For subsequent Turkish policy-makers, as well as the Turkish people, the most obvious and important lesson of the Ottoman state’s long period of struggle and decline since the late eighteenth century was that, territorially and structur- ally, the Empire was not sustainable and could not be recreated. In effect, the late Ottoman rulers had been engaged in a long project of damage limitation, which had ultimately failed. Through careful diplomacy, they had been able
to slow down the decline but they had never been able to create a long enough breathing space to reconstruct and modernize the Empire effectively, and might well have been unable to do so even if they had managed to secure external stability. The European powers had paid lip service to the principle of Ottoman sovereignty, and had frequently repeated the claim that they respected the Empire’s territorial integrity, but in reality this respect was usually a fiction. The process of dismemberment of the Empire had been a long and gradual one, rather than a single and cataclysmic collapse, as many had predicted. Most commonly, a subject community would rise in revolt, would be defeated by the Ottomans, but would then win autonomy within the Empire thanks to support by one or more of the European powers. Autonomy would eventually be converted into full independence, after the next Ottoman defeat and a respectable length of time. This story had been repeated in the case of Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and finally Albania. Even when the Ottoman armies won a clear victory against an enemy state – as in the case of Greece in 1897 – political pressure by the European powers had reversed the verdict of the battlefield. In effect, the late Ottoman Empire had apparently been locked into a no-win situation.
This experience did not mean that the tactic of exploiting the balance of power had been wrong. The greatest mistake made by Ottoman foreign policy had been in 1914, when Enver had abandoned it (though how long the Ottoman Empire might have survived if it had remained neutral in 1914 is still an unans- werable question). At the same time, there were certain inescapable conclusions to be drawn from the late Ottoman experience. First, the future Turkish state would have to draw afirm line round those territories that it could reasonably expect to defend, either by itself or, if absolutely necessary, with the support of allies whose long-run interests were very close to its own. For the most part, this meant the territory inhabited by ethnic Turks, or other Muslims who were willing to integrate into or cooperate with the Turkish state. Ethnic Turks outside these boundaries could not be protected, except in rare cir- cumstances where Turkish military force could be brought to bear.49 Second,
the nineteenth century experience encouraged a highly suspicious attitude towards any expressions of religious or ethnic separatism by non-Muslim or non-Turkish minorities remaining in Turkish territory. This derived not from innate prejudice but from the perception that, in the past, such movements had been used by rapacious foreign powers as a mask to hide their own imperialist ambitions. This reaction ignored the genuine humanitarian sym- pathies that might exist abroad for such minorities, but was none the less real for all that. The huge influx of refugees resulting from the Empire’s contraction reinforced this feeling of betrayal by the west and led to a high degree of integration of the newcomers into the existing Turkish population of Anatolia. The modern Turkish nation was born in this melting pot.50
In other circumstances, this might have produced a nation of xenophobes, determined to cut themselves off from the outside world. That this was not so in the Turkish case was primarily due to the fact that, for the political elite,
the western nation-state and its values still retained a powerful attraction as the sole practical model for national reconstruction– political, economic and cultural. Those outside the elite might still prefer traditional or Islamic values– as they were perfectly entitled to do – but only the most eccentrically conservative could deny the importance of western economic and technical achievements, or refuse to emulate them. The result was something of a love– hate relationship with the west. There was a natural desire to emulate the west in technical, economic and military terms, and to be recognized as a respected member of the western community of nations. This was balanced by a suspi- cion of western motives, and afierce resentment of any sign of patronizing or dictatorial behaviour by western governments, which was not unjustified by past experiences.
Perhaps the most complicated and problematic element in the resulting political culture was its attitude to Islam. On the one hand, there can be little doubt that, even at the end of the Empire, most Turkish and Kurdish inhabi- tants of Anatolia still identified themselves in primarily religious terms, and continued to do so for many years. The Ottoman state had been defeated, but the idea that political authority should have a religious basis still remained common. On the other hand, most of the original Islamic political project lay in ruins. Muslims were not united in a single state, and had not been for centuries. Abdul Hamid had appealed for Islamic unity as a general principle, but even he had never treated it as a real political blueprint. Above all, Ottoman rule over the Arab Middle East and its holy places had been decisively ended, both by superior British military strength and what the Turks saw as Arab betrayal during the First World War. Hence, the idea of rooting the legiti- macy of the state in Islam was greatly weakened and that of continuing the empire as a geographical entity almost entirely destroyed. On the other hand, Islam as a cultural and social system as well as a religious faith still com- manded mass respect. How to integrate it into the structures and values of a modern state, with its concomitant foreign policy assumptions, still remains a problem for many Muslim Turks.