The Historical “Stickiness” of Nationalism Inside Turkey's Political Field

Abstract

This article revisits modern Turkish political history with a specific focus on trajectories of Turkish nationalism, from the end of the nineteenth century of the Ottoman Empire, to the forms it takes under Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule today. The discussion is theoretically embedded within a relational political-sociological framework that utilizes the "field analysis" approach developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Using this approach, this paper argues that a workable, explanatory political -sociological "surface" of analysis of Turkish politics might be "the political field." It further argues that inside this field of political forces and competing groups, there is an ordering principle that supplies the political actors with a set of beliefs concerning "what can be politicized for sustainable power." In this study, nationalism is treated as a kind of historically constituted and re-constituted "set of beliefs," or doxa in Bourdieu's terminology. The paper further explores two long-lasting "challenges" to Turkish nationalism, those of Islamist and Kurdish claims, and the recent trajectories of these two forms of politics inside the field.

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“…The foundational myths of modern Turkey have constituted a doxa that reaches beyond the pronounced official ideology of any given period. This doxa that is called according to different researchers as "republican cosmology" (Akdeniz and Göker, 2011) or "Turkishness contract" (Ünlü, 2014) is essential particularly in the construction of an urban, secular habitus; however, some of its elements, such as nationalism and militarism, are more widespread and extend to a very broad social stratum that also includes conservative, rural parts of the society. The widespread acceptance of these elements creates a tense consensus between otherwise opposite social poles, one of which is largely represented by the Kemalist opposition, and the other by the ruling Justice and Development Party and its populist-Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.…”