Turkey and the Politics of National Identity

Social, Economic and Cultural Transformation

Shane Brennan, Marc Herzog

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857736857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

In the first decade of the twenty-first century Turkey experienced an extraordinary set of transformations. In 2001, in the midst of financial difficulties, the country was under IMF stewardship, yet it has recently emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. And on the international stage, Turkey has managed to enhance its position from being a backseat NATO member and outside candidate for EU membership to being an influential regional power, determining and developing its own individual foreign policy. Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog explore how these and other changes have shaped the way people in Turkey perceive themselves and how the country's self-image shapes its actions. In the modern age, the sovereign nation-state still continues to be one of the basic building blocks of social or political identity. The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, is a good example. In weaving together and selecting certain elements of memory, myth, tradition and symbols, the narratives of national identity in Turkey have been, to a large extent, socially constructed.This volume offers analysis of the ways in which these narratives have been created, maintained and negotiated, and how current economic and political interests have been incorporated into the construction of a modern identity.
External forces such as those of cultural and economic globalisation have also been influential agents in this process. As a result, the space and opportunity for social and cultural expression has increasingly widened while alternative identities and life-style choices at both the collective and individual levels have also become more visible. Bearing this in mind, this book examines issues such as those of alternative gender identity and sexual orientation, formerly taboo issues. Through different approaches engaging with politics, economy, society, culture and history, Turkey and the Politics of National Identity offers new perspectives on the transformation of national identity in this increasingly influential country in the Middle East.

PART 1

POLITICS

CHAPTER 1

EXPLORING TURKISHNESS: ‘TURKISH’ AND TÜRKİYELİ

Baskın Oran

On 1 October 2004, the Human Rights Advisory Commission (HRAC),¹ a human rights body of which I was a member, and which was appointed by the Turkish Prime Minister’s Office, published ‘The Report on Minority Rights and Cultural Rights’. Produced by one of the 13 subcommittees of the HRAC, it was approved in the Commission’s plenary by 24 votes for, seven against and two abstentions. Shortened in the media to ‘Minority Report’, it was prepared in accordance with paragraphs a, b and d of Art. 5 of the HRAC Regulation, titled ‘Duties of the Commission’. These paragraphs task the Commission to ‘provide advice, submit recommendations and reports, express opinion and recommend adoption of administrative measures’.

The report caused a furore in Turkey. There were all sorts of attacks on it. For example, one member of the Commission seized and tore up the papers held by the Chairman of HRAC during the press conference. The attacks included all sorts of threats and insults. Some trade union leaders issued death threats. One member of the parliament took the floor and spoke off the agenda: ‘People looking for minorities by producing this report should ask their mothers who their fathers are’.

I must provide an explanation here for readers not familiar with Turkish politics. I do not know what this statement amounts to in their respective countries, but one cannot imagine a worse insult in Turkey, and this person was finally acquitted at the Court of Cassation on grounds of ‘freedom of expression’. I would also like to add that we took legal action against some of these death threats and harsh insults – 14 legal actions in total. We lost on all counts in all cases, always on grounds of ‘freedom of expression’, against which we have now gone to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.²

As to the report itself, the public prosecutor instigated legal action against it. He requested a five-year imprisonment sentence for myself as the author of the report and for Professor Ibrahim Kaboğlu as the Chairman of HRAC who put the report to the vote. The indictment was based on two pieces of legislation, ‘Insult against the Judiciary’ (Art. 301/2) and ‘Inciting hate and enmity among the public’ (Art. 216/2). It might create some perplexity for the foreign reader but I must add the following two things: the first charge (under Art. 301/2) emanated from the fact that I had repeated word for word a section of an academic paper of mine published in the Review of the Constitutional Court; Art. 216/2, from which the second charge emanated, was promulgated in 2002 to punish hate speech against disadvantaged groups.

To cut very short a long story, the case ended with acquittal in the Court of First Instance. The public prosecutor of this court then appealed to the Court of Cassation; however, Penal Chamber No. 8 of this Court approved the acquittal. Then the public prosecutor of the Court of Cassation placed an appeal against this with the Plenary of the Penal Chambers. That body finally and decisively approved, on 29 April 2008, the acquittal concerning Art. 216 of the Turkish Penal Code. As the permission of the Minister of Justice was necessary to continue the trial concerning allegations about Art. 301, the court asked for this permission. Although Professor Kaboğlu and I declared willingness to be tried, the Minister refused to grant this permission and the trial was concluded in March 2009.³

In this brief chapter, I first reproduce an expanded version of the part of the 2004 report that has attracted the harshest reactions: the concept of Türkiyeli. I then summarize, and respond to, the main objections that were levelled against this concept. Finally, I conclude by looking at the use and place of the concept Türkiyeli in Turkey’s recent past (see Figure 1.3 for the place of the term Türkiyeli in the evolution of Turkish political thought).

The concept of Türkiyeli in the Minority Report

Foundations of the situation in Turkey

It is clear that the question of minorities is considered from a very narrow viewpoint in Turkey. The fundamental reasons for this are summarized below.

Instead of keeping track with international developments concerning minority concepts and law, Turkey is stuck with 1923 and the Treaty of Lausanne. This peace treaty was signed in Switzerland in 1923 by Turkey and the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the Serb-Croatian-Slovene state. Concluded after the War of Independence in Anatolia, it annulled the Treaty of Sèvres from 20 August 1919 and established national borders for several of the signatories, including Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne also formulated the position of the Turkish Republic on the issue of minorities. It framed some of the non-Muslim communities in Turkey, namely those of the Jewish, Armenian or Greek Orthodox faith, as ‘minorities’, but smaller non-Muslim communities such as the Syriacs, Nestorians and Chaldeans were not taken into consideration by the treaty. And neither was the distinction of ‘minority’ given to Muslim communities such as the Laz, Kurds or Alevis. Turkey moreover interprets the Treaty of Lausanne in an incorrect or deficient manner as some significant stipulations of the treaty have frequently been ignored altogether.

There is a widespread assumption that recognizing the different identity of a minority and granting minority rights to it are the same. However, the former implies an objective situation whereby one formally culturally recognizes the different minority groups as they exist, whereas the latter is a matter of discretion for the state. In the context of the diversity of different identity groups, Turkey also assumes that ‘internal self-determination’, which can be seen as political democracy and equal representation within the sovereign nation-state, is the same as ‘external self-determination’, which means fragmentation and possible secession of various regions. Consequently the recognition of different identities rather than a homogenized national one, and extending specific rights to them, is commonly held within Turkey to be tantamount to the disintegration of the state. Turkey assumes that, with respect to the concept of nation, oneness and unity are the same. However, the former gradually destroys the latter. It does so by insisting that the multicultural diversity of identities within Turkey be undermined in order to give way to a picture of an ethnically and culturally uniform, homogeneous and monolinguistic population. In this context, in speaking of the Turks as a nation, Turkey does not seem to realize or acknowledge that the term ‘Turkish’ also denotes a particular/dominant ethnic group that occludes other identities present in the country.

The above situation stems from two particular points. The first, a theoretical one, is outlined in the next section, the second point, a historical-political one, is looked at in the last section, on the historical foundation of the term Türkiyeli.

The theoretical point: the relationship between the supra-identity and infra-identities in the Republic of Turkey

As the successor of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey inherited the various ethnic, religious and social identities of that Empire. However, while what we can term the supra-identity in the empire (the identity assigned by the state to its citizens) was ‘Ottoman’, it emerged as ‘Turk’ in the Republic of Turkey. In this sense, a supra-identity can be seen as the one that is associated with membership of a particular country or other political body or territory. Infra-identities, on the other hand, are those of a secondary and specific nature existing underneath and contained within the supra-identity. In the case of the use of ‘Turk’ by the Republic of Turkey, then, one of the infra-identities reversed its hierarchical position and declared itself the supra-identity.

This supra-identity tends to define the citizen in reference to ethnicity and even to religion. For example, ‘our kinsfolk abroad’, a term sometimes used by Turkish nationalists, means people of ethnic Turkish origin. In addition, one must also be a ‘Muslim’ in order to be considered a ‘Turk’, because Turkey’s non-Muslim citizens are not referred to as ‘Turks’. In Turkey, nobody uses ‘Turk’ when talking about, say, a Greek or Jewish citizen, because these are non-Muslim citizens. Regrettable examples of this occurring in state practices abound and I refer to them specifically in the next section, ‘Objections to Türkiyeli’.

INFRA- AND SUPRA-IDENTITIES WITHIN THE CONVENTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Figure 1.1 A breakdown of infra- and supra-identities during the Ottoman Empire where ‘Ottoman’ became a super-category to collect the diversity of different ethno-religious configurations within the empire

This situation therefore alienated the other infra-identities that do not consider themselves as belonging to the Turkish race but rather as having a distinct identity, and it created problems for ‘national unity’. If one had chosen the supra-identity of Türkiyeli (‘being from Turkey’) this would likely not have happened. It would have equally embraced all infraidentities without involving ethnic or religious aspects. This is because Türkiyeli is fully based on a territorial conception of nationality and citizenship, jus soli, and thus completely excludes any involvement of ‘blood’ or religious or ethnic kinship and group membership, jus sanguinis.

The definition of citizenship in the 1982 Constitution (written by the military) is much narrower than the one in the 1924 Constitution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The latter had used the term ‘people of Turkey’. This definition recalls the supra-identity that we mentioned as Türkiyeli. This supra-identity embraces all infra-identities living on this territory without exception and ensures that the concepts of ‘nationality’ (being of a particular ethnic origin) and ‘citizenship’ (the legal bond between the individual and the state) are taken as separate and independent concepts.

INFRA- AND SUPRA IDENTITIES WITHIN THE CONVENTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF THE TURKISH REPUBLIC

Figure 1.2 During the Turkish Republic, the specific infra-identity of ‘Turk’ was elevated as the main category to define all others

Objections to Türkiyeli

The situation should become clearer if I summarize the objections to the term Türkiyeli made right after the publication of the report which I mentioned at the start of the chapter. Firstly, however, a quick summary of the concept of Türkiyeli. The principal idea behind it as a possible supra-identity is to present an inclusive and plural umbrella identity that is, in so far as it can be, ethnically and religiously neutral; by the same token it can also acknowledge the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous nature of identities that actually exist in Turkey. Thus Türkiyeli is a territorially-based term that seeks to avoid any ethnic or religious conceptions.

The following then is a summation of the main objections to the term Türkiyeli that were presented:

1. ‘Turkish is not the name of an ethnic group; it is an identifier of a nation’.

The prosecutor who took the legal action used this argument, but it only reflects a certain type of wishful thinking. I summarize here what I said in the Counter-Indictment:⁴

The Office of the Public Prosecutor claims that in Turkey the term ‘Turk’ is not used in the racial context. But if one opens the 24-volume Meydan Larousse Dictionary and Encyclopedia, the largest dictionary ever published in Turkey, under the term ‘Türk’, the first sentence says: ‘A person of Turkish race’. (Volume 19, page 471.) But I don’t think I am going to leave it at that. If the term ‘Turk’ is not the name of an ethnic group, then the Public Prosecutor’s Office must answer the following four questions:

a) What does ‘Domestic foreigners (Turkish ci...