4 - Sovereignty, Legitimacy and the Voice of ‘The People’

Summary

‘The People’ as an Empty Signifier

As the Ottoman Empire was about to capitulate at the end of the First World War, the forces that would eventually form the National Movement represented themselves as campaigning against and making up for the Empire’s legitimacy deficit. Having their intellectual and many of their activist roots in the Young Turk movement, they were motivated by the same drive to ‘empower’ the Turkish national community in an empire that had granted constitutional equality to other ethnic groups and enabled them to pursue their own national goals at the expense of the Turkish nation. In this context, the National Movement, just like its contemporary movements, did indeed challenge the traditional foundations of authority that underpinned the ancient regime, and invested itself with the aura of popular consent (see Jenkins and Sofos 1996:10–11).

What can be said about the National Movement in particular, and Turkish nationalism at the end of the First World War in general, was that its ideology and politics were characterised by fluidity and ambiguity. As I argued in Chapter 3, leaving aside the underlying, yet widely shared, foundational belief that the Christian population of the territories that were included in the National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) and, eventually the territories that were ceded to the Turkish state in the treaties of Lausanne and Kars, were at best ‘minorities’ and, at worst, unworthy of citizenship, the political project of privileging Turkishness and subsuming in it all other alternative and potentially competing identities coexisted with a more open conception of the nation that acknowledged, and on occasion formally recognised. diversity among the Muslim peoples of the emergent Republic, their cultures and the ways they were organised. The various disagreements in the National Assembly over the nomenclature that would apply to ‘the people’ of the Republic were indicative of both the nationalist project’s not yet closed character and also the precariousness of its legitimacy, and where that rested.

These ambiguities notwithstanding, the National Movement claimed to be expressing the will of ‘the people’ of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and eventually of the territories of Anatolia and Thrace, that would become republican Turkey. Long before Mustafa Kemal described the Turkish state as ‘populist’ in 1931, in an effort to afford it legitimacy, the National Movement was claiming to be acting in the name of ‘the people’.