History of the Republic of Turkey making Turkey a homogeneous Muslim state. There was also the rise of the active participation of the military in politics after the First World War as shown in the so-called Young Turk Revolution in 1908. Ten years later, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and other army officers dominated the polity that finally established the nationalist Republic of Turkey out of what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was established based on the ideology found in the country's pre-Ottoman history and was also steered towards a secular political system to diminish the influence of religious groups such as the Ulema. The history
Accession of Turkey to the European Union European Parliament, equal to Germany's. If Turkey were to join the European Union, Istanbul would become the most populous metropolis in the EU. Cyprus was divided when, on 20 July 1974, Turkey invaded and occupied a third of the island in response to an Athens-engineered coup aimed at annexing Cyprus to Greece. Since then, Turkey has refused to acknowledge the Republic of Cyprus (an EU member since 2004) as the sole authority on the island, and recognizes the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus since its establishment in 1983. The Turkish invasion in 1974 and the resulting movement of refugees