West from Turkey: the state of Ataturk's revolution mattered little to Europe - until Bosnia

ON A hillside overlooking the Turkish capital from the west, in a mausoleum of severe, neoclassical, and definitely non-Oriental design, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk lies in his marble sarcophagus. Below him, the city which he more or less invented (Ankara was the sleepiest of country towns until he turned it into the national capital) hums with non-stop activity in a haze of exhaust fumes. Stand in any of its main streets, disregard the occasional minaret on the skyline, and you might think you were in the modern quarter of an Italian, Spanish, or French city during a period of unusually rapid economic expansion.

All of which is exactly what Ataturk would have wanted you to feel about Turkey -- a country he more or less invented too. Economic growth, modernization, and Westernization were the driving forces of "Kemalism," the personal doctrine of state and government which he imposed on Turkey and which remains its official dogma. Occasionally, the sheer dynamism of the Westward-tending impulse can still take one by surprise. At Bilkent, for example, five miles outside the city, a huge new privately funded university has sprung up out of the bare earth in a forest of well-built high-rises; modeled on an American university, it conducts all its teaching in English. One lecturer there told me that the telecommunications and computer technology in his faculty building was much better than it had been at the British university where he had just finished his doctorate. Remembering a story in a Turkish newspaper about an overheard conversation between two Turks who were working as manual laborers in Germany, I was inclined to believe him.

"Is there anything in your fax machine today?" asked one of them.

"No, nothing," said the other. "Do you think something has happened to my mother?" Both workers had had fax machines installed in their central-Anatolian village homes.

If Ataturk had known what a fax machine was, he would surely have approved. When he came to power in 1923, more than 80 per cent of the population was illiterate, and those who could write did so in Arabic script. Ataturk's crash program of cultural modernization, affecting education, political life, communications, religion, women's rights, and even, famously, the permitted style of headwear, is surely the greatest example in modern history of an entire country being remodeled by an individual -- and of that remodeling being accepted by the population as a whole.

Or was it? Dissident voices have long murmured that Ataturk's whole project was a failure, even though such comments were akin to propagating atheism in Vatican City. The "Kemalism is dead" debate has sputtered on for many years; there is nothing original about making such a claim today. Nor does any one of the current spate of bad-news headlines necessarily prove that it is true: the sliding currency, the inflation of 140 per cent and unemployment of nearly 20 per cent, the murders of secularist intellectuals, the rise of a vociferously Islamic political party, the attacks on members of the Alevi sect, the massive and controversial military operation against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq. But somehow the combination of all these things, set in the wider context of Turkey's position between the post-Communist Balkans and the post-Soviet Russian Empire, does help to focus the mind on the weaknesses of the whole Kemalist project.

First, Make a Nation

FOR Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was not just engaged in modernizing the Turkish nation. Before he could do that, or at least at the same time, he had to make a nation out of the people who lived within Turkey's borders. These two processes were intimately connected: the campaign against "Oriental dress," for example, was concerned just as much with homogenizing, with getting rid of regional distinctions, as it was with Westernizing. A kind of Turkish Anatolian nationalism was invented, substituting the compact geographical identity of modern Turkey for the diffuse cultural-imperial thing that Ottoman civilization had been.

All who lived within the Turkish state (apart from the Greek minority, for whom special conditions were laid down under the Treaty of Lausanne) were expected to think and speak as Turks -- indeed, to be Turks. The intolerant official policy which has been applied for most of the last seventy years toward any expression of a distinct ethnic or linguistic identity by the Kurds is thus a direct legacy from Ataturk himself. Indeed, the dictatorial powers under which he pushed through many of his boldest modernizing measures were passed by the Turkish Assembly in 1925 in order to enable him to deal with a Kurdish revolt in the southeast of the country.

The firmest stronghold of Kemalism today is of course the army; and it was the army which pressured the government, against the latter's better judgment, into mounting a large-scale operation in northern Iraq at the end of March. The government's better judgment, however, concerned only the timing of this adventure, coming as it did during the most delicate final stages of a customs-union agreement with the European Community. Although the effectiveness of such military action should have been doubted, its popularity was never in question. Private initiative has decked the streets of Ankara with banners calling for donations to help "little Mehmet," the Turkish equivalent of GI Joe; several million dollars had been collected for the widows of fallen soldiers within 24 hours after this appeal was launched.