State of the art. Turkey: Politics and Identity in Transformation

This paper presents a state of the art about a fundamental issue between the Western and Eastern world: the modernity as an identity element in Turkey. Consequently, four segments are developed according to the modernity and Turkish westernization: Fall of the empire, birth of the republic, military power and alignment with the Western world during the Cold War. This review contains key references in the deconstruction of the Turkish identity, which is an issue of great relevance in contemporary history, and reveals possibilities of change in Middle Eastern nations. The methodology was based on an extensive review of secondary sources according to each developed section, and included international databases, libraries and national bookstores. The latter implied the purchase of certain books to account references about Turkey.