A comparative study of Turkey and Iran: a socio-political approach

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study on two neighbouring countries in the Middle East, Turkey and Iran, both of which experienced similar constitutional revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century, within a period of two years. Considering the other constitutional movements that occurred one after another raises the question of whether these movements were just the consequences of a world political agenda or they occurred only coincidentally, inspired by their internal dynamics.To answer this question, a comparative study was conducted on Iran and Turkey from an historical perspective. First their traditional socio-political structures on the eve of the nineteenth century before the modernisation movements began were compared, then the reform process in the nineteenth century was shown from an analytical perspective looking at how both domestic and foreign dynamics worked interactively. Before making the final comparison for understanding why these two countries, which have such different political regimes today although they passed through similar constitutional and modernization processes, a detailed study of the events of the revolutions is undertaken. The paper concludes that these developments were inspired and affected by outside forces and developments in the world political system. However, the internal dynamics formed by the historical and cultural backgrounds of these two countries, and the experiences they had in the nineteenth century caused different constitutional revolutions in terms of the outcomes they procudced in the next years.