Young Turk Revolution

The Bosnian Crisis.

Then German hopes were dashed to the ground by the Young Turk Revolution in July 1908.

The Young Turks, as fervent nationalists, educated for the most part in France or England, were suspicious of Germany and friendly to England and France.

Germany had been too friendly with Abdul Hamid.

Moreover, the Young Turk Revolution presented Austria-Hungary with an opportunity to annex the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied since 1878, and the annexation of these provinces in October 1908 by Austria-Hungary with the firm support of Germany did not lessen the unfriendliness of the Young Turks toward the Central Powers.

The Bosnian Crisis in the winter of 1908 through 1909 was the sudden flare of diplomatic embers that had been kindled long before and continued to burn long afterward.

As we have seen, Bismarck had permitted Austria-Hungary to occupy Bosnia in 1878, partly in hope of binding Austria close to Germany and

The former hope had been immediately realized in the Austro-German Alliance of eighteen seventy-nine, and the latter seemed not impossible when the Three Emperors' League of Russia, Austria, and Germany was formed in the eighties, and Russia secretly agreed that in due time Bosnia should be annexed by Austria.

Crowds fill the streets of Salonica, Monastir, and towns across the province, waving flags, embracing strangers, weeping openly at the sudden and almost unimaginable arrival of what they have been taught for a generation to consider an impossibility: freedom from the suffocating apparatus of Hamidian absolutism.

Turks and Greeks and Bulgarians and Jews and Armenians, communities that Ottoman policy has spent decades setting against one another, stand together in these first heady days of what will come to be remembered as the Young Turk Revolution, embracing a shared, almost certainly naive hope that constitutional government might yet dissolve the ethnic and religious animosities that have made Macedonia one of the most violently contested regions in Europe.

Mustafa Kemal, present in Macedonia As these events unfold, experiences the revolution's triumph with a complexity of feeling that is not always adequately captured in accounts that treat nineteen oh eight simply as a moment of unambiguous vindication.

He has, after all, given years of his life and risked his career and quite possibly his life to bring about exactly this outcome, and there can be no doubt that he shares in the genuine exhilaration that sweeps through the ranks of the CUP and its sympathizers in these weeks.

The war he finds here bears almost no resemblance to the desert campaign he has just left.

Where Libya demanded speed, dispersal, and irregular tactics suited to vast open terrain and a friendly local population, the Balkan front is a war of entrenchment, of fixed defensive lines, of artillery duels across narrow valleys and contested river crossings, fought in a climate that swings from autumn rain to bitter winter cold against enemies who are in many respects better prepared, better equipped, and more highly motivated than the Ottoman forces opposing them.

The Bulgarian army in particular has spent years preparing for this war, drilling under strict Prussian-influenced discipline, while the Ottoman army has spent those same years consumed by the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution, purges of the officer corps, and a chronic shortage of the modern rifles, artillery, and logistical infrastructure that a serious European-style war demands.

Mustafa Kemal watches this collapse with an anger that never quite leaves him for the rest of his life, an anger not primarily at the Bulgarians or Greeks or Serbians, whom he respects as disciplined, well-prepared adversaries, but at the Ottoman political and military establishment that allowed this catastrophe to become possible.

They can become a chess piece themselves that can be moved around.

And I think the Janissaries was a really important and really good example because in Ottoman, one of the things we touched a little bit on when the Young Turk Revolution happened is they started a policy of Turkification.

basically were going, like, if you want to be in this polity, you will be Muslim, privately, you will be Turkish.

And the Ottoman Empire was very different than that.

And I will show that, yeah, essentially what happens is they all use, they all use orthodox Marxist methodology to reach similar conclusions, but no one developed a meta-theory aside from the Bolsheviks.

So what we see is, you know, Blagojev talks, you know, he's skeptical of the peasants, but he still talks about the worker-peasant government in the context of the Young Turk Revolution, because he realizes that, yes, the Young Turk Revolution is a bourgeois revolution, but their bourgeoisie is too weak to push the revolution to the end.

Same thing that, obviously, the Bolsheviks will be saying in Russia.

So they reach some of these conclusions independently.

End of section 8 Section 9 of Imperialism and World Politics Part 2 of 4 By Parker Thomas Moon This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Read by Alistair Chapter 11b Near Eastern Questions Old and New Subsection The Bosnian Crisis Then German hopes were dashed to the ground by the Young Turk Revolution in July 1908.

The Young Turks, as fervent nationalists, educated for the most part in France or England, were suspicious of Germany and friendly to England and France.

Germany had been too friendly with Abdul Hamid.

Moreover, the Young Turk Revolution presented Austria-Hungary with an opportunity to annex the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied since 1878, and the annexation of these provinces in October 1908 by Austria-Hungary with the firm support of Germany did not lessen the unfriendliness of the Young Turks toward the Central Powers.

The Bosnian crisis in the winter of 1908-1909 was the sudden flare of diplomatic embers that had been kindled long before and continued to burn long afterward.

As we have seen, Bismarck had permitted Austria-Hungary to occupy Bosnia in 1878, partly in hope of binding Austria close to Germany, and partly in hope that Austria and Russia might agree to define for themselves separate spheres of influence in the Balkans.

The former hope had been immediately realized in the Austro-German alliance of 1879, and the latter seemed not impossible when the Three Emperors League of Russia, Austria, and Germany was formed in the 80s, and Russia secretly agreed that in due time Bosnia should be annexed by Austria.

There were lots of other ones within the empire.

And in that lodge in 1908, in addition to Masonic activities, it was ground zero for the plotting of the Young Turk Revolution.

And what happened as a result of actions and discussions that took place within that lodge is that there was a military uprising His members were members of the law.

It was their Masonic affiliation that was used to organize this entire coup d'etat and revolution.