Pan-Turkism

PAN-TURKISM

a movement advocating the union of turkish peoples.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Turkish-speaking Ottoman intellectuals became familiar with European cultural nationalism. The result was increased awareness of the origins of Turkish peoples, an enhanced consciousness of a distinct Turkish identity, and interest in Turks living outside the Ottoman Empire. Aided by the political interest the Ottoman sultans took in the Muslim Turks of central Asia under the onslaught of Russian imperialism, Turkish consciousness gradually became politicized and led to formulations for political unity of Turkish peoples.

Meanwhile, Eastern European scholars and nationalists fighting Russian expansionism stressed the Asian roots of their peoples and forged the notion of pan-Turanism. "Turan" refers to the Turkish-populated regions east of Iran and extending into the Ural and Altai mountains, also ancient home-land of Finns, Hungarians, and Mongolians. In strict terms "pan-Turanism" refers to a vague union of Ural-Altaic peoples. "Pan-Turkism," often used interchangeably with "Pan-Turanism," refers to a political union of Turkish peoples who in the nineteenth century lived within and beyond Turan.

Pan-Turkish ideas influenced Young Ottoman leaders (particularly Ali Suavi) and found systematic expression in a linguistic movement to simplify literary Turkish. From the 1880s on, Turks in Russia clung to pan-Turkish ideas to resist Russian cultural subjugation. The best-known propagandist was Ismail Gasprinski, a Tatar who published a journal called Interpreter. Emigrés from Russia propagated pan-Turkish ideas in the Ottoman realm. In 1904, Yusuf Akçura, a Kazan Turk educated in Constantinople (now Istanbul), wrote his influential Three Kinds of Policy, making a case for pan-Turkism against Ottomanism and Islamism. He also contributed to the foundation of cultural and literary Turkish societies, best known among them the Turkish Society and Turkish Hearth Association. Writers such as Halide Edip, Ömer Seyfettin, and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul joined Russian Turks (including Akçura, Ahmed Ağaoğlu, and Ali Hüseyinzade) in Turkish cultural activity.

In the Ottoman period, contrary to later nationalist contentions in the empire's successor states, pan-Turkism did not become the predominant ideology. Even in the thought of Turkists, such as Ziya Gökalp, Turkism could not be separated from Islamism or Ottomanism. As a political program pan-Turkism remained vague and marginal. Tekin Alp (Moise Cohen), a Jewish journalist, was an ardent propagandist. Pan-Turkish thought did promote nationalist consciousness among certain educated segments of Turks and, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, contributed to the crystallization of a Turkish nationalism limited in scope and restricted to Anatolia.

Pan-Turkism flourished at the end of World War I and until the consolidation of the Bolshevik state and the Turkish republic. The simultaneous collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires stimulated fantastic, ill-conceived, and unrealistic schemes of unifying the Turks of Asia. Enver Paşa and Cemal Paça, who fled Istanbul at war's end, spent their lives in uncoordinated attempts to establish the great Turkish state. The Soviet governments discouraged and systematically undermined panTurkism in Central Asia.

Pan-Turkish sentiments briefly surged in Turkey during World War II with the aid of German propaganda and with the expectation that the Soviet Union would crumble. In the Republic of Turkey, pan-Turkish racialist ideas have inspired the ultranationalist right. A pan-Turkish political framework has not emerged as a realistic or popular scheme among the Turkish republics of central Asia since the breakup of the Soviet Union, while cultural and economic interchange among them and with Turkey has intensified.

see also ali suavi; cemal paşa; enver paşa; ottomanism.

Bibliography

Berkes, Niyazi. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1998.

Kushner, David. The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876–1908. London: Cass, 1977.

Landau, Jacob M. Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation, 2d revised and updated edition. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995.

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