New Turkey: Regional Aspiration and National Anxiety

Abstract

In modern Turkey, as in other parts of the globe, the production and dissemination of patriotic histories has been part of the process of stateand nation-making. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, Turkish nationalists were able to forge an independent nation-state; and so, unlike the post-colonial world, the official narrative regarding the foundation of the new Turkish state did not suffer from a “sovereignty deficit” vis-à-vis the Western empires, nor did it embrace an anti-colonial discourse of resistance against the Empire. Nevertheless, the Turkish state did suffer from the anxiety of erosion of national sovereignty and this was played out on two fronts: the governance of ethno-religious difference in the country and relations with the West, both of which have been formative tropes in patriotic histories in Turkey. The foundation of Turkey as a politically sovereign nation-state, long before decolonization in the post-World War II period, has thus played a significant role in the construction of Turkish patriotic histories. On the one hand, the foundation myth of 1923 was depicted as an essential pride in the Turkish state/nation and contrasted with the subjugation of the colonized states/subjects of the Western empires. The trope of the Western threat, however, has never vanished from Turkish historical discourses. Indeed, it has revealed itself in the intimate links between the West and the ethnically non-Turkish/ non-Muslim citizens of Turkey as well as the cross-border threats outside its territory. The politics of history has been a tool of ethno-politics, manifesting and instigating the state’s aim to consolidate its national-scale power and unitary political project. Disseminated through various state institutions and actors, such as national education, statesponsored media, performances, and re-organization of urban and rural spaces, the early official history of the Turkish Republic transformed a heterogeneous social space ruled by the logic of imperial diversity into a homogenous social space governed by a modern nation-state. The politics of history in Turkey has gone through various phases. While the earlier Kemalist patriotic histories were preoccupied with nationalist consolidation, from the mid-2000s onwards, domination on a regional scale preponderated, acquiring a new magnitude over the former concerns. Here, I chart the development of the latter period under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). As much as exploring