Transcript
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: So here we are at another decisive moment in Turkish history. As Professor Philliou just said, history does matter. It really does. And this country, Turkey, has faced many such moments in the last 85 years. While the historical record is mixed, the general trend has been unmistakable since Atatürk's extraordinary odyssey that set Turkey on its current path. Almost no one in the last century anywhere in the world fused political skills and vision so brilliantly and left such a lasting impact as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
In creating the modern nation-state of Turkey he laid the foundations for a vibrant secular democracy and he succeeded. In the words of the lead article in this week's Economist, "Turkey is a remarkable place. As a mainly Muslim country that practices full secular democracy, it is a working repudiation of the widespread belief that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Still --" the Economist went on to say, "-- over the years, Turkish democracy has shown itself to be vibrant yet at the same time fragile."
. . .If once reduces Atatürk's vision of the Turkey he sought to build to a simple animating idea, it was that the new republic should be Western. Everything else flowed from that. Being Western today obviously means something different from what it did in the dark days after World War I when Atatürk was founding the republic. Later as he sat in motion the process of democratization in Turkey, Atatürk with typical brilliance and foresight anticipated the direction which the West and Turkey should evolve, toward each other. Through its membership in NATO and as the reforms of the late President Turgut Özal made clear, Turkey became a more open society. Its Western identity put down firm roots. And with the European Union's confirmation in 2004 that Turkey's progress toward meeting the Copenhagen Criteria justified the start of negotiations on membership, those roots bore fruit. That fruit will ripen in due course but only if Turkey keeps its face turned firmly Westward.
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