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The trajectory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule offers an ideal empirical window into puzzling shifts in Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy. The policy transformations under its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan do not align with existing explanations based on security, economics, institutions, or identity. In Identity Politics Inside Out, Lisel Hintz teases out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy using an in-depth study of Turkey. Rather than treating national identity as cause or consequence of a state's foreign policy, she repositions foreign policy as an arena in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. Drawing from a broad array of sources in popular culture, social media, interviews, surveys, and archives, she identifies competing visions of Turkish identity and theorizes when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Hintz examines the establishment of Republican Nationalism in the wake of imperial collapse and examines failed attempts made by those challenging its Western-oriented, anti-ethnic, secularist values with alternative understandings of Turkishness. She further demonstrates how the Ottoman Islamist AKP used the European Union accession process to weaken Republican Nationalist obstacles in Turkey, thereby opening up space for Islam in the domestic sphere and a foreign policy targeted at achieving leadership in the Middle East. By showing how the "inside out" spillover of national identity debates can reshape foreign policy, Identity Politics Inside Out fills a major gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle.
In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.
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.
This book examines the ways in which states and nations are constructed and legitimated through defining and managing outsiders. Focusing on Turkey and the municipality of Dersim – a region that has historically combined different outsider identities, including Armenian, Kurdish, and Alevi identities – the author explores the remembering, transformation and mobilisation of everyday relations of power and the manner in which relationships with the state shape both outsider identities and the conception of the nation itself. Together with a discussion of the recent decade in which the history, identity, and nature of Dersim have been central to various social and political organisations, the author concentrates on three defining periods of state-outsider relationships – the massacre and the following displacements in Dersim known as ‘1938’; the growth of capitalism in Turkey and the leftist movements in Dersim between World War II and the coup d’état of 1980; and the rise of the PKK and the ‘state of exception’ in Dersim in the 1990s – to show how outsiders came to be defined as ‘exceptions to the law’ and how they were managed in different periods. Drawing on archival methods, field research, in-depth and multiple-session interviews and focus groups with three consecutive generations, this book offers a historical understanding of relationships of power and struggle as they are actualised and challenged at particular localities and shaped through the making of outsiderness. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology and political science, as well as historians.
"Examining Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Büyük Nutuk (The Great Public Address), this book identifies the five founding political myths of Turkey: the First Duty, the Internal Enemy, the Encirclement, the Ancestor, and Modernity. Offering a comprehensive rhetorical analysis of Nutuk in its entirety, the book reveals how Atatürk crafted these myths, traces their discursive roots back to the Orkhon Inscriptions, epic tales, and ancient stories of Turkish culture, and critiques their long-term effects on Turkish political culture. In so doing, it advances the argument that these myths have become permanent fixtures of Turkish political discourse since the establishment of Turkey and have been used by both supporters and detractors of Atatürk. Providing examples of how past and present leaders, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a vocal critic of Atatürk, have deployed these myths in their discourses, the book offers an entirely new way to read and understand Turkish political culture and contributes to the heated debate on Kemalism by responding to the need to go back to the original sources - his own speeches and statements - to understand him. Contributing to emerging discourse-based approaches, this book is ideal for scholars and students of Turkish Studies, History, Nationalism Studies, Political Science, Rhetorical Studies, and International Studies"--
National and State Identity in Turkey uses the concepts of national and state identity to examine Turkey's domestic and international politics and explain how the country's position in the international system has changed over the last ten years. State identity is understood as the end result of a transformed national identity, linking both domestic and international levels. Toni Alaranta argues that there has been a radical reformulation of Turkey's national identity, interest, and positioning in the world since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. This transformed identity has helped the country renegotiate its status in the world. He first examines the changing nature of Turkey's national identity before looking at the struggle between two extreme positions--secularism and Islamism. He then explains how the "New Turkey" discourse is part of an Islamic-conservative ideology that targets the notion of the "domestic other," or minorities, versus the Turkish-Muslim "self." This discourse is transforming not only the notion of national identity but also Turkey's relations with the rest of the world, and particularly with the European Union.
Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.
Thousands of Kurdish politician-activists have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and hundreds have been murdered for espousing Kurdish political and cultural rights over the past twenty years. The risks are high, yet Pro-Kurdish political parties have made significant gains, as resources afforded by the political system have allowed them to challenge state rhetoric and policies to exercise power at the municipal level, which has helped legitimize and advance the pro-Kurdish movement. Activists in Office examines how these parties, while sharing many of the goals expressed by armed Kurdish groups, are using the legal political system to promote their highly contentious Kurdish national agenda in the face of a violent, repressive state. Nicole F. Watts sheds light not only on the particular situation of Kurds in Turkey, but also on the challenges, risks, and potential benefits for comparable movements operating in less-than-fully democratic contexts. The book is a result of more than ten years of research conducted in Turkey and in Europe, and it draws on a wide array of sources, including Turkish electoral data, memoirs, court records, and interviews.
Ethnic and religious identity-markers compete with class and gender as principles shaping the organization and classification of everyday life. But how are an individual's identity-based conflicts transformed and redefined? Identity is a specific form of social capital, hence contexts where multiple identities obtain necessarily come with a hierarchy, with differences, and hence with a certain degree of hostility. The contributors to this book examine the rapid transformation of identity hierarchies affecting Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, a symptom of political fractures, social-economic transformation, and new regimes of subjectification. They focus on the state's role in organizing access to resources, with its institutions often being the main target of demands, rather than competing social groups. Such con- texts enable entrepreneurs of collective action to exploit identity differences, which in turn help them to expand the scale of their mobilization and to align local and national conflicts. The authors also examine how identity-based violence may be autonomous in certain contexts, and serve to prime collective action and transform the relations between communities.
This ethnography of contemporary Istanbul charts the success of Islamist mobilization through the eyes of ordinary people. Drawing on interviews gathered over twenty years of fieldwork, White focuses on the appeal of Islamic politics in the fabric of Turkish society and among mobilizing and mobilized elites, women, and educated populations.