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estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 59-79
riod of thorough institutional reforms, known as Tanzimat, whose goal was
to modernize the State to face the long decline of the Empire’s relative power
on the European stage. One of the key constituents of the process of “reorga-
nization” or “restructuring” (whence the meaning of the word “Tanzimat”),
was the improved legal status of its non-Muslim subjects, enacted with the
direct participation of European powers in the drafting of their decrees – the
Edict of Gülhane of 1839 and the Reform Edict of 1856. It is important to bear
in mind that, although the Ottoman Empire had become a recognized actor
in international society and has never been directly colonized or completely
dominated by European powers, its very survival depended on a delicate in-
terplay between autonomy, reforms and international alliances, and its status
as a “second-class member” of the European Concert derives both from its
military and economic fragility and from the European balance of power
(Austria-Hungary, United Kingdom, France, Prussia / Germany, and Russia).
The Tanzimat period (1839-1876), the subsequent period of authoritar-
ianism under Sultan Abdulhamid (r. 1876-1909), as well as the turbulent peri-
od of the Young Turks Revolution (1909) and the First World War can be seen
as permeated by the interdependence of international relations and the Ot-
toman political system. As symbolic and economic exchanges with the West
deepened, structures and attitudes towards modernity, as well as political
currents, that emerged during this period would inform future generations.
In this context, interreligious relations are a privileged locus, a
“prism” for a reading of the modernization process and creation of mod-
ern states in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Issues
that arose during or immediately after this “long 19th century” are at the
root of modernization and state-building processes in Europe (Balkans,
Central and Eastern Europe) and the Middle East and North Africa.
In this article, we will deal specically with one of the main vec-
tors of autonomy vis à vis the central administration of the Empire, con-
stituting a crucial and sensitive feature of the internal and international
political landscape of the Ottoman Empire – the issue of non-Muslim
“minorities”. We shall rst briey sketch the symbolic and institutional
eld that dened these relations within the scope of the religious and le-
gal practices of Islam and regarding the political reforms of the Ottoman
Empire in the 19th century. The traditional hierarchical form of social
and political organization in the Empire will undergo profound changes
during the 19th century, under European inuence and internal reforms,
in the shadow of monumental economic and geopolitical challenges.
We shall then turn our attention to two case studies: the seemingly
inconsequential
5
and often overlooked establishment of the Melkite millet
in 1848 and the momentous sectarian conicts in Mount Lebanon in 1860 as
events that both reected and helped shape the course of modernization and
integration with the Western international/economic order. In both cases
we witness the dialectic between integration, conict, and autonomy, in a
delicate negotiation between communities and local authorities, the center
of power in Constantinople, and the European powers directly or indirectly
involved in this process. Finally, we conclude considering the impacts, con-
tinuities, and ruptures established in this process, which still echo in the so-
cial, political, and symbolic structure in some countries in the Middle East.
5. In hindsight, one could easily dismiss
and explain away the Melkite union
with the Roman Catholic Church and
its subsequent recognition as an auto-
nomous millet by the Ottoman Empire
as simply a result of European political,
economic and religious encroachment
upon native religious communities,
just one in a series of Churches in the
Middle East that split and united with
Rome (whence its slightly derogatory
epithet “Uniate Churches”). However, as
we shall endeavor to demonstrate, the
Melkite case presents its own cultural
and religious peculiarities, which cannot
be wholly subsumed into an economic
or political explanation of foreign
influence. Local and regional dynamics
(in politics, economy, and society) must
be given pride of place side by side
broader Mediterranean confluences
with the European powers. Moreover,
the development of the Melkite Church
and its community has been taken as a
mere backdrop for other, more momen-
tous developments, such as the creation
of autocephalous (i.e., autonomous)
Orthodox Churches in the Balkans in the
latter half of the 19th century.