Turkey

Turkey was a human nation located on Earth in the Sol System. It was located between Europe and Asia, and shared borders with other countries including Greece, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, Hejaz and Persia.

The Republic of Turkey was established in 1918, shortly after the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the end of the Great War. The Ottoman Empire, which included large territories in Anatolia, the Middle East and North Africa, had fought on the side of the German Empire in the war, opposing Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire. During the war, the Ottoman Empire's small colony on Mars was quickly annexed by Allied nations. The war ended in 1916 with a massive exchange of orbital weapons and long-range rockets. The Ottoman Empire was a target for many of the Allies' orbital bombardment and long-range rocket attacks, and as such it was one of the hardest hit countries in the exchange. The Ottoman capital of Constantinople was heavily bombed and destroyed, killing Sultan Mehmed V and much of his line of succession as well as most of the Empire's government and military leadership. Discontent with the Empire had been growing among its people due to the poor economic conditions the population was subjected to during the Great War and tensions among the many different ethnic groups in the Turkish-dominated nation. The power vacuum resulting from the Ottoman government's collapse led to a wave of civil unrest erupting across the empire. In the Anatolian core of what had once been the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed by a group of leftist intellectuals hailing from the city of Antalya. The new government declared its intention to abolish the monarchy, establish a constitutional multi-party democracy, and modernise Turkey into a secular and Western country. Many new states declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire throughout the empire's former territories in the Middle East and North Africa, forming several new countries including Hejaz and Isratin. The new Turkish government announced that they would not oppose the various independence movements within the former Ottoman Empire from establishing self-determination.

Meanwhile, Greece - which had become independent from the Ottoman Empire after the Greek War of Independence in the early 19th century - took advantage of the political instability in the Ottoman Empire as it was collapsing and invaded parts of western and northwestern Anatolia in 1918, before the new Turkish republic had even been established. Volunteer Turkish nationalist militia groups comprised of former soldiers from the Ottoman Turkish military attempted to defend Anatolia from invading Greek forces, but the Greek invasion was ultimately successful due to the weakened and disorganised state of the militias and the post-Great War Turkish military. The Kingdom of Greece annexed the cities of Manisa, Balıkesir, Aydın, Kütahya, Bursa and Eskişehir before their advance was stopped by Turkish forces at the Battle of Sakarya in 1920. The greatly weakened Turkish military found itself unwilling and unable to retake these cities, given that many of them had already been destroyed and depopulated as a result of Allied orbital weapon strikes during the Great War.

The years immediately after the end of the Great War were challenging for the new nation of Turkey. In addition to the cities lost to the Greek invasion, the Turkish cities of Constantinople, Izmir, Edirne, Scutari, Selanik and Kayseri had been destroyed in Allied orbital weapon attacks, and many of these large metropolitan areas were simply left abandoned for several years. Millions were left homeless and with unreliable access to food, water and medicine. Crime skyrocketed - in many cities and towns, armed gangs of bandits and looters roamed the streets, with very few police officers and soldiers being available to stop them. Turkey's population shrank at least 25 per cent and its economy 80 per cent from prewar levels, with the country largely reverting to a rural agrarian economy due to the destruction of industry in urban areas. While Turkey's economy and population gradually recovered in the decades after the war, its economy never surpassed the size of that of the pre-great war Ottoman Empire.

As the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, representatives of the Republic of Turkey participated in the negotiations with the former Great War combatants in Switzerland, leading to the signing of the Treaty of Geneva in 1918. In 1919, Turkey became a founding member of the League of Nations.

Despite poor economic conditions, the substantial loss of territory in Anatolia to Greece, and other geopolitical factors including the growing threat of the communist Soviet Union, Turkey's Western-style secular democratic government proved to be surprisingly stable and effective in modernising the country. The horrors of the Great War caused a rejection of nationalism in Europe, which was strongly evident in the development of post-war Turkish culture and diplomatic strategy. In 1930, the Turkish government formally recognised the atrocities that had been committed by the Union and Progress Party government of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks during the Great War as genocides. Diplomatic relations between Greece and Turkey dramatically improved in 1940, when the two countries agreed to create a passport-free travel zone between Turkey and the former Ottoman areas of Anatolia that had been annexed by Greece after the Great War.

Limited government budgets and the fall of the Ottoman Empire's former colony on Mars to the Allies led Turkey to abandon the Ottoman Empire's manned spaceflight program. Instead, Turkey sent astronauts into space and to other planets in cooperation with foreign space agencies.

In 1961, Greece and Turkey joined the European Union (EU). In 1963, Turkey allowed France to establish military bases in its territory for the purpose of monitoring the transits of Soviet naval vessels through the Turkish Straits. In 1965, the member states of the European Union made the decision to unify their military forces under a single European command. The Turkish military was dissolved, and the resources of the Turkish military forces were integrated into the newly-formed European Union Defense Force.

In 1968, the supranational political and economic structures of the European Union and the Commonwealth of Nations were combined to form the United Commonwealth. The resources of the European Space Agency and the separate space agencies of Commonwealth of Nations member states were combined to form the United Commonwealth Space Agency. The European Union Defense Force of the former European Union and the separate Earth and space military forces of Commonwealth member states were also reorganised into the United Commonwealth Defence Force. The Euro was replaced as the currency used in Turkey by the newly-established currency of the United Commonwealth, the Commonwealth credit.

In the wake of the start of the Allied-Cramori War and the Cramori Empire's attempted invasion of the Sol System in 1976, in 1988 the citizens of the member states of the United Commonwealth voted to give the United Commonwealth Parliament and the United Commonwealth Secretariat the powers of a federal government, effectively transforming the United Commonwealth from a supranational political and economic union to a single federal republic. It was thought that granting the United Commonwealth greater economic, political and military control over the resources of its constituent states would be more effective for planetary defence against the Cramori. The Turkish government was therefore effectively absorbed into the United Commonwealth Government in 1988, and Turkey is largely regarded to have ceased to exist as a separate nation-state on that date.