Crafting Turkish National Identity, 1919-1927

A Rhetorical Approach

Aysel Morin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000517057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Nahen Ostens

Examining Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Büyük Nutuk ( The Great Public Address ), this book identifies the five founding political myths of Turkey: the First Duty, the Internal Enemy, the Encirclement, the Ancestor, and Modernity.

Offering a comprehensive rhetorical analysis of Nutuk in its entirety, the book reveals how Atatürk crafted these myths, traces their discursive roots back to the Orkhon Inscriptions, epic tales, and ancient stories of Turkish culture, and critiques their long-term effects on Turkish political culture. In so doing, it advances the argument that these myths have become permanent fixtures of Turkish political discourse since the establishment of Turkey and have been used by both supporters and detractors of Atatürk. Providing examples of how past and present leaders, including Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, a vocal critic of Atatürk, have deployed these myths in their discourses, the book offers an entirely new way to read and understand Turkish political culture and contributes to the heated debate on Kemalism by responding to the need to go back to the original sources – his own speeches and statements – to understand him.

Contributing to emerging discourse-based approaches, this book is ideal for scholars and students of Turkish Studies, History, Nationalism Studies, Political Science, Rhetorical Studies, and International Studies.

Part IRhetoric, nationalism, and the Turkish case

1Constitutive rhetoric and nationalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003152354-3

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable political leaders of the twentieth century. He was an accomplished soldier, a charismatic statesman, a well-rounded intellectual, and a gifted speaker. But maybe more than anything else, Atatürk was a dreamer and a mythmaker. At an age when Islam was deemed unquestionably incompatible with western modernity, he dreamt of and told the story of Turkey’s modern, democratic, and secular future.

Anyone who wishes to understand today’s Turkey, its successes, and its struggle to remain a modern nation, needs to have a firm grasp of the rhetorical forces behind the Turkish nationalist movement: Kemalist discourse and its nationalizing myths. Though much has been said and written about Turkey and its legendary leader Atatürk, the political myths, which imprinted his ideology on the hearts and minds of many, have yet to be explored.

Atatürk emerged as the leader of the Turkish national resistance movement during the last years of the Ottoman Empire (1919–1923). His success, first as the military leader of the resistance and then as the president of the new Turkey, depended on his ability to speak the language of both a largely illiterate society and a handful of intellectuals. He appealed to the masses by invoking ancient narratives, which communicated the core values of Turkish culture, and appealed to the intellectuals by depicting the future place of Turkey among the most prosperous, democratic, and modern western nations. Both the point of departure (who Turks were) and the destination (who Turks could become) were mythic. These myths shielded Kemalism from criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, gathered support for him, and fueled the nationalist movement. In subsequent years, Atatürk himself became almost a mythical figure, the embodiment of Turkish heroism, and Turkey’s national leader. Kemalism gradually claimed its place as the state ideology. But even then, surprisingly little has been written and said about the founding myths of modern Turkey and Turkish national identity.

However, at the heart of Turkey’s many problems, as well as their solutions, lay the semiotic universe of politics that these myths generated. The myths of Kemalist discourse designated becoming a modern western nation as the ultimate objective, which required complete structural, social, cultural, and political change in society. At the same time, the myths glorified ancient Turkish cultures and history, emphasizing the need to return to the cultural roots to recover “lost Turkishness.” Consequently, drastic reforms to “recover” Turkish culture and to “reform” it were implemented simultaneously. The paradox pitted traditional and westernized segments of society against each other and invited political instability and internal conflicts. Democratic dreams of Turkey were interrupted five times by military coups and ultimatums after Atatürk (1960, 1971, 1980, 1997, and 2016). The same myths Atatürk used in his discourse became the justification for the takeovers. Since the first coup, the military officials argued that their role was to protect Kemalist ideals, thus the modern, democratic, secular, indivisible Turkey. The myths and the vocabulary they generated allowed the army officials to reason within the Kemalist framework, and at the same time, to act entirely against its principles. Ideologies that deviated from Kemalism were labeled “divisive” and their supporters “internal enemies.” Minorities were oppressed to keep Turkey “Turkish.” Conservative Muslims were called “reactionaries.” Freedom of speech was restricted. As Turkey drifted further and further away from achieving Atatürk’s dreams of becoming modern and democratic, many crimes that had been committed to “protect” and “preserve” his Turkey were justified using his own vocabulary.

What was this vocabulary that became both the driving force and a roadblock for Turkey’s modernization? The answer lay in the delicate and complicated relationships among five founding myths of Turkish national identity in Kemalist discourse. I call these myths the Ancestor, First Duty, Internal Enemy, Encirclement, and Modernity.

The traditional stories of Turkish culture provided the narrative seeds for the Ancestor, First Duty, Internal Enemy, and Encirclement myths in Kemalist discourse. Though none of them appeared as individual and full-length narratives in ancient stories, various components and versions of each myth existed in most well-known stories of Turkish culture, from its oldest epic tales and legends to the most recent heroic stories, lyric poems, folk songs, and elegies written and sung for the martyrs of World War I. These ancient collections of narratives, which had been regarded as folktales of an illiterate public and dismissed by Ottoman historians for centuries, gained scientific significance and new interest among the Ottoman elite when Turkology research in the eighteenth century uncovered the Orkhon Inscriptions (732 and 738 AD), the first written account of Turkish history in central Asia. Building on fragmented bits and pieces of old narratives scattered over centuries and the limited literature generated by the Ottoman elite, Atatürk reconstructed these four ancient myths in his discourse.

The First Duty communicated the military values of Turks. It depicted Turks as an historically military people who were fond of their freedom and ready to die for it. This was the most dominant myth of the Kemalist discourse. It provided the main narrative frame within which the story of national resistance against the Entente Powers (1919–1923) was told in Nutuk. In 1919 the Ottomans had been defeated in World War I and had signed the Mudros Armistice under severe conditions. The country was under occupation by the Entente Powers, and the official end of the empire was imminent. The First Duty depicted a proud nation that resisted the invasion and Atatürk as the hero of this resistance. It portrayed a cohesive body of people who instinctively rallied around a defiant military leader and fought tooth and nail to preserve their freedom. The “independence” theme dominated Nutuk’s narrative, influencing the way official Turkish history was later written. Due to the dominance of the “independence” theme in Kemalist discourse, Turkish historians later called the resistance movement the “War of Independence” or “Freedom War” of Turks.

The Internal Enemy was the second most prominent myth of Kemalist discourse. In the ancient stories, the internal enemies were those who betrayed their khagans, kin, and tribes and brought discord among Turks. In Nutuk, Atatürk defined those who opposed the resistance movement, refused to join it, and questioned his authority as internal enemies. The targets of the Internal Enemy evolved from foreign mandate-seekers to the Ottoman government and the Sultan, as Atatürk recounted the events that took place during the different phases of the national resistance. When the resistance ended in 1923 with the victory of Turks, the myth found its last target in the opponents of modernization.

The establishment of the Republic in 1923 marked the beginning of the reform years in Turkey (1923–1934). Accordingly, Atatürk’s discourse shifted its focus from regaining independence to maintaining it through rapid modernization. By appropriating and reinterpreting the discourse of Orientalism from the West, Atatürk began to construct the Modernity myth in his discourse. Though Nutuk covered only the beginning of the reform years, the myth of Modernity emerged strongly in the pages where Atatürk explained and justified his most important political reforms: Abolishing the sultanate and caliphate and establishing the new Turkish Republic.

In later years the myth of Modernity gradually gained more power and eventually dominated Kemalist discourse. However, Atatürk continued to draw from the First Duty and Internal Enemy myths to justify the drastic measures taken against those who opposed his reforms and modernization agenda. Consequently, the main constructs of the Modernity myth, such as democracy, secularism, and popular sovereignty, became entangled with the military notions of the First Duty and the Internal Enemy myths. The argument of “saving independence” transformed itself into “defending,” “preserving,” and “protecting” the new system, “the Republic,” and its modern foundations. With the opponents of modernization becoming the new internal enemies, using coercive force against them became permissible. Turkey emerged from this mixture as a democratic but military nation.

The myths of the Ancestor and the Encirclement had secondary roles in Kemalist discourse. They remained in the background throughout the resistance years. The myth of the Ancestor found its place in Kemalist discourse toward the end of the movement and achieved its maturity during the reform years. This myth brought the ancient Turkish civilizations in central Asia to the foreground in political discourse. This new, non-Muslim ancestor image displaced the Ottomans as ancestors in the identity discussions. Designating pre-Islamic Turkish civilizations in central Asia as the ancestors helped justify Turkey’s secularization efforts. It helped depict the reforms, which were aimed at eliminating the heavy influences of Arab cultures and Islam in public life, as attempts to recover “lost Turkishness.”

Starting with the abolition of the sultanate and caliphate, and extending all the way to the changing of the alphabet and headgear, Atatürk’s reforms set in motion Turkey’s cultural and symbolic departure from the East and its move toward the West, though it soon became clear that neither the reforms nor their rhetoric convinced the western nations of the “western-ness” of the new Turkey. Halfway through its journey, Turkey stumbled against western skepticism. Being caught between the East and the West led to the last myth of Kemalist discourse, Encirclement.

The ancient myth of the Encirclement communicated the loneliness of Turks. According to this myth, Turks were surrounded by enemies on all sides and had no friends. Atatürk reinterpreted this myth in his discourse and emphasized Turkey’s “uniqueness” instead of its loneliness. Both East and West were alien to Turks. Turkey belonged entirely neither to the West nor the East. Instead, Turkey was a historical, geographical, and cultural bridge between these worlds. It could choose and embrace whatever it found useful from both cultures but was not bound by either. The rhetoric of in-betweenness dominated both the public and political discourse. Since then, even in the travel guides, Turkey has come to “represent a meeting point of eastern and western lands and way of life, and its inhabitants always look in both directions in trade, in the exercise of power, and defense” (Stoneman, 1996, p. 5).

Nation, nationalism, and nationalizing myths

Exploring Turkish nationalism from a rhetorical perspective is vital to understanding today’s Turkey and Kemalist ideology. So far, many of the current theories of nationalism have provided inadequate frameworks to fully explain the emergence of Turkish nationalism, its unique characteristics, and cultural foundations.

Currently, four schools of thought dominate the highly complex and contested field of nationalism studies. The classical approaches, which are broadly known as primordialism, modernism, and ethnosymbolism, make up the most dominant schools of thought in the field. The fourth, a relatively new and less cohesive group, is called the “contemporary” school, and it includes various cultural, critical, and discursive approaches to nationalism (Özkırımlı, 2017).

The origin of nations and nationalism has been the major source of dispute among the classical schools. While primordialism and ethnosymbolism have placed the origins of nations in antiquity, modernism has placed them in the modern era. Scho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Rhetoric, nationalism, and the Turkish case
• Part II The founding myths
• Part III Theoretical and political implications
• Final thoughts
• Index