From the Sultan to Ataturk – Turkey Andrew Mango PDF

Modern Turkey is a country that stands between two worlds, a state with an avowedly secular constitution which is a member of NATO but an overwhelmingly Islamic population which causes alarm in European countries when it seeks European Union membership. This country was the creation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), a Turkish general whose military victories over the Greeks in 1922 gave him the power to shape the Turkish state to his own design. Defeat in the First World War had finally sent the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, as the Ottoman Empire had been known in the 19th century, to his deathbed. The major Allied Powers gathered in Paris were planning the final division of the Empire between them. But Mustafa Kemal’s military victory ensured the independence of the Turkish heartland in Asia Minor. The inability of Great Britain, in particular, to mobilise sufficient forces to support the Greek occupation triggered the political crisis that brought down Lloyd George’s wartime Coalition government, and ensured that ‘The Man Who Won the War’ would never hold high of fice again. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923, set the borders of modern Turkey and is the one part of the post-war settlement that has survived to the present day. This book, written by one of the leading experts on the life of Ataturk, explains how one of the key states of the modern world arose out of the Paris Peace Conferences and their aftermath.