Most scholars have explained post-independence state-formation in Morocco by looking solely at institutional and domestic factors. They argued that the bourgeois Istiqlal had failed to establish a power base in the countryside and that the sultan exploited this weakness by playing off royalist rural elements against the urban elites. However, this view is incomplete, because the nationalists’ local and global activities were so interwoven that we cannot understand them apart from each other. Many of the Istiqlal's leaders spent more time abroad in exile than on Moroccan soil during the two decades preceding independence. The official party structure of the Istiqlal also constitutes an inadequate unit of analysis for understanding Moroccan nationalism. The Istiqlal had never been a self-contained actor in itself, but merely the institutionalized nodal point of a number of overlapping networks. I argue that the very structure of the nationalists' non-hierarchical and flexible international propaganda network helped them prevail in their struggle against the French, but also enabled the Sultan to co-opt it after independence and turn the Istiqlal into just another opposition party. Its informal nature, the lack of a clearly defined membership and loyalty, and the absence of a coherent ideology proved beneficial in the short-run, but detrimental in the long-term. Furthermore, the skills, resources and personal connections, which the nationalists acquired during their international activities, fell into the hands of the Sultan and strengthened his position once he had pocketed many of the network’s participants. At its core, this project deals with two issues: the relationship between domestic and foreign factors in shaping political systems, and the short- and long-term effects of informal ways of organizing political activism, as in contrast to institutionalized ones.

It is a widely accepted argument in political and historical sociology that the formation of modern states and centralization of the political power played a crucial role in the formation of national identities through both state-leading and state-seeking nationalisms. This perspective concerning the formation of national identities in the Ottoman Empire is, however, problematic in two respects. First, the Ottoman political modernization is seen as an uninterrupted and consciously-designed process. Scholars inspired by the modernization theory present the modernization in the Ottoman Empire as a rationalization and integration process, while their critiques focus on the concentration of power techniques as the redeployment of state’s control on social resources. Thus, both perspectives implicitly share the same approach. Secondly, national identity formations are perceived as a compound of unilinear and unavoidable dynamics. In fact, both modernization and the national identity formation are seen as teleological historical processes. Providing an alternative perspective, Michael Mann’s regime strategies refers to the attempts of the dominant power actors to cope with the challenges because of the emerging social classes and ‘nations’. This paper uses this conceptual framework to understand the complexities of the Ottoman political modernization. The Ottoman political modernization witnessed three different regime strategies, namely the Tanzimat, the Hamidian and the Constitutional eras. Characteristics of the political society of each period characterized each regime strategy. In fact, components of the national identity, the major social actors of the political society, and the challenges by the relevant social actors posed for the regime contextualized the space of politics for each period. This periodization allows us to avoid teleological approaches and shifts our focus to the articulation or the resistance forms by sub-state actors to the referred regime strategies. The last century of the Ottoman Empire witnessed dynamics towards the co-habitation of different ethnic and religious groups and the integration with state, while the same century was also an era of fully-fledged nationalist movements. The realization of each of these dynamics was closely related with the performance of the aforementioned regime strategies in each period. Following this conceptual framework, this paper analyzes the responses of the Albanians, Kurds, and Arabs, the non-Turkish Muslim elements of the Empire, against the Ottoman regime strategies. This analysis is intended to contribute to the ongoing debates on the national identity and modern state formations in the Ottoman Empire.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 marked a decisive moment in the crystallization of Turkish national identity. In order to study this moment, this paper will examine the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. The Carnegie Report was written by a commission that consisted of one representative from each neutral European Great Power, and attempted to provide an unbiased account of the atrocities committed by the various armies involved in the Balkan Wars. The resulting work is heavily referenced in historical works on the Balkan Wars as a unique primary source. The Carnegie Report was not only a pioneering effort of the international peace movement that would culminate in institutions such as the League of Nations and United Nations, the document produced was non-binding but nonetheless carried an air of impartial adjudication. I will argue in this paper that the response to the announcing of this Commission and the resulting coverage of the completed Report in various contemporary Ottoman newspapers sheds light on the Ottoman world view at this critical moment of transition from inclusive policies of pan-Islamic and pan-Ottoman national identities towards an exclusive Turkist or pan-Turkist ideology. The Ottoman newspapers viewed the Report as vindication of their plight on the international scene. The editorials shifted in tone from the announcement of the Commission in August of 1913, when the editorials expound on the plight of the "Muslims and the Greek Orthodox" against the Bulgars. Less than a year later, in the the May 1914 previews of the Report, and in other responses the Ottoman newspaper articles decry the depraved acts of the Greeks and Bulgarians towards the Muslims. This Report was seen by the Ottomans as presenting Ottoman grievances to the Western world, and the change from an inclusive national ideology to an exclusive one is observable when the Ottoman responses to the Carnegie Report are examined. To help support this argument and provide context, the Carnegie Report itself will be examined, as well as the response in the Western world. This paper will scrutinize the Carnegie Report's unique position in Ottoman history and as a focal point to analyze the transition of the Ottoman Empire's national identity in the critical year spanning the end of the Balkan Wars to the beginning of World War I.

In decades after 1860, education was a principal area of conflict and negotiation in Ottoman Syria and Lebanon. Ottoman Arab youth were themselves the battleground, prize, and frequently the soldiers in a conflict between Anglo-American Protestants and predominately French Catholic missionaries, which the French state interpreted through a lens of the Eastern Question and its rivalry with the British. Despite expelling the Jesuits from France, successive republican French governments gave funding and exercised political influence on behalf of the formerly-banished order in exchange for using its network of schools to teach French and promote French cultural norms in the Levant. Examining the French Jesuits and the French-International Alliance israélite universelle’s work in Syria and Lebanon, I will argue that despite teaching French, the mission civilisatrice of the Catholic missionaries was fundamentally religious, not cultural, whereas the French Jewish organization sought to introduce their Ottoman coreligionists to French ideals of modernity, citizenship, and civilization. Together these organizations were not quite the storm troopers of colonialism in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, as some would have them, but non-state actors whose relationships to their host and funding states were constantly being reevaluated and renegotiated. Though the French would not establish a permanent political entity in the Levant until after the First World War, the years after 1860 saw a rise in proposals from the Catholic-Royalist French right to destabilize, invade, or occupy the region on a permanent basis, and the governmental and non-governmental officials proposing these plans for Franco-Christian rule frequently saw the missionary schools and their instruction of French as the first step in any political mission. Whether intentional or not, the result of these missions was the deepening of lines of sectarian religious identity, supplanting those of class and region. The Jesuits succeeded in their stated goal of filling the halls of government with a generation of Jesuit-educated, Franco-Christian Lebanese, who would shape the orientation of their communities and the state during the mandate period and after independence.