Atatürk

"Yes. Andrew Mango has exactly the right background to understand Turkey. He knows the country inside out. He was brought up in Istanbul, speaking several languages, and was the head of the BBC Turkish Service. He’s a great collector of all the memoirs and biographies about what happened to make Atatürk the man that could found the modern state of Turkey. A lot of what the Republic has turned into derives from the decisions taken in that period. The elements that are important are: Firstly, the role of the army as the backbone of the new Turkish state, which we’ve just talked about. Secondly, a very strong positivist ideology that wanted Turkey to catch up with Europe – which in Atatürk’s mind was synonymous with civilisation. The question remains open today whether Turkey wants to join Europe or just be its equal. That’s an eternal question for Turkey, and Mango gives evidence of what Atatürk thought about it. There’s also the question of democratic participation. He isn’t rose-tinted-spectacled about Atatürk at all. He shows how Atatürk crushed opposition after he came to power; he shows how the one-party state worked. If you think about the period, the 20s and 30s, it wasn’t unusual to have authoritarian government. The trouble is that Turkey took a long time to shake it off. It was only at the end of the Cold War that Turkey really started moving away from the Kemalist legacy. What I love about Mango’s book is the detail, and the clarity. He has all the evidence marshalled. You can read the footnotes and find out where everything has come from. It’s so different from Turkish historiography, which is very emotional. The bestselling book in Turkey about that period is called These Crazy Turks . It’s basically novelistic. The reader thinks he’s getting history, but basically it’s a transport of imagination by a quite well-informed writer. Because Mango is so detailed, and gives such weight to first-hand material, you get a really good feeling of how Turkey sees itself, through Atatürk and his friends. People are quite prejudiced about Turkey in the West, especially in Europe. Mango shows how they’d been threatened, and how for about 200 years they were in retreat, until Atatürk picked them up. He chose the highlands of Anatolia as the place where the Turks would take their stand, defended it, got it nailed down in the Treaty of Lausanne and made the country safe for his community. At great cost, of course. The previous decade saw the ancient minorities of Turkey wiped out: the Armenians deported and massacred, the Greeks transported out and also, to some extent, massacred. On the other hand, Turkey was itself invaded by Greeks, Italians, French, British and Russians. It was an absolutely disastrous decade, bloodbaths all around. But at the end of it, Atatürk managed to create a state. It wouldn’t surprise me if 100 years from now, Atatürk was still being revered almost as a prophet, as he is today. He still is very, very important for the Turks. These ideas didn’t come out of the blue. For instance, a few years before Turkey changed its alphabet, there had been a meeting of all the Turkic peoples in Baku, and they’d decided there that they would all have a common Latin alphabet. But he implemented it much earlier, and much more rigorously than the rest of them. People talk about the acquis communautaire : Turkey is gradually taking over bits and pieces of European law as it converges with Europe. Atatürk wrote everything into Turkish law from a whole range of European models: the Italian penal code, the Swiss civil code, German maritime trade rules, and the French concept of secularism. Turkey as a society must have had extraordinary indigestion from this wholesale adoption of all these Western things. But because it was a revolutionary period, and he had such tight control of power, he was able to do it. Today, the idea of going back to Arabic script has almost zero support. But you have to wonder what it must have meant to this old and deep-rooted society that suddenly no one could read anything written before 1928. The literature was all cut off. Only now are people rediscovering it. Some of the most popular TV series now, the sitcoms, are Ottoman. Everyone is busily rediscovering the Ottoman Empire. Atatürk spent a lot of time reviling the Ottoman heritage in order to make the Republic look good, even though he was actually an Ottoman gentleman and officer who had been quite close to some members of the Ottoman royal family. The people who came after him spent quite a lot of time reviling the Ottoman Empire as well. It’s taken 100 years for Turkey to make peace with its past. That’s unfortunate because Turkey lost a lot by not appreciating the good things about the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were quite a tolerant lot. That also comes through in Mango’s book. He shows how the Ottomans tried to maintain the multicultural, multi-ethnic nature of the Empire for much longer than perhaps was realistically possible. Atatürk was a Macedonian from Salonica. He was brought up speaking Turkish, but there may have been some Albanian in his background. The people that came with him to Ankara, his inner coterie, were from Salonica. That’s another interesting aspect of Mango’s book. Very roughly, about a third of the population of Turkey today are muhajir or refugees from the Balkans, the Caucasus, southern Ukraine and Russia, and the old Ottoman holdings in the Arab world. They came and converged on the cities of the Ottoman Empire, often taking the place of the deported and massacred Armenians and Greeks. This was a group of people who wanted to build a new state, who were quite well educated, who wanted to build something new that would be strong enough to stand up to the Europeans. Those were the Kemalists who took power. Then you have the rest. When Atatürk came to power, Turkey’s population was about 80 per cent rural – most of them peasants, struggling, ploughing the land with sticks dragged by oxen. Their lifestyle was very primitive, their knowledge of even their own religion unsophisticated. What’s happened since the 1960s is this huge migration to the cities, and now only 30-40 per cent of the population is rural. Half the population of the country has moved from being peasants to being developing urbanites. This is the basis of the party that took power in 2002: Erdogan and the AKP. They are generally more relaxed, more open-minded, more pragmatic, more willing to deal with foreigners in a trusting way and also more religious. By the time AKP came to power in 2002, the tensions between these two groups almost amounted to a class war. You have people who will not talk to each other from the two sides of this social divide – the old Kemalist urban people, and the nouveau riche, the bourgeoisie that has developed from the newly urbanised rural folk. They’re often quite rich, ready to spend money on clothes, but with a headscarf, because that’s how they’re comfortable. The two sides often can’t stand each other. That goes back to the very beginnings of the Republic. You can find people from the rural AKP side who give lip-service to Atatürk, but in private they’re much more ready to be critical of the Kemalists. In the last general election, the AKP got 47 per cent. According to the opinion polls, they’re not far from that figure – we’ve got an election in June. They’ve given quite good government because it’s easier for them. The country was pretty much sorted out when they came to power in 2002. Turkey had gone through a very bad decade; it was the Kemalists who sorted it out, but in the election it was the AKP that won. They’ve kept it fairly steady as it goes, up until recently. Now it’s a bit more turbulent, but there’s still enough money in the treasury. Especially, the local government of the AKP is pretty effective and much less corrupt than in the old days. If you do have to make contributions, you can see what it’s used for much more easily. But the book on the AKP still hasn’t been written. There is no good book in English on Erdogan or what he’s done. I think it would be quite a scary enterprise to write it. He’s quite thin-skinned. We’ve seen the anger he can have for people who challenge him. There are lots of question marks – those who are close to him have become quite wealthy now. How deeply can anyone pry into this while he’s still in power? You’d have to be brave. You have to be careful how you deal with power in Turkey. As a preliminary judgment, I would say that Erdogan is more of a consolidator than a revolutionary. The real revolutionary was Turgut Özal from 1983-93. He really broke the bonds that had been holding Turkey back."