Turkey’s Mission Impossible

Оглавление

Cengiz Çandar. Turkey’s Mission Impossible

Отрывок из книги

Turkey’s Mission

Series Editor: Bahar Baser, Coventry University

.....

Delving into the passionate debate among the great historians presiding over more than a hundred years to dig out the methodology for Turkey’s Mission Impossible has not only been an amusing and thought-provoking exercise but also a constructive one. The research taught me that until recently, alongside many from my generation in Turkey, I have been guided by a primitive understanding of Hegelian determinism and Marxian materialism in looking at history, tropes that have injected a linear directionality into our view of history. History was seen through the lens of an inevitable progress toward our ideologically preferred objectives. Of course, to neither Hegel nor Marx can be attributed the responsibility for this, but in writing Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, I consciously refrained from adopting historical determinism as the sole tool of my analysis. Instead, I wanted to make use of all the available tools in the rich arsenal of historiography, in an eclectic manner. If “how it was” and “what really happened” had precedence in Ranke’s historiography, it was “why” for Carr. In my ambitious project, I wanted to reconcile Ranke’s empiricism that empowered my anecdotal notes as primary sources with the relativism of historians like Carr, who construct history with the foundation of their selectively arranged and organized “facts.”

Perhaps I should add that I do not embrace the doctrine which stipulates that there are invisible laws that govern the flow of history. There, indeed, are dynamics to explain specific historical developments and of overall history itself—that is to say, generalizations—but they cannot be put forward as laws that govern it.

.....