A what? Lebanonization of Turkey?

Calls to beware 'Lebanonization' echo through Turkish political discourse today, conjuring old ghosts of division and collapse. But these anxieties rest on a misreading of Ottoman history.

The fear of fragmentation and the impulse to negate difference are legacies of Turkey’s founding moment, shaped in the aftermath of World War I and hardened during the War of Independence.

These anxieties became embedded in the early Republic’s state-building project. Since then, the national psyche has wavered between an aspiration to “be Western” and a dread of turning into something else—once Iran, sometimes Malaysia, nowadays Lebanon. Beneath this tension lies a rigid understanding of modernity, one that claims Turkey’s destiny is Westward-looking while overlooking a deeper historical reality. That the Ottoman Empire was as much a Balkan and European polity as it was an Islamic one. This selective view of the Ottoman past as ‘backward’ has left behind a residue of misconceptions and inherited fears. Of pluralism, of recognition, and of anything that might blur the illusion of unity. Or in the words of Erdogan ‘one flag, one state, one nation.’

Anxieties about becoming Iran or Malaysia have long reflected fears over the erosion of Turkey’s strict secular order by Islamist movements. Over the past two decades, it was Erdoğan’s AKP with its Islamist roots that brought these concerns back to the surface. Yet while the public fixated on the prospect of turning into Tehran or Kuala Lumpur, the country drifted elsewhere entirely. What emerged instead was an oligarchic one-party regime that bears more resemblance to Putin’s Russia. A grim irony.

Nowadays, the debate centres on the idea of “Lebanonization,” sparked by three key statements.

The first came from the United States’ ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, who, in an interview with Turkey’s state news agency Anadolu Ajansı, praised the Ottoman millet system as a model of coexistence among different religions and ethnic groups. “For me, İzmir is an example where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together,” he said. “A place where these communities were interwoven. This is the kind of situation that should exist throughout the world and in the Middle East. I believe Turkey can be the focal point of all this, as we’ve seen in Syria. Much of what has happened in Syria is thanks to Turkey and its leadership.” He recalled that the millet system had allowed diverse groups to maintain their presence within the imperial administration for centuries.

Some in the opposition interpreted this as a veiled threat. For example the head of the Atatürkist Thought Association, argued that Barrack’s real aim was “to turn Turkey into a religion-based state.” Retired Ambassador Onur Öymen added that the millet system had led to the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, arguing, “The groups that benefited from the millet system, especially under the influence of the French Revolution, broke away and rebelled against the Ottomans.”

This is a deeply flawed reading of late Ottoman history. It disregards the pivotal modernization and centralization efforts of the 19th century, particularly the Tanzimat reforms, that sparked resistance among previously autonomous groups. It was not the millet system that created disorder, but rather the efforts of the Ottoman state to reorganize and streamline its military and bureaucracy. This deserves its own article. For now, it is enough to highlight how these misconceptions feed the current political discourse.

The second trigger came from Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the nationalist party MHP, long known for casting minority demands as existential threats to the Turkish sovereignty. A few weeks ago, he declared—allegedly off the record—that the President of the Republic should have two deputies: one Kurdish, one Alevi. The reaction was swift from the opposition benches. They warned that Turkey was on the verge of “Lebanonization”: power shared along ethnic and sectarian lines, which they claimed would shatter national unity.

At first glance, the comment seemed bizarre coming from Bahçeli because, like I said, he has spent his career opposing any recognition of Kurdish or Alevi identity. It was stranger still when placed alongside President Erdoğan’s speech that same week, delivered after the symbolic PKK disarmament ceremony in Sulaymaniyah. Erdoğan invoked a narrative of unity of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs once again “drawing the lines of history together.” Istanbul and Damascus were named “shared cities.” “If we are united, we exist,” he declared. “When divided, we are defeated.” He invoked Malazgirt, the War of Independence, a sacred alliance stretching from Anatolia to Jerusalem.

Taken together—Barrack’s nostalgia for the millet system, Bahçeli’s structural gesture, and Erdoğan’s civilizational overture—the fear of national fragmentation was reawakened. Secularists, hardline Kemalists, and segments of the opposition media rushed to warn that introducing identity politics into the executive would trigger factional paralysis, foreign meddling, and institutional decay. As if identity politics hadn’t already shaped the Republic from its very beginning.

Just like the earlier fears of becoming “like Iran” or “like Malaysia,” the current panic over Lebanonization and the millet system is misplaced and worse, it reveals a historical illiteracy about 19th century Middle East.

Let me try to explain:

A French post card showing four Christian men from Mount Lebanon (the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate at that time — late 1800s) with their full set of weapons. Src: MidEastImage.

In 1860, Mount Lebanon and Damascus saw a wave of brutal sectarian conflict between Druze and Maronite communities. This violence was not spontaneous. It emerged from years of European missionary activity, social dislocation from Ottoman centralization reforms, and the unequal integration of these regions into global trade networks. When thousands of Christians were killed in Damascus and entire quarters burned, the Ottoman state appeared unable to govern its own provinces, opening the door for European intervention.

What followed was an imperial compromise. Under French and British pressure, the Ottomans agreed to a new arrangement: the Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon. A Christian governor, approved by both the Porte (Istanbul) and European powers—would rule a province where sectarian identity was formally recognized through communal councils. What was meant as a temporary fix to contain violence became the architecture of confessional governance.

This system persisted under the French Mandate and was later enshrined in Lebanon’s 1943 National Pact and the Taif Agreement. Lebanon became a state where identity was fixed in law. The presidency was reserved for a Maronite, the prime ministership for a Sunni, and the speakership of parliament for a Shia. Parliamentary seats were apportioned by sect. Political parties mirrored sectarian blocs. Even in peacetime, governance remained hostage to communal arithmetic.

The Ottoman state, by contrast, had managed to reassert its authority in Damascus. It prosecuted those responsible for the violence, some of whom were hanged in public, paid reparations, and oversaw the reconstruction of Christian quarters. The return of exiled Muslims in 1866 helped reduce tensions. Energetic governors like Mehmet Rashid Pasha invested in infrastructure and rural development, giving Damascenes a renewed stake in the imperial order. The late 1860s were a time of effective reform; an example of Ottoman modernity achieved through co-option rather than imposed from above.

So in today’s debate, when Turkish pundits invoke Lebanon, they are invoking what happens when the nation is overwhelmed by multitudes of identities. But they are mistaking the form of Lebanese governance for its failures. They confuse a historical settlement under imperial duress with the mere fact of recognizing diversity. They forget what Lebanon was before 1860, and what the Ottoman state tried to do in response.

As Oxford historian Eugene Rogan has long argued, sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire was instrumentalized by European powers looking for excuses to intervene, and by local minorities hoping to attract their support. Centuries of communal coexistence were overwritten by a short-term logic of sectarian gain.

It was not Ottoman backwardness nor the millet system that produced confessional Lebanon. It was the post-World War I order and French colonial engineering that fixed identity in law and fragmented politics along communal lines.

Similarly, the millet system may not be an ideal model, but it is hardly the most dangerous. It certainly was not a tool for “divide and rule.” If anything, it offered a form of legal pluralism long before modern liberal states embraced multiculturalism.

Lebanonization is the wrong frame, I must say. The real danger in Turkey has never been too much recognition of identity. It has been systematic denial. Kurdishness was criminalized. Alevi rituals were excluded. Languages, cultures, and beliefs were assimilated into the fiction of a monolithic Turkish identity. What emerged was not a confessional state, but a state that punished divergence.

Bahçeli’s comment, bizarre as it was, does not signal a Lebanese-style pact. It merely inserted the names of two excluded communities into a symbolic formula, then left it suspended. Erdoğan’s narrative, by contrast, fits into a longer ideological arc—imperial nostalgia reframed for a domestic audience. Turks, Kurds, Arabs shaping history together. A rhetorical unity. Neither position signals a Lebanese future. Both are expressions of a deeply Turkish habit which is the symbolic inclusion of difference while denying its institutional reality.

As for Barrack’s praise of the millet system, it does not point to some grand American design. The U.S. no longer operates with that kind of vision. Those days are over. It responds to facts on the ground, often through CENTCOM rather than through real estate moguls on diplomatic adventures.