What happened to the non-Muslims in this country was not the making of fascism, but nationalism and the quest to establish a nation-state assumed to be free of different ethnic and religious identities. Such a project was particularly difficult for a country like Turkey, which had been the home of different ethnic and religious groups under the roof of the Ottoman Empire.
Nonetheless, the history of the late Ottoman Empire in the age of nationalism provided a groundwork for the need to establish a national (Turkish) state as almost all ethnic components of the empire embraced the idea of a nation-state of their own. The non-Muslim groups, particularly the Armenians and Greeks remaining in Anatolia, emerged as “foreign elements” in the empire and then in the republic. This was to some extent a response to the history of the late Ottoman Empire, where foreign powers used the non-Muslims within the empire to expand their power and influence over the empire's territories. In the age of nationalism, each ethnic group was also prone to establish foreign alignments so as to achieve their national aspirations. The history of disintegration, especially in the Balkans and later in the Middle East, built-in Turkey a national psyche that viewed non-Muslims as the extensions of foreign powers.
Besides this, the search for a nation-state was thought to require religious and ethnic homogeneity. During the republican era, while Islam was excluded from the public sphere through radical secularization policies, the state pursued a policy of Islamization of the population. The exchange of population with Greece took religious differences as the point of departure. Those who were subjected to forced immigration were separated on the basis of their religion. The homogenization of the population was certainly a means to establish a nation-state for both Turkey and Greece.
Moreover, the homogenization of the people through the exchange of populations and forced immigration made it possible to close Turkey off from the world since the non-Muslim elements were the most cosmopolitan groups in Turkey. As they were forced to leave the country, Turkey turned ever more inward, enabling the Kemalist elite to pursue an authoritarian modernization project that situated its elite at the center of power independent of the world powers.
The result was that the creation of a nation-state out of an empire was traumatic not only for the non-Muslims but also for the Muslims since the new nation-state regarded all collective identities except the Turkish national identity as a deviation threatening the supreme state identity. The state demanded allegiances of all sorts. Any collective identity independent of the state constructed an alternative source of allegiance, thus threatening the single professed and forced identity of the state.
This was an attitude very similar to the Ottoman Empire in the age of expansion that never allowed the emergence of alternative centers of power and authority that might appear to be competing with the center.
Likewise, in the republican era, different identities, be they ethnic or religious or even ideological in more recent times, were regarded as divisive. An identity that demands allegiance from the citizens of the Republic constituted a threat to the consolidation and sustainability of the Kemalist identity.
So the problem, in essence, is the difficulty of the nation-state to live together with plural identities. It may be possible to deny and even repress ethnic or religious identities in an authoritarian polity, but contemporary liberal democracy requires respect for “difference.” To pursue a policy of assimilation or expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities is no longer possible. Yet this is not enough. Facing the past and confessing mistakes that went contrary not only to the contemporary notion of pluralism but also to the conventional Ottoman practice of tolerance and coexistence is necessary to move forward.
01 June 2009
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