State-building in multi-ethnic borderlands: Nationalizing Eastern Anatolia and Transylvania in interwar Turkey and Romania

This dissertation examines Turkish and Romanian state-building practices during the interwar years, exposing the major reasons for and consequences of the multiple strategies the two states employed in their efforts to unify and nationalize their territories. Turkey and Romania followed parallel trajectories toward national consolidation in this period while also sharing specific security concerns in their respective regions. In their efforts to create centralized and homogenized nation-states, the ruling authorities chose to categorize certain ethnic minorities as a threat to territorial integrity and national unity. Most prominent among these groups were the Kurds in Eastern Anatolia and the Hungarians in Transylvania, whose demographic concentration in a particular region, linguistic unity, economic control, and capacity to resist the emerging central authority flagged them as potential security risks. These features made the Kurds and Hungarians, respectively, the primary targets of the Turkish and Romanian states' centralization campaigns. This analysis of the relations between the state and aforementioned ethnic communities in Turkey and Romania contributes to and expands on the discussion of factors affecting state-building in post-First World War nation-states. It thus explains how legal frameworks (minority status), state capacities, domestic politics, and international power dynamics were intertwined, and how they played a crucial role in the state's policies, especially in the areas where the central government's jurisdictional power was still relatively weak. Ultimately, this dissertation reveals how the state's initial policies toward certain ethnic groups changed over time in Eastern Anatolia and Transylvania and why the relationships evolved into a large-scale struggle in one case but remained relatively calm and contained in the other. Drawing mostly on primary sources from archives across Turkey, Romania, and the United Kingdom, this comparative research argues that the Turkish and Romanian states' policies in multi-ethnic areas were very much affected by various internal political and socio-economic dynamics, legal measures, international affairs, and kin-state activism. This dissertation also claims that the evolution of state policies did not follow a linear path; rather, they diverged over time in response to domestic and international developments. In this process, regional security risks, inter-state relations, economic dimensions, and internal politics, such as increasing right-wing nationalism, all contributed to the trajectory of state policies toward the selected communities. Hence, the similarities and differences between the nationalizing strategies in Turkey's and Romania's multi-ethnic regions reflect the reasons for the different outcomes while dealing with ethnic groups as a whole.