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THE NEW TURKISH REPUBLIC: TURKEY AS A PIVOTAL STATE IN THE MUSLIM WORLD Graham E. Fuller Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2008 196pp., paper, $14.95
Graham Fuller has written a very useful analysis of the foreign policy options facing Turkey. Basically, there have been three Turkish Republics. The first was created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after the First World War. He built on late reform movements within the Ottoman Empire but centered all his attention on the modernization of Turkey. The Arab lands which had belonged to the Ottomans were under the control of France and England while Arabia was taken over by the Saudi family. For Ataturk, modernization was to copy Western European laws, military training and technology while avoiding European political influence. Ataturk's style of government was authoritarian and reforms were top-down.
During the 1930s, with growing dangers from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Turkey followed a foreign policy of neutrality with its attention focused on European issues. This policy followed through the Second World War.
In 1950 the Second Turkish Republic began, although it was only slightly different from Ataturk's. There was greater internal democracy with the growth of a plurality of political parries - all of which followed the Kemalist tradition with a strong military as the backbone of national unity. The major foreign policy change was to join NATO - the US-led alliance. Turkey's military received its weapons and training from the USA and joined into other defence alliances with the USA. For the Arab states Turkey was seen as an agent of US policy and a threat. For most Turks, the Arabs were a people they knew too well from the Ottoman period, and they did not like them very much. Of more interest were the non-Arab Muslim states of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan with which there were historic...