Buffers, not Brethren: Young Turk Military Policy in the First World War and the Myth of Panturanism

The rise of mass national identities and nationalism is surely one of the most common narrative themes in the historiography of modern Europe and of many other regions. Scholars have created a tremendous theoretical and empirical literature on the origins of nationalist movements, the contents of nationalist ideologies and the formation of national identities. Although nationalism emerged as a western European phenomenon, the collapse of formal empire and the proliferation of the nation state around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seemingly revealed it to be a global phenomenon. Moreover, the nationalist narrative's inherent claim to universality lent it an apparently exceptional explanatory power and its familiarity made it an attractive theme around which to organize the historiographies of regions beyond Europe. At times, however, the theme of nationalism and its development has been allowed to overshadow other processes, and its uncritical application has proven deleterious to our understanding of history. To illustrate the point, this article examines one of the most entrenched theses in Ottoman historiography, the contention that the ideologies of Panturkism and Panislam, often lumped together under the rubric of Panturanism, profoundly influenced Ottoman policies and decision-making towards Russia in the empires’ final years.1 According to this thesis, the rise of mass identities among Muslims and Turkic peoples in the Ottoman and Russian empires at the turn of the century generated among Ottoman leaders a powerful irredentism directed towards the Muslim lands of the Russian Empire. The increasing influence of Panturanic sentiment, we are told, culminated in 1917–18, when it inspired the Ottomans to send their armies into the Caucasus for the purposes of uniting with their ethnic brethren and co-religionists and rekindling imperial grandeur by carrying out a campaign of conquest across the Caspian into Russian Turkestan.