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Debating Turkish Modernity explores how Turks spoke about the prospect of joining the European Economic Community between 1959 and 1980. It argues that these debates created deep, bitter divides among Turks by bringing up long-standing questions about Turkey's past and its ambivalent relationship with Europe.
Between 1945 and 1960, the birth of a multi-party democracy and NATO membership radically transformed Turkey's foreign relations and domestic politics. As Turkish politicians, intellectuals and voters rethought their country's relationship with its past and its future to facilitate democratization, a new alliance with the United States was formed. In this book, Nicholas L. Danforth demonstrates how these transformations helped consolidate a consensus on the nature of Turkish modernity that continues to shape current political and cultural debates. He reveals the surprisingly nuanced and often paradoxical ways that both secular modernizers and their Islamist critics deployed Turkey's famous clichés about East and West, as well as tradition and modernity, to advance their agendas. By drawing on a diverse array of published and archival sources, Danforth offers a tour de force exploration of the relationship between democracy, diplomacy, modernity, Westernization, Ottoman historiography and religion in mid-century Turkey.
This thesis investigates the socio-historical developments of Turkey in the light of current developments in the tradition of comparative-historical sociology by according a central place to the 'concept of varieties of modernity' in the analysis. The debate on varieties of modernity is a response and a contribution to new theoretical developments regarding modernity. And this thesis is set in the conceptual context of the current debate on varieties of modernity by aiming at understanding the Turkish experience as a particular model of modernity. The starting-point of the thesis is the possibility of the emergence of 'multiple modernities' with their specific interpretations of the 'imaginary significations of modernity'. As a consequence, a critique of perspectives that reduce modernization of non-western societies to Westernization emerges immediately. Thus, the assumed equivalence between the West and modernity is problematized through the themes of the 'plurality' of civilizations, histories, modernizing agents and projects of modernity. The concept of 'later modernities' is suggested as a category for certain varieties of modernity, entirely different from the Western model. The term 'later modernities' refers in particular to non-western experiences that came about as distinct models of modernity, different from the West European experience, in the absence of colonization. In this context, the Turkish experience is a particular modernization an analysis of which is able to clarify the argument for varieties of modernity: the Turkish experience has been so far analysed only as a mere case of Westernization. By analysing both civilizational patterns and modernizing agents of Turkey, this thesis suggests that Turkish modernity cannot be read as a version of the Western model. This conclusion is reached through examining Turkish history in terms of a 'singularization of culture' against the view that sees Turkey as a border country between the West and Islam. It is argued that the division between West and East is, in fact, irrelevant in the case of Turkey. Therefore, the Turkish experience, as later modernity, does not express a Western model of modernity nor does it correspond to a 'pure' Islamic East. The distinctive traits of Turkish modernity are analysed on the basis of the following themes: the nationalizing process, the configuration of state, society and economy; Islam; the woman question. Finally, the lessons from the Turkish experience for a social theory of modernity are discussed in terms of conclusions.
In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.
In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide “whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalized as a white person”; the New York Times article on the decision, discussing the question of Turks’ whiteness, was cheekily entitled “Is the Turk a White Man?” Within a few decades, having understood the importance of this question for their modernization efforts, Turkish elites had already started a fantastic scientific mobilization to position the Turks in world history as the generators of Western civilization, the creators of human language, and the forgotten source of white racial stock. In this book, Murat Ergin examines how race figures into Turkish modernization in a process of interaction between global racial discourses and local responses.
Turkey's Enagement with Modernity explores how the country has been shaped in the image of the Kemalist project of nationalist modernity and how it has transformed, if erratically, into a democratic society where tensions between religion, state and society continue unabated.
India and Turkey, Asia Minor and the Subcontinent of Hindustan, and the Ottomans and Mughals have had shared histories of contact, engagement, and dialogue over the centuries. Much of northern India was under the control of rulers from Central Asia since at least the thirteenth century. Startling glimpses of the presence of Turkic-speaking peoples from Central Asia are still visible, for example, in north Indian material cultures - languages, cuisine, religion, architecture, and medicine. This book places the Indian subcontinent side by side with the Turkic-speaking world, both past and present, in order to understand one geographical context in relation to the other. The juxtaposition of the two countries throws up some startling commonalities as well as considerable differences, and it is the variations as well as the similarities that allow for comparability. By exploring historical connections and providing a comparative perspective in terms of spirituality and religion, social movements, political economy, and foreign policy, the book initiates productive cross-cultural conversations, allowing concerns from one location to illuminate the other. The book is split into five parts: History and Memory, Nationhood and Leadership, Secularism, Debating Development, and claiming the City. The first comparison of the Subcontinent and present-day Turkey, the book emphasizes the importance of cross-regional comparative analysis in order to overcome some of the pitfalls of area-focused analysis. Filling a gap in the existing literature, it will be of interest to scholars in various disciplines, including politics, religion, history, urbanization, and development in the Middle East and Asia.