PDF Dosyası - Ankara Üniversitesi Kitaplar Veritabanı

phase of its national independence struggle (1919-1922). This victory enabledTurkey to become the only one of the powers defeated in WorldWar I to secure a renegotiation of the peace settlement that had been imposedon it. In a longer-term sense, the restructuring of external economicrelations was affected by changes in the world system, changes so significantthat I would like to take them as the theme of my next section.The other element stili to account for is that of cultural revolution,which began at the end of the national struggle and continued through the1920s. Amid many social and cultural reforms, several measures can bethought of as revolutionary in impact. The most notable is the replacementof Islamic empire with secular republic. Building on an Ottomanfeminist movement that extends back to the 1860s, the emancipation ofwomen —including the abolition of polygamy and full voting rights by1935— also amounts to revolutionary change. So do the alphabet and languagereforms (inkılap) launched in 1928. The language reform was intendedto purify the Ottoman language of foreign, specifically Arabic andPersian elements, and give it a national character. The language and alphabetreforms together were designed to make the cultural inheritance ofthe Ottoman Empire inaccessible to later generations of Turks; for betteror worse, they have.American commentators, insufficiently sensitive to Turkish terminology,tend to refer to the Turkish experience of the 1920s as a revolution.Turkish terminology, as we have seen is more nuanced. Here, truly,is a "national struggle" (milli muadele) later generations speaking thenew Turkish have sometimes made it into a "national liberation struggle"(milli kurtuluş savaşı). This national struggle was carried out within theconceptual framework of a constitutional revolution. It eschewed violentrevolution (ihtilal), and yet produced cultural revolution. This is a casethat merits more careful study by theorists of revolution.EARLY REPUBLİCAN TURKEY AND THE CHANGINGWORLD SYSTEMThe story of how Turkey severed or transformed external dependencyrelations, while usually treated in terms of Turkish initiatives such asthe abolition of the capitulations, is also a story of changes in the vvorldsystem, particularly from 1929 on. The point I wish to stress is that in avvorld characterized throughout the last two centuries by progressivelytightening global interlinkages, the years betvveen the tvvo vvorld vvarsrepresented an exceptional conjuncture for any nation just emerging froma national liberation struggle. The military exhaustion of the majör europeanpovvers in vvorld War I vvas clearly one factor in enabling the Turksto emerge victorious in 1922. The 1929 depression and the collapse ofvvorld trade then ensured that the intervvar years vvould be the only majörinterval since 1800 during vvhich global interlinkage loosened rather than95