Formation of the Turkish Nation-State, 1920-1938.

• Author: McConnel, Adam
• Position: Book review

Formation of the Turkish Nation-State, 1920-1938

By Yesim Bayar

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 200 pages, $95.00, ISBN: 9781137384522.

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Yesim Bayar's Formation of the Turkish Nation-State, 1920-1938, an adaptation of the author's doctoral dissertation, is a strong introduction to several topics that dominated official Turkish thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Even though the book's title suggests a comprehensive analysis, Bayar focuses on three primary issues: language, education, and citizenship. All three are discussed in relation to the manner in which the early Turkish Republic's elites employed them in order to mold their new society. The author's essential aim is to situate the Turkish experience in the literature on nationalism and nation-state formation.

Bayar begins the study by arguing that Turkey's national project has been largely ignored in the literature on nation-state formation (p. 6) and then, in the second chapter, presents a broad overview of 19th century Ottoman history that pauses at appropriate points to focus on issues leading to the book's main discussions. Chapter three, concerning language policy, asserts that in the Turkish case language "becomes a question of politics and ideology" (p. 38). The chapter's exposition continues on to provide many examples from parliamentary debates, newspapers, speeches, and memoirs of prominent Turkish political figures from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as from the secondary literature. The author closes the chapter by reiterating the connection between language and politics, and emphasizes that in the Turkish case, "... linguistic assimilation became inextricably linked with the rules of belonging to the nation" (p. 72).

The study's two other main chapters follow a similar pattern. Chapter four, which considers education policy, argues that Turkish state elites utilized education in order to assimilate minorities and to control society in general. The fifth chapter focuses on citizenship and explains that the Turkish elites created a hierarchy of assimilationist and exclusionist categories for the issues of citizenship and immigration. The author concludes the study by arguing that, in the Turkish case, cultural and ethnic elements of Turkish nationalism were manipulated by the Turkish elites for their own political ends, and that those elites' overriding concern was internal threats posing potential challenges to their sovereignty.

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