Zeroth Estate: Journalism as a Constitutive Laboratory of Sovereignty in the Ottoman Collapse of 1919
This article introduces the "Zeroth Estate" framework to argue that during the 1919 Ottoman collapse, journalism functioned as a pre-institutional generator of sovereignty by synchronizing divergent temporal regimes of deceleration and acceleration across Istanbul and Anatolia, thereby constituting political authority through discourse prior to institutional consolidation.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the study of how societies function, there is a long-standing idea that the press acts as a watchdog, watching over the government to ensure it behaves correctly. This concept, often called the "Fourth Estate," assumes that a stable government already exists and that the news media simply reports on it, checks its power, or holds it accountable. However, history occasionally presents moments when the government itself falls apart. When the institutions that hold a country together—the courts, the parliament, the police—cease to function, the question arises: what happens to the idea of the state? Does the nation simply dissolve into chaos, or can something else step in to hold the pieces together? This is the territory explored by a new study looking at the final days of the Ottoman Empire in 1919. The research investigates how newspapers, in the absence of a working government, did not just report on the crisis but actually helped build the new political order from scratch. It suggests that during such total collapses, journalism can become a "Zeroth Estate," a foundational layer that creates the very conditions necessary for a country to exist again, effectively acting as the architect of sovereignty before the buildings are even constructed.
The study focuses on a specific and chaotic moment in history: the year 1919, following the end of World War I. The Ottoman Empire had just signed an armistice, and its capital, Istanbul, was occupied by foreign powers. The parliament was closed, the administration was fragmented, and the legal system was paralyzed. In this vacuum, the country faced a terrifying question: who was in charge, and what did the nation look like? A researcher named İbrahim Emre Günay examined 18 editorials from six different newspapers to understand how the press responded to this void. He looked at three papers based in occupied Istanbul and three based in Anatolia, the interior of the country where a resistance movement was forming. The goal was to see how these writers used language to organize time and action when the usual rules of politics had vanished.
What the researcher found was that the newspapers did not just argue about politics; they created two different ways of experiencing time that worked together to rebuild the state. The writers in Istanbul, living under foreign occupation and censorship, adopted a strategy of slowing things down. They wrote with a focus on procedure, law, and patience. They acted as if the parliament were still sitting, even though it was closed, insisting on legal terms and diplomatic language. They argued that the nation needed to wait for the right moment to act, that it needed to follow the rules of international law, and that it must not lose its legal identity in the heat of the moment. One writer, Celal Nuri, treated the newspaper like a virtual court, carefully analyzing political arguments to ensure that no one was unfairly excluded or punished without a proper process. Another, Lütfi Fikri, wrote as if he were a foreign ministry, trying to keep the country's reputation intact by speaking in a calm, objective tone that could be understood by the rest of the world. A third, Refi Cevad, acted as a moral judge, deciding who was a "germ" that needed to be removed from the body politic, but he did so by declaring these judgments as if they were legal verdicts. Their collective effort was to keep the idea of the state alive by insisting on the rules that make a state possible, even when the state itself was gone.
In contrast, the writers in Anatolia, who were closer to the front lines of the resistance, operated with a completely different sense of time. They embraced speed, urgency, and immediate action. For them, the crisis was not something to be analyzed slowly but something to be solved right now. They wrote editorials that called for instant mobilization, unity, and the formation of a new national will. One writer, Yunus Nadi, used his column to declare that the old way of thinking about parties and politics was dead and that the nation was now a single biological entity fighting for survival. He argued that the country needed to act as one body, immediately, to protect its land. Another writer, Falih Rıfkı, worked to turn this raw energy into a structured movement, insisting that the resistance was not about one man but about the people as a whole, and that this movement would eventually lead to a new parliament. A third, Ahmed Emin, acted as a diagnostician, identifying the "sickness" in the old government and explaining why the resistance was a necessary reaction to it. Their writing created a sense of immediate reality, making the idea of a new nation feel tangible and urgent.
The crucial discovery of the study is that these two approaches were not fighting each other; they were working together as a single machine. The "slowing down" in Istanbul provided the legal and moral framework that made the new state look legitimate to the world, while the "speeding up" in Anatolia provided the energy and will to actually build it. Without the Istanbul writers, the resistance might have looked like a chaotic mob with no legal standing. Without the Anatolian writers, the legal arguments in Istanbul might have remained just words on a page with no power to change anything. The newspapers, in effect, synchronized the time of the nation. They made sure that the slow, careful work of defining what the country was legally matched the fast, urgent work of defending it physically.
This research challenges the common view that journalism simply reflects what is happening in the world. Instead, it shows that in moments of total collapse, the press can become the primary site where a country is reassembled. The writers did not wait for a government to tell them what to do; they used their columns to decide who belonged to the nation, what the rules were, and how the future should look. They acted as a "Zeroth Estate," a term the author uses to describe a layer of society that exists before the government itself, creating the conditions that allow a government to eventually form. By analyzing the specific words and rhythms of these editorials, the study reveals that the birth of modern Turkey was not just a military or political event, but a journalistic one. The new state was first imagined, argued for, and given a sense of time and order in the pages of newspapers before it ever existed in reality. This finding suggests that when institutions fail, the way people talk to each other can become the most powerful force in holding a society together, turning the chaos of collapse into the ordered beginning of a new era.
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