THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 1932. TURKEY AND THE LEAGUE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21239, 20 July 1932, Page 10

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, JULY 20, 1932. TURKEY AND THE LEAGUE.

So Turkey is to enter the League of Nations. A special meeting of the Assembly has unanimously asked Turkey to join, and that implies more than it says. There has been a feeling of the way. For questions have to be answered and guarantees given before the door is held ajar. A sincere intention to observe international obligations and a readiness to accept regulation of the national armed forces have to be attested. These things are serious and they take time to decide. Perhaps that explains why Russia and the United States, as yet shy of seeking membership, remain outside; Turkey, at all events, goes in before them. The fact is enough to start a score of questions less formal, put by those who know their history as it was written up to a near yesterday. Turkey till then was "the sick man of Europe" and a sort of pariah. "Abdul the Damned" wrote William Watson in years when the Balkans were seething —"immortally, beyond all mortals, damned" —not to repeat a story of Joseph Parker in the City Temple about the same time. Watson was a trifle inaccurate in the title of his scathing sonnet, and duly apologised for that; but his adjective was apt enough. That was Turkey in the bad old days, before there was any League or any Mustapha Kemal. And those days were many and terrible; it is hard to get the taste of them out of n\emory. Barbarity, lit only by a fanatical frenzy for ideals alien to the West, darkens the retrospect. There was a strange compensation for the downfall of the city of Constantine in 1453—it drove classic scholars and their literature in a spreading exodus across Europe and thus brought the epochal Renaissance — but the south-eastern region of the Continent was almost continuously vexed by "the unspeakable Turk" until our own time. His entry to the League will betoken a remarkable modern change.

Both the League and Mustapha Kemal have credit for this change. There are others, but these have helped most. Without the League, Turkey would have had scarcely a chance of joining the concert of the world; at least, not yet. The cleavage between East and West could not have been crossed. But the movement that has swept up, say, China and Abyssinia in its hopeful march, was bound, to take Turkey too, sooner or later. There is a credential for the League no less than for the land of Kemal Pasha in this event. Yet that it did not wait longer is due to a national advance for which he'stands in his day. There was a near-democratic Turkish constitution, it is true, long ago. In 1876, by the influence o5 Midhat Pasha, this was granted by Abdul Hamid soon after his accession ; a parliamentary system came, with a life-membership Senate and an elected Chamber of Deputies. It roused no enthusiasm, however, and was gone in a few months. Thereafter the old order, suppressive of liberty, ruled ■ again for a generation, until the revolution prompted by the Young Turk' Party broke the spell. Thus, in 1908, the Chamber of Deputies came back. But it so fell under the control of this party that those who promised a popular administration became a new oligarchy. The picture of that period is not pretty; quarrels over politics, a riot of personal ambitions, the murder of many Ministers, cancelled out diverse aims of progress ; even foreign diplomats, bent on no common purpose, could do nothing in Turkey save defeat each other. Then came fateful 1914, and a new pressure of circumstances made solidarity more real than ever before. That was the dawn of Turkey's modern era. Yet it lingered on the threshold; not till 1923 was the present constitution born. It is not wholly democratic, but it serves. The President dominates the Republic. Ruthless, even violent, but able beyond all possible rivals —that is Mustapha Kemal ; and Turkey owds its qualification for a place at Geneva mainly to him. Any inclined to question the possibility of Turkey's playing a prominent part in the League ignore the pronounced Western trend of events under this able man —the ablest in all Asia, it is generally said. Exercising absolute power, he makes his Angora capital, Erzerum, more really a part of Europe than Constantinople ever was, for all .its being on the nearer side of the Dardanelles. His extinction of the Caliphate—when he might have been Caliph himself —severed an Asiatic tie, and his secularising of the government of the country had a distinctly European touch. There is more than this substitution of civil law for that of Islam; he has made polygamy illegal, emancipated women from the harem, forbidden the wearing of the fez and turban, established a strict system of taxation and introduced a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language. These changes, brought about without provoking any serious opposition, denote a. Westernisation that has gone far. Turkey's representatives at Geneva will be more at home than those of some other countries have been. And Turkey, at the bidding of this masterful ruler, has developed a' foreign policy more amiable than when Russian envoys dominated Constantinople. The Black Sea is in less danger of reverting to its status of a Russian lake because of this policy, and Britain has been greatly helped in-develop-ing Irak by the marked neighbourliness of a virtual ally. There has been ready co-operation by this Power in the work of the Disarmament Conference. In domestic affairs Mustapha Kemal has lived his dictatorial creed of "nothing by discussions," but beyond their borders he is disposed to frank parleys. In the' new co-operation of these days, his country is evidently prepared to share international duty.