Specialists in foreign affairs explain that Turkey's unique location within the Anatolian setting defines the range of choices that it has had to live with in the modern world. Turkey is facing new confines, and neighbors themselves are in the throes of change; Russia and the problems it has inherited from the Soviet Union; Iran and its rulers; Syria and its regimes, Greece and its recurring views regarding Istanbul as the center of Byzantium: and Bulgaria alternating in its role of a good neighbor and promoter of memories of Ottoman presence create enormous chaos. In a wider circle, Turkey has been seen as the defender of NATO's "southern flank:" as the tail end of Western defenses.
Since local patriotism has molded the mind of many Middle Eastern intellectuals born after 1923- the date of the foundation of the Turkish Republic and since this has often en- tailed an outright rejection of the history they had shared with the Ottoman Empire up to World War I, it is difficult to explain to citizens of these successor states that although Turks share Islam as a common patrimony with its Muslim neighbors, there exists a cultural specificity of Turkey which promotes attitudes considered to be "unusual" by these neighbors.
For one, the Balkans were an area in which Turkmen/Ottoman settlement Shifted large chunks of "Turkish" population into what we now know as "Macedonia" and "Bosnia," let alone some of the other components of the Balkans, It is the Balkan compass of the Ottoman Empire that brought with it an orientation to the states of Western Europe, which lies in the background of its attitude towards the West: the Ottoman Empire had co-opted into the Arab speaking lands in the 16th century, hut its daily politics had to confront developments in the West.
An interesting trace of this Western involvement of the Ottomans transmitted to modern Turkey came to my attention about eight years ago. I was the host to a journalist from the periodical Le Monde. The journalist had traveled to Turkey with the specific mission of plumbing the minds of Turkish citizens on their adhesion to the European Community. He told me he was puzzled by the most precisely formulated reaction to the question lie had asked on this subject, to an audience in a cafe in a town West of the capital, Ankara. When he requested that someone tell him what the Turks thought about this adhesion, the local mufti, the religious functionary raised his hand. The mufti then began a long excursus about how the Turks were good, indeed, excellent Muslims holding closely to their faith. He continued by giving a catalogue of the qualities of Turks as great Turkish patriots, proud of their Turkishness and sterling qualities as nationalists and ended by asking: "So why don't you take us into the Community?" It is this somewhat paradoxical layering of attitudes that our neighbors and Western observers often do not understand with regard to Turkish views and the way this layering propels the country's foreign policy.
The extent to which the Ottoman Empire was linked to the Balkans can be followed in the memoir of Falili Rifki Atay, a journalist and a person of the generation or Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He reminisced that when. at the end of World War I the Turks realized Turkey was to be constituted by the Anatolian Peninsula, he had tears in his eyes. "For us," he stated, "the center of the nation (millet) was Rumelia In our view, at the time, the boundaries of our nation extended-at most-two hundred and fifty kilometers East of Istanbul. It was in Rumelia that the purest Turkish was spoken."
The very first generation of Ottoman reformers, the men of tile 1840s, were already aware that they needed to create the secular educational institutions that would mobilize a larger number of intermediary cadres to achieve the goals they had in mind, namely the strengthening of the Ottoman social structure. It is the generation that followed them in the 1860s, the first intellectuals who promoted constitutionalism and representative democracy, who went one step further and advocated the simplification of the elite's language and the use of popular speech. They were hoping to reach a wider population through the use of what may be called the "conscientization" Turkish-speaking ordinary citizens. They aimed to achieve this goal through the use of an emerging press which they themselves had created. Not only were these men, known as the Young Ottomans, the founders of Turkish journalism, but they also promoted the growth of a national literature in Turkish. This is probably one of the most striking aspects of the evolution of -Turkish culture among the generation that succeeded them. the intellectuals of the years 1880 to 1920.
The emergence of Turkish literature is arguably the most outstanding element of modern Turkish identity. Prosper de Barante, a revolutionary of 1789 confirmed this thought noting that a national literature can itself serve as an institution at the time when institutions are liquefying. This identity was strengthened through the study and use of themes of popular Turkish culture which had remained lively among the non-elite.
One of the elements that has so marked contemporary Algeria and which explains some of the deadly Algerian cultural cleavages of our time (i.e. the lack of a national literature) was not remotely an element of modern Turkish history. Turkish "native" culture was propelled to the front stage of Turkish culture through the project of a national literature. It was to be expected that this rise of a national Turkish literature would raise the issue among the new, enhanced readership of what Turkish is all about. Who else spoke Turkish? What were the links between these other Turkish-speaking population and the Turkish of Turkey? It is in this frame as well as an aspect of the policy of the Young Turks-a policy which began to be increasingly interested in links with Azerbaijan and Central Asia after 1910-that the emerging bridge between the Turks of Turkey and the remaining Turkic world have to be understood. The same may be said about the links of Turkey with contemporary Turkic world.