Turkey and the Middle East: Ambitions and constraints

Turkey and the Middle East: Ambitions and constraints

Crisis Group

Compte d'auteur

For many decades after its establishment in 1923, modern Turkey ignored and at times scorned the Middle East. Republican founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the new rulers blamed conservative Islamic ideas for holding back progress in the region and turned their faces towards the modernity represented by Europe.1 There was bitterness among many Turks, who saw Arab collaboration with the British during the latter’s seizure of the region as having knifed the Ottoman Empire in the back.2 And, when the Arab world won independence after the Second World War, several states blamed many of their ills on Ottoman Turkish misrule.

Alongside these basic dynamics dur ...