PDF Dosyası - Ankara Üniversitesi Kitaplar Veritabanı

The Kemalist Revolution was a national revolution, in the sense thatits leader limited it to the territory and the genuinely Turkish populationthat made up the historical core and the basis of the old Ottoman Empire,thus distancing himself from the hardly realistic aspirations of Pan-Turkish trends, traditional in certain previous nationalist modernizing circles,like that of the Young Turks; on the other hand, it was a nationalismbased on more secular and rational tenets than the one expounded bythinkers like Gökalp; the Revolution was also republican, for it abolishedthe Sultanate and assumed this form of government as the most apt for amodern, civilized State; it was also popular or popülist, in the sense thatit united various sectors of the nation in the struggle for effective independenceand transformation of the nation, considering such sectors notas divided into antagonic classes, but as functional and complementarysectors, joined by the shared interest of saving the fatherland; secular, becauseit separated the State from the Islamic religion, considered as acomponent of the citizens' private lives,as a basic requisite demanded bythe modernizing endeavor; etatist because it granted a central and basicrole to the new State in economic development, which made Turkey thefırst among developing countries to implement a state-directed industrializationprogram; lastly, it applied revolutionism, in that it deeply transformed,in a few years, the nation's structures, ossifıed under the Ottomanrule, vvithout becoming radically socialist like the Soviet Union, acountry with which the new Turkey maintained excellent relations duringthe fırst twenty years of the Republic, that proved to be quite importantand signifîcant during the war of liberation and the drive for industrializationin the 1930s.Bearing in mind that Turkey was a basically agrarian, backvvard, Islamiccountry and, furthermore, the see of that religion's spiritual leadership;that, 90% of its population was illiterate; that it lacked modern scientifıcand technical development and administrative and technicalpersonnel in sufficient quantities, and that it had been obliged to honor apart of the debts contracted by the Ottoman Empire and had grave limitationsfor receiving foreign funding, the Turkish national revolution probablywas the most feasible experience in those historical circumstances.Thus, nationalism, republicanism, secularism, populism etatism andrevolutionism were the bases of Kemalism, not only as the ideology of asingle party -the Republican People's Party founded by Atatürk, but of agreat national endeavor from which emerged the modern Turkish nation.The Kemalist Revolution -one of the first national-populist revolutionsof this century that took place in one of the continents subjected towestern colonization, in a region of primary geostrategic importance, thebridge between Europe and Asia, the question around vvhich revolved traditionaldiplomacy for several centuries- undoubtedly has an enormousmeaning in this century. For the peoples of Asia, and specially for Mus-35