It’s hard to find a “neo-“ ideology that is so utterly detached from the original version than neo-Ottomanism, the political worldview associated with Turkey’s ruling Islamists, driven by a testosterone-filled re-imagination of a glorious imperial past.
In fact, the neo-Ottomanism of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not only intellectually unrelated, but also diametrically opposed to the principles of the original Ottomanists, the nineteenth and early twentieth century proponents of pluralism, constitutionalism and parliamentarism in the Ottoman Empire.
There is, of course, a simple explanation for this. The term “neo-Ottomanism” was coined neither by modern-day advocates of Ottomanism, nor by political Islamists, but presumably by journalists or IR scholars more interested in Turkey’s geopolitics than its history. As it called attention to the imperial ambitions of the AKP’s foreign policy, it has been publicly rejected by leading government figures, including Erdoğan and his former foreign and prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, who is credited as being the architect of that policy.
Be that as it may, it was still difficult to miss the irony of watching commentaries on the “triumph of neo-Ottomanism” on 24 July, when Erdoğan was crowned the second conqueror of Istanbul, as he led the Friday prayer in the newly converted Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque. The chosen date was doubly packed with revanchist symbolism. It has been widely noted that 24 July is the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, the founding agreement of the secular republic under which Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum; a historic account that generations of political Islamists vowed to settle. Fewer people noticed that it was also the anniversary of the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution of 1908, which marked the short-lived victory of Ottomanism against the absolutist rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the tragic hero of Turkey’s Islamists.
An inclusive notion of citizenship
The original Ottomanists were a diverse lot. They included the powerful bureaucrats of the Tanzimat era, who were driven not so much by a democratic purpose but by the practical urgency of saving the empire from disintegration and restoring state authority, the patriotic “Young Ottoman” critics of Hamidian despotism, revolutionary members of the Committee of Union and Progress, as well as liberal-minded Ottomans of all millets – Muslims, Greeks, Armenians and Jews – who yearned for a cosmopolitan future under a constitutional monarchy. At its core, Ottomanism represented a belief in the necessity to establish an inclusive notion of citizenship, based on equality before (secular) law regardless of race or religion, and a pluralistic view of society, where diverse identities would be united under a shared Ottoman civic identity (Osmanlılık).
If we were to search for a “neo” version of Ottomanism reflecting these aspirations in modern Turkey, we would find it not in Erdoğan’s neo-imperialism, but in the left-liberal intellectual strand that emerged in the 1990s and advocated redefining citizenship on the basis of a shared belonging to Turkey (Türkiyelilik) that would allow for the expression of diverse sub-identities. In other words, instead of assimilating majority-Muslim ethnic groups into a monolithic “Turkishness” and excluding non-Muslims, as the Turkish Republic had sought to do since its foundation, it proposed layered expressions of identity, such as “Turk from Turkey” (Türkiyeli Türk), “Kurd from Turkey” (Türkiyeli Kürt) or “Armenian from Turkey” (Türkiyeli Ermeni).