Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires

Abstract

This book is divided into two parts, in which the respective chronologies of the two empires do not necessarily converge. Each part contains two chapters. The first part titled ‘Men versus Institutions: Law and Religion’ loosely covers the first half of the nineteenth century. What binds this part together is the notion that political reform is strongly entrusted to the rather miraculous effects attributed to new and permanent laws, domestically as well as in foreign relations, and new institutions. But tensions that arise in their constraining the unlimited political authority of powerful men remains unresolved. This is because even though renewal of the empires through ‘modern’ law, the rule of law, gains high traction, its nature and function are strongly contested. Would it be to curb the despotic power of powerful men or solely for regulating the workings of state institutions? Would laws, as in the Russian case, find their legitimacy from the unlimited power of the monarch, or would they be, as in the Ottoman case, disputed between the religious and secular domains? Would religion have an important role in domestic and international politics? These are some of the most important tensions tackled within this section. The first chapter, ‘Quests for Fundamental Change: “True Monarchy” and the “Holy Alliance” ’ is an account built around two prominent early nineteenth-century Russian imperial figures and their ‘projects’: Russian statesman Michael Speransky with his idea of ‘True Monarchy’ for internal constitutional change, and Emperor Alexander I with his European peace project of the Holy Alliance in the post-Napoleonic European restoration. The second chapter, ‘ “Alternation and Complete Renewal of Ancient Custom”: An Unattainable Pledge’, is an account on Ottoman modern reformer, statesman Reshid Pasha – from the latter part of the first half of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Crimean War in 1856 – around his project for new laws and permanent institutions to engineer change internally and externally in the Ottoman Empire. Amidst a myriad of structural differences, their stories reflect unexpected mirror-like paths, efforts and destinies. Speransky’s ‘True Monarchy’ and Reshid Pasha’s ‘Permanent Institutions’ relied heavily on a similar legal vocabulary – permanent laws (European, French civil codes) that ran short of any contemporary constitutional conceptions – as well as a shared idiom of political economy. Whereas, in foreign relations, Tsar Alexander I’s geopolitical dilemmas in a post-Napoleonic European restoration entailed the use of constitutionalism in tandem with a paradoxical employment of the religious idiom (based on Christian precepts) in the project of the ‘Holy Alliance’ to forge a durable European peace. This, however, was not the idiom with which Reshid Pasha’s Ottoman Empire could make peace and forge alliances with European states. The vocabulary of civilization, with which European powers articulated their influences in inter-state affairs, was acceptable to him not in the sense of reinforcing an antagonistic religious dichotomy of Islam versus Christianity, but rather, a secular understanding of civilization that necessitated new laws and institutions was, in Reshid Pasha’s conception, the future for bringing the Ottoman monarchy closer to the Concert of Europe, as well as for regenerating the empire. Compelled by persistent immediate political concerns and personal shortcomings, their visions and efforts seemed daring, but met insurmountable resistance. Their political projects remained incomplete; while their drive for change faded so did the alternative to a future based on the prominence of laws. The second part, ‘Managing the Future: From Law to Political Economy and Political Representation’ is largely set between the mid-nineteenth century, the aftermath of the Crimean War (1853–1856), and the 1870s and 1880s, highlighting the urgency of political economy and political representation as key ideas for managing the future of the empires. But again, these concepts are highly contested. The ensuing chapter ‘Empire and Progress’ traces the diverging and occasionally converging visions and trajectories of three influential figures in the post-Crimean Russian wave of political and socio-economic change. They are: the reformist bureaucrat Nikolai Miliutin, embarking on a well-trodden path to change in order to prepare the most ground-breaking draft legislation in nineteenth-century Russian history (Emancipation of Serfs in 1861); the timid but determined Emperor Alexander II whose fear of Russia losing its Great Power status takes him into dangerous paths of change internally and externally; and hereditary bureaucrat, and minister of internal affairs Peter A. Valuev who saw a direct link between reforming the politics and the economics of the provinces of the empire with extending political rights of nobility as well as peasantry to the imperial level through a constitutional project. The final chapter titled ‘A Constitutional Empire’ is an account of the interactions of key Ottoman political figures, Ali, Fuad and Midhat Pashas, from the negotiations of the Paris Treaty in 1856 to the aftermath of the Berlin Congress of 1878, also in the context of the rise of the Young Ottoman intellectual movement and the 1870s Ottoman debt crisis. The chapter contextualizes the search for new imperial politics (in political representation and economic welfare) in the practice and the reflections of these three figures, particularly Midhat Pasha’s pragmatic move – grounded on his successful provincial Ottoman reforms – towards formalizing constitutionally what Ali and Fuad Pasha de facto had established, namely, the preponderance of the Porte as the fulcrum of the Ottoman political power over the palace. By the end of their political careers both Fuad and Ali Pasha had seen the limits of Reshid Pasha’s spearheaded Ottoman reform project – a European-inspired, rule-based and economically liberal approach – either because of the impossibility of its rules and regulations to unify the diverse peoples of the empire, with Fuad suggesting to think otherwise in terms of forging a ‘union’, or because of an unsustainable combination of such reforms with European political intervention, with Ali calling for a rethink of Ottoman politics in terms of ‘common interests’. Meanwhile, taking on imperial politics where Fuad and Ali left it, Midhat Pasha’s alternative, for reforming the imperial centre, became constitutionalism – a fortuitous combination of his experience as a successful reformer of the Ottoman province, applying ‘developmental’ economy and ‘national’ political representation with the language of constitutionalism already articulated by the main proponents of the Young Ottoman movement. The ‘Epilogue’ reflects on whether the language of political reform in the two states was completely undermined, respectively, by the 1908 Young Turk, the Russian 1905 Liberal and the 1917 Communist political revolutions.