Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy

Discursive Construction of New Turkey's Identity

Filiz Coban Oran

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350270909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión, política y estado

This book provides a critical discussion on how different discourses of nationalism in the Turkish media construct contested concepts of New Turkey's identity, which has great importance for mapping modern Turkey's place in the world of nations. Drawing on a Discourse-Historical Approach, the author analyses different discourses on Turkish national identity and foreign policy in Turkish media in the second term of the AKP government from 2007 to 2011, which was the period of consolidation of Muslim conservative nationalism in both internal and external relations. By using three case studies, including the Presidential elections in 2007, the launch of Kurdish Initiative in 2009, and the debate of axis shift in Western orientation of Turkish Foreign Policy in 2010, the book argues that not only has AKP's Muslim nationalism reconstructed new Turkish foreign policy, but also new Turkish foreign policy discourse has reconstructed Turkish nation's Muslim identity and reinforced Muslim nationalism.

1

History

Religion, Turkish nationalism and foreign policy

Introduction

This part of the study reveals that the discourse of Turkish nationalism has had numerous evolutions and branches from its rise in the late nineteenth century to the emergence of post-Kemalist nation-state identity in the present. At the time of the founding of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his adherents set the goal of lifting Turkey to ‘the level of contemporary civilization’ (Lewis 2002: 292). Their images of the civilized Turkish nation-state were modern and secular, thus the way of civilization had appeared clear, distancing itself from the Islamic Ottoman past and the Eastern way of life and instead cooperating with the civilized and modern West.

In this regard, Turkey is defined as a ‘torn country’ by Samuel Huntington (2002: 139) in ‘the clash of civilisations’ in his interpretation of the world of civilizations and the remaking of the world order after the Cold War period. Turkey is torn due to its Kemalist leaders attempting to shift Turkey to another (Western) civilization, even though it has a predominantly Muslim culture. But as Huntington argued, in the post-Cold War era national, ethnic and religious identification issues continued to emerge, and Turkey’s Kemalist secularist identity has been under challenge at home while its Western or European identity has been questioned more internationally. Since a response to this challenge is required, Turkey has been in the process of a redefinition of its national/state identity, which is complicated and painful, both culturally and politically. The common approach accepts that there is a cleavage between the Republican secularist bureaucratic centre and the conservative Muslim periphery (Mardin 1973) in Turkey. This study alternatively argues that the secular (European-Western) and Muslim identities of Turkey are historically constructed and mutually constitutive (Turner and Zengin-Arslan 2013) due to their power struggle; therefore, it concentrates on the diversity in existing understandings of Turkish identity, and it reveals that changing domestic power relations have changed the dominant discourse in Turkey’s nation-state identity discourse and led to the emergence of a post-Kemalist discourse. Therefore, it offers a discursive approach for the understanding of New Turkey’s identity and its place in the world.

This section demonstrates that the Kemalist Turkish state had not been neutral in creating Muslim secularism, which made Turkey an original example in the identity politics of International Relations studies. It is the paradox that what divides and maintains Turkish national unity is Muslim identity and its secular interpretation. Even though this paradox has highly polarized Turkey in the last decade, both sides have benefited from this struggle, as Kadioglu and Keyman (2011) defined that these are symbiotic antagonisms. This thesis therefore offers an anti-essentialist conceptualization of these identities, their differences, and mutual relations, which opens possibilities of democratic interaction, post-secular pluralism (Connolly 2000; Habermas 2008) and ‘ethos of engagement’ among different traditions, faiths, and ways of living them. That this engagement is becoming plural may be healing to Turkey’s ‘social and historical wound left open by the incompletion of the struggle of civil rights’ (Finlayson 2011: 17).

To shed light on the origins of contested discourses on Turkish national identity and the emergence of Turkey’s post-Kemalist nation-state identity, this chapter will provide the historical framework for analysing different elements of Turkey’s identity such as Turkic, Islamic, secular, European and Western. It invokes three major factors that have urged re/construction of Turkey’s identity since the end of the Cold War: the international paradigm shift, especially with 9/11 events; Turkey’s bid for EU membership; and the rise of political Islam and transformation of domestic power relations with the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party’s government since 2002.

In the first decade of the 2000s, reformist AKP aligned itself with the West/EU to consolidate democracy. This attempt legitimized its actions to transform domestic power relations, significantly Turkey’s self-image at the domestic and international levels. Throughout the last decade, Turkey’s internal dilemmas and contradictions in identity politics have reached the top of the country’s agenda in their impact on Turkey’s international relations, particularly relations with the EU/West. Within this context, the object of this chapter is to present a critical discussion on the national identity and foreign policy interactions that will assist in providing a historical framework to study Turkey’s post-Kemalist nation-state identity, its challenges and changing EU/West relations. To realize this goal, the chapter begins with a presentation of the historical roots of Turkish nationalism and its challenge to the Kemalist state’s traditional others: non-Muslim, Islamist and Kurdish identities. Then, it seeks out the evolution of discourses of Turkish nationalism and its relations with these other identities in changing internal and international circumstances during the 1990s and 2000s.

The origins of Turkish nationalism

This section deals with the concepts of the Turkish nation while locating the perspectives on Turkish nationalism within the theories of nationalism. In Turkish nationalism studies, Nergis Canefe (2002) offers an ethno-symbolic alternative (Smith 1999; Hutchinson 2000) for studying Turkish nationalism and its popular appeal. She points out that the hybrid nature of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious Ottoman history and heritage constitutes one of the two obstacles hindering the examination of the Turkish case. Another obstacle is the political and cultural denial of the Ottoman heritage since the Republican establishment. The Kemalist tradition of secular nationalism of the Republican era is formulated against the idea of a continuum that links the Ottoman legacy and Islamic Turkish history. According to Canefe, ignorance of the Ottoman origins of the Turkish nationalist movement and an overwhelming modernist trajectory in analysing Turkish nationalism limit understanding of the Turkish case (Smith 1999: 134). This is because this Kemalist narrative has been influenced officially and popularly by the counter-narratives, their readings of history, and selec tion of events that differently built their imaginations of the nation. Thus, as she argues, the central problem of the construction of Turkish national identity can be identified as its dealings with its own history and hybrid character. Canefe applies a historical ethno-symbolism method to the Turkish case in looking at the myths of the Turkish people’s origins, memories, traditions, and ways of life in a distinctly Muslim Turkish Anatolian society in related symbols of its ethnicity. She shows that the Kemalist narrative and myths of nation selectively highlight the history of Turkish people in Asia Minor. This specifically Kemalist reading of the political past serves for imagining a secular nation by creating distance from the Islamic character of the Ottoman era. She overcomes the clean break between the Ottoman and the Kemalist Republican narratives that hinders seeing the social, cultural, and economic determinants of emerging Young Ottoman and Young Turks movements as the birth of Turkish nationalism in late Ottoman times. Therefore, to gain a deeper understanding, the role of the national awakening, imperial legacy and power struggle in the nation-state building process are taken into account for classification of Turkish nationalism in this section.

The Ottoman Empire had a multi-religious, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual millet system that was organised based on religion (Inalcik 1997). In the period of the Ottomans, it was used to identify legally organized different religious communities such as Jewish millets, Armenian millets or Kurdish millets. For the sake of building a nation-state, Kemalist modernist elites of Turkey rejected the Ottoman millet system and tradition (Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997), and instead invented a new tradition associated with an imagined Turkish ethnicity that had its roots, myths and past in Central Asia (Neyzi 2002: 141). To unify the people, the nation-state would be based on the Turkish language and culture rather than on religion. Turkish was accepted as the official language of the state since it was the general language of communication of the Anatolian peoples. Thereafter, Turkish identity, history and society were redefined, systematized and centralized by the state institutions. For that matter, the words used to refer to ‘nationalism’ in the Turkish language are also ideologically differentiated by the users. Rather than using the term ‘milliyetçilik’, Kemalists prefer to use the term ‘ulusculuk’ (Ozkirimli 2011: 95) or ‘ulusalcılık’ (Bora 2003) to identify their Turkish nationalism, which has a secular modern meaning. The origins of this difference of perspectives on Turkish nationalism will be clarified in this part of the chapter to tackle the complexities of the contested debate on how Turkish identity was constructed and how it has had other branches of doctrine.

Although the words ‘Turk’ and ‘Turkey’ were mostly used to refer to the Ottomans in European literature, this usage covered not only Turkish-speaking people but also other Muslims in the empire as well (Kushner 1977: 8). On the other hand, in Ottoman writings, the word ‘Turks’ signified the peasants of Anatolia, Turkish-speaking Ottomans, with an insulting sense. This identification had changed by the Sultan Abdulhamid period, in the second half of the 1800s, when the term ‘Turk’ became widely used in Ottoman publications and even the newspapers were labelled ‘Turkish newspaper’ (Kushner 1977: 21). Thus, in the pre-Hamidian period the term means ‘Turks as the rulers of the Ottoman Empire’, and then it was used to denote a historical, linguistic and ethnic entity. It is worth noting that the ruling class and state officials had to know the Turkish language as a requirement for employment; however, Turkishness did not hold a privileged position–for instance, the state showed a definite lack of effort in spreading the Turkish language among the population and in dealing with public education. Umut Uzer (2011: 113) supports that argument by noting that Turkishness and pre-Islamic Turkish history were ignored in the Ottoman Empire due to the goal of strengthening Ottoman and Islamic solidarity.

In The Emergence of Modern Turkey Bernard Lewis (2002: 3) provides the literature with a much-needed general perspective for understanding the mainstream of influence that gave rise to modern Turkey: the Islamic, the Turkish, and the local (Anatolian elements such as the Hittites, the Byzantine, the Seljuk, the Rumelian, the Balkans, and Perso-Arabic influences). In the debate over the emergence of Turkish national consciousness, Lewis develops his argument from the book by P. Wittek (1952) Le Role de Tribus dans L’empire Ottoma’ which analyses the Ottomans’ descendants who are claimed as Turkish nomadic tribes, particularly the Oguz Turkish tribe of Kayi. Lewis (2002: 9) writes that at the time of Murat (1421–51), Ottoman history and literature elaborated on the Oguz legend. Significantly, a pure and simple central Asian Turkish language was used in literary schools in writing folk poetry (Kushner 1977: 3) at the end of the fifteenth century. Indeed, making Turkish the official state language in the time of the Ottomans, rather than Persian or Arabic language such as in other Turkish dynasties, such as the Seljuks and the Mamluks, did contribute to maintaining the Turkish character of the empire (Kushner 1977: 2).

According to Lewis (Kushner 1977: 9), the key here was that the sense of Turkishness was retained among Anatolian people in their folk literature, but a Turkish national consciousness bloomed in the nineteenth century as an outcome of Turcological studies, set off by Turkish emigrants from the Russian Empire. The growing interest in, and awareness of, Turkish history produced the first publications concerned with the genealogy of the Ottomans, such as Ahmet Mithat’s History of Modern Times in 1877. According to this narrative, the state of Oguz Khan and the Turks were extensively accepted as pointing out the fathers of the Ottomans who were tribes of Central Asia (Kushner 1977: 27). In the eighteenth century, the Turks had been influenced by Islam and the language and culture of Persian and Arabic. The Turkish Seljuks brought Islam from south-west Asia to Anatolia. Moreover, the transfer of the Caliphate from Abbasid Caliphs to the Ottomans gave the Sultans a mission to expand it to the borders of Western Anatolia. They protected and spread the power of Islam against the Christian West during the six centuries. Therefore, ‘Ottoman’, ‘Turk’ or ‘Muslim’ had been used to identify them in European literature, and the term referred to the territories of the empire. Similarly, in the writings of Ottoman history, the country, the ruler and its army were defined with a reference to religion as ‘the land of Islam’, ‘the Padishah of Islam’ and ‘the soldier of Islam’ (Lewis 2002: 13).

Under the ideology of Ottomanism, all communities in the empire enjoyed their rights as long as they maintained their loyalty to the Sultan. When the empire began to collapse in the beginning of the nineteenth century. different doctrines came to be known to hold unity. During the same period, th e non-Muslim public’s demands upon the empire and the secularization by the Tanzimat (1839) pushed for reactionary anti-Western attitudes (Kushner 1977), while Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek nationalism and restlessness were growing like warning bells of separation. In the following decades, territorial losses made the empire overwhelmingly Muslim; therefore, the authorities and Sultan Abdulhamid emphasized Islamism and Islamic institutions of the state (Deringil 1991), particularly the symbolic power of the Caliphate among the Muslim world to strengthen the legitimacy of the regime between 1876 and 1909. It can be argued that nationalist movements among non-Muslim communities of the empire and their positions in the First World War played a role in the construction of Turkish identity as Muslim, both in the Kemalist and Islamist imaginations of the nation.

The greatest historians of the time, such as Hayrullah Efendi (1817–1876) and Ahmed Refik Pasa (1823–91) indicated the importance of the Islamic character of Ottoman history, culture, and religious affiliation to identify different groups and residents of the empire in the millet system. Equally critical was the fact that as an outcome of Ottoman modernization, the Westernized Ottoman colleges and academies emerged with a new political culture and a new class that had a vision to do politics differently (Canefe 2002: 140). Meanwhile, the Ottoman imperial system, tradition and reforms began to be questioned by the rising military-bureaucratic elite. In the 1860s the Young Ottomans movement opposed the Hamidian politics and practices with an offer of new ideological and political solutions based on Turkism. By the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the new elite was encouraging the formation of commercial companies fostering a Turkish entrepreneurial class and created a bourgeois class among the Turks to construct a society to cope with the capitalist economy (Ahmad 1993: 45). Here it is useful to manifest how their ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism and nationalism (Poulton 1997) could reach the masses of the empire. On this point, Kushner (1977: 14–19) supplies detailed knowledge on the role of newspapers and periodicals of the Hamidian press in giving rise to debates on Turkish nationalism, Westernization, Islamism and secularism. He argues that the press certainly caused increasing awareness of separate Turkish cultures among educated elites and a desire to Westernize the country due to being aware of the scientific and technological power of Europe. The literature on Turkish nationalism supports the point on the existence of a growing body of Turkist publications in the Young Turks period (1908–1918), but there is common agreement in the literature (Hanioglu 1995, 2001; Deringil 1991; Kayali 1997) about whether the Young Turks of the CUP were Ottomanists due to their desire for the continuation of...