Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

Many experts on the history of my country have considered that the achievements of the Greek and Roman civilizations in Anatolia were greater, both in number and sophistication, than those actually in Greece and Italy. Can it, therefore, be claimed that Anatolia contributed in an original and significant way to world civilization, or was it merely the stage upon which the Indo-Europeans played their role of civilizes, while the Anatolian was only the spectator or had, at the very most, a walk-on part? Was Anatolia a crucible in which diverse civilizations fused to give an exceptional cultural amalgam, or was it merely the antechamber of a continent ruled, it was believed, by dark and barbarous forces? Was the Aegean Sea simply a strait separating two peninsulas of the northern Mediterranean, or a terrible abyss isolating from each other two different, hostile worlds, the East and the West? Moreover, what is the East, what is the West? Do the categories `Asia' for the barbarians, and `Europe' for the civilized and civilizing Indo-Europeans, correspond to reality?

CHAPTERS

1. Origins
2. The Ionian Civilization
3. The Helenistic Period
4. Christianity in Anatolia
5. The Eastern Roman Empire
6. The Philosophies of Islam, Greece, and the West
7. The Turks
8. The Encounter of Turks with Christians in Asia Minor and Europe (the Balkans), or the Legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire
9. The Ottoman Empire, its Structure and Institutions
10. Ottoman-Turkish Culture and Art
11. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire-East-West Differentiation
12. The Independence of the Balkan Christian Nations
13. First Reforms
14. Image of the Turk in the West
15. The Westernizing Reforms
16. From Abdülhamid II the First World War
17. Turkey's Image in the West in the Nineteenth Century
18. From Atatürk's Reforms to the Present Day
19. Secularism and Religion
20. The 1980 Intervention and Turkey's Image
21. A New Party: The Motherland Party
22. The Request for Membership of the European Community
23. Modern Turkish Culture and the European Community
24. Conclusion