From the dilemma over headscarves to the Kurdish question, the national agenda is essentially dominated by a sense of Kemalist malaise. But the roots of this malaise are much deeper than it seems. In the 1920s and 1930s, the founding fathers of the Turkish Republic had envisioned a linear process of modernization for Turkey at the end of which an ethnically homogenous and unambiguously secular state would emerge. During these formative decades of the republic, the strongest opposition to Kemalism’s drive for secularization and nation-building came in the form of Islamist and Kurdish rebellions. Between 1925 and 1938, a total of 17 Kurdish and Islamist uprisings had to be forcefully suppressed. In order to effectively deal with such threats, the fledgling Kemalist republic formulated and developed a peculiar understanding of secularism and Turkish nationalism. Turkish laicism displayed a remarkable continuity with the Ottoman tradition of state supremacy over religious affairs. Instead of delineating a clear separation of religious and political affairs, Turkish laicism facilitated the administration of religion by the state in order to better control and shape the Islamic realm. In other words, laicism in its Turkish context became a major instrument for social engineering; the Kemalist state began to use it in order to project its progressive ideals to Anatolian society at large. In this sense, rather than democratization, the exclusion of Islam from the socio-political realm and “Westernization from above” became the primary goals of the secularist reforms that the Kemalist regime undertook.
The kind of nationalism adopted by the Turkish Republic also displayed interesting continuities with the Ottoman millet system. The major difference, of course, was the political determination to create a homogenous nation-state. The imperial ethos of multicultural tolerance had no equivalent in the Kemalist era. Despite the fact that Turkish nationalism adopted a civic and secularist rhetoric, minority status was confined only to non-Muslims, who were discriminated against on several occasions. In other words only the Jewish, Armenian and Greek citizens of the new Turkish Republic came to be recognized as official minorities, while all Muslim ethnic groups, as in the Ottoman era, became part of the “authentic” Turkish majority. The civic dimension of the emerging sense of Turkish citizenship de-emphasized the ethnic background of heterogeneous Muslim communities in Anatolia. The state therefore pursued an active policy of assimilation of Kurds based on a conceptualization of “Turkishness” as part of a common national, linguistic and territorial identity.
Yet, such civic intentions also proved to have an important ethnic dimension. The latter emerged in cases when the assimilation process met with active Kurdish resistance. In that sense, Turkish nationalism turned increasingly ethnic in its attempt to forcefully eradicate Kurdish ethnic and linguistic identity in the aftermath of the Kurdish rebellions in the 1920s and 1930s. The existence of Kurds as an ethnic group was denied, and the Kurdish language was systematically proscribed in order to enhance the prospects of “Turkification” and assimilation. As far as non-Muslims are concerned, their prospects of “equal citizenship” could not overcome an official state of mind that continued to identify Turkishness with being Muslim.
The authoritarianism from the elite, which characterized the Kemalist regime during the early decades of the republic, gradually softened after the transition to competitive politics. Yet, the Kurdish issue remained a major taboo and political Islam never gained enough power to constitute a systemic threat during the Cold War -- as long as activist Kurds and Islamists were contained within the right wing-left wing divide they did not represent a real threat to the Kemalist identity of the republic. In the absence of both ethnic and secularist-Islamist polarization during most of the Cold War era, there was a sense that Turkey had transcended Kemalism. The official ideology of the Turkish Republic appeared to have lost its primary relevance in determining the political agenda of the country.
However, by the late 1980s the Cold War and its politics of ideology were over. Identity-based polarization and the Kemalist perceptions of threat were back. Today, unsurprisingly, we are once again going through a ethnic dilemma over our Kurdish population. And in the absence of a more multicultural and civic understanding of nationalism and a more tolerant style of secularism, we will only continue to exacerbate our identity problems.
