"New Turkey" was created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a "Republic of Culture." It drew inspiration from his quintessential statement that "Culture is the foundation of the Turkish Republic." In launching its idealpolitic, the Turkish Enlightenment -- especially in the Republic's first 15 years -- served as the intellectual substance, the galvanizing spirit, and the rational strategy for the encompassing transformation in law and political institutions, social and economic dynamics. It recognized the inherent power of the cultural synthesis the that the Turkish nation had fostered in the past fifteen centuries -- Central Asian, Islamic, Anatolian, Ottoman elite, and folk creative arts, westernization -- and enriched it with a brave new program of modernization in science, higher learning, scholarship, mass education, fine arts, architecture, music, theatre, opera, ballet, cinema, and a new vigorous language.

Remarkably, the Atatürkist venture has remained vibrant for eight decades while our century's most ambitious ideologies have collapsed. It is Turkey's cultural plurality that will give shape and spirit to participatory democracy, which was and continue to be the ultimate aim of the Atatürkist Republic. The flaws and turbulences the Republic has experienced in recent decades have resulted from deviations that threaten to erode the Turkish cultural synthesis. The tenets and the motive force of that synthesis are the sovereignty of the national will, secularism, freedom of thought, the supremacy of law, equal rights, peace and progress, nationwide education and economic development, democracy, and modernization for "life in dignity" and full-fledged participation in world civilization.