Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 15

1997

15. Finding the Meeting Ground of Fact and Fiction: Some Reflections on Turkish Modernization _*

The modernity project is one of both fact and fiction. Its facts lie in the tremendous cultural and political power concentrated by leaders with like-minded notions of how society could (and should) be organized. ₁ From the halls of science to the streets of the city, that power has involved knowing the physical and social world in which humans live and then dominating and controlling it. Michael Keren, in a book about Israel that I shall return to later, captured the duality of modern power—its knowledge and domination—in his title, The Pen and the Sword. ₂ In Turkey, as elsewhere, leaders have used modernity’s steamroller to create nations out of the remnants of ancient empires.

Modernity’s fiction resides in the myths that it has generated about the limitlessness of that power. The project proclaims, for example, its own inevitability and universality; through words ending in “ization”—modernization, centralization, secularization, and a host of others—it has appeared as an inexorable force, transforming all in its purview in all facets of their lives. Another myth involves homogenizing all those who somehow were missed in the first pass of the modernizing steamroller to some uniform residual category, such as “traditional peoples.”

Marshall Berman contrasted the two faces of nineteenth-century Paris, which captured the fact and the fiction of the modernity project in that city. The planned, modern city was expressed in the new, wide boulevards, where “great sweeping vistas were designed, with monuments at the boulevards’ ends, so that each walk led toward a dramatic climax.... Paris [became] a uniquely enticing spectacle, a visual and sensual feast.” But “alongside the glitter, the rubble: the ruins of a dozen inner-city neighborhoods—the city’s oldest, darkest, densest, most wretched and most frightening neighborhoods, home to tens of thousands of Parisians—razed to the ground.... The setting that makes all urban humanity a great extended ‘family of eyes’ also brings forth the discarded stepchildren of that family. The physical and social transformations that drove the poor out of sight now bring them back directly into everyone’s line of vision.” ₃

In recent years, modernity itself has been a subject of dispute, losing its aura as the fated future. It is not surprising that proponents of the project have tended to emphasize the facts of modernity—increased food production, the elimination of smallpox, greater productivity of labor, the wide boulevards of the new city. They have regarded society itself as a human artifact that could be known and reshaped for the betterment of humankind. And equally unsurprisingly, its critics have focused on the fiction, including its totalizing discourses, its creation of the exotic “other,” its disempowerment of the discarded stepchildren of the family. They have despaired at the hubris of those who would seek to remake society according to human plans and blueprints.

In many ways, unfortunately, the debate between proponents and critics has been an argument between advocates of oranges and apples. They have more often spoken past one another than with one another. At one dissertation defense in which I sat, the postmodern candidate lambasted the totalizing discourse on the Green Revolution in India and called for a sympathetic reading of villagers’ magical agricultural rites. He argued that poor farmers used such rites, much more than the experimental results presented by government agents, to make important decisions about planting and harvesting. The Ph.D. examiners, on the other side of the table, wanted to talk not about discourses but about which methods—those of the Green Revolution or the magical ones—were more likely to increase food for the villagers’ bellies. Those on both sides of the table, I think, left the exam oozing frustration. Both the examiners and the candidate would have agreed that modernity had cast a long shadow, reaching to the distant villages of India. Their frustration with each other stemmed from their different perches as they tried to assess the project’s impact.

It is impossible to understand social and cultural change in the Turkish republic, or any other twentieth-century state for that matter, without confronting the effects of the modernity project. But where do the dynamics supporting social stability or prompting social transformations lie? Is it in the facts or in the fiction, in the structural bases of power or in the dominant discourses? Are we relegated to choosing one or the other and thus to talking past each other? Do we look to state leaders and the grand boulevards they create or to the discarded stepchildren in their wretched and frightening neighborhoods? Answers to these questions, I think, can be found not in an examination of elites and their institutions exclusively, nor in a focus solely on the poor or marginal groups of society, but on those physical and social spaces where the two intersect.

The project of modernity has not always gobbled up those in its path or discarded those who resisted absorption; it has often engendered protest and resistance, reorganization and adaptation, in a rich variety of ways. And while the forces of modernity have been powerful agents of change, they themselves have not been impervious to obstructions and reconstructions on the part of those touched, but not necessarily absorbed, by the project. At the critical interstices of society, we can find the unexpected effects of people’s resistance and reorganization on modernity’s instruments of power, even on its core beliefs.

Modernity encapsulates physical and social space. Indeed, the project of modernity is aimed at creating and constantly enlarging a space in which people can establish new contractual relationships free from the binding social ties of the past—of family, tribe, and religion. On the paved walkways that meander under the modern bridges spanning the Nile in Cairo, married and unmarried young couples walk hand in hand, forging relationships that would have been impossible several centuries, even several decades, ago. Urban planning and architecture can delineate and define public and private space in ways that promote the new social relationships.

But for all the technological and aesthetic power that is part and parcel of modernity, the project’s goals have not been totally achieved; gaps have remained. As it has encapsulated, it has also created frontiers leaving some people on the other side. Those caught in the gaps and on the far side of the boundaries have not been unaffected by the project, as Berman’s reference to Paris’s destroyed neighborhoods attests. Nor has the project of modernity itself been unaffected by encounters with those outside its frontiers. In its creation of gaps and spaces, the project has cut these people off from their pasts, from their connections. They have had to forge new social relationships, indeed a whole new social world, for themselves. And they, in turn, have changed the nature of modernity. The seemingly totalizing project has been buffeted, eaten away, changed from inside and out.

In her article “Irreconcilable Landscapes,” Zeynep Kezer captures the sparks in Ankara’s gaps and spaces. Standing on one side were those who found, in the words of a modernizer, “a dilapidated town ailing in neglect... one that we are determined to heal and build anew in the image of a modern city.” The new capital city would, as another put it, “symbolize the breakaway from the old which would demonstrate... what can be done in a hitherto backward Turkey.” ₄ Still, those standing beyond the new boulevard also had a say in what the new Ankara would be, even if they did not sit on the new municipality’s commissions and boards. Or, to paraphrase Kezer, those who came to build the new Ankara were vulnerable to the reality that they set out to frame.

Ankara never quite became all that its modern planners hoped it would be. Its bright new buildings and planned streets resembled a Hollywood set, at first glance representing depth and a total community but on closer inspection becoming just a facade with little behind its placard fronts. Those inhabiting the crawling lanes beyond Ankara’s new boulevards were not simply excluded from the modern project; they, too, had a say in what Ankara was to become and thereby shaped the project of modernity as it shaped them.

Too often, observers have failed to note those spaces where fact and fiction have met, where the project of modernity and those outside its walls have intersected and transformed one another. Nowhere has this been more true than in the Middle East, where powerful, often charismatic political leaders have merged the project of modernity and a fiery nationalism into their personal programs of rule. The Shah of Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, David Ben-Gurion of Israel, and others all sought to present the project of modernity not only as an inevitable end in its own right but also as the means to revive the nation. Indeed, nationalism and modernity have been the odd couple of the last two centuries—one parochial and exclusive, the other cosmopolitan and universal. ₅ Key leaders and social classes have used them to sustain each other. The powerful tools of modernity—technology and rational organization—have been harnessed to empower nations. At the same time, the idea of the nation has mobilized poor and other vulnerable peoples into the service of modernizing sectors.

Using their personal charisma to lend a sanctity to the idea of the nation, the Shah, Nasser, and Ben-Gurion were able to muffle dissenting voices or to label them as subversive. Protesting, resisting, or obstructing modernity came to be seen as a traitorous act to the nation. In Mexico or Ecuador or any other number of other countries, Berman’s stepchildren, those on the far side of the project’s frontiers, were idealized as the future soldiers of modernity’s army. But as Berman noted, alongside the glitter, the rubble; these marginal groups’ troubling encounters with modernity were often hidden from view. Intellectuals, themselves mesmerized by the powerful leader, the passion of nationalism, and the allure of modernity, did little to cast light on those spaces beyond the boulevards and the glittering lights of the city where the actual encounters with marginal groups took place. The great leaders’ forcefulness, their stature, and the breadth of the stage upon which they strutted frequently obscured critical social dynamics in their societies.

Keren’s account of Israel points to Ben-Gurion’s overwhelming role in obfuscating those spaces where fact and fiction met. Once Israel achieved independence in 1948, the new prime minister insisted that the new era would demand more than modern scientists creating the resources for the nation and its new state. “The whole intellectual community must participate in heart, soul, and deed.” ₆ Ben-Gurion saw writers, teachers, academics, and scientists alike as parts of a single pursuit to transform the Jews into a modern, normal people. The idealized figure was the oleh, the broken Jew who had somehow made his or her way from oppressive lands up to the promised land. Once these people reached Israel, the focus was less on their actual encounters with the harsh realities of settlement in remote towns and their relations with an unresponsive bureaucracy than on an idealized picture transforming them into halutzim, or pioneers.

Ben-Gurion’s personal role went far beyond the political arena into a running commentary on what was acceptable or unacceptable in the country’s cultural, aesthetic, and scientific life. ₇ He wanted writers to develop the notion of the halutz and thereby fortify the image of a modern Jewish nation. He intervened in the debates of historians and endlessly suggested what the proper subjects for essayists and fiction writers might be. No corner of cultural life, let alone politics, was beyond the range of his sweeping interests.

Even after the inevitable revolt against Ben-Gurion’s domineering methods—indeed, into his retirement and after his death—the wily leader seemed to dominate the agenda on countless scientific and cultural issues. Intellectuals lined up for or against his positions, and they continue to do so until this day. Little thought went into the possibility that Ben-Gurion’s agenda obscured key dimensions of social change in Israel and that unexpected, marginal forces, such as Arabs and immigrant Jews from Arab countries, were changing his cherished project as much as they were being changed by it.

In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal has played at least as dominant a role as Ben-Gurion did in Israel or as the Shah and Nasser did in Iran and Egypt. For Turkey’s intellectuals, Atatürk has been like an elephant sitting in the living room. Whether one likes the elephant or not, it is very difficult for others in the room to see around it or, for that matter, to speak about anything else. More than half a century after his death, Atatürk has continued to set the agenda, provoking ongoing veneration, along with a sometimes vituperative opposition. Indeed, as Resat Kasaba points out in chapter 2, criticism of the Kemalist program of modernization became a vocal and persistent theme in political discourses in Turkey. For the most part, critics have stayed within the parameters that the Kemalist plan established, more than they have peered beyond it.

Yesim Arat’s analysis of the feminist movement in Turkey, in chapter 7, reflects Atatürk’s continuing domination of the cultural agenda. On one side have stood the early feminists, devoted to the Kemalist project. Nermin Abadan-Unat, the first female political scientist in Turkey, remarked that “if Mustafa Kemal did not exist, perhaps I would not exist.” And on the other side have been the anti-Kemalists, such as Sirin Tekeli, who saw Atatürk’s support of women’s rights as little more than a ploy to further his own larger goals. Yet Arat’s analysis leads one to ask just how far apart the two feminist groups are. For all the criticism that the new feminists have heaped on Atatürk, they still are firmly planted within the boundaries of the program he established.

When Atatürk was alive, his emphasis on devlet, or stateness, combined with Jacobinism to delegitimize the sound of dissenting voices outside the republic “une et indivisible.” Those voices were simply from “feudal remnants” and could be discounted or muffled as atavistic cries. Serif Mardin’s argument in chapter 5 for the study of the “everyday,” I believe, is a call to recent critics of Atatürk as much as to his admirers. A focus on the “everyday” will pull intellectuals away from the Kemalist agenda, pro or con, to the spaces that the agenda veiled. It is here that the power of modernity’s facts and the overstatement of its myths will be most obvious.

The vast distance between what the peoples of Israel, Egypt, and Turkey were and what their great leaders envisioned for them, between the fact and the fiction, lent a utopian quality to the modernity project in these cases. For Ben-Gurion, this was expressed in a kind of secular messianism. He transformed the traditional Jewish belief in a great figure who would usher in the end of days into one emphasizing a national redemption through collective initiative and the tools of science. Although Ben-Gurion never claimed to be the Messiah in a religious sense, he was not above projecting himself as a “Messiah-like” figure, chosen to effect the redemption of the Jewish people into a modern nation, indeed, into a light unto other nations.

Nasser’s vision also had a utopian dimension, although it was less clearly set out than Ben-Gurion’s. Here, too, redemption and revival played critical roles, as the Arab nation would return to its previous glory. Through a distinct brand of Arab socialism, again with the use of scientific techniques, the degrading dimensions of recent history would be shed. Nasser saw himself as the towering philosopher-king who could break through the barriers of resistance to the nation’s unity and to the promises that modernity held.

Atatürk faced a challenge as monumental as Ben-Gurion’s or Nasser’s. Fashioning a nation out of the core remnant of the Ottoman Empire demanded a utopian image of the future. Atatürk did not stand as the messianic messenger of redemption in the mold of Ben-Gurion or as Nasser’s philosopher-king. Rather, he became the embodiment of the nation. His personal being represented the possibilities of the future. As the title of one publication indicated, the new nation was to be La Turquie Kemaliste.

Several years before his death, he insisted that all citizens take on a family name. His own choice was instructive—Atatürk, the father Turk. To the shaky concept of a Turkish nation he lent his personal being as a representation; his aim was to achieve a sense of sanctity and inviolability for that developing idea of the nation. “Atatürk had above all created a legend,” wrote his biographer, Lord Kinross. “In a land needing heroes his mystique was such that a child, blessed by his handshake, would for weeks leave his hand unwashed, lest the virtue depart from it; that an old peasant woman, once asked what her age was, replied, ‘Seventeen,’ for her life had begun only when she first saw him with her eyes during the War of Independence.” ₈

Like Ben-Gurion, Atatürk insinuated himself into issues far beyond normal politics. Creating a nation, in his mind, demanded an embrace of the West and its project of modernity. That project was a package including not only the hard core of science and technology, the facts, but also the trappings of style, the fiction. His reach extended into unlikely crevices of the country’s cultural life. He took an interest in linguistics, pressing for the cleansing from the language of the “linguistic capitulations” of Arabic and Persian. Sitting with dictionaries piled high around him, he sought to create an elevated, modern Turkish language. He also harangued the historians, at one point summoning them to a Turkish Historical Congress in Ankara. “Its task,” noted Lord Kinross, “was to carry out research with a view to ‘proving’ the theory that the Turks were a white Aryan race, originating in Central Asia, the cradle of human civilization. As their lands progressively dried up they moved westwards, migrating in waves to various parts of Asia and Africa and carrying their civilization with them. Anatolia had thus been a Turkish land since remote antiquity.” ₉

It was inevitable that intellectuals and others would eventually rebel against this sort of cultural tyranny. The critiques of Atatürk’s project in recent years were aimed first at the fiction—Atatürk’s insistence on the entire package of modernity—and later at the facts, the positivistic science of the Enlightenment. But too often these criticisms have been narrowly conceived, reacting to Atatürk’s cultural and political agenda rather than seeing beyond it. Kasaba complains that the official versions of history often portray a narrow, sterile path—one that excludes those on the far side of modernity’s frontier and even the majority of those who were ostensibly included in the project. But it is not enough to cast light on those formerly excluded groups. The challenge is to illuminate their encounter with the modernity project—the changes in them that this encounter produced and their surprising ability to transform the project itself. Toward that end, this volume takes a giant first step.

Endnotes

*: I would like to thank Tom Lewis for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Back.

Note 1: Perhaps no one has written more incisively about the integration of elites, institutions, and values than Edward Shils, Center and Periphery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Back.

Note 2: Michael Keren, The Pen and the Sword: Israeli Intellectuals and the Making of the Nation-State, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989. Back.

Note 3: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Penguin Books, 1982, 151–53. Back.

Note 4: Zeynep Kezer, “Irreconcilable Landscapes: Vision and Division in Early Republican Ankara,” unpublished paper presented at the MIT conference leading to the present volume, 1994. Back.

Note 5: For one view of the linkage between the two, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992. Back.

Note 6: Keren, The Pen and the Sword, 35. Back.

Note 7: Michael Keren, Ben-Gurion and the Intellectuals: Power, Knowledge, and Charisma, Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983. Back.

Note 8: Lord Kinross, Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 474. Back.

Note 9: Lord Kinross, Atatürk, 468. Back.