Kemalist identity in transition: A case study of Kurdish nationalism and political Islam in Turkey

This dissertation is an attempt to study Turkey's national and secular identity in light of the challenges posed by Kurdish nationalism and political Islam. The underlying premise of my argument is that Kurdish nationalism and political Islam represent existential threats to Turkey's Kemalist military and political establishment. While any evidence, no matter how minor, of Kurdish nationalism is perceived as a major security threat to the nation-state's territorial and national integrity, Islamic sociopolitical and cultural activities are often considered as harbingers of a fundamentalist revolution. I will try to illustrate that such an alarmist, zero-sum approach to Kurdish nationalism and Islamic groups not only fuels authoritarianism and societal polarization but also aggravates the Kemalist identity crisis the country is currently undergoing.; Although these identity-related problems gained a new sense of urgency after Turkey's last military take-over in 1980, they are far from being products of the last two decades. By adopting a historical approach, this thesis will demonstrate that Kurdish and Islamic dissidence have culminated in the 1920s and 1930s in reaction to---and in certain cases as products of---Kemalist nation-state building and militant secularism. Such an assertion and the Turkish military's ongoing determination to confront the powerful re-emergence of Kurdish nationalism and political Islam by using authoritarian Kemalist precepts require a reconsideration of the basic tenets of Turkish "nationalism" and "secularism".; The first part of this dissertation, therefore, starts with a detailed analysis of these two concepts. Methodologically, the Turkish understanding of nationalism and secularism will be traced not through radical deconstructionism or cognitive psychology but through an older method which has the advantage of being more transparent and reliable: historical sociology. In light of the Ottoman legacy, the first two chapters, which deal with Turkish secularism and nationalism respectively, will provide the relevant historical and theoretical parameters for the second part of the study. It is in this second section of the dissertation that political Islam and the Kurdish problem will be analyzed as major challenges to Turkey's official ideology of Kemalism. Finally, the last section of the dissertation will examine Turkey's Kemalist identity dilemma in a foreign policy perspective and analyze the impact of the Kurdish problem and political Islam on Turkey's difficult relations with the European Union since the end of the Cold War.; By following such a structure, the thesis will focus on certain patterns of causality between Turkey's current identity dilemma and its peculiar understanding of secularism and nationalism. It will finally be argued that a less authoritarian way to tackle the Republic's ethnic and religious problem depends on Ankara's ability to transcend anachronistic political rigidities legitimized by a stagnant version of Kemalism.