the beginnings of ottoman-german partnership - Bilkent University

Britain and Russia, all of which were rejected. The Ottomans, however, did have
reasons to prefer Germany once they decided that they needed a big brother in order
to survive. There were common concerns and coincidents of interests between
Germany and the Ottoman Empire, as well as increased rivalries between Germany
and the Entente Powers before the First World War. 261 One cannot claim, therefore,
that the Ottomans could have avoided the war by only analyzing the last three
months before their entry into the war.
This study concludes that several factors influenced the course of relations
between Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The Russian threat, the Baghdad
Railroad Project, the German military reform missions and the German ambassadors
in the Ottoman Empire, the friendship between Wilhelm II and Abdulhamid II, and
the Young Turk sympathy in the military circles for the German militarism were the
factors shaping the German-Ottoman partnership. However, actually, both countries’
own state interests, and theirs ways and choices of conducting foreign policy defined
the degree of the partnership between the two states. Most of the Turkish sources
emphasize one or few of the factors, and try to depict the Ottoman Empire’s entry
into war as an eventual result of those factors. Historians like Gottlieb, Earle,
Trumpener and Weber focus on the separate parts of the picture. Foreigner or
Turkish alike, the historians tend to evaluate the period after the signing of the treaty
of alliance as the continuation of the previous periods. This thesis tries to cover a
broader picture of the relations between Germany and the Ottoman Empire and
concludes that the German-Ottoman relations had different characteristics before and
after their treaty of alliance. Before the alliance the Ottoman Empire tried to ally
261 Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire: 1914-1918, pp. 5-6. “…It is generally agreed
today that the frictions between Germany and the Entente Powers in and along the edges of the
Ottoman Empire contributed substantially to the general atmosphere of distrust which made the World
War I possible.”
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