Throughout my school life, between the ages of six and seventeen, together with all of the other students, I used to sing the first two quatrains of the Turkish National AnthemFootnote 1 during assemblies as we came back to school on Monday mornings and before leaving for the weekend break on Friday afternoons. It is no coincidence that the first demand of the anthem is ‘fear not’. As I show in this book, negative emotions like fear have been the dominant constitutive components of modern Turkish nationhood and the deep conviction of nation-builders to create a homogenous nation of desired citizens by assimilating or eliminating ethnic, religious and political minorities. The book shows that despite the radical changes having been implemented by the authoritarian Islamist Erdoğan governments, these fundamental emotions, high politics of affection and thus the desired citizen creation ambitions of the state, have not changed.
Negative collective emotions and insecurities in Turkey, especially vis-à- vis the West, have resulted in an anxious nationalism. Insecurities, anxieties and fears of the Ottoman-dominant population of Muslim Turks led by the Young Turks have continued since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. This book shows that all these negative emotions and insecurities have lingered from the Kemalist Era to the Erdoğanist Era, and they have shaped the state’s radical and oppressive approach to the ethno-religious and political heterogeneity of the population, regardless of the change in the hegemonic ideology and regime. As a result of these negative emotions and insecurities, not only have the ethnic, religious and political minorities (non-Muslims, Kurds, Alevis, leftists, liberals, democrats) in the country been constructed as undesired citizens, but even the country’s majority population (practicing Sunni Muslim Turks) have been treated as second class (merely tolerated but not desired) in the citizenship hierarchies of both regimes.
Arguably this anxious nationalism has always been the ‘real’ official ideology and guiding principle of the Turkish state. As I will try to show in this volume, this has been costly as far as the ethnic, religious and political minorities are concerned. Even the majority group (Sunni Muslim Turks), on whose identity the new national identity was built, has been the victim of Kemalist and Erdoğanist nation-building projects. All of these negative emotions and insecurities have made Turkish nation-building projects traumatic experiences for different groups of citizens. Instead of progressing smoothly, they have created more problems, injustices, victimhood and resentment. As you will see in the chapters on the rise and consolidation of Erdoğanism, Kemalist injustices, victimisations and all sorts of accompanying negative emotions would pave the way for another authoritarian, resentful, vindictive and oppressive nation-building project that is at the moment securitising and traumatising its own out-groups of ethnic, religious and political minorities.
These emotions had been formed during the centuries-long, agonizing decline, collapse and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. This process traumatised the Ottoman Turks, especially the elite. For centuries, they have tried to stop the decline, to deal with the rising challenges coming from Russia and the West, to respond to accusations of Turks being semi-civilised or even barbarian, to tackle Western interference, to contain nationalist movements among minorities, and to stop the loss of territory and humiliating military defeats. These issues have caused immense trauma, frustration, desperation, insecurity, fear and anxiety especially with regard to dominant Western powers and civilisation. All of these emotions have been inherited via collective memory by the generations that established the Turkish Republic and maintain it to this day. These emotions have continued to inform and guide Turkish domestic and foreign policy as well as its two dominant and competing national identities and nation-building and desired citizen creation projects that this book analyses. To use the themes and expressions of the National Anthem, this book is an attempt to show that fear, anger, rage, desire to own the homeland forever, the need for a smile, being pleased to sacrifice blood for the country, and the desire to enjoy the freedom of the God-worshipping nation, victimhood, resentment and siege mentality have all been influential factors in Turkey’s two subsequent and competing nation-building projects. They have not been only influential, they have made them more radical, more polarizing and tribalist, more security-obsessed and more oppressive.
These fundamental emotions, desires or themes have been propagated by the state via public statements of political leaders, education, media, pop culture and religion for the last hundred years. As a result, well before Erdoğanism, Turkey was already an ‘anxious nation’ (Walker Reference Walker1999).Footnote 2 The Erdoğanists inherited these emotions from the last generation of Ottomans and the first generation of Kemalists, but they did not passively inherit them. As powerful political hegemons with agency, they have steadily increased the intensity of these emotions in their narrative and political performances, especially since 2010 when they eliminated Kemalist teaching and its ‘ambivalent Westernism’ (Yilmaz 2020). Erdoğanists have also increasingly added their ‘restorative nostalgia’Footnote 3 for the lost Empire, their yearning for grandeur and imperial glory, an intense desire for global domination and Pan-Islamism, anti-Western resentfulness, vindictiveness and anger to the inherited emotions. Thus, while remaining anxious, the Turkish nation has also become an ‘angry nation’ (Öktem 2011) and even a ‘furious nation’ under the Erdoğanists who started leading Turkey towards a vindictive and confrontational civilisationism.
Creating desired citizens, and simultaneously constructing undesired citizens, is, of course, not unique to Turkey. But Turkey is one of the most significant manifestations of this phenomenon of creating a nation-state on the remnants of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual Empire. Turkey has been unable to develop a unifying national identity that entirely represents its various ethnic, religious and political groups. As a result, ‘at various times, society has splintered along lines that can be glossed as Islamist/secular, left/right, Kurd/Turk, Alevi/Sunni, Muslim/non-Muslim, liberal/conservative, as well as left/left, Kurd/Kurd, and Sunni/Sunni’ (White Reference White2017, 26).
For the Kemalists, top-down social engineering meant the revolutionary modernisation and Westernisation of social, political and economic spheres in the newly founded Republic of Turkey. The Erdoğanists have used the same techniques to shift all spheres of life towards the Islamisation of Turkey. Nevertheless, with its focus mainly on religion, this book demonstrates how the Kemalist (and its antecedent, the Young Turks) hegemony and subsequent Erdoğanist Turkish Islamist counter-hegemony were under the influence of similar emotions and as a result how they also employed similar nation-building methods and social engineering tools to create their desired and undesired citizens and to consolidate their respective hegemonies. These two opposing yet influential political ideologies/regimes of modern Turkey have not only been implemented using the same instruments and methodologies, but have also, arguably, used the same narratives, albeit with different motivations and for different objectives. What is more, as the book tries to show, although their conceptualisation and implementation of desired citizen typologies are at odds, there is an astonishing overlap between these two authoritarian ideologies/regimes’ understanding of undesired and tolerated citizens.
Because all these negative collective emotions and experiences have been very influential in Turkish and Erdoğanist nation-building and desired citizen creation projects, in addition to being influential in the securitisation and oppression of minorities as undesired citizens, I will elaborate on this theme before moving on to the literature on citizenship and securitisation.
1.1 Insecurities of the Anxious Nation
The Turkish nation is haunted by its ontological insecurity vis-à-vis the West. In the Social Theory of International Politics, Alexander Wendt (1999, 235–236) categorises four elements of national interest that are common to all states: (1) physical survival, (2) autonomy, (3) economic well-being and (4) collective self-esteem. While the first three are defined as material needs, self-esteem refers to a state’s need for respect and status (Wendt Reference Wendt1999, 215–219). Since interests and identities are constructed intersubjectively, variation in a state’s self-image depends upon relationships with respect to significant Others. As such, humiliation or disregard by significant Others destabilises a state’s self-image, resulting in competitive international environments as states seek to compensate for their self-esteem with self-assertion, and/or devaluation and aggression towards the Other (Wendt Reference Wendt1999, 218).
The issue of how states deal with existential threats to their identity has also been studied with reference to the term ontological (in)security. Ontological security is the need for the individual to feel themselves as whole and comprehend their sense of self to satisfy the need for a self-assured and stable identity in relation to significant Others. Giddens (Reference Giddens1991) and others (Kinnvall 2004, 746; Steele Reference Steele2005, 519–540; 2008; Mitzen Reference Mitzen2006a, 341–370; 2006b, 270–285) have applied this concept to state identity. Ontological security-seeking is an anxious process which features a constant desire to maintain or restore stability and social order (Mitzen and Larson Reference Mitzen and Larson2017).
Turkey’s ontological insecurity (Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010) stems from its sense of never having aligned temporally with the West, always being ‘behind’ in the process of modernisation, always seeming ‘backward’ in comparison (Çapan and Zarakol Reference Çapan and Zarakol2019, 269), and seen as uncivilised, savage and brutal by the powerful, dominant and hegemonic West. Thus, the Turkish state did not have the same legitimacy of existence as ‘the civilised states’, which were seen as having a right to colonise as part of their civilising mission or, to invoke the poet Rudyard Kipling, the ‘White Man’s Burden’.
Turkey has historically been rather sensitive to its international status in general and vis-à-vis the West in particular (Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010, 8). Nothing can manifestly show these emotions more than the Tenth Anniversary March,Footnote 4 which was written and composed at the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish Republic:
The desire to ‘catch up’ with the West and Western orientation of foreign policy were fundamental elements of Kemalist ideology, while at the same time reproducing perceptions of inferiority. Indeed, the goal of becoming part of the West emerged long before the foundation of the Republic in 1923, and most of the late Ottoman intelligentsia shared the view that the only way to secure the Empire was through Westernisation (Bagdonas Reference Bagdonas2012, 117). Since the nineteenth century, Turkey has been trying to overcome this insecurity by espousing, emulating and transplanting Western educational, political and legal constructs and institutions. On the other hand, it has had deep suspicions about the West’s true intentions in relation to the fate of the Empire and, later, Turkey. In this context, Turkey’s ambivalent relationship with the West and the international system has been repeatedly underlined (Ahıska Reference Ahıska2003; Rumelili Reference Rumelili2003; Reference Rumelili2011; Bilgin Reference Bilgin2009; Yanık Reference Yanık2009; Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010; Reference Zarakol2011; Reference Zarakol2013; Bagdonas Reference Bagdonas2012). In short, the Kemalist response to the insecurities, anxieties and fears of the fledgling nation was what I call ‘ambivalent Westernism.’ In the final analysis, this was still Westernism and saw Western civilisation as the only civilisation to be emulated but it still harboured anxieties, insecurities and fears in relation to the true intentions of the powerful Western states.
Until Erdoğan’s turn, Turkey had been trying to cross the bridgeFootnote 5 between the East and the West for more than a hundred years, with a self-conscious anxiety that has persisted over the years and remains a source of frustration and threat, and a symptom of internalised inferiority (Ahıska Reference Ahıska2003, 353). However, ontological insecurity was just one of the insecurities of the new nation. Fear of loss of territory as well as fear of abandonment by the rest of the world became prominent themes during the Ottoman Empire, persisted through the transformation into the Turkish nation state, and remains an underlying premise to this day (Göçek Reference Göçek2011, 41; Alaranta Reference Alaranta, Lehti, Pennanen and Jouhki2020, 269). Fear of loss of territory needs a little more elaboration, as it is very major concern of the current Turkish national psyche too.
In the lands of the former Ottoman Empire there are now twenty-six countries in Europe and the Caucasus, fourteen countries in the Middle East and twenty-two countries in Africa.Footnote 6 However, the expansion of the Empire stopped towards the end of the sixteenth century and stagnation began in 1606. For the first time in their history, the Ottomans lost territory with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 and their self-confidence was shaken little, but they would go on to have more victories. Nevertheless, starting with the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji in 1774, the Empire’s capital would consistently receive one piece of devastating news after another, and the Ottomans would come to accept the supremacy of European power. In the nineteenth century, millions of Muslims escaping from ethnic cleansing in the lost territories of Crimea, the Balkans and the Caucasus poured into the shrinking Ottoman heartlands, creating additional trauma for the forced migrants as well as the receiving communities. In the meantime, the Great Powers (including Russia) were being granted protection rights over non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire as concessions for wars fought with the Ottomans, and were also encroaching on Ottoman sovereignty in other ways, by gradually granting citizenship to the Sultan’s non-Muslim subjects and even establishing consulates on Ottoman territory, such as on the Aegean islands, to facilitate the rights of these new ‘citizens’. Through these minorities, they constantly pressured the Ottoman rulers and intervened in the domestic affairs of the Empire.
Another related reason for trauma was debate over the Eastern Question, which made the Ottoman elite anxious. The Eastern Question was a diplomatic problem in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concerning the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the contest for Ottoman territories. The European powers did not want another nation to take advantage and increase its own influence as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Question was comprised of many interrelated elements such as Ottoman military defeats, institutional insolvency, the ongoing political and economic modernisation programme, the rise of ethno-religious nationalism in the Ottoman provinces and competition between the Great Powers (Anderson 1966; Macfie Reference Macfie1996). However, as we will repeatedly see throughout this book, in the Turkish national imagination, this question has been expanded to include all Ottoman territories at all times, not just during the period of the Empire’s decline. Thus, in popular parlance, the Eastern Question refers to the constant attempts of Crusader Europe to rid Anatolia of Turks, from their first arrival in 1071 to the present.Footnote 7
The shrinking of the Empire took an excruciating 220 years, leaving its traumatic mark on the national memory and motivating Kemalist Turkish nation-building. All of these traumas, anxieties and fears have been perpetuated in education (especially history), the media and popular culture to create desired citizens, warn them against external and internal existential threats and mobilise them for the state.
One of the Kemalist responses to accusations of barbarity and the Eastern Question was to develop the Turkish Historical Thesis. According to this thesis, Turks were the generators of civilisation from the very beginning of human development and almost all prominent ancient civilisations on earth were either Turks or indebted to Turks. The Turks were descendants of white (Aryan) inhabitants of Central Asia who had to migrate to other areas like China, Europe and the Near East, because of natural disasters, before establishing major states, such as the Sumerian and Hittite Empires centred in Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and helping China and India to produce their impressive civilisations. The Turks could even take substantial credit for the achievements of the Greco-Roman civilisation, which was the product of Turkic peoples who had migrated to Crete and Italy. While, paradoxically, the Turks were celebrating their arrival and conquest of Anatolia in 1071 every year, they were also claiming that they had been in Anatolia for several millennia. By extending the roots of Turkish citizens in the land they inhabited, the Kemalists endeavoured to tackle their feeling of insecurity with regard to Western powers and their Sèvres Syndrome (to be explained below). Moreover, with the aid of this myth, which bolstered Turkish self-confidence, the Kemalists did not need Ottoman glory. They filled the historical void left by their rejection and erasure of the Ottoman past with the new myth (Türkmen-Dervişoğlu Reference Türkmen-Dervişoğlu2013, 677).
The fall from grace as a great empire, humiliating years of constant foreign interventions that the Ottoman Empire had endured as a member of so-called semi-civilised humanity, ethnic uprisings, nationalism among minorities, traumatic incidents like the fall of the former Ottoman capital Edirne (Adrianople) to Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars,Footnote 8 the bloody dismemberment of the Empire, the occupation of Istanbul by the British in 1918, the attacks of Islamist fanatics’ on the Turkish army during the War of Independence, the Kurdish uprising of 1925, and the allegedly Islamist uprising in Menemen in 1930 have not remained in the past and the resulting wounds are still open (Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010, 15). Thus, existential fears and anxieties in relation to external powers as well as the view of ethnic, religious and political minorities as unreliable and threatening elements have persisted. This both heavily influenced but also facilitated the Kemalist elite to implement their nationalism construction project. For this, they have used a ‘chosen trauma’ that I will discuss in the next section.
Ottoman history in the Turkish educational system, which I myself have experienced, is a roller coaster of joy, distress, and frustration. This educational programme teaches students to be overjoyed at every victory of the Ottoman Empire, and then be angry at the collapse of the Empire and the Sultans – who were framed as corrupt, evil, suffering from psychological problems, spending all their time in the harem instead of on the battlefield, and pursuing extravagant lifestyles while the people were poor and suffering. I still remember how I felt in my school years when studying Ottoman history. I (and I am sure almost all of my classmates) would be almost ecstatically overjoyed with the victories of our heroes against the villains from one battle to another. We would then be also annoyed with the foreign powers that were always jealous of and hostile to ‘our’ Empire and were constantly conspiring against it. Neither the textbooks nor the teachers offered us alternative explanations or perspectives such as how the peoples in the conquered lands felt, and their perceptions of Ottoman rule and desires for independence. Neither did we seriously study the structural, economic, cultural, geopolitical, and domestic reasons for the decline and collapse other than the ‘inept, corrupt and evil Ottoman elite’ and their backwardness, i.e. the wrong understanding of Islam.
The emotions generated from reading textbooks on Ottoman glory and its agonising collapse were not a coincidence. The Kemalists carefully ‘chose the trauma’ (Volkan Reference Volkan1997) of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent invasion of Turkey by the British, the French, the Italians and the Greeks to mould the minds of new generations in line with their insecurities, anxieties and fears in order to create a resilient and agile nation.
In the next section, I will elaborate on this chosen trauma, victimhood and siege mentality, which are all embodied by the Sèvres Syndrome.
1.2 Chosen Trauma, Victimhood and the Kemalist Siege Mentality
A ‘chosen trauma’ is the selective recollection of a calamity experienced by the predecessors of a national or ethnic group. This political-psychological repertoire includes information, fantasized expectations, intense feelings and defence against unacceptable opinions (Volkan Reference Volkan1997, 36). Chosen traumas co-exist in the psyche of groups with diametrically opposite counterparts; ‘chosen glories’ are used to bolster a group’s self-esteem and to provide comforting narratives in times of intense ontological insecurity and existential anxiety (Volkan Reference Volkan1997, 81; see also Volkan Reference Volkan1988). When transposed to new spatio-temporal contexts, a chosen trauma is used to comprehend and interpret new challenges, problems and threats that the group faces. Employing chosen traumas in new situations brings with it powerful emotions of loss, humiliation, vengeance and hatred that, in turn, trigger unconscious defence mechanisms which attempt to reverse these emotions (Volkan Reference Volkan1997, 82). Chosen traumas and chosen glories are deeply connected to the narratives of nations and religions (Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2004, 756).
The Kemalists used the chosen trauma of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the invasion of Turkey by the Allies as well as the Greeks to make sense of the defeats and challenges they faced. They sought refuge in a narrative about the existence of external forces, internal citizen enemies and constant anti-Turkish conspiracies, traps, plots and games.
As Barkey (Reference Barkey, Kerslake, Öktem and Robins2010, 240) notes, although the Ottomans had built their empire through conquest, Turks perceived its collapse as the result of unjust and nefarious plots conjured up by the Great Powers and their proxies. A Turko-centric reading of international relations and emerging nationalisms in the Empire resulted in the understanding that Western powers were abusing the Ottoman multi-ethnic structure by manipulating and provoking its minorities. All of this created serious trauma and suspicion of the Great Powers. In Anatolia alone, between three and four million people, one-fifth of the Empire’s total population, lost their lives due to wars, diseases and forced migration policies. Turkey had also received millions of Muslim refugees from the Empire’s lost territories in the Balkans and the Caucasus. All these people ‘who later formed Turkish society were active participants and/or victims of these massive atrocities’ (Adısönmez and Onursal Reference Adısönmez and Onursal2020, 291). Even Turks in Turkey have had imminent concerns about losing their privileged position, resulting in the majoritarian anxiety of the ‘Turk’ (Adar Reference Adar2018, 742; Hage Reference Hage2003; Skey Reference Skey2011). This has made ‘saving the state’ or ‘state survival’ the main and constant preoccupation of the Young Ottomans, Islamists, Young Turks and the Kemalists.
This fear and victimhood discourse has been a consolidated part of the Turkish national psyche and many millions in Turkey believe in this collective victimhood of the Turkish people as a nation, especially at the hands of Western imperialist forces. An essential aspect of the Kemalist habitus (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Nice1977) is the perpetuation of the Kemalist experience of external conspiracy and internal betrayal (Jung Reference Jung and Muller2001, 149; Şirin Reference Şirin, Berger and Düzyol2020, 77). This deeply internalised mentality is based on a deep suspicion of the true motives of Western countries regarding the possible annihilation, abandonment or betrayal of the Turkish state (Kalaycıoğlu Reference Kalaycıoğlu2005, 37; Göçek Reference Göçek2011, 99; Nefes Reference Nefes2015a, 575; Şirin Reference Şirin, Berger and Düzyol2020, 75).
A crucial component of Turkey’s victimhood nationalism and the most concrete manifestation of the Kemalist chosen trauma is the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920 in Sèvres, France, was one of a series of treaties that the Central Powers signed with the Allied Powers after their defeat in World War I. It aimed to liquidate the Ottoman Empire and virtually abolish Turkish sovereignty. Its stipulations included the renunciation of most of the territory not inhabited by Turks, leaving to the Turkish sovereignty only a fraction of modern Turkey in Central Anatolia. The Treaty of Sèvres could not be realised; Italy and France came to an agreement with Mustafa Kemal, Britain left voluntarily after Mustafa Kemal’s victories, and the Greeks were finally defeated at Dumlupınar on 30 August 1922. It was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923) which defined the border of today’s Turkey with the exception of Hatay province, which was annexed in 1939. Nevertheless, Sèvres has had a lasting legacy. It was chosen by the nation-building elite as ‘a powerful symbol of the near-annihilation of the Empire’s Muslims and Turks’ (Öktem 2011, 18) to remind citizens constantly that they need to be fearful, vigilant and obedient to the state to make it strong.
As a result, on the one hand, Kemalists enthusiastically embraced many aspects of Western civilisation, but, on the other, they feared that Western powers wanted to ‘divide and rule’ Turkey.Footnote 9 While Mustafa Kemal viewed European civilisation as the zenith of progress and the epitome of modernity, he was at the same time suspicious of Europe’s power and designs on the Ottoman Empire. He confessed to an interviewer in 1923 that the West was ‘an entity that, seeing us as an inferior society, has exerted its best efforts to encompass our destruction’ (Hanioğlu Reference Hanioğlu2011, 57).
Despite Turkey’s participation in NATO and the EU accession process, Turkish nationalism has been accompanied by intense isolationism and a suspicion of outsiders. Even when the EU process was on track and the AKP was still pro-EU, opinion polls still showed the fear and distrust of foreigners expressed by some Turks which was explained by cultural memories of European interventions during the last years of the Ottoman Empire (Haynes Reference Haynes, Haynes and Hennig2011). However, the Kemalists’ love–hate relationship with the West generally suppressed anti-Western rhetoric and anxieties, and the Kemalist Turkish state aspired to be a member of Western civilisation.Footnote 10
The Treaty of Sèvres had paved the way for emergence of the Sèvres Syndrome (Jung Reference Jung and Muller2001; Göçek Reference Göçek2011). The Sèvres Syndrome is a siege mentality, a belief that the in-group is encircled by enemies and in immediate need of self-defence (Bar-Tal and Antebi Reference Bar-Tal and Antebi1992).Footnote 11 When siege mentality influences a society, it becomes part of the national ethos. It is then expressed and reproduced through educational, cultural and political channels, in schools, from parents, through literature and the media. As a result, this mentality becomes part of the individual’s cognitive repertoire (Bar-Tal and Antebi Reference Bar-Tal and Antebi1992, 636). In this condition, group members may press for cohesiveness and unity in order to withstand actual or imagined external threats. They may take exceptional measures to avert the threat (Bar-Tal and Antebi Reference Bar-Tal and Antebi1992, 643).
All of these factors: wounds, cultural trauma, fears, anxieties, insecurities and victimhood (Ülgen Reference Ülgen2010; Türkyılmaz Reference Türkyılmaz2011; Yılmaz Z. 2017), and siege mentality have become part of the Turkish national psyche, maintained, augmented and emotionally reproduced in everyday life (Scheff Reference Scheff1994; Berezin Reference Berezin1997; Reference Berezin and Steinmetz1999; Bonikowski Reference Bonikowski2016) through discourses in the public sphere, pop culture, textbooks and other politico-cultural apparatuses such as newspapers, movies, TV series and narratives of the elites. The state continually stoked citizens’ fear of the outside enemy, a fear directed towards Western countries that sought to undermine Turkish unity and destroy the nation, just as they had dismembered the Ottoman Empire and divided the spoils during World War I (White Reference White2017, 28). As a popular Turkish saying goes, ‘Turks have no other friends but Turks’ (White Reference White2017, 28). Turkish students of my age would sing a song many times in their school lives that repeats the line ‘there is no friendly nation to the Turks other than the Turks’. The TV and radio stations would continually broadcast this song and everybody at the time knew the song by heart. We would also hear countless times in History, Social Studies and Atatürk’s Revolution lessons the Kemalist oft-repeated maxim that ‘Turkey is surrounded by enemies.’Footnote 12
Over time, the Sèvres Syndrome gave birth to various anti-Western conspiracy theories (Jung Reference Jung and Muller2001; Mendenhall Reference Mendenhall2011; Herzog Reference Herzog and Reinkowski2014, 196; Çaylı Reference Çaylı2018, 261). It has been argued that when we get to the bottom of the ‘national security culture’, we find Sèvres Syndrome. The Turkish Republican elite in general, and the Turkish military in particular, initially generated the elements of the Sèvres Syndrome for purposes of nation state formation and then reproduced it as a paradigm to sustain political power and control over the social and economic resources of the state (Göçek Reference Göçek2011, 99).Footnote 13 Thus, from the early days of the Republic, Turkey has been a security-conscious state.
Within the context of Sèvres Syndrome, siege mentality and the integral notion of external/internal enemies, the Kemalists viewed ethnic and religious diversity as being inherently dangerous because of its potential to fracture the Republic (Kehl-Bodrogi Reference Kehl-Bodrogi, White and Jongerden2003, 64). Parliamentary discussions on the 1924 Constitution show the overarching consensus that religious and linguistic affiliations were the primary markers of nationhood, as ‘best expressed by one of the MPs: Our authentic citizen belongs to the Hanafi sect of Sunni Islam and speaks Turkish’ (Adar Reference Adar2018, 741). Thus, only ethnic secular Turks passed ‘the acid test of Turkishness’ by also prioritising state interests (Göçek Reference Göçek2011, 131). Kemalist narratives did have their own antagonists, such as the Kurds, Armenians, Islamists, leftists and Jews, and these antagonists were sometimes also cast as ‘foreigners’ and accused of treachery by conspiring with the West (Çapan and Zarakol Reference Çapan and Zarakol2019, 272). As a result, the state securitised these minorities.
1.3 Securitisation of Minorities and Political Islam
Securitisation is the transformation of a political issue into a problem of security by constructing and presenting it as an existential threat that requires extraordinary measures (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde 1998; Buzan and Hansen Reference Buzan and Hansen2009). In other words, when there is a perceived existential threat to the survival of the nation or the state, then the latter argues that this necessitates ‘the state of exception’ (Agamben Reference Agamben2005) that requires and legitimates extraordinary measures beyond the rule of law. Trauma and fear and are particularly used in securitisation. In an atmosphere where there is fear, it is easier to argue the need to use extraordinary means. Historically rooted trauma, nostalgia, insecurity and grievances of the nation have been used by states to use extraordinary measures (Shipoli Reference Shipoli2010; Reference Shipoli2018). Securitisation has negatively impacted the citizenship rights of ethnic, religious and political minorities in a variety of contexts such as Nazi Germany, the USA, China and Russia, Israel and Turkey (Smooha Reference Smooha2002; Roe Reference Roe2004; Gibson Reference Gibson2008; Nyers Reference Nyers2009; Guillaume and Huysmans Reference Guillaume and Huysmans2013; Huysmans and Guillaume Reference Huysmans, Guillaume, Guillaume and Huysmans2013; Chandler Reference Chandler2014; Rubin Reference Rubin2017).
In the Turkish context, the state elite decided that a backward interpretation of Islam and ethno-religious and political heterogeneity were the fundamental reasons for Ottoman collapse, humiliation and hence trauma, so they decided to securitise them and deal with them with extraordinary measures. Those citizens belonging to the ethnic, religious and political identities that were perceived to challenge the dominant national identity narrative were constructed as existential threats to the security of the nation and the full extent of their citizenship rights was denied (Rubin Reference Rubin2017, 877).
The loss of Ottoman territories in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century led the Young Turks to conclude that Ottoman attempts to catch up with Western civilisational standards of equality among different ethno-religious and linguistic groups had been a failure. Thus, especially after the 1913 coup, in which the Young Turks established a one-party regime, they promoted a nationalist ideology that was modernist, statist, socially Darwinist and relatively secularist (Hanioğlu Reference Hanioğlu1996; Reference Hanioğlu2001; Zarakol Reference Zarakol2010, 13).
However, as Islam has been the religion of the majority of the population and non-Muslims were perceived to be the pawns of Western powers, Turkish Muslimness was also, albeit undeclared, part of this national identity. Even though the core of Turkey’s conflicts surrounding Islam–state–society relations has occasionally been reduced to an Islam–secularism divide, this is neither an accurate nor a ‘useful lens for understanding political developments in Turkey’ (White Reference White2017, 23) as Turkish Muslimness has been part and parcel of the national identity, i.e. ‘Muslim Nationalism’ (Zürcher 1999; 2010; White Reference White2012), since Young Turk times. However, this entailed a version of Islam that was secularism-friendly, Turkified, and strictly and monopolistically controlled by the state. All of this would mean that Islamic religious groups including Islamists, non-Muslims and non-Turks would be gradually securitised. The state would either try to assimilate them into secular Muslim Turkishness or dissimilate them and construct them as security threats and citizen enemies if assimilation was not possible. Kemalist elites used Sèvres Syndrome to justify laicism, fearing European intervention on the grounds of backwardness of Turkish society that was related to religiosity (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2008, 603). Kemalist secularism consistently reproduced the fear of Islamic fanaticism (Azak Reference Azak2010).
As a result, over the course of Turkey’s history, warnings against the inside enemy have featured in classrooms, newspapers, political discourse and conspiracy theories spread from neighbour to neighbour. The inside enemy refers to non-Muslim citizens, who were assumed to be disloyal to the state because they lacked Turkish-Muslim blood, to Islamists and independent Islamic groups such as Sufi brotherhoods and to Kurds and Alevis who, though nominally Muslim, were believed to be guided by outside powers aiming to divide Turkey (White Reference White2017, 28). In a similar vein, the Kemalist establishment always believed that behind the Islamic dissidents, leftists, socialists, communists, Kurds and Alevis, there was always at least one Western state, if not several, working to destroy the Republic (Hurd Reference Hurd2008, 66).
The Kemalist elite saw linguistic heterogeneityFootnote 14 too as an existential challenge, a threat, and thus even language became securitised. The discourse of the Kemalist elite and textbooks show that in the Kemalist imagination, belonging to the Turkish nation was only possible through linguistic assimilation and thus the slogan of the Turkish Republic during the single-party period was ‘one language, one culture, one ideal’ (İnce Reference İnce2012a, 39; Bayar Reference Bayar2011, 114–115).
The Kemalist discourse on Islam remained unchanged in the multi-party period, although actors (alleged ‘bad’ or ‘good’ Muslims) who were made to fill the roles of fanatical Islam and Turkish Islam varied in different settings (Azak Reference Azak2010, xiv). Keeping this in mind, it can broadly be asserted that the key element of Kemalist ideology was secularisation, through which it tried to transform Turkish society and institutions into modern and Western bodies.Footnote 15
The one-party rule of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) lasted from the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 until 1950. The multi-party period suddenly presented new alternatives to the people, especially those who could not identify with Kemalist ideology. By the 1970s, the Kemalist hegemony faced two main ideological rivals. On the one hand, the Islamist National Outlook Movement (NOM) of Necmettin Erbakan (see in detail Yavuz Reference Yavuz2003; Yıldız Reference Yıldız2003) was gaining ground among the conservative masses and petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, leftism with its socialist, communist and Leninist variations was on the rise in universities, among the intelligentsia, Kurds and Alevis. However, the end of its administration did not end the dominance of Kemalism over the state.
A brief, but violent, confrontation between rightists and leftists in the late 1970s brought chaos and disruption to Turkey. The military tutelage in Turkey used this as an opportunity to stage a coup and take hold of the government on 12 September 1980. After the coup, Cold War conditions inspired the Kemalists to move beyond aggressive secularism and pursue an Islam-friendly version (a right-wing Kemalism) in order to reach devout Muslims. Thus, as far as the Kemalist establishment was concerned,Footnote 16 the process of de-securitising Islamic manifestations in the public sphere from the late 1940s accelerated with the 1980 coup. Military generals, in the face of Islamist and leftist challenges, increased the Diyanet’s (the Presidency of Religious Affairs) budget to make use of what I call Diyanet Islam more effectively (to be discussed in detail later in this chapter). The military ruler, (and later president) Kenan Evren, publicly propagated a new ideology, the ‘Turkish–Islamic Synthesis’, aimed at state-controlled Islamisation (Sunnification) of society in an attempt to counterbalance socialists, leftists and Kurdish separatists (Saleem Reference Saleem2015, 352; Ünlücayaklı 2012, 99–108).
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kemalists ended their symbiotic relationship with the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis and turned their attention to rising Turkish Islamism. This resulted in a soft coup of 28 February 1997. However, despite the coup, younger generations of Islamists came to power by jettisoning Islamism and establishing the AKP. The repeated general elections and referendum victories of the AKP in the face of weak opposition parties and loss of prestige of the Kemalists would lay the foundations for the rise of Erdoğanism.
While securitising non-Muslims, non-Sunnis, non-Turks, Islamists and leftists, the state had also been busy creating its own desired citizens. This policy was based on the majority population’s identity of Sunni Muslim Turkishness but these citizens also had to have secular lifestyles, i.e. non-practicing Muslims loyal to the Atatürk’s ideology and revolution. The following section discusses this new citizen creation project.
1.4 Creating the Desired Citizens
The Republic of Turkey has expended many resources in creating a hierarchy of citizens. Citizenship has been a significant concept studied by scholars (e.g. Turner Reference Turner and Turner1993; Turner and Hamilton Reference Turner and Hamilton1994; Beiner Reference Beiner1995; Kymlicka and Norman Reference Kymlicka and Norman2000; Shafir Reference Shafir1998). Citizenship is defined as an individual’s participation, or membership, in a common community, typically understood as a political community (Barbalet Reference Barbalet1988, 2). It has been bound closely to the institution of the nation state (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1992, 23).
Modern states portray themselves not as arbitrary collections of people tied together by a common legal status, but as a community of values, composed of people who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour expressed through ethnicity, religion, culture, or language – that is, members have shared values (Anderson 2013, 2). The community of values is one of the ways that states claim legitimacy, and, in this way, it often overlaps with ideas of the nation (Anderson 2013, 3). The community of values is populated by ‘good citizens’ – law-abiding and hard-working members of stable and respectable families (Anderson 2013, 3).
Consequently, citizenship is not only a legal status,Footnote 17 but also a ‘social practice’ (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004) that is embedded in a wider matrix, through which issues of national identity, belonging and values are addressed and articulated. Citizenship may be claimed through ‘acts of citizenship’ that ‘call the law into question’ (Isin Reference Isin, Isin and Nielsen2008: 39).
There are different variations or classifications of citizenship.Footnote 18 For instance, important to the Turkish context, Cohen (Reference Cohen2009) was the development of the concept of semi-citizenship, which also has sub-groups ranging from permanent residents to cultural minority groups, such as the Roma. Building on Menjívar’s (2006; 2008) notion of liminal legality, Torres and Wicks-Asbun (Reference Torres and Wicks-Asbun2014, 195) argued that undocumented illegal migrants in the USA experience a form of ‘liminal citizenship’. The notion of liminal citizenship acknowledges the agency that undocumented people demonstrate in constructing new forms of citizenship, claiming rights and legitimising themselves through their success in school, their positive work ethic, commitment to community, sense of belonging, and identification as Americans; however, they face exclusion in many aspects of their daily lives because of their legal status (Torres and Wicks-Asbun Reference Torres and Wicks-Asbun2014, 200).
Anderson’s (2013) concepts of the ‘failed citizen’ and ‘tolerated citizen’ are two such liminal citizen categories. She argues that individuals and groups that are imagined as incapable of, or failing to live up to, liberal ideals may be designated as ‘failed citizens’.Footnote 19 The failed citizen is both a disappointment and a threat to the local community and/or the nation (Anderson 2013, 4).Footnote 20 As well as good, non-, and failed citizens, there are also (not-quite-)good-enough citizens. These are ‘tolerated citizens’ (Anderson 2013, 6). Both hardworking immigrants and deserving claimants are only tolerated members of the community of values, and neither are good citizens (Anderson 2013, 7). Similarly, in the British context, Tufyal (Reference Tufyal2017, 225) argued that Muslims are at best ‘tolerated citizens’, required to demonstrate their commitment to British values, and Muslims holding unacceptable extremist views are ‘failed citizens’.
It is well known that the self-declared civilising mission of the Kemalist project was to raise the level of Turkish society and culture to contemporary civilisation (muasır medeniyet seviyesi) and create a new human (yeni insanı yaratmak) that was accepted by the Kemalists as Western. They stipulated consistently and clearly that contemporary civilisation was defined by the West (Göle Reference Göle1996a, 11–13). However, rather than studying the pro-Western, modernist and pro-Enlightenment ideals of Kemalism, which have been repeatedly and very successfully investigated, this book will look at its practices while ruling: its methods, and instruments vis-à-vis ethnic, religious and political identities. In other words, the book will examine what happened while the Kemalists tried to implement their ideology and achieve their objectives.
Since the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Turkish state has held a de facto definition of desired and, by implication, undesired citizens. For single-party era Kemalists, citizenship was not a liberal category framed by the language of rights, but was a morally loaded category aimed at creating a secular, rational, Westernised national identity compatible with the project of modernity as civilisation (Keyman and İçduygu Reference Keyman and İçduygu2005, 6; see also Kadıoğlu Reference Kadıoğlu1999; Ünsal Reference Ünsal1998; Üstel Reference Üstel1997; Soyarık Reference Soyarık2000; Birtek and Dragonas Reference Birtek and Dragonas2005; Caymaz Reference Caymaz2007; Kadıoğlu Reference Kadıoğlu2008). Thus the official policies of the Turkish state in many areas, including immigration, taxation and employment, reveal a thinly disguised exclusionary ethno-racial understanding of the nation, especially in the early Republican period, despite claims of being a civic republic (Akar Reference Akar1992; Mardin Reference Mardin, Barkey and Hagen1997; Deringil Reference Deringil and Gladney1998; Dündar 1999; Aktar Reference Aktar2000; Kirişçi 2000; Çağaptay 2003; 2004; Yeğen 2004; Okutan Reference Okutan2004; Oran Reference Oran2004; Maksudyan Reference Maksudyan2005; Eissenstatt Reference Eissenstat2007; Kadıoğlu 2007; Birtek Reference Birtek, Benhabib, Shapiro and Petranovic2007; Ülker Reference Ülker2008; İnce Reference İnce2012a; Bayar Reference Bayar2014; Kaya Reference Kaya2016). Many works published in the last two decades have consistently underlined the symbiotic relationship between Turkishness and Muslimness in the Kemalist nation-building project (see for instance Davison Reference Davison1998; Lindisfarne Reference Lindisfarne2002; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2006; İnce Reference İnce2012a; Reference İnce2012b; Yılmaz H. 2013; Dressler Reference Dressler2013; Houston Reference Houston2020).
Kemalists trusted only the citizens in their desired citizen categories and barred others from critical positions within state institutions, especially the military (see in detail Hale Reference Hale1994), judiciary and national intelligence organisations that are key to preserving hegemony.
On the other hand, the Kemalists used a religious institution too. Since the beginning of the Turkish Republic, the Kemalists gave the Diyanet (The Presidency of Religious Affairs) the duty to protect the Turkish national identity and help the state to ensure national solidarity (Poulton Reference Poulton1997, 185–187; Zürcher and Van der Linden 2004, 110; Sunier et al. Reference Sunier, van der Linden and van de Bovenkamp2016, 406) by controlling, monopolizing and moulding Islam, along with the ideological pretensions of secularist–nationalist Kemalism (Yılmaz Reference Yılmaz2005). In this book, I refer to this state version of Islam as ‘Diyanet Islam’. The purpose of Diyanet Islam was to inculcate the faithful to be obedient to the rulers, to deeply respect the state, to be militarist and to be Turkish nationalist. Islam was valuable in the face of a potential threat arising from the ‘Christian’ imperialist West and ‘Atheist’ imperialist North. Nevertheless, it needed to be a matter of national identity and belonging rather than Islamic spirituality, theology, law and global brotherhood of Muslims (ummah). The Kemalists knew that Islamic mysticism, religion and piety would not disappear quickly and decided to mould this religiosity in line with their ideology until all citizens become desired citizens. In other words, while the project of creating desired citizens was the primary project, the Diyanet Islam project was a secondary transitory project. If the best citizens of Kemalism were Homo LASTus (the Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni and Turkish people), then the second-best, liminal or tolerated citizens were Homo Diyanetus. In short, the creation of the Homo Diyanetus citizenship typology was another top-down attempt at social engineering.
All other ethnic, religious and political identities were condemned as out-groups, undesired citizens and even citizen enemies. However, Kemalist attempts at homogenizing the nation by creating the desired citizen, gradually transforming tolerated citizens into desired ones and totally eliminating the undesired ones were only partially successful. Especially thanks to membership of NATO and transitioning to the multi-party politics albeit under Kemalist tutelage, millions of citizens continued to claim their Kurdish, Alevi, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, leftist, socialist, practicing Muslim and Islamist identities. One of these undesired groups, the Turkish Islamist group, would consistently grow each decade, would be part of coalition governments in 1970, would win municipal elections in Istanbul and Ankara in 1994, would lead a coalition government in the mid-1990s and would come to power in late 2002, resulting in the Erdoğanist hegemony. Like the Kemalists, Erdoğanists would also have their own desired, tolerated and undesired citizens.
Erdoğanism, the political ideology, has developed around the personality cult of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and has been trying to replace Kemalism as the hegemonic ideology in Turkey. Currently, we can describe this as an interregnum, or, to paraphrase Gramsci (Reference Gramsci1971), the old hegemony is dying and the new one cannot be born.
1.5 Erdoğanism: The Death of Kemalism or the Resurrection of Kemalism?
The Kemalist system eventually collapsed with the constitutional amendment referendum in 2010, after which the AKP succeeded in changing the rules of the game of Turkish politics. The preservation of Kemalist hegemony through constitutional organs ended, as did the separation between the state and the government, and a New Turkey (as Erdoğan likes to call it) was born.
The construction of a New Turkey (Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2015; White Reference White2017; Sezal and Sezal Reference Sezal and Sezal2017; Ongur Reference Ongur2018; Çevik 2019; Alaranta Reference Alaranta, Lehti, Pennanen and Jouhki2020) had a strong emphasis on a fully independent, developed, resilient Turkey as a leading regional and even global power (Yılmaz, Çaman and Bashirov Reference Yılmaz2020, 272). Thus, the AKP positioned Erdoğan as the chief (the wise, native and national leader) of the New Turkey which is comprised of three elements: independence, democracy and development. ‘Independence’ means being unshackled from Western domination. This narrative reflects a continuity of the insecurities, anxieties and fears of Turks since late Ottoman times. This insecurity is fortified with anti-Western conspiracy theories that imply that ‘Turkey’s unbridled rise and political potency challenges and annoys the hegemonic western powers’ (Taş 2014b) and they constantly plan and enact plots to stop Turkey’s rise and dismember it. The ‘democracy’ component of the New Turkey construct relies on majoritarianism, a hegemonic leader who is the embodiment of a Rousseauean ‘general will’ and obedient institutions. The ‘development’ component refers to reaching economic, military and political power such that Turkey is considered to be a great power (Yılmaz, Çaman and Bashirov Reference Yılmaz2020, 272).
However, Özyürek asks ‘Is this a “New Turkey” or “is it the Old Turkey in new garments?”’ (Özyürek 2019, 2; see also Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2015). Once the AKP secured its grip on power, it started to mimic its opponent and chose to become the new hegemon instead of being merely the ruling party of democratic Turkey (Polat Reference Polat2016, 21). The ‘New Turkey’ is, in a way, the resurrection of Kemalist authoritarianism under the guise of Islamism. The resemblance between Kemalism and Erdoğanism was first mentioned by Aron Liel, as early as 2003, though in a positive way. According to him, Erdoğanism was ‘an updated version of Kemalism.’Footnote 21 The first to write about the resemblance in a negative sense was Mehmet Altan in 2012, using the term ‘religious Kemalism’.Footnote 22 Şahin Alpay and Hasan Cemal used another term, ‘Islamic Kemalism.’Footnote 23
Dedeoğlu and Aksakal (Reference Dedeoğlu and Aksakal2015, 249–250) claimed that Erdoğanism is in fact a revised version of Kemalism, while some have depicted Erdoğanism as the ‘mirror image’ of Kemalism (Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2015, 3; Çapan and Zarakol Reference Çapan and Zarakol2019) and others have speculated that Kemalist ideology started to infiltrate AKP ranks gradually until, finally, Erdoğan was convinced to adopt this mindset (Bayart Reference Bayart2015, 11).Footnote 24 Most tellingly, perhaps, Doğu Perinçek, of the far-left nationalist Patriotic Party, praised Erdoğan as an ‘Islamic Kemalist’ in 2017Footnote 25 and Erdoğan drew parallels between himself and Atatürk during the 2019 election campaign.Footnote 26 However, my preference was ‘Kemalo-Islamism’ (Yılmaz Reference Yılmaz2015), to emphasise its profound Islamist aspect that the other suggested terms did not highlight. The term ‘Kemalo-Islamist’ sounds oxymoronic but I hope this book will substantiate it.
Additionally, there is a growing body of literature that claims that Erdoğanism imitates the Kemalism of the 1930s rather than resurrecting the Ottoman past (Polat Reference Polat2016; Christofis Reference Christofis2018; Oran and Akkoyunlu Reference Oran, Akkoyunlu, Özyürek, Özpınar and Altındiş2019). Between these two ideologies, the creation of the new rich class, the centralisation of power, a personality cult, demonisation campaigns and the positioning of the nation state as a sacred entity are the most salient points (Yılmaz Reference Yılmaz2015; Kocamaner Reference Kocamaner2015; Bora Reference Bora2017; Christofis Reference Christofis2018; Polat Reference Polat2016).
However, as Bora and Yonucu (Reference Bora, Yonucu, Özyürek, Özpınar and Altındiş2019, 234) indicated, in contrast to the previous regime, under Erdoğanism ‘the dominant AKP narrative is about both continuity and discontinuity’. First of all, the AKP is an unashamedly Islamist-leaning party and consequently it has counter-Enlightenment tendencies. Another point that separates classical Kemalism from Erdoğanism is the latter’s irredentist policy.Footnote 27 Atatürk’s famous foreign policy position, ‘peace at home, peace in the world’, was initially adopted by Erdoğan and Ahmet Davutoğlu in the ‘zero problems with neighbours’ foreign policy ideology, but very soon after was totally abandoned under Erdoğan’s single rule. Now Turkey pursues an aggressive foreign policy that seeks to expand its boundaries. The AKP is becoming increasingly anti-Western and this policy has become a key issue. One should always remember that despite its insecurities, anxieties, suspicions and fear about Western governments, when it came to civilisation, classical Kemalism was uncompromisingly and unequivocally Westernist (see Atalay Reference Atalay2018, 118–134).
Despite these, the resemblance between the AKP and neo-nationalist/neo-Kemalist ideology culminated in the AKP’s alliance with the Kemalist far-right MHP after the June 2015 elections, and a de facto alliance with some of the staunchest supporters of the Kemalist far-left (Perinçekists) after the 2016 coup attempt. The common ground of this alliance is the authoritarian, anti-Kurdish, anti-Gülenist, anti-liberal and leftist, anti-Western and anti-intellectual political stance, and ‘an existential threat narrative based on nationalist-religious myths, societal resentments and conspiracy theories’ (Akkoyunlu and Öktem Reference Akkoyunlu and Öktem2016, 515).
In short, Erdoğanists are followers of Kemalism, based on the same political-cultural-historical and social psychological reservoir but constructing themselves differently, using the same Kemalist social engineering tools and methodology, but for a different ideology, different aims, different beneficiaries, a different national identity, different social engineering and a different trilogy of desired, tolerated and undesired citizens. Even though each of these typologies will have their own chapters, also separately for each regime, I will now discuss these typologies in a little more detail.
1.6 Citizenship Typologies of the Book
This study conceives three new analytical terms to understand how and why the Kemalist and Erdoğanist hegemonies tried to build their nations partly through creating their desired citizens. These terms are Homo LASTus, Homo Diyanetus and Homo Erdoğanistus.
The reason why I refer to these Weberian ideal-type citizenships with the word ‘Homo’ is simple: seeing only their desired citizens as humans, neither the Kemalists nor the Erdoğanists consider undesired citizens to be human or equal. Thus, from their perspective, creating the model citizen was also an attempt to create the new human. As I mentioned above, the Kemalists openly talked about ‘creating the new human.’ Also, several Kemalist leading figures uttered sentences like ‘if someone is not laic/he is not a human’. As a matter of fact, my use of ‘homo’ for the desired citizenship typology is also justified by the Young Turk and Kemalist ideal of ‘creating a new human’ (yeni insanı yaratmak) through education (Demiray Reference Demiray1997, 45; Üstel 2004, 127, 155). The teachers were asked by the Kemalist nation-building project ‘to execute the transformation, that is, ‘to create a new human’’ (Alaranta Reference Alaranta2011, 40; Selçuk Reference Selçuk2006, 37). The Tenth Anniversary March,Footnote 28 which was written and composed in 1933 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Republic, reiterates the same ideal:
While Erdoğanists have not yet uttered a similar sentence, their treatment of undesired citizens and especially their constant verbal abuse are worse. Erdoğan himself has employed dehumanising and demonising language and has called the dissidents ‘virus’, ‘cancer’, ‘tumour’ and so on. In short, by using ‘Homo’ in the desired citizen typology of both authoritarian regimes, I want to highlight the fact that these regimes did not see and treat their undesired citizens as humans who deserve human rights.
Homo LASTus is the desired citizen typology of the Kemalists. It refers to a new human being who is Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim and Turk at the same time. In other words, in order to be a desired citizen under the Kemalists, a person must satisfy all four parameters concurrently. In this understanding, the Turkish nation is a military nation whose citizens are prepared to sacrifice their lives for the survival of the state. A good Turk deeply reveres the state, especially the military, worships the nation, loves the homeland and is militarist and authoritarian. They are also ambivalent about the West; while on the one hand they want to emulate and appropriate aspects of Western civilisation, on the other they distrust the powerful Western states that are perceived of harbouring bad intentions towards Turkey’s existence and national identity. Individuals who were citizens on paper but did not have all four parameters at the same time (Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni, Turk) were not considered fully trustworthy and not treated as full citizens.
The undesired citizens of Kemalism or the Others to the Kemalist desired citizen identity were Christians (especially Armenians and Greeks), Jews, Islamists, pious Muslims, leftists, socialists, liberals, democrats, Alevis and Kurds, all of whom encountered the discriminatory and at times oppressive face of the state. Some of these undesired citizens were even constructed as enemy citizens.
Homo Erdoğanistus is the desired citizen typology of the Erdoğanists. The desired citizen of Erdoğan is an exact copy of Erdoğan in terms of political identity. First and foremost, Homo Erdoğanistus is a staunch loyalist of Erdoğan and is a devoted believer of the personality cult of Erdoğan. Being an Islamist is no longer sufficient to be a desired citizen of Erdoğanism, rather loyalty to Erdoğan is absolutely essential. Homo Erdoğanistus is a cultural and religious conservative, Islamist, Muslim nationalist, Islamist populist, civilisationist, militarist, jihadist, Pan-Islamist, anti-Western, anti-Kemalist and authoritarian. Homo Erdoğanistus has a very deep restorative nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, the Caliphate and the unity of the Muslim World. Homo Erdoğanistus has an emotional attachment to the memory of and desire for the Ottoman Empire in its grandeur, machismo, power, domination and especially in its ability to stand up to the Crusader West that has victimised Muslims all over the World and keeps conspiring against them. At the same time, Homo Erdoğanistus has Islamist victimhood mentality, anti-Western resentment, vindictiveness, Islamist insecurities, and conspiratorial and Manichean mindset. Last but not least, Homo Erdoğanistus is ready to sacrifice his/her life for (in the order of) Allah, religion, ummah, nation, homeland and the state.
The undesired citizens of Erdoğanism or the Others to this Erdoğanist desired citizen are Kemalists, non-Muslims such as Christians, Armenians, Greeks, disloyal pious Muslims and even disloyal Islamists, leftists and socialists, liberals, Alevis, and disloyal Kurds. As can be seen the overlap between the undesired citizens of the two competing and seemingly opposite ideologues is very significant. Whatever the regime change, for some out-groups, being constructed as undesired citizens or even citizen enemies does not change.
Homo Diyanetus is the liminal citizenship category of the two antagonistic ideologies and regimes. Homo Diyanetus is a practicing Sunni Muslim whose religious knowledge comes only from the Diyanet and is not a member of any religious group, association, brotherhood or movement. The Homo Diyanetus is a liminal and temporary citizenship category as both regimes knew that transforming society to their desired citizen typology would take time. The Homo Diyanetus is the transitional tolerated citizen, although bureaucratic positions, media organisations, businesses, public procurements and tenders were never entrusted to them or anyone other than desired citizens.
The state has socially engineered Homo Diyanetus in the image of the state’s version of Islam that I call Diyanet Islam. The Diyanet has made heavy use of the centrally written Friday sermons to propagate its state version of Turkish Islam in order to indoctrinate the practicing Sunni Muslim masses. Thus, the Friday sermons of the Diyanet constantly discuss the state’s agenda in relation to the high politics of survival of the state, such as war, economic development, victimhood, existential threats to the nation, ever conspiring enemies, the importance of military service, greatness of the Turkish nation, sacredness of the state, importance of national solidarity and brotherhood, patriotic sacrifice and martyrdom.
While these high political agenda items, that are the products of Turkey’s insecurities, anxieties, fears, victimhood and siege mentality, have not changed since Kemalist times, especially since 2010, Erdoğanists have been making gradual but profound changes to Diyanet Islam in accordance with Erdoğanist ideology. As a result, by 2020, we already have a new version of Diyanet Islam that is not completely new but a revised and reconstructed version of the earlier Diyanet Islam that, even in the Erdoğanist Era, has retained the high political agenda items, themes and narratives that I mentioned above.
As a result, I argue that the Kemalist version of Diyanet Islam was Diyanet Islam 1.0 and the Erdoğanist version is Diyanet Islam 2.0. Accordingly, there are two versions of liminal citizens – one for each ideology/regime. The Kemalists’ liminal citizen category was the tolerated citizen typology of Homo Diyanetus 1.0, whereas for the Erdoğanists it is Homo Diyanetus 2.0. There is still a significant overlap between the Kemalist and Erdoğanist versions of Diyanet Islam and Homo Diyanetus. Homo Diyanetus 1.0 is closer to the Kemalist desired citizen (Homo LASTus) and Homo Diyanetus 2.0 is further away from the Homo LASTus in the spectrum and is closer to the Erdoğanist desired citizen – the Homo Erdoğanistus.
Homo Diyanetus 1.0 was the tolerated citizen of the Kemalists who expected that one day, as a result of their civilising policies and social engineering, these tolerated citizens would be upgraded to desired citizens. This meant that Homo Diyanetus 1.0 had some characteristics of Homo LASTus: they were both Turkish nationalist, militarist, revered the state, Sunni, did not believe that Islam had a political or transnational role, were under the influence of Atatürk’s personality cult, and had insecurities, anxieties and fears in relation to enemies of the Turkish nation. But unlike the desired citizens these tolerated citizens were not secularist and did not have secular lifestyles, they were practicing Muslims. Some of them had a Kurdish political identity. Some of them were liberal democrats. Almost none of them were Kemalists.
At least since 2010, the Erdoğanists have been gradually transforming Homo Diyanetus 1.0 to Homo Diyanetus 2.0. They aim to make them desired citizens, Homo Erdoğanistus. Homo Diyanetus 2.0 is a mixture of Homo Diyanetus 1.0 and Homo Erdoğanistus. They are proud of their heroic militarist history and the Turkish military. But Homo Diyanetus 2.0 citizens additionally believe that the Turkish military’s role is not limited to defending Turkey. They love their homeland. However, Homo Diyanetus 2.0 additionally love the ummah and are concerned about what happens in the Muslim World, especially in the Middle East. Like the earlier version, Homo Diyanetus 2.0 citizens also believe that Turkey has many external and internal enemies who tried to destroy it in the past and still conspire against it. They are confident that these enemies attack Turkey and keep attacking it because of Turkey’s religion. However, Homo Diyanetus 2.0 also believes that these enemies attack Turkey because of Turkey’s religion, they are jealous of Turkey’s rise, its leadership of the ummah and its being the last hope for the ummah. Like 1.0, Homo Diyanetus 2.0 citizens also believe that in the past, many soldiers sacrificed their lives for the homeland, the nation and the state. However, for Homo Diyanetus 2.0 these soldiers were not just Turks, they were brothers from the ummah, from different corners of the Ottoman Empire. Homo Diyanetus 2.0 reveres the state but is no longer expected to revere Atatürk. More importantly, Homo Diyanetus 2.0 citizens now know that jihad is not only about the struggle against the lower self – the struggle to purify one’s heart, do good, avoid evil and make oneself a better person, but it also means fighting against injustice, oppression and victimisation all over the world. It also means making Allah’s word dominant and supreme in the world and the Turkish army should engage in jihad for these purposes.
Needless to say, these desired, undesired and liminal citizenship typologies of each regime, the regime/ideology typologies and terms like the West, the Muslim World and ummah are Weberian ideal-type constructions. For reasons of practicality, as far as the purposes of this book are concerned, I will employ loose definitions of Kemalist and Erdoğanist ideologies as Weberian typologies and I will use the imperfect terms of the West, the Muslim World and the ummah, despite knowing their heterogeneity, complex compositions and lack of coherence.
The definition of the ideology in question is a generalised construct and is not strictly consistant with all the characteristics of the adherents of this ideology. As Kemalism has never been a well-defined, coherent and thick ideology, different political actors have interpreted and represented it differently. The same could be said of Erdoğanism. These typologies focus on identifying general characteristics and they emphasise certain general elements, glossing over cases that are in reality intertwined, convoluted, aberrant and varied, for the purpose of formulating an analytical concept. As these categories are Weberian ideal-type constructions, in reality there exist all sorts of variations, exceptions, hybridities and interwoven cases. In other words, there are of course limitations to the conceptualisation of these ideal types and wherever possible I will underline nuances and exceptions to the typology. Lastly, it is also true that depending on the domestic or international context, a regime’s treatment of undesired citizens shows variations,Footnote 29 as the state may decide to enter into a de facto alliance with one citizenship group (ethnic, religious or political minorities) against others.
I must also note that this book is mostly and unashamedly state-centric. Here, I predominantly analyse the vision of the state, its insecurities, anxieties, fears, siege mentality, victimhood, ideology, regime, elite, national identity, nation-building, historiography, social engineering and citizenship creation projects. I do not directly focus on the results of these projects or how these projects have operated within society; what were the reactions and dynamics; agency of the citizens; and how these citizenship projects influenced society. Having said this, for Kemalism, several works have focused on these aspects in relation to different ethnic, religious and political groups and where relevant I will refer to them. For Erdoğanism, it is mostly too early to tell. Moreover, especially when discussing undesired citizens, some of these aspects will also present themselves even though that is not one of my aims in the book. There are many surveys and polls showing that these social engineering attempts have been partially successful and there are indeed millions of people in Turkey who resemble either full or partial versions of these typologies.
1.7 Structure of the Book
This book has a chronological structure, which has been chosen to examine the differences (and similarities) in the treatment of citizens by breaking down desired, undesired and tolerated citizens under each regime. A separate chapter is dedicated to each citizenship type for each ideology/regime, after an initial chapter introduces the regime’s emergence, power consolidation, main ideas and policies.
Chapter 2 starts with a historical background of the Kemalist hegemonic paradigm, starting with the late Ottoman period. The secularist nationalist narrative of the Young Turks who ruled the Empire between 1908 and 1918, was later incorporated into Kemalist ideology following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This ideology shaped state thinking until the early 2000s despite transitioning to a multi-party political system in 1950. After discussing different variants of Kemalism, the chapter discusses how the Kemalist elite guaranteed the continuation of their hegemony by locking their privileges into the 1960 Constitution and creating a dual tutelage system with anti-majoritarian institutions such as the Senate, Constitutional Court and the National Security Council whose decisions had to be implemented by the government. These institutions were in control of high politics issues that were all securitised to the level of existential importance for the nation. Thus, the politicians were not allowed to modify the secularist Muslim nationalist identity of the state, the creation of the desired citizens project, state–Islam relations, the status of the Diyanet, homogenisation policies and discrimination against minorities.
Chapter 3 discusses the principle aim of the Kemalist nation-building project: the construction of Homo LASTus. Understood here as a Weberian ideal type, Homo LASTus refers to a new human being who is at once a laicist, Atatürkist (Kemalist), Sunni Muslim and Turk. Having determined, ethnic religious heterogeneity, Islamism and Ottoman nostalgia as existential threats to the new secularist and Turkish nationalist state and national identity, the Kemalists were determined to create a secular nation out of the country’s majority that happened to be Sunni Muslim and Turkish. After summarising Kemalist nation-building and its relations with Islam and minorities, the chapter briefly elaborates on the social engineering policies of the Kemalists and their securitisation of minority identities. It explains how the Kemalist state marginalised, securitised and even in some cases criminalised ethno-religious and political minorities as well as religious Muslims; and the state’s assimilation and dissimilation policies in relation to these minorities. After discussing each parameter (laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk) in a separate section, this chapter discusses how the Kemalists created and made use of Atatürk’s personality cult in addition to education in creating their desired citizens.
Chapter 4 analyses what happened to the undesired citizens of Kemalism during the Kemalist nation-building project. The ‘Other’ to the state’s desired citizens of Homo LASTus were practising Muslims, Islamists, non-Atatürkists such as leftists and socialists, non-Muslims, Alevis and Kurds who were discriminated against by the Kemalist state in a variety of ways. Not only were attempts made to assimilate or dissimilate them, but they were also denied important bureaucratic positions, despite officially being ‘equal citizens’. The chapter looks at the ‘Others’ to the Homo LASTus in order: practicing Muslims and Islamists (opposite to the laicist), leftists, socialists and communists (opposite to the Atatürkist), non-Muslims and Alevis (opposite to the Sunni Muslims) and Kurds (opposite to the Turks). Before concluding, the chapter discusses how for a variety of reasons these minorities felt a need to hide their identities in public, resorted to dissimulation and were constructed by the majority as villains in different conspiracy theories linked to the insecurities, anxieties, fears and paranoias of the state and the nation.
Chapter 5 analyses Kemalism’s tolerated citizen creation project via the state’s powerful Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) that controls all mosques and employs all imams and preachers in Turkey. Kemalism wanted to keep Islam under strict control to prevent its potential use for opposition. Thus, it made it illegal to have private mosques or non-state employed imams. However, the Kemalist state also wanted to use Islam as a helping hand in building the nation based on the majority’s sectarian as well as ethnic identity. Thus, it worked to create a secularism and Turkish nationalism-friendly Islam – what I call ‘Diyanet Islam.’ Before AKP came to power there were about 75,000 mosques in Turkey. The Diyanet used these mosques as adult education and indoctrination centres by politically instrumentalising weekly Friday sermons that are attended by about 60 per cent of the nation’s adult males. After elaborating on and defining Diyanet Islam, the chapter proceeds to discuss the Kemalist construction of a tolerated citizen category that I call ‘Homo Diyanetus’. Homo Diyanetus refers to a practising Sunni Muslim citizen of Turkey who follows the state manufactured Diyanet Islam, reveres the state and Atatürk, is Turkish nationalist, militarist and is definitely not a member or participant of any other religious group, brotherhood or movement.
Chapter 6 discusses the revival of Islamism as a counter-hegemonic paradigm in Turkey. After giving a brief definition of Islamism, it looks at the genealogy of Turkish Islamism and at how the Kemalists put an end to Turkish Islamism by securitising and criminalising it. Next, the chapter summarises the several Turkish Islamist parties that were created by the National Outlook Movement after the closure of each party by the Kemalist Constitutional Court. After briefly evaluating National Outlook Islamism’s divisive, Islamist populist, anti-Western and conspiratorial rhetoric, the chapter proceeds to the emergence of the AKP and the consolidation of its own authoritarian regime. This chapter argues that there are three different versions of AKP. The first version’s (AKP 1.0) emergence can be traced back to 1997 when the Kemalists profoundly victimised and traumatised Turkish Islamists once again after staging a coup. The AKP was established in 2001 as a Muslim Democrat party and until 2008 continued to democratise Turkey in line with the EU’s requirements. AKP 2.0 emerged in authoritarian drift times between 2008 and the Gezi events of mid-2013, when Erdoğan decided to crush peaceful demonstrators with violence. AKP 3.0 is the full authoritarianist and Erdoğanist version of the AKP that started with the Gezi Protests of mid-2013 and has continued until present.
Chapter 7 elaborates on the definition of Erdoğanism from the perspective of this book. To define Erdoğanism for the purposes of this book, the chapter first discusses the insecurities, anxieties, and fears of Erdoğanism. After this, it analyses the Islamist populism dimension of Erdoğanism and how its narrative divides the nation into real citizens and their enemy the ‘evil’ Kemalist elite and the Homo LASTus grassroots and also all secular Turks who are labelled as White Turks. In this imagination, the out-group is not only comprised of citizen-enemies, there are also international groups, entities, institutions, lobbying groups and states that also collaborate with the evil White Turk elite. This international conspiracy has been framed along the lines of civilisations. The chapter calls this populism ‘Islamist Civilisationism.’ This discussion is followed by an analysis of Erdoğanist victimhood and resentment vis-à-vis the secular sections of society as well as the West. The chapter moves on to analyse Erdoğan’s style of politics as a zero-sum-game between friends and enemies. Finally, it attempts to define Erdoğanism.
Chapter 8 discusses the Erdoğanist nation-building project to create its own desired citizens: Homo-Erdoğanistus. Erdoğanists do not openly express that they have a desired citizen creation project. However, they have a different name for it: Dindar Nesil, the pious generation. Erdoğan has consistently argued that it is the state’s duty to raise a religious generation. For at least the last decade, the AKP has been using many apparatuses of the state as well as the media, popular culture and Erdoğanist educational foundations to raise this generation that is not only religious but also staunchly Erdoğanist. Homo Erdoğanistus emanates from Erdoğanism. Erdoğanist ideology and national identity, which are based on Islamism, majoritarianism, Muslim nationalism, authoritarianism, patrimonialism, personalism, the cult of Erdoğan, Ottomanist restorative nostalgia, Islamist myth-making, militarism, jihadism, glorification of martyrdom, Islamist populism, civilisationism, anti-Westernism, resentfulness, vindictiveness, and anti-Western conspiracy theories. Thus, Homo Erdoğanistus citizens are under the influence of all these. Just as in the Kemalist relationship with Homo LASTus, Homo Erdoğanistus is the Erdoğanist regime’s favoured citizen who ascends to the critical positions of state and military bureaucracy, and economic positions.
Chapter 9 analyses the use of popular culture and the personality cult of Erdoğan in creating the desired citizen of Erdoğanism, the Homo Erdoğanistus. Media, entertainment and pop culture are used to raise the Erdoğanist generation. One of the influential tools for this is to manufacture and propagate the personality cult of Erdoğan via different narratives, acts, speeches, performances, emotional instances, movies and TV dramas. All these have been informed and guided by the Erdoğanist ideology, insecurities, anxieties, fears, victimhood, anger, emotions, resentment, siege mentality, restorative nostalgia, anti-Western sentiments, conspiracy theories, militarism, jihadism, glorification of martyrdom, Muslim nationalism and ummatism. Also, via historical movies and dramas, socio-political reality is being shaped to help the Erdoğanist political cause. This chapter discusses, first, Erdoğan’s personality cult and its propagation. Then it elaborates on Erdoğanist myth-making and the rewriting of history. This is followed by an analysis of how reality has been shaped by using movies and historical TV dramas. The chapter also highlights Erdoğan’s open and direct support for these movies and dramas.
Chapter 10 investigates how the AKP has been very gradually de-Kemalising education and Islamising it at the same time. It explores how the AKP has been instrumentalising the national curriculum, compulsory and optional religious lessons at schools, Erdoğanism’s most-favoured schools, Imam Hatip Schools and Islamist educational foundations to create Homo Erdoğanistus. The chapter starts with an analysis of the continuities and changes between the Kemalist and Erdoğanist national curriculums, showing how these overlap to a great extent when it comes to the nation’s insecurities, nationalist fears and anxieties, siege mentality, nationalism, militarism, glorification of martyrdom and the out-groups of the ‘pure’ people. Education has always been an instrument of social engineering and nation building in Turkey. The AKP has used it for its desired citizen project too and the education system has undergone profound changes that are intended to enable Erdoğanists to shape the worldview and national identity of citizens.
Chapter 11 analyses how the state under the rule of the Erdoğanists has been treating undesired citizen identity groups. In post-coup-attempt Turkey, the AKP has developed a staunchly populist narrative to divide the citizens of Turkey as ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’) versus its out-groups: Kemalists, White Turks, disloyal Kurds, Alevis, Gülenists, leftists, liberals, etc., who are framed as citizen enemies. All of these groups have been constructed as terrorists – internal enemies of the nation and pawns of the Western powers that do not want Turkey to lead the Muslim World. The chapter starts with the most significant and oldest antagonists of Islamists/Erdoğanists: the Kemalists and their desired citizen, Homo LASTus, but also the non-Kemalist White Turks and secular elites who allegedly victimised Islamists in the past and are alleged to still be plotting against them. Then, following the same order as Chapter 4 – on Kemalism’s undesired citizens, this chapter will discuss other undesired citizens of Erdoğanism: disloyal practising Muslims and Islamists; leftists, liberals, socialists; non-Muslims; Alevis; and disloyal Kurds.
Chapter 12 elaborates on the state’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) under AKP rule. Even during the AKP’s democratisation and human rights reforms, the Diyanet remained untouched and the AKP kept the Diyanet under its direct control as the Kemalists had. This chapter shows that, along with the rising Islamist populism and Muslim nationalism in Turkish politics, the Diyanet has gradually embraced a populist Islamist and Muslim nationalist rhetoric, paving the way for the emergence of Diyanet Islam 2.0. Via its centrally prepared Friday sermons that are delivered in Turkey’s 90,000 mosques and attended by roughly 60 per cent of adult males, Diyanet propagated its new version of Diyanet Islam 2.0. Thus, in the sermons, the glorification of martyrdom, anti-Western conspiracy theories, existential threats posed to the Muslim nation and the ummah by external and internal enemies, the politics of victimhood, the reverence of the military, ummah and jihad, and enthusiastic support of the Turkish military’s incursions into other countries and framing these incursions as jihad have become prominent themes. Similar to the earlier version, Diyanet Islam 2.0 also has its own corresponding version of the tolerated citizen, Homo Diyanetus 2.0. The chapter concludes with the definition of Homo Diyanetus 2.0.
Chapter 13 analyses the Diyanet’s Friday sermons that were delivered in the last two decades between January 2001 and July 2020. The state has always seen this as an adult education and indoctrination tool to propagate its religious doxa, Diyanet Islam. To trace the change in the content and perspective of sermons from the pre-AKP years to the AKP 3.0 period, and also to investigate the worldview that is disseminated through these sermons, I have looked at the topics and themes of the ‘Love of Homeland’, ‘Turkish Nationalism, National Unity and Solidarity’, ‘Reconstructing History: From Nationalism to Islamist Populism’, ‘Disappearance of Atatürk’s Personality Cult’, ‘Conspiracies, Victimhood, and the Crusader West’, ‘Militarism and Sacrificing Life for Allah, Islam and Ummah’, and the ‘Turkish Army’s Jihad’. Each of these are analysed in a separate section in this chapter. Each section starts with the last decade of Diyanet 1.0 (2001–2010) and then moves on to the Diyanet 2.0 period (2010–2020). The analysis shows that Diyanet Islam has significantly moved towards an Islamist, populist and Ottomanist discourse with a restorative nostalgia and more intense resentment, ummatist, anti-Westernist, jihadist, conspiratorialist, and a militarist direction.
