KEMAL ATATÜRK had created a new Turkey. He had left it in the hands of an experienced leader, an efficient administration, and a flexible parliamentary system, capable of evolution in more liberal terms when the time became ripe.(1) He had transported his country from the Middle Ages to the threshold of the modern era and a stage beyond. It was now the task of his successors, covering new ground and filling in ground behind him, to carry it on a stage further.

The progress had been rapid - too rapid for some. In a mere half generation Ataturk had sought to build a new Turkish society. He had abruptly uprooted the traditions of centuries, but had not yet evolved a new culture in place of them. This had caused some dislocation in the mind and the life of the ordinary Turk, whom a leader more sympathetic to Islam might well have weaned more gradually from one civilization to the other. As it was, some twenty years after Ataturk's death, a successor was to imperil his Revolution by reviving and exploiting dormant forces of religion for political purposes.(2)

Socially, before Turkey could consolidate the unity which Atatürk had given her, a gap remained to be closed between the 'two nations' of her illiterate peasantry and her literate bourgeoisie. It was this class, essentially urban in character, which was for the present the true beneficiary of the Turkish Revolution. Formed by Atatürk as a Westernized elite for the support and direction of a centralized Government, it still needed to achieve close touch with the mass of the rural population, to whom the full benefits had not yet been able to percolate. Only the spread of education could close this gap, together with an effective grasp of economic problems which the generation of Atatürk lacked. Twenty-five years after his death his successors were engaged on a fresh national struggle to establish the country as a whole on a productive economic basis.

These however are hardly more than the growing pains of any new country. What Atatürk left to the Turkey he had freed was strong foundations and a clear objective for her future growth. He gave her not merely durable institutions but a national ideal, rooted in patriotism, nourished by a new self-respect, and promising fruitful rewards for new energies. He created, by his deeds and his words, a personal myth, to feed the imagination of a people given to the worship of heroes. He infused them with a belief in the values of Western democracy, which they learnt sincerely to respect, differing only as to the means of achieving it. All that he gave them survives as a living force in the Turk of today.

The logical outcome has been the emergence of the Turkish Republic as a reliable ally of the West. The soldier in Atatürk saved his country, confounding, as no other man at that time could have done, the designs of the European powers against it, and thus changing the face of its history. The statesman in him then won their acceptance of his country on equal terms, and ultimately its incorporation into the Atlantic Alliance, as a bulwark against Russia - its hereditary enemy - and an element of stability in the shifting Middle Eastern world.

Such was the life's achievement of Mustafa Kemal, 'Father of the Turks'.

LONDON—ISTANBUL—ANKARA—LONDON 1960-64



1 This happened in 1950, when free elections returned an Opposition party, that of the Democrats, to power, with Celal Bayar as President of the Republic.

2 This was Adnan Menderes, the Democrat Prime Minister. His autocratic tendencies, suffused with an aura of 'divine right', provoked, in 1960, a bloodless revolution which overthrew his regime and, after an interval of military government, established a new Constitution.