METIN HEPER, İsmet İnönü: The Making of a Turkish Statesman, Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). Pp. 280.

Abstract

İsmet İnönü had one of the longest public careers of any statesman of the 20th century, serving as soldier, diplomat, revolutionary, prime minister, president, and party leader in a career that spanned eight decades, from the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to his retirement from politics, at age 88, a year before his death in 1973. Moreover, for most of his career, İnönü was at the very center of the events and decisions that shaped the Turkish Republic and its involvement in regional and global affairs. But as Metin Heper points out in his eloquent study of İnönü's career, this is a “neglected statesman.” One of the major lacunae of Western studies of modern Turkish history has been an English-language biography of İ smet İnönü. Heper's study is not a biography as such, but it has three main goals: to cover İnönü's entire career; to explore how his self-education and personality shaped his views on the state and democracy, and thus his policies; and to present a picture of İnönü free of the deification or vilification that marks much of the existing scholarship (p. ix).