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Essay on Young Turk Revolution
The coup d'état in July 1908 by the Young Turks under the direction of the Committee of Union and Progress, which compelled Abdul Hamid to issue a decree putting into operation the "Midhat" constitution of 1876, was a new stage in the revolutionary process that had begun in Turkey seventy years earlier and had made considerable headway, politically and intellectually, between 1839 and 1876 during the era of the Tanzimat reformers. The new direction taken by the revolutionary movement from 1908 to 1918 affected significantly subsequent events which led to the more profoundly revolutionary changes brought about in Turkey after World War I under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), who was one of the Committee of Union and Progress before and after 1908.
Young Turk Revolution can be termed as success because like many of the revolutionary movements in modern history, the revolutionary movement in the Ottoman Empire, which ended the autocratic rule of Abdul Hamid, was the result of complex and frequently contradictory forces. The unbearable despotism of the Hamidian regime, the violent internal conflicts between the various religious and national groups, the deepening misery of the people, and the increasing menace of disintegration or partition by the Great Powers brought together men of diverse views and aims in a movement to overthrow autocracy.
European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides many examples of the tendency of diverse and antagonistic groups to combine in united efforts to overthrow a domestic or foreign tyranny and later, when their primary objective had been achieved, to break apart and engage in an internecine struggle for power. Such proved to be the case in respect to the Turkish Revolution of 1908. (Hanioĝlu, M. şükrü 21-22) Several for eign observers, as well as Ottoman subjects, however, were so enthused by the success of the Young Turks......
