“Democracy and National Unity Day” in Turkey: the invention of a new national holiday

Solomonovich, Nadav

doi:10.1017/npt.2020.33

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…7 The "official" ones, whose construction plans were announced in October 2016 by Erdogan, were built in ˙Istanbul, near the Bosphorus Bridge (renamed as July (Cumhurbaşkanlıgı Külliyesi) in 2017 (Yeni Şafak 2017). 9 July 15 arose as the founding moment of the "New Turkey," which would reclaim the lost glory of the Ottoman Empire, de-emphasizing the Republican period and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, while bringing the AKP to the center of collective memory with its more traditional and religious ideology (Altınordu 2017;Taş 2018;Uzer 2018;Hammond 2019Hammond , 2020Hammond , 2022Solomonovich 2021). However, these monuments built across Turkey also reflect a different range of political, cultural, and local sensitivities inside the official narrative of AKP.…”

Section: Monuments As Invisible Nodes Of a Mnemonical Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

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The “glitch” of Rabia monuments: a semiotic analysis of July 15 monuments in Turkey

Üngür

2023

New Perspect. Turk.

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After the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, the Turkish state started to produce a new official history of the event as a narrative of popular resistance against a military coup for the sake of democracy. This narrative with a religious aura was supported by “democracy watch” meetings and new commemoration days, museums, and monuments across Turkey. It was based on four concepts, symbolized by the Rabia sign: one nation, one homeland, one flag, and one state. However, the use of the Rabia sign has fallen from grace recently, creating a critical gap or “glitch” in the mnemonic infrastructure. This paper offers a visual categorization of July 15 monuments across Turkey and positions them in the historiography of Turkish national monuments. Finally, Rabia monuments are analyzed as a case study to show part of the complex (trans)national narratives of the “New Turkey.”

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Section: Monuments As Invisible Nodes Of a Mnemonical Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The "Şehitler Makamı" memorial is analyzed in detail byHammond (2020).9 The official ˙Istanbul and Ankara memorials are compared bySolomonovich (2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

The “glitch” of Rabia monuments: a semiotic analysis of July 15 monuments in Turkey

Üngür

2023

New Perspect. Turk.

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“…Thus, the case of minority holidays (religious or national) provides us with a good opportunity to gain novel insights into the role of informal institutions in sociopolitical life and into the way they interact with formal counterparts. The existing literature offers several studies that analyze the role of officially recognized public holidays (national or religious) in Turkish sociopolitical life (e.g., see Öztürkmen 2001;Roy 2006;Zencirci 2012;Acikalin and Kilic 2017;Solomonovich 2021). However, we do not have much scholarly analysis on minority holidays, which operate in an informal domain of the Turkish sociopolitical landscape.…”

Section: Religious Minority Holidays In Turkeymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Informal Institutions Matter

Sarigil

2023

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Appendix 3.A. A List of Interviewees (Religious Marriage) Appendix 3.B. Factor Analysis of Religiosity Appendix 4.A. A List of Interviewees (Cem Courts, Informal Conflict Resolution) Appendix 5.A. A List of Interviewees (Religious Minority Holidays) ForewordThe Importance of Informal Institutions and Norms Most people, whether scholars or ordinary citizens, might consider the term "informal institutions" to be an oxymoron. Institutions are formal entities like legislatures, or the bureaucracy, or the church, and they appear identified and defined by their formality-by being written on parchment as Zeki Sarigil describes them. These institutions have internal rules and incentives to control their members, as well as to interact with their environment. Those formal structures certainly do exist, and are extremely important in our social and political lives, but they may, however, be too formal to meet many of the challenges that the society and the economy present for would-be governors.This incomplete nature of formal institutions then creates the opening for informal patterns of behavior to emerge as institutions. Constitutions may define the ways in which legislatures function, up to a point, but beyond that point informal rules and patterns become the dominant means of shaping behavior (Lauth 2000). Conversely, the completeness of some institutions, and the detail of their rules, may also assist in the emergence of informal institutions. Doing business with some bureaucracies may be perceived as being so difficult that informal institutions-bribery or clientelism-emerge to facilitate transactions (Kaufmann, Hooghiemstra, and Feeney 2018).Informal institutions, however, must go beyond being simple, regular patterns of behavior. Two friends who meet every Tuesday morning for coffee have not created an institution. They may, however, be functioning within an informal institution such as reciprocity, especially if they are members of a broader social network, and they agree to take turns paying for the coffee. What is important here is whether there are norms at work B. Guy Peters University of Pittsburgh aCknowledgmentsSince the start of this research project, I have received invaluable support and encouragement from many mentors, colleagues, friends, and academic organizations. First and foremost, I am very thankful to the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu) for its financial support. Thanks to the TÜBİTAK grant (No. 118K281), I was able to conduct extensive research on symbiotic informal institutions and collect original qualitative and quantitative data. I feel indebted to B. Guy Peters, whose works on institutional theory triggered, guided, and inspired my own thinking and research on institutions. I am also thankful to him for his continuous and generous scholarly support and encouragement at each stage of my career.

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“…27 Immediately after the attempted coup, Erdoğan called for support for an executive presidency, leading to extensive crackdowns on judicial independence and opposition of all types. 28 This accelerated the pace of changes, the most important of which was increasing the power of the executive either by constitutional changes or the de facto ordinances of prime ministers, resulting in the diminution of the Great National Assembly's authority. 29 These structural changes formed the basis of Erdoğan's effort to create a new state and nation, resulting in a period of intervention in social and cultural fields, promoting the discourse of neo-Ottomanist Islamist nationalism and rejecting the Western-Kemalist understanding of the nation-state.…”

Section: Political Islam: a Radical Challenge To Kemalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Windscreens as sites of competing Turkish nationalisms: Kemalists vs. Islamists

Akan

2023

Studies on National Movements

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In Turkey, the dominant political ideology is nationalism, but there are different variants competing for influence. Kemalism, the philosophy that laid the foundations for modern Turkey, advocated for a top-down modernization and secularisation of society, but also crucially involved creating a modern western-style nation state. The decades of the 1920s and 1930s saw the establishment of Kemalism as the official state ideology. Until the late 1990s, Kemalism remained as the state ideology, despite being challenged by a wide range of political tendencies. The greatest and most serious threat has come from political Islam, which rejects key tenets of the Kemalist ideology, namely western modernization and secularism. Conflict between Kemalists and Islamists on the national level has simmered since the 1970s, but a defining moment occurred in 2002 with the electoral victory of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). Over a period of 20 years in power, the AKP has eliminated much of the Kemalist improvements to Turkey's state institutions, society and culture. The result of the AKP’s Islamic nationalist policies has been increased political polarisation and friction in Turkish politics and society. This political polarisation led to an unusual practice in everyday politics; supporters on both sides manifest their respective ideologies via stickers with political messages displayed on the rear windscreens of cars as a challenge to the opposing ideology. Based on the findings of interviews conducted with owners of cars displaying these messages, this study aims to analyse the meaning of this practice in relation to everyday nationalism, and its implications for Turkish politics at large.

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“Democracy and National Unity Day” in Turkey: the invention of a new national holiday

Cited by 10 publications

References 38 publications

The “glitch” of Rabia monuments: a semiotic analysis of July 15 monuments in Turkey

The “glitch” of Rabia monuments: a semiotic analysis of July 15 monuments in Turkey

How Informal Institutions Matter

Windscreens as sites of competing Turkish nationalisms: Kemalists vs. Islamists

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