“Westernisation against the West”: Cultural Politics in the Early Turkish Republic

Abstract

‘European civilisation will have a beneficial effect on us, not only with its science and technology, but also in matters of taste and morality. But this influence is permissible only to the extent that it helps dismantle the Persian one. The moment it attempts to supplant what it destroys, it has itself become harmful and should be resisted’ (Gökalp, 1995, p. 15). Written at the end of the First World War, these words of Ziya Gökalp revealed with utmost clarity (too explicitly, perhaps, even for a reluctant inheritor of a defeated empire) the ideological and psychological mainsprings of the newborn Turkish nationalism. Today, at a century’s remove, we hear much the same idea reiterated in different sectors of the Turkish political and cultural elite: to be part of Europe so as not to be part of the Middle East, or, more often, to be part of Europe if only not to be bogged down in the Middle East. In the long interval, Gökalp’s ideas have come to define the terms of the relevant debate, not only providing the spiritual core of early Republican cultural politics, but perhaps more significantly, forcing even his opponents to begin with his formulation of the problem at hand: how ought the long-submerged and now re-emerging Turkish national identity be understood and lived in relation to Ottoman culture on the one hand, and the modern, scientific-rational civilisation of the West on the other? And no cultural agent of importance, whether official or oppositional, has been able to entirely escape the call of the indicated, if fantastic, answer: Westernisation in defiance of the West, in order to be freed of Persian and Arab influences.1 At the time, the immobilising double-bind involved in such a stance seems to have gone largely unnoticed.