Your book is organized around four major historical moments: the Early Republic, the Cold War, the Özal period, and Erdoğan’s neo-patrimonial era. How should readers understand the scope and ambition of this book?
This book should be read as a major interpretive history of modern Turkey. In that sense, it enters into conversation with two classic works: Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey and Niyazi Berkes’s The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Lewis explained the emergence of modern Turkey through modernization and Westernization. Berkes examined the long struggle over secularism and the transformation of religious authority. My book, The Torn Republic: Turkey’s Search for Civilizational Identity, may be seen as a third comprehensive account—one that revisits the entire Republican experience through the question of civilizational identity.
The book is thick in ideas, concepts, and interpretive framework, but thinner in archival research. Its purpose is not to provide a narrow documentary history of a single institution, party, or event. Rather, it offers a broad analytical map of the Republic’s central tension: the unresolved struggle between secular-Westernizing state formation and the enduring Ottoman-Islamic moral and cultural universe of society.
The book is organized into four sections. The first examines the Early Republic, from 1918 to 1950, when the state’s founding philosophy was constructed through secularism, nationalism, statism, and top-down modernization. The second section focuses on the Cold War, from 1950 to 1990, when Islam and nationalism were reconfigured through anti-communism and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. The third section analyzes the Özal period, from 1983 to 1993, when market liberalization, Muslim conservatism, globalization, and neo-Ottoman imagination opened new social and political spaces. The fourth section examines Erdoğan’s neo-patrimonial era, from 2002 to the present, when Islamism, nationalism, state power, patronage, and civilizational rhetoric fused into a new regime form.
In this interview, I would like to move through these four sections, but with special emphasis on domestic politics and state-society relations. Foreign policy matters, of course, but the deeper story is internal: how the state tried to shape society, how society resisted, adapted, and captured the state, and how Turkey’s unresolved civilizational question continues to define its political life.
Professor Yavuz, what is the main argument of your new book?
The main argument of the book is that Turkey is not simply divided between political parties, social classes, or even secularists and Islamists. The division goes much deeper. Turkey is divided over a fundamental question: What is Turkey? Where does it belong? And what should it become?
Since the founding of the Republic, two powerful civilizational orientations have competed to answer these questions. And these two orientations are built around different memories of the past, different understandings of Turkish identity, and ultimately different visions of Turkey’s future.
The first orientation is the Republican, secular, and Western-oriented vision. It emerged from the catastrophe of the late Ottoman Empire—the loss of territories, the expulsion and massacre of Muslims from former Ottoman lands, the Balkan Wars, World War I, foreign occupation, and finally the threat of partition embodied in the Treaty of Sèvres. The founders of the Republic looked at this history and reached a very powerful conclusion: the old order had failed. Turkey could survive only by becoming something new—a sovereign, secular, modern nation-state oriented toward Europe.
So Kemalism was not simply a project of Westernization. It was, first and foremost, a survival ideology. But survival required transformation. The Republic did not merely create a new state; it tried to create a new society, a new citizen, a new historical consciousness, and even a new relationship with the past. The Ottoman-Islamic order was increasingly presented as something Turkey had to overcome. The caliphate, the religious orders, Islamic law, the Ottoman language and alphabet, dress, education, and public symbols all became objects of reform. The message was very clear: Turkey could not build its future while remaining imprisoned in its Ottoman-Islamic past.
But there was always another Turkey.
This second orientation never accepted that modernization required such a radical rupture with the Ottoman-Islamic past. It saw Turkey as the historical heir of an Ottoman-Islamic civilization. The empire might have disappeared, but its civilization had not. It survived in families, neighborhoods, mosques, religious communities, Sufi networks, literature, music, everyday practices, and, above all, collective memory. For this Turkey, Islam and the Ottoman past were not obstacles to becoming modern. They were constitutive elements of who the Turkish people were.
This is why memory is so central to my argument. The conflict is not simply over history. It is over which history should be remembered and which history should define the nation.
The secular Republican imagination remembers Ottoman collapse, backwardness, military defeat, foreign intervention, and the struggle for national survival. Its foundational memory says: “We almost disappeared. The Republic saved us.” The Islamic-conservative imagination remembers something very different: the abolition of the caliphate, the closing of religious institutions and Sufi orders, restrictions on religious life, the alphabet and language reforms, and the marginalization of religious Muslims. Its foundational memory says: “We survived as a state, but we were forced to abandon part of who we were.”
These are not simply two interpretations of the past. They produce two different identities.
And identity always contains a vision of the future.
One side asks: How can Turkey complete the Republican project and become a more secular, rational, modern, European country? The other asks: How can Turkey recover the historical and civilizational identity that the Republican project attempted to suppress?
This is where the struggle becomes political. The Ottoman past becomes a counter-memory. The mosque, the headscarf, Ottoman history, the caliphate, religious education, historical figures, architecture, even the language we use to describe the past become political symbols. They are political because they answer the question of who legitimately represents the “real” Turkey.
This is also why I do not think Erdoğan can be understood simply as a populist authoritarian leader or the AK Party simply as another conservative political party. Erdoğan represents the political culmination of a much longer struggle over memory and civilizational identity. His project seeks not merely to govern the Republic but to redefine the Republic’s relationship with its Ottoman-Islamic past. In that sense, Erdoğanism presents itself as a project of historical restoration: recovering a civilization, restoring a suppressed memory, and reversing what conservatives regard as the cultural hierarchy established by Kemalism.
Of course, the irony—and one of the book’s central arguments—is that a project that began by promising to liberate religious society from an authoritarian secular state eventually produced its own highly centralized and personalized state.
Why do you call Turkey a “torn republic”?
The country is torn not simply because people vote for different parties. Democracies normally have political divisions. Turkey is torn because its major political traditions have disagreed about the country’s very identity. They remember different pasts, construct different identities from those memories, and imagine different futures.
At the heart of modern Turkish politics, therefore, are three interconnected questions: What should we remember? Who are we? And what should Turkey become?
My argument is that unless we understand those three questions—memory, identity, and the struggle over Turkey’s future—we cannot fully understand the political history of the Turkish Republic.
Because Turkey’s state, society, and memory have often moved in different directions. The state was built as secular, nationalist, and Westernizing. But much of society continued to live through Islamic practices, Ottoman memories, local identities, and communal traditions. The Republic changed the institutions much faster than it changed the social imagination.
Turkey is “torn” because it has never fully reconciled these layers: republican institutions, Islamic/Ottoman memory, Turkish nationalism, Western aspirations, and Ottoman legacies.
So “torn” does not simply mean secular versus religious?
No. That would be too simple. The torn condition is not a mechanical division between secularists and Islamists. It is a deeper civilizational uncertainty. Turkey asks itself again and again: Are we European? Are we Middle Eastern? Are we Muslim? Are we Central Asian Turkic nation? Are we Ottoman heirs? Are we a secular nation-state? Are we a civilizational state?
These questions never disappeared. They return in every major political crisis.
What do you mean by “civilizational identity”?
Civilizational identity is the broad moral, historical, religious, and cultural world through which a society understands itself. National identity asks, “Who are we as a nation?” Civilizational identity asks, “To which historical and moral world do we belong?”
For Turkey, this question is especially difficult because the country emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Muslim empire but tried to remake itself as a secular, Western nation-state.
Why is Turkey still searching for this identity?
Because the founding project never produced full moral consent. The Republic created a strong state, secular laws, national education, and a new public culture. But it could not erase the Ottoman-Islamic past. Islam survived in families, neighborhoods, religious orders, Qur’an courses, Sufi networks, conservative towns, and popular memory. Eventually, Islam became more than a religious tradition; it became an oppositional identity against the Republic’s Westernizing reforms. For many conservative-Muslim groups, the reforms were not experienced merely as institutional modernization, but as a civilizational rupture: the state had turned away from its own sacred inheritance. In response, these groups rallied around the language of dava or davamız—“the cause.” This concept gave their struggle a moral and historical mission. The goal was not only to defend religion in private life, but to recover the state, reshape public culture, and re-Islamize society through the very institutions that had once been used to secularize it.
The Republic could abolish the caliphate, but it could not abolish the sacred. It could close the tekkes, but it could not eliminate religious belonging. It could change the alphabet, but it could not erase memory. Indeed, the radical reforms of the Republic produced not only a new secular citizen, but also a counter- (and new) memory among those who felt dispossessed by the new order. The more the Republic sought to sever society from the Ottoman-Islamic past, the more that past became emotionally charged, morally idealized, and politically useful.
What do you mean by this “new memory”?
By “new memory,” I mean a reconstructed memory of the Ottoman-Islamic past, created in opposition to the Republic’s Westernizing reforms. This was not simply the survival of an old memory. It was a new political memory, produced under conditions of loss, exclusion, and resentment.
Islamists began to imagine the Ottoman Empire not as a complex historical formation with its own inequalities, crises, and failures, but as a lost moral order: just, Islamic, powerful, harmonious, and spiritually authentic. The past was purified and idealized. It became a mirror through which Islamists criticized the secular Republic and a reservoir of symbols through which they imagined an alternative future.
In this sense, nostalgia was not innocent. It was political. The Ottoman past was reconstructed to serve present struggles: to challenge Kemalism, delegitimize Westernization, restore Islamic confidence, and mobilize conservative society around the promise of civilizational revival. I examined this process in my previous book, Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanism, where I argued that neo-Ottomanism is not simply a love of history. It is the politicization of imperial memory in the service of contemporary identity, power, and statecraft.
When did this Islamist search begin?
It began in the post-Tanzimat period, after 1839. The Ottoman elites were already asking how the empire could survive. Some looked to Ottomanism, some to Islamism, some to Turkism, some to Westernization. The Tanzimat reformers adopted European legal and administrative models. The Young Ottomans tried to reconcile Islam with constitutionalism. The Young Turks moved toward nationalism, positivism, and centralization.
The Republic inherited these debates but answered them more radically: Turkey must join Western civilization.
Let’s turn to the founding philosophy of the Republic, formed after World War I.
The founding philosophy was Kemalism, but I treat it as more than an ideology. It was a state-building project, a civilizational program, and a pedagogy of citizenship. It sought to create a new state, a new nation, a new citizen, and new ways of being as European.
Its core principles were secularism, nation-state building, nationalism, Westernization, and republicanism. In other words, the founding philosophy aimed to create a secular European nation-state.
How should we understand the origins of Kemalism—as a modernization project or as a survival ideology born from trauma?
The founding philosophy of the Turkish Republic—Kemalism—must be understood not simply as an abstract ideology of secularism and Westernization, but as a survival ideology born out of imperial collapse, collective trauma, and the fear of national extinction. The late Ottoman world was shattered by the partition of the empire, the Balkan Wars, World War I, foreign occupation, and the forced migration, deportation, and massacre of Muslims from former Ottoman territories. Millions of Muslim refugees arrived in Anatolia carrying memories of humiliation, dispossession, and violence. For the founding cadres, the Treaty of Sèvres crystallized the nightmare of being swallowed by Europe and erased from history. It was not merely a diplomatic document; it became the symbol of dismemberment, dependency, and civilizational death. Kemalism emerged from this wounded historical consciousness. It was the ideology of a defeated but resisting people who believed that only a strong, secular, centralized, nationalist, and modern state could prevent the final destruction of the Turkish-Muslim homeland. In this sense, Kemalism was not only a project of modernization; it was a politics of survival. Its nationalism, secularism, statism, and suspicion of pluralism were all shaped by the memory of loss and the fear that internal fragmentation would invite external intervention. The Republic was built by people who had seen empire collapse, Muslims expelled, cities occupied, and Anatolia nearly partitioned. Their answer was a disciplined nation-state. Kemalism therefore should be read as the ideological response of a traumatized political elite determined never again to allow the Turkish nation to become vulnerable, dependent, or defenseless.
What did republicanism mean?
It meant replacing dynastic and religious sovereignty with national sovereignty. The Ottoman dynasty and the caliphate were seen as symbols of a failed order. The new Republic declared that sovereignty belonged to the nation created by the reforms.
What did nationalism mean in this context?
Nationalism meant constructing a Turkish nation out of the ruins of a multiethnic, multireligious empire. After World War I, Anatolia was not yet a unified national society in the modern sense. It was a fragmented social landscape made up of tarikats, cemaats, tribes, villages, neighborhoods, local notables, religious networks, and regional loyalties. In other words, the Republic inherited not a coherent nation, but a collection of dispersed and often formless social entities.
For the founding cadres, this fragmentation was dangerous. They believed that imperial pluralism had produced weakness, separatism, foreign intervention, and ultimately collapse. The Ottoman experience convinced them that a modern state could not survive on overlapping religious, ethnic, and communal identities. It needed a unified national identity, a common language, a centralized education system, and a shared political loyalty.
Thus, Turkishness became the central language of citizenship, loyalty, education, public culture, and state legitimacy. It was not only an ethnic category; it was a state-building project. The Republic sought to transform peasants, tribes, religious communities, local identities, and former Ottoman subjects into modern Turkish citizens. Nationalism was therefore both integrative and coercive: it created a common political identity, but it also suppressed alternative identities that did not fit the official definition of the nation.
What made secularism so central?
Secularism was central because the founders believed that Islam, as a political, legal, and institutional order, had to be removed from state power. In their eyes, the Ottoman-Islamic order had failed to produce modern sovereignty, scientific education, legal rationality, and national unity. Religion could remain as belief, morality, and ritual, but it could no longer organize law, education, politics, or public authority.
The abolition of the caliphate, the closure of religious courts and madrasas, the unification of education, the closure of tekkes and zaviyes, and the subordination of religion to the Directorate of Religious Affairs were all part of this project. These reforms were designed not merely to separate religion from politics, but to break the institutional autonomy of Islam.
But Turkish secularism was never simply the separation of religion and state. It was the nationalization and bureaucratization of religion. The state did not withdraw from religion; it reorganized, supervised, and disciplined it. Secularism became a means of preventing religion from becoming an alternative source of sovereignty, law, education, and collective loyalty.
Why was the state so powerful in the founding philosophy?
The state was powerful because the founders did not trust society to modernize itself. The country had been devastated by war, occupation, poverty, displacement, demographic destruction, and institutional collapse. Capital was weak, industry limited, illiteracy widespread, infrastructure fragile, and social fragmentation deep. The founders saw society as exhausted, divided, and bound by traditional loyalties.
In this context, the state became the carrier of reason, science, order, progress, and national survival. It was not merely an administrative machine; it was the engine of transformation. The Republic believed that society had to be educated, disciplined, secularized, nationalized, and modernized from above.
This is why the early Republic placed such emphasis on schools, law, language, dress, history, public rituals, and bureaucracy. The state sought to create not only new institutions, but a new type of human being: the modern Turkish citizen. Modernization, in this founding philosophy, could not be left to spontaneous social evolution. The state had to direct, protect, and impose it.
Was the Republic democratic at its foundation?
It was republican, but not liberal-democratic. The founders believed that the Republic first had to survive before it could become pluralistic. They feared imperial return, religious reaction, Kurdish separatism, and European intervention. This produced a defensive and authoritarian understanding of politics.
The Republic liberated Turkey from empire and occupation, but it also imposed a narrow model of national identity.
Why did Islamists reject the founding philosophy?
Islamists saw the founding philosophy as a civilizational rupture. They believed the Republic did not simply modernize the state; it cut the nation off from its Islamic moral foundations. The abolition of the caliphate, secular law, alphabet reform, closure of madrasas and tekkes, and restrictions on religious life were seen as attacks on Islam as a way of life.
For Islamists, the Republic created a state without soul and a nation without memory.
Did Islamists reject modernization itself?
Not always. Many Islamists rejected Westernization, not modernization. They argued that Turkey could become modern without abandoning Islam. They believed that Ottoman decline was not caused by Islam but by moral decay, Western imitation, elite alienation, and loss of Islamic solidarity.
Their objection was not simply political. It was civilizational.
How did Islamists resist the Republic?
In the early Republic, resistance was mostly defensive and social. Religious networks survived underground. Families, Sufi orders, Qur’an circles, local communities, and informal teachers transmitted Islamic knowledge. Some resistance also took the form of rebellion, especially when religious and Kurdish grievances overlapped. MORE—SABRI/NURSI/TOPCU/
After 1950, Islamists discovered the power of electoral politics. The Democrat Party opened more space for religious expression. Later, Islamist movements organized through imam-hatip schools, Qur’an courses, dormitories, publishing houses, student groups, business networks, charities, and political parties.
Was Necmettin Erbakan important in this process?
Very important. Erbakan’s Milli Görüş movement gave Islamism a modern political form. It combined Islamic morality, anti-Westernism, economic nationalism, industrialization, and opposition to secular elites. It taught Islamists how to organize politically, socially, and economically.
What was the most effective Islamist strategy?
Patience. Islamists built institutions over time: schools, dormitories, media networks, municipalities, foundations, business associations, and professional cadres. They created a parallel moral and social world. They did not only seek power; they sought to produce a new Muslim subject.
How does Erdoğan fit into this story?
Erdoğan and the AKP brought this long Islamist struggle into the center of the state. At first, the AKP presented itself as conservative democratic, reformist, and pro-European. Over time, it became more assertively Islamist-nationalist. It sought to reverse Kemalist cultural hierarchy, expand religious education, rehabilitate Ottoman memory, and redefine Turkey as a leading Muslim power.
But there is an irony: Islamism began as a movement against state domination, yet under Erdoğan it created its own state-centered authoritarianism.
You also discuss Kurdish and Islamist rebellions. Why are they so important?
Because the early Republic consolidated itself through conflict. Islamist and Kurdish rebellions helped harden the Republic’s secular, nationalist, and security-centered state philosophy.
The state did not develop its founding ideology in calm conditions. It developed it in response to fear: fear of religious reaction, Kurdish separatism, foreign intervention, and internal fragmentation.
What was the significance of the Sheikh Said rebellion?
The Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925 was crucial. It combined Kurdish, religious, tribal, and anti-secular elements. It cannot be reduced to one cause. It reflected Kurdish grievances, religious opposition to secular reforms, local power struggles, and anxiety over the abolition of the caliphate.
For the Republic, however, it confirmed the fear that Islam and Kurdish identity could become vehicles of counter-revolution and separatism.
How did the state respond?
The state responded with extraordinary measures: the Law on the Maintenance of Order, Independence Tribunals, executions, closure of opposition newspapers and associations, and suppression of the Progressive Republican Party.
The rebellion helped justify one-party rule. It strengthened the idea that pluralism was dangerous and that secularism and Turkish nationalism were necessary for survival.
Did these rebellions shape Kemalism?
Yes. They did not merely challenge Kemalism; they helped define it. The Republic became more secular because religious rebellion appeared dangerous. It became more nationalist because Kurdish mobilization appeared separatist. It became more authoritarian because political pluralism appeared risky.
Rebellions became the negative mirror through which the Republic clarified itself.
What about Dersim?
Dersim further consolidated the security-centered state. The Kurdish question was treated not as a political or cultural question, but as a problem of order, backwardness, tribalism, and rebellion. The state used military power, administrative centralization, settlement policies, and assimilation to impose control.
Dersim revealed the coercive side of republican modernization.
And the Menemen incident?
Menemen became symbolically central for secularists. Although limited in scale, it confirmed the fear of religious reaction. After Menemen, secularism became not only a reform principle but also a security doctrine. Religion had to be supervised, regulated, and prevented from becoming politically autonomous.
What was the long-term cost of this state-building process?
The Republic built strong institutions, but it also produced deep grievances. It created citizens, but also internal others. It modernized, but it also silenced. It defeated rebellions militarily, but it did not resolve the questions behind them.
What is the place of Islam in public life? Can Turkish citizenship include Kurdish identity? Can the state be secular without being hostile to religion? Can the nation be unified without denying plurality?
These questions remain unresolved.
The second part of your book treats the Cold War as a decisive stage in the making of the Turkish Republic. Why do you see the Cold War as the Republic’s second foundational moment? How did it reshape state–society relations in Turkey?
I treat the Cold War as the second stage of the Republic because it fundamentally altered the meaning of Kemalism, Islam, nationalism, and state power. The first Republic was built around secularization, nationalization, and Westernization. Its main concern was to control religion and create a modern Turkish citizen. But after World War II, and especially after Turkey joined NATO, the priorities changed. The state now defined communism as the central threat, and this transformed religion from a danger to be contained into a resource to be mobilized.
This was a major shift in state–society relations. In the early Republic, the state disciplined Islam. During the Cold War, Islam was partially rehabilitated as an anti-communist force. Religious education expanded, imam-hatip schools gained importance, Qur’an courses became more tolerated, and conservative associations found new space. The state still controlled religion, but it also used it to build a loyal, nationalist, anti-communist society.
The Cold War also fused Turkish nationalism with Sunni Islam. This produced what later became known as the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. The ideal citizen was no longer only the secular republican citizen of the 1930s, but also the pious, nationalist, anti-communist Turk loyal to family, flag, mosque, and state.
For example, after the 1980 coup, the military regime suppressed the left but promoted religious-nationalist education to depoliticize society. This weakened class politics and strengthened conservative networks. Ironically, the state’s use of Islam against communism helped create the social and institutional foundations of later Islamism.
Thus, the Cold War did not resolve Turkey’s torn identity. It reorganized it. Islam returned to public life not as the old Ottoman order, but as anti-communist morality, nationalist piety, and eventually political power.
You argue that the Cold War did not only shape Turkish politics and state institutions, but also transformed literary imagination. How did the Cold War influence the way leftists and Islamists imagined Turkey, the West, the nation, and the future? Could you explain this with some examples from literature?
The Cold War shaped Turkish literature by dividing the moral imagination of society into rival worlds. Literature became one of the major arenas in which leftists and Islamists narrated the meaning of injustice, alienation, authenticity, and salvation.
For the left, the Cold War produced a literature of class, exploitation, imperialism, and social awakening. The village novel, worker stories, and prison literature presented Turkey as a society divided between oppressed people and exploitative elites. Writers such as Yaşar Kemal, Orhan Kemal, Fakir Baykurt, Kemal Tahir, and . .. . explored poverty, peasant suffering, state violence, migration, and the moral contradictions of modernization. In this literature, the West often appeared through capitalism, imperialism, and dependency. The hero was frequently the worker, the peasant, the teacher, the prisoner, or the intellectual who tried to awaken society.
For Islamists, the Cold War produced a different but equally powerful literary and ideological imagination. If leftist literature narrated Turkey through class, exploitation, peasant suffering, and imperialism, Islamist literature narrated modernity as spiritual exile. The central problem was not only poverty or social inequality, but the loss of faith, morality, family, sacred authority, and civilizational memory.
In this Islamist imagination, Westernization did not simply bring new institutions; it wounded the Muslim soul. The secular Republic was seen as having produced a generation cut off from its own history, language, piety, and moral universe. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek’s Büyük Doğu vision, Sezai Karakoç’s idea of Islamic resurrection, and later Islamist novels all portrayed modern Turkey as a society suffering from spiritual homelessness. Minyeli Abdullah became a classic Cold War Islamist novel precisely because it offered the image of the steadfast Muslim believer struggling against secular oppression, moral corruption, and ideological captivity.
The Islamist hero was therefore very different from the leftist hero. He was not the revolutionary worker, the peasant rebel, or the socialist intellectual. He was the morally wounded Muslim, searching for authenticity in a secularized world. His struggle was not only political; it was existential. He had to recover faith, dignity, Islamic consciousness, and a lost civilizational confidence.
What role did Necip Fazıl Kısakürek play in shaping Islamist ideology?
Necip Fazıl was one of the most important architects of modern Turkish Islamist imagination. His importance lies not only in his poetry or literary style, but in his ability to transform conservative Muslim resentment into a total ideological worldview. Through Büyük Doğu, he gave conservative Muslims a language of injury, humiliation, revenge, and historical mission. He told them that they were not backward or marginal, but the bearers of a suppressed civilization waiting to return.
His thought combined anti-communism, Islamic revivalism, Turkish nationalism, moral authoritarianism, anti-Western resentment, and deep hostility toward the secular republican elite. He did not merely criticize Kemalism; he recoded it as a civilizational betrayal. For him, Westernization was not reform but deracination: the uprooting of the Muslim nation from its sacred sources.
But this ideological world also carried darker elements. Necip Fazıl’s anti-Western and anti-communist language frequently relied on conspiratorial thinking, exclusionary nationalism, and antisemitic themes. Like many figures of the Cold War right, he identified Jews, communists, Freemasons, cosmopolitans, and Westernized elites as forces of moral corruption and national decay. His Islamism was therefore not simply a movement of piety or moral renewal. It was also structured by resentment, enemy-making, and a politics of purification.
Nurettin Topçu is often remembered as a moral Islamic thinker, a critic of materialism, and a defender of spiritual responsibility. Yet his intellectual world also contained troubling authoritarian and antisemitic elements. His anti-communism, nationalism, and critique of modernity were not liberal or pluralist. They were shaped by a search for moral discipline, hierarchy, sacrifice, and spiritualized nationalism. His reported admiration for Hitler—symbolized by the fact that he allegedly kept Hitler’s picture among the images in his bedroom until his death in 1973—reveals the disturbing authoritarian underside of parts of Turkish conservative-Islamic thought. It shows that the moral critique of modernity could coexist with admiration for violent order, racialized politics, and anti-liberal power.
This is important because Turkish Islamism should not be romanticized as merely a suppressed religious movement seeking freedom. It was also shaped by anti-communism, nationalism, antisemitism, authoritarian longings, and fantasies of state power. The language of dava was not only about moral revival; it was also about capturing the state, defeating internal enemies, and remaking society from above.
This is why Necip Fazıl’s influence on the AKP generation, especially on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is so significant. He helped create the emotional and ideological grammar of Islamist politics: victimhood, revenge, civilizational revival, hostility to secular elites, suspicion of pluralism, and the dream of using the state to restore Islamic authority. In this sense, the Cold War Islamist imagination was not simply a literature of faith. It was a literature of wounded pride, sacred memory, anti-communist militancy, antisemitic conspiracy, and the desire for power.
Was there any affinity between Islamists and leftist literature?
Leftist and Islamist literatures shared a common structure: both were literatures of alienation and rescue. But they diagnosed the wound differently. For the left, Turkey’s tragedy was capitalism, imperialism, and class domination. For Islamists, it was Westernization, secularism, and the loss of Islamic civilization.
The Cold War therefore created two rival utopias: the socialist future and the Islamic revival. Literature gave these utopias emotional depth. It turned ideology into character, suffering, memory, and moral drama. This is why novels, poems, journals, and essays became so central to the making of political identities in modern Turkey.
One of your arguments is that Turkey was not ready for a multi-party system. What is the basis of this argument?
When I say Turkey was not ready for a multi-party system, I do not mean that Turkish society was culturally (Islamic) incapable of democracy. That would be a wrong and elitist argument. My point is institutional and sociological.
The Republic had created the form of a modern state, but it had not yet produced the habits, institutions, and social compromises necessary for democratic pluralism. The state was strong, but civil society was weak. Political parties existed, but the rules of loyal opposition were not yet internalized. Elections became not simply a competition over policy, but a struggle over the identity of the Republic itself.
The deeper problem was that Turkey entered multi-party politics without resolving foundational questions: the place of Islam, the state-society relations, the nation-building process, the meaning of being a secular Turk, and the limits of state power. Once competitive elections began, these suppressed questions returned immediately.
So democracy reopened the Republic’s unresolved questions?
Exactly. The single-party regime had contained these tensions through control. It had not resolved them. When the Democrat Party came to power in 1950, it gave voice to social groups marginalized by the Kemalist center: religious conservatives, provincial notables, small merchants, rural voters, and those excluded by the bureaucratic elite.
This was democratic in one sense. It brought society back into politics. But it also frightened the Kemalist establishment, which believed that the Republic’s founding principles were being endangered by the very people in whose name the Republic had been created.
Was the Democrat Party anti-Kemalist?
Not at the beginning. The Democrat Party did not reject the Republic. It accepted the state’s basic framework. But it softened secularism, opened space for religion, restored the Arabic call to prayer, expanded religious education, and used a language closer to the moral world of conservative society.
For the secular bureaucracy, military, and intellectual elites, this looked like the beginning of counter-revolution. For the Democrat Party’s supporters, it looked like normalization.
Then what was the contradiction?
The contradiction was this: the Republic claimed to be based on national sovereignty, but the guardians of the Republic did not fully trust the nation. They believed the people could vote, but only within the boundaries of Kemalist civilization. If the electorate chose a party that reintroduced religion into public life or challenged bureaucratic authority, then the guardians believed intervention was necessary.
So multi-party politics produced a structural clash between electoral legitimacy and founding legitimacy. The Democrat Party had ballot-box legitimacy. The military-bureaucratic elite claimed the legitimacy of the founding philosophy.
You argue that the 1960 coup resulted from this structural contradiction. How?
The 27 May 1960 coup was not simply the result of Menderes’s authoritarianism, although the Democrat Party had become increasingly intolerant, majoritarian, and repressive in its final years. The coup resulted from a deeper structural contradiction between democratic competition and Kemalism’s guardianship structure.
The Democrat Party treated electoral victory as permission to dominate the state. The Kemalist establishment treated itself as the permanent guardian of the Republic, regardless of elections. These two logics could not coexist peacefully.
The crisis of the late 1950s—economic difficulties, press restrictions, university unrest, polarization, and the DP’s Investigation Commission—accelerated the breakdown. But beneath these immediate causes was the unresolved question: Who owns the Republic? The elected majority? Or the founding elite and its institutions?
Why do you call 27 May a turning point for Kemalism?
Because after 27 May, Kemalism changed from a founding philosophy into a guardianship ideology. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kemalism was a revolutionary state-building project. It sought to create a new nation, new citizens, new legal order, and new civilizational orientation.
After 1960, Kemalism increasingly became a doctrine of protection. Its main purpose was no longer revolutionary transformation but the defense of the Republic against elected governments, religious conservatives, communists, Kurdish movements, and later Islamists.
What happened to Kemalism after the coup?
Kemalism became institutionalized through the military, judiciary, universities, bureaucracy, and the new constitutional order. The 1961 Constitution created a more pluralistic political environment in some ways, but it also strengthened unelected institutions. The Constitutional Court, National Security Council, autonomous universities, and other mechanisms limited the power of elected governments.
This produced a paradox. The 1961 Constitution expanded freedoms, but the coup that produced it also normalized military intervention. It taught the military that it had the right to correct politics when elected leaders deviated from the founding principles.
Did Kemalism become more democratic or more authoritarian after 1960?
Both, in a contradictory way. The post-1960 order opened space for unions, socialist movements, student politics, constitutional rights, and intellectual life. In that sense, it was more liberal than the late Democrat Party period.
But politically, it also created a tutelary democracy. Elected governments would rule, but under the shadow of the military and high bureaucracy. Democracy became conditional. The people could govern, but not against the guardians of the Republic.
How did this affect later Turkish politics?
It created a pattern. Every major political crisis was interpreted through the question of whether elected politics had betrayed the Republic. This logic shaped 1971, 1980, 1997, and even the struggles of the 2000s.
The 1960 coup created the grammar of military guardianship. It turned Kemalism into a constitutionalized security doctrine.
How would you examine the interaction between Kemalism and Islamism in the 1950s?
The 1950s were not a simple story of secularism versus Islamism. They were a period of negotiation, adjustment, and mutual transformation. Kemalism did not disappear, and Islamism did not yet capture the state. Rather, religion slowly re-entered public life through democratic politics.
The Democrat Party understood that the strict secularism of the single-party period had alienated large parts of society. It did not abolish secularism, but it relaxed it. The Arabic call to prayer was restored. Imam-hatip schools expanded. Religious publications became more visible. Qur’an education gained more space. Conservative voters felt that the state was becoming less hostile to their values.
Was this the beginning of political Islam?
It was one of the important openings. The organized Islamist parties of the 1970s had not yet emerged, but the social and institutional foundations of later Islamism were strengthened in the 1950s. Religious communities, Nurcu networks, conservative associations, imam-hatip graduates, and Islamic publications began to gain confidence.
The 1950s created a new possibility: Islam could return not through rebellion, but through elections.
How did Kemalists react?
Many Kemalists saw this religious opening as a betrayal of the Republic. They believed the Democrat Party was using religion for political gain and weakening secularism. For them, the 1950s confirmed the fear that democracy could become a vehicle for religious reaction.
This is why the decade (1950s) matters. It exposed the unresolved tension inside Kemalism: Kemalism claimed to represent the people, but when the people voted for a more religious public life, Kemalist elites became suspicious of democracy.
Did Islamism also change during the 1950s?
Yes. Islamism learned to operate within democratic institutions. Instead of relying only on underground religious networks, Islamists and conservatives began to use newspapers, associations, schools, electoral politics, and party networks. They learned that the state could be pressured from below.
This was a major shift. Islamism became less purely oppositional and more strategic. It began to understand that modern institutions—parties, media, schools, municipalities, associations—could be used to gradually Islamize society.
What was the role of Said Nursi and the Nur movement?
Said Nursi and the Nur movement were extremely important because they represented a distinctive strategy of Islamic survival and renewal under the radically secularizing Republic. Unlike movements that sought to confront or overthrow the state, Nursi increasingly withdrew from direct political struggle. His answer to Kemalist secularization was not revolution but the reconstruction of faith from below. He focused on belief, personal discipline, community formation, and, above all, producing and circulating the Risale-i Nur. Through reading circles, informal religious networks, handwritten and later printed texts, and intense interpersonal bonds, the Nur movement created an alternative religious public sphere at a time when autonomous Islamic institutions had been severely restricted.
This was Nursi’s great historical achievement. He understood that Islam could survive without immediately capturing the state. In fact, his movement demonstrated that religious identity could be reproduced through society even under an aggressively secular political order. The Nur communities preserved Islamic consciousness, created networks of solidarity, educated new generations of religious Muslims, and eventually contributed to the formation of a much broader conservative and pious society. In this sense, Nursi helped shift Islamic activism from the mosque and traditional Sufi lodge toward the text, the reading circle, the household, and the informal community.
What was the central weakness in Nursi’s understanding of the relationship between faith and morality?
This is where I think we need to be more critical of Nursi. Nursi placed enormous confidence in faith’s transformative power. At the center of his thought was the assumption that strengthening iman would transform the individual morally. If individuals genuinely believed in God, accountability, the afterlife, and divine judgment, they would acquire moral discipline. The reconstruction of society therefore had to begin with the reconstruction of the believing individual. Faith would produce virtue, and virtuous individuals would eventually produce a more moral society.
But the Turkish experience forces us to question this assumption.
What we have witnessed, particularly during the long period of AKP rule, is that a society can become more publicly religious without necessarily becoming more moral. Religious visibility increased dramatically. The headscarf became normalized in public institutions. Religious education expanded. Imam-Hatip schools multiplied. Qur’an courses and religious foundations expanded their activities. Islamic vocabulary entered the language of state institutions. Mosques, religious associations, and cemaat networks acquired unprecedented access to political and economic resources. Yet none of this automatically produced greater honesty, justice, accountability, humility, or respect for others’ rights.
Indeed, one of the great paradoxes of contemporary Turkey is precisely this: public piety expanded at the same time that corruption, nepotism, favoritism, political patronage, conspicuous consumption, and the instrumentalization of religion became increasingly visible.
This is where Nursi’s conception of the relationship between faith and morality needs critical reconsideration. Piety and morality are not the same thing. A person can pray regularly, fast, perform the pilgrimage, use an Islamic vocabulary, and identify strongly as a Muslim while simultaneously participating in corruption, remaining silent before injustice, benefiting from nepotism, or treating political loyalty as more important than truth. Religious observance can coexist with serious moral failure.
The problem, therefore, is the assumption that piety naturally produces morality. It does not. Piety can provide moral resources, but those resources have to be translated into ethical principles and supported by institutions. Morality requires more than personal religiosity. It requires accountability, justice, the protection of rights, institutional restraints on power, an autonomous conscience, and the willingness to criticize one’s own community when it behaves unjustly.
What, then, does the experience of the Nur movement and the AKP tell us about the limitations of Islamic revivalism in Turkey?
It tells us that the Islamic movements of twentieth-century Turkey became extraordinarily successful at answering one question: How can Muslims preserve their faith and identity under an authoritarian secular state? But they were much less successful at answering another question: How should religious Muslims behave once they themselves acquire political, bureaucratic, and economic power?
Nursi developed his thinking when religious Muslims were marginalized and the state was viewed as the principal threat to religious life. His primary concern was therefore how faith could survive the secularizing state. But he did not sufficiently theorize the opposite problem: What happens when religious people themselves control the state?
That is a very different problem.
A religious community struggling against an oppressive state can emphasize solidarity, sacrifice, loyalty, and collective survival. But once that community gains access to state power, those same qualities can become dangerous if they are not balanced by accountability and universal ethical principles. Loyalty can become obedience. Solidarity can become nepotism. Community can become faction. Religious brotherhood can become a network for distributing state resources. And the conviction that one’s movement represents a sacred cause can become a justification for ignoring the rights of those outside the movement.
This is one of the central lessons of the AKP period. The Islamic movements of twentieth-century Turkey were very successful in teaching Muslims how to survive the secular state. They were much less successful in teaching them how to exercise power ethically once they captured important parts of that state.
How about different Nurcu communities?
The Nur movement was part of creating a religious civil society that eventually challenged the cultural monopoly of Kemalism. It helped preserve Islamic memory and identity and prepared the social terrain from which later conservative political mobilization emerged. But the subsequent history of Nur-inspired communities also reveals another weakness: religious community itself does not guarantee democratic or ethical behavior. Cemaat structures can generate extraordinary solidarity and educational commitment, but they can also produce hierarchy, secrecy, unquestioned obedience, and intense loyalty to charismatic authority.
The Gülen movement represents the most dramatic example of this contradiction, although it should not simply be equated with Nursi or the wider Nur tradition. It emerged from the Nur milieu but developed its own organizational structure and political ambitions. Its trajectory nevertheless exposes a broader problem within religious communitarianism: a movement formed around moral education can, when it acquires institutional power, become preoccupied with influence, bureaucratic penetration, competition, and control. The language of service and morality does not by itself prevent the pursuit or abuse of power.
This requires us to rethink a central assumption of modern Turkish Islamic thought. The problem was never simply that Turkish society was insufficiently religious. The deeper problem was how religious belief would be translated into a public ethics capable of restraining power—including power exercised by religious people themselves.
In that sense, Nursi succeeded brilliantly in answering one historical question but left another largely unanswered. He showed religious Muslims how faith could survive a secularizing state. He did not provide an adequate political and institutional theory for what should happen when those Muslims became powerful enough to govern the state.
The AKP period demonstrates that Islamization and moralization are not synonymous. A society can become more visibly pious while also experiencing profound moral erosion. If religion becomes connected to political privilege, economic opportunity, and access to the state, piety itself can even become instrumentalized.
The lesson is not that religion contributes nothing to morality. Nursi was right to insist that faith can be a powerful source of moral responsibility. But he underestimated the autonomy of power, institutions, and interests. Faith alone cannot control them. A moral political order requires institutions that hold rulers accountable, protect opponents’ rights, prevent nepotism and corruption, and limit political power.
This is the larger historical significance—and limitation—of Nursi. He helped preserve Islam as an identity, a memory, and a moral language under Kemalist secularism. But the later history of religious politics in Turkey demonstrates something Nursi did not sufficiently anticipate: preserving religious identity is one thing; transforming that identity into an ethical political order is something entirely different.
So the 1950s softened Kemalism but strengthened Islamism?
Yes, but with qualifications. The state remained Kemalist. The army, judiciary, bureaucracy, universities, and education system still carried the founding ideology. But the political system became more responsive to conservative society. Islam reappeared as a legitimate public language.
This changed the balance between state and society. Kemalism was no longer the nation’s uncontested voice. Islamism was no longer simply a suppressed underground memory. The two began to compete within democratic politics.
What is the larger significance of the 1950s in your book?
The 1950s reveal the central dilemma of the torn republic. Once society entered politics through elections, the secular founding elite discovered that the nation did not fully share its civilizational project. Democracy made visible the gap between the Republic’s official identity and society’s moral world.
The 27 May coup was the dramatic response to this gap. It was the moment when Kemalism stopped trusting electoral democracy and became a guardianship ideology. At the same time, Islamists learned that democracy could be the most effective path to long-term cultural and political transformation.
You also cover the Cold War. How did it change Turkey?
The Cold War transformed both Islamism and nationalism. Turkey joined the Western alliance, entered NATO, and positioned itself against the Soviet Union. This changed the domestic role of religion.
In the early Republic, Islam was treated mainly as something to be controlled. During the Cold War, Islam became something to be used against communism.
How did the state use Islam?
The state and right-wing actors promoted religion as a moral barrier against Marxism, atheism, and Soviet influence. This did not mean that the state became Islamist. Rather, it instrumentalized Islam for national security.
Islam became part of anti-communist nationalism.
Is this what you call the Turkish-Islamic synthesis?
Yes. The Turkish-Islamic synthesis fused Turkish nationalism with Sunni Islam. Turkishness gave Islam a national form; Islam gave nationalism moral depth. This synthesis became especially powerful after the 1980 military coup.
The ideal citizen was no longer only the secular republican citizen. He was also pious, nationalist, anti-communist, loyal to family, nation, religion, and state.
How did this affect Islamism?
It gave Islamists more room to organize. Anti-communism made religious networks more acceptable. Imam-hatip schools expanded. Qur’an courses became more visible. Islamic publishing grew. Religious communities gained legitimacy as defenders of morality and nation.
The Cold War unintentionally empowered the Islamic actors that would later challenge Kemalist secularism.
What happened to the left?
The left was crushed, marginalized, and delegitimized. Especially after the 1980 coup, class politics was weakened. Trade unions, socialist organizations, and radical student movements were suppressed. Religion and nationalism were promoted as antidotes to socialism.
This shifted Turkey’s ideological balance.
You also discuss Cyprus, ASALA, and Kurdish nationalism in the Cold War section of the book. Why do you place these issues in that context?
The Cold War transformed Turkey’s internal and external security imagination. Cyprus, ASALA, and Kurdish nationalism were not isolated issues. Each touched a different wound in the Turkish state’s historical memory: Cyprus revived the fear of losing Turkish-Muslim communities outside Anatolia; ASALA revived the unresolved memory of 1915 and the Armenian question; and the PKK revived the fear of territorial fragmentation and foreign-supported separatism and brought the ghost of the Treaty of Sèvres back.
The Cold War gave these issues geopolitical meaning. Turkey was not only defending territory or citizens; it believed it was defending the Republic’s integrity against encirclement, subversion, and historical revenge. This is why these conflicts became so emotionally powerful in Turkish political consciousness.
How did the Cold War shape the Cyprus question?
Cyprus became a Cold War issue because it stood at the intersection of NATO, the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek-Turkish rivalry, British imperial withdrawal, and the politics of non-alignment. The island was not merely a local ethnic conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. It became part of the strategic map of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Archbishop Makarios was especially important. He was not simply the president of the Republic of Cyprus; he was also an active figure in the Non-Aligned Movement. This made Washington uneasy. The United States preferred stability within the Western alliance and did not want Cyprus to become a source of Soviet influence or non-aligned unpredictability in the Eastern Mediterranean. Makarios’s balancing politics, his resistance to full alignment with NATO priorities, and his tensions with both Athens and Ankara made him a difficult figure for American policymakers.
At the same time, the United States did not want a Greek-Turkish war. Washington worked hard to prevent direct conflict between two NATO allies. But in 1974, after the Greek junta-backed coup against Makarios and the threat of enosis, Ankara concluded that the constitutional order had collapsed and that Turkish Cypriots were in danger. Bülent Ecevit was determined to intervene. He framed the intervention not as expansionism, but as protecting Turkish Cypriots and restoring the 1960 guarantee system.
Did the United States understand Turkey’s position in 1974?
The United States understood Ankara’s security concerns, especially after the coup in Cyprus. But understanding did not mean approval. Washington feared that Turkish military action would fracture NATO’s southeastern flank and deepen the Greek-Turkish conflict. After Turkey’s intervention, the United States imposed an arms embargo on Turkey.
This was a major turning point. Many Turks concluded that even Turkey’s closest Western ally would punish Ankara when Turkish national interests were at stake. The embargo created a deep wound in Turkish foreign-policy thinking. It strengthened the belief that Turkey could not rely entirely on the West for its security.
What was the impact of the Cyprus conflict on Turkish foreign policy?
Cyprus changed Turkish foreign policy in several ways.
First, it reinforced the idea that Turkey had to act independently when core national interests were threatened. The 1974 intervention became a symbol of strategic autonomy before the concept became fashionable.
Second, it deepened mistrust toward the United States and Europe. The arms embargo convinced many Turkish policymakers that Western alliances were conditional and that Turkey needed its own defense industry. In this sense, Cyprus contributed indirectly to the later emphasis on national military production.
Third, Cyprus strengthened nationalist sentiment inside Turkey. It became a rare issue around which the left, right, secularists, and conservatives could converge. Ecevit himself, a social democrat, became associated with the phrase “Kıbrıs Fatihi.” Cyprus showed that nationalism could cut across ideological divisions.
Fourth, it hardened Turkey’s security culture. The state came to see the Eastern Mediterranean not only as a diplomatic arena but as a geopolitical front where Turkish survival, honor, and sovereignty were at stake.
How did Cyprus affect state-society relations inside Turkey?
Cyprus created a powerful moment of national unity. It allowed the state to mobilize society around an external Turkish cause. Turkish Cypriots were seen not simply as a minority abroad, but as part of the larger Turkish nation whose protection was a moral obligation.
This is important for my book because Cyprus helped expand the emotional geography of Turkish nationalism. The Republic had been built within Anatolia, but Cyprus reminded Turkish society that Turkish identity also had external communities, historical obligations, and geopolitical frontiers.
You provide a detailed trajectory of identity-centered Kurdish activism. You also treat Kurdish nationalism as, in significant part, a reaction to and byproduct of Kemalist nation-building. At the same time, you reject the essentialist argument that there has always been Kurdish nationalism before Kemalism. Could you explain the social and political origins of Kurdish nationalism?
This distinction matters because we have to separate the existence of Kurds from the existence of Kurdish nationalism. Of course, Kurds, Kurdish languages, Kurdish principalities, tribal structures, local identities, and a consciousness of being Kurdish existed long before the Turkish Republic. I am not questioning that. What I reject is the retrospective assumption that because Kurds existed, they must also have possessed a modern nationalist consciousness and continuously sought to establish a Kurdish nation-state.
That is simply not how nationalism works.
Nationalism is not something permanently contained in a people’s blood, language, or culture, waiting to awaken. It is historically produced. People possess multiple identities, and political conditions determine which of those identities becomes salient. Before the twentieth century, most Kurds did not organize their political world primarily around an exclusive Kurdish national identity. They lived within overlapping structures of belonging—tribe, locality, family, Sufi order, Sunni Islam, and the Ottoman political order. Kurdishness existed, but it existed alongside these other attachments rather than necessarily above them.
So you are making a distinction between Kurdish identity and Kurdish nationalism?
Exactly. This distinction is fundamental. Kurdish identity is much older than Kurdish nationalism. A person could know that he was Kurdish, speak Kurdish, belong to a Kurdish tribe, and inhabit a region understood as Kurdish without concluding that Kurds constituted a sovereign nation requiring their own nation-state.
This is why I resist an essentialist reading of Kurdish history. We should not take late-twentieth-century nationalism and project it backward into the eighteenth or nineteenth century. National consciousness is not simply inherited; it is constructed and reconstructed through changing political and social conditions.
So when does Kurdish nationalism begin to emerge?
It begins gradually in the late Ottoman period, particularly in the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman state centralizes and destroys or weakens the autonomous Kurdish emirates. Modern education, print culture, new communications, urbanization, intellectual networks, Ottoman centralization, European ideas of nationalism, and competition with Armenian nationalism all contributed to the emergence of a new Kurdish consciousness. Kurdish intellectuals and elites increasingly began asking: Who are the Kurds? What is the Kurdish language? What is Kurdish history? What should be the political status of Kurdish-populated regions?
But even at this stage we should be careful. Early Kurdish nationalism was not necessarily separatist. Many Kurdish intellectuals wanted recognition, education, local development, greater autonomy, or protection of Kurdish cultural identity without necessarily demanding an independent Kurdistan.
Said Nursi’s early Medresetü’z-Zehra project is a good example. He sought recognition of Kurdish linguistic and educational needs while simultaneously maintaining Ottoman political belonging and Islamic brotherhood. Kurdishness, Ottomanism, and Islam could coexist. In other words, identities were nested rather than mutually exclusive.
Then what changed with the creation of the Turkish Republic?
This is where my argument becomes more controversial. I argue that Kemalist nation-building did not simply confront an already fully formed Kurdish nationalism. It helped produce the conditions under which Kurdish identity was transformed into a much more powerful oppositional nationalism.
The Republic inherited an extraordinarily heterogeneous Muslim population from the Ottoman Empire and attempted to transform it into a homogeneous Turkish nation. The political logic was understandable in its historical context. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed. The Balkans had been lost. Anatolia had been invaded. The Treaty of Sèvres threatened partition. The Republican elite therefore associated ethnic pluralism with weakness, foreign intervention, and ultimately territorial disintegration. The new state concluded that survival required a unitary nation-state.
But that survival strategy created another problem.
The Republic effectively said to the Kurds: You can belong to the new state, but increasingly you must belong as Turks.
Kurdish language and public cultural expression were restricted; place names were Turkified; Kurdish historical and geographical claims were denied; and upward mobility within the state often encouraged the suppression of Kurdish distinctiveness. The Republican project did not simply demand political loyalty. It increasingly demanded cultural assimilation.
Are you therefore arguing that Kemalism actually helped create modern Kurdish nationalism?
Yes, but we have to formulate this carefully. I am not saying that Kemalism created the Kurds. That would obviously be absurd. Nor am I saying that there was no Kurdish national consciousness before the Republic. There clearly was.
What I am saying is that Kemalist nation-building transformed the political meaning of Kurdishness. It intensified Kurdish identity by attempting to suppress it.
This is where identity politics becomes dialectical.
The state says, “You are Turkish.”
A population begins to answer, “No, we are Kurdish.”
The state insists more strongly that Kurdishness should disappear from public life.
Kurdishness consequently becomes more politically valuable.
This is one of the great ironies of coercive nation-building. The state can actually strengthen the identity it is trying to eliminate. Repression does not necessarily destroy identity. Under certain circumstances, it produces the consciousness it seeks to suppress.
That is one of the central arguments of The Torn Republic. Kemalist Turkish nationalism and modern Kurdish nationalism developed relationally. Each helped radicalize the other. The more the state identified national unity with cultural homogeneity, the more Kurdish activists came to define liberation through the recognition of Kurdish difference. And as Kurdish nationalism became more assertive, the Turkish state became even more convinced that Kurdish identity represented a threat to territorial integrity.
A security dilemma emerged around identity.
How did this security dilemma shape the early Kurdish rebellions?
This is precisely where we have to avoid reading contemporary categories backward.
Take the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925. Was it Kurdish nationalist? Yes, it contained Kurdish nationalist elements. But was it only Kurdish nationalist? Certainly not. It was also tribal, regional, religious, and explicitly Islamic. Sheikh Said was a Naqshbandi sheikh. Many of those who mobilized against Ankara were responding not simply to Turkish nationalism but also to the abolition of the caliphate, secularization, centralization, and the destruction of traditional religious and local authority.
To describe Sheikh Said simply as either a “Kurdish nationalist revolt” or an “Islamist revolt” misses the historically layered character of identity at that moment.
The same complexity applies more broadly to the early Republican Kurdish revolts. Sheikh Said in 1925, Ağrı in 1930, and Dersim in 1937–38 were not identical movements. They emerged from different configurations of tribe, religion, locality, Kurdish consciousness, resistance to centralization, and nationalism.
But the state’s response increasingly placed all of these conflicts within a single security narrative. Kurdish difference became associated with rebellion, separatism, foreign intervention, and ultimately the possible partition of Turkey.
And that had enormous consequences because repression itself became a mechanism of identity formation.
How can repression actually produce national identity?
Because nationalism needs memory.
The memory of military campaigns, executions, deportations, linguistic restrictions, cultural denial, and state violence gradually created a shared repertoire of Kurdish grievance. Experiences that had initially been local could later be remembered nationally.
This is crucial.
A village experiences deportation. A tribe experiences military repression. A family remembers an execution. Someone is punished for speaking Kurdish. A region remembers Dersim. Another remembers Sheikh Said. These are initially different experiences. But nationalist intellectuals, political organizations, literature, music, commemorations, and eventually political movements connect these experiences and place them inside a common narrative.
They become Kurdish memories.
And once that happens, suffering itself becomes part of national identity.
People who previously might have understood themselves primarily through tribe, region, religion, or locality increasingly acquire reasons to interpret their experiences through a broader Kurdish identity.
So Kurdish nationalism was not simply inherited from the past. It was also produced through the memory of encounters with the Republican state.
But there is still a large historical distance between Sheikh Said and the PKK. How did Kurdish nationalism change after the 1950s?
Another major transformation occurred after the 1950s, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Urbanization, internal migration, mass education, universities, socialist movements, print culture, and the emergence of a new Kurdish intelligentsia completely changed the social basis of Kurdish activism.
This is critical. Kurdish nationalism increasingly moved away from the world of sheikhs, tribal leaders, landlords, and traditional notables toward students, teachers, lawyers, workers, urban migrants, and leftist intellectuals.
Many Kurdish activists initially participated in the Turkish left. That experience gave them a new political vocabulary: colonialism, imperialism, class oppression, national liberation, self-determination, and revolutionary struggle.
The Kurdish question was consequently reinterpreted.
What earlier generations might have understood as the suppression of a tribe, religious community, locality, or cultural group was increasingly conceptualized as the oppression of a nation.
So Marxism and the Turkish left were important in the formation of modern Kurdish nationalism?
Extremely important. This is another reason why I reject primordial explanations of Kurdish nationalism.
The Kurdish nationalism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply an ancient Kurdish consciousness suddenly awakening. It was deeply shaped by the intellectual environment of the global 1960s—the Vietnamese struggle, anti-colonial movements, Marxism, Third World liberation movements, Palestine, and the language of national self-determination.
Young Kurdish activists began interpreting eastern and southeastern Turkey through a colonial framework. Poverty was no longer simply poverty. Underdevelopment was interpreted as colonial underdevelopment. State repression was understood as national oppression. Cultural restrictions became evidence of colonial domination.
This created the ideological environment from which the PKK eventually emerged.
And what role did the 1980 military coup play?
The 1980 coup was decisive because the state once again attempted to solve an identity problem through coercive homogenization.
Kurdish language and identity were subjected to intense repression. Diyarbakır Prison became one of the most powerful sites in producing Kurdish nationalist memory. Torture and humiliation did not simply punish Kurdish activists. They created martyrs, narratives, memories, and political identities.
Diyarbakır Prison is therefore not merely a prison in the history of Kurdish nationalism. It is a site of memory.
The PKK understood this extraordinarily well.
It transformed scattered grievances into a coherent national narrative: Kurds were not merely Turkish citizens suffering discrimination; they were a colonized nation whose identity had been systematically denied by the Turkish state.
The PKK connected this narrative to armed struggle, territorial claims, symbols, martyrs, songs, funerals, prisons, and collective memories. It helped transform Kurdishness from one identity among several into, for a significant segment of the Kurdish population, the primary political identity.
Does that mean the PKK came to represent Kurdish identity as such?
No. And this is another mistake that both the Turkish state and some Kurdish nationalists have made.
The PKK has never represented all Kurds.
Kurdish society has always remained internally diverse. There are assimilated Kurds, religiously conservative Kurds, Kurdish nationalists, leftist Kurds, tribal Kurds, urban middle-class Kurds, and Kurds who simultaneously identify strongly with Turkey. For some, Islam remains more important than ethnicity. For others, Kurdish national identity is paramount. Many combine Kurdishness, Turkish citizenship, Islam, locality, and other identities in different ways.
This diversity itself demonstrates why an essentialist account of Kurdish nationalism does not work. If Kurdish ethnicity automatically produced Kurdish nationalism, all Kurds would have become Kurdish nationalists. They did not.
So what is the larger lesson of the Kurdish experience for your argument in The Torn Republic?
The Kurdish question reveals one of the central contradictions of Republican nation-building.
The Republic wanted to create national unity, but it confused unity with homogeneity.
That distinction is fundamental.
A state can create unity while recognizing cultural difference. But the Kemalist state frequently assumed that a strong state required a culturally homogeneous nation. Difference therefore became a security problem rather than a social reality that had to be politically accommodated.
And here we see a tragic dialectic.
Kemalist nationalism sought to eliminate Kurdish difference in order to strengthen Turkey. But the attempt to eliminate that difference helped transform Kurdishness into a much more powerful political identity.
Kurdish nationalism then confirmed the state’s fear that Kurdish identity threatened national unity. That produced further repression. Further repression generated additional grievances and memories. Those memories strengthened Kurdish nationalism, which produced greater insecurity within the Turkish state.
Each side increasingly became evidence for the other’s fears.
Could Turkey have followed a different path?
Yes. And I think this is one of the great missed opportunities of Republican history.
The Republic could have distinguished political loyalty from cultural homogeneity. It could have said: You can be Kurdish and Turkish citizens at the same time. You can speak Kurdish, remember Kurdish history, maintain Kurdish cultural institutions, and still belong politically to the Republic.
In other words, Turkey could have constructed citizenship around political belonging rather than cultural assimilation.
Instead, for much of Republican history, recognition of Kurdish difference was treated as the first step toward separatism.
That was a profound mistake.
So I would not say that Kemalism “created the Kurds.” Nor would I say that Kemalism single-handedly created Kurdish nationalism. Kurdish cultural consciousness and early forms of nationalism clearly preceded the Republic.
My argument is more precise: Kemalist nation-building transformed the meaning, intensity, and political salience of Kurdish identity. By attempting to assimilate Kurdishness, the Republican state helped turn a historically layered and often locally embedded identity into an oppositional national identity.
This is why I treat nationalism as a process rather than an essence.
People do not simply wake up one morning and discover that they have always been nationalists. Political institutions, schools, intellectuals, repression, war, migration, prisons, memories, political organizations, and encounters with the state teach people which dimensions of their identity matter politically.
And this takes us back to the broader argument of The Torn Republic. Turkey’s identity conflicts have repeatedly been produced by attempts to impose a single answer to the question: Who are we?
The Kemalist answer was that the citizens of the Republic would become a homogeneous Turkish nation.
But when the state insisted on asking the Kurds, “Why are you not Turkish?” it helped produce an increasingly powerful counter-question:
“Why should we not be Kurdish?”
That interaction between state-building and identity-building, assimilation and resistance, repression and memory, is at the heart of the Kurdish trajectory I trace in The Torn Republic.
How does Kurdish nationalism fit into the Cold War framework?
Kurdish nationalism, especially in the form of the PKK, emerged in the ideological atmosphere of the Cold War. The PKK was not initially a liberal national movement. It was a Marxist-Leninist organization shaped by anti-imperialist language, revolutionary violence, and Third Worldist liberation movements. It framed the Kurdish question in terms of colonialism, class struggle, national liberation, and armed revolution.
This matters because the Turkish state interpreted the PKK not only as a Kurdish separatist movement but also as part of the broader Cold War threat. The overlap between Kurdish nationalism and revolutionary leftism intensified the state’s security response. For Ankara, the PKK represented three dangers at once: ethnic separatism, Marxist revolution, and foreign manipulation.
Did the PKK receive Soviet support?
The PKK’s relationship to the Soviet world was not always direct or simple. It operated within a broader ecosystem of Cold War radical politics. It benefited from the regional networks of the revolutionary left, Palestinian camps, Syrian support, and the permissive environment created by Soviet-aligned or anti-Western regimes. Syria’s role was especially important. Damascus allowed the PKK to organize, train, and operate for many years as a tool of pressure against Turkey.
So rather than saying the PKK was simply a Soviet proxy, it is more accurate to say that it emerged within a Cold War revolutionary geography in which Soviet influence, Syrian strategy, Palestinian militant networks, and anti-Western revolutionary ideology overlapped. This gave the PKK ideological language, training spaces, and geopolitical room.
What was the impact of the PKK on Turkish nationalism?
The PKK transformed Turkish nationalism from a nation-building ideology into a security-centered defensive nationalism. The early Republic had already treated Kurdish identity with suspicion, but the PKK insurgency gave this suspicion a new militarized form.
From the 1980s onward, Kurdish demands were increasingly filtered through the language of terrorism, separatism, and foreign conspiracy. This made it difficult to develop a democratic language for Kurdish rights. The Turkish state could not easily distinguish between Kurdish identity, Kurdish political claims, and PKK violence. The result was hardening state nationalism and deepening Kurdish alienation.
The PKK also contributed to the fusion of nationalism and security in Turkish politics. The army, intelligence services, village guards, emergency rule, and counterinsurgency became central to governing the southeast. This militarized the Kurdish question and shaped the entire political culture of the country.
You also discuss the second ghost of the Treaty of Sèvres. You claimed it returned in the form of the ASALA. Where does ASALA fit into this Cold War picture?
ASALA, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as another armed movement that targeted Turkey through the language of historical justice and national liberation. Its campaign against Turkish diplomats brought the Armenian question back into Turkish public consciousness in a violent and traumatic way.
For the Turkish state and public, ASALA’s attacks were not perceived simply as terrorism. They were interpreted as an international campaign to delegitimize Turkey through the memory of 1915. The assassination of Turkish diplomats created a sense that the past had returned as violence.
ASALA’s campaign also interacted with Cold War radicalism. Like many militant organizations of the period, it operated within transnational networks shaped by anti-imperialism, revolutionary violence, Middle Eastern conflicts, and diaspora politics. The Armenian genocide became not only a memory of suffering but also a political weapon in the struggle against the Turkish state.
How did ASALA affect Turkey’s understanding of the Armenian question?
ASALA hardened Turkish defensiveness. Instead of encouraging open historical reckoning, the violence made Turkish society more suspicious of Armenian claims. The state presented genocide recognition campaigns as part of a hostile international strategy against Turkey. Thus, the Armenian question became securitized.
This is one of the tragedies of memory. Armenian suffering required moral recognition and historical honesty. But ASALA’s violence allowed the Turkish state to frame the entire issue as terrorism, revenge, and foreign manipulation. The result was not dialogue but deeper denial, fear, and nationalist closure.
Could you briefly summarize your perspective on the 1915 Armenian genocide?
In The Torn Republic, I treat 1915—what Armenians remember as the genocide and what I often refer to as Medz Yeghern, the Great Catastrophe—as one of the deepest wounds in the making of modern Turkey. It was not a marginal episode. It was a foundational rupture that reshaped Anatolia, destroyed the Armenian presence in much of the Ottoman homeland, and left behind a moral and political trauma that neither Armenians nor Turks have fully resolved.
My perspective is that 1915 must be understood through three lenses: suffering, context, and memory. First, the suffering was immense. The deportations, massacres, dispossession, starvation, and destruction of communities cannot be minimized or morally excused. Turkish historiography has too often reduced Armenian suffering, treated it defensively, or hidden behind state language.
Second, the context matters. The events occurred during imperial collapse, world war, Russian-Ottoman conflict, Armenian revolutionary mobilization, Muslim expulsions from the Balkans and Caucasus, and the existential anxieties of the Committee of Union and Progress. Context does not justify atrocity, but it helps us understand how violence became possible.
Third, 1915 became a battle over memory. For Armenians, it became a foundational trauma and a struggle for recognition. For the Turkish state, it became an object of denial, silence, and strategic forgetting because it threatened the moral legitimacy of the Republic’s founding narrative.
What I criticize is the politics of single memory. Armenian memory often centers exclusively on Armenian victimhood, while Turkish memory often refuses to confront Armenian destruction. Both societies need a more responsible remembrance: one that recognizes Armenian suffering without erasing Muslim suffering, and one that acknowledges Ottoman responsibility without turning history into permanent ethnic indictment.
The task is not to weaponize 1915, but to humanize it. Without moral recognition and historical honesty, the wound remains open.
Am I right to say that there is a change in your view of the Armenian genocide? Has your position evolved, especially as Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also appears to resist the politicization of Armenian pain by Israel or other powers?
I would not describe my position as a denial or reversal of the historical reality of Armenian suffering. What has evolved is my concern with the politicization of memory. I recognize 1915—Medz Yeghern, the Great Catastrophe—as one of the deepest wounds in the making of modern Turkey.
But I also argue that memory should not become a weapon in the hands of states. Armenian pain should not be instrumentalized by Israel, Russia, France, the United States, or any other power for their own geopolitical struggles with Turkey. When outside actors invoke Armenian suffering selectively, while ignoring other atrocities or using recognition as diplomatic pressure, they do not honor the dead; they exploit them.
In that sense, my position converges with Pashinyan’s recent caution. He has stated that international recognition of the Armenian Genocide is not currently among Armenia’s foreign-policy priorities, while also saying that the genocide itself is “undeniable.” He also declined to enter Israel’s recent recognition debate, warning against the “weaponization of the Armenian Genocide.”
The task is not to turn 1915 into a permanent instrument of accusation, nor to erase responsibility. The task is to humanize memory, acknowledge Armenian suffering, also remember Muslim suffering in the same imperial collapse, and build a language of moral honesty rather than nationalist revenge.
What connects Cyprus, the PKK, and ASALA in your broader argument?
They all reinforced the Turkish state’s perception that the Republic remained vulnerable to historical enemies and external manipulation. Cyprus suggested that Turks outside Anatolia could be threatened. The PKK suggested that territorial integrity could be challenged from within. ASALA suggested that unresolved Ottoman history could return as international violence.
Together, these conflicts strengthened a siege mentality. They pushed Turkish politics toward security, nationalism, and suspicion of external powers. They also helped consolidate the idea that Turkey must be strong, centralized, militarily capable, and vigilant.
Did these conflicts also change Turkey’s relationship with the West?
Yes. Cyprus, the PKK, and ASALA all complicated Turkey’s relationship with the West. The Cyprus arms embargo weakened trust in the United States. European sympathy for Kurdish rights was often interpreted in Ankara as support for separatism. Armenian genocide recognition campaigns in Western parliaments were seen as political weapons rather than moral acts.
This produced a powerful conclusion in Turkish strategic thinking: the West may be Turkey’s ally, but it is not always Turkey’s friend. That distinction became central to later nationalist and Islamist critiques of the West.
What is the larger meaning of these Cold War conflicts in The Torn Republic?
The larger meaning is that the Cold War did not only produce anti-communism. It reorganized Turkey’s historical fears. Cyprus, ASALA, and the PKK activated different layers of trauma: imperial collapse, territorial loss, minority rebellion, foreign intervention, and national humiliation.
These conflicts made the Republic more defensive. They strengthened the military’s role, deepened nationalist reflexes, and narrowed the possibility of democratic accommodation. They also helped create the emotional environment in which later Islamist-nationalist politics could flourish.
In this sense, the Cold War was not only a geopolitical period. It was a psychological and ideological stage in the making of modern Turkey. It taught the Turkish state to see society, history, and geography through the lens of permanent vulnerability.
What is the connection between the Cold War and the rise of the AKP?
The AKP did not emerge from nowhere. Its cadres were shaped by the Cold War world: anti-communist networks, religious education, conservative municipalities, Islamic business associations, imam-hatip schools, and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis.
The Cold War helped create the social infrastructure of political Islam.
So did the Cold War heal Turkey’s torn identity?
No. It reorganized it. Islam returned to public life, but not as the old Ottoman order. It returned as anti-communist morality, conservative nationalism, religious education, and eventually political power.
The torn republic remained torn, but the terms of the struggle changed.
What is the most important lesson of your book?
The most important lesson is that Turkey’s crises are not only institutional or electoral. They are civilizational. Turkey is still struggling over the meaning of its past, the identity of its state, the place of Islam, the definition of Turkishness, and the direction of its future.
The Republic was founded to end an imperial crisis, but it inherited a deeper civilizational question. That question has never disappeared. It continues to shape Turkish politics today.
Finally, can Turkey overcome this torn condition?
Only if it stops treating its internal plurality as a threat. Turkey needs a democratic language that can include secularists, conservatives, Kurds, Alevis, religious communities, and non-Muslim memories without forcing them into a single state-defined identity.
The solution is not to abolish the Republic or return to the Ottoman past. The solution is to democratize the Republic by allowing Turkey’s multiple memories to coexist. A republic can survive only when it no longer fears its own society.
Moving to the Özal Era: Why Do You Treat 1983–1993 as a Separate Turning Point?
Let us move to the third section of your book, the Özal era. Why do you treat the Özal period as a separate historical era rather than simply as a continuation of Menderes or Demirel?
This is an important question because Özal is often placed in the same center-right tradition as Menderes and Demirel. There is some truth in that. Like Menderes and Demirel, Özal represented the provincial, conservative, religiously sensitive, and market-oriented social forces that had long challenged the bureaucratic-Kemalist center. He also spoke to those groups that felt excluded by the secular state elite.
But Özal was different in a deeper sense. Menderes and Demirel worked largely within the inherited Republican framework. They softened Kemalism, opened more space for religion, defended economic growth, and represented the periphery against the center. But they did not fundamentally restructure the Republic’s grammar.
Özal did.
He changed the relationship between state and society, economy and religion, nationalism and globalization, Turkey and the Ottoman-Islamic past. He did not merely continue the center-right tradition; he transformed it. For that reason, I treat the Özal era as a distinct historical moment.
What made Özal so significant?
Özal was significant because he opened the closed Republican system to market forces, global capital, religious networks, Anatolian entrepreneurs, Kurdish debate, and Ottoman-Islamic memory. He did not destroy the old Republic, but he loosened its walls.
The early Republic had been built around the state. Özal shifted the center of gravity toward society, markets, mobility, consumption, and transnational connections. He created new openings for groups that had previously existed at the margins: conservative businessmen, Islamic communities, export-oriented Anatolian towns, religious educational networks, and new media actors.
This is why I call the Özal period a turning point. It was not merely an economic liberalization. It was a social and cultural reordering.
Was Özal a liberal?
Özal was liberal in economics, but not necessarily liberal in the deeper constitutional or moral sense. He believed in markets, entrepreneurship, exports, privatization, and integration into global capitalism. He weakened the old statist model and encouraged individual initiative.
But his liberalism was selective. It opened the economy without building strong democratic institutions. It empowered society, but also empowered religious networks and patronage structures. It challenged the bureaucratic state, but did not create a fully accountable democratic state. In this sense, Özal’s liberalism created dynamism, but also deregulation, inequality, corruption, and new forms of dependency.
You are more critical of the Özal era than many other writers. Why?
Because I think the Özal era is often romanticized. Many liberals remember Özal as the man who liberated Turkey from the suffocating statism of the Republic. Many conservatives remember him as the leader who gave religious society confidence. Many business circles remember him as the architect of market opening. All of this is partly true.
But the cost is usually ignored.
Özal weakened the old state without creating a strong rule-based democratic order. He expanded markets but also normalized informal networks, clientelism, speculative enrichment, and corruption. He opened society but also helped politicize religion through market mechanisms, media, education, and patronage. He gave the conservative periphery access to opportunity, but also helped create a new conservative bourgeoisie tied to state favors and political loyalty.
This is why I am critical. Özal did not simply liberalize Turkey. He helped create the social and economic infrastructure of the later Islamist-conservative order.
So Özal prepared the ground for Erdoğan?
Yes, but not in a simple, intentional way. Özal did not create Erdoğan, but he created many of the conditions that made Erdoğan possible.
The AKP did not emerge only from Islamist ideology. It emerged from a transformed society: export-oriented Anatolian capital, Islamic business networks, conservative municipalities, religious education, new media, consumer culture, and a weakened secular bureaucracy. Much of this social world expanded during the Özal era.
Özal made it possible for pious conservatives to become businessmen, media owners, professionals, municipal leaders, and global actors. He gave them confidence. He showed that one could be Muslim, capitalist, modern, and politically ambitious at the same time.
That synthesis later became central to the AKP.
What was Özal’s relationship to Islam?
Özal did not present himself as a classical Islamist. He was not Erbakan. He did not speak the language of rigid ideological Islamism. He was more pragmatic, flexible, worldly, and technocratic. Yet he normalized the presence of Islam in public life.
He made piety compatible with capitalism. This is one of his most important legacies. Under Özal, Islam was no longer only a language of opposition, resentment, or moral protest. It became linked to entrepreneurship, consumption, mobility, banking, education, charity, media, and middle-class aspiration.
This was a major shift. Islam moved from the margins into the circuits of the market.
Özal also played a decisive role in institutionalizing the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. Unlike the early Republican elite, which sought to discipline Islam through secular institutions, Özal normalized Islam as part of the language of state, society, market, and national identity. Under his leadership, religious networks, imam-hatip graduates, conservative businessmen, Islamic foundations, and Anatolian entrepreneurs gained unprecedented access to state resources and public legitimacy. In this sense, Özal did not invent the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, but he helped move it from ideological discourse into institutional practice.
Yet this religious language also served a political function. Özal’s piety softened his image and allowed him to present himself as a moral, God-fearing leader close to ordinary conservative society. But behind this moral vocabulary stood a deeply problematic political economy. His era witnessed the expansion of patronage, speculative enrichment, favoritism, informal networks, and corruption.
You argue that Özal was pious but corrupt.
Yes. Religion became a language of legitimacy that concealed the rise of a new conservative-capitalist class dependent on state favors, contracts, credit, and political access. Özal was personally pious, but his piety did not prevent the moral corrosion of public life. On the contrary, it helped cover it. This is one of the central contradictions of the Özal era: Islam entered public life as a language of morality, but it was increasingly intertwined with money, patronage, and corruption. In this sense, Özal was not only a transformative leader; he was also one of the most corrupting figures in modern Turkish politics, because he made corruption appear compatible with piety, market freedom, and national renewal.
Is this why you connect Özal to neo-Ottomanism?
Yes. Özal helped revive a more confident Ottoman-Islamic imagination. He did not use neo-Ottomanism exactly as later AKP circles would, but he opened the symbolic and geopolitical space for it.
He looked beyond the narrow borders of the early Republic. He was interested in the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Muslim world. He saw Turkey not only as a defensive nation-state but as a country with historical depth and regional reach.
This was a major departure from the introverted Republican nationalism of earlier decades. Özal’s Turkey was more mobile, more commercial, more outward-looking, and more willing to remember the Ottoman past as an asset rather than a burden.
How did Özal change state-society relations?
The early Republic tried to discipline society through the state. Özal tried to energize society through markets. This is the key difference.
He trusted entrepreneurs more than bureaucrats. He trusted mobility more than planning. He trusted religious-conservative society more than the secular establishment did. He believed that Turkey’s dynamism would come from below—from businessmen, towns, families, communities, migrants, traders, and networks.
But this also meant that the state became less a rational planner and more a distributor of opportunities. Access, connections, favors, contracts, credit, and political proximity became crucial. This created a new social order: market society with patronage.
What happened to Kemalism during the Özal era?
Kemalism lost its monopoly over modernity. This is very important.
Before Özal, the secular Republican elite claimed that they alone represented modernity, progress, civilization, and rationality. Özal disrupted this claim. He showed that conservative Muslims could be modern, entrepreneurial, technologically minded, globally connected, and economically successful.
This weakened the Republic’s cultural hierarchy. The old image of the backward religious periphery no longer worked. The periphery was now exporting, building companies, sending children to universities, watching private television, traveling, and entering the middle class.
Özal did not defeat Kemalism politically, but he weakened its sociological foundations.
Did Özal also transform the Kurdish question?
Yes. Özal was one of the first major Turkish leaders to recognize that the Kurdish question could not be solved only through denial and military force. He was willing to discuss Kurdish identity more openly than many of his predecessors. He understood that the Republic’s rigid nationalism had created a problem that required political imagination.
But his opening remained incomplete. The PKK insurgency, military resistance, nationalist opposition, and his own premature death prevented a deeper transformation. Still, Özal matters because he introduced the possibility that Turkish citizenship might be reimagined in a more flexible way.
This was another reason his era was a turning point: he briefly opened questions that the old Republic had tried to close.
Why do you extend this section beyond Özal to 2002?
Because Özal’s death in 1993 did not end the Özal era immediately. The transformations he unleashed continued throughout the 1990s, but in a more chaotic and violent form.
The 1990s were the decade of consequences: the Kurdish war, the rise of political Islam, the growth of Islamic capital, media fragmentation, corruption scandals, coalition instability, the Susurluk scandal, the February 28 process, and the collapse of the old center-right. These were all connected to the social forces that Özal had helped unleash.
By 2002, the old party system had collapsed. The AKP emerged from the ruins of that system. In this sense, the period from 1983 to 2002 bridges the Kemalist Republic and Erdoğan’s neo-patrimonial order.
What is the most important contradiction of the Özal era?
The central contradiction is that Özal democratized society without sufficiently democratizing the state. He opened the economy, loosened cultural controls, empowered conservative society, and pluralized public life. But he did not build a strong institutional order capable of managing this new pluralism.
The result was a more open but also more unstable Turkey. Society became more dynamic, but the state became less coherent. Markets expanded, but inequality and corruption deepened. Islam became more visible, but secular-religious polarization intensified. Kurdish identity became discussable, but the Kurdish war escalated.
Özal opened the door, but Turkey lacked the institutions to manage what came through it.
How should readers understand Özal’s place in The Torn Republic?
Özal is the transitional figure between the defensive Republic and the Islamist-conservative Republic. He did not abolish the old order, but he made it impossible to preserve it in its previous form.
He transformed the periphery from a passive social category into an active economic and political force. He connected Islam with capitalism, conservatism with globalization, nationalism with Ottoman memory, and society with market energy. He broke the secular state’s monopoly over modernity.
That is why I treat him as a turning point. But I am also critical because the Özal era did not produce a democratic synthesis. It produced a new opening without sufficient institutional restraint. It liberated energies that later became the basis of authoritarian populism, Islamist nationalism, and neo-patrimonial power.
In this sense, Özal is both a liberating and destabilizing figure. He opened Turkey, but he also helped create the conditions under which new forces would capture the Republic. His era is the hinge of the book: the moment when the torn Republic moved from secular state domination toward conservative-Islamic social power.
Let’s move to the fourth section of the book. Erdogan’s era.
Let us leave the final and most controversial part of the book—Erdoğan’s neo-patrimonial era for our second interview. This is the largest section of The Torn Republic, and for good reason. It is where all the unresolved tensions we have discussed—the struggle over civilizational identity, the legacy of Kemalism, the rise of Islamism, the Kurdish question, the transformation of nationalism, the politicization of Ottoman memory, and the use of the state to remake society—come together in their most intense form.
In the next part of our conversation, we will examine how Erdoğan inherited these historical struggles, transformed them, and ultimately captured the state. I use Erdoğan’s own term, “şahsım devleti,” to describe this new political order: a state increasingly organized around the person of the leader, his will, his family, his loyalists, and his networks of patronage. The Şahsım Devleti is not simply authoritarianism; it is the personalization of the Republic itself.
We will also discuss how Islamism moved from opposition to power, how the state was restructured around loyalty rather than law, how nationalism and religion fused into a new regime ideology, and how Erdoğan turned civilizational rhetoric into a tool of rule.
We will continue next week with the final section of the book: Erdoğan’s Şahsım Devleti—the most powerful, most contested, and perhaps most consequential chapter in the story of the torn Republic.
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