Following the end of the First World War, elated and distinguished statesmen representing the victorious powers gathered in Paris, London, and San Remo to draft terms that were to be imposed on their defeated enemies as safeguards of a hard-won peace. Of the five pacts that were ultimately concluded, the treaty with the Ottoman Empire took by far the longest to negotiate; for it involved not only the drafting of the peace terms themselves, but also the division that was to be made among the victors of vast territorial spoils. Professor Helmreich traces the troubled history of the negotiations among those nations -- which included, for a time, the United States -- that ultimately produced the remarkable document known, by virtue of the place in which it was signed, as the Treaty of Sevres. -- book jacket
Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War in late October 1914, months after the war's devastations had become clear? Were its leaders 'simple-minded,' 'below-average' individuals, as the doyen of Turkish diplomatic history has argued? Or, as others have claimed, did the Ottomans enter the war because War Minister Enver Pasha, dictating Ottoman decisions, was in thrall to the Germans and to his own expansionist dreams? Based on previously untapped Ottoman and European sources, Mustafa Aksakal's dramatic study challenges this consensus. It demonstrates that responsibility went far beyond Enver, that the road to war was paved by the demands of a politically interested public, and that the Ottoman leadership sought the German alliance as the only way out of a web of international threats and domestic insecurities, opting for an escape whose catastrophic consequences for the empire and seismic impact on the Middle East are felt even today.
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.
By way of an introduction : the entangled legacies of a population exchange -- part I. Humanism and its discontents : biopolitics, politics of expertise, and the human family. Segregative biopolitics and the production of knowledge -- Liberal humanism, race, and the family of mankind -- part II. Of origins and "men" : family history, genealogy, and historicist humanism revisited. Heritage and family history -- Origins, biopolitics, and historicist humanism -- part III. Unity in diversity : culture, social cohesion, and liberal multiculturalism. Museumization of culture and alterity recognition -- Turkish-Islamic synthesis and coexistence after the 1980 military coup -- In lieu of a conclusion : cultural analysis in an age of securitarianism