PREFACE

This issue of Perceptions marks the completion of our first year of publication. For the editors of this periodical and for all the staff of the Centre for Strategic Research, it has been a valuable and satisfying twelve months.....

TURKEY'S EUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY by Onur Öymen

The choice made by Turkey, its leaders and its social forces to link its future to that of Europe is not a recent one, nor was it in 1963 when the Association Agreement was signed with the Europe of the Six. This vocation has a much longer history.....

ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION ORGANISATION: A PROMISING FUTURE
by Önder Özar

The Economic Co-operation Organisation was established in 1985 as a trilateral organisation by Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. It is intended to promote multi-dimensional regional co-operation with a view to creating the conditions for sustained socio-economic development and to raise the standard of living and quality of life in the member states through the mobilisation of the economic and social potential of the region.......

INTERPRETING THE INTERPRETATION: CONTEMPORARY TURKISH FOREIGN POLICY by Leonard A.Stone

Prof. Dr. Tansu Çiller interpreted the vitality of contemporary Turkish foreign policy (Perceptions, September-November 1996) as a traditionally peace-orientated foreign policy in a post-Cold War climate, outlining in particular possible successes and difficulties ahead in terms of co-operation, relations with the West, Russia, the Middle-East and Islamic countries and concluding with an impressive set of statistics with ....

TURKEY HEDGES ITS BETS by James Nathan

From the sixteenth century Turkey has been preoccupied with the West. Though Turkey wanted to first emulate Western institutions and then join the West, the West has remained suspicious at best. First, Turkey was the indisputable enemy of Christian Europe. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Turkey began to adopt Western institutions.......

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN HUMAN RIGHTS by Riza Türmen

The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union have brought fundamental changes to the international system. The post-Cold War system is no longer based on a balance of terror and nuclear deterrence between the two blocs, but on moral values like democracy, human rights and rule of law, shared by all countries....

MINORITY RIGHTS OR HUMAN RIGHTS? by Helmut Rittstieg

Since religion became a private affair in Europe and a matter of tolerance, minority questions have been dominated by ethnicity. Thus, minority rights became mainly an antidote against a political illness which developed in nineteenth century Europe and has its worst fits in the twentieth century: Ethnic nationalism......

TURKEY AND EUROPE:A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE by Halil Inalcik

The earliest known Neolithic site of Hacilar and Çatalhöyük, dating back to 7000BC "stands out as an incomparable prehistoric centre of culture. It was here that man created one of his first great works of art" (Prof. Dr. Ekrem Akurgal, Ancient Civilisations, p. 3). Agriculture was then practised, as revealed by the excavations......

RUSSIA-TURKEY: DOOMED TO BE ETERNAL NEIGHBOURS by Vadim Markurshin

Viewed in historical retrospect, Russian-Turkish coexistence can hardly be described as an idyll. The two countries fought each other fiercely and for a long time. They fought more than traded. Nevertheless, even in the most stagnant and cloudy periods in relations between the two peoples the process of mutual enrichment of their cultures was not interrupted.....

TURKEY'S ROLE IN POLITICAL DIALOGUE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION by Atila Eralp

My comments will basically incorporate into the discussion insights from the 'globalist' perspective in the field of international relations. Based on that perspective, I will argue that the process of political dialogue in the Near East and the Mediterranean region should be contextualized within the changing global and regional environment.......  

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CHURCHES OF UKRAINE by Ilber Ortayli

The history of the Ukraine and Russia is that of two distinct peoples who share much in common, above all their religion. What we call the Orthodox faith was bequeathed to a portion of the earth by Byzantium. It is true that owing to reforms instituted in the seventeenth century by the Moscow Patriarch Nikon, the church of the eastern Slavs is today much closer to Greek Orthodox practice....  

FOREIGN ECONOMIC POLICY AND RELATIONS OF TURKEY: THE REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE by Ercan Özer

Today, globalism has become the mainstay of international relations and regional groupings are the order of the day. The interdependent international setting is becoming more propitious for co-operation at regional and global levels now that a radical political and economic transformation is unfolding world-wide, reshaping the international scene.......  

ETHNICITY AND POWER: RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CENTRAL ASIAN STATES by Nadir Devlet

The newly independent states of Central Asia could have some serious problems in keeping their independence. When we speak about this we must take historical, demographical, economical, security, social and, maybe much more seriously, ethnic problems into consideration.
In the former USSR, the peoples of various ethnic backgrounds were and still are divided into different administrative categories.....  

BOOK REVIEW

"BLACK ATHENA - The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation - Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985" by Martin Bernal, London: Vintage, 1991, pp. 575.

Orhan Kologlu
Half a century after the Second World War–the most horrible catastrophe of human history–re-search is more and more directed towards the lessons to be derived from it. They aim to welcome the twenty-first century with a more objective and scientific world view......