Turkey's Travails

Dankwart A. Rustow

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1979

Article preview: first 500 of 8,395 words total.

Summary:  No nation that has maintained close relations with the United States for the last generation is so little understood by well-informed Americans as is Turkey. Even West Europeans, from their closer vantage point, are rarely better informed. In part, this lack of understanding may be due simply to limited contact. There is in the United States no sizable Turkish-American community, hence no ready Turkish constituency in American public opinion. In Western Europe, Turks are present in large numbers?but as guest workers living with their families, apart and unassimilated in the more crowded parts of the cities, and eager to save enough of their wages for the ultimate return home to Turkey.

Dankwart A. Rustow is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is honorary past president of the Turkish Studies Association of North America. He is co-author of OPEC: Success and Prospects.

No nation that has maintained close relations with the United States for the last generation is so little understood by well-informed Americans as is Turkey. Even West Europeans, from their closer vantage point, are rarely better informed. In part, this lack of understanding may be due simply to limited contact. There is in the United States no sizable Turkish-American community, hence no ready Turkish constituency in American public opinion. In Western Europe, Turks are present in large numbers-but as guest workers living with their families, apart and unassimilated in the more crowded parts of the cities, and eager to save enough of their wages for the ultimate return home to Turkey.

Perhaps, too, it requires a larger effort of the imagination than most of us are accustomed to making to grasp the seeming contradictions of a country that is part in Europe, part in Asia, bordering on the Soviet Union in the north and the Arab countries in the south; a developing nation that is a dedicated and vociferous democracy; a Muslim population in a secular state; not to mention a country with a Central Asian language written in the Roman alphabet.

Moreover, the Turks themselves are proud, sometimes too proud to explain themselves to others, or to undertake the frank and detailed exposition of their case that committees of the U.S. Congress or visiting missions of the International Monetary Fund may seek as a basis for their actions. And Turkish pride has deep roots.

II

Unlike most countries in the early phases of industrialization, Turkey has no history of having been a foreign colony. Its governmental tradition dates back to the infancy of the Ottoman state in the thirteenth century, and includes three or four centuries during which Ottoman Turks dominated most of southeastern Europe as well as most of the Muslim Middle East. In the contemporary era, Turkey's political independence was reasserted after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, as Kemal Atatürk founded the modern Turkish Republic. And although Atatürk's Turkey undertook an ambitious program to westernize its culture, its foreign policy retained an element of deliberate isolation. Indeed, a somewhat self-conscious and assertive nationalism remained one of Turkey's most notable cultural imports from the West. Today Turkey is truly a nation-state: of its present population, 99 percent are Muslims, and 90 percent speak Turkish as their native tongue; conversely, over 90 percent of all Turkish speakers are citizens of the Turkish Republic.

Yet Turkey's very location is international, and suggests multiple connections rather than splendid isolation. The close links with Europe that have developed in the last generation through participation in the European Recovery Program, membership in the Council of Europe and formal association with the European Economic Community were a logical outgrowth of the cultural westernization of Atatürk's generation. In the 1940s and 1950s, close ties with the United States and membership in NATO were welcomed as a counterweight to the Soviet threat from the north; more recently, as some strains developed in ...

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