Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 14

1997

14. Modernizing Projects in Middle Eastern Perspective

When I first read the conference papers that became the chapters of this book, I was very much struck by their overall coherence—by the way in which they seemed to speak directly to one another. And this, it seemed to me, could only be a result of the fact that there was general agreement among the participants about the nature of Turkey’s modernity project, as well as a belief that it would be difficult to discuss twentieth–century Turkish history from any other point of view.

I was also struck by the opportunities the papers offered for comparison with other projects elsewhere in the Middle East, where new states were provided with basic blueprints for their future moral and material progress by elites who were often led by some important historical figure, such as Atatürk, Reza Shah, David Ben–Gurion, or Habib Bourguiba. What they all seemed to share was a common response to twentieth–century colonialism and dependence, leading to a common desire to find a place for themselves and their peoples within the larger community of independent nation–states.

So much can be easily said. But if the comparison is to be pushed any further, it is necessary to elaborate the modernity project itself a little more fully and then try to situate it more securely in its Middle Eastern, as well as its Third World, context. I will start by seeking to establish some of the features that seem common to all such modernizing schemes.

First, the type of modernity project we have been discussing can be imagined only in terms of a state and a people. In other words, before there could be such a project, it was first necessary either to create its particular site de novo, as in the case of Turkey or Israel or Syria, or to reshape an existing site, as in the case of Iran or Egypt or Morocco. It was also necessary to transform the existing inhabitants into a homogeneous people, sometimes by forcibly excluding some and forcibly including others, and always by appealing to a common history and a common culture reinforced by a common educational system.

Second, the definition of the project often went through several stages. As a rule, the first nationalists were concerned simply to get rid of foreign domination, without thinking much about what would happen next, beyond the passage of a new constitution and the creation of a few truly national institutions such as banks and universities. Later, as the twentieth century progressed, there came more elaborate notions concerning the peoples to be modernized and their future progress. Hence, after a while, it came to be quite common to associate colonialism with political division and the deliberate encouragement of narrow sectoral interests, and thus to associate nationalism and progress with the healing of social wounds, with unity, and with spiritual regeneration. In many cases, such views were the result of positive interaction with Marxism and communism, which encouraged nationalist intellectuals to analyze their societies in terms of their component classes, without, as a rule, positing any necessary contradiction between them.

Third, there was a similar development in the central notions of moral and material progress, in terms of both definition and how they were to be brought about. For material progress, the elite took its cue from what it perceived to be the central features of the larger economic world in which the country found itself, aiming at some times to interact with that world as openly as possible, and at other times to protect the national economy from what were identified as harmful international influences. The usual passage was from a mainly “open” foreign trade and investment regime to a mainly closed one, and then back again. In any case, it was the elite, using the machinery of the state, that tried to set the terms of this pattern of exchange as well as to define the way its progress was to be measured, in terms of improvements in income, in welfare, in productive capacity, or, sometimes, in national self–reliance. The elite seems to have been motivated by an urgent sense of haste—the need to catch up with the industrialized economies, often by means of an organized economic and social revolution.

Fourth, and finally, the notion of moral progress was much more difficult to pin down. It could be found in any number of different formulations and reformulations until, by and large, it dropped from the state elite’s own vocabulary, only to be rescued, on occasion, by various types of liberal or religious opposition. In the anticolonial period there was usually no major problem in defining the notion. As Michael Aflak and Salah a–Din Bitar, the founders of the Ba’ath Party, sought to define it in French–mandated Syria, the promotion of such progress was part and parcel of the nationalist struggle itself, which, to be effective, “had to involve a change of mind and of thought, a deepening of national consciousness and of moral standards.” ₁ Later, as the actual practice of power dimmed the luster attached to most of the first generations of nationalist politicians, similar notions found their way into the vocabularies of other groups—sometimes the army (“the moral guardian of the nation”), sometimes the monarch (for example, in Morocco and Jordan), sometimes the more radical elements who seized power in the name of revolution, positive neutralism, and social justice—before they, too, proceeded to discredit themselves by their dictatorial, self–serving, and often corrupt ways.

These are what I take to be the main components of the modernity project as it received political and practical expression among the various countries of the Middle East. Let me now turn to a few of its more controversial, but still general, features. The first set of these features concerns the project’s historical and international context, and the second involves some central characteristics of modernity itself.

Given the need to create a state as a site for the project, much depended on how this task was carried out, particularly for its significant longer–term consequences. The Middle East provides a number of examples. In some cases, notably Turkey and Israel and to a lesser extent Iraq, the very founding of the new state was accompanied by the expulsion of large numbers of persons previously resident within its borders, whether Greeks and Armenians, Palestinians, or Assyrians, and the forcible incorporation of others into a project to which they owed only unwilling allegiance. In other cases, notably many of the Arab countries at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the new boundaries established during the colonial period were not only disputed by many but also contained a mix of groups which, though mainly Arabic speaking, proved resistant to attempts to turn them into a homogeneous Syrian, Iraqi, or Lebanese people. In other cases again—for example in the Persian Gulf—the coupling of a people with a land was presented in the somewhat unusual formula of the historical right of a family (or tribe), rather than of a people, to dominate a particular space, in such a way that Kuwait became synonymous not with the Kuwaitis but with the Al Sabahs, and Saudi Arabia with the house of Saud. The result was to build into the project of modernity from its very inception certain fundamental rigidities and ambiguities regarding its scope and uniformity.

The international context also had an important impact in that the interpretation of modernity itself, and even the territorial space in which it was carried out, was shaped by world economic and political forces. One obvious example is the way in which colonialism and dependence could be used to generate their own counterprogram in the postindependence period. That is, if colonization was defined in terms of division, industrial backwardness, and minimal spending on education and welfare, then the new state had to concentrate on uniformity, rapid industrialization, and much larger social expenditure. The same processes can be seen in the rival influences of the capitalist and communist models, in the intrusion of Cold War pacts and alliances into the Middle East from 1947 onward, and in the spreading effect of oil wealth throughout the region in the 1970s and 1980s. Not only did such forces have a profound impact on the internal balance of power within the separate states, but they also changed some of the basic definitions of the project itself—for example, by allowing it to be identified on some occasions with capitalism, on others with socialism, and on still others with some third way such as etatism, neutralism, or the Arab Socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser or the Syrian Ba’ath Party.

Turning more explicitly to the character of the modernity project itself, I would like to make three points. First, as I have mentioned, it seems to contain, in its twentieth–century, Third World context, an implicit sense of needing to “catch up” by means of some transformative economic and social revolution. The presence of such an imperative could explain some of the sudden enthusiasms generated by certain aspects of the project—for example, those often associated with the early stages of state–engineered import substitution, when progress up the technical ladder seems as easy as it is inevitable. Such excitement was well captured by a slogan of Egypt’s first five–year plan in 1960–65: “From the needle to the rocket.” ₂ The need for speed could also account for some of the lack of enthusiasm for party democracy, a practice that was seen both as divisive and as standing in the way of the strong, effective government that the project itself was thought to require.

Second, the introduction of the modernity project alone was enough to transform domestic politics, licensing new vocabularies and opening up new possibilities for recruitment, organization, and contestation. One thing the project could not avoid was a high degree of definition, a feature that worked to its advantage so long as it monopolized the ideological terrain but which could provide a tempting target for oppositional forces as the project’s achievements began to seem less compelling. As a rule, the project was initially identified with Westernization and secularism, something that not only proved offensive to many but also threatened the authority of preexisting sources of religious authority, with whom compromises often had to be made. These compromises might take the form of, for example, the Israeli agreement over continuing religious control in matters of family law, or the more radical Saudi attempt to dissociate scientific progress from the maintenance of what were taken to be the existing moral and cultural norms. On at least one occasion, in Iran in the late 1970s, dissatisfaction with the project of modernity itself, both in theory and in practice, was sufficient to encourage nationwide protest by almost all sections of the population, who were united only in their opposition to the Shah and his much–advertised policies and achievements.

Third, there are several senses in which the modernity project can be regarded as necessarily incomplete. One, which finds support in the essays in this book, is the argument that in the Turkish context, the project lacked an explicit program for creating a democracy based on well–defined rights of citizenship, a state of affairs that still awaits proper implementation. In this sense, the notion of incompletion could also be used to provide a political agenda for the future, not only in Turkey but also in many other parts of the Middle East, on the grounds that it can be said to have achieved its aims only when it has gone on to create the legal and ideological base for full popular participation in the political process.

But there are other ways in which the notion of incompleteness could be employed as well. For example, the relatively common idea that modernity required its opposite is central to several of the architectural chapters in this volume, demonstrating how the traditional, the old, could be presented as “bad” in such a way as to encourage an exaltation of the modern, not simply as something new but also as something essentially “good.” Another example is the way in which the realities associated with the exercise of political power rarely permit the imposition of the types of universalities and uniformities upon which modernity, in most of its definitions, must necessarily insist. Typically, twentieth–century regimes came to rely on the support of a heterogeneous mix of social and political forces, all standing in quite different relationships to the economy and the outside world and requiring different strategies for control and incorporation.

If space allowed, it should now be possible to use the larger notions just outlined to illustrate key aspects of the recent political history of a number of Middle Eastern countries. What I would like to do instead is to focus attention on just a few of the ways in which the comparative approach can be made to yield interesting results. Starting with the historical part of the analysis, it seems to me that it is only when a state elite is pursuing a project of this type that the state itself, as an instrument of management and control, appears as a coherent actor and can be talked about and analyzed as such. In contrast, where there is no such self–declared project, the concept of state lacks consistency, and the machinery of government can more easily be analyzed in terms of the relationships among its component parts. The Middle East, like other regions of the non–European world, offers a variety of historical examples in which the coherence, or lack of it, of various types of statist structures can be compared and contrasted over time and in different country settings.

Something of the same type of argument can also be applied to the study of the present and the future. As the preceding essays show, Turkey’s modernity project is under attack from many directions, and the same is true elsewhere in the Middle East. For one thing, the world economy contains a huge variety of forces, all of which impinge on the domestic economy and on domestic policy–makers in an often bewildering variety of ways. For another, rapid economic and social change has made the imposition of a single, coherent vision increasingly difficult to sustain. In such circumstances, those who seek a new consensus seem to have to look for it in some notion of revived community, sometimes based on religion, sometimes to be founded on a society of legally constituted citizens acting within a framework of properly democratic institutions. But in either case, two things are sure. First, the process of modernity itself is unstoppable and will continue, however it is interpreted and performed in a national context. Second, almost all Middle Eastern religious movements are perfectly congruent with the material aspects of modernization and will preserve most of its central features if they ever come to power.

As the essays—and discussions at the conference where they were first presented—make clear, these are exciting and yet increasingly uncomfortable times in which the historians of a new state’s twentieth–century history cannot avoid becoming engaged in some of the most highly charged political issues of the day. On the one hand, historians have recognized the strength of the hopes raised by independence and by the promise of rapid economic and social development; on the other, they have to chart the actual experiences of the millions of people whose lives were changed in ways over which they had little control and that in many cases created great disruption and disturbance. Analysis presents formidable problems and may lead to unexpected and perhaps unwelcome conclusions. Judgment is unavoidable.

Endnotes

Note 1: Quoted in Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post–War Arab Politics 1945–1958, London: Oxford University Press, 1965, l49. Back.

Note 2: Quoted in John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983, 81. Back.