In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Simon Sebag Montefiore discuss how the collapse of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to modern nationalism and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, how the region’s history has shaped today’s conflicts, and the long-term impact of October 7.
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history → discuss → October
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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transcript → condense → clarity
I really look forward to this conversation.
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I → look → conversation
It’s a very ambitious book.
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It → ’ → ?
As in many parts of the world, the origins of a modern world are in a way the story of the fading of the imperial world that preceded it.
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that → precede → it
In this case, I think you have to look at the old world.
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you → think → world
You have to look at the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire to understand the Middle East today, and that’s why I begin with those empires.
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I → have → empires
In 1900, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling in Europe, but still pretty formidable in Asia.
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Empire → crumble → Asia
That’s the story of The Cauldron.
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That → ’ → Cauldron
That’s how the book begins.
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book → ’ → ?
Tell us a little bit about how the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the fading influence of the British Empire in parts of the Middle East set up the basic structure that started to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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that → tell → century
The Ottoman Empire was fading.
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Empire → fade → ?
It had lost most of its Balkan territories and most of its North African territories, except Libya, except Tripoli.
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It → lose → Tripoli
But it still controlled what is now Turkey and the whole Arab world essentially, all the way to the border with the Persian Empire.
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what → control → Empire
In World War I, it proved to be surprisingly resilient militarily, and it defeated the British in two pretty significant battles.
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it → prove → battles
The Ottoman Empire lasted for over four hundred years, and there were many versions of it.
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Empire → last → it
It started as a conquest state based on the enslavement of Christian children who were recruited to be its soldiers, its civil servants, and so on.
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who → start → children
Then it went through massive crises and remade itself several times.
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it → go → itself
In the last period, which I deal with in The Cauldron, which is really the opening of the twentieth century or the 1890s, it had been through a period of reform when it had allowed its many peoples, sects, and ethnicities to have equal citizenship.
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peoples → deal → citizenship
It was tightening itself into an Islamic and nationalistic, Turkish nationalistic entity with a kind of almost proto-Nazi ideology.
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It → tighten → ideology
So by World War I, it was ruled by the Three Pashas, who were kind of eugenicist, social Darwinist people who believed that war was a purifying struggle for races to perfect themselves.
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races → rule → themselves
It was they who embarked on the genocide against the Armenians and other peoples too, like the Greeks and the Maronites and so on.
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who → embark → Greeks
That was a sort of Götterdämmerung, if you like, of the Ottoman Empire.
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you → like → Empire
The great myth that you read about all the time, about the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire and how everyone lived together in a cheerful, peaceful, charming way, spouting poetry, is rubbish really.
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everyone → read → poetry
It is rubbish, because there were very strong forms of exclusion and discrimination built into those empires.
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It → be → empires
But the strange thing about empires does seem to be that as they fade, you get those periods of ethnic cleansing.
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you → seem → cleansing
You obviously get that extremely strongly in the Middle East, with the Armenians and others, but also in other parts of Europe.
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You → get → Europe
It’s in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of nationalism and the attempt to create those more coherent national states that you then get all of the expulsions and ethnic cleansings that define a lot of the first half of the twentieth century.
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that → ’ → century
Tell us about the era of the Three Pashas and the ideology that drove them, and in what ways those were preferable to the Ottoman Empire and in which ways perhaps they weren’t.
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they → tell → ways
You’re putting your finger on it.
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You → put → it
In the West, we decided, I guess, sometime during the nineteenth century, that the nation-state was the best form of government.
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state → decide → government
But the creation of these nation-states always included exclusions of people who either didn’t fit into the new national definition or who didn’t want to fit.
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who → include → definition
All the national states that were created in Eastern Europe involved excluding Muslim citizens from them, and they had to leave and go into the Ottoman Empire, in their hundreds of thousands.
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they → create → thousands
The same process took place in Eurasia and in the Middle East.
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process → take → East
That’s what happened in the Ottoman Empire.
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what → ’ → Empire
The idea moved from Ottomanism, which was meant to be a definition of a broad citizenship involving all sorts of peoples, to a much tighter one, a sort of Turkish definition.
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which → move → definition
You had to be Turkish, you had to be Islamic, you had to speak Turkish.
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you → have → Turkish
That excluded the Arabs, who were millions of people, as well as the Jews and of course all the Christians in the empire.
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who → exclude → empire
They were huge communities, including the Armenians.
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They → include → Armenians
All of these peoples in the Middle East started to embrace the idea of nationalism because that was the flavor of the times.
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that → start → times
…and 237 more, not listed.
The Aporia
