Content area
Full Text
Modern Turkey FATMA MÜGE GÖÇEK, The Transformation of Turkey. Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), Pp. 310, $ 105.00 cloth
Publishers, or rather their marketing people, have a tendency to disguise interesting monographs on Turkey under bland titles that suggest overview histories intended for a general readership. Feroz Ahmad's analysis of the role of the military in twentieth-century Turkish politics was disguised by Routledge as The Making of Modern Turkey; IB Tauris turned Handan Nezir Akmese's penetrating account of the worldview and mentality of the late Ottoman officer corps into the equally bland The Birth of Modern Turkey; and Oxford presented Ugur Ümit Üngör's seminal study of Diyarbakir in late Ottoman and Turkish republican times as, once more, The Making of Modern Turkey. This questionable marketing strategy hides the monographs from the specialist's eye even though it is unlikely that the non-specialist will buy them once he or she is aware of the contents. Fatma Müge Göçek's The Transformation of Turkey is one more example of the trend. Potential readers might be forgiven for thinking it is yet another overview history of Turkey in the twentieth century. It is something very different, however: a collection of essays on the influence of history and historiography on the current state of Turkey. The transformation in the title is not the change that Turkey underwent in the past century, but the transformation of historical events in the collective memory of Turkey. The book also has a contemporary agenda: the change that the country should undergo in order to become a mature democracy that is at ease with itself. It is Göçek's contention that this transformation can be achieved only if Turkey looks anew at the developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the most important contemporary problems of the country (defined by Göçek as the Kurdish, Armenian and Cyprus issues) have their roots.
This interesting and thought-provoking work has definite strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses are most visible in the first chapter, "Surveying contemporary Turkey: A country of social tensions rooted in the past." This sets out the agenda of the book outlined above, but it also presents a historical overview that makes clear...