In 1993, a documentary film titled Sarı Zeybek, which narrates the last days of Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, appeared on a private TV channel in Turkey. Having roused considerable interest, the film reappeared on screens a few more times and later was made into a video. Can Dündar, the producer of the film, writes:

Over the past two decades, the debate over multiculturalism challenged the justice of neutral, “difference blind” rules in liberal democracies. Allegedly neutral institutions were shown to be implicitly biased toward the priorities, experiences, or interests of the dominant groups in the society. Criticism of difference-blind rules and claims for justice to minority groups defined the relationship between government and opposition in many contexts. Arguments for special rights to protect minorities, women, or ethnocultural groups gained legitimacy (Young 1990, Jones 1990, Phillips 1991, Taylor 1994, Kymlicka 1995, Kymlicka and Norman 2000).

The childhood memories of most Turkish citizens are full of images of national holiday celebrations. Loudly recited heroic poems, enthusiastic folk dance performances, costume parades and school shows, anxious teachers, and involuntary laughter during the long, silent moments of commemoration-all are part of these images. A few years ago (in 1998), Turkey celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic, giving us an opportunity to rethink these remembrances as both collective and personal experiences, with all their political and social implications. As in any other country with a state-controlled educational system, the structure of these celebrations had been well established and consolidated over the years, having “an accumulative effect upon successive generations” (Ben-Amos 1994, p. 54). The formalism and the overemphasized nationalism of the celebrations, repeated over and over for years, eventually created a sense of alienation. Nevertheless, when the Islamist Welfare Party assumed power over the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, the revival of the national holiday celebrations was remarkable. Thus began a new approach to celebrating national holidays, with rock concerts, extensive TV coverage, and public interviews. The seventh-fifth anniversary celebrations further revived the national holidays, with contributions from state as well as nongovernmental organizations. After the Welfare Party's assumption of power, the celebration of national holidays symbolized support for the Republic's reforms and secularism, in opposition to rising Islamic fundamentalism.

During the interwar years, U.S.-Turkish relations had been confined within the boundaries of conventional diplomacy. By the end of World War II, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the military assistance agreement that drew on it marked the beginning of a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements that bound the two nations together in the military as well as political, economic, and cultural fields. However, relations between the two states did not always proceed on a smooth path. Hence, the relatively optimistic, formative years of 1947-1960 were followed by the troublesome decades of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, mutual relations settled back on an upward track, reaching a peak during the Gulf War of 1990-91. With the demise of the Soviet system, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Cold War, some commentators expected the eventual dismantling of NATO and with it the waning of the American connections with Turkey. Turkey's “strategic value” in the eyes of the Americans, it was being argued, would necessarily diminish as the Soviet threat-the main component of this “value”-was disappearing. Developments throughout the 1990s, however, did not fully justify those pessimistic scenarios. In fact, by the mid-1990s, Turkey and the United States, with the occasional participation of other states such as Israel, began to build a so-called strategic partnership to contain regional and local threats (arising in the areas surrounding Turkey and ranging from the Balkans to the Middle East and the Caucasus) that had been unleashed by the destabilizing forces of the post-Cold War period. It should be noted that, during about the same period, U.S.-Turkish relations gained unprecedented new dimensions, economic and cultural, complementing and sometimes overshadowing the military one.

This worthy man combined in his single person the various characters of diplomatist, husbandman, merchant, manufacturer, and master of a privateer. To be more explicit-he was drogueman to the French consul at Chios; in town he kept a silkloom at work; in the country he had a plantation of agrumi (citrus); he exported his stuffs and fruits to the principal sea-ports of the Archipelago, and, in the first Russian war, he employed all his spare money in fitting out a small vessel to cruise against the enemy-for so he chose to consider the Russians, in spite of all their amicable professions towards the Greeks. As a loyal subject of the Porte, and an old servant of the French government, he felt no sort of wish to be delivered from the yoke of the Turks; and he looked upon those barbarians of the north, who cared no more for the Patriarch of Constantinople than for the Pope of Rome, as little better than rank heretics, not worthy of being treated even like his silkworms, which he got every year carefully exorcised before their spinning time. (Hope, 1819, vol. 1:2)