Introduction: Turkey at the Threshold of the European Union

Abstract

The history of contemporary Turkey is characterized by change, the main causes of which have been external stimuli and incentives, particularly the drive for transformation from an oriental Islamic empire to a secular national state. This transformation — known as Westernization — has been slow and occasionally painful. It has been aptly called ‘the Turkish revolution’ and, as Bernard Lewis pointed out, it could be defined not only ‘in terms of economy or society or government, but also of civilization’.1 It gained momentum with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the ascent of Kemalism, when ‘everything had to be rebuilt, above all a new identity’.2 Its main goal was to move Turkey from being a medieval Islamic theocracy to becoming a modern capitalist Western democracy. At the centre of the Kemalist ideology and its state-building and nation-building efforts was the consolidation of the Turkish Republic which was based on a political system the core principles of which were ‘heavily tainted by a historically developed authoritarian understanding of the unitary state and its functioning as well as an organic and homogenous understanding of the nation’.3 Eventually the scope of Westernization was broadened to include economic, social and cultural changes which were intensified by industrialization efforts and rapidly increasing urbanization.