Antecedentes de ¡Ya es hora! 78

The Turkish Republic was born out o f the Ottom an Empire, but bore little resemblance to its forerunner. The new Turkey was not an empire, but a relatively small nation­ state; not autocracy or theocracy, but a parliamentary democracy; not a state founded on expansionist principles, but a nation dedicated to peaceful coexistence; not a multinational, multi-racial, and multi-religious state, but an almost hom ogeneous society.1^ H er aims w ere not to create and expand an empire, but to build and perpetuate a strong, stable nation within the boundaries o f her homeland. Those w ere not ephemeral happenings (at that critical time o f history) but the facts created by the deliberate choices o f the leaders o f the new Republic.

Though at one time the Turks formed an important part o f the ruling classes, they w ere actually one o f the smaller nations within the multi-ethnic empire. M oreover, the O ttom an sultans did not consider themselves as Turks as such, but as Ottomans. Therefore w hen the Turks fought for their independence after the First W orld War, they did not fight only against the Entente' invaders, but also against the Ottoman

Sultan and the forces o f the old system: a point that is usually overlooked.1*1 Hence, it is not surprising to see that the leaders o f the new Turkish state sought to break with the O ttom an past which they identified with ignorance, corruption, backw ardness and dogmas. To establish a truly new state, they had to clear away the ruins o f the Empire, disow n its legacy and discover new virtues based on the Turkish nation. The new T urkey had to have no relationship with the o ld.1^ Yet, this does not necessarily mean that the Turkish Republic did not inherit some o f the fundamental features o f the O ttom an Empire. A closer look at these features would help one to understand the background o f Turkish Foreign Policy.

The new Turkey was established not only in the very heart o f the old Empire's geo-political setting, that o f Asia M inor and Thrace, therefore acquiring its com plications, but it also retained many o f its ruling elites. Since the bureaucratic elite o f the Em pire in its last days was dominated by Turks, the new Turkish state had found an experienced bureaucracy, an important value o f which other post-em pire states ran into scarcity. Fortunately 1 9 ^ century experiments with W estern education had produced an educated official class. Later this elite group o f adm inistrators, under A taturk's guidance and within the one-party authoritarian regime, formed the nucleus o f Turkey's modernizing elites - the Republican People's Party, and imposed revolutionary changes from the top. Though these elites, on the one hand, secured a strong political pow er base for A taturk and thus enabled him to carry out the most needed radical reforms to break down the traditional social and spiritual culture o f Turkey and transform it into a secular and W estern culture, on the other, they som ew hat contradictorily supplied a material connection between the Em pire and the new Turkish Republic. This pattern o f elite, one-party politics with its dual character, w as to set the trend in Turkish politics for many years to com e.15

One o f the fundamental features o f Turkish foreign policy has been its W estern orientation. D espite the fact that Turkey had fought against the W estern pow ers during the First W orld W ar, after independence she opted for the W estern World. This was expressed first in cultural and, after W orld W ar II, in political and military terms. This

orientation has been so deliberate and continues to be a policy choice that can not be explained w ith the limited aim o f "countering an imminent threat" or such formulations as "the econom ic interests o f the ruling elite". These kinds o f explanations w ould not only be unsatisfactory, but also misleading. Instead, one should look into Turkish history which has helped to shape Turkish understanding o f its environment and its governm ental philosophy.

Throughout history, the Turks have been connected to the W est, first as a conquering superior and enemy, then as a com ponent part, later as an adm irer and unsuccessful imitator, and in the end as a follower and ally. Before anything else, the O ttom an Em pire was a European state. After the M ongol invasion throughout Anatolia, a small tribe o f Turks which later became known as O ttom ans settled in the Valley o f the Karasu, w here they w ere in direct contact with the Greeks and W estern influences. This was the beginning o f the influence which had such a profound effect on their subsequent history. They began, indeed, to face the W est; before they had any status in Asia M inor, the Ottomans were already an empire based largely on South-east Europe.

It is an im portant historical fact which is not often appreciated that the O ttom an Turks started their career as a people in extreme north-w est o f Asia M inor, facing Europe; that they founded their Empire not in Asia but across the Sea o f M arm ara in Thrace and the Balkans, in other w ords in E urope, and that then expanded eastwards into Asia M inor a century after they had already becom e a European power. It was, in fact, only during the course o f the fifteenth century that they became ah Oriental pow er as well as a E uropean.16 N o t only did Europe have an effect on the Ottom an Empire, but the Turks, from the tim e that they first entered the European continent, played a role in the destiny p f Europe. They w ere not only the enemy o f the European monarchs, but frequently allied themselves with one or more o f the European countries against the others, and operated within the European system. It is, however, one o f the ironies o f history that the O ttom an Empire, whilst it had progressively becom e m ore and m ore alienated from E u rope through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was "officially" re-adm itted to the E uropean legal system at the Paris Congress o f 1856.

It is only natural that the Ottoman rule over one-third o f E urope for four hundred years w ould have important effects on Empire's ou tlook.1^ Its adaptation o f a som ew hat secular state system, especially in the conduct o f foreign affairs and in the adm inistration o f the various millets, was part o f this influence. Although It must be adm itted that serving the cause o f Islam was an im portant element behind m ost o f the O ttom an conquests, but it is also a fact that, so long as the state w as strong, the O ttom an rulers did not use the title "caliph", the religious leader o f the Muslim community. It w as only after the continuous dismemberment o f the Empire's non- moslem subjects in the 19th century that the sultans, notably Abdulhamit II, upheld the idea o f Pan-Islamism in order to prevent the disintegration o f the Empire's Moslem subjects. In fact, the Ottoman Empire, though essentially a theocratic state, had come to create its ow n peculiar understanding o f Islam, somewhat "secular" and different from that o f the Arabs. It is no w onder that the Arabs, orthodox Muslims, called O ttom ans "Atrak Rum", meaning the Turks o f Rome or Byzantine. M oreover, it must be remembered that there was no institutionalized religious authority independent from the state. Therefore, it was easy for the Ottoman Sultan to make peace with the infidels, whenever he considered it necessary, and to look for W estern help when m odernization o f empire was needed.

Given this background, the introduction o f the w estern-oriented secular state in the 1920s w as not totally contradictory to the overall experience o f the Turkish people. In fact, modernization in terms o f the W est was started after a series o f Ottoman defeats at the hands o f the W estern pow ers.18 M ost Ottom an and Turkish modernizers did agree upon one basic assumption, as put by Abdullah Cevdet, that "there is

no

second civilization; civilization means European civilization, and it must be imported with both its roses and thorns".19 Turkey owed a great deal to the late Ottoman intellectuals, w ho advocated most o f the reforms, which w ere finally realized under the guidance o f A taturk in the 1920s and 30s. Ataturk's success derived from his belief in E uropean civilization and his willingness to accept "both its roses and its thorns", w hereas earlier reformers had only tried to imitate them with limited success.

A nother point o f historical significance is the realistic outlook o f O ttom an diplomacy, which w as shaped during the nineteenth century w ith extraordinary success. D uring the last hundred or so years o f its life, the O ttom an Em pire was w eak in com parison to the W estern Powers and was forced to pursue its foreign policy am ong the tensions betw een its own interest and those o f other powers. Nonetheless, by playing one great pow er against another for survival, the O ttom ans w ere able to maintain the territorial integrity o f much o f the Empire for a long time. Thanks to the contem porary international system o f the "balance o f pow ers", and the Ottomans' understanding o f its main features, the Empire's decline too k three hundred years and its collapse came only with a world war.

As a student o f this remarkable diplomacy, A taturk w ould later use all the advantages o f the international system, such as the differences between England, France and Italy at the end o f the First W orld W ar, and the greater antagonism betw een the W estern pow ers and the Soviet Union. One can also see that after the second W orld W ar Turkey's well-played role as a continuously threatened nation (by the Soviet Union) gained resulting American aid which mounted to the point o f $738.9

70

million to the year 1986, at its highest point, only third after Israel and Egypt