THE PROBLEM: COMMON HISTORY AND PARTICULAR IDENTITY
By Dogu Ergil
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Oct 7 2007
"Identity" has become the center of focus of both politics and
social science lately. Until recently, we were talking about national
identity in particular and "Western" and "non-Western" identities in
general. However, today we are talking about multiple identities both
as individuals and as groups. For some, this is a great danger to the
unity of the nation; for others, it is an awakening for coming to terms
with the plural realities of our own lives as well as our society’s.
Nonetheless, how we learn history and how our collective lives
are shaped by it is very important in our personal and collective
development. For example, we Turks were educated believing that:
1- We migrated from Central Asia and settled in Anatolia as if it
was a vacant piece of land. Such a belief is based on the premise
that there was no fusion of cultures and mixture of races.
2- We are a uniform nation with no diversity or hierarchy; state and
society are one entity.
3- We are an oppressed nation (totally disregarding our imperial
past that dominated continents and a sundry of conquered peoples)
that has been delivered from the yoke of Western imperialism through
the War of Independence (1919-1922). So being on constant watch for
foreign intervention and sinister plans to divide our country has
been a national preoccupation that has reached the dimensions of
collective paranoia.
Our educational system has been influenced by these assumptions and
fears. The Turkish history curriculum revolves around developing a
unified national identity and provides few opportunities for students
to examine diversity within or outside the country. The creation of
a sense of national identity is at the core of the social studies
curriculum from the earliest years of schooling all the way through
high school. This takes place not only through overt nationalism
or patriotic indoctrination, but through repeated and systematic
attention to national origins that is built on semi-mythical stories
of victories and larger-than-life heroes. Defeats, failures and the
failing leaders are deliberately omitted, creating a void in the face
of reality that does not correspond with this glorified narrative.
Schools avoid issues of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity and
thus do little to help students move beyond the bonds of their own
political/religious communities and build transcendental visions of
living together in harmony. A more productive way of incorporating
diversity into the history curriculum would involve attention to
the reality of interlocked communities with ethnic and religious
differences in the nation’s past. This could help promote pluralism
and democracy.
Teachers and their pupils repeatedly use first person pronouns like we,
us and our when discussing the nation’s past. The events they select
as historically significant are those that established the country’s
political origins, marked it off as unique from other nations and led
to its current demographic makeup, which is ethnically and religiously
rather homogeneous. However, the story they tell of the nation’s
past is one that denies progress. While history is turned into a
fabricated fiction, problems that have been lingering from the past
cannot be solved because they are not understood at all. Take the
Armenian and Kurdish problems: There is no place for them in Turkish
historiography — that is why both issues have become dilemmas for
us that are hard to comprehend and hard to deal with.
The end result is the syndrome of "split social consciousness and
multiple histories." It is no wonder that Kurds and Armenians or even
those of Turkish origin who identify themselves as Muslims first have
a different historical narrative than the one taught in school.
It is not history education that dwells on diversity as a historical
reality, but this artificial uniformity that threatens national
solidarity that could have been born out of citizens’ consensus,
living together and respecting differences. On the contrary, minority
students encounter alternative and politicized accounts of the
national past in their homes and communities. This bifurcation born
out of a common history lived through the prism of particular group
experiences divides the lives and minds of many students/citizens
creating identities that are mutually exclusive. This is not only
painful on the individual level, it is harmful for national unity in
that it bolsters sectarian perspectives.
Indeed, students who are confused with this bifurcation, particularly
those from minority backgrounds, eventually come to reject national
identification because the official story of the past excludes or
minimizes their own backgrounds. Nor does this kind of narrow history
help students develop an understanding of the perspectives of people
from backgrounds other than their own.
If Turkey is going to be a pluralist democracy, it must promote a
national identity that encourages inclusiveness and diversity that
do not dismiss other identities important to its citizens. It would
also mean a greater emphasis on events that have led to broader
participation in the nation’s life by groups omitted from history
and narratives of national development.