Turkey has plenty to celebrate on its centenary

It’s difficult to imagine the Middle East having reason to celebrate. It happens, however, that today is the centenary of modern Turkey, an occasion which president Erdogan, in an uncharacteristically emollient mood, recently described as a ‘big embrace of 85 million people’. If Turkey’s authorities mean to mark the occasion with rallies, fireworks and festivities, it could be said they have good reason. For while war, sectarianism and displacement continue to stalk so much of what once comprised the Ottoman Empire – not only in Palestine and the Holy Land, but in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, not to mention much of north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula – the Ottomans’ successor state may be said, at least in relative terms, to look like a welcome exception.

Turkey’s 100^th birthday marks the day in 1923 when national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk declared the fledgling state a republic. His diktat was greeted with consternation by Turks still digesting the Sultan’s flight into exile the previous year, not to mention the bombshell announcement that the capital was to be moved from Istanbul to a flyblown station stop on the Anatolian steppe: Ankara.