Product Description

Eighty years have passed since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and set it on the path of modernisation. He was determined that his country should be accepted as a member of the family of civilised nations. Today Turkey is a rapidly developing country, an emergent market, a medium-sized regional power with the second strongest army in NATO. It is an open country which attracts millions of tourists, thousands of foreign businessmen and hundreds of researchers. They enjoy Turkish hospitality, experience its rich landscape and history, but find it hard to form an overall picture of the country. In this effective sequel to Ataturk, Andrew Mango provides such an overall portrait, tracing the republic's development since the death of its founder and bringing to life the Turkish people and their vibrant society today. The Turks Today also interprets the latest academic research for a broader audience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83504 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781585677566
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Istanbul-born, British-based Mango (Atatürk) offers an insightful, sympathetic portrait of recent Turkish history. The first third of the book discusses the growth of the Turkish state after Atatürk's death in 1938, with a fitful spread of democracy, clashes with Greece and the departure of Istanbul's Greek community. Economic and social conflict from 1960 to 1980 was subsequently "contained" by a military-driven constitution and rapprochement with Europe. A battle over the logo of the mayoralty of Ankara, the capital, illustrates the recent negotiations between Islamists and secularists. Istanbul, whose "infrastructure does not match its size," is growing as a regional base. In impoverished, traditionalist eastern Turkey, "the Third World has not been banished," though Mango argues that integration with the state—if not assimilation—is the best hope for the Kurdish minority. Turkey today, Mango suggests, resembles the late modernizing countries of southern Europe in many ways. He sees potential for a fully democratic and secular state, but warns that it takes time to "implant Western institutions in non-Western soil." Though this volume lacks some of the bite and immediacy of a journalist's book like Stephen Kinzer's Crescent and Star, it emerges as a more thorough introduction to a less-known but increasingly vital country.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
If countries could be vegetables, Turkey would be an onion. Every time you take off a layer of skin, hoping to get to the core, you come across yet another skin. In The Turks Today, Andrew Mango successfully peels modern Turkey to its core.

Most people who have rubbed elbows with Turks might suggest that they are experiencing an identity crisis, torn between the East and the West. In contrast, Mango, who was born in Istanbul, says the Turks have a strong sense of national identity. The Turks are "a distinct people with a Muslim background," he writes, who think like the West more so "than do their Muslim neighbors to the east and south." In the post-Sept. 11 world, Turkey indeed stands out. To what does the country owe its uniqueness?

Turkey's position between Europe and the Middle East is a major factor. However, Kemal Ataturk's legacy of secular democracy in a Muslim society is even more important.

Clearly, Ataturk was a visionary politician, but why has Turkey managed to remain a secular democracy more than 60 years after his death? Why has it not fallen like Iran's pro-Western regime, which collapsed like a house of cards in 1979, or declined like Egypt, an intellectual powerhouse in the 1930s that is now a crumbling edifice? Well, Ataturk got it right. He made Turkey a secular republic in the 1920s, long before it became a democracy in 1950. Hence, even after Ataturk's own Republican People's Party (CHP) lost Turkey's first free multiparty elections in 1950, secularism was able to survive. Not only that, it was now armed with democracy to defend itself. For example, when members of the Muslim Ticani order started mutilating Ataturk's statues in 1951 and attacking secularism, the Democrat Party, which had just defeated the CHP, passed a law to protect Ataturk's legacy.

And more recently, when the Turkish military challenged the Islamist Welfare Party government in 1997, it found many allies within the country, ranging from secular political parties and media to NGOs and women's groups. Women's participation in the anti-Islamist alliance was not an accident. Turkish women are "much more emancipated and better able to realize their potential" than women in other Muslim countries, Mango writes.

The second reason why Turkey works is the Alevis. Little known outside the country, Alevis are liberal Muslims who profess a syncretic version of Islam laden with elements of Sufism and Shamanism, the Turks' pre-Islamic faith. Alevis shun fundamentalism and cherish secularism. According to Mango, they represent a "distinctively Turkish humanist Islam open to modernity."

While planting the seeds of secular democracy, Ataturk found inspiration in 19th-century French and European sociology. Therefore, contemporary Turkey shares many similarities with France, including administrative practices and legal structures. Along the same line, secularism in Turkey, like the French concept of laicité, provides freedom from religion.

Just as Turkey learned from Europe in the past, that continent, grappling with a growing and restless Muslim community, can now turn to Turkey for ideas. Turkish secularism has created a tradition of "state Islam" whereby the government builds and staffs mosques to curb the influence of jihadist preachers. Meanwhile, Turkish Islam "has learnt to live in a secular state in a society where secular values prevail," Mango writes. Turkey has much to offer France and the European Union.

Even so, Turkey's path to the E.U. is full of uncertainties. Although Ankara, which applied to join in 1987, was recently invited to start accession talks in October 2005, resistance to Turkey's membership is rife in Europe -- ironically, especially in France. Most Europeans say, for instance, that Ankara's human- rights record is too negative. "Turkish citizens are at least as free as their neighbours in the Balkans," Mango contends. Other critics say that Ankara is too poor for Brussels. Turkey surely has catching up to do with Europe. It needs to improve its economy and reform its heavily centralized, inefficient government, which Mango sees as a drain.

All the same, Turkey is a southern European country. Like Greece and Spain, it has a history of military involvement in politics; like Portugal's, its economy is dominated by large family-owned conglomerates; and like Italy, it possesses an intricate network of social structures.

For the Turks, joining the E.U. is not about entering Europe; it is about going back to Europe. Almost half of them are of European descent, ranging from Hungarian Muslims and Bosnians to Greek Muslims and Balkan Turks, who have been driven out of the continent ever since the territorial demise of the Ottoman Empire started in the late 17th century. Even in its worst days in the 19th century, Turkey was known as the "sick man of Europe," not the sick man of the Middle East. The Turks might well be ready for Europe; the Europeans, though, do not seem ready to take them into their midst. As Andrew Mango makes clear, modern Turkey is not an oddity; it is, however, a rare kind of nation that deserves special attention.

Reviewed by Soner Cagaptay
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Geographically and culturally, Turkey lies at the crossroads between Europe and the Near East. Mango was born in Turkey and has written a widely praised biography of Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. Here, he traces the evolution of the Turkish Republic since the death of Ataturk. This fascinating and timely survey is both a political history and a cultural examination of a diverse, dynamic society. From a military standpoint, Turkey is staunchly European, since it forms the eastern anchor of NATO. Politically, Turkey is nominally democratic, but the military continues to wield inordinate influence. In the cultural sphere, the Turkish elites have traditionally been strong secularists, yet there are desires among many, particularly in rural areas, to emphasize the role of religion in public life and to forge stronger ties with other Islamic countries. With Turkey pressing hard for admittance to the European Union, while conflict rages in neighboring Iraq, Turkey is of vital importance to American interests, so this readable and well-researched work has great value. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Mango gets it right....
Dr. Andrew Mango in The Turks Today covers the history of the Turkish Republic with an easy-to-read narrative and thoughtful analysis.

In the fist segment, the author provides a short history of the

* Ataturk era (1923-1938) when the founding principles of the Republic were established,

* difficult times (1938-1945) in which President Ismet Inonu managed to keep Turkey non-aligned and out of WW II,

* transition period to a multi-party system (1946-1960) and the huge electoral successes of the Democratic Party in 1950, 1954 and again 1957 and the first intervention of the military into politics in 1960,

* years of strife (1960-1980) when the coalition governments struggled to cope with growing domestic problems,

* conflict contained (1980-2003) while Turkey made progress and emerged as a regional economic and military power.

In the second segment, Dr. Mango offers insightful analysis on several major issues, such as:

* economy, education, culture, Ankara (the seat of government and the ruling elite), Istanbul (the center of practically everything outside of government), the divide between Islam and secularism, the Cyprus saga and relations with Greece,
the quest to join the European Union and all EU related matters, the Kurdish problem and PKK's terrorist activities, the contentious Armenians' claim of genocide of events in 1915,
changes in relations between USA, Israel and Iraq after the events of Sep 11, 2001 and the rule of an Islamist party in a majority government since November 2002.

This book is vintage Mango. Page after page, it offers the essentials without getting into boring details yet remains factual and balanced. Once you begin to read "The Turks Today", it becomes very clear that Dr. Andrew Mango knows the history of the Turkish Republic and presents it in a marvelously
lucid fashion.

Anyone who is interested in knowing "what's going on in Turkey today" would enjoy reading this book.

Muharrem Sev
Ottawa, Canada
Dec 16, 2004

A Country at the Crossroads
Turkey is in one of the more unique positions in the world which, if played properly, could propel it into being a major player in the international arena. As the West is in a fight against radical Islam, Turkey's influence derives not only from being geographically at the intersection between the Middle East and Europe but, more importantly, being the most successful example of a secular country with a Muslim majority. An examination therefore is beneficial as a guide for the secularization of other Muslim countries both in terms of what Turkey has done right and where improvements may be found.

Andrew Mango is certainly qualified for such an examination, having devoted much of his life to the study of Turkish affairs. The result is that THE TURKS TODAY is a fairly comprehensive picture of modern Turkey though one that is, on a bit of a sour note, a tad dry.

Part I of the book is a fairly detailed history of Turkish politics since the death of Ataturk. It is this section of the book that suffers from, shall we say, writing that is lacking in personality. Nonetheless, if one is looking for such a history with a good but not extreme amount of detail, one will find it here.

Part II is more exciting and delves into various aspects of modern Turkish life such as Turkey's developments in economics and education. Mango gives us concise chapters on the growth of Istanbul and Ankara over the past several decades. Chapters on the Eastern and Kurdish sections of the country do a good job of outlining the alienation many Kurds may feel in Turkey and how this has led to the development of Kurdish nationalist and Marxist terrorist organizations.

THE TURKS TODAY is a good companion read to CRESCENT AND STAR by Stephen Kinzer. Kinzer's book provides less overall information than Mango but has a better feel to it, more personality. Mango's book provides the reverse. Together they give a reader good working knowledge on what may prove to be one of the more important nations around.

Nice review of current events in Turkey
This book gives an excellent account of recent events in Turkey.
It starts out with an overview of Turkish history which is fairly brief, then moves into the 20th century and gives a nice summary of events since 1923, and most of the book then focuses on events of the last few years. There are MANY statistics, and much research obviously went into this book.
Overall it is a great resource for recent events in Turkey and would be the perfect companion book to Stephen Kinzer's "Crescent & Star."