Abdülhamid II had closed parliament in 1878 and effectively suspended the constitution of 1876. Thirty years later the centre of opposition was not the palace but the Third Army in Salonica and the Committee of Union and Progress. The movement that began in July 1908 when officers Niyazi of Resne and Enver took to the hills spread quickly; when troops sent to suppress it joined instead, the sultan restored the constitution on 23 July. Scenes of Muslim, Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities celebrating together in the streets carried the hope that the empire could continue on a basis of equal citizenship.

The hope was brief. After the counter-revolution of April 1909 Abdülhamid was deposed; the same year saw a large massacre of Armenians in Adana. In the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 the empire lost nearly all its European territory, and with the 1913 raid on the Sublime Porte the Committee of Union and Progress established what was in practice single-party rule. The pluralist promise of the constitution turned, under wartime conditions, into centralised and increasingly nationalist government — the same cadre that in 1915 ordered the deportation and genocide of the Armenians.

Even so, 1908 is a threshold in Turkey's political history. With press censorship lifted, the number of newspapers and journals multiplied within a year; trade unions, women's associations and political parties organised openly for the first time. Most of the cadre that founded the Republic emerged from the officer and intellectual circles of this period. Both the institutional legacy of 1908 — elections, parliament, parties — and its procedural one, the army's claim to correct the regime, shaped twentieth-century Turkey.