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Crescent & Star : Turkey Between Two Worlds (2001)

    A truly modern Turkey governed by the rule of law would raise the Turkish people to levels of
    prosperity and self-confidence they have never known before. Despite the country's political and
    psychological underdevelopment, it has the resources to become a towering power. If it can liberate
    itself from its paralyzing fears and embrace true democracy, it will also serve as a magnetic
    example of how the ideals of liberty can triumph over enormous obstacles. By adding moral
    strength to its military strength, Turkey could become a dominant force in the Middle East,
    encouraging peace and pulling Arab countries away from the social backwardness and feudal
    dictatorship under which most of them now suffer. It could exert a mighty and stabilizing
    influence westward to the Balkans and eastward to the Caucasus and Central Asia, becoming the
    key power in a region that is strategically vital, overwhelmingly rich in oil and other resources, and
    now ruled mostly by tyrants who are dragging it toward chaos.
        -Stephen Kinzer, Crescent & Star

Though we pay obscenely little attention, Turkey is an extraordinarily important nation and its future may go a long way to determining whether Islam and democracy can ultimately co-exist in one nation. Geographically and politically, Turkey occupies a unique position, squeezed between Europe to the West and the Islamic world to the East. Though traditionally Muslim, its great revolutionary leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, upon taking power in 1922 and establishing a Republic, reoriented the nation towards the West, toward the values of the Enlightenment and the institutions of secular democracy. But still today, despite the continuing devotion of Turks to the person and ideas of Ataturk, it remains an open question as to whether the democracy can endure.

Stephen Kinzer was the NY Times correspondent in Turkey for four event filled years and his passion for the country and its people is infectious. In conversational but admonitory style he manages both to educate Westerners as to the history and cultural richness of Turkey while also honestly depicting its internal problems, many of them unresolved, and firmly prodding Turks to deal with them, as a great nation must.

One very effective device Kinzer uses is a series of brief interludes each dealing with one element of Turkish life. These include : the fez; raki, the national drink; the nargile, or water pipe; the nation's three favorite sports--camel fighting, oil wrestling, and cirit (a form of jousting); the literature of Nazim Hikmet; and the romantic endeavor of swimming the Bosphorus. These quick chapters provide a rich and fascinating texture to go along with the history.

The hero of the story is very much Ataturk, who at least in Kinzer's portrait seems to have been one of the most remarkable national leaders of the 20th Century. Like Peter the Great in Russia and the Shah in Iran, which not coincidentally are the two other equally troublesome Eurasian democracies, he found it intolerable that his people should be so far behind the West in terms of technology, wealth creation and self governance, and so, using dictatorial means, he imposed Western institutions an an often reluctant populace and tried eliminating persistent vestiges of the Ottoman past. That the Republic endures, is allied with NATO, has a strategic partnership with Israel, and is on the verge of entering the EU is testimony to his success. But the too frequent necessity for the armed forces to step in and depose governments, the oppression of the Kurd minority, and the very real fear of a takeover of government by radical Islamicists, illustrates just how tenuous the democracy remains.

Kinzer is extremely optimistic about Turkey's future and feels that it can afford to face its past more honestly than it has--including such issues as the Kurds, Cyprus, and the Armenian massacre--and can take the risk of loosening the Kemalist grip on society, the military backed determination of Turkey's elites that no threat to Kemal Ataturk's legacy will be permitted. I certainly hope that he is right, though I'm not as confident.

Even as this book hits the stores, Turkey has decided to allow the United States to operate out of Turkish airbases in the war on terrorism. Once again, Turkey is proving itself to be a far more important ally than we in the West give it credit for. Hopefully Stephen Kinzer's excellent book will educate many Americans as to the unique and potentially vital role in world affairs that Turkey, with its uneasy blend of democracy and Islam, may play in the coming decades. We have a far larger stake in the outcome of Turkey's internecine struggles than we seem to realize.

(Reviewed:22-Sep-01)

Grade: (A-)

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Crescent & Star : Turkey Between Two Worlds (2001)

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