29 October marks the Centenary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey/Turkiye, in 1923. The Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 recognised the sovereignty of the Turkish Republic established in defeating the Treaty of Sevres which the Western Powers had sought to impose on the Turks in the course of the Great War.

The Turkish Republic was not an internal product of Turkish development. It came about through the decision of the Western Powers to finally destroy the centuries old Ottoman Empire. This process began with the promotion of nationalism within the Empire by Liberal progressives affronted that a great Muslim state should exist with Christian peoples as subjects and who were bent on making nations of these Christian peoples, no matter what the consequences.

Nationalism was a most unsuitable thing to promote in the region covered by the Ottoman Empire where a great patch-work of peoples were inter-mingled and had become inter-dependent in their pursuit of order and prosperity. Its promotion in the region by the Western Powers was as disastrous for the many Muslim communities of the Balkans who were driven from their homes of centuries, as it was for Christians caught up in the inevitable consequences of the simplifying process it encouraged.

It was the Great War of 1914 – a war between Christian Europeans – that was to finish off the great Ottoman State of centuries.  

In response to Germany’s rise as a commercial power, Britain had re-orientated its Balance of Power policy in Europe. Making arrangements and informal alliances with its traditional enemies, France (1904) and Russia (1907), Britain decided to help provoke and join in a European war against Germany to smash her commercial development. The British came to an understanding with the Tsar in which Russia’s military forces would be used against Germany. This necessitated a change in the traditional British policy with regard to the Ottoman Empire. No longer would Britain guarantee the Ottoman integrity against the Tsar’s ambitions but collaborate with the Russian Tsar in its destruction.

When the Anglophile/Francophile Young Turks came to power in Istanbul they attempted to distance themselves from the Sultan’s previous fraternal relations with Germany but found it impossible given the predatory intentions of those they wished to ameliorate relations with. They were driven back into Germany’s arms by the need to avoid destruction.

After the assault of the Christian nationalists, supported by the Western Powers, on the heart of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, and the vast ethnic cleansing and killing of Muslims there, the Young Turks had attempted to combine a form of European nationalism within the Ottoman structures.

The Young Turks failed to find an effective combination and it took the catastrophe of World War for a thorough nationalising project to be carried through. It was never the Ottoman intention to divest itself of its Christian element, which was an indispensable and functional part of the Empire. And only when the Armenians (1915) and Greeks (1919) become fifth columnists and aiders and abetters of the Ottoman catastrophe, as instruments of Western war aims, did the Young Turks take vigorous action against these long-standing communities. The Germans had been urging the Ottomans to do this for years before the War but the Ottomans resisted the advice until it was nearly too late, and the existence of the State itself was put in the balance by multiple Allied invasions from 3 fronts, aided by an Armenian insurrection behind the lines.

The Armenians were no more European than the Turks. They had a non-European language and they had lived in the territory for longer than the Ottoman Turks. But Europeans like James Bryce began telling them they were a Western people who deserved to be a nation and they were a special, Christian people with a higher level of civilisation than those they were ruled by, and even collaborated with in high position, within the Ottoman State. The fact that they were a dispersed people, not a majority in any area of consequence, did not seem to trouble those who became their self-appointed champions. But nations ultimately require territories to build states. So how was an Armenian nation state to be achieved? That became a big concern to those who lived amongst them who did not fit in with the progress these Europeans had in mind for them.

It should be noted that the Greek population was generally undisturbed by the emergency forced migration of the Armenians from the Eastern Anatolian warzone in 1915. The Ottoman Turks and Greeks, with their distinctly oriental habits of life, had lived side by side in comparative harmony in Asia Minor, despite war between the two peoples in the Balkans. It was Lloyd George’s insistence that the Greeks of Anatolia become a nation in the course of being a punitive instrument against the Turkish population that did for this community.

In using nationalism to break up the Ottoman State in the name of progress the West forced an alien national project on the Muslim element of the Empire. How else could it respond to avoid destruction of its people who were the object of eradication of the nationalising Christians forming nations and seeking to devour large expanses of territory?

Great moral hatred was worked up against the Turk right across Europe during the course of the Great War. Britain established its ministry of propaganda, Wellington House, containing its best and brightest literary talents, with the purpose of writing the same thing in a thousand different ways – these barbarians from the East needed to be sent packing “bag and baggage” to a confinement in an Anatolian desert where they could be whittled away by the superior Christians who were to be provided with Western-backed states all around them. The military power of Britain, France, Italy, Greece etc. was provided to achieve this mission. But it failed in the face of a dramatic and unexpected Turkish resurgence, led by Mustafa Kemal.

Remarkably, in one corner of Europe the Turks had their supporters – Republican Ireland!

A few years ago I discovered that an enthusiastic commentary had been published in Ireland about Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), the Turkish struggle for independence and the successful negotiations that led to the Treaty of Lausanne. It is no exaggeration to say that the Irish who wrote and published it saw Mustafa Kemal as their greatest inspiration and they recognised the enormous significance of what he had achieved in defeating the British Empire at the height of its power, along with the other Imperial Powers who had planned to pick the bones of the Ottoman corpse.

In the days of John Redmond’s Imperial Ireland the Irish Parliamentary Party and its Press begun to hold views that were very similar to the British understandings of the world. This had been a recent development, due to the alliance the Irish Party at Westminster had formed with Liberal England to gain Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish political establishment who looked forward to getting an Irish Parliament in return for their recruiting efforts in providing Irish cannon-fodder for the various fronts where “the battle for small nations and democracy” was taking place, unquestionably supported Britain’s Great War and led the propaganda effort for it.

The Great War could not be presented in purely British Imperial terms in Ireland. The Irish Party held Christian sympathies in favour of the Greeks and Armenians and had deep prejudices against the Turks which they absorbed from their allies in Gladstonian Liberalism.

However, from 1916 another current emerged in Ireland.

The Catholic Bulletin was a popular religious periodical that supported the view that Ireland should have an independent existence from Britain so that it did not have to participate in catastrophic wars through which England stirred up conflict in the world to its own advantage.

Fr. Timothy Corcoran, Professor of Education at University College, Dublin, was the driving force and main contributor to the Bulletin. He had taught, and was a close friend of the Sinn Fein President, Eamon de Valera, who later led the Irish State to independence.

The last Ottoman Monarchical Parliament was dissolved by Britain on 18 March 1920 and the only elected body in Turkiye was the Turkish Grand National Assembly which was inaugurated on 23 April 1920. In early 1919 Britain began to suppress the Irish democracy which came into being after the 1918 election. About a year later it did the same in Ottoman Turkiye. The Ottoman Sultan, a virtual prisoner of the British in his palace, had been persuaded to send Mustafa Kemal to Eastern Anatolia, to control Turkish forces that were preparing to resist the establishment of an Armenian State, and get him out of the way. But having got there Kemal resigned from the army, united with the resistance forces, and signed the Amasia Protocol on June 9 1919 declaring an intention to overthrow the occupation and also the Sultan, as its instrument. This rival source of power to the puppet regime in Constantinople/Istanbul became the nucleus of a new Turkish national development.

Mustafa Kemal presided over a National Congress at Erzurum, in Eastern Anatolia, held in July; and then in Sivas in September 1919. From these conferences was issued the Milli Misak or National Pact. This pact proposed a settlement with the British on the basis of self-determination for the Arabs south of the Armistice line; the opening of the Straits to free commerce; full rights for non-Turkish minorities; the retention of all non-Arab Muslim-majority areas of the Empire (Anatolia, Eastern Thrace and Mosul included); and abolition of the Capitulations.

In January 1920 the Ottoman Parliament in Constantinople, conducting its business within range of the Royal Navy’s guns, declared support for the National Pact. The British occupying power viewed this development with concern and told the Sultan to repress it. As Churchill candidly put it: “The Allies were loyal to the principle of representative government: accordingly the Turks had voted. Unhappily, they had almost all of them voted the wrong way” (David Walder, The Chanak Incident, p.76)

To force the Ottoman Government to submit to Allied demands and to control events in the country the British authorised a full military occupation of Istanbul on March 16 1920 – against the terms of the Mudros Armistice. British forces marched into the Ottoman capital, arrested Turkish nationalist leaders in the city and occupied the various Ottoman Ministries. The leading Deputies and leaders in the Parliament were arrested by British Intelligence Officers and it was shut down. Many of the representatives of the Turkish democracy were sent to internment in Malta.

A week later Mustapha Kemal opened the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, which was attended by, amongst others, those Deputies who had managed to escape the Allied repression of its Parliament in Istanbul. In 1920/1 both assemblies, in Dublin and Ankara, were assailed by British occupying forces, determined to shut them down, and prepared to use military force to do so.

The Dáil, in its first act of foreign affairs, sent out a message to the other free nations of the world (including Turkiye’s new national development) declaring the existence of an independent Irish Government. This was an early contact between the independent Irish Parliament and the Grand National Assembly of Turkiye, established by Mustafa Kemal at Ankara. This contact was made through the Dáil’s ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’ delivered to the revolutionary Grand National Assembly at Ankara, on a date following 10 August 1921. The Dáil, in its first act of foreign affairs, sent out this message to the other free nations of the world (including Turkey) declaring the existence of an independent Irish Government.

It was read out, in Irish, to the Dáil by J.J. O’Kelly, the editor of The Catholic Bulletin in January 1919.

The Peace Conference at Paris was to prove a great disappointment to the Irish and the Turkish. Ireland found its representations vetoed by England and the Turks got the punitive Treaty of Sèvres, which partitioned Turkey and the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire amongst the Western Christian Powers.

The Catholic Bulletin published a substantial commentary on events regarding Turkiye between 1922 and 1924. Its reporting amounted to about twenty pages across twelve editions of what was, a religious magazine in essence. It supported Turkiye in its struggle against the Imperialist powers and defended the Turkish position in relation to the Greek invasion, when most of the Western Christian press were sympathetic to the Greeks. Following Roger Casement the Republicans were also deeply sceptical about the tales they were hearing about what had happened to the Armenians. The Bulletin viewed it all as British propaganda, describing the atrocities perpetrated on the Turkish population and treating the accusations that the Turks had burned their own city of Smyrna/Izmir with incredulity.

Irish Republicans were greatly inspired by what Mustafa Kemal had achieved for his nation and saw parallels between their struggle and that of the Turks. Britain had closed the Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul as it had done to the Irish Parliament in Dublin; it had arrested and interned the Turkish nationalist Deputies as it had the Irish Members of Dáil Eireann. It had attempted to destroy the new Turkish national assembly in Ankara as it also attempted to prevent the Irish democracy from functioning. It had forced a treaty reluctantly on the Turks as it had done on the Irish.

The Bulletin drew attention to the Turk’s humiliation of the British at Chanak in October 1922 when the British Empire was faced down at the height of its power, as the world was seemingly at England’s feet. For The Catholic Bulletin Mustafa Kemal proved that the British Empire was not invincible. The Bulletin saw the Turkish victory at Chanak as a pivotal event in the history of the British Empire and Imperialism generally – although the event is mostly forgotten about today in Ireland and Britain.

Mustafa Kemal overthrew the punitive Treaty of Sèvres dictated by the Imperialists to the Ottoman Sultan at the point of the guns of the Royal Navy. He defeated the most powerful empire in the world and it’s army at the height of its power, along the other victors of the Great War. He then negotiated a new treaty at Lausanne which turned Turkiye into an independent sovereign state.

The Catholic Bulletin was particularly impressed with the Turkish negotiating skill at Lausanne and contrasted it to, what it saw as, the Irish failure in negotiating with the British in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, that left the country part of the British Empire the national forces divided fatally against each other.

In April 1923, to keep its readers well informed, The Catholic Bulletin took the unusual step of publishing the official (British) record of the proceedings at Lausanne. It did so without comment, believing, presumably that no comment was necessary. And the Bulletin, being of an Anti-Treaty mind that went into the making of Fianna Fail, contrasted the performance of the Turkish and Irish plenipotentiaries in their respective settlements with the British.

As the Catholic Bulletin saw it, the one great positive development of the Great War was the achievement of Mustafa Kemal in leading the Turkish nation to independence from the Imperialist Powers and the establishment of the Turkish Republic. This was an event that Republican Ireland could only marvel at, from the confines of the 1921 Treaty which ended the Irish Republic and created an Irish state within the British Empire again.

The Irish Free State got a nasty shock in 1924 when it found out, to its dismay, that it had obligations to the Empire it had returned to in signing the Treaty. It was technically still at war with Turkiye and had to ratify the Treaty ending that war. The Treaty of Lausanne, which Britain alone signed, pledged the Empire to defend the neutrality of the Straits against infringement. And the Empire meant Ireland as well! On 1 July 1924 the Minister of External Affairs, Desmond Fitzgerald introduced a motion to acquiesce in the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne.

Mustafa Kemal exposed the fact that the British Empire was no longer what it was or what it seemed when the Irish submitted to the Treaty in 1921. The Turks had successfully beaten the Imperial power and The Catholic Bulletin described Mustafa Kemal as the “Man of the Year” in 1923 and the greatest cause for optimism in a world that had been shattered by the catastrophe of the Great War.

I have seen the Catholic Bulletin criticised for its relentless war of ideas waged against British influence in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s. This criticism, of course, has come from those wishing to re-establish those ideas in Ireland – so that the Irish see the world in the same way as the British State decides we should view it, and abandons its traditional policy of neutrality today.

The Bulletin itself, has only one historian, Fr. Brian Murphy, OSB, now sadly departed.

The British Empire’s demise was set in motion by the successful Turkish war of independence and the humiliation of Britain at Chanak. And that had important ramifications for the Irish who wished to overturn the Treaty in the event of a decline in British power.

What Mustafa Kemal achieved became an inspiration to the Republicans in Ireland who did not accept the restrictions of the Treaty imposed upon them by Britain. And in the coming decades they gained power under the leadership of de Valera and Fianna Fail and began to challenge and undermine the Treaty in the knowledge that Britain was no longer the power it once was since it came up against Atatürk.

What the Catholic Bulletin did was very important in establishing independent Ireland when many thought the mere signing of a Treaty would accomplish it. Independent Ireland was not a fact in 1921 – it had to be fought for in various ways for another quarter of a century before it was achieved. The Catholic Bulletin clearly saw what happened at Chanak and then Lausanne as a turning point that had important implications in world affairs – and for Ireland in its future relations with the Empire. That understanding was acted upon over the coming two decades by Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fail to achieve for Ireland what Mustafa Kemal had achieved for Turkiye. And having achieved the substance of independence, Ireland, like the Turkish Republic, chose neutrality in the Second World War.

Mustafa Kemal – as Atatürk – carried through the building of a Turkish nation state. This was not the Ottoman Empire reinvented as the Ottoman past was largely repudiated and little outside Asia Minor/Anatolia made sense as Turkiye. The many languages that constituted the Ottoman State were discarded in favour of a national language, simplified and changed from Arabic to Roman script, to aid literacy. A republican form of government and parliamentary democracy were introduced, although a real opposition proved difficult to bring about, even when Atatürk introduced it himself. Westernisation, secularism and modernisation in all areas of society were driven by Atatürk and through his personal example. The khalifate was abolished and Islam, seen as a major cause of backwardness, was demoted. Atatürk and his State became the model for much of the Muslim world seeking to modernise to ward off Western interference and plunder.

But all of this was in the future, in 1923.

There were good reasons for the ease with which the Nationalists were able to demolish the ancient and once powerful structure of the Ottoman Monarchy and Khalifate. The effect of the Treaty of Sèvres to which the Sultan’s Government had given their signature would have been to have handed Thrace to the Greeks, Eastern Anatolia to the Armenians, Adalia to the Italians and Cilicia to the French. And Constantinople would have been giving away to be “internationalized” outside of Turkish sovereignty forever. Turkiye would have been deprived of its armed forces and would have ceased to be, save only in name, an independent state. The Treaty of Lausanne, on the other hand, reversed the position in favour of the Turks. The Nationalists had, completely by their own efforts in marshalling the Turkish people, expelled the Greeks from Smyrna and its hinterland and had frustrated the parcelling out of Anatolia among the Western Powers. The Capitulations were removed and the problem of religious minorities used by the Western Powers as instruments to destabilise the State neutralised.

Reading again the extracts from The Catholic Bulletin concerning the British Empire and Turkiye during the years, 1923-24 readers will quickly realise how little things change in the World and how it is only the names of countries deceived by the West into destroying themselves that change: