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Understanding the exclusionary politics of early Turkish nationalism: an ethnic boundary-making approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Gregory J. Goalwin
Gregory J. Goalwin*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Turkish nationalism has long presented a study in contrasts. The nationalist movement that created the Republic of Turkey sought to define the nation in explicitly civic and inclusive terms, promoting a variety of integrationist reforms. Those same nationalist politicians, however, endorsed other policies that were far more exclusionary, expelling many religious and ethnic minorities from the new nation and imposing harsh restrictions on those who remained. The seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies has been mirrored by much of the scholarship on Turkish nationalism, which has often viewed Turkish nationality through the lens of the “civic/ethnic divide,” with various scholars arguing that the Turkish nation is exclusively civic or ethnic. This article seeks to transcend this dichotomous way of looking at Turkish nationalism. I argue that the policies previously seen as being exclusively civic or ethnic are in fact both examples of boundary-making processes, designed to forge a cohesive nationalist community. Seen through a boundary-making perspective, the seemingly contradictory nature of Turkish nationalist policies in its early years is not paradoxical at all, but represents a multidimensional effort to construct a cohesive national community that could replace the defunct Ottoman state.

Keywords

Turkeycivic nationalismethnic nationalismboundary-making
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 45 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 1150 - 1166
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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