The Roots of the Contemporary Civil-Military Relations in the Ottoman Constitutinol Period

The Ottoman modernization is not a unique process or an exceptional case among other forms of modernization. It is an indispensable consequence of this process that there emerges an ideological conflict between those social classes and groups that are open to modernization and those that are not. In the Ottoman case, this conflict was fully experienced during the short period between the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution in 1908 and the start of World War I in 1914. The conflict emerged particularly between the traditional ideology that the Ottoman Palace adopted and the West-oriented, modernist ideology that was embraced by the army and the civil bureaucracy, which were the two strongholds of the modernist groups. This ideological struggle resulted in the defeat of the Ottoman dynasty and the Palace. The victorious army and bureaucracy that won the fight then reshaped the state and its ideology based on the Western-oriented modernist one. This article aims to briefly shed light on the relationships between the Ottoman army and the new ruling elite during the process of the emergence of modern Turkey. Ahmet Turan ALKAN

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