Committee of Union and Progress

The Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also translated as the Society of Union and Progress; Ottoman Turkish: اتحاد و ترقى جمعيتی, romanized: İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti, French: Union et Progrès) was a revolutionary group, secret society, and political party, active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey. The CUP and its members have often been referred to as "Young Turks", although the Young Turk movement produced other political parties as well. Within Turkey its members were known as İttihadcılar ('Unionists') or Komiteciler ('Committeemen').

The organisation began as a liberal reform movement, and the autocratic government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) persecuted it because of its calls for constitutional government and reform. Most of its members were exiled and arrested after a failed coup-attempt in 1896. The resultant period of infighting among Young Turk émigrés saw Ahmet Rıza Bey emerge as the organization's leader. The CUP's cause revived by 1905 with a new cadre of bureaucrats and army contingents based in Ottoman Macedonia which were fighting ethnic insurgents in the Macedonian Struggle. In 1908 the Unionists revolted in the Young Turk Revolution, and forced Abdul Hamid to re-instate the 1876 Constitution, ushering in an era of political plurality. During the Second Constitutional Era, the CUP at first influenced politics from behind the scenes, introducing major reforms to continue the modernisation of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP's main rival was the Freedom and Accord Party, a conservative party which called for the decentralisation of the empire, in opposition to the CUP's desire for a centralised Turkish-dominated state.