Meet Norman Stone: Turkey’s staunchest defender
“Turkey is the only country in the region whose past seems to flow toward a positive outcome, a history with a future. As with any narrative, to make things interesting, you want a sense of progress—otherwise you get that famous definition of history as ‘one damn thing after another.’ The Turks have always played a role in making things happen in the world. For a while they seemed pretty dormant, but I knew it would change.”
As the sun goes down, Prof. Norman Stone is standing on the balcony of his residence at Bilkent University in Turkey’s capital, gazing out over gleaming new tower blocks and the Anatolian hills. Ankara looks distinctly affluent these days, with the Turkish economy steadily expanding at 11 percent this year. For two days I have been gently pushing Stone to look back on his career, his decision to leave his post as professor of modern history at Oxford in the mid-1990s and to transplant himself in Turkey, his life before and since. It’s a highly poignant encounter for me, a Turk educated in the U.K., to talk to one of Turkey’s staunchest public enthusiasts—a contrarian posture in any century.
It seems like an appropriate moment for self-assessment: Stone had a minor stroke some months ago. At 70, he’s had to give up drinking and smoking (he was a famous practitioner of both). And he recently published a timely new book, Turkey: A Short History—timely because the world is increasingly curious, not to say concerned, about the strategic direction of his adopted second home, a former hegemon that has rather alarmingly rediscovered its independent spirit in recent years. With Turkey’s newfound influence in the Middle East, with the inchoateness of the Arab Spring, the West holds its breath. Inevitably, what Stone says about Turkey will be closely followed....