"'An astonishing irony' in Turkey!
Yasemin Congar's picture
By Yasemin Congar | bio
As much as I appreciate Steven Cook's four points that summarize the basic messages of RBNG, I find the book's analysis especially valuable in the passages that deal with the EU reforms in Turkey. The desire to become a full member of the EU not only has resulted in a major --albeit incomplete-- uprooting of authoritarian laws and structures in the country, but also serves as a catalyst for the world to see who/what is modern in Turkey now. As Cook told me in a recent interview, 'This is not your grandfather's Turkey.' In an irony of history, the forces that are in the forefront of Westernization in today's Turkey come from among the religious masses of Anatolia, while many among the Western-looking secularist elite of the big cities are nostalgic for the modernism of 1920s and not ready to accept what it means to be modern and Western today."
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