The Young Ataturk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey.

• Author: Deal, Roger A.
• Position: Book review

The Young Ataturk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey

By George W. Gawrych

London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013, xiv+267 pages, $35.00, ISBN 9781780763224.

IN THE YOUNG ATATURK, George Gawrych examines the intellectual development of Mustafa Kemal as a soldier, and looks at how he applied what he had learned about soldiering to the problems of statesmanship. He traces Mustafa Kemal's intellectual development primarily through his own writings. With access to Ataturk's personal notebooks, in addition to his published writings, as well as drawing on a vast array of other primary sources and secondary literature, Gawrych is able to follow the ideas Mustafa Kemal was exposed to in his classes and in his personal readings, and see which of those ideas are adopted and expanded upon. Rather than a biography of Ataturk, this is an examination of his characteristics as a leader, explicated through his intellectual journey. Gawrych focuses on three concepts, which he argues were central to Ataturk's philosophy of life and of leadership: "his, dimag, and vicdan", which he translates as feeling/sentiment, mind (cognitive activities), and conscience (pp. xii-xiii). Previous analyses of Ataturk's leadership, he argues, have focused almost exclusively on the intellectual component, which is too narrow to explain Ataturk's successes.

The book is organized chronologically, beginning with Mustafa Kemal's early education, and ending with the end of the War of Liberation. Chapter 1, "The Making of an Ottoman Soldier," covers his military education, as well as his early military and diplomatic experiences in Libya and Bulgaria. Chapter 2, "The Great War and an Imperialist Peace," covers World War One. The remaining five chapters ("Developing a Resistance," "The Grand National Assembly," "A Crisis in Battle," "Commander in Chief," and "From Lightning Campaign to Peace") cover the War of Liberation and the nation-building program that went along with it. It is in these later chapters that Gawrych uses the concepts of "his, dimag, and vicdan", which he has introduced, explored, and developed earlier, to analyze Ataturk's leadership style and explain the military and political successes of Mustafa Kemal.

While the three-part framework is useful and enlightening, there are also other concepts that Gawrych has to appeal to in order to complete his analysis. Part of his argument is that Mustafa Kemal's success as a politician and statesman, his success in...