(Download) "Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three Requirements of Turkish Citizenship (Report)" by Insight Turkey # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three Requirements of Turkish Citizenship (Report)
- Author : Insight Turkey
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 79 KB
Description
Long before the White Turks/Black Turks distinction gained currency, the dominant academic metaphor for the analysis of Turkish society was based around the Center and Periphery model, introduced to the Turkish context by Serif Mardin in his "Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics," an article published in Daedalus (1973). Mardin's discussion revolved around the challenge of integrating the periphery (Anatolia) to the center, a persistent problem facing power holders from the late Ottoman period through to the Republic. We know that Mardin borrowed the term from Edward Shils's The Constitution of Society. The conceptual origins of the distinction, while not acknowledged by Shils, can be traced back to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. In the years since Mardin first applied this paradigm to Turkey, however, it has become clear that approaching center-periphery relations from the point of view of "integration" is rather too simplistic. Such an analysis fails to question the centrality of the center: it gives the impression that the incumbents of the center have arrived there through some achievement and effort, and that the periphery is under some teleological obligation to try to join with them under normative conditions that Shils calls the "central value system." Even in Western democracies, where such "central value systems" are relatively broad, there has been a tendency towards multiculturalism as a way of acknowledging the multiplicity of values. In countries like Turkey, what has become the "central value system" of the society is still far from representative or inclusive. Authoritarian efforts to engineer a new society from above led to a center that has remained in constant opposition to the periphery, creating two Turkeys at odds with one another. Once we begin to see the relationship between the center and the periphery in these terms, we can no longer think of its vernacular reflection, the White Turks/ Black Turks distinction, in terms of income level, economic power or, most misleadingly, the "degree of modernization." The relationship between the two Turkeys has been one of power relations. It can best be grasped as a long-running competition, often obscured by the domestic discourse of national homogeneity and by such imported templates as "political Islam versus the secular state." This competition occasionally flares up into political crises, the most recent example of which is the ongoing standoff between the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) and the Kemalist bureaucratic elite. What follows is a discussion of the historical and cultural conditions that contributed to the bifurcated Turkey we see today.