Turkey Before and After Ataturk: Internal and External Affairs (Middle Eastern Studies)

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Turkey's modern history has been unstable and contradictory. National identity continues to be an issue as Turks are faced with joining the West and preserving their own culture. The emergence of Islamicism contributes to the question of how safe the secular constitutional democracy is.

Turkey Before and After Ataturk: Internal and External Affairs (Middle Eastern Studies) Review

This is not light reading, but it is illuminating for anyone who wishes to understand Turkey, one of the most unusual and important Middle Eastern states. It is a collection of studies that was timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the creator of modern Turkey, and the 700th anniversary (as 1999 was designated) of the creation of the Ottoman state that Ataturk's Turkey replaced. The fact that the vast preponderance of the contributors are based in Ankara might well be indicative of a scarcity of first-rate Turkey specialists abroad. Anyone viewing the role of Turkey in Middle East today must be surprised, as one might well have been during the Cold War, for this reason: why does not Turkey fit the mould? Why is it atypical amongst Muslim states? As a Muslim nation, it has been the exception in insisting on the separation of Mosque and State and entrenching an unashamedly secularist polity. During the Cold War, it was the least volatile of Muslim states, firmly in the Western orbit, exemplified by its membership in NATO, as it remains today. Similarly, it was the first Muslim nation to establish links with Israel which have of late blossomed into something approaching a strategic relationship. The xenophobia and reflexive anti-Americanism one takes for business as usual in these parts is not a Turkish phenomenon. Gavin Brockett, in examining Turkish social upheaval in the 1920s and 1930s, is able to provide an answer, because he set out to turn away from the usual tendency to examine the political history of the Turkish elites and uncover what happened at a popular level. Ethnic and Islamist disturbances in 1925 were put down by martial law declared by Ismet Inonu's government. Prominent protesters of secularisation measures were tried by military courts, often with a minimum of publicity and with the result that only one upheaval in 1933, less serious than the first, disturbed the transformation of Turkey into a secular Muslim state. However, harsh measures were used by other secular Muslim governments after the Second World War. The Shah was notorious for these in Iran. Why did such measures work in Turkey and not elsewhere? Because even without Islamist credentials, the Kemalist reformers had a legitimacy no Arab secular ruler ever held in the Middle East. Successfully able to appeal to genuinely national sentiments and perspectives, the Kemalists adopted policy that only looked like bad faith in artificially contrived Arab federations. Additionally, they did not embark on grandiose economic programmes and social engineering that characterised the regimes of the Shah or Nasser. Far from possessing liberal origins, Turkey nonetheless has been able to conform to democratic norms with the passage of time, interrupted, it is true, by military intervention on three occasions since multi-party politics emerged in 1946.Ataturk had the foresight to realise that secular nationalism would ultimately fail in a traditional society which neglected adult education and the inculcation of a civic culture. M. Asim Karaomerlioglu's chapter points to one reason secularist nationalism has a chequered history in Arab states: Arab nationalists remained in fact absolutists, incurious except negatively to public opinion, and opposed to genuinely representative institutions. Turkish nationalist thought in the 1920s and 1930s evoked a genuine interest in the factors that permit a society to develop into a modern nation. None of the foregoing detracts from the continuing difficulties in which the Turkish state and society find themselves. The tension between Westernisation and tradition is still widely felt, more prominent than even before with the emergence of Islamist political parties in all but name (religious nomenclature is prohibited; thus names like the `Virtue Party'). The best efforts to integrate into neighbouring Europe and a reliable record as a NATO member have not eased the plainly discriminatory restrictions that continue to exclude the country from the EU. Turkey's close and ambivalent relationship with Europe is the subject of an interesting chapter by Meltem Muftuler-Bac. The ambivalence in the relationship is best exemplified by the attitude of the Europeans, who took the unusual step in Luxembourg in 1997 to consider all applications for EU membership other than that of Turkey. The recent Turkish-Italian spat over the extradition of Abdullah Ocalan, in which a fellow NATO member refused to hand over Turkey's most wanted terrorist, an event recent enough to have eluded a consideration in this book, can only have reinforced the Turkish suspicion of European bad faith. Undoubtedly, Turkish reluctance to grant cultural or regional autonomy to Kurds remains more than merely an internal Turkish problem and indeed is perhaps the most serious issue the republic Ataturk created confronts. It is clear that some eventual modification to the notion of a nationally undifferentiated Turkish identity will be necessary to accommodate the Kurdish reality.As Metin Heper and E. Fuat Keyman reveal in the book's concluding chapter, secularism in Turkey has fared largely well till now because the bureaucratic elite since pre-republic days has been secularist and Western in its thinking. This factor amongst others has preserved Turkey from the revolutions that have resulted in one tyranny merely supplanting another in a succession of Middle Eastern states.Whether secularism is securely established in the political culture of Turkey is a question on which no contributor to this book was willing to provide a confidently affirmative answer. The problem is well encapsulated in the 1996-97 coalition government of staunchly secularist and Islamist parties, produced despite much pre-election mutual recrimination, which is surely one of the strangest political constellations to have appeared in a democratic polity. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews Was this review helpful to you?�Yes No Report abuse | PermalinkComment Comment

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