Of Azerbaijan and ‘A Peace to End All Peace’

During 1989, as one Eastern European Communist regime after another disestablished itself, the foreign-affairs community in this country debated the thesis that the decline of communism portended the final triumph of capitalism and “the end of history.” The initial plausibility of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis, propounded in an influential article in the journal Foreign Affairs, was obvious, as far as it went; and yet if the rejection of Marxism teaches anything, it teaches the limitations of any philosophy of history that would enlarge economic factors to the exclusion of all others. Take a step back from economics, admit other factors to the equation, and, for better or worse, history may start moving again.

On Feb. 12, the National Book Critics Circle board of directors will select the winners of the NBCC’s five book awards. (Finalists are listed on Page 8.) In the category of general nonfiction, my vote will go to a book that may be warmly recommended to anyone who thinks that history is about to end and, to adduce a case in point, to anyone curious about Azerbaijan. The book is David Fromkin’s splendid “A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922” (Henry Holt).

Americans tend to remember World War I as a war fought in Europe. We recall Flanders Fields and forget the rest. But the war against the German kaiser was also a war against the Turkish sultan. It ended with the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the last and greatest of the extraordinary, 700-year chain of Turkish empires. Fromkin tells the story of this epochal ending with wonderful completeness and clarity. No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East than his does.

Surprisingly, however, “A Peace to End All Peace” is also deeply illuminating about the turmoil in the southern Soviet Union. Fromkin writes the history of World War I in the East as the continuation of the “Great Game” in which the Russian, British and Ottoman Empires contended with one another for control of the road to India. In this struggle, Azerbaijan occupies a special position.

Azerbaijan stands at the demographic midpoint of a great Turkish cultural continuum. To its west lies Turkey proper with (today) 55 million people; to its east, across the Caspian sea, lies a region with 45 million people that was called, until the Russian Revolution, Turkestan. Azerbaijan, whose Azeri people the Armenians call Turks with good reason, lies between these two larger components of the Turkish world, its 10 million people about evenly divided between the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and northern Iran.

The term Turkestan , it should be noted, is now little used. Moscow refers to the region occupied by the five states of its own creation--the Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh and Tadzhik Republics--as Soviet Central Asia, and the rest of the world has followed suit. Ethnically, however, with the exception of Tadzhikistan, all of these republics do speak one form or another of Turkish, and the forms differ moderately enough from one another (no more than Spanish from Portugese) that speakers of one can understand much that is said by speakers of another.

In the ethnic politics of the Soviet empire, the designation Soviet Central Asia is thus transparently intended to blur an identity, to demote to the vague status of geographic region the homeland of a family of peoples whose cultural homogeneity surpasses that of Europe. The Baltic states, to offer a relevant comparison, speak languages that differ far more sharply than do the languages of Turkestan, and practice Christianity in forms (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Lutheran) that differ more profoundly than do the forms of Islam practiced across Turkestan.

Politically, the Turkish peoples of Central Asia are heirs to the Mongol conquerors of the 13th Century. The Mongols--who came from farther east, of course, and were not Turks--had, originally, their own religion, a form of shamanism. But just as the Mongols went Chinese in China (an oft-told tale), so they went Turkish (and Muslim) in Turkestan. The resulting system of successor Turkish states or khanates (so-called for the sons and grandsons of the Mongol founder Genghis Khan) remained dominant for centuries not just in Turkestan but also in nearly all of what is now the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.

The Russian Empire began as Muscovy, a Western vassal state to the Turks, or the Tatars as the Russians called them, using the name of one Turkish group among the many ( Cossack --simply another spelling of Kazakh-- names another such group). In the 14th Century, the Turks of Central Asia united to fearful effect under Tamerlane. In the 15th, the Western or Ottoman Turks, under Mehmed II, brought the Byzantine Empire to a close. In the 16th, Suleyman the Magnificent extended Turkish rule as far as Budapest. At one time or another, regions as far apart as Algeria, the Ukraine and the northern Himalayas were Turkish dominions.

I hold no brief whatsoever for Turkish nationalism. I merely note that, in Azerbaijan, the history of that nationalism is showing itself to be far from ended. After the Russian Revolution, Fromkin tells us, the Turkish lands that had gradually fallen to the czars during the long Russian expansion of the 19th Century briefly reasserted their independence. It was not yet apparent to them (or to anyone) that where the czars had been, there the commissars would now be.

Even as they were losing their Western and Southern holdings (their Arab dominions) to the British, the Ottoman Turks made an impressive effort to drive eastward--through newly independent Azerbaijan--and link up with their Turkish brethren to the East, thence perhaps to strike against British India. The movement was called, in Britain, Pan-Turanianism, and British diplomacy took it seriously.

The Ottoman Empire was defeated in the end, and the Soviet Union was permitted by the victorious Western powers to reassert Russian control over Azerbaijan and Turkestan. The treatment of these traded-off Turkish peoples after World War I was thus like the treatment of the traded-off Baltic States after World War II. The Turks--like the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians a generation later--did not cast a vote in their own future. Instead, a second Iron Curtain descended, dividing them as ruthlessly as the first Iron Curtain divided the Europeans.

The resurgence of Turkish nationalism in the Azerbaijan of 1990, at a time of weakness in the Soviet Union, seems not unlike the Turkish resurgence of the early 1920s, as Fromkin decribes it. No one knows where this history is headed, but it would be risky to say of it, or of any Muslim-affected movement, that its deepest motivating force is the desire to taste the fruits of Western capitalism. The Turkish nationalism of Azerbaijan may in fact not be nationalism at all, at least not in the form that we find it in a country like Czechoslovakia. One of Fromkin’s recurrent themes is the recurrent over- estimation of nationalism by Western observers of the Muslim world.

Classically, Fromkin says, Muslims place fidelity to Islam over their various national loyalties. A part of the long stability of the Ottoman Empire, he says, derived from the relative indifference of subject Muslim nations to the nationality of their ruler, so long as he was Muslim. Missing this, Britain vastly overestimated the passion of Arab nationalism against the Turks, he says. The sultan of the Ottoman Empire was also, if only nominally, the caliph, the successor to Muhammad; and this conferred upon Turkish rule a legitimacy that, Fromkin says, the modern Arab states carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French have never enjoyed. Those states--like the Soviet-created states of Turkestan--make approximate ethnic sense. Unfortunately, ethnic coherence has not been enough, Fromkin says, to legitimate them. Ethnic coherence may not be enough for the Soviet Turkish states either.

On this reading, one fears, Azerbaijani attacks on the Armenians may actually be attacks on Christians. Moscow has called these attacks “pogroms.” Most recently, there have been reports of similar Azerbaijani attacks against Jews. The Koran prescribes tolerance toward Christians and Jews; but, as has often been noted, the Islamic sense of world order calls for Islam to be always in the role of tolerant host, never in that of tolerated guest.

In short, the inference that Fromkin’s book invites about Azerbaijan is that the conflict looming there may be of a different order from the one we have lately witnessed in Eastern Europe; that it may not be “ethnic unrest,” to use the phrase that journalism has made standard, but something more like religious revivalism. To be sure, the Turkish world has had--since Kemal Ataturk, the first post-Ottoman president of Turkey--a tradition of secularism that, even in its current, weakened form, is unmatched anywhere in the Muslim world. This tradition may awaken in time to moderate militant Islam in the historically Turkish portions of the Soviet Union. One can only hope so; for of all unhappy histories, the history of religious warfare seems the furthest from any kind of ending. Fukuyama, thinking of Europe, may see a war ended. Fromkin, thinking of the Greater Middle East, sees a peace not yet begun.