Mediterranean democracy, Year 2 Athens, 10-11 January 2014

Mediterranean democracy, Year 2

Athens, 10-11 January 2014

University of Athens: 6 Themistocleous Street

Present, Greek specialists (indicating areas of main interest): Antonis Anastasopoulos (Ottoman-Greek world), Eleni Calligas (day 2 only) (Ionian islands), Dimitris Christopoulos (day 2 only) (citizenship), Antonis Hadjikyriacou (Ottoman Cyprus), Marios Hatzopoulos (Ottoman Balkans, concepts of national identity), Anna Karakatsouli (book history, war of independence), Ioannis Kyrakantonakis (Orthodox church), Sofia Matthaiou (intellectuals and new Greek state), Marinos Sariyannis (Ottoman political thought), Lycourgos Sophoulis (Greek mid C19 politics and religion), Michalis Sotiropoulos (University of Athens and formation of Greek state and culture), Ioannis Tassopoulos (Greek constitutional and legal history), Konstantina Zanou (Greeks and national identities), Paschalis Kitromilides (Greek enlightenment), Yanna Tzourmana (British and American cultural and intellectual history), Perikles Vallianos (Hegel, German idealism, political thought), Socrates Petmezas (Greek economic and social history), Nassia Yakovaki (formation of the public sphere in Europe, including Greece).,

With other specialist interests: Andrew Arsan (Middle East), Gianluca Fruci (Italy), Caitlin Gale (North Africa), Stella Ghervas (Europe, Russia, Balkans), Peter Hill (Middle East)

And: Joanna Innes, Maurizio Isabella; Mark Philp, Eduardo Posada Carbo

Apologies, or expressed interest but didn’t appear: Nikos Alivizatos, Sakis Gekas, Leonidas Kallivertakis, Kostas Kostis, Mark Mazower, Margarita Miliori, Grigoris Molyvas, Tassos Pachlivanidis, Michalis Psalidopoulos, Elpida Vogli, Aggelis Zarokostas// Marc Aymes, Adam Mestyan, Florencia Peyrou
DAY 1

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Joanna Innes explained that the project had been running for ten years; currently it was operating on the basis of three years of Leverhulme funding, which allowed them to hold a series of meetings across southern Europe every year. This was the second Greek meeting. The object was both to trace how certain themes played out in a Greek context, and to allow some visitors specialising in other regions to develop and offer their comparative perspectives.

The project was concerned with how democracy became modern: with how a concept that in 1750 was understood to be applicable primarily to the ancient world became an important category for understanding the modern world. Tracing these process entailed attending to vocabulary, concepts and practices: words acquired new meanings (so e.g. it became possible to term a representative system a democracy); they were embedded in new discourses (e.g. about sovereignty, the people and the nation), and new practices developed, sometimes in an attempt to give substance to concepts (such as representative government, mass voting, public meetings and petitioning).

The first phase of the project, which had been pursued from 2004-10, had focussed on the North Atlantic (America, France, Britain and Ireland). A major conclusion from that had been that vocabulary, concepts and practices developed in very different ways in these different places: there was no one standard trajectory by which democracy acquired modern meaning. In this second, Mediterranean phase of the project the object was first, to explore more variations on the theme: to add a new set of places into the mix. It was not supposed that these places were necessarily more like each other than they were like other places. Nonetheless, the possibility that they, or some of them, might share significant features also seemed worth exploring. Possible common features of interest included: histories of past greatness; especially in early C19, subordination to northern ‘great powers’ (Britain, France, Austria, Russia); in that context, facing simultaneously of challenges of asserting effective state sovereignty and coming to terms with new (and contentious) theories of popular sovereignty.

The project took words as its guiding thread: the idea was not to impose our idea of democracy but to see what they called democracy (with whatever positive or negative valence). Yet it was not conceived as a study of word-use only. Rather, the object was to look at language in context: to see what descriptive or evaluative work it was being asked to do.

People who had been invited to this conference spanned the greater Greek world and not just what became the Greek state: they included people interested in Thessaly, the Ionian islands, Crete and Cyprus. Among visitors were people with interests in various parts of the eastern Mediterranean: Italy, the Middle East and North Africa. Ideally Spain and Portugal would also have been represented, but people invited from those places hadn’t been able to come.

Although Greece had a distinctive intellectual and cultural, as well as institutional heritage, some parallels could probably be drawn between its experiences and patterns of development and patterns elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and in southern Europe more generally. In retrospect, these countries all tended to be seen as late developers, economically, and therefore, it was sometimes suggested, politically. However, it was not clear that was how things were seen, or how they were, in this period. In the early nineteenth century, as the Restoration order clamped down on northern Europe, some liberals and radicals there saw the south as a frontier of opportunity: the region in which the conservative Vienna settlement was most likely to crack. And in fact Spain (at intervals in early C19, and then from 1869) and Greece (from 1844) did institute forms of universal suffrage at a time when these were by no means standard elsewhere in Europe. Rather than asking if these arrangements lived up to modern standards was perhaps a less worthwhile exercise for historians than simply enquiring into how they did work, novel as they were, in the context of their times.

She concluded by noting that each paper-giver was asked to speak for 20 mins. Each paper would be followed by 30 mins of free discussion.
Marinos Sariyannis (FORTH, Crete), Ottoman discourse – [the following represents a slightly abbreviated version of his written paper]
Autocratic monarchy seems to have been the standard way of rule the Ottoman authors could conceive. The traditional image the Ottomans had for their state or any other was provided by the “administration according to the Holy Law” (siyâset-i şer’iyye, a notion coming from Ibn Taymiyya and analyzed in an Ottoman context by the much-read Dede Çöngi Efendi, for instance) or the neo-Aristotelian concepts of the “virtuous state” (madina al-fazıla), as formulated by al-Farabi and passed to the Ottoman tradition through the Persians Nasireddin Tûsî and Devvanî. Kınalızâde explained that a political community couldbe either virtuous or imperfect (medîne-i fâzıla, medîne-i gayr-ı fâzıla). The virtuous state is only of one kind, while the imperfect ones have three forms: In the “ignorant state” (medîne-i câhile), it is the bodily powers rather than the faculty of reason that lies behind the need for association (accordingly, there can be the “irascible ignorant state” or the “appetitive ignorant state); in the vicious or wicked state (medîne-i fâsıka) the faculty of reason exists among the people, but faculties of the body prevail; finally, in the “erroneous state” (medîne-i dâlle) people use their reason but consider wrong for right. The “erroneous state” can be either infidel, like the Frankish or Russian states, or Muslim, like the Kızılbaş (Sürh-ser, meaning Safavid Iran). Such deviations can be explained by the fact that humans vary enormously in terms of intelligence and morality. But when copying or drawing from the earlier tradition of Neo-Aristotelian political philosophy, Ottoman authors generally omitted all reference to the various types of government, focusing only in what they perceived as self-evident, i.e. government by a king.

A key concept moderating the king’s absolute rule is consultation or meşveret. Hasan Kâfî el-Akhisarî, for instance, writes that the real purpose of consulting is to show the sunnet among the community of believers. Not only the king must take counsel with his viziers, but they also should take advice from ulema, as well as other intelligent and sagacious people. A key notion for the right, or indeed the duty of consultation is the precept of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” (emr-i ma’rûf ve nehy-i münker); this traditional Islamic obligation was usually a tool in the hands of “fundamentalist” movements with a view to reinstalling orthodox life, such as the (in)famous Kadızadelis throughout the seventeenth century. Yet the same concept was used by Dihkânîzâde Kuşmânî in 1806, when he tried to establish his right to speak against the opposers of the nizam-ı cedîd reform: he admitted that he was neither a soldier nor a receiver of state salaries; but, on the other hand, even an itinerant dervish is still a Muslim, and all Muslims are similarly responsible (since the Holy Book was not given in different forms to the travelers or the nomads) for “commanding right and forbidding wrong”; and if one raises the objection that ulema should know better, the author argues that unfortunately they do not care, and all the more so, this neglect to command right and forbid wrong from their part could be disastrous.

A wind of change seems to blow by the mid-seventeenth century, linked to what Baki Tezcan named the development of “the second Empire”; the idea that societies and states are not static but have to respond to their environment gained place. The beginning of this current is marked by the introduction of the Ibn Khaldunian theory of society stages by Kâtib Çelebi. This concept of change, however, still passed through the absolute rule: according to Kâtib Çelebi, what is needed is a “man of the sword” (sâhib-i seyf) who will “make people submit to the right way”. Yet this absolute rule should take into account the customs of people; rulers should not force their subjects to comply even with Holy Law, because divisions in mankind are inherent and what a wise man should do is to get to know the beliefs and tenets of every class of people in every country, rather to try to impose his own.

Still, Ottoman authors continued to find it very difficult to perceive a form of government other than monarchy, although they had deep conscience of the limitations of the latter and its potential and checks and controls. One of the first Ottoman descriptions of Venetian power, that made by Mustafa Celalzâde in the mid-sixteenth century, barely mentions “the chieftains of Venice” (Venedik beğleri). An anonymous chronicler writing in the beginnings of the eighteenth century mentioned the “kings of the Netherlands” (Felemenk kıralları); possibly though meaning the stadtholder William III of Orange. However, his contemporary Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa writes of “the commonwealth of the Netherlands” (Felemenk cumhûru). By this time, the same expression was also used for Venice, although no less than Na’ima speaks occasionally of the “king of Venice”, i.e. the Doge. As for the English Revolution, its only known description belongs to Müneccimbaşı Ahmed b. Lutfullah (d. 1702), who used European sources in his universal history up to 1672 and reported the English civil war as follows: “In the year 1648 the English people (Angliya kavmı) revolted (hurûc... edüp) and killed [King Charles] bringing [his dynasty] to an end; henceforth the English people did not appoint any king upon themselves (üzerlerine bir kıral nasb etmeyüp); apart from this extinction (of the line, inkıraz) we know nothing more of their affairs”.

Na’ima’s famously alleged that one of the leaders in the 1703 revolt wished “to turn the Ottoman state, ruled for four centuries by kings, into a popular assembly and a state of crowds, like the polities of Algiers or Tunis” (istiklal-i müluk ile mazbut ve muntazam olan devlet-i Osmaniye’yi... cumhur cemiyyeti ve tecemmu’ devleti kıyafetine koyup). Thus, whatever they knew of practice elsewhere, it was again political formations in their own cultural milieu they turned to whenever they wished to describe a government other than monarchy.

We have to wait until the first decades of the eighteenth century to find a renaissance of the Aristotelian theory of the kinds of government –together with one of the first instances of “democratic rule”. And it is a Hungarian convert, İbrahim Müteferrika (ca. 1674-1745), educated as a priest either in a Calvinist or a Unitarian college and ultimately founding and directing the first Ottoman Turkish printing house in 1727, who re-introduces this thread of thought. In his Usûlü’l-hikem fî nizâmi’l-ümem, composed in 1731 and printed almost simultaneously, he advocated military reforms in the European style, but first he laid down a general theory of society. Like his predecessors, he stated that the various peoples are naturally inclined to submit to wise rules necessary in order to control injustice, and every community is subject to a king (her cema’at bir melike tâbi’ olub). Thus, people have created various states and appointed rulers (hâkimler ta’yin etdiler) by various names –caliphs, Sultans, kings, khans, Kaisers or Czars.

Yet, proceeds Müteferrika, “as everyone knows”, the religion and disposition of the kings vary; the same applies for the forms administration of human affairs may take, and that is why the structures of states and societies differ from each other. In this matter, most philosophers follow the views of three great philosophers of old, namely: (i) Plato’s view; according to Plato, people must submit and obey to a wise and just king. People trust all their state affairs to his hands and must obey to his decisions and orders. For a person to be established in this place, a noble lineage (neseb-i âlî) is necessary. Most of the states in the world administrate their affairs in this way; Greek philosophers named this kind of state “monarchy” (munârhıyâ). (ii) Aristotle’s view; rulership must be in the hands of the magnates of the state (a’yan-ı devlet), who choose a head (re’is) from among them. In this way, nobody is raised above the rest by lineage or personal merits, and the head of this government cannot part from justice by acting independently. This form of state is called “aristocracy” (aristokrâsiyâ –from Aristotle’s name, claims Müteferrika) or “rule of the magnates” (âmme-i tedbir-i ayan); an example is the state of Venice. (iii) Demokratis’ view; administration should be in the hands of the people (saltanat tedbir-i re’ayanın olmak gerekdir), so that they may avoid by themselves the oppression of anyone among them. In this form, government is conducted by election (tarik-i tedbir ihtiyardır): people from every ten villages elect one or two whom they deem wise and experienced, and send them as representatives (muhtar) to the centre of the government. In their turn, these representatives elect one from among themselves, and in the end a council of ten elected persons administers state affairs. These ten persons sit in the council for one year; after this term another ten people are elected in the same way; they inspect the accounts of the previous year’s government and punish those that have oppressed people. This form of state, called “democracy” (dîmukrâsiya) or “rule of the elected” (âmme-i tedbir-i mehârîn), is used in England and the Netherlands. All nations and religions in general, concludes Müteferrika, are governed according to one of these three forms of state.

Müteferrika’s introduction of the term and concept of democracy did not find any immediate followers. Even the French Revolution was not perceived immediately as a major challenge for Ottoman thought.The earliest Ottoman source for the revolution is to be found in the dispatches of Ratib Efendi, envoy to Vienna during 1792: he describes it as “the rising of the rabble”, led by the “Jacobin bandits”. Although he attributes the revolution mainly to the bad finances of the French state, Ratib Efendi notes that the insurgents had “tasted freedom”. He even translates Jacobin arguments, claiming that kings are “human beings like us” and that it is “us that make them kings”. In his chronicle, composed from 1808 to 1814, Câbî Ömer Efendi writes that Napoleon “appeared in the French state and killed its king (França Devleti’nde zuhûr ve kralı i’dâm), whose brother fled”. The other European countries declared that “France became a democracy” (França cumhûr makûlesinden oldu) and that Bonaparte “was not [a king] from a dynasty of many generations” (eben an ceddin kral değildir); to which he answered: “Kings did not descend from the skies with the angels. I will work and make them recognize me as their Emperor” (kral olanlar gökden melâike ile inmedi. Ben kendüme imparatorumuzsun [dedirtince] bu maddede çalışırum). Elsewhere in Câbî’s work, we read again that Bonaparte was a “rebel” (zorba) who killed the king and took his place, something that could set a bad example for other countries as well; this discussion contains an interesting distinction between an usurper and his state (“we still shall not call this state Bonaparte’s state, it is always the state of France”). Earlier documents on the issue of the French republic’s official recognition speak of the “communal state” (cumhurluk) of France, which has to be recognized by one of the “kings” or “states” (kırallar, devletler) of Europe.

Closer to the source, as he was the Ottoman ambassador to Paris from 1797 to 1802, Moralı Ali Efendi speaks of “the French republic” (França cumhûrı) already in the first sentences of his report. He notes that “the French nation, capricious like the colour of the chameleon, had been divided into three estates which went one against another”; he marks the anniversary of the execution of Robespierre, from whose “tyranny and oppression the French were saved” and describes in some detail and in a rather neutral way the function of the Directoire (müdîrân-ı hamse) and of the Council of Five Hundred (beşyüz vükelâ, beşyüz meclisi).

Another memorandum, composed in 1798 by the reisülküttâb Âtıf Efendi, contains a detailed description of Napoleon’s Italian campaign, urging the Sultan to take sides against France. Âtıf Efendi stresses the atheist side of the Revolution: followers of the well-known atheists (zındık) Voltaire and Rousseau, he writes, introduced to the common people ideas such as the abolition of religions and the sweetness of equality and democracy (müsâvât ve cumhûriyet), drawing all the people to their cause. Thus they succeeded in abolishing the churches, killing or persecuting the monks and more generally persuading the commoners (‘avam-ı nas) that “this equality and freedom” (serbestiyet) was the sure means for total worldly happiness. Âtıf Efendi argues that there is an imminent danger of these atheistic ideas to expand with ease into “all states and republics” (kâffe-i düvel ve cemâhîr), “of true or false religions”: the French have translated “what they call [the proclamation of] human rights” (hukûk-ı insan) and try now to incite every people and nation against their king (matbû’ları olan mülûkun aleyhine). He notes repeatedly that they intend to turn all states into democracies (“i.e. interregna”: cemî’ düveli birer birer cumhûriyete ya’ni fitret sûretine tahvil etmek), as they did with Genoa or the Helvetic Republic; if they succeed, they will renew one-third of the members of the consultation bodies (erbâb-ı meşveretlerinin tecdîd-i sülsi içün nasb ve ihtiyar olunacak vükelâ-yı millet) and most of the new members will belong to the Jacobin sect, known for their tendency to execute and confiscate. As shown by the example of the Ionian islands, which were turned “under the regime of freedom” (serbestiyet sûreti), this could be threatening the Ottoman lands as well.

The most intriguing study of the French Revolution’s significance for the Ottoman Empire comes from Şânî-zâde Mehmed Atâ’ullah Efendi (ca. 1770-1826), one of the most insteresting figures of Ottoman intellectual life in the period preceding Tanzimat. Şânî-zâde had a good education in religious studies, medicine and mathematics and knew quite a few European languages (including Greek), apart from his usual Arabic and Persian. Şani-zâde’s understanding of European languages, just like İbrahim Müteferrika’s almost a century ago, seems to have made the difference with his predecessors, at least as far as it concerns information (for his other views belong more to the known Ottoman ideological currents, including a strong influence by Ibn Khaldun).

Trying to explain French victories under Napoleon, Şani-zâde moved beyond military reasoning, attributing the “perfection of the military arts” to the “national unity” (ittifâk-ı milliyye) exhibited by the French: a tribe that used to have fallen into lethargy, was made strong, enhanced by “patriotism, fraternity, equality and liberty” and under the motto “freedom or death” (el-hürriyetü ve’l-mevtü). Elsewhere, he speaks again of the French Revolution: because of the words of some philosophers (feylesof), the inhabitants of Europe (Frengistan) started to seek equality and parity (tesâvî vü i’tidâl) and thus threatened the safety of their old notables (ser-i kâr ve ricâlleri), turning the high against the low; everybody aimed to seize the life and property of one another in order to obtain any whim of theirs (tasarruf-ı keyfe mâ-yeşâ’).

He admits that, while in the old times all “classes and persons, strangers and peasants knew their limits and their duties, which were recorded and registered, now, and due to the general changes that came with the time, there arose the need for a reordering (tekmîl-i nizâm), that would deal with the general idleness and lethargy prevailing in all affairs. But on the whole, Şani-zâde’s attitude toward the revolutionary ideas is negative. One of his most concrete and long pieces of political thought is contained in his discussion of the 1821 Greek Revolution, forming a kind of introduction to the narration of the events. There he cites Fâzıl (Şamseddin) Şehrezûrî (late 13^th century), who talks of the four kinds of government “according to Aristotle”: tyranny (siyâsetü’l-galebeti), which ends in the humble and ignorant taking over the country, aristocracy (siyâsetü’l-kerâmeti), or the government of those seeking wealth and honour, government of communities (siyâsetü’l-cemâ’ati), or the “government according to a common law (‘alâ vefkı’l-kânûni’n-nâmûsiyyi’l-mevzû’i) shared by various groups (fırak)”, and monarchy (siyâsetü’l-meliki), which is “the government of governments” and the state of the virtuous. However, goes on Şani-zâde, there are times where such evil people may effectively pursue their selfish ends; they may succeed into entering the ranks of the military and thus destroy the worth of the whole army.

The form of democratic government also appears in another excursus, where Şani-zâde describes the events in Europe after Napoleon’s death. He narrates the Liberal Triennium in Spain (1820-1823) as a demand for “Demokratis’ law” (kânûn-ı Dimukrâtî üzere; cf. İbrahim Müteferrika’s discussion), i.e. for an administration by unanimous consent with the votes of the representatives of the community (vükelây-ı cumhûr re’yleriyle ittifâk-ı ‘âmme sûretinde ru’yet) or, in other words, for a “democratic rule” (cumhûriyyet kâ’idesi; a little later, Şani-zâde uses the term “democratic government”, hükûmet-i cumhûriyye). The reaction of the other European states (the Congress of Vienna) is interpreted with their fear for general insurrection, since there was danger of the peoples preferring this kind of rule by freedom (serbesiyyet) to the “absolute government or monarchy” (“monarşi” ta’bir etdikleri hükûmet-i müstakılle).

The notion of consultation kept developing. In a traditional way, Müteferrika in the late seventeenth century included taking decisions without counsel (müşavere), as well as avoiding counsel by people of knowledge and experience among the reasons of Ottoman military defeats. A century later the influence of the French Revolution is evident: Şani-zâde sets on to describe a council or rather a series of councils (mecâlis-i meşveret) summoned for dealing with the 1821 revolution, with the participation of “a great number of people, as there was an assembly of [even lower janissary officials], the wardens of the bazaar and other guilds in crowds”. This unusual decision caused some surprise; and even if this could have been a device for obtaining information, Şani-zâde notes, the benefit from simple information is by itself a trifle. Now “some wise have argued that the proper administration of public affairs (umûr-ı cumhûr) duly needs the consent of all individual; and in some organized states (düvel-i muntazama) this advice of wisdom has caused ease and security among subjects and sovereigns. In these countries, and because this practice has been followed in a great degree in their state laws, whenever need arises two classes of consulting experts, namely the state servants and the representatives of the subjects (hademe-i devlet ve vükelây-ı ra’iyyetden ‘ibâret iki sınıf erbâb-ı meşveret), discuss matters in a free manner and confer their view of the best possible course by way of a petition; their sovereigns either approve it and put it into execution or, if they discern any weakness or conceive any better course, they always have the power to do what they deem best. In the aforementioned states, both important and trivial affairs are conducted this way, without complaints or quarrels; however, to be elected by the people (muhtâr-ı nâs olmak) a representative must belong to the experts who have knowledge and wisdom, who are literate and can discuss affairs; and the right of a representative to enter and serve in the councils of power (mecâlis-i hall ü ‘akd) depends on such qualifications. In the opposite case, there will be no sense whatsoever for the Exalted State –where the Sultan has his own independent opinion- except that the high councils of viziers and ulema and the assemblies of the higher notables will fall without reason into the shape of democracy (cumhûriyyet), with the vain quest for majority (‘abes yere teksîr-i sevâd)”. Decisions in the Ottoman Empire, Şani-zâde concludes, must depend of the will of the Sultan of the Muslims according to the Holy Law; only in some important affairs it is an ancient custom that only viziers, ulema and state servants consult and give their opinion in accordance with the Sunna and the religious precepts. Şani-zâde records his opposition to such enlarged assemblies in other occasions as well; he argues that there must be some wisdom in the creation of certain old arrangements for decision-making, as “not all our ancestors could be mad so that we despise them”. Every man tends to think that he holds the most perfect opinion; but the proper way of action would be that everybody looks his own business and abstains from such envy and selfishness.

“Consultation”, thus, tended to be used not in corroboration of but in contrast with the concept of freedom; Şani-zâde himself uses the word (meşveret) for summit meetings such as the Congress of Vienna, while much later the increasing influence of the ulema in the Tanzimat rhetoric led to the newly introduced “freely conducted system” (nizâm-ı serbestâne) being replaced by the more traditional “consultation system” (usûl-ı meşveret), as a description for constitutional rule in the Hamidian era.