Ottoman State

The **Exalted Ottoman State** (/ˈɒtəmən/; *Devlet-i ʿAlīye-i ʿOsmānīye*[dn 5]), also known as the **Ottoman Empire**,is a transcontinental country in Eurasia, with its heartland in Anatolia in Western Asia, the region of Eastern Thrace and it's capital Kostantiniyye on the Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe, and the region of Mosul and Kurdistan in Mesopotamia. Following the Great War, the Empire became a British client state and has been progressing fairly rapidly. The Ottoman Sultans hold the title of Caliph, Leader of all Islam and Successor of Muhammed, and while the influence and might of the empire have declined significantly over time, they are still one of the few, if not the only, independent major Muslim power in the world. Despite the atrocities committed during the Great War with the Armenian Genocide under the dictatorship of the Three Pashas and the CUP, Anatolia remains a diverse place with Turks, Rûm (local Greek-speakers), Kurds, Armenians, Laz, and more living together, with Greeks making up the majority of Ottoman bourgeoisie and intellectuals.

## Post-Great War History and Society

With the capitulation of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918 with the Armistice of Mudros, in May 1919 David Lloyd George came to an agreement about Enosis with Clemenceau and Venizelos. In a turn of events, however, just as they were coming to an agreement on Enosis, news of Berlin falling to the Revolution arrives, leading to Woodrow Wilson and Clemenceau to retract their support for the Greeks. Nonetheless, Lloyd George attempted to give a go-ahead for the occupation without any sort of permission from Parliament. After realizing what was happening, Tories, dominant in Parliament, ousted Lloyd George and dismissed the agreement, leading to the Greeks, who knew they wouldn't be able to hold an occupation in the region without Allied support, leaving Izmir soon after, without much plunder, with Venizelos yet again ending up in exile.
With Britain and the rest of the Entente agreeing to have a lighter hand with the Ottomans, the Ottoman Parliament-proposed borders in Misak-i Milli are accepted as the legitimate borders of the Empire for the most part, and Kars, Western Thrace, and other territories were left up to democratic mandates, to be set up at a future date to determine their fate. The treaty wasn't all good for the Ottomans however, the Ottomans lost all their territories in the Levant, Iraq, and Arabia. The OPDA were to be disbanded, however, Britain, France, and Italy get economic spheres in the nation, and the debts owed by them were still to be repaid, on top of extensive reparations to Greece and Armenia. The Ottoman losses, while massive, for the people were overshadowed by the guarantee of their independence as a sovereign state and their borders, leading to the Turkish Nationalist movements to subside. This period also saw the trials of Ottoman war criminals who participated in the Armenian Genocide and other atrocities are largely and successfully prosecuted, with only the former Ottoman Minister of War Enver Pasha being MIA, and was sentenced to death in absentia.

With the Ottoman people satisfied with the treaty, and the Liberal Entente (Hürriyet ve İtilaf Fırkası) were elected into power and came to dominate parliament, rapidly passing social reforms, and fully integrating the Christians of the Empire as truly equals. Ottomanism went from being a dream of some to become a large identity aspect of the Empire, local Christians could now serve in the army and are free of their old tax burdens, and pluralism was embraced by the people and the institutions. As a result of many intellectuals and bourgeoisie being Greeks, Greeks also come to have a strong voice in Ottoman politics.

Despite the radical changes occurring in the Ottoman social order, 1919-1923 saw large-scale anti-Arabic sentiments arise, much of the population seeing the Arabs as traitors and source of malicious intent, leading to anti-Arab pogroms and the deportations of what Arabs remained within their borders, with the British and French turning a blind eye to this mainly out of disinterest due to the vast majority of deported Arabs being Muslims.

Despite the progress earlier in the decade, by the later 1920s and early 1930s, the Liberal Entente’s rule became stagnant as a result of this coalition of various liberal parties being based almost exclusively on social reforms. Although this period saw industrialization sped up as a result of the emancipation of Rûm, there were arguably very little effective economic and political reforms, over time leading to larger and larger cracks in the Liberal Entente.

This lack of good policy, as well as a rapidly changing cultural and political atmosphere, led to the rise of new ideas and movements. Anatolianism, for example, basically sees Turkish-speakers, Kurdish-speakers, Greek-speakers, and other peoples they claim to be Anatolian to be a part of a single culture and nationality, and in its end-goal want these peoples to unite under a single banner, without any sort of hierarchies unlike Ottomanism, it is also predominantly left-wing. Anatolian nationalism was developed by Hilmi Ziya Ulken, a Turkish-Ottoman republican sociologist, philosopher, and historian, and through its progressive, populist, and inclusive rhetoric, this idea started to gain prevalence in the post-war years from various groups and numerous people in the nation. Influential war hero and aspiring politician Mirliva Mustafa Kemal Pasha saw this as a way of uniting, modernizing, and mending the broken nation, and after meeting with Ulken and through his influence within the army, created the Anatolian People’s Party (Anadolu Halk Partisi) in 1926, and managing to gain significant traction from people. Liberals' dominance in parliament, however, which enabled them to control polls and allowing themselves to stay in power, the party itself wasn't able to make many gains in parliament. There are also fairly significant and growing Marxist groups in the nation, with many intellectuals like Ethem Nejat, Mustafa Suphi, Hikmet Ali, and others contributing to the spread of Spartacist and Bolshevist thinking and ideology.

With Ottoman society rapidly pluralizing and reforming in this new renaissance, and new radical left-wing movements start to pop up that seek to fully embrace modern and different ways of life, conservatives, aristocrats, Turkic Nationalists, and other far right-wingers felt alienated and bitter at all that was taking place, seeing these movements ruining Ottoman traditions and cultures in their eyes. Many of them, as a way of reaction against progress, turn to reactionary Pan-Turkist ideology, philosophy, and politics, with some of them becoming outright violent and deranged towards minorities. With Christians becoming quite significant in the nation's affairs after their emancipation, many Pan-Turkist see them as foreign oppressors of the Turkish people and that they are losing their culture to foreigners. Despite many of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide being persecuted and discredited, and the CUP being purged and banned, many become sympathetic to the acts of the CUP again, and see it as necessary to rid rightful Turkic lands of "gâvurs". Some reactionaries even theorize that the MIA war criminal and former dictator Ismail Enver Pasha, whom they idolize, is alive in exile somewhere in Central Asia, and that he will one day return to cleanse Turkic lands of foreign influences, in their eyes bringing salvation to the great Turkic peoples.