BesondersWeg

Çekoslovak-ya-lı-laş-tır-a-ma-dık-lar-ımız-dan    mı-sınız?

That’s the sentence (two words! I put in the dashes to show all the parts!) they gave us to show that Turkish is intimidatingly agglutinated; it means “Are you one of those people that we haven’t been able to Czechoslovakize?”

Unintentionally hilarious, of course (tabii!), because they’ve set the menacing question of the twentieth century in Czechoslovakia (a state of competing nationalisms if there ever was one), when such a question could easily have been prefaced by “Türk,” rather than “Çekoslovak,” and been far more contemporary, not to mention relevant.

I suppose the continued relevance, not to mention violence, of the nationalizing project is something most Turks would rather not talk about.

I just finished Hugh Poulton’s 1997 book Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic, which was a good overview of competing strands of modern Turkish nationalism–Kemalist (secular, territorial) nationalism, pan-Turkish (ethnic, focuses on Turks elsewhere) nationalism, and Islamic (98% of Turks are Muslim) nationalism. 

The story about modern Turkey is that it was founded and shaped by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (the Turkish Grand Assembly granted him his last name, which means “Father of the Turks,” in 1934 as part of his reform program) in the 1920s and 1930s. He wanted to bring Turkey into the twentieth century and into Europe, and he did that using a mixture of authoritarian and democratic methods. Atatürk’s concept of the Turkish nation was fundamentally secular and largely territorial and civic rather than ethnic.

Territorial and civic nationalism means that everyone who lives in Turkey ought to be an equal citizen, and that ethnic minorities shouldn’t be acknowledged or treated as separate nations. France and the U.S.A. are often cited as examples. For Atatürk, it also meant that his job was not to wage wars of territorial expansion to bring other people he considered to be Turks into the state (which is good, because that’s one of the defining characteristics of fascist regimes), but to defend the territory he already had.

(French colonialism and USAian expanding-into-Native-America are, uh, not quite the same as that idea, but they’re also not the German-Anschluss-of-Austria-and-the-Sudetenland or Fascist-Italy-trying-to-conquer-the-Mediterranean.)

But two other ideas about how to define the Turkish nation–the ethnic one and the religious one–have always competed with constitutional Kemalism, and Islamic nationalism has been particularly successful in winning votes. (Pan-Turkism is less popular because it calls for war against Greece and Bulgaria and who-knows-what, and most people like religion more than they like war.)

Current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was actually jailed in 1999 for his Islamist sympathies, but is now, well, Prime Minister thanks to his many friends. He’s also made enemies who have called for him to be banned from politics and for his party to be shut down for threatening to change Turkey’s secular nature.

Turks who are critical of Islamist nationalism for whatever reason–because they see it as reactionary, because they’re not particularly religious, because, y’know, you can imagine all the reasons–tend to fall back on good old Atatürk and constitutional Kemalism, which has purportedly seen its own revival along with the rise of Islamist nationalism.

I can say that in Izmir (which somebody told me was “the only province” not to give Erdoğan any votes), you see Atatürk everywhere. Turkish flags with his likeness fly from apartment balconies, his portrait hangs in every classroom, and the university theater has a bust of him above the stage. I’m told that some young Turks even have his signature tattooed on their bodies.

So debates about Turkish nationalism make for good reading before you even start thinking about asking the Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Greeks or Jews what they think. (Which Poulton does, but I found it the less interesting part of the book. It is important to note that Islamic nationalism can be seen as more inclusive towards the Kurds, since they are “brothers in Islam,” which is more important for Islamic nationalists than being “brothers in speaking the Turkish language,” which Islamic nationalists don’t really like anyway because they’ve had to fight to be able to do their prayer calls in Arabic.)

As somebody who only learned anything about this business two weeks ago, I might have my sympathies, but in true Swattie style, I would rather talk about how each of the nationalisms is problematic.

(Of course I think every nationalism, everywhere, is problematic, and can quote Hannah Arendt to back me up, but that is not the point.)

The point, I suppose, is that Poulton’s book was a pretty good way to start getting my head around the various Turkish nationalisms, particularly because it took a refreshingly critical approach to Kemalism, rather than just seeing Kemalism as “modern” and Islamist nationalism as “reactionary.”

Poulton argues that Kemalism and its modernizing reforms were often bizarre (since it claimed, among other things, that all languages descended from Turkish), top-down and authoritarian (with the attendant problems of not fully reaching the peasantry), and perhaps anti-Islamic more because Islam threatened its power and ability to push through reforms than because of some sort of grandly articulated theory of the secular state.

I also gather from the book that because most historians focus on the late Ottoman empire and not on modern Turkey, the choices that led to Kemalism have usually been seen as the one and only inevitable path towards modernity. It’s a minor part of the book, but Poulton argues against that interpretation, describing a number of the alternatives that existed but were not chosen.

(Some of which were definitively worse: my favorite part of the book was where an Ottoman intellectual argued that Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 showed that “ethnic” nationalism was superior to “territorial” nationalism, and Turkey should therefore become more racist. I’m glad that guy was ignored, and I wonder if he was still alive in 1914.)

(This whole discussion also gives me a new perspective on my Fulbright project: I said I was a melting-pot-American confused by the German definition of nation, but comparing German and Turkish definitions of nation would also be interesting, particularly in the context of debates over whether German Turks should be allowed to have dual citizenship.)

I’d probably be waving an Atatürk flag too if I were in the country, don’t get me wrong. But if it’s important to understand the many sides of historical villains, it’s even more important to understand the many sides of historical heroes.

So I appreciated Poulton’s critical take on the phenomenon of the twentieth century, a phenomenon that is by no means limited to those-Eastern-European-countries-with-long-names-that-no-longer-exist, but which is vital to those-bridge-countries-with-long-words-in-their-languages too.

(And I’m not one to miss the Chorukor irony.)