Three Tales of Horror: The Demons and Inner Hatreds of Early Turkish Nationalism
November 28, 2007, 12:30PM
Fares Center Conference Room
Speaker: Halil Berktay, Associate Professor of History, Sabanci University, Istanbul; Visiting Scholar, Center for Middle East Studies, Harvard University

Summary

Halil Berktay, Associate Professor of History at Sabanci University in Istanbul, and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies of Harvard University, spoke about the construction of Turkish nationalism and national memory in the late Ottoman and early Republican Kemalist era.

Berktay began his lecture by providing historical background about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He argued that early Turkish nationalism must be understood by analyzing the collapse and demise of the Ottoman Empire and the nationalist struggles—especially the Balkan nationalist movements—of that period. For Berktay, the rivalry among different nationalist movements in the Balkans constituted "one big protracted crisis" that ultimately paved the way for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is this nationalist crisis and the late Ottoman responses to the challenges therein that eventually formed the basis of modern Turkish nationalist ideology.

Focusing on nationalist historiography, Berktay challenged the Kemalist Republican paradigm, which invokes that there never existed a nationalist ideology in the pre-Republican period, and that Turkish nationalist ideology was constructed by the Republican Kemalist elite after the proclamation of independence. Berktay disagreed with the concept that Turkish nationalism is a product of emerging loyalties tied to the creation of the Kemalist Republic as a nation-state. In his view, not only the Kemalist revolution had a clear agenda for transforming the remainder of the Ottoman Empire into a nation-state. Instead, Berktay argued that the Kemalist criterion for nationalism was deliberately set too high in order to win recognition as a nationalist ideology.

Referring to the theoretical foundations of the construction of nationalist ideologies, Berktay argued that a negative agenda always precedes a positive agenda. First, a narrative of demonology is typically based on an imagined category of national enemies. Berktay considers the existence of an ethnic narrative of demonology as a premature form of a nationalist ideology, which carries with it a comprehensive program for an eventual nation-state. This narrative not only distinguishes between allies and adversaries, but also forms a historical space that informs the ideas of sovereignty and territoriality of the nation-state. Berktay noted that in modern state-building processes, there is no exception in which national identity was not identified in opposition to "the other," whether real or imagined.

Berktay's current research on the Balkan nationalisms is reflective of this trend of demonology. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalist movements took the form of conflicting national ideologies, which were defined as purely Greek, Bulgarian, or Slavic. In the late Ottoman period, the Turks experienced a similar process themselves. By the time of the Balkan Wars and their aftermath, the Young Turk variant of Turkish nationalism had acquired a complete demonology vis-à-vis other national groups in the Balkans.

Berktay observed that Turkish nationalist demonologies have literary manifestations in short stories written during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and particularly during the Balkan Wars. In particular, he focused on one of the vanguards of early Turkish nationalism: Omer Seyfettin (1884-1920), a writer and essayist who lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Seyfettin was born into a Circassian family that was displaced by the Czarist Russian advance into the Caucasus. He joined the army and fought during the Balkan Wars. After the war, he was decommissioned and devoted himself to writing. In that period, Seyfettin became very close to the Unionists and to Enver Pasha in particular, therefore becoming instrumental in the construction and narration of the new ideology of Turkish nationalism.

Berktay divided Omer Seyfettin's stories into two major categories. The first set of stories is about the Ottoman retreat from the Balkans and includes works such as "Flags of Liberty" (Hurriyet Bayraklari), "Two Congressmen" (Iki Mebus), "Revolution and Counter Revolution" (Irtica Haberi), "The Bomb" (Bomba), "A Pure White Tulip" (Beyaz Lale), and "After Gallipoli" (Canakkale'den Sonra). In all of these stories, Turks are in the position of victims and their persecutors are, most of the time, representatives of the new Balkan nationalisms, such as Greeks or Bulgarians.

The second set of stories was published in 1917 and is collectively known as the "Ancient Heroes Series" (Eski Kahramanlar). In 1917, when World War I began to turn sour for the Ottoman Empire, Enver Pasha organized a propaganda campaign that mobilized authors, poets, and artists to produce nationalistic works in order to sustain public morale and the will to continue fighting. Seyfettin's second set of stories was written during this period of defeat and severe humiliation, but does not reflect the weakness of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, Seyfettin created tactical situations in which Ottoman heroes face impossible odds at the hands of the Great Powers, but Turkish heroes inevitably triumph through a combination of intellect, agility, and courage.

Berktay argued that Seyfettin's two sets of stories are reflective of the construction of early Turkish nationalism. The first set is comprised of victimization stories, whereas the second set demonstrates that regardless of the strength of the enemy, it is possible to triumph over the "steam and steal civilization" of the Entente. By deconstructing these stories in light of the writings of contemporary Turkish columnists, Berktay concluded that, in fact, both the early nationalist perception of the West and the idea that the world is conspiring against the Turks remain part and parcel of today's Turkish nationalist narrative.

~ By Emre Kayhan (Ph.D. Candidate)

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