Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey ed. by Ayşe Kadıoğlu and E. Fuat Keyman (review)

206 JOTSA 2:1 (2015) Kadıoğlu, Ayşe and E. Fuat Keyman, eds. Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011. Xxi, 376 p., ill. Paperback $40.00: ISBN: 978-1-60781-031-5. Symbiotic Antagonisms: Competing Nationalisms in Turkey is a welcome contribution to the fields of Turkish, Kurdish, and Islamic nationalisms. Articles in the edited volume cover these “competing nationalisms” through an extended period and look at their development through different perspectives, such as their relationship with modernity and identity, discourse analysis, political hegemony, and civil society. The editors of the book indicate that the book is a compilation of articles submitted by the authors to an earlier symposium in Istanbul in November 2007. Chapter 1 by Şerif Mardin, is an exposition of the relationship between Islam, nationalism, and modernity in the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, Mardin makes a distinction between the Ottoman system of “classification” and Turkish Republican system of “consolidation,” arguing that the empire’s constant loss of territory and population caused the leadership to look for an identity definition (in this case, nationalism) that focused on consolidating the feeling of belonging, rather than decentralization . In Chapter 2, Fuat Keyman presents a historical overview of the interaction between modernity and identity through the late-Ottoman period to its relations with the European Union in the 1990s. Keyman argues that Turkey’s own imperial past in the Ottoman Empire had caused it to tie modernity and nationalism together and, together with its strong state tradition, its adoption of a European style modernization and its geopolitical standing had caused it to connect modernization with security considerations and had placed modernity at the heart of the state identity, in direct relation to its raison d’etre. In Chapter 3, Ayşe Kadıoğlu also focuses on the same idea, discussing how Turkish nationalism and modernization had “twin motives”; first, of preserving the unity of the Ottoman Empire and second, of adopting Westernization as a state identity, which also spilled over to how the state defined its “ideal citizen.” In this, Kadıoğlu explains that during the transition from empire to republic, the Turkish state had gone through a profound change in self-definition, but once the change took place, it also found itself as a state “in search of its nation.” Kadıoğlu also treats the same historical period as Keyman, beginning her analysis with the late Ottoman period and ending with nationalismIslam debates during the tenure of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In Chapter 4, Tanıl Bora looks at how Turkish nationalist discourses have taken shape since Ziya Gökalp and Atatürk’s consequent definition of the nation and its people, analyzing how the official state nationalism evolved through the republican period and how “liberal neo-nationalist,” “pan-Turkist” and Islamistnationalist discourses challenged that original definition. In Chapter 5, Umut Özkırımlı looks at how Turkish nationalism evolved through the republican period, analyzing in detail how secularism/anti-secularism and Westernism/anti-Westernism had shaped political parties’ nationalist rhetoric. From there Özkırımlı questions whether the discourse of a “homogenous nation” was a reality or myth, arguing that Book Reviews 207 the parties’ understanding of national unity depended on power relations among them and their struggle for hegemony. In Chapter 6, Umut Uzer focuses on the early republican construction of Turkishness and how Kemalist nationalism competed against the ethno-nationalist variant of Nihal Atsız, Islamism, and Turkism and how this competition affected the state identity. Referring to Turkish nationalism as “reactive and defensive,” Uzer stipulates that the state, while aiming to create a feeling of belonging and unity among its citizens, had at the same time provoked polarizations against competing definitions of identity and belonging. In Chapter 7, Berrin Koyuncu-Lorsadağı focuses on Islamist-nationalist discourses and religious rivals to secular nationalism through the late Ottoman Empire, how late Ottoman Islamist-nationalist discourse shifted through the republican period and how the 1980s’ Turk-Islam synthesis was re-defined by Fethullah Gülen. Then, building on this in Chapter 8, Simten Coşar offers an analysis of two competing processes in...