Death Rattle of an Empire – Birth Pangs of a Republic Resonant Themes in Turkish History

Mixed Messages: Chania, Crete

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Themes• Towards the Republic

• Founding the Republic

• The population exchange• Political consequences• Musical consequences

• Modernisation and westernisation• Language reform, literacy and Education • Music and Dress

• Securing and mythologising the Republic

• The Republic today

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Towards the Republic• Survival?

• Balkan wars; lost territories, lost identities, new identities, population movements

• Creating and conflicting identities: • Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism, Westernism, Socialism

• Since 19th century Tanzimat, new language of identity at centre of politics.

• Changes in military, political life and social life, from dress codes to education to protect and sustain the Empire.

• Impact of First World War• Armenian question and repercussions

• Something genuinely new was necessary to construct a nation state.• What? How?

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Towards the Republic

• The rise of Ataturk in the First World War• Gallipoli

• The fall of the Ottoman Empire, 1919

• The Greek invasion, 1919-1922• the ‘Asia Minor catastrophe’

• Treaty of Sevres (1920)• Carved up Ottoman lands

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Sevres Syndrome• Turkish war of independence• Repulsion of the Greek invasion and rejection of Sevres

• Sevres Treaty signed by Ottoman delegation (but never by Sultan).• Duality of political leadership: who represents Turks/Turkey? • Ankara rejected it from the very beginning • Still born Treaty increased resistance to occupation

• Never implemented but Sevres left a legacy in Turkey• Sevres left a notorious legacy in Turkish collective memory as a symbol

of defeat and capitulation. • ‘Sevres mentality’ is to see every demand from the outside as a threat

to integrity of Turkey. 6

Treaty of Lausanne (1923)

• Resolved boundaries of the Ottoman successor state in a territory bigger than that agreed for Turkey in never implemented Sevres.

• Established Turkey as a sovereign geo-political entity.

• Confirmed the triumph of ‘resistance’ and of war-torn (for decades) people.

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The one and indivisible republic?

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Founding the Republic• Sultanate abolished in 1922

• Following Treaty of Lausanne, Republic of Turkey founded 1923

• Ankara chosen as capital

• Republic as unitary state

• Republic as Turkish state

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The Population Exchange • Military defeats, lost territories. Events of late 19th century paved way for big

waves of migration within and outside territory that later became Turkey.

• Around two million Muslims migrated to Anatolia territories lost to Russia, Austria and Greece

• Balkan Wars created another wave of migration, this time including a reverse direction of Christian refugees.

• When Anatolian resistance drove the Greek army out of Anatolia most western Anatolian Greeks fled. • Fear of reprisal

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The population exchange• Why?• Who? • Where?• How?• Treaty of Lausanne (1923)

• Criterion = religion, not language

• Consequences • Economic• Social• Political consequences

• Precedent• Musical

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Twice a stranger’

• Asia Minor’s Greek-Orthodox community, including the Karamanlıs of central Turkey and the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea, left for Greece.

• Turkish-Muslim community of Western Thrace stayed in Greece

• Cretans to Cunda and elsewhere

• Greek-Orthodox communities of Istanbul and the Aegean islands of Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos) exempted from the exchange. 12

Küçükkuyu‘In commemoration of exchanges on both shores’

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The Population Exchange

• Exchange affected Asia Minor Greeks and Turkish-Muslim communities differently since Turkey and Greece were at “at different stages of nation-state formation” (Ç. Keyder, in Hirschon, 2003).

• Asymmetrical: added c25% to Greek population and c5%• Parts of Greece became overcrowded and parts of Turkey

seriously underpopulated• Greek planning laws

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Population exchange: Rebetika

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_nOoZCGtd8&index=5&list=RDUaR1vKSV-dI

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cPbCXWGJMo&list=RDUaR1vKSV-dI&index=8

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A busy time• 1924: Abolition of caliphate

• 1924: Muslim sabbath, Friday, dropped in favour of Sunday.

• 1924: The Ministry for Islamic law (Shariat) and pious foundations (vakıfs) abolished = Islam stripped of state backing.

• 1924: Religious seminaries (madrassa) shut down; religious high Schools placed under authority of Ministry of Education.

• 1924: Presidency of Religious Affairs

• 1925: Sufi dervish lodges closed.

• 1925: Fez declared illegal. New law required men to wear western-style hats.

• 1925: Lunar calendar and clock dropped; Gregorian calendar/solar clock adopted

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Even busier• 1926: Turkish Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük• Millet Meclisi—TBMM) approved a secular civil code to

regulate marriage, inheritance, divorce, and adoption.

• 1926: the government annulled Shariat courts, declaring Islamic law null and void.

• 1928: parliament removed from constitution declaration of Islam as Turkey’s state religion.

• 1928: Arabic alphabet to be dropped and new, Latin-based alphabet effective from January 1, 1929.• Previous efforts from tanzimat onwards not very successful

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Mythologising the Turkish Republic

•Nutuk 1927

• Six day speech

•Nutuk as a performative

•Myth creation 18

Kemalism as a state doctrine• The six principles: the “six arrows,” representing

republicanism, nationalism, secularism, populism, statism, and revolutionism.

• Most important are republicanism, nationalism, secularism

• CHP: Republican People’s Party established 1923

• Multi party system 1946

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The Shape of the Republic

• Turkish identity

• Unitary state • Hobbesian conception of state sovereignty.• Rejection of regionalism and autonomy.

• Minorities: e.g. Kurds and integration in Turkish Republic

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Language Reform• A reform in alphabet:

• Persian/Arabic script ill suited to Turkish, hard to read, fiendishly difficult to write

• A reform in language – words, spelling and grammar• Purification of language – removal of Persian and Arabic words• Most people could not read or write• Mass literacy, education and language reform was a joint project• Declaration of cultural and political westernisation• Creating new Turkish identity• Origins of Turkish and Turkish past

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A ‘catastrophic success’?• Cut Turks off from their own history.

• Nobody could read their grand great parents letters, diaries

• Only trained scholars can read official Ottoman documents and books

• Alienation

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Secularisation• Pushing Islam out of public domain. • Atatürk’s vision of Turkey: as a modern nation state of citizens.

• “the regime targeted a new, national, and all-inclusive identity for the country’s inhabitants and ... having turned its back on Islam, Ankara promoted a varied definition of the nation”

• Atatürk declared: “the people of Turkey, who have established the Turkish state, are called the Turkish nation.”

• Atatürk stressed shared past, interests and desire to live together as factors binding the nation together.

• Article 5 of CHP’s new by-laws adopted at the Second Congress, 1927, stipulated that one of “the strongest links” among the citizens was “unity in feelings and unity in ideas.”

• (Soner Çağaptay, 2006) 23

Professional life and education

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Equality between the sexes• On 17 February 1926, Turkey adopted a new civil code by

which the rights of Turkish women and men were declared equal except in suffrage.

• In 1930, women gained the right to participate in municipal and, in 1934, national elections.

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Women in public life

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Modern Secular Life

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Marriage, civil law and dress codes

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Reform• Westernisation and modernisation was not new

• Dated back to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid 19th century

• However the way Ataturk exploited the opportunities provided by the formation of the Turkish Republic was new.

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The Present

Challenges to the republic • Neo-Ottomanism• Pan Turkism• Unitary state• Autonomy

And unresolved issues with• CHP (Republican People’s Party) • Islam in Public Domain• Electoral System• 1915: Armenia and Armenians• Kurdish autonomy and integration

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Suggested Reading• Alaranta, T. ‘Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Six-Day Speech of 1927:

Defining the Official Historical View of the Foundation of the Turkish Republic’ (Turkish Studies, 9: 1,115-129, 2008)

• Çağaptay, S. Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: who is a Turk? (Routledge, 2006)

• Clark, B. Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Granta, 2006)

• Hirschon, R.(ed) Crossing the Aegean: an appraisal of the 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey (Bergahn, 2003)

• İnalcık, H. Turkey and Europe in History (Eren, 2006)• Kedourie, S. (ed) Turkey before and after Atatürk (Cass, 1999)• Kili, S. The Atatürk Revolution: a paradigm of modernization

(Türkiye Bankası, 2008)

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Suggested Reading• Lewis, G. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic

Success (Oxford University Press, 1999)• Mango, A. Atatürk (2nd ed, Murray, 2004)• Mango, A. Turkey: From the Sultan to Atatürk (Haus, 2009)• Özkırımlı, U & Sofos, S.A. Tormented by History: Nationalism in

Greece and Turkey (Hurst, 2008)• Zürcher, E.J.Turkey: A Modern History (3rd ed, Tauris, 2004)• Zürcher, E.J. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building from

the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (Tauris, 2010)

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