Turkeys Engagement With Modernity

Turkey's Enagement with Modernity explores how the country has been shaped in the image of the Kemalist project of nationalist modernity and how it has transformed, if erratically, into a democratic society where tensions between religion, state and society continue unabated.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's government encouraged substantial American investment in education and aid. It was argued that Turkey needed the technical skills and wealth offered by American education, and so a series of American schools was set up across the country to educate the Turkish youth. Here, Ali Erken, in the first study of its kind, argues that these organizations had a huge impact on political and economic thought in Turkey - acting as a form of `soft power' for US national interests throughout the 20th Century. Robert College, originally a missionary school founded by US benefactors, has been responsible for educating two Turkish Prime Ministers, writers such as Orhan Pamuk and a huge number of influential economists, politicians and journalists. The end result of these American philanthropic efforts, Erken argues, was a consensus in the 1970s that the country must `westernize'. This mindset, and the opposition viewpoint it engendered, has come to define political struggle in modern Turkey - torn between a capitalist `modern' West and an Islamic `Ottoman' East. The book also reveals how and why the Rockefeller and Ford foundations funneled large amounts of money into Turkey post-1945, and undertook activities in support of `Western' candidates in Turkey as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. This is an essential contribution to the history of US-Turkish relations, and the influence of the West in Turkish political thought.

In the first two decades after World War II, social scientists heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a “modernizing” nation in the Western mold. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning.

This book collects Serif Mardin’s seminal essays written throughout the span of his prolific career. Comprising some of the author’s finest and most incisive writings, these essays deal with the historical background, political travails, and socioeconomic metamorphosis of Turkey during a century of modernization. With his characteristic sophistication and breadth of vision, Mardin provides readers with a remarkably objective analysis of ideology, civil society, religion, urban life, and violence in late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. Mardin moves easily from sociological topics on violence and class-consciousness to the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the philosophy and culture of modern Turkey within the greater Middle East. These influential pieces—collected for the first time in one volume—represent an invaluable addition to the field of Middle East studies.

The debate on varieties of modernity is central to current social theory and research, and this book explores the theme in relation to the culture and society of Turkey. The book focuses on the Kemalist project to create a modern Turkish nation-state, analysing its historical background, the role of concepts of ethnicity and nation, and the configurations of state, society and economy in the new Turkish republic. The author then moves on to examine the relations between Islam and modernity, arguing that both must be understood as open to multiple interpretations rather than seen as monolithic and as diametrically opposed. He considers the rise of Islamism in Turkey and looks in particular at the paradoxical role of women activists within the Islamist movement. Ultimately, Kaya argues that Islamism must be understood as a modern movement, albeit a paradoxical one, rather than simply as a return to ‘tradition’.

This is a clear and original examination of the impact of modernity on Greece and Turkey, and the influence of the West on these former states of the Ottoman Empire during the crucial hundred years between 1850 and 1950. "Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey" explores the reactions and coping mechanisms displayed in both societies in reaction to Europe's all-pervasive influence. Elites in both societies engaged in defensive modernization, culminating in parallel attempts to mould their nations in line with the western blueprint. The authors examine reforms in the legal regime, the changing nature of family and gender relations, and re-engineered conceptions of space and the built environment. They describe and analyse different aspects of the changes in the two societies over this period, as they defined their practices and identities against Europe, and often against each other.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century Turkey experienced an extraordinary set of transformations. In 2001, in the midst of financial difficulties, the country was under IMF stewardship, yet it has recently emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. And on the international stage, Turkey has managed to enhance its position from being a backseat NATO member and outside candidate for EU membership to being an influential regional power, determining and developing its own individual foreign policy. Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog explore how these and other changes have shaped the way people in Turkey perceive themselves and how the country's self-image shapes its actions. In the modern age, the sovereign nation-state still continues to be one of the basic building blocks of social or political identity. The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, is a good example. In weaving together and selecting certain elements of memory, myth, tradition and symbols, the narratives of national identity in Turkey have been, to a large extent, socially constructed.This volume offers analysis of the ways in which these narratives have been created, maintained and negotiated, and how current economic and political interests have been incorporated into the construction of a modern identity. External forces such as those of cultural and economic globalisation have also been influential agents in this process. As a result, the space and opportunity for social and cultural expression has increasingly widened while alternative identities and life-style choices at both the collective and individual levels have also become more visible. Bearing this in mind, this book examines issues such as those of alternative gender identity and sexual orientation, formerly taboo issues. Through different approaches engaging with politics, economy, society, culture and history, Turkey and the Politics of National Identity offers new perspectives on the transformation of national identity in this increasingly influential country in the Middle East.