Denationalization of Citizenship? The Turkish Experience1

¹ This article is dedicated to the memory of Hrant Dink, an Armenian Turkish journalist/writer who was the editor of the newspaper Agos and a beloved friend, who was assassinated in Istanbul on 19 January 2007. While his assassination is a signal of a nationalist backlash, about 100,000 people (mostly Muslim Turks) who marched in grief in his funeral portrayed the enduring possibility of rethinking citizenship in Turkey in denational terms.

Abstract

Turkism as a political project aiming at the construction of a Turkish national identity was spelled out in 1904. The realization of this project included processes of assimilation and exclusion of non-Turkish and non-Muslim “others”. There was also an attempt on the part of the Republican elite to construct oblivion in the society about the multicultural Ottoman past in order to constitute a Turkish national identity. Hence, Turkish citizenship emerged as membership to a national state defined on the basis of a single religion (Sunni sect of Islam) and single language (Turkish). The increasing visibility of the non-Turkish and non-Muslim identities in the 1990s unleashed a process of denationalization of citizenship. Denationalization of citizenship gained momentum after Turkey's official candidacy in the European Union in 1999. Many reforms were undertaken in the parliament towards the utilization of languages other than Turkish as well as the practice of multiple religions. These reforms were upheld by the activities of civil societal organizations in order to portray the presence of multicultural identities in Turkey. Unless reversed by a nationalist backlash, these processes point to the denationalization of citizenship in Turkey.

Acknowledgements

The draft paper that led to this article was written and presented at St Antony's College, Oxford University where the author spent a term as a Visiting Scholar in Autumn 2005. The author benefited a great deal from the insightful comments of various scholars and is particularly grateful to Kalypso Nicolaidis, Celia Kerslake, Othon Anastasakis, Philip Robins, Kerem Oktem, Gokhan Yucel and Julie Adams who made the stay at St Antony's a comfortable and an intellectually stimulating experience.

Notes

¹ This article is dedicated to the memory of Hrant Dink, an Armenian Turkish journalist/writer who was the editor of the newspaper Agos and a beloved friend, who was assassinated in Istanbul on 19 January 2007. While his assassination is a signal of a nationalist backlash, about 100,000 people (mostly Muslim Turks) who marched in grief in his funeral portrayed the enduring possibility of rethinking citizenship in Turkey in denational terms.

² This expression was allegedly uttered for the first time by Fahrettin Kerim Gokay who was the governor and mayor of Istanbul between the years 1949–1957.

³ In pointing to such differences in terms of rights among certified citizens in the Middle East, Uri Davis benefits from a distinction made between jinsiyya (passport citizenship) and muwatana (democratic citizenship) in the Arabic political and legal language (Davis, 1997).

⁴ For post-national citizenship, see Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (1994). City citizenship in Netherlands is emphasized in Benhabib (2004).

⁵ Engin Isin and Bora Isyar contest this view that underlines the lack of an urban dimension in modern Turkish citizenship by elaborating on the concept of “medeniye” as an evidence of a connection between the citizens and the city in the Ottoman empire (Isin & Isyar, 2006).

⁶ Akcura's historically significant article raised some criticisms at the time of its publication. The criticisms that were written by Ali Kemal and Ahmet Ferit and published in the same newspaper pointed to the dangers of prompting the nationalist feeling among the Turks since it was believed that this would have a domino effect on various other nationalisms and bring the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the disintegration came not due to the Turkist political nationalism but as a result of various other nationalisms within the empire of both the non-Muslim and Muslim groups. The emergence of these nationalisms pointed to the inability of the Ottomanist vision to keep the empire intact and hence the inevitability of its disintegration (Yildiz, 2001, p. 72).

⁷ Such racial claims had already been rampant in late nineteenth century Europe. One of the pioneer works classifying the races was by Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) titled Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines (1853–1855).

⁸ Berkes (1998) pointed to a continuity between the Tanzimat and the Republican reforms. The issue of continuity or rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic produced a debate among the historians. This contested issue is particularly important for grasping the evolution of citizenship in Turkey. The “rupture” argument places too much weight on the liberating impact of the Republican reforms for the Ottoman subjects. The “continuity” argument, on the other hand, points to the inability of the evolution of a view of citizenship that is based on universal rights, both in the Ottoman empire and the Turkish Republic, due to a type of modernization “from above”. In pointing to the significance of the continuity/rupture debate for citizenship, Isin & Isyar (2006) refer to the works of Unsal (1998) and Aybay (1998) as representatives of a “rupture” approach coupled with an emphasis laid on the necessity of a Republican regime as a prerequisite of citizenship. Keyder (1998), Kasaba (1998) and Kadioglu's (1995) approaches, on the other hand, underscore a continuity between the Ottoman empire and the Turkish Republic in terms of the evolution of citizenship “from above”.

⁹ The Reform Edict was prepared by a commission of representatives from England, France, Austria, and the Ottoman state. The issue of the equality of the Muslims and non-Muslims that was underscored by the Edict created a feeling of resentment among the Muslim populace and was expressed in the writings of the Young Ottomans who referred to it as the Edict of Privileges (Imtiyaz Fermani) (Turkone, 1994, p. 68).

¹⁰ The attempted coup, known as the Kuleli incident, failed.

¹¹ The first of such mutinies was led by Seyh Celal from Yozgat in 1519. It was prompted by an urge against the central taxation system and the corruption of the state tax collectors. It was realized in religious terms. It started among the Alevi-Turcoman peoples of the empire and then was extended to the Sunni groups in Islam. Although it was suppressed in no time, subsequent such attempts within the Ottoman empire that were against the central state administration and realized in religious terms acquired the name Celali mutinies (Celali isyanlari).

¹² The nature of the Republican reforms that were undertaken from above by the Republican elite carried traits of the centralized state system of the Ottomans. In fact, it is possible to refer to a “state in search of its nation” as a distinguishing feature of the Turkish modernization project (Kadioglu, 1995). In the words of Serif Mardin (1991, p. 196): “Mustafa Kemal took upon a hypothetical entity, the Turkish nation, and breathed life in it”.

¹³ The minority status is legally granted only to the non-Muslim groups, namely, the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews according to the 1923 Lausanne accords. Gocek thinks the exclusion of the Kurds and Alevis from the minority status was a major flaw of the Lausanne Accords (Gocek, 2006, p. 66).

¹⁴ The review of the constitutional amendment and the “packages” containing amendments of other legal codes in the following pages benefited from the detailed account of such amendments in Oran (2004, pp. 94–111) as well as Ozbudun & Yazici (2004).

¹⁵ Cetin's grandmother Heranush was known to the family by her Turkish name Seher. She was adopted by a Muslim family when she was a child and her Armenian family faced deportation. She was born in a small village in Southeast Anatolia. Aysegul Altinay (2005), in her insightful paper into Fethiye Cetin's and her grandmother's story, reveals her personal interviews with Cetin. Altinay maintains that: “Fethiye Cetin believes that her grandmother had kept her ‘inner-voice’ alive for all those decades of silence, speaking only to herself”. Cetin's conviction about her grandmother's inner-voice stems from the fact that her grandmother could remember all the names of the people and places as far back as 70–80 years ago.

¹⁶ Baskin Oran in fact was part of a Commission on Minority Rights which was founded by the Prime Ministry in order to serve advisory functions. After the suggestions of the Commission akin to the ones that are contained in Oran's book were made public, the government dissolved and disowned the Commission. Oran and other members of the Commission were acquitted of the legal charges that were brought against them for “degrading Turkishness” through the content of their report. Recently, there were other similar legal suits brought against novelists such as Orhan Pamuk (2006 Nobel Award in Literature), Elif Safak and journalists for referring to past atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey.

¹⁷ Interestingly, the exhibit itself was vandalized on its opening day by nationalist groups. In addition to the exhibit, History Foundation devoted the September 2005 issue of its monthly journal Toplumsal Tarih mostly to these events.

¹⁸ The conference was originally scheduled to take place in May. Yet, a speech delivered by the Minister of Justice in which he blamed the conveners and participants for “stabbing the Turkish nation in the back” paved the way to its postponement. The Minister's unfortunate choice of words was reminiscent of the dynamics in Germany in November 1918 and the Dolchtosslegende (Dolchtosslegende refers to a belief in Germany that became widespread in 1918 when the German government admitted defeat by signing the Treaty of Versailles; the widespread belief was that the undefeated German army was “stabbed in the back” at home by Jews and Communists who manipulated the government into signing the Treaty). The speech was powerful enough to cause a postponement of the conference since it raised doubts regarding the security of the conveners and participants. The second obstacle came the day before the new due date of the conference (23 September). In spite of the fact that the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs expressed opinions in support of the conference, this time the conference was cancelled as a result of an order of an Istanbul Administrative Court. The conveners were able to quell this obstacle and the conference, which became a first of its kind that is held within the boundaries of Turkey, was finally realized on 24–25 September 2005.