scholarly journals A Re-evaluation of the Revisionist - Status Quo Dichotomy in Interwar Turkish Foreign Policy, 1936-1939

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Çoban

Turkish history during the interwar period (1918-1939) has been described in terms which place it on a dichotomy best used to analyse the actions of the eventual belligerents in World War II. This dichotomy describes the eventual defeated Axis countries as revisionist and the victorious Allies as status quo nations in the interwar period. The contention is that this distinction, taking as its basis the actions of belligerents, is unhelpful in analysing the foreign policy of a non-belligerent state in WWII.Three case studies are examined through the secondary literature as well as archival sources to show that notions of Turkey as either status quo or revisionist are not entirely accurate. This is because Turkish foreign policy can be classified as either or both, thus diminishing the terms’ explanatory utility. Three case studies are; the Montreux Straits Convention (1936), the Saadabad Pact (1937) and the Sanjak dispute of Alexandretta (1936-39). A reading of history which assumes macro level (1914-1945) superiority based on Great Power interests and actions undermines the complexity of Turkish foreign policy in the 1930s. By extension, the practice of subsuming the actions of smaller states under terminology which was intended for Great Powers is challenged. 

Author(s):  
J. Casey Doss

This epilogue places the challenges of landpower examined in this volume into a historical perspective since World War II. It argues that the American use of landpower is both ambivalent and Janus-faced. Ambivalent in that the United States has a militarized interventionist foreign policy but looks to withdraw once the complications of conflict become apparent. Janus-faced in that the United States seeks to use landpower in two opposing roles: as a foreign policy deterrent against other great powers and as a global constabulary. That the United States has neither resolved this dilemma nor overcome this ambivalence has curtailed the possibilities inherent to the use of force and must be taken into account when considering the American use of landpower since 9/11.


2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-329
Author(s):  
FRANK TACHAU

This book purports to be a study of Turkish foreign policy and decision-making in the post–World War II era. The author declares that her book “explores the contention that Turkish foreign policy has been greatly affected by the end of the cold war” (p. xi). She also “examines the argument that the . . . removal of the Soviet threat diminished Turkey's strategic importance for the United States and Western Europe” and led “Turkish policymakers . . . to search for new foreign policy partners” (p. xxii). Finally, Çelik suggests that the changed environment of the post–Cold War era entailed a shift from reliance on military power for the maintenance of national security to an emphasis on economic resources and relations.


Author(s):  
Nikita Evgen'evich Belukhin

Based on the historical analysis, this article attempts to give a detailed and comprehensive answer to the question about the reasons that forced Denmark to abandon the policy of neutrality after the World War II and become the member of the North Atlantic Alliance. The object of this research is the foreign policy of Denmark in the XV – XX centuries, while the subject is the balancing strategy of Denmark in the conditions of transition from the status of regional power to the status of second-order power, and ultimately, to the status of a small European state that seeks to ensure the own neutrality. Special attention is given to the analysis of strategic foreign policy decisions of Denmark in the conditions of major regional and European conflicts, such as the Dano-Swedish War of the XVII century, Great Northern War (1700-1721), Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), First Schleswig War (1848-1850) and Second Schleswig War (1864), World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). The conclusion is made that reaching the actual neutral status for Denmark throughout its foreign policy history was virtually impossible due to the fact that conventional neutrality acquired either a pro-German or pro-British orientation, and in reality represented an attempt to find a complex balance between the interests of the great powers. The need for balancing overlapped the historical vulnerability of Northern European region to external influence. Since the great powers using bilateral diplomacy did allow close rapprochement countries between Nordic countries, the common defense alliance projects both prior to the World War II and after the World War II failed to implement  A crucial point in evolution of the foreign policy strategy of Danish politicians became the negative experience of the World War II, when strict conformity to the policy of neutrality did not prevent the German occupation of the country.


Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier ◽  
Charles S. Maier

The author, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published this, his first book, in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization. Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, the book provides a comparative history of three European nations—France, Germany, and Italy—and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representation. While most previous accounts presented the decade as a prelude to the Depression and dictatorships, the author suggests that the stabilization of the 1920s, vulnerable as it was, foreshadowed the more enduring political stability achieved after World War II. The immense and ambitious scope of this book, its ability to follow diverse histories in detail, and its effort to explain stabilization—and not just revolution or breakdown—have made it a classic of European history.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan

This chapter helps to confirm the explanatory power of the naturalistic theory of moral progress outlined in previous chapters by making two main points. First, it shows that the theory helps to explain how and why the modern human rights movement arose when it did. Second, it shows that the advances in inclusiveness achieved by the modern human rights movement depended upon the fortunate coincidence of a constellation of contingent cultural and economic conditions—and that it is therefore a dangerous mistake to assume that continued progress must occur, or even that the status quo will not substantially deteriorate. This chapter also helps to explain a disturbing period of regression (in terms of the recognition of equal basic status) that occurred between the success of British abolitionism and the founding of the modern human rights movement at the end of World War II.


Author(s):  
Tim Watson

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.


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