‘I’M NOT ALWAYS CONSISTENT, BUT I’M ALWAYS RIGHT’
Newsweek Magazine
Oct 24 2011
Oct 23, 2011 10:00 AM EDT Meet Norman Stone: Turkey’s staunchest
defender.
“Turkey is the only country in the region whose past seems to
flow toward a positive outcome, a history with a future. As with
any narrative, to make things interesting, you want a sense of
progress-otherwise you get that famous definition of history as
‘one damn thing after another.’ The Turks have always played a role
in making things happen in the world. For a while they seemed pretty
dormant, but I knew it would change.”
As the sun goes down, Prof. Norman Stone is standing on the balcony of
his residence at Bilkent University in Turkey’s capital, gazing out
over gleaming new tower blocks and the Anatolian hills. Ankara looks
distinctly affluent these days, with the Turkish economy steadily
expanding at 11 percent this year. For two days I have been gently
pushing Stone to look back on his career, his decision to leave his
post as professor of modern history at Oxford in the mid-1990s and
to transplant himself in Turkey, his life before and since. It’s a
highly poignant encounter for me, a Turk educated in the U.K., to
talk to one of Turkey’s staunchest public enthusiasts-a contrarian
posture in any century.
It seems like an appropriate moment for self-assessment: Stone had
a minor stroke some months ago. At 70, he’s had to give up drinking
and smoking (he was a famous practitioner of both). And he recently
published a timely new book, Turkey: A Short History-timely because
the world is increasingly curious, not to say concerned, about the
strategic direction of his adopted second home, a former hegemon
that has rather alarmingly rediscovered its independent spirit in
recent years. With Turkey’s newfound influence in the Middle East,
with the inchoateness of the Arab Spring, the West holds its breath.
Inevitably, what Stone says about Turkey will be closely followed.
“I’ve never had trouble making my opinions heard,” he says in a
throaty Scottish chuckle, and one gets a flash of the Oxford don
in the ’80s-the hard-living, impish bon vivant who outraged academe
with pro-Thatcher polemics and who later became a political adviser
to the Iron Lady. Is that why he left Brit-ain, because he had made
too many enemies? He chuckles again. “It was simply that I didn’t
get paid enough to make a living as a young professor. There was no
dignity in it. I started writing for newspapers, which I enjoyed,
because frankly in those days the entire world needed an overhaul in
ideas to shake off the socialist doldrums. But it did take time away
from scholarship, and I wanted to get back to that. No, in the end,
I got a respectable offer from Turkey to focus on my studies.”
If Stone won notoriety in journalism, puncturing the stale pieties of
the nanny state, his fame as a historian began early and built more
slowly. His 1975 book The Eastern Front 1914-1917 became a classic
of World War I literature. His expertise as a Sovietologist extended
to the Eastern Bloc and its languages-at one point he could study and
speak Russian, Hungarian, German, Slovakian, and a smattering of other
tongues. “Nobody had really done the spadework in foreign archives.
There was a Cold War. As an area of work, it was uncomfortable,
thankless and bound up in red tape-and full of apologists for Moscow.
But you see, early on, before Turkey, I already had an interest in
the world from the Eastern perspective.”
I put it to Stone that he achieved the near impossible by inciting
as much outrage while abroad as he did at home. “You’ll always find
entrenched sensitivities everywhere,” he says. No sooner had he
settled in Turkey than he began (and continues) to offend on such
topics as military coups, the Armenian massacres, and Kurdish unrest.
He saw good things in the 1980 coup: “There was a left-right civil
war with thousands of casualties per year fueled partly by pro-Soviet
neighbors. You have to imagine the alternatives to a coup.” On the
Armenian question he says, “Not a genocide in the Hitler sense,”
and, perhaps more offensively to some, he likes to put the matter in
historical perspective. “Well over a million Muslim refugees had been
expelled from the Crimea or Balkans or Caucasus,” he writes. “It was
the clash of these refugees with Armenians that caused a part of the
problem.” Conclusion: not a sudden, arbitrary genocide but a civil
war. On the Kurds, he offers himself as exemplar-he’s Scottish but
considers British citizenship a benefit, and he says that similarly,
the Kurds are better off with the Turks than in a monoethnic enclave.
Is there a particular “Stonian” approach to history? “That’s for you
to tell me,” he says. I cite some attributes: a fast-moving prose
style with no-nonsense judgments on touchy subjects. Also: sweeping
original perceptions that can realign received wisdom in a stroke. In
his previous book, World War One: A Short History, the reader learns
that the Russian Army spent almost a year surviving on scant supplies,
drinking “highly poisonous alcohol,” and soon after, the revolution
followed. The Turkey book is full of such revelations. The Ottomans
were a successful European empire that began to falter only when
they absorbed the Middle East. Plague and climate change were
equally responsible for the empire’s collapse. In 1876, Turkey’s
first constitutional Parliament quickly disappeared because Turkish
statesmen realized that a plebiscite would only empower religious
reactionaries. (Arab Spring, anyone?)
Always throughout his histories, Stone throws in sparkling, eccentric
details that beguile the reader’s eye. In his latest book I found out
that my father’s alma mater, the French-style lycee of Galatasaray,
was launched by Sultan Abdulaziz in 1868 and soon bred the kind of
educated elite who tried to overthrow the sultanate. Stone alludes
to little-known facts, such as that the secret Jews of Salonika, the
Donme-who converted to Islam en masse in the 19th century (along with
my grandfather’s ancestors)-later became the ultra-secular elite of
the republic. In fact, some even whisper (though Stone doesn’t say so)
that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was descended from the Donme-another reason,
perhaps, for the Islamist hostility to his reforms.
On many things, Stone’s opinions differ between the written page
and real life. In person, he laments the loss of phrases with “long
poetic memories” when Ataturk changed the language and shed many
Perso-Arabic words. In the book, he argues that such language would
never have served as “a vehicle for the mass literacy that Turkey went
on to achieve with Latin letters.” “Oh, I’m not always consistent,”
he says, “but I’m always right,” and laughs again in the jovial way
of a contented man.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/23/norman-stone-turkey-s-staunchest-defender.html