Dismantling the Ottoman Empire

Britain, America and the Armenian question

Nevzat Uyanık

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138914025
• eBook ISBN: 9781317428985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Prior to World War I, American involvement in Armenian affairs was limited to missionary and educational interests. This was contrary to Britain, which had played a key role in the diplomatic arena since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, when the Armenian question had become a subject of great power diplomacy. However, by the end of the war the dynamics of the international system had undergone drastic change, with America emerging as one of the primary powers politically involved in the Armenian issue.

Dismantling the Ottoman Empire explores this evolution of the United States' role in the Near East, from politically distant and isolated power to assertive major player. Through careful analysis of the interaction of Anglo-American policies vis-à-vis the Ottoman Armenians, from the Great War through the Lausanne Peace Conference, it examines the change in British and American strategies towards the region in light of the tension between the notions of new diplomacy vs. old diplomacy. The book also highlights the conflict between humanitarianism and geostrategic interests, which was a particularly striking aspect of the Armenian question during the war and post war period. Using material drawn from public and personal archives and collections, it sheds light on the geopolitical dynamics and intricacies of great power politics with their long-lasting effects on the reshuffling of the Middle East.

The book would be of interest to scholars and students of political & diplomatic history, Near Eastern affairs, American and British diplomacy in the beginning of the twentieth century, the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Caucasus.

1
On the eve of the Great War

British diplomacy and the Armenian crisis of 1912–14

Long before fin de siècle, Ottoman diplomacy had been in the throes of internal and external woes stemming from the conflicting imperial aims of European great powers toward its lands on the one hand, and the breakaway movements among its various ethnic and religious communities on the other. These two dynamics, often spurring and reinforcing each other, severely checked the capability of Ottoman statesmen to reverse the downward course of Ottoman political affairs. With each “reform scheme,” the Ottoman elites saw an increase in encroachment by one or the other foreign power that added further complication to an already checkered situation. The Ottomans’ efforts to bring order to their own house encountered, more often than not, antagonism from within, which in return prompted intervention from without.¹

In addition to political difficulties, there were also deeper economic and strategic forces at work that militated against Ottoman endeavors to arrest the looming likelihood of a total disintegration. It is hard to overemphasize the crippling impact of the Capitulations, i.e. the extraterritorial concessions to foreigners in commercial, judicial, and criminal affairs, upon the empire’s socioeconomic fabric and domestic cohesion. Though averse to this situation, the Ottoman officials were in no position to limit the scope of these concessions, let alone to abrogate them. This became evident particularly in the course of several fruitless attempts to abolish or modify the capitulatory regime by the Young Turks following the 1908 Revolution. Rivalry among the great powers, not to mention their capitulatory rights, disturbed and usually incapacitated Ottoman efforts to modernize their country and revitalize their economy, and thus precipitated political turmoil. Therefore, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, notwithstanding the optimism it created at the beginning, soon proved to be insufficient to remedy the chronic malady of the so-called “Sick Man of Europe.” The efforts to uphold Ottomanism above ethno-religious differences did not sit well with the aspirations of various ethno-nationalist groups whose breakaway tendencies were frequently occasioned by foreign intervention.

According to Anderson’s analysis, the gulf between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe in productive power, military strength, and government efficiency, was at least as wide in 1908 as it had been in 1774.² The general tendency in the declinist approach to the late Ottoman history sees it as an impossibility to expect the Ottomans to rejuvenate from within. Only through outside intervention by the powers to implement directly a thorough-going reform would have been the remedy. Yet, this was also not an option for the Ottomans except where European material interests were involved. The mutual suspicions and rivalries of the great powers rendered any comprehensive reform scheme ineffective as a consistent program of rehabilitation. These insurmountable dynamics plunged the empire into a maelstrom of disintegration engulfing the entire Ottoman population with disastrous consequences.

As a noteworthy example of great power meddling, the competition of obtaining railway concessions can be cited here. Ottoman efforts to develop railways in the empire each time encountered great difficulty owing to rivalry among the powers. Britain, for instance, resented the presence in the Ottoman Empire of German firms building railways, seeing it an encroachment on its interests in the Near East. British ambassador Lowther was aware of the Ottoman frustration of the great power duplicity regarding “reforms” when he quoted the Ottoman complaint: “We are invited on the one hand to improve the position of our subjects in Asia Minor but we are deprived of the means of doing so by not being allowed to build railways.”³

Extracting concessions from the Sublime Porte required what Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, called “diplomatic effort.” Ironically, while the Ottoman Empire bore the brunt of the detrimental impacts of the capitulatory regime, British statesmen resented its continuation in Egypt under their protectorate. Despite the fact that they were occupying an incomparably different status in the scale of balance of power, British officials found the debilitating regime wrought by the Capitulations unbearable and incompatible with a state’s sovereignty to run its own affairs.⁴

The growing significance of the Armenian issue as a subject of great power diplomacy was part of a more general and larger problem of what came to be known as the “Eastern Question,” namely how to succeed in a scramble for acquiring as large a share as possible from the spoils at the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Although foreign involvement in Armenian affairs, in terms of cultural and economic impact, dated back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Treaty of Berlin internationalized, and according to some authors “legitimized,” the Armenian Question, as a subject of great power diplomacy.⁵

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Armenians, like many other ethno-religious elements of the empire, came increasingly under the influence of European ideas and experienced a cultural self-awareness. Modernization efforts by Ottoman statesmen, improved communications, mass use of the printing press, expanding foreign trade, and the influence of foreign missionaries paved the way for such a development.⁶ Of the ethno-national groups in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were among those who had attracted great sympathy throughout the Western world. As an indication of this sympathy, for instance, prominent French figures such as Georges Clemenceau, Anatole France, Jean Jaurès, and others founded a fortnightly journal Pro Armenia in November 1900 to advocate the Armenian cause.⁷

Nevertheless, it was Russian Armenians who had spearheaded the ideological and organizational formation of Armenian nationalism by setting up the two most influential secret political parties: the Hunchak Party in Geneva in 1887 (later, its center was moved to London), and the Dashnaktsutiun (the Armenian Revolutionary Federation) in Tiflis in 1890. The aim of these parties was the “national independence” of Ottoman Armenians, while their method of “insurrectionary revolutionary action” was based upon the expectation of provoking great power intervention. These parties disseminated nationalist propaganda among the Armenian populations in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere through their official organs: Hunchak (Bell), and Droshak (Flag). They stirred up revolts whenever possible in eastern Anatolia, staged violent demonstrations in Istanbul and in other cities, plotted assassinations and bombings, and employed other coercive and terrorist methods. The leaders of the revolutionary Armenian parties thought that the Greek, Romanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian peoples attained their nation-states by following such a course of action. Hence, both the Hunchak Party and Dashnaktsutiun attempted to transplant the Balkan, particularly Bulgarian, “model” of nationalism into Asia Minor where Armenians were only a minority on the territory they were claiming for themselves.⁸

For Britain, as from the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 and the signing of the Treaty of Berlin, the Armenian question became another significant aspect of the Eastern Question, to be dealt with under the impetus of political and strategic considerations of great power politics. Fearing that the Russian advance in Asia Minor would threaten its lifeline to eastern imperial possessions, Britain managed to compel Russia to revise its stipulations with more moderate terms by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.⁹ As a strategic measure against the territorial expansion of Russia further south toward the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf sea-lines, Britain moved to secure its own position in the Near East by getting under its control strategic Ottoman regions and sea-ports in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean in an incremental, yet determined, policy. British efforts to “encourage” the Ottomans to undertake reforms toward the Armenians included at times gunboat diplomacy, as seen in 1894 when Britain sent its Mediterranean Squadron to Beirut, which proceeded thence to Bodrum via Marmaris in order to press the Ottoman government to accept the reform scheme.¹⁰

King Edward’s visit to the Tsar at Reval in June 1908 and news that both sides had reached an agreement on certain issues, including a reform scheme for Macedonia, added to the Ottoman fears. Sultan Abdulhamid II’s diplomacy had been able to maintain the status quo in the Near East by carefully attending the requisites of the balance of power politics at the time.¹¹ However, with consolidation of its strategic position in the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean through establishing de jure or de facto protectorates along its seaways, British policy towards the Ottoman Empire underwent a dramatic change. Since the Gladstone government, the British Empire had ceased to be the Sublime Porte’s main ally to turn to against the Tsarist Russia’s expansionist policy towards the Near East. The emergence of the Entente Cordiale between Britain, France, and Russia at the turn of the century did not bode well for the Ottoman diplomacy’s principal objective, i.e. to maintain the empire’s unity.¹²

This rapprochement between Russia and Britain, whose interests had long been looming large over the Near East, increased the anxiety of the Ottomans. The fears of yet another secession in the remaining Balkan territories of the empire, exacerbated by the renewed Anglo-Russian initiative for reform in Macedonia, somehow precipitated the Committee of Union and Progress’ action in July 1908 for the Young Turk Revolution.¹³ After all, it was the Near East, and particularly the control of the Turkish Straits and Russia’s ambitions for southward expansion, which had been the original cause of hostility and friction between Britain and Russia, and even in these areas the British government was prepared to discuss favorably some changes if Russia would introduce them, as Grey himself had underlined. However, the fact that the question of the Turkish Straits and the Near East concerned the other European powers would make any bilateral arrangement untimely prior to the Great War.¹⁴

Ottoman attempts at finding allies or cultivating sympathy for alleviating its vulnerability against external woes were falling on deaf ears. As the British ambassador in Istanbul brusquely put it in his annual report of 1912, it was not sufficient to desire an alliance and to offer it, “but it must be accepted by the other contracting party.”¹⁵ Diplomatic overtures that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government had undertaken in order to cultivate alliance relationships with a major European power, possibly with Britain or Germany, did not yield any favorable result. As explained by M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, neither London nor Berlin was impressed much by such a burdensome engagement with the “Sick Man of Europe,” whose demise was already viewed as foredoomed by its economic and military weakness. The attack on the Ottoman Empire by the Balkan states in 1912 compelled the Sublime Porte to sign a peace treaty (the Treaty of Ouchy) with Italy in order to end the war in Libya that had been started in 1911 when Italy had embarked upon an assault to occupy the Ottoman province of Tripoli (Tripoli of Barbary and Cyrenaica). The treaty resulted in the loss of the last Ottoman territory on the African continent. The Balkan Wars, started in 1912 and continued in 1913, deprived the empire of almost...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 On the eve of the Great War
• 2 War, humanitarian relief, and propaganda (1914–17)
• 3 America at war and the resurrection of the Armenian question (1917–18)
• 4 New vs. old diplomacy: a mandate plan (1919)
• 5 “The Wilson Award” and its specter at Lausanne (1920–23)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index