Nationalism, displacement, and ethnoreligious differentiation in Turkey’s southern borderlands

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, this paper examines the shifts in the positioning of ethnoreligious differences vis-a-vis Turkish nationalism over the past decade. Hatay was annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, 16 years after the foundation of the Turkish nation-state, and did not experience the national homogenization that characterized the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in the post-WWI era. Its ensuing ethnoreligious diversity with a population composed of bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish, Christian, Alawi, and Sunni communities characterized the region’s peripheral border status until the new millennium. In this paper, I focus on two major shifts in Turkish politics which reoriented the ethnoreligious identities of these communities. First, I interrogate the short-lived turn to pluralism in mid-2000s to late-2000s when Hatay’s religious diversity gained prominence as an exemplar of Turkish Muslim tolerance. Built on the nostalgia for Ottoman cosmopolitanism against Turkey’s Republican model of nationalism, this regime celebrated the ethnoreligious difference of Hatay’s residents as long as they were identified as representable elements of the nation. I then turn my attention to the emergent ruptures in this discourse of multireligious nationalism with the outbreak of the Syrian War, Turkey’s foreign policy, and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Hatay. In showing how both polities operated within and through rather than replaced the formerly hegemonic understandings of national unity, this paper reveals the constant reworking of national and ethnoreligious identities at the Middle Eastern borderlands.