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Three imperialisms anda Turkish nationalism:international stresses,imperial disintegration andthe Armenian genocideD. BloxhamVersion of record first published: 07 Dec 2010.

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DONALD BLOXHAM 37

PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE © Institute for Jewish Policy Research, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi) 0031-322X/37–58/029697

DONALD BLOXHAM

ABSTRACT Bloxham attempts to place the Armenian genocide of the First World Warin a broader perspective than that in which it is usually depicted. Without

questioning the agency of the Young Turk perpetrators, he assesses the ways inwhich Great Power political and economic policies influenced the Turkish–

Armenian polarization up to and during the critical point of 1915. He questions thehistoriographical trends that have, on the one hand, established Germany as a co-

perpetrator during the First World War and, on the other, blamed the Ententepowers for their longer-term failure to intervene more effectively in the interests of

the Ottoman Armenians. Instead, he places each of the powers on a continuum ofmore diffuse, less direct, but equally significant responsibilities for the exacerbation

of inter-group tensions in the Ottoman empire.

KEYWORDS Armenian genocide, Britain, Committee of Union and Progress, EasternQuestion, genocide, Germany, Great Powers, imperialism, Ittihad ve Terakki,

Ottoman empire, Russia, Young Turks

M ike Davis has vividly illustrated the grim side-effects of westernimperialism, together with the destructive effects of capitalist norms

and exploitative penetration on the socio-economic infrastructure of subjectsocieties.1 The starving to death of a staggering figure of tens of millions ofIndians and Chinese, among others, because of the imposition of laissez-fairetrade policies on to a grain economy, is a blind spot on the conscience of theliberal-democratic West. It is easier to imagine imperial culpability in instancesof direct mass murder, such as those of the British in Tasmania, of Americantroops against Native Americans and in the Philippines, of the Belgians in theCongo, or of imperial Germany in South-west Africa. These are, however,much lower down in our list of historical priorities than the Holocaust, andhave certainly not come into the reckoning in recent British official com-memorations of genocide as a generic historical problem.

However, there might be a conceptual half-way house between Davis’ssubjects and direct, imperial-instigated mass killing, between death from

Three imperialisms and a Turkish nationalism:international stresses, imperial disintegrationand the Armenian genocide

1 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World(London: Verso 2001).

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38 Patterns of Prejudice 36:4

socio-economic disruption and death from murder by a third party. This linkis one further down (or up) the chain of causal responsibility, and involves thecreation of some of the preconditions for genocide or other systemic mass vio-lence by hegemonic regimes interfering in other states’ affairs. This is a hugecategory, encompassing, for instance, Belgian colonial policies of ethnic divide-and-rule in Rwanda, the destabilization of pre-genocidal Cambodia by USbombing in the Vietnam war and the decisive backing by the US for the Suhartoregime in Indonesia. It also includes a variety of socio-economic policies withless direct or obvious, even incidental, influences on inter-group tension.

The focus of this article is the murder of at least one million of itsArmenian Christian subjects by the Ottoman government during the FirstWorld War, and the way that the European Great Powers and later the UnitedStates related to that genocide. None of what follows is intended to play intothe hands of Turkish nationalists by placing the blame for these events on forcesexternal to the then government. The agency of the direct perpetrators remainsthe paramount issue, and I and many others have addressed it at length else-where.2 I am not concerned here with the precise course of government policytowards the Armenians or the precise ways in which the genocide unfolded in1915. Several matters specific to Muslim–Christian and Turkish–Armenianrelations will not be considered here. Yet this essay may shed light on some ofthe circumstantial factors that, on the one hand, saw the leaders of the rulingTurkish Ittihad ve Terakki (Committee of Union and Progress) at such a pointof radicalism in 1915 and, on the other, saw an Armenian population with aperfectly ordinary profile—no more or less ‘innocent’ in collective terms thanany other—fall victim to the most extreme collective sentence.

Two episodes illustrate that the murder of the Armenians was not a self-enclosed action, but was rather influenced by international, inter-imperialdynamics. Mass arrests of Armenian communal leaders in Constantinopleon 24–6 April—commemorated in Armenian communities today as thebeginning of the genocide—occurred exactly at the time of the first Anglo-French landings on the Gallipoli peninsula.3 Likewise, the first majordeportations from ‘historic Armenia’, from the city and province ofErzerum, probably occurred when they did, in late May and early June 1915,because of the proximity of the Russian Caucasus armies to that strategicallyvital area.4 What grounds did the Turkish government have for making these

2 This article is a summary of part of the author’s ongoing research into issues surrounding theArmenian genocide: see his ‘The beginning of the Armenian catastrophe: comparative andcontextual issues’, in Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik Schaller (eds), Die armenischeVölkermord und die Shoah (Zurich: Chronos 2002) and his ‘Cumulative radicalisation andthe Armenian genocide: war, national re-casting and the development of a destruction policy’(forthcoming).

3 ‘Landing of the French-English expeditionary corps in Asia Minor anticipated’, diplomaticcommuniqué, Madrid, 22 April 1915; diplomatic communiqué, Aleppo, 7 April 1915, fearingEntente-stimulated uprisings in the interior ‘simultaneously with the attacks on the Darda-nelles’: Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna (hereafter HHSA), PA I, 943.

4 Arnold Toynbee (ed.), The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Pre-sented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1916), docs. 53, 57, 58.

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links? What role did the powers witnessing the massacres, often at close range,play in reacting to their occurrence? And how did the victorious powersaddress the post-war and post-genocidal geopolitical situation?

Of the three ‘imperialisms’ in the title, two types are examined in theopening two sections of the article. First, there are the older, dynastic landempires: the Ottoman and the Russian. The Habsburg empire will also fea-ture, but only briefly. Second, there are the newer, more vigorous northernand western European empires with their overseas colonies and more advancedmilitary-industrial complexes: Britain and Germany (France, again, will fea-ture but only briefly). Broadly, the context is the conflict—initially in termsof the balance of power and then of full-scale war—between different combi-nations of these powers, in which the survival of the Ottoman empire wasone of the most significant issues.

The ‘Turkish nationalism’ of the title emerged as the Turks sought topreserve as much of the diminishing empire as possible, but particularly theputative ethnic ‘heartland’ of Anatolia, demarcated by the Black Sea, the Medi-terranean, the Caucasus, Syria and Mesopotamia. In its conservative raisond’être, that nationalism bore similarities to the preceding Osmanli policy ofpan-Islamism, which sought to unify and galvanize the empire’s Muslimsagainst the backdrop of reforms, some of which aimed at greater Muslim–Christian equality. The large Armenian population of the empire, centred ineastern Anatolia, was destroyed during the war to secure the region for the‘new Turkey’. The trigger for the policy of destruction was the suspicion thatsubstantial elements of the Armenian population were in league with theEntente powers, a belief stemming from the existing instrumental relationsbetween those players.

The third ‘imperialism’ is that of the self-avowedly non-annexationist,non-interventionist United States, the one power considered here that wasoutside the European imperial network. This is examined in the third section,as part of an assessment of the way that the United States joined the battle foreconomic influence in the Near East in the aftermath of the First World War,and established for posterity an influential pattern of trading-off American inter-ests with the nationalist republic of Turkey against recognition of the genocide.

Aspects of Turkish–Armenian relations before the First World War: theimpact of the powersFrom approximately the second half of the seventeenth century the Ottomanempire declined in the face of two new forces. One was the growth of the‘world economy’, centred on the economies of north-western Europe, anexpansion that first incorporated the more self-enclosed economy of the em-pire and then subordinated or ‘peripheralized’ it.5 Capitalistic economic

5 Resat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (NewYork: SUNY Press 1988); Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Ottoman empire and the capitalistworld economy. Some questions for research’, in Osman Okyar and Hilal Inalcik (eds),Social and Economic History of Turkey (1071–1920) (Ankara: Meteksan 1980), 117–22.

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40 Patterns of Prejudice 36:4

penetration was also accompanied by influence in the internal affairs of theOttoman empire. Thus the formation of the Ottoman Public Debt Adminis-tration in 1881 in response to Ottoman default on western loans gave Europeand in particular Britain extensive powers of tax-gathering in the empire byway of ensuring repayment. In turn, it reassured potential European credi-tors and furthered the indebtedness and hence subordination of the Ottomaneconomy. Penetration and control at this level actually inhibited the ability ofthe Ottoman state to develop its economy.6

The increasing openness of the Ottoman economy to supra-nationalcapital coloured relations between Muslims on the one hand and Armenians(and Greeks) on the other. Donald Quataert explains the divergent develop-ment of different sections of the Asiatic population as follows:

West Europeans’ assumptions that Ottoman Christians were somehow more trust-worthy as business partners than Muslims certainly played a role. As protégés ofEuropean merchants, Ottoman Christians obtained powerful tax exemptions . . .that allowed them to buy and sell goods more cheaply than Muslim merchants.Also, the pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman state did favor Muslims in granting thememployment in the military and state bureaucratic service. With fewer of these jobprospects before them, Christians were more likely to engage in . . . trade and com-merce. As trade with west and central Europe mounted, so did the opportunitiesfor such ventures.7

The passing on of the benefits of the ‘capitulations’—the system of extra-territorial privileges enjoyed on Ottoman soil by representatives of theChristian powers—to native non-Muslim ‘protégés’ was a source of perma-nent irritation for the Porte, the Ottoman government. It compromisedgovernmental sovereignty over its citizens on matters ranging from legal andcommercial rights to rights of settlement, and the arbitration of disputes in-volving these privileged individuals required the involvement of the consulof the concerned European power, who would frequently deny the Porte. Anillustration of the general significance of the capitulations as a symbol of Otto-man frustration is the case of the district of Jerusalem at the end of thenineteenth century. From the early 1880s Jewish immigration into the areahad been prohibited for three reasons: there had been a growth in foreignvisitors to the holy places; the powers, partly because of this, had developedconsiderable political interests in the area, and the Porte feared that, as had sooften been the case, these would develop into claims for territorial ‘influence’;and, with the earlier rule in Egypt of Muhammad Ali and his successors, andthen the British occupation of the country in 1882, Jerusalem had become a‘sensitive border area’, one over which the Porte naturally wished to maintain

6 Wallerstein; Feroz Ahmad, ‘Vanguard of a nascent bourgeoisie’, in Okyar and Inalcik (eds),329–50 (332–3); Kasaba, 110. See also Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and PopularResistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908 (New York: New York University Press 1983), 9–10.

7 Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press2000), 67. See also Ahmad; and Moshe Ma’oz, ‘Intercommunal relations in Ottoman Syriaduring the Tanzimat era’, in Okyar and Inalcik (eds), 205–10.

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maximum control. Yet Jewish citizens of the powers managed to gain entry asforeign nationals, and were naturally supported by their respective consuls,not from any imperial desire to establish Jewish sovereignty in the area, butbecause the presence of a large number of, say, Russian citizens meant in-creased de facto Russian influence. Moreover, the very enforcement, andthereby perpetuation, of the capitulations was an important principle for allthe Christian powers.8

This example sheds light on the alacrity with which the Turkish govern-ment seized the opportunity presented by the outbreak of the First WorldWar to abrogate the capitulations. It also contextualizes one of the first majorOttoman forced population movements of that war, as Russian Jews wereexpelled from Palestine, particularly the port city of Jaffa.9 As one scholar hasrecently pointed out, this expulsion was a function of the ethno-nationalismof the Turkish government in 1914–15.10 Nevertheless, that increasingly viru-lent ideology cannot be divorced from the historical circumstances in whichit developed: the compromising of Ottoman authority and control in manyareas, such that individual non-Muslim groups—and then non-Sunni Mus-lims, particularly Kurds,11 and then other non-Turkish Muslims—came to beseen by virtue of their very ethnic identity as inimical to Turkish interests andthe consolidation of Turkish power and territorial integrity. In war time, withthe Ottoman empire ranged against the powers to which it had so long beenin thrall, those communities on Ottoman territory with affiliations of citizen-ship and/or of perceived loyalty to Russia, Britain or France, particularly inthe border or exposed coastal regions, were in great danger.

The tying in of capitulatory interests specifically with the Armenians isdemonstrated by a case arising in 1843–4 and involving the British ambassador,Stratford Canning. Here Canning lobbied strongly against the religious lawthat condemned apostates from Islam to death. The question arose in relationto the execution of one such apostate, an Armenian. The desire to improvethe lot of the Ottoman Christians was one factor in Canning’s involvement,as ordered in 1941 by Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, yet it was inex-tricably entwined with two other imperatives: the wish to raise Britain’sprestige in the Near East, in absolute terms as a show of power at the Porteand in relative terms vis-à-vis Russian influence; and concern that the law on

8 For this case-study, see David Kushner, ‘The district of Jerusalem in the eyes of three Otto-man governors at the end of the Hamidian period’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 35, no. 2,1999, 83–102.

9 Thomas A. Bryson, American Diplomatic Relations with the Middle East, 1784–1975: A Sur-vey (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press 1977), 61–2; for more details, see Frank E. Manuel, TheRealities of American–Palestine Relations (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press 1949). Con-temporary reports on the expulsion of the Jews may be found in the Public Record Office,Kew, London, FO 371/2355, 12868.

10 Hilmar Kaiser, ‘The Ottoman government and the end of the Ottoman social formation,1915–1917’, paper delivered at the ‘Generations of Genocide’ conference, Wiener Library,London, 26–7 January 2002.

11 Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen derTürkei 1839–1938 (Zurich: Chronos 2000), 123 and passim.

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42 Patterns of Prejudice 36:4

apostasy might be applied to a British subject living in Ottoman territory.12

Thus Canning’s somewhat self-fulfilling justification for his tough stance:

In proportion as the old malignant spirit of Mahomedanism is revived, the Chris-tian subject of the Porte will naturally look to the nearest foreign protector; harshmeasures of repression will be adopted; more frequent acts of violence and crueltywill ensue; and a fanatical arrogance, making little distinction between the Rayah[non-Muslim Ottoman] and the Foreigner, will trample upon our commercial privi-leges, and embroil the Porte with her best friends.13

The second new force threatening the Ottomans in the modern period,one that would eventually threaten every world empire, was the rise of nation-alism. The sponsorship of subject nationalisms in rival imperial polities bythe Great Powers meant that another new weapon was added to the arsenal ofimperial expansion, supplementing armed might, one of the main means bywhich the Ottoman empire had expanded. And with the revolutionary socialchanges that were cause and expression of the burgeoning north-westerneconomies came formidable improvements in armaments and military strate-gies, such that the military advantages of the Ottomans were also neutralized.

A key to the consolidation and longevity of the Ottoman empire hadbeen its ability to incorporate an array of different ethnic and religious groupswithin its system in a way that, by the standards of the mediaeval and earlymodern periods, was lenient and inclusive, if strictly stratified in religiousterms. Nationalist ‘awakenings’ posed an obvious threat to a system thatwas based on inter-communal cohesion. The prominent religious differenceswithin the Ottoman empire provided a long-established cleavage on to which‘national’ identities could be superimposed as they developed, and which theChristian powers could opportunistically exploit to establish influence inOttoman lands. Russia and Austria-Hungary focused particularly on theempire’s Balkan possessions, and the nineteenth century saw a successionof secessions or, more frequently (in the interests of maintaining the balanceof power), erosion of Ottoman sovereignty in Europe to the point at which itwas no more than nominal.

The Ottoman economic and administrative reforms of the nineteenthcentury sought simultaneously to emulate European state-modernization tobuttress the empire and to incorporate the benefits of internal Christian eco-nomic advancement, proffering equality by way of tying in the interests ofsubject Christians with those of the regime.14 Yet, as those reforms opened upTurkish society further to western penetration and influences on the subjectpopulations, they were somewhat self-defeating; moreover the maintenanceof the capitulations meant that the modernizing goal of establishing greater

12 Turgut Subasi, ‘The apostasy question in the context of Anglo-Ottoman relations, 1843–44’,Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2002, 1–34.

13 Letter from Canning to Aberdeen, 27 August 1843, reproduced in ibid., although Subasi makesno mention of the rather circular nature of Canning’s judgement.

14 Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 67.

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control over the population could not be achieved in the case of many non-Muslims. One of many western influences was the influx of westernmissionaries whose presence, for instance, complemented and helped to chan-nel an Armenian cultural renaissance begun at the turn of the century. Thehigh proportion of Armenians attending mission schools learned somethingof the idea of social emancipation,15 while the increasing number of bourgeoiseducated in Europe returned with notions of modern statehood. Moreover,as the reform programme was frequently imperfectly carried out, the promiseof equality was not realized while the consciousness of pre-existing inequal-ity was heightened in the perspective of many Christians.

This is only half the picture, however. The Muslim populations were dis-tressed at reforms perceived to favour Christians, and at European (Christian)influence eating away at Muslim sovereignty. Abuses of Armenians increasednotably as the established hierarchy of religions was upset, a common patternof interaction when inherently unequal social systems begin to fragment.16

Turks and Kurds, the latter forming a plurality with the Armenians in easternAnatolia, no longer perceived Christian communities to be under their ‘protec-tion’ as had been the prescribed state of affairs in relations between dominantMuslims and the other monotheists, though this ‘protection’ had increasinglymeant freedom of exploitation. And the relationships established betweenChristians and foreign powers helped create, as we have seen, a stereotype ofminorities with extra-territorial interests not pulling together with the Mus-lim population in the interests of the state on whose territory they dwelt.

The Christians in question were perhaps less the comprador class theyhave been negatively portrayed as being,17 and more simple proto-capitalistswho were maximizing their advantageous economic situation,18 and indeedpursuing normal human desires for improving their position. Nevertheless,to other Muslims and the ruling classes they signified an overturning of theestablished order. The Janus-faced situation is best illustrated in the stream ofArmenians leaving the empire for the United States in the latter part of thenineteenth century, gaining US citizenship and then returning to live in theirhomelands with the extra-territorial privileges extended to all Americans.19

Massacres of 80,000–100,000 Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1894–6and 10,000–20,000 in Cilicia in 1909 can be attributed to a combination ofeconomic and ‘nationalist’ factors. Simple jealousies were important, as wereMuslim perceptions of improper Christian advancement and behaviour in a

15 Kieser, Der verpasste Friede, passim.16 Susan Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press 1992), 3. On the specific case of the Ottoman empire, see Stephan Astourian,‘Genocidal process: reflections on the Armeno-Turkish polarisastion’, in Richard G.Hovannisian (ed.), Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St Martin’s Press1992), 53–72.

17 See, for example, Ahmad, 329.18 Kasaba, 114.19 Leland James Gordon, American Relations with Turkey 1830–1930: An Economic Interpreta-

tion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1932), 329–36.

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society that was trying to stymie what it saw as destabilizing influences. Chiefamong these influences was anything that might be interpreted as nationalistagitation, and the paranoid sultan Abdul Hamid was particularly influencedin his policies by the formation in the late 1880s of Armenian revolutionaryorganizations expressing the unrequited grievances of Armenians. The sultansaw these revolutionaries as direct emulators of the Bulgarian insurgents whohad, with Russian and Bulgarian émigré assistance, helped foment the easterncrisis of 1875–8.

That crisis ended with Russia and Britain high-handedly arbitrating theempire’s future, and the question of enforceable reforms for the OttomanArmenians being introduced by Russia into international treaty negotiationsfor the first time. Britain, opposing Russia’s territorial demands as an exten-sion of the latter’s physical influence, and its reform demands as an extensionof its (growing) moral influence among the Armenians, successfully watereddown each of these. The British did pay lip-service to reform for reform’ssake, encouraging the Armenians in order to maintain the sympathy of theOttoman Christians to which they had previously played, but the paramountnecessity was seen as maintaining the eastern Anatolian provinces within theOttoman empire to restrict Russian expansion and maintain the balance ofpower in the East. One portentous British idea that was tossed around byway of maintaining order in the provinces, keeping would-be revolutionariesquiet and holding the territory for as long as possible for the Ottomans, wasthe creation of ethnically stratified zones by population movement where thecauses of discontent would theoretically be removed by the ethnic homogeni-zation of different territories.20

Great Power-sponsored national secession, Ottoman reactions to inter-nal socio-economic changes, combined with outright Russian conquests inthe Caucasus in the wars of 1828 and 1877–8, fundamentally altered the char-acter of the Ottoman empire. The Balkan territories of Rumeli had once beenviewed as the empire’s centre of gravity; as the Ottoman Balkan possessionswere eroded, that centre was shifted to Anatolia. With those territorial lossestoo, the ethnic proportions of the empire shifted heavily in favour of theMuslims. This was only emphasized by the mass movement of Muslim refu-gees into the shrinking Ottoman territory from the Caucasus from the 1850sand the Balkans particularly from 1878, fleeing from repression and in somecases what would today be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. This different, more reli-giously homogeneous constituency, was the one at which Abdul Hamid’span-Islamic policy was in part directed.

The Anatolian Christians, seen increasingly after the Balkan insurgen-cies as potentially if not actually disloyal, unwilling and unreliable membersof the Ottoman community, were pushed to the periphery of the ‘universe ofobligation’, as the 1894–6 massacres showed. Abdul Hamid also presided over

20 Bilal Simsir (ed.), British Documents on Ottoman Armenians, I, (1856-1880) (Ankara: TürkTarih Kurumu Printing Office 1989), 645–55 (646–8); Kieser, Der verpasste Friede, 123.

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the de facto official endorsement of an increasing and vicious practice in east-ern Anatolia as thousands of Armenians were effectively evicted from theirproperties in favour of Muslim refugees and the principle of creating a morethoroughly Islamicized peasantry. In turn, these depredations became one ofthe chief grievances of the Armenians, and one of the leitmotivs for Russianpseudo-humanitarian intervention in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, a factor that in circular fashion further exacerbated Hamidian andthen ‘Young Turk’ anxiety to secure eastern Anatolia for the empire.

The Young Turk revolution of 1908 was essentially an attempt to pre-serve the empire by reforming Abdul Hamid’s moribund state, therebyundermining the logic of nationalist separatism and summoning resistance tothe interventionism of the European powers. Young Turk rhetoric of a newOttomanist equality, harking back to the nineteenth-century reform periodand resurrecting the abortive constitution of 1876, certainly did not meanextensive devolution of power to non-Muslim communities. The alliance-of-convenience between Young Turks, or ‘Ittihadists’, in opposition and Armenianrevolutionaries had, contrary to popular perception, been an uneasy one fromthe beginning. The Balkan secessions of the nineteenth century meant thatthe Ittihadists suspected non-Muslim revolutionaries of having anti-state ratherthan anti-regime goals.21 The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austriashortly after the revolution did nothing to alter this perception.

Young Turk dissidents in opposition had identified the dangers of west-ern economic penetration for Ottoman society, its destructive effects on othercultures from the Native American to the Sudanese to the Chinese. (Indeed,the Boxer Rebellion was a violent rejection of this process that itself turnedon local Christians.) They also tied in the need to shed these bonds with anattack on internal Christian economic influences. Thus the vision of a ‘neweconomy’ came to incorporate that of a ‘new Turkish bourgeoisie’, and thesame weapon of boycott used in retaliation against Austria for the annexationof Bosnia-Herzegovina was subsequently used against Armenians (from 1913)and particularly Greeks (from 1910).22

The Turkish ethno-nationalism that was an increasing feature of theYoung Turk movement was influenced by the nationalisms that had grownup around it. The secession of Albania during the Balkan wars of 1911–13showed that even a Muslim province was susceptible to the lure of national-ism; Islam, though, remained as one unifying force in the Young Turkworldview. But the Balkan wars certainly represent the moment at whichMuslim-Christian pluralism was finally killed off, witnessing as they did theremoval of Istanbul’s tenuous control over all the remaining European areaswith the exception of a small hinterland, and the rise to dictatorial power of a

21 Mehmet Sukru Hanioglu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford:Oxford University Press 2001), 40–1, ch. 5. Erik Jan Zürcher, ‘Young Turks, Ottoman Mus-lims and Turkish nationalists’, in Kemal Karpat (ed.), Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey(Leiden: Brill 2000), 150-79 (151).

22 See the introduction to Quataert, Social Disintegration, and Hanioglu, passim.

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radical subsection of the Young Turks. They also witnessed another massiveinflux of refugees. And in the immediate aftermath they saw imperial Russiaattempting to exploit Armenian grievances in order to increase its influencein the eastern Anatolian territory adjacent to its Caucasus border. This policyrevived the notion of externally enforced reforms for eastern Anatolia thathad been advocated in 1875–8 and 1895.

Again, it will not do to portray the Ottoman empire as a victim or apassive participant in an imperial power-play. The history of the region hadbeen characterized, and would be again in the Cold War, by Russian paranoiaat the Turkish presence on its south-west border, just as much as it had byRussian intervention in Turkish affairs during the recent period of Russianascendancy in power relations between the two.23 Moreover, the plight ofcountless thousands of Ottoman Armenians was dire in the period leading upto the First World War, with violence almost at the endemic level in the east-ern provinces—not that this was a genuine concern of the Russian ForeignOffice. But of all the threats to Turkish sovereignty in Ottoman history, theseschemes for eastern Anatolia were perhaps closest to the bone, since in theTurkish view as of 1914—though most certainly not the Armenian one—Anatolia was not some outlying vassal province but the central land of theempire. Turkey’s enforced acquiescence in the reform plan, to be implementedfrom the beginning of 1914 and overseen by two European inspectors in situin the Armenian provinces,24 meant that on the eve of the First World War theempire and its Armenian population stood on the edge of a precipice.

The period of the genocideThat the empire entered the war alongside the central powers is testament notto a belief that a militarist Germany would provide a shield for the implemen-tation of a long-planned murder of the Armenians, as some would have it, butrather to shorter-term exigencies and negotiations. Like all of the Europeanpowers, Germany was viewed with suspicion. And Germany had spent theprevious two decades engaged in a successful penetration pacifique of theOttoman empire; and one of the methods employed was to draw a sharp divi-sion between ‘political’ and charitable aid to the Armenians. Thus, in contrastto the actions of Russia and Britain in 1875–8 and 1894–6, the Wilhelmstrassechose explicitly not to object to the ill-treatment and massacre of Armenians.25

If Russia had instrumentalized the plight of Armenians proactively,Germany did so by default, as it were. Yet, no less than the other powers,Germany’s own economic strategies sought to bring territories within its

23 Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 5.24 The plan envisaged the creation of two supra-provincial zones incorporating the provinces of

Van, Bitlis, Erzerum, Diabekir, Sivas and Harput. For more details, including the politicssurrounding the plan, see Roderic Davison, ‘The Armenian crisis, 1912–1914’, American His-torical Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 1948.

25 Uwe Feigel, Das evangelische Deutschland und Armenien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck andRuprecht 1989), 86–93, 322–3.

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geo-strategic and economic orbit. And in this process, like any other power,they ran roughshod over the established social order of the empire, as in, forinstance, the distinctly ethnically oriented stratification of labour on the Bagh-dad railway, the critical spine of German imperialism in the Near East.26 TheIttihadists were correct to suspect German intentions, which had been spelledout rather baldly by Staatsekretär (Secretary of State) Gottlieb von Jagow, inthe foreign ministry in May 1913. According to von Jagow, Germany’s‘Orientpolitik’ was predicated on maintaining Turkey as long as possible while,at the same time, consolidating its economic interests in its Asiatic spheres ofinfluence, so that, if and when Turkey did collapse, German political influ-ence could be ‘brought to bear’.27

Complete Turkish neutrality in the First World War would probablyhave ended in substantial territorial losses to whichever side won the war.Some form of pact with Russia was not impossible until late in the day, and itseems that Russia might have been prepared to forego the Armenian ‘reformplan’ as part of the bargaining process. For the Young Turks, the Germanalliance was only to provide assistance in the reorganization of the ‘new Tur-key’ in the opportunities provided by the war. As the Interior Minister, TalaatPasha, put it but a few days before the mass arrest of Armenian leaders inApril 1915—‘We must be masters in our own house: all capitulations havebeen lifted’28—an action that irritated Germany and Austria, as well as theUnited States. Given Young Turk sensitivity and long-term intentions, if Ger-many was to capitalize after the war on its investments of time and money inthe Ottoman empire, then—as the ambassador to the Porte in 1917 observed—the Kaiserreich’s ‘iron hand’ needed to be ‘clad in a velvet glove’ for the softtouch that the sensitive Ittihadists required.29

As far as Germany was concerned, the Turkish alliance would sharesome of the military burden and might also help with the extension of Ger-man influence by proxy into the Caucasus, Persia and central Asia, threateningBritish India and the territory over which the Great Game had been foughtout between Russia and Britain.30 In their own geopolitical interests, theIttihadists saw an opportunity to reinvigorate the Ottoman empire by in-corporating Turkic and other Muslim populations to the north and east atthe expense of Russia, thus further accentuating the change in the empire’sethnic make-up after the prior loss of the Balkan populations. An integralpart of German–Turkish military strategy at the outset of the conflict was to

26 Quataert, Social Disintegration, 90.27 Johannes Lepsius, Albracht Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Friedrich Thimme (eds), Die Große

Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914: Sammlung der Diplomatischen Akten desAuswärtigen Amtes, vol. 37 (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte1926) (hereafter GP), part 2, no. 15048.

28 Berliner Tageblatt, 21 April 1915, emphasis added.29 Letter from Johann von Bernstorff to Georg von Hertling, 22 November 1917: Auswärtiges

Amt, Politisches Archiv, Bonn (hereafter AA), Abt 1A, Türkei I 34, vol. 38, 40120.30 For the earliest concerted German intrigues in this connection, see Edmund Dane, British

Campaigns in the Nearer East 1914–1918, vol. 1 (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1919), 26.

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mobilize some of the different national and religious groupings against theEntente by sponsorship of revolt. Thus the Germans tried to capitalize onKaiser Wilhelm’s earlier self-description as protector of the world’s Muslims,31

by encouraging the Turkish declaration of cihad—holy war—in November1914, despite concern among diplomats of the central powers over the deleteri-ous effects this would have on Muslim–Christian relations.32 To the same end,military intelligence fostered nationalist sentiment among Egyptians and somenon-Muslim Russian subject peoples, including Ukrainians.33

On the other hand, it was a common belief among the Ittihadists in theFirst World War that the Russians had struck a deal in which an Armenianstate would be given in exchange for an Armenian uprising in eastern Anatolia.34

This was the rationale for the mass deportations that would turn into whatwe now know as the genocide. The source of this fear is simple enough tolocate. St Petersburg and the Russian Caucasus authorities had tried blatantlyto appeal to the Armenian community on both sides of the border fromAugust 1914 onwards, hinting without any formal commitment that collabo-ration in the Russian cause would bring post-war territorial rewards. Theextent to which these insincere advances were taken up by the OttomanArmenians is a subject of great controversy.35 A small minority did opt totake up arms, but many more were obviously appalled by the danger intowhich this threw the community. If foreign diplomats could predict the dan-ger for the Christian populations of Turkish entry into the war on the side ofthe central powers,36 it would scarcely have been lost on the populations thathad spent recent decades on the receiving end of increasing insecurity andviolence, and doubtless the prevailing trend among ordinary Armenians wasto keep their heads down and hope for the best while fearing the worst. Butfor our purposes the important fact is that the Ittihadists knew that there hadbeen Russian overtures and that they fitted exactly into a Turkish cognitivemodel of externally influenced Christian-nationalist behaviour influenced bythe experiences of the previous century.

A crucial point in understanding German actions in the genocide is thatmany representatives of the central powers also acted according to precon-ceived notions of the Armenians as an ethno-political community.37 This is

31 Feigel, 83–6.32 Diplomatic communiqué, Pera, 2 November 1914 (no. 773): HHSA, PA I, Karton 942.33 Wolfdieter Bihl, Die Kaukasus-Politik der Mittelmächte, vol. 1 (Vienna: Böhlau 1975); Fritz

Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto and Windus 1977), ch. 4;Dane, 40–1.

34 See, for example, Documents on Ottoman Armenians, vol. 1 (Ankara: Prime Ministry Direc-torate of Information 1982), no. 1, dated Erzeroum, 19 September 1914.

35 The author has dealt with this subject in Bloxham, ‘The beginning of the Armenian catastro-phe’ and Bloxham, ‘Cumulative radicalisation’.

36 Diplomatic communiqué, Pera, 17 November 1914: HHSA, PA I, Karton 942. For a Britishview on the possibility of massacres, see the article by Louis Mallet, former ambassador toConstantinople, in La Reforme, 15 January 1915.

37 For a much more extensive analysis of the German actions, see Donald Bloxham, ‘Powerpolitics, prejudice, protest and propaganda: a reassessment of the German role in the ArmenianGenocide of WWI’, in Kieser and Schaller (eds).

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less true of the diplomatic and consular staff on the ground, who had longer,direct experience of conditions in the Ottoman empire. But, on a general level,we may borrow a concept introduced by Christoph Dinkel in the midst of hisaccusations of complicity in genocide against the German officer corps. Withthe idea of a war-time ‘insurrection hysteria’, he identifies a self-explanatoryrationale for the extreme views of the officers in question: a fear that Armenianrevolutionary action in the rear would jeopardize the central powers’ pros-ecution of the war.38 This accusation was supported with reference to Armenianmilitary desertion and defection to Russian ranks,39 and it was certainly in-formed by Germany’s own strategy of Insurgierung, which suggested,incorrectly,40 that whole peoples were prepared to fight for nationhood. Thusneither central power was predisposed to sympathize with Armenian suffer-ing and, indeed, like the Ittihadists themselves, sought to transfer the burdenof moral guilt for what was happening on to Entente agitation among theOttoman Armenians.41

German officers were also involved with the reorganization of the infa-mous ‘special organization’, the irregular units that would gain notorietyduring 1915 as the principle murderers of the Armenian deportees. The evi-dence of that German influence only exists up to 1914, however, at a timewhen the special organization was devoted to surveillance activity and attackson specific Armenian and other targets within and on the borders of the empireand, beyond the border, to clandestine missions to incite ‘national’ and reli-gious movements against the Entente powers.42 The boundary between thephases of the special organizations’ functions is blurred, but the distinctionsprovide a useful analogy to the German role in the area in stimulating ethnicantipathy generally as opposed to being instrumental in genocide specifically.The same is true of the activities of Baron Max von Oppenheim, another whose

38 Christoph Dinkel, ‘German officers and the Armenian genocide’, Armenian Review, vol. 44,no. 1, 1991, 77–133 (118).

39 Letter from Markgraf von Pallavicini to Baron von Burian, 29 April 1915: HHSA, PA 209;letter from Dandini (Aleppo) to von Burian, 24 June 1915: HHSA, PA XXXVIII 366; Rafaelde Nogales, Four Years beneath the Crescent, trans. from the Spanish by Muna Lee (NewYork and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1926), 27, 152–3; Joseph Pomiankowski, DerZusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches. Erinnerungen an die Türdei aus der Zeit des Welt-krieges (Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag 1928), 147, 156–9. Diplomatic communiqué, Constantino-ple, 23 February 1915, claims that 75,000 ‘Asian’ Armenians had passed over to the Russianside and were fighting alongside the Russian army (HHSA, PA XL 272).

40 Bihl; Fischer, ch. 4.41 See, for example, Karl Roth, Armenien und Deutschland (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit and Co.

1915); Emil Daniels, ‘England und Rußland in Armenien und Persien’, Preussische Jahrbücher,no. 169, 1917, 237–67. For the same arguments from Entente nationals, see W. Edgar Granville,‘Le Tsarisme en Asie-Mineure. Le Problème armenien’, La Revue Politique Internationale,March–April 1917; C. F. Dixon-Johnson, The Armenians (Northgate: Geo. Toulmin and Sons1916), 23.

42 Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the His-torical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown, ME: Blue Crane 1996), 49–54; for moredetails on the special organization, see Taner Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord: die Istan-buler Prozesse und die türkische Nationalbewegung (Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen 1996),54–8; V. N. Dadrian, ‘The role of the special organisation in the Armenian genocide during theFirst World War’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime (Oxford: Berg 1993), 50–82.

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complicity in the genocide is the object of unsubstantiated innuendo; vonOppenheim gathered intelligence on the ground and promoted the Germanembrace of cihad.43 He also promoted the Muslim refugees to Turkey—Circassians, Chechens and Muslim Georgians who had fled from the RussianCaucasus over the previous half-century—as a potentially ‘fanatic’ fightingforce against their former imperial masters. These well-armed groups, he noted,had come into ‘severe conflict’ with the local populations of Anatolia (par-ticularly the Christians, he might have added), and ‘the survivors havepreserved a martial spirit’, with a high representation in the military and theGendarmerie (both of which were to play crucial roles in the slaughter of theArmenian deportees), while maintaining influence in their communities inthe Russian empire.

The combined effect of German policy and preconception was identi-fied by Markgraf von Pallavicini, the Austrian ambassador, after the majordeportations had taken place: he deemed that the German ingratiation withTurkey had assured its leading statesmen, and particularly ‘the intelligent bututterly uneducated fanatics like Talaat’, of their positions, and allowed themto give free reign to their xenophobic policies.44 Indeed, it is certain that thecihad and its attendant ethno-religious agitation did motivate some Turkishand Kurdish popular participation in the Armenian genocide.

German diplomatic protests against the ongoing genocide that Germanimperial and war-time interests had indirectly helped stimulate have been con-demned as formulaic and lacking in real substance, designed to exculpate theembassy.45 There is truth in this, as there also is in the accusation that Ameri-can protests were subdued, of which more later. Tellingly, though, Germandémarches remained ineffective even when the Foreign Office put more weightbehind them, as it did from a self-perceived position of strength on the defeatof Serbia in October 1915.46

Setting aside humanitarian concerns, there were real pragmatic reasonsfor Germany opposing the genocide. Almost without exception, observers of thesituation in Turkey saw that the deportations spelled economic disaster giventhe functions that the Christians had come to fulfil.47 That corresponding

43 Dadrian, German Responsibility, 65–81, fails to adduce any solid evidence that von Oppenheimwas in any way implicated in the massacres, as opposed to vilifying the Armenians. On hisactivities concerning the cihad etc., see Dadrian, German Responsibility and the Ernst JäckhPapers at the Yale University Library (box 2, folders 46–7), especially von Oppenheim’s ‘DieRevolutionierung der islamischen Gebiete unserer Feinde’, [October?] 1914 (box 2, folder 47).

44 Letter from Markgraf von Pallavicini to Baron von Burian, 12 November 1915: HHSA, PA I, 944.45 Gabriele Yonan, Ein vergessener Holocaust: die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der

Türkei (Göttingen and Vienna: Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker 1989), 98–9; Dadrian, Ger-man Responsibility, 184.

46 Hilmar Kaiser, ‘The Baghdad railway 1915–1916: a case study in German resistance andcomplicity’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial: The Case of theArmenian Genocide (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press 1999), 67–112 (93); UlrichTrumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-sity Press 1968), 213–33.

47 Johannes Lepsius (ed.), Deutschland und Armenien 1914–1918. Sammlung diplomatischerAktenstücke (Potsdam: Tempelverlag 1919), lxi–lxii; letter from Johannes Lepsius to Rosenberg,

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German protests did not alter the equation in any way shows how immov-able the Turks were on the question, but it also reveals the distance betweenthe Turks and the Germans, and helps to explain the mistrust of the latter bythe former. The removal of Armenian economic influence, regardless of theimmediate detriment to the Turkish infrastructure, was, like the attack on thewestern Anatolian Greeks, an intrinsic part of the policies that culminated ingenocide.48 As Talaat was to counter in a German press interview in August1915, the measures against the Armenians would have some adverse economicconsequences, but ‘all vacant positions [are being] filled by Turks’,49 showingthat the logic of the pre-war boycotts of Christians was incorporated into themurder of the Armenians.

But Germany had tied its own hands vis-à-vis vigorous protest againstthe ongoing genocide by the very logic of its longer-term policies in theregion. It is no wonder that the Ittihadists felt able to pursue the most im-moral agenda based on their experience that the imperative of German interestsrestricted meaningful opposition, and in the knowledge that this would be soin the future as well. Finally, the diplomats were surprised when the Ittihadists‘irrationally’ ignored their advice about the damage extirpation of the Arme-nian community would do to the economy, when the Ittihadists were thinkingin the longer term of their own national ‘new economy’, and certainly not inthe interests of German imperialism. Hence the Turkish preparedness in theface of some German opposition to deport to their deaths vital Armenianworkers on the Baghdad railway.

Yet this policy of trading off Ottoman inhumanity against westerninterest was only somewhat further along the continuum on which Disraeli’sTories had appeared with their deliberate downplaying of the Bulgarian atroci-ties in 1876 to justify supporting Turkey against Russia. Meanwhile, noChristian leader bothered with the suffering of Muslims in the region,Gladstone included,50 illustrating that, beyond the genuine humanitarianismof an international community of missionaries, diplomatic and popular pro-test was more a function of identity politics and of the strength of the ‘terribleTurk’ stereotype.

23 June 1915: AA, Abt 1A, Türkei 183, vol. 37; letter from Max von Scheubner-Richter toTheobald von Bethmann Hollweg, 10 August 1915, Anlage 1: AA, Abt 1A, Türkei 183, vol.39; letter from Hans Wangenheim to von Bethmann Hollweg, 7 July 1915: AA, Abt 1A,Türkei 183, vol. 37. For the Dual Monarchy’s response, see the letter from Markgraf vonPallavicini to Baron von Burian, 2 November 1915: HHSA, PA XII 463. For specific prob-lems created by the destruction of the Armenians, see ‘Zur inneren Lage in der Türkei’, 7October 1915, ff. 3, 5, and the letter from von Scheubner-Richter to von Bethmann Hollweg,10 August 1915, Anlage 1: AA, Abt 1A, Türkei 183, vol. 39; report by the US Consul, Jesse B.Jackson, 3 August 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the Arme-nian Genocide, vol.1 (Watertown, MA: Armenian Review Books 1994), 41.

48 Mark Levene, ‘Creating a modern “zone of genocide”: the impact of nation and state formationon Eastern Anatolia 1878–1923’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 12, 1998, 393–433 (407).

49 Berliner Tageblatt, 21 August 1915.50 Levene’s introduction, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History

(Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 1999), 1–38, esp. 26–7.

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With the Turkish entry into the First World War, Britain finally aban-doned its longstanding policy of supporting Turkey, which it had temperedover the previous two decades. Yet this did not mean that it was free to expresssolidarity with the imperilled Armenians, as was shown in reaction to a Rus-sian (!) proposal in spring 1915 to issue an inter-Allied warning to the Turkishgovernment of the consequences of its policies towards the Armenians.51 TheTurkish announcement of cihad had, it seems, worried the British as to thereactions of Indian Muslims, and they did not wish to be seen invoking aChristian cause against a Muslim power. (To be momentarily counterfactual,a somewhat different policy might have been arrived at had British interestsbeen greater in eastern Anatolia and Cilicia than on the route to India throughPersia and Mesopotamia.) And this at a time when they were beginning toencourage their own version of Insurgierung, trying to persuade Muslim Arabsto disregard the cihad—by emphasizing the Turkish imperialism implicit inIttihadist pan-Turkism as opposed to the religious doctrine of pan-Islamism52—and rise up with promises of a piece of Ottomania as the reward.

One justification for British opposition to the inter-Allied declaration,which was finally made in a modified form on 24 May 1915, was that it mightonly exacerbate Turkish fury against the Armenians.53 This was true,54 but itwould be rather easier to believe the line of humanitarian concern were it notfor the later reluctance of the British authorities to allow the survivors of thefamous last-ditch Armenian resistance at Musa Dagh on the Mediterraneancoast in autumn 1915 to be transported to the safety of Cyprus or Egypt. Theofficial stance was that ‘in view of the present state of feeling in both theseplaces, it would be highly undesirable that the victims of insurrectionary fight-ing between Turks and Christians should be landed there’.55

Around this time it dawned on the British that the ongoing slaughtermight be used as a lever to influence American opinion more decisively to-wards the Entente, just as the Belgian atrocities of 1914 had been used.56 Thuschanges were rung in the official British depiction of the fate of the Armenians,and the ensuing propaganda drive also happily portrayed the Armenians as astruggling arm of the Entente, playing to the American audience by invoking

51 For the Russian proposal, see the diplomatic communiqué dated Paris, 11 May 1915, repro-duced in Arthur Beylerian (ed.), Les Grandes Puissances, l’empire Ottoman et les arméniensdans les archives françaises (1914–1918) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne 1983), 23.

52 British department of information report, October 1917: National Archives and RecordsAdministration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA), RG 59, 867.00/806. For implicit cor-roboration of my interpretation of the opposition to the announcement, see Akaby Nassibian,Britain and the Armenian Question 1915–1923 (London: Croom Helm 1984), 71–2. On thecontexts of this British agitation, see David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (London:Phoenix,2000), part 4. For a chronology of correspondence between the British and someArab leaders dating back to September 1914, see Public Record Office, Kew, London, FO371/2768, 69301, 12 April 1916.

53 Nassibian, 71.54 Letter from H. K. Aivazian to Boghos Nubar Pasha, 8/15 July 1915: Bibliothèque Nubar,

Paris, papers of the Armenian National Delegation, Correspondence Arménie 1915, I.55 Diplomatic communiqué, Paris, 14 September 1915, in Beylerian (ed.), 67.56 Nassibian, 73–9.

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a dispossessed minority in search of national freedom. This was not really inthe interests of the terrified majority of Armenians (though perhaps it was inthe interests of some of their nationalist leaders), for it lent easy propagandavalue to the German Foreign Office to argue that the Armenians deservedeverything they got as a military fifth column.57

American aftermathsThe entry of the United States into the war in 1917 was not primarily influ-enced by British propaganda, and was not accompanied by a declaration ofhostilities against Turkey, though diplomatic relations were broken off. USpolicy was partly predicated on the need to concentrate troops in Europe,and partly because it was feared that declaring war on Turkey would threatenAmerican missionary institutions and interfere with ongoing humanitarianaid.58 ‘On the ground’ in Turkey, American actions were indeed guided by alarge measure of humanitarianism, funded by substantial charitable donationsfrom concerned groups and individuals within the United States, and facili-tated where possible by the State Department. The US bore the brunt of thefinancial support for survivors of the genocide, though the aid workers inTurkey laboured in tandem with German missionaries and even consuls, whowere themselves receiving much less aid from home. There appears to havebeen a tacit distinction in American policy between humanitarian interven-tion and political intervention, because diplomatic relations with the Porteremained cordial throughout the war, and the State Department had not re-sponded to pressure from its diplomats in Turkey for stronger protest againstthe Armenian massacres.59

The American stance is not to be compared, however, with the long-standing German or British policies towards the Porte. The United Stateswas not seeking great economic or imperial advantage in Turkey, with theprinciple of non-intervention ruling. American policy such as it was in theregion was very much governed by the ‘missionary interest’ up until the re-sumption of limited diplomatic relations in 1919, with only a few limited signsof preparedness to compromise ‘non-intervention’ in the interests of tradein the pre-war period.60 (However, the dichotomy of ‘missionary’ versus com-mercial interests is not an entirely rigid one, since in the 1920s some of themissionary element showed themselves capable of compromise,61 and sinceone of the rationales for protecting missionary establishments during the war

57 Letter from Zimmermann to Faber, 4 October 1915: AA, Abt 1A, Türkei 183, vol. 39, A29675;‘Zur inneren Lage in der Türkei’, f. 7: AA, Abt 1A, Türkei 183, vol. 39; letter from Berlin toGerman Embassy, 8 October 1915: AA, Abt 1A, Türkei 183, vol. 39.

58 Bryson, 63.59 Letter from Hoffman Philip to Robert Lansing, 20 July 1915, and from Abraham Elkus to

Lansing, 17 October 1916: NARA, RG 59, 867.4016/244 and 867.4016/299, respectively.60 See, for example, Robert L. Daniel, American Philanthropy in the Near East, 1820–1960 (Ath-

ens, OH: Ohio University Press 1970); Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the NearEast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1971).

61 Bryson, 75.

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54 Patterns of Prejudice 36:4

was that they represented an American ‘investment’ in Turkey that might beexpected to bear fruit.62)

One important technique imported by the American diplomats whenthey returned to active service in Turkey in 1919, in the guise of the office ofthe US High Commission, shows that they had learned from European inter-vention in Turkish affairs. With the ascendancy in Turkish politics of resurgentnationalism under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)—such that the 1920 post-warpeace treaty of Sèvres had to be renegotiated in Turkey’s favour in 1922–3 atLausanne—recognition of Turkey’s free hand in internal affairs was set as theprice for any trade advantage in the new state. Under the leadership of Admi-ral Mark Bristol, whose policies were applauded by prominent Americaninterests in Turkey,63 and given tacit sanction by Washington (which was dis-tancing itself from Wilson’s miscalculations about foreign ventures), thefurthering of American economic interest was predicated upon US diplomatsneither being seen to favour an ethnic or religious group in Turkey, nor al-lowing ongoing discriminations and atrocities (on any side) to deflect it frompursuit of self-interest. Unfortunately, the inter-group problems caused bythe ‘wickedness of the powers’,64 as Bristol saw it,65 and with some truth, werenot going to be reversed by a self-interested and selective occidental with-drawal from Turkish affairs at this stage of the day.

A comparative assessmentWhat may we conclude about the actions of the world powers in and aroundthe Armenian genocide? Salahi Sonyel’s suggestion that the Armenians weremerely ‘victims of great power diplomacy’ will clearly not do, for it fails toaccount for Ittihadist agency in driving the most violent of agendas. Criminaland legal responsibility lies entirely with the Ittihadist leaders and their func-tionaries. The ambit of historical responsibility, however, judged in terms ofbroader, longer-term causes, and circumstantial influences must incorporate theGreat Power politics of the Eastern Question and then of the First World War.

Vahakn Dadrian’s critique of the powers, similar in many ways to thatof Manoug Somakian, is that the fault of the European polities lay in theirfailure to intervene in Turkish affairs with greater sincerity and more altruis-tic intention. Yet their analyses focus only on the Armenians of the empire,and here they are just as one-dimensional as was European ‘humanitarian’

62 Letters from Lewis Heck to Robert Lansing, 7 February 1918, and from Mark Bristol toFrank Polk, 1, 5 March 1919: NARA, RG 59, 867.00/813 and 867.00/850, respectively; MarkMalkasian, ‘The disintegration of the Armenian cause in the United States, 1918–1927’, Inter-national Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 16, 1984, 349–65 (352).

63 Letter from G. Bie Ravndal to Frank Polk, 9 May 1919: NARA, RG 59, 867.00/871. Gener-ally on Bristol, see the (perhaps overly positive) picture by Peter M. Buzanski, ‘Admiral MarkL. Bristol and Turkish-Armenian Relations 1919–1922’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley, 1960.

64 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press1951), 25.

65 Letter from Mark Bristol to Secretary of State, 23 October 1920, and Bristol’s war diary, entryfor 16 January 1923, f. 3: NARA, RG 59, 867.00/1361 and 867.00/1619, respectively.

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political intervention from 1878 onwards. Whether altruistic or not, and gen-erally not, with the honourable exception of much missionary activity,66 thisintervention failed to address either the suffering of Muslims in the Caucasusand the Balkans alongside the treatment of the Ottoman Christians, or thesituation of the Kurdish population, which in eastern Anatolia formed at least aplurality with the Armenians, and which was thus crucial to any peaceful ‘terri-torial solution’ to the ‘Armenian question’.67 Hence the empire’s rulers wereonly encouraged in views deep-rooted in the history of Islamic–Christianenmity, and in the diagnosis that Muslim unity was the antidote; and the Kurdswere encouraged back into the arms of the Muslim power. Besides, the sug-gestion that intervention would have been desirable had it been betterconceived and enacted does not take into account the potential of any form ofvested-interest intervention to destabilize further Ottoman internal affairs.

This is not so much a question of the pernicious influence of westernideas of nationalism on the Ottoman construct. The flow of ideas is beyondthe control of any, though evangelical missionary activity surely contributedinadvertently to the infiltration of nationalism, even in its revolutionary form,among the Ottoman subject peoples, Armenians included.68 And there can beno doubt that the development of Turkish nationalism, like that of AbdulHamid’s pan-Islamism, was influenced by the development of the other na-tionalisms within the empire.69 However, it was the structural strain placedon the empire by the more tangible physical influences of the European pow-ers that helped bring inter-Ottoman relations to the critical point of the FirstWorld War, when violent renewal and xenophobia were the desiderata.

From at least the time of Palmerston, Britain wanted a viable Turkeyunder its politico-economic influence as a barrier to Russian expansionism. Itneeded continually to reassert its mastery over the Ottomans both to the Porteand the other powers, and thus periodically had to reinvent its attitudes toreform for the Christians depending on the dictates of its own interests. Theresult was a series of instrumentalizing policies that antagonized successiveTurkish governments and generally brought little succour to their subjects,for such was generally only a secondary aim if an aim at all. Meanwhile Brit-ain indirectly exacerbated the polarization of Muslim and Christian by theexercise of its economic policies and prerogatives under the capitulations.

As the heat of battle cooled after 1918, Britain went back on its unreal-istic war-time promises to secure independence for the Armenians.70 At firstit attempted unsuccessfully to use an American mandate for an independentArmenia in eastern Anatolia as a brake on potential Soviet advance, and as a

66 On the admirable humanitarian work performed by many missionaries, see Kieser, Derverpasste Friede, passim.

67 Ibid.68 Ibid.; Bryson, 21–2; cf. the less convincing arguments of Jeremy Salt, Imperialism, Evangelism

and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878–1896 (London: Frank Cass 1993).69 Roderic H. Davison, Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774–1923 (Austin: University

of Texas Press 1990), 88.70 Nassibian, chs 4 and 5.

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56 Patterns of Prejudice 36:4

legitimation of its own territorial ambitions in the former Ottoman empire.71

Though the war-time alliance system and the establishment of British post-war control of Mesopotamia altered the British perception of Turkey’sgeopolitical position significantly, as the peace progressed London graduallyreturned to the old idea of Turkey itself as a bulwark against the Russianempire in its new Soviet form. And as the United States took over Britain’shegemonic position in the Near East from the middle of the twentieth cen-tury, it also took over this containment strategy.

For its part Russia, less economically influential in Turkey, had tradi-tionally pursued its geopolitical goals through agitation. Depending on theconfluence of Russian interests, this influence could be manifested as the spon-sorship of outright nationalist separatism or the attainment of controlling‘influence’ in Ottoman territory, as, for our purposes, was the case in easternAnatolia. If, for Russia, having an enfeebled Turkey as neighbour was sincethe first half of the eighteenth century ‘the next best thing to having no neigh-bour at all’,72 this logic was pursued up to and even into the First World War.In the longer term the grievances of the Armenians provided an excuse tocompromise Turkish sovereignty by interference. In the immediate (war) termthe relationship between Russia and the Ottoman Christians was expressedin the exploitative and ultimately catastrophic policy of encouraging insur-gency. Though the Ottoman government remains the genocidaire, and anindeterminate number of Armenian nationalist leaders were culpable in theirwar-time recklessness, Russian actions were so callous in their instrumental-ity, given the well-known pattern of Ottoman response to insurgent Christians,that they deserve a special place in the pantheon of imperial co-responsibilityfor the fatal deterioration of Turkish–Armenian relations.73

Germany provides us with a very interesting study of Great Power struc-tural involvement in the Turkish genocide. To reiterate: this involvement isnot primarily, as has been asserted, one of direct complicity in the murders.Few if any Germans wished to see the Armenians killed. Though a smallnumber were implicated in approving certain deportations, and a larger numberexpressed strong anti-Armenian sentiments, this is not the same as complicityin a scheme to destroy the Armenian nation, to the genesis of which theywere not privy. Where imperial Germany was involved was at the level ofdirectly exacerbating the ethno-religious conflicts in and around the empire.Germany helped to create the very preconditions for inter-ethnic strife at aparticularly precarious time in Ottoman history, and as a by-product legiti-mated Ittihadist xenophobia and anti-Christianism. Its role mirrored that ofRussia in sponsoring nationalist insurgency behind enemy lines, therebypromoting irregular warfare in which civilians were implicated as combat-ants and/or as ‘legitimate’ targets for reprisal actions. Given the recent violent

71 See, for example, Laurence Evans, United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey 1914–1924(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1965), 375.

72 Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (London: Allen Lane 1982), 304.73 See Bloxham, ‘The beginning of the Armenian catastrophe’.

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DONALD BLOXHAM 57

history of irregular warfare in the region, involving the Kurdish Hamidiyeregiments on the one hand, and various Muslim and Christian nationalist guer-rilla organizations on the other, a history implicitly acknowledged in vonOppenheim’s observations about the martial aptitude of Muslim refugees foruse in irregular formations, it is impossible to believe that either side wasunaware of the dangers involved in their war strategy.

In the specific matter of the murder of the Armenians, the weakness ofthe German protests were obviously influenced by the state of the war-timealliance, but it was also a direct continuation of Germany’s policy establishedin the 1890s of not exercising political influence against persecutions in order togain competitive advantage in its economic penetration of the Ottoman empire.The humanitarian assistance that German consuls and missionaries renderedduring the genocide did not tend to agitate the Ittihadists but, when this wasexpressed as strong political pressure by Count Wolff-Metternich, the Germanambassador, in the autumn of 1916, it provoked an equally strong reaction.74

Like meaningful British opposition to the Bulgarian atrocities or the 1895-6massacres, German protest was here stymied by the logic of pre-existing policy.

The American self-perception of its role during and after the genocidewas as a humanitarian influence above the vicious intrigues of the Europeanpowers. Since the United States had no geopolitical interest in the Near East,except in the negative sense during the war of countering German–Turkishambitions of eastward expansion, we may not accuse Washington of pure prag-matism as far as the ongoing Armenian catastrophe was concerned, exceptthat American protests, like those of the central powers, might well have beenlouder. The United States continued the German policy of differentiating(falsely) between humanitarian and political involvement, but it did so withless self-interest and with a greater emphasis on humanitarian aid.

After the war, however, the United States was put in the position ofhaving to fight for the rights of its own nationals and businesses as it tried todevelop a new trade relationship based on the ‘open door’, and a politicalrelationship based on ‘non-interventionism’. From 1919, though Bristol andhis staff would never admit it to themselves, the United States had to facewhat German diplomats had already identified as the very real ‘political con-sequences’ of ‘economic interests’.75 There was no chance that the US wouldcommit the troops necessary to maintain an Armenian state on former Otto-man territory, and both the Turks and the Americans at the 1923 Lausannepeace negotiations knew that European powers were only using an independ-ent Armenia as a bargaining chip.76 A mandate would have been impossible tojustify domestically and would, as the State Department rightly observed,have played directly into the imperial interests of Britain and France, whose

74 Ernst Jäckh, personal memorandum dated ‘Herbst [autumn] 1916’ (i.e. September/October):Yale University Library, Jäckh Papers, file 35, Abschrift.

75 Letter from Gottlieb von Jagow to Flotow, 22 May 1913, in GP, part 2, no. 15046.76 Richard Washburn Child, A Diplomat Looks at Europe (New York: Duffield and Company

1925), 103, 106.

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records in the region had made them far more responsible for the presentsituation.77 Besides, an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia would havebeen difficult to justify on demographic grounds. Where American diplo-mats made a proactive decision was between the American ‘national interest’as defined in strict economic terms and anything perceived to counter that,whether supported by public opinion or not.78

The significance of the new trade Realpolitik was less in terms of thefate of Ottoman Armenians—most of the damage had already been done tothem by this point—than the pattern it established for posterity. Turkey’scontinued geo-strategic importance on Russia’s border during the Cold Warwas important in determining the reluctance of successive American govern-ments to recognize the Armenian genocide, but it emerged from an establishedrelationship in which American quiescence could be easily bought. ‘Non-interventionism’ notwithstanding, in the US refusal to address the simple truthof the terminal point of Turkish–Armenian relations, they found themselvesalso drawn into the ‘whirlpool of Old World Imperialism’,79 compromisingthemselves in a manner with which Whitehall and the Wilhelmstrasse werewell acquainted. The intense persecution of the Kurds that began under Atatürkin 1925 was conveniently rationalized by Mark Bristol,80 and ignored by hisgovernment and its successors to the present day. But then it had not causedwestern politicians to lose any sleep when hundreds of thousands of Kurdshad been forcibly deported from eastern Anatolia in 1917.81 And still, up tothe present day, the ongoing Kurdish ‘ethnocide’ has rarely been of any use inarousing popular opinion.82

DONALD BLOXHAM is lecturer in history at Edinburgh University. This article waswritten during a Leverhulme special research fellowship in the history department atthe University of Southampton. He is the author of Genocide on Trial: War CrimesTrials in the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford 2001), and a numberof articles on the Holocaust, war crimes trials and his current research project, theArmenian genocide.

77 Bryson, ch. 7.78 Ibid.; Gordon, American Relations with Turkey, 32–4. On this policy as a return to the US’s

traditional line, see Edward Mead Earle, ‘Early American policy concerning Ottoman minori-ties’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 42, 1927, 337–67.

79 Gordon, 257–65. On the politics of American non-recognition of the Armenian genocidemore generally, see Vigen Guroian, ‘Post-Holocaust political morality: the litmus of Bitburgand the Armenian Genocide Resolution’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 1988,305–22.

80 Mark Bristol’s war diary, 24 September 1925, lecture, ff. 25–6: NARA, RG 59, 867.00/1914.81 On the Kurdish deportations, see Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘Zwischen Ararat und Euphrat’, in

Hans-Lukas Kiesere (ed.), Kurdistan und Europa (Zurich: Chronos 1997), 113–51 (135–6).82 On ‘ethnocide’, see Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Genocide in Kurdistan?’, in George J.

Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Press 1994), 141–70.

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