An International Relations Study: Turks in the Western World's History Perspective and Ataturk's Approach

Abstract

Atatürk started numerous revolutions immediately after the war of independence, also called the struggle for national independence. The works conducted were about the content rather than the form. He desired the Turkish nation to take its rightful place among the world's nations. While building the foundations of the newly established state, on the one hand, he was making great efforts to improve the country's prestige and position abroad. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Western world treated the entire Eastern world, naturally to Turks, as second-class people and expressed this attitude on any occasion. Mustafa Kemal, who knew this case very well, decided to conduct comprehensive historical studies to achieve the following objectives: To refuse the accusations that were attributed to the Turks, which sometimes reached the level of insult; to introduce the true identity of the Turkish nation to the world; to get rid of the understanding of chronological history and to switch to the conception of social history in the country. At the end of the studies, a "Turkish History Thesis" was put forward. It was revealed that Turkish history was not limited to Islamic or Ottoman history. There was a pre-Islamic Turkish history with numerous achievements as many as post-Islamic history. Stating that history was not just the chronology, Ataturk gave the task of revealing the human aspect of history to Turkish historians in line with a study plan aiming to reveal the culture and civilization of Turkish history. © 2021, Assiut University, Faculty of Engineering. All rights reserved.