2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli
At another level, the Kemalist experience has come to be reassessed, in the
West as well as in Turkey as awareness of the seriousness of the Kurdish
question has grown since the 1990s. The Kurdish insurgency, which began in
the 1980s, and which the Turkish state has had great difficulties subduing, is
another reason why the republican construction – which rests on the twin
pillars of secularism and the nation-state – as a whole has tended to become
intellectually de-legitimized, or at least has come to be questioned. The
apparent difficulty of maintaining the integrity of the nation-state has
suggested to liberal, modernist intellectuals, who themselves are the product
of the modernizing republic, that the republican enterprise in its entirety is
misconceived.
The Challenge of Ethnic Separatism
As an ancient crossroads of civilization, Turkey has always been multiethnic,
with over 50 ethnic groups represented in the country today. 24 With
the globalization and modernization processes gaining strength in recent
decades, Turkey experiences two conflicting developments. On the one hand,
Turkey experiences an integration of the population into a Turkish identity,
spurred by urbanization and education; but on the other, a process of
rediscovery of ethnic identity among minority populations.
It is difficult to draw an ethnic map of Turkey, for at least two reasons: first,
ethnicity has been a sensitive and delicate issue in a nationalizing nationstate,
something that the conflict involving separatist Kurdish movements
further exacerbated. Second, modern Turkey on the whole is an example of
the successful integration of many population groups into a common,
Turkish identity. Turkishness has traditionally not been defined by
ethnicity. “The people of Turkey that founded the Turkish republic are
called Turks”, Atatürk put it. Thus, as in the French case, Turkish national
identity has rested on common citizenship, not on blood ties. It is legion for
Turks to extol the melting pot of Turks, Arabs, Kurds, and peoples of
Caucasian and Balkan origins intermarrying and developing the modern
Turkish nation. And indeed, this characterization is in many ways correct, as
people of mixed and varied background now identify primarily as Turks.
24 Peter Alford Andrews, Türkiye’de Etnik Gruplar, Istanbul: Ant Yayınları, 1992.