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view, it has a price. Being cut off from the past creates uncertainty aboutthe present and future. Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar devoted his novels to exploringthis problem, and Turkey's experiences since his death in the early1960s have illustrated it with increasing complexity. A world historicalperspective helps, I think, both to emphasize the importance of Turkey'smodern transormation and to reconnect it with Turkey's past.Turkey is practically unique among the world's nations in being locatedat the pivot between two of the zones where the vvorld's most influentialcivilizations have developed. In Bozkurt Güvenç's words, Anatoliais "the West of the East and the East of the West"'. Whoever lives inthis land always has a choice betvveen cultural orientations in different directions.Anatolia's history includes many reorientations, with long periodsof stability in between. In the second millennium BCE, for example,the Hittites' sphere of influence extended as far as Aleppo. A visit to theantiquities museums of Ankara and Aleppo makes clear that both regionsshared Hittite culture. A millennium later Asia Minör was integrated intolarger political entities, first the Achaemenian Empire of Iran to the east,then the Empire of Alexander coming from the West. Later, the RomanEmpire made Anatolia a key component —as a visit to Ephesus remindsus— of an empire that encompassed the entire Mediterranean world andmore, before the breakup into eastern and vvestern empires again reinforcedties to the East 2 . The Turkish dynasties reshaped this eastward orientationin an Islamic mode, preserving it until the Turkish republic reorientedTurkey to the West. If there is anything that may change theancient phenomenon of pivoting betvveen East and West, it is the dawningera of globalization, which gives Turkey choices among a number ofregions that will be important to it in the future.In any event, only historical amnesia can make us see Turkey's culturalreorientation under Atatürk as a unique turning point in the historyof this country, rather than as the fulfillment of a potential often realizedbefore. To say this is not to dovvnplay the achievements of the Atatürkera. Rather, it is to relieve the sense of rootlessness that comes from notbeing able to see the events of the 1920s and 1930s in a larger contextthat recognizes the unique potential for cultural change that its geographyconfers on Anatolia. This is one important lesson from the world historicalperspective.TURKEY'S EXCEPTIONAL NATİONAL INDEPENDENCESTRUGGLETheoretical research now being done on the comparative history ofrevolution is beginning to formulate a distinction between constitutional1. Bozkurt Güvenç, Tiirk Kimliği, Ankara, 1993, 168.2. Geoffrey Barraclough, The Times Concise Atlas of World History, Maplewood, NJ,1992, 20-23,30-31.92