292 DESTINY DISRUPTED
with the western Europeans, in league with the breakaway Slavic territories
of Eastern Europe.
This new generation ofTurkish nationalists said the nation superseded
all smaller identities and suggested that the national "soul" might be vested
in some single colossal personality, an idea that came straight from the
German nationalist philosophers. The writer Ziya Gokalp declared that
except for heroes and geniuses, individuals had no value. He urged his fel-
low Turks never to speak of "rights." There were no rights, he said, only
duties: the duty to hear the voice of the nation and follow its demands.?
Trouble for the empire tended to confer glamour upon such militaris-
tic nationalism. And trouble did keep coming. It had been coming for a
long, long time. Bulgaria wrenched free. Bosnia and Herzegovina left the
Ottoman fold to be annexed by the Habsurgs into their Austro-Hungarian
empire. About a million Muslims, forced into exile by these changes,
streamed into Anatolia looking for new homes in the dying, dysfunctional,
and already-crowded empire. Then the Ottomans lost Crete. Nearly half
the population of that island were Muslims, nearly all of whom migrated
east. All this social dislocation generated a pervasive atmosphere of free-
floating anxiety.
Amid the uproar, nationalism began heating up among other groups.
Arab nationalism began to bubble, for one. And after all the horrors they
had suffered at the hands of their fellow Turks, Armenian activists too de-
clared a need and right to carve out a sovereign nation-state of Armenia.
These were exactly the same nationalist impulses stirring among so many
self-identified nationalities in eastern Europe at this time.
In 1912, a war in the Balkans stripped the empire of Albania, of Mace-
donia, of its last European holdings outside Istanbul, a military defeat that
triggered a final spasm of anxiety, resentment, and confusion in Asia
Minor. Turmoil like this favors the most tightly organized group, whatever
its popular support may be; the Bolsheviks proved as much in Russia five
years later. In Istanbul, the most tightly organized group just then was the
ultranationalist Committee for Union and Progress. On January 23, 1913,
the CUP seized control in a coup d'etat, assassinated the incumbent vizier,
deposed the last Ottoman sultan, ousted all other leaders from the govern-
ment, declared all other parties illegal, and turned Ottoman Turkey into a
one-party state. A triumverate of men emerged as spearheads of this single