From the Terrible Turk to the Incredible Turk: Reimagining Turkey as an American Ally, 1919-1960
Public Deposited- Creator
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akbaba, turgay
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
- Abstract
- This study examines the transformation of the Terrible Turk image into the Incredible Turk one in the U.S. from 1919 to 1960. It mainly seeks to answer two questions: 1) how and why this transformation became possible within thirty years 2) what role the Turkish elite played in this transformation. I argue that the rise of Turkey’s theoretical and geopolitical values in the eyes of American cold warriors facilitated the shift of Turkey and Turks’ image from being a villain to a victim and a hero in the early Cold War. American policymakers imagined that the Turkish experience with modernization not only presented a success story that could be emulated by other Muslim countries, but also provided Turkish leaders with prestige to politically lead other Muslim countries and align them with the West in the East-West struggle. The Turkish elite also played an active role in the emergence of the Incredible Turk image in the U.S. They not only established and transmitted the grand narrative of modernization that American cold warriors would regard as a model, but also undertook campaigns to improve Turkey’s relations with Muslim countries and rally them along the lines of the West on behalf of the U.S. Taking a cultural turn in Turkish-American relations, this project makes several historiographical contributions. First, it stresses the importance of cultural perceptions in U.S. foreign policymaking and the interplay between geopolitical considerations and cultural observations. Second, it reveals that modernization as an ideology was not solely an American discourse and it has international origins. Both the Ottoman and the Kemalist elite clung to modernization narrative in an effort to prove that the Ottoman Empire and later the Republic of Turkey was a part of the Western civilization. Last, more important, this project demonstrates how malleable modernization discourse was for American policymakers. Despite Turkey’s symbolic exit from the Muslim world and its joining in the Western civilization in the 1920s and 1930s, American modernization discourse required Turkey to return to the Muslim world as a model and an intermediary in the mid-1940s and 1950s.
- Date of publication
- 2020
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Advisor
- Aydin, Cemil
- Larres, Klaus
- Morgan, Michael
- Shields, Sarah
- Tasar, Eren
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2020
- Language
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This work has no parents.
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