Ottomanism

Ottomanism was a late 19th- and early 20th-century political and ideological program within the Ottoman Empire that sought to forge a common Ottoman identity among its diverse subjects. Rooted in the Tanzimat reforms, Ottomanism argued that all subjects—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—shared equal citizenship and loyalty to the state, rather than allegiance to separate religious millets. The project aimed to integrate non-Turkic populations by promoting legal equality, centralized administration, secularized institutions, and universal education, while maintaining imperial sovereignty under the sultan.

In practice, Ottomanism sought to replace millet-based loyalties with a civic allegiance to the empire. It faced tensions between centralizing reforms and the growth of nationalist movements among Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, and others. The program achieved limited success in the legal and bureaucratic spheres and in attempts at modernization, but it did not erase communal identities, and it sometimes collided with established religious authorities and local power structures.

With the late 19th-century constitutional movement and the 1908 Young Turk era, Ottomanism reappeared as a political ideal, yet by World War I the empire’s multiethnic aspirations clashed with rising nationalisms and its imminent disintegration. After the war, Ottomanism largely faded as a practical policy, overshadowed by the emergence of nation-states and ethno-religious nationalism. Scholars view Ottomanism in various lights: as a genuine attempt at civic nationalism, or as a fragile framework that failed to reconcile diversity within a shrinking empire.