Concluding Remarks on Territoriality and Borderlands

State officials, local agents, the central state and its officials all negotiated national territory. Isa Blumi stresses that there isn't necessarily a difference between a state's subjects and state officials. This approach, he insists, includes agents who move beyond the modernization paradigm and thus helps to avoid eurocentric views which depict change as always imposed and initiated by Europe or the West. Even though to a certain point borders were drawn on maps and fought out by wars, they nevertheless have been before and in between negotiated in everyday life, and in encounters by different agents moving on different levels and with different agendas.

Throughout this chapter I traced the negotiation of national territory in Ottoman border lands. To understand the significance of this space, it helps to view these borderlines as on the cusp between becoming nation-states and competing empires and nationalisms; not just as demarcation lines, but as spaces themselves.²²⁵ This makes their entangled history, which is the common and reciprocal history of center and periphery, visible. The spacial dimension of identity construction and subjectization in these borders lands de-essentializes identity and integrates histories of 'the West and the rest' within transnational spaces.²²⁶ These spaces contain different concepts of culture and identity within and beyond the modern framework. Meanwhile, nationalist imaginations overlap

225 See Stephan Günzel and Franziska Kümmerling, eds., Raum: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Stuttgart [u.a.]: Metzler, 2010), 187.

226 See Ibid., 181.

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with imagined but powerful cultural dichotomies, local conditions and interests of local agents, as well as capitalist and imperialist activities.

Homi Bhabha locates the production of culture within border areas or borderlines, conceptualized as spaces in-between or third spaces.²²⁷ The transfer of his framework of analysis from the context of literary production and art, transnational migration, and hybrid postcolonial identities to Ottoman border lands entails that the production of national identities are inseparable from the “territoriality of the global citizen” and their post-national, trans-national and de-national identity, as Günzel phrases it.²²⁸ What I want to suggest is that the parallel and interdependent construction of the national and the transnational are set at the same time and space through conditions set by war, global capitalism and discourses on modernity, colonialism and imperialism. Thus interactions between the Ottoman government, provincial state officials, local agents, central European and local powers demonstrate and prove the inseparability of histories of the West and the rest.²²⁹

The fluid meaning of cultural or religious symbols such as clothes and headgear, and apparent efforts to fix their content challenge the rigid concepts of cultural difference. I consider the cases presented above as negotiations of representation which can be used to demonstrate the invented character of essentialized national identities and founding myths. These identities are virtually worked out on the margins of national spaces. Borderlines therefore function as powerful discursive formations, both in the metaphorical sense and as a phenomenon.²³⁰

Mary Louise Pratt's notion of contact zones and transculturation might be helpful to grasp Ottoman encounters with Western clothing.²³¹ She uses these notion to analyze contacts between European colonialists with societies which did not have contact before.

This is not the case with the Ottoman state because of its manifold relations and geographical proximity to central Europe. Still, it might be helpful to apply these notions

227 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Reprint. (London [u.a.]: Routledge, 1994), 217-218.

228 Günzel and Kümmerling, Raum, 181.

229 On territoriality see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, [Nachdr.], Radical Thinkers (London [u.a.]: Verso, 2011), 150-151. On the borders in the Balkans and the production of space see also Blumi, Foundations of Modernity, 58-59; Blumi, Reinstating the Ottomans, 98.

230 See Günzel and Kümmerling, Raum, 181.

231 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London [u.a.]: Routledge, 1992), 4-5.

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to characterize the processes commonly referred to as modernization or Westernization in order to get away from the presumed centrality of modernity and the West, and the one-sidedness of the processes of transfer. This can be done in order to point out that the metropolis was determined by the periphery to the same degree as the periphery by the metropolis. That might also be the case of Istanbul as the center of the Ottoman Empire with its periphery as was demonstrated by the given examples. The attitudes of Creole elites and their appropriation of and subjection to colonialist power techniques bare great resemblances with Ottoman elites.²³²

The incidences in the Ottoman borderlands and other contested spaces such as schools depicted throughout this chapter display dynamics between different agents, such as the Ottoman central government, provincial administrators, other local actors and the European great powers. Even though all this took place under the influence of a certain Western hegemony, I think that in order to provide a better understanding of these interactions it is important to highlight the agency of all these actors.

Isa Blumi, in his comparative account of processes of transformations in the Arabic Peninsula and the Balkans throughout the nineteenth century, stresses the part of local powers “who shaped the region's relations with the outside world.”²³³ For the Arabic peninsula, this also implicates that within a comparative imperial history the British, French, and Ottoman were all imperial agents busied with centralizing reforms as basis for future imperial state expansion. He suggests a “different geographical centering” in order to understand power dynamics before Britain achieved imperial hegemony in the Gulf region.

In the case of the Balkans, this shift in perspective mainly affects the construction of national identities and their reification in nationalist historiography after San Stefano and the Berlin Treaty (1878). More than by the realties on ground, they were determined by European interests against Russia's expansion. These were specifically the interests of European banks who owned lands in the regions and the redemption of Ottoman debts.

At the same time, maps depicting the newly drawn borders were “disguised ontological fiction[s]”. These borderlines “naturalize a spacial order” that was dictated by these

232 See Ibid., 175-176. The spaces in between cultural communities, the relation between encounters of national independence and space are gendered. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books Ltd in Komm., 1986).

233 Blumi, Foundations of Modernity, 36.

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interests rather than by the “ethnic realities” as such they were read.²³⁴ The cases depicted about are examples of the negotiation of this spacial order between local agents, European powers and the central state. In reference to borderline studies, Blumi regards these maps as spaces of authority used to interpret the past and fix existing humans contingencies on the basis of which the state still interacted with its subjects. To make these contingencies visible, borders need to be conceptualized as a social process and

“broad zonal institutions” rather than markers of separation and difference, which

“helped to create new forms of social interaction.”²³⁵

Yet measures were implied to consolidate the separating character of the Ottoman state and its north-western neighbors. International treaties comprising of measures of state expansion attempted to transform conditions in favor of Western capitalist interests, thus managing economic productivity more effectively. These state-building measures also involved the tightening of border controls. Especially after 1878, newly drawn borders in the Balkans with the Berlin Treaty, emphasis was put on (re-)territorialization through i.e.

more rigid surveillance of the taxing of cross-border trade. In contrast to the Ottoman-Greek border, after 1878 those in the Balkans became more conventional in character.

Nonetheless, their character as markers of state sovereignty has to be handled with care considering the failure to control local economies and the considerable resistance of communities which led to a “crisis in the marking of boundaries”²³⁶ in the region. Local agents' interventions brought about renegotiation and the redraw of boundaries. Blumi proposes, in reference to Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja, the application of the term “third space” in order to analytically grasp the situation and challenge the monolithic functionality of the modern border land.²³⁷

Blumi claims that ethno-religious categories and politics involved in these

234 See Ibid., 51.

235 See Ibid., 53. Blumi uses the “blurred character” of the Ottoman-Greek border as an example which enforced the interaction between Greek and Ottoman officials, and at least in the first place reinforced their corporation rather than separated them. Thus the border created institutions of mutual exchange rather then discrete entities. On a broad range of studies, geographically and historically, see also Kemal H. Karpat and Rober W. Zens, eds., Ottoman Borderlands: Issues, Personalities and Political Changes, Publications of the Center of Turkish Studies/The University of Wisconsin ; ZDB-ID:

21609834 2 (Madison, Wis.: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

236 Blumi, Foundations of Modernity, 54.

237 Ibid., 55. Blumi refers to “The Third Space: Interview with Homi K. Bhabha.” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 207-221; and Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.]: Blackwell, 1996).

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monolithic understandings of the border are insufficient to explain resistance against the boundaries drawn after 1878. Beyond being nationalist, it had comprised a “multiplicity of local concerns” and turned against the subjugation of “previously autonomous communities.”²³⁸ Rather then in favor of the newly found nation-states, these communities fought to remain within the Ottoman Empire. Maps which manifested these borders in this respect were tools of the state which defined the modern world and dominated by the West. Thus the production of space through maps and formal treaties naturalized and normalized identities through a spacial order that “distinguished one territory from another.”²³⁹ Yet this tool to define the modern world dominated by the West did not occur without resistance and contingencies. It is thus necessary to reconsider this order of difference and power which “separates the world into bounded units on the maps.”²⁴⁰

Carter Findley identifies two currents of change for the Hamidian period: a secularist, which expressed itself through the modern press, and its institutions and religious movements. Both of which, while competing with each other, also intermingled and converged to epitomize Ottoman modernity.²⁴¹ They formed the two wings of an Ottoman Muslim middle class which I will trace in the following chapters.²⁴²

238 Blumi, Foundations of Modernity, 58.

239 Ibid., 61.

240 Ibid., 77.

241 Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, 181.

242 Did the 1896 attempted coup d'etat trigger investigations on the hat (many school issues take place in 1896), or were the school cases just related to Armenian crisis? See Zürcher on actions against the opposition following the Armenian crisis, which led to the sending into internal exile of all known Young Turks to Tripolitana. Albeit, shortly thereafter many of them returned and accepted posts in the Hamidian government and administration, see Zürcher, Turkey, 87.