America and the Making of Modern Turkey

ISBN: 9781838604684 出版年：2018 页码：240 Ali Erken Bloomsbury Publishing

After tOttoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's government encouraged substantial American investment in education aarguneeded the technical skills and wealth offered by American education, aof American schools was set up across the country to educate the Turkish youth. Here, Ali Erken, in the first study of its kind, argues that these organizations hadon political and economic thought in Turkey - acting as a form of `soft power' for US national interests throughout the 20th Century. Robert College, originally a missionary school founded by US benefactors, has been responsible for educating two Turkish Prime Ministers, writers such as Orhan Pamuk andof influential economists, politicians and journalists. The end result of these American philanthropic efforts, Erken argues, was a consensus in the 1970s that the country must `westernize'. This mindset, and the opposition viewpoint it engendered, has come to define political struggle in modern Turkey - torn between a capitalist `moderIslamic `Ottoman' East. The book also reveals how and why the Rockefeller and Ford foundations funneled large amounts of monpost-1945, and undertook activities in support of `Western' candidates in Turkey as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. This is an essential contribution to the history of US-Turkish relations, and the influence of the West in Turkish political thought.