Nation-Building and Turkish Modernization

This book evaluates the Turkish nation-building process from the Ottoman Empire to today, considering the role of Islam in this process. It gives insight into what has changed and not changed in this process. The book explains to readers that the Islamisation of the country is not a coincidence. Rather, Islamism has been grown symbiotically with the secular Republican regime through the organizational power of Islamic sects and with the assistance of the West. How we live as a nation today is not a revolution of Islamists, as some scholars have remarked. Rather, it is a continuation of the Turkish nation-building process with further Islamisation.

This welcome volume alerts to the presence of nation-building in contemporary Turkey that it juxtaposes to earlier Kemalist nation-building practices. With historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives, the individual chapters make for a particular dense description of the ways in which the AKP under the leadership of Tayyip Erdoğan has embarked on a remaking of Turkish state and society along the lines of newly interpreted Ottoman and Islamic pasts. Emerging “New Turkey” entails not only changes in the structure and function of the political system, but a remaking of memories, discourses, bodies, and spaces. The resulting complex picture provides for ample new comparisons with other countries that have recently undergone overhauls of their political systems and cultures and that have likewise embarked on renewed nation-building. It thus, more fundamentally, points to the continued presence of nationalism in the contemporary world.

Rasim Özgür Dönmez is professor of international relations at Abant İzzet Baysal University.Ali Yaman is professor of international relations at Abant İzzet Baysal University.