Europe’s Seminal Proto-Fascist? Historically Approaching Ziya Gökalp, Mentor of Turkish Nationalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Hans-Lukas Kieser
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Turkish Nationalism ◽  
Supreme Leader ◽  
Executive Leader ◽  
Kemal Ataturk ◽  
Racial Ethnic ◽  
Party State

Abstract This essay considers Ziya Gökalp, the received “spiritual father of Turkish nationalism”, as an early mastermind of fascism in Greater Europe. During the 1910s, Gökalp acted as a prophet of expansive war and as a mentor of demographic engineering in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, which was a laboratory for new political styles in a crisis-ridden empire. Gökalp’s thinking longed for a supreme leader in an army-like, disciplined and hierarchised society, while it rejected a social contract-based nation and state. An influential inspiration for and beyond the new élites in the capital, Gökalp combined the call for radical modernisation according to “European civilisation” with an assertive essentialism based on völkisch (cultural-racial-ethnic Turkish) and religious (political Islamic) references. He was the chief ideologist of the Young Turk party-state (1913–18) – side by side with Talaat Pasha, its main executive leader – and “the father of my thoughts” for Kemal Atatürk.

scholarly journals Understanding the Praetorian Rule of Fatah al-Sisi in Egypt

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-145
Author(s):  
Arshad
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Majority Rule ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Military ◽  
Gamal Abdel Nasser ◽  
Party State

Gamal Abdel Nasser established the praetorian regime in 1952. Nasser ruled Egypt with the ‘party-state’ system to maintain the ‘social contract’ between the state and the Egyptians. The government thrived on the patrimonial relationship and de-politicization of the population. The ‘Egyptian upheaval’ in 2011 sought the protection of individuals’ rights, equality, and freedom against the military-led praetorian regime. A short-democratic experiment led to the arrival of Islamist majority rule in Egypt under the leadership of President Mohammed Morsi. The liberal-secular oppositions and the military removed President Morsi because Islamists failed to achieve the protesters’ aspirations. Egyptians supported the military’s rule that led to the election of General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as President of Egypt. Fatah al-Sisi shifted the dynamics of government from ‘party-state’ to ‘ruler-arbiter’ praetorian rule that centralized the authority and power under his leadership through military domination to counter the Islamists and revolutionary aspirations. The research explains the causality behind the Egyptian military's intervention in politics, structuring of the praetorian regime in Egypt; the return of military praetorianism after the removal of President Hosni Mubarak; the rise of the Sisi as ‘ruler-arbiter’ and its implications on the democratization process. The paper’s method is explanatory to study the ‘structural’ (military) and ‘agential’ (Sisi’s rule) factors to determine the causes of establishing the praetorian ‘ruler-arbiter’ type Sisi’s regime. The approach to examine the ruler-arbiter phenomenon is the ‘actor-centric’ instead of the ‘mechanistic’ to understand the praetorian rule in Egypt. The research finds that the rise of the ‘ruler-arbiter’ regime under the leadership of the Sisi, caused by the military-established praetorian authority and President Sisi's choices and decisions, led to the failure of the democratization in Egypt.

Nationalism and Kemalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu
Keyword(s):  
Successor State ◽  
Turkish Nationalism ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Civic Religion ◽  
Kemal Ataturk

This chapter examines Turkish nationalism and Kemalism. The elimination of Islam as an ideological pillar of the main Ottoman successor state created a legitimacy vacuum at the center of the regime. Furthermore, the abolition of the sultanate and the dissolution of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) had given rise to a second void necessitating the creation of substitute foci for popular allegiance—both personal and institutional. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk sought to fill this lacuna with a new civic religion buttressed by a number of cults. The new ideology, unsurprisingly, was a modified, scientifically sanctioned version of Turkish nationalism. In the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal's followers and party pulled together various strands of several associated cults to create Kemalism, an all-encompassing state ideology based on his sayings and writings.

The Formation of Turkish Republicanism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Banu Turnaoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Turkish Nationalism ◽  
Turkish Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kurdish Question ◽  
Modern Turkey ◽  
Kemal Ataturk

Turkish republicanism is commonly thought to have originated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, and is understood exclusively in terms of Kemalist ideals, characterized by the principles of secularism, nationalism, statism, and populism. This book challenges this view, showing how Turkish republicanism represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual dispute in Turkey over Islamic and liberal conceptions of republicanism, culminating in the victory of Kemalism in the republic's formative period. The book is the first complete history of republican thinking in Turkey from the birth of the Ottoman state to the founding of the modern republic. It shows how the Kemalists wrote Turkish history from their own perspective, presenting their own version of republicanism as inevitable while disregarding the contributions of competing visions. The book demonstrates how republicanism has roots outside the Western political experience, broadening our understanding of intellectual history. It reveals how the current crises in Turkish politics—including the Kurdish Question, democratic instability, the rise of radical Islam, and right-wing Turkish nationalism—arise from intellectual tensions left unresolved by Kemalist ideology. The book offers a new narrative of the evolution and shaping of modern Turkey.

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