Who Are You Calling Janus-Faced?
A Post Kemalism, Post-Nationalism Substack Post
Hi folks,
We have a guest post today from Nick Danforth!
Nick is a historian of Republican Turkey and wrote an excellent book on the 1945-1960 period, when Turkey started having competitive elections and joined NATO. If you want to get a deeper understanding of the patterns that dominate Turkish politics today, the 1950s are critical, and Nick’s book is really the best English-language source on the decade.
Nick is also an editor at War on the Rocks (where I occasionally write) and recently embarked on a project about history education and foreign policy in the U.S.
His piece today is a critical look at academic views of Turkish nationalism. So how did academics think of Turkish nationalism in the recent past? How do they think of it today? And of course, why does it matter for people who aren’t in academia?
Turkey studies has entered a time of rapid change, and this Nick does a great job of taking you through it all.
Enjoy!
- Selim
In 2008 and 2009, I recall attending successive November 10th Atatürk memorial lectures at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. The first was by Heath Lowry, the second by Şükrü Hanioğlu, both prominent historians at Princeton University. Listening, I got the distinct impression that Lowry would have been happy to spend his entire talk praising Atatürk, but in deference to the nominally academic nature of the event threw in some criticism as well. Hanioğlu, by contrast, seemed like he would have gladly spent his whole talk criticizing the Gazi, but in deference to the obviously political nature of the event, threw in some grudging praise.
I really can’t vouch for all of my thoughts from the early years of graduate school: at one point it seemed like a good idea to make fondu in the history department microwave with leftover cheese from a book talk. At the time, though, the contrast between the two lectures certainly seemed indicative of the way attitudes in academia were evolving. Atatürk was out, relentless criticism of his regime was in. Adjectives like “Jacobin,” “top-down” and “authoritarian” became the inevitable epithets attached to terms like “secularism,” “Westernization” and “modernization.”
There’s a growing debate about this whole academic trend, which İlker Aytürk has called “post-Kemalism.” Depending on how curious you are, you can read his initial article on the subject, check out a special issue of the European Journal of Turkish Studies covering the debate, listen to a podcast on it, or read my summary of the podcast. The essence of the argument many of us have made is not that the criticism of Atatürk and his authoritarianism was entirely unfair. Rather, it’s that critics were too quick to attribute modern Turkey’s failures exclusively to the Kemalism. Seeing Atatürk’s revolutions as the country’s formative trauma led scholars to downplay other factors, like the Cold War and right-wing nationalism. It also created the conviction that with the military enforcers of Kemalism gone, liberal democracy would naturally flourish. In this context, Erdogan’s challenge to secularism and embrace of the Ottoman past were seen as necessary correctives to Ataturk’s excesses rather than potentially dangerous ideological projects of their own.
I don’t want to rehash the post-Kemalism debate here, but rather focus on the way academic criticism of Turkish nationalism fit into it. What’s striking in retrospect is that post-Kemalist scholarship treated nationalism like secularism, waltzes or latin letters, that is, an alien European import that Atatürk forced on a resistant population. Now I get why people might not have liked a lot of the revolutionary reforms, and I don’t know anyone who likes waltzing. But nationalism seems different. It is, famously, something popular, which is why it is so appealing to populists. At a moment when nationalism is routinely understood as something leaders like Erdoğan or Trump use to bolster their popularity, it seems strange how hesitant scholars were to imagine it could have played this same role under Atatürk.
During the heady days of post Kemalism, you could read articles claiming, for example, that Atatürk “cared little for the pious, conservative majority of the population.” I don’t claim to know how Atatürk personally felt about the majority of Turks. He certainly didn’t like their piety. And you could argue his regime, like countless others in history, ultimately disappointed the people it ruled over. But the essence of nationalism is its celebration, if even only rhetorically, of the people. It was all about telling the majority how much the government cared about them. Atatürk, most famously, declared that “the villager is the master of the nation.” Or take another example that has always stuck in my mind. A plaque at the entrance to the local museum in Bergama describes when Atatürk visited the town. Villagers laid out their home-spun carpets on the road for him to walk on. Atatürk refused, saying something to the effect of “these exemplify the talent and tradition of the exalted Turkish people, they don’t belong on the ground, they belong in a museum." The carpets are still on display there today. Again, maybe just flattery, but then a lot of people like flattery. And there’s no record of Sultan Abdülhamid II saying this kind of thing.
Part of this phenomenon, I suspect, reflects the way some post-Kemalist scholarship projected the heavy-handed version of Atatürk that was imposed by the 1980 coup back onto the early Republic. During the 1980s and 90s, when countries from Spain to Taiwan shook off their authoritarian legacies, the Turkish military repeatedly invoked Atatürk to justify its renewed crackdown. Under the stern gaze of so many brutalist statues erected under the military’s watch, the popular version of Kemalist nationalism was certainly more elusive. Another factor might have been Ottoman nostalgia among some historians themselves, who really did see the Empire as embodying a more authentic version of Turkish identity than the Republic.
But I think the view of nationalism as an alien imposition also says something bigger about the way historians, at least, have treated the global spread of nationalism. Precisely because we’ve all seen the violent, destructive face of nationalism today, historians seem to be caught up in an effort to present it as a historical accident. Treating nationalism as a European import fits with the broader academic desire to depict it as contingent, and therefore avoidable or reversible. Some scholars have specifically argued that the spread of nationalism was purely a product of Europe’s rise to global prominence. In this view, rather than being the inevitable outgrowth of mass media or new, technology-driven forms of warmaking, nationalism itself, as much as trappings like the square flags and the marching-band national anthems, is a coincidental result of European hegemony. Thus if China had had an industrial revolution first, we might all be living in multi-cultural societies.
Applied to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, this perspective veers toward positing an alternate historywherein, were it not for some bad luck and the outbreak of WWI, the virus of nationalism might have been contained in the Balkans while the Middle East escaped it altogether. In fiction, this view found its most charming incarnation in Louis de Bernier’s book Birds Without Wings. Set in town a on the Turkish coast, it depicts Greeks and Turks living happily together until nationalism shows up, inflicted on the innocent villagers by the poison tongue of a foreign schoolteacher. The town is named Eskibahçe, or Old Garden, and the story revolves around one character’s literal fall, so it doesn’t seem like too much over-interpretation to suggest that nationalism has been cast as the original sin of the modern world here.
Perhaps inevitably, historians have been accused of being “woke” for defending this nostalgic version of Ottoman multi-culturalism. But in this they actually seem to be playing the role of contemporary anti-woke critics. Arguably, saying that the spread of nationalism among Christians in the Balkans disrupted the multicultural harmony that existed under the Ottomans is a bit like conservative Americans saying that Black Lives Matter activists are creating racial tensions in the US today. From the position of the people on top, whether Ottoman Muslims or white Americans, the status quo always seems tolerant enough and the disruption only comes when people complain. The alternative of course, is to acknowledge that it was enduring American racism that led to Black Lives Matter, and that the unequal treatment of Ottoman Christians may have been one of the factors driving the spread of their national movements.
After a century of oppressive, state-sponsored nationalism, it is understandable that people are hesitant to engage with the liberatory promise it might have held in the past. Conveniently, the still aspirational national movements that academics are most inclined to cheer for today can be cast in other lights. The Kurdish national movement, for example, has recast itself in the language of Benedict Anderson. Palestinian nationalists, in turn, can be cast as anti-imperialists, whose use of slogans like “from the river to the sea” conveys solely their condemnation of settler-colonialism rather than any hint of nationalist irredentism.
Perhaps because they witnessed the role of third world nationalism in bringing down imperialism, an earlier generation of scholars seemed considerably more comfortable discussing its liberatory side. Tom Nairn famously described nationalism as “Janus-faced,” not in the sense of being deceitful but in the sense of having both positive and negative aspects which were inextricably bound up in each other. (Incidentally, my dad has always described nationalism this way, which would be a particularly eccentric piece of paternal wisdom except in this case he is quite literally the earlier generation of scholars) I also remember being amazed in graduate school to learn about the original three 19th century verses of Deutschland über Alles. The first verse, later removed by the Weimar government, lays out some very aggressive borders stretching into Poland and France. The second takes a detour into women and wine. Then the third verse, this one later banned by the Nazis, stresses justice, freedom and happiness. Both faces of Janus in one song, with a quick drink in the middle.
Today, even Erdogan has tempered his condemnation of Ataturk the authoritarian statesmen with praise for Ataturk the war of independence hero. Western historians, however, have been slower to come around. Where Turkish public debate has seen a vocal, very angry reckoning with “yetmez ama evetçiler,” or Erdogan’s early liberal supporters more broadly, academics, in the US at least, have shown little interest in discussing what role their own work might have played in facilitating Erdoğan’s rise to power. If anything, it seems like it should be the other way around. Whatever you think of liberals who were cautiously (or uncautiously) optimistic about Erdoğan, politics is the realm of pragmatism. It always involves picking the lesser evil and making gambles about the future based on inevitably imperfect knowledge. In the 2000s, by contrast, academics seemed supremely confident in calling out the ideological misdeeds of their predecessors, explaining how historians from Fuat Köprülü to Bernard Lewis were personally responsible for Turkish authoritarianism. Whether these accusations were fair or not, we should hold ourselves to the same standards today.
In time, the end of Atatürk’s cult of personality in Turkey will probably facilitate a more positive academic appraisal. I don’t think the Turkish Embassy is inviting anyone to give Atatürk memorial lectures on November 10th anymore, which is probably for the best. It’s not a venue that’s conducive to historiographic nuance. At the same time, with Erdoğan doubling down on some of the worst aspects of Turkish nationalism, it’s going to be harder for historians to step back and say anything new about the phenomenon. But that’s exactly what’s needed now. Janus-faced or not, nationalism has proved surprisingly malleable. The ease with which Erdoğan co-opted it, and the extent to which this caught historians off guard, shows just how much more work is needed.
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