American Caliphate: Who Are the Young Turks?
There are some ideas I have been developing since I began writing on US empire and imperialism here back in 2011, a whole decade ago. Because I am now teaching an online course on the subject, I thought I should write a couple of pieces tying my reasoning together and elaborating it more fully. If you want to skip ahead to the meat of this piece, just scroll down to the second section. And if you’re already conversant with my analysis of the similarities between the US and Ottoman Empires, head to section three. This article is the first of two in a short series.
1. Why Comparative Empire?
One of the most important tools we have for understanding empires and the operation of imperialism in the present is disciplined historical comparison. I say “disciplined” because one of the features of discourse in modern imperial systems is lazy and undisciplined comparison.
There is always going to be someone in any European or Euro-American empire going on about how the present is like the “last days of Rome,” which usually yields, if explored, a total absence of clarity or accuracy about how the Roman Empire came to an end, according to any historiographic tradition. We all know that usually male, conservative, ancient mariner type who grabs the wrist of a young person at a Christmas party or wedding and begins reciting the myth of the sexual permissiveness of the Late Roman Republic and how that’s all happening again thanks to gay marriage or heavy petting or whatever the moral panic of the moment is.
But the existence of this social phenomenon should not put us off comparing empires. If anything, the ubiquity of bad thinking about comparative empire is actually a good thing; at least one’s starting position is something people are thinking badly about, rather than something people are not thinking about at all.
Thanks to first Marxists, Dependency theorists, World Systems theorists and, most recently, what we might call the “energy systems theorists” to use a broad enough brush to include Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy and Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, we can usefully compare imperial structures based on a variety of metrics across time and space. That is because they have noted universal structural properties we find across empires, both self-conscious and unconscious, such as the existence of a core and a periphery, and the redirection of energy from periphery to core.
As a historian, this is my main toolbox for thinking about not just the United States but the regional empires seeking to challenge its status as the global hegemon in the late twentieth century or as the pre-eminent global power in this century. As a non-quantitative historian, I necessarily rest my analogical reasoning atop the hard inductive work of economic and environmental historians of these empires, without whom this work would not be possible.
2. How the Ottoman Caliphate Worked
In my endorsement of the Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2020 US presidential nomination, I argued that a striking feature of the imperial vision of the mainstream of the Democratic Party and that of the shrinking neoliberal faction of the Republicans, as espoused by characters like Pete Buttigieg and Lisa Murkoswski, is a theory of political representation similar to that of the Ottoman Empire and, to a lesser extent, previous Muslim empires claiming to be the Caliphate.
The status of Caliphate and the title of Caliph have been claimed by Muslim states that wished to be recognized as the pre-eminent Muslim power globally since the religion’s founding. The head of state of a Caliphate, the Caliph, had a role similar to the Byzantine and Russian emperors who took on the mantle of “vicegerent of God on earth.” The idea was that God had effectively chosen the Tsar/Caliph by placing his chosen representative in the position of leading the state that controlled the most territory, fighting men and population within a larger religious community.
In this way, although a Tsar, Emperor or Caliph might rise to his office through the ranks of the army or through inheritance, or, most commonly, a combination of the two, he became, upon his accession, the greatest churchman in the land, the successor to Muhammad the Prophet in Muslim tradition and successor to Constantine the Great, “equal to the apostles” in Orthodox Christian tradition. Caliphs and emperors were expected not just to lead the armies of Christ or Allah, as the case might be, but to intervene in settling doctrinal and liturgical disputes, policing the boundaries of orthodoxy, not just militarily but ideologically.
With less stringent controls on doctrine and sectarianism and an impressive record of conversion across vast geographic areas, the Muslim world over which a Caliph presided was far more diverse than that over which any Byzantine or Russian emperor ever did. And this remained true up until the official disbandment of the Ottoman Caliphate by the Turkish parliament in 1922.
Within the Ottoman Empire, there were al-kitab, the people of the book, Christians and Jews, whom the Quran and hadiths specifically designated as enjoying freedom of religion. But did that apply to Yazidis? Zoroastrians? Then there was the problem of Islamic sects and movements not recognized as Muslim by most Sunnis. Sure, Shi’ites were Muslims. But Druzes? Alawites? Should they be managed like the Yazidi or like the Ismailis? This was then overlaid on a complex mass of ethnicities, Albanians, Kurds, Nubians, Greeks, Serbs, Copts and Arabs. And this, in turn, was overlaid on the geography of Europe, the Near East and North Africa.
In other words, central to the job of an Ottoman Caliph was the maintenance and management of diversity. Like the other venerable empires of its age, the Russian, Mughal, Hapsburg and Holy Roman Empires, this diversity was understood to redound to the glory of the emperor, who might style himself Caliph of his whole realm but also Emperor of the Greeks, King of the Serbs, Protector of the Jews, etc. The number of kinds of person over which one’s empire ruled, the richer it was considered to be.
This diversity had to be reflected not only in titles but in the pageantry of government. A successful Caliph’s court featured viziers (ministers handling portfolios, regions or peoples) representing all the diversity of the empire: an Orthodox Greek from Palestine, an Arab Shi’ite from Basra, an Egyptian Orthodox Copt from Asyut, an Arab Alawite from Alakia. While the Caliph was always a Turk, and the empire, one that moved wealth from non-Turkish periphery to the Turkish core, the symbolism of the empire typically sought to downplay Turkish domination through the pageantry of diversity.
Of course, because the average early modern peasant was more politically sophisticated than progressive Twitter is today, the non-Turkish subjects of the empire were not fooled. They had had no part in choosing their “representative” and correctly understood that being picked by the Caliph was not a triumph of representation and that no ceilings of any sort had been broken in the process.
While some local folks close to the vizier would no doubt benefit from government jobs and the rewriting of laws in their favour, having one’s local ethno-religious community “represented” in the court of the Caliph was hardly good news for the community as a whole.
Having been selected by the Caliph and elevated from above, the interests of the vizier were clear: their ability to “represent” their community was contingent on its good behaviour and continued labour to move resources to the Turkish core of the empire. If “his” people rose up in a costly or protracted way, the vizier had failed and could not expect to keep his job. Therefore, through a combination of pageantry, patronage, surveillance and force, the vizier did all he could to keep his people in line, as loyal subjects of the Caliph.
Ottoman diversity politics proved highly effective until the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. But while an incipient Pan-Arab Nationalism and the rise of Palestine-focused Zionism raised some concern about imperial cohesion, it was the unexpected force of Turkish nationalism that brought the empire down.
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By the early twentieth century, Turks could see that capitalist industrialization was ravaging the imperial core more than its periphery. And, as they began to buy into the identity political of nationalism, it seemed clear who the culprits were and what was to be done? What was the point of even having an empire if Turkish people were passed over for senior government jobs that were given to Arabs or, worse yet, to Copts, Armenians or other Christians? Why were Jews dealt-in when modern nation-states like Russia were getting rid of theirs?
And it wasn’t just the ministerial jobs. It was government patronage. An Arab vizier might work to maintain Arab trading monopolies in Damascus or Beirut. A Copt might make a sweet trade deal for Egyptian wheat and pass over Turkish-owned, Turkish-tilled wheat fields in Anatolia.
This spirit was felt most strongly in the military and led to what we knew as the “Young Turk” coup. It should be understood that this was not the only force that propelled the mini-revolution forward. Members of many ethnic and religious minorities joined the movement backing the coup saw its central demand of representative, parliamentary democracy as serving them too. At last, their representatives would be chosen by them from below and not selected by the Caliph, from above. This presumably would mean that their representatives would pursue their community’s interests. Because in any politics, representatives can only represent the interests that have conferred their power on them.
However, one can see that Turkish soldiers and working and middle class Turks were the prime motive force, militarily and economically, behind the coup, as power was increasingly consolidated in the Turkish junta that would lead the empire into the First World War.
3. The American Caliphate
The Young Turks are alive and well in America, and not on Cenk Uyghur’s show.
Substitute “Turkish” with “white,” and one can see the same central grievance reflected in the Trump movement as in the Young Turks. Working and middle class folks in a white settler empire mistakenly focusing their grievances about capitalism on the minority tokens used to control racialized populations, rather than on capitalism itself.
And, like the Young Turk movement, they are joined by members of the tokenized minority populations who do not benefit from the small amounts of patronage and largesse the modern viziers like James Clyburn dole out to their personal networks. And this choice is, to an extent, rational because it is these tokens, these modern viziers who are the most immediate and visible faces of capitalism, corruption, cronyism and empire in their communities.
In his recent book The New Authoritarians, David Renton argues that the modern left must work harder to expose the racism of movements like the Trump movement. This is completely wrongheaded. The Black, Indigenous and Latinx supporters of the movement are perfectly aware that they are working with racists—because they have correctly ascertained that they have no choice but to work with racists because the other side are also racists hellbent on maintaining and reinforcing racial hierarchies. They flocked to the Trump movement in larger numbers in the four years following his election because they saw how little it mattered whether the racists in power were overt or covert in acknowledging their own racism and that of the socioeconomic order of the American Empire. And the same is true of white working class folks.
Everybody already knows that contemporary conservative populist parties are racist. The problem is that most but not all people know that mainstream progressive parties are not merely racist; they, like conservatives, are growing more racist. They are just manifesting this increasing racial essentialism and disrespect for the agency and opinions of racialized people through the diversity politics of a Caliph rather than the populist blaming politics of Young Turks.
Misogyny, similarly, is something people are increasingly seeing as a wash. If women wish to protect their reproductive rights as their first priority, they need to vote for progressives. But the cost of doing so grows higher with every passing year as progressive parties increasingly court social movements that advocate violence against women in the name of diversity. Incarcerated women, lesbians, victims of domestic violence, racialized feminists in authoritarian patriarchal religious communities, women concerned about girls and women’s sport, women concerned about girls’ body images, are increasingly deciding that the conservative misogynists are a safer bet on their specific issue than the progressive misogynists.
The same is true on the environmental front. The choice is between a lying family annihilator patriarch like John Horgan or Justin Trudeau versus an honest one like Donald Trump, who made it his goal to achieve the hothouse climate scenario. Both kinds can be relied on to increase fossil fuel subsidies, fracking, logging, coal mining and every other omnicidal activity on the table, to floor the gas over the cliff.
As often happens in an empire in decline, consciousness of that decline enables a growing portion of the population to see the insincerity, emptiness and simple failure of the empire’s messages about itself. “A place for everyone and every in their place,” might have been coined with respect to the British Empire but it is true of all empires large enough to encompass a significant portion of the world. And when these empires begin to contract and there are fewer places, not more, for its diverse population, one sees the rise of Young Turks.
We have to do better than that. We simply must. These Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Labour, Leave/Remain, Liberal/NDP, UCP/NDP binaries must be broken. And this is especially challenging because, just as they share commitments to increased carbon emissions, a widening wage gap and a white supremacist order, they also share a commitment to reducing regular folks’ access to the political system. Again, the differences are mostly superficial. While today’s Young Turks focus their efforts on monetizing politics and reducing voters’ access to the polls, the Caliph’s men focus on locking down candidate selection processes through vetting committees and rigged primaries.
And that means challenging myths. Just as Donald Trump appealed to a golden age that never existed through his recycling of Ronald Reagan’s slogan, “Make America great again!” America’s Democrats also pine for some lost golden age when their empire exercised power multilaterally, didn’t keep immigrant toddlers in cages and didn’t illegally detain and torture thousands of people for thinking the wrong thoughts. There is no idyllic past for the empire and the vassal states tied to it, like Canada, to return to. There is no pristine moment, for instance, in my province when the Okanagan fruit harvest was made without busing in racialized, pauperized labour force denied the full protection of the law.
After years of reluctantly backing progressives against conservatives and urging others to stay in that coalition, I have to acknowledge that they have worn me down. I no longer have a dog in that fight. Being involved in the factional politics of a necrotic imperial order makes me and anyone else in it not just a worse person but a more confused one. Before I assess what an alternative, socialist, feminist, eco-centric course might be, I still need time to shake off the confusion.
This article will be used in a number of Los Altos Institute programs this year, including our Authoritarianism reading group and our up coming online course, The Holy American Empire.
