Was There a Civil War in Anatolia between the Ottoman Collapse in World War I and the Establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923?

Abstract

For most Turks the emergence of the Republic of Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire involved a four-year period of national struggle/milli mücadele. In the version of events canonised by Ataturk's October 1927 Nutuk speech to the Turkish parliament the expression civil war is not used. Yet the range of adversaries he depicts, including the Ottoman Palace suggests that there were many types of wars being fought in Anatolia in those years. This article suggests that the term civil war can be applied to those years and discusses historical research that says so. Not only was the war with the Palace an inchoate civil war over the Ottoman Succession, there are strong European parallels with the Turkish experience of imperial collapse, ethnic conflict, partition and state formation between 1918 and 1923. To draw the connections we need to think of civil war in a ‘layered’ way and the latter part of the article justifies such an approach.