Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
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Introduction
In less than twenty years, between the late nineteen-thirties and the fifties the views of Western intellectuals on the future of mankind underwent an extraordinary revolution. Between the wars, most Western people took for granted the gulf in way of life and standard of living between Western Europe and its emigrants and trainees, and the poverty-stricken rest of the world. If not eternal, the difference was fundamental and apparently unchanging. Only the Japanese had succeeded in demonstrating that industrial society could be transplanted without a European ruling class, and this was regarded as a special case - almost unfair. No one dreamt of hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans driving their own cars to work in their own industrial cities. It was not yet customary to measure national success in terms of the annual rate of economic growth, and few had thought of arguing that a completely industrialised world, far from rivalling Western industry, would provide that industry with vastly increased markets.
In the nineteen-twenties, a whole generation before problems of backwardness had been rechristened problems of development and aid programmes and agencies had sprouted in all parts of the world, when most of the West still knew little and cared less about the millions of Africa and Asia and their poverty, Turkey attempted to westernise its institutions and its economy. Turkey was one of the very first `developing territories'.
The thoroughness with which Turkey's legislative and administrative reforms reproduced their European models is startling. By the nineteen-thirties the Turkish Republic could
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