On 19 March 1877, the first Ottoman parliament opened at Dolmabahçe Palace when Sultan Abdülhamit II crossed a velvet carpet to stand beside a golden throne. Seen later as the finale of the Tanzimat reform era, the parliament appeared to diplomatic observers as the strategy of former grand vizier Midhat Paşa. Midhat's constitutionalism was a plan for “reform, revival, and indeed survival” that included seeking allies against Russia and containing Russian influence in the Balkans.Footnote ¹ Abdülhamit listened as his secretary charged the new body: “The progress effected by civilised states, the security and wealth they enjoy, are the fruit of the participation of all in the enactment of laws and in the administration of public affairs.” Among the most urgent priorities was “the development of agriculture and industry, and the progress of civilisation and of public wealth.” Parliament later responded with a pledge to deliver the empire from its malaise, to “eliminate the last traces of abuses, the heritage of the regime of despotism.”Footnote ²

In Istanbul on 26 November 1949, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State George C. McGhee convened a conference of American diplomatic representatives to Middle Eastern countries. Although part of the Turkish republic, the former capital was a fitting vantage point from which to survey the region once ruled by the house of Osman. Attendees generally corresponded to an Ottoman imperial geography, including envoys posted to Turkey, the Arab states, Israel, Greece, the Balkans, and Cyprus. “I have never failed,” McGhee wrote, “to be moved by the aura of this ancient seat of empires.” An “air of power and mystery” enveloped Istanbul, which beneath its “modern drab exterior . . . hides more history than any other city in the world except Rome.” Fear of creeping Soviet influence consumed the assembled diplomats, who worried that Communist subversion would prevail in societies suffering from poverty and frustrated nationalism. They concluded that “security in the region could best be attained through the improvement of the economic and social position of the individual countries . . . and of the area as a whole.”Footnote ³

The link between these two conclaves runs deeper than their common setting and concern for economic progress. McGhee recalled the Chiefs of Mission Conference and invoked Istanbul's history in his 1983 book, Envoy to the Middle World. The memoir reflects the fascination that Ottoman reform and Mustafa Kemal's Turkish republic held for many Americans of McGhee's generation. For those who authored the Cold War strategy of security through development, Turkey's experience with modernization had been one of the most successful among non-Western societies. The Ottoman-Turkish past therefore contained lessons for U.S. policy toward the “Third World.”Footnote ⁴ Such lessons were far from self-evident, however, and efforts to unlock them raised fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of development. What was the relationship between economic and political reform? Was anti-Communist stability or liberal democracy the ultimate objective, and which formed the precondition for the other?

This article examines how scholars and policymakers debated such questions on the terrain of the Ottoman-Turkish past. I study the uses of that history by Americans casting about for a Third World strategy and consider why, during their formative encounter with problems of development, the Ottoman-Turkish experience appeared to offer the most germane historical case. It provided a usable past for some Cold Warriors who advocated land reform as a strategy for preempting radicalism in the Arab Middle East. Their bottom-up development policy sought to replace a regressive Ottoman legacy with the agrarian republicanism that they identified as the basis for American democracy. However, Ottoman-Turkish history also provided the justification for a contrasting approach, one that envisioned an authoritarian path to modernization. This alternative interpretation rationalized collaborating with dictatorial regimes by portraying democracy as the crowning achievement, rather than the precursor, of the development process.

Such an analysis contributes to two important trends in scholarship on American foreign relations. The first is a growing tendency to move the Third World from the periphery to the center of the Cold War. Some literature portrays the superpowers' strategic rivalry as ultimately less consequential than their fight to prove the “universal applicability of their ideologies” in postcolonial societies.Footnote ⁵ For American policy in the Arab Middle East, this campaign involved containing the rival ideologies of nationalism and communism.Footnote ⁶

A second trend is the study of U.S. development policy as an outgrowth of American liberalism.Footnote ⁷ At home and abroad, postwar liberals struggled to reconcile democracy with order; they increasingly regarded technocratic and elite authority as a defense against populist radicalism. This identity crisis formed part of the Cold War ordeal whereby liberals redefined themselves as free from ideology while renouncing former alliances with the political left.Footnote ⁸ Using archives, published sources, and the records of the Council on Foreign Relations, I show how development debates mapped these tensions within American liberalism onto Middle Eastern history.

Another objective is to recover historians' contributions to development policy, drawing inspiration from work by Irene L. Gendzier and Nils Gilman examining social scientists' influence.Footnote ⁹ Reading postwar scholarship on the Ottoman Empire in the light of policy debates has led me to rethink the relationship between historiography and Cold War social science. I question the Saidian critique that scholars from the 1950s and 1960s justified American power in the Middle East both by perpetuating stereotypes about Islamic societies and by applying the modernization paradigm to the region's past.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, how approaches as different in their assumptions as Orientalism and modernization theory together contributed to Cold War policy requires further explanation. While the former ascribed timeless, essential qualities to Islamic civilization, the latter envisioned development as a universal, unilinear process. Zachary Lockman captures the ambiguity of the relationship when he writes that the two approaches shared the premise of Western superiority but “divided up the world in different ways.”Footnote ¹¹ Critics have concluded that historians took their marching orders from social scientists. Huri Islamoğlu and Çağlar Keyder portray modernization theory as prefiguring, and as externally imposed on, study of the late Ottoman period.Footnote ¹² James L. Gelvin detects traces of the modernization paradigm, “the main gameplan for American policy toward the underdeveloped world,” in Albert Hourani's “politics of notables” thesis.Footnote ¹³ These perspectives emphasize the impact of Cold War social science on Ottoman studies.

By considering the uses of the Ottoman-Turkish past, my article shifts attention to the role of historians in the Cold War study of development and identifies a practical basis for their collaboration with social scientists. Modernizers' conceptual distinction between “tradition” and “modernity” shared a binary logic with Ottoman reformers. Studying Ottoman reforms, Cold Warriors could readily appropriate older portrayals of tradition and innovation. They were able to do so because Ottomanists opened a window onto past representations of continuity and change, facilitating a dialogue with imperial reformers and making the Ottoman case useful. As Carter V. Findley wrote in 1989, the “Ottomans' efforts to reform and preserve their state . . . mark them as pioneers of the struggle for development that has become a universal Third World theme in this century.”Footnote ¹⁴ In the latter part of the article, I argue that Ottomanists influenced the modernization discourse as much as it did them by transmitting Ottoman reformers' depictions of “tradition” to Cold Warriors concerned with managing change in developing societies. The Ottoman legacy for Cold War modernization therefore lay not just in selective uses of the imperial past but also in the ways that American intellectuals and bureaucrats borrowed the logic of reform from their Ottoman predecessors.

HOMESTEADERS

Cold War histories have incorporated the Middle East without disturbing the conventional narrative that opens with the superpower clash over Europe before subsequently turning to the Third World. Early conflicts involving Iran, Greece, and Turkey, as well as concern for the region's oil, typically appear as subplots within this Eurocentric story.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the Middle East assumes a more prominent place when Cold War history is inverted to feature postcolonial development. While American and Soviet leaders clashed over Berlin and Czechoslovakia, experts at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) debated how to curb radicalism in the Middle East. The State Department's new Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs (NEA), assigned to McGhee, likewise pursued development across a vast swath of the decolonizing world. In both settings, Cold Warriors identified land reform as key to America's economic and political goals. Wider distribution of landownership would result in more egalitarian societies immune to radical subversion. Legal rights would give formerly disenfranchised peasants incentives to improve the land, thereby raising yields and living standards. Land reform served as an altruistic mission that simultaneously promoted American interests and values. It also depended upon a historical perspective that associated a regressive social order with the Ottoman past and its legacy of failed reform.

Compared to the attention given the Anglo American transfer of power in the Middle East, historians have neglected the Ottoman antecedents of U.S. policy.Footnote ¹⁶ Although this inheritance had been mediated through intervening colonial administrations,Footnote ¹⁷ Cold Warriors cited Tanzimat land reform as an explanation for the Middle East's underdevelopment and as a foil for their own visions. They invoked the presumed failure of the 1858 land code to distribute land titles more widely, its concentration of such titles in the hands of notables and tribal leaders, especially in the Arab provinces, and its conversion of elite land rights into private property.Footnote ¹⁸ Successful regional reforms would redress the inheritance of older, unsuccessful ones by replicating the agrarian democracy of the early United States as the precondition for development. Land reformers therefore constructed their Cold War agenda where an idealized American liberalism met prevailing interpretations of Ottoman history.

At the CFR, study groups on the “Near and Middle East” (1947–48) and the “Moslem World” (1948–49) both addressed the Ottoman legacy. Their partially overlapping rosters typified CFR groups, including scholars E. A. Speiser and Philip Hitti, oilmen Max Thornburg and Charles Darlington, and spies Allen W. Dulles and William A. Eddy. One presenter attributed underdevelopment in the Tigris–Euphrates region to “Ottoman rule.” World Bank loan director William Iliff grimly characterized societies that had been “under Turkish suzerainty” only three decades earlier. In the “typical Middle Eastern state,” he explained, “are 500 men on top . . . 5,000 below that who with the 500 have all the money, and from 2 to 5 million people who are the have-nots.”Footnote ¹⁹ Herbert Liebesny, a specialist in Islamic law, explained this steep hierarchy. “When the Ottoman government introduced its Land Code,” he began, “ownership of land in the Arab parts of the empire still possessed some communal features.” Attempting to “reduce the powers of the local sheikhs,” the government “tried to enforce individual ownership of land” through “compulsory registration of land titles.” Because villagers feared conscription and taxation, however, they “entered false returns” in the name of a shaykh or family member, and “complete confusion resulted.”Footnote ²⁰ Bayard Dodge, outgoing American University of Beirut (AUB) president, identified the same cause for the region's backwardness. The “real problem which needs straightening out,” said Dodge, “is the problem of land tenure.”Footnote ²¹

The leading promoter of land reform in U.S. Middle East policy was Lebanese sociologist Afif I. Tannous. A product of schooling in his village of Bishmizzin, the American Boys' School in Tripoli, and AUB, Tannous described his education as combining Arab and American cultures. Such influences were reinforced by emigrants' letters from the United States and by frontier tales in books: “I read about Daniel Boone, Squanto the Indian, [and] George Washington.” His formative memories included smuggling wheat in defiance of the Ottoman embargo during World War I, and he came to regard the repressive Ottoman government as the antithesis of the nurturing village environment. Tannous idealized village life, later seeing it as the basis for “modern communities” that “catered to the development of the whole person.” He especially noted the “glaring contrast” between hardworking, landowning villagers in Bishmizzin and tenants “at the lower levels of existence” who tilled absentee owners' land.Footnote ²² After earning a doctorate at Cornell, he joined the Foreign Agricultural Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and participated in a 1946 mission to the Middle East cosponsored by the State Department.Footnote ²³

When Harry S. Truman unveiled Point Four in his 1949 inaugural address, promising technical assistance to developing countries, Tannous regarded it as an opportunity to democratize the Arab countryside. He lobbied for land reform as necessary to overcome the Ottomans' regressive legacy. Technical assistance alone, he wrote, “would amount only to half the job” and neglect “the emancipation and welfare of the people.” Tannous identified this goal as “the primary target and objective for Democracy in its new role of constructive expansion into the underdeveloped areas of the world.” In the Arab Middle East, he traced the problem to the 19th century, when the Ottomans “largely failed to implement a comprehensive land reform (along the lines of their famous Land Code of 1858).” Under this policy “abuse of the land and of the peasants was accentuated,” and the region experienced “the rise of a powerful class of absentee landlords.” He observed that many Arab countries still classified land according to the five categories established by the 1858 code. “It would be tragic,” he proclaimed, “if the Point Four Program should be wholly spent upon the imparting of techniques for increased production without concern as to whether such production would be used for democratic ends.” It would be equally “ironical” if Truman's initiative “should unwittingly serve as an instrument for the perpetuation of the present oppressive and undemocratic system of land tenure.”Footnote ²⁴

Such ideas took root in McGhee's NEA bureau, where Tannous attended weekly staff meetings.Footnote ²⁵ McGhee appealed to Truman in August 1950 for $300 million a year over five years to help regional countries achieve a “substantial improvement of the indigenous food supply.”Footnote ²⁶ Initially, officials considered policies to address landownership as well as productivity. Among the projects in which they took special interest was Iraq's Dujayla Settlement in Liwaʾ al-Kut south of Baghdad, which transferred parcels of state-owned land to families in exchange for working them. According to Norman Burns, the first NEA official to visit Dujayla, the program was meant to address the problem of tribal shaykhs and absentee landlords leasing most state lands indefinitely or temporarily. Particularly striking was the way in which Burns associated Dujayla with the American frontier. Dujayla replicated “our own Homestead Act of western pioneer days.” Burns even referred to participants as “homesteaders.” He described Dujayla as the “type of grass roots project that has tremendous impact upon the entire rural population” through its demonstration effect and for increasing “the number of small individual landholders in Iraq.”Footnote ²⁷ Both McGhee and Tannous singled out Dujayla as the sort of agricultural reform needed throughout the Middle East.Footnote ²⁸

In 1951 the NEA selected participants from the Middle East for a global conference held at the University of Wisconsin on “World Land Tenure Problems.” There, technical cooperation administrator Henry G. Bennett opened with “Land and Independence—America's Experience,” a history of U.S. agriculture that featured Thomas Jefferson, the Homestead Act, and the New Deal but omitted slavery and sharecropping.Footnote ²⁹ The argument that U.S. aid could redress the backwardness of Third World agriculture dovetailed with remarks by Tannous, who chaired the Middle East session. “This whole system,” he stated, “is characterized by absentee ownership of the land.” He urged participants “to think of the system as one for all” and to seek common regional solutions to individual countries' problems. Akram El-Ricaby, secretary general of the Syrian Agriculture Ministry, explained that Syria had been trying to complete a cadastral survey begun during the French Mandate, the first since the Ottomans, but “shortage of staff is becoming a serious problem.” The survey was necessary to sort out confusion resulting from the 1858 Ottoman land code and as a prerequisite for distribution of state-owned lands.Footnote ³⁰ The U.S. agenda for the Middle East and other developing areas was clear. Secretary of State Dean Acheson endorsed the work of the conference and the need to reform “antiquated systems of landownership.”Footnote ³¹

The Palestinian refugee crisis presented an urgent case for land-reform policy. As special assistant to the secretary, McGhee nominated Gordon Clapp, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, to chair a United Nations economic-survey mission that would investigate possibilities for sustaining some three quarters of a million refugees. Clapp's final report recommended reclamation and irrigation projects without directly addressing the political conflict over refugees between Israel and the Arab states.Footnote ³² McGhee urged a congressional committee to support Clapp's proposals, warning that refugees were a “natural focal point for exploitation by Communist and disruptive elements.”Footnote ³³ McGhee hoped that most could be settled in Syria's fertile northern Jazira plain and that in exchange they would issue a “quit claim” on compensation for their former homes.Footnote ³⁴ According to one NEA memo, refugee policy could even point the way toward regional agricultural reform: “It would be hoped that the great majority of the refugees can be resettled on the land as freeholders, so as not to perpetuate the feudal type of landholding so prevalent in the Near East.”Footnote ³⁵

Clapp told a CFR study group, however, that his recommendations for Syria faced problems. “As with all nations which rose out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire,” he explained, “the land ownership problem is very complex” and absentee ownership “firmly entrenched.” Previously, Damascus had also refused to sign a Point Four agreement, although Clapp felt that negotiations with the new military regime of Adib Shishakli would be “more promising.”Footnote ³⁶ For Clapp, the Ottoman legacy formed the Middle East's social landscape and helped to account for difficulties confronting American policies.

The NEA also identified obstacles to land reform. According to one official, Syria and Iraq were “the only two Arab states with what might be called an agricultural frontier region.” Yet, the Syrian government “has no real or accurate knowledge as to the extent of its public holdings” in part because of an “old Ottoman law” granting rights to anyone cultivating land for three years.Footnote ³⁷ In Iraq, reform was impossible without breaking shaykhs' power and investing in irrigation,Footnote ³⁸ nor was land reform necessarily compatible with economic growth and development. Small plots were inefficient. Increasing a cultivator's share in his output enhanced his “own standards of consumption” at the expense of the surplus that his landlord would otherwise market in the city.Footnote ³⁹ Of most importance, land redistribution threatened to alienate the social elements most disposed to be anti-Communist. “Land is still political power out here,” warned Donald C. Bergus, the American consul in Lebanon, “and it is not to our interest to overthrow the present ruling classes but to convince them that social and economic reforms are for their own good.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Syrian and Lebanese diplomats made precisely this argument to officials in Washington. Preference for “agrarian reform” in State Department documents indicated a shift away from questions of ownership toward the narrower goal of increasing yields.Footnote ⁴¹

Land reform in its redistributive sense ultimately proved incompatible with emerging U.S. strategy for the Middle East. As officials applied containment to the region, establishing alliances with reliably anti-Communist regimes overtook economic and social change as the leading concern. American policy promoted the Middle East Command, an Anglo American regional defense scheme predicated on Egyptian cooperation and access to Britain's Suez military base.Footnote ⁴² The first major assistance program for the Middle East, Title II of the Mutual Security Act of 1951, indicated Truman's priorities. The president requested $415 million in military aid for Greece, Turkey, and Iran, compared with $125 million in total economic assistance for all of the Middle East and North Africa.Footnote ⁴³

In public statements, McGhee borrowed from Tannous's populist rhetoric while rejecting his political agenda. McGhee described U.S. aid to the Middle East as “directed at the ‘grass roots'” and intended “to help better the living conditions for the masses.” Speaking at the University of Virginia, McGhee even invoked the ideals of such Old Dominion figures as Jefferson and Patrick Henry.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, the assistant secretary simultaneously redefined land reform as enhancements to productivity and severed the link between landownership and political development. Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he doggedly refused to endorse land redistribution. McGhee argued that although redistribution might have “a great many social advantages,” such benefits were only from “the nontechnical standpoint,” because small farms were inefficient and because any such program would have to give due “consideration for the rights of the property owner in question.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Title II, he explained to a House committee, sought merely to provide “technical assistance.” Far from imagining Arab peasants as would-be homesteaders, this approach would assist “backward nomadic peoples to raise their standards through increased agricultural production and through a beginning of some industrial production which is appropriate to this territory.”Footnote ⁴⁶

American policy had taken the tragic turn against which Tannous had warned. He regarded land reform not simply as a technical matter but also as the basis for grassroots democratization. Tannous and others justified land reform with a usable past centered on the socially regressive consequences of the 1858 Ottoman land code and the argument that U.S. aid could redeem its effects. However, policy discussions in the NEA never contemplated wholesale redistribution and focused instead on parceling out state-owned lands. Clapp and some NEA officials cited the confusion in land titles bequeathed by the Ottomans as an obstacle to even this limited sort of reform. Tannous's subsequent experience with the Egyptian–American Rural Improvement Service, the boldest U.S. resettlement program in the region, illustrates the fate of his vision. As Jon B. Alterman explains, although Americans envisioned “yeoman farmers,” Egyptian bureaucrats had no desire “for a radical democratic experiment.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1955, Iraqi adherence to the U.S.-supported Baghdad Pact and Israel's raid on Gaza convinced Gamal Abdel Nasser to seek arms from the Soviet bloc. This was hardly an auspicious time “for promoting American yeoman democracy in the Egyptian countryside.”Footnote ⁴⁸

As military-strategic priorities increasingly overshadowed socioeconomic concerns, the significance of the Ottoman legacy for U.S. policy changed as well. Analysts consumed with regional defense fixated on the disparity between Turkey's staunch anti-Communism and the neutralism, or even pro-Soviet policies, of many Arab states. These Cold Warriors also mined the Ottoman-Turkish past to understand contemporary problems of development, but their concern for security led them to draw entirely different lessons from those emphasized by land reformers.

GAZI (COLD) WARRIORS

During the early Cold War, Turkey stood at the center of Americans' Middle East map. Its friendly policies not only made it the model ally against which to compare other states, but its history also became the basis for understanding the region. The main distinction made was between Turkey, whose foreign policy was thought to reflect its advanced development, and Arab countries. Turkey accepted Marshall Plan aid, recognized Israel, sent troops to Korea, and clamored to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In contrast to Arab instability, the Republican People's Party handed power to Adnan Menderes and the Democratic Party in a peaceful 1950 election that appeared to herald a popular democracy free from military interference. By 1953, the United States had abandoned hopes for basing regional defense on Egypt and shifted to a “northern tier” strategy in which Ankara provided the link with NATO. Then secretary of state John Foster Dulles declared that Egypt's Free Officers “were too ignorant and too lacking in experience to grasp the stake of the free world in the security of the Suez base.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Cold Warriors trying to understand why Arab states could not adopt anti-Communist policies similar to Turkey's addressed the problem in comparative, historical terms. Indeed, their historical vision deserves greater attention to complement the emphasis that Gendzier and others have placed on behavioral social science. Even Daniel Lerner, whose The Passing of Traditional Society made the “mobile personality” the basis for studying modernization in the Middle East and beyond, cited Ottoman historiography.Footnote ⁵⁰ In economic reports, government documents, published scholarship, and CFR study groups, Cold Warriors applied lessons from Ottoman-Turkish history to contemporary development problems. They pointed to the authoritarian character of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms, which they regarded as achieving more substantive results than either previous Ottoman policies or anything attempted in other successor states, to explain the disparity between Turkish and Arab foreign policies. This interpretation postponed democracy to the end of the development process and imagined political liberalism as the culmination of that process rather than as its impetus.

During the 1950s, Turkey provided a convenient basis for historical study of development—and not only because it appeared to have successfully transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. By accepting American aid and foreign investment, the republic also seemed to have outgrown the adolescent etatism of the Kemalist period. The originator of this theme was Max Thornburg, who published an economic survey of Turkey in 1949. His main concern was to consign Turkey's policies from the 1930s—five-year plans, state industries, high tariffs—safely to the past. He downplayed Moscow's role in Turkish industrialization and disavowed any correspondence between Kemalism and Soviet Communism. “The leaders of the People's Republican Party are not Communists,” he insisted, “and do not adhere to a Marxist philosophy.” The State Department agreed that Turks' past mistrust of foreign investment was excusable in light of “the humiliating period of the Ottoman Capitulations.”Footnote ⁵¹ Max W. Ball, the American oilman whom Menderes hired to rewrite Turkey's extractive laws, requested a portrait of Atatürk for his personal gallery of “modern founders of new countries.” Ball's work involved overhauling the Kemalist Mineral Research and Exploration Institute, and he judged Atatürk's economic legacy sufficiently dead that the leader could be honored alongside George Washington, Simón Bolívar, and Chaim Weizmann.Footnote ⁵² Turkey's apparent postwar economic and political liberalization enabled Cold Warriors to accentuate Atatürk's anti-Communism while they portrayed the authoritarian, autarkic aspects of Kemalism as vestigial.

CFR records from the 1950s and 1960s reveal just how significant the Turkish case was for historical study of development. Background papers formed the basis for published scholarship about Middle East modernization. The CFR also served as an important forum for exchanges between historians and social scientists. H. A. R. Gibb, the British Orientalist who relocated to Harvard, participated in a study group on modern Islam. Co-author of Islamic Society and the West, the study of the 18th-century Ottoman Empire, Gibb was one important influence at the CFR.Footnote ⁵³ Another, German political scientist Dankwart A. Rustow, grew up in Istanbul, where he attended the Galatasaray lycée. Rustow developed Princeton's Near East program, worked with Gibb on the Social Science Research Council–American Council of Learned Societies' Near East Committee, and helped to found the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He contributed the Near East chapter to The Politics of the Developing Areas, the volume inspired by the SSRC's Committee on Comparative Politics, coedited Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, and authored the synthetic development study A World of Nations.Footnote ⁵⁴ As secretary of the CFR group “Defense of the Middle East” (1954–55), Rustow assembled a roster that included scholars J. C. Hurewitz and T. Cuyler Young, oilmen James Terry Duce and Walter Levy, and Middle East hands John Badeau and George McGhee. Other groups that discussed the Turkish past included as members Manfred Halpern, Daniel Lerner, Marion J. Levy, Jr., and Lucian Pye.Footnote ⁵⁵

CFR discussions of Turkey drew a contrast with Arab states and cited the Ottoman and Kemalist legacies to explain Ankara's pro-Western policies. In the first postwar study group on the Middle East, one diplomat praised Turkey's example to the Arabs “as a firm body surrounded . . . by very soft bodies.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Princeton professor Walter Livingston Wright noted the Turkish exception to the rule that “500 men on top” dominate Middle Eastern states and explained that the republic benefited from a “vast bureaucracy recuperated and repatriated from the old Empire.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1952, Princeton Ottomanist Lewis V. Thomas argued that the key to “Turkey's internal stability is to be found in her history” because the “generation now in power . . . is composed of the sons of those who ran the last generation under the Ottoman Empire.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Although Atatürk drew on Ottoman reforms, it was only during the Kemalist period that Turks developed a “strong nationalism.” Here, the fact that most Turkish peasants owned their own land testified to the success of top-down transformation. This legacy helped “to make for a healthy society in Turkey, especially when comparison is made to countries like Egypt and Iran.” Walter Levy pragmatically asked “what factors caused Ataturk to be a benevolent dictator and whether we could duplicate it elsewhere.” For Thomas, the way in which Kemalism fulfilled earlier Ottoman reforms accounted for Turkey's successful modernization: “[E]very single measure of reform . . . had been agreed upon by the upper class while Ataturk was an infant, i.e., the work of the ‘Young Turks.’”Footnote ⁵⁹

In background papers prepared for his study group, Rustow also explained the contrast between Turkish and Arab foreign policies in historical terms. “For years,” he wrote, “no amount of Western insistence, reasoning, coaxing, and cajoling could move the Arab countries to a frank recognition of the Russian danger.” The Turks, however, “took pride in having opposed that threat at a time when official Western diplomacy was still pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of Big Three Unity.” Rustow emphasized a pair of themes that rendered Ottoman-Turkish history useful. First, he conflated Turkey's postwar anti-Soviet stance with the rivalry between the Ottoman and Russian empires. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, he noted, “Turkey and Russia never were at peace for more than a few decades at a time.” Turkish parents even threatened their children: “The Moskofs will get you.” Second, the German-born scholar stressed how Atatürk, whose reforms were heir to a “century of Ottoman efforts to adopt Western military technique and limited aspects of the West's legal and educational system,” transformed society in short order through a benign and transitory form of dictatorship. The People's Party was “not doctrinaire,” so there was “no basis for ideological purges, no thought of concentration camps.” The “most remarkable development” since World War II has been “the voluntary and gradual abdication of dictatorship.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Piecemeal Ottoman reforms had therefore begun a development process whose promise Atatürk fulfilled through authoritarian means and that culminated in democracy.

By making Turkey the focus of a study group on “Human Factors in Economic Development” (1957–58), the council singled out the republic as its favored example of modernization. Along with Rustow, members included Daniel Lerner, Harvard scholar Richard Robinson, and Cornell political scientist Robert V. Presthus. Carnegie Fellow Edwin J. Cohn authored a background paper that served as a basis for discussion. The group also received a list of questions intended to facilitate generalization from the Turkish case to those of other Muslim and “Underdeveloped countries.”Footnote ⁶¹

A key debate was whether Turkey could serve as a model for other societies, or whether, as the repository for the Ottoman reform legacy, it was historically exceptional. Cohn explicitly applied lessons from the Ottoman-Turkish past. He criticized early Ottoman reforms for focusing on the military “without any corresponding reform in the political, economic, social and cultural institutions of the empire.” This approach paralleled underdeveloped countries' efforts to transplant industrialization “without its social and economic context.” Atatürk's reforms were superior to Ottoman ones precisely because they did encompass the social and cultural aspects of development.Footnote ⁶² For Lewis V. Thomas, Ottoman and Kemalist reforms were not separate but steps in a cumulative process. Atatürk was not a universal type of modernizing strongman but a “child of his times.” Understanding his generation required examining Ottoman bureaucratic influences, such as the School of Civil Administration, the Mülkiye.Footnote ⁶³ This controversy over Turkish (non)exceptionalism not only addressed whether modernization as such could be managed through the use of models. It also exposed disciplinary tensions between social scientists who sought to derive general rules and historians focused on distinct contexts.

Later discussions made Ottoman history the basis for theorizing modernization as elite driven and measured against a universal clock. Days after John F. Kennedy's assassination, a study group on the role of the military in the Middle East considered J. C. Hurewitz's paper “Military Modernizers.” Contrasting Mustafa Kemal with Abdel Nasser, Hurewitz stressed that “Atatürk made a rigorous point of civilianizing his regime.” The group also heard Rustow explain Turkish modernization as the legacy of the Ottoman military elite. Rustow dated the modernizing process to the 18th-century New Order reforms of Selim III and portrayed the democratic nation-state as its climax. Turkey was therefore “a new nation based on an old state with a continuous ruling tradition.” It was the military's gazi ethos that gave it the prestige needed to push for reforms, accept “foreign technical assistance” from European powers, and, in Atatürk's day, “to get out of politics.” Although Turkish officers led by general Cemal Gürsel had recently hanged Menderes, Rustow characterized this intervention as a defense of the “constitutional order.” Comparing the Turkish military with Nasser's Free Officers, Rustow declared that “Egypt was at least thirty years behind Turkey in its development.” Manfred Halpern summed up the discussion with ten reasons why militaries were qualified to direct societies' modernization. Only three factors appeared on the debit side of the ledger: deficiencies in “technical civilian skills,” political appeal, and democratic accountability.Footnote ⁶⁴

Here was the value of Ottoman-Turkish history for Cold War modernization. To some, it showed that the political dominance of the military was no obstacle to a Hollywood ending. Americans could imagine democratic futures for Third World clients however authoritarian such regimes might be in the present. Although Rustow's theme echoed that of new histories such as Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey (whose proofs Rustow had corrected), in 1963 the contemporary significance of the Ottoman-Turkish past was already taken for granted.Footnote ⁶⁵ Indeed, this had been the conclusion published three years earlier by Lerner and Robinson. They summarized the work of the CFR development group by siding with those who regarded Turkey as exemplary rather than as exceptional: “This is the great lesson which the Turkish Republic has to teach the underdeveloped nations of the world. Its past provides a model, and its future a test, for the role of dynamic government in the critical decades of rapid growth that lie ahead—and, perhaps more fundamentally, for the supremacy of civilian authority itself.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The CFR records provide another illustration of how Cold Warriors debated the nature of modernization on the terrain of Ottoman-Turkish history. Indeed, by 1957, the council had selected Turkey as the preeminent case for understanding development. While Rustow portrayed the empire and republic as sharing “a continuous ruling tradition,” he identified Atatürk's authoritarianism as the basis for Turkey's successful modernization and staunch anti-Communism. Developing societies thus achieved security and economic stability through a process that began with a revolution from above and that later permitted dictatorship to give way to democracy. He clung to this interpretation even after the military's 1960 coup, which he initially described as a defense of constitutionalism and subsequently portrayed as the first in a string of aberrations.

The fact that Cold Warriors made use of the Ottoman-Turkish past to support theories of development raises questions about the sources of their historical knowledge. Rustow's contributions to modernization studies took shape during the 1950s in the context of Turkey's apparent liberalization and when concerns about regional defense were paramount. However, his ideas, and those of other social scientists, also reflect the state of Ottoman historiography during the same period. To understand the exchange between historians and social scientists, and the ironic significance of the Ottoman legacy for Cold War modernization, it is necessary to consider the scholarship then regarded as authoritative.

A BRIDGE BETWEEN TWO ERAS

H. A. R. Gibb's prominence in shaping area studies, his role at the CFR, and the attention given Islamic Society and the West even outside of Middle East scholarship provide a basis for rethinking the Cold War collaboration between historians and social scientists. Gibb and Harold Bowen published the two parts of their study in 1950 and 1957, as Ottomanists were still beginning to avail themselves of the imperial archives.Footnote ⁶⁷ Critics have argued that the pair's declinist portrayal of imperial institutions came from their literal reading of secondary Ottoman sources whose authors invoked the golden age of Süleiman the Magnificent as a literary device. Gibb and Bowen's “analysis of the ‘decay of the ruling institution,’” Douglas Howard explains, “repeats almost verbatim the interpretations of Ottoman Decline writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Contemporary reviewers likewise criticized the authors' use of later works by Ignatius Mouradgea d'Ohsson (1740–1807), Seyyid Mustafa Nuri Paşa (1824–90), and Ahmed Cevdet Paşa (1822–95).Footnote ⁶⁹

Such criticism, however, neglects the implications of social scientists' uses of Islamic Society and the West as authoritative. The study served as a bridge between two eras, linking intellectuals and bureaucrats who similarly used the convention of an idealized “tradition” to define visions for change. Ussama Makdisi has described both the temporal and spatial dimensions of Ottoman reformist discourses. Such discourses were based on a “temporal subordination in which an advanced imperial center reformed and disciplined backward peripheries of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire.”Footnote ⁷⁰ By explicating 18th- and 19th-century Ottoman reform writings, Gibb and Bowen helped to render Ottoman-Turkish history useful for their 20th-century social-scientist colleagues. Indeed, Rustow's perspective, which portrayed Turkey's modernization as the culmination of Ottoman reforms and as outpacing Arab development by thirty years, corresponded closely to what Makdisi calls “Ottoman Orientalism.”

The sources on which Islamic Society and the West relied emphasized Ottoman institutional decline between the Süleimanic and contemporary reform eras. Findley has shown how d'Ohsson wrote Tableau général de l'empire Othman partly to secure French support “for what would become the reforms of Selim III's New Order.”Footnote ⁷¹ Gibb and Bowen describe the histories of Seyyid Mustafa and Cevdet as exhibiting a prejudice “in favour of the reforms of the early nineteenth century” while painting “the anterior age in too sombre colours.”Footnote ⁷² Cevdet was apprenticed to one of the architects of the Tanzimat and drafted the mecelle, the European-style civil code based on the şeriat. Having participated directly in the Tanzimat, “its legitimation through historiography” became his leading motivation.Footnote ⁷³ Thus, Gibb and Bowen cite Seyyid Mustafa and Cevdet on the corruption of the devşirme in the 1580s, d'Ohsson on the “decay of the Ruling Institution,” and Cevdet, d'Ohsson, and Seyyid Mustafa on the excellence of the ulema in Süleiman's era, which his successors failed to maintain.Footnote ⁷⁴ The logic inherent in such writings, their strategy of opposing tradition and reform, fit the Cold War agenda of defining modernization against an idealized past.

Gibb and Bowen married this declinist interpretation to a perspective that looked outward from the imperial center. Their account incorporates Arabic works by ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1825) and Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (1759–91) into the framework provided by d'Ohsson's taxonomy and the Turkish-language histories. In their chapter “Government and Administration in the Arab Provinces,” Gibb and Bowen associate administrative decay with the reassertion of “the violence of factional spirit” among Arabs, the “senseless and ceaseless tearing of faction against faction . . . restrained neither by scruples of religion and humanity nor by consideration of economic and political consequences.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The rise of Egyptian “Mamluks” and renegade Syrian governors are for them manifestations of this 18th-century crisis. The authors thus bequeathed a view of the empire whose spatial, as well as temporal, dimensions accorded with Cold Warriors' agenda for the Middle East.

Given their sources and how they used them, it is hardly surprising that Gibb and Bowen's study gained currency in the modernization literature as the definitive depiction of “traditional” Islamic society. Reviewing Part II, Rustow pronounced it “of far greater value to the social scientist” than a chronological narrative, because of its “systematic analysis” of Ottoman institutions and “the forces which made for evolution, synthesis, stagnation, and decay.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Rustow went even further in The Politics of the Developing Areas, where he lauded Islamic Society and the West as a “comprehensive survey” of the “traditional structure of Near Eastern society before the concentrated impact of the modern West.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Lerner and Robinson used it to establish the place of military elites in the Ottoman-Turkish tradition. Frederick W. Frey cited Islamic Society and the West as an authority on the decline of Ottoman education. Both Lerner and Halpern, in their major works on Middle East modernization, had Gibb and Bowen testify to the heritage of passivity among the region's peasants.Footnote ⁷⁸

Islamic Society and the West also drew interest from social scientists who regarded Ottoman history as having applications beyond Middle East studies. Arabist Edward Calverly, evaluating Part I in the American Sociological Review, praised its “special sociological character” and the authors' “use of Oriental sources,” which “adds immensely to the worth of the work” outside their field. Sociologist Morroe Berger described Islamic Society and the West as “the kind of history the sociologist and the student of comparative institutions need.”Footnote ⁷⁹ They needed the Ottoman case for bureaucratic studies identifying universal trends toward rational-legal authority in the tradition of Max Weber. Islamic Society and the West, and Gibb's other work, appeared in scholarship by Arnold Brecht, Robert V. Presthus, Talcott Parsons, and S. N. Eisenstadt. In The Political Systems of Empires, Eisenstadt referenced Islamic Society and the West nine times. He made special mention of the Ottoman Empire as one “that, while it disintegrated through secessions and rebellions, later became transformed—at its core—into a more differentiated, modern system.” As evidence, Eisenstadt inserted a seven-paragraph quotation from Bernard Lewis, treatment not accorded any other case. The empire could not only stand for “tradition” in the modernization discourse, but it could also assist in Eisenstadt's main objective of “previewing modern political systems.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Gibb and Bowen transmitted Ottoman reformers' depictions of imperial institutions to Cold War modernizers, who recycled them in defining “traditional” society. Moreover, researchers could mine Ottoman reform for wisdom regarding how the United States should direct contemporary change. In 1961, Rustow told the CFR's group on “Diplomacy and the Developing Countries” that

Rustow hoped that Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey would yield practical lessons for countries “committing very sizeable amounts of capital and other forms of assistance” to promote development. Contributors examined media, bureaucracy, the military, and politics. Their understanding of Ottoman history came not only second hand, through Gibb and Bowen, but also through 19th-century reformers. Rustow, Kemal H. Karpat, and Richard L. Chambers each quoted Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, and Arif T. Payaslıoğlu deposed Midhat Paşa regarding Turkish political modernization.Footnote ⁸²

The irony underlying Cold War uses of the Ottoman past is that portrayals of the empire's reformist legacy as regressive or deficient indirectly drew on imperial reform discourses. More than any other source, Islamic Society and the West formed Cold Warriors' historical knowledge about the empire. The declinist interpretation that resulted from Gibb and Bowen's readings of 18th- and 19th-century works dovetailed with Cold Warriors' own logic of “temporal subordination.” Turkey's policies were therefore not the only reasons that Ottoman-Turkish history became one of the Cold Warriors' favorite laboratories for studying modernization. At a time when Ottomanists' archival research was beginning to render the textual approach of Orientalists obsolete, Gibb and Bowen enabled social scientists to appropriate older reform discourses in the effort to manage Third World change.

AMERICA'S FORGOTTEN ALLY

Ottomanists contributed to, as well as borrowed from, the modernization paradigm. This influence was further apparent in modernizers' citations of scholarship published in the early 1960s about the Ottoman reform period.Footnote ⁸³ David E. Apter used Şerif Mardin's account of the Young Ottomans as an example of intellectuals successfully acting as “critical mediators between traditionality and modernity.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Closely paraphrasing Bernard Lewis, Harold D. Lasswell and Lerner exclaimed that Turkey “changed its continental identity” from Asia to Europe and its history exemplified how a top-down revolution could be “engineered by intellectual and official cadres!”Footnote ⁸⁵ Among this cohort of historians only Lewis repaid the compliment by citing Lerner, but even Lewis noted “striking divergences” between Turkey and other countries.Footnote ⁸⁶ Roderic Davison was similarly “reluctant” to present his study of the Tanzimat as useful for understanding the “slippery concept of modernization” given the “sharp contrasts” with other instances.Footnote ⁸⁷

Early in the Cold War, the working relationship between Ottoman scholars and social scientists contained a division of labor, with historians explicating texts from which social scientists could extrapolate rules. Social scientists thereby gained access to the late-imperial reform discourses found in literary sources. By the 1960s, however, archival research provided Ottomanists with a basis for studying state institutions outside of the temporal framework that characterized such discourses. Researchers “enthusiastically plunged into these archives,” Donald Quataert explains, to produce “an explosion of historical scholarship” that significantly escaped the tendency to regard the empire as an incipient Turkish republic.Footnote ⁸⁸ Historians' relations with social scientists shifted as the former applied structural approaches such as political economy and world systems theory.Footnote ⁸⁹ More recent work on the 18th century has not only refuted Gibb and Bowen's decline school but has also rejected a center-periphery dichotomy by describing the imperial elite as the product of households throughout Ottoman lands.Footnote ⁹⁰

The strategic context that shaped Rustow's interpretation during the 1950s also changed, so Cold Warriors could no longer look upon Turkey as a model ally. American hopes that Turkey would persuade the Arab states to compromise with Israel and stand up to the Soviet Union were bitterly disappointed. Gürsel interpreted John Kennedy's “flexible response” doctrine as a diminished willingness to defend Turkey with nuclear weapons, a suspicion that appeared justified when Kennedy agreed to remove missiles from Turkey during the Cuban crisis. Instead of a pillar of stability, Lyndon B. Johnson regarded Turkey as a contributor to conflict in Cyprus. The two allies also diverged economically as Menderes's liberalization gave way to a series of new five-year plans beginning in 1963 and Bülent Ecevit remade the opposition Republican People's Party on a platform of social democracy. Also, in contrast to Turkey's role in Korea, Prime Minister Süleiman Demirel refused to send combat troops to Vietnam.Footnote ⁹¹

Changes in the Cold War significance of Ottoman-Turkish history corresponded to those in postwar liberalism. Contrasting invocations of that history by Tannous and Rustow reflected tensions that divided liberals at home and bedeviled efforts to export American ideals to developing societies. Security concerns reinforced Cold Warriors' predilection for elite authority and led them to embrace Kemalism as a model for Third World development. As Nils Gilman has shown, even after Cold War liberalism fragmented, the modernization paradigm lived on in certain intellectual circles,Footnote ⁹² as did the concomitant version of Ottoman-Turkish history. “Turkey is returning to democracy, with no question,” testified Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams in 1983. Whatever abuses the military had perpetrated since its most recent seizure of power three years earlier, the republic had “committed itself to the West without reservation” in Atatürk's time, making it “an important and precious example.”Footnote ⁹³

Thirty years and three coups after serving as secretary of the CFR's “Defense of the Middle East” group, Rustow published Turkey: America's Forgotten Ally. He wrote critically of the Turkish military's interventions in politics while excusing them as an Ottoman holdover and as the anomalous “childhood ills of democracy.” At every stage of the republic's serial liberalization, Rustow portrayed American assistance as crucial to “historic initiatives that Turkey had taken for its own compelling reasons.”Footnote ⁹⁴ His book grew out of a 1984 CFR study group whose members included Cyril E. Black, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Bernard Lewis. In the foreword, Lewis wrote that “Turkey now has a crucial role to play in the defense of southeastern Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and even southern Asia.” Turkey's pro-Western foreign policy “is the outward expression of a profound internal change extending over a century-and-a-half of Turkish history.”Footnote ⁹⁵

A throwback to the interdisciplinary collaboration of the 1950s, Forgotten Ally is also a reminder of how the Cold War remade American liberalism in a global context. That reinterpretation was essentially historical. It enlarged the national story to conflate U.S. interests with the progress of other peoples. McGhee wrote in 1990 that Turkey's repudiation of its Ottoman heritage and adherence to NATO “can best be described as the meeting of historical trends that were operating in both Turkey and the West.”Footnote ⁹⁶ When development is made into the central Cold War issue, U.S. foreign policy appears not simply as a reaction to external threats but also as a struggle waged abroad to resolve the meaning of American liberalism.