Associate Professor Hans Lukas Kieser

In Europe the First World War marked a lethal culmination of the imperialism of the modern nation-states and the end of the great dynastic land empires that dated from the late Middle Ages. The characteristics of the conflict itself, including not just developing strategic, tactical and geopolitical considerations, but the psychological, material and socio-political consequences of total war, are vital in explaining the extremity of policies against a range of civilian populations on both sides. Nevertheless, it was the conjunction of war and pre-existing ethno-political 'problems' that produced genocide and other extensive crimes perpetrated against population groups. Accordingly, the main and final focus of this chapter, which is a study of the murder of the Ottoman Armenians and other Anatolian Christians during the First World War, incorporates an account of pre-war state¿minority relations. Our contention is that there were two, related cases of outright genocide in the 1914¿18 conflict: the deportation and murder of the Armenians, or the Aghet, and the fate of the Ottoman Syriac Christian populations (sometimes called 'Assyro-Chaldeans'), which is known in the survivor communities as Sayfo. Use of the word 'genocide' is still inflammatory in relation to the First World War, because of a lack of clarity about the applicability of the term, deliberate obfuscation and a vitiating confusion of moral, legal and historical criteria. In order to elucidate key conceptual issues, we will begin in the following section by considering its applicability to the Armenian case.

On 8 February 1914, Ottoman Grand Vizier Said Halim and the Russian chargé d'affaires Konstantin Gulkevich signed a reform project for seven Ottoman eastern provinces that covered roughly half of Asia Minor. This international Reform Agreement differed considerably from a first Russian draft the year before. Though little known by most World War I historians in the West, this agreement was a central but fragile piece for the future of Ottoman coexistence in egalitarian terms in Asia Minor on the eve of World War I. Often called 'Armenian Reforms', it was also a last seminal, more or less consensual project of European diplomacy before the latter's breakdown in the July crisis of 1914. Important Ottoman and non-Ottoman protagonists then chose the road towards cataclysm instead of efforts for Ottoman coexistence, reform and international consensus building. The cataclysm of greater Europe in World War I produced various seminal outcomes. One main result in the Levant was a Turkish nation-state in Asia Minor that excluded Asia Minor's Christians and tried to assimilate non-Turkish Muslims, above all Kurds, into 'Turkdom'. This article argues that the agreement of 1914 had opened for a short time a completely different perspective and that it played a crucial role on the road that led to genocide in spring 1915. Its postulates are still topical.

This essay starts from the idea that the European Union is a contractual community united by political will, a commitment to law and historical responsibility - not by race, culture or religion, and only partly by geography. Referring to a debate on the possibility of Turkey joining the EU conducted in German language newspapers since September 2002, it refutes a generalizing historico-culturalist approach to Europeanness, and instead emphasizes the catastrophic experience of WWI and WWII as fundamental for the initiation of the European project. More than any other country Turkey, the ally of Wilhelminian Germany, had been afflicted by, and transformed during, WWI. Its elites, especially the Young Turks, were westernized in the early 20th century sense, believing in science, progress, secularist nationalism and Social Darwinism. "New Turkey" was a quasi European project of that time: an secular ethnonationalist unitarian state led by people who had embraced and wanted to implement European civilization. The Kemalists (most of them former Young Turks) abolished the Califate and the Sharia, and introduced the Swiss Civil Code. in 1926 as the core of their "Turkish (social) Revolution" Politically, the establishment of the Republic (including WWI and the War of Independence) was aimed against the Occident, culturally it wanted the West. Murderous population politics, lack of democracy, a quasi religious Turkism and a distorted history were the dead-ends of the new state. Turkey's integration into the NATO after World War II did not help overcoming them; on the contrary, it enabled the military and a few political leaders to persist in their undemocratic positions. The broad mobilization in today's Turkey for joining the EU is strongly linked to recently emerged civil society agents who look to close-by Europe rather than to the strategically motivated USA. The broad resistance against the war in Iraq bore a clear message in this direction. Despite the negative effects of the interior war against the PKK, important changes took place in Turkey since the 1990s: The word «Kurd» was no longer banned, the Kurdish reality accepted, at least as an issue to be discussed. The important heterodox Islamic groups of the Alevis (about a quarter of Turkey's population) for the first time made themselves heared in public, thus more than ever questioning the subordinating integration and financing of Sunni Islam by the so-called secular state since 1924. The last remaining, great taboo is the Armenian Genocide. This significant episode again leads back to the World Wars: At the Conference of Lausanne (1923/24) Western diplomats condoned the Young Turks' expulsion and murder of the Christians in Asia Minor's during and after World War I; they were therefore partly responsible for establishing an ethno-nationalistic paradigm for "solving" the issue of minorities which later proved to be disastrous in Central Europe and elsewhere. In order to be integrated into the EU, Turkey must fulfil the political, economical and juridical criteria, nothing else. In the long term, however, the implementation of human and minority rights can only succeed hand in hand with the unconditional elucidation of the past. A shared future with shared values needs a common, if pluralistic historical perspective. If the EU is in essence a response to the catastrophes of the World Wars, Turkey must be part of it. The road towards the EU helps and urges Turkey towards emancipating itself from a rigid nationalism, as it did many present members; but it also challenges the EU not to become a bigoted "Christian club" opposing "Islam".

This article explores the complex role Protestant missionaries played in late Ottoman Asia Minor. For several generations they were important, even if today almost forgotten, actors of social and mental change. They succeeded in establishing autonomous schools, hospitals and factories not only in the capital, but also in the provinces. They had a vision of integrating minorities into an egalitarian pluralist society which was diametrically opposed to the ideas of the ruling groups and the nationalists. Instead of homogenizing society and strengthening its (Turco-)Muslim unity, missions were differentiating society in religious, ethnic and social terms. Protestant missions supported religious minorities such as the Armenians and Assyrians, heterodox groups such as the Alevis and Yezidis and the poorer classes, but could not win over the state, which was based on the support of the Sunn I majority and saw the missions' successful puritan and liberal modernity as a threat. Even if during and after World War I the missionaries' human networks and social visions tragically broke down, their strong contribution to modern education in Turkey remained. © 2002, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.