Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
A few years ago, the New York Times featured an article on the ancient city of Antioch and its modern-day inhabitants. Having lost its ancient grandeur a long time ago, Antioch (Antakya) is described as today a place that “even most Turks consider … [to be] remote and undistinguished.” The article features interviews with two members of the same family: the 110-year-old Ali Baklaci and his 20-year-old grandson Hasan Negruz. An old-timer who lived through the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, subsequent French mandate and eventual incorporation into Turkey in 1939, Ali Baklaci is unequivocal regarding his identity. In a matter-of-fact manner, he declares, “We cannot forget our origins. We are Arab people.” The grandson, Hasan Negruz, however, has a different view. While Negruz is “one of many local youths who have taken advantage of Syria's offer of free education,” the article informs us, “the experience did not turn him into a pan-Arabist.” Instead, Negruz formulates his identity in a way that is remarkably different from his grandfather's: “I am an Arab who is also a citizen of Turkey, and that's fine. I like being Turkish because this country is more modern than the Arab countries.”
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20. The suggested differentiation of modernism from mere modernization can be met with skepticism. The question could be raised as to whether nationalism is not already a modern phenomenon as such? In other words, one could ask, “What is the use of distinguishing between ‘nationalism as a modern phenomenon’ and ‘modernist nationalism’ proper?” The difference between “nationalism as a modern phenomenon” and a specifically modernist form of nationalism is similar to the difference between modern painting and modernist painting. While “modern painting” refers to a whole collection of different styles and understandings united by their epochal boundedness, “modernism” refers to a particular style within modern painting which has its own distinctive stylistic conventions. Nationalism (and specifically “nation-form”) mimics the character of “modern painting” in so far as it depicts a certain epoch within which different forms of nationalism flourish. Modernist nationalism, by contrast, is a specific kind of nationalism which, while using the nation-form as the container of its expression, offers a substantially different vision of the “nation” than ethnic or civic nationalisms. In other words, just as modern painting includes different currents like cubism, tribalism, modernism and the like, so does nationalism—as a modern phenomenon—encompass different kinds of nationalisms; ethnic, civic and modernist. Modernism is no more reducible to modernization than modern painting is reducible to modernist painting.Google Scholar
21. In the Turkish experience, being a modern subject entailed not only literacy and urbanization but also a militant secularist attitude, a certain dress code, preference for polyphonic Western music, use of the Latin script, incorporation of women into the public sphere by professionalization and a series of interrelated reforms aimed at transforming the cultural fabric of the nation. We will take this up in a later section where the radical reforms that Kemalist nationalists adopted will be discussed.Google Scholar
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28. The argument presented so far should be qualified with a caveat. Any scholar who is sensitive to the extreme complexity of such a major historical phenomenon as nationalism would be compelled to recognize that the absence of sustained colonial domination is unlikely to be the sole factor determining the modernist character of the nationalist identity project. I would like to argue that, while the absence of colonial rule may fall short of providing an exhaustive explanation, it is nonetheless the major dynamic that steers these nationalisms in a modernist direction. To gain a more complete understanding of the situation, the relationship between colonial presence and modernist national identity needs to be supplemented with a consideration of a set of contextually specific factors such as tribal networks, religious solidarity, geostrategic peculiarities, difference in policies adopted by colonial powers, etc. Google Scholar
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71. Similarly, in France the complex and hierarchical system of appellations of the old regime was replaced by the simple citoyen and citoyenne. See W. H. Sewell, “Le Citoyen/La Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” in C. Lucas, ed., The Political Culture of the French Revolution, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), pp. 105–124.Google Scholar
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76. The Directorate of Religious Affairs and Directorate-General for Pious Foundations were established in 1924 with the aim of instituting state control over religion.Google Scholar
77. By eradicating the office of the Seyhulislam (1924), by outlawing religious orders and sects (1925) and by restricting the display of religious symbols in public places.Google Scholar
78. In their profound hostility towards religion the Kemalists and Jacobins were quite similar. The Kemalists’ abolition of the religious orders and sects and the seizure of their lands and properties is analogous to the Jacobins’ confiscation of the lands of the Church and their desire to discredit and dishonor the clergy. Not only were the French and Turkish states ideologically committed to crippling religious organizations and sentiments, they also materially took advantage of them.Google Scholar
79. Robins, “Interrupting Identities: Turkey/Europe,” p. 70.Google Scholar
80. Ibid., pp. 68–69. The parallels to the French Revolution are remarkable: “The nation, as it emerged in the French Revolution, was the site and the subject of a radical break in history, one perhaps best symbolized by the new calendar that started time over again with a new Year One that began with the declaration of the French Republic.” Sewell, “The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form,” pp. 23–24. One also observes a similar tendency in the Soviet and Chinese experiences.Google Scholar
81. While it may be debatable whether French, Soviet or Chinese nationalisms are unequivocally modernist, it is indisputable that modernism constitutes at least a major strand within them. Even when it does not constitute a “pure type,” modernist nationalism can still be helpful for our understanding for the experience of nationalism in the non-European world. The purpose of alluding to these cases is to suggest certain parallels among the Turkish, Soviet and Chinese experiences. Due to space limitations, a detailed comparative analysis cannot be attempted here. The following remarks are meant to be suggestive for further study.Google Scholar
82. Suny argues that “Soviet Russia was conceived not as an ordinary national state but as the first state in a future multinational socialist edifice … For communists of the civil war period, internationalism was less the servant of the Soviet state than the Soviet state was the servant of internationalism” (R. G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], p. 85). This, in turn, rested on the idea that ethnic “nationalism reflected only the interests of the bourgeoisie, that the proletariat's true interests were supranational” (Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 87). The ultimate irony here is that, rather than being a melting pot in which ethnic identities would be bracketed and universal, socialist identities would be valorized; “the Soviet Union became the incubator of new nations” (Suny, The Revenge of the Past, p. 87).Google Scholar
83. C. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in A. Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 43.Google Scholar
84. In addition to the similarities stemming from their modernism, the Soviet and Turkish experiences are also similar in terms of the historical circumstances of their formation during the 1910s and 1920s: neither Soviet nor Turkish statesmen were burdened by the shadow of prolonged colonial rule, even though both faced imminent external threats to their survival. Modernist elites in Turkey waged the War of Independence (1919–1922) against Greece (backed by Britain, France and Italy), while the Soviet Union had to face the military campaign of the counter-revolutionaries supported by the Allies roughly during the same period (1917 to 1922). In addition, both countries were characterized by the heritage of a strong imperial state ruling over multiethnic and multi-religious populations. Remarkably, both the Ottoman and Russian Empires embarked on self-inflicted processes of defensive modernization (intensifying in the course of nineteenth century) to counteract the rising power of Western European states.Google Scholar
85. Mainly blaming Confucianism, superstition, a highly inegalitarian social stratification and a corrupt imperial bureaucracy for the backwardness of the country.Google Scholar
86. Although played out in different ways, language reform was another common concern of the Turkish and Chinese regimes. Simplification of the characters in China and the changing of the script from Arabic to Latin in Turkey were remarkably similar in intent. Overall, despite some moves in the direction of Sinocization, modernism constituted a major streak within the Maoist reforms and consequently had a significant impact in shaping Chinese national identity.Google Scholar
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91. Keyder, Ulusal Kalkinmaciligin Iflasi, p. 143.Google Scholar
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