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Learning about Civil War, Separatism, and Nation Building through Teaching in the Turkish Republic
Tim Roberts
| Like many college students around the world, students in Turkey are familiar with American popular culture, whether they like it or not, but have little sense of American history, particularly history before the Cold War. They may have heard anecdotes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, but the first president whose policies mean much to them is Harry S. Truman, whose anticommunism influenced Turkey through the Marshall Plan and the dispatch of the massive USS Missouri to Istanbul in 1946, partly as a sign of support in the early Cold War. In the words spoken to me by a Turkish colleague at Bilkent University, a secular private university in a suburb of the nation's capital, Ankara, "it seemed the first time anyone had ever stood up for us." An observer today can still find Turkish memorabilia with the name "Mizuri." Unusual outside North America and Western Europe, Bilkent's history department offers several courses in American history at the graduate level. From 2002 through 2008 I was responsible for its components in the colonial period, the early republic, and the Civil War. |
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While they are on foreign ground regarding the pre-1945 American past, Turkish students are all too aware of important issues with which Americans in the Civil War era grappled—the problems of unifying a republic and of recognizing the existence and rights of minorities. These are "common anxieties of rule" in postcolonial societies. At the cost of sectional destruction, the Civil War basically solved Americans' anxiety about national unification and at least partly solved the question of race and citizenship. Similar, or perhaps analogous, issues in present-day Turkey enlivened my teaching there of the American national crisis, providing "fresh perspective on what was at stake in similar American conflicts in the past."1 |
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Three developments in Turkey in particular influenced my teaching about the Civil War. First, the country has changed rapidly in the last few decades, with cable television and the Internet enabling Turks to learn more about world events and to deliberate about their country's direction. Many Turks have rethought the wisdom or at least the legacy of their country's strong support of the United States during the Cold War. A punctuating moment in this debate came in March 2003, when the Turkish parliament voted to reject the U.S. request to use Turkey as a base for intervention in Iraq. Second, the Justice and Development party, or AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi), first elected in 2002, has advocated Turkey's joining the European Union, the privatization of industries, and restraint of the political power of the Turkish military. Critics of the AKP allege that the party has an Islamic agenda because it has encouraged temperance, awarded contracts to businesses professing Islamic practices, and ensured that female students may wear headscarves at universities, as a form of religious expression. Third has been the chronic conflict between the Turkish military and militants of the Kurdistan Workers' party, or PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan), whose goal since the 1980s has been to create autonomy along the Turkish borders with Iraq, Syria, and Iran, where the 12 million Kurds in Turkey are the majority. Regional separatism outside the United States is hardly a matter merely for historians. The Turkish government considers the PKK a terrorist organization. These developments complicate the legacy of the establishment by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey as a culturally Islamic yet officially secular republic in 1923. On four occasions the Turkish military has intervened in civilian government to maintain Kemalist principles, and it threatened to do so again in 2008. The AKP's ascension and the rumbling struggle among Islamic, ethnic separatist, and hypersecular military forces once prodded a Turkish colleague to mutter to me, "Perhaps we need a civil war."2 |
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