ABSTRACT
Alexander Lyon Macfie emphasizes an unexpectedly favorable international and domestic environment (not much recognized at the time), in combination with extraordinary leadership, to explain the success of Atatürk in creating the modern Turkish state. Internationally, the loss of the Christian and Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan and First World Wars left a cohesive Turkish “national” core in Anatolia, while revolution and civil war in Russia put Turkey’s principal enemy out of action during the early stages of the struggle. Domestically, the survival of Turkish units of the Ottoman army left an institution capable of imposing order, while the survival of elements of the Committee of Union and Progress, the party that ruled over the Ottoman Empire both before and during World War I, left an organization capable of providing an institutional framework for the development of civil institutions. In addition, mainly Turkish Ottoman scholars had written extensively on the possibility of using Turkish national identity as the basis for a future state. Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) then astutely used the power afforded by his position as a military officer in Anatolia to unite rival political movements in a Turkish national movement capable of laying the foundations of a new secular (nation) state.
