The Young Turks Movement 1908 – 1923

M. M. Ashaduzzaman Nour :

The twentieth century opened for Turkey on 23 July 1908 with the restoration of the Constitution of 1876, shelved 30 years earlier by Sultan Abdül Hamid. Contemporaries recognised that this was an event of momentous significance which would alter their lives beyond recognition. A society which had been closed to the outside was suddenly thrown open, at least in cities and towns. Censorship was lifted and newspapers and magazines, representing all the communities of the empire and a wide assortment of opinions, flooded the market to satisfy the curiosity of an eager public. There were popular demonstrations in support of the new regime organised by the leaders of the principal religious and ethnic communities-Muslim, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish-as well as by the various factions of the Young Turks. Political exiles who had either been banished to distant provinces or escaped to Europe began to return to the capital in the hope of carving out political careers for themselves.
As though in a rush to make amends for the years lost by the Hamidian generation, the Young Turks experimented with virtually every sphere of life; hardly anything was left untouched. They not only changed the political system but they also attempted to refashion society by borrowing more freely from the West than ever before. They introduced competitive sport and, for the first time, an Ottoman team of two athletes participated in the Olympic games in Stockholm in 1912. Soccer, however, became very popular and clubs such as Galatasaray began to thrive as they do even in the 1990s. Boys were introduced to scouting and Lord Baden-Powell sent instructors to help with the organisation of the training of the troops. Though it is still too early to talk of feminism or women’s liberation, the Young Turk period did see the establishment of a women’s organisation commited to their welfare. The Ministry of War, quick to understand the benefits of the aeroplane in warfare, founded an air force in 1911. The first film was made just before the World War and used as anti-Russian propaganda to justify Turkey’s entry into the war. The theatre began to flourish and the new climate permitted Muslim women to go on the stage which had hitherto been monopolised by Armenian actresses simply because they alone among the non-Turks could speak flawless Ottoman Turkish.
Meanwhile politics were in a limbo and the outcome far from certain. The sultan was viewed with suspicion by almost everyone in the Young Turk elite. There was a healthy respect for his cunning and an awareness that he would not become a constitutional monarch out of his own volition. Despite 30 years of despotism, Abdül Hamid had managed to retain the aura of a benevolent ruler who had bestowed a Constitution upon his people when the time was ripe. The Young Turks expected him to fight to retain his power and they knew that he had the charisma of the sultan-caliph to do so.
The high bureaucrats, the pashas of the Sublime Porte, who had risen to power during the Tanzimat period (1839-1876) only to be overshadowed by the Palace until 1908, were convinced that they alone were capable of making the constitutional regime work. They thought that the Constitution, while curbing the sultan’s absolutism, gave them the monopoly of power through their control of the cabinet which one of their numbers would lead as grand vezir.

They also intended to maintain their hegemony by controlling the legislative assembly and the senate. Elections for the assembly were conducted through the indirect two-tier system in which deputies were elected by electoral colleges which were the domain of local elites. Moreover, the pashas believed that their modern, Western education, their knowledge of Europe and her languages, gave them the tools necessary to take Turkey into the modern world. Besides, they alone had the trust and confidence of the European embassies, especially the British, without whose active co-operation the new regime was bound to fail. Such was the sense of confidence and the social arrogance of the pashas that they did not conceive of any other group daring to challenge their authority.
The leaders of the religious-ethnic communities welcomed the Constitution, sure that the end of absolutism would enhance their own power and influence. They were not entirely wrong. They expected to share political power in both the cabinet and the assembly commensurate with their demographic and material strength in the empire. Their influence would be the greater if authority was decentralised and so they supported the liberal faction among the Young Turks led by Prince Sabaheddin who had always spoken in favour of ‘decentralisation and private initiative’.
However, the non-Muslim and the non-Turkish communities were apprehensive lest the new regime be used as a means to revive and strengthen the empire under the leadership of the largest group, the Turks. That would threaten the privileges of the religious communities organised under the traditional millet system which guaranteed virtual autonomy in cultural and educational affairs. The non-Turkish people feared centralisation and turkification. They all relied on the Great Powers-Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy-to prevent that since they knew that the Powers were themselves loath to see a Turkish revival which challenged their hegemony in the region.
The Young Turk movement, composed of all those who had joined forces in order to overthrow the Hamidian regime, was itself divided. While there were numerous factions, it is convenient to divide them into two principal groups: Liberals and Unionists. Generally speaking, the Liberals belonged to the upper classes of Ottoman society. They were well educated, westernised, cosmopolitan, and comfortable with a foreign language and culture, usually French. They were the supporters of constitutional monarchy controlled by the high bureaucrats who belonged to the same social group. They expected Britain, which they described as ‘the mother of parliaments’, to back their regime by providing loans and expertise to guide the limited social and economic reforms they envisaged. This was in keeping with the policy begun by the Anglophile statesmen of the Tanzimat era who had also sought Turkey’s salvation within the world system dominated by Western Europe. The ideology espoused by the Liberals was Ottomanism, a dynastic patriotism to which all religious and ethnic communities could owe allegiance without sacrificing their own narrower aims and aspirations.

(The writer is a PhD Researcher, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, ?stanbul Medeniyet Üniversitesi, ?stanbul, Türkiye & Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration, Bangladesh University of Professionals).