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PAN-TURKISM. FROM IRREDENTISM TO COOPERATION. By JACOB M. LANDAU. London, Hurst, 1995. 275 pp. L14.95. Whenever the foreign policy of the Republic of Turkey towards the Turkic areas in Central Asia is discussed, the spectre of 'Panturkism', the ideology which aims at the unification of the Turkic peoples, rears its head most of all in Russia. Fear of Panturkist expansionism on the part of Turkey has a long tradition, not only in Russia, but also in the West. It has its origins partly in the struggle for possession of the gateways to India between Russia and Britain, the `Great Game' which played such a large role in the minds of late 19th century British diplomats and (through the works of people like Kipling) in British public opinion, and partly in the Panturkist ambitions of the young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
Jacob Landau's Pan-Turkism, which first appeared in 1981, is a careful description of the origins and development of this movement from its earliest protagonists in the l9th century Russian empire to the current situation. Except for the first and last chapters, the focus is very much on developments in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.
Landau describes how, during the First World War, especially after the Russian revolution, some Ottoman leaders were converted to a Panturkist policy, as compensation for the Ottoman losses in Near East. In this, they were influenced by Tatar and Azeri immigrants from the Russian empire, who had formed a Panturkist circle within the Young Turk movement based in Istanbul since 1911.
After the end of the Ottoman Empire, Panturkism in Turkey went into eclipse. For the leadership of the young republic, the overriding foreign policy objective after 1923 was consolidation of the hard-fought national unity and independence. In...