Artículo 3. Las operaciones de compra y venta de divisas cuya liquidación hubiere sido solicitada al Banco Central de Venezuela antes de la
2.6. Consecuencias de una Devaluación
2.6.1. Aumento de los precios de la cesta básica
The last phase of the Ottoman Empire was a period of political, social, economic, and cultural change and turmoil. Along with the people of the Balkans, Istanbulites much suffered from the nationalistic movements of the 19th century. This nationalism had most of the Muslim population flee the Balkans for Istanbul, where they lived in difficult conditions.43 According to Yavuz Selim Karakışla, the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) made for the overture of World War I, and during the four years of the world war, the Ottoman Empire fought on several fronts in three continents.
By signing the Mundros Armistice on October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire literally lost the war.44 As a result, the multinational forces composed of British, French, and Italian soldiers occupied Istanbul in 1920, as set forth in the Sèvres Treaty signed after the armistice.45
The Balkan Wars and World War I brought great difficulty for the Ottoman economy. Hunger and epidemics caused population loss, and thousands of people were forced to migrate. Fires were also common during that era, making many
43 Alen Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households Marriage, Family and Fertility 1880–1940, 13.
44 Yavuz Selim Karakışla, Women, War and Work in the Ottoman Empire: Society for the Employ-ment of Ottoman Muslim Women (1916–1923), 39.
45 Ibid., 39.
Istanbulites homeless.46 The Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century thus faced a disaster in the early 20th century, if not chaos.
The Committee of the Union and Progress (CUP), organized by the Young Turks first as a secret organization, emerged as the ruling political party during the Second Constitutional Period. CUP members had revolted against the sultan Abdülhamid II on July 23, 1908, to restore the Constitution; hence Ottoman constitutional political life resumed.47 Tarık Zafer Tunaya has defined three periods for the CUP: 1909-1912, when it came to power; at this time the power of the legislature was amended and the Second Constitutional Period began with the sultan’s powers restricted and a truly constitutional system established.48 Then followed the period of rule, 1913-1918; and finally the period of the armistice, 1918-1922.
The establishment of the Hürriyet ve İtilaf Party in 1911 also marked another significant point for the CUP, as CUP rulers took every measure to dispose of the opposition party. For that purpose, the Talat and Enver Pashas in 1913 organized the Babiali Baskını, after which the CUP became the only party on the Ottoman political scene.49 According to Şükrü Hanioğlu, the CUP was the harbinger of constitutional revolution, yet once in power, CUP rulers developed distaste for strong legislatures.
Like the sultan, they were concerned about the ability of a strong parliament to undermine the regime and aggravate ethnoreligious conflict.50 However the CUP did not abolish the parliament. Instead, the rulers skillfully used the press to restrict freedom of speech and to consolidate their power.
46 Alen Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households Marriage, Family and Fertility 1880–1940, 23.
47 İhsan Yılmaz, Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States Dynamic Legal Plural-isms in England, Turkey and Pakistan, 3.
48 Ibid., 92.
49 Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasal Partiler (İstanbul: İletişim, 2009), 395-399.
50 Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Ottoman Empire, 163.
Justin McCarty argues that the Young Turks had long searched for formula to modernize and westernize the Ottoman Empire. They were revolutionaries and reformers in that they wanted to change the state and society radically. But the disastrous results of the wars required an end to political rivalry and strong leadership in the political arena.51 A series of military defeats threatened the empire, and the cities of the empire were crowded with the refugees and the wounded. These harsh conditions made people accept one-party rule by the CUP, which started in 1913 after the Bâbıâli Baskını.52
Although the Turks were the last group to embrace nationalism, Turkish nationalism became the fastest-growing ideology in the late Ottoman Empire, especially after the Balkan Wars.53 Stanford Shaw states that Turkish nationalism developed as a result of the loss of 83% of the empire’s European territories.54 At that time, most of the empire’s non-Turkish subjects had already become nationalists and declared the Turks as their enemies.55 In fact, Muslim Albanian support of the rebels during the Albanian revolt changed the Turks’ approach to Ottomanism.56 Rising Arab nationalism also stirred its Turkish counterpart.
After 1913, the CUP pursued an intensive policy of economic57 and cultural Turkification,58 and even some of the reformers wanted to relinquish the Ottoman
51 Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasal Partiler, 399.
52 Stanford J Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and ModernTurkey Volume II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975, 289.
53 Roderic Davison, “Nationalism as an Ottoman Problem and the Ottoman Response” in Nationalism in a Non-National State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, eds. William W. Hadad and William L. Ochsenwald (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1977), 25-26.
54 Stanford J Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and ModernTurkey Volume II, 287-289.
55 İhsan Yılmaz, Muslim Laws, Politics and Society, 87.
56 Stanford J Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and ModernTurkey Volume II, 247.
57 The Young Turks’ aim was to save the nation, for saving the nation according to them meant saving the Ottoman state. (See: Aykut Kazancıgil, “Türkiye’de Modern Devletin Oluşumu ve Kemalizm,”
Toplum ve Bilim, 17 (1982): 82) However, the Ottoman state was deficient in providing the necessary capital for such economic progress. According to Zafer Toprak, in the early days, the CUP decided to
state and create a secular Turkish nation.59 The most influential Turkish nationalist was Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924). According to McCarty, Gökalp and other nationalists emphasized the importance of Turkish folk culture, pre-Islamic Turkish history, a pure Turkish language uncorrupted by Arabic and Persian, and the political traditions of the central Asian Turks. They encouraged the diminishing role of Islam in the public sphere and its replacement by nationalistic fervor.60
The situation of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of early twentieth century required a strong and centralized state apparatus, made possible by administrative and political reforms.
2.1.2 Administrative and political reforms: Centralization, bureaucratization,