Nationalism
The Ankara demonstrators, called to march in bare feet to the National Assembly, sensibly
forgot about the bare feet bit, but some three thousand of them gathered. About a company of troops held them off. Their leader harangued the few hundred who actually pressed against the line to push on , through it, while a police official on the other side urged them not to. It
looked and sounded fierce up to a point, but there was very little actual violence and few arrests. In a Turkey far less accustomed to the liberties implied, this demonstration was more impressive in itself and much more sensibly handled by the authorities than one I had wit- nessed just previously in Athens (but that bad been of students demanding more theology, and passions naturally run higher on such points). And the outward resemblances to something in the 1905 Revolution in Russia were superficial. There is division, but nothing like disintegration, in the organisation of State power. There is respect for the Army on all sides. There is a Powerful nationalism. The demonstrators carried, iL addition to some rather sharp slogans, pictures of Atattirk, and banners with the word 'Vatan' —Fatherland. Talk of Communism among the Turks seems largely exaggerated. Odd groups of students and others, mainly in Istanbul, and the few trade union militants so affected, cannot truly be compared with their apparent counter- parts in other lands where seeds as small finally produced vast results. It is not merely that most of the young Marxists are of dubiously ortho- dox Communism (even Turkey's most famous Communist, the poet Nazim Hikmet, has been in trouble in his exile in Russia for 'revisionism'). For the average Turk of all parties the question of being pro-Soviet does not arise. This is not only because of the perennial external threat. Turkey is naturally one of the areas where Soviet attacks on colonialism ring particularly hollow. The Turks are well aware of the great stretches of Turkic-speaking territory in the Caucasus and Central Asia where independence is denied. For all these reasons we may think it no coincidence that the Turkish prisoners of war in Korea were the only ones to have a 100 per cent. record of resistance to brain- Washing.
Moreover, the Turks are a people with sufficient national self-confidence not to mind taking their progress from the advanced coun- tries, instead of pettishly seeking some local speciality, or turning to the famine-mandarins in Peking. Even the intransigently 'progressive' look to the West, and say so without embarrass- ment.
'norm in a recent speech assertod, 'We feel happy indeed that the idea of achieving a modern and westernised influence in our eco- nomy through co-operation between the State and private enterprise has been so well under- stood.' (Kemal's Otatisme, still strongly nourished, Was explicitly pragmatic and non-ideological.) And even a journalist urging that the present voting system in Turkey may have to give way to a more authoritarian 'basic democracy' on the Pakistani pattern only thinks of it 'to gain the time to develop the Western type of de- mocracy' (Ahmet Emin Yalman in Hur Vatan, April 29). Appeals for various reforms are regu- larly put in terms of proving Turkey a Euro- pean country. Amid the world-wide cult of political primitivism, this is a heartening mood.
And, of course, it was Atattirk's supreme achievement—as it may be de Gaulle's—to create a non-imperialist, anti-annexationist nationalism. It is tempting to imagine that, given a Mikado instead of Abdul Hamid, Midhat might have modernised Turkey three genera- tions ago. But the empire would surely have been a millstone to him, as it was to the Com- mittee for Union and Progress. Yet not only did Atattirk have the luck to inherit none of the subject peoples, and the strength to destroy all ideas of re-creating the empire; he also avoided the more modern (and more understand- able) irridentist ideas of Pan-Turanianism, which Enver had managed to combine with the old imperialism. For all that millions of Turkic people live under Soviet colonial rule, and for all that hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Turkey proper are the descendants of refugees driven by the Russians from the national homeS, active agitation for a greater Turkey is limited to a very small fringe. Here the comparison would be, not with France, but with the good sense of the West Germans faced with frontiers which Stalin perhaps intended as a permanent provocation.
Only a country whose nationalism was strong yet assured enough not to run to hysteria could have signed the treaty on Cyprus. That even more credit, if anything, is due to the Greeks than the Turks does not affect the fact that the Turks deserve a lot too. Just the same, the very nationalism that makes Turkey such a solid block to Soviet expansion, regardless of the odds, does have its bad side. Though reasonable compromises are accepted, the reaction to any threat to definite Turkish rights is likely to be extreme. It is widely believed both in Greece and in Turkey that any overthrow of the settle- ment in Cyprus would result in instant and massive Turkish intervention, regardless of the Russians or anyone else. (It is possibly this as much as anything that keeps the Greek Cypriot moderates moderate.) At present there is a nasty situation on Imbros, and Turkish papers have warned the local Greeks that methods which worked against the British, in Cyprus, won't work against Turks. Anti-Greek demonstrations —though not just lately—sweep Istanbul from time to time. And there are once again rumours that the Turks are, most shortsightedly, consider- ing the expulsion of the Oecumenical Patri- archate—a step which could only benefit Moscow.
Previous page
