Turkey: Challenges of Continuity and Change
2005; Middle East Institute; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-3461
Autores Tópico(s)Turkey's Politics and Society
ResumoTURKEY Turkey: Challenges of Continuity and Change, by Meliha Benli Altunik and Ozlem Tur. London, UK and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005. xvii + 139 pages. Map. Tables. Chron. Notes to p. 163. Bibl. to p. 170. Index to p. 174. $18.99 paper. In a succinct and highly readable book, Meliha Benli Altunik and Ozlem Tur have produced the best overview of modern Turkish history since Erik Zurcher's Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B.Tauris, 1993). In an excellent chapter on history, the most important contribution of the book is the emphasis on continuity between Ottoman reformism and the foundational decades of the Turkish Republic. In doing so, the authors manage to avoid the common mistake of analyzing the Kemalist reforms as a radical departure from Ottoman social engineering. Parallels between Ottoman and Republican patterns of state-religion relations, as well as certain similarities between the Ottoman millet system and Republican concepts of minorities and citizenship are also analyzed in a similar vein. Far from considering Turkey a textbook example of modernization theory, or a model to be emulated by the Arab world, the book realistically analyzes the problematic dimension of Turkish modernization. Authoritarian proclivities and elitist nation-building are indeed two aspects of Kemalism that continue to have an impact on modern Turkish politics. Not surprisingly, these negative aspects of Turkey's political tradition became more discernible with the rise of domestic politics in the wake of the 1980 military take-over. As Kurdish and Islamic dissidents began to challenge Turkey's Kemalist identity in the post-Cold War era, the elitist and authoritarian trend went from bad to worse. In that sense, the authors correctly identify the Kurdish problem and political Islam as the twin threats to the official ideology of Kemalism. Of course, neither Kurdish nationalism nor political Islam is, in the strictest sense, a new challenge for the Turkish Republic. There is, in fact, an intriguing continuity between the societal and political cleavages of the foundational decades of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s, and the cleavages that polarized Turkish society in the 1980s and 1990s. Surprisingly, the book fails to emphasize explicitly this continuity of Kurdish and Islamic dissent in modern Turkish history. It is very interesting that Turkey managed to avoid an identity-based polarization along Kurdish and Islamic lines during the Cold War interlude. …
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