Transcript state-builiding

State-Building
Nationalism, secularism, and great power
politics at the turn of the 20th century
Some questions to consider:
 Islamists are in power in both Iran and Turkey. Why is Turkey so
different from Iran?
 Why is the government in Egypt so different from the government
in Saudi Arabia?
 Why has the military played an important role in the politics of
Turkey?
1914
Two (major) political entities in the region:
 The Ottoman Empire (Egypt, Tunisia)
 Iran
Ten years later…
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Turkey
Egypt
Iraq
Transjordan (later Jordan)
Syria
Lebanon
Saudi Arabia
Iran
The Ottoman Empire:
 the balance among linguistic, regional, and religious
groupings was disturbed by European
interventions and the internal political changes.
The Ottoman decline:
 By the turn of the 20th century the Ottoman state
became unstable.
Keep in mind:
 The religious foundations of Ottoman rule.
Legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire
 As long as loyalty to the empire appeared
consistent with loyalty to the best interests of
Islam (the ties of the ummah were paramount) most
Arab Muslims accepted the legitimacy of the
Ottoman rule.
Modernism, Humanism, political
liberalism, and the Enlightenment.
 A transition from communities of faith to national
communities;
 Secular (universal) citizenship;
 Loyalty to the state and its institutions rather than to
communal (mostly tribal) identities.
 Constitutional government;
 Anti-monarchism
 Religious pluralism, freedom, individualism;
 Unified legal, judicial, educational system;
 The expansion of the state instituions (bureaucracy, surveillance).
The Ottoman swings in opposite
direction:
Constitutionalism;
Religious restoration.
Young Ottomans (bureaucracy):
 Secularization (legal, judicial, educational systems);
 Universal citizenship;
 The 1876 Constitution.
Religious restoration
(sultan Abdul Hamid II)
 Technological and administrative modernization, railways, post
offices, warships but:
 Refurbished the long neglected title of caliph,
 Broadcasting pan-Islamic appeals, and
 Topped up the ranks of his administration with Arabs.
Religious restoration and identity
 Pan-Islamisms
Rather than:
 Ottomanism
1908
 Widespread opposition to the sultan’s tyranny.
 A military rising in Monastir and Salonika (Rumelia);
 The sultan forced to call elections;
 The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) won a
majority across the empire.
The 1908 Young Turk “revolution”
 Officers demand that Abdul Hamid II restore the
constitution.
 On July 24, 1908, the constitution was declared once
again in effect.
The Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP) government
 Overriding aim was the preservation of the
empire, at whatever cost.
 They weren’t liberals but nor were they purely
anti-colonial.
The threats to the Ottoman Empire
 came from European powers or their regional allies,
 but the Young Turks did not reject the West culturally
or politically.
The 1909 counterrevolution
 Led by common soldiers and theological students in Istanbul who
voiced their resentments against the influence of the
Europeanized army officers
 Calling for the restoration of the shari’ah.
 Silenced by the Young Turks.
 Deposition of sultan Abdul Hamid II (succeeded by Mehmed
V).
A transformation of the Ottoman state
was required:
To give it a modern mass base (unifying patriotism).
 What ideological appeal could hold the populations
divided by language, religion and ethnic origin of the
Ottoman Empire together?
The Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP) government
 Abolished the millet system (stressing its commitment to
Ottomanism and to the ideal of preserving all Ottoman territory).
 But could not abandon the Islamic foundation on which
imperial legitimacy had rested.
 Continued to stress the role of the sultan as caliph and to use
Islamic symbols to buttress its own claims to legitimacy.
Italian invasion (Libya)
 Of the North African province of Tripoli (October
1911)
 Ceding Tripoli, some Dodecanese Islands, including
Rhodes
National separatist movements:
(Ottoman European provinces)
 Bulgaria proclaimed its final independence, Austria annexed the
province of Bosnia, Crete declared union with the Greek mainland
(1908);
 Albania proclaimed independence (1912);
 Ousted out of the Balkans (almost entirely) in 1912.
During the Balkan wars
 about 100,000 Turks fled before the armies of Greece and
Serbia;
 15,000 Bulgars fled before the Greek army;
 10,000 Greeks left Serbian and Bulgarian Macedonia;
 70,000 Greeks left Western Bulgaria;
 48,750 Muslims left western parts of the Greek peninsula,
 and 46,764 Bulgars lefts eastern parts of the Greek peninsula.
 In 1914, 265,000 Greeks were expelled from Turkey,
 and 85,000 deported to the interior.
 115,000 Muslims left Greece, and 134,000 left other Balkan
states for Turkey.
The Arab cultural awakening (al nahdah)
 Syria: the source of the first expressions of pre-war
Arabism.
 No organized political movement for national
independence.
Arabism
 Also a means through which some members of the
Arab notable families protested against the CUP’s
attacks on their political and economic status;
 A desire for Arab identity to receive greater
recognition by the government.
 Political decentralization; cultural autonomy.
Arab nationalism:
 Example: a Syrian reformer, Abd al-Rahman al
Kawakibi (1854-1902), suggested that the
Ottomans were responsible for the corruption of
Islam.
 A glorification of the Arab role in the
development of Islamic civilization.
Kawakibi’s Arab nationalism:
 The virtues of Islam – its language, its Prophet, its
early moral and political order – were Arab
achievements.
 The decadence of Islam was caused by practices the
Turks and other non-Arab peoples had introduced
into the ummah.
Arab nationalism:
 called for the Ottomans to relinquish their unjustified
claim to the caliphate
 and to restore the office to its rightful possessors, the
Arabs.
The regeneration of Islam
 would begin with the establishment of an Arab
caliph in Mecca whose responsibilities would be
confined to purely religious matters.
Egyptian nationalism
Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872-1963)
 Did not privilege Islam as the basis of national
regeneration;
 One of the very first nation-state nationalists in the
Arab world.
The early (Arab) nationalists:
 Grappled with conflicting notions of what an Arab
state might look like.
 Some imagined a kingdom centered in the Arabian
peninsula.
 Others aspired to statehood in discrete parts of the
Arab world.
The CUP two-track policy:
 For public consumption, it proclaimed a civic
nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no
matter what their creed or descent.
 On the other hand, it prepared for a more
confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to
Muslims or Turks.
Turkish cultural movement - departure
from Ottomanism (two main currents):
 Pan-Turkism (unifying bonds among all speakers of
Turkish);
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Turkism
 stressed the crucial Turkish contribution to the
success of the Ottoman Empire;
 there was a pre-Islamic culture that distinguished
the Turks from the other inhabitants of the empire.
Prior to the First World War:
 Turkism did not develop into a coherent ideology
defining specifically Turkish national state.
 But the discussion of a Turkish cultural heritage as
distinct from the Ottoman one sowed the seeds for a
Turkish nationalist movement in the postwar era.
The Iranian constitutional revolution
(1905-1911) and the Young Turk revolt:
 Similarity: a way to limit royal autocracy (absolutist
monarchy).
 Difference: the Ottoman constitutional movement
had been founded on a transformed bureaucratic
elite and a reform-oriented officer corps. The
Iranian movement was led by a coalition (merchants,
ulama, European-oriented reformers).
The Iranian constitutional revolution
(1905-1911) and the Young Turk revolt:
 Another important difference: The Iranian
movement was not secularizing constitutional
movement.
 Constitutional clauses stated that Islam was the
official religion of the state.
The Iranian counterrevolution:
 Internal forces: The royalist used ulama loyal to the
shah to denounce the constitutionalists as atheists
and to arouse popular sentiment in favor of the
monarchy.
 External forces: Effective division of Iran (Britain,
Russia)
World War 1
 The Ottomans side with Germany, Austria
Secret agreements
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Italy,
Tsarist Russia,
France,
Arabs
The Constantinople Agreement (1915)
 Britain, France, Russia.
 Awarded Russia the right to annex Istanbul and the
Turkish straights.
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The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916)
 Recognized long-standing French claims to Syria
by awarding France a large zone of “direct
control.”
 Guaranteed the British position in Iraq.
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The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916):
 The independent Arab state lying in the two
zones of British and French indirect influence.
 Palestine was to be placed under international
administration.
Sharif Husayn ibn Ali (the emir of Mecca)
and the British
 British officials sought out a Muslim dignitary who
might be persuaded to ally with the Entente powers
(as a counterweight to the prestige of the Ottoman
sultan-caliph).
The emir of Mecca
 was selected from among those families claiming
direct descent from the Prophet and thus bore the
honorific title of sharif.
Sharif Husayn ibn Ali (the emir of Mecca)
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Sharif Husayn ibn Ali
 Claimed to represent all the Arab people.
 Distrusted the (Ottoman) CUP on both political and religious
grounds.
 The CUP regime is atheistic; it ignores the Quran and the
shari’a.
Husayn-McMahon correspondence
 July 1915 - March 1916
 An exchange of ten letters that lie at the root of a
controversy over whether Britain pledged to
support an independent Arab state.
Husayn:
 Requested British recognition of an independent
Arab state embracing the Arabian peninsula, the
provinces of greater Syria (including Lebanon and
Palestine), and the provinces of Iraq-- essentially
the Arabic-speaking world east of Egypt -- in
exchange for his commitment to lead an armed
rebellion against the Ottomans.
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Britain informed Husayn that
 The areas west of a line from Damascus, Homs,
Hama, and Alepo could not be included in the
proposed Arab state (because its inhabitants were
not purely Arab!!!)
 The real reason: France claimed control over the
Syrian coast.
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Britain promised to provide Husayn with
 supplies,
 weapons, and
 funds for his revolt against the Ottomans.
 To recognize an Arab caliphate should one be
proclaimed.
Husayn committed himself to
 an all-out armed uprising,
 a denunciation of the Ottoman regime as an enemy
of Islam and
 abandoning the Arab claim to coastal Syria.
Husayn and Islamic solidarity:
 Tried to portray his action as a duty to Islam.
 Called on all Muslims of the empire to join him.
 Careful not to attack the caliph, Husayn urged Muslims
to rise up and liberate their caliph from the clutches of
the CUP.
Palestine:
 McMahon’s language was so ambiguous and so
vague that it gave rise to widely conflicting
interpretations.
 Was Palestine included as part of the future
independent Arab state?
British officials later claimed
 that the region was part of the coastal Syrian
territory that had been reserved for France and was
thus excluded from the Arab state.
The Balfour Declaration (1917)
 Britain agreed to favor the establishment of a
Jewish national home in Palestine.
 In an effort to
 secure control over the territory adjacent to the Suez
canal;
 appeal to US, Russian, and German Jewry.
The Versailles Peace Agreements 19191923
 Self-determination (selectively, as it turns out);
 Secret diplomacy, treaties; and
 The League of Nations.
The Treaty of Sevres (August 1920)
 Anatolia: a partition of the original core of the Ottoman
Empire (Italy and France were to divide southwestern
Anatolia between them)
 The (Bosphorus) straits placed under the jurisdiction
of an international commission.
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The Treaty of Sevres (August 1920) cont.
 Granted Thrace to Greece.
 Recognized an independent Armenian state in eastern
Anatolia and Russian Caucasia (with no aid).
 The Kurdish regions of eastern Anatolia would have
a semiautonomous status (but with no aid).
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The San Remo Conference (April 1920)
 Detached the Arab provinces from Ottoman authority and
apportioned them between Britain and France.
 The former provinces were divided into entities called mandates.
 Britain received the mandates for Iraq and Palestine, France the
mandate for Syria.
Sharif Husayn
 Emerged from the war as king of Hijaz.
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The Syrian Kingdom (1918-1920) and the
creation of Transjordan:
 Amir Faysal formed an Arab government in Damascus;
 The government was staffed by young Arab activists with
dreams of a united Syria and Palestine, by ex-Ottoman
officials and military officers who converged on Damascus,
and by prominent local Syrian notables.
In March 1920, a general Syrian congress
 proclaimed Syria an independent state with Faysal
as its king.
 The rebirth of an Arab kingdom on the site of the
former Umayyad imperial capital.
The declaration of Syrian independence
 A usurpation of French claims to the region and a
violation of the Franco-British agreement to divide
the Arab areas.
 Britain had to renounce any support, it may have
been prepared to give Faysal and his Syrian
kingdom.
On July 24, 1920
 the French forces defeated Faysal’s army, occupied
Damascus, and forced the king of Syria into exile
in Europe.
Transjordan:
 Faysal’s brother, Amir Abdallah, led a tribal
contingent from Mecca to Ma’an (a desert town east
of the Jordan river).
 His presence in Ma’an had the potential to rally
dissident tribes in the region.
Transjordan:
 Abdallah was offered the opportunity to set up an
administration in Amman under British administrative
guidance;
 His territory would be part of the Palestine mandate, but it
would be exempted from the stipulation of the Balfour
Declaration.
 The emirate of Transjordan came into existence.
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From the Arab perspective
 Britain had made a pledge it did not honor;
 the Arabs had been misled and then betrayed.
 The British pledges to Husayn had been sacrificed to the
requirements of Allied harmony and imperial selfinterest.
Pushes for independent Arab states
(1919-1920)
 The Syrian delegation to the Paris Peace
Conference;
 The Egyptian demand to participate at te conference
(Egypt’s Revolution of 1919).
Egypt (1919):
 The ancient mosque university of al-Azhar
became one of the centers of the uprising;
 A religious shaykh inside the mosque: “haranguing
an audience of many hundred from the top of a pile
of stones, telling them that hey must scorn death
itself in their efforts to destroy the tyrant, and throw
off his yoke, and promising Paradise to ‘Martyrs’ in
the holy cause”
The Ottoman Empire
 Embodied the achievements of the Islamic past,
 Also offered hope, that a distinctly Islamic state could
survive in a world of expansionist European powers
(the religious foundations of Ottoman rule).
By 1920
 Neither that state nor its Islamic institutions held
sway in the Middle East.
 Its former Arab and Turkish subjects were left adrift.