Spatial Conceptions of the Nation: Modernizing Geographies in Greece and Turkey.

• Author: Ozbudun, Ergun
• Position: Book review

Spatial Conceptions of the Nation: Modernizing Geographies in Greece and Turkey

Edited by Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Caglar Keyder

London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010, 311 pages, ISBN 9781848851313.

This volume edited by P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, and Caglar Keyder is the third of a very interesting series, product of a trans-disciplinary dialogue among Greek and Turkish scholars on the intertwining histories of their respective nations. As the editors of the present volume put it, "the passage from the multiethnic Ottoman Empire to the contemporary nation-states and the nationalist discourses accompanying the process constituted the epicenter of both previous volumes and continues to dominate the present one." The first volume edited by Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas is entitled Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey (London: Routledge, 2005), and the second, edited by Anna Frangoudaki and Ca?lar Keyder is entitled Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey: encounters with Europe, 1850-1950 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007).

The present volume focuses, as its title indicates, on "the elusive congruence between territory and people," in other words, on the respective roles of space (with its history) on the one hand, and religion, language and ethnicity, on the other, in the making of modern nation-states, or more accurately on the tense relationship between the two. As the editors eloquently put it, the nationalist movements' "vision of an unadulterated purity ... requires ethnic cleansing, expulsion, exchange of populations and forced conversions ... Even the least primordial nationalisms are loath to take space as the primary defining dimension of their mobilization. So, they devalue, disregard and even suppress the particularity of territory; states and politics strive to make spaces into national (and shallow) places ... Richness of the particular was a threat ... Their histories, constructed as the imperative of the nation-state, actively forgot and suppressed big chunks of the lived experience of the populations. Accordingly, spaces that could not be readily assimilated were relegated into oblivion" (pp. 1-2).

Indeed, tensions between territorially-based and primordial attachments were particularly acute in the successor states to multi-religious, multi-ethnic empires like the Ottoman state. The Ottoman millet system and the nineteenth century's dominant ideology of Ottomanism attempted to provide a territorially-based alternative to the...