Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014, 264 pp., (ISBN: 9780804791472).
This book is about an important issue of modern Ottoman history. Bedross Der Matossian has analysed the short time period between the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and the counterrevolution in April 1909. His focus lays on the “nondominant” actors in the Ottoman sphere: the Jews, the Arabs and the Armenians. The essence of his research is that these three peoples were able to discuss and, to some extent, create their own role within the Ottoman framework between the two revolutions. The “dreams” of better political representation in the capital, harmony among the religions, and justice with the reinstallation of a constitution were “shattered” in spring 1909, when the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, CUP) showed its nationalistic vision of Ottomanism.
The book begins with the Young Turk Revolution and its impact on Ottoman society. An important observation is the role of print media and the creation of a public sphere in this important political movement. Matossian stresses the necessity of a public sphere, because it allowed discussions between and inside ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire in a way only the intellectuals in exile were able to engage in before 1908. The revolution triggered a major and complex debate over constitutional issues. Intra- and interethnic relationships had to be newly defined. Der Matossian offers new insights into changes and disputes inside Armenian, Jewish, and Arab communities. But not only did the multiethnic aspect of the Ottoman Empire define the discussions, but so did its multilingual and geographical components. For example, the traditional power of the notables in Damascus was in danger due to demands of change by the CUP, and therefore, local actors reacted differently to the news in July 1908 than did those in the capital and furthermore the ones based in Jerusalem (p. 28).
The diverse ethnic groups in the multilingual empire faced a transformation of internal structures and new positioning towards a reborn central government. Der Matossian focuses on Arabs, Armenians and Jews. With Kurds and Kurdish organisations he deals only marginally, mostly in relation to the Armenians. The Young Turk Revolution reactivated constitutional discussions and reanimated various demands concerning a new reality that emerged from the end of the reign of Abdulhamid. He writes: “The euphoria that followed the Revolution of 1908 raised the ethnic groups’ expectations of proportional representation, increased fairness, democracy, and equality in the electorial process” (p. 98).
Jews, for example, saw the opportunity to enforce Zionist projects and to strengthen the political voice of Jerusalem. The author explores print media sources and political speeches in Salonica and Jerusalem in his analysis of the Jews’ roles in and responses to the revolution. The international framework concerning the postrevolutionary discussion is important, since central ideas and concepts came from the active “excilic public spheres.” The strength of Shattered Dreams of Revolution is the connection between micro- and macro-history.
The question of political representation in the parliament and the situation in Eastern Anatolia dominated the Ottoman Armenian discourse. Concerning electoral confrontation among the empire’s ethnic groups, proportional representation was the key concept. The elections in the different sancaks in the winter after the revolution cover a great deal of the book. As for the Greek and Armenian communities, expectations concerning the election results were too high. The Arab press on the other side expressed satisfaction. Der Matossian shows that the elections offered a platform for the various discussions and visions of the political future among and between the empire’s ethnic groups. On the other hand, the CUP as the central actor of the postrevolutionary order put itself more and more against the major claims of non-Turkish ethnic groups’ political platforms. The CUP followed a different version of Ottomanism and proclaimed its ideals of centralisation. The author characterises the elections as a “negotiation process” (p. 119) with reference to administrative decentralisation, ethno-religious privileges, national education, and proportional representation. The 1908 Ottoman elections “represented one of the first organized, mass political performances in the Middle East” (p. 119).
After the election, parliamentary politics became an important dimension in the public sphere. According to the author, the politics of the street and the politics of the Parliament went hand in hand. In his fifth and next-to-last chapter “From the Ballots to the Parliament”, he explains the “degeneration” from the dream of a constitutional assembly towards the “reality of a one-party dictatorship” of the CUP (p. 124). The Macedonian Question demonstrates the complexity of the issues treated in the new parliament. Der Matossian emphasises that frictions in parliamentary discussions were marked by intrareligious and interethnic issues. For these, a hitherto under-researched “perspective of ecclesiastical politics” played a major role. “In fact, ecclesiastical politics was one of the key factors in defining inter- and intraethnic relationships in the empire” (p. 128).
Der Matossian follows the chronology of the events that took place after the 1908 revolution while focusing on internal changes of the empire. After different examples of local political problems in diverse areas of the empire, he briefly refers to the Baghdad railway as an example of European entanglement in the Ottoman Empire. Apart from remarks on the influence of exilic ideas and the role model of France in the constitutional discussion, he does not mention further the role of foreign powers in the shape of the events during the Ottoman cataclysm. One could argue that the author should mention ideas of Ottoman modernity and the role of the military, which were strongly influenced by Europe at that time. Furthermore, a description of the reaction of the non-Ottoman-world towards the shift of power and ideals in 1908 could be fruitful for providing a fuller picture. The Russian role concerning the Ottoman Armenians and with regard to Eastern Anatolia is not part of this study.
In his final chapter, “The Counterrevolution and the ‘Second Revolution’”, Der Matossian introduces the term, “Second Revolution”, which becomes central to his analysis designating a counter-revolution and a counter-movement from forces within the Ottoman state that were the results of the first revolution in 1908. While the first revolution allowed “dreams” about constitutionalist harmony of all Ottoman subjects, the second revolution “shattered” those ambitions and hopes. In the author’s words: “In short, the Counterrevolution led to the demise of the Ottoman dream that the Revolution had promised to fulfill” (p. 149). The events in April 1909 unleashed fears inside the three nondominant groups of falling “back into the abyss of absolutism and the ancien régime” (p. 149).
The culmination of despair and mistrust were the Adana massacres in April 1909. The author outlines in detail the escalation and how the Armenians turned, once again, into victims. The ambivalent role of the CUP and the tensions afterwards between the Armenian revolutionary parties and the central government followed the opposite path, when compared to the ideas of fall 1908. As a reaction, they finally “resorted to mobilizing international powers to exert pressure on the Ottoman government” (p. 178).
The development was not the same for the Jews who were able to mobilise own troops to fight along with the Action Army against the Counter- revolutionaries in Istanbul. The reaction of different ethnic groups to the Second Revolution depended on geography and composition of the population. Against general belief, Der Matossian argues that the Counterrevolution was less about religious fanaticism than a multi-actor event against the power shifts and new values of the first revolution (pp. 151–152). Contradiction and ambiguity pervaded that revolutionary era. He concludes that Ottomanism fell victim to the rise of nationalisms. The two revolutions were turning points for the Jews, Armenians, and Arabs. The latter’s perception that the “dark history of the empire” (p. 176) would be over, was seriously shattered, even before the Ottoman cataclysm of the 1910s was unleashed.
Shattered Dreams of Revolution explores ecclesiastical politics that previously had found little interest among historians. It is a well focused, well written and innovative comparative contribution to the field of the Second Constitutional Period in late-Ottoman Turkey. All those interested in the question why the first attempt to achieve democratic constitutionalism failed in the Middle East a hundred years ago will greatly profit from this fine study.