Grand National Assembly of Turkey

More broadly, it illustrates how failures in investment markets can undermine public trust and place pressure on governments to strengthen financial safeguards.

For further information, see the Turkish Parliament, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg HT, Anadolu Agency, and Turkey's Capital Markets Board.

IMF forecasts Saudi economy to shrink 3.3% in 2026 as regional war disrupts oil trade.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts Saudi Arabia's economy will contract by 3.3% in 2026, reversing its earlier projection of 3.1% growth.

When World War I ended in total defeat and the victors moved to partition Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal stepped onto the docks of Samsun in May 1919, resigning his military commission to lead an unlikely war of independence.

Against European powers, internal rebellions, and the lingering authority of the Ottoman Sultanate, he unified scattered resistance societies, established the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, and drove occupying forces from the homeland.

But winning the war was only the beginning.

In the years that followed, he executed one of the most astonishing cultural and political transformations in modern history, abolishing the six-hundred-year-old Sultanate and the global Caliphate, replacing Islamic jurisprudence with modern civil law, introducing a new Latin alphabet, granting full political rights to women, and building a secular sovereign republic built on national identity and industrial self-reliance.

Many of the deputies who manage to evade arrest flee the capital and make their way, often through considerable danger and hardship, toward Ankara, where they join the growing nationalist apparatus.

This crisis, rather than crushing the nationalist movement as the British likely intended, instead provides Mustafa Kemal with precisely the catalyst he needs to take the final decisive step in constructing an alternative national authority.

With the Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul effectively neutralized by British occupation, he calls for the election of a new representative assembly to be convened not in the occupied capital, but in Ankara itself, a grand national assembly that will claim for itself the authority to speak for and act on behalf of the Turkish nation, independent of an increasingly indirect opposition to the sultan's compromised government.

The scene of this assembly's opening on April 23rd, 1920, deserves to be pictured with some care because it represents, in many ways, the culmination of everything set in motion eleven months earlier on the deck of that modest steamship approaching Samsun.

Uh, that regulation was, uh, im-- um, uh, imposed or, uh, practiced, uh, by the district government of Silopi, the, the, the, the town, the border town that's right, uh, by acro-- by the, uh, uh, border crossing.

Uh, all this structure was later, um, including the fact that Turkey published a secret, um, uh, Council of Ministers, uh, decisions and regulations, was later, uh, exposed or, uh, accepted in this, uh, parliament, this, uh, parliamentary report published by the Turkish Parliament in two thousand and five, the report on the, uh, uh, on oil smuggling.

So that's how I got all this, that picture, that part of the picture as well.

But because of that, uh, this kind of a bypassing and then Turkey is trying to, uh, you know, um, complying with the sanction regime, international law, but at the same time not really, uh, created a kind of an legal, uh, peculiarity because, uh, they cannot really, um Regularize or legalize the oil, uh, that was, uh, brought to Turkey, uh, by these humanitarian aid cargos.

If you go back 10 years, they were regional adversaries.

And I think one of the most interesting lines that's come out for me in the past few days comes actually from the Speaker of the Turkish Parliament, Neman Kurtulmuş, who said, well, no, Iran is not our adversary here.

In fact, maybe Iran could join this organisation one day.

Well, I wonder what Saudi Arabia has to say about that.

I think if we look at the early Cold War period, when a lot of essentially the sort of geopolitical alignments that were coming about weren't also entirely clear to the actors at the time.

So I actually grouped together parts of the early Cold War with the earlier period that I look at, because if you consider the records of the assembly, for example, the parliamentary, the Grand National Assembly in Turkey, then I think you This is also clear in a lot of the speeches that various political figures made at the time.

For example, the way in which NATO was framed or NATO membership was also understood as a way of becoming almost like, you know, one of the great powers going back to the sort of Ottoman period and the way in which diplomacy was understood at the time.

I think it's useful to bear in mind how a lot of that generation, especially until the 1960 military coup, how a lot of that generation had actually had their political diplomatic military careers formed in the sort of earlier Ottoman context.