Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 1

1997

Introduction

In Turkey and around the world today, we are witnessing the eclipse of the progressive and emancipatory discourse of modernity. Some of us view the spectacle with melancholy—yet it has also produced a remarkably lively and pluralist climate in which new voices are being heard and deeply entrenched assumptions are being radically and, we believe, irreversibly challenged. At the center of the most heated theoretical debates in many disciplines is the question of whether it is possible to undertake a rigorous critique of the Enlightenment project of modernity without surrendering its liberating and humanist premises.

From the humanities and social sciences to art, architecture, and cultural studies, scholars in many disciplines are looking for new ways of critically engaging with the modern project and exploring options beyond it without falling back on an antimodern “return to tradition” or getting lost in the postmodern “global theme park.” The stakes in these latter gambits are too high. As Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob explain it, turning our backs to modernity completely would amount to abandoning any notion of the “freely acting, freely knowing individual whose experiments can penetrate the secrets of nature and whose work with other individuals can make a new and better world.” ₁ Although the current debate on modernity is a worldwide and highly popular one, we believe it has a particular urgency in non-Western contexts where modernization has had a relatively short and contentious history. This collection of essays aims to assess the Turkish experience of modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective.

In the first two decades after World War II, social scientists often heralded Turkey as one of the most successful models of a universally defined modernization process. The country’s history of modernization and Westernization, extending back to the institutional reforms of the late Ottoman era and epitomized by the establishment of a secular nation-state under Kemalism in 1923, appeared to confirm all the expectations of theoretical writings in this genre. Ottoman and Turkish modernization was seen to be succeeding as an elite-driven, consensus-based, institution-building process that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. It is no wonder that two books whose authors studied the Turkish transformation closely from this perspective—Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society and Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey—became the classic texts of the modernization literature. ₂

In these and similar writings, Turkey’s apparently successful adoption of Western norms, styles, and institutions, most conspicuously in education, law, social life, clothing, music, architecture, and the arts, was portrayed as testimony to the viability of the project of modernity even in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. As such, the Turkish case has not only been frequently cited in academic discussions on modernization but has also informed and inspired many independence movements in Muslim “Third World” countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia.

The first cracks in the celebratory tone that characterized these early writings appeared in the late 1960s and the 1970s. With the growing influence of what Serif Mardin calls the “Marxisant” perspective, ₃ new histories shifted their focus away from the elite, emphasized conflict over consensus, and studied economic structures rather than political institutions. According to these critiques, Turkish modernization, when examined from alternative vantage points, contained little that was worth celebrating. So influential was their demur that by the end of the seventies “modernization” had become a dirty word, and authors such as Lerner and Lewis were cited only as examples of the “wrong” way of studying the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey.

Early critiques of Turkish modernization concentrated their criticisms on the Ottoman leaders who preceded Mustafa Kemal or on those who followed him, and not on what Kemal himself attempted to do. In these writings, the “War of Independence” especially was considered a valiant effort and was even seen as a harbinger of the Third World revolutions to come. Recently, in the hands of groups ranging from advocates of liberal economy to Islamist intellectuals, the criticism of Turkish modernity has become more comprehensive. Now, people publicly debate and criticize the Kemalist doctrine as a patriarchal and antidemocratic imposition from above that has negated the historical and cultural experience of the people in Turkey. In a hitherto unprecedented tone, the Kemalist path of modernization, far from being an exemplary success story, is declared a historical failure that undermined the normative order in Ottoman-Turkish society. It is ironic that such doubts about the Turkish experience are being voiced precisely at a time when Turkey is again being promoted by Western diplomatic and press circles as an appealing model of social reform for the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.

Underpinning these criticisms of Kemalist modernization is a strongly held doubt about the universalistic claims and aspirations of modernization theories. Today, many scholars and intellectuals favor and emphasize cultural identity, difference, and diversity over homogenization and unity. At the same time, concurrent with the demise of nationalist developmentalism in the world at large, the globalizing trends and high technologies of the market are also finding their way into Turkey. As these global trends ensnarl the country with all their energy and unruliness, official modernization, with its singularity, austerity, and paternalism, appears woefully inadequate both as a source of inspiration and as a mechanism of control in economics, politics, and cultural production.

Few of us would deny the democratic premises embodied in these developments, but we should realize that the theoretical, historical, and political debate in Turkey has left some important loose ends and generated several pitfalls. For example, it is sometimes ignored that regardless of how shallow Turkey’s “civilizational shift” from Islam to the West has actually been, institutional, ritual, symbolic, and aesthetic manifestations of modernity have become constituent elements of the Turkish collective consciousness since the 1920s. Images and photographs of La Turquie Kemaliste in the 1930s, the propaganda films of the 1950s, and countless other representations of the official history of modernization still offer the most powerful visual tropes of this ethos of the making of a thoroughly modern nation out of the ruins of an old empire. Unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men in educational and professional settings, healthy children and young people in school uniforms, the modern architecture of public buildings in republican Ankara and other major cities, the spectacular performances of the national theater, symphony orchestra, opera, and ballet, and proud scenes of agriculture, railroads, factories, and dams are among the most familiar images. Not only have these been charged with a civilizing agency for the greater part of Turkey’s republican history, but they have also come to set the official standards of exterior form and behavior against which people, ideas, and events have been measured and judged.

Another loose end is the inadequate way in which some aspects of recent Turkish history are studied and evaluated. As writers try to align themselves according to whether they believe Turkey has had too much or too little modernization, few have stepped up to study the real history of modernization in Turkey in all of its aspects. The serious doubts of some postmodernists notwithstanding, it is hard to ignore the relevance and reality of history. No matter how one might want to qualify it, in Turkey today more people live longer, fewer children succumb to childhood diseases, more people can read and write, and more people have access to modern means of transportation and communication than was the case in the 1920s. In other words, one would be justified in claiming that most people in Turkey now live lives that are qualitatively better than was typical in Anatolia during the early decades of the twentieth century. It seems to us that how this came about constitutes a valid and interesting research topic. Yet more than thirty-five years after its publication, Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey remains the best introductory text for the study of the late Ottoman and early republican eras. On the other hand, despite his omnipresence in all aspects of modern Turkish history, Kemal Atatürk still does not have a scholarly biography.

A third and perhaps more important pitfall can be described as the state of extreme relativism that is associated with some forms of postmodernism and that may follow from a radical break with Kemalist modernism. Such an outcome would erode the possibility of finding any common ground or evaluative standard among different discourses and lifestyles. As editors of this volume, it is our conviction that if the recognition and celebration of pluralism and difference are not to lead to a complete “indifferentiation and indifference,” as Chantal Mouffe cogently puts it, “one must be able to discriminate between differences that exist but should not exist, and differences that do not exist but should exist.” ₄

On the basis of this conviction, we underline the importance of avoiding reductionist definitions of both modernity/modernism and postmodernity/postmodernism while embarking upon a rigorous and critical rethinking of Turkish modernization. Just as we need to distinguish between modernity as a potentially liberating historical condition and its instrumentalization for a political project of domination, we also need to distinguish between the democratic implications of the recent postmodern critique, on the one hand, and its self-closure into a new form of orthodoxy, on the other. In order to take advantage of the openings created by the former while avoiding the pitfalls of the latter, we must work toward building a new consensus that makes communication across social, political, and theoretical divides possible while upholding the universal principles of justice and truth. The parameters of this consensus must originate not in a grand theory or the political project of an elite but in the very dialogue that would take place across societal divisions. It is only through such interchange that we can support the growth of an “unfettered, uncensored domain of public discourse,” which Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob describe as a “New Republic of Learning.” ₅

The essays in this volume, first presented in an interdisciplinary conference titled “Rethinking the Project of Modernity in Turkey,” held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 1994, bring together a wide range of writers from different disciplines and professions, all of whom are preoccupied with the critical debates over the current dilemmas and prospects of the project of modernity in Turkey and elsewhere. While keeping their essays focused on Turkey from their respective fields of expertise, they incorporate some of the most recent conceptual tools and frameworks, thereby providing an opening for theoretical and historical engagement with each other across disciplinary boundaries, as well as with specialists on other parts of the world. They represent a variety of positions, mostly complementary but at times conspicuously at odds with each other.

Rather than selecting the contributors strategically to affirm our own views, our objective was to open up space for some of the most prominent names to speak for themselves around our selected theme. We did not, however, want to reduce the debate to essentialized and mutually exclusive oppositions, especially between Kemalists and Islamists. Therefore, we avoided activists who were closely identified with these positions in favor of contributors who maintain a critical distance from essentialist and totalizing worldviews of any kind. A distance from both the self-righteous authoritarianism of Kemalist nationalism and the anti-individual and antimodern authoritarianism of certain aspects of Islamist politics characterizes most of the essays in this collection.

The range of positions notwithstanding, the common thread cutting across the essays is a two-fold observation that can also be seen as the tentative conclusion of this study. First, many of the writers find that the Turkish project of modernity, in the way it was conceived under the sponsorship and priorities of the nation-state, has been flawed and problematical from its inception, compromised precisely by some of the things that were done in the name of modernity. Second, they agree that both politically and intellectually, the current critical climate is an opportunity, albeit a precarious one (without any convincing indication so far that the opportunity has been seized), for rectifying the initial flaw toward a more democratic, pluralist, and creative unleashing of the country’s potential.

The first seven essays after this introduction offer historical overviews of Turkish modernization, critically reevaluate the paradigms employed in its study, and discuss current challenges to it. In chapter 2, Resat Kasaba distinguishes between modernization as a world-historical process and the modernization that is described in social science texts. He sees the former as a liberating process that made it possible for people to pursue their individual interests while forming meaningful collectivities. By contrast, the models of social change that were elaborated in the aftermath of the Second World War confined the analysis of this rich and complex development into separately conceived nation-states that were labeled with sterile pattern variables. Kasaba sees the current conjuncture in the world and in Turkey as fortuitous for having brought a relative relaxation of political, intellectual, and ideological constraints. He argues that it should be possible for us, as historians and as historical subjects, to take advantage of these circumstances and reclaim the universal and liberating potential of modernization.

Çaglar Keyder argues in chapter 3 that the 1980s and 1990s have been a time of momentous change for Turkish society, when all the institutions, values, and ideals of modernity have come under siege. Yet he cautions us that it would be misleading to blame modernization as such for the current sense of malaise in Turkey. Rather than agreeing with those who advocate culturally authentic models of social change, Keyder insists that modernity should be accepted as a total project, embracing and internalizing all the cultural dimensions that made Europe modern. Hence, he insists on the enduring validity of the project of modernity while emphasizing the crucial need for shifting the focus of the project away from the state to society itself. For this to take place, the society needs to be constructed around well-formulated and protected notions of freedom and citizenship.

The essays by Haldun Gülalp and Serif Mardin address, in different ways, the primary challenge to Turkish modernization posed recently by an increasingly visible Islamic element in society. Gülalp examines the growth of Islamist politics in Turkey within a global political-economic perspective. He argues that Islamism in Turkey and other similarly situated countries is a product of the frustration of the promises of Westernist modernization and state-led economic development that preoccupied the governments of these countries for the better part of the twentieth century. According to Gülalp, Islamist politics grew in such an environment not as a backward looking premodernism but as a critique of modernity, without, however, articulating a clear alternative in economic terms.

Focusing more on the historiography than on the history of Turkish modernization, Serif Mardin’s essay takes issue with precisely the kind of macroeconomic and structural analysis proposed by Gülalp. Mardin looks at the existing literature on Turkish modernization, of both Kemalist and Marxist persuasions, and finds too heavy an emphasis on macro models and too little interest in micro aspects of social change, which he describes as “life-worlds.” Only by reintegrating life-worlds as a central component of the study and practice of modernity in Turkey, Mardin suggests, will we be able to move beyond the shortcomings of the existing historical experience and analysis. This, he argues, will alleviate the authoritarian tendencies inherent in exclusively structuralist perspectives and help overcome the distance and alienation that the overwhelmingly Muslim population of Turkey has felt in the face of the social and political reforms of the past two hundred years.

Along similar lines, Nilüfer Göle, in chapter 6, takes exception with common ways of studying the rise of Islam as resulting from poverty, authoritarianism, and massive urbanization. For her, Islamist movements involve not only a rejection of and a reaction to modernity but also a positive articulation of a holistic vision for the community. She sees in these movements a reassertion of Islamic identity that had been excluded from both the practice and the history of Turkish modernization. Göle reminds us that Muslims are reclaiming their history in body and spirit, in relationship to and within the context of modern institutions that surround them. Thus Göle is inclined to see in Islamic movements “a hybridization between local and global realities.” This way of thinking about Islam, however, should not deter us from critically assessing the future that is inherent in Islamic visions. As Göle herself notes in the concluding section of her essay, “the ‘rise of the oppressed’ can be emancipatory only if it is not itself repressive.”

The last two essays in this section introduce the dimension of gender into the discussion. Yesim Arat’s chapter begins by reviewing the way the status and appearance of women in public have been among the most effective visual and symbolic expressions of the Turkish project of modernity in its various stages. After emphasizing the centrality of women’s position in all discussions of modernity in Turkey, Arat compares the earlier construct of the Kemalist woman with the recent feminist critique of this idealized construct. The feminist critique, she states, represents nothing less than a major change from women’s being the objects of paternalistic republican reforms that “granted them their rights” to women’s claiming subjecthood in their own lives. Yet Arat refuses to cast these two in oppositional terms and sees the feminist activism of the 1980s as testimony to the strength of the republican project of modernity. Despite their revolt, she argues, these feminists, in their search for autonomy and their belief in universal rights beyond local traditions and provincial moralities, contribute to the liberal, secular, and democratizing polity that Kemalist Westernization ultimately stood for.

While agreeing with many of the recent criticisms directed at studies of Turkish modernization, Deniz Kandiyoti draws our attention to a still largely neglected area: the emergence of new identities and new forms of subjectivity through which we can begin to question the very meaning of what is “modern.” She argues that certain lifestyles, identities, relationships, mannerisms, and habits came to be defined as “modern” not by virtue of their intrinsic qualities but as a result of the specific policies of the modernizing elite and, subsequently, the particular categories developed by the modernization school of social sciences. In particular, she focuses upon the central role of family, sexuality, and gender in discourses about Turkish modernity and highlights the historically and socially constructed nature of “modern” categories. More significantly, she emphasizes that the specific ways in which these categories affected the lives and status of women depended to a large extent on local conditions and class differentiations, which varied dramatically from city to village or from one region to another. This emphasis on the need to study “the local specificities of modernity,” as Kandiyoti puts it, marks an important agenda of research neglected by traditional studies of modernization confined to official and institutional realms.

The book continues with four studies that more specifically address cultural aspects of the modernity debate in Turkey. These essays focus on current popular reactions to official modernism and examine the historical context of such reactions. Architecture, music, and popular culture are taken up in these essays with the underlying conviction that these fields are not autonomous and self-referential but are related to one another in meaningful ways as aspects of a larger cultural phenomenon. The predominance of architecture in this section, either directly or by implication, is neither arbitrary nor inconsequential. Apart from its being a recognized discipline and profession, we have viewed architecture (and its implication of a “rational structure”) as a powerful metaphor for the project of modernity itself, in Turkey as elsewhere. The architectural terminology of the current postmodern debate is revealing: it is the modern “project” that is under attack; designs and blueprints are discredited as inherently oppressive and authoritarian; instead of construction, deconstruction occupies the cutting edge of critical thought; and architecture itself, as a metaphor for knowledge, is replaced by the archaeology of fragments.

In chapter 9, Sibel Bozdogan presents a historical overview of the predicament of architectural modernism in Turkey through three distinct periods: its introduction in the Kemalist 1930s, its proliferation in the 1950s, and its rejection in the 1980s. She elaborates the discussion of modernity/postmodernity as it manifests itself in the discipline and profession of architecture, and she offers a visual stage-set for the following two contributions. In architecture, Bozdogan argues, the problem lies less with the initial precepts of modernism, in the way it emerged as a critical, universal, and liberating discourse in architectural culture at large, than with the way it was reduced to an ideologically charged exterior form and scientific doctrine in the service of the nationalist modernizing elites in Turkey. At the same time, she suggests that the more recent postmodern celebration of liberation from the facelessness and sterility of modern architecture needs to be approached with caution, in order to avoid a standardless stylistic pluralism as an end in itself.

In his essay, Michael Meeker analyzes the seemingly opposite ideological and architectural statements of two state monuments, the Atatürk Memorial Tomb and the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara—symbols of secular reason and religious faith, respectively—in terms of an underlying shared language of “popular intersubjectivity.” From folktales to the “stories” that monuments tell, from the constitution of personhood to that of nationhood, this shared language constitutes a sort of collective imagination. On this basis Meeker rejects common binary oppositions that are typically employed to characterize the project of modernity in Turkey, such as nationalism versus religion, modernity versus tradition, and state versus society.

The last two essays in this section, written from the fields of architecture and music, respectively, look at the most phenomenal challenge to official culture in Turkey in recent years—the challenge coming from or informed by the experience of marginalized people in squatter settlements around major cities. In chapter 11, Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu looks at the architectural sites of encounters between urban and rural Turkey, specifically those between city dwellers and peasants and nomads. She calls for the opening up of a cultural and architectural space of difference irreducible to either of the poles of this binary opposition. Nalbantoglu focuses on architectural (re)constructions of rural dwellings, from early republican model villages to the ingenious dwellings and tactics of survival put forward by rural migrants on the urban fringes today. In these she finds critical tools and disruptive moments that have been excluded from or silenced by the established architectural discourse and practice in Turkey, including the worn-out advocacies of regionalism and contextualism.

Meral Özbek’s essay addresses the relationship between modernization and popular culture in Turkey through the example of arabesk music, which, emerging out of the discontents of squatter populations in the 1960s, has become the most prolific form of popular entertainment in the 1980s for millions of people of all classes and backgrounds. Taking issue with “modernizers of both the right and the left,” Özbek challenges the characterization of arabesk as the vulgar, fatalistic, tasteless, and cheap culture of manipulated masses. Instead, she defines it as the site of both submission and resistance to dominant groups by real people who are at once the source and the consumers of this culture. Focusing on the work of Orhan Gencebay, the undisputed “King of Arabesk,” she takes us through the historical processes in the making of the prominent examples of this genre of music. Özbek argues that arabesk lost its initial resistant and utopian dimension in the 1980s as it became absorbed by the hegemonic ideology of the Özal years in Turkey.

In the last section of the book, three authors whose primary specializations lie outside Turkey look at the Turkish case from their respective vantage points and make some comparative and theoretical observations. Ernest Gellner, in chapter 13, returns to a general theme that inspired many early writers on the history of modern Turkey: the successful transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a secular and modern republic. Instead of simply asserting this success, as was frequently done in earlier writings, Gellner explains it by arguing that both popular Islam and the scholar-elites in late Ottoman and early republican Turkey were better positioned to adjust to the requirements of modern life. For the same reason, argues Gellner, there is a basis for remaining optimistic about the future of Turkey, especially in comparison with its less fortunate neighbors to the north and south.

Roger Owen and Joel Migdal approach the topic from a more specifically Middle Eastern context. In chapter 14, Owen argues that modernity became a political project in the Middle East under the uncertain conditions of the postcolonial and postimperial years of the early twentieth century. Most states and societies in the region undertook to advance certain values, characteristics, and standards in their respective societies. The mechanisms through which these models were imposed, as well as their impacts, varied across the region. Nonetheless, Owen argues, they have transformed local circumstances to such an extent that today modernity should be seen as an irreversible reality in the Middle East. At the same time, he reminds us that this is an incomplete reality, or rather an unfinished project, and as such it leaves much room for human intervention and interpretation.

Where and how this intervention is likely to take place finds a partial answer in Joel Migdal’s concluding essay. He argues that the ultimate character and direction of the project of modernity in countries like Turkey will be determined not by the will of state elites but in that zone where state forces come into contact with social structures which they try to mold after an idealized vision. Because of the larger-than-life stature of leaders such as Atatürk, Ben-Gurion, and Nasser, who dominated political life in their respective countries, it has not been easy to focus on these zones of interaction and untangle these complex relationships. But as Migdal reiterates, the general thrust, the hope, of the arguments expressed in this volume is that the current conjuncture will allow us to lift this veil and arrive at a more open and inclusive assessment of the past and future of the project of modernity in Turkey and the Middle East.

In putting together the essays in this volume, we started with a set of open-ended questions rather than with a clearly delineated, a priori agenda. Instead of trying to resolve the debates over such a complex and contentious history of modernization as Turkey’s, our aspiration was to complicate a picture frequently oversimplified not only by the smooth trajectories and universally defined models of modernization theories but also by some of the more recent antimodern and postmodern trends. As we write, events unfolding in Turkey continue to complicate the picture daily. If modernity is a project fraught with uncertainty, as we believe it is, we can perhaps say this much: it is alive and well in Turkey.

Endnotes

Note 1: Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, New York: Norton, 1994, 201. Back.

Note 2: Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, New York: Free Press, 1958; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Back.

Note 3: See Mardin’s chapter 5, this volume. Back.

Note 4: Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” in Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy, London: Verso, 1992, 13. Back.

Note 5: Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 282. Back.