Alliance Without War: Strategic Culture and the Modalities of Turkish Alignment Before the Two World Wars

Twice within twenty-five years, governments in Istanbul and Ankara concluded great-power alliances as Europe moved into world war, with opposite results: the Ottoman alliance of 1914 ended in active belligerency and imperial collapse, while the Republic’s 1939 alliance with Britain and France never led to sustained combat. This article explains the contrast through the interaction of structural opportunity and strategic culture, understood here as the historically formed criteria through which decision-makers judged commitment and translated structural pressure into divergent alliance modalities. Power transition theory identifies when systemic war becomes likely; the concept of historical rupture specifies when transition-motivated rivalry widens into a crisis that forces pivotal states such as Türkiye to choose. Broadly comparable structural settings nonetheless produced belligerency in 1914 and alliance without combat in 1939, a difference traceable to strategic-cultural transformation and to the options that status quo powers made available.