Activities - The Making of Modern Turkey Seminars 2008-2009

Understanding Republican Turkey

This season, the Making of Modern Turkey Seminars focus on the main difficulties faced by Republican Turkey. Adopting a wide perspective that encompasses political, economic, social and cultural aspects and taking as their point of reference writers and their publications, the seminars provide a critical analysis and, with the audience’s contributions, offer a different viewpoint to the issues. 

October18, 2008– Prof. Ahmet Makal
Labor Relations in Turkey During the Multiparty Period: 1946-1963
The third book in Ahmet Makal’s “trilogy” on the long term development of labor relations in Turkey won the 2003 Sedat Simavi Social Sciences Award; it focuses on the period, which started off with the transition to a multiparty system in 1946, continued with the rule of the Democrat Party and ended with the constitutional and labor laws brought by the May 27 military intervention. The book examines the history of that period from a “work” perspective and adopts an integrated approach to history to evaluate the political, economic and social foundations of labor relations while attempting to resolve as well the internal and external dynamics of the period’s events. In this context, the book offers new connections and a wider vision to the writing of Turkish political, economic and social history. The main topic headings in the book include; the social significance of economic transformations in the agricultural and industrial sectors, salary administration and the development of labor law and trade unions, salaries and the living standards of employees, and developments in the area of social security.

November 15, 2008 – Prof. Ayse Bugra
Capitalism, Poverty and Social Policy in Turkey
The charity concept during single party rule in Turkey, which divided the poor into those who “deserved assistance” and those who “didn’t...” The institutionalization of social policy after World War II... The unravelling of the social welfare regime after1980... The liberal conservatism of AKP and the “return” to charity with the Fakir Fukara Fonu (Poverty Fund), Yesil Kart (Green Card) etc. In this book, Ayse Bugra offers a critical analysis of the history and polemics of social policy in Turkey. She does this in the context of two opposing appproaches to poverty that have accompanied the rise of modern capitalism ever since the 16th century. The first approach, which places work at the center of its value system, has reservations concerning the use of public resources for social ends and stresses charity when it is no longer able to explain poverty by condemning it. The rights-based approach on the other hand, addresses poverty as a human rights and political issue. The clash between these two approaches is actually the clash between those who wish to keep capitalism in its original state and those who want to turn it into “something different.” The book’s most important contribution is to bring a fresh perspective – along the axis of this clash – to the evolution of state-society relations throughout the history of Republican Turkey.

December 20, 2008 – Prof. Nurhan Yentürk
The March of the Blind: Turkish Economy and the Post-1990 Crises
In the essays of this book, Prof. Nurhan Yentürk addresses the theoretical sources of the economic policies applied to the Turkish economy throughout the 1990s in times of crisis, the changes in economic structure caused by different forms of administration and the impact of these changes on ongoing crises. The author sees Turkish economic history as a process of transition from one crisis to the other and accordingly dubs it a “history of economic crises.” Her essays examine the economic foundations and the outcomes of IMF policies, the characteristics of economic growth in developing countries in the 1990s, as well as the economic structure of Turkey and the outcomes of the economic policies applied. In addition to discussing the causes of the crises and the policies that might be applied to deal with them, Yentürk suggests alternative solutions to minimize the negative effects of financial globalization on investment. In two further articles that constitute an addendum to the book, she also evaluates the state of Turkey’s manufacturing industry and its competitive power.

January 17, 2009 - Assoc. Prof. Mesut Yeğen
From Future Turk to So-Called Citizen: the Republic and Kurds

The book examines how and with which concepts the main actors in Turkish politics perceive the Kurdish question. How do the different versions of nationalism in Turkey, the Turkish left, bureaucrats, political parties and ordinary citizens view the Kurdish problem? The texts included in this work attempt to provide an answer to these questions. The central claim of the book is that a great change may be occuring in the perception of the Kurdish matter as a whole. For nearly the entire Republican period, the main actors in Turkish politics have perceived Kurds essentially as future Turks and have believed that the solution to the Kurdish problem was assimilation. Nonetheless, in recent years, there are signs that this perception and belief are gradually waning. According to the book, the conviction that Kurds are future Turks is not nearly as strong as it was once and it is also likely that this change in perception will in turn have an impact on the attempts at citizenship practices displayed by Turkey’s Kurds.

February 21, 2009 - Yaprak Zihnioğlu
Revolution without Women: Nezihe Muhiddin, the Women’s Popular Party and the Women’s Union

The book aims to provide a critical analysis of modernization in Turkey by focusing on the early years of the Republic from a women’s history viewpoint. It thus attempts to bring to light the political history of influential women and women’s groups between 1923 and 1927. Beginning with the foundation of the Women’s Popular Party and continuing with the activities of the Women’s Union (which would later be known as the Turkish Women’s Union), the book presents the thoughts of Nezihe Muhiddin, who emerged as a leading political figure during that period, and traces the endeavors of the members of the Women’s Union. It also provides insights into how women were represented in the public and private spheres and examines the sexual hierarchy operating at a time when a new political system was being established.

March 21, 2009 - Assoc. Prof. Asım Karaömerlioğlu
There is a Village over There in the Distance: Peasantist Discourse in the Early Turkish Republic 

The village and village romanticism figure among the dominant themes of the early Turkish Republic. Delving deeper into the actual nature of this romanticism, Asım Karaömerlioğlu demonstrates that while on the one hand, Republican elites, worried about the consequences of industrialization and urbanization, sought for ways to keep the peasants in their villages; on the other, they did not wish to set off an autonomous peasant movement. The crucial question the author ponders is why the ideology of peasantism fared so well all through the long twentieth century. Thus, he examines in a critical light all the ideologies, politics and projects targeting the village produced during the single-party era. Taking up the ideas of so-called “peasantist” writers and ideologists, Karaömerlioğlu shows how populist ideologies were appended to peasantism; he observes the activities and publications of the People's Houses, the “famous” Village Institutes experience and the ideological debates concerning the attempts at land reform. The book is complemented by scanned images of villages and villagers from the works of leading literary figures of the period such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Sabahattin Ali and Mahmut Şevket Esendal.
Addressing peasantist movements in Bulgaria and Germany - two countries of dissimilar levels of industrialization and modernization - Karaömerlioğlu provides a comparative analysis of villages and peasantry in Republican Turkey during a historical period in which the whole world felt the jarring impact of the disintegration of agricultural systems.

April 18, 2009 - Assist. Prof. Hüseyin Sadoğlu
Nationalism and Language Policies in Turkey

In this work, Hüseyin Sadoğlu examines the relationship between Turkish nationalism in its various phases and Turkish and other ethnic languages and, against the background of different theories of nationalism, compares it to the Western European experience. Focusing on the relatively long time span from 1839 to1950, the book investigates the language policies of different unification strategies such as Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism, the role of Turkish in the growth of cultural Turkism, the efforts of the Turkish Republic to make Turkish the spoken language of all of its citizens, and the resistance of cultural conservatism to the “purified Turkish” policies of the single-party era. Taking into account both nationalistic and modernizing motives, the author concludes with a wide ranging appraisal of the great linguistic change that Turkey experienced over the past century.

May 23, 2009 - Assoc. Prof. Mesut Yeğen
From Future Turk to So-Called Citizen: the Republic and Kurds

The book examines how and with which concepts the main actors in Turkish politics perceive the Kurdish question. How do the different versions of nationalism in Turkey, the Turkish left, bureaucrats, political parties and ordinary citizens view the Kurdish problem? The texts included in this work attempt to provide an answer to these questions.
The central claim of the book is that a great change may be occuring in the perception of the Kurdish matter as a whole. For nearly the entire Republican period, the main actors in Turkish politics have perceived Kurds essentially as “future Turks” and have believed that the solution to the Kurdish problem was assimilation. Nonetheless, in recent years, there are signs that this perception and belief are gradually waning. According to the book, the conviction that Kurds are future Turks is not nearly as strong as it was once and it is also likely that this change in perception will in turn have an impact on the attempts at citizenship practices displayed by Turkey’s Kurds.