 Wel, ddeBL addysgu, rydyn ni wedi rhoi fawr o'i rhaid addysg, a rhaid addysg o'i creddol, fel mae'n ddych chi'n ddefnyddio'r byw. Felly, mae'n ddefnyddio'r byw o'u dros sy'n mewn John, I was briefly moved in to be Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter, and it was after she'd fallen and she was still in good vigor, and she was of course invited to talk quite a lot. She got an invitation to Frankfurt to talk to the Buddhist bank, and God forgive me, I rather approve of modern Germany, and we used to have some rows about it, and I did manage to make her do a pro-German speech, and she was pro-German for a good week, but while we were doing it, oh, we had rows, and she would say, where's John, and throw things, and throw to be temperamental, and obviously John did this, he played her like a stratifarius, it was a brilliant performance. Now, I don't want to talk about what John has to say about Europe, but I have a very difficult one to follow, which is John Derbyshire talking about China, and he said, in reference to Turkey, that perhaps Turkey, with 90 years, having got rid of an empire, adopted a republican constitution, perhaps Turkey can be some sort of model of China, despite this long, millennial history of Oriental despotism. It could be a very difficult act to follow. I'll do my best, but Turkish history is quite complicated, and whether Turkey, whether the Ottoman past is actually a guide in any way to the Turkish present is a very good question. You know, you can look at English history, and you can see, you know, you can't do it these things directly, but you can get a general sense of the history and the character of the place, and it's a sort of vague guide to the present. If you look at English, or, for that matter, European portraiture, from the moment where, I suppose, in the 14th century, representational paintings come up, you can see the national face emerging. As I look in the mirror, I can recognise, very obviously, a sort of pudding-faced Scotsman. And you can see these things back in the 14th century. It's not so easy with the Ottoman Empire. You can actually, if you look at the porcelain curiously enough, the little faces in these miniatures of Persian type, you can see the faces of, well, the waiters in this hotel in another version. But it's very difficult to take the Ottoman Empire as any sort of model for modern Turkey. I think I can do it, and I've got a thesis which I will dance, which is that what we are living through at the moment is a version, a smudgy version, of what Turkey went through in the 1880s and 1890s under Abdulhamid, when, with the kind of politicised religion, there was, for the last moment, a revival of the Ottoman Empire expressed in the fabulous buildings of the European, of the Ismir or Constantinople, or the railways which begin to snake around, and the emergence of a government machine, which is capable of doing the sort of things that government machines have to do. Now, I'm not going to go on too much about this, but when, at the present phase, Turkey is in, in an interesting moment of renewing with the Ottoman past, not saying, as was done 90 years ago, the Ottoman past is so much junk, let's get away from it. This is year one of the Republic, not doing that, but going back, and it's curious, you know, just knocking around in Turkey, if I go on the bus quite often from Ankara to Istanbul, and if I get out at Chalayan, the taxi driver, we've got talking, but the taxi driver will talk about the television things which are shown, now, very, very popular, the latest one is about Suleiman, the magnificent, but there have been plenty of programmes where serious historians talk about this or that aspect of the Ottoman past, and the history has very much come alive, sometimes wrong, but it's there, and it's an interesting phenomenon. Now, before I get on to talking about, well, my title is What Makes Turkey Work, before I approach this vast and formidable subject, I might start by saying that, you know, although there are good books on Turkey, not as many by Turks on their own modern history as there ought to be, they've let that foreigners remarkable, but there's still a sort of idea which goes round that, which can only be described as the black legend of Turkey. Now, I think it's eroding, I think more Europeans, and the Americans have never been anti-Turkish, they're the best foreigners here, by the way. The Europeans are beginning to understand that it's not all black, but because a lot of students go. My star, I mean I've had many good students here, my star got a Microsoft scholarship to Cambridge, and I mean I heard about the interview from three sources, one obviously from him, two from a friend of mine who was on the board, and three from one of the defeated candidates who realised when he heard the laughter coming from inside the room that he'd lost. And a little more out has gone off to Cambridge, and I said, well, how is, what's it like? He said, it's all right, but it's just terribly difficult because people keep saying to me, what about human rights in Turkey, what about police women, wasn't there an Armenian genocide, what about the poor old curbs? He said, how should I deal with it? I said, listen, it's simple, just say, yes, it's true, but the sex is heaven. And there is this black legend which goes on. It has been, I'd have to say, it's been fermented, most obviously, by the Armenian diaspora. And this is something I know something about. And let's put it this way. The Armenians were not innocent. They were doing their share of the slaughtering as well. And you cannot see that the Minister of the Interior said, wipe the Armenians out. That's all forgeries, nasty things happened, lot of theft, but not, and it's not the genocide. The Armenians jump up and down, up and down and up and down in the European Parliament and here, there, everywhere, trying to take advantage, obviously, of American law to try and extract compensation from the Deutsche Bank or French insurance company on and on. The ones who I think have made a terrible mistake are the Greeks. It has done them no good at all to frustrate Turkey's entry. What happened on Cyprus, everybody knows who was there at the time, is by no means 100% Turkish guilt and Greek innocence. If you listen to Greeks talking about it, you get the impression that the Greek Cypriots were just dancing around their meatballs with their bazookie music when all of a sudden a hairy squat people arrived, not at all. And yet that is the version which somehow spread around the Western world. And the Greeks have gone on for quite a long time, making life difficult for the Turks, over endless silly little issues, particularly now, obviously, the European matter. It is something which they ought to regret. It is in no way in Greece's interest to get on so badly with her major neighbour and she will simply provoke trouble. It's simply not true to say that historically Greeks and Turks were enemies. In 1453 when the Turks arrived, the first port of coal of the Sultan was on the Orthodox Patriarch and the Orthodox Patriarch had one hatred in his life, the Latins. The Latins had destroyed Constantinople in 1204 on the 4th Crusade. That was when the Byzantine Empire was ruined. After that it was taken over by teams of rival Italians, Genoese, Pesans, Venetians. The population of Constantinople shrank from something close to a million to something like 50,000. The buildings were falling down. The last Byzantine Emperor didn't pay his rent and the Turks decided more or less to kick him out. Now, the Patriarch and men at the second did a pant that the Orthodox Church was the largest landowner in the empire. The Patriarch had the rank of an Ottoman Pasha, all sorts of privileges attached to it, and the document was run together with the title that was used for a Byzantine Emperor, Megasar Thente's Great Prince. Now, the Turkish here can't accommodate certain combinations and constants. That's why they call Smyrna, Izmir. It's why Urgub in Cappadocia comes from the word Procopy. It couldn't accommodate Megasar Thente's, and it turned it into Effendi. Effendi, the honorific of the Middle East, is actually a corruption of Byzantine Greek. That sums up the relationship. It's only in modern times that there was any kind of rivalry. I'm sorry, now listen, I'll be accused of using all sorts of unfortunate vocabulary at this, but I often think that about 1453, and the siege of Constantinople, if you'll forgive me, the Turk saved the speck from the warp. That is more or less what happened in the setting up of the Ottoman Empire. Now, it declined. Why? It's a very interesting question. Here you're asking the question, why did China go, how did these non-European societies, great civilizations like China, why did they lose their impetus? It's very difficult to answer that. I have a suspicion about the Ottoman Empire that it might even be climate change. In the 17th century, you can see deforestation happening in central Anatolia. Maybe the strains of malaria or something, but at any rate, the decline happens, and you ask yourself, which country does Turkey resemble? It's a good one, and the answer is Spain. If you think Spain, five centuries of Islam, and very grand most of the time, an empire, Latin America, Peru conquered by 2,000 Spaniards, etc. A very grand civilization, the architecture, everything. And then around about 1600, signs of trouble, and 1700, it's rotting, actually more than Turkey. And then comes a very sad period in the 19th century, when the army becomes the maker of politics. Its relationship with Europe is expressed first by the Spanish experience in the peninsula of war, and then, of course, the horrible civil war in the 20th century. And it's only in the 1970s, after Franco, that you can see some kind of Spanish recovery happening. But other little parallels, the Catalan, who do you think the Catalan resemble? The Greeks of Anatolia, the creative minority, and who pray of the Basques? Seven Basque languages, only one of them particularly developed, living in mountains, one part of them fanatically religious. The other half, the other part, taking part in the terrorist activity of Eta, the courts. You can see, the Spanish parallel is something that works quite well. Spain has recovered, not at the moment, but it has recovered remarkably well, and I think that is the path that Turkey is on. Now, the Turks started off in 1922, having lost about a third of the population. The Armenians, I'm sorry to bang on about this, but the Armenians claim that they lost, well, a third of their population. The figures have expanded now to sort of 2 million. The figure they gave at the time was 800,000. But the fact is that in eastern Anatolia, there's horrendous diseases starvation going on, and a third of the population is wiped out. Refugees had come in from the Balkans, as earlier from the Caucasus, as earlier from the Crimea, and seven million refugees represented something like two-fifths of the then population, and half of the urban population in the town population. When the Turkish Republic was set up, they more or less had to create a language. Now, all this was forced on them. It's the Greeks and the Armenians and the French and the Italians and the British who tried to partition Anatolia and were shown off. They are left with a country to create, and although those days are long gone, and really more or less, it's not a model that's alive now. It's rather a heroic business when you think you've got a whole country to remake. Let's start off with the language. England just grew. We never had to have a language reform. People just wrote things, which is why we've got this absurd spelling. There was no English Academy to standardise the language, so you spell enough with this ridiculous OUGH and so on. It must be a nightmare for foreigners to learn and never been reformed. An effort was made in England's such an interesting place. It's the first modern country. You wouldn't think so. We've paid for it ever since. A monk at the time of the Thirty Years' War, before printing, produced a book called Remorse of Consciousness. England was fighting France at the time. Another patriotic monk said, these words are Latin. We have to change them to something Anglo-Saxon, and he translated it into the again bite of Inuit. Remorse is Latin for a bite again and inuit you get it. The English intelligentsia have many faults, many, but no one has ever accused them of lacking a sense of humour. A shout of laughter went up across the land and language reform in England has never been heard of again. Not every country is as blessed as England in that respect. The Ottoman nationalities had to invent a language and the Greeks had fun. There weren't in Greek words like journalists or foreign travel. You know what the Greek for foreign travel is. Metafora esoterica. The word for journalism is ethemeristica. The Turks are faced with the same sort of problem of having to create a language. For them it's worse because they had a script which was Arabic in origin. Arabic has got three vowels. The Turkish has eight if you include the omelons. It's complicated diacritical marks have to be used to explain the vowels. The literate population in the Ottoman Empire, even after some sort of simplification of the language, can't have been more than about 10,000 in a population of 21 million. Most of them may disagree with me about this, but when the Republic comes in, it wants to make the peasants literate and it has to change the language. If you're making peasants literate, you obviously simplify terribly and all sorts of words just go. I love reading old Turkish texturies. They're fascinating. You get words like ifrahat, which is described as the pride that a father feels in his son's achievements, or my favorite, which is mi alim. No one understands it now, but that means a condition of looseness of the vowels, which is just under control. I find myself using these things with taxi drivers to Scottish acts and results are very funny. The language reform is the first thing which comes in, and this was drastic. The counterpart has been that the writers of this country have got a patriotic mission, which carries on to this day of advancement. They're enhancing the language, and the other side of it is that people, the masses of the people are detached from their, well, they can't read their grandfather's tombstones. The Turks themselves are very badly divided on this, and some people say that the old Ottoman language could have been reformed without bringing in a whole set of Latin letters. Now, the other reforms which come in, well, you know, if you were in a town in Turkey in 1930, you turn on the radio, you hear Mozart, you go to a university, you will find 1,000 academics, mainly German, and they were supposed to be headed by Einstein coming and doing the teaching, writing the textbooks. That was the most extraordinary moment in the 1930s, and if you do that to a people, and you force Western standards on them, there's going to be some kind of reaction at some point. Now, it's all done. Well, you know, it obviously, the question hanging over these Middle Eastern events at the moment, Cairo, Tunisia, Tunisia was the first starting this process, then the question hanging over the whole thing is, why are they not like Turkey? Why is Istanbul, Barcelona, a not Cairo? It's a very good question to ask, but I think the starting point of Anatolia in 1922 is so very different from the Arab world that in the end this question was meaningless. Still, you know, the Ataturk, the Ataturk Revolution is something which took place, it did, it treated the, even the enlightened Islam, the enlightened cleric who was called Said Norsi, they put him in prison for quite a long time. They changed Islam from the top and regulated Islam quite heavily, at least in the towns. And if you were a traditional minded Ottoman, you know, and after all, the native religion is inescapably part of yourself. It's something that you get as a small child when you grow up with, it's, I mean, using platitudes, it's system values are things which are almost independent of the actual practice of the religion. It is very much part of yourself and in one form or another, and to try to suppress it is obviously dangerous. Now, in the end, Ataturk was, he was an atheist, yes, but he was careful what he said in public, and what he did try to do was to encourage a different sort of Islam. Now, at this point, I should say, this government in Turkey has been very successful in all sorts of ways, quite remarkably successful, it's in the last lot, eight, nine years. And it is also the product of an Islam which does talk about reform. I saw the Prime Minister on television about a year ago. He was in Erzurum, which is a very pious place. The Esam, the call to prayer, is deafening. And you see these women in black scuffling around the place. There is a place where you can get a drink, but it's hidden in a back street. It's ugly, Anatolian, concrete, and so on and so forth. And the Prime Minister went there, and some women turned up in the black outfit. By the way, it's called Chador, as you know. That is from the Turkish word for tent. And he saw this woman wearing her chador, and he said, look, you don't need to wear that sort of thing. It's ugly, it's as you know favours, get rid of it. Now you see, we have that kind of Islam, and that's what is wrong with it. And at the moment, if I say this kind of thing in Turkey, the secularists, the people who are on the side of the Republic, will say, no, no, the people who support this are traitors. They're only doing this temporarily, and then we'll have the full weight of traditionalist Islam. I'm really not so sure. I hesitate to say anything as a foreigner, and you know, as John Derbyshire said, even if you've been in the country for a long time, it is possible to make a complete fool of yourself in terms of prognosis. But I cannot myself yet see what it, what there is to be, alarmed about. Now, Turkey's come a long way. The Republican period, when you're making the peasants literate, when you're introducing elementary hygiene, which the Republic did with great success, the schools, the country works. When the election comes out next in June, everybody knows it will work in the main without any kind of corruption or anything of that sort, except possibly in the Kurdish areas, that all sorts of things do work in Turkey for a modern state. If you look at the economy very obviously, the Turks make things. It's nice to be, and if you're British, you're in a country that doesn't make things by and large. But it's nice to be in a country where my students will think nothing, going into business, Microsoft, making things, selling pharmaceuticals all around the world. They do it very well. In that respect, Turkey's been doing very well indeed. Now, at the end of it, it is, I think, going back to a period after about 1878, when they had lost the war that ended with the Treaty of Berlin. They lost a good part of the Balkans, and refugees streamed out of the Caucasus, especially to besetled in miserable circumstances all over Anatolia. The Circassians, they're called, a million and a half of them, were thrown out of Russia. About 300,000 of them died in leaking boats in the Black Sea. God knows how many others died as they were resettled all around Anatolia, particularly in northwestern Anatolia. They arrive, and then the last really serious Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid, came up, and he used Islam as a way of unifying the empire. It didn't mean trouble for foreigners. Quite the contrary, you could set up French language schools, the Americans set up missionary schools all over Anatolia, in Beirut. No trouble with foreigners. He stabilized the currency and ran things. One of the best buildings in modern Istanbul is called the Kestel Adet Ottoman. It's now the Istanbul Boys' School, and it's lit up just over the Golden Horn, the marvellous Italian building with Gabley. That set up as the Europeans looked after the Turkish finances. The Turks screamed about it, but it was exploitation by the Europeans. It wasn't. It was a way of bringing down interest rates and encouraging investment. So Turkey did get railways, did get good buildings, did get banks, and it's quite a promising period under Abdulhamid. It's all done with a certain amount of Islam in Turkey. It's not the sort of Islam you get in Egypt. Abdulhamid drunk the old brandy, but he wasn't much of a drinker, but he was a terrible lady's man. The Quran allows four wives. Abdulhamid decreed that, since he was the representative of God upon this earth, he would have seven. And he married his 17-year-old wife at the age of 58. The daughter of that married died not so long ago. He allowed the foreigners, especially the schools, to go on. He doesn't stress Turkishness. What he does stress is Sunni Islam. Sunni Islam is the one we live with in Turkey. It doesn't make problems for foreigners. It does make problems for people who are not Sunni, namely the Alevis. They are a quarter of the population of just about in Turkey. Their tradition is formally, I say stress formally, Shia, as in Persia. But they are probably a lot to the old religion of the Turks, shamanism coming from Siberia. There are obviously Orthodox influences. They are very secretive and they flourished in the provinces. And there is tension even now between this government and the Alevis, who are the backbone of the Republican and the left-wing parties. Look, the parallel doesn't work. Don't take it seriously. But the reason why Scotland got a reputation for being red was because in 1917 the Catholic third of the country voted Labour. And it's much the same sort of thing here. And there are tensions of that kind, which are in the end something historic. Now where does Turkey go from here? I think you take, first of all, the line from 1922 to the present. And that's been steadily up. It's not been dramatic progress. It's not been a career starting off exporting wigs in 1960. And then 40 years later, God knows what. It's not that. I don't think it ever would be. It's not that kind of place. Nevertheless, the progress has been very steady. If I go to a Turkish public hospital, there's a bit of bureaucracy, but I know I get dealt with quicker than I would be in an English public hospital at the moment. I'd rather tend to trust Turkish schools as well. They're not bad at all at the top end. So on that level, all's well. There are tensions below the surface and sometimes just coming up. First of all, there's a big regional problem that the east is very different from the west. The Kurdish east is going to be a terrible headache for this country because you can't solve problems like that by spending money. The problem is partly demographic. You find families with 40 children, which is a terrific strain on everything. I hope very, very firmly that the country will stick together, but still there is no doubt that there is a tension now, which has been created by a terrorist movement, the BKK, which might prevent the improper integration of the country. I don't know. I'm a Scotlun. If there is one thing I detest in this world, it is tin-plot nationalism, and the moment Scotland becomes independent, I become a Turk. I'll bear that kind of thing. Let's hope this country will stick together, because in the end it's the best place that there is to be alive between Athens and Singapore.