Turkey

Abstract

In the context of our other case studies Turkey is somewhat unique having been both occupier and occupied during the course of its history. Until the early part of the 20^th century Turkey was part of a major colonizing power with the seat of the Ottoman Empire located in Constantinople (present day Istanbul). In the aftermath of WW1 the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) formally ceded parts of the Ottoman Empire including Turkey to the victorious allied powers, with Constantinople partitioned and governed by a military administration that included France, Britain and Italy (Fromkin 1989). However, between 1919 and 1923 Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal (later given the title Atatürk when he became the first president of the new republic) were engaged in an increasingly bitter war of independence. Kemal’s success in forcing a withdrawal of the former allied powers culminated in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which granted independence to Turkey and gave international recognition to the sovereignty of the new Turkish state. In no sense could Kemal be considered a democrat and during his tenure as president of the Republic of Turkey (1923-1938) he displayed many authoritarian tendencies and enforced the doctrine of French laicism to establish a strict separation of church and state in favour of secularism (Fuller 2008; Bein 2011). In addition, he embarked upon a widespread programme of modernization — what is often termed Kemalism — that fundamentally transformed Turkish society from one that had its roots in political and religious Islam, to one that increasingly looked to the West for inspiration and guidance (Bein 2011).