This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

The point of departure of this chapter is the EU’s close cooperation with third countries, especially in the neighbourhood, which has erased a number of perceived boundaries between the EU and non-member states. Whereas within the EU, family members are largely considered to be the natural beneficiaries of the free movement of persons with ensuing residence and social rights, it is less clear whether the same undisputed status of a family also applies beyond the EU’s borders. The EU has concluded a number of association agreements with countries in its neighbourhood which comprise, to varying degrees, access to the EU’s internal market including the free movement of workers. The Polydor-doctrine of the Court of Justice of the EU has, however, established that similarly worded provisions in the EU Treaties and cooperation agreements concluded with third countries do not guarantee identical interpretation. With a focus on Turkey, the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, the chapter analyses the conception of family and related rights in the EU’s cooperation instruments, with an aim to establish the extent to which non-EU families can be considered ‘EU families’.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of viewing socioeconomic and political relationships between sedentary and herding societies from the perspective of long-term shifts in climate. Such a perspective offers the possibility of reconsidering the socioeconomic features of conflicts that appeared between similar communities in South Asia, the American West, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The rise of UKIP began in the 1990s under the leadership of Nigel Farage, another admirer of Powell. From the 1990s on, prominent Conservative Party figures spoke against what they regarded as the foreignization of Britain, sometimes overtly sometimes by insinuation. The latter approach was continued in the malevolent poster slogans of the Conservative campaign during the 2005 general election. After the Conservatives gained power, this activity continued in the even more aggressive ‘hostile environment’ campaign. By the time of the 2016 referendum, anti-immigrant sentiment was mobilised in various ways that included hints and allusions, the citing of misleading statistics, emotive metaphor and barefaced reiteration of untruths. The most blatant example was the pro-Leavers’ assertions that Turkey was about to join the EU, contrary to the well-known fact that Turkey’s application was indefinitely stalled because of its human rights record. In Brexit propaganda, the danger of Turkish accession was tacitly racist, and represented in terms of an ‘invasion’ of the British Isles. The workings of these various types of truth-twisting are examined in depth in this chapter.

This chapter explores the link between eternity clauses and electoral democracy by looking at two instances of unamendable democracy: party bans, both direct and indirect, and the protection of parliamentary mandates. These two approaches are illustrated via a range of case studies: the ban of anti-democratic parties in Germany; bans of ethnic, separatist, and religious parties in Turkey; indirect unamendability and its chilling effect on party competition in Israel; and the judicial protection of parliamentary mandates as unamendable in Czechia. Whereas such measures are adopted in the name of protecting democracy, the analysis here indicates that courts will not always strike the right balance between safeguarding and unduly narrowing democratic commitments. In some cases, they may even unintentionally undermine multipartyism itself or significantly influence electoral outcomes. Thus, the bluntness and open-ended nature of unamendability risks having a chilling effect on electoral democracy in both fragile and more stable democratic contexts.

This chapter traces the shadow that ancient Greek epic, and the Homeric poems most particularly, have cast over the modern nations of Greece and Turkey, using case studies with a specific focus on how the epics came to figure in the nation-building work of both countries. Greece presents a unique case for the reception of these poems for two related reasons: Homeric Greek can be integrated into modern Greek literature without transl(iter)ation, and a long-standing national discourse casts the Greek heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey as the ancestors of Greeks living today. On the other hand, Turkey, whose borders encompass the ancient site of Troy, made different use of the Homeric tradition. During the self-conscious process of Westernisation in the twenty-first century, the Homeric poems were among the first great works of ‘Western’ – not Greek – literature to be translated by translators working in the employ of the state. Hanink uses these contrasting studies of the national receptions of ancient epic in the ‘Homeric lands’ to point to the range of ways that Homeric poetry has been invoked in modern nation-building projects.

This chapter investigates how civilians sort truth from lies in the context of the Syrian civil war. In particular, it plumbs a rich batch of semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Turkey that was generously shared by Schon (2020). These interviews include people’s confidence in their truth discernment ability – their ability to distinguish true vs. false information – during the war, along with detailed information on what they heard and experienced while they were in Syria. The chapter analyzes these interviews with a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses show that those who spent longer in Syria, witnessed a wider range of events in the war, and explicitly rely on personal experience to assess new information are much more confident in their truth discernment ability. This is supported by ample qualitative material from the interviews, which demonstrates how Syrian refugees put stock in many of these same factors and drew many of these same connections themselves when discussing informational dynamics in the war.

For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

When Helmut Kohl became chancellor in October 1982, he resolved to fulfill the CDU’s promise of turning a remigration law into reality. But given the potential backlash at home and abroad, he knew that achieving his goal – getting rid of half of the Turkish migrant population – would be difficult. How, after perpetrating the Holocaust forty years prior, could West Germans kick out the Turks without compromising their post-fascist values of liberalism and democracy? How could they do so while minimizing criticism from the Turkish government? The answer, codified in the 1983 Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz), was to pay Turks to leave. The West German government offered unemployed former guest workers a “remigration premium” to take their families and leave by September 30, 1984, with no option to return. While the remigration law fell short of Kohl’s 50 percent goal, it sparked one of the largest mass remigrations in modern European history. Between November 1983 and September 1984, 15 percent of the Turkish migrant population – 250,000 people – returned to Turkey. Nearly half of those return migrants came to regret their decision, as they encountered difficulties “reintegrating” both socially and economically into their own homeland.