West from Turkey

ON A hillside overlooking the Turkish capital from the west, in a mausoleum of severe, neoclassical, and definitely non-Oriental design, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk lies in his marble sarcophagus. Below him, the city which he more or less invented (Ankara was the sleepiest of country towns until he turned it into the national capital) hums with non-stop activity in a haze of exhaust fumes. Stand in any of its main streets, disregard the occasional minaret on the skyline, and you might think you were in the modern quarter of an Italian, Spanish, or French city during a period of unusually rapid economic expansion.

All of which is exactly what Ataturk would have wanted you to feel about Turkey—a country he more or less invented too. Economic growth, modernization, and Westernization were the driving forces of “Kemalism,” the personal doctrine of state and government which he imposed on Turkey and which remains its official dogma. Occasionally, the sheer dynamism of the Westward-tending impulse can still take one by surprise. At Bilkent, for example, five miles outside the city, a huge new privately funded university has sprung up out of the bare earth in a forest of well-built high-rises; modeled on an American university, it conducts all its teaching in English. One lecturer there told me that the telecommunications and computer technology in his faculty building was much better than it had been at the British university where he had just finished his doctorate. Remembering a story in a Turkish newspaper about an overheard conversation between two Turks who were working as manual laborers in Germany, I was inclined to believe him.

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Noel Malcolm

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Brian Crozier

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ON A hillside overlooking the Turkish capital from the west, in a mausoleum of severe, neoclassical, and definitely non-Oriental design, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk lies in his marble sarcophagus. Below him, the city which he more or less invented (Ankara was the sleepiest of country towns until he turned it into the national capital) hums with non-stop activity in a haze of exhaust fumes. Stand in any of its main streets, disregard the occasional minaret on the skyline, and you might think you were in the modern quarter of an Italian, Spanish, or French city during a period of unusually rapid economic expansion.

All of which is exactly what Ataturk would have wanted you to feel about Turkey—a country he more or less invented too. Economic growth, modernization, and Westernization were the driving forces of “Kemalism,” the personal doctrine of state and government which he imposed on Turkey and which remains its official dogma. Occasionally, the sheer dynamism of the Westward-tending impulse can still take one by surprise. At Bilkent, for example, five miles outside the city, a huge new privately funded university has sprung up out of the bare earth in a forest of well-built high-rises; modeled on an American university, it conducts all its teaching in English. One lecturer there told me that the telecommunications and computer technology in his faculty building was much better than it had been at the British university where he had just finished his doctorate. Remembering a story in a Turkish newspaper about an overheard conversation between two Turks who were working as manual laborers in Germany, I was inclined to believe him.