Introduction: Turkey’s cold war: global influences, local manifestations

Abstract

A young Turkish boy visiting the Izmir International Fair in the mid-1950s would have found it difficult to choose a favorite between the Soviet pavilion, which displayed a model Sputnik, and the American pavilion, which promised its visitors the sight of the ‘magical’ TV set. By the late 1960s, he might have faced a similar dilemma upon entering a bookstore in Ankara, where he contemplated buying a ‘social realist’ novel instead of going to a downtown theatre to see the latest Hollywood movie. In the meantime, his friends might have been gathering at the campus of the Middle East Technical University (METU) — a model Western institution, where the language of instruction is English — to demonstrate against ‘American imperialism’. Such dilemmas, needless to say, represent only a tiny fraction of what we, as the editors of this volume, call ‘Turkey’s Cold War experience’. This volume, which aims to explore the local manifestations of the Cold War struggle in its ideological, social, and cultural dimensions, is inspired by these seemingly contradictory life experiences.