Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

Turkey's Image in the West in the Nineteenth Century

"I would rather find a single explanation for cause and effect than possess the Kingdom of Persia." Democritus

Throughout the nineteenth century western Europe continued to develop, with unification in Germany and Italy completing the transformation of all countries into nation states. The Industrial Revolution brought great advances with the aid of new technologies. Social rights were achieved little by little, a gradual process similar to that which occurred in the struggle for civil rights and public freedoms.

Music, painting, and literature were revitalized by new masterpieces. Philosophical and ideological works of great significance rivalled those of the Greek philosophers. Demographically and politically Western Europe burst out of the narrow confines of its continent to establish colonies all over the world. In a word, Western civilization was at its zenith.

By 1914 the reforms aimed at westernizing the Ottoman Empire had been in progress for more than a century. Most of the institutions which had formed the very basis of the Empire were dead and had been replaced by Western-style institutions. Even in education, justice, and civil law, the framework of the Shari'a had largely been left behind; the whole of our judicial system had become hybrid. The central and provincial administration, the army, higher education, commerce, and penal procedure had all largely been reformed. An active public opinion had come into existence. There was enthusiasm for the concepts of fatherland, liberty, even nationalism, and autocratic power was being challenged.

However, the sense of an Ottoman identity had been destroyed and no new universally recognized identity had replaced it. Beside a residual autonomies movement, proponents of Pan-Islamism, Turkism, and that nostalgic fruit of despair, Pan-Turanianism (the union of Turkey with the Central Asian countries), all grappled and fought in their effort to recreate a sense of identity.

On their own the westernizing reforms did not ensure satisfactory economic development. Also a succession of wars devoured the funds which were needed to rebuild the economy. Industrialization through a free market economy was not achievable because the division of labour took place along ethnic lines. Non-Muslims handled business and commerce, while Muslims were soldiers and farmers. Furthermore, the Capitulations were exploited to such an extent that even the small industries which did try to survive were eventually destroyed.

The indebtedness existing at the end of the Crimean War led to bankruptcy in 1875. Foreign powers then took upon themselves the task of collecting taxes and State revenues in order to ensure the payment of external debts. In these conditions, and given the lack of initiative among the population, the reforms did not improve anything. Popular will, in fact, did not support them. The élite who held power were imposing the reforms from above for the sake of safeguarding the Empire, but the masses were gaining no material advantage from them. On the contrary, they felt that the reforms went against their traditions and their cultural values; in a word, the aim was to destroy their identity.

The adoption of Western-style institutions in an economically underdeveloped, even ruined society proved insufficient to close the gaps in development and power between western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Quite the reverse, for it widened the gaps further, and even created the impression that the Ottomans would never be able to catch up with the West.

This was the internal situation in the Empire when the Balkan independence movements erupted, supported and provoked openly or secretly by Tsarist Russia and other Western powers. I have already described how the Christians presented themselves to European public opinion as victims of Muslim murderers, an image that Europe was predisposed to accept.

However, it was the birth of certain European currents of thought that dealt another blow to our image. I refer to ideas on `races'. These evolved under the influence of Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), who undertook a classification of plants and animals in the eighteenth century. In the next century interest passed to the study of human skulls and a theory about races came into being. Fiche and Gobineau were its principal exponents, explaining the superiority of the long-headed `races' (Europeans in general) over the short-headed. Mortillet, Ujfalvy, and Pittard showed, however, that the Neolithic revolution had been achieved by short-headed peoples. The superiority of Western civilization was then attributed to the languages spoken by the Europeans, the main ones all belonging to the Indo-European group.

Here again the English Assyrian scholar, A. H. Sauce, had been able to claim that the Sumerians, creators of the first Mesopotamian civilization, were of Central Asian race and language. Nevertheless, differences of race and language continued to be represented as the principal causes of differences between civilizations. This racism, which was flattering to Europeans and which attributed cultural pre-eminence to biological pre-eminence, reached its apogee in Nazi Germany, and although these ideas are now discredited, they have left traces in the collective unconscious of western Europe.

Parallel with their Chinese research, the Jesuits of the seventeenth century undertook studies of Turkey. Léon Cahun, although not studying Turkey exclusively, nevertheless had a considerable influence in this area. He thought that the Turks, like the Mongols, had served as a link between the Chinese and Iranian civilizations rather than having created a new civilization of their own. I have spoken of the `oriental despotism' described by Montesquieu, earlier detectable to a certain extent in Hobbes's The Leviathan. The success of racist authors, linguists, and orientalists accentuated further the reprehensible traits attributed to the Turks.

Already regarding itself as the sole inheritor of the Graeco-Roman and Judaic-Christian cultures, the West considered its superiority clearly established by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the nation-state, and democracy.

As to the Turk, he belonged henceforth to an inferior racial and linguistic group `incapable of creating a civilization'. He remained a stranger to Christian civilization and to Greece which had just been liberated from him. The Aegean Sea, far from being merely an extension of the Mediterranean, constituted an insuperable demarcation line between barbarism and Western civilization.

Thus occurred the emergence of ethnocentrism in the West. This term designates the tendency of a community to bestow all values regarded as just and good on itself, but it does not stop there. It also attributes everything unworthy to others whom it considers to be inferior. In my eyes, however, no cultural difference, not even a historically temporary superiority, can justify claims to all positive values for one's own civilization while the remainder are supposed to see themselves endowed with all the negative values.

Men and societies, whatever their culture and their civilization, all contain a mixture of positive and negative values. Attempting to establish the purity of a culture necessitates adopting a racist approach which is difficult to justify biologically. A puritan approach to culture involves the denial of negative values in oneself, while projecting them onto communities considered to be inferior. Hate, jealousy, intolerance, and fear occur naturally in the hearts of all large communities at times of acute crisis. A community's projection of negative values unacceptable to itself onto others, whether deliberate or not, may offer a fleeting comfort but in no way resolves any of its problems. Grafted onto a hypocritical conception of its own culture, such sentiments can have tragic consequences, as was seen between the two wars and during the Second World War.

To make a complete analysis of Western ethnocentricity is beyond the scope of this book. I confine myself to suggesting that the Ottoman Turk was condemned and sacrificed in the name of European ethnocentricity.

For whatever reason, an increasing number of Ottoman subjects came to share the Western view of their country. The Ottoman State appeared to them as ineffective, even sick. To achieve a cure it was necessary to identify with the West, to imitate it, to speak a Western language instead of Turkish. The West had thus acquired an idealized status in the eyes of certain Ottomans. Western criticisms were regarded as the accusations of a superior civilization which had the right to bring a case against the Ottoman. The assumption was that the advanced civilization and universal humanism of the West conferred on it an unquestionable impartiality and objectivity.

The masses of the Ottoman population, unaware of this in reality pathological obsession on the part of a restricted but influential élite, reacted vigorously from time to time. As a result they were accused of ignorance and discredited. The reforming élite, who undertook a fight to the death on the battlefield while at the same time westernizing them selves, considered themselves also to be outside the problem of identity. For them, the question was to ascertain to what extent they could westernize in order to secure the survival of the State without jeopardizing their own identity-an extremely precarious piece of tightrope walking. Hence the reformers and their immediate circles could not avoid a perpetual crisis of identity; nor eventually could the community which they dominated.

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