Race, culture, nation and identity politics in Turkey: some comments

Abstract

Nation-building was a major theme in American scholarship dealing with the 'new states' of Asia and Africa in the 1960s. It was generally treated as an inevitable and beneficial process. The first discordant voice was that of Walker Connor, who in an often-quoted article, "Nation-building or nation-destroying," called attention to a blind spot in mainstream scholarship.1 Not a single mainstream 'political science' text on the third world, he observed, paid attention to the existence of ethnic minorities in the new states and their resistance to assimilation into state-based 'nations.' Connor found in the political science literature failed nation-building attributed to no less than 12 factors, none of which however had anything to do with ethnic loyalties. Other disciplines were perhaps more sensitive to these realities, but in sociology and anthropology Clifford Geertz' "Integrative revolution" article of 1963 was a rare bird in its perceptiveness.2 For Geertz, too, the general thrust of social development was in the direction of integration into large nations (like the Indonesian one), but he perceived ethnic loyalties as serious hindrances on this path.