'Religion and Nation are One': Social Identity Complexity and the Roots of
Religious Intolerance in Turkish Nationalism
*Forthcoming: Social Science History*
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history
Gregory J. Goalwin
Department of Sociology,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A.
Abstract:
Turkish nationalism has long been an enigma for scholars interested in the formation of national
identity. The nationalist movement that succeeded in crafting the Republic of Turkey relied upon
rhetoric that defined the nation in explicitly secular, civic, and territorial terms. Though the
earliest scholarship on Turkish nationalism supported this perspective, more recent research has
pointed to Turkey's efforts to homogenize the new state as evidence of the importance of
ethnicity, and particularly religion, in constructing Turkish national identity. Yet this marked
mismatch between political rhetoric and politics on the ground is perplexing. If Turkey was
meant to be a secular and civic state, why did Turkish nationalist policies place such a heavy
emphasis on ethnic and religious purity? Moreover, why did religious identity become such a
salient characteristic for determining membership in the national community and for defining
national identity? This article draws upon historical research and social identity complexity
theory to analyze this seeming dichotomy between religious and civic definitions of the Turkish
nation. I argue that the subjective overlap between religious and civic ingroups during the late
Ottoman Empire and efforts by nationalists to rally the populace through religious appeals
explains the persistence of religious definitions of the nation despite the Turkish nationalist
movement's civic rhetoric, and accounts for much of the Turkish state's religiously oriented
policies and exclusionary practices toward religious minorities in its early decades.
Keywords: Turkey; Nationalism, Religion; Minorities; Social Identity Complexity
Introduction
In his influential pamphlet laying out the theoretical groundwork for the Turkish
nationalist movement, Yusuf Akçura summarized the relationship between religion and
nationalism in the Muslim world by explaining “One of the fundamental tenets of Islam is
expressed in the saying ‘religion and nation are one’” (1981). This adage has been nowhere more
put to the test than in the Republic of Turkey, the successor state to Akçura’s own Ottoman
Empire and a nation his work was influential in building. Arising out of the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Turkish nationalist movement has often been
considered a paradigmatic case of civic nationalism. The Turkish national project, led by
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, explicitly emphasized a secular western form of society and
government, based on equal citizenship for all, relegating religion and ethnicity exclusively to
the private sphere. More recent research has challenged this characterization, however, arguing
that ethnic, linguistic, and religious ties played a far more important role in the construction of
the Turkish nation than previously recognized. Indeed, despite its supposedly inclusive secular
and civic character, the foundation of the Turkish nation involved significant acts of
discrimination against religious minorities (Clark 2006; Akçam 2012; Suny 2015), part of a
larger pattern of ethnic and religious “unmixing” across the region as societies and peoples
struggled to react to the fluid and chaotic political situation. This marked mismatch between the
official inclusive civic rhetoric of the nation and the focus on exclusive ethnic and religious
politics on the ground raises significant questions about the relationship between civic and
religious identities in Turkey. If Turkey was meant to be a secular and civic state, why did
Turkish nationalist policies place such a heavy emphasis on ethnic and religious purity?
Moreover, why did religious identity become such a salient characteristic for determining
membership in the national community and for defining national identity? Is it possible to
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reconcile the civic orientation of Turkish nationalist rhetoric with the religious orientation of its
national policies? This article draws on insights from social identity complexity theory, a recent
theoretical advance in social psychology, to explain much of this seeming dichotomy and the
relationship between the ethnic and civic elements of the Turkish nationalist project.
Scholars interested in the construction and maintenance of social and group identities
have paid increasing attention to the fact that most individuals are simultaneously members of a
variety of social groups. Social identity complexity theory examines the ways in which these
various group identities interact, seeking to understand how individuals construct social identities
in relation to multiple nonconvergent ingroup memberships (Roccas and Brewer 2002). This
perspective argues that it is how those ingroup memberships are subjectively combined that
determines the relative inclusiveness of the individual's sense of social identity (Brewer and
Pierce 2005). Individuals with high social identity complexity see their groups as mostly distinct,
while those with low social identity complexity perceive their groups as largely overlapping and
convergent. Most importantly, individuals with high social identity complexity, those able to
recognize and accept the nonoverlapping nature of their various ingroups, have been shown to
maintain an inclusive and tolerant social identity. Those with low social identity complexity,
who perceive multiple overlapping facets of identity as central to their identity, are more likely to
be exclusive and intolerant, rejecting those who fall outside the ingroup on any single level of
identity (Brewer and Pierce 2005; Schmid et al. 2009).
To this point social identity complexity theory has been tested only quantitatively, in
reference to contemporary survey data (Perry and Whitehead 2015; Brewer and Pierce 2005;
Roccas and Brewer 2002; Schmid et al. 2009). This theoretical paradigm can nevertheless prove
fruitful for qualitative and historical analyses as well. Though historians and historical
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sociologists often lack the robust contemporary survey and interview data upon which social
identity complexity theorists have traditionally based their work, historical evidence can provide
important insights into the processes of group identity formation. Historical sources can reveal
the ways in which politicians and lay people conceptualized their own subjective senses of
identity, and the insights of social identity complexity theory can provide a theoretical
mechanism to explain the ways in which those conceptions of identity were translated into
policies of political and social inclusion and exclusion. Here I draw on historical sources to argue
that circumstances during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire created a situation in which
religion and national identity were merged in the minds of many Turks. Despite the civic and
secular goals of some elite politicians in the new Turkey the legacy of Ottoman social systems,
religious polarization during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the actions of nationalist
politicians seeking any means of rallying popular support to promote political goals, produced a
new national identity with religion at its core and a national community with a low level of social
identity complexity. The overlap between national and religious ingroups explains much of the
dichotomy between Turkey's inclusive civic rhetoric and religiously exclusionary practice.
Evaluating the Civic and Religious Elements of Turkish Nationalism
Traditional approaches to the study of nationalism have distinguished two dominant
forms of nationalist projects: civic, which place a voluntary association of people at the center of
national identification, and ethnic, which emphasize descent and blood relation (Kohn 1944;
Smith 1991; Brubaker 1992). Official Turkish nationalism has long been considered the civic
type. Kemalism, the nationalist ideology held by those who followed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,
called for an explicitly secular democratic republic (Çağaptay 2006). The Ottoman Empire had a
long history of using religious identity as a category for political purpose, and in fact religion
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was often used as a stand-in for ethnic identity. The Turkish nationalist movement explicitly
rejected this organization, however, and based the structure of the new Turkish state on the
laicité of France (Hanioğlu 2011, 134). Under such a system, religion was no longer to be a
powerful force for social organization, and all those who dwelled within the borders of the new
Turkish state were to be considered Turkish citizens and, theoretically, members of the new
Turkish nation. The goal was to create a new Turkish state and society constructed around a
more modern, European form of social organization that could replace the religiously focused,
and thus antiquated, Ottoman Empire.
Mustafa Kemal regarded the transition from religious community to secular nation-state
to be essential to Turkey's efforts to “live as an advanced and civilized nation in the midst of
contemporary civilization” (Ahmad 1993, 53), and secularism became the official policy of the
Turkish state. During the first decades of the new Republic of Turkey Kemal and his successors
put into place a variety of political and social reforms designed to create a Turkish form of
secular state. Turkey abolished the Caliphate and the religiously oriented Ottoman Millet system
in 1924, formally dismantling religion’s role as a key facet of political life. Within a decade,
policies of language reform were created in an effort to further weaken the connection between
Turkey and both Islam and its own Ottoman past (Aslan 2007). Simultaneously, the new Turkey
established the Diyanet, the Directorate of Religious Affairs “to execute the works concerning
the beliefs, worship, and ethics of Islam, enlighten the public about their religion, and administer
the sacred worshiping places” (Adanali 2008, 232). In practice, it represented an effort to bring
religion under the control of the central government. Such efforts sought to make religious
practice a function of the state, and established a distinctively Turkish form of secularism in
which religion was state run but rigorously segregated from the practice of government (Tank
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2005). The first Turkish constitution, ratified in 1924, seemed to support this goal and was very
careful to note that “The name Turk, as a political term, shall be understood to include all
citizens of the Turkish Republic, without distinction of or reference to, race or religion” and
continues on by saying “any individual who acquires Turkish nationality by naturalization in
conformity with the law is a Turk” (Earle 1925, 89). Religion was, in Atatürk's parlance, to be
“relegated to the mosques and consciences” (Uzer 2011, 122), privatized and pushed out of the
public sphere in favour of an official secularism that theoretically embraced members of all
creeds so long as they accepted the concept of the modern Kemalist nation-state. These
provisions and Atatürk’s reforms, designed to assert the primacy of the state over religion, testify
to the importance of a secular and civic definition of the Turkish nation to the nationalist
movement’s ideals and ideology.
The earliest wave of scholarship on the Turkish nation supported this rhetoric and tended
to portray the development of Turkey as a teleological march from Islamic empire to secular
republic (Findley 2010). This wave of scholarship, led by scholars such as Bernard Lewis
(1961) and Niyazi Berkes (1964) were heavily grounded in a modernization theory that
emphasized the official laicism of the Turkish republic and portrayed Turkey as a dynamic
secular and western state. Such works viewed Turkey as a perfect example of one of the prime
arguments of modernization and secularization theories, that as societies transition from premodern to modern forms of organization religion declines in importance. This perspective took
its cue from the rhetoric of Kemal’s secular form of Turkish nationalism, emphasizing primarily
the ways in which Turkey had transformed and drawing a stark contrast between the traditional
social structure of the defunct Ottoman Empire and the new urbanizing, industrializing, and most
importantly secularizing character of the Republic of Turkey. For these scholars Turkey's
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position as a secular civic state was self-evident, and their scholarship was dedicated to exploring
the ways in which Turkey had overcome its traditional past and taken its place in the new
modern and secular world.
More recent examinations of Turkish nationalism have problematized the
characterization of the Turkish state as civic and secular. Rather than presenting a teleological
vision of ascending modernization and secularization, these scholars have argued that the
development of Turkey as a distinct national community involved a multitude of different
strands of nationalist thought, many of which focused far more on ethnic and religious
differences than earlier theorists had recognized. Hugh Poulton (1997) identified three distinct
impulses operating in the first few decades of the Turkish republic: Kemalist secular western
nationalism, a Pan-Turkic ethnic nationalism dedicated to constructing a unified Turkish race
encompassing all Turkic peoples, and Islamic variants emphasizing religious identity. Tanil Bora
(2003) has further nuanced the picture of Turkish nationalism, arguing that by the 1990s five
distinct nationalist discourses – Kemalist, Left-wing, Pro-Western, Pan-Turkist, and Kurdish –
had found purchase in the Turkish political arena. Other scholars have found similar results,
recognizing linguistic (Aydingün and Aydingün 2004), ethnic (Uzer 2011; Gingeras 2009), and
religious (White 2013) dimensions of the Turkish national project. This more recent research has
thus added significant complexity to our picture of nation building processes in Turkey. It is now
clear that despite the nationalist movement’s secular and civic focus, ethnicity and religion
played a powerful role in the development of Turkish national identity.
Yet this dichotomy, between religious and civic dimensions of Turkish national identity
continues to dominate much of the scholarship on Turkish nationalism, in large part because it
continues to underlie the fundamental questions of Turkish politics itself (Merdjanova 2014).
6
What does it mean to be a Turk? What is the proper role of religion in society? What should be
Islam’s relationship with the state? Scholars have asked similar questions, given the competing
definitions of the Turkish nation and the seemingly disjointed nature of its national policies. How
are we to reconcile the ethnoreligious dimensions of Turkish nationalism with the explicitly
secular and civic rhetoric that typified the official Kemalist nationalism in Turkey? Ultimately
the process of nation building is one of boundary-formation, determining who does and does not
qualify for membership in the national community (Wimmer 2013). One approach to
understanding the boundaries of Turkishness has been to view the relationship between religion
and official nationalism in Turkey as largely instrumental in character, either as a “short term
tactical alliance” (Özkirimli and Sofos 2008, 58) between secular and religious nationalists, or as
a means of providing social cohesion for an insecure state still struggling to define its own
unified identity. This perspective holds promise, providing a plausible explanation for the
disjuncture between Turkey's officially secular rhetoric and its policies towards religious
minorities in the early years of the Turkish state. Viewing this inconsistency as a short term
alliance, however, does not adequately explain the Turkish state's continued reliance on religion
as a definitive characteristic of membership in the decades that followed. As Kanchan Chandra
has argued, analyses that examine the constructed nature of national groups are many and varied,
but few scholars have sought to understand the effects such processes have had on economic and
political outcomes (Chandra 2012) Insights drawn from social identity complexity theory,
however, can help explain much of this continued emphasis on religion and the concomitant
exclusionary treatment of religious minorities throughout much of Turkish history. An emphasis
on the underlying processes of boundary formation that defined the Turkish nation, and the ways
in which national identity coalesced out of a conflation of religious and political identities
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amongst the majority of the Turkish public, can thus reveal the logic behind continued antipathy
towards non-Muslim minorities, and corresponding moves from political figures to exclude them
from Turkish political and social life.
Social Identity Complexity Theory
Social identity complexity is a theoretical construct designed to reflect the relationship
between the crosscutting layers of identity that make up an individual's overall conception of
self. In essence, a person’s degree of social identity complexity refers to the “degree of overlap
perceived to exist between groups of which [that] person is simultaneously a member” (Roccas
and Brewer 2002). As Roccas and Brewer explain, scholars are most interested “When ingroups
defined by different dimensions of categorization overlap only partially… In this case some of
those who are fellow ingroup members on one dimension are simultaneously outgroup members
on the other (2002, 89). Under such circumstances individuals construct their own subjective
sense of social identity as they seek to reconcile their relationship to multiple nonconvergent
ingroup memberships. Social identity complexity reflects how this reconciliation has been
accomplished, the product of a cognitive process by which individuals recognize and interpret
information about their own ingroups. “Low complexity means that multiple identities are
subjectively embedded in a single ingroup representation, whereas high complexity involves
acknowledgement of differentiation and difference between ingroup categories” (Roccas and
Brewer 2002, 93) Ultimately, it is the individual’s own perception of the relationship between his
or her ingroups that is of critical importance. “In sum, the more a person perceives the groups to
which he or she belongs as sharing the same members, the less complex is his or her social
identity” (Roccas and Brewer 2002, 94). This subjective perception of the relationship between
different dimensions of identity plays a powerful role in the ways in which people think about
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their membership in various groups. Individuals with high social identity complexity often
conceptualize their social identity in such a way that others who share any salient dimension of
identity are considered part of the social ingroup. Conversely, individuals with low social
identity complexity often conceptualise their own sense of identity such that others must share
all relevant characteristics of identity in order to be considered members of the social ingroup,
conflating multiple levels of identity into a single overarching concept of group belonging.
Ultimately, it is the relationship between self and other that lies at the center of these
identity processes. Research has shown that the ways in which people conceive of their own
ingroups — whether they develop a high or low level of social identity complexity — is affected
by a variety of factors. Experience with groups outside of one's own social categories, tolerance
for uncertainty and ambiguity and openness to change, for example, have been correlated with a
higher degree of social identity complexity and thus a more open concept of group membership.
Conversely, little experience of diversity, stress, a need for closure, and ingroup threat have all
been found to have a negative effect on social identity complexity as individuals harden the
boundaries of their social ingroups (Brewer and Pierce 2005). Research suggests that threat to
one’s social ingroup represents one of the most powerful influences on perceptions of social
identity complexity. Indeed,
When there is a perception of threat, individuals perceive their ingroup as
more homogeneous and perceive the self as more similar to the ingroup and
more different from the outgroup. (Roccas and Brewer 2002, 99)
These reactions to situational context thus have an important impact, not just on the ways in
which individuals present their own self-identity but also on the ways in which they view people
who are thought to fall outside the membership of their own ingroup. Studies have shown that
individuals with a high degree of social identity complexity are far more likely to be tolerant of
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differences and members of outgroups, recognizing that membership in their ingroups rely upon
multiple levels of identification, rather than excluding outsiders out of hand (Brewer and Pierce
2005; Schmid et al. 2009). Individuals with a low degree of social identity complexity, however,
are more likely to be intolerant of differences, their multiple layers of identity all reduced to a
single expression of the ingroup, outside of which all others are considered different.
Methods and Sources
This paper departs from previous studies that take a social identity complexity approach
by applying it to a historical case, seeking to provide a theoretical explanation for the continued
salience of religious definitions of identity in a self-avowedly secular state. Though focusing on
a historical case precludes the survey and quantitative approaches used by earlier scholars of
social identity complexity to examine nationalism and feelings of group solidarity, a close look
at historical evidence can begin to reveal similar processes at work in past movements, thus
extending the reach and applicability of social identity complexity theory. Because social
identity complexity refers to the subjective ways in which individuals perceive the overlap of
group membership in different dimensions of identity, a historical approach needs to examine the
ways members of the Ottoman and Turkish population conceptualized their own senses of
individual and group identity. Though most studies of the Turkish nationalist movement have
focused on official policies and documents often published by Kemalist elites (Brockett 2011a,
14), recent strides have been made in developing a social historical approach to Turkish
nationalism, emphasizing the beliefs and perceptions of everyday people as they struggled to
come to grips with the radical transformation from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic
(Brockett 2011b). Such efforts have utilized collections of alternative sources such as provincial
newspapers (Brockett 2011a), oral histories (Doumanis 2013) periodicals (Ekmekçioglu 2016),
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and memoires (Göçek 2015), to supplement the official narrative of Turkey’s elite nationalists
and provide a more balanced and comprehensive picture of the end of the Ottoman Empire and
the founding of the Republic of Turkey. This study follows such trends and utilizes similar
sources. Here I draw upon the writings of late Ottoman Muslim bureaucrats and military officers,
who were in a position to write about religion, ethnicity, and nationalism. Such sources allow us
to examine the ways in which people on the ground spoke and wrote of their own national and
group identities and examine what membership in such groups meant to people in their everyday
lives.
This article thus looks at a broad spectrum of historical evidence to analyze the
relationship between religion, ethnicity, and nation in the Republic of Turkey. In what follows I
trace this relationship across roughly sixty years of Ottoman and Turkish history. I begin with an
analysis of the turmoil that accompanied the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the
first two decades of the twentieth century. Close analysis reveals that all of the conditions
Brewer and Pierce identify as leading to low levels of social identity complexity were present
during this time period, leading to a conflation of religion and national identity as Ottoman
populations struggled to reconceptualize collective identity. This association was heightened by
the polarization of identity that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and by the
actions of nationalist entrepreneurs, who sought any opportunity to rally the Turkish populace to
their political goals, drawing on religious conceptions of the nation even where it conflicted with
their own ideological rhetoric. This analysis then continues through the reform period of the
1920s and 1930s, when Turkey sought to consolidate itself as a distinct national community.
Here I argue that though a small but powerful Turkish elite sought to craft a secular sense of
Turkish identity, the vast majority of the Turkish population continued to subjectively view
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religion and national identity as essentially contiguous in groups. I then finish with an analysis of
the pogroms against religious minorities that shook Istanbul in the 1950s, when the conflation of
religion and identity burst forth in a display of religiously oriented violence. Such an approach
reveals the continued salience of religious dimensions of national and group formation well into
the Turkish Republic. In contrast to the official narrative, this analysis shows that the religious
considerations that dominated Ottoman society in its last years did not subside with Mustafa
Kemal’s modernizing reforms. Rather, conceptions of religious, ethnic, and national identity that
were fused in early modern times continued to shape ideas of Turkish nationhood long after they
were supposed to have disappeared. In turn, these attitudes played an important role in shaping
Turkish policy towards religious minorities, who were never truly considered members of the
nation by their Muslim Turkish neighbors. I argue that this persistence of religious identification
and the intolerant attitudes it engendered can best be understood as the consequence of subjective
perspectives of what it meant to belong to the Turkish ingroup, the result of a low level of social
identity complexity.
Religion and National Identity in Turkey
The relationship between religion and identity has a long history in Turkey. As Bernard
Lewis argued, during Ottoman times “Among the different peoples who embraced Islam, none
went farther in sinking their separate identity in the Islamic community than the Turks” (1961:
329). Religion had indeed played a powerful role in life under the Ottoman Empire, where the
population was divided into distinct millets based on religious identity. Strict lines were drawn in
a variety of social and political spheres, dividing the rights and responsibilities of non-Muslim
subjects of the Ottoman Empire from their Muslim counterparts (Bayar 2014: 18). In this, the
millet system codified and made political a social system in which religious difference served to
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structure daily life within the multicultural and multireligious Ottoman polity. This emphasis on
religion would play an important role during the rapid political and social changes that
accompanied the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, as religion quickly became a metonym for larger
issues of national belonging. Indeed, a close look at the political and social context of the late
Ottoman Empire and early Republic of Turkey reveals all of the conditions Brewer and Pierce
identify as being factors in the development of group identities that equate social categories,
characteristics such as religion and national identity, into a single overarching sense of collective
identity that demonstrates a low sense of social identity complexity.
Experience of Diversity
Despite its multiethnic and multireligious character, late Ottoman society remained
highly segregated, and many Ottoman Turks would have had little experience with diversity. As
Ronald Suny has argued, in big cities such as Istanbul or Smyrna “Their social interactions were
primarily with people in their own millet rather than with those outside with whom they were
unlikely to worship or marry or even bathe in the same hamam. Members of Ottoman minorities
developed social interactions with other non-Muslims or with Europeans resident in the larger
cities” (Suny 2015, 46). Religious communities jealously guarded intergroup boundaries and
though commerce and fellowship were shared across religions, conversion, mixed marriage, and
other forms of cultural blending were relatively rare. The strict enforcement of group boundaries
was the result of the ways in which self and communal identity was conceptualized in the
Ottoman Empire. Such concerns structured the ways in which people perceived of their identity.
For many in the Ottoman Empire the religious facet of identity was so dominant that ethnic and
national categories of identification “meant little to the people in question. Western accounts
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often refer to Balkan peasants who seemed puzzled by the ethnic labels ascribed to them,”
(Doumanis 2013, 16) a condition not uncommon in other areas of the Ottoman Empire as well.
Uncertainty, Stress, and Need for Closure
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its transition to the Republic of Turkey
represented an immensely uncertain time for residents of Turkey as social, political, and
cultural structures were torn down and reformed. Pressures accompanying this transition
pushed a reconceptualization of self and group identities for many Turks. This
reformulation was the result of events on the world stage. The rise of nationalism in
Western Europe spread quickly to the east, and Christian populations in the Balkans rose
up against the Ottoman Empire. Internal turmoil and the failure of much needed efforts at
reform weakened the Ottoman Empire significantly, and in 1912 and 1913 Bulgaria,
Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia forged a successful alliance that stripped the Ottomans
of most of their European territories. The violence that accompanied the Ottoman
Empire’s loss of its European colonies brought with it a wave of human misery as
communities were polarized by national conflict expressed in religious terms. The Balkan
Wars entailed significant amounts of ethnoracially motivated violence and terror, an
ethnic, and therefore religious, “unmixing” of populations that had been lived in close
proximity for centuries (Brubaker 1995). Millions of Muslim refugees fled the Balkans
for safer conditions deeper within the Ottoman Empire, providing a highly tangible
symbol of Ottoman decline and collapse for many rural Anatolians, who lived far from
the fighting and centers of power, but now came face to face with their civilization’s
impending mortality.
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The influx of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the perceived demise of the
Empire polarized Ottoman society. Religious identities, which had long been markers of
relatively benign difference acquired an increasingly political charge. Increasingly,
religion became a powerful defining line between those considered loyal to the nation
and those perceived to be a threat. Contemporary accounts reveal the escalating level of
despair among Ottoman Muslims as they watched their coreligionists suffer and
encountered at first hand the victims of Christian atrocities. One account explains that the
escalating series of crises facing the Empire made it feel as if “A nation was
disintegrating, sinking into the darkness of history” (Göçek 2015, 189). This sense of
catastrophic decline led to significant levels of uncertainty, stress, and a need for social
closure amongst Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. It became increasingly evident to
politicians and lay people alike that the Ottoman system had failed, and that a new form
of social organization would need to take its place. Yet this growing realization brought
with it yet more stress as Ottoman Muslims recognized the potential danger to their
cultural and political hegemony that a radical revolution of social structure might entail.
Ingroup Threat
The Ottoman Empire’s collapse created significant levels of ingroup threat for
Ottoman Muslims. Christians in the Balkan nations used their victory in the Balkan Wars
as an opportunity to pay back the Ottomans for what they saw as centuries of oppression.
Such ethnically and religiously targeted violence had vast repercussions. The Muslims
who arrived in Anatolia brought with them heartbreaking stories of Christian campaigns
of brutality and ethnic cleansing against Muslims. Intercommunal tensions in Anatolia,
already strained by the outbreak of war and the perceptible decline of the Ottoman
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Empire, ratcheted ever higher. Oral histories from the time reveal the damage such
violence did to intercommunal relationships as Muslims responded to what they
perceived to be an existential threat from their Christian neighbors. As one Anatolian
Christian related, before this time period “The Turks did not pressure us. We loved them,
they loved us. But the Macedonian Turks came through here and they were fanatics and
they spoiled them.” (Doumanis 2013, 140) Another argued that
The Turks were good people. Only after 1912 did our relations with them suffer,
for the Turkish refuges from Macedonia and Crete would say “they’ve pushed us
out.” They’d say [to the Anatolian Turk], “hey you. You have THESE people as
your ‘brothers’? Do you realize what the Greek army did to us?” (Doumanis
2013, 140)
Such sentiments were shared by Muslim Turks, one of whom explained that “The deadly news
delivered by the convoys of [Balkan] migrants poisoned us” (Amça 1958, 118). Not only did the
influx of Muslim refugees turn the sentiments of Anatolian Muslims against their neighbor
Christians, the increasing polarization of identity and anti-minority sentiments extended to
physical violence as Muslims driven from their homes in the Balkans extracted revenge against
Christians in their new land. As official campaigns against Christians in Anatolia got under way,
Muslim Turkish refugees began “to slowly show the Greek Rum the torture they themselves had
suffered in the Balkans” (Sunata 2003, 72–73).
The situation was made much worse less than a decade later, when the Ottoman Empire
was defeated in World War I. The Sultan’s capitulation heralded the breakup of the remains of
the Ottoman Empire and the Treaty of Sèvres granted significant Ottoman territories, including
massive stretches of Anatolia itself, to the victorious Western powers. Among the most difficult
of these to bear was the granting of Smyrna (now Izmir) and its surrounding territories to Greece.
The Greek army occupied Smyrna in May of 1919 and used the city as a staging point for an
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invasion that pushed deep into Anatolia. When the Greek army landed in Smyrna it was met with
celebration by many of the Greek residents of the town. The invading Greek army, its leaders
and soldiers steeped in the sort of nationalist ideology that drew strict boundaries between
Christian ‘Greeks’ and Muslim ‘Turks,’ committed savage atrocities against the Muslim
populations they found in Anatolia. Western sources relate countless reports of the Greek army’s
violence against civilian populations. The Greek landing itself turned into a slaughter when the
Greek army opened fire on the surrounding Turkish population killing several hundred “beastly
and wildly,” in the words of an Italian naval officer who beheld the scene ( Erhan 1999, 7). The
depredations were not confined to Smyrna, however. As the Greek army consolidated its control,
Greek soldiers and the local Greeks who were “incited by the Greek officers and clergy,
committed innumerable atrocities against the Turks” in surrounding villages (Erhan 1999, 8).
Conditions only deteriorated from there, as both the Greek army and the revolutionary Turkish
government utilized paramilitary forces who carried out campaigns of interreligious violence
until the Greek army, routed by a Turkish defense outside of Ankara fled west, and were joined
by much of the Greek Orthodox Christian population of Anatolia, now fearful of their fate under
an explicitly Muslim society, as they returned to Greece. Turkish accounts of the invasion later
published in the region’s newspapers explicitly emphasized the religious characteristic of the
national schism, reinforcing again, the centrality of Islamic belief to the new nation (Morack
2017).
Religion and the National Movement
The social and political context that accompanied the Ottoman Empire’s collapse thus
created conditions that made religion a natural unifying force for the new national movement.
Indeed, the subjective conflation of religious and ethnic identity, that most people conceptualized
17
religion as determining ethnicity, drove many of the nationalist movement’s policies as they
sought to rally popular support for the cause. This effort to construct and define a new sense of
Turkish identity and selected key characteristics around which Turkish nationhood could form is
explicitly visible in the work of Turkey's earliest nationalist thinkers. Yusuf Akçura and Ziya
Gökalp, considered two of the most important theorists of Turkish nationalism, both devoted
significant attention to this question, seeking to determine the proper relationship between civic,
religious, and ethnic dimensions of identity in the new Turkish nation. In his 1904 “Three Kinds
of Policies” Akçura discussed the change in focus amongst early nationalists from an Ottomanist
civic version of the nation, in which Muslims and non-Muslims would share membership in the
nation to one emphasizing Islamic or ethnic Turkic identity as key signifiers of membership in
the national ingroup. Akçura argued that earlier efforts to create a civic form of Ottomanism had
been unsuccessful because reformers “had failed to grasp the significance of race and religion”
(1981, 7). Akçura argued that once it became obvious to the Ottoman reformers that religious
minorities could not be adequately assimilated into the Ottoman nation, nationalist opinions
toward them hardened. These attitudes resulted in hostility towards Christians, viewing them as
outsiders (1981, 8). Indeed, Akçura saw only one inevitable result of this sort of approach “the
religious discord and enmity among Ottoman subjects would accentuate, and the non-Muslim
subjects and the areas in which they constitute a majority would be lost” (1981, 15). Though the
“Ottoman nation” would be temporarily weakened in such an eventuality “it would, for all its
shortcomings... give rise to a stronger community, an Islamic community” (1981, 16). Such a
decrease in religious and ethnic diversity, though crafting a more homogenous society in the way
Akçura preferred, also furthered the segregation of society. Individuals in the last decades of the
Ottoman Empire experienced less contact with those who fell outside of the boundaries of their
18
own highly conflated social ingroups, providing less opportunity to acknowledge multiple
crosscutting dimensions of identity, and fostering a sense of national identity that heavily
emphasized ethnicity and religion, rather than Ottoman multiculturalism.
Though Akçura himself advocated Turkish race and ethnicity as the proper foundation for
the new Turkish nation, he recognized the role that Islam should play in the formation of national
identity. “It should not be forgotten” he argued “that the greater part of the Turks whose
unification is envisaged are Muslims. From this point of view, the Islamic religion can be an
important element of a great Turkish nation” (Akçura and Fehmi 1981, 18). The creation of a
new specifically Turkish nation was thus, to Akçura, a complex process. What we see in his
discussion of Turkish nationalism, however, is the failure of a secular and civic minded form of
Ottomanism in favour of a more ethno-religiously focused conception of the nation, an
entanglement of national and religious modes of identity. Critically, Akçura represents ethnic,
religious, and national identities as being multiple facets of a single Turkish ingroup. To be a
“true” Turk meant holding allegiance to the state, sharing Turkish blood, and practicing a
distinctly Turkish form of Islam. Those who failed on any dimension could not truly be
considered members of the Turkish nation.
Ziya Gökalp, made a similar argument about the role of religion in the Turkish nation.
Gökalp, unlike Akçura, argued that it was Turkish culture, not race or ethnicity that should
define the new Turkey. In his 1923 The Principles of Turkism Gökalp argued that an emphasis
on ethnic purity is normal for nations in the early stage of social evolution, but was
“pathological” for the stage Turkey had reached. Instead, at the current stage “social solidarity
rests on cultural unity, which is transmitted by means of education and therefore has no
relationship with consanguinity” (1968, 13). Gökalp argued that it is clear that a nation is not a
19
racial, ethnic, geographic, or political group “but one composed of individuals who share a
common language, religion, morality, and aesthetics.” After all, he continues “In truth a man
desires more to live with those who share his language and religion than with those who share
his blood, for the human personality does not dwell in the physical body but in the soul” (1968,
15–16). Here too, Gökalp placed a key emphasis on the role of religion in promoting national
identity and solidarity. To Gökalp, in order to form a true community a modern state must
become homogenous in terms of culture and religion, and thus national identity (Akçam 2006,
88). Gökalp's vision of the Turkish nation was thus a community that would share a common
culture, defined explicitly in terms of language and religious identity. Here again, belonging on
multiple levels of identity was considered crucial for true Turkishness. The vision of Turkishness
that Gökalp preached conflated religion, language, morality, and even aesthetics, a singular
national ingroup, revealing a low sense of social identity complexity. Those who fell outside of
the boundaries of the new community on any single dimension of identity could not adequately
conform to Turkish culture, Gökalp’s main point of emphasis, and thus did not qualify as
members of the new overarching concept of Turkish identity being developed by the nationalist
movement.
Despite its professed civic character, the growth of Turkish nationalism would rely
significantly on Gökalp's theoretical approach to the Turkish nation (Parla 1985, 7). The
Kemalist emphasis on the confluence of linguistic community, culture, and Turkified Islam were
the culmination and extension of pre-existing processes first theorized and set in motion by late
Ottoman thinkers (Dumont 1984, 30). In his Nutuk, the great speech recounting, and in many
ways formulating the official history of, the Turkish nationalist revolution, Mustafa Kemal
himself drew on popular conceptions of religious identification. Kemal explicitly discusses the
20
danger of the collapsing Ottoman Empire’s Christian minorities. In the speech Atatürk describes
how after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI and the occupation of various parts of its
territory "Christian elements were also at work all over the country, either openly or in secret,
trying to realize their own particular ambitions and thereby hasten the breakdown of the State"
(Atatürk 1980, 1) Elsewhere, Kemal described the religious dimension of the struggle for
independence, arguing that “God’s help and protection are with us in the sacred struggle which
we have entered upon our fatherland and independence” (Atatürk 1980, 513).
Other nationalists, too, relied upon religion in public statements describing Turkish
identity. In an address to the Lausanne convention in which he discussed the situation of
minorities in Turkey İsmet İnönü, lead Turkish negotiator and the general who led the victorious
campaign over the Greek army in the Turkish War of Independence, described the debate over
Christian minorities in Turkey as a historical problem, a primordial clash of civilizations dating
all the way back to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. İnönü proceeded to lay out
at length the ways that Tsarist Russia and other Christian powers had interceded in Turkish
affairs, instigating and supporting various heinous rebellions by Christian populations who had
previously been content to live in peace under the beneficent leadership of the Turkish (Ottoman)
state. İnönü summed up by arguing that in light of such continued foreign interventions on behalf
of Christian minorities, and the tendency of those minorities, once instigated, to rebel violently,
an enforced population exchange was necessary for the security and development of both the
minorities, and Turkey itself (Great Britain 1923, 190–204). In its decision to privilege religious
and ethnic dimensions of identity over the civic and secular dimensions of identity endorsed by
its own rhetoric, the Turkish nationalist movement helped construct a Turkish national identity
with a low level of social identity complexity. Those who could meet the new definition of
21
national identity on multiple levels of identity — ethnicity, race, language, and religion — would
be welcomed into the new national ingroup and be considered “true” Turks. Those who fell
outside the ingroup on any of these dimensions were regarded with suspicion and thus were not
truly Turks in the most important senses of the term.
The Politics of Exclusion
Faced with constructing a new national community, Turkish nationalists, even those who
preferred a more secular system of government, were more than willing to go along with the use
of Islam as a cultural component on which to found a national identity. Indeed, with the new
state’s obsession with defining boundaries, the violence that Akçura foresaw and the
homogenization that Gökalp thought necessary were not long in coming. As the new Turkish
nation struggled to resist the imperialist ambitions of western powers and form a new nation out
of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, attention swiftly turned to the question of minorities
within Turkish territory. The Turkish government undertook significant efforts to assimilate all
Muslim minorities who were not ethnically Turkish. The government initially attempted to rely
on shared bonds of religion to form a bond with the Kurds, for example, desisting only when it
became obvious that Kurdish social structure would prove too resilient for such efforts (Yavuz
1998; Poulton 1997; Belge 2011). Indeed, the Turkish government targeted all Muslim minority
groups for assimilation, with varied success, as the state sought to craft a new ethnically and
religiously pure nation.
Such was not to be the case of non-Muslim minorities, however. Viewing such
populations as traitors and potential fifth-columns within the new nation, the Turkish
government took severe measures to deal with what they considered a significant threat. Again,
the potential of ingroup threat provided a powerful motivation for hardening ingroup boundaries
22
and adopting a more strictly limited, and thus less complex, conception of social identity (Brewer
and Pierce 2005). Turkish nationalists were quick to respond to the threat. Hüseyin Cahit Yalçin,
a journalist who often expressed the opinions of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP), summarized their approach to Christian minorities by saying “For the State... [and] the
Constitutional Regime, the greatest danger came from the non-Turkish elements within Ottoman
Society” thus “the history of the Constitutional period is the history of the Turks, who perceived
the danger, and struggled not to drown in the flood of peoples” (Akçam 2006, 56). Such efforts
to stem the tide of minority peoples began before even the formal founding of the nation, with
the Armenian Christian population in Eastern Anatolia. While estimates vary, somewhere
between 800,000 and 1.5 million were massacred in the Armenian Genocide. Throughout, the
Turkish nationalist movement's concern was for the homogenization of the Turkish homeland,
removing a minority population that did not share Turkish culture or religion. As influential CUP
member Halil Menteşe argued “Had we not cleansed our Eastern Provinces of Armenian
revolutionaries collaborating with the Russians, there would have been no possibility of
establishing our national state” (Akçam 2006, 122). Here again, religion was seen as an integral
part of Turkish culture and identity, ethnic, religious and national identities were conflated in a
way that strictly delineated in and outgroups. To be a Turk meant being a Muslim, a relationship
which displayed a very low degree of social identity complexity.
Similar motivations lay behind the 1923 population exchange between Greece and
Turkey. Though the Turkish nationalist movement managed to repel the Greek invasion and
retake western Anatolia, Greece and the Greek Orthodox population that remained in Turkish
territory were seen as a dangerous threat to the nascent Turkish nation. Again, Turkey took steps
to deal with this threat directly, this time in concert with Greece and the Allied powers. Under
23
the terms of the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations — an
agreement reached during the negotiations that established the Republic of Turkey — the
remnants of the some 1.3 million Anatolian Greek Orthodox Christians, were exchanged for
400,000 Muslims living in Greece, (Clark 2006, 12). Theoretically designed to 'unmix' national
populations, this exchange is a particularly useful example of the degree to which religious and
national identities continued to be fused in the newly forming Turkey. The exchange explicitly
utilized religious affiliation as a proxy for national identity, assuming that anyone who was
Orthodox Christian could not be Turkish and Muslims could not be Greek. While the politicians
involved expressed reluctance and regret over the compulsory nature of the exchange, it was
clear that many thought the exchange was the only way to calm tensions in an area claimed by
both states (Clark 2006, 54). The exchange was thus meant to homogenize both countries and
remove “dangerous” minority elements that threatened the fledgling self-constructed historical
narratives and national identities of the two states (Yildirim 2006b). The concerted effort to
remove all Christians from the new Turkey that accompanied this exchange (Ladas 1932) reveals
the significance with which the nationalist government invested the question of religion. It was
of critical importance to many of the Turkish leaders that the new Turkey be an exclusively
Muslim state, free of the Christian minorities that had proved problematic to the Ottoman Empire
in the past and might conceivably do the same for the new Republic of Turkey in the future.
Crucially, despite the civic character of the rhetoric of the new Turkish nation,
populations were exchanged even when all other markers of identity — characteristics such as
language, ethnicity, and territorial origin — ran contrary to their religious affiliation. As one
first-hand account phrased it “We were trying by force to remove these Greek Rum elements that
had been almost completely Turkified” (Ulunay 1999, 100). This was particularly true of the
24
Karamanli people of central Anatolia, for example, a Turkish-speaking group of Greek Orthodox
Christians who Turkey made part of the exchange, despite expectations that they would be
allowed to remain in place (Balta and Kappler 2010). Orthodox Arabs from Cilicia were
similarly compelled to emigrate to Greece despite their lack of any connection with Greece or
with Hellenic nationalist sentiments (Ladas 1932, 379–83). On the other side of the exchange
Muslims from Greece, who despite their centuries of ancestral roots in Greece and lack of any
understanding of the Turkish language were sent to Turkey, where their religious identity more
closely matched that of surrounding population in their new ethnic “homeland” (Yildirim 2006a,
59). Tellingly, Greek Muslims that were relocated to Turkey during the exchange often faced
significant discrimination for their inability to speak Turkish (Kolluoğlu 2013). Though their
religion was now appropriate, they still did not fulfill all the requirements to be considered part
of the new Turkish ingroup, lacking “Turkishness” in the linguistic dimension, and thus not
immediately considered members of the new Turkish nation.
This conflation of religious and national identity lasted well past Turkey's founding
period, however. As Turkey entered the high Kemalist years of the 1930s, religion continued to
play a powerful role in defining national identity. As Soner Çağaptay has argued, this was
particularly true in regards to immigration policy, where Turkish policy utilized religion as a
litmus test when granting citizenship and allowing entrance to the country (2006, 65). Turkey
allowed some of the remaining Greeks in Istanbul to gain full citizenship rights if they were
willing to convert to Islam (Çağaptay 2006, 75). Similarly, Turkey allowed wide scale
immigration of Muslims from former Ottoman territories while denying entrance to Christians
from similar territories and denaturalizing minority residents of Turkey who had left during the
wars. As a resettlement law adopted in 1926 explained “Those who don't share the Turkish
25
“hars”... will not be admitted as immigrants”(Çağaptay 2006, 85). The Turkish word, “hars,”
means culture, and is the same word Gökalp used to refer to Islam and a shared sense of cultural
identity in his own efforts to define the Turkish nation. At the beginning, Turkey explicitly
utilized religious terms in citizenship decisions, specifically describing those allowed citizenship
as “Muslims”. This slowly changed throughout the 1930s as the term “Turk” began to replace
“Muslim” in the official documents (Çağaptay 2006, 78). Significantly, while the term used to
describe such immigrants changed, immigration policy itself did not. Citizenship and
immigration priority was still determined on religious grounds, but the relationship between
religion and national identities was such that the terms were interchangeable, members of the
Muslim ingroup and members of the Turkish ingroup were considered one and the same, and
those that fell outside of the Muslim ingroup could not and would not be Turks.
Other policies put in place by the Turkish government reveal an emphasis on religion in
determining full membership in the nation. A law passed in 1931 established strict control of the
press in Turkey, permitting only Turks to own magazines or journals (“Matbuat Kanunu [The
Press Law]” 1931). Similarly, a Law on Associations was passed in 1936 prohibiting the
establishment of organizations and associations representing ethnic and religious minorities
(“Cemiyetler Kanunu [Law on Associations]” 1983). Most devastatingly, law number 2007
passed in 1932 banned non-Turkish citizens from a large variety of professions, both skilled
professional ones and those requiring little formal training (“Türkiye’de Türk Vatandaşlarina
Tahsis Edilen Sanat ve Hizmetler Hakkinda Kanun [Law on Professions and Services Allocated
to Turkish Citizens in Turkey. Nr, 2007” 1932). This law was aimed specifically at the remaining
Greek Orthodox population in Istanbul, which had been exempted from the population exchange
and remained a thorn in the side of Turkish efforts at homogenization. As Çağaptay explains,
26
many of these Greek Christians were left unemployed, and more than 15,000 left the country as a
result (2006, 70). The burdens on the remaining religious minorities were made even heavier in
1942 when under the pretence of raising funds for national defence, the Turkish government
imposed a strict tax on non-Muslim citizens, a move widely understood to be an effort aimed at
financially ruining the remaining non-Muslim minorities in Turkey (Çetinoglu 2012, 14; Ince
2012, 75). Though this tax was nominally to be paid by all residents of Turkey the rates imposed
were extremely unequal, placing a far heavier burden on non-Muslims while taxing Muslims at
an insignificant level.
Discrimination and mistreatment of the remaining religious minorities in Turkey
extended beyond official government policy, however and in September 1955 hostility towards
Christians and Jews boiled over in violent riots targeting non-Muslims in Istanbul. Following the
explosion of a bomb outside Atatürk's historic house in Salonika, later proved to have been
planted by the Turkish Secret Service, thousands of shops, homes, churches and cemeteries
owned by Christians were burned and destroyed (Kuyucu 2005, 362). Rioters caused nearly $300
million worth of damage to Christian and Jewish property, with Greek Orthodox Christians in
Istanbul serving as the primary target (Göçek 2015, 259). Anecdotal accounts and later research
have argued that the Turkish government played a powerful role in planning and directing the
riots (Vryonis 2005). Some scholars have argued that the pogrom that resulted was a reflection of
rising tensions over control of Cyprus and served as retaliation for Greek Cypriot attacks on
Turkish Muslims there (Dosdoğru 1993), while others have seen it as a means to disadvantage
remaining Christian populations whose continued presence and prosperity had been a symbolic
thorn in the Turks’ side since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 (Kuyucu 2005). Whether the result
of such deeper motivations, or as a spontaneous outpouring of outrage as a result of the bombing,
27
as others have maintained (Fersoy 1979) there is little doubt that the tens of thousands of
exclusively Muslim Turkish rioters who targeted non-Muslim churches, homes, and schools did
so out of a belief that non-Muslims were not full members of the national community. As one
bureaucrat later related in his memoirs, after the riots he found his colleagues “immersed in
newspapers, reading on the one side, looking at the pictures on the other, saying things like ‘it is
a good thing this happened; it was necessary; these rotten bastards had gotten too big for their
britches; it was time to teach them a lesson’” (Oğuz 2000).
Conclusions
When Yusuf Akçura related the old adage that in Islam “religion and nation are one” he
did so critically, arguing that though it was a formulation all Muslim children learned while they
were young, attempts in his time to reconceptualize the fading multireligious and multicultural
Ottoman Empire as a modern nation through pan-Islamism and an emphasis on religion were
destined to fail. Atatürk’s secularizing reforms seemed to confirm such an opinion, and scholars
have long argued that they spelled an end for religious definitions of communal identity and the
rise of a civic and secular nation. A historical examination of the ways in which Turks have
viewed the role of Islam in the modern nation reveals that, contrary to the civic rhetoric
expressed by the Kemalist movement, the maxim that Akçura discounted has, in fact, held true:
Turkish self-conceptions of national identity have frequently been intimately intertwined with
membership in the Islamic community. From the very beginning of the nation, Turks have
subjectively perceived a high degree of overlap between members of the Turkish nation and
adherents of Islam. Analysis of nationalist theorizing, political actions, and treatment of religious
minorities reveals that for many Turks, to be a full member of the Turkish nation meant to be a
28
Muslim; those who were not a member of the religious community were simultaneously
excluded from the national ingroup.
Here, historical analysis has revealed that social and political conditions during the last
decades of the Ottoman Empire were ripe for creating what Roccas and Brewer have called a low
level of social identity complexity, that is distilling a variety of facets of identification down to a
single hardened and exclusionary ingroup. For residents of the former Ottoman Empire, religion
became synonymous with national identity, and all those who fell outside the boundaries of the
religious ingroup simultaneously faced exclusion from the national community. This association
of religion with nationalism was heightened both by the polarization of religious and political
identities that accompanied the Balkan Wars and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as well as
the actions of nationalist entrepreneurs such as Yusuf Akçura, Ziya Gökalp, and even Atatürk
himself, who seized on a religious definition of the nation as a common core around which a new
polity could be constructed. The association of religious and national identity had unforeseen
consequences for nationalists, however, many of whom were essentially secularist in their own
orientation. Conditioned to thinking about the nation in religious terms, indeed with a new
national community whose membership was explicitly defined religiously, Turkish politicians
and common people alike took steps to reinforce the boundaries of Turkish identity by working
to assimilate Muslim ethnic minorities and excluding non-Muslims. Such exclusionary tactics
can be seen as the end result of a politics driven by conceptions of social identity that conflate
religion, ethnicity, and nation into a single ingroup around which national identity has coalesced.
The Turkish case provides an important example for the efficacy of social identity
complexity theory in explaining modern and historical cases of discriminatory politics. Turkey is
hardly unique in its paradoxical approach to nationalism, in which exclusionary policy making
29
on the ground did not live up to the lofty rhetoric its officially civic nationalism promised. Social
identity complexity theory can explain some of this disconnect, bringing into sharper focus the
interplay between facets of identification, be they religious, ethnic, national, or other, as well as
the negotiations between popular conceptions of identity and the official policies enacted by
governments that do not always conform with widespread public consensus. In the Turkish case,
elite efforts towards secularization were hindered by the overwhelming emphasis placed on
religion in the late Ottoman Empire, and the religious character of the state that reformed from
its wreckage. A social identity complexity approach which emphasizes the relationship between
the multiple facets of national identity can thus provide important insights into cases in which
recalcitrant ethnic and religious definitions of national identity inspire intolerance toward
minority populations. In such cases the desire for a civic nation-state amongst portions of the
nationalist population may not be enough to create the sort of tolerant and open state civic
nationalism supposedly promotes. Instead, in societies which harbour low levels of social
complexity, a large subjective overlap between different facets of identity may still lead to a
focus on more restrictive definitions of the national community and significant levels of religious
and ethnic intolerance as the dominant majority hardens its ingroup boundaries.
30
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