Ladies and Gentlemen.
Welcome, on behalf of the Presidential Committee of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I offer a specific welcome to our guests from Croatia, Great Britain, Ireland, Turkey, and the United States. And I give a big hand to the organizers of this conference, Professor Justin Stagl, Professor Anne Buttimer, and Dr Wiebke Sievers.
Modern Turkey and modern Austria started after 1918 as leftovers from two old empires, the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. The victors of the First World War treated Austria and Turkey as ex-enemy states. The peace settlement of Sèvres reduced Turkey to a quarter of its former size, and the peace settlement of Saint-Germain reduced Austria to one eighth of its former size. In comparison, the treaties with Austria and Turkey were far harsher and more vindictive than the one with Germany. Unfortunately, in freeing old minorities, the peace settlements created new ones. Concerning Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Arabia were designated ‘A mandates’ of the British and the French, Italians and Greeks had conflicting ambitions in Anatolia. Yet General Mustapha Kemal organized a National Covenant and created a sovereign state based on areas inhabited by an Ottoman Muslim majority, united in religion, race and aim. After heavy battles, the treaty of Lausanne, 1923, fulfilled these terms. Turkey also retained full sovereignty over the Straits.
Both, Austria and Turkey started as new democracies and as new nation states. However, Austria became a shadow of its former self, while Atatürk's regime was concentrated on interior reforms. Nevertheless, the old connections between Austria and turkey remained intact. Thus, the Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister constructed many official buildings in the new capital Ankara. After Hitler came to power, Turkish foreign policy very quickly understood the danger of the Anschluss. Meanwhile, the Germans increased their share of both Turkish imports and exports and participated in the country's various development plans launched in 1937. However, British capital took the lion's share both in these projects as well as in Turkey's re-armament programmes. The Anglo-Turkish declaration on 12 May 1939 stirred the Germans into action. Hitler cancelled a Turkish order for heavy howitzers from Škoda works for which payment had already been made. The Turks stood firm, informing Berlin that after the German breaches of existing contracts, all Turkish economic and technical missions in Germany would be withdrawn. But Germany's dependence on Turkish chrome persuaded Hitler to reverse his decision. Caught between fears of the Soviet Union and of Germany on the one hand and doubts about British backing on the other, the Turks considered that their best suit was to preserve their neutrality in the Second World War.
After 1945, the former ‘Eastern Question’ did not refer to Turkey but rather to the Near East, especially to Palestine. And Turkey was no longer regarded as Europe's ‘other’. Instead, Ankara became an accommodating participant in the Western alliance throughout the duration of the Cold War, contributing to NATO a rather significant contingent of soldiers. American missiles and bases were established in Turkey as part of the cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union. Since the 1970s, large numbers of Turkish ‘guest workers’ migrated to Germany, Austria and other Western European countries. Since the 1990s, after the end of Cold War, Turkey – with more than 70 million inhabitants – changed from a barrier state to a mediator between Europe and Asia. Although Turkey's educated professional and business elites were disproportionately located in the ‘European’ megacity of Istanbul, Turkey's application to join the European Union lay unaddressed for many years. There were fears of huge immigration from Anatolia, the influence of Islam and different sets of values on both sides. On the other hand: there is no concern about the kranker Mann am Bosporus (ill man at Bosporus) anymore, as there was in 1912.
I wish our conference the best success!
