The Emergence of Modern Turkey

Turkish nationalism emerged during the last quarter of the 19th century as the all-but-inevitable result of the decline of the multi-national Ottoman Empire. The new movement began among young Turkish writers living as political exiles in London and Paris who, influenced by Western European nationalist thinkers, began to consider what it meant to be a Turk (as opposed to an Ottoman) and to examine the relationships between Turkish culture, Islam, and the West. Soon they became known as the “Young Turks.” In 1908 a mutiny of reform-minded military officers who were loosely associated with the Young Turk movement succeeded in ending the autocratic regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II who had been in power since 1876.

For most of the next, and final, decade of the Ottoman Empire, Young Turks from the army controlled the government in Istanbul. In 1915 they took the Ottoman state into World War I on the side of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), a policy that led to military defeat and economic catastrophe. By 1918, the once-vast Ottoman realm was no more. It had shrunk to little more than the borders of the Anatolian Peninsula. Moreover, because of fiercely contested territorial disputes with the Greeks, the fighting did not end for the Turks until 1922.

In 1923, Turkey was proclaimed a republic under the presidency of Mustafa Kemal, later called Ataturk meaning “Father Turk,” a general who had been active in the nationalist movement since 1905 and who had led the poster expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal was an authoritarian modernizer who in some ways resembled the Tanzimat reformers of the 19th century. He was both intolerant of political opposition and determined to bring about major economic, social, and cultural changes in Turkey. Under his leadership a program of industrialization was launched, the shari’a (the traditional Muslim legal code) was replaced by a secular system of laws, the Islamic Caliphate was abolished, numerous rights were accorded to women, the Arabic alphabet gave way to the Roman script, and the fez and the veil were outlawed as symbols of backwardness. At the time of Mustafa Kemal’s death in 1938 the new Turkish nation-state seemed to have become a successful model of modernity for the rest of the peoples of the Middle East.

The documents that I would like you to read (you can read them by clicking here) come from speeches by Mustafa Kemal during the early 1920s and from the writings of Ziya Gokalp, the most creative Turkish thinker of the late Ottoman/early republican period. Gokalp wrote mainly for newspapers and other periodicals. His ideas, especially his pleas for the Westernization of Turkey, were widely discussed by his contemporaries and were influential in the shaping of public policy during early years of the Turkish republic. How do these documents capture the dilemmas facing the Turks following World War I and collapse of the Ottoman Empire?

After reading both documents, I would also like you to think about and discuss the following: What are the main themes in the speeches of Ataturk? What did he think were the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire? Why did Gokalp think that the Turks must adapt themselves to Western civilization? What was Gokalp’s of view of the Tanzimat reforms? In your opinion, must societies industrialize in order to achieve well-being? What is a nation in your opinion? Your thoughts…