Turkey

TURKEY • C. F. Beckingham The Western political observer surveying the countries of the Near East or the Islamic world, turns with relief to Turkey, which has preserved its independence without xenophobia, rejected Communism without becoming Fascist, accepted industrialization without Marxism, and maintained an exemplary stability in its internal affairs since the foundation of the Republic. Twenty years ago, writers on Turkey were impressed above all by the seeming miracle of Westernization, by the abolition of the veil and the fez, the Sultanate and the Caliphate, the Arabic script and the dervishes. Today it is rather the stability of Turkish political institutions and the continuity of Turkish foreign policy that excite the admiration of commentators. The Turkish Revolution, which swept away so many ancient institutions , was in fact much more than a movement for Westernization. Atatiirk was not merely a luckier or more clever Amanullah. The task he undertook was not so much to Westernize as to save Turkey. The acceptance of Western methods was necessary to save the country, and the revolution was essentially patriotic and nationalist. There is indeed an ironic contrast between the Russian and Turkish revolutions, both born of World War I. In Russia national collapse enabled a group of expatriates to seize power and to impose on their countrymen a system excogitated in London by a cosmopolitan German Jew. It was the repudiation of this system by the masses of the workers in Western Europe that forced upon the Soviet Union isolation behind the cordon sanitaire and the choice of socialism in one country or no socialism at all. Because the West would not accept what the Bolsheviks believed it must, they were compelled to retreat to some of the positions of the Slavophils of the nineteenth century. In Turkey a movement that began in bitter hostility to the West ended by adopting Western ideas and methods because it found that the West could not be defeated without being imitated. In some ways the figure of Atatiirk, on any showing one of the most 210 C. F. BECKlNGHAM remarkable men of his time, has obscured the fact that the Turkish Revolution was a complex movement of very long standing. Nor was AtatUrk in any sense a cosmopolitan. His education was Turkish and military. He read French, fought in Libya, served as military attache in Sofia, and visited the German armies during World War I in the suite of the future Sultan Vahdettin, but he never spent years of exile in Paris like many of the Turkish intellectual leaders of the earlier generation, nor was his admiration for the West focused upon anyone country. Indeed one has the impression that much as he wanted Turkey to imitate the West it was the common factors of Western civilization that he admired and that he was not greatly attracted by anyone country. Certainly no single country had for him the fascination that British institutions had for many Indian and Japanese leaders or that French cnlture had for many Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Throughout his life he was above all a patriotic Turk, concerned to preserve and to safeguard the survival of Turkey, to force upon her by whatever methods might be necessary the form of government, the laws, the economy, and the social customs that would most conduce to her independence, prosperity, and prestige in the world. Herein, rather than in any liking for formal democracy, lay the fundamental difference between him and the Bolsheviks with whom he was for a while on friendly terms. The alliance served its turn, enabling him to direct his attention to the Allies and the Greeks in Western Anatolia, but it conld never have been more than a mariage de convenance. It is not that he was not on occasion as authoritarian and as ruthless as Lenin. It was rather that he was concerned only with the independence and well-being of his own country. The rest of the world, provided its attitude remained friendly, might take care of itself. He had no panacea that he wished to force upon mankind at large. In fact the problem of Westernization, however formidable, was not the major difficulty that confronted the Turkish reformers. In some...