TURKISH CONSERVATIVE MODERNISM: BIRTH OF A NATIONALIST QUESTFOR CULTURAL RENEWAL

Abstract

The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist– Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social, economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22) against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernist elites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentary democracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer to the new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabulary constituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.¹ Then the term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the Turkish Revolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that had taken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideological positivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by an adherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. Ali Kazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism, nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.² The dominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenment movement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism and characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists in action and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists and reactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formed around different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought about by the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the plurality of groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranks of which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretations of the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalist histography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological and philosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.