3 - ‘The Sovereign People’ in Anxious Times

Summary

e canterò di quel secondo regno

dove l’umano spirito si purga

e di salire al ciel diventa degno.

Dante, Divina Commedia

‘Othering’ and Turkishness

As already discussed in the preceding pages, leading nationalist figures, including Mustafa Kemal himself and İsmet Paşa (İnönü), followed the European imagination of modernity in establishing a ‘secular’ nation state, where the diverse Muslim populations were racialised under the single category, ‘Turk’. The founders of the Republic made clear on numerous occasions, especially after the turning point of 1925, that the Republic they envisaged would be a Republic for its Turkish citizens. The annihilation of the Armenian population and forced exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians with Greek Muslims were two critical events that contributed to the ‘post‐Ottoman’ realisation of Turkey’s image as an ethno‐sectarian state for non‐Arabic‐speaking Ottoman Muslims.

The tolerance of diversity that was exhibited during the War of Independence, and the references to an (at least internally) diverse Muslim ‘people’, had run their course and outlived their utility. As the new state had acquired international recognition through the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, the republican elites felt that they were given a free hand to work towards the creation of a strong unitary state based on an ethnically homogeneous ‘people’. Alternative identities were thus seen as an aberration, with the potential to undermine the unity of the nation they sought to construct. In May 1925, Prime Minister İsmet Paşa, addressing an audience of schoolteachers, expressed clearly the aspiration to create a monolithic (yekpâre) state:

There are Turks who give this land its Turkish character. But this nation does not display the characteristics of the monolithic nation we would like to see. Only if this generation works consciously and seriously, under the guidance of science and life in general, devoting itself to it, can the political Turkish nation become a complete, mature cultural and social nation. In this monolithic nation, all foreign cultures must dissolve. There cannot be different civilizations within this national body. (Kaplan 1999:143–4)

In his address, İsmet Paşa admits that the Turkish nation is in a state of incompleteness and lacks maturity, and suggests that its maturation relies on the eventual prevalence of Turkish culture over all alternatives, which must dissolve as a result of a considerable intellectual and cultural effort.