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The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era, by Fatma Müge Göçek. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011. 320 pages. £59.60.
Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989, by Kerem Öktem. London and New York: Zed Books, 2011. 176 pages. $72.95 cloth; $26.95 paper.
Reviewed by Metin Heper
In The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era, Fatma Müge Göçek takes up the legacy of the Ottoman past for the Republican Turkey. Göçek attributes almost all of the "tensions" in post- 1989 Turkey to that particular historical legacy. According to her, the tensions in Republican Turkey have lingered because the legacy in question has been "silenced." That is, "the collective violence, prejudice, and discrimination that ... was part and parcel of the ... past" have been conveniently ignored and, instead, the focus has been on "former glories and virtues" (p. 37). In the process Turkey's relations with the countries hostile to it could never be normalized. It is suggested that the Turkish state and society should "successfully negotiate the heretofore unacknowledged collective violence embedded in the past" and so overcome "the past collective trauma" that they suffer from. In the author's opinion, acting in this manner, the tensions in Republican Turkey would have come to an end.
Göçek perceives the "Sèvres syndrome" as the source of the collective trauma she talks about. By collective trauma she has in mind those "individuals, groups and institutions in Turkey who interpret all public interactions - domestic and foreign - through a framework of fear and anxiety over the possible annihilation, abandonment, and betrayal of the Turkish state by the West" (p. 99). Gökçek argues that the Turkish Republican elite in general and the Turkish military in particular concocted the Sèvres syndrome as a paradigm for the purpose of maintaining their "political power and control over the social and economic resources of the state" (p. 100).
While taking up what she sees as several consequences of the so-called Sèvres syndrome, the author, 1) by resort to contemporary Turkish-Armenian literature, attempts to provide an account of the so-called sufferance and marginalization that the Armenians have experienced during and after the periods of troubles, 2)...