The Remaking of Republican Turkey
Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire

Explores how Turkey first became a democracy and Western ally in the 1950s and why this is changing today.

Nicholas Danforth (Author)

9781108833240, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 2021

272 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'Danforth's volume is the best interpretive study of modern Turkey in some time … Anyone interested in democracy should read this insightful book … Highly recommended.' R. W. Olson, Choice

Between 1945 and 1960, the birth of a multi-party democracy and NATO membership radically transformed Turkey's foreign relations and domestic politics. As Turkish politicians, intellectuals and voters rethought their country's relationship with its past and its future to facilitate democratization, a new alliance with the United States was formed. In this book, Nicholas L. Danforth demonstrates how these transformations helped consolidate a consensus on the nature of Turkish modernity that continues to shape current political and cultural debates. He reveals the surprisingly nuanced and often paradoxical ways that both secular modernizers and their Islamist critics deployed Turkey's famous clichés about East and West, as well as tradition and modernity, to advance their agendas. By drawing on a diverse array of published and archival sources, Danforth offers a tour de force exploration of the relationship between democracy, diplomacy, modernity, Westernization, Ottoman historiography and religion in mid-century Turkey.

Introduction
1. A Nation Votes: Democratic Modernity for the Masses
2. Turkey Attends the American Classroom: Modernization as U.S. Policy and Propaganda
3. Europe in Asia and Asia in Europe: Synthetic Identities and the Promise of Paradox
4. Multi-Purpose Empire: Reinventing Ottoman History in Republican Turkey
5. Istanbul Yesterday and Today: Making the Past Modern
6. Ottomans, Arabs and Americans: Geography and Identity in Turkish Diplomacy
7. The Path to Progress and to God: Islamic Modernism for the Cold War
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Diplomacy [JPSD], International relations [JPS], Political structures: democracy [JPHV], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]