Eternal Dawn

From the Ryan Gingeras book

Committee of Union and Progress

Mehmet Cavid is an instructive, though somewhat underappreciated, figure in the making of modern Turkey. His biography genuinely captures important aspects of the country’s origins and he embodies key traits of the empire that had preceded it. The complexity of his background, a Turkish-speaking Muslim of Jewish ancestry born in modern-day Greece, encapsulates the diversity and richness the Turkish Republic eventually sought to deny or destroy...

The party that Mehmet Cavid and his confederates established in Salonika, the Committee of Union and Progress (or CUP), seized power and came to command the empire as a whole. The Young Turks, as the foreign press often referred to them, took to governing with the same ferocity and conviction that propelled them to stage their dramatic revolution in 1908. Their desire to unify the nation and bring order to the state led them to confront dissent with increasing severity. The outbreak of the Great War proved a tipping point in their rule. Rather than bring the many peoples of the empire together as a “nation-in-arms,” the war, and the CUP’s management of it, wrought terrible chasms within society.

[Kemal] declared that Dolmabahçe was no longer “the palace of caliphs but truly the people’s palace.” “Here,” Kemal concluded, “I am elated to be solely the nation’s guest.” For the remainder of his life, Mustafa Kemal could hardly be called a mere guest of the old palace. Dolmabahçe gradually became both his part-time residence and formal reception hall. Like the sultans before him, he chose the home as a place to welcome and entertain visiting dignitaries, statesmen, and royalty...

It was only in the early 1950s that the public was allowed to step foot again into the “people’s palace.” Editors and statesmen who passed comment upon the death of Mustafa Kemal did not express discomfort or bemusement with the president’s strong affections for Dolmabahçe. Atatürk was no sultan-caliph, despite the fact that he had lived and died in a palace built for the departed Ottoman dynasty. Such an association flew in the face of the man’s reputation and achievements...

[During late Ottoman era] The reign of the first Ottoman parliament, however, proved short-lived. A rising tide of domestic crises gradually bled the sultan’s patience with constitutional governance. The outbreak of popular revolt among villagers and townsmen in Bosnia and Bulgaria in 1876 cast a shadow over the ascendant liberal order. Rather than settle local and international apprehensions, state efforts to crush the uprisings provided an aggressive Russian government a casus belli to invade. Under the guise of Istanbul’s humbling defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877, Abdülhamid II abrogated the constitution, suspended the parliament, and reinsti- tuted a stringent monarchical order over the state... [But then] Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian turn led to growing levels of militancy in the empire’s Balkan and Anatolian provinces...

Rather than grant greater authority to trained professionals, like [like Mehmet Cavid], in finding solutions to the challenges facing the nation, the empire’s ruling sovereign, Abdülhamid II, jealously guarded his power. The Great Powers of Europe, it often seemed, drew strength from the sultan’s predilection toward autocracy. As the government sank deeper into debt, and fell under ever greater foreign control, men such as Cavid sensed that the state teetered on the brink of collapse.

Fears of the empire’s imminent fall drove Mehmet Cavid into the company of like-minded officials and officers desperate for political change... The party that Mehmet Cavid and his confederates established in Salonika, the Committee of Union and Progress (or CUP), seized power and came to command the empire as a whole. The Young Turks, as the foreign press often referred to them, took to governing with the same ferocity and conviction that propelled them to stage their dramatic revolution in 1908. Their desire to unify the nation and bring order to the state led them to confront dissent with increasing severity. The outbreak of the Great War proved a tipping point in their rule. Rather than bring the many peoples of the empire together as a “nation-in-arms,” the war, and the CUP’s management of it, wrought terrible chasms within society. By the armistice in 1918, large numbers of Ottoman citizens cast the Young Turks as the chief culprits for loss and suffering witnessed across the empire. The CUP’s revolution, from the perspective of 1918, was a false dawn. Rather than save the state, the Young Turks had condemned it.

Yet, the defeat of Mehmet Cavid and other so-called Unionists in 1918 did not mark the end of the Ottoman state or necessarily the CUP itself. Though the party would formally dissolve itself in the wake of the empire’s capitulation, competing Young Turk factions reconsolidated themselves as the postwar order unfolded. The humiliation brought on by the subsequent occupation of the empire gave rise to a new set of leaders eager to reinvent themselves, and the remnants of their party, into the saviors of the state and nation. The largest of the factions, Mustafa Kemal’s self-proclaimed Nationalists, gradually prevailed over what remained of the empire.

No appreciation for the early history of the Turkish Republic can begin without a proper understanding of the origins, desires, and tribulations of the Young Turks. Their era by no means constituted a mere placeholder or prologue to the dramatic events that occurred thereafter. Turkey, as it came to be defined philosophically, was the unintended offspring of this movement. The most profound attributes of Atatürk’s state, its thirst for radical social change, its predilection for chauvinistic nationalism, and its oligarchic structure, descended directly from the CUP’s approach towards politics...

Cavid is an instructive, though somewhat underappreciated, figure in the making of modern Turkey. His biography genuinely captures important aspects of the country’s origins and he embodies key traits of the empire that had preceded it. The complexity of his background, a Turkish-speaking Muslim of Jewish ancestry born in modern-day Greece, encapsulates the diversity and richness the Turkish Republic eventually sought to deny or destroy...

Typifying the passions and contradictions within the CUP were the three men most instrumental in later propelling Mustafa Kemal to power. Like the Gazi himself, Kazım Karabekir, Ali Fethi Okyar, and İsmet İnönü each joined the party as young officers serving in the Balkans. Ethnically and geographically the three men shared little in common. Ali Fethi was born of wealthy Albanian parents in the central Macedonian town of Prilip. As the sons of public servants, İsmet and Kazım spent only a portion of their youths in their hometowns of Istanbul and Izmir. Their respective fathers, the former a Kurd from Malatya and the latter a descendant of provincial Turk notability from Karaman...

[Kazim's] patriotism was partially born of a hatred towards Armenians that his family instilled in him at an early age. An attempt upon the life of Abdülhamid II by Armenian militants in 1905 helped crystalize his general suspicion towards non-Muslims in general. If an Armenian had killed the hated sultan, he and others would have grieved over the crime...