В търсене на нова национална и културна идентичност: Турция на границата на два века
In Search of a New National and Cultural Identity: Turkey on the Borderline between Two Epochs

Summary/Abstract: The formation of the new Turkish cultural identity was a complex and inwardly contradictory process. Its ideological sources should be sought in the views of Turkish intellectuals from the middle of the 19th century, of the Tanzimat writers and the New Ottomans, and later of the Young Turks, that is to say in the big ideological and political movements in the Ottoman Empire in the period discussed. The strengthening of the national, including the sphere of Turkish culture involved in its formative period a certain withdrawal from the imperial consciousness and mentality. That was quite a difficult task for the Turkish intellectual and ruling élite for which going through the disintegration of Ottoman Turkey was a difficult and emotional process. The preservation of the empire was among the leading ideas and motives of the young Turkish intelligentsia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and that fact manifested itself in the diffusion in intellectual circles of such "transnational" ideologies as Ottomanism, Islamism and Pan-Turkism. They were hard to overcome and it turned out that a revolution had to take place for them to develop into or be removed by a national ideology. The Kemalist revolution was the one to put an end to the "long farewell" to the Ottoman principles in state organization, culture and mentality. Having started in the Tanzimat epoch the serious social changes not only in the sphere of culture but also in the institutions, state system, education, the process of "Europeanization" continued with more profound reorganizations carried into effect in the first decades after the foundation of the Turkish Republic and known in history as the "Kemalist reforms" or the "Kemalist revolution". That is the period of the formation of the new cultural identity of modern Turkey which rose from the ruins of the empire. This identity overcame the division between "Oriental" and "European" and was built through the drive towards bridging over the gap between them. Turkish culture sought its new aspect by means of synthesizing the two principles, by means of the possibly most complete "amalgamation" of two civilizations so much different from each other which had gone through a mutual clash besides, but were also unceasingly drawing nearer to one another. It looked as if modernity had removed the centuries-old opposition through a new mutual attraction. At the same time the national identity formed by the Turkish model of modernization of the national state underwent a transformation in which the newly appeared national identities preserved their former elements but included as well those previously rejected. Furthermore national identity was increasingly manifesting itself not as being formulated and formed "from above" but as a result of the influence of the complex social development of Turkish society.

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