The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk's Turkey

Erik J. Zürcher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848852716
• eBook ISBN: 9780857731715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The grand narrative of "The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building" is that of the essential continuity of the late Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey that was founded in 1923. Erik J. Zurcher shows that Kemal's 'ideological toolkit', which included positivism, militarism, nationalism and a state-centred world view, was shared by many other Young Turks. Authoritarian rule, a one-party state, a legal framework based on European principles, advanced European-style bureaucracy, financial administration, military and educational reforms and state-control of Islam, can all be found in the late Ottoman Empire, as can policies of demographic engineering. The book focuses on the attempts of the Young Turks to save their empire through forced modernization as well as on the attempts of their Kemalist successors to build a strong national state. The decade of almost continuous warfare, ethnic conflict and forced migration between 1911 and 1922 forms the background to these attempts and accordingly occupies a central position in this volume. This is a powerful history reflecting and contributing to the latest research from a leading historian of modern Turkey.
It is essential for all readers interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and for an understanding of a key player in the politics of the Middle East and Europe.

1.	The Politician as Historian, Historians in Politics: On the Nutuk (Speech) of Mustafa Kemal Pasha*

In October 1927 Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the later Atatürk, delivered a speech to the congress of the Republican People’s Party (RPP). All in all his speech at the congress, known in Turkish historiography simply as Nutuk (Speech), would take 36 hours and 33 minutes, spread out over six days.

In this chapter I analyse the character of this speech and its role in the modern history and historiography of Turkey. It is a subject that has been significant for me personally, for my first foray into the field (my research of the years 1978–84 into the role of the CUP in the Turkish independence struggle and that of the years 1985–9 into the first opposition party of the republic) often involved a direct confrontation with the version of the history of the period 1919–27 left to us by Atatürk.

In the spring of 1927 Atatürk began preparations for the great speech he was to deliver in the autumn. He had at his disposal in his presidential villa in Çankaya both his own correspondence files and the most important dossiers from the archives of the republic. His method of working was as follows: first he would seek out the most important documents, then he would take notes, and from these notes he would then dictate for several hours on end to secretaries who would be regularly relieved. The production of the day would often be tried out on his circle of trusted friends and collaborators, who were invited almost every night to the presidential villa to eat, drink and talk. It therefore comes as no big surprise that it was common knowledge in Ankara in 1927 that the president was preparing a detailed survey of the events since 1919.¹

In the night of 22–23 May Atatürk for the second time in four years suffered a mild heart attack,² which temporarily interrupted the writing of the speech. After resting for two weeks, he then travelled to Istanbul for further recovery at the end of June. This was actually the first time he set foot in the old capital since he had left it in May 1919. He settled himself in the old sultan’s palace of Dolmabahçe on the shore of the Bosphorus and there he continued to work on the text.

His efforts ultimately resulted in the six-day speech at the first party congress of the RPP, the party that had been founded by Atatürk himself in 1923 and that was the only legal party in Turkey at the time. Atatürk spoke every day for about three hours in the morning and again for three hours in the afternoon, from 15 to 20 October. The newspapers, which since the spring of 1925 had been under tight government control, published summaries of the president’s words every day.

Officially, the subject matter of the speech was the history of the emergence of the new Turkey, from the start of the national resistance movement in 1919 until the year 1927. In reality, the story ends roughly at the end of 1924, with the events in the years 1925–7, comprising 30 per cent of the period discussed, covered in only about 1.5 per cent of the total text. It is possible that this last period would have received more attention had Atatürk been able to continue his work during the summer, but I don’t think that was the case. The lack of attention to the most recent years can be adequately explained in light of the real purpose of the speech, to which I will return later.

Publication history

Shortly after the party congress the speech became available in print under the auspices of the Türk Tayyare Cemiyeti (Turkish Aeroplane Society).³ There were two editions: a luxury edition in two volumes, the text of which had been printed in Istanbul with maps and illustrations printed in Vienna; and a popular edition, also in two volumes, on cheaper paper. Of the popular edition the Ministry of Education printed and distributed 50,000 copies. To put this number into perspective, Turkey at the time had about 13.5 million inhabitants, and only about 1.4 million of those inhabitants were literate.⁴ A first edition of 50,000 is enormous when set off against this number (the equivalent of a print run of about 10.7 million copies in the contemporary USA) and indicates the importance attached to the text by the leadership of the Turkish republic right from the start.

In later years there were three more editions of the original text, all of them in the new Latin alphabet that had been introduced from January 1929. Those of 1934 and 1938 were published by the Ministry of Culture, that of 1952–9 by the Institute for the Study of the Turkish Revolution (Türk Devrim Tarihi Enstitüsü) for the Ministry of Education. This last-named edition was reprinted 14 times until 1981.⁵ With the exception of the cheap and heavily subsidized edition of 1938, all editions in the new alphabet consisted of three volumes, two of them containing text and one with supporting documents.

Apart from these editions of the original text, which in linguistic terms can only be termed Ottoman source documents, the Turkish Linguistic Society (Türk Dil Kurumu) beginning in 1963 issued at least six printings of a version called Söylev. ‘Söylev’, a neologism, is synonymous to ‘nutuk’ and is used to designate a version of the text that has been converted, or translated, into ‘pure’ Turkish by replacing most of the originally Arabic and Persian vocabulary with Turkish words, many of which had been newly created by the society. In 1973–5 yet another, different, modernized version appeared at Ankara University Press, this time in two volumes and without the supporting documents.⁶ This edition was a reaction to the one published by the Turkish Linguistic Society a decade earlier that had been judged artificial and purist by many. This time there was an attempt to write in a more natural Turkish, closer to the everyday usage of the 1970s. Finally, the committee in charge of the celebration of Atatürk’s 100th anniversary in 1981 decided to make one more attempt to render the Ottoman of the 1927 version into modern Turkish in a manner that would have made the text accessible and, it was hoped, enjoyable to read. The commission was given to Professor Zeynep Korkmaz and she produced the book in a single volume in 1991.⁷ It was published by the Atatürk Research Institute in Ankara and it is probably the most successful of the conversions. It goes without saying that in their efforts to modernize the text each of the editors had to make choices in which a great deal of interpretation was involved.

The reason that these editions in contemporary (or supposedly modern) Turkish appeared was that the generations that could read and understand Atatürk’s text were starting to die out. Atatürk’s language is late Ottoman. He modelled his style on that of the great mid-nineteenth century writer and politician Namık Kemal, with whose work he became familiar through his schoolmate, the Young Turk poet and orator Ömer Naci.⁸ Although Namık Kemal’s style was considered refreshingly direct and modern in the 1860s and 1870s, his language is full of vocabulary and syntactical elements borrowed from Arabic and Persian. The same is true for Atatürk’ usage in the Nutuk. Of the vocabulary roughly 85 per cent is derived from these languages. The language reform that Turkey has undergone from the 1930s has had such a great cumulative effect that modern-day Turks cannot read the text without special training.

The conversion of the text into modern Turkish is called ‘simplification’ (sadeleştirme) or ‘purification’ (özleştirme) in the different editions themselves. Nowadays the process is usually called ‘translation into Turkish’ (Türkçeye çevrilme), a term that seems to indicate that for modern Turks Ottoman is no longer seen as part of their own language. It is ironic that this is true even for the language of the founder of modern Turkey.

A really simplified version also exists in the shape of a kind of ‘children’s bible’ published by the newspaper Milliyet, and over the years the Nutuk has also been the subject matter of several (very serious) comic books.

The Nutuk was translated into French, German and English immediately after its first appearance. All of these translations were published by Koehler’s publishing house in Leipzig, Germany. The German translation by Dr Paul Roth⁹ is excellent, but the two other versions that were translated from the German, are unreliable. Nevertheless, the English translation¹⁰ has been reprinted by the Turkish Ministry of Education twice, in 1962 and 1973. A Russian translation in four volumes appeared in Moscow in the years 1929–34.

Given the attention the text has received and the dominance it has acquired as the master narrative for the history of Turkey in the years 1919–27, it is surprising that there still does not exist a truly scholarly, critical edition of the Nutuk. The manuscript, including corrections made by Atatürk himself on the typescripts produced by his secretaries, was kept in the presidential palace during his lifetime and then deposited in the safe of the Agricultural Bank in Ankara. Later it was moved to the archives of the War History Department of the Turkish General Staff (ATASE), which is perhaps the most inaccessible of all Turkish archives. To the best of our knowledge that is still where it remains. A critical edition based on the manuscript, the existing archives and the accounts of Atatürk’s contemporaries undoubtedly would fill an important void. Very recently, in the spring of 2008, a team of leading Turkish historians (Ahmet Kuyaş, Cemil Koçak, Mete Tunçay and Zafer Toprak) announced their intention to publish a critical edition, in which they will collate the text with evidence from Atatürk’s contemporaries.¹¹ Its publication will be a significant step forward, but the project is based on the published version of 1927, not on the manuscript.

The influence of the Nutuk on Turkish historiography

The Nutuk has exerted immense influence on the historiography of the national resistance movement and the emergence of the republic, both inside Turkey and outside the country. Turkish history textbooks for school and university paraphrase the Nutuk or include whole sections. In the popular writing on Turkey, as well as in most of the academic literature, the version of events presented in the Nutuk is preserved in its essential points. This is true both for publications from Turkey and for those from abroad.

Undoubtedly, Atatürk’s unassailable position as the liberator and founder of modern Turkey partly explains the acceptance of his words as objective truth. The existence of a law banning defamation of Atatürk in Turkey also plays a role, but beyond that, it also has to do with the degree to which we have at our disposal independent sources to verify Atatürk’s account. Here the situation is still far from satisfactory. For many years the restrictive archival regime in Turkey was criticized by historians both inside the country and out, and rightly so, but since 1989 both access to, and cataloguing of, the main collections in the state archives (the Ottoman and Republican Archives of the Prime Ministerial Archives, Başbakanlık Arşivi) has vastly improved. With some exceptions, the material older than 50 years that has been catalogued is now also freely accessible to historians.

Where research on the Nutuk is concerned, however, this does not solve all the problems. For the history of the national independence movement and the birth of the republic, the main subjects of the Nutuk, the ATASE, the collections of the Institute for the Study of the Turkish Revolution and the presidential archives (which hold the ‘Atatürk Archive’) are the most important archival resources and they are far less accessible. Because of this prevailing situation, not only foreign historians, but also Turkish ones, have recourse to the archival records of Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Russia. They, however, can only very partially replace the Turkish materials and they are of very little use where the real subject of Nutuk is concerned (of which more below).

No systematic publication of documents on the Turkish independence movement has ever been undertaken, in spite of the importance attached to the ‘history of the Turkish revolution and principles of Atatürk’, a required subject in secondary and higher education in Turkey. The Turkish press is very useful source for the period up to March 1925, when very strict censorship was introduced under the Law on the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükûn Kanunu). Before that, the press, which had grown into a mature medium in the second constitutional period, was quite active and critical.

Finally, we have at our disposal the accounts of Atatürk’s contemporaries and colleagues. Many of them have published their reminiscences, but almost without exception they did so starting in the 1950s, when the liberalization of the Turkish political system and the softening of censorship created a climate in which this was possible. Where the Turkish-speaking public was concerned, therefore, the Nutuk held sway as the unchallenged truth for about 25 years, long enough for it to completely dominate historiography as it evolved in the republic. When, from the 1950s onwards, increasing numbers of memoirs appeared that differed from the version given in the Nutuk, even if they did not openly challenge it, it was too late for them to have any serious influence on the established, official historiography that was being taught in schools and universities. The official version, based on Atatürk’s testimony, was perpetuated in textbooks and primers. With the increase of ideological challenges to Kemalism in Turkey from the 1960s onwards, the correct teaching of ‘history of the Turkish revolution and the principles of Atatürk’ gained added importance as an antidote in the eyes of the Kemalist state, which promoted Ataturkism in general, but with even more emphasis in the context of the celebrations of 50 years of republic (1973, at the end of the army-backed tutelary regime of 1971–3), the centenary of Atatürk (1981, a year after the military takeover led by general Kenan Evren) and the 75th anniversary of the republic (1998, a year after the ousting of the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan by the military).

What is the Nutuk about?

In Atatürk’s own words he intended to ‘explain how a great nation, which was thought to have come to the end of its national existence, had gained its independence and had founded a national and modern state based on the latest principles of science and technology’. He would be happy if he ‘had been able to clear up some points that would be able to make my nation and our future children attentive and wakeful’.¹²

Generally, his claim that the Nutuk is essentially concerned with writing the history of the independence struggle and the founding of the republic has been accepted both in Turkey and abroad. Beginning in the 1970s, there has been some discussion in Turkey on the questions of whether the text should be seen as straight history or as a source for historiography, and whether it was right for a politician like Atatürk to write history himself, rather than leaving that task to later generations.¹³ Some commentaries appear to recognize that the speech is also a political document, with their characterization of the Nutuk as a manifesto with which Atatürk symbolically closes one period and points the way to the future. After all, he emphasizes that ‘this is the story of a period that has finally come to an end’. This aspect receives scant attention in the discussion, however, and anyway is not seen as something that undermines the essential truthfulness and reliability of the account. In the eyes of Turkish historians the reliability of the Nutuk is demonstrated by the inclusion of a large number of original documents. The fact that these were selected by Atatürk himself is not seen as a problem.

In my view this approach fundamentally fails to appreciate what the Nutuk is about and why it was written. To understand its true function, we have to set the speech in the time and context in which it was conceived.

The years immediately preceding the giving of the speech in October 1927 were not only a period of far-reaching, radical reform; they were also the period in which all forms of political opposition were suppressed. The tensions with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Dedication & Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface: Thirty Years of Turkish History
• I. SOURCES AND LITERATURE
• Introduction
• 1. The Politician as Historian, Historians in Politics: On the Nutuk (Speech) of Mustafa Kemal Pasha
• 2. Young Turk Memoirs as a Historical Source: Kâzým Karabekir’s I·stiklâl Harbimiz
• 3. The Historiography of the Constitutional Revolution: Broad Consensus, Some Disagreement and a Missed Opportunity
• 4. The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey: Bernard Lewis’s Emergence Fifty Years On
• II. IMPERIAL TWILIGHT
• Introduction
• 5. The Ottoman Empire 1850–1922: Unavoidable Failure?
• 6. The Ides of April: A Fundamentalist Uprising in Istanbul in 1909?
• 7. Sultan Mehmet V’s Visit to Kosovo in June 1911
• 8. Who Were the Young Turks?
• 9. The Young Turk Mindset
• 10. Atatürk as a Unionist
• 11. The Ottoman Legacy of the Kemalist Republic
• III. THE GREAT WAR
• Introduction
• 12. The Ottoman Conscription System in Theory and Practice, 1844–1918
• 13. The Ottoman Soldier in World War I
• 14. The Ottoman Empire and the Armistice of Moudhros
• 15. Renewal and Silence: Post-war Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide
• IV. TOWARDS THE NATION STATE
• Introduction
• 16. Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics 1908–38
• 17. Were the Progressives Conservative?
• 18. Institution Building in the Kemalist Republic Compared with Pahlevi Iran: The People’s Party
• 19. Touring Anatolia at the End of the Atatürk Era: Kemalist Turkey Observed by Western Visitors
• 20. Islam in the Service of the Caliphate and the Secular State
• 21. Turning Points and Missed Opportunities in the Modern History of Turkey: Where Could Things Have Gone Differently?
• Notes
• Bibliography of Erik J. Zürcher