Ottoman History Podcast - Kemalism and the Making of Modern Turkey

Episode Date: July 6, 2017

Episode 323 with Erik-Jan Zürcher hosted by Andreas Guidi and Elif Becan Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this collaboration with The Southeast Passage, we discuss the emergence of the Turkish nationalist movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the establishment of a sovereign Republic of Turkey in 1923. As our guest Prof. Erik-Jan Zürcher notes, Kemalism can be studied both as a political transformation from armed struggle to a one-party state administration system and as a repertoire of discursive symbols based on the imaginary of nation, civilization, and modernity. This installment is structured along a series of lectures that Prof. Zürcher has given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, in which he has framed Kemalism’s activism and worldview within its contemporary international context as well as along a broader chronological axis continuing into the 1950s. « Click for More »

The Southeast Passage, a podcast about the history and the society of the Balkans and beyond. I am Andreas Guidi. I'm Elif Bejan. Today's episode is somehow special because it is actually a collaboration with our friends at the Ottoman History Podcast, same as we did for an interview with François Georgian on the Young Turks that you can find on both platforms. And I know, Elif, that you are a follower of the Ottoman History Podcast yourself,

so maybe you can introduce this project to our listeners. It's a wonderful project that we recommend to all of those who are interested in history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. And for those who haven't heard of them yet, we invite you to visit their website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com and follow the initiative in social media platforms such as Facebook, iTunes and SoundCloud. Yeah, and now maybe it's time to introduce our guest. I'm very pleased to welcome on the podcast Professor Erikan Zürcher from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. So welcome

to our podcast today. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Professor Zürcher has the chair for Turkish studies at the Department of Middle East Studies at Leiden University. But there is a particular reason why we are hosting this episode in Paris, right, Alif? Yes, because Éric-Yann Zürcher was invited to our dear CETOBAC at École des Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and he gave four lectures during his visit. And we would like to base our discussion on these four lectures that covers the period from the Young Turks movement till the end of 1930s regarding Kemalist reforms. Yes and I'm sure that most of our listeners who are working on or are interested in the

late Ottoman Empire, in particular the second constitutional period, World War I, but also the early republican period in Turkey and Kemalism, already know Professor Turcher's works quite well. Indeed, his list of publications is quite long. I will just remind you maybe the standard work, Turkey, a Modern History, which has recently been published in its fourth revised edition by Tauris. So, as Elif was mentioning, we covered a very broad set of issues in the seminars that we had the privilege to attend. I will just mention, let's say, the most important ones that will represent the core of our conversation today. that will represent the core of our conversation today.

First, we talked about the legacy of World War I for the later developments in Anatolia. And then we moved to the question of the so-called War of Independence and the very foundation act of the Turkish Republic. And then we also approached the notion of culture and civilization and how both of them underwent a transformation in the 1920s and 1930s in regards to the Kemalist worldview or Kemalist reforms. And finally, we also touched upon the question to what extent a tool such as modernization theory can be applied or not to the developments that we will be talking about today. So maybe to begin with, I would move from First World War in the Ottoman context. I think this is useful in a way because it gives us an impression of actually a longer period of warfare that affected

the Ottoman state, beginning with the Italo-Ottoman war in 1911 and 1912, all the way to the Treaty of Lausanne, which was basically the international recognition of the newborn republic. So, Professor Zürcher, you approached this in regards to several aspects of social transformation, and maybe you can elaborate a bit on this. you could debate it a little bit for the Italian-Turkish war which was of course in some ways rather far away and very limited at least on the Ottoman side but I think it makes sense to look at that whole period of 1911 to 1923 as a single period of war which of course transformed the whole region and the states within it.

But primarily, at least when we look at what would later become Turkey, Anatolia, Asia Minor, it had tremendous effects in terms of demographics, but also in terms of economy, infrastructure. demographics, but also in terms of economy, infrastructure. So when the Turkish Republic emerges in 1923, it is in almost every respect a scarred country, a country that bears the imprint of 10 years of war in all kinds of ways. And I think in any understanding of the early republic, that has to be a point of departure.

A bit similar to the period of Abdulhamid, you might say. We can only understand the Abdulhamid period if we take into account that it was a period of recovery after the Great War of 1877-78, in which the Ottoman Empire in Europe almost ended. Similarly, the Republic after 1923 is the child of this decade of war. And I remember you talked in particular about three, let's say, indicators of this transformation. Maybe firstly, the changing borders that resulted from this decade of warfare, then, as you already mentioned, demographic changes, and also new

negotiation in terms of political elite. So maybe we can touch upon each of these aspects. Yes, certainly. The question of the borders is the simplest one, perhaps, in the sense that when the Kamalists develop a national resistance movement after 1918, their claim is very similar to the claims of Eastern European nationalists, in the sense that they base themselves on the Wilsonian idea of self-determination for national majorities. So their imaginary borders are, in a sense, programmatical. They base it on an understanding of what the nation is, and in their case, that is the nation of Ottoman Muslims, in which they see Turks and Kurds as constituent parts. But of course, the borders of Turkey, as they emerge in reality,

are not the product of this kind of idealist, nationalist thinking. They are the product of power relations, power balances on the ground. And that is why Turkey emerges as it does now, particularly, of course, the borders in the east and the south, where a deal with the Bolsheviks, a victory over the Armenian Republic, and again, a year later, a deal with the French on the border with Syria. In the end, produce Turkey as we know it. The fact that in 1939 one province, the province of Iskenderun or Hatay, was added to Turkey at the expense of Syria, again is purely a question of power politics.

And moving to the issue of Syria, again, is purely a question of power politics. And moving to the issue of population, you show that even within Anatolia, there are dramatic changes happening both at its eastern and western markets, right? Oh, absolutely. Because you have the effects of the Balkan War and World War I, both in the sense of loss of lives in the army, but also, of course, the effect of the Armenian Genocide and also of economic dislocation in the country as a whole, which leads to hunger and to many civilian deaths. And as a result, As a result, Anatolia is a particularly empty country in 1922. It has been a war zone itself after World War I, first in the east, then in the west.

So we're facing a country where population has gone down from about 16.5 million to 13, maybe 13.5 million. So that's dramatic. And there are many provinces where, you know, over a third of the adult women are widows. That tells you enough. So it is a particularly empty country, but it's also a different country because the combined effects of the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox from the West in 1914 and the Armenian genocide in 1516 and the population exchange of 1923-25

lead to a country that is now 98% Muslim. Whereas before the wars happened, Asia Minor had been about 80% Muslim, perhaps slightly less than that. So it's a completely different country. And that in turn has its effect also on the economy. Because with the loss of the Christian minorities, there's a tremendous loss of skills, both in the sense of artisanal skills as in, let's say, the modern professional skills, the accountants, the doctors, the engineers, and so on. And there's a loss of international networks, which had also been dominated by these minorities. So it also means that this empty country is economically far more backward than it had been 10 years earlier. Regarding what happened during the First World

War, and then in the so-called Independence War, we also see that the elites that were in charge of leading these policies regarding populations, Armenian genocide, or the war itself, can we see any correlations between their biographical trajectories and how they perceived Anatolia during this period? Yes, I think we definitely can, because when we look at the leadership of the Young Turk period, particularly, of course, after the Young Turk coup d'etat of January 1913, the national struggle period after World War I, and indeed the early republic, we see that overwhelmingly this leadership consists of people with a background either in Istanbul or in the Balkans or the Aegean. So that's where they grew up. It's a coherent generation. It's people who were, all of them, born around

1880. And that means that they grew up in the Balkans and the Aegean, say between 1880 and 1900, also had their educational and first professional experiences there. So they were shaped by the Balkans of the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. With all that that means, particularly in two respects, one is that this was, of course, the area that was modernizing most dramatically under the impact of incorporation in a European capitalist world, very concretely in the sense of more traffic, more commerce, establishment of all kind of novelties, street lighting, tramways.

So European modernity was visible there more than almost anywhere else in the ottoman empire but so was of course the disruptive force of ethnic nationalism and an ethnic nationalism but a greek serbian or bulgarian in which religious identity played a key role as the ethnic marker making up the nation. And that was the legacy that when very suddenly and unexpectedly they were kicked out of the Balkans in 1912, they took with them to Anatolia. And it's immediately related to the decision to deport the Greeks of the western coastal areas, also because they fear that the Balkan War may restart. And it's also linked, I think, to their decisions on the deportations of the Armenian population, because they very much feared that what had happened in the Balkans could happen again,

but now in Anatolia. When we talk about the Kemalist elite, there's almost complete continuity with the previous era. Yes, sure, the top leadership had fled the country, people like Enver Talat, Jamal. But under that, whether it's in the army or in the bureaucracy, in the legal system, in the educational system, the people who had come to the fore in the previous decade

are still all there. So all these people who lead the struggle from Anatolia practically without exception have a background in the Ittehadwe Teraki, the Union and Progress Party. So that means that their views on constructing a solid base for either the Ottoman Empire or the new Turkey is also taken from that era. They are deeply convinced that to be successful, a state has to be based on national unity and solidarity.

And what you then see is, both in the Young Turk era and in the Republic, that there are basically two choices open. One is to refuse entry to the nation to certain groups, of which the Young Turks and the Kemalists think they can never be part, true part of the nation. So then you're talking about Greeks, Armenians, Jews to a certain extent. The other option is, of course, assimilation.

And that concerns groups that the Kemalists think can be turned into a part of the nation. And then you're talking primarily about Kurds, but also about Arabs. this first lecture, where he basically stated that in 1923, we observe a completely transformed country, but with a strong continuity in terms of, let's say, human resources in key positions in the ministries, and so on. And maybe to understand this kind of dilemma, it is important to focus on the very dense years of the War of Independence. So the period between, let's say, to put it simply, like the First Armistice at the end of World War I and the Treaty of Lausanne. So maybe we can elaborate more on how the power was negotiated between Anatolia and Istanbul,

even though those who became the Kemalist elite were part of this old world of Istanbul. Yes, they were. But they waged a struggle, of course, in the name of the national will, right from the start. So you see two things at once in the resistance movement that wages the war of independence. On the one hand, they identify with what you could call the old regime. And they identify themselves as part of the Ottoman Empire.

And they, both in their proclamations and also, for instance, in their celebrations, they show themselves to be fighting for sultanate and caliphate. And the sultan's birthday is celebrated in Ankara, for instance, right up till the end of the resistance movement. At the same time, in a Wilsonian sense, they base themselves on the will of the nation.

And during the national resistance period, that tension between the two is not really resolved. So although the government in Istanbul declares war on the resistance movement and closely collaborates with the occupying powers, particularly the British, they still keep recognizing the Ottoman Empire as the entity they're part of. as the, let's say, the entity they're part of. But at the same time, there is a change in the understanding of what that empire is.

And that empire, more and more, is the empire of the Turkish Muslims, of the nation of the Turkish Muslims. And so you see a transition, you see a maintenance of the imperial ideology, but under that you see a transformation from what we would see as a classical empire with its multicultural, multi-ethnic makeup to the idea of the nation state. And maybe we can frame it in the broader international context that also undergoes dramatic changes in those years with the collapse of other empires in Europe, in the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian and even the German. But also it's a period of very strong social tensions, for example, with the emergence of fascism in Italy. So how did this

political elite position itself in regard to this broader context? The big difference, of course, is that in all the other, we have to look primarily at the states that lost the war, of course. In the states that won the war, the situation is a bit different. But the ones that lost the war, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. In the European continental empires, you see that these empires collapse. They all collapse. They lose their legitimacy, and basically a vacuum comes into existence, but that the vacuum is filled quickly and successfully by primarily social democrat socialist parties in each of these countries.

And that could happen because these were industrialized countries. Even Russia was industrializing fast before World War I. And with a labor movement and with developed socialist and social democrat parties that could step into the void. In the ultimate empire, there's nobody that can step into the void. That is the reason that the wartime regime can continue to exist to such an extent. There is no viable alternative. So in that sense, the situation is really different. In a number of European states, of course, you see a right-wing restoration, even sometimes a monarchical

restoration. Think of Hungary, for instance, but also Austria and Germany to an extent. But in the immediate post-war period, power is taken over by forces of the left. Those do not exist in any practical sense in the Ottoman Empire. And that is why the wartime regime under new management continues. Yeah. And we have arrived now to the point of the foundation of this new state. We will approach important issues regarding the early years of the Turkish Republic. We will be back in a few seconds after a short music break. Thank you. So welcome back to our podcast, Andrea Squidi and Elif Bejan here, talking to Professor Erikan Sürser from Leiden University. In the first part of the podcast,

we elaborated on the background of the foundation of the Turkish Republic, and we already mentioned some aspects that we can relate to Kemalism, not just as a movement on the battlefield, but also as an elite that develops new concepts of governance. But now I would maybe draw the attention on the more, let's say, ideological, intellectual side of this issue and address the topic of culture and civilization that was also part of one of the lectures you gave here in Paris. Of course, when we approach this domain,

we have to do with a transnational debate on what culture and civilization mean. And this all dates back already to the 19th century, at least. And you illustrated how even late Ottoman thinkers adopted but also innovated these notions coming from other European countries. One has to think of Zyago Kalp, for example, as one of the ideologues. But you also showed how the notion of culture and civilization undergoes a dramatic transformation in the early 20s with this new regime. So maybe you can also introduce our listeners to what happened in this regard. Yes, what I think happens is that, of course, you have this distinction between culture and civilization, which ultimately is taken from

German romantic nationalism. And as in German romantic nationalism, in the late Ottoman Empire, empire with people like Zia Gökalp, it is part of a romantic nationalist worldview. For Gökalp, the distinction between culture, harse, and civilization, medeniyet, is one in which he invests his emotional capital in the first, in culture. invests his emotional capital in the first, in culture. It's about two things, trying to make the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman society strong again through rediscovery of Turkish culture, original Turkish culture, and also through modernization, by making the Ottoman Empire part of contemporary civilization.

But in essence, when you look at Gökalp's work, becoming part of contemporary civilization is a means to an end. It is needed to make the Turkish nation strong. It is needed to make the Turkish nation strong. With the Kemalists, my feeling is the two are inverted. You see still this distinction between culture and civilization. Gökalp's vocabulary survives into the republic. But when you see what particularly Mustafa Kemal Pasha himself says

in his many speeches, you see that the emotional investment is in modernity and civilization. And the key now is for Turkey to leap from a backward civilization, the Islamic Arab slash Byzantine one, to the contemporary modern European one. Or, as he would say, universal one.

There is only one contemporary civilization. And that eclipses the culture factor. Yes, to be a strong part of this contemporary civilization, you need to be a nation state as well. Only then can you survive in the modern world. But the whole emphasis, the whole drive is towards being civilized and modern. And it's that what explains the enormous investment in not only secularism,

but also the reforms that impact on people's daily lives. If you were to be a strict reader of Gököp, things like dress would belong to the culture sphere. They are people's private life and they should be rooted in culture. Not so for the Kemalists. The dress reform is argued from the argument of civilization. We need to do this to become civilized. So there is this, the vocabulary is still there, but the relative importance of the two changes.

Yeah, and as you mentioned, this impacts on several spheres of society. You mentioned language, but we can also think of gender roles. And I think we can sum this up on these two axes that somehow were implicit in your reply. We have this kind of diachronic dimension of civilization as related to progress and becoming closer to what is contemporary, but then there is also the factor of distinction, what distinguishes one culture from the other. And I remember from the discussion during this third lecture, a point raised by Francois Georgian, who was also present, saying that basically we should not think of this as something completely coherent or linear, because in the 1930s we see other changes in this regard. When we look at the other from the

point of view of Kemalist Turkey, namely the West or Europe, there is a sense of crisis of pre-existing civilization, right? There is, but for the Kemalists, of course, this relationship with Europe is always a very complex one because the Ottoman heritage means that Europe is always an example and an enemy. In current Turkey, of course, contemporary Turkey, now the

second element is more prevalent, more visible, Europe as the enemy. But it's not an invention of Erdogan. It's always been there. It's always been this double meaning. Europe is a threat as well as an example. So there are fluctuations in that, definitely. Where the relationship between

culture, Turkish nationalist culture, and civilization are concerned, you can certainly see in the 1930s a shift where culture again becomes more important. But there is also the element that in order to argue for civilization from a nationalist perspective, it has to be shown that this contemporary civilization has historic roots in Turkish culture as well. So when, let's say, when transformations, changes are advocated,

they are very often advocated with reference to Turkish history and culture, which make the Turks, as it were, natural recipients of this contemporary civilization and indeed will allow them to transcend it. Because that is also, and Francois pointed that out too, and he's right, when you look at speeches in the 1930s, you often see that the Kamalists not only claim to become part of contemporary civilization, but to lead it.

Yeah. And maybe you can just give a brief example of what happened in the ground. I mean, what was the sort of mediator that was supposed to implement this worldview also at the local level. For example, maybe the most prominent measure was the foundation of the People's Houses, right? Maybe you can briefly introduce our listeners to this institution. Yeah, the People's Houses are, let's say, the cultural and social arm of the single party, the Republican People's Party,

from 1932 they are tasked with spreading the Kemalist ideology under the population. But, of course, a study of the people's houses, as indeed recent studies of a variety of Kamala's reforms, have shown that it would be wrong to analyze the process purely in a top-down manner, just to think about what Ankara wanted these people's houses to do or wanted the reforms to accomplish. Instead, detailed research on the ground on the actual effects of the reforms shows that there's a lot of negotiation going on between local elites and the center and local elites from two different sides,

you could say traditional elites, but also local representatives of the Kemalist regime and the Kemalist worldview. Local doctors, teachers, sports clubs, women's clubs are very often also the engine behind these reforms. And talking about bottom-up approach, in your work you use sources such as Traveler's Diaries and some reports regarding what happened in Anatolia. So maybe it could be interesting to discuss a little bit more about what happened

on the ground. Yeah, that is certainly useful, because to observers from the West, you know, there was a huge fascination in this new phenomenon of the republic, this new secular republic that tried to become part of Western civilization. And what that produced is an overemphasis on the program and ideology of the Kemalists and on their achievements in the big cities, particularly in Ankara, which was the showcase of the regime. And that's, of course, the way the Kemalists wanted it themselves as well. So it was a product of both Kemalist policy and of Western prejudice, you might say.

western prejudice you might say. Relatively rare are the authentic reports on what happened in the countryside in the provincial towns and in the villages because very few people went there it was pretty inaccessible still until the 1950s and the interest simply wasn't there. So when you get a view of what was happening in the countryside, it often contrasts very sharply with the image produced by the type of literature that's based only on the Kamalist program and on Ankara. You see, for instance, that a simple thing like electricity only reaches the major towns of the eastern half of Turkey by the end of the 30s. You see that roads are still in very bad repair, so beyond Ankara, further to the east, average road speeds are something like 15 kilometers an hour.

That tells you something about transport. You see even in post-World War II reports that almost no village has a road that is usable the year round. You see that the older city centers still have no drainage. So all kinds of realities then suddenly open up, are visible, that escape you before. And maybe for those of our listeners

who don't know this work, I think a useful reference is Michael Meeker's A Nation of Empire, right? To show that it took actually decades and new tools and new approaches in terms also of field work to really make sense of how this imperial legacy went through the Kemalist period

and actually even after World War II, which is connected, of course, to local relations of power. Yeah, there are a few other examples as well. What we have is reports of European travelers, which can be individuals or can be members of committees like the American advisory committees that visit Turkey extensively after World War II. American advisory committees that visit Turkey extensively after World War II. Another potential source to break through this top-down vision is indeed the work of anthropologists, not just Mika, also important because he has a very novel vision on the way continuities between empire and republic play out in the local context.

So we do have that. that. And then I would say in the last 10 years, there's been a lot more research that privileges the local situation to understand how change was happening, actually happening rather than being dreamt of in Ankara. And regarding this issue, you also mentioned in one of your lectures that Turkey was seen as an example for modernization. And I was wondering if we can see Turkey as a modern country in that sense. Not by the end of the single-party period. The whole debate on modernization and the hegemony of the modernization paradigm is something that dates from the 1950s. And it's very much informed by American anxieties. American anxieties about one particular issue, that all over the world with decolonization, new countries are becoming independent,

and that almost none of them seem to look at capitalist development as the way forward. In the context of the Cold War, that creates a lot of anxiety in Washington, and that is the reason why they start to think about In the context of the Cold War, that creates a lot of anxiety in Washington. And that is the reason why they start to think about alternatives. How can we propose a viable capitalist development model? And ultimately, that is theorized by Walt Rostow in his Five Stages of Economic Growth, which he posits as an anti-Marxist manifesto.

But, indeed, he does that by 1960, but the particular policies that he advocates and the whole view of development had been very much in evidence already in the 1950s. And in that context, yes, Turkey is seen as an example, particularly the Turkey of the 1950s, which under the Democrats, the successors at the Turks party after 1950, really tried to embrace this particular American-inspired kind of development. Yeah, and you showed very well that a modernization theory, as probably most of theories, are at the same time descriptive and prescriptive. And I wonder in this context whether there were also voices from Turkey that engage in the debate of what modernization should look like, what a modern

country should look like, not just in, let's say, in the political realm, but also in terms of scientific production, for example? Yes, and there is a significant shift between, let's say, the single-party period, the early republic, and the 1950s and after, where the whole view of what development is about changes. But when you specifically ask about the role of science and knowledge, until really quite late, I think the role accorded to science and knowledge and expertise in Turkey transcends the political changes. And to understand that, we have to look at the enormously heavy imprint of positivism on the generation that

created republic and that has left an enormous imprint on Turkey this enormous value attached to expert knowledge as the engine for change of course that, and Turkey's not alone in that, but in recent years that has changed because now in an increasingly Islamist-dominated Turkey, science is more and more also identified with an enemy world, with the West. It's defined as not being universal, but Western. And there are more and more calls for diminishing the role of what is now seen as Western science

and replacing it with Islamic science, whatever that may mean. and replacing it with Islamic science, whatever that may mean. But for a very long time, the idea that science and knowledge were drivers for development was very strong in Turkey, exceptionally strong even. I think we can conclude our discussion here, because otherwise we're going to go until 2017 and longue durée as a historical narrative. I would like to thank you because you showed us all the developments that we can observe from the late 19th century till 1950s. And you showed us how Turkey is embedded in the broader framework

of what happened in Europe in the first years of the 20th century, but also how Turkey has its continuities regarding Ottoman Empire and what happened in the late years of the Ottoman Empire. So thank you also on my side, Professor Zücher. It has been a terrific episode, I think. And we are already looking forward to meeting you again here in Paris or in Leiden to continue our discussion. So thanks for being part of the Southeast Passage and the Ottoman History Podcast.

Well, thank you very much for having me. It was fun. Thank you, Elif, as well for being part of the discussion. Let me just remind our listeners that we will provide a short bibliography on this topic. And Professor Tusser will also upload some visual material to integrate our discussion. And this is all for today. So until next time, take care. Thank you.