Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

It's really impossible to understand the Turkish state without understanding Ataturk. It's difficult to explain the significance of Ataturk to Turkish history in a single blog post. Even finding a comparable figure from U.S. History is difficult. Ataturk is the founder of a nation and its first strong leader, much like George Washington, but he also has the progressiveness of Teddy Roosevelt, he was beloved like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and secularists harken back to the days of his leadership much like the many American conservatives who remember Ronald Reagan. Maybe Ataturk has the importance of all of these figures rolled into one charismatic leader...and then multiplied by 10.

Ataturk vanquished the occupying Allied powers and replaced the broken Ottoman Empire with a modern state in less than two decades. But his accomplishments went beyond that of just nation building. He transformed the everyday life for the Turkish people. He created the very concept that there was such a group of people who could be considered Turkish, and that they could be connected through a new national identity. Ataturk created this along with essentially everything that it takes to run a modern nation from scratch. A new capital city, a new secular government, new styles of dress, a new language and script, Ataturk constructed all of these.

He's often credited with bringing democracy to Turkey. But it's difficult to see how anything about Ataturk's rule was especially democratic. It's clear that Ataturk was the sole deciding source on many of these drastic reforms. And resistance to his policies would be dealt with swiftly. For everything good about democracies, there are disadvantages. Giving more people a voice in policy making makes things much more difficult to get done. And it's difficult to make the case that Turkey didn't need Ataturk's strong leadership during this period.

It really is impossible to imagine what Turkey would be like today without Ataturk's influence. It's also hard for me to explain to other Americans how deep the affection the Turkish people hold for him is. You can't walk into any shop, cafe, restaurant, bus station, airport, hotel lobby, etc. without seeing a portrait of a staunch, resolute Ataturk gazing off into the distance. I think that maybe the U.S. has experienced similar periods of worship for their leaders, but never something so strongly based on a single individual. Maybe George Washington as the first president of the United States, or maybe FDR during World War II, but there's nothing that matches the longevity and the intensity of admiration that the Turkish people feel for Ataturk.