Suny: That is the central question of my forthcoming book. There is a tendency on the part of some scholars - particularly Armenians - not to try to explain the genocide because – “why do you need to explain it? These are Turks, this is what they do, and this is the kind of regime it was.” Or, slightly more sophisticated – “oh, it's Christians and Muslims – they are inevitably in conflict.” Or — “it's clashes of nationalism.” Now for me, religion, nationalism, the nature of Turkish culture, Ottoman society, the state - all of these are the questionsto be asked, not the answers. That is, they need to be investigated. The way I would explain this genocide, and I think it has relevance for other kinds of ethnic cleansings and mass killings, is that the regime developed what I call an “affective disposition” - that is, an emotional understanding of who the enemy was. They constructed the Armenians as an existential threat to the Ottoman Empire and to the Turkish nation, what they conceived as the Turkish nation at that time. I try to explain the origins of this affective disposition - this mental universe - in which emotion, fear, anger, and resentment combined to create an image of Armenians. Armenians originally had been thought of as a loyal millet, but after 1878 the Armenians became an instrument of certain foreign powers to intervene in the Ottoman regime and internal policy — the Ottomans began to see them as a threat.
Remind us what happened in 1878.
This was the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The Russians beat the Turks, and they were going to impose reforms on the Ottoman Empire, and that was the beginning of the new “Armenian question” that continued right up to the war. Now, some people would say "well, you don't need to go into emotions - it was a perfectly strategic, rational choice. The Armenians were actually a threat in World War I, and the Turks decided to get rid of them for national security reasons.” My view is that's an insufficient explanation. Why did they see them as a threat? A threat is always a perception. It's about emotion, it's about understanding, feeling, sentiment, and construction - both cognitive and emotional construction. I'm taking a step backwards to see how they got into the position that they could imagine people this way and then carry out the worst possible kinds of things. I’m bringing emotion into it.
By some accounts, Armenians sided with Russia at the beginning of World War I —was that something the Ottomans could point to that the Armenians were a threat?
This is the problem. You can't say the Armenians sided with Russia. That is what the Ottomans would say, and they perceived that. So there are people who try to justify what the Ottomans did to the Armenians by saying they were with the enemy. What I try to show in the book is that the overwhelming majority of Ottoman Armenians wanted to stay in the Empire, but they also wanted reforms to protect them and allow them to prosper. They wanted Kurdish predations against Armenians to be contained, for example. The Ottoman government was opposed to these reforms, but ultimately had to agree to them in February 1914. When the war came, though, they used the first opportunity to get rid of them. I’ll give you an example. As the Ottomans are going to war, they mobilize the population. Hundreds and thousands of young Armenian men are drafted and join the Ottoman army. A few desert and go over to the Russian side. Some prominent leaders go over to the Russian side. The Russians form Armenian voluntary units on the Caucasian side against the Ottomans, but the Turks see this as treachery and demobilize hundreds of thousands of Armenian soldiers, take their weapons and uniforms away, turn them into labor battalions, and eventually murder them. So it's a very different thing. It's not that there wasn't sympathy among some for Russia, but there was also no particular love for Russia. Russians didn't like the Armenian nationalist revolutionaries any more than the Turks did so they were persecuting them as well. The Armenians were in an unfortunate position - in Persia, in Russia, and in Turkey. They were like the Kurds today.
