Introduction

Summary

… And from the other side, it is also the case that the most earnest and heartfelt efforts to imitate some foreign model can never entirely succeed in eliminating tell-tale traces of older, traditional local patterns of human interaction. The modern history of Japan, Russia and Turkey should suffice to tell us that.

William McNeill, “A Defence of World History”

In 2006, while I was working on an earlier draft of this book, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What should have been a joyous occasion for the writer and for Turkey, however, was instead marked by histrionic public accusations of treachery against Pamuk. He was vilified in the Turkish press. Several months before the announcement of the award, Pamuk had been interviewed by a Swiss newspaper, and in response to the reporter's characterization of Turkey as a country having difficulty in facing its past, he had emphasized his own willingness to discuss the Armenian genocide and the plight of Turkey's Kurdish minority. Even though Pamuk's transparency had been partly motivated by a desire to defend Turkey (against the implied charge that Turkey cannot deal with its problems like an “adult” and therefore does not deserve to join the European Union), when this interview was later covered in the Turkish media, many Turks decided that Pamuk was either a traitor or, at best, a sleaze. Official charges were brought against him for denigrating “Turkishness” (the charges were later dropped).