232 • 14 MODERNIZING RULERS IN THE INDEPENDENT STATESamong Asia's first noncommunist leaders to call for state ownership and
control of the primary means of production. Hoping to speed up modern¬
ization, he brought in Soviet economists to draft Turkey's first five-year
plan. During the 1930s, the Turkish government set up a textile spinning
and weaving complex, a steel mill, and various factories for producing ce¬
ment, glass, and paper. Agrarian reform limped along in this land of
50,000 villages, some linked by just a donkey path to the rest of the world;
but agricultural training institutes, extension agents, rural health and
adult education centers, and model farms did lead to some improvement.
Ataturk summed up his program in six principles, which were later incor¬
porated into the Turkish constitution. Often called the "six arrows," from the
symbol of Ataturk's Republican People's Party (RPP), they are republican¬
ism, nationalism, populism, statism, secularism, and reformism. Republi¬
canism entails the selection of a leader from the citizenry, in contrast to the
hereditary system of the Ottoman Empire and other dynastic states. Nation¬
alism calls on the Turks to devote themselves to the needs of the Turkish
nation, rejecting special ties to other Muslims or to foreign ideologies. Pop¬
ulism means that the government belongs to the Turkish people, working
together for the common good, without distinction of rank, class, or sex.
Statism is state capitalism: The government must direct and take part in the
country's economic development. Secularism amounts to the removal of
religious controls over Turkey's politics, society, and culture. Reformism
(originally called revolutionism) refers to the ongoing commitment of the
Turkish people and government to rapid but peaceful modernization.
Kemal Ataturk was a westernizing reformer, but above all he was a Turk¬
ish nationalist. The linguistic reforms simplified Turkish, bringing the writ¬
ten language closer to what the Turkish people spoke. Moving the capital
from Istanbul to Ankara represented the rejection of the cosmopolitan
Byzantine and Ottoman past in favor of an Anatolian Turkish future. The
study of history now stressed the Turks, from their misty origins on the Asi¬
atic steppes up to their triumph over the Greeks, instead of the Islamic
caliphate rooted in the Arabic and Persian cultures. Even westernization was
defended in terms of Turkish nationalism: Cultural borrowing was accept¬
able, considering how much Western civilization owed to the Turks. Accord¬
ing to the "sun language theory," a once popular idea that has since been
discredited, all languages could be traced back to Turkish, whose word for
sun was the sound uttered in awe by the first articulate cave dweller. If the
Turks had created the first language, anything they now took from other
cultures was only a fair exchange. In addition, the schools, armed forces, rail
and motor roads, newspapers, and radio broadcasting all reinforced the
Turkish sense of nationhood.