• DOI:10.1080/00263200701422709
• Corpus ID: 143536942

Defining the public sphere during the late Ottoman Empire: War, mass mobilization and the young Turk regime (1908–18)

@article{zbek2007DefiningTP,
  title={Defining the public sphere during the late Ottoman Empire: War, mass mobilization and the young Turk regime (1908–18)},
  author={Nadir {\"O}zbek},
  journal={Middle Eastern Studies},
  year={2007},
  volume={43},
  pages={795 - 809}
}

• N. Özbek
• Published 1 September 2007
• History
• Middle Eastern Studies

This study aims to explore state-society relations during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-18) through a study of philanthropic activities, particularly those of semi-official aid societies such as the Ottoman Red Crescent Society (Osmanli Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti), the Ottoman Navy League (Osmanh Donanma-i Milliye Iane Cemiyeti), and the Committee of National Defence (Madafaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti). These three societies, all founded after the Revolution of 1908, provided the Young Turk elite with instruments for extending its political influence, thus moulding the dispositions of the 'political public sphere' along its own ideological premises. These societies, hence, offer promising cases for a deeper understanding of state-society relations during the late Ottoman Empire and the contours of the political public sphere in this era. This discussion also enables us to reconsider the usefulness of the 'public sphere' concept that historians have borrowed from political and social theory rather, it may contribute to a redefinition, making the public sphere a working concept in analyses of concrete historical situations such as the Young Turk period. Until quite recently, studies in late Ottoman history tended to view state-society relations as if in isolation from one another, in a relationship of dichotomy. This historiography has conceptualized the state-civil society relationship in terms of conflict and contestation, such that the so-called lack of civic initiative in the Ottoman context is explained by the presence of a strong central state. The persistence of this concept for understanding Ottoman realities is not to be wondered at, with its antecedent in the enduring motif, 'oriental despotism'. Approaches developed within this framework, which exaggerates the power of the state and underestimates civic/voluntary initiatives in different sectors of Ottoman society, fail to note certain nuances of state-society relations in the Ottoman milieu. Historians in this school mostly explain the alleged weakness of civic initiative by essentialized conceptions of cultural/religious specificity.1 According to a liberal variant of the same school, the so-called strong central state, which was believed to have curtailed the emergence of democratic institutions and accompanying political practices and cultures, was a by-product of the centralizing