Societal Peace and Ideal Citizenship for Turkey

SOCIETAL PEACE AND IDEAL CITIZENSHIP FOR TURKEY

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SOCIETAL PEACE AND IDEAL CITIZENSHIP FOR TURKEY

Edited by Rasim Özgür Dönmez and Pınar Enneli

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Societal peace and ideal citizenship for Turkey / edited by Rasim Özgür Dönmez and Pinar Enneli. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7391-4920-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4922-5 (ebook) 1. Citizenship—Turkey. 2. Minorities—Civil rights—Turkey. 3. Turkey—Ethnic relations—Political aspects. 4. Turkey—Politics and government—1980– I. Dönmez, Rasim Özgür. II. Enneli, Pinar. JQ1809.A2S63 2011 324.609561—dc22 2011010146

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

1

Beyond State-Led Nationalism: Ideal Citizenship for Turkey Rasim Özgür Dönmez

1

2

Citizenship and National Identity: A Comparative Analysis Elçin Aktoprak

27

3

The Making of Modern Turkey and the Structuring of Kurdish Identity: New Paradigms of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century Maya Arakon

49

4

The Alevi Identity and Civil Rights in the Twenty-First Century Fazilet Ahu Özmen

71

5

Gypsies and Citizenship in Turkey Senem Kurt Topuz

95

6

Less than Citizens: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Question in Turkey Hakan Ataman

7

Turks of African Origin and Citizenship Esma Durugönül

125 159

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Gender and Citizenship in Turkey at the Crossroads of the Patriarchal State, Women, and Transnational Pressures Canan Aslan Akman and Fatma Tütüncü

179

The European Union and Turkey: Transformation of the State–Society Relationship Bahar Turhan Hurmi and Bülent Temel

207

10

Social Rights as Ideal Citizenship M. Kemal Öke

11

The Turkish Young People as Active Citizens: Equal Participation or Social Exclusion? Pınar Enneli

12

Environmental Citizenship and Struggle for Nature Feryal Turan

227

257 281

Conclusion

299

Index

303

About the Contributors

309

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Acknowledgments

Come, Come again ! Whatever you are . . . Whether you are infidel, idolater or fire worshipper. Whether you have broken your vows of repentance a hundred times This is not the gate of despair, This is the gate of hope. Come, come again —Mevlana Jelaleddin RUMI

M

EVLANA WAS NOT BORN in this soil, but blossomed here. His ideal is still alive here. So if there could be a possible societal peace in the world, we believe that this soil is a good starting point to try. In this adventure, we would like to thank the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) for sponsoring this book through the project of “Disadvantaged Young People’s Transition to Adulthood in the Metropolitan Areas: Being Part of the Problem or the Solution.” We also would like to thank Ayşe Kaya for her relentless assistance in the formation of this book.

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Introduction

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in a society? This question led us to arrange a workshop on citizenship and societal peace at Turkey’s Abant İzzet Baysal University in Bolu on April 9, 2010, with the financial assistance of the Turkish Scientific Research Center (TUBITAK) on disadvantaged young people. This book is the result of that workshop and aims to understand the ways and means for ensuring societal peace by evaluating problems about citizenship in the Turkish regime. It also offers the ideal citizenship regime for Turkey in relation to various issues, such as the environment, gender, youth, and poverty. The Turkish state was built on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, inheriting the empire’s transcendental and patriarchal nature and incorporating state-led nationalism to create the ideal Turkish citizens. This process can be deemed as the radical modernization of the Turkish elite in creating a new Turkish society,1 hampering the Ottoman past, and drawing the boundaries of ideal citizenship—as will be seen in sections of this book—patterned on specific elements, including heterosexuality, the middle class, males, Sunni Hanafi Islam, Turks, and so on. In recent years, the definition of citizenship through state-led nationalism, secularism, and a free market economy has created crises in politics and society. The implicit ideal of the citizenship envisioned by the state—namely, solely Turkish, Sunni-Hanafi, heterosexual, male-dominated, and free market believers—has been criticized by social movements, particularly after the 1980 military intervention. This ideal is especially criticized for not allowing S SOCIETAL PEACE ACHIEVABLE

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different ethnic, religious, and sexual identities to represent themselves in both the political and public spheres. Although some problems deriving from the existing Turkish citizenship regime are much more visible, such as the Kurdish and Alevi phenomena, others are less obvious but still have potentials to create foreseeable troubles. These include the use of male-dominated violence against women, crimes deriving from homophobia, discrimination against Gypsies and other ethnic and religious groups, and the building of industrial complexes and the hydroelectric barrel generators at the expense of the environment and citizens’ habitats. Meanwhile, Turkey’s integration into globalization and the European Union processes makes these political and social problems visible, forcing the current government—the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government—to take stock of the solution. Still, this process sometimes forces the state to preserve the orthodox form of the Turkish citizenship regime, thus turning a deaf ear to these demands. In other words, this crisis stems from the transformation of the classical nation-state (i.e., Westphalian) to the denationalization of the nation-state2 whose borders are more flexible and in which clashes between these controversial processes occur in the discussion of the citizenship regime. Therefore, the citizenship regime is a strong fault line for these discussions, and the state–society relationship continuously regenerates itself according to the position—namely, first or second—of the Turkish state to its society. Today, no single hegemonic power dominates the Turkish political and state spheres as social movements, interest groups, and civil society organizations have articulated their problems relatively freely and want to be free players in the political and public spheres. All the existing problems to a great extent reside in a citizenship regime that makes the subject one of the sole issues in the liberalization of politics and the provision of societal peace in the country. Managing these problems by developing a new constitution, while involving all political and social actors in this attempt, is appropriate for enhancing societal peace in the country. Therefore, this book attempts to understand the conflicting areas or subjects in the political and social spheres to offer solutions from the perspective of the citizenship regime. In this context, Rasim Özgür Dönmez evaluates the dynamics of the Turkish citizenship regime, tracing it back from the Ottoman period onward and trying to analyze the deficiencies of this regime in obstructing societal peace in the country. The writer offers that the new citizenship regime should be based on civic patriotism rather than state-led nationalism and should be approached solely in terms of nation-states (i.e., enacting laws without considering how international agreements lead to societal and political conflicts in society).

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Elçin Aktoprak’s “Citizenship and National Identity: A Comparative Analysis” sheds light on the formation of national identities and minority nationalisms in Spain, Ireland, and Turkey as well as the relationship between the structure of the citizenship regime and national identities in providing peaceful settlements between national identities and minority identities. Meanwhile, Maya Arakon and Fazilet Ahu Özmen analyze the problematic relationship between Kurdish and Alevi identities and the official ideology and its citizenship regime, arguing that it is vital to provide constitutional democracy in integrating these identities successfully in the citizenship regime in Turkey. Maya Arakon’s chapter, “The Making of Modern Turkey and the Structuring of the Kurdish Identity: New Paradigms of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century,” aims at analyzing the structuring of the Kurdish identity within the construction of modern Turkey and seeks for new paradigms of citizenship that can meet new claims of the twenty-first century. Fazilet Ahu Özmen tries to answer how the Alevis can have equal civil rights and what should be done for this by the society and the government. In her chapter, Senem Kurt Topuz focuses on Gypsies’ citizenship with reference to those in Edirne, where she conducted field research. She evaluates the perceptions of Gypsies on the citizenship regime in Turkey by underscoring their problems. Topuz claims that the government should make some social and economic arrangements to improve Gypsies’ life conditions and should enact specific laws to prevent prejudice against them in the society. For the writer, the constitutional democracy that abandons the constitution for ethnic, religious, cultural, and gender-based elements is an effective solution for removing this prejudice. In addition, Hakan Ataman evaluates the social injustices that lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and transsexuals face in society, stressing the importance of both reactive measures (e.g., adequate legal protections and provisions, regulations, an improved justice system, and the cessation of impunity as ensured by the government of Turkey) and proactive measures (e.g., social protection and cooperation, solidarity, education, the creation of a positive atmosphere for dialogue between different people, and empathy). Esma Durugönül focuses on the relationship between social exclusion and the Turkish citizenship regime through the Afro-Turkish community in Turkey. The writer analyzes how the Turkish citizenship regime makes the Afro-Turkish community invisible in society and its negative effects on this group such as poverty and prejudice against this group. Canan Aslan Akman and Fatma Tütüncü analyze the relationship between gender and citizenship regime in Turkey. Their chapter provides an overview of the determinants and the dynamics of the patriarchal construction of citizenship in Turkey from a historical perspective, and its major concern is

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with identifying the major cultural, political, and discursive forces preventing Turkish women from fully exercising their social, civil, and political citizenship rights. It highlights specific problem areas in women’s experiences of citizenship with a focus on women’s civil and social rights, and it underlines the impact of women’s groups and transnational influences in the improvement of citizenship. Lastly, the chapter underlines the discrepancy between egalitarian legal rights and their social applications in the era of religiously conservativism. Bahar Turhan Hurmi and Bülent Temel underline the positive effects of the European Union on the Turkish citizenship regime and their necessary engagement in the progression of social and political liberties in Turkey. The writers point out that one of these prominent changes has been a reformation of the state–citizen binary relationship and its impact on the empowerment of people against the state in their demands for ethnic or religious existence. While the writers argue that this denationalization process promises favorable contributions to a more democratic, diverse, stable, and content Turkish society, it also makes the country more prone to separatism. Unfettered democratization demands by the European Union from its associated countries may jeopardize sociopolitical stability in the European continent. Mustafa Kemal Öke analyzes the relationship between social inequalities, poverty, and the citizenship regime in Turkey, concluding that the government or state should provide equality and social justice by providing for citizens’ essential needs, such as education and accommodation. Pınar Enneli evaluates the relationship between the citizenship regime and young people in Turkey. The writer argues that the state in Turkey is not inclusive of young people, especially disadvantaged ones, and it does not allow them to be critically active in the political and social spheres. According to Enneli, there is a need to create a new citizenship regime to allow the young people with various backgrounds to involve themselves actively in the decision-making processes. Feryal Turan further points out the different facets of social injustice in environmental citizenship and their connection with the struggle of the local people suffering from the construction of hydroelectric power plants in Turkey against energy companies and the government. She comments on the importance of environmental citizenship, requiring active citizenship in eliminating social injustice derived from neoliberalism and improving sustainable development.

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Notes 1. See Touraj Atabaki and Eric Jan Zürcher, Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah (London: IB Tauris, 2004). 2. Saskiye Sassen, “Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin Isin and Bryan Turner (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 285.

Bibliography Atabaki, Touraj, and Eric Jan Zürcher. Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah. London: IB Tauris, 2004. Heper, Metin. “The Strong State as a Problem for the Consolidation of Democracy: Turkey and Germany Compared.” Comparative Political Studies 25, no. 2 (1992): 169–94. Karaman, Lütfullah, and Bülent Aras. “The Crisis of Civil Society in Turkey.” Journal of Economic and Social Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 39–58. Sassen, Saskiye. “Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship.” In Handbook of Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin Isin and Bryan Turner London, 277–93. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003.

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1 Beyond State-Led Nationalism: Ideal Citizenship for Turkey Rasim Özgür Dönmez

T

HE POST–COLD

WAR ERA led to a new phase in politics that has changed the interaction of domestic and international politics and state–civil society relationship. This new structure ultimately caused the deterioration of the classical nation-state relationship, leading to the prioritization of collective ethnic and ethnoreligious identities over nation-state identity or its trademark, citizenship. This identity-based politics makes citizenship a terrain on which to create antagonism against the state and its ideology. The efforts of Western Europe to integrate Muslim immigrants into its political and social systems or the rise and the demands of the radical rightist movements are some examples of this antagonism. Likewise, Turkey has also witnessed such a development, in that citizenship has become a fault line of this antagonism between the state and the collective identities. Therefore, citizenship has gained multidimensional features in the post–Cold War era and cannot simply be perceived as a legal status signifying the official relationship between the individual and the state. In this regard, citizenship has three important patterns. The first is the dynamic nature of citizenship. In regard to the changing structure of the political and social spheres, citizenship is not a static concept; rather, it is a dynamic, reproducible, and definable social and political identity. Thus, the concept does not have an ahistoric nature, but corresponds with a reconstructive identity patterned after historical, discursive, and institutional elements. To put it succinctly, the citizenship identity based on rights-freedom-responsibilities, which distinguishes it from all other identities, can be redefined according to

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time as well as changing needs and demands. Therefore, citizenship refers not only to a social identity but also a strong political identity by which making politics should be perceived as part of the citizenship.1 In other words, citizenship can be identified with Aristotle’s zoon politikon. In addition, the concept of citizenship is one of the sole instruments of “governmentality” for the state in managing society. Therefore, every state has a “citizenship regime” that is a signifier for the state in its approach to individuals, communities, and cultural identities. In this context, although some identities, cultures, or communities gain privileged positions, others may fall into a secondary position. Consequently, citizenship functions as an inclusion/exclusion mechanism that makes us think of it beyond its legal status.2 Finally, Ayşe Kadıoğlu’s notion of defining the late modern times as “the divorce of nation from state” indicates the culmination of identity politics; recognition of such demands makes the citizenship regime one of the cardinal “governance technologies” in solving these problems.3 In this regard, the citizenship regime may serve as political, social, and cultural terrain for collective identities in their recognition by the state and help form common language between them and the state. Based on these points, the identity recognition demands of Kurdish, Islamist, and Alevi movements and their sociopolitical protests, as well as drastic economic crises occurring since Turkey’s transformation of its economy to a free market economy in 1980, have weakened the state–citizen relationship. In particular, the focal point of this tension between the state and these identities is the citizenship regime in Turkey, thereby demonstrating how the concept of citizenship regime is paramount for Turkey in providing societal peace in the country. This study argues that the citizenship regime in Turkey, patterned on state-led nationalism and the state’s political monopoly in the public sphere, has not allowed the emergence of free political participation and active citizenship. In addition, liberalism, to a great extent without social welfare, alienated masses from a feeling of belonging to the Turkish state. Indeed, it has encouraged them to form or become involved in ethnic, religious, and somewhat primordial formations. In this sense, the polarization of the political sphere and society along Turkish–Kurdish, secular–conservative, and similar lines is not coincidental. As such, the Turkish citizenship regime should be repatterned on civic patriotism while the social welfare system should be enhanced in order to address the alienation of citizens to the state. In this regard, the first section focuses on how and why the concept of citizenship regime has been historically conceptualized by the state and evaluates its consequences. The second section offers a new paradigm beyond state-led nationalism and argues that civic patriotism can be a cure for providing societal peace in the country.

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The State, the Public Sphere, and Citizenship in Turkey Citizenship in the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, unlike its counterparts in the West, adopted a monist governing system in which citizenship was viewed as the property of Sultan. In this context, the meaning of politics in Arabic, siyaset, which was used during the Ottoman period as well, etymologically refers to governing the ruling class rather than its Western counterpart (politics), which is derived from polis, indicating participation in the city’s problems.4 This noble example of a military and agricultural empire had two important features relating to this study: the overwhelming dominance of the state over society and the composition of society. Compared to European states, Ottoman politics did not consist of different players who could influence power, nor did society intend to challenge power, as did the bourgeois revolution in Europe.5 The Ottoman state structure can be categorized into two parts: the governors (askeriye) and the governed (reaya).6 Although intermediaries existed between these strata as well as a very complex bureaucracy, it is not unusual to categorize the two parts in this manner, as Ottoman wealth was based on agriculture (accounting for 90 percent of the population), which made the reaya as a whole an important player in economic sphere. Yet the reaya was to a great extent ineffective in the political sphere, in which it did not have any political rights.7 Thus, the relationship between these two sections formed an important part of Ottoman politics. A second important feature of the Ottoman Empire was its multicultural structure. The system, consisting of various communities—each with different laws and social systems—was called the “millet system.” These communities developed and practiced their own laws without state intervention; as such, in this respect, every community was autonomous. The leaders of these communities were responsible to the state for their communities. The Ottoman policy was to make these groups dependent on the state for two reasons: • To control these communities from the center • To close the distance between state and society A variety of communities, distinguished according to their religions, sects, and ethnic groups, such as the Armenians and Jews, formed the Ottoman society. The Sunni Muslim community was at the top of the hierarchy, with society constructed from various groups with their own educational systems, heritages, and other laws. These communities were only responsible to the state for taxation and military duty.8

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The citizenship regime can be divided into two periods during the Ottoman Empire. In the first period of the Ottoman Empire (1453–1839), the Ottoman ideology, or Ottomanism, was an elite and imperialistic ideology in which the state elite had different traditions; the society’s distinct elite languages strongly internalized this ideology. As previously discussed, the rest of the population—namely, the ruled class—was structured by the millet system, but these communities could not utilize the benefits of the system as the askeriye section of the state did. Although they and their communal freedoms were protected by the state in exchange for paying taxes and accepting the Ottoman borders, they were deprived of political rights and not allowed to engage in politics. The system perceived citizenry as objects of the system and patterned its citizenship regime on the concept of justice, but not equality. The state tried to be fair to its citizens, but it perceived itself as their owner, which did not lead it to open the public sphere as the arena for making politics.9 During the second period, starting with the 1939 Tanzimat Reforms, the public sphere was enriched with urban elites from various Muslim and non-Muslim communities. According to Faruk Birtek, the Ottomanism of the Tanzimat period was radically different from the first period. Tanzimat broadened Ottomanism to a larger population by putting further prominence on the urbanity of manners, style, and language.10 As Birtek remarked, “Thus, once more an imagined class emerged, but now much wider in scope and with full recognition of multiplicities—or better, of multiple layers of identity.”11 Urban elites having multiple identities indicated a citizenship that could negotiate among multiplicities of social spaces without dissolving their private/ communal features, albeit differences emerged in situating better positions for themselves in negotiations. In other words, the possibility of carrying multiple identities signified what it meant to be an Ottoman in this period.12 This process, resembling Habermasian deliberative democracy, led Ottomanism to be extended to relatively large sectors of society and helped find a common language in the name of an Ottoman identity in the public sphere.13 Unlike the first period, with the influence of the French Enlightenment, equality became as important as the principle of justice, and making politics became relatively normalized in urban elites. However, this process did not satisfy both Muslim and non-Muslim communities. For Christian communities, the idea of Ottomanism and the Ottoman Empire itself were no longer an attractive anchor to the Empire. These communities had a new ideal, which was to form their own new nation-states. Meanwhile, Muslim communities were afraid of losing their power against non-Muslim communities or minorities. The establishment and the strengthening of the vigilant paramilitary group Union and Progress, particularly within the military in this era, were no coincidence. This vigilante group

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would capture the power and—after the Balkan wars and the independence of Albania—begin to transform the state ideology of Ottomanism into Turkism. Hence, the group began to Turkify the empire, which did not lead to multiple identities.14 In addition, this new movement hegemonized the political sphere and did not allow the common person to engage in politics. This process escalated with the demolition of the Ottoman Empire and continued radically after the establishment of the Turkish Republic. The Citizenship Regime in the Turkish Republic: Secularism and the Unbearable Lightness of State-Led Nationalism The demolition of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic paved the way for emerging traumatic nationalism, which had two paradoxical features. First, this nationalism was citizenship-based nationalism, which focused on erasing its Ottoman past in the name of bringing about radical modernity. In this context, it drew a sharp line between modern and nonmodern, the West and the East, and Turkish and non-Turkish. Second, and in contrast to the first feature, the new regime borrowed monist and societal engineering features of the Ottoman Empire, which did not lead to enabling civil society to engage in politics or promote equality for society.15 As such, the Ottoman legacy continued in the administration and political regime of the new Turkish Republic. These two points intersected in the public sphere and in the citizenship regime, which unfortunately created a fault line between the center and the periphery.16 The Kemalist establishment (i.e., the center) accepted the dominance and the priority of the West against the East and the modern against the not-modern. In this respect, although the establishment envisaged the public sphere as the terrain of modernity, it identified the private sphere with tradition. Therefore, ethnic and religious differences were not perceived as problems as long as they stayed in the private sphere. This perception resulted from the establishment’s ideal, which constructed a direct relationship between the creation of the modern citizenship and the modern nation-state by using the public sphere. Furthermore, this perspective paved the way for confining all the ethnic and religious discourses and symbols to the private sphere. The establishment thought to transform the subject of the Ottoman Empire to modern citizenship through secularism, rationalism, and Republicanism—also called nationbuilding—while excluding the ethnic, rural, and religious identities from the public sphere. In other words, the republican project created a “communitarian and regulatory” public sphere.17 Nationalism was the other prominent component of this sphere, and the political elite tried to define citizenship based on nationalism. Mustafa Kemal

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was influenced by Rennan’s understanding of nationalism, which prioritized common history and the will to live together. In other words, nationalism was identified with people living in the same land. However, this nationalism simultaneously consisted of ethnic features as the ideology of Islam was necessarily replaced by ethnic Turkish nationalism. This was done to a certain extent by inserting Islam into nationalism. Thus, ethnic nationalism was used to inculcate the population, which lacked a Turkish consciousness. These two kinds of nationalism—while strongly interlinked with one another— sometimes clashed with one another as well. However, in any case, these two nationalisms generally complemented one another while the ethnic nationalism feature of Turkish nationalism strongly determined the historical and cultural definition of the state ideology. Given that the minority right regime of the Ottoman Empire continued in the new Republic, Islam became a strong indicator in distinguishing Turks from minorities. Consequently, non-Turkish groups such as Kurds tried to assimilate into the system.18 This situation indicates the role of the state in society, where the state had paramount power over society. The establishment deliberately maintained a vague definition of the relationship between the state and society, in which a single party—namely, the Republican People’s Party—was purely engaged with the state’s bureaucracy. The Republican ideology, which accepted the undeniable role of the nation in providing the state’s legitimacy in principle, helped the party and the state become the sole actor in the public sphere and the sole representative of the nation. Two additional instruments fostered this role:19 the statism principle of the state’s ideology, which gave the state a paramount role in the economic sphere, and the state of emergency conditions set by the state. Claiming the vital importance of modernization in escaping the Ottoman past and the undeniable role of the state in this objective, the state of emergency conditions was used to create the concept of a citizenry that was in debt to its nation rather than having social and political rights.20 In other words, it tried to create the agent of the modernization project rather than the individual in liberal terms. Although this perspective led to the maintenance of the Ottoman patrimonial system, it simultaneously patterned the citizenship regime between the center–periphery, Islam–secularism, and Turk–non-Turk dichotomies. This citizenship regime made the state a separate community from society, using different codes and “habitus” to alienate large sectors of society. The uprisings against the reforms in the country from the East to the West of Turkey showed this alienation. In other words, the dominance of the state over the society did not allow the state to achieve its prospect of creating a homogenous society. The birth of the multiparty system in 1950 signified the clash between the liberal and authoritarian political tendencies. However, the political, eco-

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nomic, and social developments that occurred in this period left their mark after the 1970s. Two had a drastic effect on the citizenship regime—namely, the transformation to a multiparty system and the urban-to-rural migration, which culminated in three important results.21 First, the public sphere was pluralized, which opened the ground for mushrooming religious and ethnic identities, thereby setting the stage for identity recognition demands and identity-based conflicts that emerged in modern Turkish politics in the 1980s. Second, the strict control of the state over Islam weakened, resulting in the freeing of the circulation of the symbols of Islam in the public sphere. For example, the Islamic sects became visible in this period and became effective players in the political sphere, leading Islam to become one of the strong elements in the citizenship regime.22 Finally, the Turkish government chose to shift to the Western bloc and, in return, the Marshall Plan aid given by the United States to Ankara hindered the state’s control over the economy and formed the foundation of the free market economy.23 Parallel to the formation of the free market economy, citizens’ social rights were to a great extent ignored by the Democrat Party (DP) government because the system took working rights into consideration, not citizenship rights. For example, the social security of unemployed women was defined not by their citizenship status but through their husbands or fathers who were employed. Yet, with the large immigration flow from rural to urban areas, the informal working sectors became widespread. Unlike the first kind of citizenship, which involved working in formal working sectors and having social rights, those working in the informal sectors had no precise or clear definition of their relationship to the state. Hence, the government tried to connect the relationship with the latter during election times to win votes, implicitly leading them to establish informal ways of social solidarity (e.g., family, kinship, and ethnic and religious formations).24 This ultimately led to groupings of new urban settlers rather than a modern citizenship identity. This fundamental grouping subsequently led to the formation of communitarianism based on ethnic and religious kinship as well as fellow citizenship,25 resulting in these groups locating themselves antagonistically against one another in terms of accession to social and financial sources. These new settlers also formed a new hybrid culture synthesizing rural and urban values, which directly positioned them against the sectors of society having formal social rights culturally. In other words, the distance between the center and the periphery widened, despite the sectors moving closer to each other geographically.26 Therefore, membership in modern citizenship was blocked by sociological and political developments, which led to a new kind of millet system based on city fellowship (hemşehrilik) and ethnic and religious kinship.

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Nevertheless, the 1960 military intervention of the army against the DP government, which practiced authoritarian policies like its predecessor (i.e., the Republican People’s Party, or CHP), resulted in a new constitution in 1961. Although this constitution was comprised of liberal essences, such as giving autonomy to universities and social and syndicate rights to citizens, it paradoxically gave the military and the state elite power over the political elite.27 In particular, the military gained important exit guarantees that strengthened its role in a democratic regime. On the other hand, the constitution affected society in two ways.28 The liberal side displayed its effects in both the political sphere and civil society; the pluralization of social movements and the translation of many ideological sources began in this period. As a result, the 1961 constitution created active citizens.29 However, the 1961 constitution also polarized the right and left wings’ relationship with one another. University students and second-generation settlers participated in the clash of the Eastern Bloc and the West by supporting the first bloc. Meanwhile, the industrial bourgeoisie, military and civilian bureaucracy, and nationalist and conservative governments allied with each other against the discontent of modernization, liberalization in the society, and their side effects to form the left. They created common nationalist, populist discourse and bound it to Kemalist ideology, particularly its stateof-emergency discourse, which also demonstrated the military’s assertive power. The state elite, which had continued since the beginning of the republic, directly connected the citizenship regime and the state of emergency.30 This lead to the second phase: the authoritarian phase of the 1961 constitution’s effects. The state of emergency patterned on the discourse of the “communist threat and its collaborators” drew the framework of the citizenship regime and provided a means of disciplining the citizenship regime.31 Biriz Berksoy analyzed the discourse of the police force and its reflections on practice, drawing three conclusions about the perception by the police force of the citizenship regime during that period, thereby helping to embody this perception.32 The first was the role of the state in society. The state and society were perceived as the inseparable parts of an organism; the state was the concrete and explicit expression of the society. As in fascist regimes, the state was perceived first and foremost as the representative of the society. Second, the aim of the police was the continuation of nation-building and the homogenous, classless nation. According to Berksoy, the perception of citizenship had ethnic essences, and those outside the Turkish nation (i.e., non-Turks, Kurds, minorities, and socialists or communists) were seen as the enemy. People talking about the classes were also perceived as an enemy threatening the unity of the country. In other words, it is highly evident that the police force identified socialists or communists, centering the concept of class in its

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discourse, as one of its vital enemies. Finally, the police force stressed the vitality of the military within the state and its cardinal role in modernization and protection of the country. Hence, the military was shown as the head of the state and the society’s organic dependence on this institution was glorified.33 In short, during this period, the state tried to control society by some exit guarantees and the condition of a state of emergency. The state tried to suppress divergences in society by producing nationalism combined with the state of emergency. In this regard, the idea that the citizen was in debt to the state rather than having rights continued through this period. Pluralization of the Public Sphere in the 1980s and 1990s and the Struggle via Citizenship With the intensification of clashes between the left and the right in society, the military engaged in a coup d’état in 1980. During the aftermath of the military intervention, the 1982 constitution was enacted, which abolished many individual and social rights, such as the right to organize trade unions and universities’ autonomy. The 1982 constitution made society fully dependent on the state via state institutions such as the Council of Higher Education, which controlled all universities, and the National Security Council, which had an implicitly higher position than the Turkish National Assembly and comprised higher-ranking soldiers.34 This process radically cut the state and citizenship relationship and led to a power monopoly of the state in both political and public spheres against the citizens. The easing of the control of the military junta in the mid 1980s provided a relatively stable relationship within society. The transformation of the economic system from the import substitution model to a free market economy, coupled with the drastic migration flow from rural to urban centers, led to the pluralization of the public sphere and the relative reinforcement of the civil society during the late 1980s. On the other hand, the cultural antagonism vividly embodied in the center–periphery distinction in Turkish politics in the post-1980 era due to migration from rural areas to big cities, the rapid urbanization and modernization of Turkish society, and the integration of global economy and politics brought uncertainties to society. This situation particularly affected those along the periphery, who had migrated a decade or two earlier. This conservativism later met with not only Islamic networks but also ethnic and religious networks in the post-1980s and 1990s due to the impotency of the welfare regime in Turkey.35 Unlike the 1970s, the left and the right ideologies that covered ethnic, religious, and fellowship networks were demolished by the 1980 military intervention. Therefore, these identity-based groups became visible and began to struggle with the nation-state via citizenship regime,

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which tried to deconstruct and change the structure of it. Their criticism and actions focused on three points: • The modernization perspective—ignoring the grassroots and its reflection on the citizenship regime by perceiving the society as the organic compound of the state—was strongly criticized. • These groups tried to make their symbols visible in the public sphere, generally merging them with the symbols of the high culture and the state ideology. This impacted the strict nation-state understanding of the Kemalist elite, leading the nation-state into crisis. • Related to the previous point, these groups demanded to be represented in both the political and public spheres. This demand was controversial to both the state ideology and the structure of the state institutions, ultimately leading the state into crisis.36 The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the reinforcement of the identity recognition demands and the social movements in the country due to the European Union accession process, which made them visible in both public and political spheres. However, the relationship of the state with these groups was patterned on the security paradigm—particularly the state-of-emergency vision—rather than the perspective of democratization. The identity recognition demands of Islamists, Alevis, Kurds, and terrorist facilities of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish ethnonationalist movement, fostered the state’s security paradigm. PKK assistance from Russia, Greece, Iran, and Syria also accurately corresponded with the state-of-emergency paradigm of Turkey in terms of promoting the discourse of a domestic and international enemy. In addition, the acute economic crisis in the country, particularly the one in 1994, led people to lose confidence on the political and economic spheres. This situation appeared to weaken the political sphere by strengthening the state elite over the political elite. Therefore, the state elite continued to preserve the citizenship regime against the social movements with identity recognition demands using nationalism in the context of its state-of-emergency paradigm.37 On the other hand, Alevis, Kurds, and Islamists followed antagonistic politics both with the state and with each other. Hence, the citizenship regime became a battlefield for these movements. For example, Kurds demanded to be the other fundamental actor with the Turks in the constitution, while the Alevis demanded all the rights of Hanefi Sunni Muslims, such as opting out of the same status in the Presidency of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Turkey. In other words, these groups demanded not only justice but also equality from the state. However, the state cooperated with some of these groups against others in order to remain the sole hegemonic representative of

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the public and political spheres.38 Although this approach forced these groups to close in on themselves, it also made them follow antagonistic politics both against the state and with themselves. This situation escalated antagonisms among secularists and Islamists, center and periphery, and Turkish and Kurdish nationalists, whose roots could be traced back to the beginning of the Republic or before.39 Denationalization of Citizenship Regime and the Justice and Development Party: The Citizenship Regime between the Agonistic and Antagonistic Politics40 The February 27, 2007, military intervention carried out against Islamists in the country and the capture of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, were two victories for the state elite. Although the activities of political Islam in the political sphere were to a great extent halted by the former, the PKK was taken over by the latter. By means of these actions—particularly the February 27 military intervention—the state continued its hegemony in both political and public spheres and strongly affected public opinion, which enabled it to preserve the existing citizenship regime. However, the end of the low-intensity conflict in the country and the abolition of the threat of political Islam diverted Ankara’s target to accession into the European Union. At the Helsinki Summit in December 1999, the efforts to fulfill the promised reforms within the National Program (March 2001) gained speed. In February, March, and April 2002, several changes were made in criminal and civil law. For example, the death sentence was abolished and converted to life sentence while the freedom to establish an association was expanded.41 The Article 26 amendment expanded the content of the “languages” with which people could express themselves in their daily lives. Freedom of expression was further broadened by the removal of wording from Article 28: “There can be no activities of publication in languages that are forbidden by law.” Additional changes in the freedom of expression occurred by opening up the possibility of broadcasting in radio and television in previously forbidden languages (March 26, 2002) as well as lifting the ban on the teaching and learning of different languages (August 3, 2002).42 The victory of the neoconservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 2002 elections accelerated this Europeanization process. Amendments were made in Turkey concerning the law of foundations that facilitated the possibility of non-Muslim foundations to own property (January 2, 2003). A package of amendments that was passed on June 19, 2003, contained a change in construction law that made it easier to construct sites of religious prayer for all religions. There was also a change in legal codes that restricted

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the utilization of non-Turkish names. The constitutional amendments of 2004 comprised an addition to Article 90 of the constitution concerning the approval of international treaties. The addition stated that, whenever conflicts arise between international treaties pertaining to fundamental human rights and domestic laws, the articles of the international treaties should prevail. This opened the door to the possibility of implementing some of the articles promoting minority rights as contained within the Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923). In addition to these constitutional amendments, various amendments of other legal codes were made, including amendments to the criminal code in order to make possible the incrimination of expressions that degrade minorities. There was also a change in legal codes that restricted the utilization of non-Turkish names.43 This liberalization and democratization process led to the “denationalization of citizenship regime” with reference to Ayşe Kadıoğlu, borrowing the terminology from Saskiye Sassen. The concept refers to the legitimate claims of Turkish citizens who are non-Muslims and who are not of Turkish descent regarding their different religious, linguistic, and cultural existences in the public realm within the territorial boundaries of the Turkish state.44 “The legitimation of such claims makes it possible for these ‘authorized yet unrecognized’ citizens to enjoy equal rights.” According to Sassen, denationalization and postnationalism represent two different trajectories, albeit not excluding each other. Denationalization “has to do with the transformation of the national, specifically under the impact of globalization and several other dynamics, and will tend to instantiate inside the national.” Postnationalism, on the other hand, makes references to new forms of citizenship such as European citizenship and city citizenship that are located outside of the national realm.45 This process broke the hegemony of the state elite in the public sphere. Therefore, the ex-Islamist but currently neoconservative AKP, which had problems receiving legitimacy from the West, followed two seemingly contradictory policies. The AKP began to engage in clashes for hegemonic dominance with the state—or Kemalist—elite over democratic and Western values. In doing so, it accelerated the denationalization process until 2004 and reformulated its liberal American perspective, which criticized state-centered nationalism having ethnic nationalist tunes. On the other hand, it raised civil society over the state, guaranteeing civic nationalism, at least in rhetoric. This idea corresponded with another idea of the liberal American perspective of secularism, which made the state approach all other religions from the same distance. This perspective was complemented with the party’s international relations approach embodied in its willingness to use soft power and zero problem policy in domestic and international relations.46 Therefore, these two

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perspectives and instruments abolished the state-of-emergency perspective of the state elite patterned on their international relations understanding of the international enemy and its domestic collaborators. Although these policies were the reflections of the new geopolitical conditions of the world, this policy compulsorily requires zero problem—at least in theory—in domestic politics. This fact normalizes politics, making politics the communitarian and fragmented structure of society. Radical efforts of the AKP in solving Kurdish and Alevi problems reflected this fact. The AKP, in its second main policy, has to some degree tried to democratize the public and political spheres, realizing civic integration in both terrains due to its neoconservative ideology and its clash with the state elite. In fact, it has focused efforts on conservatizing these terrains and the citizenship regime by controlling civil society and the public sphere through Islamic philanthropic associations and fundamental organizations such as Islamic sects with their media organs. The party also inculcates a conservative ideology among society through state institutions such as the Radio Television Supreme Council, which controls the contents of programs, and the National Ministry of Education. The AKP borrowed the political engineering perspective and hegemonic nature of the Kemalist elite, which inculcated Islam into society. The party followed a radical neoliberal perspective and ignored social welfare, trying to stick to the society by both Islam and economic aid to philanthropic associations.47 According to Soner Çağatay, the classical Turkish nationalistic identity is patterned on Turkish language, with its complementary Islam. However, the AKP has indicated a tension with this definition as it does not perceive Islam as an ordinary complementary identity, but rather it takes a true worshiping (i.e., orthopraxy) as the primary pattern of Turkish identity.48 In short, the AKP used popular Islam, merging it with liberalism, to create an instrument for arranging the citizenship regime. In this regard, although the AKP changed the content of the classical stateof-emergency paradigm of the state elite, it in fact continued it by otherizing the state elite in the name of “subversives of democracy” and others not internalizing traditional lifestyles (e.g., gays, transsexuals, people not obeying traditions such as people drinking alcohol). In other words, being Turkish began to be defined in terms of morality and to what extent individuals practiced their religion.49 On the contrary, the state elite defined positivism in the context of the statist and modernization perspective, which led to the emergence of the authoritarian state. The AKP has tried to deconstruct this paradigm and redefine the role of the state with reference to liberal and conservative values. This created strong opposition in certain sectors of Turkish society on the grounds that the party had been evolving the political system into civilian authoritarianism.

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However, we can say that the citizenship regime during this period evolved to some extent into liberalism and liberal values. It also had strong tendencies in the evaluation of the system to liberal conservative authoritarianism, prioritizing traditions and Islam while merging with Turkish nationalism.

The Need for a New Definition of Citizenship Regime: Civil Patriotism As previously discussed, three cardinal deficiencies existed in the Turkish citizenship regime. The first one is the hegemonic nature of the state in the public sphere and its monopoly of this sphere. Related to this is the lack of confidence in politics—which especially continued until the AKP—and the antagonistic perspective of the state elite to various social movements and their politics. Finally, politics has been defined via the state of emergency, which aimed to control both the public sphere and the citizenship regime. All three points anchored the citizenship regime on state-centered and ethnic-based nationalism owned by the majority and to a great extent excluded others from both the public and political spheres. In this section, we try to show why we need a new definition of citizenship regime by using field research as evidence. In recent years, two studies into citizenship in Turkey have demonstrated that the public’s understanding of citizenship is different than the state’s perspective of nationalism. These give important clues for this study in order to find the ideal citizenship regime for societal peace in Turkey. The first study was conducted by Konda, a famous research company in Turkey, in 2006. Entitled Who We Are, the research sought to reveal the demographic structure of Turkish society. It was carried out with 47,958 people using semistructured interviews in 12 regions as determined by the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS). Participants were asked about what is required to be Turkish citizens, including the fundamental factors for being a Turkish citizen: • • • •

Is it compulsory to love Turkey? Is it cardinal to say that I am from Turkey without regard for ethnicity? Is it fundamental to be Muslim? Is it compulsory to be ethnically Turkish?

The participants who most often chose the last two options had not completed high school and came from low strata of society in terms of education. As evident in Table 1.1, the ethnic and religious features of citizenship

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TABLE 1.1 How Do We Understand Turkish Citizenship? 82% 64% 54% 46%

It is compulsory to love Turkey in order to be a Turkish citizen. It is fundamental to say that I am from Turkey without regarding ethnicity in order to be a Turkish citizen. It is fundamental to be Muslim in order to be Turkish citizen. It is compulsory to be ethnically Turkish in order to be a Turkish citizen.

are not considered to be as significant as the first two options based on patriotic feelings.50 The second research study was carried out by Pınar Enneli, Rasim Özgür Dönmez, and others, focusing on disadvantaged young people in the Altındağ region of Ankara from 2008 to 2010.51 This region largely consists of slum areas and generally consists of cosmopolitan worldviews. The researchers carried out a survey with 619 people, executing semistructured interviews with 60 of these participants. In the semistructured interviews, the researcher asked participants, “Do you feel that you are in a life debt to the state or to the homeland?” Approximately 55 people answered that they were in debt to the homeland rather than the state. According to a 24-year-old Furkan high school graduate, “I do not have any life debt to the state. Has the state ever done a favor for me? No! . . . Of course, I can give my life for our homeland without a second thought.” As can be seen from the examples, the public’s perspectives are controversial with regard to the citizenship regime of the state, which has the strong potential to distort the societal peace in Turkey. Such understanding makes us think about what should be done in order to provide societal peace in Turkey. Before answering this question, we should consider four cardinal domestic and global facts: • Turkey, as an important player in the global capitalist system, is part of the solution and the problems of the global system. The political and state elites cannot think about their policies from solely a domestic perspective. • The world entered the postmodern period, according to Tuathail, during the post–Cold War era, where nation-states are no longer the sole players in international relations. Globalization, information, and developments in technology have transformed the space and time regime in world politics.52 These dynamics have created spatial transformations resulting in the profound erosion of the sovereignty of nation-states and blurring of internal and external boundaries, leading to a common global society. The current situation in the world can be termed a postmodern geopoliti-

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cal condition, shaped by the information and risk society. This process creates interconnections between places across the globe and alters the relationship among local, national, and global sectors. This situation has enabled ethnic and religious identities to produce themselves epistemologically and define their identities beyond the nation-state.53 • Turkey is a member in many supranational institutions, particularly Western supranational organizations such as the United Nations, the European Commission, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Consequently, Ankara cannot act in a solely state-centric way and produce merely state-centric discourses. Otherwise, its efforts to control the public sphere by nationalism, strict secularism, and the prevention of politics are meant to avoid universal, transnational values such as democracy and the rule of law. Thus, the Turkish state’s relationship may fall into crisis with domestic political actors, which often becomes transnational. • The state and the political elite’s definition of politics within the context of security and the state of emergency means the state is perceived as a community lacking links with the society in the eyes of ethnic, religious, and other ideological groups. This has two results. First, ethnic and religious identities close in on themselves and act antagonistically towards other communities and the state. Second, politics cannot transform from antagonistic politics to agonistic politics, leading to ethnic and religious tensions in the country.54 In considering these points, we should ask what kind of citizenship regime is convenient for Turkey. By recalling citizenship deficiencies in Turkey, we argue that civic patriotism, which can be categorized as liberal thinking, is the most convenient philosophy for the Turkish political system. According to Laborde, Civic patriotism is both more situated and more radical than neutralist constitutional patriotism: It emphasizes the motivational prerequisites of democratic governance, stresses the need to preserve existing co-operative ventures, and demands that existing political cultures be democratically scrutinized and reshaped in an inclusive direction. It promotes mainly political identity, whose political content makes it compatible with variety of practices and beliefs, but whose thin particularistic form justifies citizens’ commitment to specific institutions.55

Although both civic and constitutional patriotism are helpful for dismantling the dominance of one ethnic group in the citizenship regime in Turkey and provide societal peace within the unitarian structure of the country, civic patriotism criticizes the constitutional patriotism in the sense that it focuses merely on universal values such as democracy and freedom while isolating

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politics from culture. It also does not seriously consider the need for cultural mediations between citizens and their institutions. There is no room in this study to argue profoundly why some other kinds of citizenship (e.g., postnational citizenship, civic nationalism, or the ecological citizenship) are or are not convenient for Turkey. We pattern our thoughts on Cécile Laborde’s influential article entitled “From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism.”56 According to Laborde, it is essential to distinguish the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Whereas nationalism generally refers to locality, culture, and ethnicity, patriotism indicates constitutionalism, territory, and universality. Although the former has the strong potential to clash with universal values, the latter is suitable for interweaving with universal values. To reveal the difference clearly, the four layers of the national identity should be clearly identified: • Ethnic and fundamental links • Culture, language, customs, and the way of life of a particular community • Political culture as represented in political institutions, symbols, and ideological and rhetorical traditions • The abstract, universalist political ideals indicated in the form of general principles figured out in the constitution Nationalism to a great extent relies on the first two features in arranging the citizenship regime; civic patriotism mostly stresses the latter two by seriously considering the first two features.57 In the Turkish case, civic patriotism should be discussed in three topics: (1) the legitimacy perspective, (2) the social democratic perspective, and (3) the inclusiveness perspective.58 Legitimacy Perspective Today, many political actions or legal rules in Turkey cannot receive legitimacy from society. These laws or political matters are either not compatible with universal values or are so abstract that they are not able to be interwoven with local values, customs, or political culture. According to civic patriotism, democratic and universal values must be rooted not only in laws but also in mores. They should also be brought in as guiding ideals in “deliberations about particular public issues and applied interpretatively in the light of all the information relevant to the concrete context.”59 Therefore, the content of national identity in Turkey should be redefined, and freedom, democracy, and human rights should be inserted and interwoven with the current elements in Turkish national identity—namely, religion, history, language, and territory.

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Some patterns in the content of Turkish national identity can be replaced, such as freedom rather than security; human rights rather than the dominance of state over state. For example, when a terrorist attack is carried out in the country, the society should perceive this attack as an assault on the Turkish national identity as it threatens the freedom of Turkish society and Turkey’s human rights principle, not just an assault executed against the state. According to Lebord, for such an active citizenry, citizens must be educated in the habits of democratic self-government and civic education should be given to citizens in the process. As seen from the example, universal values such as human rights and freedoms merge with local ideas—namely, the Turkish national identity.60

The Social Democracy Perspective In an interesting study carried out by Sabancı University scholars Ersin Kalaycıoğlu and Ali Çarkoğlu focusing on societal inequality in Turkey, the authors gave strong clues about the Turkish people’s mindset regarding their confidence in the political and economic spheres. The scholars interviewed 1,569 households in 65 of Turkey’s 81 cities. According to the results, 70 percent of the participants believed that they earn less than they deserve and 92 percent did not think that there is social justice in the distribution of wealth and services throughout society. In addition, 90 percent did not believe in the utility of the free market and wanted state interference in the market. According to scholars, the participants did not believe in the benefits of the private sector for themselves. Rather, they believed in the benefits of the state actions for themselves in the economy.61 This brings us to the social democracy perspective of civic patriotism. National identity requires mutual trust in other citizens as well as solidarity and reconciliation with them, which necessities social justice, fair wealth distribution, and basic human rights for subsistence. As previously described, this is necessary to dismantle the communitarian structure—forming groups on the basis of fundamental ties—of society, thereby preventing societal peace in the country that emerges from the inability of the state to bring enough social justice to Turkey. However, social democracy itself cannot be realized only domestically. Thus, the state or government in Turkey should focus on transforming the international economic system through international economic institutions with reference to social democracy. Therefore, civic patriotism works to develop social democracy not only in Turkish political and economic spheres but also in its international economic system through supranational organizations.62

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The Inclusiveness Perspective63 In Turkey, nationalists always claim that the public sphere is neutral in its nature and everyone has the same access to resources. However, for civic patriots, this sphere is not neutral, as the majority often offends the minority through banal nationalism rather than leading them to feel that they are citizens. As such, the feeling of unity can be realized in two ways. The first is to open the public sphere to minorities for deliberation of their demands and their problems. Although this has been achieved by some identities in Turkey (e.g., Kurds and Alevis),64 it must be realized for all minorities, including non-Muslim groups. Here it is not important to realize all these demands in reality, but rather to take these demands and problems into serious consideration. Second, some ideological, ethnic, and religious movements clash with the majority; the state can generate democratic and universal discourses in order to find room in both the public and political spheres. It sometimes does this at the expense of some local institutional and ideological structures. Hence, civic patriotism perceives the public and political spheres as arenas for deliberation and attributes an important meaning to the concept of politics for providing agonistic politics. Therefore, civic patriotism takes all the discourses of these political groups into consideration and suggests borrowing democratic and universal discourses and policies from these groups. Furthermore, it offers to adapt them to the ideology and institutions of the majority while avoiding local and particularistic ones. For example, writing the names of streets in two or three languages in some municipalities in the eastern part of the country does not dismantle national unity; rather, it reinforces the feeling of solidarity among minorities. Finally, civic patriotism’s political culture and symbols should be open to reconstruction. Common mythos and symbols should be produced, and sometimes some parts of official ideology should be deconstructed for the integration of political groups into the system. It is important to know that a political culture itself does not have a historic nature; rather, it is changeable. Not only the political culture but culture itself can be reformulated by creating common myths, rewriting official ideology, and so forth. All these provide solidarity and a feeling of togetherness. Civic patriotism’s refining of the ethnic dominance of one group aims to provide solidarity in Turkey without distorting the unitarian structure of the country, which is an important means for providing peace in the country. In order to be realized, Turkey needs an active government and should make it state policy. Although it seems radical to realize this project, it is crucial to integrate others into the system to create a strong power in world politics.

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Conclusion Turkey’s citizenship regime to a great extent relied on the heritage of the first period of the Ottoman Empire to lead the state to become dominant over society in both the public and political spheres. The hegemonic nature of the state and the state elite’s lack of confidence in politics have excluded large sectors of society from both the political and public spheres. This fact was fostered by the state-of-emergency discourse, aiming to control both the public sphere and the citizenship regime. All three points anchored the citizenship regime in state-centered and ethnic-based nationalism owned by the majority. The rapid urbanization and migration flow from rural areas to cities starting in the 1950s created a new societal fact by changing the structure of society and the political sphere. These people, who were deemed as living along the periphery, began to organize along ethnic, religious, and historical groupings that vividly emerged after the dismantlement of the left and right wings during the 1980 coup d’état and demolition of the Soviet socialist bloc. One of the profound reasons behind this fact was the weak social welfare system of the country, which led these people to feel insecure. In addition, the position of the state against society acted as the sole representative of society and perceived society from the state-of-emergency perspective. This fact ultimately led the state to close in on itself. The grouping of the society along ethnic and religious terms for resource mobilization located these groups antagonistically to the state and to each other, thereby preventing people from feeling they were the real citizens of the Turkish nation-state by blocking that societal security in the country. In this regard, civic patriotism is an important tool for providing societal peace in Turkey, requiring a citizenship regime based not on the dominance of one ethnicity or an identity but rather on the equality of all identities. According to civic patriotism, democratic and universal values must be rooted not only in laws but also in mores. In regard to Turkey, the content of the Turkish constitution should be refined to eliminate any ethnic, gender-based, or religious elements. The content of national identity should be redefined, and freedom, democracy, and human rights should be inserted and interwoven into the current elements in Turkish national identity (i.e., religion, history, language, and territory). In addition, civic patriotism requires strong social welfare in the country by providing solidarity among citizens. Hence, it is almost impossible to think that governments and states think domestically; thus, social democracy is an important requisite for Turkey to provide solidarity among its citizens. However, the government cannot think about democracy while political and economic institutions focus solely on domestic issues. Instead, they should

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think globally. In other words, they should focus their efforts on changing the neoliberal system in global institutions. In terms of Turkey, the weak social welfare alienated individuals from the state and encouraged them to become involved in fundamental groups. The social democratic system will make them feel like members of the state rather than members of a community. Another factor is the inclusiveness perspective of civic patriotism. Deliberation in the public sphere should be free for all groups, and the majority should be open to adopting the symbols and discourses into consideration while suggesting the borrowing of democratic and universal discourses and policies from these groups. Furthermore, it should offer to acclimate them to the ideology and institutions of the majority by avoiding local and particularistic ones. In other words, the state monopoly in the public sphere should be lifted, and all ideas and symbols should be lifted from the state-of-emergency perspective of the state. Some discourses and symbols of social movements can be adapted to the political sphere while some can be avoided. In other words, the dominant political actors in Turkey should learn to play the game of politics rather than control politics. Notes 1. E. Fuat Keyman, “Kimlik, Vatandaşlık ve Demokratikleşme,” in Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, ed. E. Fuat Keyman (İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008), 13–14. 2. Keyman, “Vatandaşlık ve Demokrasi,” 13–14. 3. Ayşe Kadıoğlu, “Denationalization of Citizenship? The Turkish Experience,” Citizenship Studies 11, no. 3 (July 2007): 283; Keyman, “Kimlik, Vatandaşlık,” 13. 4. Mümtazer Türköne, Siyaset (Ankara: Lotus Kitabevi, 2005). 5. Rasim Özgür Dönmez, Europeanization and Turkey (Exeter: University of Exeter, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 2003), 127–30; Taner Timur, Osmanli Toplumsal Duzeni (Ankara: Imge, 2001), 243. 6. Timur, Toplumsal Düzeni, 243; Dönmez, Europeanization and Turkey, 127. 7. Halil Inalcik, “Sivil Toplum and Neo-Patrimonyal Siyaset,” in Kuresellesme, Sivil Toplum ve Islam, eds. Emin Fuat Keyman and Ali Yaşar Saribay (Ankara: Vadi Yayinlari, 1998), 76. 8. Etyen Mahcupyan, Turkiye’de Merkeziyetci Zihniyet, Devlet ve Din (Istanbul: Patika, 1998), 59. 9. Teyfur Erdoğdu, “Osmanlılığın Evrimi Hakkında Bir Deneme: Bir Grup (Üst Düzey Yönetici) Kimliğinden Millet Yaratma Projesine,” Doğu Batı 11, no. 45 (May, June, July 2008): 20–26. 10. Faruk Birtek, “From Affiliation to Affinity: Citizenship in the Transition from Empire to the Nation State,” in Identities, Affiliations and Allegations, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranović (New York: Cambridge Press, 2008), 30.

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11. Birtek, “Nation State,” 37. 12. Birtek, “Nation State,” 38. 13. Jurgen Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (December 1994): 1–10. 14. Murat Belge, “Türkiye’de Zenofobi ve Milliyetçilik,” in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce: Milliyetçilik, ed. Tanıl Bora (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002), 183–86. 15. Feyzi Baban, “Türkiye Cumhuriyet’inin Kuruluşunda Vatandaşlık ve Kamusal Kimlikler,” in Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, ed. E. Fuat Keyman (İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008), 64–80. 16. To explain Turkish politics, several scholars used the center–periphery framework, which is an important tool that draws an organized state elite indicating nationalist, orientalist, and laicist characteristics against a periphery, including suburbanized classes and ethnic, religious, and regional groups that identify with traditional values. The central elite composed of military and bureaucratic officials—and business cycles—constructed a mechanism to control the selection and socialization of new elites—namely, the periphery. See Şaban Tanıyıcı, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey: Islamist Welfare Party and Pro-EU Turn,” Party Politics 9, no. 4 (2003): 468; Frank Tachau, Turkey, the Politics of Authority, Democracy and Development (New York: Praeger, 1984); Şerif Mardin, “Center Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?,” A Daedalus 102, no. 1 (1973): 169–91. 17. Baban, “Vatandaşlık ve Kamusal Kimlikler,” 70–75. 18. Baban, “Vatandaşlık ve Kamusal Kimlikler,” 75–77. According to the Lausanne Treaty signed on July 23, 1923, Turkey recognized only non-Muslims as constituting a minority. Non-Turkish groups who are Muslims, such as Kurds, were not accepted as a minority. 19. Baban, “Vatandaşlık ve Kamusal Kimlikler,” 77. 20. See Kaya Akyıldız, “Büyüyen Çöl: Vatan, Türklük ve Kalıcılaşmış Olağanüstü Hal,” Toplum ve Bilim 17 (2010): 19–41. 21. Ali Çarkoğlu and Ersin Kalaycıoğlu, The Rising Tide of Conservativism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 18. 22. Hakan Yavuz, Modernleşen Müslümanlar: Nurcular, Nakşiler, Milli Görüş ve AK Parti (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2005), 88–92. Unlike the first period, heterodox Islam came to be recognized by the state, which let followers act freely in the political and public spheres. In return, these sects were not to violate the borders of the state ideology. During this period, many religious leaders were sued for violation of the secularism principle of the state. 23. Çarkoğlu and Kalaycıoğlu, The Rising Tide, 18–19. 24. Ayşe Buğra, “Sosyal Haklar ve Eşit Vatandaşlık Kavramı,” in Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, ed. E. Fuat Keyman (İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008), 162–63. 25. Çarkoğlu and Kalaycıoğlu, The Rising Tide, 24–25, 146–47. 26. Although these two sectors came to live in cities, they were isolated from each other culturally. The center began to perceive the periphery as posing a threat by distorting Western values.

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27. Nalan Soyarık Şentürk, “Türkiye’de Vatandaşlık: Anayasal ve Yasal Düzenlemeler Işığında Bir İnceleme,” in Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, ed. E. Fuat Keyman (İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008), 30–31. 28. Ergün Özbudun, Contemporary Turkish Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 106–8. 29. See Nadire Mater, Sokak Güzeldir: 68’de Ne Oldu? (İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2009), 11–17. 30. Eric Jan Zürcher, Modernleşen Türkiye’nin Tarihi (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1993), 370–82. 31. Biriz Berksoy, “Devlet Stratejilerinin Bir Tezahürü Olarak Polis Alt-Kültürü,” Toplum ve Bilim 114 (2009): 104–13. 32. Biriz Berksoy, “Devlet Stratejilerinin,” 104–13. 33. Berksoy, “Devlet Stratejilerinin,” 105–13. 34. See Özbudun, Contemporary Turkish Politics. 35. Çarkoğlu and Kalaycıoğlu, The Rising Tide, 146. 36. Rasim Özgür Dönmez, “Kesişen ve Ayrışan Etnik ve Dini Toplumsal Hareketler,” in Türkiye’de Kesişen Çatışan Dinsel ve Etnik Kimlikler, eds. Rasim Özgür Dönmez, Pınnar Enneli, and Nezahat Altuntaş (İstanbul: Say Yayınları, 2010), 30–45. 37. Dönmez, Europeanization and Turkey, 152–81. 38. Although the state used Alevis against political Islam, it promoted some sectors of Islamists to prevent the rise of political Islam. 39. Dönmez, “Dini Toplumsal Hareketler,” 33; see also Çarkoğlu and Kalaycıoğlu, The Rising Tide. 40. According to Chantel Mouffe, while antagonism is a we/they relationship in which all players have emnities lacking any common ground, agonism indicates a we/ they relation in which conflicting parties recognize the legitimacy of their opponents. In the latter, players are adversaries, not enemies. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 20. 41. Şentürk, “Yasal Düzenlemeler Işığında Bir İnceleme,” 34–35. 42. Kadıoğlu, “The Turkish Experience,” 292. 43. Kadıoğlu, “The Turkish Experience,” 292; see also Şentürk, “Yasal Düzenlemeler Işığında Bir İnceleme,” 34–35. 44. Kadıoğlu, “The Turkish Experience,” 284. 45. Saskiye Sassen, “Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship,” in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, eds. Engin Isin and Bryan Turner (London: Sage, 2003), 285. 46. Rasim Özgür Dönmez, “The Justice and Development Party between Islam and Modernity,” Religion Compass 4, no. 6 (June 2010): 369–71. 47. Dönmez, “Islam and Modernity,” 361–72. 48. Hasan Bülent Kahraman, “Bayramda Baklava Yiyen Türktür,” Radikal Kitap, 5 March 2010, www.radikal.com.tr/Default.aspx?aType=HaberYazdir&ArticleID=9 83530 (accessed September 8, 2010). 49. Rasim Özgür Dönmez, “The Re-Birth Pangs of New Turkey in the 21st Century,” SEER 13, no. 1 (June 2010): 65–66. For example, police officers imposed penalties on transsexuals walking in Beyoğlu, an important central square in Istanbul.

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50. “Biz Kimiz: Toplumsal Yapı Araştırması,” Milliyet Konda Araştırma, 2006, www.konda.com.tr/html/dosyalar/ttya_tr.pdf (accessed September 8, 2010): 35–37. 51. Pınar Enneli, Rasim Özgür Dönmez, Çağlar Enneli, Sibel Kalaycioğlu, Ayşe Kaya, and Sinem Teber, “Metropollerde Yaşayan Dezavantajlı Gençliğin Yetişkinliğe Geçiş Süreci: Sorun Ya da Çözümün Parçası Olmak,” unpublished research report, TUBITAK Project No. 107K456, 2010. 52. Gearoid O. Tuathail, “The Post-Modern Geopolitical Conditions: States, Statecraft, and Security at the Millennium,” Annals of the American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 166. 53. Tuathail, “Security at the Millennium,” 166. 54. Dönmez, “Dini Toplumsal Hareketler,” 23–49. 55. Cécile Laborde, “From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism,” British Journal of Political Science 32 (2002): 592. 56. Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 591–612. 57. Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 597–9. 58. Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 599. 59. Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 602–3. 60. Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 602–3. 61. Cited in Sedat Ergin, “İki Akademisyenden Hükümet ve Muhalefete Altın Öğütler,” Hurriyet, (May 26, 2010), www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/14838174 .asp?yazarid=308&gid=61 (accessed September 8, 2010). 62. See Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 603–6. 63. For more details about inclusiveness, see Cécile Laborde, “Civic Patriotism,” 606–611. 64. Kurds and Alevis are not perceived as minorities for the Turkish citizenship regime. We mention them as minorities because they do not have the same access to certain resources as Turks (for Kurds) or Sunnis (for Alevis).

Bibliography “Biz Kimiz: Toplumsal Yapı Araştırması.” Milliyet Konda Araştırma (2006), www .konda.com.tr/html/dosyalar/ttya_tr.pdf (accessed September 8, 2010): 35–37. Ayşe Buğra, “Sosyal Haklar ve Eşit Vatandaşlık Kavramı,” in Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, edited by E. Fuat Keyman. İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008. Baban, Feyzi. “Türkiye Cumhuriyet’inin Kuruluşunda Vatandaşlık ve Kamusal Kimlikler.” In Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, edited by E. Fuat Keyman, 64–83. İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008. Belge, Murat. “Türkiye’de Zenofobi ve Milliyetçilik.” In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce: Milliyetçilik, edited by Tanıl Bora, 179–93. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002. Berksoy, Biriz. “Devlet Stratejilerinin Bir Tezahürü Olarak Polis Alt-Kültürü,” Toplum ve Bilim no. 114 (2009): 104–13.

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Birtek, Faruk. “From Affiliation to Affinity: Citizenship in the Transition from Empire to the Nation State.” In Identities, Affiliations and Allegations, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranović, 17–45. New York: Cambridge Press, 2008. Çarkoğlu, Ali and Kalaycıoğlu, Ersin. The Rising Tide of Conservativism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Dönmez, Rasim Özgür. Europeanization and Turkey. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 2003. ———. “The Justice and Development Party between Islam and Modernity.” Religion Compass 4, no. 6 (June 2010): 365–75. ———. “Kesişen ve Ayrışan Etnik ve Dini Toplumsal Hareketler.” In Türkiye’de Kesişen Çatışan Dinsel ve Etnik Kimlikler, edited by Rasim Özgür Dönmez, Pınar Enneli, and Nezahat Altuntaş, 30–45. İstanbul: Say Yayınları, 2010. ———. “The Re-birth Pangs of New Turkey in the 21st Century,” SEER 13, no. 1 (June 2010): 55–69. Erdoğdu, A. Teyfur. “Osmanlılığın Evrimi Hakkında Bir Deneme: Bir Grup (Üst Düzey Yönetici) Kimliğinden Millet Yaratma Projesine,” Doğu Batı 11, no. 45 (May, June, July 2008): 19–46. Ergin, Sedat. “İki Akademisyenden Hükümet ve Muhalefete Altın Öğütler.” Hurriyet (May 26, 2010), www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/14838174.asp?yazarid=308&gid=61 (September 8, 2010). Ergün Özbudun, Contemporary Turkish Politics. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2000. Gearoid O, Tuathail. “The Post-Modern Geopolitical Conditions: States, Statecraft, and Security at the Millennium,” Annals of the American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 166–78. Habermas, Jurgen. “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (December 1994): 1–10. Halil Inalcik. “Sivil Toplum and Neo-Patrimonyal Siyaset.” In Küreselleşme, Sivil Toplum ve Islam, edited by Emin Fuat Keyman and Ali Yaşar Saribay, 74–87. Ankara: Vadi Yayınları, 1998. Kadıoğlu, Ayşe. “Denationalization of Citizenship? The Turkish Experience.” Citizenship Studies 11, no. 3 (July 2007): 283–299. Kahraman, Hasan Bülent. “Bayramda Baklava Yiyen Türktür,” Radikal Kitap (March 5, 2010), www.radikal.com.tr/Default.aspx?aType=HaberYazdir&ArticleID=9835 30 (accessed September 8, 2010). Kaya, Akyıldız. “Büyüyen Çöl: Vatan,Türklük ve Kalıcılaşmış Olağanüstü Hal,” Toplum ve Bilim 17 (2010): 19–41. Keyman, E. Fuat. “Kimlik, Vatandaşlık ve Demokratikleşme.” In Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, edited by E. Fuat Keyman, 7–18. İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008. Laborde, Cécile. “From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism.” British Journal of Political Science 32, (2002): 592. Mahcupyan, Etyen. Turkiye’de Merkeziyetci Zihniyet, Devlet ve Din. Istanbul: Patika, 1998.

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Mardin, Şerif. “Center Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?,” A Daedalus 102, no. 1 (1973): 169–91. Mater, Nadire. Sokak Güzeldir: 68’de Ne Oldu? İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2009. Mouffe, Chantal, On the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Sassen, Saskiye. “Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship.” In Handbook of Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin Isin and Bryan Turner, 277–93. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 2003. Şentürk, Nalan Soyarık, “Türkiye’de Vatandaşlık: Anayasal ve Yasal Düzenlemeler Işığında Bir İnceleme.” In Aydınlanma, Türkiye ve Vatandaşlık, edited by E. Fuat Keyman, 27–38. İstanbul: Osmanlı Bankası Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi, 2008. Tachau, Frank. Turkey, The Politics of Authority, Democracy and Development. New York: Praeger, 1984. Taner Timur, Osmanli Toplumsal Duzeni, 2nd ed. Ankara: Imge, 2001. Tanıyıcı, Şaban. “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey: Islamist Welfare Party and Pro-EU Turn,” Party Politics 9, no. 4 (2003): 463–83. Türköne, Mümtazer. Siyaset. Ankara: Lotus Kitabevi, 2005. Yavuz, Hakan. Modernleşen Müslümanlar: Nurcular, Nakşiler, Milli Görüş ve AK Parti. İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2005. Zürcher, Eric Jan. Modernleşen Türkiye’nin Tarihi. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1993.

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2 Citizenship and National Identity: A Comparative Analysis Elçin Aktoprak

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are two forms of identity that closely linked with the nation-state. Since 1789, they are the key terms determining access to state resources and patterns of solidarity.1 They have been interpreted as interdependent and interchangeable2 because they have common cultural and political meanings such as differentiating inhabitants and aliens. Both are critical elements in the formation of the nation-state as a political community. Nevertheless, unlike national identity, citizenship is also a legal status that names the official relationship between an individual and a state. Rights and obligations are the basic determinants of this relationship that define a legal equality between citizens. National identity is inseparable from this official meaning of citizenship. The distinction between civic versus ethnic nationalism and comparison of French and German nationalisms are ongoing debates in nationalism studies, which have focused on this close relationship between national identity and citizenship.3 A civic nation is defined as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values; France and the United States have been generally given as examples.4 On the other hand, an ethnic nation with the ethnic concept of membership views national identity as an inherent and unitary identity which is independent of one’s will. But the differentiation of these definitions is analytical and normative. They do not describe particular nationalisms, nor can they be used to trace the trajectory of nationalism in general. For even the most “civic” and “political” nationalisms often turn out on closer inspection to be also “ethnic.”5 However, the aim of this study is not to contribute to this ongoing debate on nationalism studies but to highlight the ITIZENSHIP AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

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importance of national identity formation for comprehending the recent debates on the relationship between citizenship and national identity, especially during the conflict resolution processes about national minority issues. Therefore, national identity will be the key concept of this paper. However, contrary to the widespread usage of the concept of national identity, here it will not be equated with the supra-identity of the state. In order to emphasize the double meaning of the national identity concept, the terms supra-identity and sub-identity will be delineated. Supra-identity is the identity of a state which cannot be directly equated with national identity.6 For example, Ottoman identity was a supra-identity but not a national identity in the seventeenth century. However, particularly after the nineteenth century, nearly all supra-identities—whether they are nation-states or not—have begun to be identified as national identities both in theory and practice. Therefore, the states sought for identification of national identity and citizenship and, in cases that these two did not overlap, the states have used their power to realize this idealized situation which in turn deeply influenced the position and perception of sub-identities in these countries. Sub-identity is the identity of a group that an individual is born into (various ethnic, religious, and other groups).7 The repressive policies may vary from one country to another depending on the various national(ist) discourses and instruments of states; but it is particularly the national minorities that have been subjects of this oppression because of their contending identity definitions. National minorities are cultural autochthonous groups that think of themselves as nations within a larger state since the nineteenth century,8 such as the Irish, Basques, and Kurds. They usually have distinct culture, language, and traditions from the dominant nation, and with their self-identity definition they challenge the national identity discourse of states. Their demands, such as cultural rights, autonomy, and/or secession, challenge the state-defined political community; conflicting national identities within a state deeply affects other identity forms, including citizenship. In this context, the two forms of national identity will be examined by comparing Britain, Spain, and Turkey with reference to their national minority issues, the Northern Ireland, Basque, and Kurdish problems. Taking into consideration the ongoing discussions on democratization in Turkey, a comparison of different cases might contribute to the redefinition of political community in Turkey.

Structural and Historical Similarities For comparing three different countries and three different national minority groups, it is first of all necessary to draw the lines of our frame of refer-

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ence. The capitalist evolution of the world system will be the main structural signifier here. As Wallerstein puts it, a capitalist world-economy came into existence in the sixteenth century and has established its dominance for over four centuries not only in economic but also in social and political structures. In this chapter, it will be argued that the history of nationalism is embedded in the history of capitalism. Although the emergence of nationalism is closely linked with the rise of capitalism, nationalism would appear at the later stages of capitalist development in the nineteenth century. The emergence of new economic conditions in this period led to the formation of the nation-state, and the nation-state led to the formation of nationalism, as will be explained below. According to the transformation of economics, national identities have been formed and revived in every new phase of the world-economy. In this paper, these periods will be basically categorized as the nineteenth century, the welfare state of the post–Second World War period, and the neoliberal era. National identity formations will be analyzed in this framework. The second structural signifier is the center–periphery relation. Here, following Hechter, the center is used as the region in which the dominant cultural group has been living and where the political and administrative forces have been centered in a country; the periphery denotes the regions which have culturally different population from the center and are not determinants in the political and administrative structure of the country. The level of economic development in the periphery will not be taken as the main characteristic of the peripheral regions. The regional inequalities could be stemming from the developed economy of the center which is reinforced by the political and military advantages; but this argument cannot explain the case of the Basque Country, which is one of the wealthiest regions of Spain. In this case, another factor comes into existence: different modernization processes of the center and periphery.9 Interestingly, regions like the Basque provinces and Catalonia have integrated into the capitalist world-economy earlier than the center, and their modernization processes have differentiated them from the center, but by political and military power central authority has protected its central pose. In this context, political, military, and administrative forces of the central authority gain importance in analyzing center–periphery relations. But surely, the roots and contents of the center–periphery relationship and the evolution of capitalism vary from country to country. Nevertheless, the center–periphery relationship in the scope of the capitalist world-economy provides significant clues to analyze some common paths that various groups have followed, especially after the nineteenth century in which the nation-state has emerged. However, for following these paths we should also look at their history before the nation-state was formed.

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Before the nineteenth century, despite the geographical, socioeconomic, and cultural differences, indirect rule was the basic common principle that formed the center–periphery relationship in Britain, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. The peripheral regions in these countries were under the political control of the central authorities, but there was no pressure from there to build a culturally homogenous “national” society as would be experienced during and after the nineteenth century. The peripheral regions were able to preserve their regional identities in an economic, social, and cultural sense while enjoying a large degree of autonomy in the respected administrative structures. The linguistic differences, different modes of production, and/or self-directed political institutions supported the different composition of the central and peripheral regions. Ireland in the history of Britain, the Basque provinces in Spain, and Kurdish regions in the Ottoman Empire were clear examples of these kinds of peripheral regions. Ireland was a peripheral region of Britain, with its distinct regional identity relying on its different linguistic, religious (Catholic), and economic structure. It was invaded in the twelfth century, but the British monarchy did not achieve the complete subjugation of Ireland until the sixteenth century. There was an Irish Parliament that was formally founded at the end of the thirteenth century, but the Crown remained the sole, overarching political authority. Its power was weak or nonexistent, and settler and native lordships were left largely to their own devices. However this policy broke down by the end of the sixteenth century, and a policy of coercion and displacement took its place.10 In 1609, the British government invited settlers (Protestants) to take up offers of land in the northern part of the Ireland. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these new settlers did not integrate with the local Irish. The land settlements were in favor of these new-coming Protestants against the Catholic Irish people as part of the British strategy. The composition of the Irish Parliament also altered as Protestants began to hold a majority of the seats in the Parliament. The position of the Catholics in Ireland changed, and they were increasingly treated as second-class citizens.11 These religious, political, and economic differentiations planted the conflict between the center and periphery and reproduced sectarian patterns of the conflict through time in changing conditions. Before the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire also embraced indirect rule. The administrative system consisted of two components: the central government and the provincial administrations. In the provincial administration, administrative flexibility was the norm. The frontier regions enjoyed greater autonomy than the ones that lay closer to the Ottoman center.12 Kurdistan, as a frontier region, enjoyed this kind of autonomy until the nineteenth century, and Kurds were able to protect their regional identities without interference

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by the central authority. There was a loose connection among the Kurdish tribes and between the center and the subregional system of this borderland between the Persian and Ottoman Empires.13 We also have to mention the statute of the Kurds under the millet system in the Ottoman Empire. The millet system was not based on an ethnic hierarchy but on a religious one. Muslims were at the top of this hierarchy, and the term millet (nation) denoted the religious, not the ethnic, community. As Muslims, Kurds were also parts of this ascendancy.14 The caliphate was the symbol of the unity of Muslims as a faith-based community and allowed space for diverse loyalties and local autonomy for the periphery.15 The Basque provinces enjoyed a similar kind of autonomy under the name of the foral system, in which the local laws and economic privileges had been maintained against the central authority until they were replaced in the nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, Spain was a composite of very diverse territories united under the monarchy. Many of these territories kept not only their languages but also very distinct customary laws and legal codes. And, in some cases, such as the Basque provinces and Navarre, they retained political institutions of their own, such as governing assemblies and collective territorial privileges. In the Basque provinces these privileges also exempted the local population from both military service and taxation while allowing the provincial assemblies the right to veto royal edicts.16 In sum, it is possible to argue that in Britain, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire, central authorities were compelled to rely on indirect rule to control their far-flung territories in order not to lose their political control over them before the nineteenth century.17 However, in the face of the new capitalist development it has gradually become necessary to transform the indirect rule, and once indirect rule is undermined a potential for nationalism exists.18 Capitalism is a process of capital accumulation which is open to structural changes,19 and nationalism, as a closely linked ideology with the capitalist world-economy, has gained different characteristics at different levels of capital accumulation. Nationalism has emerged in the European scene when the capitalist world-economy was in need of a more regular market, common legal bindings, clear frontiers, and a compromise between capital and coercion. This process was accompanied by rising nationalism and the nation-state. Monopolization of the means of coercion was in the hands of the state until the sixteenth century, but from the end of the eighteenth century the state has also taken over the monopoly of administration and jurisdiction.20 The nation-state has emerged as the new main actor of the new world system. State-building nationalism was embodied in the attempt to assimilate or incorporate culturally distinctive territories in a given state. It was the result of the conscious efforts of central rulers to make a multicultural population

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culturally homogeneous. Peripheral nationalism is spurred by these efforts of state-building nationalism.21 These states imagined their own communities on behalf of the others, and the relationships between these conflicted communities have basically transformed during the three phases of the capitalist accumulation that will be mentioned below. The nation-state formation has taken different forms in different regions. The same goes for the British, Spanish, and Turkish cases as well. However, the transformation of the center–periphery relations in each of these cases followed similar paths with different contents. The growing pressure of the central authority on peripheral regions was conspicuous. Consequently, the peripheral regions not only lost their administrative autonomies; they were also under the threat of losing their different cultural identities under the expanding national identity construction of the state. While Ireland directly became part of the United Kingdom in 1801,22 Kurds23 and Basques24 also lost their autonomies in the nineteenth century. Although they have different places in the capitalist world-economy, in terms of defining their identities Britain, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire were going through a similar transformation. Since then, supra-identities have merged with the national identity discourses of the state. Located in the European geography, while the British and Spanish supra-identities have turned into national identities, Turkish national identity had to be built both as national and supra-identity at the same time during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and foundation of the Turkish Republic. Under these circumstances, the peripheral regions sought ways to organize resistance against the center by redefining their regional sub-identities as national identities. Therefore, two contentious nationalist discourses, one from the top (the state) and one from the bottom (the minority) had begun to clash at the end of the nineteenth century. Peripheral nationalisms were outcomes of the tension between the forces of homogenization and the struggle to maintain cultural and local autonomy. This tension is at the core of the politicization of the Kurdish, Irish, and Basque cultures.25 Looking closely at the peripheral regions, one can observe similar cultural awakening experiences in Ireland, the Basque provinces, and the Kurdish regions. These experiences have been a cultural base for nationalist risings against the center in these territories. During the cultural awakening era, the Irish, Basques, and Kurds rediscovered their regional differences like language, history, and culture through nationalist lenses. With the help of newly established associations, sport clubs, and/or newspapers, they had begun to imagine their own community against Britishness, Spanishness, or Turkishness. The Nation, the first Irish nationalist weekly newspaper, was founded in 1842. It set out to awaken a national consciousness in the mass of

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the Irish people and to make them aware of their cultural heritage, which had been trampled by centuries of British domination.26 In 1892, Sabino Arana, the father of Basque nationalism, published his first political writing, Bizkaya por su independencia, in which he articulated a narrative of how Basques had lost their ancient independence and noble freedom.27 The first Kurdish newspaper, Kürdistan, which was published in 1898, was a very significant source in determining the perception of Kurdish identity at the turn of the century. Another newspaper, Jin, which was published in 1918, represented a broad spectrum of Kurdish rhetoric.28 It is in this period that Irish, Basque, and Kurdish societies were formed and legally functioned in Britain, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. The first nationalist political parties also had been founded during the same periods: 1895, PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco); 1905, Sinn Fein; and 1908, Kürt Teavün ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Kurdish Society for Cooperation and Progress). They were the leading voices of nationalists in their own communities. These similarities have exposed themselves during the next phase of the capitalist economy, the welfare state period. After the Second World War the new welfare state “consensus” had many diverse sources—the communist threat included—and a new institutional order adopted at Bretton Woods, with its restrictions on capital flows and free trade, contributed to a stable trade regime. The confidence that the welfare state was affordable and even functional to the needs of the economy was surely among the reasons for the “consensus.”29 Macroeconomic planning of the state and its reflections on political and social life was the major fact of this new capitalist phase. The national identity discourses in the center and periphery were revived under this new orientation. The first dynamic was closely linked with the regulatory role of the state in public and private areas. While the state had turned into a major actor in economic life, it still maintained its critical position in defining national identity through the renewed discourse of citizenship. With this new capitalist turn, with varying degrees of civil, political, and social citizenship, the states began to legitimate themselves in terms of “the people.”30 The development of the welfare state meant a “social citizenship” whereby national social programs brought citizens together through common sets of rights, responsibilities, and values. In other words, social policy was integrated into, and fed, national identity as a supra-identity.31 It was probably the most striking period for observing the interchangeable meaning of the national identity and citizenship. The developing social rights and relatively increasing incomes have expanded middle classes under the control of the welfare system. It has succeeded in creating higher levels of education, social security, remuneration, and employment. The peripheral regions were—relatively—part of this

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development. But while the level of education and incomes were on the rise in these regions as part of macro-level planning, as was the case in Northern Ireland, in the Basque provinces and Kurdish regions the political oppression did not cease to exist. In the 1940s, the welfare state in Northern Ireland undoubtedly benefited one of the poorest regions of the Britain. Among the social and economic improvements made, those concerning education must be highlighted, since they made it possible for increasing numbers of Catholics to attend university, which in turn led to a substantial improvement in life conditions. The welfare politics created a relatively more prosperous, well-educated, and socially ambitious Catholic middle class. But despite these improvements, Catholics continued to be underrepresented in sectors such as the civil service, local government, or the judiciary, having a greater presence in unskilled work.32 The most important reaction against this situation was the peaceful Civil Rights Movement which began in 1963. With the support of the working classes, a newly expanded Catholic middle class and students were at the front of this struggle and demanded equal citizenship rights as British citizens. But the reaction of the local and central governments against this unarmed movement was harsh. In 1968 armed conflict between the Catholics and Protestants increased and replaced the peaceful demonstrations. It was the outbreak of “the Troubles,” which lasted till 1998. The dictatorship of Franco in Spain also deepened the conflict between the center and periphery. Between 1939 and 1975, any expression of Basque culture, in particular the language, was severely oppressed. At school, in the post offices, and the town halls the use of Euskera was heavily sanctioned. The Francoist civil servants and the hated Guardia Civil removed the language from the public domain through ruthless repression.33 On the other hand, in the 1950s the Basque economy was booming.34 The PNV, the leading political party of the Basque provinces, was largely middle class and reformist. It supported a vaguely specified expansion of the public. However, the young generation was not satisfied with the ineffective strategies of the PNV against the cultural oppression of the Franco regime. Like in Northern Ireland, the university students especially led a new movement, and the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) was founded in 1959. By gaining a wide-based support from the Basque provinces it dethroned the PNV and became the symbol of Basque nationalism until 1978. The leading role of the university students and newly expanded middle class could also be observed in the Kurdish issue in Turkey during the same time period. The separate existence of Kurds had been denied by the Turkish nationalist discourse for many decades after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. As a part of the nation-building reforms, Kurdish traditional

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notions of identity and culture were constructed as “reactionary,” “tribal,” and an outcome of regional “backwardness.” After crushing a long series of Kurdish revolts in 1938, Ankara concentrated its assimilation program. Until 1961, Kurdish nationalist activity in Turkey appeared largely dormant. However, with the spread of universal education and sociopolitical liberalization as a result of the 1961 constitution a new phase began for Kurds in Turkey. The Kurdish language and any other cultural representation of Kurdishness were still forbidden; the oppression on Kurds did not soften. However, the 1961 constitution created an opening for freedom of expression in any way, and new modern intellectuals rather than tribal and religious leaders started to shape Kurdish identity in this atmosphere. In 1960s, Kurdish identity found a place for itself within the framework of the broader leftist movement in Turkey.35 Kurdish students were active members of the socialist movements like Revolutionary Youth (DEV-GENC). Öcalan was a member of DEV-GENC; but in 1974 he begun to organize his own political group; the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was formally founded in 1978. On the other side, there was Revolutionary Cultural Associations of the East (DDKO), which was founded in 1969 and closed in 1970. It advocated political, civil, and economic rights for the people in the East and played an important role in reviving the modern Kurdish movement in Turkey in that short period.36 During this Kurdish reawakening the demands were primarily concerned with civic and social rights at the beginning, as in the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. They focused around issues such as being recognized as full citizens by the state and being given the same rights as other citizens.37 The Third World movement of the 1960s was an inspiring second dynamic in this period that particularly affected the peripheral nationalisms. The concept of “internal colonization,”38 which was developed during the anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa, inspired the peripheral nationalist movements in Europe. The term was not just a commentary on the structure of territorial politics, but a critique of how modernizing forces of the central authority in the form of industrialization, urbanization, mass consumption, and mass education lead to integration of regional communities into homogenous societies.39 Kurdish and Irish nationalists were using “internal colonialism” for legitimating their newly organized movements, and even Basques were in favor of it to blame the Franco regime.40 Besides the internal colonization term, the liberation wars in Asia and Africa also gave motivation to the new peripheral nationalist movements for using force against the central authority and for legitimating it in the eyes of public opinion. The rebirth of the IRA in Northern Ireland and the founding of ETA and PKK in Spain and Turkey could also be interpreted within this context.41

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The third dynamic in this period was the 1968 movement, which shook the established political movements and institutions with its critical discourse and action-oriented disposition. The rising human rights activism and civil rights and antiwar movements in almost all the Western countries encouraged new nationalist movements as mentioned above. The appealing socialist ideas of the time had their influence on these movements, and as a reflection of the prevalent ideas nationalist movements in the peripheral regions acquired a class element. As a corollary, the nationalist rhetoric has been shaped not only against the center, but also against the capitalist mode of production. Ironically, nationalism has gained a new dimension in the hands of peripheral nationalists despite its roots that are embedded in the capitalist worldeconomy. Therefore neither the cooperation between the Turkish socialist factions and Kurdish movement nor the socialist debates in the IRA and ETA were exceptional.42 The alliance between nationalist and socialist movements would last until the end of the Cold War. The third and the last phase of structural and historical similarities between the three cases that are analyzed here is the neoliberal era, which started during the late 1970s. This neoliberal turn in the capitalist world-economy was not just an economic recipe to its last crisis but was also a political path which genuinely transformed the classical meaning of the nation-state and sovereignty concepts, especially in the EU for member states. Surely, state institutions, both domestic and geopolitical, still have causal efficacy because they, too, (like economic, ideological, and military institutions) provide necessary conditions for social existence.43 However, on the other side, as a new economic project on new conditions, neoliberalism also committed itself to further liberalization and deregulation in many areas; to the privatization of most of what remained of the state-owned sector; and to the extension of market forces into what remained of the public and social services at national, regional, and local levels as well as to the spread of market forces into the provision of such services in Europe and elsewhere in the world.44 While strengthening the subnational and transnational economic and political networks, it began to decentralize the nation-state and, in this context, the nation-state has been reorganized on territorial and functional levels. The transformation of the nation-state has deeply influenced the center–periphery relations and therefore majority–minority relations. The state, under the deregulatory pressures of the neoliberal turn, not only lost some of its critical functions in economic life but also began to lose much of its capacity to define limits of different identities in its borders. The identities that hitherto were subjected to the homogenizing efforts of the state were able to raise their voices and reclaim their rights under the new conditions

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because identity politics as well as the sanctity of free markets and privatization emerged as the most salient outcome the neoliberal transformation. The expansion of the public sphere of civil society and the privatization of the media played important roles in breaking the state’s monopoly over information and deliberation on identity issues.45 In addition, two other developments also enhanced the rise of identity politics during the neoliberal era. First is the growing attention to the minority rights in Europe after the collapse of the USSR and disintegration of Yugoslavia. There was an extensive diffusion and institutionalization of minority rights culture in Europe, and a minority rights regime has stemmed from the EU, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The development of this rights regime has involved the construction of a rights culture, which has put peripheral nationalist movements on stronger normative footing.46 Second is the new regional policy of the EU, which aims to reduce the development levels of the various regions and also supports decentralization in economic and administrative structures in member states. European market integration has provided new opportunities for autonomy and self-government, although one constrained by the needs of economic competition.47 The region has become a more or less autonomous agent within the broader market, and peripheral nationalists have redefined their regional interests according to this new orientation. A new political space has emerged for them in which they have found a chance to represent themselves. Under these new conditions, the peripheral nationalisms in Western Europe have effected reconciliation with the new order. As has been the case for Sinn Fein/IRA or the PKK, the peripheral nationalist movements that had a socialist past have ruptured their socialist ties and begun to draw a more compatible portrait with the EU. Their demands (cultural rights and/or autonomy) have been reshaped according to this settlement. Contrary to the nineteenth century and welfare state period, the neoliberal system has supported their political demands unless they do not persist on armed struggle. In this sense, neither the Northern Ireland peace process48 nor the diminishing support for ETA in the Basque Country is surprising.49 The “Kurdish opening” in Turkey can also be regarded as a corollary50 as it was initiated by the government under the intersection of the external and internal dynamics in Turkey. However, despite the basic structural and historical similarities in line with the evolution of the capitalist world-economy, there are also significant differences between Britain, Spain, and Turkey and between peripheral regions which have differentiated the conflict resolution processes in these countries.

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National and Regional Differences Although the world system analysis provides a general framework which allows us to draw common historical and structural patterns among the identity issues, the internal dynamics have definitely played a crucial role in terms of identity politics. As argued above, nationalism and national identity construction, both in the center and periphery, are a product of the nineteenth century, and this process has reproduced itself during the welfare system and neoliberal era. However, looking closely, each case represents different identity formation processes that affect both citizenship policies and conflict resolution mechanisms in the peripheral regions. The first significant difference that could be examined between Britain, Spain, and Turkey are the etymologic roots of the supra-identity and the construction process of the supra-identity as a national identity. When Britishness and Spanishness are compared with Turkishness, it can be seen that while the first two identities refer to a territory, the latter refers to an ethnic identity. The British national identity especially is not only different from Turkey but also from other countries in continental Europe because, unlike most of other supra-identity constructions, British supra-identity as a national identity has been built as a multinational identity from the beginning, without abandoning an imperial mentality.51 “Unity in Difference” has never been a new slogan for Britain. For understanding the exception of the British national identity, we should look at the history of early capitalism in Britain, in which the British bourgeoisie, unlike its French or Spanish counterparts, did not have to fight against the monarchy and aristocracy by instrumentalizing “the nation” against them. It transformed the regime as it desired by forging a coalition with the aristocracy against the ruling monarchy, and a stable parliamentary regime could be built in the seventeenth century.52 In the nineteenth century, the British monarchy and parliament have turned into the symbols of a British national identity, but as mentioned above, it was an identity that did not ignore the Scottish, Gaelic, or Irish identity. In this context Britain has never been a typical nation-state, and British policies against its peripheral regions have never been shaped by an intense English nationalism; instead Britain, as the leading imperial power, had imperial concerns, and it approached its peripheral regions through a strategic thinking. Therefore, London has recognized the different cultures and distinct identities in the peripheral regions: the Irish are Irish; he or she has never been called English. London has enforced centralization, but British centralization policies have been based on parliamentary sovereignty rather than national sovereignty with homogenizing efforts. Thus, the effects of the British centralization policies on identity politics have been quite soft when compared with Spanish and Turkish cases.

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However, the situation was very different in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While the British Empire was at the peak of its power, the Ottoman Empire was in the process of breaking up, and the Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism was not able to prevent it from failing. Interestingly, the non-Muslim minorities, mostly living in the Balkans, had encountered nationalism before the Ottoman Turks, who were the ruling majority. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Turkish nationalism also emerged among some intellectuals, and in 1908, after the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) seized power from the Ottoman sultan, it has become the main ideology of the new government. The CUP elites saw Turkish nationalism as a recipe for delaying the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, instead of saving, they accelerated the fall and disintegration of the Empire, and Turkish nationalism was the founding ideology of a new state, the Turkish Republic, in 1923. The new regime continued to pursue and even strengthen this ideological approach, and, among the many other ethnic identities in the ex-Ottoman territories, chose “Turkishness” as the supraidentity of the nation with an aim to create a homogeneous society, which led to assimilating and suppressing other ethnic identities in Turkey. Therefore, Turkishness has never had a plural content as has Britishness. Spanish national identity as a supra-identity has also been built in a very different way than Turkish national identity. Spanishness has been defined as a national identity since the nineteenth century; however the internal political conflicts between political parties and early formation of peripheral nationalist movements in the Basque provinces and in Catalonia have averted the development of a strong supra-identity in Spain.53 The national minorities were subject to centralization during the nineteenth century, but the first authoritarian regime that they faced was the era of General de Rivera (1923–1930). The cultural representation of their identities were limited and nationalist and regionalist political activities were forbidden in this period. However, the Franco period (1939–1975) was much worse than that. The regional and cultural differences were violently oppressed, and Spanishness lost its plural meaning to Spanish nationalism. These practices under authoritarian regimes have strengthened Basque nationalism and led to the establishment of new underground organizations like ETA. But, even in these periods, the existence of a separate Basque identity has never been denied as with the denial of Kurdish identity in Turkey. Despite all the authoritarian experiences of the twentieth century, a historical mentality that acknowledges Spanish identity as a plural identity has been retained in the minds of Spaniards even in the Franco period. This legacy would be effective in the democratization process of Spain after Franco’s death in 1975. The constitution of 1978 has revised the Spanish identity on this plural

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understanding and created a new political stage for the national minorities like Basques and Catalans by granting them regional autonomies.54 Therefore, during the conflict resolution processes in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country, the redefinition of the supra-identity has never been an issue of debate like it is in Turkey. The territorial references of British and Spanish identities have been inclusive of the subidentities. On the other hand, when initiatives for a reconciliation of the Kurdish issue were started by the government in Turkey, the first issue raised was about renaming the supra-identity. Instead of Turkish or Turk, Türkiyelilik has been suggested by some intellectuals.55 However, not only the nationalist Turks but also some prominent Kurdish figures have rejected this new definition, which made the supra-identity reach a stalemate. The Turkish experience in identity politics is also different from the British and Spanish cases in terms of its integration to the neoliberal accumulation regime. Unlike Britain and Spain, Turkey has integrated this new phase by a coup d’état in 1980, and this fact has generated some basic dissimilarities between the Northern Ireland, Basque, and Kurdish issues. The repressive policies of the central authorities and security forces, violations of human rights, and torture in prisons were widespread before the 1980s in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country. The IRA and ETA were defensive armed groups against the antidemocratic politics of the British and Spanish governments in the eyes of local and international public opinion. But, during the neoliberal era, as the democratic conditions improved and new political options have emerged, the IRA and ETA have begun to lose their legitimacy for armed struggle, and British and Spanish governments have adapted to new conditions and changed their approaches towards these regions. However, this was not the case in Turkey. The Kurds in Turkey have undergone similar kinds of violations as Catholics and Basques have experienced during the same period; but while the level of repression began to decline in the two other cases after the 1980s, the oppression of Kurds increased heavily after the 1980 coup d’état. It was under these conditions that, unlike the IRA and ETA, the PKK began its armed struggle and found grassroots support at the beginning of the neoliberal age. The Turkish authorities have adopted severe policies that British and Spanish authorities have begun to give up, such as treating all Kurds as suspected terrorists, banning all kinds of cultural expression, and jailing many Kurdish activists. This oppression has only made the PKK more popular. It must also be stressed that Turkey was and is not an EU member like two others, and economic, social, and regional policies of the EU were not effective in Turkey as they were in Britain and Spain. While the EU played a positive role during the peace processes in Northern Ireland and the Basque

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Country, Turkish nationalists have begun to regard the EU as protector of the Kurdish nationalist movement. In this context, the third difference that should be taken into consideration is geographical location. It is obvious that the Northern Ireland and Basque issues are national minority issues within Europe. However, the Kurdish issue is an issue in the Middle East, although the EU has been interested in the Kurdish issue in Turkey and has urged Turkish governments to transform the legal procedure of minority policies and improve the implementation. The Kurds are an autochthonous people spread to four countries, namely Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Therefore, Kurds as a whole do not take advantage of the EU conditionally like the Catholics in Northern Ireland or the Basques in Spain. Their fate is closely linked to developments in the broader Middle East. But for those Kurds living in Turkey, the EU accession process is also as significant as the developments in the Middle East. The leading Kurdish politicians in Turkey clearly declared their support for Turkey’s EU bid, in the anticipation that the EU conditionally would help transform Turkish state society relations and increase pressure for more democratization, including human and minority rights. The last difference that should be underlined is that not only Britain, Spain, and Turkey but also the peripheral regions represent geographical, historical, social, cultural, and economic differences which consequently affected the conflict resolution processes. Northern Ireland is a peripheral region which was formed after the division of Ireland in 1921. When examined from a center–periphery perspective, it can be argued that it has never been a subject of British nationalism, but that the main problem was between the Protestant majority, which has been supported by Britain since the seventeenth century, and the suppressed Catholic minority. Therefore, the problem in Northern Ireland had always two interdependent dimensions: the first was a conflict between the center and periphery revolving around the demands for an independent Ireland, which then turned into a dispute of unification of Northern Ireland with Ireland. The second was a conflict of two communities within the periphery between Catholics and Protestants. However, this second dimension of the conflict have been more determinant in the Northern Ireland conflict, especially after Britain accepted the consent of the majority in 1973.56 As of the 1990s, while the conflict between the center (Britain) and the periphery (Northern Ireland) had already lost its momentum, the conflict between the communities there could not be solved until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. However, neither in the Basque provinces nor in the Kurdish regions do intercommunal conflict exist. Therefore the Good Friday Agreement is a significant step in finding a solution to a 100-year-long identity conflict, but

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it works only as a source of inspiration, not a role model to be followed, for the solution of conflicts in the two other regions. In a search for a solution, the Basque model is much more appropriate as a model for the Kurdish issue than the Northern Ireland model. The Basque Country, contrary to the least-developed Kurdish regions in Turkey, is one of the most developed parts of Spain;57 however, except for this significant difference, the center–periphery conflict in each of them is more similar than that of Northern Ireland.58 The 1978 Spanish constitution, which granted autonomy to the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia and has paved the way for a solution of the Basque problem by marginalizing the ETA,59 should be analyzed not only for finding a solution for the Kurdish issue but also to realize the democratization steps in Turkey.

Conclusion This chapter tries to develop a novel approach to majority–minority relations through the perspective of center–periphery relations within the framework of the capitalist world-economy. It tries to reveal common global dynamics to observe the similar political discourses and actions during the national identity formations in the center and periphery. Despite the apparent internal and local differences, these commonalities have the potential to provide a broader outlook to analyze the transformation of the national identity concept in general. In this framework, both the “Kurdish Opening” of the JDP government and the efforts at the reconstruction of the political community in Turkey fits into this global context.

Notes 1. Damin Tambini, “Post-National Citizenship,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 2 (March 2001): 195. 2. Jean Leca, “Nationalité et citoyenneté dans l’Europe des immigrations,” in Logiques d’Etat et immigration en Europe, edited by J. Costa-Lascoux and P. Weil (Paris: Kimé, 1992), from Riva Kastoryano, “Citizenship, Nationhood, and NonTerritoriality: Transnational Participation in Europe,” Political Science and Politics 38, no. 4 (October 2005): 693. 3. For further reading, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1992); Anthony Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998); and Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Penguin Group, 1993). 4. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 6.

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5. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 126. 6. Baskın Oran, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar, Kavramlar, Teori, Lozan, İç Mevzuat, İçtihat, Uygulama (İstanbul: İletişim, 2004), 27. 7. Oran, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar, 27. 8. Will Kymlicka and Christine Straehle, “Cosmopolitanism, Nation-States, and Minority Nationalism: A Critical Review of Recent Literature,” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no, 1(1999): 66. 9. Raphael Zariski, “Ethnic Extremism among Ethnoterritorial Minorities in Western Europe: Dimensions, Causes, and Institutional Responses,” Comparative Politics 21, no, 3 (April 1989): 257, 260. 10. Jennifer Todd, The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and Emancipation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18–19. 11. John Tomaney, “End of the Empire State? New Labour and Devolution in the United Kingdom,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no, 3 (September 2000): 676; Mari Fitzduff, Beyond Violence: Conflict Resolution Process in Northern Ireland (New York: United Nations University Press, 2002), 1–2; Todd, The Dynamics of Conflict, 20. 12. Hakan Özoğlu, Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 51, 53. 13. Hakan Yavuz, “Five Stages of the Construction of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 7, no. 3 (2001): 4. 14. Mesut Yeğen, “The Kurdish Question in Turkish State Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 4 (1999): 557. 15. Yavuz, “Five Stages,” 7. 16. Xosé-Manoel Núñez, “The Region as Essence of the Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism (1840–1936),” European History Quarterly 31 (October 2001): 487; Daniele Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation (London: Hurst and Company, 1997), 45. 17. Michael Hechter, Tuna Kuyucu, and Audrey Sacks, “Nationalism and Indirect Rule,” http://faculty.washington.edu/hechter/Nationalism.pdf (2008), 4. For further details on this mutual dependency in Kurdish case see Özoğlu, Kurdish Notables. 18. Hechter, Kuyucu, and Sacks, “Nationalism and Indirect Rule,” 5. 19. Bob Jessop, “Capitalism and Its Future: Remarks on Regulation, Government and Governance,” Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 561–581. 20. Bkz. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990); Cem Eroğul, Devlet Nedir? (Ankara: İmge, 1990), 54. 21. Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15–17. 22. Great Britain was created with the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, but the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formally begun at the beginning of the nineteenth century after the Act of Union with Ireland. The centralization of Britain was based on parliamentary sovereignty, and, despite the acknowledgement of different regions and their cultures, Westminster was the head of the Union. Tomaney, “End of the Empire State,” 676; Richard Kiely, David McCrone, and Frank

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Bechhofer, “Whither Britishness? English and Scottish People in Scotland,” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 1 (2005): 80. 23. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the modernization and Westernization process had started in the Ottoman state for coping with the West. The central authority had gone through a process of administrative restructuring throughout the empire, including in Kurdistan. Therefore, Kurds began to lose their autonomy in the nineteenth century while the Ottoman state was transforming itself to a nation-state, the Turkish Republic. 24. Basques lost all their foral privileges in 1876. As the century ends, the Basque provinces seemed closely linked to Madrid both politically and administratively. Robert P. Clark, The Basques: The Franco Years and Beyond (Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1979), 31. 25. For Kurdish nationalism, see Yavuz, “Five Stages,” 3. 26. Priscilla Metscher, “‘Ireland Her Own’: Radical Movements in NineteenthCentury Ireland,” The Republic 2 (Spring/Summer 2001): 59. 27. Diego Muro, “The Politics of War Memory in Radical Basque Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 4 (May 2009): 670. 28. Özoğlu, Kurdish Notables, 163. 29. John Callaghan, “Social Democracy and Globalisation: The Limits of Social Democracy in Historical Perspective,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 4, no. 3 (October 2002): 437. 30. Michael Mann, “Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nationstate?,” Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (1997): 476. 31. André Lecours, Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007), 137. 32. Rogelio Alenso, The IRA and Armed Struggle (London: Routledge, 2007), 57; Jeremy Smith, Making the Peace in Ireland (London: Longman, 2002), 65. 33. Hans van Amersfoort and Jan Mansvelt Beck, “Institutional Plurality: A Way Out of the Basque Conflict?” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 450. 34. Lécours, Basque Nationalism, 75. 35. Yavuz, “Five Stages,” 2, 9; David Romano, The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization, and Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 120. 36. Michael M. Gunter, Historical Dictionary of the Kurds (Oxford, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), 41. 37. Hamit Bozarslan, “Political Aspects of the Kurdish Problem in Contemporary Turkey,” in The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview, edited by Philip G.Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl (London: Routledge, 2005), 77. 38. For further reading, see Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 39. Mike Marinotto, “The Settlement and Process of Devolution: Territorial Politics and Governance under the Welsh Assembly,” Political Studies 49, no. 2 (2001): 308. 40. Alenso, The IRA, 16; Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 38; Ludger Mees, Nationalism, Violence and Democracy: The Basque Clash of Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 173.

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41. The IRA was born from its ashes during the Troubles in Northern Ireland against the British army and security forces. The ETA was founded in 1953 and began armed operations in 1968. The PKK was also founded in 1977, but despite the IRA and ETA, it started armed struggle in 1984. 42. For more information, see Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of IRA (Oxford: Macmillan, 2003), 115–120; Conversi, The Basques, 91–98; Mees, Nationalism, Violence, 25. 43. Mann, “Has Globalization Ended,” 474. 44. Bob Jessop, “From Thatcherism to New Labour: Neo-Liberalism, Workfarism, and Labour Market Regulation,” published by the department of sociology, Lancaster University, www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc131rj.pdf (March 2009), 6. 45. Betigül Ercan Argun, “Universal Citizenship Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Question,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19, no. 1 (1999): 85. 46. Lécours, Basque Nationalism, 174–175. 47. Michael Keating, Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a PostSovereignty Era (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 151. 48. The peace process in Northern Ireland has gained ground in the 1990s, and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has been a sign of this process. In 2005 the IRA gave up arms, and in 2007 a devolved government of Northern Ireland was formed. 49. Asked for their personal “opinion or attitude towards ETA in this moment,” between 1981 and 1996 the percentage of Basque citizens who expressed their “total support” for the ETA came down from 8 to 1 percent. Mees, Nationalism, Violence, 98. 50. In 2009 the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government publicized a new initiative to give more rights and freedoms to Kurdish citizens of Turkey. It has been interpreted as a new positive step for finding a peaceful solution for the Kurdish issue. However, it has paused because of the governments’ paradoxical actions and because of the restart of PKK operations. 51. For further reading, see Tom Nairn, “The Twilight of the British State,” New Left Review I, no. 101–102 (January–April 1977): 3–62; Ben Wellings, “EmpireNation: National and Imperial Discourses in England,” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 1 (2002): 95–109. 52. For details, see Barrington Moore, Jr., Diktatörlüğün ve Demokrasinin Toplumsal Kökenleri: Çağdaş Dünyanın Yaratılmasında Soylunun ve Köylünün Rolü (Ankara: İmge, 2003). 53. The Spanish state also could not rely on an effective education system. Politics revolved around clientelism rather than mass mobilization, and the political elite was reluctant to change this comfortable situation. Lecours, Basque Nationalism, 20. 54. For the 1978 Spanish constitution, see www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/sp00000_.html. 55. The leading examples are Professor Baskın Oran and Professor İbraim Kaboğlu, who prepared the minority report in 2004 for the subcommittee of the Prime Ministry’s Advisory Board on Human Rights. They suggested that the foundations of the population must be based on Türkiyelilik—the idea of belonging to Turkey—in this report. However, Oran and Kaboğlu have become public targets after being prosecuted under Article 301 for allegedly denigrating the Turkish state because they had put forward the concept of “Türkiyelik.” To read the full text of the report, see Basbakanlık Insan Hakları Danısma Kurulu, “Azınlık Hakları ve Kültürel Haklar Calısma Grubu” raporu

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(Ekim, 2004), http://baskinoran.com/belge/IHDKAzinliklarRaporu-MakamaTakdim _Ekim2004_.pdf (2008). 56. By the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, both Britain’s and Ireland’s governments have recognized that Northern Ireland’s status could depend on majority consent. This has also been acknowledged by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. 57. 1973 Sunningdale Agreement Article 5: “The Irish Government fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in that status. The British Government solemnly declared that it was, and would remain, their policy to support the wishes of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The present status of Northern Ireland is that it is part of the United Kingdom. If in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish.” http://cain.ulst .ac.uk/events/sunningdale/agreement.htm. 58. 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Constitutional Issues, Article 1(i): “1. The participants endorse the commitment made by the British and Irish Governments that, in a new British-Irish Agreement replacing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, they will: (i) recognise the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status, whether they prefer to continue to support the Union with Great Britain or a sovereign united Ireland.” http://news.bbc .co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/07_12_04_ni_agreement_01.pdf. 59. Regional resources per capita in the Basque Country are 60 percent higher than the average of the rest of the regions in Spain. José Ignacio Martínez Churiaque, “The Economic Situation in the Basque Country: A Powerful Financial Tool: The Economic Agreement State Government–Basque authorities,” www.paralalibertad .org/descargas/InformeLaberinto/M_Churiaque_Ingles.pdf (April 2010).

Bibliography 1973 Sunningdale Agreement. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/sunningdale/agreement.htm. 1978 Spanish Constitution. www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/sp00000_.html. 1998 Good Friday Agreement. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/07_12_04_ ni_agreement_01.pdf. Alenso, Rogelio. The IRA and Armed Struggle. London: Routledge, 2007. Baban, Feyzi. “Community, Citizenship and Identity in Turkey.” TIPEC Working Paper 04/4, www.trentu.ca/tipec/4baban4.pdf (March 2010). Basbakanlık Insan Hakları Danısma Kurulu. “Azınlık Hakları ve Kültürel Haklar Calısma Grubu.” raporu (Ekim 2004). http://baskinoran.com/belge/IHDKAzinliklar Raporu-MakamaTakdim_Ekim2004_.pdf (2008). Bozarslan, Hamit. “Political Aspects of the Kurdish Problem in Contemporary Turkey,” in The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview, edited by Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl, 74–89. London: Routledge, 2005. Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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Callaghan, John. “Social Democracy and Globalisation: The Limits of Social Democracy in Historical Perspective.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 4, no. 3 (October 2002): 429–451. Churiaque, José Ignacio Martínez. “The Economic Situation in the Basque Country: A Powerful Financial Tool: The Economic Agreement State Government–Basque Authorities.” www.paralalibertad.org/descargas/InformeLaberinto/M_Churiaque_ Ingles.pdf (April 2010). Clark, Robert P. The Basques: The Franco Years and Beyond. Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1979. Conversi, Daniele. The Basques, the Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation. London: Hurst and Company, 1997. English, Richard. Armed Struggle: The History of IRA. Oxford, UK: Macmillan, 2003. Ercan Argun, Betigül. “Universal Citizenship Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Question.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19, no. 1 (1999): 85–103. Eroğul, Cem. Devlet Nedir? Ankara: İmge, 1990. Fitzduff, Mari. Beyond Violence: Conflict Resolution Process in Northern Ireland. New York: United Nations University Press, 2002. Gunter, Michael M. Historical Dictionary of the Kurds. Oxford, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2004. Hechter, Michael. Containing Nationalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hechter, Michael, Tuna Kuyucu, and Audrey Sacks. “Nationalism and Indirect Rule.” http://faculty.washington.edu/hechter/Nationalism.pdf (2008). Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. Toronto: Penguin Group, 1993. Jessop, Bob. “Capitalism and Its Future: Remarks on Regulation, Government and Governance.” Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 561–581. ———. “From Thatcherism to New Labour: Neo-Liberalism, Workfarism, and Labour Market Regulation.” UK: Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. www .comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc131rj.pdf (March 2009). Kastoryano, Riva. “Citizenship, Nationhood, and Non-Territoriality: Transnational Participation in Europe.” Political Science and Politics 38, no. 4 (October 2005): 693–696. Keating, Michael. Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kiely, Richard, David McCrone, and Frank Bechhofer. “Whither Britishness? English and Scottish people in Scotland.” Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 1 (2005): 65–82. Marcus, Aliza. Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Mann, Michael. “Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State?” Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 3 (1997): 472–496. Marinotto, Mike. “The Settlement and Process of Devolution: Territorial Politics and Governance under the Welsh Assembly.” Political Studies 49, no. 2 (2001): 306–322.

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Mees, Ludger. Nationalism, Violence and Democracy: The Basque Clash of Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Metscher, Priscilla. “‘Ireland Her Own’: Radical Movements in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” The Republic 2 (Spring/Summer 2001): 59–71. Moore, Barrington, Jr. Diktatörlüğün ve Demokrasinin Toplumsal Kökenleri: Çağdaş Dünyanın Yaratılmasında Soylunun ve Köylünün Rolü. Ankara: İmge, 2003. Muro, Diego. “The Politics of War Memory in Radical Basque Nationalism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 4 (May 2009): 659–678. Nairn, Tom. “The Twilight of the British State.” New Left Review 1, no. 101–102 (January–April 1977): 3–62. Núñez, Xosé-Manoel. “The Region as Essence of the Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism (1840–1936).” European History Quarterly 31 (October 2001): 483–518. Oran, Baskın. Türkiye’de Azınlıklar, Kavramlar, Teori, Lozan, İç Mevzuat, İçtihat, Uygulama. İstanbul: İletişim, 2004. Özoğlu, Hakan. Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties,and Shifting Boundaries. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004. Romano, David. The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization, and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Smith, Anthony D. Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1998. Smith, Jeremy. Making the Peace in Ireland. London: Longman, 2002. Tambini, Damin. “Post-National Citizenship.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 2 (March 2001): 195–217. Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990. Todd, Jennifer. The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Power, Conflict and Emancipation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Tomaney, John. “End of the Empire State? New Labour and Devolution in the United Kingdom.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 3 (September 2000): 675–688. van Amersfoort, Hans, and Jan Mansvelt Beck. “Institutional Plurality: A Way Out of the Basque Conflict?” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 449–467. Wellings, Ben. “Empire-Nation: National and Imperial Discourses in England.” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 1 (2002): 95–109. Yavuz, Hakan. “Five Stages of the Construction of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 7, no. 3 (2001): 1–24. Yeğen, Mesut. “The Kurdish Question in Turkish State Discourse.” Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 4 (1999): 555–568. Zariski, Raphael. “Ethnic Extremism among Ethnoterritorial Minorities in Western Europe: Dimensions, Causes, and Institutional Responses.” Comparative Politics 21, no. 3 (April 1989): 253–272.

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3 The Making of Modern Turkey and the Structuring of Kurdish Identity: New Paradigms of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century Maya Arakon

T

KURDISH QUESTION IN TURKEY mainly started after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 but turned into ethnonationalist terrorism in the mid 1980s. After the military coup of 1980, Kurds and leftists of Turkey had to flee the country, and those who remained faced severe pressure on the part of the military government. In those years was born the Kurdish resurgent movement, which claimed the recognition of its cultural and linguistic identity and which afterwards turned to terrorist violence because of the violent pressure with which the government suppressed the demands. Thus, the terrorism problem that Turkey has been facing since then has its roots in the conflicting aspects of two major identities in Turkey: the Turkishness, which lies in the very founding principles of the Republic and which was fortified especially after the coup of 1980, and the Kurdishness, which is a different ethnic identity and was suppressed mostly with violence and spreading fear. This particular ethnic and cultural identity (mainly linguistic) became over the last decades the basis of a new nation-building process, in Turkey, but also in northern Iraq and western Iran. Except for the period of struggle for independence between 1919 and 1923, Kurdishness has never been accepted by the founding elites of the republic as a different entity, who saw in it a danger of breaking the newly unified state. Yet, during the war of independence between 1919 and 1920, Kemalists, the founding elites, promised autonomy to the Kurds and received Kurdish tribes’ assistance. As an autochthonous people of Anatolia, Kurds have lived in the ancient region of Mesopotamia; their societal structure was feudal, with landlords and sheiks who did not conceive of themselves as under the HE

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authority of the Ottoman sultan nor the new Turkish Republic, of which one of the founding principles was the centralization of the administration and the political authority. The Turkish state’s coercive policies to assimilate or to “Turkify” the Kurdish people began at the period that followed the foundation of the republic, and the repressive measures since then resulted in a struggle which dragged the country into bloodshed for almost 30 years. During this time, Kurds have started to claim their equal cultural rights. The concept of citizenship in Turkey is problematic. Three different interpretations are used to identify who is a Turk. The first is purely technical: a Turk is a citizen of Turkey. But the social perception of Turkishness and also the application of the official rules consider Turkishness as belonging to the Turkish ethnic group and especially to Turkish speakers. Finally, there is a religious interpretation, which accepts in this Turkishness all Muslims groups having lived under the Ottoman rule. In this confusing configuration, most of the Kurds—Turkish citizens, Muslims, but not ethnically Turks—have never felt entirely “citizens” of the state where they live. The problem became undeniable in the twenty-first century, when the founding concept of citizenship has remained insufficient to meet the claims of the Kurds. Some Kurds happen to believe that they cannot fully benefit from citizenship and demand more political, social, cultural, and linguistic rights. Under these circumstances, and especially since the beginning of the 2000s, a need to redefine Turkish citizenship and to find new paradigms has developed. This chapter aims to analyze the structure of the Kurdish identity within the construction of modern Turkey and to seek for new paradigms of citizenship that can meet the new claims of the twenty-first century. In the first part, the concept of nationalism and the historical background of the Kurdish question will be examined. In the second part, the chapter will try to analyze the Kurdish identity and the question of citizenship in Turkey and to find an answer to the very question of “why do we need a new paradigm of citizenship for the twenty-first century?”

Nationalism and the Historical Background of the Kurdish Question Since the end of the Cold War, nationalism has experienced a revival by being unleashed from its long-suppressed status under the bipolar system. The awakening of nationalist feelings across Europe went hand in hand with the growing strength of the EU institutions. There was the emergence of a new system in which the supranational bodies came to fulfil the functions for-

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merly provided by the state. In this new system, which allowed the minorities in Europe to express their identities more freely, some groups such as the Catalans, Basques, Corsicans, Irish, and Scots sought greater autonomy within their state territories.1 So why did the minorities begin to claim autonomy or independence after the end of the Cold War? What was the new impetus or the trigger for the revival of nationalism in Europe? In order to answer these questions, we should first understand what nationalism is in a broad sense. What Is Nationalism? Nationalism is an ideology that merges two separate entities, the first one being purely administrative—the state—and the second being purely emotive—the nation. The state provides goods and services to its citizens as well as economic prosperity,2 whereas the nation provides a sense of belonging and community to its members3 and thus brings forth a common political identity among a specified population. This common identity is grounded in a common and shared ethnicity, lineage, language, culture, religion, and/or citizenship. By generating shared historical experiences and myths, nationalism commands popular loyalty and elevates the nation-state to a place of primacy. It is vital to the transformation of disparate and politically weak ethnic and cultural groupings into modern states,4 and it transforms the administrative state into the sentimental nation. The nation can be defined as a political community that is capable of extracting further devotion from its members due to its emotional appeal. Hence it is not erroneous to assert that nationalism is about identity and that the nation-state serves as a defining element of political identification. In recent years, scholars have defined nationalism in several different ways. In his influential study entitled Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson5 argues that nationalism is a process of imagining nations, or political communities that have offered secular continuity and meaning to life after a radical change in the apprehension of time and space have transformed the way in which people conceptualized the world. Anthony D. Smith calls nationalism an ideological movement that extends and intensifies the meaning and scope of historic ethnic groups as communities whose members share ancestral myths, histories, cultures, and a sense of solidarity.6 Finally, Ernest Gellner defines nationalism as a theory of political legitimacy based on the correspondence of ethnic and state boundaries.7 Analyzing nationalism is guided by two assumptions. First, nationalism and the concept of nationality were and continue to be socially and politically constructed, and the nation-state is prevalent because it still provides security, economic welfare, and a sense of belonging to its members. Hence

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nationalism should not be treated as an essentialist value; it is malleable and its trajectory is susceptible to influence through policy instruments. The underlying social and economic conditions affect the course of nationalism within a given polity.8 Second, nationalism has stabilizing and destabilizing effects on the international system. It has been and continues to be a key ingredient of both domestic and international orders. All forms of nationalism embrace symbols that help define a unique and distinctive national grouping. These symbols may be either ethnic or civic in character. Ethnic nationalism defines nationhood as sharing some characteristics, including physical traits, culture, religion, language, and a common ancestry. For this reason, citizens of different ethnic origins, even if they live and share the soil of a common territory and state, do not become part of the national grouping. And in reverse, the ethnic groupings do not need states in order to become nations.9 Civic nationalism defines nationhood in terms of citizenship and political values rather than in terms of ethnicity. It is thus more inclusive than ethnic nationalism. A citizen is a national without taking into consideration ethnicity or common ancestry.10 This is why civic nationalism is sometimes able to erase ethnic and racial dividing lines. Ethnic nationalism is in a way the basis for a solid nation-state when the latter is formed around an ethnically homogeneous population. In today’s international system, however, ethnic nationalism might become violent and cause the breakup of existing multiethnic states, as we have seen in the case of the former Yugoslavia, or demand separatist action, as is the case in Spain, Turkey, and France. As an ethnic group inside a multiethnic state becomes mobilized, it passes through three main stages of national identification. First, it claims group distinctiveness and sets itself apart from the political and cultural mainstream. During this stage, ethnic identity may coexist with civic notions of nationhood, but ethnic affiliation becomes an important determinant of political affiliation, as was the case for the Bretons in France. Second, the ethnic grouping claims group autonomy and seeks to separate itself from central political institutions and establish its political autonomy. This means a distant affiliation with the nation-state. This was the case with the Catalans and the Basques in Spain. The third is the group secession stage. The ethnic community claims to establish its own nation-state, and ethnicity becomes the dominant factor of political identity.11 Kurds in Turkey, Corsicans in France, and Basques in Spain are examples in that respect. At this stage, the members of the ethnic groups show great devotion to the nation-state and sacrifice themselves on behalf of it if necessary. They even form armed organizations and fight for their own state-building process. This is the case with the Euskadi Ta Askata-

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suna (ETA) in Spain, Front de Libération National Corse (FLNC) in France, and Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK) in Turkey. In order to understand the incentives of the self-sacrifice of Kurdish people by forming the PKK in Turkey, we need to take a look at the historical background of the Kurdish question and understand why the Kurdish people turned to violence. Was it merely an ethnic claim on the part of the Kurdish people to found their own nation-state, or were there some other reasons which made them revolt against the authority of Turkish state? The Kurdish Question: A Historical Background The Kurdish question has certainly been one of the most important political problems of Turkey throughout the twentieth century. Although this was a problem that emerged in 1840 when the Ottoman Empire attempted to centralize the Kurdish emirates of the southeast part of the country, which led to a conflict between the central government and the Kurdish emirates in 1848,12 the question gained new dimensions with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The Ottoman system was based on the concept of millet, which referred to religious and ethnoreligious groups. The homogenization of the Anatolian population started at the end of the nineteenth century with the immigration of the Balkan Muslim populations and the emigration and massacre of nonMuslim populations. In order to cut off its links with the Ottoman legacy and to build a new and “modern” nation, the founder elites of modern Turkey, led by Mustafa Kemal, attempted to homogenize the population either by erasing religious differences by the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey or by ignoring ethnolinguistic differences. The new state had to be formed out of a single nation unified around the same language, the same culture, the same collective memory, and the same religious belonging. The Turkish state had two objectives: to create a society without any social, ethnic, and religious distinctions and to construct a nation based upon an individual and juridical affiliation and not upon the conglomeration of the ethnoconfessional communities.13 The Kurds, at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, were divided between the territories of four different countries: Turkey, Syria (under French control), Iraq (under British control), and Iran. In time, the Kurdish problem has gained both an intrastate dimension within and an interstate dimension between these countries.14 The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 did not recognize any groups other than non-Muslims as a minority.15 Thus, the new Republic rejected the existence of the Kurds. Furthermore, the societal structure of the Kurds who were living in the rural areas of southeast Turkey was not compatible with the project of

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modern Turkey since it was still a feudal system dating back to the Ottoman Empire. The Kurdish societal structure was then archaic and conservative; hence the new and modern Turkish state had to cut off its links with this old system which was against the rationale of the new republic.16 Before the independence war, Mustafa Kemal offered Kurdish tribal leaders future autonomy in exchange for their help during the independence movement, but that commitment faded as the founding elite started their nation-building after the liberation, and rebellion in the Kurdish region was used to justify repression nationwide.17 By the late 1920s, state historians and social scientists began to build a new ancestry for the Kurds, stating that they had descended from Turkmen tribes and thus really were Turks, but “Mountain Turks.”18 Towards the mid 1920s, coercive measures of the government started to rise. Speaking Kurdish was progressively banned, and the juridical practices were followed by military ones, culminating in the Kurdish revolt of 1925. It was the first Kurdish revolt of the new republic and, as the Kurds “did not exist” any more, those who resisted the new regime were not presented as Kurds with an ethnopolitical cause, but as tribes and bandits threatened by the dissemination of modern state power in the region. By the 1930s, with the rise of fascism in Europe, the Turkish governments also displayed nationalist sentiments under a single-party system. Within time, oppressive practices and assimilating policies increased to the extent that there has been a policy of “Turkification” in every aspect of life, from education to culture and even to the economy.19 The Settlement Law of 1934, a privileged text of Turkish nationalism of the 1930s, constitutes an example in this respect. After two large-scale Kurdish rebellions in 1925 and 1930, respectively the Sheik Said Rebellion and the Ağrı Rebellion, the new regime embarked on solving the Kurdish question by the means of an extensive settlement law. Despite highlighting that the ultimate aim of the law was the Turkification (assimilation) of non-Turks, the text produces the impression that those intended to be assimilated were tribal people with no ethnic identity.20 The Turkish state thus initiated a struggle against those who would not identify themselves as Turks. This practice went as far as emptying Kurdish villages to fill them with Turkish-speaking populations and changing the Kurdish names of the villages into Turkish ones.21, 22 Turning Kurds into Turks was a civilizing mission to eradicate tribalism and feudalism. During the republican period, there were many revolts against the new state. But the state always met resistance with violence. In 1925 the Sheikh Said Rebellion was crushed and the Independence Tribunals brought back its leaders for prosecution. Other revolts broke out from 1926 to 1930 in the southeast of the country, and in Dersim (now Tunceli) in 1937. Between

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1925 and 1938, tens of thousands of Kurds and Alevis23 were deported to Western Turkey.24 Parts of the area were under continuous martial law from 1925 until 1946. With the transition to a multiparty system in 1946, the Kurds could finally find some political means to express their identities. They started to form some modest political movements, and from the 1960s on, also thanks to the rural exodus to the big cities, a Kurdish intellectual elite started to emerge. Nevertheless, they were perceived as a threat to the secular and modern Republic, and thus their existence were constantly denied. With the military coups of 1971 and especially of 1980, the Kurds and their newly expressed demands for identity were harshly oppressed by the military junta, under which some Kurdish militants had to flee from Turkey. Under these circumstances, the cultural and linguistic claims of the Kurds turned into separatist, violent, and autonomous actions. Those who fled from the country became organized in Europe, gained cultural consciousness abroad, and started to express stronger demands for identity. An armed opposition led by the PKK—Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party)—was established in 1978 and lasted for 25 years, leading to approximately 40 thousand casualties. By the early 1990s, the militants numbered a few thousand. They eventually adopted a more conventional guerrilla style of violence, but tactical use of terrorism also persisted over time.25 In the 1990s, the armed struggle of the PKK went together with an eager discontent of the Kurdish masses. This indicated that the alienation between the Kurds and the state increased in the 1990s.26

Kurdish Identity and the Question of Citizenship in Turkey: Why Do We Need a New Paradigm? John Rawls defines citizenship as tangential to the concepts of equality and freedom, which are assumed to engage issues of justice, moreover the political one.27 Political justice should then be more direct and equitable. In most contemporary political theories, the citizen is conceptualized as a competent adult who can work and organize his or her life and formulate some vision of his or her personal good.28 So the political citizen should possess all the requisite capacities for self-government, should be politically active, and must be able to voice his or her discontent or assent.29 T. H. Marshall denotes that the meaning of citizenship has evolved from one tied to rights of property and liberty to one including rights of political participation and finally to one that comprises rights of welfare.30 The concept of citizenship in Turkey has been problematic since the foundation of the Turkish Republic. From its inception, the machinery of the state

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has been dedicated to homogenizing a diverse populace. Religion, for example, has been nationalized. Minority cultural expressions have been discouraged. The only explicit minority rights that exist in Turkey are the negative and positive rights “given” to the non-Muslims in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which codified the status of modern Turkey in international law.31 Even these minority rights have not been accorded correctly. The Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, or CHP), which was established by Mustafa Kemal and ruled Turkey as single-party state until 1946, proclaimed that the Turkish nation was a “social and political whole formed by citizens that are united by a common language, culture and objective.”32 In the early years of the Republic, Ankara reined in right-wing Türk Ocakları, which was the first body to define an ethnic Turkish nationalism. Thus, an organic Turkish identity was constructed in the 1920s and 1930s, rich in ancestral myths, national memories, and ethnic symbolism. Afet Inan, one of the architects of the new history, wrote that “Turkish children will learn that they are part of an Aryan, civilized and creative people descended from a high race who have existed for tens of thousands years.”33 The result was that, from Eastern Thrace to Kurdistan, “Turks were a people like the peoples of Europe . . . (and) had more historic right to Turkey than did anyone else.”34 The main references of Turkish nationalism have evolved from religious themes (1919–1923) to secularism (1924–1929) and finally to ethnocultural motifs (1929–1938).35 Within these boundaries, Turkish history has started to be rewritten to promote nationalist historiography, and Greek, Armenian, and Syriac contributions to the history have been obscured.36 By the way, all Muslims were considered members of the majority, the “Turkish nation.” In fact, demographers estimate that there are perhaps 50 different ethnic groups in the country.37 For the first 70 years of the Republic, the denial of the Kurdish identity was official. In 1991, then Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel lifted the ban on the Kurdish language, only for “nonpolitical” communications, and acknowledged, as he put it, “the Kurdish reality.”38 Yet, as Michael Hechter puts it, economic relations between core and periphery within a country incite peripheral nationalism.39 Ankara preferred to see the Kurdish question as an economic problem rather than an ethnic one.40 However, for many, Kurdish nationalism is the result of modern identity politics of the new republic, since many Turks consider Kurdishness as a latter-day political construct rather than an authentic ethnicity, and activists for Kurdish rights are cast as “terrorist and enemies of the nation.”41 With the Turkification of the southeast, the Kurdish language was banned and registrars refused to record Kurdish names on birth certificates.42 The Special Commission for

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Name Change, established in 1956, rebaptized thousands of Kurdish villages with new Turkish names.43 After the outbreak of the PKK violence, Kurdish rights entered a deep freeze. Kurdish cultural and historical representations were banned. Kurdish-leaning newspapers, publishing houses, charitable organizations, and NGOs were shuttered. Books about Kurds, Kurdistan, and Kurdish nationalism were seized.44 In August 2002, Parliament ended the ban on Kurdishlanguage broadcasting and legalized private Kurdish language lessons, and in June 2004, the state-run TRT television and radio began broadcasts in Kurmanci, the most widespread Kurdish dialect in Turkey. Yet Kurdish language–teaching institutions face frequent bureaucratic obstacles; censors still seize Kurdish pop music; in the past, the government criminalized the letters “x,” “q,” and “w,” which are proper to the Kurdish alphabet but do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, and plenty of prosecutions were mounted over spelling;45 in the “poster crisis” of 2003 a lower court ruled that a campaign of posters reading “Peace will prevail” in Turkish and Kurdish threatened national unity; and police nationwide were ordered to take off and remove similar kind of placards.46 In 2009, the Constitutional Court decided to ban the legal Kurdish party, Demokratik Toplum Partisi (DTP), the only one which represented the majority of the Kurdish population living in the southeast of the country, by reason of its allegedly close ties with the Kurdish terrorist organization PKK. The closing of the DTP was the last step in a series of closings of Kurdish parties that sought a political representation within the Turkish state system. In fact, since its foundation, the Constitutional Court has decided to ban 24 political parties, and most of them were Kurdish. Thus, before DTP, six other Kurdish parties have been banned by the Constitutional Court during the 1990s, and another one which saw the same fate coming along dissolved itself.47 As is seen from the above mentioned examples, Turkey presents a vigorous case of civic nationalism strongly connected to ethnicity and culture. From its very foundation, the Turkish republic became a coercive state that put ethnoreligious state policies at the heart of national identity, state-building, and the division of public resources.48 Kurds, who were banned from their cultural rights, were also banned from their political rights collectively, because the threshold for the general elections has been—and still is—10 percent for overall, and the Kurdish legal parties could not pass it as they did not get enough votes from the western parts of Turkey. This situation created an obstacle to the representation of most of the southeastern Kurdish people in the Turkish Parliament. The traditional concept of citizen necessitates for political citizenship to possess all the requisite capacities for self-government,

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and since the political citizen should be politically active and must be able to voice his or her discontent or assent and must participate in the political representation, according to T. H. Marshall, it is then possible to affirm that the Kurds, being kept from fulfilling their citizenship rights because of all the facts enumerated above, could in practice not be considered as—at least—full citizens of the Turkish republic. In this respect, Turkey needs a new definition, even a new paradigm of citizenship for the twenty-first century in order to make the Kurds feel at an equal level of citizenship with Turks. At the foundation of the Turkish republic, citizenship was considered as a societal project to create a modern, national, Turkish identity. Thus, the structural characteristics of universal citizenship have been described as rationality, progression, modern nationhood, and secularism whereas ethnic identities, religion, and traditional societal relations have been driven to the private sphere.49 Yet, in modern societies, citizenship has entered a process of “divorcing the nation-state,” and differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and language have begun to require their “legitimate” existence in the public area. In our days, citizenship is no more just belonging to the nation-state.50 It is also recognizing racial, linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic differences of the citizens. The concept of modern citizenship includes not only human rights but also identity politics. In this context, after the end of the Cold War and with the awakening of nationalist feelings in the 1990s, identities that once had been driven to the private sphere started to come out in the public arena, and the absolute, homogeneous, and inclusive category of Turkish citizenship has started to be questioned.51 The concept of “constitutional citizenship” was the main subject of discussion of this period, and some began to call themselves “to be from Turkey” instead of “to be Turkish.”52 When the then president, Süleyman Demirel, used the term in one of his speeches, he referred to an umbrella concept that bestowed on citizenship an identity without regard to ethnic, religious, or gender differences. The concept was appropriated from the German context, where the difference between citizenship as membership of a nation (Volk) and citizenship as membership of a state had paved the way to a critical debate. The notion of “constitutional patriotism” was initially suggested by Jürgen Habermas in 1992. By this notion, Habermas referred to a posttraditional citizenship that involved membership in the state.53 From that date on, the discussion around the recognition of Kurdish identity in Turkey has involved some arguments referring to the Spanish constitution of 1978, which gave some autonomous rights to regional ethnic groups such as the Basques and the Catalans. In fact, those who defended Kurdish autonomy or at least required the recognizing of the Kurdish identity, includ-

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ing political, social, cultural, and linguistic rights, pointed at some articles of the Spanish constitution. The preamble of the Spanish constitution, refers to the “protection of all Spaniards and peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, of their culture and traditions, languages and institutions.” Section 2 of the Preliminary Part stipulates that “the Constitution recognizes and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed and the solidarity among them all.” Clause 2 of Section 3 states that Castilian is the official language, but stipulates that “the other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Self-governing Communities in accordance with their Statutes,” while Clause 3 recognizes “the wealth of the different linguistic forms of Spain (as) a cultural heritage which shall be especially respected and protected.” Section 4 makes it clear that “the Statutes may recognize flags and ensigns of the Self-governing Communities. These shall be used together with the flag of Spain on their public buildings and in their official ceremonies.” Recent discussions about the Kurdish identity in Turkey and its official recognition by the state turn around these articles, and the defenders of the Kurdish cause often give the Spanish constitution as an example for the resolution of the Kurdish question. Especially the demands of the Kurds in Turkey for identity-based political activities are shaped around this thesis. The Kurdish question placed the concept of ethnicity in the heart of the politics in Turkey in a very efficient way. Yet, as the Kemalist political system did not allow the Kurdish reality to express its political identity in an ethnic motif, legal Kurdish political parties have been banned by the Constitutional Court, especially after the coup of 1980. In fact, the Constitutional Court in Turkey has given the judgment to close 24 political parties. Since the 1990s, the majority of the closing decisions have been given for the parties having the resolution of the Kurdish question as a political issue on their agenda. Within this framework, Halkin Emek Partisi (Popular Labor Party) was banned in 1993, Özgürlük ve Demokrasi Partisi (Freedom and Democracy Party) in 1993, Demokrasi Partisi (Democracy Party) in 1994, Demokratik Degisim Partisi (Democratic Change Party) in 1996, Demokratik Kitle Partisi (Democratic Mass Party) in 1999, and Halkin Demokrasi Partisi (Democratic Party of the People) in 2003, all being Kurdish parties. Demokratik Halk Partisi (Democratic People Party), which was founded instead of Halkin Demokrasi Partisi, abolished itself just before the decision of the Constitutional Court about its closure came to a conclusion.54 The only Kurdish political party which was representing the majority of the Kurdish vote of southeast Turkey, Demokratik Toplum Partisi (Democratic Society Party), was closed in 2009 by another decision of

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the Constitutional Court, and most of its dominant leaders have been banned from political activities. Moreover, most of the elected Kurdish mayors of the region have been jailed under accusation of being in close ties with the PKK, the Kurdish armed separatist organization. In recent years, and especially after the 2009 initiative of “democratic opening” of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), Kurdish political leaders have formulated a proposal of constitutional amendments. The “Declaration of the Workshop for the Constitutional Priorities of the Kurdish Question,” issued in October 2009 by Kurdish political, economic, and civil leaders of the southeast as well as members of the Bars of the region, of human rights associations, and some scholars, put forward some concrete proposals.55 First, two articles of the proposal declaration emphasized the cultural richness of Turkey with its ethnic differences and stipulated that everyone is equal within this richness. It underlines the importance of peace, the state of law, freedom, and equality in the society and makes it clear that the Kurds of Turkey want to live peacefully within the borders of the Turkish Republic. This article can be considered as a response to those who insist that Kurds want a separate and independent state of their own.56 The Declaration requests some amendments to the Constitution and sets forth changes, especially in articles stipulating issues such as official language, right to education in the mother tongue, autonomous municipal administrations, gender equality in the political participation, and legislative immunity. It also brings up two important proposals on the citizenship rights. The first one states that citizenship is a fundamental right and there should not be any religious, linguistic, racial, or ethnic discrimination in getting citizenship in the Turkish Republic. No one should be deprived of his or her nationality without his or her consent. The second proposal of the amendment concerning citizenship rights stipulates that anyone who is bound to the Turkish Republic is a citizen of Turkey without any religious, linguistic, racial, ethnic, gender, or cultural discrimination. Here as well, the emphasis is on the equal citizenship of Turks and Kurds, and it is possible to denote that there is a conscious refusal of using words which refer to the ethnic identity, such as “Turk.” In fact, a constitution based in equal citizenship such as the model proposed by Habermas would not refer to an ethnic identity or religious belonging, and the Declaration proposes a new paradigm based on this very model. In this context, what should be done to find a resolution to the Kurdish question in order to achieve a peaceful and equitable solution to the problem? First of all, a new definition for citizenship should be found in order to make the Kurds feel equal to Turks. Therefore, Article 66 of the Turkish Constitu-

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tion, which stipulates that “everyone bound to the Turkish State through the bond of citizenship is a Turk”57 should be amended. This article, which binds the citizenship to an ethnic identity, is seen as a discriminatory or even a racist statement by the Kurds. Secondly, the Kurdish question, which is often stated as a geopolitical or economic underdevelopment problem by Turkish officers or governors, should be recognized not as above but as an ethnic identity political problem. This is also a question of the government of those who describe themselves as Kurds of Turkish Republic.58 Another step for the solution should be that Turkey discover that it can protect its long-term interests by adopting new cultural paradigms and political pluralism.59 The Kurdish question can then be resolved by reconstructing the relations between state and society on the basis of cultural and political pluralism.60 This idea of pluralism has been put into practice with the entry of the Kurdish party into the Turkish Parliament but remained deficient and incomplete because of its closure by the Constitutional Court. Yet the lack of multiculturalism or political pluralism affects Turkey not only on the national scene but also in the international arena, for it makes Turkey vulnerable in its relations with its neighbors. It also affects Turkey’s image on the international level because Turkey commits many human rights violations or antidemocratic practices in its fight against Kurdish separatism. Here, of course, one should not ignore that the terrorism problem in Turkey has not been seen by the governors as a fact caused by the Kurdish problem but as a merely economic and contextual question. Government leaders and the Turkish state have denied recognizing the problem as about identity and equal citizenship rights. Within this framework, the PKK action is solely seen as violence in itself, without having any relation to the identity claims of Kurdish people. The PKK violence has served those who believed and made the people of Turkey believe that Kurds wanted to split and to build their own independent state. Discussions were essentially based on two main, contradictory ideas: (1) the Kurdish problem is a question of democracy in Turkey, and therefore more democracy would resolve the problem; and (2) this is not a question of democracy; too much democracy would harm Turkey; and the Turkish people are not ready for more democracy.61 Some scholars argue that the solution lies in associating the identity claims to citizenship rights in Turkey. In doing so, pluralism and multiculturalism would contribute to the reconstruction of a modern society and thus would transform the Kurdish question into a citizenship claim for individual and cultural rights. In this way, identity claims would be distinguished from ethnic nationalism and would be dealt within the context of citizenship rights.62

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Conclusion As we have seen above, the debate about the resolution of the Kurdish question turns around the ways to find a new paradigm of citizenship in Turkey, and those who suggest a new model of civic rights emphasize rights such as nondiscrimination on religious, linguistic, cultural, and political levels. They also demand the rights to education in the mother tongue or freedom of expression in Kurdish, right to speak Kurdish without any practical obstacle—since speaking Kurdish is legally authorized—and so forth. They want to be full citizens of Turkey with full political, cultural, economic, and social rights. The theoretical approaches as well as the arguments mentioned in this chapter give the possibility to affirm that Kurds in Turkey cannot use their citizenship rights fully for many political and societal reasons. So the problem needs to be first resolved from a point of restructuring citizenship in the mind of the Turkish state, and there is a great need to bring a new model of citizenship which can respond to the claims of the twenty-first century. Fortunately, recently, those who consider the Kurdish problem as a citizenship one began to raise their voice. After Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, announced in 1999 the renunciation of the idea of an independent state,63 and with the general elections of 2002 when Kurdish deputies could enter the Turkish Parliament for the first time as representatives of the Kurdish people in southeastern Turkey, the debate started to turn around the democratic claims of Kurds, and mainly their demands for an equal citizenship in which their ethnic identity would be recognized officially. But the closure of the Kurdish Democratic Society Party and the imprisonment of the elected mayors of the region awoke an important level of dissent within the Kurdish people of the southeast. Following the decision of closure by the Constitutional Court, unrest broke out throughout the country, and even some violent events occurred in the western cities of Turkey. The decision to close DTP triggered violence again, and the PKK restarted its actions as of the beginning of the year 2010. This process has served the defenders of democracy and a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question. They started to call for more civic rights for Kurds in Turkey. The Kurds have already been the center of all attention since the ruling Justice and Development Party’s “democratic opening” project of summer 2009—a project that divided the public opinion into two: those who saw it as a betrayal of the state and those who take it as a democratic step. The project, which in fact was not a clear one for the peoples of Turkey, who never knew the outlines, resulted in failure, and the hope of Kurds for a peaceful democratic solution turned into disappointment.

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Today there is an emotional distance and societal rupture between Turks and Kurds in Turkey. Although Kurds declare themselves to have given up their separatist claims of the 1980s and 1990s and to actually demand cultural and identity rights,64 Turks have been turning against them for a long time, since many perceive them as those who seek to divide Turkey to create their own country, Kurdistan. A concrete political solution is still not under way, and a societal solution seems even more urgent than a political one. To start negotiations, there are some prerequisites, and both sides, the Turkish state and Kurdish authorities, are not ready to fulfill them yet. But the main problem lies in the governmental and state perception of the question. All the governmental and state leaders continue to take the problem not as a civic one or a question of citizenship rights in a democratic perspective but as a problem of economic deficiency and terrorism. Thus, the question remains unfortunately unsolvable without a new paradigm of citizenship.

Notes 1. Charles A. Kupchan, “Nationalism Resurgent,” in Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe, edited by C. A. Kupchan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2. 2. Jack Snyder, “Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, edited by M. E. Brown (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 79–101. 3. Charles A. Kupchan, “Nationalism Resurgent,” 2. 4. Ibid. 5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 6. Anthony Smith, “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, edited by M. E. Brown (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993). 7. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms (New York: Cornell University Press, 1983). Some scholars, including Charles Kupchan, argue that this definition is inadequate since it is important to draw a clear distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. He argues that “disparate ethnic groups can and do unify around a common notion of nationality when nationhood is defined in terms of citizenship, not common ethnicity or culture. The nation-state can very comfortably cut across ethnic and cultural boundaries as long as national sentiments and identities do so as well. Defining nationality in terms of identity rather than in terms of ethnicity or culture resolves this problem.” See Charles Kupchan, “Nationalism Resurgent,” 194. 8. Charles Kupchan, “Nationalism Resurgent,” 3. 9. For example, the Palestinians today are accepted as a national grouping despite the fact that they do not have a state. See Charles Kupchan, “Nationalism Resurgent,” 4.

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10. Charles Kupchan, “Nationalism Resurgent,” 3. 11. Ibid., 6. 12. Interview with Kendal Nezan, director of the Kurdish Institute of Paris, Paris, August 3, 2009. See also Hamit Bozarslan, “Conflit kurde. Le brasier oublié du Moyen-Orient,” Autrement, Paris, 2009. 13. Samim Akgönül, “Les Kurdes forment-ils une minorité en Turquie?” Diplomatie 30 (2008): 70. 14. Bahar Şahin, “Türkiye’nin Avrupa Birliği Uyum Süreci Bağlamında Kürt Sorunu: Açılımlar ve Sınırlar,” in Türkiye’de Çoğunluk ve Azınlık Politikaları: AB Sürecinde Yurttaşlık Tartışmaları, edited by A. Kaya and T. Tarhanlı (İstanbul: TESEV Yayınları, 2005), 123. 15. Samim Akgönül, “Les Kurdes,” 70. 16. Bahar Şahin, “Türkiye’nin Avrupa,” 125. 17. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (I. B. Tauris, 1997), 186–189. 18. Christopher Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 99–101. 19. Ayhan Aktar, Varlık Vergisi ve Türkleştirme Politikaları (İstanbul: İletişim, 2000), 78. 20. Mesut Yeğen, “Turkish Nationalism and the Kurdish question,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 130. 21. Saygı Öztürk, İsmet Paşa’nın Kürt Raporu (İstanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2008) 37. 22. Samim Akgönül denotes that there have been three toponymic waves of change: the first one between 1930 and 1934, the second between 1956 and 1964, and the third between 1982 and 1990. For more details see Samim Akgönül, De la nomination en turc actuel: appartenances, perceptions, croyances (Istanbul: Isis, 2007), 94–97. 23. A religious community in Turkey which constitutes a branch of Shi’a Islam. 24. Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State, 125. 25. Fernando Reinares, “Nationalist Separatism and Terrorism in Comparative Perspective,” in Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward, edited by T. Bjorgo (New York: Routledge, 2005), 121. 26. Gülistan Gürbey, “The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in Turkey since the 1980s,” in The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in the 1990s, edited by R. Olson (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 7–37; Mesut Yeğen, “Turkish Nationalism,” 136. 27. John Rawls, “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Value III, edited by Sterling McMurrin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 14. 28. Monique Lanoix, “The Citizen in Question,” Hypatia, 22 no. 4 (Fall 2007): 114. 29. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–35. 30. Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 67.

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31. Thomas W. Smith, “Civic Nationalism and Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey,” Human Rights Quarterly 27 (2005): 437. 32. Kemal Kirişçi and Gareth M. Winrow, The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of a Trans-State Ethnic Conflict (London, 1997): 97. See also their statement in Turkish Daily News, March 11, 1995. 33. Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 108. 34. Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (Hodder Arnold, 2001), 213. 35. Ayşe Kadıoğlu, “Türkiye’de Vatandaşlığın Anatomisi,” in Küreselleşme, Avrupalılaşma ve Türkiye’de Vatandaşlık,” edited by Fuat Keyman and Ahmet İçduygu (İstanbul: Bilgi Üniversityesi Yayınları, 2009), 119. 36. David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876-1908 (London: Franc Cass, 1977), 8–10. 37. Servet Mutlu, “Ethnic Kurds in Turkey: A Demographic Study,” Middle East Studies 28, no. 4 (1996): 517. 38. Dogu Ergil, “The Kurdish Question in Turkey,” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 3 (2000): 130. 39. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (University of California Press, 1975), 7–9. 40. Incomes in the Kurdish southeast are roughly one-tenth of those in the industrial swathe of Western Turkey. 41. Heinz Kramer, A Changing Turkey: Challenges to Europe and the U.S. (Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 39. 42. In July 2003, Parliament removed language from the Census Law that had prohibited the use of names contrary to the “national culture.” See U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Turkey: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2003. 43. Kerem Öktem, “Creating the Turk’s Homeland: Modernization, Nationalism and Geography in Southeast Turkey in the Late 19th and 20th Centuries.” Paper for the Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Workshop, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2003), 9. 44. Thomas W. Smith, “Civic Nationalism,” 467. 45. See Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, Country of Origin Research: Turkey, TUR42658.E (2004), 189. 46. Ebru Doğan, “Kurds Wait for Turkish Sea Change,” BBC News (December 19, 2003). 47. “Kapatılan Yedinci Kürt Partisi DTP Oldu,” Haber ve Saire (November 12, 2009) www.habervesaire.com/haber/1661/. 48. Thomas W. Smith, “Civic Nationalism,” 470. 49. Feyzi Baban, “Türkiye’de Cemaat, Vatandaşlık ve Kimlik,” in Küreselleşme, Avrupalılaşma ve Türkiye’de vatandaşlık, edited by Fuat Keyman and Ahmet İçduygu (İstanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2009), 64. 50. Ayşe Kadıoğlu, “Türkiye’de Vatandaşlığın Anatomisi,” 111. 51. Ibid., 115.

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52. Türkiyeli olmak instead of Türk olmak. For a broad definition of the concept, see Baskin Oran, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar, 4th ed. (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008), 171–181. 53. Ibid., 118. For more details on Habermas’ concept of constitutional citizenship, see Jürgen Habermas, “Yet Again: German Identity—A Unified Nation of Angry DM Burghers?” New German Critic 91 (1992): 84–102. 54. For more details see www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay &link=141728, www.merip.org/mero/mero080410.html, and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/europe/66468.stm. 55. “Kürt Meselesinde Anayasal Öncelikler Çalıştayı Sonuç Bildirgesi,” (Diyarbakır: October 1–2, 2009). 56. See “Kürt Meselesinde Anayasal Öncelikler Çalıştayı Sonuç Bildirgesi,” issued by the Bar of Diyarbakir (October 2009). 57. See www.constitution.org/cons/turkey/part2.htm for the entire constitution. 58. Fuat Keyman, “Vatandaşlık ve Kimliği Eklemlemek: Türkiye’de ‘Kürt Sorunu,’” in Küreselleşme, Avrupalılaşma ve Türkiye’de vatandaşlık, edited by Fuat Keyman and Ahmet İçduygu (İstanbul: Bilgi Üniversityesi Yayınları, 2009), 351. 59. Van Bruinessen, Martin, Kurdish Ethno-nationalism versus Nation-Building States (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000). 108. 60. Fuat Keyman, “Vatandaşlık ve Kimliği,” 353. 61. Baskın Oran, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar. Kavramlar, Teori, Lozan, İç Mevzuat, İçtihat, Uygulama (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2008), 227. 62. Fuat Keyman, “Vatandaşlık ve Kimliği,” 354–355. 63. Maya Arakon, “Le PKK: Un groupe terroriste comme un autre?” Diplomatie no. 30 (January–February 2008): 77. 64. Milliyet, “Interview of Hasan Cemal with Murat Karayılan, the Current Leader of PKK” (May 2–10, 2009).

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Mutlu, Servet. “Ethnic Kurds in Turkey: A Demographic Study.” Middle East Studies 28, no. 4 (1996). Newland, Kathleen. “Ethnic Conflict and Refugees.” Global Politics and Strategy 35, no. 1 (1993): 81–101. Oran, Baskın. Türkiye’de Azınlıklar. Kavramlar, Teori, Lozan, İç Mevzuat, İçtihat, Uygulama. Istanbul: Iletişim, 2008. Öktem, Kerem. “Creating the Turk’s Homeland: Modernization, Nationalism and Geography in Southeast Turkey in the Late 19th and 20th Centuries.” Paper for the Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Workshop, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2003. Öztürk, Saygı. İsmet Paşa’nın Kürt Raporu. İstanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2008. Poulton, Hugh. Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic. New York : NYU Press, 1997. Rawls, John. “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority.” In The Tanner Lectures on Human Value III, edited by Sterling McMurrin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Reinares Fernando. “Nationalist Separatism and Terrorism in Comparative Perspective.” In Root Causes of Terrorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward, edited by T. Bjorgo. New York: Routledge, 2005. Ross, Marc Howard. “Good Enough Isn’t So Bad: Thinking about Success and Failure in Ethnic Conflict Management.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 6, no. 1 (2000): 27–47. Smith, Anthony. “The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism.” In Ethnic Conflict and International Security, edited by M. E. Brown. New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 1993. Smith, Thomas W. “Civic Nationalism and Ethnocultural Justice in Turkey.” Human Rights Quarterly 27 (2005): 436–470. Snyder, Jack. “Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State.” In Ethnic Conflict and International Security, edited by M. E. Brown. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Şahin, Bahar. “Türkiye’nin Avrupa Birliği Uyum Süreci Bağlamında Kürt Sorunu: Açılımlar ve Sınırlar.” In Türkiye’de Çoğunluk ve Azınlık Politikaları: AB Sürecinde Yurttaşlık Tartışmaları, edited by A. Kaya and T. Tarhanlı. İstanbul: TESEV Yayınları, 2005. Van Bruinessen, Martin. Kurdish Ethno-nationalism versus Nation-Building States. Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000. Yeğen, Mesut. “Turkish Nationalism and the Kurdish Question.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 1 (2007): 119–151. Yıldız, Ahmet. Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene—Türk Ulusal Kimliğinin Etno-Seküler Sınırları 1919–1938. İstanbul: İletişim, 2001.

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Newspapers and Electronic Sources BBC: www.bbc.co.uk Encyclopedia Qanda: www.qanda.encyclopedia.com Haber ve Saire: www.habervesaire.com Middle East Report Online: www.merip.org Milliyet: www.milliyet.com.tr Official website of the European Union. europa.eu/scadplus/glossary/subsidiarity_ en.htm Radikal: www.radikal.com.tr Sansursuz: www.sansursuz.com Smithsonnian: www.smithsonnian.com Taraf: www.taraf.com.tr Today’s Zaman: www.todayszaman.com Turkish Daily News: www.hurriyetdailynews.com

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4 The Alevi Identity and Civil Rights in the Twenty-First Century Fazilet Ahu Özmen

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that develop and transform with globalization have a significant influence on today’s formation. In this context, identities and cultures are eroding and keeping up with the state of play. The erosion in question can be explained as the search for identity of various religious and ethnic groups in the society. As is well known, Turkish society has a cosmopolitan structure. This cosmopolitanism results from the presence of diverse cultural groups. Among these cultural groups, the Kurds and the Alevis are the majority, and both these groups have been in a search of identity since the Ottoman period. The Kurds and the Alevis, who were able to express their presence to some extent with the establishment of the Republic, were exposed to severe political and social suppressions until the 1980s. Still today, they cannot convey their identities freely, and they are still face-to-face with similar restraints. These communities, which struggle for their rights by establishing political parties and by taking charge in various departments of the government, express on all occasions that they do not have equitable and equal civil rights with the population comprising the majority of the society. These communities are supposed to have the right to lead their cultures comfortably in terms of religion, culture, and ethnicity in the Republic of Turkey, where a multicultural structure exists. However, the structure of the existing government still rejects multiculturalism today and maintains the consolidating Sunni–Turkish synthesis that emerged in the coup of 1980. The Turkish–Sunni Islam conception, which arose out of especially Islamic movements, once more acquired currency with the coup in 1980 and became the political symbol of the Turkish republic. HE VALUES AND PRINCIPLES

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If that’s so, then what should be done for these discrete cultural groups to benefit from equal civil rights? Although the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) has been trying to find solutions to these problems through “expansions” (opening), the projects in question have been inadequate. The subject we are going to address is how the Alevis can have equal civil rights, and what should be done for this by society and the government. In order to understand the civil rights Alevis are supposed to have, we should first refer to the development and the qualities of the Alevi identity. After apprehending the process of identity, we will touch upon the issue of the kind of citizenship notion to be discussed and even established. We can briefly define Alevism as an ethnic and religious community.1 Several writers and researchers claim that Alevis are a minority group and therefore they should have different rights. However, Alevis have stood up for the policy that they are Muslims and have repeatedly shared with the public the fact that they are not a minority group and that the status of minority is given only to non-Muslims. On the basis of our presentation, we will first refer to the definition of Alevism, then to the development of the Alevi identity, and finally discuss how the Alevis view the concept and principles of citizenship.

The Definition of Alevism Alevism is a concept that has embraced various definitions. For some, it is designated as a religion, for others a sect, a culture, or even a lifestyle. It is even considered as a cult by some parts of the society. This conceptual plurality or even confusion has also led to disunity among the Alevis. For this reason, Alevis have not been able to compose a homogeneous community for centuries. Before we refer to this heterogeneity, we will briefly refer to some different descriptions of Alevism and some religious and mystic movements Alevism has been influenced by. Looking at the studies done on Alevism, it can be seen that this concept has been interpreted through various definitions. The concept of Alevism was first used for the supporters of Prophet Ali during the caliph discussions after Prophet Mohammed’s death. However, in the course of time, it gained various meanings in different regions and countries. The surmise about Turkish Alevism, also called Anatolian Alevism, is that it appeared as a result of the Turkmen’s accepting Islam and integrating their beliefs and traditions within it. The beliefs that these societies had are known as shamanism, Manichaeism, and Buddhism. As they led a nomadic lifestyle, the Turkmen were

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influenced by different belief systems everywhere they went. The Turkmen who were eventually influenced by Islam in Anatolian lands were engaged in a diverse religion together with their own beliefs. For this reason, we can define Alevism as a “diverse phenomenon.” That is to say, Alevism is a body of beliefs that has gained a diverse structure affected by various beliefs and cultures and that emerged with a rather Islamic image. The word Alevism is used for the connotation “belonging to Ali” in Arabic. According to denominational history and the philosophy of mysticism, it means “to love and respect Ali and to be faithful to him.” The person who loves and respects Ali and who is loyal to him is called “Alevi.” Besides, after Mohammed’s death, the caliphate would be taken over by his nephew and son-in-law Ali, as Mohammed had desired. Nevertheless, the caliphate was taken over by Ebu Bekir, and this instance separated Muslims into two groups. The supporters of Ali were named the group of “Shia,” and this movement brought forth “Shi’ism,” an important branch of Islam. Islam was separated into two branches called Sunnism and Shi’ism. That’s why the word Shia is used as a synonym for Alevism by some authors. Concurrently, people who were on Ali’s side were called “Alevi” for their loyalty to him. The relevance of Alevism to Shi’ism is, in fact, indefinite. Alevism is not Shi’ism, but has been affected by Shi’ism. Now, it might be useful to have a look at various definitions of Alevism. As we have already mentioned, Alevism arose as a movement and religion that was nourished by thought patterns exclusive of Sunnism, based on religious reasons and rebellious to the Sunni religious view, which is dominant in societies complying with Islam. In this respect, Alevism gained numerous meanings in terms of geographical regions, ethnic roots, and cultural structure. For example, the concept of “Alevi” is used for the connotation “Ismaili” in Pakistan, “Caferi” in Iran, “Zeydi” in Egypt and Yemen, “Nusayri” in Syria, and the Durzi sects in Lebanon. As for the perception of Alevism of the Turkish society, Alevism is a religious thought pattern embellished by some beliefs influential on the Anatolian lands for some period, such as shamanism, Buddhism, and Manichaeism, and later integrated with Sunni Islam. For this reason, we can say that Turkish Alevism, in other words Anatolian Alevism, emerged as the nomadic Turkmen and Turkish clans accepted Islam and combined Sunni Islam with some of their already existing religious and mystic beliefs and traditions. This composition, which was developed by the Sufi societies, was brought to Anatolia with the immigrations that started in the eleventh century and became varied by adding partly Hurufi and Shia elements in its structure.2 Alevis, who were formerly called Kızılbash (“Red Heads”), belonged to the Turkmen clans who were the supporters of Sheikhs Cüneyd, Haydar, and

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Ismail, the first Safevis3 in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were called Kızılbash or Red Heads because they wear a red headgear. However, the concept of Kızılbash was later associated with the connotations “heathenrebel” or “deviant” along with the religious–social rebellions known as the Celali Riots. As a consequence, the concept of Kızılbash was replaced by Alevism.4 It is known that the concept of Alevism has been used to define a nonconformist and heterodox religious structure.5 As we have mentioned earlier, there are several definitions of the concept of Alevism. It will be useful to explain these definitions through the interpretations of some authors. According to Mehmet Eröz, who is an important Alevi author, the Alevis, who were mostly comprised of uneducated Turkmen, have preserved the religious beliefs they had brought from Middle Asia under the name of Alevism with an Islamic image.6 In this context, Alevism has become a belief system described as heterodox and was defined as a nonconformist public Islam by the societies who started to lead a sedentary lifestyle while maintaining their nomadic practices. Rıza Selyut, on the contrary, claims that Alevism is bound by the concepts Allah (God)–Mohammed–Ali from the beginning till the end, and therefore takes place right within Islam, and even makes up the core of Islam. According to Zelyut, people who are willing to see Alevism exclusive of Islam are either the Shari defenders or some researchers or authors who are not informed about Alevism.7 Alevism is also a social movement that covers life in all aspects and tries to set up a better system. This social movement seeks what is right, good, and just in the name of God and expresses this request disguised by religion. On the other hand, according to Cemal Şener, who is another Alevi author, Alevism is a unique lifestyle.8 It is a culture and an identity. The Shia movement, which was society based, yet also a religious opposition trend at the beginning, later turned into a philosophy of life and an opposition movement that is preponderant more in social rather than religious or racial aspects. This conception, as a matter of fact, reflects reality. Alevis have always responded to the religious movements born and still existing in the Turkish Republic in an opposing manner. Alevis, who have always supported the Republic and have been the guardians of secularism, have criticized conservative movements and have been the protectors of the “Atatürk’s Turkey.” On the other side of the coin, this philosophy is a worldview that has established love of Ali and Ehl-i Beyt, fraternity, just distribution, equality, freedom, and standing against any kind of injustice as its missions.9 This philosophy is what actually lies beneath the Alevis’ tendency towards the leftwing movements. At the same time, Şener states that it is impossible to define

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Alevism without relating it to the history of Islam. Nonetheless, Alevism has turned out to be a minority group or a religious phenomenon exposed to injustice. Yet this religious structure is an egalitarian, liberal, and secular religious structure.10 The most significant religious feature that separates Alevis from Sunnis is their loyalty to secularism. As we can see, views and thoughts about Alevism are varied. However, this concept has actually been examined through two main points. The first point is to predicate Alevism on pre-Islamic beliefs, especially early Turkish beliefs, and the second point is to evaluate Alevism within Islam and to emphasize the fact that Alevism completely originates from Islam and that it is the soul of Islam itself.11 This diversity, as we will mention later, prevents Alevis from gathering under the same roof and leads to separations within the community. Every individual interprets Alevism in respect to his or her own lifestyle or ethnic roots, and this results in serious problems among Alevis. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak claims that the only right way to clear away this chaos of thoughts is by examining Alevism under the light of a historical perspective. According to Ocak, this historical process should be examined within two periods, pre-Safavi and post-Safavi. The first period is the duration between the tenth century and the end of the fifteenth century when Islam started to spread among the Turkish groups in Middle Asia. This period brought the Turks residing in Anatolia face to face with a situation in which the Islamic conception was incompatible with the holy book interpretations of Islam, old beliefs and traditions were predominant, and a superficial Islam percept prevailed. In other words, the Turks living in that period were not able to integrate Islam completely into their lives and continued to remain under the influence of religious structures such as shamanism and Manicheism. Along with the Safavi propaganda in the second period, covering the period following the fifteenth century, today’s Alevism, which puts Ali in the center regarding the fundamentals of 12-Imam Shi’ism, emerged. Thus, the heterodox Islamic conception, which has existed in Turkey since the thirteenth century, brought forth an Islamic conception that resembles neither Sunnism nor Shi’ism, is not orthodox, and may be defined as heterodox, in the sixteenth century and assured its survival up to today.12 Briefly, Alevism is a diverse religious and cultural structure that emerged as the Turkish people accepted Islam in the beginning of the tenth century. Alevism, with its unique religious and cultural qualities, is also defined as a minority group without a status by Hamit Bozarslan. The status of minority, which is given only to non-Muslims in the Republic of Turkey, does not involve the Kurds and the Alevis. However, all their religious, cultural, and ethnic structures implant minority qualities in these two communities. Now, it will be useful to have a look at the current political and social structuring

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and acts of the Alevis in Turkey in order to highlight the civil rights Alevis believe they are supposed to have.

Alevis and the Republic As we have formerly mentioned, Alevis used to present an opposing community and attitude towards the official ideology during the Ottoman period. They were excluded by the Sunnis and the supreme power due to their styles of belief and worship, and they also suffered a lot during the Safevi and Babai Riots. However, as soon as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Turkish Republic, they were able to get through being repressed to some extent, and they took significant roles in the new constitution. Perhaps for the first time since the Ottoman Period, Alevis started to express their identities freely and take part in politics. Alevis started to support the Republic after Atatürk visited the tomb (mausoleum) of Hacı Bektaş Veli. Atatürk asked for support from the Alevis during the Turkish War of Independence and declared that Alevis would be given freedom of religion and worship in the new regime he would establish. However, the Alevis were disappointed as the Presidency of Religious Affairs was established soon after the Republic, and this formed a handicap for their religious demands. In fact, the aim of the team establishing the Republic was to transform the Islamic connection within the society to a national connection. For this reason, the executed reforms mainly targeted the Orthodox Sunni Islam. As the tekkes, small dervish lodges and sects, were abolished, Alevis also got their share of religious restrictions. Sects and congregational organizations were considered to pose an obstacle for the intended homogeneous nation and therefore were prohibited. Tekkes were abolished with the thought that such organizations would be incongruous with the “secular” state being established, and thus any kind of religious organization was averted and the element of religion was purified from government policies. During the single political party period, covering the years between 1923 and 1950, the type of citizen required for the desired homogeneous nation was designated, and this citizenship symbolized an individual who was not only modern, secular, patriotic, and nationalist, but also who embraced Muslimism purified from Islam.13 In brief, the social structure of the Republic should be secular. However, in order to operate this transformation process properly, the government planned to take control of the religious field and established the Department of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlıgı, DİB) in 1924. By setting up

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this division, the government intended to take control of the religious transformation the society experienced after the change of regime and desired to prevent congregational gatherings of various groups by using Islam. As Murat Okan states, this instance shows that the government used Islam again to achieve the transformation to a nation freed from religion, in other words Islam.14 The DİB has developed a lot since the day it was established and has reached an organizational level resembling a ministry. During the process of secularization, the establishment of DİB formed an obstacle in terms of Islamic values, and as a matter of fact its role in the government and society has progressed dramatically. Looking at the purpose of the establishment of DİB (stabilizing religion within the government), it is quite obvious that it will not allow for any belief except Sunnism, especially for Alevism, which possesses an opposing tradition. Alevi authors and the majority of the Alevis gave support to the war of independence and the Republican regime following it, and they have had the need to frequently recall the fact that they are the defenders and the guardians of secularism; underneath all these lies the feeling of being disregarded during the period of the establishment of the Turkish Republic and even today. The fact that an organization endowed with religious elements such as DİB conducts its existence in a consistent way leads to consolidation of Sunnism and disregarding of the Alevis in Turkey. In this context, equal civil rights are discussed. In a secular government structure, caring for and defending the rights of the individuals belonging to Sunni Islam specially puts Alevis, who make up 25 percent of the society, into the position of second-class citizens. Alevis, who express in every platform that they are Muslims, strongly condemn the fact that the sect of the Alevism is not represented by DİB. Besides, a considerable part of the majority emphasizes that DİB is against secularism and that it should be abolished. No matter how much Alevis were disturbed by the establishment of a department such as DİB along with the Republic, Alevis have always been the defenders of a secular Turkish republic and they have never given up being Atatürkist and Kemalist. Alevis, who were far from the center during the Ottoman period, became the defenders of the modern state and secularism along with the Turkish Republic. We can say that there are two main reasons for Alevis supporting the republic. The first reason, as we have already mentioned, is the religious and cultural structure of Alevism. In other words, we can say that it originates from its secular structure. The second reason is that along with the secular reforms, Turkish society, dominated by Sunni Islam, has modernized. Alevis, who were targeted as “the others” by the Sunnis for centuries, especially during the Ottoman period, were able to emphasize their existence comfortably for the first time after the secular reforms of the Republic, and greatly

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defected from the Sunni suppression. However, as the multiple political party period started, Alevis have once more become the target.

Political Development of the Alevi Identity On May 14, 1950, the Democratic Party (Demokrat Parti—DP), which was established under the chairmanship of Adnan Menderes, came into power polling 53.3 percent of the votes. Government by the Democratic Party, which was a fresh and significant period for Turkey, was also important for Alevis. The agricultural policy the subject party had promised mostly influenced the Alevis, who resided in rural areas in that period. On the other hand, during the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi—CHP) period, when the Alevis supported DP, abolishment of the Alevi tekkes and representation of Sunni Islam alone drew Alevis away from CHP. Harald Schüler refers to this issue broadly in the light of statistics in his book. For instance, in the city of Sivas where the majority is Alevi, the percentage of the votes for DP was quite high. Although the vast majority of the Alevi votes were for DP in the general elections in 1950, the manner in the general elections in 1957 was different. Alevis moved their votes towards the CHP again, and once more expressed the fact that they are the protectors of the principle of secularism and the Kemalist values. The main reason for this maneuver is, without any doubt, the DP putting Sunni-oriented religion policies in the foreground. Reciting of the azan in Arabic, opening of the Religious Vocational Schools (İmam Hatip), and attaching too much importance to the Qur’an classes were the most specific indications that the DP’s policies were predominantly religious.15 The secular part of the society, especially Alevis, argued that this political arena posed a huge threat for the Republic and that it was a coup against the revolutions of Atatürk. The DP government, covering the years between 1950 and 1960, led to dramatic changes in terms of religion, and this period came to an end with the May 27, 1960 coup. The coup was welcomed with delight by Alevis and was designated as the salvation of Kemalism. After this painful experience, secularism has been the key element determining Alevis’ political tendencies.16 After the coup in 1960, a new political formation opened in Turkey. Leftwing movements, which were basically emergent in Europe, penetrated into Turkey before long. It was in this period that the Alevi youngsters were acquainted with socialism and got actively involved in political formations. Before we address the Alevi youngsters’ connection to the left wing, it will be more appropriate to refer to the characteristics of the Alevi mobilization that was generated after the coup.

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President of the period Cemal Gürsel announced to the public that it was crucial to represent the sects other than Sunni within the DİB and launched a project in order to get the opinion of Alevi leaders about this issue. Religious and conservative populations argued that there were no Shi’ites in Turkey and severely protested against this project and underlined that Alevis would not be recognized as a separate sect. In response to this attitude of the conservative population, about 50 Alevi youngsters published two declarations comprising the religious and cultural rights of the Alevis, and by means of these declarations they shared the concept of Alevism with the public for the first time. In the first declaration, the Alevi youngsters expressed their connection to the principles of the Turkish Republic, their loyalty to the national values, and the importance they gave to human freedom and strongly condemned the discrimination against the Alevis. They explained that Alevism is the core of Islam and that they were Muslims themselves and should be represented as a separate sect by the DİB just like the Sunnis. As for the second declaration, the youngsters expressed their loyalty to secularism more broadly and urged the president of the DİB of the period to resign because of the discriminations he allowed for.17 As a matter of fact, through these two declarations, Alevis were able to express their desire for equal civil rights clearly for the first time. They pointed out that they are also citizens of the Republic of Turkey and that they are not different from the Sunnis who make up the majority of the society in terms of Muslimism, that they fulfill the requirements of Islam as much as Sunnis, but that they are different in terms of sect. They have repeatedly highlighted that they are against any kind of discrimination and that every individual should have equal rights regardless of his or her religion or sect. After these two declarations were published, Alevis started to become organized for the first time in the history of the Republic. The first Alevi associations were founded, and the ritual of Cem organized by “Hacı Bektaş Tanıtma Derneği” took place in Ankara in 1963. Parallel to the associations, the Alevi press began to develop. The first Alevi journals and newspapers were established in that period and became the means of calling out to the nation and the public for the Alevis. Thus, an Alevi identity began to form, and this revindication of identity went on consistently until the 1970s. Again during the same years, the waves of immigration from villages to cities influenced the social structure of the Alevis as well. Rustic Alevis who immigrated to cities integrated the universities in that period and adopted the intensely increasing left-wing movements in and around the universities. Both their cultural structure and lifestyle kept Alevis away from right-wing societies endowed with religious and nationalist trends. On the other side of the coin, as is well known, waves of immigration resulted in “squatting” in

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big cities, and these recently composed slums turned into propaganda centers for socialistic youngsters. Şükrü Aslan states that slums were set up with the contributions of socialistic groups.18 Thence, a bond of solidarity was formed between the Alevis residing in these slums and the left-wing groups, and Alevi youngsters were seriously involved in left-wing movements. The aforementioned mobilization took place as a result of urbanization and mass education. Intellectuals, university students, laborers, and all the working population became aware of the dissimilarities in big cities and the discrimination against themselves. Universities and the unions which were established at that period also had a great influence on this awareness. In these circumstances, Alevis concluded that they should politicize themselves, and on October 17, 1966, they established the Turkish Party of Great Union (Türkiye Büyük Birlik Partisi—TBP) under the leadership of Hasan Tahsin Berkman. The addressing of the party to the Alevis was quite obvious in its logo: the lion surrounded by 12 stars, symbolizing Ali and the 12 Imams, clearly stands for Alevism and its philosophy. The purpose of the party was, as Paul Dumont mentions in his article, to call all the citizens of the Turkish Republic to unity, to maintain the national unity of the Republic of Turkey in a cycle of one nation and one language, and to preserve the values Atatürk built, such as secularism and democracy.19 The program of the party was to emphasize that freedom of thought and religion should be protected, and as long as secular principles were preserved, the religious beliefs and services of any individual would not be restricted by any force. TBP also stressed that economic growth based on a planned economy and agriculture was essential and clearly expressed its progressivist ruling. The party focused on religion during the period it was active and came up against law number 89 involving the closure of the political parties. Nevertheless, the party was not closed for the reason that it did not pose a hazard for Turkey owing to both its discourses and the peaceful and egalitarian policy it set forth. Yet it did not manage to poll enough votes either in the elections in 1968 (2.8 percent), in 1973 (1.1 percent), or in 1977 (0.4 percent), and it was not represented sufficiently in the parliament.20 Only in the elections of 1968 was it able to be represented by eight members of parliament, and these members were returned in the cities where Alevis mostly lived, such as Amasya, Çorum, Malatya, Sivas, and Tokat. The main reason for the loss of votes of the party in 1977 can be explained by the left wing–inclined discourses of Bülent Ecevit, leader of CHP in that period, and the fact that it had similar purposes with TBP in terms of social aspects. In fact, TBP was set up in order to prevent the Alevi youngsters from alienating from their traditions, prepossessed by Marxist movements, but it could not achieve this goal. The party was not able to organize Alevis and did not manage to fight against

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the dominant left-wing movements of the period; it was eventually closed down with the coup on September 12, 1980, and withdrew from the political arena completely. In the meantime, with the influence of TBP, Alevis became organized long before Sunnis, and perhaps this organization later led to the organization of Sunnis.21 After the defeat of TBP, Alevis mostly turned towards left-wing movements supporting CHP and even got closer to extreme left-wing trends. We can understand the reason why the Alevis easily integrated socialistic and Marxist movements into their constitution when we look at their process of formation and their myths.22 The Turkmen and Kızılbash riots, which took place in the sixteenth century, were considered as protocommunist movements, and even the Marxists who were not Alevis were deeply affected by these. The hero behind these movements, Pir Sultan Abdal, rebelled against the central government and became the leader of the oppressed. Looking at today, the archenemy of the Alevis is Sunni Islam, and the DİB, which supports the Sunnis, has been the major concern for the Alevis. And as long as the government supports Sunni policies, it alienates Alevis, and they have taken a dislike towards the government. And in this very context, the citizenship struggle of the Alevis emerged once more. Alevis, who think they have been repeatedly excluded, have called for solutions in the light of Atatürk’s principles. Alevis, who have been fighting for equality and more freedom, thought that they would find solutions to their problems through left-wing trends. The encounter of Alevis with the populist trend actually dates back to the period of the Republic, and they have been the most welcoming population for Atatürk’s revolutions. Establishment of the modern state and the principle of secularism becoming the foundation of the government were the main reasons Alevis supported the Republic, and these also provided the basis for their connection to the CHP, which was set up under the leadership of Atatürk. As a matter of fact, secularism is where we will find the answer to the source of the expression “Alevis are leftists.” As Murat Belge explains, secularism, as well as being leftist, stands for a broad definition comprising many other conducts such as being “against Islamic revivalist,” “progressivist,” “modern,” “democratic,” “intellectual,” and “revolutionist.”23 The main reason for most Alevis’ supporting the CHP is that the CHP has been associated with secularism. In brief, beyond being leftists, a majority of the Alevis have pursued a rather “statist” conduct. Even though Alevis were estranged from the CHP and voted for the DP in the single-party period, their connection to the CHP has never changed. Especially in the 1960s, the policies in favor of religion influenced them to connect fully to the CHP. Alevi youngsters, influenced by the populist policies of the CHP, implemented

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their leftist trends within the scope of the CHP and became one of the most active youth movements of the period. During the period between 1960 and 1980 when the left-wing trends were quite extensive in Turkey, the Alevi society began to participate in socialistic movements and voted mostly for left-wing and even extreme leftist parties. For instance, in the elections of 1965, the Turkish Party of Labor (Türkiye İşçi Partisi—TİP) was represented by 15 members of parliament polling about 300,000 votes, and it was stated that they owed this success to the middle class in İstanbul and the Kurdish and Alevi votes in rural areas.24 Reha Çamuroğlu also explains that Alevis have rapidly converged towards the left wing since 1960 and lists the most influential factors for this inclination, such as the success of the TİP in 1965, the proliferation of youth organizations like the FKF (Fikir Kulüpleri Federasyonu, or Federation of Thought Clubs), Dev-Genç, and Ecevit, rallying with the motto “Ecevit, our hope.”25 As for Rıza Zelyut’s point of view, Alevi youngsters’ affiliation with the left-wing trends is defined as a search of identity.26 Alevis have been excluded for ages by the Sunnis because of their belief and culture and have found an identity among the left-wing trends. So, Alevis have found a place in the society by concealing their religion and integrating the leftwing trends. Leftism has been associated with Alevis’ lifestyle and has become an element of their identity. Consequently, there has been a serious integration between socialism and Alevism. The fact that the essence of the Alevi belief is not “God” but “human” has made the integration easier and has been quite effective in this process. In brief, in the 1960s, Alevis found the humanistic and egalitarian values comprising the basis of their culture and secularism, which is their everlasting protector, inside the left-wing trends along with the establishment of the Republic, and thereby imposed an identity on themselves. On the other hand, the tragic events that occurred between 1970 and 1980 targeted Alevis once more and caused them to retreat from the political platform until the 1990s. In the elections of 1975 and later in 1977, the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) entered the parliament and started the “idealist” movement, and this caused foul repercussions for the leftists. The party, supported especially by Sunnis and Nationalists, targeted the Kurds and Alevis and led the attacks carried out against Alevis in 1978 in Malatya, Sivas, Kahramanmaraş, and Çorum, where Alevis mostly lived, and in other cities in 1980. These years, named “the years of violence” in the political history of Turkey, ended with the death of thousands of Alevi and Kurdish youngsters and, along with the coup on September 12, 1980, following these, all the leftists were found guilty of all these events; starting with the CHP, all the political parties of the period were closed down.

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Along with the coup in 1980, the political atmosphere in Turkey completely changed and a Turkish–Islamic synthesis–oriented system of governance was implemented. As we have already mentioned, leftists were held responsible for the “years of violence” and were subjected to severe conducts. According to statistics, 400,000 left-wing militants were dispelled, over 600,000 people were in custody, and 85,000 people were imprisoned for several years.27 At the same time universities were evacuated and thousands of university students had to prorogue or give up education. The military regime prohibited any kind of ideology except for Kemalism and began to apply a Turkish–Islamic system of governance. At the same time, the military coup accused any Alevi organization established after 1961 of discrimination and blamed Alevis for the tragic events. Consequently, Alevi culture and customs were targeted, and any kind of organizations were put to an end. Underneath the Alevi mobilization that started in the 1990s lies this chain of exclusion and prohibitions. According to Hobsbawm’s explanation, movements of identity intervene when customs are endangered or stopped.28 As a consequence, the Alevi mobilization emerged in such an atmosphere. The reasons for Alevis to form into organizational groups can be explained by several factors and events. As we have formerly mentioned, Alevis were deeply affected by the negative political and economic context after 1980. Communism was banned, and the state doctrine was based on Sunnism and Turkishness. The synthesis in question shows that national culture was built on Islam and Turkishness, and the aim was to gather the Turkish society around this ideology and to prevent any kind of ideological cleavage. This new doctrine also changed the system of education in Turkey dramatically; with the constitution of 1982, religion classes were made compulsory in primary education, and once more Alevis were seriously agitated by this instance. The religion classes mentioned are entirely focused on Sunnism and do not allow for Alevism in any way. This way the DİB grew stronger, and in a short period of time the number of mosques, especially in Alevi villages, increased, and imams were sent to Alevi villages. Even though Turkey opened out globally and applied neoliberal policies in the 1980s, this economic progress in 1980 did not affect every segment of the society in the same way. Alevis, who had started to live in cities then, got their share of the situation. In the years 1980 and 1990, they experienced a recession in the economic field as well as the political and social fields. Probably, this marginalization led to the mobilization of Alevis.29 According to Anthony Obershall, the most important factor that caused the mobilization was the degree of vertical integration of the social group in question. The further a group and its elites are from the center of authority, the more excluded

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they feel, and therefore they become mobilized.30 It is true that other social and cultural groups beside the Alevis also felt exposed to discrimination in the 1980s. The poor population in the cities who were involved in right-wing and left-wing movements in the 1970s also went into a search of identity in the years 1980 and 1990. These pursuits of identity were the manifestations of the dissatisfaction felt due to the inequalities and the homogenized cultural and religious structure. Thus, a communitarian, identity-based revindication and mobilization commenced. As the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) came into power under the leadership of Turgut Özal in 1983, associations were allowed to be established once more and religious and ethnic groups started to express themselves more comfortably. Moreover, in 1991, Turgut Özal abolished the law comprising the prohibition of languages except Turkish and announced that the Kurds were an ethnic group and could express their cultural rights. The aforementioned mobilization and search for identity was even supported by a political party established with the support of Alevi elites in 1995. On September 1, 1995, the Democratic Peace Movement (Demokratik Bariş Hareketi (DBH), which was an Alevi political party, was established under the leadership of Ali Haydar Veziroglu. This party, which was set in about 40 provinces and 200 towns and announced its objectives clearly through newspapers to the public, could not get the support of the Alevis. Alevis, who thought that the establishment of a political party based on sect or cult would be prejudicial in terms of politics, did not support the DBH and preferred to vote for mass political parties. However, the establishment of an Alevi political party was, without any doubt, an indication of how important and intense Alevi mobilization was. Another factor influencing the Alevi mobilization was the rise of Islamic activities in the 1980s. Alevis, who considered this activism as a threat, began to organize. Again in the 1980s, the rise of the Kurdish mobilization along with the PKK and the Kurdish fight for the independence of land posed a threat especially for the Kurdish-origin Alevis and accelerated the process of mobilization. The process of organization which started in Turkey correspondingly began to take place in Europe as well. This process of organization, beginning particularly in Germany, may well be the reason for the Alevis to make up with their own culture after all the suppressions and exclusions for several decades. Concurrently with this process of organization, Alevis published the Alevi Declaration (Alevi Bildirgesi) in Cumhuriyet Gazetesi on May 15, 1990, and by means of this declaration, the whole public was confronted with the reality of Alevism and became aware of the Alevis’ expectations from the government and society. In this declaration, the Alevis’ main request was

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the recognition of their religious freedom (the fact that Alevism is a sect of Islam) and the acceptance of the Alevi reality by the government agencies. As the declaration—which was signed by intellectuals such as Muharrem Naci Orhan (Alevi senior dervish), Nejat Birdogan (Alevi author), Cemal Özbey (one of the founders of the BP, or Birlik Partisi), and leftist Alevi author Rıza Zelyut—was published, Alevism came into prominence and began to be discussed, and several books and articles on Alevism were written. Thereby, in the beginning of 1990s, several Alevi associations were established and Cem rituals began to be carried out. As a result, Alevis began to organize against the danger of assimilation and the rising Islamic mobilization and returned to their beliefs, traditions, and rituals by means of these associations. This period, which is defined as the return to identity and culture, is called the “Alevi Renaissance,” and this renaissance once more highlighted the Alevi reality. In fact, the only wish of the Alevis is to practice their beliefs freely and to lead their lives without being excluded and discriminated by the Sunnis and the government. Nevertheless, this burst of identity was harmed by the Sivas events in 1993 and the Gazi Mahallesi events following them in 1995,31 and Alevis once more suffered from discriminations and attacks because of their beliefs. Although Alevis had established their presence and had been purified with their culture as the number of associations and foundations increased, they still had to lead a communitarian lifestyle, and their expectations from the government diminished until the beginning of the 2000s. Yet they became hopeful again with the Alevi Expansion Project of the AKP, and from then on they began to expect to attain equal civil rights.

Alevism and “Multicultural Citizenship” Since 1990, Alevis have been in search of a new identity. Alevis, affected by the political and social changes, have executed social and political maneuvers and have required identity- and culture-oriented rights. We have to highlight the fact that the Alevi Declaration published in Cumhuriyet has, without a shadow of a doubt, had a great significance for this formation of identity. From that day forward, Alevi foundations and associations whose names we hear rather frequently today have been established. The Alevis and intellectuals have named the beginning of this period the “Alevi Renaissance.” Together with this renaissance, Alevis have started to state their identities comfortably. However, their main purpose and desire is to improve their superstructure with the state and to have equal rights with the Sunni Muslims who make up the majority of the society.

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The AKP, ruling the government since 2003, has launched two projects under the name of “expansion” with the aim of finding solutions to the cultural and political problems of the Alevis and the Kurds. These are the Kurdish expansion and the Alevi expansion, which were later given the name “democratic expansion.” Expansions have stepped in with the aim of helping to find solutions to the demands of the Kurds and the Alevis and to form a platform where political, social, and cultural rights of these two groups—who on all occasions state that although they are not minority groups, they are treated like minority groups—can be discussed. The demands of Alevis from the state and the government that started the expansion are as follows: • Alevism must be accepted as an association of belief and must be secured against discrimination in all areas by the laws. • Compulsory religion classes must be abolished (the fact that the lessons are only Sunni Islam–oriented in this country poses a problem for the Alevis). • Cem houses must be recognized as official places of worship. • The religion section of the identification cards must be removed. • Actual equality must be obtained by the laws and law enforcement. • “Religion and ethics” classes must be excluded from compulsory classes and must be established as elective courses. • Building of mosques in Alevi settlements must be put to an end. • Tekkes must be taken from the Ministry of Tourism and must be assigned to the management of Alevi foundations. • The Presidency of Religious Affairs must be closed down or must integrated the Division of Religious Affairs of Alevism. • The Sivas Madımak Hotel must be made into a museum. These demands are the demands that the Alevis have expressed for years. The “expansion” has given hope to the Alevis and has inspired them with expectation for the fulfillment of these requests. Since 2009, 16 workshops consisting of various foundations and institutions have been congregated up till now. These workshops have been constituted with the aim of discussing the demands of the Alevis in detail and conveying precise and objective information to the government, within the framework of the government’s Democratic Expansion process. However, the Alevis have not been satisfied with the results, and most of the Alevi population has found the efforts of the government insincere. The only reconciliation which seems to be achieved is the religious affairs issue. There has been consensus on the issues of the DİB maintaining its existence, constituting independent foundations that will also represent the Alevis within, and giving a share to the Alevis from the budget.

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Above all, achieving and maintaining the principle of civil equality were the most important subjects discussed. Traditionally, it is a well-known fact that the Alevis and the Bektashis have always been deeply loyal to the principle of civil equality. Equality, fraternity, and fellowship are the most important fundamentals of the Alevis. The Alevis, who were involved in the left-wing movement in the 1960s and 1970s, have actually been defenders of these principles through their political views. As Fuat Keyman states, if equality is defined as treating every individual equally in every kind of practice viable for all the foundations that make up the whole society, as we have formerly highlighted, the Alevis have demanded to receive the same treatment as the Sunnis in all foundations of the government.32 Since the Ottoman period, it has been emphasized several times that the Alevis have often been excluded from the society and from some specific foundations of the government up to now due to their belief. As a result of being excluded and not being represented properly, Alevis have taken an opposing attitude and have been against some of the foundations of the government and some specific Sunni sections. Expressions and actions such as regarding of the Cem houses as “entertainment houses” or even disregarding them, teaching Sunnism to Alevi students and imposing the idea that real Islam is Sunni Islam, forcing people who do not fast to fast, and verbalizing inappropriate expressions for the Alevis are all attitudes and conducts against the principle of “civil equality.” These expressions are even used as a policy for some authorities. The subject of the Alevis’ benefiting from the civil rights connected to social, judicial, democratic, and human rights that are stated in the constitution forms a significant issue. In the 1990s, a main purpose of the Alevi associations and foundations that had an influence on the formation of the Alevi Renaissance was for the Alevis to have freedom of religion and conscience and to have equal rights with the Sunni Muslims who comprise the majority of the society. The 10th provision of the Turkish constitution emphasizes that no individual can be granted a privilege for his or her belief, race, sect, or religion.33 However, Alevis have been excluded from the society due to their belief structure and therefore have experienced discrimination among people.

What Should Be Done for the Alevis in Terms of Citizenship? The principle of “constitutional citizenship,” which stresses on the recognition of differences, was first touched upon by Süleyman Demirel in the General Assembly of the International Press Institute in Budapest in 1992. In

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fact, it is the process of globalization that has conveyed a new meaning for the principle of citizenship and has influenced the whole world. This concept, which is expressed as the notion of “constitutional citizenship, has provided the reestablishment of social stratification, the reinforcement of social mobility, and the increase in the political and social demands of ethnic, religious, and gender-related identities.34 Hereby, the definition of “multicultural constitutional citizenship” by Fuat Keyman emerges.35 If the civil platform in Turkey can turn into a democratic and multicultural platform, and the existing civil regime is reestablished in an exclusive, equal, and universal manner, expanding the cultural identity and political participation rights, and on the basis of a multicultural identity providing a constitutional guarantee, an effective solution can be found to the demand for identification. What is emphasized here is to find democracy-based, but not identity-based, solutions to the problem of identity. In this context, the concept of “multicultural constitutional citizenship” can be an important model and even be the best solution in terms of implementing rights and freedom for all segments of the society equally and the globalization of the values. Here, the main idea is that solutions should not be sought in the concept of “Turkish citizenship” as Baskın Oran expresses but in the democratization of the notion of citizenship. It is strongly emphasized that only a new citizenship regulation can solve the problem of identity and assure equality. In this context, changing the conception of citizenship can be seen as a solution for the identity problem of the Alevis.

Conclusion Alevis, who form a significant social and cultural identity for the Republic of Turkey, have been in an ongoing search for identity and a struggle for survival for several years, as we have mentioned above. Alevis, who have been alienated as the “other,” especially by the Sunnis who make up the majority of the Turkish society, have been excluded from the society because of their distinct religious and cultural structure, and as a result of this exclusion, they have taken an opposing stand. Alevis, who have supported the political parties which they hoped would cater their demands, have established their own political parties at certain periods, and who claim to be the guardians of secularism, still have not been able to resume their cultural autonomy completely today. Alevis have stated that they do not have equal citizenship rights with the Sunnis, have firstly established associations and then have intensely appeared in politics in the society since 1990s; yet they have not been able to get the rewards of their efforts. The fact that some Alevi elites have integrated

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into the AKP and have been elected as members of parliament has been a vital factor and has activated the government. Alevis, who have demanded that Alevism be recognized as a separate sect especially by the DİB, and that Alevism also be taught in religion classes at schools, have regarded the “Alevi expansion” project as a sign of hope and have supported it. However, during the period when Alevis started to organize, it appeared that the Alevi society actually has a heterogeneous structure, and there are distinct ideas and organizations in the society. These distinctions have been a significant element in Alevis’ defining Alevism. For instance, while the Pir Sultan Abdal Association (Pir Sultan Abdal Dernegi) defines Alevism as a lifestyle and culture, the Cem Foundation (Cem Vakfı) argues that Alevism is a religion or sect. This manner pulls the Cem Foundation towards the right-wing tendencies while bringing the Pir Sultan Abdal Association closer to the fractions of the left wing. This heterogeneity, without any doubt, makes it harder for the Alevis to gather under one roof and breaks down their demands. In field research we have done to study the political and cultural identity of the Alevis, we have discovered these distinctions at a close range and have personally witnessed how disunited the Alevis are. Alevis define Alevism through the incidents they have experienced, their history, and the places they have immigrated to, and get organized according to these definitions. For example, for a Kurdish Alevi, Alevism is a culture or a lifestyle, whereas for an Anatolian Alevi Alevism might express a sect or a cult. Ethnic roots or regional settlements are important agents when defining Alevism However, Alevis have compromised on one point no matter what ethnic root or definition of Alevism they have, and no matter what age or gender they are, and that point is their loyalty to the principle of secularism and Kemalism; in spite of the fact that they seemed to have adopted a supportive manner towards the AKP, Alevis think that the AKP executes a policy based on religion, and they do not find their discourses sincere. Another point which should be highlighted is that the demands of the Alevis are in fact parallel with the search of “equal citizenship.” As we have formerly mentioned, the concept of citizenship has changed along with the establishment of the republic. The new concept of citizenship led to a new citizenship concept which is “modern, secular, patriotic and nationalistic.” Through this engineering of nation and citizenship, Islam was carefully avoided, and the creation of a nation and citizenship culture composed of a single identity, not multiple identities, was aimed for. As a result of the changes that took place in the years between 1950 and 1980, the identity of citizenship also changed. The primary change was that Islam started to become a part of this identity, and the second of these changes is that a more liberal definition of citizenship emerged along

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with the constitution of 1961. The concept of citizenship, which is shaped according to the political and social changes in Turkey, has evolved especially after the 1980s along with the globalization and various pursuits of ethnic and religious identity created by globalization. The concept of citizenship which began to develop after the 1980s was based on distinctions and later formed the concept of constitutional citizenship. What is this constitutional citizenship? Vahap Coşkun referred to this issue in detail in his article published in a newspaper on September 2, 2007.36 Coşkun stated that the only way to accept distinctions and give them equal rights is through the concept of citizenship, that it should be understood that it is impossible to go any further with the citizenship regulations of today, and that it is an inevitable and an urgent need for Turkey to form a new citizenship regulation that does not suppress existences, lets them exist as themselves, and entitles them the right to maintain their presence. Sociologist Emre Kongar claims the concept of constitutional citizenship is an understanding that combines the political identity of the country and citizenship based on equal rights, rather than combining the national state with cultural identities such as religion, language, or race coming from history or geography.37 Kongar, who suggests that the concept of constitutional citizenship has emerged as a “soft,” “unifying,” “cultural identity,” underlines constitutional citizenship as a principle in which all individuals and different groups that constitute the society are treated equally by the state regardless of their religion, tongue, ethnicity, or origin; equally benefit from the public rights and resources of the state; and, as a result, identify with the state of which he or she is a member. In this respect, this conception of citizenship can be seen as a solution to the recognition of differences and problems of cultural identities. Change in the actual principle of citizenship and its reconstruction under the notion of constitutional citizenship can be a solution for Alevis, Kurds, and all other religious and ethnic groups to benefit from equal rights. On the other hand, besides acting as a factor unifying Alevis, who are divided due to the differences in their views and beliefs, a new conception of citizenship can also be seen as the most suitable solution to the recognition and formation of all cultural rights. Notes 1. Dominique Schnapper, “Le sens de l’ethnico-religieux,” Revue des Archives des Sciences Sociales,(January–March 1993): 149–163. 2. Ilyas Üzüm, Günümüz Aleviliği (Istanbul: Isam Yayınları, 2000), 1. 3. Safevis, besides being the first dynasty that formed a unique political structure in the sixteenth century after the state of Sasani was demolished by the Arab–Muslim

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attacks in the Iranian lands ruled by Arabic, Turkish, and Mongolian dynasties in the seventh century, have also exhibited Iranian identity along with the union they established in the Alevi and geographical centerline. 4. Irène Mélikoff, Uyur Idik Uyardılar (Istanbul: Cem Yayınları, 1994), 33. 5. Mélikoff, Uyur Idik Uyardılar, 53. 6. Mehmet Eröz, Türkiye’de Alevilik ve Bektaşilik (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1990), 89–90. 7. Rıza Zelyut, Aleviler Ne Yapmalı: Şehirlerdeki Alevilerin Sorunları ve Çözümleri (Istanbul: Yön Yayınları, 1993), 121–124. 8. Cemal Şener, Alevilik Olayı (Istanbul: Etik, 2002). 9. Şener, Alevilik Olayı, 105. 10. Cemal Şener, Aleviler Ne Yapmalı (Istanbul: Ant, 1998), 127–129. 11. Nail Yılmaz, Kentin Alevileri (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2005), 36. 12. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, “Aleviliği Nasıl Anlamalı,” Köprü (Spring 1998): 62. 13. Ahmet İçduygu and Fuat Keyman, “Globalleşme, Anayasallık ve Türkiye’de Vatandaşlık Tartışması,” Doğu-Batı no. 5, (1998–1999): 143–155. 14. Murat Okan, Türkiye’de Alevilik (Istanbul: Imge, 2005), 89. 15. Şaban Sitembölükbaşı, Türkiye’de İslamın Yeniden İnkişafı (1950–1960) (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995). 16. Murat Okan, Türkiye’de Alevilik, 95. 17. CEM Dergisi no. 1 (July 1966), 23–24. 18. Şükrü Aslan, 1 Mayıs, (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005). 19. Paul Dumont, “Le poids de l’Alévisme dans la Turquie d’aujourd’hui,” Turcica 21–23 (1991), 165–167. 20. Elise Massicard, L’Autre Turquie, Le mouvement aléviste et ses territoires (Paris: PUF, 2005), 43–44. 21. Massicard, L’Autre Turquie, 43. 22. Thierry Zarcone, La Turquie Moderne et l’Islam (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 187. 23. Murat Belge, “Sol,” in Geçiş Sürecinde Türkiye, edited by İrvin Cemil Schick and Ahmet Tonak, translated by Nail Satlıgan (Istanbul: Belge, 1992), 159–189. 24. Belge, “Sol,” 159–189. 25. Reha Çamuroglu, Günümüz Aleviliğinin Sorunları (Istanbul: Ant, 1994), 78. 26. Rıza Zelyut, Aleviler Ne Yapmalı, 99–103. 27. Hamit Bozarslan, Histoire de la Turquie Contemporaine (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), 66. 28. Hamit Bozarslan, Histoire de la Turquie Contemporaine, 66. 29. Elise Massicard, L’Autre Turquie, 59. 30. Anthony Obershall, Social Conflicts and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973). 31. The Sivas and Istanbul Gazi Mahallesi (District) incidents are the most severe and painful of the attacks that were carried out against the Alevis. The Sivas Genocide, or Madimak Incidents in other words, were incidents which took place during the Pir Sultan Abdal Festivities organized by the Pir Sultan Abdal Association on July 2, 1993, when 33 authors, poets, and philosophers and two hotel employees were

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killed by the fire or choked by the smoke. Thirty-five people lost their lives by getting burnt and choked in this incident, which is considered a genocide. The Istanbul Gazi incidents took place on March 12, 1995, during the night hours, when three coffee houses and one shop in Istanbul’s Gazi District, where Alevis mostly live, were simultaneously subjected to gunfire by unknown persons firing from a taxi. As a result of the attacks, a citizen was dead and 25 people were injured, five of whom were severely injured. It was understood that the attackers killed the taxi driver and set the taxi on fire after leaving the venue. After the event, many Alevi citizens gathered in the Gazi District and marched to the police station, asserting that the security forces intervened in the incident. The policie opened fire, and as a result a citizen named Mehmet Gündüz lost his life and many others were injured. 32. Fuat Keyman, “Çokkültürlü Anayasal Vatandaşlık,” Radikal (November 21, 2004). 33. Item 10 of the Constitution: “Every individual is equal before the law regardless of language, race, color, gender, political view, belief, religion, sect and other reasons.” 34. Nail Yılmaz, Kentin Alevileri. 35. Fuat Keyman, “Çokkültürlü Anayasal Vatandaşlık.” 36. Vahap Coşkun, “Anayasal Vatandaşlık,” Radikal (September 2, 2007). 37. Emre Kongar, “Küreselleşme, Mikro Milliyetçilik, Çok Kültürlülük, Anayasal Vatandaşlık,” www.emrekongar.org.

Bibliography Aslan, Şükrü. 1 Mayıs. Istanbul: Iletişim, 2005. Belge, Murat. “Sol.” In Geçiş Sürecinde Türkiye, edited by İrvin Cemil Schick and Ahmet Tonak, translated by Nail Satlıgan, 159–89. Istanbul: Belge, 1992. Bozarslan, Hamit. Histoire de la Turquie Contemporaine. Paris: La Découverte, 2004. Cem Review, no. 1 (July 1966) : 23–24. Coşkun, Vahap. “Anayasal Vatandaşlık.” Radikal (September2, 2007). Çamuroglu, Reha. Günümüz Aleviliğinin Sorunları. Istanbul: Ant, 1994. Dumont, Paul. “Le poids de l’Alévisme dans la Turquie d’aujourd’hui.” Turcica 21–23, (1991), 165–167. Eröz, Mehmet. Türkiye’de Alevilik ve Bektaşilik. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1990. İçduygu, Ahmet and Keyman Fuat. “Globalleşme, Anayasallık ve Türkiye’de Vatandaşlık Tartışması.” Doğu-Batı no. 5 (1998–1999): 143–155. Keyman, Fuat. “Çokkültürlü Anayasal Vatandaşlık.” Radikal (November 21, 2004). Kongar, Emre. “Küreselleşme, Mikro Milliyetçilik, Çok Kültürlülük, Anayasal Vatandaşlık.” www.emrekongar.org. Massicard, Elise. L’Autre Turquie, Le mouvement aléviste et ses territoires, Paris: PUF, 2005. Mélikoff, Irène. Uyur Idik Uyardılar. Istanbul: Cem, 1994.

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Obershall, Anthony. Social Conflicts and Social Movements. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973. Ocak, Ahmet Yaşar. “Aleviliği Nasıl Anlamalı.” Köprü (Spring 1998). Okan, Murat. Türkiye’de Alevilik. Istanbul: Imge, 2005. Schnapper, Dominique. “Le sens de l’ethnico-religieux.” Revue des Archives des Sciences Sociales (January–March 1993): 149–163. Sitembölükbaşı, Şaban. Türkiye’de İslamın Yeniden İnkişafı (1950–1960). Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995. Şener, Cemal. Aleviler Ne Yapmalı. Istanbul: Ant, 1998. ———. Alevilik Olayı. Istanbul: Etik, 2002. Üzüm Ilyas. Günümüz Aleviliği. Istanbul: Isam, 2000. Zarcone, Thierry. La Turquie moderne et l’Islam. Paris: Flammarion, 2004. Zelyut, Rıza. Aleviler Ne Yapmalı: Şehirlerdeki Alevilerin Sorunları ve Çözümleri. Istanbul: Yön, 1993.

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5 Gypsies and Citizenship in Turkey Senem Kurt Topuz

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a legal status that establishes a bond between the state and individual and is defined on a basis of rights or freedoms and duties. Despite its legal status, it also stands as an independent identity and expresses the individual’s belonging to a political community. In other words, citizenship is a form of “sociopolitical identity” and points out the legal bond between the state and the individual.1 The nation state was mostly regarded as the universal form of political community during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, modern politics is shaped by the idea that people can only exist as a citizen of a nation state. Individuals are then able to benefit from the rights of citizenship as long as they are bound with a citizenship bond to a nation state.2 In the nation state, the citizen is defined above his or her whole tangible and distinctive features as an insulated individual.3 These tangible features may be economic, ethnic, religious, and cultural as well as biological. Thus, in the context of belonging to the state, the definition of citizenship is that citizens are people who have different ethnic or cultural and religious bonds but share common rights and duties within the same nation state.4 The essential argument at the center of this definition is that citizens are regarded as equal since they have the same rights and duties before all else.5 Thus, all the citizens are regarded as equal members of the state in terms of the rights they have and the duties they are obliged to fulfill. Then, the question of de jure and de facto equality of citizenship comes to the fore.6 The question of whether the citizens’ de jure equality is based on de facto equality or whether it triggers the cause for it is in the center of these discussions. In fact, it ITIZENSHIP IS FUNDAMENTALLY

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does not mean that the citizens are equal in practice as they hold the same rights and duties because the society which is the source of the legitimate political decisions of the state varies based on the preferences determined by economic, cultural, ideological, or simply different lifestyles, and what is important in practice is whether the citizens of such a society that shows great variation have sufficient material and cultural resources in order to make a choice between “different activity styles.”7 In other words, it should be identified, for example, “whether citizenship is allowed to be turned into a reality between genders, employers and employees, social classes or between the black, the white, or among other ethnic groups”8 in citizen communities that show variation based on preferences determined by economic, cultural, ideological, or different lifestyles, and necessary regulations should be made accordingly. There is no doubt that the state not only affects and shapes these relationships but also has a crucial role in maintaining equality in practice among its citizens—especially as a part of utilizing citizenship rights—and thus in turning the concept of citizenship into reality. Therefore, mere declaration of citizens’ equality with regard to rights and freedoms in the texts of law is not sufficient. These abstract legal articles should be supported with tangible precautions and contributions.9 What really matters in this respect is whether the citizens benefit from the citizenship rights equally and thus whether all of them have the same opportunity to access citizenship rights, as the obstacles or constraints and breaches in accessing these rights may lead to marginalization and isolation of individuals from the social life.10 Gypsies, who are the focus of this study, are regarded as a marginal group and live as such both in Turkey and in many countries worldwide where they have citizenship.11 It is claimed in many studies conducted on Gypsies that Gypsies encounter a number of difficulties in accessing and benefiting from equal citizenship rights even though their rights are ensured in the constitution in Turkey.12 However, the case is not unique to Turkey. Gypsies usually have low education levels and maintain their life under unhealthy housing conditions and below decent living standards. Many scholars studying Gypsies13 state that Gypsies were exposed to segregationist policies and exclusion for many reasons for centuries and are one of the most oppressed communities in Europe and that gypsies demonstrate the characteristics of a marginal ethnic group in many respects. According to the third report of the Council of Europe–European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) on Turkey issued in 2005, Gypsies in Turkey, defined as a group in a vulnerable position, encounter difficulties arising from their complete exclusion from social life and are subject to discrimination in terms of benefiting from the rights of employment, accommodation, and the public sphere. According to ECRI (2005), Gypsies

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in Turkey maintain their lives under harsh conditions in temporarily allocated units on being expelled from their residences by force without being presented any alternative residential options most of the time. There is inequality of opportunity in terms of benefiting from health and employment services; however, there is also inequality in benefiting from education services as the parents are too poor to send their children to school. Therefore, like the report issued in 2001, ECRI suggested in its third report that the Turkish authorities evaluate the condition of Gypsies, accepted as one of the vulnerable groups, in Turkey and carry out research to determine the problems the Gypsies might encounter especially about intolerance and discrimination in various spheres of social life. Moreover, when we look at the social dimension of the issue it is seen that Gypsies are exposed to discriminatory treatments unlike the rest of the society by those who are prejudiced against them. As a matter of fact, the meanings such as humiliation, insult, and accusation the word “Gypsy” conveys in Turkish results in avoidance of the use of the word. Another issue that must be discussed specifically in the context of Turkey is the debates on citizenship. The ethnic content of citizenship lies at the heart of these debates. There are two different commentaries with reference to the issue. The first one argues that the concept of “being a Turk” which marks the citizenship is an umbrella concept that includes all the people, independent of ethnic origin and race, “bounded with citizenship” to the state of the Republic of Turkey.14 The second perspective claims that the concept of “being a Turk” may have functioned as an umbrella term or have been used for that purpose during the establishment period of the Republic; however, its comprehensive feature is lost due to several regulations directly connected to the idea of “from the Turkish race.” This perspective argues that definition of being a Turkish citizen does not carry a neutral meaning.15 When we look at the issue from this perspective, it can be said that it affects the way the state treats its citizens.16 Therefore, when we look at the status of Gypsy citizens it is seen that they are subject to some discrimination in the regulations made by the state. The regulations discussed in detail under this chapter’s section titled “Citizenship Status of Gypsies in Turkey” and the discriminatory expressions that existed for many years or still exist in those regulations certainly disturb Gypsy citizens and cause them to lose their faith in equal citizenship. In addition, low status and limited opportunities and resources of Gypsy citizens as compared to the rest of the society deepen such a feeling. The general purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the state and Gypsy citizens within the framework of the Gypsies’ rights arising from being citizens of the Republic of Turkey. Thus, through firsthand data collection, the study aimed at finding out the views, in other words the perceptions, of Gypsy citizens on to what extent the rights declared in the

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constitution are actually realized17 and whether Gypsy citizens encounter any discriminatory attitudes while benefiting from these rights. In addition, the survey tried to reveal whether the present citizenship regime in Turkey cause discrimination against Gypsy citizens, if they are subject to any. Gypsy citizens living in Edirne were the focus of this study. Edirne is a city in the northwest of Turkey with a population of approximately 400,000. There are a number of reasons for carrying out the study in Edirne. First of all, Edirne is one of the most important cities of Turkey historically and is its gate to Europe. Hosting various cultures within its borders, the city was the capital of the Ottoman Empire for a long time. It let in Gypsy immigrants during that period of time and allowed a substantial number of them from Balkan countries again after World War I according to the Treaty of Lausanne.18 Some of the Gypsy population that immigrated from the Balkans moved to different cities of Anatolia in the following years. Gypsies in Turkey are most densely populated in Edirne when compared to the other cities. Edirne is also considerably preferred by Gypsies/Romanies settled in the city because they are able to keep their culture alive and preserve their identities. The Kakava Festival, which is held annually in Edirne, is a significant indicator of the case. Moreover, the Accessible Life Association and Edirne Research and Development of Gypsy Culture and Solidarity and Assistance Association organized the International Romani Symposium in 2005 during the festival. Another example is the “Gypsy Chief Elections” that took place in May 2008. Gypsy citizens living in Edirne elected a new Gypsy chief as the successor of the one who had served for 18 years.19 Another significant factor why Edirne was chosen as the site of the study is the fact that Gypsies are more organized in the city as one of the few associations of preserving and developing Gypsy/Romani culture active in Turkey is in Edirne. The process of founding associations which started with the Edirne Romani Association (EDROM) led the way for Gypsies living in other cities, and thus Gypsy/Romani associations were founded in many other cities. In February 2006, a few Gypsy/Romani associations were united and established the Federation of Romani Associations (ROMDEF) in Edirne, which was chosen as the center, and started carrying out its activities in the city. Therefore, the high level of organization and organized activities of Gypsies in Edirne is another important factor which contributed to the success of the study. In this study, a face-to-face, in-depth interview technique was used for collecting primary data. Interviews were held in the districts called Menzilahır (Kemikçiler-Çadırcılar), Umurbey (Küçükpazar-Çalgıcılar), Çavuşbey (Gazimihal-Süpürgeciler-Papazoğlu), and Yıldırım (Kum District-Yıldırım Beyazıd) from May to June in 2009. The relationship between Gypsy citizens and the state was analyzed using the data in the form of in-depth interviews

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with 26 individuals. As is generally accepted, there is no standard research method to determine the number of interviewees for an in-depth interview technique as the technique is qualitative in nature. When the amount of data collected is satisfactory and/or the number of interviews sufficient to represent the target universe is reached, the interviews can be discontinued in this method. Thus, it is believed that the 26 interviews conducted were satisfactory for achieving the general purpose of the study. A purposeful sampling method was used to the select the interviewees. According to this method, participants are comprised of individuals who the researcher thinks would provide answers to the research questions. In other words, the interviewees are not selected randomly, but the criterion for the selection is the researcher’s judgment. Still, the age, gender, occupation, education, and neighborhood differences among the 26 interviewees were taken into consideration as much as possible. Interviews were recorded after consent was given by the participants. In cases where the participant did not consent for recording, the researcher took detailed notes. The duration of the interviews ranged from 30 to 120 minutes. In the following section, the history of gypsies living in Turkey is briefly presented and then the citizenship status of Gypsies living in Turkey is discussed. Next, the findings of the study conducted in Edirne are presented, and whether the present citizenship regime in Turkey is the reason behind the Gypsies’ exposure to discrimination is discussed. In the final section, a general evaluation of the findings of the study is evaluated.

Gypsies in Turkey Gypsies, whose existence in Anatolia goes far back, are known to have passed through Anatolia after they had left India and chose Anatolia as a site to settle down.20 However, there is no clear evidence of when Gypsies first settled in Anatolia. A significant number of Gypsies who immigrated stayed and then settled down in Anatolia while some others migrated to the Balkan states through Istanbul in the following centuries. Some of these Gypsies immigrating to Balkan states settled there while others scattered around European countries at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century.21 The number of Gypsies living almost in every region of Turkey is still a matter of debate today since official data of the number of ethnic groups are not recorded. Since 1960s, there have not been any questions related to ethnic origin in the population census. Yet, commonly used numbers regarding the Gypsy population living in Turkey range from nearly 500,000 to 600,000.22

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The concepts to define Gypsies living in Turkey differ from one region to the other: Gypsies in Turkey are called Poşa (in Erzurum, Artvin, Erzincan, Bayburt, and Sivas), Mutrib (in Hakkari, Mardin, Siirt, and the south part of Van), Arabacı (in the Mediterranean