Nationalism and Kemalism

Author(s):  
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

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.

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Nabila El-Ahmed ◽  
Nadia Abu-Zahra

This article argues that Israel substituted the Palestinian refugees' internationally recognized right of return with a family reunification program during its maneuvering over admission at the United Nations following the creation of the state in May 1948. Israel was granted UN membership in 1949 on the understanding that it would have to comply with legal international requirements to ensure the return of a substantial number of the 750,000 Palestinians dispossessed in the process of establishing the Zionist state, as well as citizenship there as a successor state. However, once the coveted UN membership had been obtained, and armistice agreements signed with neighboring countries, Israel parlayed this commitment into the much vaguer family reunification program, which it proceeded to apply with Kafkaesque absurdity over the next fifty years. As a result, Palestinians made refugees first in 1948, and later in 1967, continue to be deprived of their legally recognized right to return to their homes and their homeland, and the family reunification program remains the unfulfilled promise of the early years of Israeli statehood.


1970 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Dobrochna Hildebrandt-Wypych

The text focuses on neoliberalism and desecularisation as two major dimensions of social and educational change in contemporary Turkey. Key educational reforms of recent years are discussed from the perspective of the conservative-religious turn in Turkish society and politics, particularly noticeable from 2002, i.e. the first AKP electoral success. However, the origins of the Oriental-Western duality of identity, as well as the “use” of Islam for strengthening the new Turkish national identity, can be traced back to Kemalist policy of secularisation and modernization of Turkish society. This peculiar merge of neoliberal and religious symbols is also visible in education, where selforientalizing, nationalizing and secularizing discourses mix with the pressure on selection, effectiveness and competition in the “western” style. Therefore, the rising importance of faith schools in present day Turkey has also been discussed in the light of the historical Kemalist concept of transformation of Islam and the creation of national, state-controlled “civic religion”.


Author(s):  
Banu Turnaoğlu

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Hans-Lukas Kieser

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefen Beeler-Duden ◽  
Meltem Yucel ◽  
Amrisha Vaish

Abstract Tomasello offers a compelling account of the emergence of humans’ sense of obligation. We suggest that more needs to be said about the role of affect in the creation of obligations. We also argue that positive emotions such as gratitude evolved to encourage individuals to fulfill cooperative obligations without the negative quality that Tomasello proposes is inherent in obligations.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Temperley
Keyword(s):  

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