Kerem Oktem, Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989 (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011)

Turkey's transformation evidenced best by its more active and assertive foreign policy and economic growth for the last decade has deservedly attracted a great deal of attention. More and more students of Turkish politics have tried to explain underlying domestic, regional, and international dynamics of these monumental changes. As Turkish landscapes alter, a powerful current of scholarship with a revisionist approach to nationalist historiography and the Alevi, Kurdish demands as well as Armenian genocide claims have also surfaced. Kerem Oktem's Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989 is better taken in this overall context; it is one of the most recent efforts to make sense of Turkey's metamorphosis through the lenses of revisionist views of the history of the Turkish Republic.

In this timely book Oktem seeks to explain the causes of what he perceives Turkey to be today, an angry nation that has finally started facing its deep structural and other problems. Feeling obliged to stray from the general framework of the 'Global History of the Present' series, of which this book is a part, Oktem commences Turkey's journey from the late Ottoman Empire to end it with Turkey in the first decade of the 21s century by taking the reader through the Cold War years and the derelict first post-Cold War decade with weak coalition governments, the 'Kurdish war', and a post-modern coup d'etat in 1997. Digging in the history of the Turkish Republic for Turkey's ills today the author pins the blame on the founding ideology of the Republic, namely in the nationalist modernization forms of Unionism (Ittihatcilik) and later Kemalism. Three key areas that Kemalism resolved in a very problematic fashion stand out in author's analysis: the definition of citizenship, the (mis)practice of...