More than a century after the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I, historians continue to blame European powers for this catastrophe as part of a broader indictment of the Western colonial legacy. At the same time, these historians idealize the Ottoman Empire as a shining example of tolerance. Yet overwhelming evidence suggests that the Ottoman entry into the war itself was a failed imperialist bid for territorial aggrandizement and the reassertion of past glory. Nevertheless, this remarkably resistant interpretation remains in place, reflecting a well-established tendency to view Middle Easterners as perpetual victims of the West.
Aksakal’s The War That Made the Middle East is no exception to the conventional wisdom. He presents the Ottoman decision to enter the war as an attempt “to save our people and our homeland” in the face of a century-long “colonial pressure.” He goes further still, dismissing the Ottoman Empire’s long decline (encapsulated in the unflattering label “the Sick Man of Europe”) as “Orientalist imagery” that served to legitimize great power intervention in Ottoman affairs, including “military occupation, annexation, and even colonial rule.” Far from a decrepit entity on its last legs, the Ottoman Empire, Aksakal argues, “was a vital political community in 1914,” presiding over diverse ethno-religious groups in the “spirit of friendship and cooperation.” So much so, in his view, that its destruction “spelled disaster for the people of the Ottoman Empire during the conflict and, arguably, ever since,” especially given that the new states rising from its ruins “proved largely unable to foster domestic peace, force fair and representative government, deliver economic prosperity, and stay out of military conflict.”
It is doubtful whether the empire’s subjects would have concurred with this prognosis. Suffice it to note that throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting across Europe. They did so in response to the nationalist aspirations of their colonial subjects: during the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean War, and the Balkan explosion of the 1870s. Turkey’s Afro-Asiatic provinces, though far less infected with the nationalist virus, were also scenes of mayhem and destruction culminating in the 1890s massacre of tens of thousands of Armenians—a foretaste of the horrendous World War I genocide, when, according to Aksakal, the Ottoman government “killed more of its citizens—men, women, and children—than enemy guns.” (He nevertheless downplays the uniqueness of the Armenian genocide by tracing its roots to “the imperial practices of the Great Powers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the practices of the United States from North America to the Philippines.”)
Nor was the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I a spurned and isolated power in danger of imminent attack. Rather, it occupied the enviable position of being courted by two warring camps: the German-Austro-Hungarian Central Alliance, which sought its participation in the war, and the Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente, which preferred its neutrality. Indeed, on August 18, 1914, less than a month after the outbreak of hostilities, the Triple Entente’s ambassadors to Istanbul assured the grand vizier of the empire’s continued survival provided it stayed out of the war. Five days later, the three powers, at Ottoman request, formalized this pledge in writing. Had the Ottomans accepted this guarantee and kept out of the war, their empire would have readily weathered the storm. But by the time the Entente made its far-reaching proposal, Istanbul had already concluded a secret alliance with Germany, effectively transforming it into a belligerent power.
In other words, the Ottoman Empire did not join the Great War in a last-ditch attempt to ensure its survival. Rather, for Ottoman leaders, war represented not a mortal danger to be averted but a unique opportunity to realize imperial ambitions—first and foremost (in the words of the Ottoman declaration of war), “the destruction of our Muscovite enemy to obtain a natural frontier to our empire, which should include and unite all branches of our race.” But acknowledging this would require abandoning the victimization paradigm that has long informed scholarship.
Efraim Karsh, King’s College, London
