European Legal Doctrines on Intervention and the Status of the Ottoman Empire within the 'Family of Nations' Throughout the Nineteenth Century
This article examines the status of the Ottoman Empire in the 'Family of Nations' throughout the nineteenth century. I tackle this broad question through the prism of legal doctrines on intervention in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire as put forward by European scholars, for I believe that they reveal something about European conceptions of the 'Family of Nations' and of international law. Western international lawyers paid particular attention to and constructed a jurisprudence around allegedly urgent cases, during which violent counterinsurgency campaigns undertaken by Ottoman authorities led to disturbances or massacres. In turn, these led to collective and military interventions in the Ottoman Empire by European powers. The jurisprudence of legal scholars often concerned intervention on the part of European powers in Greece (1827 1833) Lebanon (1880 1861) Crete (1866 1867 and in the late 1890s) and Macedonia (1905 1908) Their doctrines also encompassed famous cases of non intervention, such as the 'Bulgarian horrors' of the mid 1870s and the massacre of the Ottoman Armenians in the 1890s and 1900s. These interventions would subsequently be labelled interventions d'humanite, or 'humanitarian interventions' In the elegant formulation of Eliana Augusti,