Τurkey was founded in 1923 after the Turkish War of Independence that led to the Treaty of Lausanne which recognized Modern Turkey with her current frontiers, in addition to Alexandretta. The founder of Turkey Mustafa Kemal and the Kemalist state that he created was based on Nationalism, Statism, Turkism and Secularism, but the underground force that is still present in the Turkish psyche, even after 15 years of Erdoğanism is the syndrome of the Treaty of Sevres that partitioned the Ottoman Empire and left a small portion to the Ottomans in Anatolia.
Despite having made its first application for EEC membership in 1959, Turkey’s bid to join the EU remains as controversial as ever, with Turkey and EU relations arguably at an all–time low in the aftermath of the attempted coup d’état of July 2016. In this context, the essays here, while using (de)Europeanisation as a broad theoretical framework, explore the current state of Turkey’s EU accession bid from a variety of perspectives, including discourse analysis, Euroscepticism and institutionalist approaches. The essays focus not only on discursive and policy (de)Europeanisation within Turkey, but also examine both official EU and European right–wing Eurosceptic discourse on Turkish accession, as well as approaching the Turkish accession process through comparisons with the contemporary Western Balkan countries and with post–war Germany.
In recent years, there has been growing interest in Turkey, stemming from the country’s developing role in regional and global politics, its expanding economic strength, and its identity as a predominantly Muslim country with secular political institutions and democratic processes. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging profile of modern Turkey. Bringing together original contributions from leading scholars with a wide range of backgrounds, this important reference work gives a unique in-depth survey of Turkish affairs, past and present. Thematically organised sections cover: Turkish history from the early Ottoman period to the present Turkish culture Politics and international relations Social issues Geography The Turkish economy and economics Presenting diverse and often competing views on all aspects of Turkish history, politics, society, culture, geography, and economics, this handbook will be an essential reference tool for students and scholars of Middle East studies, comparative politics, and culture and society.
Gradually since 2003, Turkey's autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to make Turkey a great power -- in the tradition of past Turkish leaders from the late Ottoman sultans to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Here the leading authority Soner Cagaptay, author of The New Sultan -- the first biography of President Erdogan -- provides a masterful overview of the power politics in the Middle East and Turkey's place in it. Erdogan has picked an unorthodox model in the context of recent Turkish history, attempting to cast his country as a stand-alone Middle Eastern power. In doing so Turkey has broken ranks with its traditional Western allies, including the United States and has embraced an imperial-style foreign policy which has aimed to restore Turkey's Ottoman-era reach into the Arabian Middle East and the Balkans. Today, in addition to a domestic crackdown on dissent and journalistic freedoms, driven by Erdogan's style of governance, Turkey faces a hostile world. Ankara has nearly no friends left in the Middle East, and it faces a threat from resurgent historic adversaries: Russia and Iran. Furthermore, Turkey cannot rely on the unconditional support of its traditional Western allies. Can Erdogan deliver Turkey back to safety? What are the risks that lie ahead for him, and his country? How can Turkey truly become a great power, fulfilling a dream shared by many Turks, the sultans, Ataturk, and Erdogan himself?
This Handbook discusses the new political and social realities in Turkey from a range of perspectives, emphasizing both changes as well as continuities. Contextualizing recent developments, the chapters, written by experts in their fields, combine analytical depth with a broad overview. In the last few years alone, Turkey has experienced a failed coup attempt; a prolonged state of emergency; the development of a presidential system based on the supreme power of the head of state; a crackdown on traditional and new media, universities and civil society organizations; the detention of journalists, mayors and members of parliament; the establishment of political tutelage over the judiciary; and a staggering economic crisis. It has also terminated talks with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK); intervened in and occupied mountainous border areas in northern Iraq to fight that organization; occupied Afrin and strips of territory in northern Syria; intervened in Libya; articulated an assertive transnational politics toward “kin” across the world; strained its relations with the European Union and the US, while developing relations with Russia; flirted with China’s intercontinental Belt and Road Initiative; and carved out a presence in Africa, to name just a few of the most recent developments. This volume provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging overview of the making of modern Turkey. It is a key reference for students and scholars interested in political economy, security studies, international relations and Turkish studies.
Written by leading scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of modern empires. Spanning the era of modern imperial history from the early sixteenth century to the present, it challenges both the rather insular focuses on specific experiences, and gives due attention to imperial formations outside the West including the Russian, Japanese, Mughal, Ottoman and Chinese. The companion is divided into three broad sections. Part I - Times - surveys the three main eras of modern imperialism. The first was that dominated by the settlement impulse, with migrants - many voluntarily and many more by force - making new lives in the colonies. This impulse gave way, most especially in the nineteenth century, to a period of busy and rapid expansion which was less likely to promote new settlement, and in which colonists more frequently saw their sojourn in colonial lands as temporary and related to the business mostly of governance and trade. Lastly, in the twentieth century in particular, empires began to fail and to fall. Part II - Spaces - studies the principal imperial formations of the modern world. Each chapter charts the experience of a specific empire while at the same time placing it within the complex patterns of wider imperial constellations. The individual chapters thus survey the broad dynamics of change within the empires themselves and their relationships with other imperial formations, and reflect critically on the ways in which these topics have been approached in the literature. In Part III - Themes - scholars think critically about some of the key features of imperial expansion and decline. These chapters are brief and many are provocative. They reflect the current state of the field, and suggest new lines of inquiry which may follow from more comparative perspectives on empire. The broad range of themes captures the vitality and diversity of contemporary scholarship on questions of empire and colonialism, encompassing political, economic and cultural processes central to the formation and maintenance of empires as well as institutions, ideologies and social categories that shaped the lives both of those implementing and those experiencing the force of empire. In these pages the reader will find the slave and the criminal, the merchant and the maid, the scientist and the artist alongside the structures which sustained their lives and their livelihoods. Overall, the companion emphasises the diversity of imperial experience and process. Comprehensive in its scope, it draws attention to the particularities of individual empires, rather than over-generalising as if all empires, at all times, and in all places, behaved in a similar manner. It is this contingent and historical specificity that enables us to explore in expansive ways precisely what constituted the modern empire.
Sociological theory has veered between an insistence on understanding human rights as a genuine universal morality and far more cynical portrayals of human rights as a veil of bourgeois capitalist enterprise. This book criticizes, adapts and combines seemingly disparate elements of contemporary sociological theory within a new approach to human rights. The practicality of the approach is clearly demonstrated in its application to one of the most important, complex and vexing locations of human rights violation in the world: modern Turkey. While sociological analyses of Turkey have largely been limited to local perspectives on individual issues of human rights violation, this book expands sociological understanding of the broad swath of Turkey's human rights violations into a new global perspective of hope and resolution.
In 1923, the Modern Turkish Republic rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, proclaiming a new era in the Middle East. However, many of the contemporary issues affecting Turkish state and society today have their roots not only in the in the history of the republic, but in the historical and political memory of the state's imperial history. Here Fatma Muge Gocek draws on Turkey's Ottoman heritage and history to explore current issues of ethnicity and religion alongside Turkey's international position. This new perspective on history's influence on contemporary tensions in Turkey will contribute to the ongoing debate surrounding Turkey's accession to the EU, and offers insight into the social transformations in the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Nation-State. This analysis will be vital to those involved in the study of the Middle East Imperial History and Turkey's relations with the West.
Textbook providing a thorough assessment of the political, social and economic processes which led to the formation of a new Turkey; socio-economic change is emphasised throughout.
This book provides a detailed analysis of one of the most prominent and widespread international phenomena to which criminal justice systems has been applied: the expression of revisionist views relating to mass atrocities and the outright denial of their existence. Denial poses challenges to more than one academic discipline: to historians, the gradual disappearance of the generation of eyewitnesses raises the question of how to keep alive the memory of the events, and the fact that negationism is often offered in the guise of historical 'revisionist scholarship' also means that there is need for the identification of parameters which can be applied to the office of the 'genuine' historian. Legal academics and practitioners as well as political scientists are faced with the difficulty of evaluating methods to deal with denial and must in this regard identify the limits of freedom of speech, but also the need to preserve the rights of victims. Beyond that, the question arises whether the law can ever be an effective option for dealing with revisionist statements and the revisionist movement. In this regard, Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective breaks new ground: exploring the background of revisionism, the specific methods devised by individual States to counter this phenomenon, and the rationale for their strategies. Bringing together authors whose expertise relates to the history of the Holocaust, genocide studies, international criminal law and social anthropology, the book offers insights into the history of revisionism and its varying contexts, but also provides a thought-provoking engagement with the challenging questions attached to its treatment in law and politics.