Building national identificasion strategies: The case of Turkey 1839-1946

Identification and national identification concepts are one of the most important subjects of today?s literature in social sciences. National identities have been built in a spesific time period of the history. National identities have not been occured at the same process in all around the world. Different building strategies have adopted due to several factors such as a country?s nationilize process, economical developments, and homogenity of the society. The methods of building Turkish national identity have their own particularities. Even though there are many studies in the subject of building Turkish national identification, those studies have resulted by focusing only one subject (such as economy, politics, culture etc.) or made some assesments by taking a narroved historical era. There isn?t enough study to understand Turkish national identity construction process in a manner of totalitarian comprehension by following those studies.The aim of this study is to examine Turkish national identity construction strategies by introducing similar and different ways from the national identity construction strategies in the Europe. In this context, construction strategies that are practised since Tanzimat Period to multi-party era, differencies and similarities in this era will be explored with the reasons lying behind the background of those changes.The main assertion of this study is that policies introduced in the one- party era, and the strategies practised in constructing Turkish national indentity are mainly in complience with those, but in some areas there are mainly important variences in the meaning of basic parameters of National identity.To be able to test the assertion, first of all, the literature written in German and Turkish languages have been widely reviewed. The Author?s approaching the subject from different directions were studied by analitical manner. For an objective look at the event, foreign literature have been given weight of. Thus, rather than approaching the subject from only Turkey, it is tried to look away from other countries. Generally scanning the literature of constructing national identity, and thus, examining the national identity strategies in different geographies allowed us a better understanding of Turkey in particular.In this frame, it has been tried to introduce that some breaks have been occured in Turkish national identity constructing process although they were inter-related. It has been presented that in many aspects Republic is the continuation of the Ottoman empire as the national identity constructing is. The one party managment has caused the biggest break with the past by eliminating the religion which is a core element while constructing national identity,. It is possible to find the basic parameters caused identity problems occured at the one party managment. In this regard, it can be said that the results of this study is very important.