Mustafa Kemal

There was no friendly neighbor for the Republic of Mustafa Kemal when it was born in 1923. It seemed that the British delegation’s head at the Lausanne Conference and Foreign Minister Lord Curzon intended this when he allowed, as the legal midwife of the new state, that the newborn would not resemble the offspring of […]

The issue of the ethnic origins of national leaders has drawn considerable attention since the establishment of Iraq under a colonial framework that placed Kurds and Arabs within a political entity that quickly revealed its fragile structure. This was particularly evident in the use of ethnic origin as a weapon to undermine opponents and obstruct […]

The concept of the nation-state has not succeeded in Atatürk’s Turkey, Pahlavi’s Iran, the Baathist republics in Syria and Iraq, nor has the Islamic Republic of Iran managed to solve the issue of nationalities while maintaining the dominance of Persian nationalism within its regime. From these five experiences, confrontational rifts emerged among the four major […]

On 12 November 1918, the first group of French troops entered Constantinople to occupy the city under the Mudros Armistice, which had been signed just days earlier on 30 October. French General Després entered the city on horseback. Did the Turks have a problem with the occupation? This is a significant and complex question, but […]

The issue of “identity” preoccupied the late Ottoman milieu. There were those who argued that an Ottoman identity must be formulated to preserve territorial unity and protect the “eternal Ottoman state,” as was the case in the late literature of the intellectuals of Abdul Hamid II’s court, and those for whom identity took on nationalist […]

In November 1922, Ismet Pasha Inonu led the Grand National Assembly of Turkey delegation to the Lausanne Conference. The trip included an elite group of politicians, including Reza Nur, an Ottoman physician and minister in Ankara’s government at the time. The country was ruled by two capitals, Ankara, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later named […]