Yesterday’s common ground invalid today

The fact is that globalization causes nationalist ideologies to dissolve. With the rise of globalization, local identities become more evident, consequently ruining the meta-discourse-based concept of creating a “great nation” and constructing an identity. Everyone has a dream of being part of a great nation such as a Greater Turkey, Greater Israel, Greater Armenia, Greater Albania, and so on, but some lose all that they have while trying to get bigger. The Greater Serbia dream caused Yugoslavia to break into pieces. There are many reasons for this: the main one is that nationalists do not understand developments in the world properly. They think they can keep groups which have changed and continue to change together with an ideology formulated in the 19th century. Empirically, we understand that this is not possible and that it’s only good for maintaining oppressive regimes and nothing else.

With urbanization, different identities, ethnic groups and people from different religions and denominations come together and develop relations with each other. These different groups reject adopting a single overarching identity and prefer to bring out their own identity. Before mass social migrations, millions of people living in rural areas, in villages and small settlements, were considered relatively homogenous. They had strong social control mechanisms that kept people together. Everyone knew each other, and everyone tolerated each other to a certain extent. Migration and the development of major metropolises brought differences to light, and people from different sects, religions and ethnic groups were forced to interact with each other. We started seeing unfamiliar groups of people on our streets, in the places where we shopped, at the market and on trains, airplanes and ships as we traveled together.

This deeply rattled our perceptions. It made us ask ourselves the question of how we were going to perceive these different groups of people. The response of nationalist ideologies and nation-states to this question was to either estrange them or to assimilate them. But people don’t always accept assimilation very easily. They want their differences to be evident. When the Turkish identity was being built, the Muslim nation in the Ottoman Empire was made into the Turkish nation and the phrase “Happy is he who says I am a Turk” was adopted. According to this view, anyone who identified himself as a Turk was a Turk in the sense of being a citizen of the Republic of Turkey. However, Kurds refused the new identity description and the new conceptual framework and said: “We are citizens of Turkey. We belong to Turkey, but we also have a Kurdish identity.” In short, Kurds refused a central/official identity description and a “one nation” concept.

Those who defend the conventional form of a nation-state point out that citizens with Kurdish roots in Turkey can take part at every level of life and that, for example, they can become a prime minister, state minister, general director, businessman and scientist as well. Certainly, this is correct, but it is incomplete. Kurds do not have the chance to hold these positions if they emphasize their own identities. The solution is simple: Everyone under the umbrella of Turkish citizenship should be able to express themselves with any identity they want. But there are some challenges to implementing this solution. Most of these obstacles stem from the rigidity of the traditional nation-state form. It is true that there are differences between Kurds and people who come from different tribes or ethnic groups when it comes to dealing with this issue. Tribes with different ethnic backgrounds that came from the Balkans accepted this easily for certain reasons at the time. Of course, when the state rejected counter-identity proposals, conflict emerged. Unfortunately, Turkey has been going through this process since 1984.