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In February, Recep Erdoğan issued an imperial warning to Donald Trump. The US military had backed the mainly Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and pushed ISIS out of most of northern Syria to a remote area astride the border with Iraq. Erdoğan sees the YPG as an arm of Kurdish rebels in Turkey, and launched an operation against the group in the north-western Syrian enclave of Afrin, threatening also an offensive towards the Syrian town of Manbij where US troops were training Kurd forces. If US troops stood in his way, said Erdoğan, he would deliver an “Ottoman slap”.1
Things have gone quiet since, but what does Erdoğan’s reference to the Ottoman empire have to say about modern Turkey’s relationship with its imperial past? Indeed, what does it say generally about empires eclipsed by defeat in war rather than by longer-term organic decline?
If Thomas Hardy had written his poem In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” in 1918 rather than in 1915, he might have written not “Nations” but “Empires”. The First World War was the end of four of them: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist Russian and Ottoman. It left only the British and (of a sort) the French, and begat a new one, the Japanese.
Das Kaiserliche Deutsche Reich came to an official end in 1919 at Versailles (where it had been proclaimed in 1871). The instinct for a greater German imperium quickly revived, however, and was only properly subdued in 1945 with Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies after almost six years of devastating war, and the making thereafter of the Federal Republic.
The fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was linked to that of the Deutsche Reich. The Österreichisch-Ungarisches Reich was also dissolved at Versailles. Its two former monarchies were, however, inveigled by Hitler into seeking past glories, and they too paid the price in 1945. Ironically, though, while Berlin has since 1945 been content with liberal democracy, recently Vienna and Budapest have taken a backwards look. Neither, though, show any interest in moving their borders – only strengthening them.
The fall of Russia in 1918 came six months before that of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Exhausted by three years of war for which the Russian army was ill-equipped, revolution had swept the Tsar from his palace the previous year, and then the moderate socialist government that followed, and in March 1918 the new Bolshevik Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany. In consequence, the old imperial Russia lost much territory. Moscow (now the capital) had not surrendered unconditionally, though. Russia’s future was not entirely ordained by its former enemy, therefore, and its leaders soon proved keen for a new Russian imperium, if only for “security”. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics soon looked as great an entity as had imperial Russia in 1914. Indeed, in 1940 it became in effect even larger. “New General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is but old tsar writ large.”
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