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03-10-2009 15:22

The Republic of Turkey is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, created after the overthrow of Sultan Mehmet VI Vahdettin by the new Republican assembly of Turkey in 1922. This new regime delivered the coup de grâce to the Ottoman state which had been practically wiped away from the world stage following the First World War.

Turkish War of Independence

The Grand Chamber of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara

Turkish nationalists established modern Turkey as an outcome of the Turkish War of Independence, mostly on what was to become Turkish territory, as of the Treaty of Lausanne. The war resulted in the defeat of Greece in western Turkey (see Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922)), the East Armenian state on the east; (2 November 1920 Gümrü Treaty), Britain, France, and Georgia. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24, 1923, and negotiated by İsmet İnönü on behalf of the Ankara government, established most of the modern boundaries of the country (except the province of Hatay, formerly the Syrian province of Alexandretta, which joined Turkey following a referendum organized in 1939 after having gained its independence from France in 1938). The Treaty of Lausanne also led to the international recognition of the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey as the successor state of the defunct Ottoman Empire. The Republic of Turkey was founded as a nation-state on the French Revolutionary model.