 I've taken the subject of Turkey in Spain because, you know, for people who come from abroad, Turkey looks obviously rather unfamiliar. A splendid American woman in my first years here said, look, when you land here, it's like being on Mars. The language looks as if a scrabble board had been kicked by a baby and all that sort of thing. And it's not really like that at all. And what I want to do is to try to put Turkey in a European context and compare it with the country which I think she most resembles, which is Spain. I'll say one or two things to start off with. It's a country you enjoy waking up in it. I know something nice will happen or something interesting. People tend to be very cheery. Most foreigners have that sort of reaction. Now, it is true, of course, that as a university professor in a go-ahead private university, it's the first that was ever set up in what we can call the European space. It followed an American model with intelligent adaptations. And I live in a sort of bubble. And sometimes I'm reminded of the immortal remark of a Russian prince, Fyatopolk Myrski, who had been very rich before the revolution, emigrated to England, became taught Russian literature at the School of Slavonic Studies in London and started writing a life of Lenin and fell in love with the man and went back to Russia where he wrote in the newspapers. It all went wrong. He ended up in a camp. But he made this remark, I have been three times a parasite, a prince under feudalism, a professor under capitalism, and a journalist under communism. But still, it is, I think, true that if I hear foreigners talking, we tend to be, you know, what's said about the Turks is picturesque, but it's on the whole in favour, very much so sometimes. Now, I'd better explain that beginning. When I first came to Turkey, I said, how should you talk to a Turkish audience? And they said, well, look, so long as you start off with something nice, you can see what you like. And we've moved beyond that stage. I'm not making silly compliments just to be nice. We've moved beyond that stage because the Turks have now got self-confidence and they're all over the world. You bump into Turkish businessmen selling pharmaceuticals in Venezuela, this kind of thing. And, you know, for all the problems that Turkey has, and I'm going to talk about them, frankly, we've moved a long, long way from 1923 when the Republic was established. It was established, you know, having lost a quarter of the population through epidemics, war, expulsions, all that. And the Turks didn't have skills. They wanted a table made. You had to go and ask an Armenian carpenter because he would understand how to stop the lakes from wobbling. And, you know, it's true the Turkish... I don't like the expression economic miracle, but progress is not the same as, say, South Korea. The principal export of which in 1960 was wigs. It's still done, you know, pretty commendably and the place works. I mean, if I'm 71 now and if I have problems with my health, I've no difficulty at all in going down to a Turkish hospital. I sometimes think that health is something which represents, like, television, a sort of general will. The health service in England doesn't work because everybody's drunk on Saturday night. The health service in Turkey is under terrible strain because any time some old peasant has a pain anywhere, he arrives with his entire family at the best hospital in Ankara and demands huge amounts of pills. However, they keep on top of it and that sort of thing, as you can judge from the statistics of infant mortality, anything like that, works better than it does in Russia. Still, the problems Turkey had to face were enormous. They began, I think, with the language. You know, just as an example, I was reading a book about the Russian occupation of Kars in eastern Anatolia in 1878 and they took statistics for the first time in that place and they discovered that 1% of the Muslim population was literate and they had 57 religious establishments, big and small, in a city of perhaps 25,000 people. And that problem of illiteracy was something that came up partly because the language had fragmented and partly because the script was just unsuited to the sort of noises that the Turks make which are not Arabic or Persian and that was the script. And there's a measure of the problem you can see in the Statue of the Great Man, Attatur, which is about 100 yards away, you'll see it reads, jihanda sulh, peace at home, peace in the world. Now, the word sulh, nobody uses it. It's now barish for peace. And the word jihan, I don't think anybody, people might not even understand it for world. You say dunya. And they had to do a thoroughgoing language reform beginning with the abolition of the script and the substitution of today's script. It was something that divided people and it still divides my students. They say we could have made adaptations to the old script to accommodate Turkish noises. And other people more radical said, no, no, scrap the whole thing and they could get away with it in 1928 because the urban population consisted often of refugees and they were a clean slate waiting to be written on. And it's been remarkably successful. One example, which is 10 years ago, God knows what it is now. But it's just a statistic I happen to remember. In Turkey there are 11,000 translations made every year. In the entire Arab world, 300. I guess you will measure that we've now got literacy. Things wrong with it, yes. If I listen to my students talking, I fear that they're going down the Anglo-Saxon path and here I might boast that in England we have come down to 120 words whereas in the United States, benightedly I gather it's 80. Now my purpose in all of this is not to do a fanfare for modern Turkey. That would be easy, whatever you take. What I'd rather do is talk about the problems which Turkey faces nowadays and I'll try and put them in a European perspective rather than a Middle East perspective because I think that is the right way to look at it. The country I'm going to talk about, of course, is Spain but I'll come on to that. Now Turkey's problems come, obviously, from a geographical situation. With neighbors like that, you're going to get problems. I do not understand the world Greeks for a start. You know, if you go down to the port, you'll see Greek islands about costs, I suppose, about ten minutes away. They're wonderful islands and I will say this for the Greeks, that if you go to costs and you look across at Bodrum, it's a great mass of concrete which should never have been allowed and this is true also of Spain, the Spanish wrecked their coastline building hotels in each other's back gardens and the Turks lost control of that process as well in parts and here in Bodrum. If you look at the Greek islands, they've been quite well wooded, the nice little sparkling white houses, white churches, they look, you know, the classical museums are on costs anyway which I know are really well looked after, that sort of thing, but what does it cost? There was a forest fire on Kiosk last month and the Turks offered to help but the Greeks have to bring in all the water by tanker from the mainland. They get their electricity from the mainland and there is no possibility of keeping those fabulous islands going except for tourism. Now what does it cost the Greek treasury to maintain those islands in this state with more or less a boycott of the Turkish, which is quite prosperous, nearby, it's crazy. But still, you argue with the Greeks, just let professional class Turks in without a visa to those islands. You run into endless complications of resentments of a frankly silly kind. Now that Greece is the easiest to the neighbors, well, perhaps from Bulgaria and Georgia, but if you deal with the Middle East, that's always been Turkey's problem really from the 16th century onwards when a long war developed, a long rivalry developed, partly on religious lines with Iran. It's always been headaches and problems for the Turks. Sometimes I say to them, you know, that the man who was really responsible for the decline of the Ottoman Empire was a 17th century sultan called Murat IV. And he made, I think, two mistakes. The first was to say, in all our mighty empire, no alcohol is to be served. Now, try running an empire without alcohol, doesn't work. And the second mistake he made was to take Baghdad. There's a historical rule. Two Cairo's and you're out. One Baghdad and you're out. And the strain of maintaining these Arab provinces is a not often appreciated problem of Ottoman history. Oh, no, all this is coming back. Turkey, in my view, not very sensibly, allowed herself to be sucked into this Syrian embryo. They ought to have known that Syria is not something, it's not going to be, Libya wasn't easy, getting rid of Gaddafi took seven months. Getting rid of Assad is a much tougher job because he's got support from Iran and also from Iraq, which doesn't want to see him go. And the Turks have got themselves into a situation where they have 100,000 refugees flooding into Anatolia. Incidentally, in the refugee camps run by the Red Cross or the Red Crescent, there's a notice reading strictly no smoking in this camp. 50,000 Syrians immediately returned to Syria to be bombed. That's the first one. Now, there are tensions between the two branches of Islam. I mean, it sounds almost absurd to say this. It's, you know, for us nowadays there are. Well, I was in Ireland last weekend and there are obviously Protestant Catholic troubles here and there. But to say, you know, to have a conflict between the Shia and Sunni versions of Islam at this stage of the 21st century is surreal. But that's come up. Then another one that is, I'm going to talk about a bit, is the Kurds. They're a quarter of the population in Turkey just about. Not all of them speak Kurdish. Syria, when the tensions happened, the Syrians said, we will cease to treat our Kurds, who are often nomadic as second-class citizens. They can have an autonomous area. Now, surprise, surprise, the terrorist movement in Turkey, BKK, which is a horrible outfit, has started a campaign of terror, the like of which we haven't seen since 1993 and not even then. This is a very bad one. The Kurdish question comes up in Iraq as well. And a question mark really comes over boundaries in the whole area. So much for the great man saying peace in the world, the formula with which Turkey was launched. She's got a bad one. Now, the Americans, I'm trying to drive, the Americans nowadays, if you ask them, help, help, help, as the Turks have been doing, get the answer, surprise, surprise, sorry, it's election year. And so the Americans aren't being much help in all of this. And the Turks have found themselves in a seriously difficult situation, arguing for a no-fly zone, which no one will enforce. Europe, well, look, the candidacy of Turkey for the European Union ought to be a matter, straightforward matter. If Europe were what it was originally, a free trade zone with a few common values, the admission of Turkey would not really be a problem, certainly not western or central Turkey. They're not all going to get up and flood to stay in Germany, nothing like it. But still, Europe makes difficulties. It's terribly humiliating for an educated Turk to try to get a visa for European countries, forms this size to fill in the exact specifications of photographs. The Americans are much better. You go to the American embassy in Ankara, you wait a day and you get a 10-year visa if you're an educated Turk. And the Europeans should do that because it's a matter of course. They're simply offending everybody. And then the idea that the Turkish membership of Europe should be dependent on a pipsqueak little problem like Greek Cyprus. Turkish Cyprus has been in effect independent since 1973 when the Turkish army protected it. President Dengtas bless his soul said, if I hadn't behaved as I did, we would have been in a sort of Gaza strip and he's absolutely right about it. But why not go the whole hog and simply say independence for Northern Cyprus? It's a simple matter and if it's done for East Timor or in the name of God, if it's done for Kosovo or Montenegro or dare I say it, Scotland, which is where I come from, if Scotland becomes independent, I'm becoming a Turk. It's a ridiculous idea. If these things are done, then why not North Cyprus? And so the Europeans find themselves in this standoff situation with Turkey and the Turks have given up hope of joining Europeans and I think it's reflected in a drive back if you like to the mainsprings of Turkish Islam, Turkish nationalism, the wave of Turkish self-consciousness in the last 10 years has been quite remarkable. There are some very good, actually, Turkish soap operas about the Ottoman Empire and even taxi drivers have become considerable experts on Ottoman history. I enjoy talking to them about these things and that I think is a consequence of the Europeans' attitude. The last thing, of course, is the economy. Turkey said this government's done very well. People grumble about it, especially if they're professional class, but it's been remarkably successful in all sorts of ways. When I arrived in Ankara, you would move past not exactly shanty tones. People weren't living in boxes, but there were clapboard structures put up in 24 hours which meant that they were quasi-legal and they dotted the hillsides all around the main cities of Turkey as rural migration happened. It's a phenomenon everywhere, Bogota, Mexico City, and so on. They've all gone. They've been replaced by ugly tower blocks but still modern flats with all that goes with it and a good thing. Turkish trade has become a serious economy. I won't go on about this because it's obvious. Quite successful, but is the economic boom coming to an end? There's a bit of debt, probably too much. Foreign investment is not coming in quite the amounts that it should do and it mainly consists of Arabs buying property in Istanbul and driving property prices up, which in itself is something which makes for obvious tensions. We'll have to see about that. But Turkey is now facing quite serious problems. More so, I think, than I've known since I came here in 1995. The final thing is that the government has been cracking its whip. Its background is religious. There was a religious party which started off in the 1960s from small beginnings and it grew in the 70s as people looked for electoral alliances with it. And it had this to be said for it that it wasn't corrupt. In the main, the Islamic politicians, the religious politicians were not corrupt. They offered things which most Turks didn't want from them at that time. For instance, there's an institution for training clerics, a school for training clerics. There were very few of them in the old days. Now there are thousands. And people are, school children are taught in Quranic schools. There are prizes for, correct me if I'm wrong, Mustafa, there are prizes for learning the Quran off by heart. Now, that is a teacher who doesn't know Arabic, let alone 6th century or 7th century Arabic, who is administering noises to school children who will absorb these noises without understanding them. And whether this is a proper way of education, a lot of people seem to do remarkably well out of it, but you can see that this sort of thing is going to be a problem. Now, the previous Islamic government, there was an Islamic prime minister, Erbakan. He came in as a result of an electoral pact with one of the conservative parties. And his idea was to say, let's have an Islamic free trade area and then an Islamic foreign policy, whatever that's supposed to be. And he lined himself up in Libya with Gaddafi with a couple of plug-uglies from Nigeria and Chad with some maniac from Iran. And you get the general picture of the prime minister of Turkey lining up with people like that. And he wasn't well received because Gaddafi said, what about the Kurds then? And started ranting at him to treat the Kurds properly. So the conference broke up in uproar and Erbakan's deputy, Tansu Chiller, turned around and said, what is that bear arsed bedouin doing telling us what to do? And the army got into the act and put them out of power. Now the present prime minister started off from that background and he went to eastern Turkey and made what was said to be an inflammatory address and he was put in prison for 11 months. He had been a very successful mayor of Istanbul which is a terribly difficult city to run. The rubbish is picked up twice a day. You don't see rats anywhere. It's got hideous problems but it's not Cairo by a long, long chalk. They're building an underground railway, all this sort of thing. The show keeps on the road and that man deserves some respect for that. And he was in prison for 11 months. Now if you do that for somebody, he's going to take some kind of revenge. I remember seeing him on one of my journeys back to England. The poor man was clutching, he was on his own. He was clutching a Teach Yourself English book. He was going to England obviously to try to learn English. It didn't work. But the poor man was standing there just out of prison, lonely, feeling defeated. I mean, I felt awfully sorry for him. But he has gone on to take pretty serious revenge. Just recently, coming on for 400 years, sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for holding exercises back in 2002 for a military pooch against a possibly reactionary Islamic government. 20 years. The evidence is there are coming on for 400 journalists in prison for similar reasons. And they've been held there often without charge, I think, for three, four years. The word going round is that Turkey now has more journalists in prison than Iran or China. Now, I think it's a matter of course that you don't put journalists in prison for doing their job, certainly not for that length of time. Oddly enough, I think it's probably a good idea to put writers in prison. It stops them making such a mess of their private lives and taking themselves too seriously. If Orhan Pamuk had had a dose of prison, perhaps his prose would become a little less muggy. And do you know the famous remark about American writers? There have been six American Nobel Prizes for literature. Five were drunks and the sixth was Perles Bach. Now, compare that with Russia. It's a discussable point. However, we are in a difficult situation and now the atmosphere in Turkey is, I have to say, really, you know, it's quite tense. We're not in for any kind of Arab Spring. It's true that in Eastern Turkey there are conditions not unlike the Middle East. Too many children, dirt poor, tribal politics, honor killings, this kind of thing. But it is really a local phenomenon in the Southeast, however intractable it is. I think we've got to look to another situation. This is where I come in with Spain. Spain, I don't need to tell you, was Islamic for 7th century, 6th. It's a world empire, a Pax Hispanica. And if you look into the different elements of Spain, the Galicia in the Northwest, quite like the Black Sea in Turkey, the Basques, very like the Kurds, seven languages, very divided, partly industrial and modern, partly very backward. The Catalan, the Greeks and the Armenians of the past, to some extent even the present, or secularized Turks if you like. There's a curious comparison I could make with railways. Spain in the 19th century said we must modernize and build railways and they got the French to do it. A lot of money. Now the whole land is eroded and hammering nails into that kind of thing is very difficult. And they had to do it on the cheap and the railways kept breaking down. And in the end they didn't have much traffic, they didn't actually promote modernization at all. They just carried market, you know, peasants' wives carrying chickens. So they didn't have the money to pay for themselves. And by the 1890s they were in the grotesque position of having to build factories to make obsolete spare parts for the Spanish railways. And it took 12 hours to go from Madrid to Barcelona. The same problem occurred in Turkey. And as in Spain, once they had the money from proper roads built to American specifications, they then had the money to plow into the railways. And who pray is now reforming the Turkish railways, Spanish engineers? Now Spain's modern history is pretty catastrophic. But that devastating civil war between 1936 and 1939 seems to have carried off something like 3 million of the Spanish population. There's a recent book about it by one of the best Spanish historians in England, and it's called The Spanish Holocaust, and that's right. It was an orgy of killing. Its origins I think go a long way back. Spain in the 18th century, part of it looked to enlightenment in Europe, and part of it looked to Spanish traditions themselves obscure. The Basques were at that time ferociously religious and loyal to old Spain. And a civil war of a sort broke out with the Peninsular War. When I was a boy I thought of the Peninsular War as a heroic British set of British victories. It's not really like that. The Spanish were busy fighting each other, and continued to do so in varying forms. They got a reactionary monarchy in the 1830s, further than the 7th. When the Catholics went to town and ensured that they would have purity of blood, what that meant was that three brothers married their three nieces, and the children of those marriages also got intermarried. Until Queen Isabella seems to have jumped the gun and had an affair with an army officer, the quality of the Spanish dynasty was going right down. Until you come to the sad business of the Cuban War, the loss of empire, and then Primo de Rivera and that vicious civil war. Franco in 1940, however much sympathy one might have for somebody having to deal with Spanish communists, Franco overdid it by a long, long way. He did things which Ataturk would never have done. For instance, the old prime minister of Catalonia, Louis Companisse, took refuge in Paris in 1939. He had been instrumental in saving the life of Franco's brother, swapping him for somebody, and had been otherwise very distressed about everything. Franco got the Gestapo to arrest him, bring him back to Spain, and put him up against the wall and shot him. He used to pride himself as he went in from the Thartuela Palace to his office in Madrid. In the number of death warrants he could sign in the back of the car, his record was 3,000. Now, this old monster died finally in 1975, and the Spanish did something obviously sensible, which was to say, amnesty, let's not go over this vicious period. People sometimes try to raise it, but on the whole not. And they've tried to come to terms with the problems that overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1936. So you have an attempt to deal with nationality problems, if you want, with autonomy. Now, there are two problems with this. Sometimes in Turkey they say, let's give autonomy to the Kurds. The first thing is it's very expensive. The Spanish economy is being wrecked by decentralization and duplication of endless offices, whether it's in this bogus language of Valencian or Galician or Catalan or Basque. It's a terrible strain on the Spanish budget, is all that. And the second thing is how do you deal with these nationality problems? They are hideously intractable. I won't go on too long about it, but what is the point in having people speak Basque, especially when it divides into endless dialects which have to be artificially standardized? And I'm afraid the same is true of the Kurds. There are about seven Kurdish languages. The two main ones spoken here are Kermansk and Zaza, and people don't understand each other if they're talking them. Obviously any Kurd, and I know an awful lot, wants to get on in Turkey. And an awful lot of them do. As I speak, assimilation is going on in, well, probably next door. With all these things, but you're still left with an intractable nationality problem that is hideously difficult to know what to do about it. It's all very well-saying. It's a human right to talk your own language. But it's also a children's right to have a language that is useful to you for the future. As you can see, I feel fairly bitterly about this because I can imagine, all too easily, an independent Scotland. It will be run by the most ineffable, soft-professional second-rateers. It'll be a hideous idea. But still, these things seem to be somehow unstoppable, and I don't know what to do about it in Turkey. No one seems to do. The government says one thing, one time, another thing, another. I have a really to deal with one final point in all of this, or I'm overshooting my time slightly. There's one thing at the heart of it all, which I think needs to be talked about, and it is religion. The central point of the Civil War in Spain, the long Civil War in Spain, was the role of the Catholic Church, counter-reformation Catholicism. It started off as an obviously brilliant idea, as you can see from its monuments everywhere, but something went wrong with it. Just to give you an example, the University of Salamanca used to be a very great place. I think the circulation of the blood, that sort of thing, came up there, rather than in Harveys, England. It was a great place. Now, the decline of Spain, or the decline of the Spanish Church, meant that in the year of grace 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, and the United States made some little local difficulties, the University of Salamanca was reduced to one faculty of canon law, and the academics were all lazy and couldn't be bothered doing exams. So they had one examination for the entire university, and it contained one question to be answered in Latin. What language do the angels talk? That is the University of Salamanca. Another example, in the 17th century, the Spanish banned all literature coming from foreign Protestant countries, including Holland. Now, the Dutch knew how to build ships. The Spanish went on making the same ships, decade in, decade out, until it came to the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. About 90 of 100 Spanish ships were sunk, and the King of Spain struck a medal to reward the captains of the ships which had not been sunk. That's the measure of things going wrong. Now, compare that. I could go on on that theme. I don't want to sound too Protestant triumphalist, but I can't help it. There's a counterpart in Turkey which is quite well documented. Ottoman Turkey in the 16th century, very go-ahead place. They needed to know about navigation, and they had telescopes on a tower in Besiktas in Istanbul, which plotted the stars. Some of the religious did not like this. I think possibly because the Sultans were using them for purposes of astrology. Ulema, the religious judges, said no, no. They were given their chance because there was an earthquake. They went up to Mehmet III and said, this is a punishment on us for trying to probe the secrets of God with telescopes. They threw the telescopes down from the tower, and Ottoman astronomy was not heard of ever again. Another example, 1739. They began to realize that if you wanted proper artillery, you needed mathematics. So they had a school of mathematics set up, which again the religious judges didn't like at all. They said very properly, in my opinion, that mathematics was the work of the devil. And they therefore closed that school down. So you find things like the religion getting in the way in the Ottoman Empire and in 18th century, 19th century Spain, and it's something which divides the country even now. I would like to end a bit on an optimistic note because I don't think this country is going to get anything like the Spanish Civil War. It's never had that kind of thing in the past. It's a tense situation, but I think this is the moment when Turkey should learn from Spain and just say, look, let's wipe a slate over the past and let those journalists out of prison. Thank you.