The half-century before the First World War saw the final crumbling of the Ottoman Empire's European domains. Despite its rulers' attempts at modernisation, the Empire fell victim to a combination of great power interference and the expansionist ambitions of Balkan nation-states, and by 1913 was reduced to the south-east corner of the Balkans.
I t was customary at the time, and in much written since, to portray the Ottoman Empire as the 'sick man of Europe', whose decline was as much the result of his own misrule and 'oriental' inefficiency as it was of external assault. Yet a counter-argument has been mounted to the effect that the Empire was not so much sick as mugged. If it was economically ailing, a primary producer importing more than it exported, it was the imposition of unfair trading terms by the more advanced great powers which made it so. If it was weak militarily, this was because of the necessity of defending itself with inadequate revenue and insufficient manpower against a host of internal and external foes.1 Ottoman rule has for too long been seen through the prism of Christian prejudice against a Muslim-dominated state.
There is some truth in this. The Balkan states were themselves backward, inefficient and militarily weak, and their advances against the Ottomans owed much to great power backing or the interventions of the great powers on their own behalf. In disputes between the Empire and the Balkan Christians, the great powers almost invariably sided with the Christians. We should also not overestimate the strength of Balkan nationalism. The majority of Balkan Christians, to say nothing of Balkan Muslims, probably were indifferent to the ideal of the nation even in the late nineteenth century. And the great powers undoubtedly had compelling reasons for intervening in Ottoman affairs, either for fear of ceding strategic advantage to one another or because they saw opportunities for economic profit.
Yet the fundamental weaknesses of Ottoman rule in the Balkans were cultural ones, which no amount of latter-day lauding of its 'tolerance of diversity' can obfuscate.2 Firstly, the Empire was a Muslim state ruling over a multiplicity of Christian peoples, whose disaffection and readiness to be subverted were, in the end, decisive factors. The Ottomans' enemies continued to exploit this weakness to the end. Secondly, the emergence of nationalism, however few its adherents initially, accentuated this vulnerability. Nationalism, moreover, was possible not just among Christians but also among non-Turkish Muslims too, like the Albanians or, in the Empire's non-European provinces, Kurds and Arabs. Nationalism even emerged, towards the end of this period, among the Turks themselves, a development which made it impossible to retain the allegiance of the sultan's non-Turkish subjects.
World History
