ABSTRACT
Both Turkey and Egypt had emerged in the early 1920s under ‘new management’, so to speak. They were ruled by ambitious modernising elites wishing to emulate Europe but also to emancipate themselves from its overbearing tutelage. In Turkey the republican regime of Kemal Pasha, reverently called Ataturk, had rejected the heritage of the Ottoman Empire and established a Turkish nation state which was still in a rather precarious position. The ruling elite preserved its power by means of an authoritarian one-party system. An experiment of permitting the establishment of an opposition party in 1930 was quickly abandoned when this party attracted too much support. Authoritarian rule was not challenged by the majority of the nation which hardly understood the ideas of its modernising elite. At the same time the sovereignty of the new Turkish nation state was severely restricted by its foreign creditors.
