Turkish nationalisms, Part II

Who will embrace Steve?

As promised, I am back with the second installment of discussion of Turkish nationalisms.

As I explained in Part I, this started with a question from

Steve Bryant

a naturalized British-Turkish reader of this blog. Steve was told that there are “milliyetçi” and “ulusalcı” flavors of nationalism in Turkey, and that the former might be amenable to accepting him as a compatriot, but that the latter would not.

To recap, yes, people in Turkey have a different mental image of what the Turkish nation is, and sometimes this means that they use different words for “nation.”

and that Turks have just as many words for “nation”?

I took on Steve’s question, but expanded the discussion beyond those two terms a bit. In Part I, I discussed the two major nationalistic traditions using the term “millet.” In this part, I will discuss “ulusalcılık” and - stretching the prompt a bit - add the term “halk” as a third category of conceptualizing the people of Turkey.

Also, if anyone wants to discuss the issue in greater depth, Steve and I are hanging out in this thread.

Let’s get started.

2. Ulusalcılık

This is a narrower and much newer term than “millet.” It was first used in the 1970s among some left Kemalists, particularly academics. The idea was that one had to leave behind terms like “millet,” which was tainted by association with Islamists and Turkists, and reach back into Turkish history for a term that was more authentic, yet modern at the same time. Hence, “ulus.”

According to Nişanyan’s etymology dictionary, the term “ulus” comes from the Mongolian term meaning “part, country that is given to every member of a Khan’s (ruler’s) family.” I think it was already in use as a somewhat weak synonym for “nation,” but this is when the term was recruited into more definite political usage. (In “Ulusalcılık”, the -cılık suffix makes it out to be “partisanship of the ulus” just as in milliyetçilik, -çilik makes the word into “partisanship of the millet.”)

Keep in mind that especially in the 80s and 90s, Kemalism was softening up. Its elite took on criticisms of nationalism and modernism. They were no longer as confident in standing behind military coups, nor were they as adamant in suppressing Islamism and Kurdish politics. In other words, Kemalist intellectuals were becoming liberals, and as such, too eager to please various identity groups.

It was at this time that the Ulusalcı came about as a reactionary strand of Kemalism. The Ulusalcı saw the liberal takeover of the Kemalist elite as merely another stage of Western imperialist encroachment. Turkey could only survive as a nation through a vigorous national body that was devoted to Kemalist modernism and remained free of “globalist” influences. Its natural allies in this struggle had to be Russia and China. Atatürk, after all, had received Soviet support during the War of Independence. The Ulusalcı sort of clung on to that heritage.

The Ulusalcı rose to prominence in the 2000s, largely in reaction to the AK Party’s Islamism. Then-CHP chairman Deniz Baykal channeled this sentiment, building up a fairly large contingent in the party’s ranks. In 2010, a sex tape of all things, forced Baykal out of office, and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu took overthe CHP. He wanted to pursue a liberal (“globalist”) policy catering to conservative identity markers. The Ulusalcı in the CHP bitterly opposed this, and in the ensuing years, Kılıçdaroğlu purged them all. It got pretty nasty there for a while. Kılıçdaroğlu may have been weak against Erdoğan, but he sure knew how to make heads roll in the CHP.

The last stand of the CHP Ulusalcı: in 2014, this group opposed the appointment of Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as a unified CHP-MHP presidential candidate (don’t ask). Here they are, calling on Kılıçdaroğlu to resign. Source: T24

So today, the main Ulusalcı presence on the party-political level is the Vatan Party (VP), headed by the quixotic Doğu Perinçek. It’s a small outfit that sometimes runs interference with the Russians - or pretends to anyways - but doesn’t do much else.

The most significant presence the Ulusalcı have is probably in the military. They came out strongly against the coup attempt (eliminating their Atlanticist rivals) and have been getting closer with the presidential palace since. They’re the ones who come up with doctrines like the “Blue Homeland” (Mavi Vatan). Even in the military though, my guess is that the Ulusalcı are gradually being replaced by Islamists.

So the overall arc of the Ulusalcı has been a bit tragic. They went from being the most fervently opposed to the AK Party in the 2000s to kind of warming up to them in the mid-2010s, when Erdoğan distanced himself from the West. To this day, when an ostensibly left-leaning person moves viciously against left-liberals, they are sometimes derided as “ulu-solcu” (“holy-leftists”) hinting that that person is a nationalist in leftist clothing.

Perhaps I should come up with a vision of what the Turkish “Ulus” of the Ulusalcı looks like, but it’s difficult to do. I don’t think there are full-bodied texts that flesh out such a vision, or at least none that I’m aware of. I see them as unreconstructed Kemalists, meaning that they believe in the Turkish nation being ethnically homogenous and secular. Beyond that, Ulusalcı thinking is pretty thin. Despite the name, they barely ever use the term “Türk ulusu,” especially if they’re under the age of 50 or so.

The most appealing part of the whole orientation seems to be the Eurasianist twist. The Ulusalcı believe that the Turkish nation is against Western hegemony (even though it is European in form) and that it is natural for Turkey to engage in some kind of enhanced relationship with Russia and China. That’s also the bit that attaches them to the Erdoğan people, however remotely.

Steve’s question of course, is whether these Ulusalcı would be amenable to see a well-integrated British man as part of the “ulus.” I’d have to agree with the person who talked to him, and say probably not. That’s not because of some theoretical notion of the “ulus” being a more exclusionary concept than the “millet.” It’s more that Ulusalcılık is still opposed to the Islamist trajectory Turkey is still on, which puts it in the mood to object to most social trends in the country, including migration. It also doesn’t help that he’s British-born. Ulusalcı tend to be old, nostalgic, and resentful, and that’s just not the kinds of people to build inclusive models of the nation.

3. Halklar

There are some people in Turkish politics who don’t use either “millet” or “ulus” when talking about the inhabitants of our fair land. They say “halk,” meaning “people,” or sometimes its plural “halklar,” meaning “peoples.”

It’s usually leftists who do that, but even there, there’s two forms.

3.1. The Turkish left

The Turkish Workers Party (TİP) will also speak in this way, though not quite as heavy on the plural. They’ll use “halkımız” (our people) instead of “millet,” which they consider to be right-wing and inherently nationalistic.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t anything inherently more amenable to socialism in “halk.” According to Nişanyan, the term comes from the Aramaic חֶלְקָא meaning “part” and made its way into Arabic خلق where it meant “a group of people.” There’s also a secondary meaning, something like “creation,” which actually sounds to me like it’s pretty close to the Latin “natio” meaning “something born.”

Socialists do have a more contingent reason for using the term though. “Halkçılık” is actually a concept that goes back at least to early Kemalism, when it referred to a sort of democratic and communitarian solidarity. That’s why the CHP is called Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican Peoples’ Party). The left-wing use of the term was always an effort to refer back to that tradition. In the Cold War, a popular slogan was “For the brotherhood of all peoples, long live a totally independent Turkey” (“Halkların Kardeşliği Adına, Yaşasın Tam Bağımsız Türkiye”). Today, the term “Halk” is seeing more use in the opposition ecosystem again. Halk TV is one of the biggest opposition TV channels. Istanbul municipality’s drive to sell cheap bread is called “halk ekmek.”

I should note that for the CHP, “halk” isn’t really a replacement for “millet.” They still very much use both. As you go further left though, “millet” drops off, and you hear more talk of the “halk.”

3.2. The Kurdish-left/left-Kurdish movement and Democratic Confederalism

Kurdish politics speaks in ways that’s linked to the Turkish left, but also has its own intonations. The former name of the main left-Kurdish party in Turkey was up until recently “Halkların Demokratik Partisi” (the People’s Democeratic Party, the HDP). Left-Kurdish politicians will always speak of the “halklar” of Turkey. They’ll never speak of the “nation” (millet) of Turkey.

The key difference here is that the Kurdish left will use “halklar” (peoples) in the plural. Why is that? Because they want to shatter the notion that there is only one “people” in Turkey.

I don’t know when they started doing this, but it’s almost certainly linked to some of the political theory the PKK’s founding leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was doing in prison. Having a lot of time to kill, Öcalan read the anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin, adopting his theory to create “Democratic Confederalism,” a form of horizontal political organization.

I don’t think that’s the whole story though. They’d probably hate this idea, but there’s also a significant liberal aspect to the “halklar” tune. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was pretty common in these circles to get invited to programs in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Spain. Both countries had struggled with guerrilla movements, both had some form of devolution. Both were now successful European states that acknowledged multiple “peoples” with complicated administrative arrangements. Those were optimistic times for left-liberals. Sure, change always felt unthinkable until it one day swept over a country.

Anyways, whenever I hear “halklar” I hear a yearning for what could have been: a devolved Turkey, where there’s a Kurdistan Region with its own parliament, making laws, negotiating with Ankara, maybe even sporting its own soccer team.

On the matter of Steve’s citizenship, I think Turkish and the Kurdish left would be pretty open to accept him, but then again, they’re against the idea that national separation should be a basis for politics, so I’m not sure it counts.