Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the veil, and replaced the Arabic script with the Latin one. But as revolutionary as these acts
were, they were also the culmination of a Turkish obsession with Europe going back cen-
turies. Though Turkey remained neutral during most of World War II, Kemalism—the pro-
Western, secularist doctrine of Kemal Ataturk—guided Turkey's culture and particularly
its foreign policy right up through the end of the first decade after the Cold War. Indeed,
for years Turkey entertained hopes of joining the European Union, a fixation that Turkish
officials made clear to me during many visits to the country in the 1980s and 1990s. But
in the first decade of the twenty-first century it became apparent that Turkey might never
gain full membership in the EU. The reason was blunt, and reeked of geographical and cul-
tural determinism: though Turkey was a democracy and a member of NATO, it was also
Muslim, and thus not wanted. The rejection was a shock to the Turkish body politic. More
important, it merged with other trends in society that were in the process of issuing a grand
correction to Turkish history and geography.
Actually, the European orientation that Ataturk imposed on Turkey entailed a contra-
diction. Ataturk was born and brought up in Salonika, in northern Greece, among Greeks,
Jews, and other minorities. He was a man of Europe, in other words, as Salonika in the
late nineteenth century was a multilingual outpost of cosmopolitanism. Likewise, Ataturk's
definition of nationality was strikingly modern. For he oft declared that whoever says he
is a Turk, speaks Turkish, and lives in Turkey is a Turk, even if he be a Jew or Christian.
He moved the capital to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia, from Istanbul (Constantinople) in
European Turkey, because of Istanbul's association with the ancien régime. And he made
no effort to regain lost Ottoman provinces in the Balkans or the Middle East: rather, his
strategy was to build a uniethnic Turkish state out of the heartland of Anatolia, which
would be firmly anchored toward Europe and the West. The keeper of the Kemalist flame
would be the Turkish military, for authentic democracy was a thing to which Kemalism
never got around during Ataturk's lifetime. The problem, and this would take decades to
play out, was that by focusing on Anatolia, he unwittingly emphasized Islamic civiliza-
tion, which was more deeply rooted in Asia Minor than in the European Turkey of Con-
stantinople and the sultanate. Furthermore, democracy, as it developed in Turkey in fits
and starts between periodic military coups, delivered the electoral franchise to the mass of
working-class and devout Turks in the Anatolian hinterlands.
For the first few decades of Republican Turkey's existence, the wealth and power resided
with the military and with the ultra-secular Istanbul elite. During this period, American
officials had the luxury of proclaiming Turkey's democratic status even as the Turkish
generals were responsible for its pro-Western foreign policy. That began to change in the
early 1980s, when the newly elected prime minister, Turgut Ozal, a devout Muslim with
Sufi tendencies from central Anatolia, enacted a series of reforms that liberalized the stat-
ist economy. A slew of large firms were privatized and import controls loosened. This
led to the creation of a nouveau riche middle class of devout Muslims with real political
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