What Happened to the Ottoman Empire?

What about the Ottoman Empire? It was a very important component of the Central Powers. I've touched briefly on some of the Arab politics related to the Turkish Empire, but we should get down the core of things here. Today: how did the war end for the Ottoman regime?

First off, a definition. The Ottoman Empire was an empire led by an Islamic and Turkish dynasty and administration which covered much of what we today call the Middle East. It had its origins a thousand years ago, and it grew by leaps and bounds at the expense of the Byzantine Empire in the 1300s and 1400s. In fact, the Ottomans ended the final vestige of the Byzantine Empire (and hence the final vestige of the Roman Empire) in 1453 by capturing Constantinople (eventually to be called Istanbul). Thereafter, the Ottoman Empire included the Balkans, most of the Black Sea coast, the whole Eastern Mediterranean rim, Syria, Palestine, much of Arabia, Egypt, and even some of North Africa west of Egypt. Plus much island real estate. Huge!

It was, also, a strange mixture of fearful autocracy at the top (the Sultan) and highly variegated society reflecting complex rights, privileges, negotiations, discriminations, dissatisfactions, and satisfactions. The majority of the population was Muslim, but significant minorities were Christian: Greeks, Armenians, etc. Dubbed the "sick man of Europe" by the Russians in the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had gone through three major periods of reform from the 1830s to 1914. This "modernization" thus impacted society as yet another layer of this complex mix. For the most part, ideas of ethnic nationalism grew year by year in the Ottoman Empire as in the other European Empires. And though Turkish elites considered many possibilities of how to increase cohesion in the vast, porous empire, the option of Turkish nationalism—a mode of cohesion based on only one of many nationalities—seemed inevitable. This was especially the case after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 reformed the empire in a nationalist mode.

So Ottoman Turkey entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. It fought on many fronts, achieving success that was really amazing in the face of many difficulties. By 1918, of course, Turkish armies were being pushed back on the Russian fronts, in Syria, and elsewhere. Hence, the trio of Young Turk nationalist leaders who had ruled as a troika during the war signed the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918.

What did this Armistice do, apart from stopping hostilities? Well, as the headline of The New York Times put it, "Turkish Armistice Signed: Equivalent to Unconditional Surrender, Opens Black Sea to Allies." Well, yes. The Allies were to have free access to the two straits, the Dardanelle Strait and the Bosporus, at Istanbul itself. And Ottoman forces were to withdraw from certain positions to a more compact version of the Empire, and much of that territory to be abandoned had been captured by the Allies already.

On the other hand, it was not clear from the document which parts of the Empire were to be occupied by Allied forces. The Turks didn't think that Istanbul would be. Neither did the British admiral who signed the Armistice. But one way or the other, French and British forces occupied Istanbul two weeks after the Armistice. And Allied forces proceeded to occupy naval installations, such as Izmir (Smyrna) and strategic tracts of territory. Sultan Mehmet VI, who had been on the throne since 1909, continued to be Sultan in name, but his shadowing presence in the occupied city of Istanbul did not give much confidence to the confused populations of the defeated and occupied Empire.

By the time of the Peace Conference, numerous countries were armed with well-developed plans for parts of the Ottoman Empire (we have seen some Greek and some Arabian statesmen pursuing such goals already), usually based on historical precedent, ethnic unanimity and "self-determination," or recent (in most cases, secret) promise. In the line-up of those seeking pieces of this particular rock were Italy, Greece, the Arab dynasty of Faysal, Persia, certain Armenian political organizations, France and Britain (in line for indirect control of certain areas), and some others.

So this enormously complex picture sits in the background to all the talk about the settlement in the Middle East at the Conference. Two other issues come to mind immediately in discussing all this: the invention of the Mandatory Power system by the peacemakers, and the promises made to various parties during the war. We will be unpacking all this over the next few weeks. But for the moment, we leave foreign armies occupying considerable portions of the shadowy Ottoman government's territories as foreigners are lining up in Paris to talk the Four into handing over parts of the Empire.

The League Covenant

Woodrow Wilson had been in Europe since December 1918. The fact that the American President was both head of state and head of government put him in a special position to begin with. Also, Wilson was in no way certain of political necessities at home. Hence, he intended to take a break from the conference for a few weeks beginning February 15.

In the days before this, his struggle for an uncompromised League of Nations came to a head.

To many members of the American delegation, including his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, Wilson's interest in his League of Nations project had become an obsession. Commenting on this, Lansing wrote: "The consequence was that the general scheme of the treaty and many important articles were prepared and worked out by the British and French delegations." While Wilson insisted in the Councils of Ten and of Four on a "pure" version of the League, he left the American delegation without instructions.

And the negotiations over the League were bumpy in the extreme. We have to examine some of Wilson's phrases, such as "self-determination," later in connection with the disputed border areas. But the almost unique forms of platitude that Wilson employed in his Fourteen points and his phraseology connected with most "principles" occasioned many disputes with his pragmatic negotiating partners and others.

But in connection with the League, Wilson could be quite specific. He insisted, for example, that the assembly of the League would be roughly democratic, but that the business of the League would be dominated by an "executive council" and of course a secretariat to carry out real business (corresponding to positivist and Progressive ideas of socio-technocratic leadership by the way). Lansing called this Wilson's "oligarchic" organization of the League.

In Wilson's mind, the League would be agreed on quickly by the Allies, and it would then within a few months embark on a general disarmament worldwide and an application of the Fourteen Points. Indeed, Wilson wished to have the whole form approved and packaged up so that he could take it with him when he departed for the United States on February 15.

Clemenceau and the French agreed, more or less, on the organizational points but insisted on adding a standing League army—one which could strike fear into an already well-chastised Germany. And one which, incidentally, would have violated the United States Constitution. Wilson refused. Clemenceau struck back in the French press. Wilson threatened to have the conference removed from Paris to Geneva.

Meanwhile, Colonel House, former kingmaker of Wilson to begin with, and more recently Wilson's alter ego in European circles, began to negotiate in his cosmopolitan way behind the scenes, speaking with both the French and the British as the February 15 departure of Wilson loomed. These negotiations paid off. On February 13 the Ten voted against a standing League army.

Wilson read the League Covenant to a "plenary" session on Valentine's Day, 1919. His comments painted vividly the Progressive credo analyzed by Murray N. Rothbard in his classic essay "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals." In that essay, Rothbard pointed out many years ago that a kind of internal Progressive motor caused the Progressives—Wilson, Dewey, and many others—to welcome and encourage the participation of the United States in the war, since it would lead to so much progress of various kinds—would hence be worthwhile.

On February 14, Wilson thus told the peacemakers, "Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentlemen, but some very beautiful things have come out of it. Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has been more conscious than ever of the majesty of right." Men were looking each other in the eye, Wilson said, and asserting that this covenant was a "covenant of fraternity and friendship."

The next day, Wilson left Paris by train for Brest and boarded the George Washington, and headed for home.

Did Wilson really win big? Time would tell. Behind the scenes, House had promised much to the French and the British. Both Clemenceau and Lloyd George had their own intricate agendas, which they worked for under the cover of the tempest over the League. Wilson would find this out when he returned, but for the moment, he looked forward to triumph at home.

(For a colorful and coherent account of these events, see the excellent book The End of Order, by Charles L. Mee, Jr., written from primary accounts, especially memoirs.)

The drawing above comes from C. LeRoy Baldridge, "I Was There": With the Yanks on the Western Front 1917-1919 (NY, 1919). (online at Gutenberg.org)

The Opening of the Weimar Assembly, February 6, 1919

On February 6, 1919, as the Council of Ten heard Emir Faisal talk about borders and claims in the still fluid Middle East, far away, in the town of Weimar, Germany, the German national constituent assembly held its first meeting.

We have already seen that this newly elected national assembly was the result of both revolution and fear of revolution in its make-up. Actually, the strong showing of the middle parties (moderate SPD, Center, German Democratic Party) enabled the forces for a moderate constitutional republic to prevail. Indeed, constitutional scholar and German Interior Ministry official Hugo Preuss arrived in Weimar with a constitution "in his pocket" which proved the basis of the discussion.

The Weimar Constitution, as the finished product of the National Constituent Assembly would be called, had several notable problems. For one thing, it allowed the government emergency powers to call for martial law without very much limitation (a power devised because both rightwing and leftwing enemies were openly devoted to the violent overthrow of the republic). This power would lead to later problems. And in the end, the "democratic" aspect of the parliament turned out to be too responsive to public opinion. That is to say, in modern governments, we usually hope that they will be responsive, but in this case, by a system of proportional representation, the voting system would later end up deadlocking, with the parties themselves splintering into smaller groups.

Indeed, the chief problem of this tiny proportional distinction turned out to be the essential problem of democracy in general. The parties ended up as groups seeking to legislate special favors, tax monies, and other privileges for their own supporters. (Of course this process happens all the time in modern democracies. The Weimar Constitutional system was simply more responsive to smaller, more specific groups, each voting against the other to control treasure, privileges, etc. The whole splintering process would eventually allow the Nazis to gain much power with only a plurality of votes overall).

But these were all problems in the future. And from the standpoint of the Allies, and especially of the Americans, who spoke as if the whole war had been a crusade for "democracy," the Weimar Democracy should have fit the bill admirably.

But of course the war had not in any sense been a crusade for democracy. For one thing, the Entente, or Allied, side fought most of the war with Russian Empire in its ranks, and Russia was the most autocratic state in Europe. For another, the war led to every sort of violation of individual rights in all belligerent countries. The Australians put into concentration camps and expropriated the Australian population of German origin. The Americans jailed individuals for defeatism and had snoops going through the US Mail to look for more. The French picked up French citizens regularly on suspicion of spying, and strictly controlled the press for any adverse comment on war policies. The British passed the famous Defence of the Realm Act, which pared down individual freedoms enormously. Safe for Democracy? Hardly.

So as opposed to simply talking about "Democracy," the German politicians at Weimar set up a responsive government that should have told the Allies: "We are no longer the regime of the Kaiser; look: many of us were in the Kaiser's jails, persecuted for political reasons." But in fact, Germany was still Germany to the Allies. Both Clemenceau and Lloyd George understood the political aspects of what had happened in Germany quite well, but of course, they couldn't admit to any sympathy for the Germans if they were to get all they needed for their own countries in the peace settlement.

As for Wilson, right through the Peace Conference (see especially the Deliberations of the Council of Four) he considered gave his opinion that the Germans were still evil aristocrats, tools of the Kaiser, from whom he would save Europe. Strangely, it was Wilson who was a political scientist. It was Wilson, an American Anglophile a great deal of whose academic study had been in praise of the British parliamentary system. But the new shape of Germany seemed to have no resonance whatsoever with Wilson. And, as suggested already, Clemenceau and Lloyd George had their own reasons for not taking many pains to educate Wilson on these points.

Finally, one more point about the Weimar Constitution. In spite of the great (anti-individualist) tendencies of the age toward centralization of government, the moderate Germans at Weimar established a federal system. It was lopsided, since the state of Prussia represented three-fifths of the whole. And many German federalists suspected that it was too centralized (some of these later thought that a more decentralized system would have made the Nazi dictatorship more difficult to achieve). But still, the old German tendency for "Church Tower" politics (political organization extending, basically to the range of everyone within sight of one church tower) and fiercely independent cities and states was still reflected in the Weimar Constitution, at least enough to revive later on, after World War II. But that is another story.

Borders in the Paris Peace, Primer, Part II

Slowly, slowly... wait for it!

OK. A bit more, but just a bit, about borders. There are several distinct sets of issues about borders that we have to discuss, so this Primer may need to be a regular item in the blog. The peacemakers ninety years ago were just setting up the committees of experts to deal with each borders, the teams of experts brought by the various powers to the conference were just swapping maps and suggesting boundaries.

Of the Central Powers (again: Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria), let us concentrate on Germany for the moment.

Germany was a country that had existed only since 1871. I know that this is surprising to many folks who have not read much about European history, but it is true. The German world has had many state-forms in its long history in Central Europe, but it was never a single country called Germany until 1871. The creation was the product of a war between several German states (all backing up the large German state of Prussia) and France. The princes of those states agreed in 1871 to recognized the Prussian king as emperor (Kaiser) of an entity called, simply, Germany. And naturally, the Prussian capital Berlin became the German capital—though we will examine that aspect a bit more later.

I should make it clear that the country emerging as Germany in 1871 was not the only country with Germans in it. A majority of individuals in the Austrian part of the Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire spoke German at home (and of course today German is the primary language of Austria). A substantial percentage of the inhabitants of Switzerland were ethnically and linguistically German. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was largely peopled by German-speakers. Then there were enclaves of Germans elsewhere, primarily in the Baltic region, which had become part of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century, and scattered in settlements across the vast spaces of the rest of Russia. So there were actually quite a few millions of Germans who did not live within the borders of the German empire.

Nor did that empire contain only ethnic Germans. In the north, the Germany of 1871 contained a substantial minority of Danes. In the east, there was a substantial minority (reaching majority status regionally) of Poles, Masurians, Warmians, and other Slavic speakers, as well as Lithuanians, who spoke a language quite different from their Slavic and German neighbors. In the west, some French-speakers lived within the German Reich. Some French-speaking Belgians did too. And there were undoubtedly some Dutch-speaking families east of Maastricht who were citizens of Germany.

In general, the victors tend to take territory from the vanquished, as we have already mentioned. The question for Germany at the Paris Peace was: what territory will taken, and to whom will it go?

I have to say that even though some optimistic German officials early on had illusions that the ethnic German region of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) could be saved for Germany, there was never a chance. The French had taken the region from the German world in the seventeenth century, so that when the German Reich took it in the nineteenth (after beating France in the Franco-Prussian War), the French smoldered over this issue more than perhaps any single international issue at stake. So presiding over the victors at the peacemaking, France was unlikely to do more than simply assert its authority, and take back Alsace-Lorraine, which it did.

But there were many other regions inhabited by non-German speakers, in particular the north of Germany, the province of Schleswig, and in the German east, where the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil war led to a vacuum of power in the last months of World War I. It is those regions we will turn to in the next installment of the Primer. But first we have to move from Germany's peripheries to her center and travel to the city of classical German culture, Weimar.

le Tigre

Chatting ninety years later at the top of this page, The Four continue to fascinate those who still study them. And we will explore aspects of them in due time as the opportunity arises. Just few notes today on Clemenceau.

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was born in 1841 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, in the Vendée region, famed for its superb salt and for its peasant army fighting for the crown during the French Revolution, among other things. Clemenceau spent his early manhood as a radical republican, event attempting an assassination, for which he almost, but not quite, exiled to Algeria. He became a journalist, and then a physician, but also found time to be involved in radical protests against Napoleon III. He even left France to go to America, where he married, and divorced, an American woman. When France became a republic a (the Third Republic) after the Franco-Prussian War, the thirty-year-old Clemenceau returned and served as a workhorse of Radical politics (bourgeois liberalism, nationalism, secularism—as opposed to strong Roman Catholic control of education etc.).

The young politician led a tempestuous life, but he had not always been "le Tigre" as he came to be called in his later years. Still, he was a tiger during World War I. At the moment of France's great crisis, when General Nivelle's ill-fated and murderous offensive had killed its tens of thousands of Frenchmen and when the French army mutinied, two individuals saved the Western Front from collapse: General Philippe Henri Pétain and Georges Clemenceau. Pétain took over command of the army and handled the mutiny, chiefly by installing tactics less wasteful of French lives. Clemenceau was the hard man who took over the reins of government as Premier and put down strikes, negotiated with the British and Americans, knocked heads together to keep the country focused.

So we have to give the Tiger his due. With the Peace Conference sited at Paris—perhaps the first and worst decision related to the Conference—Clemenceau was the logical leader to preside over the Conference. But the fierceness lingering from his Tiger-like struggle with the Germans, the habits of long years as political brawler, and the increasingly quirky gruffness did not really make for stellar diplomatic qualities.

We have seen already that Clemenceau treated the smaller powers with contempt.
And we have also seen within the first two weeks of the Conference, the French Press was reflecting impatience and irritation against Wilson. Delays! Delays! Clemenceau began joking with the oddly stiff Wilson: at one of Wilson's sweep, Messianic demands, Clemenceau quipped: "When you cease to be President we will make you Grand Turk." Wilson was emphatically not amused.

A different day, tomorrow (Feb. 4, ninety years ago), we have another striking account of the Conference dynamic that was developing already. The speaker before the Council of Ten was the dynamic Greek Prime Minister, Venizelos, an advocate of a greatly expanded Greece—expanded, that is to say, with real estate formerly owned by the Central Powers—and others. In any case, here is Harold Nicolson's account:

"To the supreme Council to hear Venizelos conclude his statement. He talks of Greek claims in Asia Minor. He is again extremely good, but not so logical and effective as he was yesterday. The Italians say a few nice words when it is all over, which is applauded by P.[resident] W.[ilson]. 'Hear! Hear!' says P. W. clapping silent palms. Clemenceau as usual wears the half-smile of an irritated, skeptical and neurasthenic gorilla.

I stay behind a few minutes while they discuss whether they shall appoint a Committee of Experts to examine the Greek claims. Lloyd George proposes it, P.W. seconds it. Clemenceau concludes abruptly—'Objections?... Adopté.' The Italians gasp, as they do not want a Committee of Experts in the least."

Borders in the Paris Peace, Primer, Part I

OK, well I accidentally mentioned changes of boundaries and frontiers in the last post. I can't avoid using that as a lead-in to the territorial issues of the Peace. Still, I wouldn't want anyone to get hurt (or worse!) by a long disquisition on border changes--not on my blog watch, by golly!! So, I will try to lay out a few ideas about peacemaking and borders without being too prolix.

Somewhere close to the inner core of every war--in their Clausewitzian heart of causation/aims/goals--is territory. Real estate. Land.

Broad issues of world power, imperial dynamism, even ideology and religion, may shape all kinds of issues in starting and stopping wars. But wars tend to begin and end with territorial changes as both war aim and peace aim. At the end of the wars these changes tend to reflect new power relationships.

Stated baldly, the power of the victors over the vanquished at the end of a war is almost always expressed in changes of boundaries, since the vanquished almost always lose territory to the victors or their clients. Often the war begins over a chunk of territory. Sometimes, the very movements of armies in war creates new territorial claims. Frequently in the history of Europe, territory changes hands (that is, borders are altered) at the end of a war because in classical European statecraft, territory and population meant strength. Hence, after winning a war, in addition to various other claims, you wanted to weaken the enemy by taking away territory and population. By the same token, you wanted to strengthen yourself and your friends by gaining territory and population.

Now, the issues facing the Paris peacemakers were legion, but they fell into three basic categories. The Allies wanted Germany disarmed and disabled from attacking her neighbors again. The Allies wanted to deal with vast financial issues (having to do both with making Germany pay for the war and with a new kind of financial order, based on recent international and domestic financial regimes). And then there was Territory.

So, to end this very Primer, let's just say that the territorial issues of the Paris Peace were huge. They involved the breakup of each of Central Powers' empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) and the breakup of the Russian Empire too, even though Russia had been an Entente partner. Each of these empires fell into pieces. Put another way, large pieces of their territories were up for grabs, often by rival grabbers. The Paris peacemakers desired to regulate all this, but as we shall see, such issues are usually extremely complicated and may usually be viewed from extremely varied perspectives.

All of this was complicated by the nineteenth-century doctrine of "nationalism" and the early twentieth-century version of it dubbed "self-determination" by political scientists and publicists in the years before World War I. But we should save that for Primer, Part II.

Lunch With Toynbee: Harold Nicolson at Work on the Peace

Harold Nicolson, son of a diplomat, born into an upper-class British family in Tehran in 1886, was one of the most interesting and articulate chroniclers of the Paris Peace Conference. Having served as a diplomat himself since 1909, he was part of the British delegation at the conference, and in particular designated as a specialist for issues relating to Southeastern Europe.

Nicolson's educational, social, and vocational background set him up to have dinner or luncheon with just about everyone of any importance during the Conference. On January 29, 1919, the well-connected diplomat had lunch with another member of the British delegation, the well-connected historian Arnold Toynbee, a personage later famous both for his works on world history, as well as for his role in the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Mention of lunch with his friend is brief, but Nicolson's diary entry gives us a kind of microcosm of the Conference:

January 29, Wednesday

To the Quai d'Orsay in the morning. I have been summoned, as the Czechs are to make their statement to the Council of Ten, and I am supposed, for some odd reason, to be a Czech expert. In the ante-room are Kramarsh and Benes sitting on gilt chairs as if awaiting the dentist. Kramarsh large, bluff, hair en brosse, exuberant, has a nice German smell. Benes small, yellow, silly little imperial [beard], intelligent eyes rather like Keynes's, fine forehead. We speak about Teschen, its coal; Oderberg, its railway connections; the Hungarian Ruthenes, the "Carpatho-Russians." In the middle Pichon emerges from his room like a fussy owl. Says we needn't stay. Off we go.

Lunch with Toynbee and meet a Major Johnson, the geographical expert of the American delegation. He is crammed with information and I shall go into things thoroughly with him and look at his maps. Work hard afterwards at the Czecho-Slovak "case" as presented to the Supreme Council. Conclusions: Bohemia and Moravia, historical frontier justified, in spit of fact that many Germans would be included. Teschen, Silesia, Oderberg, justified: Slovakia, Danube frontier not justified to extent claimed; Hungarian Ruthenes justified and desirable; the "Serbs of Lusatia" mere rubbish; the "corridor" to connect with Jugo-Slavia completely unjustified.

The French are beginning to sneer at P.[resident] W.[ilson] and the Americans.

So the real action on this day was a combination of sitting in a waiting room, networking at lunch, and hard study of frontiers and borderlines. No need to understand the details of the "Checho-Slovak case" yet if you don't already. We will get to it in due time.

Nicolson's record of the Conference is one of the gems of diplomatic memoirs. He combined his [no doubt edited] diaries of the time with an appreciation written many years later. The book is: Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919, London, 1933. It can be found here on Google Books, and is still in print and for sale.