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In this article I consider the late Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary in an inter-imperial framework of enquiry. There is much critical scholarship about the imagined regions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe – but historians have also carefully maintained their imagined boundaries.1 Yet, the study of diplomatic cooperation, trade relations, political borrowings and shared visions about imperial federalism provide an unconventional history of two middle powers in the age of French and British dominance. Here I do not follow the great historiography of comparing empires. My perspective is a relational, circulatory and croisée one.2 This Eastern Mediterranean-European relational view can be extended to the post-imperial nation states in interwar period, to the often-shared Soviet umbrella during the Cold War and to today's intertwined regionalism, symbolised by the strategic friendship between Turkish president Erdoğan and Hungarian prime minister Orbán.3
I start with a framework for a relational history between the two empires in their last five decades. I argue that this period witnessed increased cooperation, and that this is the formative period of contemporary Eastern Mediterranean-European regionalism. My goal is to call for further research about relational and circulatory histories at the level of empire. By sketching an inter-imperial framework, the article attempts to move beyond Middle Eastern, Eastern European and Balkan exceptionalisms, as well as beyond narratives of ‘imperial decline’.4 A middle power relational history provides an alternative narrative not only to nationalist histories but also to Great Power-centred histories of colonialism; and it contributes to the rethinking of nationalism within imperial formations.5 In general, this is an experiment with taking the two middling, ‘central’, empires to be an alternative modern Europe.6
To illustrate the possibilities of the inter-imperial framework, the second half of the article zooms in on one particular idea: the transformation of the Ottoman Empire along the lines of Austria-Hungary. I narrate how Muslim thinkers used comparison for imperial reform. I describe two types of such reform visions after the 1908 restoration of the Ottoman constitution: a quickly forgotten Egyptian–Ottoman dualist idea, and a more popular, ethnic Arab–Turkish dualism. Among Ottoman Arab intellectuals, this idea was the longest living version of federal visions, surviving even the First World War.7
The case of Ottoman dualism...