in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds) Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century. Univ of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 93-108.
Modernization is a term which has no agreed meaning. As a conceptual tool for historical analysis it may or may not be useful, depending on the content one pours into it. Perhaps for the moment the ambiguities of the term can be left aside after some prefatory remarks. For what we are discussing is, obviously, some of the evidence of significant change since the late eighteenth century that affected life in Iran and the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. Much of this change was affected by contact with the European West and can properly be called Westernization.
One example of such Westernization is the advent in the governmental structure of the Ottoman Empire of the principle of representation. Ward and Rustow exclude this principle from the categories of modernization which they have tried to apply to the political development of Turkey and Japan. "Democracy and representative government," they say, "are not included in our definition of modernization." [in their book Political Modernizatino in Japan and Turkey, p. 5] With the question of democratic government we do not here need to be concerned, although I would be willing to argue elsewhere that one aspect of the Ottoman Empire's Westernization (and therefore, for that empire, modernization) was its progress toward democratic political forms and even toward the substance of democratic government. If democracy as a whole were my subject, it would be necessary to examine the development of concept and of practice in such areas as these: popular sovereignty, the equality of rights and duties of all subjects or citizens, the separation of legislative and judicial from executive power, electoral systems and techniques, controls placed by constitutional or other means on the executive, ministerial responsibility to a parliament, parliamentary procedure, and respect for and defense of the rights of minorities. All of these are, of course, related to one another and to the representative principle. To examine here developments in all these areas would be impossible.
I shall limit my scope, therefore, to an examination of how the representative principle came to be applied to various organs of government in the Ottoman Empire. This development was not only one aspect of Westernization but, I would maintain, was also related to political modernization, even as Ward and Rustow define it-for the representative principle contributed, in the terms of their check-list of the indices of political modernization, to the elaboration of a differentiated and specific system of governmental organization, to the growth of secular procedures in making political decisions, to a greater sense of popular identification with the territory of the state, to a wider popular interest in the political system, and to the allocation of political roles on the basis of achievement rather than on the basis of social status. Although the representative principle could not and did not by itself create such results, it was an integral part of the process both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Turkish Republic and in other successor states of the empire. The historian who is interested in determining what actually happened, and how, has to acknowledge that fact.
How, then, did the people of the empire, considered either as the mass of individual subjects or as a collection of groups, come to have representation in one or more organs of government in the nineteenth century?
It is sometimes tempting to assume that Ottoman tradition carried within it the seeds of a principle of representative government. One scholar has argued, for instance, that the Ottoman sultans up to the start of the seventeenth century were essentially elected by the people, though "electors" were in fact high officials, usually a palace clique, and Janissaries.[A. D. Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty, p. 8]. The sultan would thus be the representative of the people, and the ceremony of bilat would confirm this. A theory might be constructed to show that during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a kind of balance of political power within the Ottoman Empire in which ayan, Janissaries, and ulema each acted in some manner as representatives of the people, as popular voices which could operate as checks on the authority of the sultan. Some later nineteenth century Turks argued in this fashion. But such theoretical constructions seem a bit far-fetched, despite the element of truth in them.
It is true, of course, that the idea of representing the views of the people to the ruler was not a new one in Turkish history. Sultans and their ministers heard petitions and sometimes received delegations from the provinces. Inspectors were not infrequently sent out from the capital to hear complaints and check on local officials. Sultans themselves occasionally went on inspection trips and indulged in opinion-sampling. The sultan was not a complete autocrat and not only took counsel of his ministers and advisers but also sometimes called assemblies representing officials, notables, guilds, and Janissaries to discuss important matters. The most common form of a general assembly (meclis-i umumi), or gathering of dignitaries, was however not representative of all the people of the empire, but only of the higher civil, religious, and military officials in and out of office who might be available in the capital at a given moment. It might serve as a check on the actions of the sultan or of the new bureaucracy developed from the time of Mahmud II,but this was the limit of its representative quality. The extraordinary assembly of ayan in 1808 that produced the sened-i ittifak can be considered to embody a representative principle only if one believes that these local magnates, who in fact often shielded the people in their districts from direct control by central authority, were interested in more than their own autonomy; but this is debatable. So, while the central government had various means at its disposal for gathering information, opinion, and counsel, none of these ways seem to have been, even in embryo, a form of the principle of representative government. They might, however, provide traditions that could be appealed to in the future as supporting, by extension, that representative principle.
In the same category of traditions that might be appealed to, although in historical fact they did not really embody representative government, were two from early Islam: the idea that the early caliphate had been elective, and the Koranic injunction to act upon consultation (Sure 3:153 and 42:36). Ottoman reformers were to make frequent reference to these traditions and texts in the 1860's and 1870's. They had early support from some turcophil Europeans. Abdolonyme Ubicini, writing about 1850, found to his satisfaction "all the essentials of modern democracy" in the Koran, and that Islamic law "formally sets forth the sovereignty of the nation, universal suffrage, the principle of election extended to all, even to the governing power...." Ubicini was enthusiastically misreading Islamic history, but he and others like him may have influenced the thinking of some Turkish reformers. Possibly more important, however, to the development of the representative principle was the fact that the Ottoman rulers, while heading the greatest state ever based on lslamic law, had legislated on their own initiative beyond the provisions of the seriat, occasionally even in contradiction to it, so that in the nineteenth century this Turkish (rather than Arab or Muslim) tradition could condone manmade law and imported Western principles. The principle of representative government was to be among these.
If there was in Ottoman tradition any real base for the principle of representative government, it was in the localities at the bottom of the political scale. From early Ottoman days imperial orders were communicated to the towns by convoking the local ayan (magnates), esraf (notables, usually religious), guildmasters, and imams (district clerics), who were, in the words of an unnamed Ottoman chronicler, "the agents and representatives of the people." Whether truly representative or not, some of these men continued to play an important role in Ottoman political history throughout the period of nineteenth century experiments with the representative principle. Similarly, in villages and hamlets (which sometimes evidently coincided with parishes of the non-Muslim millet church organizations) there was a tradition of electing a council of elders (ihtiyar meclisi), along with a headman (kocabasi or muhtar). The traditional forms, however, provided no organizational link between this local representative body and the central government.
One usually thinks of the Ottoman constitution of 1876, with its provision for an elected chamber of deputies, as the real birth of the principle of representative government in the empire. This is true if one will consider only a well-developed national scheme of representation. But the parliament that met under the constitution of 1876 was the culmination of nearly forty years of experiment with the representation idea in one form or another, after the centralizing reforms of Mahmud II had cleared away the rival power of the greatest derebeys and the Janissaries and had weakened the authority of the ulema. The experimentation began with the reforming bureaucrat Resid Pasa, who from diplomatic service in Paris and London had gained considerable knowledge of Western political institutions in the great days of liberal bourgeois government that followed the French Revolution of 1830 and the British Reform Bill of 1832. The reform edict-the Hatt-i Humayun of Gulhane- which Resid caused Sultan Abdulmecid to promulgate in 1839 had in it nothing about representative government, either in principle or in practice. Though it has sometimes been called a constitution, it was not. Resid did not intend to introduce a parliamentary system of government into the Ottoman Empire; he said that Turkey was not ready for such methods, although he was conscious of the constitutions which involved representative assemblies in Moldavia, Wallachia, and Serbia. In this judgment he was quite correct, and the perennial, often effective, opposition of conservatives to his reform program proved the point. The Gulhane hat did, however, both indicate the rationale under which representative institutions might be tried and, through its enunciated principles, help to create an atmosphere that would be favorable. The rationale was the strengthening of the Ottoman Empire, then at a critical period in the face of Great Power pressures from without and rebellion from within. Anything that would bind the empire more closely together and win a greater loyalty of its subjects to the central government would be advantageous and welcome. The hat, furthermore, opened the door officially to new laws and new institutions-to experiment, in fact. It emphasized the rights of all subjects of the sultan in certain matters and the equality of all classes of subjects before the law. It promised good administration. There was no necessity that institutions of representative government would follow from all this, but there was a logical possibility, however small, that they could. And in fact they did.
The beginning of the movement toward representative government did not occur in the central administration at the capital. Mahmud II had, it is true, established the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances, Meclis-i vala-i ahkam-i adliye, at the end of his reign. Under the 1839 hat this council was charged with preparing new laws to carry out the reform. It operated on Western-style rules of parliamentary procedure, and the sultan promised to put into effect the laws it prepared. It was, however, in no way a representative assembly, being composed of appointed high officials
The true start of representative government occurred in the provinces In a ferman of Jariuary 1840 to provincial officials-a ferman which was in part concerned with the reform of tax collection methods by abolishing tax- farming-it was stipulated that in each of the major divisions and subdivisions of the empire there should be an administrative council. Councils in the major centers were to have thirteen members. Of these, six would be appointed government functionaries sitting ex officio. The others, however, would be representatives of the local population: four Muslims and, where there were non-Muslims in the district, the bishop and two headmen (kocabasis). The elected members were to be nominated and chosen by an oddly complex and, from a modern viewpoint, quite unsophisticated system. Nevertheless, the principle of representation was thus established in the major provincial centers. It was established also in the smaller centers, where a council of five was to include two Muslims who were not officials and one Christian notable if the region had Christian inhabitants.
The effectiveness of the local councils, once established, varied from place to place and year to year, and with the quality of the membership and of the local governor. A good many public works projects were initiated and supervised by the councils. But often the councils worked poorly, as many witnesses of the 1840's and 1850's testify. Members used their positions for private gain. Justice was not impartially administered. There was always a Muslim majority on the local council, given the ex officio membership of officials, who were Muslims. The "elected" representatives were often from the same old dominant groups of ayan or Christian kocabasis who pursued their individual and class interests. Members of the ulema on the councils retained great influence. Obviously the councils were not truly representative of the common people, except in the sense that in many localities any one of the ayan on the council may have had a clientele among the people and may have defended their interests in return for contributions of goods and services.
Yet the councils did represent innovation in several ways. One was that the chairmanship was not given to the local kadi, as had earlier been the usage. This was a step toward secularization in government. Furthermore, an electoral principle had now been officially introduced; and the representative principle had also been officially sanctioned, inasmuch as non-Muslims took seats on the council with the same right, in theory, to free discussion of administrative, financial, and judicial matters as their Muslim colleagues. It should be noted, however, that representation was on what may be called a corporate basis-that is, by millet. Delegates were not chosen by a mixed electorate of all sects. That the kadi was no more chairman of the local council was a sign of secularization; but that the representation was of millets, rather than of individuals, tended to reaffirm the religious lines drawn between elements of the Ottoman population.
The value of this initial step toward adopting the representative principle is not lessened by the fact that the motives behind the action were anything but theoretical convictions about popular sovereignty. The fundamental aim was to strengthen a weakened empire, at that moment under attack by Mehmed Ali of Egypt. Vigorous support from the European powers was necessary. They had to be shown that the Ottoman Empire was worth saving and that it was capable of progress. Resid Pasa wanted to show them that the sultan's government could deal justly with, and attract the loyalty of, all its subjects. By attracting that loyalty, he hoped to combat separatism. He was also concerned to strengthen the central government by weakening the influence of local conservatives and magnates, while at the same time providing a means for a local voice. He wanted the provincial councils to act as a check on local magnates, and on the Istanbul-appointed officials as well, in carrying out the reforms now inaugurated-in particular, at the moment, in tax collection. Hence the virtues, in his eyes, of the representative principle. It is possible also that he had in mind examples of representative organs that had been inaugurated elsewhere in the empire, in regions not under the capital's direct control-the privileged Balkan provinces, for instance, or the island of Samos. Possibly the Egyptian example influenced Resid, for local councils, including both Muslim and Christian representatives, had been formed in the 1830's by Ibrahim Pasa in Syria and Mustafa Pasa in Crete.
The representative principle was first employed in the capital in an extraordinary assembly convoked in 1845, although plans for such seem to have been envisioned in a ferman of May 1840. In February of 1845 Sultan Abdulmecid visited the Porte and read a ferman ordering each eyalet to send two delegates to the capital. This was to be a consultative group to express to the government the rural needs and wishes in regard to agricultural improvement, roads, taxes, and the like. It evidently also was to serve as a sounding board for the central administration, as the delegates were to carry back to their localities the news of the central government's benevolent intentions. The provincial notables, both Muslim and non-Muslim, came and did express their wishes, though apparently with some trepidation. They stayed in the capital two months or more. After their departure, so-called "commissions of improvement" were sent to the provinces to oversee reforms, but the results were unimpressive.
The assembly was undoubtedly more than a showpiece for Europe. Whether its convocation was influenced by the experiments of Mehmed Ali in Egypt, particularly by his gathering of some 400 notables-including some village seyhs-in 1829, I do not know. Apparently because of the financial burden of transporting and maintaining the delegates, the experiment was not repeated. It remains unique, the first assembly at all representative of the empire as a whole.
At the end of the Crimean War a new imperial edict of February 18, 1856, confirmed the promises of the 1839 hat, but went far beyond the earlier document in several ways, particularly in emphasizing the equality of all the sultan's subjects of whatever sect. The Hatt-i Humayun of 1856 also introduced, where the hat of 1839 had not, the representative principle. The pressure of the empire's Great Power allies in the victory over Russia was without question responsible for most of this. But most of the terms were in any case in accord with the ideas of Ali Pa,a and Fuad Pasa, who were members of the group that drafted the hat. It seems clear that neither of these statesmen believed that the Ottoman empire could support a representative parliament of any sort. Fuad possibly might have been receptive to such an institution in an undefined future; Ali certainly would not have been. But both statesmen evidently favored, like their former master Resid Pasa, the widening of some sorts of representative institutions. Thus the Hatt-i Humayun-of 1856 mentioned in three separate places the application of the representative principle to various Ottoman political units: first, the existing provincial councils should be reorganized to provide for fair choice of delegates and free voting within them. Second, the non-Muslim millet organizations were to be revised so that laymen would have a voice in control of their temporal affairs. Third, representatives of the non-Muslim millets were to be added to the Meclis-i vale-i ahkam-i adliye whenever matters affecting the interests of all Ottoman subjects were being considered.
These promises of the Islahat ferman, as Turks called the 1856 edict, were carried out within a few years. Actually within a few months some representatives of the principal non-Muslim millets were appointed to the Meclis-i vala, which had now become in effect a court of higher appeal rather than a body to draft new legislation. The men appointed were, however, from the leading non-Muslim families of Istanbul, and were already closely attached by interest and employment to the Porte. One Armenian so appointed, for instance, was Fuad Pasa's personal sarraf and a farmer of port duties. He and his non-Muslim colleagues were representative only insofar as they were technically members of the chief non-Muslim millets. But the principle of such representation was thereafter retained for this body and its successors. It furnishes the first example of the representative principle applied to a permanent organ of the central government.
Reorganization of the non-Muslim millet structures was harder to effect because of the opposition by clergy and certain small groups of influential notables to any weakening of their traditionally dominant position. But for some years there had been stirrings within the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities as Western ideas spread among them, and as tradesmen and some middle and upper bourgeoise struggled against the control of the entrenched elite. The Porte applied pressure to hasten the reform being prepared by commissions set up within each of the three millets. Between 1862 and 1865 all achieved new written constitutions-the Porte called them regulations or laws (nizamat). In each case the power of the clergy in civil matters was weakened, and for each millet a general assembly (meclis-i umumi) was created which contained elected lay delegates. Although provincial delegates were included, the provinces were grossly under-represented, while the Istanbul region had a disproportionately high number of delegates. The representative principle was, however, now officially entrenched in a written constitution for each millet. This reform affected approximately nine million souls scattered over the empire-nearly a third of the empire's population if the self-governing territories of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Serbia are excluded.
It is quite unlikely that Ottoman statesmen intended that the Armenian reorganization be "an experiment in constitutions" and "a model for later use," as Ismail Kemal Bey later claimed. But the millet reorganization undoubtedly helped to familiarize some Ottoman statesmen with the concept of a representative assembly embodied in a written constitution. And within a few years Namik Kemal, leading spirit of the Young Ottomans, was to refer to the assemblies of the Christians as possible models for a chamber of deputies. There is also a possibility that the vilayet reform of 1864 was affected by the Armenian constitution of the previous year.
In any case, in 1864, just when the millet reforms were being completed, a new scheme of provincial government was worked out. This was the vilayet system, so-called because of the new name given to the provinces. Efforts since the Hatt-i Hu'mayun of ~856 to improve local government and the functioning of the partly representative provincial councils had been sporadic. Tours by inspectors and a Balkan inspection trip by the grand vezir, Kibrisli Mehmed Pasa, had achieved something by way of improving the councils, but only by ad hoc methods such as dissolving corrupt ones and requiring new elections. In 1864 a complete overhaul of regulations on the organization of provincial government was attempted, and a slight further revision was made in 1867. The new scheme obviously owed much to the French example of departement-arrondissement-canton-commune, which emerged in the Ottoman law as vilayet-sancak-kaza-kariye (or nahiye).
The representative principle was incorporated in three separate institutions set up under this law: in the administrative council (meclis-i idare) in each vilayet, sancak, and kaza; in the local courts; and in a general assembly (meclis-i umumi) created for each vilayet. For the administrative councils and the courts the electoral system provided was immensely complex and indirect. Only the members of the kaza council were elected by something approaching a direct ballot. The whole law was nevertheless suffused with the idea of representation. It was still corporate representation-by millet-in most cases. The administrative councils of the vilayet and sancak were to have, in addition to their ex officio members, two elected Muslims and two elected non-Muslims The couns were to have three elected Muslims and three elected non-Muslims. The vilayet general assembly was to be composed of two elected Muslims and two elected non-Muslims from each sancak. Only in the kaza administrative councils was the religion of the elected members left unspecified. At the bottom of the ladder, the council of elders (ihtiyar meclisi) of each commune was presumably homogeneous in religion, whether Muslim or Christian.
The vilayet law, with changes and additions, had a long life. Its operation was attended with many difficulties, and complaints about it were numerous. The balance it attempted between centralization and decentralization- between Istanbul-appointed officials and local representatives-could breed friction, inefficiency, or collusion. The representative element within the system was often, depending on the locality and the appointed officials at any given moment, more shadow than substance. But there is no question that the law itself was fundamental in establishing the representative principle in Ottoman government and in linking it to an electoral process, however indirect. Some Turkish historians, notably Ahmed Rasim and Ali Fuad, have taken literally a statement in Midhat Pasa's memoirs that the new law was intended by Ali Pasa and Fuad Pasa as "a preface to a chamber of deputies." This seems, in the case of Ali Pasa, most unlikely, and doubtful in the case of Fuad Pasa. It is possible that Midhat Pasa, who helped to prepare the law, had some such idea in mind at so early a date. The aim of the law seemed to be simply to secure better government, by a combination of some popular voice with central administrative authority in each locality. It is, however, undeniable that when the constitution of 1876 was being prepared, the electoral law that accompanied it was based squarely on the electoral provisions of the vilayet law.
The first connection between the provincial assemblies and an organ of the central government was soon made when the former Meclis-i vale was replaced by the Council of State (Sura-i devlet) in 1868. The Council of State, now the major law-drafting body of the empire, was to meet each year with three or four delegates from the general assembly of each vilayet and to discuss with these delegates the desires set down in memoranda sent from the vilayet. This marks the first link between elected provincial representative bodies and a permanent central body which operated on well-defined rules of parliamentary procedure and was itself partly representative of the peoples of the empire. The Council of State was itself also more truly representative of the peoples of the empire than its predecessor, the Meclis-i vale had been. Of the thirty-eight original members appointed in 1868, nearly one quarter were provincial notables. Nearly one-third, including some of these notables, were non-Muslims, though the proportions were all askew in relation to millet population totals: four were Armenian Catholics, drawn from a tiny minority group; three were Greeks; two were Jews; one was Armenian Gregorian; and one was Bulgarian. This was still, therefore, corporate representation.
Thus by 1868 there was a considerable history, stretching over nearly thirty years, of experiment with institutions of both local and central government which embodied the representative principle. All the institutions worked imperfectly, some very poorly indeed, and the representative principle was more often breached than observed. No one could maintain that the common people of the empire were genuinely represented, or that such elections as existed were not as a rule tightly controlled by officials or local notables. Yet the representative principle was, in several ways, firmly embedded in Ottoman law. Some of the institutions created might contribute to a further extension of the representative principle, even to providing a base for the creation of a parliament. Occasional Turkish commentators have seen the foundation for a parliament in the Council of State. Midhat Pasa, who was its first president, was probably developing ideas in this direction by 1868. As Fuad Pasa reportedly said of Midhat, "This man sees in the parliamentary regime a remedy for all evils, without suspecting that politics rebels against panaceas even more than medicine." Most observers, if they saw any virtue at all in the Council of State, were more likely to agree with Ahmed Midhat that it was "a school for the training of statesmen."
By the late 1860's, however, there were new influences urging the development of representative institutions, and specifically envisioning the creation of a chamber of deputies of some sort. Among these were parliamentary examples within the Ottoman Empire itself: in the United Principalities, which had now in effect become Rumania; in Egypt, where a "constitution" had been issued in 1866; in Tunis, with its constitutional experiment of 1861 to 1864. Perhaps Napoleon lII's "liberal empire" of the later 1860's had influence. There were also voices of critics of the Tanzimat regime. Some of these critics who had held high office, like Mustafa Fazil Pasa, Halil Serif Pasa, and Tunuslu Hayreddin Pasa, wrote political treatises which advocated some sort of a representative chamber as a curb on autocratic government. The most effective of these critics were the New Ottomans, who in their newspapers and from their places of exile began similarly to advocate a representative assembly. Undoubtedly the ablest of them was Namik Kemal, who supported the doctrine of popular sovereignty and argued for a meclis-i sura-i ummet-a national assembly. He argued also that Islam offered the necessary basis on which to build, though he drew on French and English examples. Interesting as it is to try to follow the convolutions of thought of the individualistic New Ottomans, this is not possible here. The point is that, in their view, the institutions already in existence that embodied the representative principle had not gone far enough, had not proved effective, or were simply a coating of whitewash for an autocratic regime.
By the 1870's a growing dissatisfaction with the spendthrift and rather capricious personal government of Sultan Abdulaziz, coupled with a concern about lack of effective resistance to European, especially Russian and pan Slav, pressures, gave new impetus to planning for representative government on the part of a few statesmen. One plan went off at a tangent, in an effort to hold the empire together. This was the proposal advanced by Midhat Pasa and Halil Serif Pasa in 1872 that the Ottoman Empire should become federalized like the new German Empire, the initial objective being to stop the progress of Rumania and Serbia toward independence. Strong opposition by these vassal states and Russia ended flirtation with the plan. Had it gone far enough, it might have resulted in representation of states on a federal council, after the German model.
The other plan looked to the creation of some sort of chamber of deputies. When it was first discussed in secret among a few Ottoman ministers, in 1873, it did not get far. But the idea grew more attractive, particularly after the inability of the government to deal effectively with the Balkan revolts of 1875 became apparent. Amid the growing discontent with the government, more people turned to the idea of a parliament as a remedy, although frequently they did not understand what a parliament was. The most enlightened, however, did, including some genuine conservatives. A symbol of this discontent was the Manifesto of the Muslim patriots, issued annonymously in March, 1876. It argued that the cure for financial irresponsibility, for autocratic government, and for European pressure and intervention was a consultative assembly which might begin with limited powers, but which might eventually grow to be somewhat like the English parliament. The assembly should represent all races and creeds in the empire.
The culmination of the agitation came in the same year with the deposition of two sultans and the initiation of a process of working out a constitution. This process, which consumed more than half a year, with interruptions, naturally provoked much debate over the nature of representation. The basic decsions were three: that there should be a chamber of deputies; that all members of the chamber should be elected, one deputy for each 50,000 males, rather than in part appointed (though the senate members were to be appointed); and that each member of the chamber was to consider himself as representative of all Ottomans, not only of his electoral district and, by implication, not only of his own sect. In the process, the point was won that all Ottoman subjects were to be represented, not Muslims only. Argument on this became crucial on two occasions, but each time the proponents of an all-Muslim assembly were beaten down. This was underscored by the provision decided upon and written into the constitution, that all Ottoman subjects were to be styled "Osmanli" and were to be equal before the law and equally admissible to public office. Only once in the constitution was the millet distinction retained, and this was in a provision for elected councils of each religious community in the kaza to care for charitable funds. The constitution was promulgated on December 23,1876. It makes a significant transition in the history of the development of the representative principle from a corporate or millet to an individual base.
The transition was not, however, at once complete. In order to convene a chamber of deputies as soon as possible, and so try to ward off imminent European intervention, a provisional electoral law was drawn up by the constitution- drafting committee even before the constitution itself was complete. The provisional electoral law was based on the vilayet law. Members of the administrative councils in the vilayets, sancaks, and kazas-themselves chosen on a millet basis-were to serve as electors for the deputies. The Porte was to allocate a proper number of deputies to each vilayet, whose governor would decide how to divide the quota between Muslims and non-Muslims. So the members of both the first and second sessions of the chamber that met in Istanbul in 1877-78 were elected as corporate representatives.
Steps were taken to change this situation when the first chamber met. One of the bills it debated and passed was a new electoral law which did not take religion into consideration. Christian deputies tried to amend the bill by specifying a fixed ratio of Muslim and non-Muslim deputies, but the motion failed. Sultan Abdulhamid did not at once promulgate this new electoral law, and in view of his suspension of the chamber for thirty years, his failure to do so turned out to be of no immediate importance. But the new law, and with it the individual base for the representative principle, triumphed in the end. The law was resurrected and used in 1908. With amendments, it was used for elections throuphout the Young Turk period thereafter, and for all elections used the Turkish Republic through 1939.
The constitution of 1876 did not, of course, bring into existence representative government as that term is usually understood in the West today. Under that constitution the sultan retained such broad powers as to continue to be sovereign; the people, though they had representatives in the chamber, were not. Ministers were not responsible to the elected chamber, but to the sultan alone. These plain truths should not, however, lead one to underestimate the importance of the constitution and of the chamber that met under its terms. Constitution and chamber represented an important step in the process whereby People might ultimately constitute a balance against Palace and Porte. The chambers of 1877 and 1878 proved this. Despite the peculiarities and official pressures in the elections in many districts, the deputies who were chosen exhibited an amazing degree of independent thought and constructive criticism of government. Their debates were for the most part on a high plane. The individual deputies only occasionally spoke as Christians or Muslims; in general they spoke as representatives of Ottoman interests. The experiment in representation was, in fact, so successful that Sultan Abdulhamid, whose ideas on proper government ran in a different channel, felt obliged to close the parliament down.
lt is possible for a cynical realist to take the viewpoint that all this experimentation with the representative principle was a sham and to maintain further that the true needs of the Ottoman Empire were justice, efficient administra tion, and economic prosperity. This was the view of many conservative Turks, including enlightened ones like Ahmed Vefik Pasa, in the nineteenth century. It was also a view often expressed by Westerners Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador in Istanbul, told a young subordinate of his in 1855: "Above all, avoid those [Turks] who praise European systems ot government, European ideas, European laws or customs. No honest Turk will ever pretend to admire any of these. If ever Easterns get imbued with Liberal ideas of government their own doom is sealed...." 4There is enough truth in such views to make them appealing. But it is also true that representation and other forms of progress are not necessarily mutually exclusive; that imperfections in representative systems have not throughout history been characteristic of Eastern peoples alone; and that states do not develop their institutions from theoretical blueprints but by a process of growth as opportunities arise and leadership is available. Despite its many imperfections, the representative principle seems to have taken root in Turkey in the nineteenth century and to have been capable of growth thereafter. The parliament of 1877-78 was an important milestone in this process, and it had precedents to build on that extended back at least to 1840.