Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

First Reforms

"Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances."
R. W. Emerson

Ottoman budget deficits and inflation, the diversion of international maritime trade from the Mediterranean, the corruption of the administration, and the degeneration of fundamental institutions (timar and dev?irme) all began to appear during the second half of the sixteenth century, just as the Empire had attained its greatest extent. These problems, and possible remedies for them, began to be discussed by a small group of concerned individuals during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Koçu Bey, whom the Ottoman historian Hammer described as the 'Turkish Montesquieu', submitted to Sultan Murad IV in 1630 a memorandum containing a number of recommendations. Other proposals for reforms were formulated later by Katip Celebi and by the historian Naima, but they differed little from those of Koçu Bey in their analysis and diagnosis of the problems, and their suggested solutions.

Until the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, the Ottoman reformers attributed our decline principally to inadequacies in administration, i.e. to the weakening of central authority. According to them, a failing administration was destroying the stability of the Empire. The Ottoman Empire had previously benefited from a harmonious system known as the `circle of equity' (an idea similar to Rousseau's `state of nature').73

1. There can be no royal authority without the military.
2. There can be no military without wealth.

3. The reaya produce wealth:

1. The Sultan keeps the reaya by making justice reign.
2. Justice requires harmony in the world.
3. The world is a garden; its walls are the State.
4. The State's prop is the religious law.

8. There is no support for the religious law without royal authority.

These statements were usually written around the circumference of a circle, showing how the eighth statement led directly back to the first. This approach to social life was based on a concept of harmony and internal equilibrium, while the effects of the external world were not being taken into consideration. It was therefore necessary to re-establish this system with the aim of restoring a just and strong administration. By so doing it was thought that the Empire would be made as powerful and prosperous again as it had been in the time of Süleyman the Magnificent.

This spirit of reform persisted for about a century. It assumed without question the superiority of Ottoman structures and institutions, the decline of which was considered to be due only to poor management. This attitude meant that the reforms which were undertaken did not seek to adapt the Empire to new external conditions, but merely to restore the order to its previous glory.

It happens sometimes in the history of a country that a past of exceptional grandeur exercises an immense fascination for later generations. If things are going badly, one observes the very understandable tendency to seek recipes for a cure from that period of greatness in the past. Viewed from this angle, the absence of any `golden age' to attract and hold an élite to its past certainly makes progress easier by facilitating adjustment to present conditions.

In its early years the Ottoman Empire was quite sensitive to external influences. New developments and

discoveries were of interest to the men in power, and were adopted as much as possible. In the course of time, however, a feeling of complacency, even superiority, took hold of them and made them indifferent to the development and progress taking place in western Europe.

In my opinion the reformers had more important reasons for wishing to restore the past. The principal

reason seems to me to be the fact that the Ottoman Empire remained aloof from the evolutionary process triggered by the Renaissance and the economic developments which followed it. The whole structure of the Ottoman Empire was incompatible with these changes.

As we have seen earlier, Anatolian physiologoi had had to disappear in the Hellenistic period. Later, pagan Hellenism in Anatolia had been swept away in the confrontation with Christianity.

Byzantium, insofar as it was the first empire in post-classical times to have an official religion, was not

conducive to the rationalist upsurge. The Ottoman Empire, the inheritor of Byzantium, could not for the same reason view it any more favourably.

The great majority of the Byzantine people therefore rejected the Western Renaissance and preferred to submit to a new dynasty which continued in the path traced by the Byzantine Empire, and which gave a new vigour to a body that had been sick for a long time.

Indeed, this Ottoman dynasty for a time spared the area of the eastern Mediteranean from Western colonization, and saved it from the underdevelopment which would have resulted. For almost two

hundred years it rescued it from the condition of a modern Third World economy in which it would otherwise have been engulfed. But it changed neither the structure of society nor the system, which remained feudal. It was therefore an inevitable consequence of this rejection of change that the Empire would in the long run decline once more to a colonial and underdeveloped level. It is in this evolution that one can best see the ways in which the Ottoman Empire was the inheritor of the Byzantine Empire. But what nonetheless remains remarkable is that, thanks to the Ottomans, the Eastern Empire of Constantinople survived for another half a millennium.74

In its struggle against the pagans, the Orthodox religion had constructed effective intellectual and moral defence against rationalism. So effective were they that the Byzantine Empire, in spite of carefully conserving and restoring at Constantinople all the great works of Greek civilization, still remained uninfluenced by it. One could compare the situation to that of a dangerous microbe, guarded for a thousand years in the same laboratory and prevented from escaping and contaminating anyone. This fact shows how very unjust it is to reproach the Ottomans for having prevented the propagation of Renaissance ideas among the Orthodox Christian communities.

Rationalism had been born on the Aegean shores, in the Hellenic and Anatolian cities where political liberties had evolved. In conditions favorable to the blossoming of individuality, man had been able to express himself and to create intellectual works. This had been a time when both the economy, particularly commerce, and art had made enormous progress.

A similar evolution to that accomplished by Ionia between the archaic age and the classical age took place in Italy, starting gradually from the eleventh century through the fifteenth century.

The decisive contribution of Islamic civilization to the Italian Renaissance, which later leavened the entire West, has always been underrated. In reality it was no coincidence that rationalism in Western Christianity began in the Italian city-states. They were the ones which had close contacts with the Islamic world through maritime trade both before and during the crusades, which in turn served as a unique occasion for Europeans to become acquainted with the higher socioeconomic and cultural life of contemporary Islam. The Sicilian Islamic Sultanate constituted another channel to Italy for Arab science, know how, and philosophy, which were assimilated especially after the Norman invasion of Sicily in the time of Frederick II.

The mutual weakening of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy stimulated the development of the city-states. Gradually every citizen acquired a measure of influence over the destiny of his city. Although at first only a small élite predominated, even that represented considerable progress towards liberty compared with monarchical government.

Social evolution took place in tandem with the development of trade, and then agriculture. Intellectual and artistic progress accompanied material prosperity, though it seems that the prerequisite for all these beneficial changes was political liberty.

These new conditions were naturally favorable to the reaffirmation of the rights of the individual recognized in Roman law and Athenian democracy. The lands of western Europe, mainly because of their climate, were well suited to agricultural development, and technical advances contributed to increased production which transformed serfs into self-sustained farmers. Development of private ownership, the increasing profitability of enterprises, and the accumulation of wealth resulted in the flourishing of towns and their surrounding provinces, and subsequently of whole countries and their governments.

But underlying this momentous transformation was the rebirth of the individual enjoying political rights and freedoms vis-à-vis the authority as citizen and politician, rationally organizing trade and production as entrepreneur, experimenting and applying his findings as scientist and creating beyond traditional forms and content as artist.

Nevertheless, the political frame of the city-state, well suited to the reborn rationalism, awaited the invention of parliamentary representative democracy in England in order to evolve into the larger political frame of the nation-state. Only after that did Renaissance rationalism spread in western Europe.

By contrast, the Ottoman Empire was a universal state. This was not only in keeping with the tradion of the country since the time of Alexander the Great onwards, but was in full accord with the Turkish State tradition. There was also an economic rationale for this kind of state.

The Anatolian ecosystem was already out of balance, the forests having been extensively burnt during the long quarrels between the Generals of Alexander the Great. When Byzantium lost Egypt, the essential source of its wheat supply, the resulting poverty was made tolerable only by the improvement of the fief system (pronoia, timar) and because the population had been reduced by an epidemic of bubonic plague. A school of thought tends to explain the Ottoman expansion towards the Balkan peninsula as a result of the shortage of wheat in Anatolia.

I have already mentioned the droughts and the economic and demographic factors which adversely affected the agricultural development of the Ottoman Empire. It should be noted that on those lands, over-used by successive civilizations, our present agricultural production still remains well behind that of Europe, even allowing for the extraordinary scientific progress of our time.

Given the low level of agricultural production as the main economic activity of the time and poor technical know-how far short of improving it, only a fairly centralized authority reigning over a vast area would be able to mobilize public revenues sufficiently to sustain the functions of a state which under these conditions could but be a universal or imperial one. This political rather than administrative centralization implying a minimum intervention in local affairs should normally allow the regions to evolve into autonomous entities where political and economic rights were freely exercised in favour of a regional development similar to that of Renaissance Europe. In reality, this did not happen. There existed economic and political reasons working against such an evolution.

Economically, the decline in public revenues from trade, consequent on the Western discovery of the ocean routes, led to increasing pressure on the stagnant productive resources from the central government in quest of new revenues. This situation further impoverished the regions and impaired the ecosystem, thus creating a vicious circle. Also inherent in this imbalance was the converse correlation between the size of the land economically necessary to raise adequate revenues and the exponentially higher expenditure required for the defence of an area of such dimensions. This is what happened to the Ottoman Empire.

Was it then possible for Ottomans to adapt themselves to the Italian Renaissance? As I have pointed out, Ottoman architecture was part of Renaissance architecture. In science, technical know-how, and philosophy they did not entirely remain alien to main currents in Europe. But Renaissance rationalism did not penetrate the Ottoman social fabric in an organic way. The main reason was that the parliamentary system worked out by the English as the political frame for the assimilation of the Renaissance in a nation-state was too narrow to be compatible with the multi-religious and multi-ethnic universal state. Once again, the ecumenism that was the ideal of the Ottoman Empire was an obstacle to a rationalist dynamism. Even now, after almost five centuries of wars and agony in Europe, the EC is far from creating institutions capable of integrating a set of highly developed nation-states of the same civilization into a multi-national society, while trembling before the option of a multi-religious one.

In retrospect, some historians think that the collapse of the timar system following the ruin of agriculture should automatically result in private ownership while the degeneration of the Janissaries into armed shopkeepers could pave the way to democracy by containing the despotic power of the Sultan.

These analyses are not valid. Private ownership is an advanced institution which historically emerged in western Europe at a time of dynamic economic growth. Both traders and former serfs asserted their ownership rights when they materially benefited from this growth. The political aspect to the question was that they tried to wield their newly acquired economic power to limit the influence of aristocracy and the prerogatives of monarchy in the society.

In the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, the so-called private ownership emerged not as the achievement of a rising class but as a result of the collapse of order into chaos. New and mostly absentee landlords, having usurped the lands, could not enjoy legal backing or political legitimacy, and so were in too precarious a situation to invest and reap the reward thereof. Furthermore, the private owner or wealthy man is not necessarily an entrepreneur. In history, the private sector has always existed. But it was the rationalism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as well as the religious discipline and dedication of the Reformation, which created an individual who was capable of rationalizing the production process.

The challenge before every society has always been the same, namely the maintenance of security and the satisfaction of the material and spiritual needs of the population. But the response of societies to this perennial challenge has varied considerably in history, depending on a myriad combinations of factors. Response to challenge takes the shape of institutions. The nature of institutions reflects the accumulation of the civilization at a given moment of history. The Ottoman response was primarily based on the institutions inherited from the previous empires of the region. The Western response, on the other hand, was geared to building new institutions in the absence of effective ones, for in the competition for central authority the Papacy and the Empire had been losing ground, while new intellectual and economic forces were emerging.

The Ottomans added new institutions, e.g. the dev?irme, to the old: the Ulema, the millet system, the guilds, timar, and so on. With remarkable thoroughness they systematized them and raised them legally and administratively to perfection at a time when in fact they had already been made redundant by contemporary developments in the West. Nevertheless, these institutions proved themselves greatly efficient in establishing a high degree of order in the country and achieving security in the broadest sense of the word. It was not the alleged `nomadic past' of the Ottomans or the `inhuman' character of these institutions, but their full development and success in real life that created mental and physical obstacles to their adaptation to new conditions. Moreover, the magnitude of the change required was not perfunctory improvements here and there but a metamorphosis similar to the one confronted by eastern Europe today.

Ottoman institutions did not lack rationalism. But theirs was a social rationality which left little room for the free initiative of the reasoning individual. At a later stage, when Ottoman society became inward-looking, defensive, and rigid because of defeats and decline, the disintegration of these institutions was expected to break up the sclerosis and give way to an order where individual rationality would blossom. This proved impossible, for that which had not existed in the preliminary phase of the institution building process did not appear in the disintegrating phase either.

Can we then qualify Ottoman civilization as arrested? First of all, I should point out that the Ottoman Empire conceptually was not geared to constant progress but to harmony, which could best be explained by the `circle of equity'. In this respect, the term `homeostasis' is perhaps an appropriate one to indicate the ultimate goal of Ottoman civilization. The internal social equilibrium of the Empire was preserved as in a self-contained world, thanks to the Capitulations which reduced intercourse with the rest of the world to a strict minimum, and to wars which prevented invasion from outside. The development of Ottoman civilization was in fact arrested as regards progress which unleashed dangerous forces in society and in nature. It is my hope that world civilization will in future succeed in striking the right balance between progress, where the Ottomans failed, and rationality in its objectives, where Western civilization has not been totally successful.

Right from the beginning, the main challenge the Empire had to confront was wars waged over the European territories. Although the Ottomans were trying to revive the Eastern Roman Empire, the West perceived the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans as a fatal danger to its existence and did not recognize Ottoman sovereignty over any area or region as legitimate and permanent. Therefore the wars with the Ottomans assumed the character of a life and death struggle in which both parties felt compelled to go to the bitter end. This approach was different from the one which prevailed in the intra-European wars among the Western powers which aimed at limited gains and hence tolerable results for the parties.

This situation had several results. First of all the enmity it created between the two sides made it extremely difficult for the Ottomans to borrow from the progress achieved by the West. The importance of this point cannot be overestimated in view of the fact that the penetration of one civilization into another can best be achieved under peaceful conditions.

The cultivation of Hellenic science and philosophy was made possible in the Islamic Abbasid Empire at a time when the Hellenic domination of the region was a remote memory.7s The Italian Renaissance got under way by borrowing heavily from Islamic civilization only after the Arab armies had ceased to be a threat to Europe.

Thirdly, when the balance of power finally slid into the West's favour, the successive defeats which the Ottomans had to suffer had a tremendously demoralizing effect both on the ruling élite and on the people. They gradually lost their vitality and enterprising spirit; they felt their dignity damaged and they took refuge in the soothing embrace of religious pre-determination. Given such a state of mind, it is amazing that for two centuries we maintained the resolve to carry on fighting.

This imposing requirement of defence was primarily responsible for arresting the potential of the Empire for progressive evolution and prompting an instinctive drive in the ruling élite towards reviving the glorious past.

The proposals of the first Ottoman reformers were implemented by the octogenarian Mehmet Pasha (Köprülü), proclaimed Grand Vizier in 1656. For the first time a Grand Vizier acted on his own initiative, the Sultan having given him a free hand. Mehmet Pasha effectively strengthened the administration, re-established order in the army, reorganized agriculture, and supervised the seraglio, the centre of power. Soon the Ottoman armies were once again inspiring fear. When his son, Ahmet Köprülü, succeeded him, Crete was conquered and the armies advanced as far as Saint-Gotthard, and reached Khotin, Kamenets, Padolski, and Lvov in Poland.

On the premature death of Ahmet Pasha, another member of his family, Kara Mustafa Pasha, became Grand Vizier. The Ottoman Empire had regained the magnificence of the time of Süleyman. Only one last victory was lacking: the conquest of Vienna. This was the beginning of the end (1683).

The strengthening of the administration had enabled the Empire to regain its identity, thus confirming the views of the reformers. For a time its resources were such that a resurgence of power and a universal challenge appeared on the traditional lines-a mistaken assumption. In reality, the difference in strength between western Europe and the Empire had continued to widen. Perhaps it was their inability to recognize this fact that caused the Ottomans to waste time before making their last thrust. Now time was on the side of the West.

In spite of the setbacks imposed by the Treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718), the Ottoman reformers continued to defend the same theories. This situation continued until the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774.

In the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, the Empire had to face serious problems and the process of decline was accelerating. But the situation was neither desperate nor irreversible. Had there been fewer institutional and psychological impediments, the Empire could have started the process of a Western-inspired change a century earlier. This would have required opening embassies in major European capitals, sending people to western Europe to study scientific, technical, and economic developments, translating books and adapting education, establishing private ownership rights both in agriculture and trade, implementing a wiser and more far-sighted economic policy with respect to inflation and the Capitulations, as well as attracting Turks to business and creating the Turkish component of the bourgeoisie. Once this machine got going, changes in other fields would, in the course of time, inevitably have followed.

The experience of defeats and the analysis of the failure in the archaistic reforms showed the folly of trying to return to the point of departure. It had become clear that it was necessary, as it had been when the Empire was first established, to achieve a new synthesis - this time in a secular direction.

To this end they adopted Western masters and models, including some who, lacking sympathy towards the Ottomans even before the defeats, had since lost all respect for them and arrogantly treated everyone different from themselves as barbarians. It was necessary to learn from them, but not to identify with them, if the Ottoman personality was to be safeguarded. They were anxious lest the series of reforms that they envisaged undertaking should signify the negation of the Empire, its institutions, its values, its morality, and its convictions.

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