How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

Turkey has never been a country so much as a stopping-place for migrations. The Turkish coast was Greek from the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. to the early 1920s, when the million and a half remaining Greeks were expelled. No Turk lived in Anatolia until the end of the eleventh century, when the Seljuk Turks began conquering territory from the Byzantine Empire. The Westernization of Turkey rested on more than Atatürk’s personal vision; it was physically a Western phenomenon, the result of an enormous migration into Turkey from the West. By the end of the First World War, refugees or children of refugees from the collapsed European outposts of the Ottoman Empire—along with Crimean Muslims driven out of Russia—comprised more than a quarter of the 21 million people living within the frontiers of what is now modern Turkey, in the Anatolian rump of the once vast Ottoman territories. The liberation of the Balkans from Ottoman rule and Russian expulsions drove between 5 and 7 million people into Anatolia during the century before the First World War.12 After the war, another half million Muslims were expelled from Greece in the population exchange that settled the Greek-Turkish war. Turkey in turn massacred or expelled 3 to 4 million Armenian and Greek Christians during and after the First World War. Atatürk’s constituency resided on the country’s coast, swollen with Turkish refugees from Western lands, rather than in the backward Anatolian plain.