ABSTRACT
Turkey is unique for many reasons. It is an Islamic country which has embraced Western institutions and a Latin alphabet. In the 1920s the country carried out a national revolution from above, modernizing its political and social institutions. In the immediate post-war years, Marshall Aid was granted to Turkey and in 1952 the country became a member of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), thus promoting Turkey’s ties with the West. Turkey obtained membership of NATO and established close contacts with Europe. For several decades Turkey was America’s closest ally against the Soviet Union in the Caucasian region. Therefore Turkey joined several anti-Soviet regional organizations. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when defining Turkey’s international role in a globalizing and regionalizing world, President Turgut Özal spoke about ‘establishing a hegemony from east to west, from the Adriatic Sea across Central Asia to China’. Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel spoke in a similar way: ‘The achievement of independence by these countries [of Central Asia] is an embodiment of the age-old Turkish dream and… [Turkey] is prepared to do everything possible to help them implement political and economic reforms’ (Smolansky 1994:203).
