Wilhelm Röpke on The Turkish Transformation (1936)

Wilhelm Röpke’s scholarly review of Henry Elisha Allen’s The Turkish Transformation combines a favorable assessment of the book with an independent interpretation of Turkey’s reform movement. Its governing caution is that familiarity does not necessarily make Turkish society more readily intelligible. Röpke opens with a leading Turkologist’s admission that fifteen years of residence and study had diminished, rather than increased, his confidence in understanding the Turks. This anecdote establishes both the value of Allen’s undertaking and the limits within which any general account must operate.

Allen’s distinctive contribution is his attention to the spiritual foundations of reform:

Unlike many writers on Turkey, who deal principally with the political and economic aspects of the Kâmalistic Reform, this author has set himself the task of analyzing the underlying spiritual change.

Röpke regards this neglected subject as particularly suited to Allen’s theological expertise. His account of the book’s structure traces the penetration of Western ideas and their conflict with inherited institutions, followed by Turkey’s altered international and Muslim-world position, the formation of a unified, state-conscious population, and changes in social institutions. Western law, public education, and social hygiene receive substantial attention. The concluding treatment of Islam and the prospects for missionary education places religious change within the conditions created by nationalism.

The assessment is positive but qualified. Allen offers a general orientation rather than an exhaustive resolution of the problems he raises; his proportions are sometimes questionable, and his handling of evidence insufficiently critical. Röpke nevertheless finds that the book answers many of the Western observer’s questions satisfactorily. He especially values its documentation, while noting the bibliography’s omission of Becker’s Islamstudien and important publications by Wittek. These reservations distinguish scholarly usefulness from interpretive finality.

The review then turns from evaluation to supplementation and partial disagreement. Röpke warns against assimilating Turkey too readily to other contemporary dictatorships. Shared authoritarian features do not erase differences: he finds neither fascism’s aggressive nationalism and romantic mythology nor Russia’s radicalism and atheism. His alternative explanation joins two ideals, nationalism and modernism, whose particular meanings must be established rather than assumed.

Turkish nationalism, in this account, combines internal nation-building with external resistance to imperialism. It cultivates collective identification, historical and cultural continuity, and attachment to the state, while defending national integrity. Röpke insists:

This nationalism is devoid of any trace of aggressiveness; there are few nations today which are as peace-loving as the Turks.

He supports this judgment by distinguishing a regime founded through military victory from one seeking compensation for defeat. Turkey already possesses the military prestige that, in his view, authoritarian national consolidation requires; it therefore need not pursue further victories to obtain it. This is Röpke’s explanatory claim, not merely a description of Allen’s book.

Modernization follows from the defensive purpose of nationalism:

For Turkey—and the same applies to the similar cases of Iran and, formerly, Japan—has no other choice than to adopt western civilization in order to withstand western imperialism.

The conceptual reversal is central: resistance to Western domination requires adopting the foundations of Western power. Military technique alone is insufficient without its technical, economic, and spiritual supports. Röpke accordingly presents cultural Westernization, including alphabet reform and emancipation from inherited religious influence, as consequences of this strategic necessity.

He does not describe adaptation as frictionless. Heterogeneous elements collide, and its limits become visible. His final qualification concerns the West being adopted: Turkey’s conception is rationalistic and positivist, with Soviet Russia serving as a cultural intermediary that simplifies Europe’s complexity into readily assimilable elements. The review thus distinguishes political difference from cultural mediation. Its broader relevance lies in explaining how defensive sovereignty can propel extensive cultural transformation without making every authoritarian modernizing state an instance of the same political model.