Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey 1923-1945

Introduction

1 Introduction In 1923 the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I and a War of Liberation against Greece and other victorious Entente Powers. The proclamation of the Republic was accompanied by a sweeping series of modernizing reforms covering all aspects of life. Historical and political studies of early Republican Turkey tend to emphasize the elitist and the statist aspects of the Republican project of modernization. Yet to attain a better understanding of early Republican Turkish society, culture, and politics, it is critical to study the societal aspects of the reform process. The experience of the early Republican, or what came to be known as Kemalist, reforms became part of the larger social process of various local communities coming to terms with what they had lived through during a decade of wars and destruction. How did ordinary people experience the process of Kemalist reforms? How did they receive and react to the state-initiated changes? This process involved a plethora of responses between the two extremes of passive reception and outright rejection. This book explores the ways in which the meaning of the Kemalist reforms was negotiated between individuals, communities, and the state. This study focuses on the period from 1923, the formation of the Republic , to 1945, the beginning of multi-party politics with the foundation of the Democrat Party. During these two decades Turkey was ruled by a radical single-party regime, the Republican People’s Party (RPP), which was presided over by a charismatic revolutionary leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, until his death in 1938. Drawing on the legitimacy of the success in the War of Liberation , the revolutionary leadership of post-Ottoman Turkey embarked upon an ambitious project of modernization and secular nation-building. The aim of this project was summarized as elevating the Turkish nation to the level 2  Becoming Turkish of contemporary civilization. The sphere of the reforms extended from the abolition of the Caliphate to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and to the declaration of Sunday as the new day of rest. Traditionally, historical narratives of this period have been told from the point of view of the modernizing state. The main exception to this trend has been the histories of violent resistance to the reforms and of the ensuing clashes and suppression. I argue that neither the histories that focus on the state nor those that focus on opposition and resistance capture the complexity and richness of social and cultural life in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. I argue, following the path that has been suggested by Joel Migdal,1 that we can arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of social and cultural life by focusing on the meeting grounds of and the dialogue between the state and the society. This book examines state-society relations in Turkey in the context of the nationalizing and modernizing reforms of the early Republic. It tries to provide a better understanding of the Turkish nation-building process by focusing on four specific sites of the state’s attempt to produce a new Turk and a modern Turkish nation. The sites or areas of Kemalist reform that I examine are men’s clothing, women’s clothing, language, and national celebrations . I do not claim that these were the only or even necessarily the most important aspects of the Kemalist nation-building process. My choice of these areas of reform in part reflects my consideration of these sites as significant elements of the process that will reveal more about the overall process, beyond the issues specific to each particular reform area. The selection of the themes, naturally, also reflects my own interests as a historian in the politics and culture of language, dress, and celebrations. I treat men’s and women’s dress issues separately to demonstrate how (and why) the state and society dealt with the male and female dress differently in nationalizing and modernizing/Westernizing dress, and to better incorporate women and their experiences in the history of the early Republic. Language was a crucial site of the new state’s nationalizing, secularizing, and modernizing policies. Turkish nationalists, both ideologues such as Ziya Gökalp and statesmen such as Şükrü Kaya, emphasized the Turkish language as a fundamental element of Turkishness. In the early years of the Republic, the state pursued a wide range of language policies aimed at building a homogeneous nation. By 1923, the foundation of the Republic, the...