by Hew Strachan
At one level the episode’s outcome was entirely satisfactory to the Entente. If the Triple Alliance had any potential for joint operations, it was as a naval force in the Mediterranean. The Goeben and the Breslau in combination with the Austro-Hungarian and Italian fleets presented a formidable threat. But the Italians had declared their neutrality on 2 August, and in isolation the Austro-Hungarian fleet had immediately become conscious of its inferiority to the French. Its principal mission was to secure the Adriatic coast, to blockade Serbia, to watch Montenegro, and so to support the army’s land operations in the Balkans. The postponement of hostilities with both France and Britain was therefore entirely in its immediate interests. By breaking through to the Black Sea, the Goeben and the Breslau ensured that there was no German reinforcement of the Austro-Hungarian fleet. Furthermore, the two vessels did not reenter the Mediterranean until 1918, and their neutralization in relation to that sea was indeed rapidly adopted by the Entente as a rationalization of what had happened.
In reality, the mood of the opening days of August was not so considered; the uncertainty as to who was at war with whom, the emphasis on concentration on the western front, the expectation of a decisive battle in the major naval theatre, the North Sea—none of these was conducive to sustained attention to Souchon’s two cruisers. Indeed, although Souchon himself was decisive and energetic, his instructions from Berlin revealed a comparable German uncertainty which—even when known to London—did not necessarily clarify the situation.
Souchon’s orders up until 2 August were exactly those reflected in Entente dispositions—he was to operate in the western Mediterranean or break through to the Atlantic. But on that day Turkey and Germany formed a secret alliance. Tirpitz and Pohl, the chief of the naval staff, therefore agreed that Souchon should go to Constantinople; Souchon had received these orders even before the attacks on Philippeville and Bône. On 5 August the Germans asked the Austro-Hungarian fleet to leave its bases and move into the southern Adriatic to help the Goeben and Breslau break out of the Messina strait. The Austro-Hungarian naval commander, Anton Haus, was hesitant. The mobilization of his fleet had only been ordered the previous day and was not yet complete. He was therefore even more anxious to avoid meeting the French fleet. Furthermore, he was simultaneously under contradictory pressures from Berchtold. The foreign office wanted him to break through to the Black Sea in order to bolster Turkey and to persuade Bulgaria and Romania to join the Central Powers. But to do so (even if technically practicable—and Haus was clear that it was not) would court the naval action with the British and/or French which he had been told by the foreign ministry to avoid. He therefore stayed put.
The Germans renewed their request with greater urgency on 6 August. Souchon was told that the Turks did not want him to appear in the straits just yet, and he was running out of options. Haus still refused to come south, but he agreed to escort the Goeben and Breslau into Austro-Hungarian territorial waters: in Pola expectations of major fleet action—certainly with the British and possibly with the French—soared.8 That evening Haus learnt that Souchon’s course had been a decoy, and that he was now on the way to the Dardanelles. Given these tergiversations on the German side, Milne’s expectation that Souchon would break back to the west and even the Admiralty’s failure to alert Milne to the Turkish possibility become more comprehensible. It was Souchon himself who forced the pace of events. By presenting his ships at the entrance to the straits he obliged the Turks to come off the fence.
The significance of the Goeben and Breslau to Turkey’s decision to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers is perhaps more debatable than tradition allows. But what the episode does reveal is the difference in attitude to Turkey, and Turkey’s role in their respective strategies, enjoyed by Britain and Germany. Britain’s immediate response was to play down the political importance of what had occurred. The fiction of Germany’s sale of the two cruisers to Turkey was readily accepted. Churchill fumed, but Asquith was complaisant: ‘As we shall insist that the Goeben shall be manned by a Turkish instead of a German crew, it doesn’t much matter: as the Turkish sailors cannot navigate her—except on to rocks or mines.’9 Bethmann Hollweg, reluctant to credit the Admiralty with incompetence, construed the British response as a desire to limit the war.10 He was partially right, but for the wrong reasons. Britain did not propose to moderate its efforts against Germany, but it was anxious to restrict the war to Europe by preserving Turkish neutrality. The belief that Souchon would try to turn back to the Atlantic represented wishful thinking. Souchon’s push to the east showed how different was Germany’s understanding. Britain and Russia were Asiatic powers, France an African one. Their vulnerabilities lay as much outside Europe as within it. The voyage of the Goeben and the Breslau was an opportunity to widen the war, not restrict it.
TURKEY’S DECISION TO JOIN THE CENTRAL
POWERS
In the second half of the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire bore at least a superficial comparison with Austria-Hungary. In an era of increasingly strident nationalism, it rested its claims to great power recognition on the principle of supra-nationalism. Of a population of 39 million in 1897, only half were Turks. Macedonia embraced Slavs and Greeks; eastern Anatolia had a sizeable Armenian minority; Kurds bridged the frontier with Persia; and to the south were Jews, Circassians, and above all Arabs. Much of Ottoman greatness had rested on religious and racial toleration: Greeks and Armenians in particular had played a major part in the empire’s administration and in the development of its commerce. But towards the end of the nineteenth century the importation of European nationalism had fostered terrorism, particularly among the Macedonian and Armenian populations. Racial divisions were not marked out with geographical neatness. The cities of Macedonia were predominantly Muslim and Greek, while the countryside was Muslim and Slav; in none of the six provinces of eastern Anatolia did Armenians enjoy an absolute majority. In both areas the Muslim population was as much sinned against as sinning. But reprisals followed terrorism. The Ottoman empire’s multinational legacy became the victim of violence and European propaganda: the Turk was portrayed as—and increasingly became—a bloodthirsty bigot.
Like the Habsburg empire too, the Ottoman empire owed its continued integrity to the conduct of international relations. The orderly management of Macedonia lay in Russian and Austrian interests as well as Turkey’s; Britain maintained Turkey as the buffer to Russian expansion into the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the route to India. But in 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, the great powers changed tack. They were happy to affirm the independence of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, to grant autonomy to Bulgaria, to let Austria administer Bosnia-Herzogovina, to allow Britain control of Cyprus, and to give France a free hand in Tunisia. In 1897 they forced the Sultan to grant autonomy to Crete. Britain in particular, for so long Turkey’s guarantor, now centred its strategy on Egypt (another Turkish loss) and the Suez Canal. As importantly, irridentism within the empire could henceforth look to external sponsors; the emergent Balkan states encouraged their fellow nationals in the rump of European Turkey; Armenian nationalism enjoyed French and Russian encouragement.
To counter this process of disintegration the Ottoman empire had no cultural identity save that of Islam. The progressive loss of European Turkey, the consequent decline in the number of Christians, and the emigration of its Muslim population to Constantinople and points east increased Muslim predominance. Furthermore, Islam provided the unifying link whereby the Arabs could be restrained from political separatism. The fact that the European powers used religion as a mantle for their own penetration of Turkey— the Orthodox churches were vehicles for Russian, Greek, and Bulgarian agitation, and France claimed the protection of the empire’s 750,000 Roman Catholics—heightened Islamic awareness. Sultan Abdul Hamid emphasized his claim to the caliphate, fostered the use of Arabic, revived Muslim schools, and repaired the mosques. Ottomanism the redefined in increasingly Islamic terms in order to
counter irridentist nationalism.
However, any tendency towards direct ideological competition and even overt religious hostility was moderated by the principle of economic self-interest. When Abdul Hamid had come to the throne in 1876, 80 per cent of Turkey’s state revenues were devoted to meeting its foreign debts. The cost of the war of 1877–8, the subsequent indemnity to Russia, and the loss of so much productive territory exacerbated the position to the point where Turkey’s finances were about to fall under overseas control. The Sultan’s solution was to consolidate the debts, to create a public debt commission with representatives from Germany, Britain, Holland, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, and to allocate direct to the commission certain state revenues, and in particular customs duties, for the purpose of reducing the debt. Having compartmentalized the debt, Abdul Hamid was then free to develop the remaining sources of revenue in order to compensate. This he accomplished with a fair degree of success. But by 1908 foreign economic control of Turkey had nonetheless extended far beyond the bounds set by the public debt commission. In part this was the Sultan’s own fault: he encouraged European economic competition as a substitute for territorial ambitions; his drive to create the conditions for industrialization (and thus increased revenues), particularly the construction of railways, required foreign investment; the burdens of an expanded army and an inflated bureaucracy needed fresh loans. However, in addition, the industrial powers had no desire to foster Ottoman economic independence. The ‘capitulations’—privileges granted to foreigners in the days of Ottoman might, and allowing them exemption from Turkish law and taxation—became the symbol and instrument of the Sultan’s weakness. Businessmen in Turkey were foreign residents or Ottoman citizens of non-Turkish race. Turkey itself was predominantly an agricultural country. In Abdul Hamid’s reign the value of Anatolian grain exports went from 465 million kurus to 754 million, and the peasantry’s contribution to state revenues grew from 77 per cent of the total to 87 per cent between 1872 and 1910.11 But the capitulations prevented any increase in tariffs to protect Turkish industry from imports or to generate state wealth from exports. The exploitation of coal and mineral resources was limited; investment in industrial infrastructure could only proceed by way of foreign concessions and foreign loans. Thus, the Imperial Ottoman Bank was under British and (increasingly) French control, and 22 per cent of the public debt was owed to the former and 63 per cent to the latter. Thus too, despite a flourishing overseas commerce, Turkey had a trade deficit of 1.5 billion kurus in 1907–8.
The central aim, therefore, of the Young Turks’ coup in 1908 was modernization, and modernization for a specific end, that of reversing Ottoman decline. Abdul Hamid, although aspects of his administration had been marked by success, had ruled as an absolute despot and had created an administration centred around the court rather than parliament. The revolutionaries aspired to restore the constitution of 1876. Their inspiration was thus in part western, liberal, and democratic: ‘la Jeune Turquie’ had been founded in Parisian exile in 1889. But the émigrés had split, some rejecting foreign influences and embracing centralization and others not. Within the empire the growth of professional education, particularly in the army and the civil service, sponsored an indigenous political awareness. Secret societies of young Ottoman officers drew inspiration not just from the west, but also from Japan, for Japan had managed to modernize without destroying its traditional society, and had given evidence of its emergence with victory on the battlefield. The Turkish army was convinced that fears of a coup had caused its neglect at Abdul Hamid’s hands, and that if allowed a free rein it could crush terrorism and assure Ottoman integrity.
In 1906 a post office official, Mehmed Talaat, formed the Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonika. The young officers of the 3rd army proved particularly enthusiastic adherents, and its ideas were carried to the 2nd army at Monastir. In September 1907 the Ottoman Freedom Society merged with the centralist arm of the exile movement, the Committee of Union and Progress, and adopted its name. It also absorbed a smaller but older organization, Vatan (’Fatherland’), which had been formed by Mustafa Kemal, who returned to Macedonia from a posting in Syria, also in September 1907. The initiative for action in 1908 came from within the empire rather than without—from Salonika and from the 2nd and 3rd armies.
In a sense the 1908 revolution was not a revolution. Parliament was restored (not introduced for the first time); the sultanate was not overthrown; grand viziers of the pre-revolutionary period held the same office afterwards; and the Young Turks themselves did not seize power. The class origins of the Young Turks were relatively humble; they lacked both the age and experience seen as necessary for government. The Committee of Union and Progress, therefore, preferred to exercise influence on government through indirect means and to continue to make a virtue of its quasi-secret arrangements. The result was a power struggle between and within the old political elites and the newly established political parties.
If there was a revolution it occurred in 1909, and it did so as the result of a largely fabricated counter-revolution. The grievances of the army were central to the 1908 coup. Demonstrations over arrears of pay and the failure to release conscripts at the conclusion of their terms of service had turned to mutiny on several occasions between 1906 and 1908. Of 505 members of the Salonika group of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908, 309 were officers. Themselves products of military academies, they were anxious to reduce the army’s reliance on officers promoted from the ranks. In April 1909 the mutiny of a Constantinople-based battalion, feeding on Islamic fundamentalism and probably stoked by discharged ex-ranker officers, was dressed up as a counterrevolution. The Sultan, almost certainly wrongly, was implicated. Mustafa Kemal created an Action Army from elements of the 2nd and 3rd armies, and became its chief of staff. Under the guise of restoring order it declared martial law, cracked down on those parties opposed to the Committee of Union and Progress, purged the older Ottoman elites, and deposed Abdul Hamid.
Thus the army, not the Committee of Union and Progress, provided such semblances of political order as existed between 1908 and 1913. Mustafa Kemal himself proposed that officers should disengage from politics. Mahmud Sevket Pasha, the commander of the 3rd army, led the Action Army and subsequently became inspector-general of all the troops in the region and then minister of war. Sevket put the weight on patriotism and national security ahead of liberalism and social reform. He was tolerant of the Committee of Union and Progress rather than supportive of it. The latter divided against itself, the soldiers being more extremist than the civilians, and their political influence thriving on crisis but languishing without it.12
The initial reaction of the great powers to the Young Turks’ revolt was supportive, if condescending. The Committee of Union and Progress saw the objectives of the new Turkey as a revived Ottomanism, resting on a programme of capitalism and westernization. Its members, therefore, expected the backing of Britain in particular. Throughout the nineteenth century Britain had urged such reforms as means to Turkish reinvigoration. More specifically, the conviction that the meeting between Edward VII and the Tsar at Reval in 1908 presaged Russo-British intervention in the problems of Macedonia had been a key cause of the coup: domestic reform was seen as a preventive to foreign support for irridentism and eventual partition.
But the hopes of the Young Turks were soon dashed. Grey was ready to ‘give sympathy and encouragement to the reform movement’, but otherwise proposed ‘to wait upon events’; he would not, in other words, use Britain’s external clout to aid the establishment of internal order.13 The cycle of coup and counter-coup, the violence of Turkish politics over the next five years, did nothing to persuade him to adopt a more positive line. Nor did the revolution staunch the loss of territory. The Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzgovina, still nominally Ottoman, was the first blow, and elicited—it seemed—only weak protests from the Entente powers. Italy’s attack on Tripoli appeared also to enjoy great-power collusion. As th
e Italians’ allies, the Germans were reluctant to intervene, and the British did not respond to Turkey’s appeals. The culmination of this process, the Balkan wars and the effective extinction of European Turkey, confirmed for the Young Turks the notion that the international system would provide them with no succour.
The visible erosion on the frontiers was coupled with the latent threat of partition from within. Germany’s debates with Russia, Britain, and France over the apportionment of Turkish railway construction carried with them the implication that the powers were dividing even Asiatic Turkey into spheres of influence—a process confirmed by Russia’s proposals for the protection of the Armenians. Thus France sketched out its claim to Syria, Britain to southern Mesopotamia and the Gulf, Russia to the Caucasus, and Germany to central Anatolia. In reality, each of these powers pursued a policy designed to sustain the Ottoman empire, albeit in a weakened state. But by preparing its claim should the actions of another power trigger Turkey’s final partition, it fuelled great-power rivalry and Ottoman mistrust.
Thus, the revolution produced no change in Turkey’s economic subservience. Many of the Young Turks were themselves government employees whose salaries or pensions determined the size of the public debt. The army’s hold on politics made increased military expenditure, not budgetary cuts, the order of the day. In 1910–11 the government collected 2.88 billion kurus but disbursed 3.37 billion. The frustration with foreign economic dominance—by 1911 the public debt organization employed a staff of 8, 931, and was larger than the ministry of finance itself—fuelled antipathy to western capitalism and further undermined politicial liberalism. Djavid, the Young Turk minister of finance, struggled to establish Ottoman independence of French financial control, both in the public debt and in the Ottoman Bank. However, in so doing he weakened one of the few external bulwarks against the empire’s partition. The French government’s support of the political status quo was conditional on the interests of its own bondholders. Djavid resigned in May 1911.14