The roots of Turkey’s identity problem

by Omer Taspinar



It is hard to avoid the impression that every issue in Turkish politics somehow relates to the country’s complex identity problems. From the Kurdish question to whether the president’s wife can wear a headscarf, we are always debating identity issues.
Yet we are often unable to address the root causes of the problem. A major part of the problem has to do with the peculiarity of Turkey’s “civilizational” dilemmas with “Westernization.” Having a complex civilizational identity, or being a “torn country” to use Samuel Huntington’s terminology, is part of Turkish history. Indeed, the difficulty with assigning Turkey to a specific geography or civilization derives from the fact that it had always been a border country. A glance at the map shows why Turkey does not fit into any of the clear-cut geographical categories formulated by Western scholars. The country straddles the geographical and cultural borders between Europe and Asia, without really belonging to either. Such an “in-between” Turkish identity is made all the more complicated by a number of historical factors.
Perhaps most important is the fact that the Ottoman Empire was historically the intimate enemy of Europe. In religious and military terms, the Turk represented “the other” who played a crucial role in consolidating Europe’s own Christian identity. However, as centuries of Ottoman imperial splendor came to an end and territorial regression began, the Ottoman ruling elite sought salvation in one of the earliest projects of modernization. Since modernization was pragmatically identified with Christian Western Europe, the Ottomans faced major difficulties in adapting to the new paradigm without surrendering their Islamic pride. Throughout the 19th century, the result has often been a chaotic coexistence of traditional Islamic and modernized institutions. This situation did not change until the radicalization of the Westernization project, first under the Young Turks and later under their Kemalist successors.

The Kemalist revolution was by far the most radical attempt at cultural transformation in the Islamic world. Yet, it achieved a rather limited penetration of Turkish society at large. Especially the rural parts of Anatolia remained largely unaffected by the social engineering taking place in Ankara during the single party rule. In that sense, the Kemalism was too state-centered and elitist to be fully absorbed by Anatolian society. As in Ottoman times, it was essentially the governing elite and the urban bourgeoisie that supported Westernization and easily adapted to its norms. In the meantime, the gap between the state and rural periphery widened even further.

The Kemalist mission, aiming to create a centralized, secular and homogenous “Turkish” nation-state, met the active opposition of religious conservatives and ethnic Kurds. Not surprisingly, resistance to centralization and nation-building was strongest in historically semi-autonomous Kurdish provinces, which had little exposure to central taxation during Ottoman times. Between 1923 and 1938, it took the military suppression of a long series of Kurdish and Islamist rebellions for a sense of Kemalist stability to emerge. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, one can argue that behind the facade of a successful nationalist-secularist revolution, the repression of Kurdish and Islamic identities remained the Achilles’ heel of the Kemalist project.

With the Cold War, international dynamics gained precedence over Turkey’s domestic problems. A new era started in republican history in 1946, when the Soviet territorial threat and the willingness to be part of the “Free World” forced the Kemalist regime to hold multiparty elections. During the next three decades, from 1950 to 1980, ideological politics superficially trumped identity problems. Kurdish and Islamic dissent were no longer high on the political agenda, since they soon came to be absorbed by the new political divisions in Turkey. Kurdish discontent found its place within radical leftwing politics, while Islam became part of the anti-communist struggle.

When left-wing and rightwing politics lost their relevance with the end of the Cold War, Kurdish and Islamic dissent quickly re-emerged. This Kurdish and Islamic revival during the 1990s once again triggered a strong Kemalist reaction. After the long Cold War interlude, it was as if Turkey was back in the 1930s. The military had to take the initiative against Kurdish-Islamic forces by forcefully reasserting Turkish nationalism and secularism. The result was the “lost decade” of the 1990s. If we want to avoid another lost decade, now that similar dynamics are once again at play, we need to find liberal solutions to our identity problems.

23.04.2007
Today's Zaman