Young Turks

Introduction

The Young Turks, a group that consisted primarily of members of the bureaucratic and military elites, carried on the political elitism of the Old and Young Ottomans. The Young Turks dominated Ottoman politics from 1912 to 1918. They adopted the views elaborated by Ahmed Riza, an Ottoman intellectual and politician. The Young Turks took Riza's positivist sociology as a source of quasi-revealed authority on social, religious, moral and political problems. They thought that this new knowledge alone provided political legitimacy, finding in the social engineering aspect of Auguste Comte's sociology in particular the legitimation of their own elitist outlook. Yet, they still attributed primary significance to maintaining the unity of the state and believed that the salvation of society resided in the welfare of the state. This faith in the importance of the state led them to support the utopian project of legislating social change. Entrenched in the dominant center, the Young Turks did not see the importance of peripheral structures to members of the periphery (Karpat, 79-258).

Another consequence of the center-periphery conflict in the Ottoman Empire was that politico-cultural problems took precedence over socio-economic issues in the agenda of the state. For instance, the Ottoman elite had no interest in mercantilism and did not even use tariffs to collect revenue. In the view of the ruling elite, peace and prosperity depended on keeping the members of each class in their respective places. Old norms prevented the elite from understanding the logic of a capitalist economy(Kayali, 199-256). Even during the first decade of the 20th century, they were still preoccupied with such socio-political issues as the advantages and disadvantages of employing Westernization, Islamism and Turkism for the salvation of the state. The significance of socio-economic issues escaped them.

Some Dimensions Of The Ottoman Political Culture

The Ottoman state was formed by warriors who were opposed by eclectic popular culture, heterodox religious sects and threatening rival principalities. Under such circumstances, keeping the realm together became the governing institutions' most critical concern, leading them to emphasize eternal vigilance against foreign enemies and the maintenance of law and order within the country. Tursun Beg, Ottoman statesman and historian of the late 15th century, reiterated an Ottoman maxim: "Harmony among men living in society is achieved by statecraft(Arai, 78-96)." It was with this concern in mind that the ruling institution in the Ottoman Empire was called Askeriye (the military).

This imperative led the Ottomans to concentrate power in the hands of the sultan. Consequently, in the early Ottoman centuries, the Empire's political organization was marked by personal rule by the sultan. As a result, laws propounded by individual sultans were not considered permanent. As a corollary to this, in the Ottoman Empire, the sultan's will determined a man's status in society. The sultan had the patriarch's duty of hisba; that is, he was considered personally responsible for the welfare of his subjects(Behar, 19-36).

A counter-trend was also present, however. As early as the second part of the 14th century, the state began to separate ...