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.
The belief in laws of history has more to do with the historians of the nineteenth century who tried to consider the discipline of history as a science, during a period when it was widely believed that nature was guided by laws beyond the control of human beings. Karl Marx contributed to this understanding by presenting his propositions as scientific socialism which in its turn influenced generations of people all over the world. The underdogs in many lands took refuge in the belief that the injustices they faced and the plight they lived through would come to an end with the inevitable triumph they would ultimately enjoy as the laws of history took effect. For me, as even the Law of Gravity established by Newton (1642–1727) lost its significance as “law” upon the emergence of the Theory of Relativity proposed by Einstein (1879–1955), and since we are living in Liquid Times in the Age of Uncertainty as Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) describes, I do not believe in governing laws and inevitability of history.
VII
Another major question with which I also had to grapple was the role of the individual: how, for instance, in terms of the subject matter of the book, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Öcalan occupied the places that they did, in both quantitative and qualitative senses. Besides the political controversy regarding those names that erects a formidable challenge in front of the historian or writer, the issue itself, above all, is a philosophical one: the role of the individual in history.
For one of the greatest writers of all time, Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910), individuals play an insignificant role in history. In a draft of the epilogue to his immortal War and Peace, he had stated, “Historical personages are the products of their time, emerging from the connection between contemporary and preceding events.”9 One can find a strong Marxist connotation in this statement; whereas the Oxford historian, one-time member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and of the Labour Party from 1926 until his death, A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90) asserted in his 1950 book From Napoleon to Stalin that “the history of modern Europe can be written in terms of three titans: Napoleon, Bismarck and Lenin.”10
The research period for Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds coincided with momentous developments that have been effective in changing the course of history, such as the regime change in Turkey that placed the country, ostensibly, under the one-man rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. So, in terms of historiography, I have felt closer to Taylor than to the great Tolstoy. For me writing the history of the last 150 years of Turkey in terms of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1842–1918), M. Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, three autocrats who each in their own right can accurately be described as a titan, would help us better understand that period of Turkish history in all its richness and vicissitudes. Turkey’s drift from an illiberal democracy to the one-man rule of Erdoğan affected the frame and the content of Turkey’s Mission Impossible because of its impact on the destiny of the Kurdish conflict. Just as Turkey’s most protracted Kurdish insurgency, initiated by the PKK, cannot be analyzed and narrated without specific reference to its founding leader, Abdullah Öcalan, the change in Turkey that reached far beyond this country and left its mark on a global scale cannot be understood without reserving a special place for Erdoğan alongside M. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, and Abdülhamit II, the legendary Ottoman Sultan.
With a nod to the everlasting historiography debate, chronicling the rupture and continuity in Ottoman-Turkish history necessitates the inclusion of these three larger-than-life political names, Abdülhamit II, Atatürk, and Erdoğan. While the narration of history and its crucial episodes certainly features its outstanding individuals, however, I kept as my permanent reference point E. H. Carr’s cogent argument:
What distinguishes the historian is the proposition that one thing led to another. Secondly, while historical events were of course set in motion by the individual wills, whether of “great men” or of ordinary people, the historian must go behind the individual wills and inquire into the reasons which made the individuals will and act as they did, and study the “factors” or “forces” which explain individual behavior. Thirdly, while history never repeats itself, it presents certain regularities, and permits of certain generalizations, which can serve as a guide to future action.11
Moreover, the sine qua non of historiography, “historians should try to rise above their personal prejudices when writing history,” accompanied me throughout Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. I consciously observed this principle, and therefore I am reasonably confident that objectivity (but not neutrality) in that respect has been achieved in this work.
VIII
I was also lucky to call on the help of some extraordinary historians, my contemporaries, who supplied me with invaluable assistance in terms of information, angle, argument, and empirical data. The leading two names in this respect are, interestingly enough, historians whom I have never met or communicated with. Their books and works, some in long article format, played a tremendously important role in the writing of this book. The Dutch historian Erik J. Zürcher and the American historian Ryan Gingeras have been with me from the very first days of the research period, without knowing it at all.
I have never sympathized with official historiography irrespective of the country it is dedicated to. The so-called historians in the service of the official ideology, for me, are propagandists, not historians. I have always sympathized with, been interested in, and been impressed by what is called, depending on the location, context, or period, the revisionist or new historians. The unorthodoxy that they harbor in their essays and books, the creative thinking that they reveal, the challenging new approaches that they bring to the history of a specific country and period have always been thought-provoking for me besides opening up new horizons and filling my treasury of knowledge with invaluable facts that they provide. Regarding the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish history, Erik J. Zürcher and Ryan Gingeras excel among all the others of no less importance, to whom I also owe much. In 2018, Swiss historian Hans-Lukas Kieser, with his work entitled Talaat Pasha Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Armenian Genocide, and the revolutionary historiography that he proposes, stepped into the pantheon of historians who have helped me to understand what happened, and why it happened in the way it did, in Turkey in the last 100–150 years. I benefited immensely from reading his revolutionary book and found confirmation for some postulates of mine for interpreting the modern history of Turkey. The closing chapters of Kieser’s book are devoted to the controversial issues of the “Deep State,” “New Turkey,” and the prospects for Turkey’s future, and therefore the Kurdish issue. With their unique and robust arguments relying on valuable empirical data, Zürcher and Gingeras equipped me for Turkey’s Mission Impossible with concepts essential for my hypothesis on the configuration of power in the “New Turkey.”
The spirit of unorthodoxy that I treasure in history writing, along with the strong encouragement garnered from the oeuvres of Erik J. Zürcher, Ryan Gingeras, and many others, has inevitably made its mark on Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. That was what I cherished in writing the book.
IX
The Herculean challenge confronting me has been how to achieve a time-resistant book, which would remain valid as a source of reference in a rapidly and permanently changing world, especially regarding the fluid political circumstances and constantly shifting sands of the Middle East. Unlike in previous decades, the world and above all, the
