Zeki Kuneralp Archives - G. R. Berridge

Diplomatic Notebooks 1, 1958-1960: The view from Ankara

Zeki Kuneralp, Diplomatic Notebooks 1, 1958-1960: The view from Ankara, ed. and introduced by Sinan Kuneralp (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2018), ISBN 978-975-428-616-8/978-975-428-617-5, pp. 342, incl. name and analytical index. Publisher’s page

Zeki Kuneralp (1914-1998) was one of Turkey’s most gifted, well-liked and influential diplomats of the second half of the twentieth century. This book, dispassionately edited, introduced and annotated by his son, the scholar-publisher Sinan Kuneralp, is the first of a promised series of six volumes. Beginning in January 1958 and ending in August 1960, when Zeki Kuneralp became ambassador to Switzerland, it covers all but the first seven or eight months of the period when he was assistant secretary-general for political affairs in the Turkish foreign ministry in Ankara (in May 1960 he was elevated to secretary-general).

This volume consists mainly of notes taken by Kuneralp in his private meetings at the ministry with individual members of the Ankara diplomatic corps who called on him or whom – less frequently – he had summoned. But it also includes notes of encounters at the ministry with other foreign visitors, most of them important, and notes taken at meetings he attended where the Turkish principals were senior government figures. In the interests of clarity and accuracy, Kuneralp – who was fluent in English, French, German and Spanish, as well as Turkish – from 1959 onwards took his notes in the language used in the meetings. In the book, most are in English and those taken in Turkish are followed by square-bracketed translations into English; the introduction, footnotes and indexes are also in English.

For Turkey’s foreign relations, these were years dominated by questions concerning its role in the Western alliance systems, especially CENTO after the headquarters of the ‘Baghdad Pact’ were moved from Baghdad to Ankara following the overthrow in 1958 of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq by Kassem; the implications for the Middle East of Nasserist Arab nationalism, including how to react to the formation of the United Arab Republic, also in 1958; and the tangled and explosive Cyprus question, the diplomacy concerning which was gathering pace in these years. Any scholar interested in these subjects will find a wealth of primary source material of great interest in this volume. As for what it reveals about diplomacy itself, I was struck in particular by the degree to which Kuneralp’s meetings with ambassadors, chargé d’affaires, ministers (legation heads), counsellors and others were dominated by the trading of information on questions of common concern. Some of his visitors turned up at his office with great regularity and all pumped him for information, chiefly on what Turkey knew about particular developments in the region, what its attitude to them was, and what if any action it proposed to take. Depending on the visitor, he responded to such questions with more or less freedom – but invariably expected a quid pro quo. He required answers to the same sort of questions about their own countries intelligence and reactions, including assurances of their support for Turkish policy. Typical, as well as absorbing in its own right, were his exchanges with the Israeli chargéd’affaires, Moshe Alon, who on one occasion (16 October 1958) was accompanied by Reuven Shiloah, the founder of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Shiloah was roving ambassador and political adviser to the Israeli foreign minister, and originator and active promoter of the idea that Israel should leapfrog its Arab enemies and seek strategic alliances with the non-Arab states on the perimeter of the Middle East such as Iran, Ethiopia – and Turkey. Between January 1958 and 20 August 1960, Alon and Kuneralp had 41 meetings, all of which are fully recorded in this volume.

Diplomatic Notebooks 1 is a highly unusual book. It bears no resemblance whatever to the common diplomatic memoir; nor is it, despite the similarity of its formatting, a diary, for as the Editor says, ‘the human aspect is absent’. This calls to mind the contrast with Harold Nicolson’s justly famous diaries, written with wit and elegance, and containing many insights into the personalities of the great politicians and diplomats of his day as well as his own family life and personal ambitions. But the contents of Diplomatic Notebooks 1were not written with such ends in view. They were composed by Zeki Kuneralp simply as aids to an accurate memory of his official meetings, essentially as personal ‘minutes’, and – being carefully dated, full and yet succinct – they provide an invaluable resource for both the international historian and the historian of diplomacy. I recommend this book most strongly and look forward very much to the following volumes.

Just a Diplomat

Zeki Kuneralp, Just a Diplomat, trsl. by Geoffrey Lewis with a preface by Andrew Mango (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 1992), pp. 152, incl. appendices and index. ISBN 975-428-029-0

Theophilus C. Prousis, British Consular Reports from the Ottoman Levant in an Age of Upheaval, 1815-1830 (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2008), pp. 289, incl. index. ISBN 978-975-428-360-0

Centre d’Histoire Diplomatique Ottomane, De Bagdad Berlin: l’Itinraire de Yanko Aristarchi Bey Diplomate Ottoman. Correspondance officielle et prive [in 2 vols.]. I Bagdad (1846-1852), pp. 355, incl. glossary and index; II Berlin (1854-1892), pp. 341, incl. glossary and index (The Isis Press: Istanbul, 2008). ISBN 978-975-428-361-7
Close students of the new, Conservative Party Mayor of London, the at once engaging and alarming Boris Johnson, will know that he has Turkish cousins. One of these is Sinan Kuneralp, a son of the late Zeki Kuneralp, probably the most distinguished and well liked Turkish diplomat of his generation. Sinan Kuneralp is a scholar-publisher and runs The Isis Press in Istanbul, a house at the forefront of publishing scholarly works and original documents on the Ottoman Empire, chiefly in English and French. The three works noticed here are all its products and reflect the publisher’s own special interest in Ottoman diplomatic history.

Zeki Kuneralp was twice Turkish Ambassador in London and, in between, secretary-general of the foreign ministry in Ankara. He finished his career, which was marked not only by great achievements but by great personal tragedy, as ambassador at Madrid. His Just a Diplomat is the memoir of this career, prefixed by a short account of his early life. The book has now been out for many years (it appeared in Turkish in 1981), and a full and sensitive obituary of the author, who died in 1998, is available here.

I notice it so belatedly simply because it came into my hands only recently and struck me as the work of a quintessential diplomat. In its preface, Andrew Mango writes: “Wherever he went Zeki Kuneralp made friends for his country, because his own fair-minded friendship was never in doubt”. What better epitaph could any diplomat receive? It is also important, I think, for English-speaking students of diplomacy to take every chance they have to see the world through other eyes. By translating this memoir into English, Geoffrey Lewis has given us a valuable insight into the mind of Turkish foreign policy and diplomacy over the three and a half decades after 1940. It is still in print.

Theophilus Prousis, who is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Florida, has also provided us with a valuable primary resource. His book contains a selection of the reports and letters, to various addressees, written by a number of British consuls in the Levant in the early nineteenth century, chiefly against the backdrop of the Greek war of liberation from Ottoman rule. His choice falls on William Meyer (Prevesa), John Cartwright (Constantinople), Francis and Nathaniel Werry (Smyrna), and Henry Salt and John Barker (Cairo, Alexandria, and Aleppo). Consuls were expected to report – to the ambassador in Constantinople and, in emergencies, directly to the Foreign Office in London – on everything of political as well as commercial significance that occurred in their districts. Though the abilities of these men varied as much as the time they devoted to their official duties (many had to engage in trade to make ends meet), some of them provided highly revealing reports. In this collection, those of John Cartwright, the long-serving consul-general at Constantinople, are of particular interest to students of consular history. This is because it was during his time that the Levant Company was dissolved, and the British government looked to him, as the senior officer in the consular network that the company had hitherto financed and operated, for a detailed report on its staff. Prousis rightly includes this important document, dated 10 October 1825, in his selection. His book is ably introduced, each section provides background on the consuls whose reports follow, there is a very good bibliography, and a reasonable index. Prousis’s own sentences have a tendency to turn into lists, and I was puzzled as to why his section introductions should have contained such long quotations from the reports that he reproduces in full only a few pages later, but these are small niggles. Consular history deserves and badly needs more attention, and this is a very useful contribution to it.

Finally, I come to the two large volumes in French of the official and private papers (largely correspondence but including diary entries in Volume II) of the nineteenth century Ottoman diplomat, Yanko Aristarchi Bey. I have as yet only had time to read the separate introductions to each of these volumes (I do not read French quickly) but, written by Sinan Kuneralp himself, these are very interesting. Aristarchi was a member of a wealthy and well connected Greek family of Istanbul and began his diplomatic career in 1842 when he joined the Bureau of Translators of the Ottoman foreign ministry. From 1846 until 1852 he was director of political affairs of the vilayet of Bagdad, and in 1854 was appointed secretary and counsellor of legation at Berlin. Except for a short interruption in 1857, he remained in the Prussian capital until 1876, rising to charg d’affaires en titre, then minister, and finally ambassador in 1874; he was recalled in 1876. His papers published here were among those which were deposited on his death in 1897 in the Library of the Greek Literary Society of Constantinople, and eventually found their way – minus some losses suffered en route – to the Society of Turkish History in Ankara.

Among the tasks with which Aristarchi was charged in Bagdad, where he arrived barely 25 years old, were preserving harmony between the French and British consuls, in which he demonstrated dexterity; seeking to ensure that they did not abuse their rights under the capitulations, in which he was zealous; and reporting on the internal affairs of the distant province to the foreign ministry in Istanbul, in which he was so candid as to suggest, believes Kuneralp, that he enjoyed a degree of high-level protection. Bagdad was regarded by the Ottomans as an important observation post from which to keep an eye on Persia, and in 1851 Aristarchi was sent there on a special mission in order to probe the Shah’s intentions. His reports during this mission make up a sizeable part of Volume I of this book.

In Berlin, where he was head of the Ottoman mission for 18 years, Aristarchi was the observer of Prussia’s successful wars against Austria and France and the creation of the German Empire. He may have been a Greek and a Christian, like many Ottoman diplomats, but he remained an Ottoman – protesting if his title of ‘Bey’ was omitted in official communications from the Prussian government and insisting that all members of his mission should wear the fez. He was also a cultivated man with wide interests and perfect German, with a strong touch of the exotic provided by the Bedouin Arab servant whom he had brought from Bagdad. He entertained lavishly, and was altogether a tremendous success in Berlin society. In 1858 he married one of the daughters of General Eduard von Bonin, the Minister of War, which was a considerable diplomatic coup because it gave him privileged access to the court. On the other hand, his relations with Bismarck were not good, the outspokenness of his despatches found less favour with a new regime in the foreign ministry at home in the early 1870s, and in 1876 he was recalled. Though still only 54, he was never employed again.

The very large number of documents contained in these two volumes, each separately indexed, cover years of immense interest from an unusual perspective. The Isis Press is to be warmly congratulated for making them accessible. I am confident that they will be of great value to students of late Ottoman diplomacy, though it will be for students of nineteenth century diplomatic history to judge their importance in that field. I am looking forward to having the time to study them.