- Prof. Dr. Norman Stone
(Universität Bilkent / Ankara)
What I might do, now, is to try and put our deliberations in some historical perspective, and even to ask where Turkey now stands in relation to Europe. This is not altogether easy, because there is a very, very long perspective, and present-day Turkey is quite a complicated place. Just to give you and example, not long before coming to Istanbul, I looked at Hürrıyet, the largest-circulation newspaper. The front page was given over to two items. First was about the role of the Turkish voters in the German elections, the newspaper claiming that Cem Özdemir had in effect saved the Schroeder government because the Turks all voted for one or other of the parties supporting it. The second item concerned some research, showing how the various Kurdish tribes in the east would vote in the coming Turkish elections. These tribes vote as a bloc, at the behest of their chiefs, and apparently they are in vast majority going to vote for the moderate Islamic party, not the Kurdish nationalists. So we have Turkey in the words of the truism looking west and east, in this case surely two almost irreconcilable opposites. What I think I might usefully do is to try and combine these with reference to Europe. I actually chose my title with reference to a famous set of lectures, delivered at Cambridge in 1968 by the American economic historian, Alexander Gershenkron, called ‘Europe in the Russian Mirror’. He discussed in effect the industrialization and if you like the westernization of Tsarist Russia, and pointed to the role of the state in that. At that time, we were all interested in development economics, and there were some – I suppose, looking back, rather naïve – books about stages of economic growth, the sort of over-simplification that also affects works of political science. My argument concerns Europe in the Turkish mirror.
Now, on one level it is very easy indeed to say good things about Turkey. The American ambassador did so not long ago when he came to Bilkent. He rightly pointed to the contrast with Russia. Both countries emerged in 1922-23, Russia at the time a long way ahead. Atatürk made a speech in liberated Izmir and told his fellow-countrymen that they absolutely must learn how to trade and make things. Well, they have done. You had to get an Armenian carpenter in 1925, if you wanted a table the legs of which were not uneven. Now Turkey makes F16’s and ninety per cent of the televisions sold in England. In Russia, the average age on death of an adult male is now ten years behind Turkey’s figure, and the story of foreign trade also speaks for itself. In 1960, Turkey exported very little. Now her foreign trade is two-thirds of Russia’s and if things carry on in this way, then she will be supplying the trade and the financial services for a very wide area indeed. I want to talk more about Russia, but first, other matters. As I say, it is quite easy to present a positive picture of Turkey, and I have to say that like the vast bulk of foreigners living there I am baffled by the level of criticism she gets from the Europeans. Things are not perfect but let us be serious.
What I should like to do is to talk about what Turks and Europeans have in
common. I do not much like the platitudes that the word ‘Europe’ so often adduces. European countries are themselves so very different that definition becomes a waste of time. It strikes me that Turks might do better to think which countries of Europe they most resemble, and here I have I hope a useful suggestion to make. Spain. Spain was also a grand, imperial country with a first-class army and navy. She, too, then got overtaken by the Atlantic powers, Holland and England. There is as with Turkey a problem of minorities, if you like: you could compare the Basques to the Kurds without much trouble, and you could even compare the Catalans to the Armenians, commercially a highly successful people which also failed to form a state. And then there is the great question of Islam, which for generations in Spain you were not really supposed to discuss. Most of Spain was under Moslem rule for centuries, at that in the finest period for Islam. An interesting book is Americo Castro’s on the Spanish past, and he had first to publish it in Buenos Aires because under Franco you were not popular if you said that Spain was anything other than a sort of crusading, Catholic place. Intelligent people of course knew otherwise, and Castro was published when Spain became rather less oppressive, in the 1960’s. But then look at other aspects of Spain – the unhappy constitutional experiments after the mid-nineteenth century, leading up to the civil war and the Franco period, and you can see that the parallels with Turkey are not at all remote. It might repay Turks to look at what has happened to Spain since she was first associated with western Europe. Of course, in the main, a success story. Foreign investment flows in, and Spain herself has recovered in a remarkably short space of time from the backwardness with which she was once associated. She is now, I believe, the largest investor in Latin America. There are big drawbacks – an explosion of crime, property prices that make life very difficult indeed for young people, and a further frankly very disturbing development, which is the refusal of women to make babies any more. They cannot afford to, and perhaps also feel that they want freedom at last from what many must see as the oppressed condition of the past. But at any rate, Turkey has Spain as an example, and perhaps we should promote mutual interest. But my real theme is to discuss westernization as it affected Turkey and the country with which the most obvious comparisons are to be made – Russia.
Russia and Turkey are supposed to be historic opposites, but let us look at some long-term truths. The first thing is that Russia herself is in part a Turkic country. One-third of the boyars were of Tatar origin, and nowadays in Russia people with Tatar names are doing extremely well – the head of Lukoil, for instance, the two rising ballet stars, and much else. Explain this as you like – the obvious factors being that families keep together and that men do not get remorselessly drunk – but it is a fact, and one with long historical origins, going back to the time when Ivan the Terrible, after the conquest of Kazan, decreed that no Moslem could be anyone’s serf. Then again, Turkey herself took over the inheritance of Byzantium, in other words of Orthodoxy, and there is an exceedingly interesting question running through Turkish historiography as to how important this was. For instance, there is a long-term problem about Russia and Turkey: both had first-class armies, but for centuries neither was good at capitalism, and foreigners were preponderant. Why this discrepancy ? Your obvious course, once you look into the origins, is to ask how military the feudal system was, and how far it contributed to a weakness on the side of hereditary property, which is the very foundation of capitalism. In the Ottoman empire, the timar system (some say, a continuation of the Byzantine pronoia - applied to the army, and there was a similar problem in Russia with the pomestye. The old aristocracy was displaced by a military one that did not really develop local links beyond a generation or two, with everything that follows in terms of the weakness of hereditary property, at more or less any level in both the Ottoman and the Russıan empires. I note in passing that when I first took up Russian history I noticed like everyone else that there was a terrible problem with communal agriculture. Individual peasant ownership – kulaks, though the word is not right – was very un-developed. The same seems to have been the case in Turkey. How far this has to do with the absence of properly-established ownership in late-feudal times is an interesting matter to explore. The Greek historian Dimitri Kitzikis has some interesting remarks as to the relationship of the Ottomans and the late Byzantines. It is very, very far from being a story of hereditary hatred – quite the contrary, there was a great deal of inter-marriage and the man who conquered Thessaly for the Ottomans was a Byzantine aristocrat. In the 1550’s, a book appeared in Venice, showing the family relations of senior Ottoman and senior Venetian people – first cousins, many of them. Roughly up to the middle of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman empire might even be described as a Greek-Turkish condominium, and when Crete, the final Ottoman conquest, was taken, the Orthodox population of course regarded it as a liberation from Venetian serfdom.
But there is a further rich theme for Russian-Turkish comparison, that of westernization. It is curious that the long war at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not at once lead in the Ottoman case to a drive for westernization, except in bits and pieces, here and there. In Russia, the need for westernization was strongly felt even a century before, in the Time of Troubles, when the Poles sacked Moscow. And perhaps the main difference is that conscious westernization began in Russia about a century and a half before it got under way in the Ottoman empire. Of course it greatly helped that Russia was a Christian country, because inter-marriage was far easier: the descendants of those endless northern Protestants, especially Germans, could quite easily become russified. With Turkey, it was somewhat different,
But I suspect that this dimension has probably been under-stated. Westerners had an important part to play, here.
I have been very conscious, myself, of belonging in a rather remarkable tradition of people who came from western Europe to Anatolia. There was all along a remarkable Hungarian contribution. In the first Ottoman state, in north-western Anatolia, a certain ‘Mihai Bey’ had appeared – probably a Hungarian. When Constantinople fell in 1453, the heavy artillery was managed by another Hungarian, Urban (though apparently he had offered his services first to Paleologue, who had no money). Printing was introduced by yet another Hungarian, Ibrahim Bey, in the early eighteenth century. It seems also to be true that the very national anthem of Ataturk’s Turkey, the Istiqlal marsi, was composed by a Hungarian, or at least so I gather from quite an interesting book that has recently appeared, Mahmut Cetin’s Bogaz’daki asiret, which describes the vicissitudes of a set of families descended from various Europeans who arrived in the nineteenth century and converted, rising in the Ottoman world. When Nazim Hikmet, Turkey’s greatest poet, was engaging in the sort of self-destructive political behaviour that many poets since Byron have seen as their right, the minister of the interior and the head of national security, who were both connected to the Bosphorus tribe, begged him to stop, for he would have to be imprisoned. They even sent their car to pick him up for a private meeting. This theme is well-known, and I do not need to elaborate. I should only add, on a personal note, that when I first came to Turkey in 1995, I heard quite a lot about the twentieth-century successors of such people, the Germans and Austrians who added so much to the country in the 1930’s. There were about seven hundred of them, and for a time Istanbul University must have been the best in the world. They were remembered, not just by their students, but by the students of their students, whom I met. It would be interesting, and a considerable contribution to historical knowledge, if we might look generally at the careers of the various foreigners who went to Turkey at various stages in this whole process. Books of that sort are now quite common in Russia, where they consider the role of the foreigners in the development of Russian industry, for instance. I hope that I shall have enough time on this planet to be able to attempt a book of this sort, though the sheer difficulty of reading Ottoman may well be a deterrent too far.
Of course the theme, Turkey and Europe, is enormously broad, and I have not been able to do more than touch the surface of it. However, on the occasion of this symposium, I should like to stress that I have a great deal of faith in Turkey’s future. People complain, and I fear that the official Europeans do not do justice to Turkey. I read the other day in Die Zeit an article by the well-known historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, which did not make for comfortable reading, for he was not kindly as to the Turks in Germany and was also bitterly dismissive of the democratic system in Turkey, saying that the political parties were just competing clientilistic hierarchies. The article took me aback, because in the very first instance there are three million Turks in Germany and it is in the interest of absolutely everyone that they should not be driven into a corner by senior German intellectuals and lectured at. That sort of thing is counter-productive – the sort of behaviour that realizes its own worst nightmares. Then again, Wehler himself wrote a highly critical article, forty years ago, as to how in imperial Germany it had taken all of four generations before the Poles had been integrated. Is he really very happy to think that his latest contribution might just help make sure that the assimilation of many Turks, hurt by the attitudes of himself and his like, takes five ?
Curriculum Vitae Norman Stone
The Director of the Russian-Turkish Centre, Norman Stone, born in Glaskow in 1941, has been Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, since 1997. He was previously (after 1984) Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and before then (after 1965) Lecturer in Russian and German History at Cambridge where, latterly, he was a Fellow of Trinity College. His undergraduate education occurred at Cambridge (1959-62) but his graduate work was done on Central European History, in Vienna and Budapest (1962-65). His principal publications are The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (1975) which won the Wolfson Prize, Hitler (1980), Europe Transformed 1878-1919 (1983), all of which are still in print (Penguin, Hodder-Coronet and Blackwell, respectively). A further book, The Atlantic Revival 1970-1990, will be published in 2003 by Random House (it is centred upon the 1980's). He intends thereafter to work on various aspects of the Russo-Turkish relationship, past and present. He has been a frequent commentator, since 1985, in British press, and has also written for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Wall Street Journal.
 |
copyright ©2002-2010 by Kerstin Tomenendal
powered by HerwigSeitz.com