Overcoming colonialism/imperialism? Turkey and Yugoslavia in the 20th century - Detailseite

The making and early history of the Turkish Republic was explained by its state building elite as a struggle of overcoming foreign/(semi-) colonial intervention. Political realities should become different than in the late Ottoman past. In the 1920s to 1940s, just like in Kemalist Turkey, the establishment of a Yugoslav state as well was rationalized by its new ruling class as a post-imperial project. Later, in the Cold War era, both states (for some time also allied although implementing different political systems) again struggled to find a way of escaping foreign domination and economic “peripherization” – Tito-Yugoslavia, for instance, by becoming a center of the Non-Alignment-movement.