Comparing Models of Balkan Nationalism to Ottomanism, 1856–1914

This paper compares examples of nineteenth century Balkan nationalisms to Ottomanism, an attempt to include diversity and constitutional equity into a modern political state and national identity.  The developing nationalisms of the Balkan “Christian” states such as Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria, are contrasted to Albanian nationalism, Albania being a “Muslim” Balkan state, as well as to Ottomanism, a national identity of the late Ottoman state.

In most Balkan nationalist narratives, Balkan Muslims were left out of the equation, and marginalized as “others,” subject to forced migrations and in some instances, genocide.  The nation-states of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria were not created in a vacuum.  On the Ottoman side, Modern Turkish national identity was not formally articulated until the 1930s, well after the empire’s demise. Much debate, however, took place in the nineteenth century regarding the reform of Ottoman political structures and the creation of a “modern” nation-state to preserve the empire. Ottoman intellectuals, many of whom were from the Balkans, argued about and critiqued modern European social theories as well as traditional ideas of the nation that sprung from Islamic sources. Ottomanism was a multiethnic experiment in national diversity, an attempt at reordering a modern national identity out of a complex imperial heritage with legal aspects. Ottomanism, though, was suspended before its full development due to rising ethnic separatism in the empire’s Christian communities and to the continual interference of the European Great Powers who used “reform” as a tool for enhancing their own hegemony. Islam was a unifying element for some in the empire, but also something of an anachronism in a late nineteenth century world where political elites were increasingly preoccupied with science and modernity.