HISTORICAL LEGACIES IN RISING POWERS

Abstract

This articles emanates from the observation that realms like theory and broad comparison have typically focused onWestern concerns and geography while actors such as China and Turkey have been relegated to the undervalued field of areas studies. Noting that this inhibits our ability to uncover important cross-regional comparisons, the author suggests that “former empires/rising powers” (FERPs) across (Eur)Asia are a promising unit of analysis. To make the case for the FERPs, the author embeds four cases—Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China—in a common problematique, showing that their encounter with Western hegemony/ modernity engendered three waves of confrontation vis-à-vis the legacies of empire. These confrontations entailed Eurocentric denial as well as Occidentalist reification of native pasts, both of which are being superseded by what the author calls “authenticist” histories empowered by the crystallization of multiple modernities. The author then develops a theoretical framework to capture how reinvented pasts serve as sources of identity, normativity, and action. This approach enables an in-depth account of the Turkish case to show that both official and market actors claim continuity with an Ottoman-Islamic heritage from which a homegrown humanism is said to emanate. These narratives—and the tools through which they are promoted from the cultural industries to public diplomacy—may be helping Turkey and other erstwhile (Eur)Asian empires recalibrate national identity and international purpose at a time of global transformation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is part of ongoing work being done by Nora Fisher Onar (Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey) toward a decentered approach to emerging powers in international relations theory that accommodates insights from historical sociology, intellectual history, and comparative area studies. She is currently writing a monograph on the subject and developing a collaborative research platform.

Notes

1. On these overlapping processes, see the seminal work of Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010).

2. Coined in a Goldman Sachs report, the acronym “BRICs” refers to the rising economic powers of the global South, namely Brazil, Russia, India, and China. “Chindia,” meanwhile, is credited to an Indian parliamentarian. The term flags China and India as new centers of gravity in light of their fast growth rates and large populations.

3. I view Europe, Asia, and the rendering of both as “continents” (rather than one continuous land mass) as reflective not of geographic fact but of geopolitical cartographic practices associated with Western powers’ imperial enterprise of the nineteenth century. Thus, I strive to use the somewhat less essentialistic if no less politicized rendering “(Eur)Asia” throughout this article. That said, expediency sometimes necessitates use of the conventional terms.

4. See, for example, the countries surveyed in volumes from Tickner and Waever (2009) and Acharya and Buzan (2010).

5. Another approach would be to trace institutional and path-dependent legacies of imperial pasts in trans-Asian perspective. The ongoing conversation between practitioners of comparative historical sociology and historical institutionalist approaches to politics, on one hand, and international society, world-systems, and postcolonial scholars of international relations, on the other, offers promising insights in this regard. Survey of this vast corpus, however, is beyond the scope of the present study.

6. Chen 2010, 9.

7. FERPs—a playful allusion to terms like BRICs, MIKTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey), and Chimes (China, India, Middle East)—is distinguished from the descriptive emphasis of these terms on country or regional designations, by its substantive focus on the role of history, empire, and their memory in shaping viewpoints in rising powers.

8. Beck and Snzaider 2006.

9. Karen Barkey uses this metaphor extensively in her seminal Empire of Difference (2008).

10. Postcolonial scholars object to this reading as a “fraudulent self-image” (Loomba et al. 2005) insofar as systemic “peace” and “prosperity” often came at the cost of systematic enslavement of significant swathes of the population.

11. Hobsbawm 1997.

12. See, for example, Hobson 2004.

13. Hence the glib turn-of-phrase that Britain acquired and lost its empire in a fit of absentmindedness. Hobsbawm (1997, 14) points out that there were only three areas in which the loss of territories in the periphery impacted the metropole: first, when the role and structure of core armed forces were affected by anticolonial uprisings; second, when there was massive repatriation of expatriate core subjects back to the metropole; and third, when there was immigration from the former colonies. All of these are important phenomena to be sure, but only in the case of Portugal did they cause long-term disruption to core institutions and identity.

14. For more on this spectrum, see Fisher Onar and Evin 2010 and Fisher Onar forthcoming.

15. That said, the foundations forWesternist modernization had been laid by far-reaching if piecemeal reforms pursued under the earlier imperial regimes.

16. Ernest Renan is of course the prescient and seminal figure to have recognized this phenomenon.

17. Hobsbwam and Ranger 1983.

18. Ahiska 2005.

19. Kalin 2011, 6.

20. A further source was the emergence of the new social movements since the 1960s.

21. The last often emanate from sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies—a discipline well suited to the study of collective memory in the media and digital age given its preoccupation with matters of narrative and representation. Historians affiliated with the postmodernist turn in historiography are also actively engaged in the battle over collective memory, as both observers and contestants (Jenkins 1991; Hutton 1993). Increasingly, political scientists and IR (international relations) specialists—traditionally skeptical of such soft fields of inquiry— have likewise become receptive in light of resurgent identity politics in the post–cold war, post–9/11 era.

22. Talarico and Rubin 2003.

23. Mitzal 2003.

24. Halbwachs 1938; Nora 1989.

25. This refers to the 1921 treaty that followed the Allied victory over the young Turk government inWorldWar I. It envisaged the dismemberment and division of the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire among the occupying British, Greek, Italian, and French forces. It also authorized the creation of an independent Armenia and Kurdistan. The Turkish nationalist movement led by the Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Ataturk) mobilized a nationalist resistance movement to ensure that the treaty was never implemented.

26. Bartlett 1932, 296.

27. Advances in communication technologies and economic and cultural globalization may be fueling convergence in collective memories across space and time providing the basis for a cosmopolitan habitus. (See, for example, Levy and Sznaider [2002] for a discussion of the social bases of a burgeoning cosmopolitan consciousness.)

28. Bourdieu, cited in Calhoun 2003.

29. Schils 1981.

30. Wang 2007.

31. Fisher Onar 2011.

32. Mitzal 2003.

33. Goffman 1974, 44.

34. Fisher Onar, forthcoming.

35. Cagaptay and Cagaptay 2012.

36. Nicolaidis and Sebe, forthcoming.

37. For a genealogy dating back to the 1950s see Fisher Onar (forthcoming; see also 2009; 2011) who traces the interplay between right-leaning and left-leaning strands of reengagement of the Ottoman among professional and popular historians. While the former were nostalgic, the latter, like their counterparts in China (see also Wang 2007), internalized the Marxist Orientalist critique of Asian patrimonial empire and only became attracted to other aspects of the Ottoman experience, namely, its cosmopolitanism, with the broad conversion to political liberalism that transpired among many key figures in the Turkish left in the 1980s and 1990s.

38. For continuities and ruptures in the Turkish policy-makers’ representations of Turkey's geography, see Bilgin 2004.

39. See, for example, Yavuz 1999; Çetinsaya 2007; Özyürek, ed. 2007.

40. Fisher Onar 2012.

41. See, for example, the views of prominent pundits like Taspinar 2008 and Walker 2009, on the one hand, and Cagaptay 2009, on the other.

42. Sayyid 1999.

43. Cited in Tharoor 2011.

44. The twelve others are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Kazakhstan, England, and Belgium.

45. Legro 2006.

46. Cited in Kaya and Tezcan 2011.

48. Davutoglu: 2012.

47. Babahan 2012.

50. Erdanaç 2012.

49. 3. Uluslararasy Lale Festivali baslady 2008, Istanbul Muncipality website, available at www.ibb. gov.tr/tr-TR/Pages/Haber.aspx?NewsID=15782#.UXAKio6Ixdg (accessed 12 April 2013).

51. Ibid.

52. Fisher Onar forthcoming.

53. Ibid.

54. Belge 2012.

55. Gul 2012.

56. Price 1993, 674.

57. The expression “contemporary civilization” is a trope associated with early republican nation-builders’ modernist project in which the term was used to denote Western practices and frameworks without directly alluding theWest. Thus, the westernist project was portrayed as a emancipatory rather than as mimicry in keeping with the anti-imperialist and nationalist prerogatives of the nation-building agenda.