4 – Turkey
“My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go.”
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
If the fate of the post-World War One German Empire was complicated, the state of the Ottoman Empire was just as chaotic. The capital, Constantinople, was occupied by Entente Powers and the rest of the territories were tearing apart at the seams. The Ottoman Empire was arguable the most culturally, linguistically and geographically diverse in the world for much of the 17th and 18th centuries, running from the gates of Vienna to the Horn of Africa and from modern day Algeria to the Persian Gulf, but by 1914 it was already known as “the sick man of Europe” and was on it’s metaphorical last legs.
The Turks, who made up the majority of the population, had fought gallantly to defend their homeland at the famous battles of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, but by the end of the war, they were forced to sue for peace. Unbeknownst to them, however, the British and French had already drawn up a secret deal, the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, that divided control of the Middle East (and the oil that had been struck there in 1908) between them.
The Armistice of Mudros of 1918 stopped the fighting, but the Entente powers were far from agreed on what was to be done with the territory of the Empire. The British and French wanted their lands in Middle East as agreed in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Greeks and Armenians saw the potential to expand their homelands into Anatolia. The Turks themselves were largely left out.
With the French occupying Constantinople, the British exerting influence in Palestine and the Greeks invading Smyra and western Anatolia and the Turks largely powerless to stop it all, it became clear that some sort of national unity was going to be needed. Mustafa Kemal, the hero of the Gallipoli Campaign for the Turks, stepped into the breech.
On April 23 1920, Mustafa Kemal was elected as Chairman of the Grand National Assembly of the Ottoman Empire in Ankara. However, the last Sultan in Constantinople had already signed the Treaty of Sevres, which gave the vast majority of the empire away to the Entente Powers. Again, a situation of multiple governments existed and a power struggle would ensue.
Kemal began fighting with the Greeks in the west, the Armenians in the east and the French in the south. Backed by hefty supplies from the Soviets, they defeated the Armenians and rolled back the Greek advances towards Ankara. The French and British had little interest in more war and agreed to peace talks.
However, they invited the Ottoman Sultan – whom the Turkish Nationalists considered a traitor – to the peace conference, causing Kemal to officially abolish the Ottoman Empire and therefore the Sultanate. The Treaty of Lausanne, agreed between the Entente and Mustafa Kemal established new borders for Turkey and a huge population exchange between Greeks living in Turkey and Turks living in Greece, leading to the modern borders and ethnic make up that we see today.
Furthermore, Kemal – now known as Ataturk, or Father of the Turks – was adamant that the new Republic of Turkey would eschew the ways of the Ottoman Empire. He passed sweeping reforms that enforced secularism, modernised the government and essentially stripped the new republic of any of the Islamic trappings that had characterised the Ottoman Empire. The modern Turkey was born.