The Roots of the Racial Nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress: Ideas, Individuals, Influences

The Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides perpetrated within the Ottoman Empire by the Turkish government at the beginning of the 20th century were not only the direct implementations of ideological convictions or a result of a single decision. Those were, rather, the amalgam of certain theories adjusted to political and economic developments in the country and the desire to turn the multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire into a Turkish nation-state. Stressing the importance of ideas and ideologies in the process of historical development, this article attempts to show certain strains of CUP members’ worldview by deliberately singling out foreign thinkers and ideas that had a role on the formation of their worldview and on their political actions. This article refrains from discussing Turkism as a whole, but rather examines certain paths of the introduction of European thought to the mindset of CUP high ranking officials and ideologists, hoping to illuminate the background of their subsequent decisions and actions which had a tragic impact on the fate of millions of non-Muslim people in the Ottoman Empire.