Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey
Omer Taspinar
Routledge
A complex civilizational identity or being perceived as a “torn country,”1 using Samuel Huntington’s terminology, is nothing new in Turkish history. Indeed, the difficulty of assigning Turkey to a specific geographical region or to a wider civilization derives from the fact that it had always been a frontier country. A glance at the map shows why Turkey does not fit into any of the clear-cut geographical categories which western scholars have formulated in order to study a complex world. The country straddles the geographical and cultural borders between Europe and Asia, without really ...
Contents
Preface / ix
Introduction / 1
Chapter One
Turkish Secularism / 7
Chapter Two
Turkish Nationalism / 37
Chapter Three
The Kurdish Question in Turkish Politics / 67
Chapter Four
Islam in Turkish Politics / 115
Chapter Five
Foreign Policy Implications of Turkey’s Kurdish and
Political Islam Problem / 165
Conclusion / 203
Notes / 209
Bibliography / 255
Index / 267
Middle East Studies: History, Politics, and Law
Shahrough Akhavi, General Editor
New Pythian Voices
Women Building Political Capital in
NGOs in the Middle East
Cathryn S. Magno
Turkey in Germany
The Transnational Sphere of
Deutschkei
Betigül Ercan Argun
Islamic Law, Epistemology and
Modernity
Legal Philosophy in Contemporary Iran
Ashk P. Dahlen
Gender, Literacy, and Empowerment
In Morocco
Fatima Agnaou
Trapped Between the Map and
Reality Geography and Perceptions
of Kurdistan
Maria Theresa O’Shea
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to study Turkey’s national and secular identity in light of the challenges posed by Kurdish nationalism and political Islam. The underlying premise of the study is that Kurdish nationalism and political Islam represent existential threats to Turkey’s official ideology of Kemalism-named after the founding father of the moderrf republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938).
It should be noted from the outset that defining Kemalism as an ideology is a problematic issue. There is little agreement among Kemalists themselves about what Kemalism exactly means as a contemporary political project. That Kemalism, in the context of the 1930s, represented a progressive political agenda based on establishing a secular Turkish nation-state is not contested. The modernization and westernization dimension of the original project, put forward by Mustafa Kemal himself, is also widely accepted. What is more problematic, however, is what Kemalism represents in the Turkish political context of the 21st century.
This difficulty in explaining what Kemalism truly stands for in the modern Turkish political context is understandable. In many ways, Kemalism is already a success story. Modern Turkey is a secular nationstate and a democratic republic. There is certainly room for improvement in terms of establishing a truly “liberal” democracy in Turkey. However, liberalism was never on the Kemalist political agenda, and it would be unfair to blame Kemalism for this. After all, liberalism was not on the global agenda of the 1930s. It is therefore possible to argue that Kemalism, as a secularist-nationalist political project aimed at nation building, modernization, and westernization, achieved its goal.
Today, in modern Turkey, it is this very success of Kemalism that transforms it into a conservative ideology. Kemalism, in other words, displays an understandable urge to protect what has been achieved. Especially for Turkey’s politically powerful military, Kemalism represents a defensive political reaction against the “perceived enemies” of the secular Turkish republic: Kurdish nationalism and political Islam. Concerned about the ascendance of these forces, Kemalism has become a secularist and nationalist reflex, rather than a coherent ideology.
Throughout this book, what is meant by the Kemalist identity of Turkey is less difficult to explain. In the context of the country’s official ideology and identity, Kemalism refers to the sacrosanct character of the Turkish republic as a unitary and secular nation-state. Therefore, any deviation from the Turkish character of the nation-state, and the secular framework of the republic presents a challenge to Kemalist identity.
It is primarily within Turkey’s military circles that this Kemalist identity and reaction is most discernible. As far as the Kurdish question and political Islam are concerned, there is no room for ambiguity in the Kemalist position of the military. On the Kurdish front, the threat is conceptualized in the following manner. Any public assertion, no matter how minor, of Kurdish political and ethnic identity is perceived as a major security problem endangering Turkey’s territorial and national integrity. A similarly alarmist attitude characterizes the military’s approach to Islam. Islamic sociopolitical and cultural symbols in the public domain are seen as harbingers of a fundamentalist revolution.
It is the main contention of this book that such an alarmist approach to Kurdish and Islamic identity has been counterproductive for Turkish democracy. Especially during the 1990s, at a time when Turkey needed to demonstrate its post-Cold War credentials as a western democracy, the Kemalist Republic came to be seen as an illiberal country fighting its own ethnic and religious identity. The official interpretation of Turkish national¬ism and secularism played a key role in this negative turn of events. The twin pillars of Kemalism—Turkish nationalism and secularism will therefore be at the heart of our analysis.
There is no doubt that Turkey’s Kurdish and Islamic dilemma gained a new sense of urgency after the last military take-over in 1980—1983. But neither Kurdish nationalism nor Islamic dissent is a product of the last two decades. They were both very much present in the 1920s and 1930s during the founding decades of the Kemalist republic. From the birth of the Kemalist Turkish Republic in 1923, to transition to democracy in 1946, Kurdish and Islamic dissent developed in reaction to Turkish nation-building and militant secularism. It is therefore not a coincidence that the most radical decades of the Republic also witnessed relentless Kurdish and Islamic rebellions.
After 1946 a new era started in Turkish politics with the external dynamics of the Cold War and transition to multi-party democracy at home. The next four decades witnessed leftwing and rightwing polarization in Turkey as in the rest of the democratic world. Kurdish and Islamic dissent was no longer high on the political agenda. They certainly did not disappear but rather came to be absorbed by the new political divisions of Turkey. Kurdish discontent found its place within radical leftwing politics, while Islam became part of the anti-communist struggle.
Yet, in the wake of the Cold War, as leftwing-rightwing ideological positions lost their relevance, Kurdish and Islamic dissent had a powerful comeback. This Kurdish and Islamic revival during the 1990s once again triggered a strong Kemalist reaction. After the long Cold War interlude, it was as if Turkey was back in the 1930s. The Kemalist military had to take the initiative against Kurdish-Islamic forces by forcefully reasserting Turkish nationalism and secularism.
What followed during the 1990s was very detrimental for Turkish democracy. Turkish versus Kurdish polarization on the one hand, and Islamic versus secularist polarization on the other, revealed an acute sense of identity problem. Kemalism’s official understanding of nationalism and secularism remains at the heart of this ongoing dilemma in Turkey. This is why our study of Kurdish nationalism and political Islam starts with a detailed analysis of Turkish nationalism and secularism, the twin pillars of Kemalism.
Methodologically, the Turkish understanding of nationalism and secularism will be traced not through radical deconstructionism or cognitive psychology but through an older method which has the advantage of being more transparent and reliable: historical sociology. In light of the Ottoman legacy, the first two chapters, which deal with Turkish secularism and nationalism respectively, will provide the relevant historical and theoretical parameters for Kurdish and Islamic dissent. Based on our analysis of Turkish nationalism and secularism, the third and fourth chapters will explore Kurdish nationalism and political Islam. Finally, the last chapter will examine Turkey’s Kemalist identity dilemma in a foreign policy perspective and analyze the impact of the Kurdish problem and political Islam on Turkey’s difficult relations with the European Union since the end of th Cold War.
By following such a structure, our objective is to illustrate a pattern of causality between Turkey’s Kurdish-Islamic dilemma and its peculiar under-standing of secularism and nationalism.
Introduction
A complex civilizational identity or being perceived as a “torn country,”1 using Samuel Huntington’s terminology, is nothing new in Turkish history. Indeed, the difficulty of assigning Turkey to a specific geographical region or to a wider civilization derives from the fact that it had always been a frontier country. A glance at the map shows why Turkey does not fit into any of the clear-cut geographical categories which western scholars have formulated in order to study a complex world. The country straddles the geographical and cultural borders between Europe and Asia, without really belonging to either. Such an “in between” Turkish identity is made all the more complicated by a number of historical factors.
Perhaps most important is the fact that the Ottoman Empire was historically the intimate enemy of Europe. In religious and military terms, the Turk represented the ‘other’ who played a crucial role in consolidating Europe’s own Christian identity. However, as centuries of Ottoman imperial splendor came to an end and territorial regression began, the ruling elite sought salvation in one of the earliest projects of modernization. Since modernization, first in military then in legal and political terms, was pragmatically identified with Europe, the Ottomans faced major difficulties in adapting to the new paradigm without compromising self-esteem and Islamic pride. Throughout the nineteenth century, the result has often been a chaotic co-existence of traditional and modernized institutions. This situation did not change until the radicalization of the modernization project during the first half of the twentieth century, first under the leadership of the Young Turks and later under their Kemalist successors.
Despite a series of ambitious cultural reforms and the transformation of the legal and political system, the Kemalist drive for radical Westernization achieved a limited penetration of Turkish society at large. Especially the rural parts of Anatolia, where the great majority of the population resided, remained largely unaffected by the social engineering taking place in Ankara during the …
Omer Taspinar
Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey
Kemalist Identity in Transition
Routledge
Routledge
Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey
Kemalist Identity in Transition
Omer Taspinar
Middle East Studies
History, Politics, and Law
Edited by
Shahrough Akhavi
University of South Carolina
A Routledge Series
Routledge
New York & London
Published in 2005 by
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Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T8cF Informa.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taspinar, Omer, 1970-
Kurdish nationalism and political Islam in Turkey:
Kemalist identity in transition / by Omer Taspinar.
p. cm. — (Middle East studies: history, politics, and law)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94998-X (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Islam and politics—-Turkey. 2. Kurds—Turkey. 3. Nationalism—Turkey.
I. Title. II. Middle East studies (Routledge (Firm))
BP173.7.T37 2005
320.5409561—dc22 / 2005009238
