Conceptual and Theoretical Outline

Abstract

Turkey’s politics of identity is rooted in the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the process of nation-building by the Turkish Republic, which emerged out of the destruction of the empire. In response to the disintegration, Ottoman intellectuals sought solutions in three ideological perspectives: liberalism based on a common Ottoman citizenship, Islamism based on Muslim solidarity, and Turkish nationalism. When none of these solutions worked to save the empire from collapsing, Turkish intellectual and political elites, and, most importantly, military officers, who experienced the decline in the most vivid manner, concluded that the only solution for maintaining national sovereignty was through a new nation-building process. Through this process a new Turkish nation would be formed, which would essentially be Muslim but secular at the same time. However, this formula, which became the eventual state ideology of the Republic, led to domestic identity conflicts between the secularist elites and the conservative social actors that opposed radical secularization policies, on the one hand, and between the nationalist state and the resisting ethno-religious groups, namely, Sunni and Alevi Kurds, on the other. Hence the two immediate domestic threats that the secularist Republican elites felt necessary to counter were conservative Islam and Kurdish ethnic nationalism. Kurdish revolts in the 1920s and 1930s were crushed, but conservative Muslims chose to express their resentment by turning to the electoral ballot box to bring the conservative liberal parties to power and managed to end the Kemalist one-party regime in 1950.