Turkey-Anglo-American Security Interests 1945-1952: The First Enlargement of NATO.

• Author: Dutton, Jo
• Position: Review

Ekavi Athanassopoulou (Frank Cass Publishers: London, 1999) 274 pp.

"Muddling through is a prerogative granted only to great powers," the Greek dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, once commented wryly The protracted course of events that ultimately led to Turkey's (and Greece's) accession to NATO in 1952 only serve to confirm his observation. By extension, coherent expediency should be the prerogative exercised by small powers, and this too, according to Ekavi Athanassopoulou's account, would seem equally indisputable. Her Turkey is a paradigm of skillful pragmatism and doggedness, exploiting its strategic location, regional developments and the global political climate, to prey on and benefit from the fears of the West. A refusal to compromise and to renounce definitively its Second World War neutrality furnished Turkey with considerable leverage over the vacillating Allied powers in its single-minded pursuit of a US security guarantee. Interestingly, Athanassopoulou acknowledges that Turkish statesmen frequently exaggerated, often convincingly, the communist threat and the potential for Turkey to succumb to Soviet pressure and effectively `switch sides.'

Athanassopoulou's book charts the developments of the early years of the Cold War from a perspective that has been ignored by historians, but is crucial to understanding the burgeoning Western-Soviet hostility in the late 1940s. Turkey acts as a microcosm of the effects of US action, and inaction, on containing the spread of communism and fostering recovery of post-war beleaguered Europe. Athanassopoulou's account provides a unique context to examine the impact of the Marshall Plan on all of its European recipients--not exclusively those Western states deemed vulnerable to communist invasion. It also demonstrates Turkey's key role in precipitating the long overdue US perception in 1951 that global political assurances made by the Truman Doctrine could only be met by a decisive expansion of US military and security commitments. Simultaneously, Athanassopoulou's account chronicles the emergence of the US as the undisputed hegemon of the West and the simultaneous decline of British power and influence.

Athanassopoulou acknowledges that she did not have access to Turkish archives of the post-war era, and that many Turkish politicians at that time did not write memoirs. She draws her material largely from British sources, records of British-American discussions and the opinions of Turkish statesmen...