottoman Empire lay supine in defeat, its capital occupied, its leaders in flight. The country was shattered, impoverished, depopulated, and demoralized.”8 Continuing to write with dramatic flair, Lewis adds that this situation “kindled the smouldering anger of the Turks into an inextinguishable blaze…the Turks were ready to rise against the inflation and the payment of officers’ salaries increasingly in arrears: by the summer of 1908, the majority of the new members of the CUP were army officers. Combined with this trend of increasing CUP power, the meeting in June 1908 between Tsar Nicholas II and King Edward VII at Reval (Tallinn) regarding the settlement of the Macedonian problem—which would have established the de jure independence of Macedonia and left the Sultan with only formal suzerainty—became the decisive event that triggered the revolution of July 1908. In a well- coordinated campaign, the aforementioned officers took to the hills of Tikveš (Tikvesh) and Ohri (Ohrid) in Northern Macedonia with their troops and demanded the restoration of the constitution. These officers believed that this would be the only way to restore unity among the different ethnic groups of the Empire while forestalling foreign intervention at the same time. Ultimately, the Sultan gave in to the demands of the insurgents, and on the night of 23 July 1908, he announced the restoration of the Constitution and the reconvening of the Parliament. 5 Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 134. 6 Zürcher, 134. 7 For more on the Young Turks and the CUP, see Aykut Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), Banu Turnaoǧlu, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: the Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908–14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Şerif Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri 1895– 1908 (Ankara: Türkiye İş Bankasi, 1964) and his Continuity and Change in the Ideas of the Young Turks (Istanbul: Robert College School of Business Administration and Economics, 1969), and Şükrü Hanioǧlu, Preparation for a Revolution: Young Turks, 1902-1908 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 8 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 241. K u r u l t a y | 6 invader—only the leader was awaited.”9 When Mustafa Kemal assumed this role, the ensuing struggle for Turkish independence, according to Lewis, naturally culminated in Turkish victory.10 Indeed, the Treaty of Sèvres, which was signed by the Ottoman government on August 10th, 1920, counted for little when the Grand National Assembly—founded under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal by the Kuva-yi Milliye (the Turkish Nationalist Movement) on April 20th, 1920—voted to strip those who signed the Treaty of their Turkish citizenship and formally declared war on the Allied powers and on the Ottoman government.11 After its decisive victory in the Turkish War of Independence, the Kuva-yi Milliye signed the Treaty of Lausanne with the Allies, and shortly thereafter, the Turkish Republic was proclaimed on October 29th, 1923, which ultimately secured the sovereignty of the Turkish people—an outcome that resembles the ending of a story more closely than it does historical reality.