Construction of National Identities in Early Republics: A ... · PDF fileConstruction of National Identities in Early Republics: ... A. Deniz Balgamıs¸ and Kemal Karpat, ... Construction

C© 2010 The Historical Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Timothy Robert s and Emrah S ah.in

Construction of NationalIdentities in Early Republics:A Comparison of the American

and Turkish Cases

Introduction

The study of America’s relationship to the world is often conducted in one

of two ways. One approach is to study America’s direct relationship with

another people or place through diplomacy, trade, and military or cultural

interaction. Another way is through comparative analysis, or by means of

what Marc Bloch called “study of societies that are at once neighboring and

contemporary, exercising a constant mutual influence, exposed throughout

their development to the action of the same broad causes . . . and owing their

existence in part at least to a common origin.”1 Recently Bloch’s approach

has been called “interconnected or ‘entangled’ history,” concerned with

The authors wish to thank Nathan Citino, Susan Goodier, Lisa Jarvinen, Barbara Luethi,Roberto Mazza, Emily Roberts, and an anonymous reader of the Journal of the HistoricalSociety for their helpful criticisms of this essay, which the authors first presented as a paper atthe 2004 conference of the American Studies Association of Turkey. The essay is dedicated tothe memory of Stanford Shaw, whose essay, “Turkey and The United States: More Alike thanDifferent,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 11 (2000): 93–98, inspired the authors tostudy the two republics comparatively.

1Marc Bloch, “A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” inMarc Bloch, Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers, trans. J. E. Anderson (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1969), 47.

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subjects’ “‘mutual influencing,’ ‘reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions,’ and

the intertwined ‘processes of constituting one another.’”2

Scholarship on the relationship between the United States and the Republic

of Turkey typically has followed these approaches. Studies of U.S.–Turkish

diplomacy and studies of immigration and popular culture tend to emphasize

American influence. The United States gained Turkey as an important ally

during the Cold War. The seductiveness of American material prosperity

offered Turks icons and products from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. In

the twentieth century, the United States became a superpower, while Turkey

remained a developing country. Such a focus on America’s influence on

Turkey has shaped but also limited the scope and the findings of studies

concerning the connections between the two republics.3

If, however, we study the relationship between the United States and

Turkey by comparing their early national development, rather than their

direct connections or “entanglements,” we learn more about their similar-

ities. This essay seeks to do this. It assesses the countries’ experiences in

nation-building by comparing the development of republican government

and society in each country’s formative period: the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth century for the United States, and the first part of the twentieth

century for Turkey.

2Eliga Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic asa Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 766. Also see Thomas Ben-der, Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang,2006); Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American For-eign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Akira Iriye, “InternationalizingInternational History,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 47–62; Karl Schweizer and Matt Schumann,“The Revitalization of Diplomatic History: Renewed Reflections,” Diplomacy & Statecraft19 (2008): 149–186; and essays on the state of diplomatic history by Thomas Zeiler, FredrikLogevall, Mario Del Pero, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, and Kristin Hoganson, Journal of AmericanHistory 95 (2009): 1053–1091.

3Mustafa Aydın and Cagrı Erhan, Turkish-American Relations: Past, Present and Future(New York: Routledge, 2003); A. Deniz Balgamıs and Kemal Karpat, eds., Turkish Migrationto the United States: From Ottoman Times to the Present (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 2008); Talat Sait Halman, “Turks,” in Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Han-dlin, eds., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1980), 992–96; Nur Bilge Criss, “Turkish Perceptions of the United States,” in DavidFarber, ed., What They Think of Us: International Perceptions of the United States since 9/11(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 49–73; Esra Pakin, “American Studies in Turkeyduring the ‘Cultural’ Cold War,” Turkish Studies 9 (2008): 507–524.

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Construction of National Identities in Early Republics

Both Americans and Turks embraced “republicanism.” American advo-

cates of republican thought and governance during the War of Independence

emphasized popular sovereignty, encouraged citizens to exercise virtuous

self-sacrifice on behalf of the public good, and were highly suspicious of

government corruption, which they believed could be prevented by polit-

ical competition and periodic changes in government authority. Another

more contested element of early American republicanism was economic self-

interest. Some American leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,

and James Madison, worried that the individual pursuit of wealth would

conflict with public sacrifice. Others, especially Alexander Hamilton, advo-

cated economic opportunity and national growth as the means to protect

both liberty and virtue. By the early nineteenth century Americans charac-

terized republican virtue less as self-sacrifice than as democratic sociability,

particularly with regard to achieving peace and prosperity through honest

labor in the rapidly developing American economy.4

Turkish republicanism (cumhuriyetcilik) emerged as one of the six arrows

(altı ok) articulated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and other founders of the

Republic of Turkey: republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, laicism,

and revolutionism (they are symbolized on the flag of the modern Republi-

can People’s Party). The interaction of these foundational national principles

came to be called Kemalism: statism and secularism protected populism from

being manipulated by demagogues; statism provided for government control

of economic modernization, which included shifting the fiscal burden from

peasants to landlords and townspeople; revolutionism, or perhaps more ac-

curately, reformism, prevented the stagnation that had crippled the Ottoman

Empire; nationalism protected against foreign aggression; republicanism, or

4James Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),1–70; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and theAtlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 462–551; DanielRodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992):11–38; Steven Ross, “The Transformation of Republican Ideology,” Journal of the EarlyRepublic 10 (1990): 323–333; Robert Shalhope, “Republicanism,” in Jack Greene and J. R.Pole, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: BlackwellPublishers, 1991), 654–660; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise ofthe American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 14–17,61–63, 91–103, 237–248; Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 213–225, 271–286.

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the dissolution of the personal rule of the sultans, along with secularism,

encouraged reformism. Perhaps more rigid in its meaning than American

republicanism, Kemalism emphasized rational thought among the citizenry,

partly in order to break the hold of religion on society.5

As in America, some aspects of republican thought and policy in Turkey

came from European precedents, while others developed indigenously. Echo-

ing the Ottoman reform program of the nineteenth century known as Tanz-

imat, Turkish founders borrowed particular institutions of Kemalism, es-

pecially laicism, from the French and Swiss systems, in order to overturn

usage of Islamic canon law. Other practices emerged from the influence of

rural peasant groups. Irrespective of the origins of Kemalist values, a Turk

was expected to support and conduct himself or herself in accordance with

them.6

There were some differences in the meaning of republicanism for Ameri-

can and Turkish founders. However, by comparing the two regimes’ nation-

building stages, the twentieth-century power disparity between the two

countries may be offset, allowing intriguing similarities to emerge. In par-

ticular, this essay shows the similarity of the ideas and writings of several

significant key figures in each regime who assumed the responsibility to

nationalize and consolidate their countries’ formative political cultures.

Rather than reaching specific conclusions about republican ideology in the

United States and Turkey, in this essay we seek to illustrate ways to broaden

and enrich scholarship on the comparative history of republican political

ideology and institutions. We focus on two approaches in particular. We

5“Cumhuriyet Ahlakı [Republican ethics],” Milli Mecmua 9 (Istanbul, 3 March 1928); YusufAkcura, “Turkiye Cumhuriyeti [Turkish Republic],” Turk Yılı (Istanbul, 1928): 454–55; ErikZurcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 181–82; Lord Kinross,Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1992), 508, 518; Metin Heper, The State Tradition in Turkey (Walkington, UK:Eothen Press, 1985), 64.

6Adnan Guriz, “Sources of Turkish Law”; Sait Guran, “Administrative Law”; FeyyazGolcuklu, “Criminal Law”; in Tugrul Ansay and Don Wallace, eds., Introduction to Turk-ish Law (Deventer, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1996), 1–18, 47–80, 163–174; Serif Mardin, “TheOttoman Empire,” in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: MultiethnicSocieties and Nation-Building: the Soviet Union and Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Em-pires (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 115–128, esp. 125; Atabaki Touraj, ed., The State andthe Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (London: I. B. Tauris,2007).

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compare two postcolonial republican regimes at “disparate moments and

without common vocabulary” that shared “common technologies of inter-

vention and common anxieties of rule.” We also challenge the implication

of Western exceptionalism in studies of republican state formation. Marc

Bloch criticized “long-range” comparisons of “societies . . . separated in time

and space.” But such an approach illustrates what George Fredrickson called

“macro-comparative history—the effort to deal cross-culturally with broad

themes or tendencies,” intended to yield “differences at one level of gener-

alization and similarities at another.”7

Differences Between the Two Republics

While other regimes could also be compared, comparison of the United

States and Turkey allows for study of two regimes separated by time as well

as, ostensibly, by the cultural or civilizational division between the West and

the East.8 This division once had been partly bridged by the Ottoman Em-

pire, a state that in its heyday spanned the Middle East, North Africa, and

southeastern Europe. American founders tended to see the Ottoman Empire

as a warning against excessive local authority and corruption. Alexander

Hamilton actually compared the weak Ottoman sovereign to the impotent

American central government under the Articles of Confederation, which

was “gradually dwindling into a state of decay.” The decline of Ottoman

power and stability by the late nineteenth century, in fact, would precipitate

7Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North AmericanHistory and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 864; MichaelGeyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review100 (1995): 1034–1060, esp. 1041; Marc Bloch, “A Comparison,” 46; George Fredrickson,“Giving a Comparative Dimension to American History: Problems and Opportunities,” Journalof Interdisciplinary History 16 (1985): 108, 109. On republicanism as a Western phenomenonsee, for example, William Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Iseult Honohan and Jeremy Jennings, eds.,Republicanism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2006).

8Republicanism in the early American republic has been compared with its counterparts inWestern Europe in such works as Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of Frenchand American Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Jurgen Hei-deking and James Henretta, eds., Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the GermanStates, 1750–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). American nation-buildingin comparison to non-Western regimes is studied in Dru Gladney, ed., Making Majorities: Con-stituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States (PaloAlto: Stanford University Press, 1998). Nation-building in the Turkish Republic is studied incomparative context in Barkey and von Hagen, eds., After Empire.

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the U.S. government’s first intervention in the Middle East, in protecting the

schools and businesses of American missionaries and their Orthodox Chris-

tian allies, many of whom resented Ottoman authority. Twice U.S. warships

entered Turkish harbors in the 1890s to enforce redress of American citi-

zens’ losses amid the Turkish suppression of Armenian uprisings. American

global ascendance and Ottoman decline, effectively creating the unequal

American–Turkish relationship of the twentieth century, were roughly con-

temporary, opposite movements.9

Besides their different relationships with the Ottoman Empire, there were

other differences between the early Turkish and early American republics. In

1922, Turkey, under Ataturk’s military and political leadership, thwarted ef-

forts by Britain to control Istanbul and by Greece to occupy western Turkey.

American colonists also thwarted British occupation, although with the es-

sential assistance of British rivals Holland, Spain, Prussia, and France. At

its outset Turkey’s population, generally, was of central Asian ethnic ex-

traction, and remained so. The population of the early United States was

heavily British (and, on account of slavery, African American), but sizable

and growing numbers of immigrants from other European nations were be-

coming U.S. citizens as well. Where Americans, partly through the competi-

tive jealousies of European powers, were able to expand American territory

westward to the Pacific Ocean by 1850, Turkey’s borders became largely

fixed in 1923. The Republic of Turkey never practiced slavery, the Ottoman

Empire having effectively abolished it by the late nineteenth century. The

United States practiced slavery until 1865. Neither regime restricted citizens’

9[Alexander Hamilton], Federalist, no. 30, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, andJohn Jay, The Federalist: With Letters of Brutus, ed. Terence Ball (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003), 137. For American perceptions of the Ottoman Empire see RobertAllison, Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2000); Cagrı Erhan, “Main Trends in Ottoman-American Re-lations,” in Aydın and Erhan, Turkish-American Relations, 3–25; James Field, America andthe Mediterranean World, 1776–1882 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); TimothyMarr, Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);Justin McCarthy, The Turk in America: The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice (Salt LakeCity: University of Utah Press, 2010); and Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: Americain the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), 81–133, 292–339. For theOttoman Empire see Stanford Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire andModern Turkey, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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access to firearms, although only the United States provided constitutional

protection for this right.10

Other constitutional doctrines also differentiated the American and Turk-

ish states. To regulate the public influence of religion the Turkish gov-

ernment established a Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet Isleri

Baskanlıgı), whose responsibility was to maintain places of worship, approve

weekly Muslim prayer texts, and publish works on the history of Islam. The

predominantly Protestant United States sought to separate religious practice

from national government sponsorship or restriction, although when the

country was established seven of the original thirteen states retained tax-

supported churches, a practice that lasted until 1833, when Massachusetts,

the last state to do so, abolished its church tax.11 The concept of separation

of powers also helped legitimize both multiparty politics and the practice of

judicial review in the early United States, whereas Turkey suppressed for-

mal political opposition to the Republican People’s Party until a generation

after the Republic’s founding, curbing for the first time “the authoritarian-

ism of the military-bureaucratic center under one-party governments.” The

Constitutional Court of Turkey, responsible for reviewing acts by the Turk-

ish Grand National Assembly, was established only in 1962; prior to this,

parliamentary power was absolute.12

Such differences between these early republics “separated in time and

space” may seem obvious, but they hardly preclude comparison of them; in-

deed the differences bring the important similarities of the two regimes into

sharper focus. Americans and Turks faced common challenges of resistance

10Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: Universityof Washington Press, 1998); Elvan Ozalp and Hande Karakılıc, “Gun Ownership in Turkey:The Legal Dimension and Mental Health Practices,” International Journal of Mental Health36 (2007): 95–104, esp. 95–96.

11 Islam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Turkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988); Bryan LeBeau, Religion inAmerica to 1865 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 71–75, 83–85.

12Ustun Erguder, “The Turkish Party System and the Future of Turkish Democracy,” inCigdem Balım et al., eds., Turkey: Political, Social and Economic Challenges in the 1990s(Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1995), 60; Ergun Ozbudun and Omer Genckaya, Democ-ratization and the Politics of Constitution Making in Turkey (Budapest: Central EuropeanUniversity Press, 2009). In Judicial Review in the Contemporary World (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971), Mauro Cappelletti distinguishes between “decentralized” models ofjudicial review, such as the American tradition, and “centralized” models, such as the Turkishsystem.

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to European colonialism as well as construction of post-colonial national

unity. Their common nation-building strategies included suppression of

political dissent; cultivation of political and cultural institutions distinct

from those of the imperial period; creation of myths in which certain aspects

of the pre-republican period were presented as foreshadowing the eventual

rise of the republic; assertions of national “exceptionalism”; and reliance

on the persistence of popular religious practices and attitudes about race

and gender.13

Common Challenges of State-Building

Both Americans and Turks quickly sought to enshrine the date on which

their respective countries “began.” Americans sanctioned July 4, 1776, the

date of Congress’s adoption and printing of the Declaration of Independence

from Britain, as the founding date of the United States. Likewise Turks speed-

ily began commemorating the proclamation of the Republic on October 29,

1923. However, declaring republics and establishing them proved to be dif-

ferent matters. Both countries encountered daunting challenges including

weak standing in the international order; tenuous domestic political leader-

ship; resistance to authority by variously constituted political, ethnic, racial,

and religious groups; and an uncertain sense of new national identity. The

first allegiance of ordinary Americans was local or regional, not national,

which hindered the growth of nationalist sentiment. The Articles of Confed-

eration, providing for no executive ruler, national taxes, or national army,

and requiring the individual states, not Congress, to organize domestic and

international commerce, reflected this local orientation. The historian Pe-

ter Parish described this dilemma as “a crucial formative influence in the

American experience [:] the establishment of a political framework, with the

potential to become a national framework, even before a vigorous national

self-consciousness had developed.”14

13On postcolonial assertions of national sovereignty see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: AnHistorical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 166; and Jack Greene,“Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William andMary Quarterly 64 (2007): 235–250.

14Peter Parish, “An Exception to Most of the Rules: What Made American NationalismDifferent in the Mid-Nineteenth Century?” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives 27(Fall 1995): 219–229, esp. 220.

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Parish believed this situation distinguished formative American national-

ism, but the same case could be made for the early Turkish republic, which

suffered from the problem of dubious or undeveloped loyalty, owing to

Turkey’s background in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. Despite the Turk-

ish constitution’s declaration that “sovereignty belongs unconditionally to

the nation,” many citizens of the early Turkish republic had little inclina-

tion to equate the state and the nation. From the early nineteenth century

onward, sultans Mahmud II and Abdulmecid I and state ministers Mehmet

Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha had introduced a program of Western reform to

the Ottoman Empire, known as the Tanzimat. Key to this program was the

cultivation of Osmanlılık, or Ottoman identity and citizenship, which was

meant to supplant older religious and ethnic loyalties.15

This sense of imperial citizenship, however, did not take hold. At the

end of the Empire two other allegiances were still influential. First, most

Ottoman subjects still revered the sultan as the supreme administrative and

religious authority, even if he no longer was considered the “Shadow of God

on earth,” a medieval title. Second, they identified themselves through their

religious affiliations. Most Ottoman subjects were Sunni Muslims, but many

others were Greek, Syrian, and Armenian Orthodox, Catholic, or Jewish. In

some regions Ottoman bureaucrats remained important elites in republican

Turkey, thus providing for continuity in authority. Yet many Ottoman sub-

jects’ identity as slaves (kullar) of the sultan, and/or as members of a religious

group, interfered with the spread of a Turkish republican identity. In 1924

15Constitution of 1921, Law # 85, Article I, in 3. Tertip Dustur [Third full edition in theTurkish Code of Laws], I: 196, approved 20 January 1921, announced in Ceride-i Resmiye(official newspaper), 1–7 February 1921. Also maintained later as Article III, Chapter I, Con-stitution of 1924. Yusuf Akcura, Uc Tarz-ı Siyaset [Three forms of politics] (Ankara: TurkishHistorical Society, 1976), 20; Ismail Kara, Turkiye’de Islamcılık Dusuncesi [The Islamist ide-ology in Turkey] (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1997), 27. On citizenship in the Ottoman Empire seeNawaf Salam, “The Emergence of Citizenship in Islamdom,” Arab Law Quarterly 12 (1997):125–147; Roderic Davison, “Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian–Muslim Equality in theNineteenth Century,” in Roderic Davison, Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774–1923: The Impact of the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 110–132; and CevdetKucuk, “Osmanlı Imparatorlugu’nda Millet Sistemi ve Tanzimat [Millet system and Tanzimatin the Ottoman Empire],” in Halil Inalcık and Mehmet Seyitdanoglu, eds., Tanzimat: DegisimSurecinde Osmanlı Imparatorlugu [Tanzimat: the Ottoman Empire in a changing discourse](Istanbul: Phoenix, 2006), 393–403. For discussion of the common challenges of various na-tionalist movements of the second part of the nineteenth century see Bender, Nation AmongNations, 122–150.

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the Republic abolished the caliphate and the title of protector of the Muslim

peoples claimed by Ottoman rulers, and replaced religious schools (madras-

sas) with Western-type schools. Such radical reforms provoked Sheikh Said

Piran, a Kurdish leader, to rebel because, in his words, “earlier . . . a common

caliphate . . . gave to our religious people a deep feeling of being part of the

community that the Turks also belonged to.” The nationalist writer Ziya

Gokalp acknowledged in 1923 that even Turks in Anatolia, the putative

heartland of Turkey, did not think of themselves as Turks. Similar to the

early American republic’s challenge to deeply local political identity, Turkey

in its early days struggled with little secular political loyalty.16

American and Turkish founders recognized their countries’ diversity and

lack of consensus as obstacles to state-building. Contrary to the custom in

Europe, in America ethnic background officially had little to do with Amer-

ican identity. The Declaration of Independence objected to King George

III’s discouragement of immigration to the colonies and obstruction of the

colonies’ naturalization laws. In the United States citizenship was not a re-

quirement for voting. The first U.S. citizenship law of 1790 was generous

towards “free white persons,” requiring of them only a two-year residence

and support for the U.S. Constitution in order to “become” Americans.

George Washington wrote, “The Citizens of the United States of America

have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an

enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike

liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. . . . For happily the Gov-

ernment of the United States . . . requires only that they who live under its

protection, should demean themselves as good citizens . . . .”17

16Roderic Davison, Turkey (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1968), 47; Yelda Demirag, “Pan-Ideologies in the Ottoman Empire against the West: From Pan-Ottomanism to Pan-Turkism,”The Turkish Yearbook of International Relations 36 (Ankara: Ankara University Press, 2005):140; Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, 172–271; Michael Meeker, Nation ofEmpire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,2002), 285–396; Metin Heper, The State and Kurds in Turkey: The Question of Assimilation(Hampshire, UK: Macmillan, 2007), 149; Ziya Gokalp, “Tarihi Maddecilik ve Ictimai Mefkure-cilik [Historical materialism and sociological idealism],” Yeni Gun [New day], 8 March 1923.

17“Naturalization Act of 1790,” United States Statutes at Large (First Congress, 2nd Session),1:103; George Washington to Moses Seixas, 17 August 1790, George Washington Papers,Library of Congress.

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American citizenship, however, remained restricted. The required resi-

dence period was raised in 1802 to five years. Slaves and white women,

perhaps 55 percent of the population, were denied the right to vote. At the

1815 Hartford Convention conservative New Englanders petitioned that

the U.S. Constitution be amended to restrict federal office-holding to native-

born citizens. As late as 1830 half of the states required an individual’s

payment of taxes as a requirement for voting. Many American leaders saw

diversity as a handicap to national stability. Ironically, the main author of

the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, feared that a continu-

ing influx of immigrants from Europe would “warp and bias [America], and

render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”18

Turkish leaders, partly reflecting their attraction to western-style “mod-

ernization,” proclaimed that they valued pluralism. Ziya Gokalp wrote,

“Nation is not a racial, ethnic, geographical, political, or voluntary group

or association. Nation is a group composed of men and women who have

gone through the same education, who have received the same acquisitions

in language, religion, morality, and aesthetics.” Founded by Mustafa Kemal

Ataturk at the time of the Turkish Constitution of 1924, the Republican Peo-

ple’s Party drew on the Ottoman concept of Osmanlılık and insisted that

anyone who supported Turkish national independence and the supremacy

of the laws more than loyalty to family, tribe, class, or religious community

could enjoy Turkish citizenship. The party was open to representatives of

different ethnic groups. The actions of the Kemalists, however, often indi-

cated that they viewed pluralism as a security risk. Reflecting suspicion of

multiparty government, the Republican People’s Party was monolithic, the

only real political organization in the country until after World War II. Party

leaders insisted that its members have a Turkish identity and practice Turkish

18Linda Kerber, “The Meanings of Citizenship,” Journal of American History 84(1997): 833–854; Seymour Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Histor-ical and Comparative Perspective (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 13–98; Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition andthe Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), 73, 74; Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 8. Population statistics calculated fromThe University of Virginia Library, “Historical Census Browser for 1790,” online athttp://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/php/start.php?year=V1790.

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culture, defined principally in terms of embracing a revised Turkish history

and the evolving Turkish language.19 At the Lausanne Conference of 1923,

Ismet Inonu, the Turkish foreign minister, affirmed the desire of Turkish

nationalists to seek “a homogenous, unified homeland” and a collective

cultural identity through a shared memory of Turkish independence and a

common destiny.20

In light of weakness in government and divided loyalties, it is somewhat

surprising that both the early American and the early Turkish republics sur-

vived. The formative years of the United States saw a host of events challenge

American stability. Domestic rebellions by white men hit Massachusetts in

1786 and Pennsylvania in 1794. In 1807 Aaron Burr, the former vice pres-

ident, was tried for treason for conspiring to detach the new Louisiana

Territory from the United States. Disaffected New England Federalists con-

sidered secession in 1814. During the War of 1812 British forces invaded

and burned Washington DC—the only time before September 11, 2001,

that America’s national capital was attacked. Andrew Jackson’s victory at

New Orleans in 1815 diminished the likelihood that the country would

split apart, at least on an east versus west basis, yet well into the nine-

teenth century it seemed likely that the last words of the foreign minister of

France, writing in 1776, would become as true as the first: “There is every

reason to believe that . . . the [American] Colonies . . . will give to their new

19An opposition political party, the Liberal Republican Party, was established in 1929, butwas closed a year later as “premature and dangerous.” Ataturk shaped both of these de-velopments. Tevfik Cavdar, “Serbest Fırka [Liberal party],” in Cumhuriyet Donemi TurkiyeAnsiklopedisi [Encyclopedia of Turkey during the Republican era] (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayınları,1985), VIII: 2058; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1968), 280.

20Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, 317; M. Asım Karaomeroglu, “Tek Parti DonemindeHalkcılık [Populism during the single party era],” in Tanıl Bora, ed., Modern Turkiye’deSiyası Dusunce, Kemalizm [Political thought in modern Turkey, Kemalism] (Istanbul: Iletisim,2001), 272–283; Mardin, “Ottoman Empire,” 121; Taha Parla, Turkiye’de Siyasal KulturunResmi Kaynakları: Kemalist Tek Parti Ideolojisi ve CHP’nin Altı Ok’u [The ideology of theKemalist single party and the RPP’s six arrows] (Istanbul: Iletisim, 1991), 25–28; Onur Yıldırım,Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 33. For tension in the formation of Turkish nationalismbetween cosmopolitan or “western” and cultural or “eastern” influences, see Ayse Kadıoglu,“The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity,” MiddleEastern Studies 32 (1996): 177–194.

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government the republican form, and that there will . . . be as many small

republics as there are at present provinces.”21

Likewise, the people of the Turkish republic grew up amid chronic military

conflict and economic and political instability. The Ottoman Empire’s war

with Russia in 1877 led to the establishment of a public debt administration

in 1881, controlled by foreign powers to oversee the Ottoman budget so

as to guarantee the repayments of credits. Bulgarians invaded the province

of Eastern Rumelia, and Cretians revolted in 1885. Ottomans suppressed

Armenian ultra nationalists in 1894–1896, fought Greeks in 1896–1897,

and faced a revolt in Macedonia in 1903. The “Young Turks” revolted in

1908, seeking reapplication of the 1876 constitution, suspended by Sultan

Abdulhamid II. Ottomans went to war against Italy in 1911, fought the

Balkan Wars in 1912–1913, and entered World War I in 1914, beginning

a decade of hostilities that would last through the War of Independence of

1923.

In some ways these conflicts facilitated the spread of state authority. For

example, they effectively weakened resistance to the state by unionized la-

bor. More important, however, the Turkish infrastructure was devastated,

and only in 1923 did the last of the European forces leave Istanbul, end-

ing years of invasion and occupation. Kurdish rebellions, precipitated by the

Republic’s initiatives towards secularization, broke out in the country’s east-

ern provinces in 1925, 1927, and 1930. Meanwhile, Turkey inherited the

sagging Ottoman economy of the late nineteenth century, including two-

thirds of the Empire’s debts, an amount that would not be paid off until

1948.22

21H. W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (New York: Anchor Books, 2006),x, 353, 556; Bradford Perkins, Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Volume 1,The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press,1995), 31.

22Donald Quataert, “Workers and the State During the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Touraj,ed., The State and the Subaltern, 17–30; Zurcher, Turkey, 238–249; Lewis, Emergence ofModern Turkey, 239–291; Ilter Turan, “The Evolution of Political Culture in Turkey,” inAhmet Evin, ed., Modern Turkey: Continuity and Change (Opladen: Leske Verlag and BudrichGmbH, 1984), 88; Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, II: 435–38.

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Common State-Building Measures

In responding to these challenges, the leadership in each country relied on

both short-term measures, designed to provide immediate insulation from

dissenting groups within the new political borders, and long-term measures,

designed to cultivate among the citizenry an organic sense of civic awareness

and loyalty to the new nation. For both states, the short-term measures

involved a suppression of civil liberties and political opposition, and even

the physical relocation of minority groups deemed to be a threat to state

security. In the United States of the 1790s, opponents of the administration

of President John Adams were subject to arrest and deportation under the

Alien and Sedition Acts. A few decades later President Jackson, through

treaties and military coercion, oversaw the removal of Indian tribes from

the East to the less contested western hinterlands, where they were thought

less susceptible to scheming with the European powers against the U.S.

government.23

Turkey, meanwhile, amid a series of religious and separatist uprisings

through the 1930s, experienced wholesale suspension of civil liberties. Lead-

ers rationalized that citizens would resist reforms and manipulate an open

society, thus personal freedoms and political opposition could be sacrificed

as less important than protection of the Constitution. As in the early United

States, minority groups were resettled: Ottoman peoples of Orthodox Chris-

tian background were deported to Greece in exchange for Greek Muslims,

and rebellious Kurds, angered over the failure of the Lausanne Treaty to

recognize them, were relocated to western Turkey.24 The Native American

23Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic,1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 590–615, 692–726; Robert Remini,Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Penguin, 2002), 92–116. For U.S. Indianremoval policy in a comparative perspective see Greene, “Colonial History,” and Carl Guarneri,America in the World: United States History in Global Context (New York: McGraw-Hill,2007), 136–145.

24During World War I military forces of the Ottoman Empire deported and/or killed hun-dreds of thousands of Armenians. This removal of the Armenian population, shortly before thebirth of the Republic of Turkey, meant the disappearance of a common enemy of the Kurdsand the Turks, which contributed to their mutual hostilities. Many Armenians and scholarstoday consider the actions of Ottoman officials to have been a policy of extermination. Forviews of this issue see Taner Akcam, Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Questionof Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Gwynne Dyer, “Turkish

520


removal accomplished the opening up of lands in the American southeast to

white settlement, an economic incentive that the relocation of Kurds from the

Turkish southeast lacked. Still, such suppressive measures in both regimes

seem incongruous in light of the official commitments made by their respec-

tive founders to create pluralistic republics. For that reason they warrant

more extensive comparative analysis for what they may suggest about the

authoritarian aspects of republican state creation. In effect, both the United

States and Turkey relied upon “safety valves” to relocate groups that had

the potential to jeopardize the formation of national identity—the United

States through positioning native peoples beyond involvement with white

settlers, Turkey through sending Greek Christians outside its boundaries

and repositioning the Kurdish minority within an ethnic Turkish majority

to encourage assimilation.25

A longer-term project adopted by the leaders of both republics was the

strengthening of their citizens’ civic identity. The U.S. Constitution of 1787

stated that it would not become law until state conventions—an innova-

tion of American legal-constitutional practice—in nine of the thirteen orig-

inal states voted for ratification. The fate of the early American republic

hung suspended for nearly a year, until New Hampshire became the ninth

state to vote for ratification. Even after this, fierce public debate ensued

in New York and elsewhere, provoking an outpouring of pro- and anti-

Constitution writings that remain a hallmark of American political philoso-

phy. This debate also led to an important addition, the Bill of Rights, which

specified citizens’ and states’ rights that the central government could not

‘Falsifiers’ and Armenian ‘Deceivers’: Historiography and the Armenian Massacres,” MiddleEastern Studies 12 (1976): 99–107; Yusuf Halacoglu, Ermeni Tehciri [Armenian deportation](Istanbul: Babıali, 2003); and Zurcher, Turkey, 119–121 and 176–79.

25Henri Allen, Turkish Transformation: A Study in Social and Religious Development (NewYork: Greenwood Press, 1968), 76; Heper, The State and Kurds, 169; Richard Robinson,“The Lesson of Turkey,” Middle East Journal 4 (1951): 424–438. Before the 1830s, andagain in the late nineteenth century, the United States sought a policy of assimilation forNative Americans. See Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy andthe American Indian (New York: Norton, 1974); and David Wallace Adams, Education forExtinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence:University Press of Kansas, 1997). For a comparison of treatment of indigenous peoples byAmerican and Australian settlers see Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and IndigenousPeople in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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deny. James Madison wrote, “The people were in fact, the fountain of all

power . . . .”26

The Turkish Constitution of 1924, on the other hand, became law largely

through ratification by the Turkish Parliament and declaration and endorse-

ment by Ataturk. Unlike the state constitutional conventions in America, the

Turkish constitution did not undergo popular ratification, a difference in the

two regimes’ process of official state building. The people of Turkey did not

have the tradition of political participation, including the town meetings and

political constituency-building, that had characterized the American colo-

nial experience. The American Revolution had taken place “not in a society

in need of modernization but in one that was already highly modernized,”

in contrast to its Turkish counterpart. At the time of the founding of the

Turkish republic, moreover, Ataturk’s heroic leadership in the War of Inde-

pendence and in negotiating the Treaty of Lausanne was a more vivid image

among the Turkish people than was the American people’s association of

their war for independence with constitution-framing. For many Turks, that

is, Ataturk represented the nation, the Grand National Assembly, and the

new government. Many advocates of the U.S. Constitution, in contrast, were

younger Federalist politicians without military prominence. They therefore

had to seek a popular mandate to impose the federal government’s authority

over the sprawling states. Still, like the Federalists, Ataturk appealed to the

Turkish people to embrace the new Turkish state: “All the wonders that

the Turkish nation displayed during the last years and all the political and

social reforms that it made belong to the nation itself,” and sovereignty

was to “belong to the people without any qualifications and conditions.”

Both American and Turkish constitutional doctrine invoked the will of the

people.27

26Christian Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional TraditionBefore the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 140.

27Jack Greene, “The American Revolution and Modern Revolutions,” in Jack Greene, Un-derstanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University of VirginiaPress, 1995), 382; Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey(Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000), 389–395; Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ataturk’unSoylev ve Demecleri [Ataturk’s speeches and statements] (Ankara: Turkish Historical Soci-ety, 1961), II: 214, 80; Mardin, “Ottoman Empire,” 120. Several Federalists had served in the

522


In both cases, however, state legitimacy also relied on what Seymour

Lipset called “charismatic authority,” or the influence of a leader “who

embodies in his person [a developing nation’s] values and aspirations.”

When the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, an opposition Istanbul news-

paper remarked that Ataturk, as the head of the state, Parliament, and

the only political party, held more power than had the sultans, and even

suggested that his authority diverged sharply from the example of George

Washington, who, at the height of his power and influence in 1783, had

retired to his farm rather than seeking political power.28

The Istanbul paper was correct in part. Washington’s example of giving

up power created a precedent for peaceable change in American political of-

fice, as well as for civilian rule. Widespread predictions proved unfounded,

for example, that Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800,

the first occasion for change of party in political authority, would cause

civil war and perhaps the rise of another Napoleon. In contrast, present-

ing itself as the guardian of Ataturk’s legacy, the Turkish military inter-

vened in Turkey’s civilian rule four times in the twentieth century. The

American republic was distinguished by the absence of military influence in

government.29

The Istanbul newspaper failed, however, to appreciate that like Ataturk,

Washington had played a vital cultural and ideological role in securing his

new nation.30 The military hero Washington had credibility among ordi-

nary Americans. Without him stumping for the new U.S. Constitution in

key regions, the document might not have been ratified. A cult of per-

sonality grew up around Washington, and the myth of his honesty, cit-

izen soldiery, and humility became a basic moral lesson in early Amer-

ican popular culture and pedagogy. Noah Webster, the most influential

American Revolution with distinction, including Alexander Hamilton, John Dickinson, RufusKing, William Livingston, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

28Lipset, First New Nation, 18; Kinross, Ataturk, 434.29Ergun Ozbudun, “Turkey,” in Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbudun, eds., Competitive

Elections in Developing Countries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 328–365, esp.354.

30For a brief comparison of public memory of Washington and Ataturk, see Robert Allison,“Review: First in the Hearts of His Countrymen,” Reviews in American History 27 (1999):349–360.

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schoolbook author and advocate of an “American tongue,” urged Amer-

icans to adopt a national school curriculum to unify their language and

culture and to wean the country away from a corrupt and culturally hege-

monic Europe. Webster prescribed Washington’s memory as central to this

American curriculum: “With the infant in his cradle . . . . [L]et the first word

he lisps be ‘Washington.’” Another popular schoolbook compared Washing-

ton to Moses. George Washington was no less a quasi-religious patriarch to

American republican youth than Ataturk was to Turkish “youth” (gencler),

which he referred to as the new leadership of Turkey. Across nation-

building regimes, “civic education . . . requires . . . a pantheon of heroes who

confer legitimacy on central institutions and constitute worthy objects of

emulation.”31

Besides relying on the imagined kinship between national leaders and

common citizens, American and Turkish founders also sought national unity

on the basis of a shared belief in what might be called paternal religious

republicanism. In both cases, they searched history to try to avoid mistakes

that others had made. Americans gained their appreciation for “virtue” by

studying the histories of Athens, Rome, and Florence. These once healthy

republics, Americans believed, eventually had succumbed either to fratricide

or empire. Likewise, nationalist writers such as Ziya Gokalp urged Turkey

to return to allegedly pre-Ottoman Turkish customs, because the Ottomans

had mistakenly emphasized conquests of different ethnic groups, neglecting

31Don Higginbotham, George Washington: Uniting a Nation (Lanham, MD: Rowman andLittlefield, 2002); Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); George Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: APsychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 13–54; Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, speech of 20 October 1927, in Istiklal Marsı, Genclige Hitabe,Onuncu Yıl Nutku [Independence march, Address to the Turkish youth, Speech on the occasionof the tenth anniversary of the Republic] (Ankara: Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture, n.d.);Heper, The State Tradition, 52; Lester Cohen, “Creating a Useable Future: The RevolutionaryHistorians and the National Past,” in Jack Greene, ed., The American Revolution: Its Characterand Limits (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 309; Carl Kaestle, Pillars of theRepublic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang,1983), 6; Cremin, American Education, 73; Iseult Honohan, “Educating Citizens: Nation-Building and its Republican Limits,” in Honohan and Jennings, eds., Republicanism in Theoryand Practice, 204. For civic education in the early Turkish republic see Benjamin Fortna,Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (New York:Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–42.

524


the wholesome social and cultural values that the empire putatively had at

its origins.32

Americans and Turks also shared a sense that their new countries were

exceptional and bore a contemporary global responsibility to bestow en-

lightenment on other peoples and places. For example, in his influential

pamphlet, Common Sense, Thomas Paine exulted that Americans could

begin the world over again. In the mid-nineteenth century an American

history text declared that Americans “[were] to work out, not alone our

destiny, but that of the whole world . . . . The inferior races shall be ed-

ucated and made fellow laborers in the great work of human progress.”

Even later, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln urged sup-

porters of the Union to see the great conflict not merely as one over

states’ rights or the extension of slavery, but as a struggle to preserve the

global example and leadership of the United States, “the last best hope of

earth.”33

Turks were no less visionary. At the inaugural meeting of the Turkish

Historical Association in 1932, the educational reformer Afet Inan stated,

“History of the Turkish nation is not limited to Ottoman history. Turkish

history is older than that. And it was the Turkish nation that disseminated

the cultural light to all nations of the world.” Meanwhile Inan’s associate

Resit Galip argued that while, “in the last few centuries, because of external

causes, the Turks lost their leading position in directing the course of world

civilization,” today “these degrading causes are being removed with the

reforms, and so the Turkish nation is looking forward to undertake again

its role in bringing mankind to a higher grade of civilization.” Intellectual

32Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the AmericanRevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Linda Kerber, “The Re-publican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37 (1985): 474–495;Jonathan Dull, “Two Republics in a Hostile World: The United States and the Netherlandsin the 1780s,” in Greene, ed., The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits, 149–163;Ziya Gokalp, Turklesmek, Islamlasmak, Muasırlasmak [Turkification, Islamization, modern-ization] (Ankara: Yeni Matbaası, 1960); Ziya Gokalp, The Principles of Turkism, trans. RobertDevereux (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968).

33Kaestle, Pillars, 94; James McPherson, “Introduction: Last Best Hope for What?” in JamesMcPherson, ed., “We Cannot Escape History”: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 2.

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and political leaders of both early republics embraced a sense of national

“mission” to the rest of the world.34

American and Turkish history and language books were similar sources

for guidance to ethical public action. In both cases, elements of the past

that did not support a concept of national unity in the present were de-

emphasized or omitted, or were shown to be corrupt exceptions to a general

historical trend of progressive consensus-building. In the American case the

decentralized structure of the new republic left ideological education largely

to the jurisdiction of the states or to private philanthropic groups. Education

ideologues such as Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, David Ramsay, Timothy

Pitkin, and John Marshall were de facto government mouthpieces for a loyal

citizenry. Rush famously saw as the goal of American education “to convert

men into republican machines.” In 1789 Webster announced his quest to

create a national language, for a “national language is a band of national

union.” Americans boasted of their political independence from Britain, but,

Webster admonished, they still sought out British culture. This was “aston-

ishing,” because Britain in the late eighteenth century, said Webster, was in

national decline. Webster became America’s leading author of textbooks and

dictionaries, designed to cure Americans of too much diversity and cultural

and linguistic provincialism.35

Early American historians reinterpreted the past from a nationalist per-

spective. In this way the “different customs and forms of government”

of the early American republic could be worn away, “mould[ing] us into

a homogeneous people,” according to David Ramsay. History-writing in

the early American republic consisted of presenting the British colonial

past as a republican genealogy, revealing that revolutionary republicanism

34Birinci Turk Tarih Kongresi: Konferanslar, Muzakere Zabıtları [The first Turkish historycongress: the minutes of the conference and discussions] (Istanbul: Maarif Vekaleti, 1932);Cumhuriyet [Republic], 21 September 1937; Resit Galip, “Turk Tarih Tezi ve Yabancı Tezler[Turkish thesis of history and foreign theses],” Ulku 9 (1933): 142–43; Muhiddin, “TurklerTarihin Yeni ve Taze Milletlerinden Biridir [Turks are one of the new young nations in history],”Meslek 24 (Istanbul: 26 May 1925): 2; Mardin, “Ottoman Empire,” 115–128.

35Eve Kornfeld, ed., Creating an American Culture: 1775–1800 (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2001), 115; Cohen, “Creating a Useable Future,” 309, 310. See also EdwardWatts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of Vir-ginia Press, 1998), 4–6, 29–41.

526


had evolved from the beginning of colonial settlement. In describing the

American Revolution, Timothy Pitkin emphasized the “unexampled una-

nimity of sentiment . . . among two or three millions of people” that char-

acterized the American rejection of British authority. We now know that,

contrary to Pitkin’s claim, as many as two-thirds of American colonists re-

mained neutral during the Revolution or were Tories loyal to the British

crown. John Marshall, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, described

New England as a region that was “originally settled,” not by Puritan reli-

gious zealots who had no concept of republicanism, which was actually the

case, but “by republicans.” History-writing in the early American republic

sought to emphasize the deeply rooted and widespread nature of American

republicanism, even to the point of anachronism.36

Turkish history-writing, often overseen directly by the government, like-

wise sought a usable past, to vindicate Turks’ capacity for self-government,

to point out the vices of the Ottoman Empire, and to justify the need for a

reformed and distinctive Turkish language. For instance, Mithat Sadullah’s

Yeni Yurt Bilgisi (New Homeland Knowledge) the official school textbook

for fifth graders approved by the Republican People’s Party in 1932, em-

phasized the historical greatness of Turks in history: “Turks are the oldest

independent nation in history . . . while the other nations were in a state

of near barbarism; the Turks had a strong government and good laws.”37

Meanwhile, contributors to the new journal Genc Kalemler (Young Pens)

revised Ottoman literary works in the belief that they had been adulterated

by the admixture of Arabic and Persian elements and did not reflect the

greatness of the Turkish nation and its language. The Republican People’s

Party announced in 1937 that Ottoman cultural works already known and

accepted by society had to be revised in conformity with republican ide-

als and values. Works of fiction and poetry from the Ottoman era were

36Cohen, “Creating a Useable Future,” 312, 318, 320.37Ziya Gokalp, Turk Toresi [The Turkish ethics] (Istanbul: Akın Yayınları, 1972); Ziya

Gokalp, Turkiye Medeniyeti Tarihi [History of civilization in Turkey] (Istanbul: MaarifVekaleti, 1925); Reha Oguz Turkkan, Milliyetcilik Yolunda: Ergenekon, Bozkurt, Gokboru;Yeni ve Eski Yazılar [On the path of nationalism: Ergenekon, Bozkurt, Gokboru; ancient andnew texts] (Istanbul: Muftuoglu Yayınevi, 1944); Mithat Sadullah, Yeni Yurt Bilgisi [Newhomeland knowledge] (Istanbul: Turk Kitapcılıgı, 1929), 205; Allen, Turkish Transformation,114.

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rewritten, including such famous titles (to Turkish readers) as Asık Garip,

Koroglu, Yedi Alimler, Tahir ile Zuhre, Arzu ile Kamber, Leyla ile Mecnun,

Nasreddin Hoca, Sahmaran, and Kerem ile Aslı. Overall, writers of early

republican Turkish literature invoked a Turkish cultural folkloric heritage

with a purified Turkish language, distinct from the Ottoman era. Partly to

integrate highbrow intellectual and lowbrow folk Turks, the Turkish repub-

lic abandoned the Ottoman script in 1928 because it failed to reflect a true

Turkish tongue.38

Perhaps through such an emphasis on the political usages of language and

history, the early American and early Turkish republics achieved innovative

forms of republican government. The American model, at least until the

Civil War, confounded the conventional wisdom of Europe that only small

republics could avoid fragmentation, its comparatively weak central gov-

ernment paradoxically fostering loyalty to an expanding and prosperous yet

stable country. The Turkish republican system was equally without prece-

dent, though in a different way. In 1924, Turkey renounced the Ottoman

sultans’ claim to the caliphate, the leadership of the Muslim world commu-

nity, so that, in the words of the journalist Falih Rıfkı Atay, “the bridges

attaching Turkey to the Middle Ages [could] be blown up.” Determined to

create the first secular state with a Muslim majority population, Ataturk

daringly declared, “The Caliphate may have significance for us only as a

historical recollection.”39

Neither the U.S. nor the Turkish constitution refers to “God.” That si-

lence was possible because of the two countries’ strong religious cultures,

not because the respective national founders were atheists. In republican

Turkey Sunni Islam “helped people become . . . genuine Turk[s].” After the

38Necmi Erdogan, “Populer Anlatılar ve Kemalist Pedagoji [Popular narratives and Kemalistpedagogy],” Birikim (1998): 117–125; Baskın Oran, Ataturk Milliyetciligi: Resmi Ideoloji DısıBir Inceleme [Ataturk nationalism: an analysis outside of official ideology] (Istanbul: BilgiYayınevi, 1997), 201. See also Mehmet Fuat Koprulu, “Oguz Etnolojisine Dair Notlar [Noteson Oghuz-Turkish ethnology],” Turkiyat Mecmuası (Istanbul, 1925): 185–211. Debates aboutlanguage reform had appeared among Turkish and Arabic intellectuals during the OttomanTanzimat. See Mardin, “Ottoman Empire,” 119.

39[James Madison], Ball, ed., Federalist No. 10, in The Federalist, 40–46; Kinross, Ataturk,439; Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1999),457.

528


mid-nineteenth century the United States would become religiously diverse,

but during and after the American Revolution, Protestant Christianity was

the dominant American religion. American evangelical Protestantism em-

phasized not only salvation through a practitioner’s piety and belief in the

deity of Jesus. This faith also advocated the spread of religious institutions

ruled by popular moral authority, and not by ordained ministers. Thus, the

virtues of discipline and sacrifice derived from Protestant morality reinforced

civic republicanism and provided a basis for democratic order and institu-

tions. Both the American and Turkish early republics, in short, created a

secular sphere to legitimate government power. But like Islam in Turkey,

even after the abolition of its political power, in America, Protestantism was

a whole system of living and an important source of ideological unity.40

Finally, both the American and Turkish early republics were paternalistic,

in the shared assumption that the principal enactors of civic virtue would

be men. In the United States until the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 this

generally meant white men, pursuant to racial beliefs that the early republic

carried over from the colonial experience. American women would work

throughout the twentieth century for full citizenship rights. Specific strug-

gles focused on voting rights, which women won by 1920, and eligibility for

jury and military service. By comparison, the Republic of Turkey rapidly ex-

tended the franchise, granting all male citizens suffrage in 1924 and adopting

women’s suffrage in 1933. Ataturk endorsed the emancipation of women

because the Republic “need[ed] men who [had] better minds, more perfect

men.” “The mothers of the future,” he anticipated, “[would] know how to

bring up such men!” Equation of women’s suffrage with women’s equality,

40Heper, The State and Kurds, 125; Arat Yesim, “Feminists, Islamists, and Political Changein Turkey,” Political Psychology 19 (1998): 117–131; Hilmi Ziya Ulken, Turkiye’de CagdasDusunce Tarihi [History of contemporary thought in Turkey] (Istanbul: Ulken, 1994), 309, 321;Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 164–195; Mark Noll, “The American Revolu-tion and Protestant Evangelicalism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 615–638;Kloppenberg, Virtues of Liberalism, 21–37; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secular-ism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 23–83. Examplesof Congress’s consideration of America’s Christian identity appear in the Journal of the Houseof Representatives of the United States, 26 January 1821, 20 June 1864, 25 February 1867;and the Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, 18 January 1844; in A Centuryof Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875,online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html.

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of course, is problematic, particularly in the Turkish case, where the Re-

publican People’s Party effectively decided whom to allow to serve in office.

But both early republics envisioned a political role for women—if it was

an indirect role—focused on raising sons and encouraging husbands to be

citizens upon whom the state could rely.41

Summary

In summary, despite variations in the sources and the meaning of “repub-

licanism,” there are sufficient similarities between the American and Turkish

cases to allow us to use the same (English) word, “republicanism,” to de-

scribe, understand, and compare the attitude and actions of the respective

founders concerning, in Ataturk’s famous words, how to create “peace at

home.” Republican ideologues sought to cultivate such a creed, emphasizing

both “peace,” or domestic tranquility, and “home,” or a sense of primary

identity in a homogeneous, unified nation, as a means of national survival.

Those means had both short-term and long-term consequences. As this

essay shows, short-term means of republican nation-building included re-

striction of civil liberties and suppression of perceived dangerous minorities.

Longer-term means of republican nation-building were more various, includ-

ing definition and encouragement of citizenship in terms of national loyalty

through support for the new constitution; mythologizing of a founding “fa-

ther” to symbolize and inspire appropriate national allegiance; cultivation

of a new language identifiable with the formation of the new state; reinter-

pretation of history to emphasize the continuity of the new republic’s values

with certain symbolic times in the past; and development of a republican na-

tional identity that was radically new, yet dependent upon underlying social

41Ruth Bloch, “The Construction of Gender in a Republican World,” in Greene and Pole,eds., Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 601–06; Linda Kerber, No Consti-tutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill andWang, 1999), 124–302; Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the EarlyRepublic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689–721; Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Con-flicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 112,185; Kinross, Ataturk, 477; Mango, Ataturk, 473. See also Ipek Yosmaoglu, “Our WomenTreasures: Early Republican Turkish Women and Their Public Identity,” in Baki Tezcan andKarl Barbir, eds., Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essaysin Honor of Norman Itzkowitz (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 211–227.

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attitudes about religion, race, and gender. Despite their chronological, geo-

graphic, and cultural differences, the American and Turkish early republics

shared these attributes. The relevance of such developments to other situa-

tions of pluralistic republican nation-building invites further inquiry, if only

to answer the question of whether or how these two early republics together

were different from, or similar to, early republics elsewhere, “West” and

“East,” “North” and “South,” across modern history.

531