Deconstruction Of Turkey’s National Identity: Then And Now (A Postcolonial Critique)
Özet
Very recently, after the election of June 2015, the Turkish Parliament had
an opening session which was rendered significant due to the symbols of
change it put forth. A member of RPP, the Republican People’s Party (CHPCumhuriyet
Halk Partisi) representing the official founding ideology of the
country headed the session as the most senior member of the parliament,
while two female members, as the two youngest, one of whom was a Kurdish
from People’s Democratic Party, PDP (Halklarin Demokratik Partisi-HDP)
and the other one a woman with a headscarf from Justice and Development
Party, JDP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-AK Parti) shared the pulpit with
him. The fact that the latter both of whom represented the two “internal
enemies” namely the Kurdish separatists1 and the Muslim reactionaries2,
from the perspective of the official state ideology3 represented by the former for many decades were “tolerated” purported to the recent changes in the
republic. This picture which spoke a thousand words was the incendiary
to revisit the making of national identity in Turkey in this research. This
paper probes the challenges that stemmed from Orientalist ideals espoused
at the outset of the republic on the process of reconstruction of Turkey’s new
national identity that is anticipated to cater to all fractions that comprise
changing Turkey in the prospects in line with democratizing processes. In
doing so, it focuses on the Islamists and the Kurdish, to explicate how these
two groups were considered to be the major threats to this very original
construction process. It will argue that in order to meet the needs of the
democratizing republic, the state will have to reconstruct national identity
anew. This will be merely possible if the regime will move further away from
the orientalist construction of national identity, to a more universalized and
heterogenized i.e. non homogenized4one that allows particularities based
on intrinsic or acquired differences such as race, ethnicity, religion and
culture. This process, albeit stagnant at times, is already at works.