Go West! Turkey’s entry into international society

Introduction

Although it was not included in the original conceptualization of international society, the Ottoman Empire is central to both the standard English School narrative and the critique launched by Welsh and Neumann. In the former, the Ottoman Empire was ‘in Europe, but not of Europe’, as Thomas Naff formulated it. It formed an integral part of the European international system as it emerged in the sixteenth century, but did not become a member of international society until 1856, achieving full legal parity with the other states with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). ⁷¹ According to Neumann and Welsh’s criticism, the Ottoman Empire was a constitutive outside vis-a-vis which European, and thus initially also international society, identity emerged. ⁷² This article follows up on the latter line of thinking, seeking to complement the legal perspective with one that emphasizes social and political change.

In both Ejdus’ Serbian case and Gheciu’s Romanian case, distancing oneself from the Ottoman Empire was a central aspect of ‘entry’. Both the Serbian and Romanian states were, and to some extent still are, keen to rid themselves of memories of a past under Ottoman suzerainty, and hark back to times before the Ottomans arrived. By doing so, they put the recent past under erasure, while highlighting or inventing an ancient past that is more malleable and more easily applicable when emphasizing commonalities with the major European powers. Formulated this way, the social aspect of entry into international society is as much about redrawing that society’s identity boundary as it is about changing the entrant’s political practices. This was more of a challenge for the Ottoman elite, who, by transforming and rebranding itself as ‘Turkish’, ended up doing much the same. By orientalizing the Ottoman past as well as Turkey’s Arab neighbours as ‘Eastern’, it represented itself as modern and European. Just as the elites in the three other cases reached for ancient times to reiterate their Europeanness, so did the elite of the Turkish Republic.

As Turan Kayaoğlu argues, the norms, practices and representations that constitute international society did not coalesce in Europe and spread unchanged from there to the rest of the world. ⁷³ His main argument is that the concept of territorial sovereignty, and thus also the current interpretation of sovereignty itself, did not emerge in Europe, but rather in delineations between the European subjects and locals in states like the Ottoman Empire, China and Japan, where European empires acquired extra-territorial jurisdiction over their own subjects, as well as over imperial protégés. Shedding this ’intolerable’ situation of not having full jurisdiction over all the persons within the state’s territory became a key issue for non-European states such as the Ottoman Empire. In order to abolish these extra-territorial jurisdictions, a state had to be deemed civilized enough to be allowed to be given jurisdiction over Europeans. While this does involve some changes in political and legal practices, the civilizational status of a society is very much a case of the eye of the beholder. It is an open question whether the ‘British’ legal system had passed the standard of civilization in the nineteenth century, had it not itself been the enforcer of that standard. The case of overlapping jurisdictions, no equality before the law, no published legal code and so forth were as fitting for nineteenth-century Britain as they were for the Ottoman Empire in the same period. So being civilized is as much about convincing a particular audience that one has attained the standard of civilization as it is about actually changing practices.

As the traditional English School narrative holds, the identity of international society was progressively less tied to Christianity (i.e. a religiously defined identity) and increasingly described in cultural and geographical terms as ‘European’. ⁷⁴ As the German anthropologist Johannes Fabian has argued, this was a time when the narratives of religious salvation were replaced with secular historical narratives of international order that have civilization as their telos. ⁷⁵ As becoming civilized was detached from becoming Christian, non-Christian polities could (at least in theory) improve their positions in the international order through secular changes in political practice without religious conversion. Hand in hand with these changes in political practice went the adoption of civilization as a historical telos.

Tiered international society

As Iver Neumann has argued, membership in international society is not a digital issue of ‘in’ or ‘out’, but rather a complex social process whose end result can be conceived as tiered membership, with late entrants occupying outer tiers of international society, at least temporarily. ⁷⁶ I would say that this tiered nature is reproduced by the extent to which core international society states relate to a particular second-tier state by use of what Keene has pointed out as colonial practices – practices that imply hierarchical relations. ⁷⁷ But as Neumann points out, it is also about ‘sticky memories’ about a past outside the international society collective. ⁷⁸ These memories are used to legitimize the hierarchical relations that Keene points to (although it may not always be possible to bear them out, with Russia less so than with Turkey). Turkey, along with Russia and other late entrants, is continuously trying to convince the core members of the equal value of their membership (and thus to avoid being subject to these colonial practices). ⁷⁹ While Neumann’s claim may have more to do with how certain practices were adopted and are being perpetuated, thus being implicit in the practices, I will emphasize the identity aspect of those memories. Since such memories of entry do not necessarily have immediate policy implications, it is important to specify how they are important. In the case of the Turkish narrative of Westernization, one may claim that it is the narrative into which all domestic reform projects are embedded when they are legitimized to an external audience. There is a competing narrative of Western Great Powers seeking to divide and rule Turkey, but that is primarily deployed as a critique of domestic policies that match those of a Western state. This article is an analysis of how that narrative came into being. In short, it is about how the meaning given to collective’s place in the world and how international order is constituted in discourse. ⁸⁰

Entry is relational, and for changes in the identity narrative to ‘work’, they need to be accepted by core international society members. This is a case of asymmetric power relations, where access to certain diplomatic arenas is determined by European politicians, who have to defend their decisions to some audience, be that the bureaucracy, the party or the electorate. In the case of the Ottoman Empire’s acceptance into the Concert of Europe in 1856, one may say that it is a matter of the seven members of the Concert accepting the Ottoman Empire’s claims about its place in international order. To a certain extent, one may say that their claims must ‘fit’ the wider discursive setup of European discourses on ‘international order’. In the case of absolutist states, this might be less relevant, but in states like Britain, the inclusion of the Ottoman state needed to be possible to uphold discursively in Parliament. In Neumann’s ‘tiered international society’, entry is ongoing, since the entrant collective is assumed to be striving for parity with the core states. In Turkey’s relationship with Europe, this is exemplified by the accession negotiations with the EU. Here, Turkey’s narrative of Westernization is a double-edged sword. While it does underline the country’s commitment to shaping its state–society relationship on the basis of a European model, it also reifies Turkey’s ‘not-quite-European/Western-ness’. ⁸¹

Orientalizing the Ottoman periphery

Like any other identity, international society needs a constitutive outside in order to delineate a collective and to become meaningful. ⁸² That outside was originally a barbarian East, with Russia and the Ottoman Empire as key Others vis-a-vis whom it could differentiate its own identity. ⁸³ Europe is differentiated vis-a-vis Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Russia is delineated vis-a-vis the steppe nomads and Bashkir identity is meaningful vis-a-vis that which is even further east. Easternness is still a key Other to international society. My claim would be that getting an East is one important social aspect of entering international society.

In his celebrated book Colonising Egypt, the British anthropologist Timothy Mitchell argues, in much the same vein as Neumann and Welsh, that the introduction of a European ‘order’ in Egypt depended upon keeping and marginalizing remnants of the old. ⁸⁴ The old ‘disorder’ was constitutive of the new order. Thus, the European order, as introduced first by the French, then appropriated and further developed or maintained by Mehmed Ali and later by the British, could only be intelligible if the Orient was there to be seen and to make the new order recognizably distinct. The Westernization of Egypt thus depended upon a re-representation of the old as Oriental, that is, Eastern, and the new as Western (or at least modern). And these old remnants can be seen by all, and relegated to specific parts of the city and to particular classes of people.

The Ottoman modernization project involved an appropriation of European Orientalist discourse and the application of this discourse in differentiating between Ottoman metropolitan Self that was orderly, civilized and modern from the Ottoman peripheral Other – Arabs (which basically meant Bedouins) and Turks (meaning country bumpkins and Turcoman nomads). ⁸⁵ As Ussama Makdisi puts the point:

In an age of Western-dominated modernity, every nation creates its own Orient. The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire was no exception. ⁸⁶

[…] the Ottoman elite conflated the ideas of modernity and colonialism, and applied the latter as a means of survival against an increasingly hostile world: ‘Within its remaining territories, the Ottoman state began imitating the western colonial empires. The state consolidated the homogeneity of the core region, i.e – the Anatolian peninsula and the eastern regions of Thrace … even as it pushed the periphery – principally the Arab provinces – into a colonial status’. ⁸⁷

Central to what became an internal Ottoman mission civilisatrice was the Fırka Islahiya, the Reform Brigade, which was responsible for settling nomads in the Ottoman hinterland. Civilizing the hinterland also involved othering it; it became an object onto which metropolitan Ottoman goodwill and governmental efforts were directed. By doing so, it was constituted as something separate from the metropolitan Self. I would disagree when it comes to the novelty of this othering, one may possibly argue that the periphery always was constituted as other to the metropole, but this is of little consequence – it othered in a new way, one that was drew upon European representations of the Orient. With the introduction of European Orientalist discourse, the relationship was structured in a very particular manner, much in the same way as that between ‘old’ and ‘new’ parts of towns in Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt. ⁸⁸

The relationship was set up as one between metropole and colony, and one where there was a temporal axis of development whereby the periphery could and should become like the metropole. ⁸⁹ After what later became known as the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the dichotomy of old and new was given a particular political slant; the old was discursively linked to oppression or tyranny and the new was linked to freedom, and associated with Sultan Abdülhamid and the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), respectively. ⁹⁰ With the increased emphasis on Arab identity in the Ottoman Parliament after 1908 and especially with the Arab Revolt of 1917, these two dichotomies of new and old, and Ottoman centre and periphery were in Ottoman discourse overlain with one of Turks versus Arabs (although within these collectives, the centre–periphery relationship remained unchanged). ⁹¹ Arabness and Turkishness increasingly became essentialized and constituted in opposition to one another. The Arab, much in the same way as the nomad but now it was expanded to all Arabic-speakers, was othered as Oriental. The Arabs were assigned the same character traits as the Oriental was in European discourse.

With the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the new regime started conflating the Arab ‘Oriental’ periphery with the previous regime, in a way that represented the Ottoman dynasty as well as the Young Turks who had ruled it from 1908 to 1918 as Eastern. This linked the temporal dimensions of the East/West dichotomy and linked that to the dichotomy between ‘old Ottoman empire’ and ‘modern Turkish republic’. A good example of this is the staunchly Kemalist intellectual of the early Turkish Republic, Falih Rıfkı (Atay) who in his 1932 memoir of the Ottoman Empire’s last years, Zeytindağı (Olive Mountain), wrote that:

Kâmil and Sait Paşa [two of the then ruling Triumvirate] were both one-hundred percent old men. The Committee of Union and Progress found two new men: Mahmut Şevket Paşa and Sait Halim Paşa. They were also Ottoman-Islamic vezirs. One was from Baghdad and the other from Egypt. ⁹²

In the same way as the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II was othered by the Young Turk Revolutionaries, the Young Turk statesmen of the late Ottoman Empire (who had been Young Turks only a few years earlier) are here represented as Orientals in contrast to the Kemalist regime. The Orient is also given a place in this representation; it is in Baghdad and Egypt. ‘… Ottoman history became a world of lies. In the East [Şark], lies are not considered shameful [ayıp]’. ⁹³ Furthermore, the Ottoman statesman ‘Talat Bey was, like many of the men of the Constitutional regime, an Easterner. He was an Easterner who didn’t even have the varnish of the Tanzimat’. ⁹⁴ The Ottoman past was Eastern, deceitful and corrupt, and it was linked to places such as Baghdad and Egypt. ⁹⁵ This links old, Eastern, obsolete and Ottoman, and presents this as a contrast to the modern, Western, secular and vigorous Turkish Republic.

EU accession

The discourse representing Turkish history as a movement from East to West is not something that is unique to the so-called secularists in Turkish politics, but pervades every aspect of Turkish discourse on history, politics and international order. When the Turkish Parliament (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (TBMM)) debated the adoption of EU legislation in the early 2000s, one Member of Parliament (MP) represented Turkey’s relationship to Europe as follows:

Esteemed friends, the adventure we Turks have been experiencing for the last 2000 years has always gone from the East to the West. The armoured cavalrymen on horseback on the steppes of Central Asia, our forefathers who came to Anatolia as a migrant group, were never forced to assimilate or appropriate the values of the cultures and civilizations they encountered. They mobilized their own peculiarities, their own opportunities and abilities in order to establish, develop, and spread the values of the new civilization. Thus, during the last thousand years they bequeathed two large empires and states to the world’s political history. ⁹⁶

Moving forward means moving Westward. The concept of ‘Westernisation’ has been of paramount importance in Turkey for about a century, and Turkey has been trying to become a member of the EU for about half that time. As Hedley Bull summarized it, ‘Turkey’ had become a member of the Congress of Europe in 1856 and received formal equality with the European states in 1923. But there is still this persistent situation where Turkey is represented as ‘not quite there’, that it is behind, it is belated and ‘still on the path of Westernisation’. This is something that appears in both Turkish and non-Turkish discourse alike, most pertinently in the context of harmonizing Turkish laws and political practices to conform with EU standards. EU evaluations are broken down into tiny details and progress is measured on each. This is progress as in ‘many-small-progresses’ rather than Progress writ large, as an unfolding process of History. But in Turkish discourse on the EU as well as EU discourse, it appears that the two are linked. These detailed progresses in the plural add up to the greater historical goal of EU membership. This excerpt from a 2011 EU document on Turkey’s possibilities for admission sums up the relationship:

Good progress has been made in consolidating the principle of civilian oversight of security forces. In particular, civilian oversight of military expenditure was reinforced. Decisions of the Supreme Military Council were opened to civilian judicial review. Further reforms are still required in order to […] ⁹⁷

Replace ‘civilian oversight of security forces’ with almost any possible political issue that is likely to appear on the agenda – human rights, market reforms, democracy, freedom of speech – and the setup is given. ‘Progress has been made, but …’ is the standard format when European political leaders or experts are dealing with Turkish politics. ⁹⁸ While Turks generally hate this representation as well as its attendant practice, the ‘report card approach’ to evaluating Turkish political change, Turkish historical narratives are formulated by use of the very same elements. ⁹⁹

Conclusion

Given that the Ottoman Empire was a key Other for the emergence of a European identity, and hence also to some extent an international society other, Ottoman and Turkish ‘entry’ involves renegotiating this otherness. By employing historical narratives that are synchronized with European narratives, Turkish intellectuals underline Turkey’s belatedness, but in the same move make it acceptable in a wider historical setup. Being historically ‘behind’ is easier to do something about than being an essentialized, static Other. Changing historical narratives is therefore integral to a successful process of entry into international society. The question is not so much how far Turkey has progressed along the time axis of civilization, but how Turkish historical narratives came to be synchronized with European historical narratives, and inherent in this, how the semantics of Turkish politics came to match European semantics. Where the core countries of international society are said to merely ‘move forward’ in a race between nations, Turkey is said to move Westward. Nothing underlines Turkey’s liminality with respect to Europe, the West and international society more than this.