This House Regrets the Demise of the Ottoman Empire - Constantinos Filis - Opp

[00:00:00][applause] President, ladies and gentlemen, dear students, today before the most demanding audience, we are been asked to support or reject a motion that romanticizes an empire long gone. a motion that claims the demise of the Ottoman Empire was destabilizing for the region, the regions it once ruled and left a vacuum the world is still struggling to fill.

[00:00:41]I stand firmly against this motion and I invite you to examine not the nostalgia but the history, the structures and the lived realities of that empire during its decline.

[00:00:56]Let me begin with the essential point.

[00:01:00]The Ottoman Empire did not fall and create instability.

[00:01:05]It fell because it was already profoundly unstable.

[00:01:11]By the mid 19th century, the empire was referred to as the sickman of Europe for a reason. inefficiency, corruption, and inability to reform.

[00:01:25]Ethnic tensions, revolts, and civil conflicts were already widespread under Ottoman rule.

[00:01:36]Administrative decay and economic insolveny had already hollowed out the imperial structure.

[00:01:45]When a state is bankrupt, when revolts break out from the Balkans to the Arab Peninsula, the end is not the cause of instability.

[00:01:55]It's the consequence of it.

[00:01:58]Second, we must recognize that Ottoman rule systematically blocked political modernization and popular participation under the empire. Constit constitutionalism was fragile.

[00:02:15]Parliaments were short-lived and automatic uh autocratic sultans routinely uh suspended any experiment with political reform.

[00:02:26]Basic elements of modern governance that is transparent taxation equality before the law representative institutions were stunned or absent.

[00:02:37]Entire populations, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Slavs, Kurds were denying meaningful political agency.

[00:02:49]The collapse of such a system did not destroy political life. It allowed new political life to emerge. It opened space for the creation of modern nation states, independent parliaments and national education systems. that were impossible under an imperial structure designed to maintain central authority rather than develop autonomous responsible governance. Third, it's a myth that the Ottoman Empire was an agent of economic prosperity.

[00:03:27]In reality, the imperial economy was underdeveloped and structurally incapable of modernization.

[00:03:38]Industrialization arrived late and was limited.

[00:03:43]The empire lacked dramatically behind Europe and even Asia. Ottoman economic structures were not designed to foster development across its regions, but rather to extract resources and maintain the metropolitan center.

[00:04:02]Infrastructure from railways to ports was fragmented and often funded and controlled by European creditors, thus undermining sovereignty.

[00:04:15]Massive debt and bankruptcy in 1875 led to European financial control.

[00:04:24]This is not the profile of a sustainable or empowering system.

[00:04:31]It's the profile of a system that had exhausted its economic viability.

[00:04:38]An empire that collapsed under its own debt, lacked industrial capacity, and relied on European financial supervision cannot credibly be portrayed as an engine of prosperity.

[00:04:55]Fourth, let us talk about national self-determination.

[00:05:00]The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the unraveling of empires across the world from the Quink Empire in China to the Austrohungarian and Russian empires in Europe. The Ottoman collapse was part of this global transition from empire to nation state.

[00:05:22]a transition propelled by people's demanding political rights, dignity, and control over their own futures. In the Balkans, in the Arab world, and in Anatolia itself, the launching for independence and modern governance was not a foreign invention. It was deeply rooted in local aspirations. Actually, the empire's collapse allowed the emergence of modern nation states and political pluralism.

[00:05:56]Many of these states subsequently achieved higher literacy, stronger governance, and greater economic development than under Ottoman rule. And this brings me to a crucial point. To argue that the Ottoman Empire's demise was destabilizing, if not destructive, is to imply that the peoples of the region were better off without sovereignty, without self-ruule, without the right to shape their destinies.

[00:06:32]That is not only historically questionable, it is morally problematic and a deeply flawed and patternalistic argument.

[00:06:43]Fifth, we must dispel the notion of Ottoman stability.

[00:06:49]Yes, the empire lasted centuries, but longevity is not the same as harmony.

[00:06:57]The historical record is filled with violent suppressions of revolts, massacres, and the repression of minorities.

[00:07:06]From the Greek and Serbian uprisings in the 19th century to the Armenian tragedy of 1915 and the crushing of Arab and Kurdish movements, imperial authority was often maintained through force, not through tolerance.

[00:07:25]If today you ask an Arab, an Armenian, a Kurd, a Serb, or a Romanian for their opinion of the Ottoman Empire, you will find it difficult, to put it mildly, to find even a few who would tell you that they look back on that period with nostalgia. Quite the opposite.

[00:07:52]A system that relies on coercion rather than consensus is not a model of stability. It is a system waiting to collapse.

[00:08:05]In the 19th century and the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was no longer the power that had reached the outskirts of Vienna in the late 17th century. its territorial integrity, its very existence, I would dare to say, depended largely on the disposition of the great European powers, primarily Britain, which regarded the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to Russia's advance towards the so-called warm waters of the Mediterranean.

[00:08:38]Let me give you a few examples to further support my argument. In the early 1830s, Constantinople would likely have fallen into the hands of Mhmed Alipasa South Egypt had the Russians not intervened as they did not want the Turkish straits to come under Egyptian control. In 1853, once again, the Ottoman Empire found itself on the brink of collapse due to its war with Russia, and it was saved thanks to the military interventions of Great Britain and France. In 1878, the sublime porter would have lost all its European provinces had the western great powers not intervened and overturned the treaty of San Stefano of 1878 which Russia had imposed. In other words, a state that survives only through the interventions of foreign powers, in that case the Ottoman Empire, can hardly be described as a source of stability.

[00:09:43]Sixth, it is true that the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire collapse saw conflict, border disputes, and foreign interference.

[00:09:54]But let us be clear, these were the result of decisions made after the empire's fall, primarily by European colonial powers, not the fall itself.

[00:10:09]The partition of the Middle East, the mandate system and the drawing of artificial borders were not Ottoman policies. They were the policies of Britain and France which mismanaged the transition and imposed their own interests at the expense of local populations.

[00:10:29]Finally, let us consider the counterfactual, the idea that the region would be better off had the empire survived. This scenario ignores global historical realities.

[00:10:44]No empire survived the transition to the modern international system unchanged.

[00:10:50]Imperial structures were obsolete. The Ottoman Empire died because it could not meet the needs of its time.

[00:11:01]Since it could not reform, it became a liability to its populations.

[00:11:07]The last unsuccessful attempt to reform as mentioned by professor Finlay was between 1839 and 1876 with Tanzimat.

[00:11:17]At the end of it, however, it accelerated imperial fragmentation, exacerbated ethnic tensions in the Balkans and settled the empire with crippling foreign debt. So, its collapse was not a tragic accident. It was historically inevitable. So I'm going to close by saying that the motion before us rests on nostalgia not analysis. It is an appeal to a romanticized past not a sober region of history. The Ottoman Empire was not a stabilizing democratic or economically progressive force. Its demise did not destabilize the wider periphery. Neither did it undermine its cohesion. It allowed it the region to evolve, to modernize, and to begin the long and difficult process of building states capable of representing their own peoples. We have heard arguments invoking lost unity and imagined stability, but the historical record tells a different story. The Ottoman Empire was not a golden age whose loss plunged the region into chaos. It was an empire in steep decline, politically rigid, economically exhausted, and administratively incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern world. Its collapse did not create instability.

[00:12:45]Instability existed within the empire long before it disappeared. Revolts, bankruptcies, ethnic tensions, and administrative dysfunction made the Ottoman system unsustainable. The idea that this empire could have been the foundation of modern stability is a historical illusion. For these reasons, I urge you to reject the motion.

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