The decline of the Ottoman Empire was rooted in inevitability, so the simplistic and easy thinking goes.
All empires contain the seed of their own destruction, from Rome to Austria-Hungary - it could never have been otherwise with Constantinople, based on the evidence of everything that had been and gone before it.
If this is true (and I suspect it might not be, but am nevertheless interested in following the premise to its conclusion) then it is a statement not just about Turks, and their separate existence outside the Ottoman bubble, but a statement about psychology, and humanity.
I think of Croatia, and the war that nation underwent in the 1840s with Hungary. The latter's suppression of Croatian culture and tradition was too much of an insult to bear - indeed, the local language was not even used in Croatia's parliament until 1847. Amongst other things, then, the Croats fought for their own identity - or, to borrow the term favoured by Misha Glenny, their national consciousness was at stake.
Glenny feels that, at that point, the Serbian sense of self was more sharply-defined: they had at least written epic poems about the time when their golden age ended, when the battle of Kosovo Polje was lost in the 14th century. Hence, the Croatians had fought for an idea which was not yet fully in bloom - the lightbulb of inspiration had gone off collectively, but the emerging conclusions of what it means to be a Croat had not yet been realised.
To be a nation, then, there must be a reference point, real or imagined, in the past around which the idea of what it is to be a Croat coalesces, and they had very little.
The opposite extreme of this is the Ottoman Empire itself, which has so many connections to a glorious history that we become overwhelmed. The Croatians had no narrative; the Ottomans had too many. Which outstanding achievement should we select to represent ourselves that will have relevance for the vast and disparate lands we call ours? What one characteristic unites one in Sarajevo, one in Bursa, one in the Maghreb, one in Yerevan?
If there is no narrative, then the Croatian state and the Ottoman state are doomed. It is a requirement, then, of a nation that the idea of it is upheld by myth, perpetuated by heroes, else it falls down.
Might we conclude, then, that the fragmenting of the globe into arbitrary, bounded regions we call countries is unnatural, and goes against our instincts, if it needs the ballast of a plotline to maintain it? Instead of clumping five million people in the western Balkans together, and calling their territory Croatia, might there be another way of labelling humans, one that doesn't condemn them from birth? The question will most likely keep me awake tonight.
