Turkey: Any explicator of contemporary Turkey - that mysterious, wildly beautiful dissolution of Europe into Asia - must contend with the fear and ignorance instilled in Western minds by centuries of conflict between Ottoman and Christian forces, writes Joseph O'Neill.
The threatening figure of "the Turk" - a dark-browed, sensual Mohammedan, addicted to barbarism - lives on; and whereas the horror of the prison scenes in Midnight Express (1979) still lingers, the images of, say, Abu Ghraib (or, for that matter, the intermittent revelations of the shockingly primitive workings of the domestic criminal justice system in the US) quickly fade in a detergent flood of counter-narratives. Mud sticks to Turkey. Or, as the self-pitying old Turkish saying has it, the Turks have no friends but themselves.
This is, of course, untrue. It is, in fact, remarkable how frequently foreign observers fall head over heels in love with the country and its people, and how much of the literature, however critical, is tinted with affection and even bedazzlement. From appreciative travellers such as Freya Stark to hard-bitten diplomats, journalists and academics, visitors are emotionally susceptible to Turkey's extraordinary charms. Andrew Mango, a BBC veteran turned Turkish scholar, is the latest sympathetic onlooker to put pen to paper. This book, which follows his acclaimed biography of Atatürk, assesses the state of modern-day Turkey and the progress of its historic Westernising mission.
That mission was, of course, conceived and drastically pursued by Kemal Atatürk. The trajectory of the republic he founded bears, it so happens, many similarities to that of the Irish republic. Both shook off foreign rule in or around 1922; both spent their first three decades of independence in isolationist mode, staying neutral during the second World War; both have been afflicted by political violence; both have vexed relationships with their pasts and their national myths; and both now espouse a cult of entrepreneurship and economic growth at the expense of traditional values. So why is Turkey, by comparison with Ireland, still a poor, undeveloped country? What can be done to make things better?
These are vital questions. Although there is, in Mango's view, little danger of Turkey undergoing an Islamic revolution, it is obviously crucial that it succeeds in establishing itself as the first fully-fledged Muslim democracy - which, in practice, means accession to the EU. The position here is well known. Even if EU economic criteria are satisfied, Turkey must do justice to its Kurdish citizens, end the widespread perpetration of physical abuse by agents of the state, remove its clumsy restrictions on political, cultural and religious expression and dispose of the need for the army to intervene periodically to rescue the country from the dangerous incompetence of its elected governments. These concerns are not the product of historical prejudices about "the Turk". They reflect substantial and legitimate concerns that increasing numbers of Turkish citizens share.
Without hesitation, Mango puts his finger on the underlying difficulty: the shortage in Turkey of what, in a Kemalist turn of phrase, he calls "modern knowledge". (Atatürk once peevishly asked: "Can a civilised nation tolerate a crowd of people who let themselves be led by the nose by sheiks, dervishes and the like, and who entrust their faith and their lives to fortune-tellers, magicians, witch-doctors and amulet-makers?") The most profound attribute of a modern European nation - an inclination to rational, non-supernatural explanations of good and evil, and, consequently, to certain shared moral reflexes - characterises only an educated minority of Turkish citizens, the mass of whom (including many members of the political class) are still given to conspiracy theories, paranoia and weird blind spots on questions of freedom and justice. Turkey is a place where honour killings persist and, as Mango points out, where the World Trade Centre attacks may seriously be attributed to the Mossad and the CIA. It's also a place where the government actively considered the criminalisation of adultery until finally scrapping the proposal last week .
Mango's attitude to such issues seems to be that, given time, encouragement, and understanding, Turkey will muddle its way into the European mainstream. He certainly does not advocate radical liberalisation. After all, when Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Georgia, not to mention prickly Greece and Armenia, nestle on your borders, when you have a separatist conflict on your hands, when your politicians tend to be self-serving demagogues and when the voting public is vulnerable to extremist populism, it may be that you have little choice but to proceed carefully and incrementally. This - conservative progressiveness, Mango calls it - remains the stance of the Turkish army and its allies in the Kemalist establishment.
Which brings us to an unfortunate feature of The Turks Today: it sometimes reads as if it were written by and for the Turkish authorities. Although Mango favours an informed and analytically critical Turkish culture, he exhibits precisely the limitations that continue to hold back Turkish thinking. Thus, Kurdish political violence is largely attributed to the "truculent" ambition of one individual, the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, and the "tradition of violence endemic in Kurdish society"; almost nothing is said of the oppression of the so-called mountain Turks and their long-standing claims to self-government. The Armenian genocide is subjected to a cursory, misleading summary that culminates with the statement: "Turkey holds that claims and counter-claims should be examined by historians and not by politicians." Never mind that historians have in fact examined the Armenian claims and, overwhelmingly, upheld them.
Andrew Mango's new book is often expert; but to be of true service to the country he knows so well, he cannot go native on matters of intellectual and moral honesty.
The Turks Today By Andrew Mango John Murray, 292pp. £20
Joseph O'Neill is an author. His most recent book is Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (Granta Books)