America and the Making of Modern Turkey: Science, Culture and Political Alliances

Abstract

Ali Erken's monograph examines U.S. philanthropic activities in republican Turkey and provides an original account of U.S.-Turkish relations during the 20th century, the study of which has hitherto remained mostly within the framework of diplomatic history. Focusing on the activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations along with Robert College in Istanbul, the book seeks to explore how “American philanthropy complemented the political vision of Turkish ruling elite in the making of modern Turkey” and to reveal “the key tools and strategies of this philanthropic contribution to the cultural and technological transformation of Turkey,” especially after the end of World War II (p. 1).The book opens with an introduction that briefly outlines the history of U.S.-Turkish relations from its beginnings in the mid-19th century to the early 1970s. According to Erken, although the initial U.S. initiatives in the Ottoman Empire were driven by an evangelical zeal to spread Protestantism, Ottoman authorities were generally content with the services offered by U.S. schools. The good relations continued after the establishment of the succeeding Turkish republic thanks to the fact that the United States did not harbor territorial ambitions against the Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War. Chapter 1 examines the course of these relations in the early decades of republican Turkey, which was then experiencing a profound transformation as a young nation-state. Erken underlines that the main agent of U.S. philanthropic activity in early republican Turkey was the Rockefeller Foundation, which began to emphasize modern medicine and science as its primary fields of operation from the early 20th century onward. This orientation, Erken argues, fit in very well with the secularist worldview of the Kemalist leadership of Turkey, which enthusiastically embraced the foundation's involvement and asked for larger investments in the fields of public health and medicine.Chapter 2 explores how U.S. institutions, particularly Robert College School of Engineering and the Ford Foundation, made a significant contribution to the technical and industrial development of republican Turkey. Besides highlighting how Robert College School of Engineering met the country's need for technical expertise over many years, the chapter also deals with the establishment of both the Middle East Technical University in the 1950s as a joint U.S.-Turkish project and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey in the early 1960s at the instigation of the Ford Foundation. Erken emphasizes that these institutions took advantage of the intensified U.S.-Turkish partnership during the Cold War and received ever greater funding from U.S. organizations as Turkey began to be considered a bulwark against Communism.In Chapter 3, Erken turns his attention from engineering and technical advances to social sciences and business management, discussing the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations’ contributions to the development of these fields in Cold War Turkey. According to Erken, the Ford Foundation sponsored programs that aimed to transform business culture in Turkey and facilitate the country's integration with Western economies, whereas the Rockefeller Foundation allocated its resources mainly to social sciences and area studies after the Second World War. Lastly, in chapter 4 Erken examines the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the development of humanities in Turkey. Detailing the cultural and scholarly interactions between the two countries in the first decades of the Cold War, Erken argues that the Rockefeller Foundation funded educated elites to support a “creative minority” in Turkey who adopted secular and liberal values, thus bringing the country closer to the so-called Western world.Based on rigorous research in the archives of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and those of Robert College kept at Columbia University, Erken's book offers the first detailed account of U.S. philanthropy in republican Turkey and fills an important gap in our knowledge. Nevertheless, the book barely touches on the theoretical and conceptual framework that defined the overseas operations of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Erken does not engage in a discussion of modernization theory, which was highly influential in the 1950s and 1960s and greatly affected the perspectives and activities of both institutions. As a result, the book appears to examine the activities of U.S. philanthropic organizations by adopting the same perspective they did—a perspective that has been much questioned and criticized from the 1970s onward. Without a meaningful engagement with this critical literature, Erken inevitably employs the terminology and dichotomous categories of modernization theory and frequently resorts to such contentious terms as “traditional,” “modern,” “Westernization,” and “Westernized/modernized elites.”The same problem also causes Erken to neglect the internal dynamics of the change in the fields under examination. In attempting to analyze the contribution of U.S. philanthropic organizations to the fields of medicine, engineering, social sciences, and humanities in Turkey, Erken tends to overlook the internal factors of their emergence, evolution, and development. This tendency prevents him from tracing the influence of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations on these fields, most of which had a long history in the Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey prior to U.S. aid. Despite these shortcomings, Erken's richly researched book provides significant insights into 20th-century Turkish history and U.S.-Turkish relations. Furthermore, as one of only a handful of serious scholarly treatments of Cold War Turkey, it is likely to hold an essential place in the existing literature for many years to come.