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Old 2012-03-13, 23:17   Link #22
Irenicus
Le fou, c'est moi
 
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
[It got moved back to General Chat? ]

Nothing wrong with the topic being here or anything, but I'd just like to mention that you would probably find more fertile grounds for this sort of discussion in a site like alternatehistory, where history fans of this type congregate.

Alternatively, if you play Paradox games, it's always possible and fun -- and time consuming, or so I've heard -- to write up an After Action Report in their active AAR forums. While some AARs are firmly grounded in actual gameplay, many AAR authors choose to write about their favorite alternate history scenarios instead, and there is a rich and interested audience there. I would not recommend the History section there though; it's, eh, not exactly very good.
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But I'm not here just to be a spoilsport, so I might as well contribute some thoughts. I am, after all, a history student.

Nonetheless, I must preface the discussion with a few points in regards to the notion of alternate history. I'll skip the "butterfly effect" and "this will never go anywhere" spiel, recognizing that this is more or less a game and not a rigorous thought experiment. Regardless:
  • While singular events can be, literally, game-changing, historical events are just as much products of historical trends as vice versa. I will go into more detail when I discuss your Ottoman scenario.

  • The pace of reforms can be easily overestimated. In reality, sweeping reforms tend to provoke severe reactions, or their positive effects may not be seen until decades after. This is important both for your Chinese and Ottoman scenarios.

  • Similarly, singular actors, even in key positions, do not always possess the influence one may conveniently attribute to them. Likewise, their effectiveness and influence in one position may not translate into another. To provide a US example, James Buchanan was an effective and popular Senator before he became the President of the United States, of which he would later be ranked as one of the least prestigious. He had been outmatched by events, and his skills -- or just his luck -- were not up to the task of navigating a nation inexorably falling towards civil war.

    So unless a certain individual had a career which provide comparably applicable contexts, it is not always easy to equate skill as, say, a reformist bureaucrat will translate into the leader of a nation.

From these (randomly drawn up) points, I will present a few critiques of your scenario that came to mind immediately:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Aegir
In this world, the 20th century won't be monopolized by the west. Instead, three superpower will emerge as the leading nations of the world, each representing their respective 'cultural spheres'. They are consisted of two resurgent centuries-old empires of Ottoman Caliphate and China that have successfully withstood the pressure of European colonial domination over the globe during the golden years of Europe, and a younger Europe-descended republic that will become the leader of the west after Europeans have lost prominence.
The notion that China and the Ottoman Empire would both survive and prosper in the era of European Imperialism is not impossible, but it would require fundamental changes which include more than a single successful reform or a better leader in the right place at the right time -- unless you are prepared to argue for a revolutionary situation of the sort where everything is possible and minor progressive trends are magnified beyond measure.

In short, Tanzimat doesn't cut it. If you want to change the course of Ottoman history abruptly, you need something as big as the French, or Russian, Revolution. Or better yet, you need the Turkish War of Independence. Gradually, with developing events -- now that's acceptable. Of sorts [I'm trained in more rigorous, skeptical historical thinking than the level considered acceptable in alternate history discourses...].

Quote:
In this world, Ottoman and Chinese empires certainly have had better luck. In 1876, Ottoman's veteran minister of war that in RL, Husseyin Avni Pasha. was killed by an assassin, ex courtier of the recently deposed Sultan. This loss in RL costed a freshly reformed military of the empire, a single, uniformly respected leading figure, which presence in the upcoming war with Russia the next year would've led its course to Ottoman favor. In RL he was succeeded by an 80 years old Pasha which served pretty much as a furniture. Ottomans military was better modernized at that time, with better equipments and doctrines. Russians however, prevailed in unity of command, which payed off, since with the absence of Husseyin, the rivalring generals of Ottomans all acted on their own and eventually allowed Russians victory over them, rendering their empire almost destroyed.
Here it doesn't happen with Husseyin survived the assasination, and under his command, Ottomans manage to fend off Russian invasion, saving them from all the devastation and the large addition of debt they suffered post war in RL. It will be a very different Ottoman Empire from the one we usually think of it as...
The problems with the Ottoman Empire run far deeper than a single lost war, a single -- however important -- minister, and the Tanzimat reforms, relatively conservative as they were, produced tensions that would gradually build up towards the cataclysmic events of the First World War.

Let me explain in clearer detail:

Big guns are fine. Drills are fine. But while one can produce a formidable military just through military reforms, it is generally not the case. A truly effective army in the 19th century context requires the integration of not only modern weaponry and tactics, but also a State that is capable of maintaining, governing, and advancing it. This is a fatal flaw of many non-European military reform efforts which translate into armies which are effective on paper, or at least against local opponents, but prove no match for when European forces land on their shores. The Europeans were just that much better at utilizing their national resources and translating them into power.

As such, the success of the Ottoman State as a great power requires very much that a fundamental change occurs in its very structure -- and not just a department or two, or even a fully-featured ministerial government, but something as substantial as a total change in the way Istanbul interacts with the provinces, and the provincial governments with local communities.

Tanzimat, as the catch-all name for a series of reforms taking place in the middle of the 19th century, made progress on this front -- unevenly, haphazardly -- and it already produced tensions which would have severe repercussions down the road.

I will set an example: pre-Tanzimat, Ottoman interaction with its diverse subjects relied on a cornerstone policy of the Millet system. This system, simplified almost unjustifiably as "a system of sectarian communities," though somewhat unique in its Ottoman manifestation, had very clear analogies back to the Medieval Era, to the Golden Age of Islamic civilization. It could even be argued to have been a more natural form of government back then, when sectarian differences -- your tribal, religious, sectarian identity -- far surpassed the notion of whom you pay taxes to. So the Jewish community governed itself under Ottoman law and interacted with Ottoman officials on a number of matters; Christian Maronites, Coptics, etc. did the same; and so on and so forth. It was an unequal, but recognizable system. The non-Muslims did not have to be drafted into the armies of the Empire; in exchange, they paid the jizya and remained in a somewhat subordinate status.

What this means, however, is that when reforms of law and government during the Tanzimat era, primarily the one which the Sultan indicated that everyone stopped being autonomous subjects under the Millet system and became citizens of a centralized empire, theoretically, things got problematic. In Lebanon, for example, the reforms provoked unexpected and rather severe interconfessional violence between Muslim mobs, Maronite Christians, and Jews, and the government had to intervene militarily -- and rather ineffectively -- to stop the violence. This tension never went away, especially in the more far flung regions of the empire. In fact it was only growing more severe as the century progressed. Your scenario of this successful war minister surviving an assassination attempt does nothing whatsoever to change that, and an Ottoman Empire which maintained hegemony over the Middle East *will* have to confront it at some point.

In OTL ["our timeline"], this is one major element included in what can perhaps be termed the growing nationalistic sentiment in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East -- the sentiment resulting in the Arab Revolt during the First World War, in the crises on the Caucasian border throughout the 1910's and even earlier that included the brutal Armenian Genocide, in Balkan nationalist revolts which gave plenty of opportunity for Russia and other European powers to intervene in the affairs of the Empire. Your Ottoman Empire must face down the Age of Nationalism and provide a successful alternative paradigm to it. The historical propagandistic ideology of Ottomanism may give you hints, but do note that it lacked popular appeal and was very much "constructed."

I will admit, however, that regardless of the growing tensions over nationalism in the Middle East and the lack of appeal of Ottomanism itself, old-fashioned loyalty to the Sultan/Caliph was strong and the same reasons which made Tanzimat so problematic also meant that the majority of, say, Arabs, were loyal to the Ottoman Empire to the bitter end, even in the extremely stressed environment of World War I, the Arab Revolt, and the like.

Now the question becomes: how did the historical Ottoman Empire overcome that? The answer, in short, is that it failed to. The more complex answer included what Turkey -- the successor state -- succeeded to do under its very dynamic leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (who, or whose equivalent, I suspect you must make use of in your alternate history scenario). What it did was to accept the new status quo and redefined the Turkish resistance movements' goals against the Allied occupation to be, not the restoration of the hegemonic empire, but to create a state for Turks, by Turks. The sweeping and indeed awe-inspiring reforms of Ataturk's regime, secularist, authoritarian, Western-oriented, was only possible under the extremities of the revolutionary environment. The Turks had no choice but to follow him; they faced utter destruction, they knew of the details of the Sèvres Treaty, they knew of Allied garrisons in Istanbul -- it was do or die, and the success of the revolution meant Mustafa Kemal had the moral authority which not even the strongest of the Ottoman Sultans had in implementing his reforms. Of course, he also did not have to work through pre-existing organizations and power bases, as the Ottoman Sultans had to do in their tentative reforms (some of which provoke severe reactions; remember Selim's deposition early in the 19th century), because they were already all shattered.

Can your Ottoman Empire, which will not experience the extremities of utter annihilation, possibly carry out reforms necessary to secularize and Westernize it? Can your Empire create an appealing ideology that encompasses the multiethnic state, where Arabs were as numerous as Turks? Even OTL Turkey faced issues with its large Greek population -- resulting in the infamous population exchange -- and the Kurdish problem which continues to this day.

I will accept, that a victorious war or two may [or may not!] open the grounds for a stronger state to assert its authority, but if you want to achieve what Turkey achieved in real life, on a continental scale, you need something just as traumatic, just as big -- a total war, a revolution -- and the right actors in place. The trends and the preexisting conditions of the Middle East must be taken into account. Remember, always, that the modern Middle East as we understand it today comes straight right out of the traumatic breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and what preceded it was a different kind of world. Better rifles, better drilled troops, even better staff and recruitment systems would not suffice in creating a great power in the Age of Industrialization.

Oh, and a little side note: the debts that would plague the Ottoman Empire to the end preceded that 1877-78 War. Tanzimat reforms were expensive, see, and so was suppressing Muhammad Ali of Egypt. Crimea -- oh, that's even worse. The debts built up over all that, and coupled with Ottoman concessions in matters of financial governance and trade tariffs, which wrecked Ottoman economy much earlier than 1878, and your minister of war might as win his war and lose the peace.

Quote:
As for China, basically they skipped the warlords period after Xinhai Revolution. In this world, instead of choosing Yuan Shikai as president, Sun Yat Sen instead choose Kang Youwei, a prominent figure in Hundred Days Reform. He was much, much better then Yuan Shikai in both competency and personality. Still however, being part of the old establishment, and more importantly, a firm Confucian monarchist, the motion of Republic is simply unconvincing to him, so in the end he restored the empire as Yuan Shikai did in RL. This empire under him however, will be an imminently lasting one....
I'm losing steam, so the Chinese discussion will not be as long.

Note, however, that there are compelling arguments made that the Warlords Period may have been in some ways unavoidable since the development of the regional armies of the late Qing period, dating back as far as the crisis of the Taiping Rebellion. Local officials, not all of whom were Qing loyalists, were forcefully empowered in ways which were unthinkable before and they never really submitted again to central Qing authority in the way they did before that storm. A smoother transition towards some sort of Constitutional state, Republic or Monarchy, would be unlikely to prevent this unless the state is backed by very powerful regional militaries -- which would only produce another Yuan Shikai. He was hardly alone after all, but rather an archetype for all the warlords.

Note as well that the historical failure of Kang Youwei's Hundred Days Reform had very real reasons in that it had very little support -- or effect, for that matter -- outside of the reformist faction within the court itself. Local provincial officials ignored its directives, its many proclamations were only paid lip-service to, and though it seems a sweeping mandate of reform, it didn't accomplish very much at all. The reformists from within did not have the power nor the popular appeal to conduct sweeping reforms of the ancient Imperial system. You therefore have to answer the question: what changed between OTL and your alternate reality that would allow such a thing to happen?

Remember too that Sun Yat-Sen, who possessed much greater popular support that Kang Youwei, and who proved himself quite the capable leader during the last period of his life when he rallied together the Guomindang State in Southern China, was forced to accede to Yuan Shikai precisely because he, too, lacked the "guns," so to speak, to hold power in a China boiling with pent-up tension and full of ambitious military men with independent armies.

Note also the difficulties of reform in later periods of Chinese history, when regimes in power had to face problems which date back to the turn of the 20th century and much, much earlier. The Guomindang's failures in land reform in the 1930's, for example, compared to its comparative success in coastal urban locales; and the eventual Communist solution -- a revolutionary one done in blood and war -- of destroying the landlord class and collectivizing the land, produced terrible problems of its own. Your Chinese Great Power *must* confront that, at the very least, or it will break under its own failures by the storms of peasant revolutions whether they are of a millenarian nature, led by self-proclaimed reformist militarists, or inspired by the imported ideologies from the West.

And that's just the beginning. How will your China face structural problems of Sisyphean proportions and come out as strong as it is today? I am not saying it is impossible -- very good arguments could be made that a more successful China back in the early 20th century may as well replicate today's situation much earlier, but you have to articulate that from the context of a reformist, rather than revolutionary, chaotic, context. You have to articulate, so I believe your scenario implies, a successful top-down reform from a Qing Dynasty that is losing grip in its legitimacy, and that's hard. Your reformer, Kang Youwei or whoever, must navigate existing channels of power that will not be torn down and built anew (ala the Guomindang, which in itself eventually compromised with the survivors of the Confucian class anyway -- or the Communists).

Last edited by Irenicus; 2012-03-13 at 23:28.
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