Signed in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia ushered in the age of the Nation State in Europe. This phenomenon, i.e. the Nation State is yet present with us until today, despite the urging forces of Globalization, which tries to end it and usher in a new age of International amalgamation and cooperation to the detriment of the Nation State.

Why the Nation State does so stubbornly persist in the face of and despite the multi-facetted efforts to replace it with a more open, transparent and international system such as globalization?

The answer to this question lies in the fact that despite numerous philosophical and ideological endeavors that came forth during the last two centuries, such as Anarchism, Socialism, Communism, and even capitalism [yes, as of 2008], which faded and are fading nowadays, the Nation State system endures for the mare fact that it has shown its endurance and resilience in the face of more holistic systems that the human mind has produced.

Toward a Homogeneous Turkish Nation State

This introductory statement was made to simply underline the fact that the issue of our discussion today, and you may call it the way you want, such as Mass Killing, massacre, genocide, Holocaust, or even Ethnic Cleansing, as modern vocabulary defines it, were all events that occurred, are accruing, and will definitely occur as long as the system of Nation State persists.

Why is this so? Because, by definition, the Nation State implies a monolithic ethnic identity that is associated with the State it presents and excludes all minority ethnic elements that are not defined within the context of the ‘National Identity” of the Nation State.

This is true in the case of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1918, since the dominant State system of the time, the Ottoman State, was morphing from an imperial to a state model. This process had started in the beginning of the 20th century. While the Ottoman Empire was losing more and more lands in its European section, the mood within the new leadership of the ruling Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakki) Party was that only through the passage to a Nation State system, would the Turkish republic face the challenges of an antagonistic Allied Powers, and to keep a territorial package that would be homogeneous enough to sustain the continuation of the Turkish element of what was once known as the Ottoman Empire.

And since the process of the disintegration of the empire had started in the 1830’s with:

1. The secession of Greece
2. The further secession of Bulgaria and other Balkan territories as a consequence of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1876-78
3. The further secession of Macedonia and Rumelia during the Balkan war of 1911-1912

There remained no other option for the ruling elite but to conserve what had remained, knowing quite well that even the Arab territories were destined to be lost in the near future.

This was further exacerbated by the dominant Pan-Turkish ideology that was dominant at the time. The argument was as follows: The only possible outcome for the Turks is to hold on to the dominantly Turkish populated areas of the Ottoman Empire and to employ all means necessary for the integration of these territories with other Turkic territories to the east to form a purely homogeneous Turkic Nation State.

Armenia as a Hindrance

It so happened, that the geographical location where the Armenian people had been living on for the entirety of their history, i.e. the Armenian highlands,  or Eastern Anatolia, was the main hindrance against the fulfillment of this Pan Turkish Ideology.

It is ironic, to say the least, that only at this juncture of their history did the Turkish elite realized the importance of Eastern Anatolian territory. This land, as backward and uncivilized as it was, was never within the purview of these elites up until the time it lost the lucrative lands in Europe. Anatolia became “important” only as a result of the loss of lands within the European theater of events, and only because it was the only land bridge that would facilitate the formation of Turan, the immense pan Turkic state that these elites envisioned.

It is within this context that the Armenian Genocide can be viewed and analyzed. The nation State System is the dominant theory that led to the events of 1915.

The rest is history and I am not going to indulge myself into repeating the stories of cruelty, mayhem, and massacre associated with the events during the Armenian Genocide, because, frankly speaking, I am sick and tired of psychologically putting myself under so much duress come every April 24.

However, it must not be forgotten that the Turkish Nation State, which was formed on the ashes of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, did continue to act within the confines of the Nation State system in dealing with the issue of the Armenian Genocide.

This notion can be explained as follows:

…The first primarily involves denial and silence about the criminal past and an attempt at “forgetting,” at leaving it to oblivion. The second represents an attempt at exonerating oneself by being a victim to the violent structures, propaganda, and powerlessness, and blaming nationalist politicians and corrupt elites. The third and most problematic is a thorough “contextualization” of crimes and their apologia in the context of the new state building, sometimes also as an open justification of what has been done, which can serve to legitimate further exclusion of groups from membership in the state, insofar as it is not based on excessive violence or mass killing…

The irony of the analytical statement I just made is that it is not mine. It is a quote that comes from the civil criminal proceedings against criminals of war crimes in the case of Serbia. Therefore, how ironic it is, that after so many decades, and after the ratification of the Genocide Convention of 1948 on the wake of the Jewish Holocaust of 1939-1945, we, yet again, find ourselves confronting an exactly similar situation to the post Armenian Genocide conditions within places outside of the Turkish Republic. How Ironic again, is the fact that, the Serbian incidence is a reverse process of the whole “experiment,” since the victims in this case were the remnants of the Ottoman Turks who didn’t repatriate to Turkey during and after WWI.

A people, a people with a 3000 years old history had lived side-by-side to the Turks, who shared a millennium of coexistence with that people. And suddenly, that people is not living there anymore, and yet the amnesia is so strong, that nobody asks about what happened to that people.

This is the issue that a modern generation of Turks and their new government has to deal with, especially in their quest of integration into the European Union (don’t forget the Nation State vs. the Globalization debate), and more especially since more and more voices are coming out after discovering their Armenian roots. It seems that the amnesia therapy that was exerted on the so called “pure Turkish population” for some 8 decades could not wipe out the memory of the victims after all.

What Is To Be Done?

Concentrating on the now, the present, we can analyze the situation as such:

From the middle of 2008 and up until a week ago, the so called “Armenian-Turkish” negotiations for the opening of the borders between the two countries gave hope to some that it might be that finally a new government in Turkey that aspires to attain regional fame and credibility (let’s not forget Prime Minister Erdogan’s Stance at Davos, Switzerland related to the Gaza Issue), will do something to start the process of healing, that would ultimately lead to a solution to the Armenian-Turkish issue.

How naïve even our own president, Barak Obama was, that in his estimate of Turkey’s new regional role in the Middle East and the Caucasus, put the emphasis on this cooperative issue between Armenia and Turkey to the detriment of his solid pre-election pledge regarding the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

Now that the dust has settled about this farcical misadventure and  Turkey once again showed the international community that what it was doing was only a diplomatic ploy to gain time and, in the process, to water down the efforts at passing a resolution vis-à-vis the Armenian Genocide within the United States’ Congress, we are back at square one.

Conclusion

“You have to hit and shape the iron bar while it is hot,” goes the Armenian saying. It’s been 94 years since the events that started in 1915. I guess the “iron bar” has hardened so much that the blacksmith can not give new shape to it. I say this in a relative way, since if I try to compare it to the process through which the recognition of the Jewish Shoah underwent just after the end of WWII and culminated at the Nuremberg Trials and the Genocide Convention of 1948 so ardently fought for by Raphael Lemkin, what I see is that we are still far away from shaping the iron in the case of the Armenian Genocide.

Moreover, even with the noble ideas that Lemkin fought for the passage of the Genocide Convention; did it cure the malady it was prescribed for? The answer is a definite no.

Should I then be acutely pessimistic regarding the issue? Some would say yes. But I would not. I still believe, and perhaps naively enough, that we are entering into an age where this issue must come to a conclusion.

“Not until the fat lady sings” you would say. Yes, but that singing has already started. It has started with those left behind and whose offspring are discovering their Armenian identity. It has begun with a new generation of activists on both sides who will definitely reach places that their predecessors had never reached.

It will happen, because as Milan Kundera says:

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”           

It will happen since in the words of Timothy Radcliffe: 

“Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.”