The Circassian Diaspora in Turkey

A Political History

Zeynel Besleney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780367869069
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317910039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A North Caucasian ethnic group that has been largely obscured in world history as a result of their expulsion from their homeland by Tsarist Russia in the 1860s, Circassians now comprise significant communities not only in the Northwest Caucasus but also in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Europe and the US. The Circassian Diaspora investigates how a community of impoverished migrants has evolved into a well-connected and politically active diaspora.

This book explores the prominent role Circassians played during the Turco-Greek War or the "Turkish National Liberation War of 1919-1922," and examines the changing nature of Circassians' relations with the Turkish and Russian states, as well as the new actors of Caucasian politics such as the US, the EU, and Georgia.

Suggesting that the Circassian case should be studied alongside those of the Jews, Armenians and other diasporas whose formation is fundamentally tied up to a violent detachment from their homeland, and arguing that Circassian diaspora politics is not a post-Soviet phenomenon but has a history dating back to early 20th Century, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Diaspora Studies, History, and Politics.

1 Locating Circassians in the theory

After the collapse of the world’s largest ethno-federal entity, the Soviet Union, in 1991 the interest in studies of ethnicity, nations and nationalism has dramatically increased. Similarly, in a world with arguably an unprecedented level of human mobility through improved transport and communication links, the research and literature on diaspora communities and migrant groups that reside outside of their perceived ‘homelands’ have lately been growing at a phenomenal pace. Therefore, it is imperative to examine the various schools of thought on nations and nationalism, and the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism before presenting the analysis of the political history of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey between 1864 and 2011.

Theories of nations and nationalism

The word ‘nation’ is derived from the Latin word nasci, which means ‘to be born’, and was initially applied to common blood ties. Later, it was used in medieval universities to specify the regional origin of a student (Connor, 1994, p. 38). This dichotomy of territory and blood, which represents not only the biological but also the cultural dimension, has resulted in the problem of definition that has dogged the study of nations since the field’s inception. Various scholars attributed a range of features to define certain collectivities as nations and to distinguish them from similar groupings, such as ethnic groups, tribes and religious sects. While characteristics such as having common descent, language, religion, customs, state and a unified economy are among those employed by various schools of thought for the task, it seems that the significance attached to two concepts – ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘state’ – constitutes the main dividing line between disparate definitions and conceptualisations.

The modernist school in general rejects references to the psychological, sentimental and historical essence of the nation, and considers it a non-historic artificial concept invented by the ideology of nationalism, which came into existence only in post-1789 Western Europe and the United States and was used by the newly emerged local political, commercial, academic and cultural élites as an instrument to attain power in the state. According to this approach, the attainment of a state – and of ‘power to rule the state’ – was the main motivation that drove the nationalist ideologies eventually to create nations. For instance, commenting on Hegel’s claim that ‘nations may have had a long history before they finally reach[ed] their destination – that of forming themselves into states’, Ernst Gellner (1994, p. 63) makes the point that ‘the real history of a nation only begins when it acquires its own state’. He adds, ‘it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round’ (1994, p. 64).

For Instrumentalists like Eric Hobsbawm, nation is an invented tradition and is purely a political creature (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983, p. 13). Having been largely excluded from positions of power by monarchs and their feudal allies, it was the non-aristocratic élites who spotted the potential for their betterment in the creation of a new state for the nation and took the lead in ‘the formation of nations’. He believes that even such a powerful mobilising and binding force as language, which various scholars and nationalists alike consider to be the main marker of nationality, is not what feeds nationalism, as ‘problems of power, status, politics and ideology and not of communication or even culture, lie at the heart of the nationalism of language’ (Hobsbawm, 1990, p. 111). Benedict Anderson (1991, p. 37) considers that nations are constructs of collective imagination and as such are essentially ‘imagined communities’, for the majority of would-be members of these communities can only imagine what the fellow members might look like as they do not get to meet all the other members of their nation in person in their lifetime. Anderson argues that this process of imagination was facilitated by what he terms print capitalism from the late sixteenth century onwards. He asserts that, prior to the emergence of print capitalism, ideas had remained in the hands of the few, had not travelled far and wide, and usually had not been noticed or discussed widely by the large majority of the populations in whose name they were produced. This changed with the invention of printing, which brought about the mass availability of books and pamphlets and the emergence of newspapers in what had, until then, been thought of as the ‘peasant dialects’ or ‘low languages’ spoken by the masses. The fact of thousands of people being exposed to the same ideas facilitated the spread of one particular notion, namely that they were part of something much larger than their extended family, village or town: the nation.

Rogers Brubaker calls for a radical overhaul of the terminology, categorisations and conceptualisations employed by scholars, including those of the constructivist school, in debates on ethnicity, nation and nationalism. He is not convinced that race, ethnicity, nation and most of the other terms used by both laymen and scholars in reference to groups of people who are assumed to share certain values or feel they belong to certain categories of collective-ness actually describe what the user is discussing and/or researching. He finds them confusing and vague in terms of what they represent, and passionately claims that they are applied to impose sameness over a large number of people who, despite the prevailing generalisations in day-to-day life, do not necessarily share the same world outlooks and ways of life. He suggests that ‘we do not frame our analyses in terms of ethnic groups, and that it may be more productive to focus on practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, commonsense knowledge, organisational routines and resources, discursive frames, institutionalised form, political projects, contingent events and variable groupness’ (Brubaker, 2004, p. 27). As someone who has extensively researched the ethnic issues and conflicts in the postSoviet states of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, his own position on nations and nationalism is that he is of the post-constructivist school, but he still shares ‘the emphasis of constructivist studies of collective memory on the malleability and manipulability of the past at the hands of contemporary cultural and political entrepreneurs [nationalist élites]’ (Brubaker, 2004, p. 6).

Ernest Renan defines nation as ‘a soul and a spiritual principle’, and asserts that it exists as such independently of state (Kohn, 1955, p. 135). Walker Connor describes nations as ‘self-aware ethnic groups’ with an intangible ‘psychological essence that joins a people and differentiates it from all other peoples in a most vital way’ (Connor, 1994, p. 92). He also notes that nationhood is intimately tied to the subjective belief in common descent. Perennialists, such as Anthony Smith and John Armstrong, point to various human groupings in ancient history that seem to have possessed some of the features that today are attributed to nationhood. While they acknowledge that the ideology of nationalism is a recent phenomenon, they emphasise that nations or ethnies have existed throughout history, and abundant historical records provide evidence for the nation-like existence of ethnic groups such as Jews and Armenians. Smith (2004, p. 65) defines nation as ‘a named human population occupying a historical territory, sharing myths, memories, a single public culture and common rights and duties for all members’. The ethno-symbolist school, of which Smith is the leading figure, draws attention to pre-modern examples of ethnic solidarity, strength of ethnic identity, and ethnic mobilisation to explain the prevalence and massive appeal of nationalism in modern times, which, he asserts, cannot be attributed only to the creativeness of élites, and suggests that the surviving ethno-historic symbols and other memories of togetherness from pre-modern periods help ethnic groups and nations to survive and reappear time and again throughout history. The Armenian, Greek and Jewish diaspora(s), as well as the English in the early Middle Ages, are examples to which Smith regularly refers.

Before I explain my own view of the concepts of nation, nationalism and national identity, I would like to say that I am just as intrigued by the phenomena as Aviel Roshwald and share his puzzlement (specifically over the term nationalism), which he expresses as follows:

Identified as a quintessentially modern phenomenon by many scholars, it is seen as rooted in pre-modern traditions by a dissenting minority. Embraced as a vital framework for democratic self-determination by some, it is decried as the mortal enemy of tolerance and liberalism by others. Commonly dismissed as a thing of the past by post-1945 observers, nationalism has been the object of renewed fascination since the end of the Cold War, as events such as the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Yugoslav wars … and the surge of collective emotion in the United States following the September 11 attacks have highlighted nationalism’s enduring power to shape history.

(Roshwald, 2006, p. 1)

Yet, I too argue that ethnic and national identities are constructed, and their definition, boundaries and content change (and are changed by a myriad of actors and factors) over time and under various circumstances, most, but not all, of which are explained convincingly by the aforementioned scholars of the modernist school. In different settings, peripheral, cultural, political, colonial or statist élites have been the leading actors in the creation, maintenance and transformation of nations and national identities. Moreover, their efforts have been greatly assisted by such developments as the emergence of print, the collapse of dynastic empires, improved transport and communication systems, increased human mobility, and the linguistic and educational policies of nation states. For instance, in the case of the modern Italian and Turkish nations, creation of the state preceded the process of creation of the nation, while in Germany the unification of various principalities in the 1860s and 1870s was the ultimate example of an ethno-linguistic community turning into a state-owned nation. While a commonly spoken vernacular and high levels of religious unity have assisted the nation-building process, as seen in the Georgian, Armenian, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese cases, their absence has not necessarily meant failure, as evidenced by the Swiss, German and American nation-building processes. Nevertheless, the presence of an independent state, bearing the name of an ethnic group or linguistic community, is no proof that the groups in question are well-defined and stable nations, as in the cases of Belarus, Ukraine and even Turkey.

However, to my mind, this does not provide all the answers we are seeking in our quest to unravel the mystery that is the concept of nation. The durability of the Jewish, Greek and Armenian identities for nearly two millennia, the observability as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the existence of the concepts of collective unity and group mobility resembling the notions of nation and nationalism in England, as well as many failed attempts at nation-creation in the past two centuries (despite the existence of the necessary conditions set out by the modernist school), are but some of the factors that, in my opinion, call into question the universal validity and ability of modernist approaches fully to explain the phenomenon. While the ethno-symbolist approach also fails to explain the majority of the examples mentioned in the previous paragraph, its emphasis on the endurance of historical memory (whether real or imagined), the symbols of a collective past (be they physical or imaginary), and the strength and longevity of cultural artefacts in evoking the feeling of historicity and the notion of belonging to the same collective experiences in the group in question are beneficial for disentangling the issue at hand. Furthermore, in the case of Circassians, the ethno-symbolist approach helps us make sense of, for instance, the ethnic solidarity demonstrated by Circassian Mamluks in the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Egypt, which may be said to have resulted in the existence today of a dormant Circassian diaspora in Egypt, as well as the survival of Circassian ethnic identity in various Circassian diasporas since the 1860s, despite subjection to the nationalising policies of the states in which they found themselves.

To an extent, it is also applicable to the Circassians in the Caucasus. This is so because, except for the Kabardian Circassians, pre-1864 Circassian society did not have a long tradition of independent statehood, nor a standing army, nor any sizable urban centres, nor a native bourgeoisie or powerful national élites. In this sense, from a modernist point of view, the autonomous republics created by the Soviets in the 1920s for various Circassian communities (Adygheya for Adygheyans; Karachay-Cherkessia for the Cherkess; and Kabardino-Balkaria for Kabardians) may well have been considered as a starting point of some kind of nationhood. Of course, these entities were – and are – not sovereign states in the sense of the nationalists’ ultimate aspiration, yet they possessed certain attributes of a state, such as a national flag, a parliament and republican institutions for the groups in question. Indeed, as proof of the success of the state-centred approaches to nations, this type of Soviet nation(ality)-building project might be considered to have succeeded in the cases of, say, the Ingush and Chechen or the Tatar and Bashkir. However, I argue that the project is a failure in the case of Circassians. This is so because, from the perspective of the élite- and state-centred approaches to nationalism, especially in terms of the potential political and material gains involved for the would-be élites of the aforementioned entities, the creation of multiple republics under different ethnonyms would have resulted in the creation of separate Adygheyan, Cherkess and Kabardian nations out of a single Circassian ethno-cultural community residing in the Northwest Caucasus. But it did not. Therefore, since it attaches pivotal significance to pre-existing ethno-cultural features, previous attempts at communal unity, linguistic ties as well as the development of myths and shared historical knowledge (real or manufactured) that some, if not all, ethnic groups possess, the ethno-symbolist approach seems to have the upper hand in explaining the failure of this state-sponsored national-identity-formation project and the persistence of a Circassian national identity as a single national identity for the majority of contemporary Adygheyans, Cherkess, Kabardians and Shapsugh.

In summary, I reiterate that, to make sense of the full extent of the notion of nation, I do not subscribe to the notion that a single formula is c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Locating Circassians in the theory
• 2 Circassia and Circassians
• 3 History of Circassia and Circassians
• 4 Formation of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey
• 5 Ideologies and formal organisations in the Circassian diaspora
• 6 Informal Circassian political organisations in Turkey
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index