The effects of Turkish national culture on Atatürk Revolutions

Turkish history and culture is one of the oldest and ancient cultures in the world. The elements of Turkish national culture, have had a great impact on the growth and development of the Turkish nation, the establishment of important empires in the history of the world and their contribution to civilization. This process, which started with Asia Hun, Göktürk, Uygur and Seljuks, reached its peak with the Ottoman Empire. Turks, who the acceptance of Islam came under the influence of Arab and Persian culture after, started to move away from these cultures slowly. Due to growing these effects, especially from the sixteenth century, the Turks began to move away from their culture that kept them alive for centuries, and as a result, they began to decline. As a result of the social and political developments occurring in the west, especially in the nineteenth century, Europe entered into a major leap in social and political terms. Until the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, which evaluated these developments only technically, eventually started to decline against Europe. The statesmen and intellectuals that Understood that progress cannot only be technically, they have also attempted to transform the state socially and politically. These events orientated the Ottoman Empire into a search for culture. The searching of identidy that started with last century of Ottoman Empire has resulted with choise of Turkish nationalism after that the proclamation of the republic. Especially in the early twentieth century, this ideology that growing to its effect played a key role in the started of the National War of Independence and vinnig its war. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who grew up and thrivig in the most depressed periods of the empire, argued that in the light of his experiences, salvation can only be achieved by returning to the Turkish national culture, that is to say, and the level of contemporary civilizations can be reached by developing and introducing the Turkish national culture to the World. For this reason, he based his struggle for liberation both on the idea of Turkism and based his new republic on Turkish National culture. For this purpose, the studies on Turkish history and culture in the last years of the Ottoman State have been made more systematic and organized, paid attention to the compatibility of the revolutions to be made with the Turkish history and culture and based the revolutions on the Turkish national culture. In this doctorate thesis study, the effects of Turkish national culture on Atatürk revolutions were emphasized and it was emphasized that the revolutions were not only in the political and administrative fields but also a cultural revolution.