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Turkey's
Manipulation of Europe, Then and Now
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Originally published on June 24 under the title "Holding
the Balance of Power: Turkey's Complicating Relationship with Europe during
the First World War and Since."
A
Turkish regime exploiting an international crisis to manipulate
Europeans. Sound familiar?
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It is a historical irony that, for the second time in a century, Turkey
is exploiting a major international crisis to manipulate the most powerful
European nation into a hugely misconceived and self-defeating policy.
Having exacerbated the Syrian civil war by allowing jihadists of all
hues to cross Turkish territory to fight his friend-turned-nemesis Bashar
al-Assad, then spurred a massive humanitarian crisis by allowing hundreds
of thousands of Syrian refuges (and assorted Middle Eastern migrants camped
in Turkey) to infiltrate Europe illegally, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
capitalized on Chancellor Merkel's recoil from her "open door"
migration policy to extract substantial financial and political concessions
from the European Union that, if fully implemented, will irreversibly
change the EU's demographic and cultural identity.
Ottoman culpability for the outbreak of the First World War was of
course infinitely smaller, yet the ailing Muslim empire was equally adroit
in harnessing German vulnerabilities and anxieties to its advantage. In The
Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin lays bare the full extent of Istanbul's
manipulation and deceit, beginning with its success in goading Berlin into
a secret defence alliance unpalatable to most German decision-makers,
including the Chancellor, the Foreign Minister, the Ambassador to Istanbul,
and numerous senior officers who considered the Ottoman army a
"problem child."
Sean
McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame. 550 pp. Allen Lane. £30,
9-781846-147050.
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He shows, for example, how the Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha,
clinched the alliance treaty by promising to turn over to Germany the
soon-to-be-delivered UK-built Ottoman flagship, knowing full well that the
vessel had been requisitioned by London; and how, immediately after signing
the agreement, the Ottomans extracted a string of far-reaching concessions,
left out of the preceding negotiations lest they prevent the treaty's
conclusion, by allowing two German warships into the Dardanelles (in
contravention of the 1841 London Convention stipulating the closure of the
straits to military vessels), only to have them incorporated into the
Ottoman navy so as to comply with Istanbul's declaration of neutrality -
made in flagrant violation of the nascent alliance treaty.
Indeed, in order to get their ally to comply with its contractual
obligation to join the war, the Germans had to pour vast quantities of
weapons and money into the bottomless Ottoman pit and had to endure months
of insinuated threats of defection before the Sultan declared war on the
Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente on November 10, 1914.
Nor was the objective balance of power between the two allies reflected
in the actual relationship between them throughout the war. Quite the
reverse; in line with their long-established practice of using their
perennial weakness as a lever for winning concessions from powerful allies,
the Ottomans exploited their First World War setbacks to attract
ever-growing military, economic, and political support from Berlin for
paltry returns.
The Ottomans exploited their wartime
setbacks to attract greater military and economic support from Berlin.
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Thus, for example, in the late-war negotiations on the renewal of the
bilateral alliance, Istanbul secured the reiteration and expansion of the
original German pledges as well as a commitment both to avoid a separate
peace treaty and to accord the Ottoman Empire vast territorial gains in
Thrace, Macedonia, and Transcaucasia. Similarly, in the summer of 1917,
when Enver set out to establish a special 120,000-strong new army,
code-named Yilderim ("Thunderbolt"), the Germans agreed to
assign to it thousands of troops despite their great reluctance to divert
any forces from the main theatre of war in Europe.
Last but not least, the Germans so resented the Ottoman foray into
Transcaucasia following Russia's departure from the war in the wake of the
October 1917 Revolution that they threatened to withdraw all their officers
from the Ottoman Empire were it to march on the Azeri capital of Baku, and
planned to resist such a move "with all available means,"
including sabotaging the railways used to supply the Turkish army. These
attempts at influence, however, came to naught as Istanbul considered
Transcaucasia the natural preserve for its imperial ambitions, going so far
as to order its forces to engage in battle any German units that stood in
their way.
McMeekin's meticulous documentation of this pushing and shoving goes a
considerable way to discrediting the conventional paradigm of Ottoman
victimhood. Yet he seems reluctant to follow his factual findings to their
logical conclusion. "The decision by Turkish statesmen to enter the
war in 1914 is best understood as a last gasp effort to stave off decline
and partition by harnessing German might against the more dangerous powers
with designs on Ottoman territory - Russia, Britain, and France (in roughly
that order)", he writes. "Given the security problems facing the
empire in 1914, there was no realistic scenario in which it could have
endured indefinitely on some kind of status quo ante, only bad and worse
options."
Istanbul's plunge into World War I was
a straightforward attempt to revive imperial glory and regain lost
territories.
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This conclusion is hardly supported by the historical facts (or, indeed,
by The Ottoman Endgame's narrative). Far from a desperate bid to
stave off partition by the European powers (merely a year before the
outbreak of the First World War, Britain and Russia prevented the
destruction of the Ottoman Empire by its former Balkan subjects),
Istanbul's plunge into the whirlpool was a straightforward attempt to
revive imperial glory and regain lost territories. Had the Ottomans stayed
out of the conflict, as begged by the Triple Entente, they would have
readily weathered the storm and the region's future development might well
have taken a different course.
No empire can of course endure indefinitely and the Ottoman Empire was
no exception to this rule. Yet, having lost its European colonies well
before the First World War, it faced no intrinsic threat to its continued
existence for the simple reason that its mostly Muslim Arabic-speaking
Afro-Asian subject population was almost totally impervious to the national
idea - the ultimate foe of empires in modern times and the force that had
driven the Ottomans out of Europe.
Even more far-fetched is the author's speculation that in the event of a
German victory "a semi-victorious Britain (whatever this creative
euphemism means) may still have picked off Ottoman Palestine, Mesopotamia,
and Syria in exchange for accepting the German position in Russia and Ukraine."
For one thing, there is no reason to assume that a victorious Germany would
have shown greater magnanimity to a defeated Britain (or France) than that
accorded to it by the two powers. For another, having shown no interest in
colonizing the Ottoman Empire before the world conflict, Britain remained
wedded to its continued existence for months after Istanbul's entry into
the war, leaving it to a local Meccan potentate - Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of
the Hashemite family - to push the idea of its destruction.
Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk extricated Turkey from its imperial past reestablished it
as a modern, largely secularist nation-state.
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In his concluding comments, McMeekin rightly deems Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk's extrication of Turkey from its imperial past and its
reestablishment as a modern, largely secularist nation-state to have been a
resounding success. What he fails to note, however, is that for quite some
time this legacy has been under sustained assault. In the thirteen eventful
years since it first came to power in November 2002, Erdoğan's Islamist
Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has largely
undone Atatürk's secularist reforms; transformed Turkey's legal system;
suppressed the independent media; sterilized the political and military
systems; and embarked on an aggressive foreign policy blending anti-Western
rhetoric with Neo-Ottoman ambition to "reintegrate the Balkan region,
Middle East and Caucasus... together with Turkey as the centre of world
politics in the future" (in the words of
Foreign-Minister-turned-Prime-Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu).
This in turn means that while for Atatürk and his erstwhile successors
Turkish-European relations, notably Ankara's bid for EU membership, were a
matter of political and cultural affinity on top of anything else, for the
AKP these relations are strictly instrumental: a springboard both for
harnessing European economic and financial resources to the AKP's grand
ambitions without real reciprocation, not unlike Istanbul's First World War
alliance with Berlin, and for establishing an Islamist bridgehead in Europe
with a view to its gradual expansion. As Davutoğlu told a large gathering
of Swiss Turks in January 2015:
Islam is Europe's indigenous religion,
and it will continue to be so... I kiss the foreheads of my brothers who
carried the tekbir [i.e., the call Allahu Akbar] to Zurich... How
holy those people were, who came and sowed the seeds here, which will, with
Allah's help, continue to grow into a huge tree of justice in the centre of
Europe. No one will be able to stop this... We will enter the EU with our
language, our traditions, and our religion... Would we ever sacrifice one
iota of that culture? With Allah's grace, we will never bow our heads.
Efraim Karsh is emeritus professor
of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings College London, a senior
research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and
principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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