Among the many, many colleagues to whom we owe gratitude, the following have supported us in various ways. Each of them knows why we thank them. Our mentioning their names here can only hint at what we owe them. Without the help and support of each one of them, what value this study possesses would have been significantly less.
Its flaws and shortcomings are wholly ours. Most of all, thank you to our families and friends for their unconditional sup- port: It will problematize the issue of property in genocidal processes: How does expropriation precede or accompany destruction? In which ways does it have explanatory value? We will discuss several theoretical views on collective expropriation and its relationship to perpetration in genocide.
What are the interdependencies between local state elites and central authorities? From a functional viewpoint, local elites are mostly inter- ested in communal benefits, such as favourable treatment over tax assessments, help with the cost of the maintenance of public works, protection for a local trade or industry, privileges for certain markets and especially access to offices, licenses, titles, pensions, exemptions and other benefits.
The other way around, central authorities need figures of sufficient legitimacy and loyalty for the effective imple- mentation at the local level of their policies, such as tax collection, enforcement of the rule of law, suppression of state-undermining politics, etc. Historically, an important aspect of this relationship was the attention given to special interest groups, such as specific religious, military and economic classes.
It also criticizes Marxist approaches, which mainly focus on the state as an instrument of a particular class the bour- geoisie. These statist approaches see the state as sui generis and ignore the importance of society as a factor during the formation process. Critics of these statist claims view the state from the prism of society. According to this model, the state is not independent from society but constrained by it: These kinds of inter- actions may create more power for the state and particular social segments, that both benefit from these interactions. A corollary to this conclusion is that state— society relations are not zero-sum.
Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property by Uğur Ümit Üngör
Another important framework for this thesis is the relationship between war and the state. Charles Tilly explains the formation of European nation states and demonstrates the impact and contribution of war to this formation. Tilly empha- sizes that in order to survive, states have to achieve state making, war making, protection and extraction. In the European state formation experience, these four activities were interdependent. War-making led to increased extraction of the means for war, such as manpower and arms.
Confiscation and Destruction
Extraction then entailed the elimin- ation, neutralization or cooptation of rival or dominant classes such as landlords. Tilly claims that organic relations between state and society emerged during this process, and he discusses the negotiations and bargaining processes between state and society. Bargaining processes created individual and collective claims on the state, and obligations of the state to its citizens.
According to Marx, the state uses inclusionary and exclu- sionary tools to provide cohesion and allegiance. In this process, the state rewards and encourages these groups for legitimacy, its preservation and centralization. Anthony Marx recognizes the importance of this bargaining process and claims that the state cannot dispense with consent from below.
Therefore, these processes will be used to explain the state and society relations in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican period. Consequently, through analysis of bargaining and negotiating processes between state and society, we will cover the interplay between top-down and bottom-up power in Turkey. The discussion about state—society relations means that the state has to estab- lish alliances with certain groups or classes in society. In light of this theory, we will try to understand how the CUP financed the war and how it established its alliances.
The relation between top-down and bottom-up power will be discussed as a part of the theoretical framework of this study. This theory suggests that the confiscation of Armenian property offered the Young Turk political elite opportun- ities to restructure Ottoman society by forging alliances and eliminating opponent groups. This book will discuss to what extent in the Turkish state formation process the political elite forged alliances with some groups within the society at the expense of others. Finally, we will examine the relations between rulers and elites, because ultim- ately it is they who are influential in carrying out state policies.
Elites will be divided into two categories: We aim to focus on alli- ances between these elites and on intra-elite conflicts within and between them. Local elite is a broad category and consists of different classes, namely, land- owners, commercial bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasants and workers. Despite instrumentalist approaches to the state, the attempts of state rulers to perform state functions may create conflicts of interest with the dominant classes.
The interests of the state and the dominant classes converge at one important point: We will attempt to examine how the Ottoman state functioned during the process, and how it changed as a result of it. This aspect of the issue also raises questions on the institutional, organizational and bureaucratic dimension of the confiscations. Which bureaucratic structures did the Young Turk dictatorship use and spawn to orchestrate the dispossession of Armenians?
How and why did civil servants in those institutions collaborate in the persecutions? These and other questions may generate important insights into the early twentieth-century state formation pro- cess in Turkey. In the twentieth century world, approximately 40 to 60 million defenceless people have become victims of deliber- ate genocidal policies. The twenty-first century has not begun any better, with genocidal episodes ongoing in Darfur and Congo. We can speak of a genocide when large numbers of individuals are targeted, persecuted and murdered merely on the basis of their presumed or imputed membership in a group, rather than on their individual characteristics or participation in certain acts.
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Three main questions are central in the field of genocide research. First, what are the causes of a genocidal process? Second, how does the genocidal process develop once it is launched? How does that exactly play out, from the most collective to the individual level? Finally, it is important to investigate the consequences of genocide. How do perpetrator, victim and third party groups go about after a genocide?
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How do they process the traumatic events? In the growing interdisciplinary field of genocide studies, much useful research has been conducted into the evolution of separate genocides, such as the destruc- tion of Ottoman Armenians in , the Holocaust in Europe, the Great Terror in the USSR, the Cambodian genocide, and the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.
Much is also known on specific aspects of genocidal processes. In all genocides, the posses- sions of the victims, both individually and as a group, play a role in the initiation, development and aftermath of the destruction. In this section we will discuss six theoretical prob- lems: The first theoretical problem that surfaces in our discussion is vocabulary. How do we begin naming the process of state-sponsored, organized, collective theft? Do we employ legal and academic terms such as expropriation, confiscation, sequestration, spoliation and dispossession? Or do we rather seek recourse to more mundane and unequivocal terms like theft, plunder, pillage, larceny, rob- bery, looting?
This debate is interminable because it is unterminable. The Young Turk regime utilized an elaborate vocabulary of euphemisms that served to legitimize and mask its policies of perse- cution and destruction. This was the official euphemism and established term in Young Turk propaganda to characterize the expropriation of Armenians. Legally or sociologically, neither definition accurately describes the fate of Ottoman Armenians. Furthermore, it will deploy the concept of colonization to denote the redistribution of their property as a form of internal colonization.
Together, these concepts best encapsulate the twin processes of seiz- ing property from Armenians and reassigning it to Turks. Four important axes of tension need to be addressed. The first conundrum we need to confront is the tension between economic impulses and ideological prescriptions. In other words, was confiscation of the vic- tim group economically motivated as a mere instrument for material gain?
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Or was it a corollary effect of the ideology of destruction? This debate has been held in Holocaust research with different emphases but no decisive winner. The German state was the prime interlocutor in seizing assets from the Jews and assigning them to their new German owners, who benefited from symbolic prices.
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But the German state itself also benefited in many ways from the process. It accu- mulated enormous sums of money, gold and jewellry, which it allocated to the war effort and used to alleviate the tax and requisitions burden on the Germans. The popularity of the Nazi dictatorship could be explained from the material benefits that German society drew from these policies.
Moreover, these ideological motives were not a top-down dictate but a matter of bottom-up initia- tive. German commercial middle classes launched their own initiatives against competing Jewish businesses, justifying their acts with Nazi ideological exegesis. These anti-Semitic initiatives from below were carried out not only independently of national policy, but provincial authorities set their own goals, quotas and limits.
Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property
Depending on the local economic structures and profiles, entrepreneurs joined hands with government authorities and freely appropriated Jewish businesses, especially when the outbreak of war nullified moral inhibitions. In other words, did they simply buy their loyalty by appealing to their sense of economic self- interest? Or did the local elite support the destruction and expropriation out of ideological convictions?
The second, related problem is the axis of tension between national policy ver- sus regional interpretation. Regionalism, and transcendence of regionalism, are important themes in recent genocide research. Genocide scholars have examined the relationship between central decision-making processes and their implemen- tation at the local level. In-depth research on how genocidal processes evolve at the provincial, district, city or even village level has proven most fruitful.
It can teach us a great deal about how local power shifts influence the course and inten- sity of genocidal processes, since we know that some genocides are more region- ally varied than others. Local political or social elites can anticipate, expedite, intensify or delay and resist processes of genocidal destruction directed from above.
How did the expropriation of Armenians in the former provinces differ from the latter? Third, what was the scope of the dispossession process? In other words, how wide was the circle of profiteurs? Did just the Young Turk elite, from the imperial capital down to the provincial towns, profit from it, or did much wider classes in Turkish society benefit? If the sources allow, this discussion needs to address social mobility resulting from the redistribution of wealth, for which other cases of mass violence can act as a sounding board.
One can also pose this question from the perspective of the state. What was the locus of the expropriation in the emerging Turkish nation state?
Was the confiscation of Armenian property crucial for the viability of the Turkish nation state? Or did the event, catastrophic as it was for Ottoman Armenians, have a negligible impact on that state? Along these poles lies an axis of tension that is difficult to resolve without a profound quantification, which is beyond the scope of this book.
How do these ordinary social processes func- tion under a process of persecution? For example, the Swiss bank secret offered both Jewish refugees and the Nazi state a protective veil but after the war became an obstacle for Jews to redeem their assets. Return to Book Page. Hardcover , pages. Published August 11th by Bloomsbury Academic first published April 14th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Confiscation and Destruction , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Confiscation and Destruction. Lists with This Book.
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