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Book Review: Kemalism

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  • Book Review: Kemalism

    KEMALISM
    Perry Anderson

    London Review of Books (subscription)
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/ande01 _.html
    Sept 2 2008
    UK

    'The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of
    1989,' J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards, is that the
    frontiers of 'Europe' towards the east are everywhere open and
    indeterminate. 'Europe', it can now be seen, is not a continent - as
    in the ancient geographers' dream - but a subcontinent: a peninsula
    of the Eurasian landmass, like India in being inhabited by a highly
    distinctive chain of interacting cultures, but unlike it in lacking
    a clearly marked geophysical frontier. Instead of Afghanistan and
    the Himalayas, there are vast level areas through which conventional
    'Europe' shades into conventional 'Asia', and few would recognise
    the Ural mountains if they ever reached them.

    But, he went on, empires - of which in its fashion the European Union
    must be accounted one - had always needed to determine the space
    in which they exercised their power, fixing the borders of fear or
    attraction around them.

    A decade and a half later, the matter has assumed a more tangible
    shape. After the absorption of all the former Comecon states, there
    remain the untidy odds and ends of the once independent Communisms
    of Yugoslavia and Albania - the seven small states of the 'West
    Balkans' - yet to be integrated in the EU. But no one doubts that,
    a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend
    to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue
    facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe
    confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip
    of water separates one world from another. No one has ever missed
    the Bosphorus. 'Every schoolchild knows that Asia Minor does not
    form part of Europe,' Sarkozy told voters en route to the Elysée,
    promising to keep it so: a pledge to be taken in the spirit of the
    conjugal reunion on offer in the same campaign. Turkey will not be
    dealt with in that way. Within the EU the official consensus that it
    should become a member-state in full standing has for some time now
    been overwhelming. Such agreement does not exclude arrière-pensées
    in this or that government - Germany, France and Austria have all at
    different points entertained them - but against any passage of these
    to action lies the formidable barrier of a unanimity of media opinion
    more complete, and more committed to Turkish entry, than that of the
    Council or Commission itself. There is also the simple fact that no
    country that has been accepted as a candidate for accession to the
    EU has ever, once negotiations were opened, been rejected by it.

    The expansion of the EU to the lands of the Warsaw Pact did not require
    much political defence or illustration. The countries concerned were
    all indisputably European, however the term was defined, and all had
    famously suffered under Communism. To bring them into the Union was
    not just to heal an ancient division of the continent, anchoring them
    in a common liberal-democratic capitalism, but to compensate the East
    for its misfortunes after 1945, relieving the West of a bad conscience
    at the difference in fates between them. They would also, of course,
    constitute a strategic glacis against any resurgence of Russia,
    and offer a nearby pool of cheap labour, although this received less
    public emphasis. The uncontentious logic here is not, on face of it,
    immediately transferable to Turkey. The country has long been a market
    economy, held parliamentary elections, constituted a pillar of Nato,
    and is now situated further from Russia than ever in the past. It
    would look as if only the last of the motives in Eastern Europe,
    the economic objective, applies - not unimportant, certainly, but
    incapable of explaining the priority Turkey's entry into the EU has
    acquired in Brussels.

    Yet a kind of symmetry with the case for Eastern Europe can be
    discerned in the principal reasons advanced for Turkish membership
    in Western capitals. The fall of the Soviet Union may have removed
    the menace of Communism, but there is now - it is widely believed
    - a successor danger in Islamism. Rampant in the authoritarian
    societies of the Middle East, it threatens to stretch into immigrant
    communities within Western Europe itself. What better prophylactic
    against it than to embrace a staunch Muslim democracy within the EU,
    functioning as both beacon of a liberal order to a region in desperate
    need of a more enlightened political model and sentinel against every
    kind of terrorism and extremism? This line of thought originated in
    the US, with its wider range of global responsibilities than the EU,
    and continues to be uppermost in American pressure for Turkish entry
    into the Union. Much as Washington set the pace for Brussels during
    expansion into Eastern Europe, laying down Nato lights on the runway
    for subsequent descent by the EU, so it championed the cause of Turkey
    well before Council or Commission came round to it.

    But although the strategic argument, for a geopolitical bulwark
    against the wrong kinds of Islam, is now standard in European columns
    and editorials, it does not occupy quite the same position as in
    America. In part, this is because the prospect of sharing a border
    with Iraq and Iran is not altogether welcome to many within the
    EU, however vigilant the Turkish Army might prove. Americans, at a
    greater distance, find it easier to see the bigger picture. But such
    reservations are not the only reason why this theme, central though
    it remains, does not dominate discussion in the EU as completely as in
    the US. For another argument has more intimate weight. Current European
    ideology holds the Union to offer the highest moral and institutional
    order in the world, combining - with all due imperfections - economic
    prosperity, political liberty and social solidarity in a way no rival
    can match. But is there not some danger of cultural closure in the very
    success of this unique creation? Amid all its achievements, might not
    Europe risk falling - the very word a reproof - into Eurocentrism:
    too homogeneous and inward-looking an identity, when the advance
    guard of civilised life is necessarily ever more multicultural?

    Turkey's incorporation into the EU, so the case goes, would lay such
    fears to rest. The greatest single burden, for present generations,
    of a narrowly traditional conception of Europe is its identification
    with Christianity, as a historic marker of the continent. The greatest
    challenge to this heritage long came from Islam. What then could be a
    more triumphant demonstration of a modern multiculturalism than the
    peaceful intertwining of the two faiths, at state level and within
    civil society, in a super-European system stretching, like the Roman
    Empire, to the Euphrates? That Turkey's government is for the first
    time professedly Muslim should not be viewed as a handicap, but as
    a recommendation for entry, promising just that transvaluation into
    a multicultural form of life the Union needs for the next step in
    its constitutional progress. For its part, just as the new-found or
    restored democracies of the post-Communist East have benefited from
    the steadying hand of the Commission in their journey to normalcy,
    so Turkish democracy will be sheltered and strengthened within the
    Union. If enlargement to Eastern Europe repaired a moral debt to those
    who lived through Communism, inclusion of Turkey can redeem the moral
    damage done by a complacent - or arrogant - parochialism. In such
    dual atonement, Europe has the capacity to become a better place.

    In this self-critical mode, a historical contrast is often
    drawn. Christian Europe was for centuries disfigured by savage
    religious intolerance, by every kind of persecution, inquisition,
    expulsion, pogrom resorted to in the attempt to stamp out other
    communities of faith, Jewish or Muslim, not to speak of heretics within
    the faith itself. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, tolerated
    Christians and Jews, without repression or forcible conversion,
    allowing different communities to live peaceably together under
    Muslim rule, in a premodern multicultural harmony. Not only was this
    Islamic order more enlightened than its Christian counterparts, but
    far from being an external Other of Europe, for centuries it formed
    an integral part of the European system of powers itself. Turkey is
    in that sense no newcomer to Europe. Rather its entry into the Union
    would restore a continuity, of mixtures and contacts, from which we
    still have much to learn.

    Such, roughly speaking, is the discourse of Turkish entry into the EU
    that can be heard in chancelleries and chat rooms, learned journals
    and leading articles, on platforms and talk shows across Europe. One
    of its great strengths is the absence to date of any non-xenophobic
    alternative to it. Its weakness lies in the series of images d'Epinal
    out of which much of it is woven, obscuring the actual stakes in
    Turkey's suit to join the Union. Certainly, any consideration of these
    must begin with the Ottoman Empire. For the first, and most fundamental
    difference between the Turkish candidature and all those from Eastern
    Europe is that in this case the Union is dealing with the descendant
    of an imperial state, for long a far greater power than any kingdom
    of the West. A prerequisite of grasping that descent is a realistic
    understanding of the originating form of that empire.

    The Osmanli Sultanate, as it expanded into Europe between the 14th
    and 16th centuries, was indeed more tolerant - however anachronistic
    the term - than any Christian realm of the period. It is enough
    to compare the fate of the Muslims in Catholic Spain with that
    of the Orthodox in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. Christians and
    Jews were neither forced to convert nor expelled by the sultanate,
    but allowed to worship as they wished, in the House of Islam. This
    was not toleration in a modern sense, nor specifically Ottoman,
    but a traditional system of Islamic rule dating to the Umayyad
    Caliphate of the eighth century. Infidels were subject peoples,
    legally inferior to the ruling people. Semiotically and practically,
    they were separate communities. Taxed more heavily than believers,
    they could not bear arms, hold processions, wear certain clothes,
    have houses over a certain height. Muslims could take infidel wives;
    infidels could not marry Muslim women.

    The Ottoman state that inherited this system arose in 14th-century
    Anatolia as one Turkic chieftainry competing with others, expanding to
    the east and south at the expense of local Muslim rivals and to the
    west and north at the expense of the remains of Byzantine power. For
    two hundred years, as its armies conquered most of Eastern Europe,
    the Middle East and North Africa, the empire it built retained this
    bidirectionality. But there was never any doubt where its strategic
    centre of gravity, and primary momentum, lay. From the beginning,
    Osmanli rulers had drawn their legitimacy from holy war - gaza -
    on the frontiers of Christendom. The subjugated regions of Europe
    formed the richest, most populous and politically prized zones of
    the empire, and the theatre of the overwhelming majority of its
    military campaigns, as successive sultans set out for the House of
    War to enlarge the House of Islam. The Ottoman state was founded,
    as its most recent historian Caroline Finkel writes, on 'the ideal of
    continuous warfare'. Recognising no peers, and respecting no pieties
    of peaceful coexistence, it was designed for the battlefield, without
    territorial fixture or definition.

    But it was also pragmatic. From the outset, ideological warfare against
    infidels was combined with instrumental use of them for pursuit of
    it. From the perspective of the absolutist monarchies that arose in
    Western Europe somewhat later, each claiming dynastic authority and
    enforcing religious conformity within its realm, the peculiarity of
    the empire of Mehmed II and his successors lay in its combination of
    aims and means. On the one hand, the Ottomans waged unlimited holy
    war against Christendom. On the other hand, by the 15th century the
    state relied on a levy - the devshirme - of formerly Christian youths,
    picked from subject populations in the Balkans themselves not obliged
    to become Muslims, to compose its military and administrative elite:
    the kapi kullari or 'slaves of the sultan'.

    For upwards of two hundred years, the dynamism of this formidable
    engine of conquest, its range eventually stretching from Aden to
    Belgrade and the Crimea to the Rif, held Europe in awe. But by the end
    of the 17th century, after the last siege of Vienna, its momentum had
    run out. The 'ruling institution' of the empire ceased to be recruited
    from the offspring of unbelievers, reverting to native-born Muslims,
    and the balance of arms gradually turned against the Porte. After the
    late 18th century, when Russia inflicted successive crushing defeats
    on it north of the Black Sea, and revolutionary France took Egypt in
    a trice, the Ott0man state never won a major war again. In the 19th
    century its survival depended on the mutual jealousies of the predator
    powers of Europe more than any inner strength of its own. Time and
    again, it was rescued from further amputation or destruction only by
    the intervention of rival foreign capitals - London, Paris, Vienna, in
    one memorable crisis even St Petersburg - at the expense of each other.

    But though external pressures, ever more ominous as the technological
    gap between Ottoman and European empires widened, might in principle
    have continued to neutralise each other long enough to allow for
    an effective overhaul of state and society to meet the challenge
    from the West - the example of the Porte's rebel satrap in Egypt,
    Mehmet Ali, showed what could be done - the rise of nationalism
    among the subject Christian peoples of the Balkans undermined any
    diplomatic equilibrium. Greek independence, reluctantly seconded
    by Britain and France from fear that Russia would otherwise become
    its exclusive patron, shocked the sultanate into its first serious
    efforts at internal reform. In the Tanzimat period (1839-76),
    modernisation became more systematic. The palace was sidelined by
    the bureaucracy. Administration was centralised; legal equality of
    all subjects and security of property were proclaimed; education
    and science promoted; ideas and mores imported from the West. Under
    successive pro-British viziers, the Ottoman order took its place
    within the European state system.

    But the reformers of the time, however secular-minded, could
    not transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule. Three
    inequalities were codified by tradition: between believers and
    unbelievers, masters and slaves, men and women. Relations between
    the sexes altered little, though by the end of the century preference
    for boys had become less frequent among the elite, and slavery was -
    very gradually - phased out. Politically, the crucial relationship
    was the first. Ostensibly, discrimination against unbelievers was
    abolished by the reforms. But disavowed in principle, it persisted
    in practice, as non-Muslims continued to be subject to a poll tax,
    now disguised as payment for draft exclusion, from which Muslims
    were exempt. The army continued to be reserved for believers, and
    all significant civilian offices in the state remained a monopoly of
    the faithful. Such protection of the supremacy of Islam was, however,
    insufficient to appease popular hostility to reforms perceived as a
    surrender to European pressures and fashions, incompatible with piety
    or the proper position of believers in the empire. Quite apart from
    unseemly displays of Western ways of life in the cities, unpopular
    rural taxes were extended to Muslims, while Christian merchants,
    not to speak of foreign interests, flourished under the free trade
    regime conceded by the reformers to the Western powers.

    Neither consistently modern nor robustly traditional, the Tanzimat
    regimes were also fiscal failures. Tax-farming, officially disavowed,
    lingered on; rather than increasing, public revenues declined;
    capitulations - extra-territorial privileges granted to foreigners
    - persisted. Foreign borrowing ballooned, before finally bursting
    into state bankruptcy in 1875. Two years later, Ottoman armies
    were once again thrashed by Russia, and in 1878 - after a brief
    constitutional episode had fizzled - the empire was forced to accept
    the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and the autonomy
    of most of Bulgaria. For the next thirty years, power swung back from
    the bureaucracy to the palace, in the person of Sultan Abdulhamid
    II, who combined technological and administrative modernisation
    - railways, post offices, warships - with religious restoration
    and police repression. With the loss of most of the Balkans, the
    population of the empire had become more than 70 per cent Muslim. To
    cement loyalty to his regime, the sultan refurbished the long neglected
    title of caliph, broadcasting pan-Islamic appeals, and topping up the
    ranks of his administration with Arabs. But no amount of ideological
    bluster, or fabrication of tradition in the approved Victorian style,
    could alter the continued dependence of the empire on a public debt
    administration run by foreigners, and a European balance of power
    incapable of damping down the fires of nationalism in the Balkans.

    A broad swathe of Ottoman rule still extended to the Adriatic, in which
    various insurgent bands - most prominently, the Macedonian secret
    organisation IMRO - roamed the hills, and the cream of the army was
    stationed in garrison towns to hold what was left of Rumelia, the rich
    original core of the empire, its 'Roman' part. Here opposition to the
    sultan's tyranny had become widespread by the turn of the century among
    the young of all ethnic groups, not least Turks themselves. In 1908
    rumours of an impending Russo-British carve-up of the region triggered
    a military rising in Monastir and Salonika. The revolt spread rapidly,
    and within a couple of weeks had become irresistible. Abdulhamid
    was forced to call elections, in which the organisation behind the
    uprising, newly revealed to the world as the Committee of Union and
    Progress, won a resounding majority across the empire. The Young
    Turks had taken power.

    The Revolution of 1908 was a strange, amphibious affair. In many
    ways it was premonitory of the upheavals in Persia and China that
    followed three years later, but with features that set it apart from
    all subsequent such risings in the 20th century. On the one hand,
    it was a genuine constitutional movement, arousing popular enthusiasm
    right across the different nationalities of the empire, and electing an
    impressively interethnic parliament on a wide suffrage: an authentic
    expression of the still liberal zeitgeist of the period. On the other
    hand, it was a military coup mounted by a secret organisation of
    junior officers and conspirators, which can claim to be the first
    in a long line of such episodes in the Third World. The two were
    not disjoined, since the architects of the coup, a small group of
    plotters, gained empire-wide support virtually overnight in the name
    of constitutional rule - their party numbering hundreds of thousands
    within a year. Nor, formally speaking, were the objectives of each
    distinct: in the vocabulary of the time, the 'liberty, equality,
    fraternity and justice' proclaimed by the first were conceived as
    conditions of securing the integrity of the empire sought by the
    second, in a common citizenship shared by all its peoples.

    But that synthesis was not - could never be - stable. The prime mover
    in the revolution was the core group of officers in the CUP. Their
    overriding aim was the preservation of the empire, at whatever
    cost. Constitutional or other niceties were functional or futile to
    it, as the occasion might be - means, not ends in themselves. They
    weren't liberals but nor were they in any sense anti-colonial, in
    the fashion of later military patriots in the Third World, often
    authoritarian enough, but resolute enemies of Western imperialism
    - the Free Officers in Egypt, the Lodges in Argentina, the Thirty
    Comrades in Burma. The threats to the Ottoman Empire came, as they
    had long done, from European powers or their regional allies, but
    the Young Turks did not reject the West culturally or politically:
    rather, they wanted to enter the ring of its Machtpolitik on equal
    terms, as one contestant among others. For that, a transformation of
    the Ottoman state was required, to give it a modern mass base of the
    kind that had become such a strength of its rivals.

    But here they faced an acute dilemma. What ideological appeal could
    hold the motley populations - divided by language, religion and ethnic
    origin - of the Ottoman Empire together? Some unifying patriotism
    was essential, but the typical contemporary ingredients for one were
    missing. The nearest equivalent to the Ottoman order was the Habsburg
    Empire, but even it was considerably more compact, overwhelmingly of
    one basic faith, and in possession of a still respected traditional
    ruler. The Young Turks, in charge of lands stretching from the Yemen to
    the Danube, and peoples long segregated and stratified in a hierarchy
    of incompatible confessions, had no such advantages. What could it
    mean to be a citizen of this state, other than simply the contingent
    subject of a dynasty that the Young Turks themselves treated with
    scant reverence, unceremoniously ousting Abdulhamid within a year of
    taking power? The new regime could not escape an underlying legitimacy
    deficit. An awareness of the fragility of its ideological position was
    visible from the start. For the Young Turks retained the discredited
    monarchy against which it had rebelled, installing a feeble brother
    of Abdulhamid as a figurehead successor in the sultanate, and even
    trooping out, in farcical piety, behind the bier of Abdulhamid when
    the old brute, a King Bomba of the Bosphorus, finally expired.

    Such shreds of a faded continuity were naturally not enough to
    clothe the new collective emperor. The CUP needed the full dress of
    a modern nationalism. But how was this to be defined? A two-track
    solution was the answer. For public consumption, it proclaimed a
    'civic' nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what
    their creed or descent: a doctrine with broad appeal, greeted with a
    tremendous initial outburst of hope and energy among even the hitherto
    most disaffected groups in the empire, including Armenians. In secret
    conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or
    ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims or Turks. This was a duality
    that in its way reflected the peculiar structure of the CUP itself. As
    a party, it had won a large parliamentary majority in the first
    free elections the empire had known, and with a brief intermission
    in 1912-13, directed the policies of the state. But its leadership
    shunned the front of the stage, taking neither cabinet posts nor top
    military commands, leaving these to an older generation of soldiers and
    bureaucrats. Behind a facade of constitutional propriety and deference
    to seniority, however, actual power was wielded by the party's Central
    Committee, a group of 50 zealots controlling a political organisation
    modelled on the Macedonian and Armenian undergrounds. The term Young
    Turks was not a misnomer. When it took over, the key leaders of the CUP
    were in their thirties or late twenties. Numerically, army captains
    and majors predominated, but civilians also figured at the highest
    level. The trio who eventually occupied the limelight would be Enver
    and Cemal, from the officer corps, and Talat, a former functionary in
    the post office. Behind them, publicly less visible, but hidden drivers
    of the organisation, were two military doctors, Selânikli Nazim and
    Bahaettin Sakir. All five top leaders came from the 'European' sector
    of the Empire: the coxcomb Enver from a wealthy family in Istanbul,
    the mastiff Talat and the clinical Sakir from today's Bulgaria,
    Nazim from Salonika, the slightly older Cemal from Mytilene.

    The CUP was soon put to the test of defending the empire it had
    been set up to defend. In 1911 Italy seized Libya, the last Ottoman
    province in North Africa, Enver vainly attempting to organise desert
    resistance. A year later, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria
    combined to launch a joint attack on the Ottoman armies in the
    Balkans, which within a matter of weeks had all but swept them out of
    Europe. The CUP, which had been briefly dislodged from power in the
    summer of 1912, escaped the odium of this massive defeat, and when
    its enemies fell out with each other, was able to regain at least
    the province of Edirne. But the scale of the imperial catastrophe
    was traumatic. Rumelia had long been the most advanced region of the
    empire, the prime recruiting ground of Ottoman elites from the time
    of the devshirme to the Young Turks themselves, who kept their Central
    Committee in Salonika, not Istanbul, down to 1912. Its final loss, not
    even at the hands of a great power, reducing Ottoman domains in Europe
    to a mere foothold, and expelling some 400,000 Turks from their homes,
    was the greatest disaster and humiliation in the history of the empire.

    The effect on the CUP was twofold. The empire was now 85 per cent
    Muslim, lowering any incentive for political appeals to the remaining
    quotient of unbelievers, and increasing the attraction of playing the
    Islamic card to rally support for its regime. But though the leaders
    of the committee, determined to keep hold of the Arab provinces, made
    ample use of this, they had before them the bitter lesson taught by
    the Albanians, who had seized the opportunity offered by the Balkan
    Wars to gain their independence - a defection by fellow Muslims
    that suggested a common religion might not be enough to prevent a
    further disintegration of the state they had inherited. The result
    was to tilt the ideological axis of the CUP, especially its inner
    circle, in an increasingly ethnic - Turkish, as distinct from Muslim -
    direction. The shift involved no cost in outlook: virtually to a man,
    the Young Turks were positivists whose view of matters sacred was
    thoroughly instrumental.

    Nor were they disposed to accept a diminished station for the
    empire. Expulsion from Rumelia did not inspire a defensive posture, but
    an active will to avenge defeats in the Balkans, and recoup imperial
    losses. 'Our anger is strengthening: revenge, revenge, revenge; there
    is no other word,' Enver wrote to his wife. In a speech he exclaimed:

    How could a person forget the plains, the meadows, watered with
    the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish
    raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with
    our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our
    castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to
    Anatolia? This was beyond a person's endurance. I am prepared gladly
    to sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the
    Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Montenegrins.

    The lesson the CUP drew from 1912 was that Ottoman power could
    be upheld only by alliance with at least one of Europe's Great
    Powers, who had stood aside as it was rolled up. The Young Turks
    had no particular preference as to which, trying in turn Britain,
    Austria-Hungary, Russia and France, only to be rebuffed by each,
    before finally succeeding with Germany on 2 August 1914, two days
    before the outbreak of the First World War. By now the CUP occupied
    the foreground: Enver was minister of war, Talat of the interior,
    Cemal of the navy. The treaty as such did not commit the empire to
    declare war on the Entente, and the Young Turks thought to profit
    from it without much risk. They banked on Germany routing France in
    short order, whereupon Ottoman armies could join up safely with the
    Central Powers to knock out Russia, and garner the fruits of victory
    - regaining a suitable belt of Thrace, the Aegean islands, Cyprus,
    Libya, all of Arabia, territory ceded to Russia in the Caucasus,
    and lands stretching to Azerbaijan and Turkestan beyond.

    But when France did not collapse in the west, while Germany pressed
    for rapid Ottoman entry into the war to weaken Russia in the east, much
    of the cabinet got cold feet. It was only after weeks of disagreement
    and indecision that Enver, the most bellicose member of the junta
    now in control, succeeded in bouncing the government into war in
    late October 1914, with an unprovoked naval bombardment of Russian
    coastal positions in the Black Sea. However, the Ottoman navy, even
    manned by German crews, was in no position to effect landings in the
    Ukraine. Where then was Young Turk mettle to be displayed? Symbolic
    forces were eventually sent north to buff out Austro-German lines in
    Galicia, and half-hearted expeditions dispatched, at the prompting of
    Berlin, against British lines in Egypt. But these were sideshows. The
    crack troops of the army, led by Enver in person, were flung across the
    Russian border in the Caucasus. There, waiting to be recovered, lay the
    three provinces of Batum, Ardahan and Kars, subtracted from the empire
    at the Conference of Berlin in 1878. In the snowbound depths of the
    winter of January 1915, few returned. The Ottoman attack was shattered
    more completely than any comparable offensive in the Great War - fewer
    than one out of seven survived the campaign. As they straggled back,
    frost-bitten and demoralised, their rearguard was left exposed.

    In Istanbul, the CUP reacted swiftly. This was no ordinary retreat
    into the kind of rear where another Battle of the Marne might be
    fought. The whole swathe of territory extending across both sides of
    the frontier was home to Armenians. What place could they have in
    the conflict that had now been unleashed? Historically the oldest
    inhabitants of the region, indeed of Anatolia at large, they were
    Christians whose Church - dating from the third century - could
    claim priority over that of Rome itself. But by the 19th century,
    unlike Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks or Albanians, they comprised no compact
    national majority anywhere in their lands of habitation. In 1914,
    about a quarter were subjects of the Russian, three-quarters of the
    Ottoman Empire. Under the tsars, they enjoyed no political rights,
    but as fellow Christians were not persecuted for their religion,
    and could rise within the imperial administration. Under the sultans,
    they had been excluded from the devshirme from the start, but could
    operate as merchants and acquire land, if not offices; and in the
    course of the 19th century they generated a significant intellectual
    stratum - the first Ottoman novels were written by Armenians.

    Inevitably, like their Balkan counterparts, and inspired by them,
    this intelligentsia developed a nationalist movement. But it was
    set apart from them in two ways: it was dispersed across a wide and
    discontinuous expanse of territory, throughout which it was a minority,
    and it was divided between two rival empires, one of which posed
    as its protector, while the other figured as its persecutor. Most
    Armenians were peasants in the three easternmost Ottoman provinces,
    where they numbered perhaps a quarter of the population. But there
    were also significant concentrations in Cilicia, bordering on today's
    Syria, and vigorous communities in Istanbul and other big cities. State
    suspicion of a minority with links across a contested border, latent
    popular hostility to unbelievers, and economic jealousy of alien
    commercial wealth made a combustible atmosphere around their presence
    in Anatolia. Abdulhamid's personal animus had ensured they would
    suffer under his rule, which saw repeated pogroms against them. In
    1894-96, anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000 died in massacres at the
    hands of special Kurdish regiments he created for ethnic repressions
    in the east. The ensuing international outcry, leading eventually
    to the theoretical appointment - it came to nothing - of foreign
    inspectors to ensure Armenian safety in the worst affected zones,
    confirmed belief in the disloyalty of the community.

    The CUP's immediate fear, as it surveyed the rout of its armies
    in the Caucasus, was that the local Armenian population might
    rally to the enemy. On 25 February, it ordered that all Armenian
    conscripts in its forces be disarmed. The telegrams went out on the
    day Anglo-French forces began to bombard the Dardanelles, threatening
    Istanbul itself. Towards the end of March, amid great tension in the
    capital, the Central Committee - Talat was the prime mover - voted
    that the entire Armenian population in Anatolia be deported to the
    deserts of Syria, to secure the Ottoman rear. The operation was to
    be carried out by the Teskilât-i Mahsusa, the 'Special Organisation'
    created for secret tasks by the party in 1913, now some 30,000 strong
    under the command of Bahaettin Sakir.

    Ethnic cleansing on a massive scale was no novelty in the
    region. Wholesale expulsion of communities from their homes, typically
    as refugees from conquering armies, was a fate hundreds of thousands
    of Turks and Circassians had suffered, as Russia consolidated its grip
    in the northern Caucasus in the 1860s, and Balkan nations won their
    independence from Ottoman rule in the next half century. Anatolia
    was full of such mujahir, with bitter memories of their treatment by
    Christians. Widespread slaughter was no stranger to the region either:
    the Armenian massacres of the 1890s had many precedents, on all sides,
    in the history of the Eastern Question, as elsewhere. Nor was forcible
    relocation on security grounds confined to one side in the First World
    War itself: in Russia, at least half a million Jews were rounded up
    and deported from Poland and the Pale by the tsarist regime.

    The enterprise on which the CUP embarked in the spring of 1915 was,
    however, new. For ostensible deportation, brutal enough in itself,
    was to be the cover for extermination - systematic, state-organised
    murder of an entire community. The killings began in March, still
    somewhat haphazardly, as Russian forces began to penetrate into
    Anatolia. On 20 April, in a climate of increasing fear, there was an
    Armenian uprising in the city of Van. Five days later, Anglo-French
    forces staged full-scale landings on the Dardanelles, and contingency
    plans were laid for transferring the government to the interior,
    should the capital fall to the Entente. In this emergency, the CUP
    wasted no time. By early June, centrally directed and co-ordinated
    destruction of the Armenian population was in full swing. As the
    leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann,
    writes, 'the escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred
    within three months, a much more rapid escalation than Hitler's later
    attack on the Jews.' Sakir - probably more than any other conspirator,
    the original designer of the CUP - toured the target zones, shadowy and
    deadly, supervising the slaughter. Without even pretexts of security,
    Armenians in Western Anatolia were wiped out hundreds of miles from
    the front.

    No reliable figures exist for the number of those who died, or
    the different ways - with or without bullet or knife; on the spot
    or marched to death - in which they perished. Mann, who thinks
    a reasonable guess is 1.2 to 1.4 million, reckons that 'perhaps
    two-thirds of the Armenians died' - 'the most successful murderous
    cleansing achieved in the 20th century', exceeding in its proportions
    the Shoah. A catastrophe of this order could not be hidden. Germans,
    present in Anatolia as Ottoman allies in many capacities - consular,
    military and pastoral among others - witnessed it and reported home,
    many in horror or anguish. Confronted by the American ambassador,
    Talat scarcely bothered even to deny it. For its part the Entente,
    unlike the Allies who kept silent at the Judeocide in the Second World
    War, denounced the extermination without delay, issuing a solemn
    declaration on 24 May 1915, promising to punish as criminals those
    who had organised it.

    Victory in the Dardanelles saved the CUP regime. But this was the
    only real success, a defensive one, in its war effort. Elsewhere,
    in Arabia, in Palestine, in Iraq, on the Black Sea, the armies
    of a still basically agricultural society were beaten by its more
    industrialised adversaries, with great civilian suffering and huge
    military casualties, exceeded as a proportion of the population only
    by Serbia. With the collapse of Bulgaria, the Ottoman lifeline to
    the Central Powers, at the end of September 1918, the writing was on
    the wall for the CUP. Talat, passing back through Sofia from a trip
    to Berlin, saw the game was up, and within a fortnight had resigned
    as grand vizier. A new cabinet, under ostensibly less compromised
    leaders, was formed two weeks later, and on 31 October the Porte
    signed an armistice with the Entente, three days before Austria on
    3 November and two weeks before Germany on 11 November. It looked as
    if dominoes were falling in a row, from weakest to strongest.

    The impression was misleading. In Vienna, the Habsburg monarchy
    disintegrated overnight. In Berlin, soldiers' and workers' councils
    sprang up as the last Hohenzollern fled into exile. In Sofia,
    Stamboliski's Peasant Party, which had staged a rising even
    before the end of the war, came to power. In each case defeat
    was incontestable, the old order was utterly discredited by it,
    and revolutionary forces emerged amid its ruins. In Istanbul there
    was no such scenario. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war with
    a gratuitous decision unlike that of any other power, and its exit
    was unlike that of any other too. For the CUP leaders did not accept
    that they were beaten. Their handover of the cabinet was a reculer
    pour mieux sauter. In the fortnight between their resignation from
    the government and the signature of an armistice, they prepared for
    resistance against an impending occupation, and a second round in the
    struggle to assert Turkish might. Enver invoked the Balkan disasters
    of 1912-13, when redemption had been snatched with his recovery of
    Edirne, as inspiration for the future. Talat set up a paramilitary
    underground, Karakol, headed by close associates - they included
    Enver's uncle - and equipped with arms caches and funds from the
    Special Organisation, which was itself hastily dissolved, and the
    Unionist Party renamed. Archives were removed and incriminating files
    methodically destroyed.

    When surrender was signed off the island of Lemnos on 31 October,
    but Allied forces had not yet entered the Straits, the CUP leaders
    made their final move. Dispositions were now complete, and there was
    no panic. During the night of 1-2 November, eight top leaders of the
    regime secretly boarded a German torpedo-boat, the former Schastlivyi
    captured from the Russians, which sped them to Sebastopol. Germany,
    still at war with the Entente, controlled the Ukraine. The party
    included Enver, Talat, Sakir, Nazim and Cemal. From the Crimea, Enver
    made in the direction of the Caucasus, while the rest of the party
    were taken by stages in disguise to Berlin, which they reached in
    January 1919. There they were granted protection under Ebert, the
    new Social Democratic president of the republic. Unionism was not
    Nazism, but if an analogy were wanted, it was as if in 1945 Hitler,
    Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Goebbels and Goering, after laying careful
    preparations for Werewolf actions in Germany, had coolly escaped
    together to Finland, to continue the struggle.

    Ten days later, the Allies entered Istanbul. At the war's end, the
    Habsburg Empire had spontaneously disintegrated; the Hohenzollern gave
    way to a republic that had to yield up Alsace-Lorraine and suffer
    occupation of the Rhineland, but no real loss of German territorial
    integrity. The Ottoman Empire was another matter, its fate far more
    completely at the mercy of the victors. In late 1918, four powers -
    Britain, France, Italy and Greece - shared the spoils, the first two
    dividing its Arab provinces between them, the latter competing for
    gains in south-west Anatolia. It would be another two years before
    any formal agreement was reached between them on how the empire was
    finally to be dismembered. Meanwhile, they exercised joint supervision
    in Istanbul, initially quite loose, over an apparently accommodating
    cabinet under a new sultan, known for disliking the CUP.

    The postwar misery of a defeated society was much worse than in
    Germany or Austria, but its resources for resisting any potentially
    Carthaginian peace were greater. In the capital, Karakol was soon
    funnelling a flow of agents and arms into the interior, where plans
    had already been laid during the war to move the centre of power, and
    there was little foreign presence to monitor what was going on. And,
    crucially, the October Revolution, by removing Russia from the ranks of
    the Allies, not only ensured that Eastern Anatolia remained beyond the
    range of any occupation. It left the Ottoman Ninth Army, which Enver
    had sent to seize the Caucasus, intact under its Unionist commander,
    once the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk cleared the path for it to advance
    all the way to Baku.

    In the spring of 1919, another Unionist officer stepped on
    stage. Kemal, who also came from Rumelia, was an early member of the
    CUP, who had risen to prominence in the defence of the Dardanelles,
    before spending the bulk of the war in Syria. Uneasy relations with
    Enver had excluded him from the inner core of the party, absolving
    him from involvement with its Special Organisation. Returning from
    Damascus in pursuit of a ministry in the postwar cabinet, he was
    offered instead a military inspectorate in the east. The proposal
    probably came out of discussions with Karakol, with whom he made
    contact on getting back. Once arrived on the Black Sea coast, he moved
    inland and began immediately to co-ordinate political and military
    resistance - at first covert, soon overt - to Allied controls over
    Turkey. In what would in time become the War of Independence, he was
    assisted by four favourable factors.

    The first was simply the degree of preparation for resistance left
    behind by the CUP leaders, which included not only extensive arms
    dumps and intelligence agents underground, but also a countrywide
    network of Societies for the Rights of National Defence as a quasi
    political party above ground; plus - more by fortune than forethought -
    a fully equipped regular army, out of Allied reach. The second was the
    solidarity extended by Russia, where Lenin's regime, facing multiple
    Entente interventions to overthrow it in the Civil War, supported
    Turkish resistance to the common enemy with arms and funds. The third
    lay in divisions of the Entente itself. Britain was the principal
    power in Istanbul. But it was unwilling to match its political weight
    with military force, preferring to rely on Greece as its regional
    proxy. But the Greek card - this was the fourth essential element in
    the situation - was a particularly weak one for the victors to play.

    Greece was not only resented as an inferior rival by Italy, and
    suspected as a British pawn by France. In Turkish eyes a jackal
    scavenging behind great powers, who were worthy adversaries of the
    empire, it had made virtually no contribution to the defeat of Ottoman
    arms, and yet was awarded the largest occupied zones, where substantial
    numbers of Greeks had already been expelled by the Special Organisation
    before the war, and ethnic tensions ran high. On top of all this,
    Greece was a small, internally divided state, of scant significance
    as a military power. A better target for a campaign of national
    liberation would have been difficult to imagine. Four days before
    Kemal arrived on the Black Sea, Greek troops landed in Smyrna and
    took over the surrounding region, igniting anger across the country,
    and creating perfect conditions for an enterprise that still looked
    risky to many Turks.

    Within a year, Kemal had set up a National Assembly in Ankara, in open
    defiance of the government in Istanbul, and assembled forces capable of
    checking Greek advances, which had occupied more and more of western
    Anatolia. Another Greek push was blocked, after initial gains, in the
    autumn of 1921, and a year later the aggressor, still stationed on the
    same lines, was routed. Within ten days, Kemal's army entered Smyrna
    and burned it to the ground, driving the remaining Greek population
    into the sea in the most spectacular of the savageries committed on
    both sides. In Britain, the debacle of his protégé brought the rule
    of Lloyd George to an end. Philhellene to the last, when he threatened
    to take the country to war over Turkish successes in October 1922,
    he was ousted by a revolt in the Carlton Club.

    The following summer Curzon, abandoning earlier Entente schemes for
    a partition of Anatolia, accepted the basic modern borders of Turkey
    and the end of all extra-territorial rights for foreigners within
    it, signing with his French, Italian and Greek counterparts the
    Treaty of Lausanne that formally ended hostilities with the Ottoman
    state. Juridically, the main novelty of the treaty was the mutual
    ethnic cleansing proposed by the Norwegian philanthropist Fridtjof
    Nansen, who was awarded, the first in a long line of such recipients,
    the Nobel Peace Prize for his brainwave. The 'population exchange'
    between Turkey and Greece reflected the relative positions of victor
    and vanquished, driving 900,000 Greeks and 400,000 Turks from their
    homes in opposite directions.

    Hailed as liberator of his country, Kemal was now master of the
    political scene. He had risen to power in large measure on the back
    of the parallel state Unionism had left behind when the Schastlivyi
    slipped its moorings, and for a time had more the status of primus
    inter pares among survivors of the CUP regime than of an uncontested
    chief. As late as the summer of 1921, Enver had hovered across the
    border on the Black Sea coast, waiting to re-enter the fray and
    take over leadership from Kemal, should he fail to stem the Greek
    advance. Military victory made Kemal immune to such a threat, which
    Talat in Berlin anyway thought ill-advised, instructing his followers
    to stick with the new leader. But the CUP also represented another
    kind of danger, as a potential albatross around the legitimacy of his
    rule. For under the Allied occupation, trials had been held of the key
    officials responsible for the Armenian genocide by the government in
    Istanbul, and all eight of the top leaders who had sailed to Sebastopol
    were condemned to death in absentia.

    The Weimar regime, fearing they might implicate Germany if extradited,
    had given them cover. In Berlin, they had developed their own ambitious
    schemes for the recovery of Turkish power, crisscrossing Europe
    and Asia - Talat to Holland, Sweden, Italy; Cemal to Switzerland,
    Georgia; Sakir and Enver to Russia; others to Persia and Afghanistan -
    with differing plans for a comeback. Had they remained at large, they
    would have been an acute embarrassment to Kemal's regime, as reminders
    of what linked them, forcing it to take a public position it wished
    at all costs to avoid. By a stroke of irony, Kemal was spared this
    problem by the Central Committee of the Armenian Revolutionary Party,
    the Dashnaks. Deciding at a meeting in Erevan to execute justice on its
    own account, the party dispatched operatives to carry out the verdicts
    of Istanbul. In March 1921, Talat was felled by a revolver outside
    his residence in the Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfurstendamm, in
    the centre of Berlin; in April 1922, Sakir and Cemal Azmi were shot
    a few doors down the same street; in July, Cemal was assassinated
    in Tbilisi; in August, beyond the reach of Dashnak vengeance, Enver
    was tracked down - supposedly by an Armenian Chekist - and killed
    fighting the Bolsheviks in Tajikistan. No clean sweep could have
    been more timely for the new order in Ankara. With the CUP chiefs
    out of the way, Kemal could proceed to build a Turkey in his image,
    unencumbered by too notorious memories of the past.

    Three months after Enver was buried, the Ottomans finally followed the
    Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hohenzollerns, when the sultanate that the CUP
    had so carefully preserved was abolished. A year later, after tightly
    controlled elections had been held, Kemal was proclaimed president of
    a Turkish Republic. The symbolic break with centuries of a dynastic
    aura to which Unionism had clung was sharp enough, but by then small
    surprise. No such predictable logic marked what ensued. In the spring
    of 1924, Kemal scrapped the caliphate, a religious institution still
    revered across the Muslim world (there was a wave of protest as far
    away as India), and was soon closing down shrines and suppressing
    dervishes, banning the fez, changing the calendar, substituting civil
    law for the sharia, and replacing Arabic with Latin script. The scale
    and speed of this assault on religious tradition and household custom,
    embracing faith, time, dress, family, language, remain unique in the
    Umma to this day. No one could have guessed at such radicalism in
    advance. Its visionary drive separated Kemal from his predecessors
    with éclat.

    But systematic though it was, the transformation that now gripped
    Turkey was a strange one: a cultural revolution without a social
    revolution, something historically very rare, indeed that might look a
    priori impossible. The structure of society, the rules of property, the
    pattern of class relations, remained unaltered. The CUP had repressed
    any strikes or labour organisation from the start. Kemal followed
    suit: Communists were killed or jailed, however good diplomatic
    relations were with Moscow. But if there was no anti-capitalist
    impulse in Kemalism, nor was there was any significant anti-feudal
    dimension to it. Ottoman rule, centred on an office-holding state,
    had never required or permitted a powerful landowning class in the
    countryside, least of all in Anatolia, where peasant holdings had
    traditionally prevailed - the only real exception being areas of
    the Kurdish south-east controlled by tribal chiefs. The scope for
    agrarian reform was thus anyway much more limited than in Russia,
    or even parts of the Balkans, and no attempt at it was made.

    Yet the social landscape hit by the cultural revolution was at
    the same time the opposite of a stable traditional order, in one
    crucial respect. If no class struggles lay behind the dynamics of
    Kemalism, ethnic upheavals on a gigantic scale had reshaped Anatolian
    society. The influx of Turks and Circassians, refugees from Russian or
    Balkan wars, the extirpation of the Armenians, the expulsion of the
    Greeks, had produced a vast brassage of populations and properties
    in a still backward agricultural economy. It was in this shattered
    setting that a cultural revolution from above could be imposed without
    violent reaction from below. The extent of deracination, moral and
    material, at the conclusion of wars that had continued virtually
    without interruption for more than a decade - twice as long as in
    Europe - permitted a Kulturkampf that might otherwise have provoked an
    unmanageable explosion. But by the same token the revolution acquired
    no active popular impetus: Kemalism remained a vertical affair.

    Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in
    one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke
    cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past,
    in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman
    tradition, but accentuated it. All premodern ruling groups spoke idioms
    differing in one way or another, if only in accent or vocabulary, from
    those they ruled. But the Ottoman elite, for long composed not even
    principally of Turks, was peculiarly detached from its subjects, as a
    corps of state servants bonded by command of a sophisticated language
    that was a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, with many foreign
    loan words, incomprehensible to the ruled. Administrative Ottoman
    was less elaborate than its literary forms, and Turkish remained in
    household use, but there was nevertheless a huge - linguistically
    fixed - gulf between high and low cultures in the empire.

    Kemalism set out to do away with this, by creating a modern Turkish
    that would no longer be the despised patois of Ottoman times, but
    a language spoken alike by all citizens of the new republic. But
    while it sought to close the gap between rulers and ruled where it
    had been widest in the past, at the same it opened up a gap that
    had never existed to the same extent before, leaving the overall
    distance between them as great as ever. Language reform might unify;
    religious reform was bound to divide. The faith of the Ottoman elites
    had little in common with the forms of popular piety - variegated
    cults and folk beliefs looked down on by the educated. But at least
    there was a shared commitment to Islam. This tie was sundered by
    Kemal. Once the state started to target shrines and brotherhoods,
    preachers and prayer meetings, it was hitting at traditional objects
    of reverence and attachment, and the masses resisted it. At this
    level, the cultural revolution misfired. Rejected by the rural and
    small-town majority, Kemalist secularism was, however, adopted with
    aggressive zeal in the cities by modernised descendants of the Ottoman
    elite - bureaucrats, officers, professionals. In this urban stratum,
    secularism became over time, as it remains today, in its blinkered
    intensity, something like an ersatz religion in its own right. But
    the rigidity of this secularism is a peculiarly brittle one. Not just
    because it is intellectually thin, or divorced from popular feeling,
    but more profoundly because of a structural bad faith that has always
    been inseparable from it.

    There is no reason to suppose that Kemal himself was anything other
    than a robust atheist, of more or less French Third Republic stamp,
    throughout his life. In that sense, he is entitled to be remembered
    as a Turkish Emile Combes, scourge of monkish mystification and
    superstition. But in his rise to power, he could no more dispense
    with Islam than Talat or Enver had done. 'God's help and protection
    are with us in the sacred struggle which we have entered upon for our
    fatherland,' he declared in 1920. The struggle for independence was a
    holy war, which he led as Gazi, the Warrior for the Faith of original
    Ottoman expansion, a title he held onto down to the mid-1930s. 'God
    is one, and great is his glory!' he announced without a blush, in
    a sermon to the faithful delivered in a mosque in 1923. When the
    constitution of the Turkish Republic was framed in the following
    year, Islam was declared the state religion. The spirit in which
    Kemal made use of Muslim piety in these years was that of Napoleon
    enthroning himself with the blessing of the pope. But as exercises in
    cynicism they moved in opposite directions: Napoleon rising to power
    as a revolutionary, and manipulating religion to stabilise it, Kemal
    manipulating religion to make a revolution and turning on it once his
    power was stabilised. After 1926 little more was heard of the deity.

    Tactical and transient, the new regime's use of Islam, when no
    longer required, was easily reversed. But at a deeper level, a
    much tighter knot tied it to the very religion it proceeded on the
    surface to mortify. For even when at apparent fever pitch, Turkish
    secularism has never been truly secular. This is in part because,
    as often noted, Kemalism did not so much separate religion from
    the state as subordinate it to the state, creating 'directorates'
    that took over the ownership of all mosques, appointment of imams,
    administration of pious foundations - in effect, turning the faith
    into a branch of the bureaucracy. A much more profound reason, however,
    is that religion was never detached from the nation, becoming instead
    an unspoken definition of it. It was this that allowed Kemalism
    to become more than just a cult of the elites, leaving a durable
    imprint on the masses themselves. Secularism failed to take at village
    level: nationalism sank deeper popular roots. It is possible - such
    is the argument of Carter Findley in his Turks in World History -
    that in doing so it drew on a long Turkish cultural tradition, born
    in Central Asia and predating conversion to Islam, that figured a
    sacralisation of the state, which has vested its modern signifier,
    devlet, with an aura of unusual potency. However that may be, the
    ambiguity of Kemalism was to construct an ideological code in two
    registers. One was secular and appealed to the elite. The other was
    crypto-religious and accessible to the masses. Common to both was
    the integrity of the nation, as supreme political value.

    As Christians, Greeks and Armenians were excluded from the outset. In
    the first elections to the National Assembly in 1919, only Muslims
    were entitled to vote, and when populations were 'exchanged' in 1923,
    even Greek communities in Cilicia whose language was Turkish, so
    thoroughly were they assimilated, were expelled on grounds that they
    were nevertheless infidels - their ethnicity defined not by culture,
    but by religion. Such excisions from the nation went virtually without
    saying. But there remained another large community within the country,
    most of whom spoke little Turkish, that could not be so dispatched,
    because it was Muslim. In ethnically cleansed Anatolia, Kurds made up
    perhaps a quarter of the population. They had played a central role in
    the Armenian genocide, supplying shock troops for the extermination,
    and fought alongside Turks in the War of Independence. What was to
    be their place in the new state?

    While the struggle for independence was in the balance, Kemal promised
    them respect for their identity, and autonomy in the regions where
    they predominated. 'There are Turks and Kurds,' Kemal declared
    in 1920, 'the nation is not one element. There are various bonded
    Muslim elements. All the Muslim elements which make this entity are
    citizens.' But once victory was assured, Kurdish areas were stocked
    with Turkish officials, Kurdish place names were changed, and the
    Kurdish language banned from courts and schools. Then, with the
    abolition of the caliphate in 1924, Kemal did away with the common
    symbol of Islam to which he had himself appealed five years earlier,
    when he had vowed that 'Turks and Kurds will continue to live together
    as brothers around the institution of the khilafa.' The act detonated a
    major Kurdish revolt under a tribal religious leader, Sheikh Sait, in
    early 1925. A full half of the Turkish army, more than fifty thousand
    troops, was mobilised to crush the rebellion. On some reckonings,
    more of them died in its suppression than in the War of Independence.

    In the south-east, repression was followed by deportations, executions
    and systematic Turkification. In the country as a whole, it was
    the signal for the imposition of a dictatorship, with a Law for the
    Maintenance of Order that closed down opposition parties and press for
    the rest of the decade. In 1937, in the face of a still more drastic
    programme of Turkification, Alevi Kurds rose in the Dersim region,
    and were put down yet more ruthlessly, with more modern weapons of
    destruction - bombers, gas, heavy artillery. Officially, the Kurds had
    by now ceased to exist. After 1925 Kemal never again uttered the word
    'Kurd' in public. The nation was composed of one homogeneous people,
    and it alone, the Turks - a fiction that was to last another three
    generations.

    But if Kurds were no different from Turks, whatever their language,
    customs or sense of themselves, what defined the indivisible identity
    of the two? Tacitly, it could only be what Kemalism could no longer
    admit, but with which it could never dispense - religion. There were
    still tiny Christian and Jewish communities in the country, preserved
    essentially in Istanbul and its environs, and in due course these
    would be subjected to treatment that made it clear how fundamental
    the division between believers and unbelievers continued to be in the
    Kemalist state. But though Islam delimited the nation, it now did so
    in a purely negative way: it was the covert identity that was left,
    after every positive determination had been subtracted, in the name
    of homogeneity. The result has been that Turkish secularism has always
    depended on what it repressed.

    The repression, of course, had to be compensated. Once religion could
    no longer function publicly as common denominator of the nation, the
    state required a substitute as ideological cement. Kemal attempted
    to resolve the problem by generating a legendary essence of race
    and culture shared by all in the Turkish Republic. The materials to
    hand for this construction posed their own difficulties. The first
    Turkish tribes had arrived in Anatolia in the 11th century, recent
    newcomers compared with Greeks or Armenians, who had preceded them
    by more than a millennium, not to speak of Kurds, often identified
    with the Medes of antiquity. As even a casual glance at phenotypes
    in Turkey today suggests, centuries of genetic mixing followed. A
    purely Turkish culture was an equally doubtful quantity. The Ottoman
    elite had produced literary and visual riches of which any society
    could be proud, but this was a cosmopolitan culture, which was not
    only distinct from, but contemptuous of anything too specifically
    Turkish - the very term 'Turk' signifying a rustic churl well into
    the 19th century. Reform of the script now rendered most of this
    heritage inaccessible anyway.

    Undaunted by these limitations, Kemalism fashioned for instruction
    the most extravagant mythology of any interwar nationalism. By the
    mid-1930s, the state was propagating an ideology in which the Turks,
    of whom Hittites and Phoenicians in the Mediterranean were said to
    be a branch, had spread civilisation from Central Asia to the world,
    from China to Brazil; and as the drivers of universal history, spoke a
    language that was the origin of all other tongues, which were derived
    from the Sun-Language of the first Turks. Such ethnic megalomania
    reflected the extent of the underlying insecurity and artificiality
    of the official enterprise: the less there was to be confident of,
    the more fanfare had to be made out of it.

    Observing Kemalist cultural policies in 1936-37, Erich Auerbach wrote
    from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: 'the process is going fantastically
    and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic
    or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly
    become incomprehensible.' Combining 'a renunciation of all existing
    Islamic cultural tradition, a fastening onto a fantasy "ur-Turkey",
    technical modernisation in the European sense in order to strike the
    hated and envied Europe with its own weapons', it offered 'nationalism
    in the superlative with the simultaneous destruction of the historic
    national character'.

    Seventy years later, a Turkish intellectual would reflect on the
    deeper logic of this process. In an essay of unsurpassed power,
    one of the great texts in the world's literature on nationalism,
    the sociologist Caglar Keyder has described the desperate retroactive
    peopling of Anatolia with ur-Turks in the shape of Hittites and Trojans
    as a compensation mechanism for the emptying by ethnic cleansing at
    the origins of the regime. The repression of that memory created a
    complicity of silence between rulers and ruled, but no popular bond of
    the kind that a genuine anti-imperialist struggle would have generated,
    the War of Independence remaining a small-scale affair, compared
    with the traumatic mass experience of the First World War. Abstract
    in its imagination of space, hypomanic in its projection of time,
    the official ideology assumed a peculiarly 'preceptorial' character,
    with all that the word implies. 'The choice of the particular founding
    myth referring national heritage to an obviously invented history, the
    deterritorialisation of "motherland", and the studious avoidance and
    repression of what constituted a shared recent experience, rendered
    Turkish nationalism exceptionally arid.'

    Such nationalism was a new formation, but the experience that it
    repressed tied it, intimately, to the nationalism out of which it had
    grown. The continuities between Kemalism and Unionism, plain enough
    in the treatment of the Kurds under the Republic, were starker still
    in other ways. For extermination of the Armenians did not cease in
    1916. Determined to prevent the emergence of an Armenian state in
    the area awarded it - costlessly, on paper - by Woodrow Wilson in
    1920, Kemal's government in Ankara ordered an attack on the Armenian
    Republic that had been set up on the Russian side of the border in the
    Caucasus, where most of those who had escaped the killings of 1915-16
    had fled. In a secret telegram the foreign minister, later Kemal's
    first ambassador to the US, instructed Kazim Karabekir, the commander
    charged with the invasion, to 'deceive the Armenians and fool the
    Europeans', in carrying out the express order: 'It is indispensable
    that Armenia be politically and physically annihilated.' Soviet
    historians estimate 200,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the space
    of five months, before the Red Army intervened.

    This was still, in some fashion, happening in time of war. Once
    peace came, what was the attitude of the Turkish Republic to the
    original genocide? To interested foreigners, Kemal would deplore,
    usually off the record, the killings as the work of a tiny handful
    of scoundrels. To its domestic audience, the regime went out of
    its way to honour the perpetrators, dead or alive. Two of the
    most prominent killers hanged in 1920 for their atrocities by
    the tribunals in Istanbul were proclaimed 'national martyrs' by
    the Kemalist Assembly, and in 1926 the families of Talat, Enver,
    Sakir and Cemal were officially granted pensions, properties and
    lands seized from the Armenians, in recognition of services to the
    country. Such decisions were not mere sentimental gestures. Kemal's
    regime was packed, from top to bottom, with participants in the murders
    of 1915-16. At one time or another his ministers of foreign affairs
    and of the interior; of finance, education and defence; and of public
    works, were all veterans of the genocide; while a minister of justice,
    suitably enough, had been defence lawyer at the Istanbul trials. It
    was as if Adenauer's cabinets had been composed of well-known chiefs
    of the SS and the Sicherheitsdienst.

    What of Kemal himself? In Gallipoli till the end of 1915, he was posted
    to Diyarbekir in the south-east in the spring of 1916, after the region
    had been emptied of Armenians. He certainly knew of the genocide -
    someone in his position could hardly have been unaware of it - but
    played no part in it. How he would have acted had he been in the zone
    at the time is impossible to guess. After the event, it is clear that
    he regarded it as an accomplished fact that had become a condition
    of the new Turkey. In this he was like most of his countrymen, for
    the elimination of the Armenians in Anatolia, who were at least a
    tenth of the population, unlike that of the Jews in Germany, who were
    little more than 1 per cent, was of material benefit to large numbers
    of ordinary citizens, who acquired lands and wealth from those who had
    been wiped out, as from Greeks who had been expelled, another tenth of
    the population. Kemal himself was among the recipients of this vast
    largesse, receiving gratis villas abandoned by Greek owners in Bursa
    and Trabzon, and the mansion on the hill of Cankaya that became his
    official residence as head of state in Ankara. Originally the estate
    of an Armenian family, there the Presidential Palace of the Republic
    stands today, it too planted on booty from the genocide.

    Yet between taking part in a crime, and gaining from one, there
    is a difference. Kemal was one of history's most striking examples
    of 'moral luck', that philosophical oxymoron out of which Bernard
    Williams made a delphic grace. By accident of military appointments,
    his hands were clean of the worst that was committed in his time,
    making him a natural candidate for leadership of the national
    movement after the war. Personally, he was brave, intelligent and
    far-sighted. Successful as a military commander, he was formidable
    as the builder of a state. Bold or prudent as the occasion required,
    he showed an unswerving realism in the acquisition and exercise of
    power. Yet he was also moved by genuine ideals of a better life for
    his people, conceived as entry into a civilised modernity, modelled
    on the most advanced societies of the day. Whatever became of these
    in practice, he never turned on them.

    Ends were one thing, means another. Kemal's regime was a
    one-party dictatorship, centred on a personality cult of heroic
    proportions. Equestrian statues of Kemal were being erected as
    early as 1926, long before monuments to Stalin could be put up in
    Russia. The speech he gave in 1927 that became the official creed of
    the nation dwarfed any address by Khrushchev or Castro. Extolling his
    own achievements, it went on for 36 hours, delivered over six days,
    eventually composing a tome of 600 pages: a record in the annals of
    autocracy. Hardened in war, he held life cheap, and without hesitation
    meted out death to those who stood in his way. Kurds fell by the tens
    of thousands; though, once forcibly classified as Turks, they were not
    extirpated. Communists were murdered or jailed, the country's greatest
    poet, Nazim Hikmet, spending most of his life in prison or exile. Kemal
    was capable of sparing old associates. But Unionists who resisted him
    were executed, trials were rigged, the press was muzzled. The regime
    was not invasive, by modern standards, but repression was routine.

    It is conventional, and reasonable, to compare Kemal's rule with the
    other Mediterranean dictatorships of his day. In that wan light, its
    relative merits are plain. On the one hand, unlike Salazar, Franco
    or Metaxas, Kemal was not a traditional conservative, enforcing
    reactionary moral codes in league with the Church, an enemy of
    progress as the time understood it. He was a resolute moderniser,
    who had not come to power as a defender of landlords or bankers. For
    him, the state was everything, family and religion nothing, beyond
    discardable backstops. At the same time, unlike Mussolini, who was
    a modernist too - one from whom he took the penal code under which
    Turkey still suffers - he was not an expansionist, hoping to build
    another empire in the region. Recovery of so much more territory
    than had seemed likely in 1918 was sufficient achievement in itself,
    even if Turkish borders could still be improved: one of his last
    acts was to engineer the annexation of Alexandretta (now known as
    Iskenderun), with the collusion of a weak government in Paris. But
    the imperial bombast of a New Rome was precluded: he was a seasoned
    soldier, not an adventurer, and the fate of Enver was too deeply
    burned into him. Nor did Kemal stage mass rallies, bombard the
    nation with speeches on radio, go in for spectacular processions
    or parades. There was no attempt at popular mobilisation - in this
    Turkey was closer to Portugal or Greece than Italy. None was needed,
    because there was so little class conflict to contain or suppress.

    But just because his regime could dispense with a mass basis, Kemal
    was capable of reforms that Mussolini could never contemplate. In
    1934 Turkish women were given equal voting rights, a change that
    did not come in Italy or France till 1945, in Greece the mid-1950s,
    in Portugal the mid-1970s. Yet here too the limits of his cultural
    revolution showed: 90 per cent of Turkish women were still illiterate
    when he died. The country had not been transformed into the modern
    society of which he had dreamed. It remained poor, agrarian, stifled
    rather than emancipated in the grip of the Father of the Turks,
    as he styled himself in the last period of his life.

    By the end Kemal probably knew, at some level, that he had
    failed. There can be no certainty about his final years, because so
    much about his life remains a closely guarded secret of state. Only
    surmises are possible. What is clear is that he had never liked the
    administrative routines of rule, and from the late 1920s delegated
    day-to-day affairs of government to a mediocre subordinate, Ismet
    later called Inönu, who looked after these as premier, freeing Kemal
    to devote himself to his plans, pleasures and fancies in the salons
    of Cankaya or the cabarets of the Ankara or Pera Palace Hotels. There
    he summoned colleagues and cronies for sessions of all-night gambling
    or rousting, increasingly detached from daylight realities. In these
    flickering conclaves, Kemal shared a predilection with Stalin and Mao:
    all three, at the end, nocturnal rulers, as if tyranny requires the
    secrecy of the dark, and reversal of the order of hours, to bind its
    instruments to it. Nor did similarities stop there. If Kemal's style
    of detachment from government resembled Mao's - in his case too, it
    was a distance that did not preclude tight attention to big political
    operations: the crushing of Dersim or the Anschluss in Alexandretta -
    the fantastic theories of language that occupied his mind had their
    counterpart in the linguistic pronouncements of Stalin's decline. All
    three, as they withdrew from the day, ended by suspecting those who
    had to live by it.

    But in the taxonomy of dictators, Kemal stands apart in one unusual
    respect. When Politburo members assembled at Stalin's villa, liquor
    was poured throughout the night; but the general secretary himself was
    careful to keep control of his consumption, the better to force his
    entourage to lose theirs, with the chance of revealing themselves in
    their cups. Kemal's sessions were more genuine revelry. He had always
    been a heavy drinker, holding it well in debonair officer fashion. But
    in his final years, raki took its toll of him. Normally, absolute power
    is an intoxicant so much stronger than all others that alcohol, not
    infrequently shunned altogether, is at most only a tiny chaser. But
    in Kemal, perhaps because some scepticism in him - an underlying
    boredom with government - kept him from a full addiction to power,
    continual drinking became alcoholism.

    Once pleasures of the will started to yield to pleasures of the
    flesh, women were the other obvious consolation. But they were no
    shield against his solitude; he was at ease only with men. In habits
    a soldier formed by a career in the barracks, he would have liked
    to move with grace in mixed society, that symbol of Western civility
    ever since Lettres Persanes, but was too crude for it. A marriage to
    the Western-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant lasted a couple of
    years. Thereafter, random connections and incidents followed, sometimes
    involving foreigners. A reputation for increasingly reckless behaviour
    developed. Adoptive daughters, guarded - a less up-to-date touch - by
    a black eunuch, multiplied. Towards the end, photographs of Kemal have
    something of the glazed look of a worn roué: a general incongruously
    reduced to a ravaged lounge lizard, terminal blankness nearby. Stricken
    with cirrhosis, he died in late 1938, at the age of 57.

    A ruler who took to drink in despair at the ultimate sterility of his
    rule: that, at any rate, is one conjecture to be heard among critical
    spirits in Turkey today. Another, not necessarily contradictory of it,
    would recall Hegel's description of the autocrats of Rome:

    In the person of the emperor isolated subjectivity has gained a
    perfectly unlimited realisation. Spirit has renounced its proper
    nature, inasmuch as limitation of being and of volition has been
    constituted an unlimited absolute existence . . . Individual
    subjectivity thus entirely emancipated from control, has no inward
    life, no prospective nor retrospective emotions, no repentance,
    nor hope, nor fear - not even thought; for all these involve
    fixed conditions and aims, while here every condition is purely
    contingent. The springs of action are no more than desire, lust,
    passion, fancy - in short, caprice absolutely unfettered. It finds
    so little limitation in the will of others, that the relation of will
    to will may be called that of absolute sovereignty to absolute slavery.

    The picture is highly coloured, and no modern ruler has ever quite
    fitted it, if only because ideology has typically become inseparable
    from tyranny, where on the whole legitimacy sufficed in classical
    times. But in its portrait of a kind of accidie of power, it hints at
    what might, on another reading, have been the inner dusk of Kemal's
    dictatorship.

    His successor, whom he had wanted to discard at the end, was another
    figure altogether. Inönu had served under Kemal as a CUP officer in
    1916, collaborated with Karakol in the War Ministry in 1919-20, and
    held a senior command in the independence struggle. He was dour, pious
    and conservative, in appearance and outlook not unlike a somewhat less
    plump Turkish version of Franco. With war in Europe on the horizon
    by 1938, his regime sought an understanding with Germany, but was
    rebuffed by Berlin, at that point angling for the favour of Arab
    states apprehensive of Turkish revanchism. To insure itself against
    Italian expansion, and the potential implications for Turkey of the
    Nazi-Soviet Pact, Ankara then signed a defence treaty with Britain and
    France in the Mediterranean, shortly after the outbreak of war. When
    Italy attacked France in 1940, however, Inönu's government reneged
    on its obligations, and within a year had signed a non-aggression
    pact with Germany. Four days later, when Hitler invaded Russia,
    the Turkish leadership was 'carried away with joy'.

    Enver's brother Nuri was dispatched posthaste to Berlin to discuss
    the prospect of arousing Turkic peoples in the USSR to rally to the
    Nazis, and a pair of Turkish generals, Emir Husnu Erkilet and Ali
    Fuad Erden, were soon touring the front lines of the Wehrmacht in
    Russia. After briefings from Von Rundstedt in the field, they were
    flown to Rastenberg to meet the Fuhrer in person. 'Hitler,' General
    Erkilet reported, brimming with enthusiasm,

    received us with an indescribable modesty and simplicity at his
    headquarters where he commands military operations and dispatches. It
    is a huge room. The long table in the middle and the walls were
    covered with maps that showed respective positions at the battle
    zones. Despite that, they did not hide or cover these maps, a clear
    sign of trust and respect towards us. I expressed my gratitude for
    the invitation. Then he half-turned towards the map. At the same time,
    he was looking into our eyes as if he was searching for something. His
    dark eyes and forelock were sweeter, livelier and more attractive than
    in photographs. His southern accent, his formal, perfect German, his
    distinctive, powerful voice, his sturdy look, are full of character.

    Telling the Turks that they were the first foreigners, other than
    allies, to be ushered into the Wolfsschanze, and promising them the
    complete destruction of Russia, 'the Fuhrer also emphasised that
    "this war is a continuation of the old one, and those who suffered
    losses at the end of the last war, would receive compensation for them
    in this one."' Thanking him profusely for 'these very important and
    valuable words', Erkilet and Fuad hastened back to convey them to the
    'National Chief', as Inönu liked to style himself.

    Their mission was not taken lightly in Moscow. Within a week, Stalin
    issued a statement denouncing Erkilet's exchange with Hitler, and
    soon afterwards embarked on a high-risk operation to try and cut
    off the prospect of joint compensation for 1918. Determined to stop
    the Turkish army linking arms with the Wehrmacht in the Caucasus,
    he sent the top NKVD operative Leonid Eitingon - responsible for the
    killing of Trotsky two years earlier - to Ankara to assassinate the
    German ambassador, Von Papen, in the hope of provoking Hitler into
    a punitive attack on Turkey. The attempt was bungled, and its origin
    quickly discovered. But Moscow had every reason for its misgivings. In
    August 1942, the Turkish premier Saracoglu told Von Papen that as a
    Turk he 'passionately desired the obliteration of Russia'. Indeed,
    it was his view that 'the problem of Russia can only be solved by
    Germany on condition at least half the Russians living in Russia are
    annihilated.' As late as the summer of 1943, another Turkish military
    mission was touring not only the Eastern Front but the west wall of
    Nazi defences in France, before flying once more to an audience in the
    Wolfsschanze. The war had revived Unionist ambitions: at one time or
    another, Turkey manoeuvred to regain Western Thrace, the Dodecanese,
    Syria, the region of Mosul, and protectoral rights over Albania.

    Nor was alignment with the New Order confined to policy abroad. In June
    1941, all non-Muslim males of draft age - Jewish, Greek or residual
    Armenian - were packed off to labour camps in the interior. In
    November 1942, as the battle for Stalingrad raged, a 'wealth tax'
    was inflicted on Jews and Christians, who had to pay up to ten times
    the rate for Muslims, amid a barrage of anti-semitic and anti-infidel
    attacks in the press - Turkish officials themselves becoming liable
    to investigation for Jewish origins. Those who could not or would not
    meet the demands of local boards were deported to punishment camps in
    the mountains. The effect was to destroy the larger part of non-Muslim
    businesses in Istanbul.

    The operation, unabashedly targeting ethno-religious minorities, was
    in the lineal tradition of Turkish integral nationalism, passed down
    from Unionism to Kemalism. 'Only the Turkish nation is entitled to
    claim ethnic and national rights in this country. No other element has
    any such right,' Inönu had declared a decade earlier. His minister
    of justice dotted the i's and crossed the t's: 'The Turk must be the
    only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure
    Turkish stock can have only one right in this country, the right to
    be servants and slaves.' New in the campaign of 1942-43 was only the
    extent of its anti-semitism, and the fact that the Inönu regime -
    hard pressed economically by the costs of a greatly increased military
    budget - levied any part of its exactions on Muslims at all. Jewish
    converts to Islam were not included among the faithful for these
    purposes. Such was the climate in which Hitler returned the compliment
    by sending Talat's remains back to Turkey, in a ceremonial train
    bedecked with swastikas, to be buried with full honours in Istanbul,
    by the Martyrs' Monument on Liberty Hill, where patriots can proceed
    to this day.

    However, once the tide started to turn in Russia, and Germany looked as
    if it might be defeated, Ankara readjusted its stance. While continuing
    to supply the Third Reich with the chromite on which the Nazi war
    machine depended, Turkey now also entertained overtures from Britain
    and America. But, resisting Anglo-American pressures to come down
    on the Allied side, Inönu made it clear that his lodestar remained
    anti-Communism. The USSR was the main enemy, and Turkey expressly
    opposed any British or American strategy that risked altering Germany's
    position as a bastion against it, hoping London and Washington would
    make a separate peace with Berlin, for future joint action against
    Moscow. Dismayed at the prospect of unconditional surrender, Inönu
    issued a token declaration of war on Germany only after the Allies
    made it a condition of his getting a seat at the United Nations, a
    week before the deadline they had set for doing so expired, in late
    February 1945. No Turkish shot was fired in the fight against Fascism.

    Peace left the regime in a precarious position. Internally, it was
    now thoroughly detested by the majority of the population, which had
    suffered from a steep fall in living standards as prices soared,
    taxes increased and forced labour was extorted in the service of
    its military build-up. Inflation had affected all classes, sparing
    not even bureaucrats, and the wealth tax had made even the well-off
    jumpy. Externally, the regime had been compromised by its affair with
    Nazism - which post-war Soviet diplomacy was quick to point out -
    and its refusal to contribute to Allied victory even after it had
    become certain.

    Aware of his unpopularity, in early 1945 Inönu attempted to redress
    it with a belated redistribution of land, only to provoke a revolt
    in the ranks of the ruling party, without gaining credibility in
    the countryside. Something more was needed. Six months later, he
    announced that there would be free elections. Turkey, for twenty
    years a dictatorship, would now become a democracy. Inönu's move
    was designed to kill two birds with one stone. Abroad, it would
    restore his regime to legitimacy, as a respectable partner of the
    West, taking its place in the comity of free nations led by the
    United States, and entitled to the benefits of that status. At home,
    it could neutralise discontent by offering an outlet for opposition
    without jeopardising the stability of his rule. He had no intention
    of permitting a true contest.

    In 1946, a flagrantly crooked election returned the ruling Republican
    People's Party with a huge majority over a Democratic Party led by
    the defectors who had broken with it over the agrarian bill. The
    fraud was so scandalous that, domestically, rather than repairing the
    reputation of the regime, it damaged it yet further. Internationally,
    however, it did the trick. Turkey was duly proclaimed a pillar of the
    West, the Truman Doctrine picking it out for economic and military
    assistance to withstand the Soviet threat, and Marshall Aid began to
    pour in. Economic recovery was rapid, Turkey posting high rates of
    growth over the next four years.

    These laurels, however, did not appease the Turkish masses. Inönu,
    after first appointing the leading pro-Fascist politician in his party
    - responsible for the worst repression under Kemal - as premier, then
    attempted to steal the more liberal clothes of the Democrats, with
    concessions to the market and to religion. It was of no avail. When
    elections were held in 1950, it was impossible to rig them as before,
    and by now - so Inönu imagined - unnecessary: the combination of his
    own prestige and relief from wartime rigours would carry the day for
    the RPP anyway. He was stunned when voters rejected his regime by a
    wide margin, putting the Democrats into power with a parliamentary
    majority, honestly gained, as large as the dishonest one he had
    engineered for himself four years earlier. The dictatorship Kemal
    had installed was over.

    Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.

    --Boundary_(ID_7ajMwAX045f/0uim6wL5aA)--
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