How the Ottoman Empire Influenced the Development of Identity in the Balkans and Middle East

How did the Ottoman Empire affect the development of Balkan and Middle East Identities?

The administrative institutions of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire had a significant effect on the emergence of identity in the Balkans and the Middle East. While other multiethnic empires like the Habsburg Empire acted to coerce minorities to adopt a uniform state religion, the Ottoman Empire tolerated Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christians and Jewish minorities by organizing them into religious millets with religious leadership regardless of their language and ethnicity[i]. The relative autonomy provided by these millets combined with the penetration of Western European nationalism created the backdrop for the emergence of identity in the Balkans and Middle East.
The increased involvement of Western Europe in the Ottoman Empire can be divided into three areas: economics, religion and education[ii]. Non-Muslim individuals restricted from land ownership composed the merchant class. These merchants helped introduce the Nation State and Nationalism into the Ottoman Empire through their contacts with Western Europe. Also, Western European Countries began to sponsor parallel religious groups or millets within the empire. France claimed to support the interests of Roman Catholics and Russia expressed a similar claim to Orthodox Christians. Different denominations funded not only churches but hospitals, schools and printing presses.[iii]
The legacies of the Ottoman Empire have made nationalism synonymous with religion. As the concept of the homogenous nation state became more familiar within the Ottoman Empire, religion became the primary marker of nationess[iv]. The theoretical model of one state one nation manifested itself in a reality of one state several nations. As a result, identity became exclusive in the post Ottoman territories and as assimilation failed, the existence of minorities had become an obstacle hindering the creation of the nation state[v].
The failure of assimilation began a more extreme process of divergence in the transition from a multiethnic empire to a nation state during the inter war period. Ethnic cleansing and unmixing were utilized to solve the problem of national minorities by removing them from a territory all together[vi]. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne in which Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their respective 1.5 million minority populations became a model for mass forced migrations[vii].
As Charles Igrao argues, the East is different from the West[viii]. This is largely due to the different traditions of government and institutions from which the East has evolved. The Ottoman Empire allowed greater local and regional autonomy based on the millet system. This encouraged autonomous cultural development rooted in religion. As a result, what had become traditional components of identity in Western Europe like language didnt have the same impact in the Ottoman multi ethnic empire[ix]. Bosnian Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims all speak the same language and descend from a common ancestry but have different national identities[x]).
The nation state model established by the French Revolution undermined the ethnic coexistence of the Ottoman Multinational Empire. The nation state model first penetrated those regions with clearly dominant ethnic groups like Serbia in 1815, Greece in 1829, Romania in 1858 and Bulgaria in 1878[xi]. The Balkan Wars from 1912-1918 were an attempt to extend these nation states into ethnically diverse polyglot areas of the Ottoman Empire like Macedonia, Thrace, Kosovo, Dobruja and Bosnia that contained populations of there respective ethnic groups[xii].
Multi ethnicity is the solution not the problem[xiii] while maintaining that ethnic coexistence becomes possible in polyglot states where the balance of power is more evenly distributed as opposed to one group enjoying an absolute majority. Ingrao cites as evidence; North American cities like New York and Los Angeles where multiethnic communities are stabilized by a polyglot balance of power[xiv]. among ethnic groups. However, other non polyglot cities in the United States where absolute majorities and minorities do exist also experience this stability. Therefore, it could be argued that a polyglot composition is not a necessary variable in determining successful coexistence, even more so in the Balkans and Middle East.
Greece is arguably the best and most stable example of western democracy in the Balkans. The Modern Greek race is composed of Greeks, Turks, Albanians, Romanians, assorted Slavs and others[xv]. Kaplan quotes Greece Former Foreign Minister Ioannis Kapsis to suggest Greeces Balkaness or intolerance and exclusivity towards its minorities. No Turks live in Greecethere only happen to be Greeks who happen to be Muslim and speak Turkish.nor are there Macedonians[xvi]. However, in reality this quote depicts Greeces movement towards an inclusive, civic nation. Similair America; composed of Catholic, Spanish speaking Americans, Muslim Arab Americans and Buddhist Chinese Americans; Greece is also composed of multi ethnic and religious groups under the umbrella of a Greek Nation.
Conclusion: The legacies of the Ottoman Empire and of Western European Nationalism continue to define the emergence of identity in the Balkans and Middle East. Attempts to homogenize and divergence to the one nation one state model have ranged from assimilation to ethnic cleansing. As Ingrao argues, the East is Different. Western models of the Nation State cannot be readily applied in an area where autonomous cultural development is so deeply rooted in religion, even in a Polyglot context.