’We call you to holy war’: Mustafa Kemal, Communism, and Germany in French Intelligence Nightmares, 1919-1923

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Mustafa Kemal and his Turkish National Movement fought to create a Turkish nation-state in the face of Allied attempts to partition the Turkish regions of the former Ottoman Empire. The struggle over the future of Turkey overlapped with the civil war which came on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution in neighboring Russia and the assumption of control over nearby parts of the Middle East by Britain and France. Believing that events in Turkey were bound to have an impact on its attempt to consolidate control over its new imperial holdings in the Near East, the French government made a concerted effort to come to grips with the nature of the Kemalist movement. In the process, however, France’s military intelligence analysts, instead of seeing Kemalism as the nationalist and secular, westernizing movement it was, chose to identify Kemal as the central figure in a communist-inspired, German-controlled anti-colonial enterprise closely allied to Islamist political movements. The French military’s misunderstanding of Kemal’s goals and ideology reflected intelligence officers’ belief that Middle Eastern developments were essentially derivative of European politics.