Nicholas L. Danforth, The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity Since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[This review was originally published in the Fall 2022 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

In 2015, as the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lobbied for an executive presidency that would vastly expand the powers of his office, images of him as sultan proliferated on the covers of mass-circulation magazines. Critics in Turkey and abroad argued that this realignment of executive power would constitute yet another step backward toward Islamic authoritarianism. Erdoğan himself, however, cited the United States as a precedent. In his formulation, an executive presidency would perfect the country’s democracy and align it with “the most developed countries.” Such strategic lability of discourses around modernity and history and the various rhetorical uses of “the West” and “the East” in Turkish politics make up the subject of Nicholas L. Danforth’s masterfully researched book, The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.

“Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire” is perhaps too broad and vague a subtitle for the book, which focuses on years between 1945 and 1960, that is, between the initiation of the multiparty era and the country’s first military coup. With the help of archival research and a deep familiarity with popular print sources, Danforth investigates how Turkish opinion leaders of various political leanings all interpreted the 1950 election victory of Demokrat Parti (DP) over the Atatürk-founded Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) as the culmination of a more authentically Turkish modernity. For US observers as well, Turkey’s first multiparty elections signaled the country’s long-awaited transcendence of the East/West and tradition/modernity binaries. Yet the belief that the binaries of over-westernization and Islamic regression had defined the early republican era required reducing complex thinkers to straw people. The book argues that the truth about Kemalism and its would-be reformers rarely fit such categorizations. “Participants in Turkey’s long-standing Westernization debates,” Danforth writes, “consistently claimed to be moving beyond them, and transcending Turkey’s famous clichés has been a cliché for almost as long as they existed” (3).

The book demonstrates how midcentury politicians and public intellectuals, whom scholarship relegates to the opposing sides of the tradition/ modernization binary, all imagined that Turkey’s true path lay in reconciling these supposed opposites. The cliché of Turkey as a “bridge” between Europe and Asia, combining western-style modernity and authentic Muslim Turkishness, remained the ideal for ruling and opposition politicians, secular feminists, and Islamist authors alike. In fact, given how invested almost all opinion leaders were in the idea of synthesis, it would not be easy for the reader to group their quotes into different political camps without Danforth’s guiding hand. Moreover, the parties involved regularly modified their vision of synthesis in line with specific political goals, occasionally emphasizing the dangers of over-westernization, at other times warning against backwardness, and often doing both at the same time.

Refuting that anticommunism or a desire for NATO membership primarily drove the midcentury expansion of religious liberty in the country, Danforth argues that the last years of CHP rule and early years of the DP instead shared a popular vision of nationalized Turkish Islam featuring Atatürk as a “defender of true Islamic faith” (212). Unlike popular conceptions of reactionary religion, the DP and US Embassy staff envisioned a “rational, scientifically minded” Islam as a dynamic and central force of Turkish modernity (195). While the new regime revoked the “overreach” of the call to prayer in Turkish immediately following the 1950 election, it maintained and built upon foundational Kemalist religious reforms (217). The state continued to organize religion through the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), founded under Atatürk in 1924. The DP regime oversaw the translation of the Qur’an into Turkish, established Imam-Hatip (prayer leader-preacher) schools, and mandated a new religious studies curriculum. Turkish reformists and prestigious western observers such as Bernard Lewis cast these developments as the perfection of Atatürk’s plan and in line with modern global trends. The United States often served as a model, even for hardline Islamist thinkers. For example, a 1950 article in the Serdengeçti magazine critiqued the imam-less Turkish army, citing the US military chaplaincy as the proper model (208).

Highlighted and used strategically, Kemalist tenets could serve “a democratic vision of modernization as well as they did an authoritarian one” (29). US representatives, in turn, had their own rhetorical maneuvers, which justified happily collaborating with the Turkish regime in all its iterations. Having classified Turkey as “semi-Oriental,” US diplomats could highlight either aspect of the country to justify what was already official policy: US involvement. As Danforth puts it, “modernization was not the reason, but it repeatedly served as the explanation” (39). Bolstering past scholarship that shows how Cold War modernization operated as a dialogue between unequal parties as opposed to a single hegemonic US imposition, Danforth demonstrates how Turkish representatives even pushed the US mission to sell American modernity better. For example, the critical Turkish response to an “underwhelming” pavilion sponsored by the US Information Agency at the 1956 Izmir Fair belied a sense of betrayal. Turks supportive of their country’s Cold War alignment demanded that the United States do more to promote itself and its views and values in their country (62–64).

Linking domestic and foreign policy, Danforth’s research nuances the popular picture of the midcentury Turkish regime as the western stooge par excellence. During these years, US officials expected Turkey to serve as a more effective US ally in the Middle East due to its long-awaited “reconciliation” with its Ottoman heritage. Danforth demonstrates that this supposed reconciliation with the past had begun long before the Cold War and ultimately did little to change Turkish policy toward Arabs. US State Department records show that, at least in rhetoric, Turkish diplomats were more anti-imperialist and empathetic to Arab nationalism than generally assumed. Their correspondence regularly urged the United States and, by extension, Britain to compromise and be more flexible in response to Arab demands for independence. Ultimately, however, Turkey’s actions did not deviate from the NATO mold. Turkish policymakers’ interpretations and applications of Ottoman history varied between rhetorics of solidarity and superiority. The popular press subsumed or fanned anti-Arab sentiments in line with “diplomatic necessity” (152).

Danforth's examination of Turkey’s Middle East policy directly connects to debates about the role of ideology in the Cold War and beyond. Scholars and pundits alike have long maintained that Manichean anticommunist ideology blinded US policymakers to the realities of the decolonizing world, prompting stances that were harmful to US economic, military, and political interests. The most vivid example of this argument remains US military involvement in Vietnam as driven by “the domino theory.” In contrast, Danforth seems skeptical that ideology can be causative. Instead, he lands on the “realist” side of the debate, noting the malleability of ideological claims. The book identifies “immediate interests” as the reasons why Turkey consistently closed ranks behind its NATO allies on various issues, from the Suez Crisis to a much less substantial disagreement over the Wheelus air base in Libya (185). Simply put, the country’s leaders were more concerned about countering Soviet influence in the region than about remaining faithful to Kemalist anticolonialism or practicing civilizational solidarity with other Muslim-majority nations. Indeed, there is a solid argument to be made for pragmatism as a critical factor in Turkish foreign policy (if not in US foreign policy). But might not ideology operate on a deeper level in determining what counts as “national interests”? Don’t ideas about race, gender, class, and other categories influence the selection of individuals assigned to pursue the interests of a nation-state? Despite his focus on discursive formations, Danforth does not address such questions that have permeated the “cultural turn” in foreign policy history, instead letting “national interests” stand as a common-sense category.

Each chapter ends with references to the debates of the early twenty-first century, partially explaining the long vantage point implied in the subtitle. Multiple observers have mobilized superficial parallels between the Menderes years (1950–60) and the almost two decades of AKP rule. Most significantly, Erdoğan once took out a full-page ad depicting himself as one of the “Stars of Democracy” alongside Adnan Menderes and Turgut Özal (prime minister, 1983–89; president, 1989–93). The book is not interested in enforcing or opposing any such analogies but in tracing the operations of discursive strategy through them. Rhetoric, caveats, and political tactics are its primary subjects. This focus allows for a trenchant critique of the repeated rediscovery of some sort of East-West, modernity-Islam synthesis in Turkey through the simplified foil of Kemalist high modernism.

In elucidating some of the enduring “greatest hits” of op-ed punditry— such as concerns that Turkey is “moving away from the West” or hopeful claims that a new regime finally stands on the precipice of “reconciling modernity and Islam”—The Remaking of Republican Turkey is an essential companion to understanding contemporary political writing on the country. Re-reading the 1950s with Danforth highlights “the sophisticated ways” analysts pontificating on the contradictions of Turkish modernity have been wrong (222). As Danforth acknowledges, Turkey, in particular, seems to be an exceptionally fertile field for such discursive lability—a veritable borderland between “the East” and “the West.” The book’s lessons will apply beyond the confines of Turkish studies, however, urging scholars to consider how they might account for discursive malleability in examining the intersections of politics and ideology.