Turkey
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Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), officially the Republic of Turkey (Template:Audio), is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in southwestern Asia and the Balkan region of southeastern Europe. Turkey borders eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest, Greece to the west, Georgia to the northeast, Armenia, Iran and the Nakhichevan exclave of Azerbaijan to the east, and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. In addition, it borders the Black Sea to the north, the Aegean Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Turkey also contains the Sea of Marmara that is used by geographers to mark the border between Europe and Asia, thus making the country transcontinental.[1]
The region comprising modern Turkey has seen the birth of major civilisations including the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Owing to its strategic location at the intersect of two continents, Turkey's culture is a unique blend of Eastern and Western tradition, often described as a bridge between the two civilisations. With a powerful regional presence from the Adriatic to China in the Eurasian landbelt between Russia and India, Turkey has come to acquire increasing strategic significance.[2][3]
Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic whose political system was established in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. Since then, Turkey has increasingly integrated with the West while continuing to foster relations with the Eastern world. It is a founding member of the United Nations,[4] the Organization of the Islamic Conference,[5] the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development[6] and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe,[7] a member state of the Council of Europe since 1949,[8] and of NATO since 1952.[9] Since 2005, Turkey is in accession negotiations with the European Union, having been an associate member since 1963.[10] Turkey is also a member of the G20 which brings together the 20 largest economies of the world.
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Etymology
The name for Turkey in the Turkish language, Türkiye, subdivides into two words: Türk, which means "strong" in Old Turkic and usually signifying the inhabitants of Turkey or a member of the Turkish or Turkic peoples,[11] a later form of "tu-kin", name given by the Chinese to the people living south of the Altay Mountains of Central Asia as early as 177 BC;[12] and the abstract suffix -iye, which means "owner" or "related to". The term "Türk" or "Türük" was first used as an autonym in the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks (Sky Turks) of Central Asia. The English word "Turkey" is derived from the Medieval Latin "Turchia" (c.1369).[12]
History
Antiquity
The Anatolian peninsula (also called Asia Minor), comprising most of modern Turkey, is one of the oldest continually inhabited regions in the world due to its location at the intersection of Asia and Europe. The earliest Neolithic settlements such as Çatalhöyük (Pottery Neolithic), Çayönü (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A to Pottery Neolithic), Nevali Cori (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B), Hacilar (Pottery Neolithic), Göbekli Tepe (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A) and Mersin are considered to be among the earliest human settlements in the world.[13] The settlement of Troy starts in the Neolithic and continues into the Iron Age. Through recorded history, Anatolians have spoken Indo-European, Semitic and Kartvelian languages, as well as many languages of uncertain affiliation. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical center from which the Indo-European languages have radiated.[14]
The first major empire in the area was that of the Hittites, from the 18th through the 13th century BCE. Subsequently, the Phrygians, an Indo-European people, achieved ascendancy until their kingdom was destroyed by the Cimmerians in the 7th century BCE.[15] The most powerful of Phrygia's successor states were Lydia, Caria and Lycia. The Lydians and Lycians spoke languages that were fundamentally Indo-European, but both languages had acquired non-Indo-European elements prior to the Hittite and Hellenic periods.
Coastal Anatolia, which came to be known as Ionia, was meanwhile settled by the Ionians, one of the ancient Greek peoples. The entire area was conquered by the Persian Achaemenid Empire during the 6th and 5th centuries and later fell to Alexander the Great in 334 BCE.[16] Anatolia was subsequently divided into a number of small Hellenistic kingdoms (including Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pergamum, and Pontus), all of which had succumbed to Rome by the mid-1st century BCE.[17] In 324 CE, the Roman emperor Constantine I chose Byzantium to be the new capital of the Roman Empire, renaming it Constantinople (now İstanbul). After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it became the capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire.[18]
Turks and the Ottoman Empire
The House of Seljuk was a branch of the Kinik Oğuz Turks who in the 9th century lived on the periphery of the Muslim world, north of the Caspian and Aral seas in the Yabghu Khaganate of the Oğuz confederacy.[19] In the 10th century, the Seljuks migrated from their ancestral homelands into the eastern Anatolian regions that had been an area of settlement for Oğuz Turkic tribes since the end of the first millennium.
Following their victory over the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Turks began to abandon their nomadic roots in favour of a permanent role in Anatolia, bringing rise to the Seljuk Empire.[20] The empire was not to last however, by 1243 the Seljuk armies were defeated by the Mongols and the power of the empire slowly disintegrated. In its wake, one of the Turkish principalities governed by Osman I was to evolve into the Ottoman Empire, thus filling the void left by the collapsed Seljuks and Byzantines.[21]
The Ottoman Empire interacted with both Eastern and Western cultures throughout its 623-year history. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was among the world's most powerful political entities, often locking horns with the powers of eastern Europe in its steady advance through the Balkans and the southern part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.[3] Following years of decline, the Ottoman Empire entered the World War I through the Ottoman-German Alliance in 1914 - a war in which it was ultimately defeated. After the war, the victorious Allied Powers sought the dismemberment of the Ottoman state through the Treaty of Sèvres.[21]
Republican era
The occupation of İstanbul and İzmir by the Allies in the aftermath of World War I prompted the establishment of the Turkish national movement.[3] Under the leadership Mustafa Kemal Pasha, a military commander who had distinguished himself during the Battle of Gallipoli, the Turkish War of Independence was waged with the aim of revoking the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres.[2] By September 18 1922, the occupying armies were repelled and the country saw the birth of the new Turkish state. On November 1 1922, the newly founded parliament formally abolished the Sultanate, thus ending 623 years of Ottoman rule. The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 led to the international recognization of the sovereignty of the newly formed "Republic of Turkey" as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, and the republic was officially proclaimed on October 29 1923, in the new capital of Ankara.[3]
Kemal Pasha became the republic's first president and subsequently introduced many radical reforms with the aim of founding a new secular republic from the remnants of its Ottoman past.[3] According to the Law on Family Names, the Turkish parliament presented Mustafa Kemal with the honorific name "Atatürk" (Father of the Turks) in 1934.[2]
Turkey entered World War II on the side of the Allies in the later stages of the war as a ceremonial gesture and became a charter member of the United Nations in 1945.[4] Difficulties faced by Greece after the war in quelling a communist rebellion, along with demands by the Soviet Union for military bases in the Turkish Straits, prompted the United States to declare the Truman Doctrine in 1947. The doctrine enunciated American intentions to guarantee the security of Turkey and Greece, and resulted in large scale US military and economic support.[22]
After participating with United Nations forces in the Korean conflict, Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952, becoming a bulwark against Soviet expansion into the Mediterrenean. Following a decade of intercommunal violence on the island of Cyprus and the subsequent Athens-inspired coup, Turkey intervened militarily, resulting in the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus recognised only by Turkey.[23]
Following the end of the single party period in 1945, the multi-party period witnessed tensions over the following decades, and the period between the Sixties and the Eighties was particularly marked by periods of political instability that resulted in a number of military coups d'états in 1960, 1971, 1980 and a post-modern coup d'état in 1997.[24] The liberalization of the Turkish economy that started in the 1980s changed the landscape of the country, with successive periods of high growth and crises punctuating the following decades.[25]
Government and politics
Turkey is a parliamentary representative democracy. Since its foundation as a Republic in 1923, Turkey has developed a strong tradition of secularism.[26] Turkey's constitution governs the legal framework of the country. It sets out the main principles of government and establishes Turkey as a unitary centralized state. The current constitution was ratified by referendum in 1982 and has been amended numerous times in recent years.[27]
The head of State is the President of the Republic and has a largely ceremonial role. The president is elected for a seven-year term by the parliament but is not required to be one of its members. The current President, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, was elected on May 16 2000, after having served as the President of the Constitutional Court. Executive power is exercised by the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers that make up the government, while the legislative power is vested in the unicameral parliament, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature, and the Constitutional Court is charged with ruling on the conformity of laws and decrees with the constitution. The Council of State is the tribunal of last resort for administrative cases, and High Court of Appeals for all others.[27]
The Prime Minister is generally the head of the party that has won the elections and is elected by the parliament through a vote of confidence in his government. The current Prime Minister is the former mayor of İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose Islamic conservative AKP won an absolute majority of parliamentary seats in the 2002 general elections, organized in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2001, with 34% of the suffrage.[28][29] Neither the Prime Minister nor the Ministers have to be members of the parliament, but in most cases they are (one notable exception was Kemal Derviş, who was the Minister of Finance following the financial crisis of 2001;[30] he is currently the president of the UN Development Programme).[31]
There are 550 members of parliament who are elected for a five-year term by a party-list proportional representation system from 85 electoral districts which represent the 81 administrative provinces of Turkey (İstanbul is divided into three electoral districts whereas Ankara and İzmir are divided into two each because of their large populations). To avoid a hung parliament and its excessive political fragmentation, only parties that win at least 10% of the votes cast in a national parliamentary election gain the right to representation in the parliament. As a result of this threshold, only two parties were able to obtain that right during the last elections.[32] Independent candidates may run, however they must also win at least 10% of the vote in their circonscription to be elected.[33] Universal suffrage for both sexes has been applied throughout Turkey since 1933 and every Turkish citizen that has turned 18 years of age has the right to vote. As of 2004, there were 50 registered political parties in the country, whose ideologies range from the far-left to the far-right.[33] The Constitutional Court can strip the public financing of political parties that it deems anti-secular or separatist, or ban their existence altogether.[34][35]
The military has traditionally been a politically powerful institution, considered as the guardians of Atatürk's Republic. The protection of the Turkish Constitution and the unity of the country is given by law to the Turkish Armed Forces and it therefore plays a formal political role via the National Security Council (NSC) as the guardian of the secular, unitary nature of the republic and the reforms of Atatürk.[24] Through the NSC, the army contributes to recommendations for defense policy against any threat to the country, including those pertaining to ethnic separatism or religious extremism. In recent years, reforms led to efforts to extinguish the military's constitutional responsibilities, under the program of compliance with the EU demands and an increased civilian presence on the NSC.[36] Despite its perceived alleged influence in civilian affairs, the military owns strong unequivocal support from the nation and is considered to be the country's most trusted institution.[37]
Foreign relations
Turkey's main political, economic and military relations have remained rooted within the West since the foundation of the republic. Turkey has manifested an Atlantist approach in many regional and international affairs since the Second Cairo Conference, its participation in the Korean War, and its subsequent adhesion to NATO in 1952.[22] It remained a bulwark against the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, and has participated in many NATO-led peacekeeping missions since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For many historical and cultural reasons, this has led to a certain mix of trends in Turkey's foreign policy. Turkey is the only OIC member which is also a member of NATO; and its relations with Israel constitute one of the key partnerships in the Middle East.[38]
The European Union remains Turkey's biggest trading partner and the presence of a well-established Turkish diaspora in Europe has contributed to the development of extensive relations between the two parties over the years. Turkey became a member of the Council of Europe in 1949, applied for associate membership of the EEC (predecessor of the EU) in 1959 and became an associate member in 1963. After decades of political negotiations, Turkey applied for full membership of the EEC in 1987, reached a Customs Union agreement with the EU in 1995 and has officially begun accession negotiations on October 3, 2005.[10] It is believed that the accession process will take at least 15 years because of Turkey's size and the depth of disagreements over certain issues.[39]
Historically, relations with neighbouring Greece have known periods of tension. The disputes over the air and sea boundaries of the Aegean Sea remain one of the main issues of disagreement between the two neighbours.[40] Nonetheless, following the consecutive earthquakes of 1999 in Turkey and Greece, and the prompt response of aid and rescue teams from both sides, the two nations have entered a much more positive period in their relations, with Greece actively supporting Turkey's candidacy to enter the European Union.[41] South of Turkey, tensions caused by the long-lasting division of the island of Cyprus has recently become one of the main points of contention in Turkey's accession negotiations with the EU since Turkey has been refusing to open its ports to Republic of Cyprus traffic.[42]
Owing to its secular traditions, Turkey has always viewed suspiciously certain countries in the region and this has caused tensions in the past, particularly with its largest neighbour, Iran.[43] Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has actively been building strong relations with former Communist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and this has concretized in many reciprocal investments and migratory currents between these states and Turkey,[44] however Turkey's relations with neighbouring Armenia are still tense due to the emotions surrounding the events of 1915–17 as well as the ongoing stalemate in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a Turkic-speaking neighbour of Turkey.[45] The Turkish government rejects the notion that the actions by the Ottoman Young Turks that had led to the forced mass evacuation and related deaths of an estimated hundreds of thousands to over 1.5 million Armenians, in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, constituted a genocide and instead states the deaths were a result of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine.[46] Most Western scholars however agree with the Genocide thesis.[47]
Even though Turkey participated in the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan after September 11, the Iraq war faced strong domestic opposition in Turkey. A government motion which would have allowed U.S. troops to attack Iraq from Turkey's south-eastern border couldn't reach the absolute majority of 276 votes needed for its adoption in the Turkish Parliament; the final tally being 264 votes for and 250 against.[48] This led to a cooling in relations between the U.S. and Turkey and fears that they might have been damaged as a result of the situation in Iraq.[49] Turkey is particularly cautious about an independent Kurdish state arising from a destabilised Iraq; it has previously fought an insurgent war on its own soil, in which an estimated 37,000 people lost their lives, against the PKK (listed as a terrorist organization by a number of states and organisations, including the USA and the EU).[50][51] This led the Turkish government to put pressure on the U.S. to clamp down on insurgent training camps in northern Iraq, without much success.[43]