Historiography and Constructing the Modern Nation-State in Turkey

Abstract

Following Mustafa Kemal’s 1923 declaration of its establishment, the modern state of Turkey found itself before the issue of erecting the pillars of its fledgling national identity. In investigating what connects the nationalist dimension to the geographic, history is employed so as to bridge the gap between the two. It thereby became a field of interpretation and a source for the weaving-together of the fledgling state’s ideological framework. The Kemali project caused a rift with the Ottoman past and, within this framework, the Turkish History Thesis emerged to reexamine the history of the Turks in a way that served the state narrative of events. To make this possible, the “Turkish History Society” was established, for which a number of historians were recruited with the primary objective of proving the link between the Turks and Anatolia, and interpreting history in total congruence with the state objective of fusing all citizens together within a single mold of identity. The Turkish History Thesis offered a chauvinistic vision of the Turks: they were the builders of civilization everywhere they went, the forefathers of all ancient peoples—and the oldest, in fact, ever to inhabit Anatolia. This thesis created a framework for the official history of the Kemali state. It bears mentioning that the process of rewriting Turkish history extended beyond ancient history and included the recent past, where Mustafa Kemal was careful to impose his narrative of the circumstances of the war of liberation, by way of the famous “Nutuk” speech. What’s more, the reviews that included the relationship to the Islamic past, after his death in 1938, made use of Islam to raise the prestige of the Turkish ethnicity within Islamic history.