7 Revolution

Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences, we see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for humane progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline. The ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ programme which its authors put forward (a civilian minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted, and the populace of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express the motive of the movement or eventually guide its course. The essence of that movement was militant nationalism. The empire was to be regenerated, not by humanizing it but by Ottomanizing it. The Osmanli, the man of the sword, was the type to which all others, who wished to be of the nation, were to conform. Such as did not so wish must be eliminated by the rest.

The revolutionary Committee in Salonika, called ‘of Union and Progress’, held up its cards at first, but by 1910 events had forced its hand on the table. The definite annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the declaration of independence and assumption of the title Tsar by the ruler of Bulgaria, since they were the price to be paid by the revolutionaries for a success largely made in Germany, were opposed officially only pro forma; but when uninformed opinion in the empire was exasperated thereby against Christendom, the Committee, to appease reactionaries, had to give premature proof of pan-Osmanli and pro-Moslem intentions by taking drastic action against rayas. The Greeks of the empire, never without suspicions, had failed to testify the same enthusiasm for Ottoman fraternity which others, e.g. the Armenians, had shown; now they resumed their separatist attitude, and made it clear that they still aspired, not to Ottoman, but to Hellenic nationality. Nor were even the Moslems of the empire unanimous for fraternity among themselves. The Arab-speaking societies complained of under-representation in the councils and offices of the state, and made no secret of their intention not to be assimilated by the Turk-speaking Osmanlis. To all suggestions, however, of local home-rule and conciliation of particularist societies in the empire, the Committee was deaf. Without union, it believed in no progress, and by union it understood the assimilation of all societies in the empire to the Osmanli.

Logic was on the side of the Committee in its choice of both end and means. In pan-Ottomanism, if it could be effected, lay certainly the single chance of restoring Osmanli independence and power to anything like the position they had once held. In rule by a militarist oligarchy for some generations to come, lay the one hope of realizing the pan-Ottoman idea and educating the resultant nation to self-government. That end, however, it was impossible to realize under the circumstances in which past history had involved the Ottoman Empire. There was too much bad blood between different elements of its society which Osmanli rulers had been labouring for centuries rather to keep apart than to unite; and certain important elements, both Moslem and Christian, had already developed too mature ideas of separate nationality. With all its defects, however, the new order did undoubtedly rest on a wider basis than the old, and its organization was better conceived and executed. It retained some of the sympathy of Europe which its beginnings had excited, and the western powers, regarding its representative institutions as earnests of good government, however ill they might work at the first, were disposed to give it every chance.

Unfortunately the Young Turks were in a hurry to bring on their millennium, and careless of certain neighbouring powers, not formidable individually but to be reckoned with if united, to whom the prospect of regenerated Osmanlis assimilating their nationals could not be welcome. Had the Young Turks been content to put their policy of Ottomanization in the background for awhile, had they made no more than a show of accepting local distinctions of creed and politics, keeping in the meantime a tight rein on the Old Turks, they might long have avoided the union of those neighbours, and been in a better position to resist, should that union eventually be arrayed against themselves.

But a considerable and energetic element among them belonged to the nervous Levantine type of Osmanli, which is as little minded to compromise as any Old Turk, though from a different motive. It elected to deal drastically and at once with Macedonia, the peculiar object not only of European solicitude but also of the interest of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. If ever a province required delicate handling it was this. It did not get it. The interested neighbours, each beset by fugitives of its oppressed nationals, protested only to be ignored or browbeaten. They drew towards one another; old feuds and jealousies were put on one side; and at last, in the summer of 1912, a Holy League of Balkan States, inspired by Venezelos, the new Kretan Prime Minister of Greece, and by Ferdinand of Bulgaria, was formed with a view to common action against the oppressor of Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia. Montenegro, always spoiling for a fight, was deputed to fire the train, and at the approach of autumn the first Balkan war blazed up.

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