The Wars of the Ottoman Succession
20 Aug 2003
[762w]
The longest epoch anyone can think of at present is forty five minutes. This can't be healthy, and I thought it might rectify the humours a bit to look at Iraq sub specie æternitatis - or at least, sub specie the last five hundred years or so. Consider, then, if you care to, what these places have in common: the Balkans, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Holy Land. You know already they are places where, and over which, unnumbered tears have been shed. But the other thing they have in common is that up to a century or two ago they were all part of the same empire.
It was an empire in some respects continuous with the Roman empire, an empire in decline since before the Crimean war, an empire that died in its tracks in 1918. This decline was so long and large that it may need to wait a few centuries before it gets its due. But when historians of 2500 come to write up this and the last century they could do worse than put us in a chapter called "The Wars of the Ottoman Succession".
Modern warfare started in the Crimea in 1854, with Russia trying to muscle in as the Ottoman grip on its northern borders weakened. Seventy years later, the first world war began as a struggle of Russia against Germany and Austria over another imperial territory, this time in Europe, which the Turks could no longer hold. The second world war was in many respects just a continuation of this rivalry. The long painful story of the Holy Land is also premised on the Ottoman collapse. I think Israel is a Good Thing. But the bald fact is, this Good Thing, and the troubles which have attended it, would never have been born if the Sublime Porte had been in charge. Moreover, one reason why these troubles are so intractable is that though Palestinians want a state, Palestine was never a country, but part of an empire.
The Balkans are a wreck because several nations, no longer held down by an empire or by the dictatorship that succeeded it, aspired to become states. Iraq too is a fissiparous country. It contains several distinct and often hostile nations which for hundreds of years enjoyed equal, though limited, expression under the Ottomans. Now there's no empire. Perhaps only a bellicose tyranny could hold them together.
Everywhere in the decay of the Ottoman empire the story was the same: people with no tradition of ruling themselves thrown on their own resources. Democracy, tolerance, and not invading your neighbours - these are great things. But the reasons they're great are not obvious from ground level. On the other hand, loyalty to my clan or the local strong man - that's something that makes sense right away - something that gets me security and a sense of purpose. So wherever the Ottomans withdrew, they gave place to tyranny or disorder - or to rule by some other foreign power. Today Serbia holds together by a manufactured sense of national destiny; Kosovo is in the care of the United Nations; Syria is a nationalist dictatorship; the Arabian peninsula is for the most part absolute monarchies; Iraq is run by more foreigners. The jury must still be out on Croatia and Macedonia. Greece works: but Greece won her independence almost two hundred years ago. Apart from Greece the only stable democracy in the old Ottoman Empire is Israel, which brought its people and institutions from outside and is in any event, in its own way, problematic.
And we should wipe that smug grin off our faces too. Britain was a patchwork of intercommunal violence sometimes checked by despotism for a thousand years after the Romans left. That's what happens. It's just unrealistic to hope that subject nations can learn to rule themselves under the law without generations of painful struggle.
This is a disheartening picture. The wars of the Ottoman succession are not over. No power on earth can prevent the shedding of more tears and blood between the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. But seeing all these troubles as part of one large historic event may help form reasonable expectations, at least. The most important is: these are all places where independent power has only ever been exercised in the rawest and most direct forms. So parachuting in flat-pack democratic institutions that nobody has any reason to trust or care about, and buzzing off again, probably means that Iraq (or Kosovo, or wherever) instead gets again into the power of someone rawer and more direct.
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cool man wrote on 14 Jan 2009
bitch to much to read and i dont understand how any of this has to do with the ottoman empire
hjpBzTczXgnFlUjumE wrote on 18 May 2008
octAmE
I wrote on 6 Apr 2008
stupid article
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wrote on 4 Feb 2004
Why you don't tell us then your " truth "? Wake up darling ... see the reality .... and learn from the history ....
cheers
Absolute right ! None of this would happened, if the Ottoman's would have continued. And a word to Hamia Naaz ... You are an ignorant person ... or simply a dreamer ..... WAKE UP !!!!
idon't agree with it at all
there is nothing truth here