Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 3

1997

3. Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s

In the last decade of the twentieth century, a deep sense of malaise gripped Turkish society. While the elites and the intelligentsia asked themselves where things had gone wrong—or rather, where they had gone wrong—the people strived to accommodate themselves to a lack of direction, growing anomie, the decaying of institutions, and lawlessness. Observing the demise of the developmentalist ideal, they responded to the promises of the nation–state with growing incredulity. In a context where modernity was a conscious imposition by modernizers whose arsenal was the exercise of state power, the crisis of the state seemed to forebode the bankruptcy of the entire project. The pessimism inspired by Turkish reality was compounded by the fear that the global project of modernity was exhausted: that it was no longer possible to emulate the cultural achievements of the West, and that the geo–cultural choice in favor of Europe, which had always been an integral component of the Turkish project, would also have to be abandoned.

Turkish modernizers had readily identified modernization with Westernization—with taking a place in the civilization of Europe. ₁ Modernity, in their conception, was a total project: one of embracing and internalizing all the cultural dimensions that made Europe modern. They were not satisfied simply with increasing rationality, bureaucratization, and organizational efficiency; they also professed a need for social transformation in order to achieve secularization, autonomy for the individual, and the equality of men and women. This project permitted local culture no greater space than that of the folkloric; it accepted no adulteration of modernity with a qualifying adjective such as Islamic or Turkish. ₂

It was this conception of modernity, with its strict identification of modernization with Westernization, that led to the pessimism I mentioned. There is, however, another conception in which modernization is taken to mean the process of actual transformations toward organizational efficiency and rationality, which implies no normative commitment to the Enlightenment project. This perspective of non–Western modernization has gained in popularity in the Turkish context. Its proponents, taking a stance similar to the postmodernist celebration of the hybrid, see in the apparent crumbling of social cohesion and the rise of credos actively challenging the aspirations of modernity a welcome sign that some negotiation might occur between the Westernizers and their erstwhile objects. They observe in this challenge a search for cultural identity, the assertion of a claim over life—worlds whose definition had been denied to their inhabitors.

In contrast to the Westernizers, who deplore deviations from the blueprint, what the optimists would like to commend is the possibility of a combination of the local with the modern. Although the terms of the amalgam are not specified, the rubric “Islamic and modern” is usually employed to describe the desired combination. ₃ Proponents of this conception announce the death of the modernization project identified with the normative importation of Enlightenment ideals, and they celebrate the possibility of a local (and, some would argue, therefore authentic) appropriation of the modern.

Normatively, I share the Westernizers’ position that the project of modernity cannot but be a total one and should seek to realize the Enlightenment ideals. Although it may be correct to diagnose an exhaustion of the momentum represented by modernization–from–above and by the achievements of the nation–state, it is not necessarily the case that the project of modernity will henceforth be permanently stalled. The social engineering associated with modernization–from–above was badly flawed from its inception, and it has to be superseded if the ideal of a society of free and equal individuals is to be achieved. This may only be possible if the locus of modernization shifts to the society itself, with a renewed political and legal framework allowing individuals to attain the status of citizens. Hence, for those with a normative commitment to the project, it is critically important to diagnose the situation correctly: Is there any way of recovering the modernizing momentum that used to be provided by the state? If the modernizing dynamic is henceforth to be located in the society, who will be its principal agents, and what are the political conditions necessary for their success? We do need radical surgery, but it is premature to arrange for an inquest into the death of the project.

Modernization from Above

Of all the words derivative of the radical “modern,” that which applies most readily to Turkish experience is “modernization”—defined as a project. The agency behind the project was the modernizing elite, and what they sought to achieve was the imposition of institutions, beliefs, and behavior consonant with their understanding of modernity on the chosen object: the people of Turkey.

The crucial difference between modernization–from–above and modernization as a self–generating societal process is that the modernizers wield state power and are agents with their own interests. For this reason, even if they profess a project of Westernization, they are not necessarily committed to all the dimensions of modernity. It is this potential conflict between the full unfolding of modernity and the circumscribed version that the modernizers would like to see realized which defines the principal problem implicit in the formula “modernization–from–above.” That modernity is an indivisible project whose artificial truncation by modernizers generally leads to crisis has been recognized, most famously by Barrington Moore. ₄ Moore showed that aspects of modernity could not be picked and chosen at will, as if one were selecting dishes from a menu. In his account, the lack of political modernization (owing to the abiding power of the ruling class of the ancien régime) determined a crisis–ridden trajectory toward fascism. In what follows, I argue that the historical genesis of the state tradition in Turkey determined the choices made by the modernizers in their attempt to delimit the scope of modernity, thus undermining their avowed goal of Westernization.

Most students of the Turkish case agree that there was continuity between Ottoman modernizers and the founders of the Turkish state. ₅ There was no overthrow of the Ottoman state structure after World War I; the new Turkish state took over with only slightly different personnel. Furthermore, owing to the ethnic structure of the empire and to the civil war, as a result of which the Christian populations were expelled, the state elite did not have to worry about the cooperation or reluctance of a strong bourgeois class. Most of the merchants, bankers, and industrialists of the empire were no longer there when the Republic of Turkey came into being. ₆ Indeed, a new bourgeoisie was created through the policies of the state during the project of nationalist modernization.

These propositions concerning the continuity between imperial and nationalist elites are premised upon a fundamental feature of Ottoman social structure: the absence of large landlords (or, equivalently, the relative independence of the bureaucracy). ₇ Because of this absence, the guardians of the ancien régime were simply the nonreformist wing of the bureaucracy; the nationalist intelligentsia did not have to confront any serious opposition. Without a strong landlord class that might have demanded economic liberalism and civil and political rights for its narrow constituency (for example, Latin American oligarchies, or the interests around the Wafd party in Egypt during the 1920s), no group in the society found it possible to challenge the absolutism of the state.

Absent a revolutionary break in the class basis of the state, the fundamental division between the state class and the masses was perpetuated. A factor strengthening the status of the republican state was the material resources it had acquired during the civil wars leading to its establishment. As non–Muslims were eliminated and driven away throughout World War I and the war with Greece, their property, as well as the positions they vacated, became part of the dowry of the new state that could be distributed to the rest of the population. What this distribution achieved was both to expedite the creation of a native bourgeoisie and to make it beholden to the state. Shortly after the establishment of the new state, world economic conditions and the ideological zeitgeist shifted to favor antiliberalism and a state–directed economy. During the 1930s and World War II, the course of capitalist accumulation came under the full control of the state.

After the war, the Turkish state elites were prevailed upon (abetted by their own effort to locate themselves within the bloc of United States hegemony) to adopt liberalism in the economy. Within a few years, however, it became apparent to Americans as well as the Turkish state elite that instead of economic liberalism, a program of planned, import–substituting industrialization would be the proper prescription for development. Hence, the state was invested with expanded prerogatives employing new administrative capacities. In this newly created context, in which the stakes increased as economic development proceeded, it became extremely costly for businessmen to challenge the state. ₈ Bureaucrats were in a position to make substantive decisions with virtual impunity, and they evaded accountability in the name of developmentalist efficiency. The social and economic policy of the state also contributed to its ability to effectively prevent challenges originating in the society. ₉ This was the period of national developmentalism, when prevailing world conditions allowed the state to regulate the economy under relatively closed circumstances. First, etatism during the Great Depression, and later, import substitution as befit American policies and world economic conditions of the time, had supplied the necessary policy packages.

National developmentalism was successful in its economic promises. There has been in Turkey, as in the majority of peripheral economies until the 1980s, considerable development, national economic integration, urbanization, and increase in levels of welfare. These gains have been transmitted to the populace through social entitlements, feeding into the populist rhetoric. Material progress, however, has not led to the development of individual autonomy or legal rights. On the contrary, it can be argued that the success of the social entitlement programs contributed to an emasculation of the concept of citizenship. Populism emerged as the modality for successfully perpetuating the claims and the status of a strong state, and as long as the state remained strong, full citizenship could be suspended.

Social rights became a means for the state to extend its legitimacy into the population, thus dividing, creating clientelistic networks, and colonizing. The beneficiaries of social programs were defined according to their group attributes—not as individuals. ₁₀ The state’s largesse was addressed to corporatized bodies whose very existence derived from the state’s need to identify and control a freshly segmented society. When politics was reduced to a bargain over the distribution of material rewards, a strategic and procedural conception of political rights, oriented toward participation in the structure of patronage, seemed normal and sufficient.

A similar account of the isolation and imperiousness of the state elite may be given in terms of nationalist ideology and the culture it propagated. In the transition from empire to nation–state, there had been a change in the legitimating discourse of state authority. The imperial Ottomanist ideology, a blend of Islamism and elite cohesion at the top, had to be abandoned. What took its place was a delayed reaction to and appropriation of what had led to the dissolution of the empire: nationalism. While they battled separatists and irredentists, Ottoman state elites had been slow to concoct their own brand of nationalism, which, of course, would have been self–defeating since their attempt was to preserve the empire. Later, however, when the likelihood of a narrower territorial sovereignty arose after World War I, they had to opt for Turkish nationalism.

Since the mid–nineteenth century, in cases as diverse as Germany and China, nationalism had provided the vocabulary for defensive modernization. The question of modernity in the context of the Third World had become inextricably bound up with the question of constructing the nation–state. ₁₁ It was such nationalism–from–above that constituted the founding ideology of the new Turkish republic. In this construct, the state could demarcate the boundaries of the nation and determine the margins beyond which the necessary unity of the collective body would be threatened. Such an organicist and societal perspective provided the justification for rejecting the possibility of fashioning a civic identity around which the population, as an aggregate of individuals, might find cohesion. In other words, a citizenship constituted foundationally around universally applicable civil rights never developed. ₁₂ Instead, authoritarian nationalism emphasized unity and collective purpose. The nation was supposed to express a homogeneity deriving from ethnic unity, and this unity would be expressed in a single voice. Hence, the collectivist vision implied its authoritarian implementation because it called for a cadre of interpreters and expressers to know and represent the unique voice of the nation. It was this cadre that was inducted as agents of the project of modernity.

It was the elites’ perception of underdevelopment that ushered in nationalisms in the periphery. Concurrent with this perception there frequently came a surge of popular resentment stemming from the dislocating, differentiating, and polarizing tide of contact with the West. Such resentment led to a questioning of the customary legitimation of the social order and to a popular resistance against colonialism or incorporation into the world market. The success of the anticolonial and nationalist movement could well depend on how this resistance was contained and channeled by the elites toward the sought–after mobilization for national construction. In other words, in order to strengthen and mobilize the forces for construction of the nation, the elites had to appropriate popular resentment into their own ressentiment. ₁₃

Partha Chatterjee argues that nationalist elites are in a position to articulate the resentment of the masses, yet they feel the necessity of embracing the “modern” if their society is to survive in the new world. ₁₄ Nationalist imagery and historiography will reflect this dilemma and the ambivalence with which the elites embrace modernity. As nationalism faces the problem of seizing the past in order to confront the future, its accompanying texts will reflect the similarly problematic nature of peripheral modernization. A nationalist discourse that does not resonate positively with indigenous culture and its resistance when confronted with Western expansion risks failure and alienation from the masses. If the new construct is designed by the elites solely to be consonant with the perceived requirements of modernity and fails to find a popular echo, problems of legitimation will plague the new regime.

The elites must thus translate and domesticate the transcendent logic of the modern in order to utilize it in their resistance. This domestication is pragmatic and for heuristic purposes, because the nationalist elites already are cosmopolitan; they know how to exist in both worlds and are comfortable in universal and local idioms alike. ₁₅ The masses must be spared such acrobatics, however. The ambivalence of belonging to two worlds is a luxury the intelligentsia may be able to afford; for the masses, something more readily ingestible should be on offer. The imperative to translate becomes the more pressing when popular resentment is palpable, and especially when it has a voice of its own. The very attempt to translate, however, brings the intelligentsia to an accommodation with the popular idiom, to a comprehension of the dimensions of popular anxiety and resentment and of people’s willingness to resist. Unless this accommodation is worked out, elite discourse will remain isolated, only to find a greater challenge down the road.

Turkish nationalism is an extreme example of a situation in which the masses remained silent partners and the modernizing elite did not attempt to accommodate popular resentment. The degree of popular sentiment that could be mobilized toward nationalist movements varied widely in the Third World, and Anatolian peasants were at the passive end of the spectrum. The masses in Turkey generally remained passive recipients of the nationalist message propounded by the elites. The continuity between Ottoman reformers and republican nationalists is one factor explaining the lack of popular fervor. Even with such continuity, participation in the nationalist movement could have provided the unifying experience required for allegiance to the new regime. But here, too, there were problems: the struggle with Greece was widely perceived as a war against an outside aggressor rather than as a struggle against a colonial presence. As such, it was yet another military campaign to be endured by the already mobilized Anatolian youth. Once again, for the masses, the high drama of making history could be accessed only through their role as draftees in the army.

What touched the masses directly during the Turkish nationalist movement was the expulsion, deportation, massacre, and exchange of the Greek and Armenian subjects of the empire. Indeed, the presence of the Christian population was the only medium through which Muslim Anatolians had experienced the otherwise abstract notion of peripheralization in their daily lives. Rather than being popular, however, the events culminating in the expulsion and disappearance of some nine–tenths of the Christian population (around one–sixth of the total population in Anatolia) were laden with embarrassment and shame, covered up in official discourse as much as in the national psyche. ₁₆ This is not to argue that there had been no Muslim resentment against the rapid rise in both social and economic status of the Christian subjects of the empire during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, there was much daily intercourse among the different millets, and prevailing norms of behavior prescribed cordiality and mutual respect.

Given this background, what transpired was way out of proportion to the degree of hostility that might have existed. Even if the war years had aggrandized sentiments against Greeks in the western parts of Anatolia, this was not the case for Armenians in the east in 1915, or for the Karamani or the Pontus Greeks in the interior and on the Black Sea coast, respectively. Rather than rallying the population around the nationalist cause and leading to popular participation, the hostilities created a situation in which the principal event of the nationalist struggle was repressed in the collective memory of all participants. This repression was all the more effective because of the material rewards associated with the physical removal of ethnic minorities.

The degree of participation by the masses not only was important in fashioning the course of the struggle but also determined the content of nationalist historiography and the identity that was created as a basis of legitimation for the new regime. While the aim of the nationalist mobilization was formulated as appropriation of the transcendent logic of the West, it was at the same time imperative that popular sentiments be satisfied through a glorification of something local. This is part of what is regarded as imagining the nation. The main problem with Turkish nationalist historiography was that it did not result from a negotiation between what the nationalist elites were trying to achieve and what could have motivated the masses to participate, nor did it come to terms with the events that loomed largest in the experience of the participants. Consequently, the story propagated through official discourse suffered from the all–too–obvious concealment of a crucial episode and instead gained in pure artifice. There were no grounds in this history for a negotiation because the shared elements of the experience had been eliminated. Thus it became possible for the nationalist elites to treat the construction of history and national identity in an entirely instrumental fashion; the version they eventually settled on was woefully deficient in its accommodation of popular elements. The masses remained passive during the process and apparently accepted the implicit pact for mutual silence. ₁₇

The silence of the masses also permitted the construction of an imaginary “popular” by the elite. Redefinition of the “popular” (via folklore and history) is a common feature of all nationalisms and is expected to proceed from the assimilation of various decontextualized elements of mass culture to the totalizing semiotics of the national project. ₁₈ In the Turkish case, this redefinition could take place with more than the usual liberty because the freshly constituted elements of a popular “tradition” were represented to the masses as the authentic (and official) version, without much concern for preexisting versions. The defining vector of this reconstitution was an unsullied ethnic heritage endowed with all the positive virtues of might, unity, state–building acumen, and self–confidence. This trope, designed to boost self–esteem, established a matrix through which all the national symbols—from heroic sculptures to ethnographic detail, from folk music, legends, and heroes to public ceremonies—were defined. ₁₉ Henceforth, popular culture would be yet another realm amenable to social engineering.

The gap between the modernizing elites, whose discourse diverged radically from what could be popularly appropriated, and the voiceless masses gradually emerged as the axis around which the subsequent history of Turkish society was played out. No mediations developed between the modernizing discourse of the elites and the practice of the masses. Consequently, the Westernist ideal came to be identified with the statist and authoritarian stance of the modernizers. In response, a resistance culture, packaged as authentic, evolved to challenge the modernizing imposition. Modernization dictated from above necessarily politicizes its object—those who adhere to the already existing indigenous culture—and turns their culture into a residual discourse. ₂₀ In this case, as the confrontation between elites and masses unfolded, this residual discourse animated populist projects of various hues, all of which stemmed from the particular forms in which the potential dialogues had been truncated, had atrophied, or had not been allowed to evolve.

Nationalism, of course, attempts to redefine a collectivity as a community. Turkish nationalism placed special emphasis on the vulnerability of the new community, on its precarious viability in the face of hostile external forces. The state had to be intrepid in protecting it. Predictably, such a defense required the interdiction of internal dissent as well. Authoritarianism became the necessary corollary to reliance on collectivist nationalism as the legitimating principle of the state. In other words, modernization–from–above came to mean modernization of the solidary nation but not of its individual members, who were expected to continue living in their gemeinschaftlich universe newly constructed under state auspices. This project did not permit the individuation of the component parts of the national unity. There thus emerged a widening gap between the declared intent of Westernization and the actual practice of limited modernization.

This is why, in cases of elite–directed transformation in which nationalism is the ideological environment of modernization, it is the state elites who have to be defeated in order for modernization–from–above to be transcended by a full project of modernity. ₂₁ The momentum of modernity has to be allowed to overcome the local culture and gradually to dominate the life—worlds of the masses. First, however, imposition has to stop, and along with it the biases imposed on the conception of modernity by the state elite. This can be accomplished only when the legal and political conditions for a popular appropriation of modernity are created—in other words, when the legal basis for citizenship rights and the foundational requirements for individual autonomy are established. ₂₂

The Crisis of the Project

In world–historical terms, the period of national developmentalism is over. ₂₃ The collapse of the nationalist modernizing state cannot be averted through the injection of a new dose of jingoistic fervor. That scenario would ensure a marginalized involution—an outcome that current world conditions seem not to exclude. It is impossible to believe anymore that capitalism will eventually batter all walls and incorporate all packets of humanity into its purview. Even if it did, however, there is a growing suspicion that capitalism no longer requires its own expansion to be accompanied by cultural transformation toward the modern. ₂₄ Hence, a passive faith in the transformatory capacity of capitalist development is untenable.

Alternatively, the successful advance of the modernizationist momentum without a return to national developmentalism may also be imagined—a new order based on a civic, nonethnic, and nonpopulist principle of citizenship, in which the state will recognize basic civil rights of individuals and in which political liberalism will be accepted as the guiding principle. The proponents of this alternative derive their optimism from the collapse of state–centered developmentalism. It has become clear that national economies cannot be managed and that the policies of nurturing the bourgeoisie and of populist incorporation cannot continue. Consequently, the state is in serious crisis: the legitimacy it once enjoyed has been withdrawn.

One source from which demands for a citizenship–based order may originate is the bourgeoisie, which was successfully nurtured during the authoritarian period yet now finds this political order constraining and its economic orientation archaic. Until recently, the Turkish bourgeoisie had remained weak and diffident. Now, among its ranks is found a faction for whom the costs of the developmentalist state, in its arbitrariness and increasingly self–serving behavior, have become onerous. ₂₅ Businessmen strong enough to compete with and become part of the international corporate bourgeoisie opt for the rule of law and a generally predictable framework for major policies of the state. ₂₆ In their quest for calculability, they want the bureaucracy to become accountable.

The choice in favor of “globalization” made by a part of the Turkish bourgeoisie also requires an acceptance of norms associated with the West. Indeed, this requirement has been instrumental in creating a divide among the state cadres—the erstwhile defenders of modernization–from–above. Turkey’s relations with various international organs in Europe, particularly with the European Union, reached a turning point in the 1990s that required a clear enunciation of the goals of Westernization. These fora were no longer willing to accept excuses about how conditions were not ripe for the implementation of reforms in civil and political rights. It became clear that refusal to institute the legal foundations of individual autonomy would be tantamount to giving up the geo–cultural claim of “Europeanness.” ₂₇ Hence, one wing of the political elite allied itself with the bourgeoisie (and some intellectuals) to defend the view that rule of law and civil rights are the indispensable foundation for any politics.

Another impetus to the defense of political liberalism has been the attempt to understand and respond to ethnic separatism and Islamic fundamentalism. Although these movements, especially the Islamist, target goals that may be difficult to recuperate under a liberal order, an argument could be made that they would lose a good deal of their fervor if citizenship based on political liberalism and genuine secularism were instituted. For ethnic separatism, this promise is clear: if the ideology of collectivist nationalism were abandoned in favor of some form of constitutional citizenship, if a credible legal and administrative order enabling the creation of a public space in which cultural identity could be expressed were established, then separatist demands would probably be tamed toward the exercise of newly gained rights. Although a “modernist” strand is harder to find within the religious movement, it is still true that political Islam derives ammunition from the authoritarian conceptions of the state that pass for secularism. With genuine secularism, the Islamic communitarian movement could well be reduced to an ordinary millenarianism and a constituency of the marginalized.

Alternatively, the Islamic social movement may be transformed into a genuinely Islamic–democratic political party. This is not to say that the Kurdish and Islamic movements do not currently express demands in the direction of basic rights and political liberalism. On the contrary, their public stance and the manner in which they link with international loci of influence over the Turkish state foreground their democratizing platform. Combined with the universalistic demands of the heretofore silent religious minority, the Alevis, this makes for an important common front against the authoritarian state elite. Whether this objective potential for alliance will be realized in political practice remains to be seen.

Thus, the current struggle in Turkey seems to be between the old authoritarian—modernizationist, paternalistic state, with its crumbling nationalist and populist legitimation, and a modernist conception of political liberalism and citizenship. It is apparent that the transition from a modernizationist state that sees itself as the guardian of social change to a modern state based on political liberalism and citizenship is neither automatic nor readily attainable. The various practitioners and supporters of the old state conception, interests articulated around authoritarianism, are aware of their weakness and will not concede without a fight. Indeed, they seem to have opted for rear–guard action designed to extend the life of the authoritarian ideal. Since the material conditions of state–centered modernization can no longer be re–created, they may be right in thinking that this particular choice is the only alternative to a more rapid exit from the historical stage. As Barrington Moore pointed out, the trajectory of modernization–from–above could culminate in a strategy by the ruling class in which reaction is made popular. The ravages wrought by the collapse of the redistributive economy, as well as the sentiment that there is growing polarization on a global scale, help make ultranationalism (and, perhaps, sectarian intolerance) popular in the eyes of the newly marginalized. If the erstwhile modernizers, the state class, pursue their interests in self–perpetuation, the reactionary path promises to be the most effective barrier to impending political liberalization.

If the project of modernity is to divest itself of its modernizationist encumbrance, then political liberalization, ushering in civil rights and the rule of law, is the next step. For the promises of modernization to be fulfilled in all spheres of life, for Enlightenment ideals of emancipation to be realized, and for individual autonomy to be attained, full citizenship rights have to be instituted. Only then may it be possible to predict the overcoming of the inertia of indigenous culture and its communitarian predilection and to avoid the slide toward a diluted form of hyphenated modernity. But first it is necessary to perform radical surgery on the moribund state tradition—in order to prepare the legal and political coordinates within which the public space of autonomous individuals may flourish.

Endnotes

Note 1: For a fuller treatment of this point, see Çaglar Keyder, “The Dilemma of Cultural Identity on the Margin of Europe,” Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 1993, 19–33. Back.

Note 2: For a discussion of these conceptions of modernization, see Dean Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 15, March 1973, 196–226. See also Charles Taylor, “Inwardness and the Culture of Modernity,” in Alex Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, eds., Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Back.

Note 3: Reinhard Bendix’s seminal article would seem to be the initial inspiration for this view: “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1967, 292–346. Back.

Note 4: Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. Back.

Note 5: For a forceful historical argument in this vein, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London: I. B. Tauris, 1993. Back.

Note 6: For a fuller account of this period, see Çaglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, London: Verso, 1987. Back.

Note 7: See Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Egypt, Peru, Turkey, and Japan, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1977. Back.

Note 8: See Ayse Bugra, State and Business in Modern Turkey: A Comparative Study, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Back.

Note 9: On political culture, see Ergun Özbudun, “State Elites and Democratic Culture in Turkey,” in Larry Diamond, ed., Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1993, 247–68. Back.

Note 10: Lisa Anderson, in “Liberalism, Islam and the Arab State,” Dissent, Fall 1994, 439–44, makes the same argument in the context of rentier states. Back.

Note 11: There is, of course, a vast literature on nationalism in the Third World. For my purposes in this article, the essential points are covered by Ernest Gellner, Nationalism, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, London: Zed Press, 1986. Back.

Note 12: See T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. There is a growing literature devoted to arguing citizenship as a radical concept. For a representative sample, see Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy, London: Verso, 1992. For an argument linking different conceptions of nationalism and citizenship, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992. Back.

Note 13: The notion of elite ressentiment is discussed by Greenfeld in Nationalism, passim. Back.

Note 14: Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, passim. Back.

Note 15: See Alvin Gouldner, “Prologue to a Theory of Revolutionary Intellectuals,” Telos, vol. 26, 1976, 3–36. Back.

Note 16: This situation has yet to change. One significant study that confronts the silence and underlines the importance of the event for the history of the Turkish republic has, curiously, not received the attention it richly deserves. See Taner Akçam, Türk Ulusal Kimligi ve Ermeni Meselesi, Istanbul: I’letisim, 1993. Back.

Note 17: The social removal of ethnies considered alien also had the effect of purging the ambivalence that the nationalist elites would otherwise have had to wrestle with. This removal of the material anchoring of Western practices and lifestyles made it possible to imagine a fictional West with no immediate material reference. It could, therefore, be represented in rhetoric in an idealized version with no damaging or dislocating effects. Once the negative dimension was eliminated, modernization could be presented as an entirely positive project against which no defensive posturing was necessary. The elites did not feel any colonial resentment; they did not see themselves as belonging to a world different from the one they sought to emulate. Back.

Note 18: See Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Back.

Note 19: See James M. Orr, “Nationalism in a Local Setting,” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, 1991, 142–51; and Martin Stokes, “Hazelnuts and Lutes, Perceptions of Change in a Black Sea Valley,” in Paul Stirling, ed., Culture and Economy: Changes in Turkish Villages, London: Eothen, 1993. Back.

Note 20: For a discussion of this point, see Bobby Sayyid, “Sign O’Times: Kaffirs and Infidels Fighting the Ninth Crusade,” in Ernesto Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities, London: Verso, 1994, 264–86. Sayyid identifies a generic “Kemalism” with such an imposition. Back.

Note 21: See Metin Heper, “The Strong State as a Problem for the Consolidation of Democracy: Turkey and Germany Compared,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1992, 169–94. Back.

Note 22: It is true that after World War II, Turkish modernizers had to relinquish their single–party hold on political power and accept limited contestation within the procedures of representative democracy. In retrospect, however, the inception of competitive party politics under the pressure of American hegemony seems less to have signaled the advent of political liberalism than to have opened a narrow arena for elite competition. When the single party lost the elections in 1950, this change was not followed by a legal reform attempting to dismantle the privileges of the state or to define and safeguard the rights of the citizens. The state continued to enjoy its prerogatives, and a legal framework instituting freedom of expression and association for individuals, or even a state of rule–of–law where bureaucratic prerogatives could be challenged in autonomous courts, never materialized. Associations that emerged in this environment never acquired sufficient autonomy from the state to be able to advocate civil rights for individuals. Back.

Note 23: See Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Concept of National Development, 1917–1989, Elegy and Requiem,” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 35, no. 3–4, 1992, 517–29. Back.

Note 24: Cultural relativism legitimates this possibility, and a few remaining proponents of Enlightenment ideals in Third World studies struggle against such a conception of capitalist transformation. Compare Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 2, 1994, 328–56. Back.

Note 25: For a clear statement of this stagist view, see Nigel Harris, “New Bourgeoisies?” Journal of Development Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 1988, 237–49. Back.

Note 26: See David G. Becker, “Beyond Dependency: Development and Democracy in the Era of International Capitalism,” in Dankwart A. Rustow and Kenneth P. Ericson, eds., Comparative Global Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives, New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Back.

Note 27: I have argued this point in “The Dilemma of Cultural Identity.” Back.