Young Turks

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The Young Turks (Ottoman Turkish: ژون تركلر, romanized: Jön Türkler, from French: Jeunes-Turcs; also كنج تركلر Genç Türkler) was a broad opposition movement in the late Ottoman Empire agitating against Sultan Abdul Hamid II's absolutist regime. The most powerful organization of the movement, and the most conflated, was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), though its goals, strategies, and membership continuously morphed throughout Abdul Hamid's reign. By the 1890s, the Young Turks were mainly a loose and contentious network of intelligentsia exiled in Western Europe and Egypt that made a living by selling their newspapers to secret subscribers.

Included in the opposition movement was a mosaic of ideologies, from democrats, liberals, decentralists, secularists, social Darwinists, technocrats, constitutional monarchists, and nationalists, to name a few. Despite being called the Young Turks, the group was of an ethnically diverse background; in addition to Turks, Albanian, Aromenian, Arab, Armenian, Azeri, Circassian, Greek, Kurdish, and Jewish members were plentiful.^{[a][1][2][3][4]} Besides membership in outlawed political committees, other avenues of opposition existed in the ulama, Sufi lodges, and masonic lodges. By and large, the Young Turks favored taking power away from Yıldız Palace for constitutional governance. Many coup d'état attempts associated with Young Turk networks occurred during the Hamidian era, all of which ended in failure.

In 1906, the Paris based CUP fused with the Macedonia based Ottoman Freedom Society under its own banner. The Macedonian Unionists prevailed against Sultan Abdulhamid II in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.^[5] With this revolution, the Young Turks helped to establish the Second Constitutional Era in the same year, ushering in an era of multi-party democracy for the first time in the country's history.^[6] However following events which proved disastrous for the Ottoman Empire as a body-politic, such as the 31 March Incident, Balkan Wars, and 1913 coup, the country fell under the domination of a radicalized CUP. With the strength of the constitution and parliament broken, the committee ruled the empire in a dictatorship. Dragging the Empire into World War I, the genocides against Ottoman Christians were masterminded within the committee, principally Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Şükrü Kaya, and others.

The term Young Turk is now used to describe an insurgent trying to take control of a situation or organization by force or political maneuver,^[7] and various groups in different countries have been named Young Turks because of their rebellious or revolutionary nature.

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