Introduction: Between Empire and Republic

The transition from the Ottoman state to the new Turkish Republic, between roughly the end of 1919 and the formal establishment of the Turkish state on 29 October 1923, was a complex process of trial and error. The nationalist officers and the bureaucratic middle class that led the process, apart from their overarching agreement on the goal of creating a modern nation state that would be free of the inertia and shortcomings of its Ottoman predecessor, were not unanimous in the detail of their vision. Even the fundamental specificities of what the new nation state would look like in its territory, population composition and identity were not clear – the key actors in the search for a post-imperial order had different views on who the people of this new state would be, and what would be the elements that would bring them together and inspire loyalty and a sense of patriotism. Identification, during this time of transition to political modernity in the former Ottoman sphere, was a fluid and quite often complex process, riddled with contradictions that would ultimately be suppressed with the ascendance of nationalism in general in the territories of the Empire, and the establishment of hegemonic nationalisms including Turkish or Arab ones in particular, in due course.

This is, to be fair, not unique to the post-Ottoman space. As Billig suggests in his discussion of the imagination of nationhood (1995:74–7), contradictory themes, definitions and understandings can coexist within the same experiential framework and context of continuous interaction and negotiation that makes possible, sustains and reproduces social action systems. Some of these key actors remained deliberately vague as to these details as they were aware of the enormity of the task of bringing the pieces of the linguistic, ethnic and religious mosaic of the territories of the Empire that they could salvage, and forging out of them a cohesive nation that would not be susceptible to the pull of centrifugal forces that alternative, competing nationalisms represented and, more importantly, that would be willing to fight for their new motherland. This explains the ambiguity, and even diglossia, of the leadership of the nationalist movement at a time when it seemed that the mobilising force of religion, and of identities other than the Turkish, were greater than an appeal to a clearly defined nation.