[Bilimsel Haber] Review: Mustafa Aksakal, _The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War_

[Gonul Pultar]

*Mustafa Aksakal.* /The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire 
and the First World War./ 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521880602> Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2008. xv + 216 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 
978-0-521-88060-2.

*Reviewed by* Emre Sencer (Department of History, Knox College)
*Published on* H-German (September, 2009)
*Commissioned by* Susan R. Boettcher

*End Game on the Bosporus*

The story of why and how the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War 
has often remained in the shadow of the other powers' involvement in the 
war and the events that followed the peace treaties of 1919-20. The 
ensuing struggle to carve out mandates in the region, and the 
establishment of the Republic of Turkey through nationalist resistance 
against the Ottoman Empire have attracted more attention from 
researchers than the motivations that led the empire to ally itself with 
Germany and Austria-Hungary. The decision to join that alliance brought 
about its eventual collapse and the partition of its territories. 
Mustafa Aksakal's book is the first book-length study in English that 
uses both Ottoman and European sources to answer the question of why the 
empire entered the war on the side of the Triple Alliance in October 
1914, a decision that, in hindsight, was nothing less than catastrophic.

In his introduction, Aksakal begins by reviewing the assumptions and 
myths that influenced both the political commentators who considered the 
empire's options on the eve of the conflict and the historians who 
formed their opinions in the decades after World War I. Such analyses 
placed the role of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the ruling 
party of the empire, and its leading triumvirate of Enver, Celal, and 
Talat Pashas, at the center of their accounts. For the generation of 
Turkish bureaucrats and politicians active in the single-party era of 
the Turkish Republic (1923-46), the decision-makers of the CUP embodied 
all the negative attributes of the former regime from which the elite of 
the young republic tried to distance itself. While many of these cadres 
also came from the ranks of the CUP, the new regime in Ankara saw the 
former leaders of the CUP as responsible for the debacle of the war. The 
memoirs of key figures of the period repeated that line and claimed that 
the CUP leadership was pressured into the war by ambition and 
"'below-average' intelligence" (p. 1). Later official military studies 
built upon that premise to blame the entry into war on western 
imperialism and the Ottoman leadership's "secrecy and incompetence" (p. 
12). On the other hand, western scholarship that focused on the 
relationship between Germany and the Ottoman Empire also criticized the 
decision-making process in Constantinople. Historical works published in 
the 1960s highlighted German interests in the region and the German 
desire to open a second front in the Middle East, but also shifted most 
of the blame for the German-Ottoman alliance to the "willing 
cooperation" of the Ottoman leadership and the motivations of key 
Ottoman figures (pp. 64-65). Aksakal argues that the many competing 
interests at the Ottoman capital led its leadership to consider various 
options for intervention in the war, and that the Germans tried to 
manipulate the new international situation in the region that had 
emerged after the Italian capture of Tripoli in 1911 and the Balkan Wars 
of 1912-13.

The first half of the book focuses on the Ottoman situation between the 
end of the Balkan Wars and the outbreak of the July Crisis. The second 
half presents a detailed study of Ottoman negotiations with Germany on 
the nature and degree of Ottoman intervention in the war. It is a major 
strength of the book that instead of examining Ottoman policy in 
isolation, Aksakal situates the events in a broader European context, a 
decision that tracks emerging trends in the field. Approached from that 
broader perspective, it is clear that the Ottomans saw the dilemma of 
intervention as one that brought together the problems the empire faced 
in the Balkans and the Middle East. The empire's recent losses in North 
Africa and the Balkans showcased its difficulties and signaled an end to 
the era of relying on the British and French for support against Russian 
expansionism. The survival of the empire required delicate maneuvering 
in such an environment. As a result, the Ottoman leadership, including 
Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha's cabinet, tried to obtain the best deal 
for the empire from any possible alliance with European powers. 

Germany's interest in and position for such an alliance were very 
strong. The "war party" in Constantinople was aware of the benefits 
Germany sought from such an alliance. German expectations included, but 
were not limited to, anti-colonial, Islamic revolutions; a shift in 
Russian military attention from the western front to the Balkans and 
Caucasus; a realignment of the alliance positions of the hesitant Balkan 
states; and a possible expedition against British troops in Egypt. The 
activities of the German mission at the Ottoman capital focused on 
getting such an alliance underway in the wake of the July Crisis.

The other factor in balancing the equation posited by any alliance, even 
before the outbreak of the crisis, was the attitude of Russia. Aksakal 
makes good use of Russian documents published after the Russian 
Revolution by Soviet historians and translated into German after 1931 to 
underline worries among Russian diplomats and politicians about Ottoman 
intentions toward such an alliance. Thus, we learn that a part of the 
immediate German interest in the Ottoman Empire in late 1913 and early 
1914 was fueled by the kaiser's and the German Foreign Office's beliefs 
that the Ottoman empire could not be saved; Germany thus felt it had to 
act in order to forestall Entente expansion into the Mediterranean. The 
Russians, on the other hand, considered the empire to be gaining 
strength and threatening Russian foreign policy in the Near East. This 
situation increased Russian activity regarding the future of the Turkish 
Straits and Eastern Anatolia. In this environment, the Ottoman 
leadership was trying to choose the least dangerous path in preparation 
for a future conflict.

Competition to gain influence over the alliance calculations of the 
Sublime Porte in any future crisis focused the attention of the 
respective suitors on the Balkan situation. Aksakal shows how the 
Ottomans tried to manipulate their possible alternatives, for example, 
by negotiating with the Triple Alliance while concurrently sending a 
mission headed by Talat Pasha to Russia in the spring of 1914. The 
Ottoman desire to recoup some of the losses of the Balkan Wars lay at 
the center of these offerings of goodwill to the Russians. The forging 
of a theoretical Bulgarian-Ottoman-Romanian alliance was supposed to 
prevent a renewed conflict between the Ottomans and the Greeks, as well 
as continue to keep the straits open to the Russians. But such scheming 
brought no result in the end: Romanians could not remain neutral in a 
potential Ottoman-Greek conflict, and the Russians felt compelled to 
react to the slightest hint that the Ottomans might close the straits in 
response to a renewed Balkan crisis. For the Russians, a rejuvenated 
Ottoman presence in the Balkans was too high a price to pay for an alliance.

In the second half of the book, Aksakal provides a detailed analysis of 
the signing of the alliance with Germany. Closely intertwined with this 
narrative is the dramatic story of the two German battle cruisers 
/Goeben/ and /Breslau/, and their escape into Ottoman territory, which 
initiated the process of Ottoman intervention in the war. The alliance 
came into being on August 2, 1914, and the German military mission in 
the Ottoman capital mobilized to put the agreement into effect. While 
the Ottoman military awaited the arrival of the two German ships in 
Constantinople, Berlin expected the alliance to lead to an immediate 
campaign against Russia or Egypt. The person who committed the empire to 
such a pledge was the war minister, Enver Pasha himself. Three months 
would elapse, however, before those operations got under way.

The alliance did not put an end to the bargaining. In fact, according to 
Aksakal's account, the Ottoman government, especially Said Halim Pasha, 
seems to have considered the alliance a tool to gain additional 
influence over the Balkans. The imminent arrival of the German ships at 
the straits heightened the visibility of the German presence at the 
Ottoman capital. Said Halim used the situation to pressure the Germans 
to persuade the Bulgarians and Romanians to join the alliance. At the 
same time, he suggested that if the empire did not feel secure enough, 
it would look to the Entente for support. Aksakal argues persuasively 
that these maneuvers were a means of controlling the terms of the 
alliance and relieving pressure to begin operations immediately, and not 
a legitimate threat to side with the Entente. Just before the ships 
entered the straits, the government secured new conditions that ranged 
from German support for the abrogation of the Capitulations to the 
arrangement of reparations for the Ottoman Empire. Only then was 
permission given for the ships to enter the straits.

Throughout August 1914, the alliance partners continued to disagree over 
the timing of Ottoman intervention in the war, especially after the 
German ships were transferred to the Ottoman navy. Kaiser Wilhelm 
insisted that Ottomans join the fighting, preferably in the Near East, 
but Ottoman demands for supplies continued to delay operations. Aksakal 
states that a regular pattern developed, in which the Ottomans delayed 
involvement while drawing financial and military support from Germany. 
The result was what the author calls a "classic deadlock" (p. 138). 
Germans demanded intervention, but the Ottomans wanted to see signs of 
German military victory in other theaters of the conflict. By 
mid-September, the Germans rejected any request for military supplies 
without a corresponding Ottoman commitment to the joint military effort. 
German military planners accepted that the campaign against Egypt would 
take longer to prepare, but they insisted that the Ottomans show their 
support for the Triple Alliance against the Russians. Under the 
circumstances, with the presence of the newly transferred cruisers in 
the Marmara Sea, such an action could be initiated against Russian ports 
in the Black Sea. This pressure eventually led to the naval action of 
October that brought the empire into the war against the Entente.

In a crucial passage, Aksakal argues that for the Ottoman leadership, 
the Great War became a "great opportunity" (p. 152). They planned for 
the alliance to continue into the postwar era and hoped that, through 
such a partnership, the empire could obtain security and "regain its 
international status" (p. 152). Indeed, the empire received additional 
support in the form of an amendment to the original alliance treaty that 
guaranteed automatic renewal until 1926 (p. 185). But the alliance also 
locked the Ottoman Empire into German plans that eventually brought 
about the dismemberment of its territories. Aksakal believes that 
Ottoman public opinion of 1914 was dominated by feelings of having been 
"violated' by the Great Power system, and that imperial politicians and 
bureaucrats were not immune to this sentiment. Ottoman leadership wanted 
to use the system in order to extract revenge and regain status and 
prestige. It aimed to achieve "national renewal and reinvigoration" (p. 
194). These attitudes lay behind Ottoman statesmen's attempts to play 
the Great Powers against each other to obtain the best deal.

Aksakal's argument that CUP greed and incompetence should be questioned 
as reasons for Ottoman entry into the war is thus supported by the 
evidence in the book, which presents its negotiators as competent 
political agents who participated effectively in the Great Power system. 
Even so, while "the great opportunity" was pursued as a means of 
renewing the empire, the main players at the top of the Ottoman state, 
especially Enver, still appear in Aksakal's account as adventurers who 
confused brinkmanship with astute analysis of the facts. In other words, 
it is plausible, as Aksakal argues, that the Ottoman leadership of 1914 
was not wholly incompetent, and that such a characterization relies on 
the caricatures of later generations, or on the perceptions of the 
German leadership, which was attempting to position itself as profitably 
as possible for the potential dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and saw 
it as a suitable partner as long as it held together, but never an equal 
one. But the Ottoman leadership's attempt to play different European 
powers off against each other was a dangerous one that failed to 
convince any other potential ally, and did not leave the Ottoman 
government enough room to maneuver once a decision for a particular 
alliance was made.

Aksakal is right to suggest that the attitudes present among the Ottoman 
elite at the outbreak of the war did not die with the collapse of the 
empire. Militarism and nationalism, in particular, still make up an 
important part of the fabric of the modern Turkish state. One might wish 
that in his conclusion Aksakal had focused more on some of these 
connections with modern Turkey, but of course that was not the aim of 
the book. Overall, this work is an impressive and very valuable 
contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Germany 
and the Ottoman Empire, as well as their respective foreign policies, on 
the eve of the First World War. As a side benefit, it adds support to 
the argument that then, as now, Turkey was for Germany a piece in the 
European puzzle. One can only wish that the current leadership in Berlin 
paid more attention to that historic connection.


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*Citation: * Emre Sencer. Review of Aksakal, Mustafa, /The Ottoman Road 
to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War/. H-German, 
H-Net Reviews. September, 2009.
*URL:* http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25208