Today’s Zaman, Turkey
March 1 2009
Turkish identity awareness lies beneath the nation-state
Nationals of the Turkish Republic, where cultural and ethnic
differences peacefully coexist, greatly honor their families and show
the utmost respect to their older relatives, but are not very inclined
to learn about their lineage, either because it is too difficult to
gather such information or because they have been taught that such
efforts may undermine the idea of the nation-state, experts say.
The Ottoman Empire had a multinational, multiethnic and
multi-religious community structure. Following its collapse after
World War I, a nation-state, the Republic of Turkey, was established
within narrowed borders and a contracted territory but still
preserving a multitude of differences among its people. Embracing
those differences, `Turk’ is a constitutionally defined and widely
encompassing term. Article 66 of the 1982 Turkish Constitution, which
is still in effect, states, `Everyone who is bound to the Turkish
state through the bond of citizenship is a Turk.’ Therefore, all
Turkish citizens of Kurdish, Armenian, Bosnian, Arab, Circassian,
Greek and other origins are Turks according to that constitutional
definition, and they all have the same rights and duties and are all
equal before the law.
Different ethnics, one nation
What is derived from this clarification is that being a Turk does not
necessarily imply a particular ethnic affiliation whatsoever. However,
it is very well known by all that there are ethnically Kurdish,
Armenian, Greek, Albanian and Arab citizens, among others, alongside
those who have Turkish ethnicity, in Turkey. Analyzing the
demographics of the Turkish population has become confusing due to
continuous population migration in the country, which has made
regional categorization of ethnicities impossible. What makes the
picture even more complicated is the fact that many families were
composed of men and women of different ethnicities as a natural result
of living together, not only after the republic was founded, but also
for centuries during the Ottoman era. Thus, the ethnicities of later
generations of such families became blurred in the course of time.
A survey titled `Who Are We?’ conducted in 2006 by KONDA, a research
and consultancy company, received more than 100 different responses
from a sample of 47,958 persons in response to a question asking what
ethnicity they knew, or felt, they belonged to. According to that
report, which took participants’ responses as reliable estimates of
their ethnicity, 76 percent of the Turkish population was of Turkish
ethnicity whereas 15.7 percent were Kurds and Zazas, 0.7 percent were
Arabs and 0.3 percent and 0.2 percent were originally from the
Caucasus and the Balkans, respectively. The report also indicated that
0.1 percent of the Turkish population were non-Muslim citizens; this
group comprises individuals of Armenian, Greek, Syrian Orthodox and
Jewish descent. Only 2 to 3 percent of the entire group of respondents
did not give an answer to the question, which leads researchers to
state in the report that Turkish people essentially do not have a
problem expressing their identity and ethnicity. Thus, an average
Turkish citizen does not have a perceived lack of knowledge about who
he or she really is, according to the report.
What adds more color to the above-described picture are the cultural
specifics of Euro-Turks. Although they are present in Turkey only for
a limited time of the year — their summer holidays — and are
consequently not always visible, it was not the first time the Turkish
media and academia acknowledged them when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
ErdoÄ?an addressed an audience of 18,000, a sports center full
of Turks living in Cologne last year and 15,000 Belgian-Turks in a
stadium a month ago in Hasselt, Belgium. The Euro-Turk group contains
people who have dual citizenship and those who are only nationals of
the Turkish Republic as well as Turkish-speaking citizens of their
host countries. It is not possible to give an exact number due to
illegal migration, but it is estimated that more than 4 million Turks
reside in Europe, spread all throughout the continent, but mostly in
Germany followed by Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands. Hence,
discussions about identity and ethnic awareness now contain new
elements due to the fact that these Turks’ social environments are
characterized by the countries in which they live. Citizenship,
integration into the host country and cultural change, as well as
assimilation and trans-national links, are all incorporated into
academic discussions to fully understand the complexity of the current
situation.
A report titled `Euro-Turks: A Bridge or a Breach between Turkey and
the EU?’ prepared by Ayhan Kaya and Ferhat Kentel, associate
professors in the departments of international relations and
sociology, respectively, at Istanbul Bilgi University, states that
third and fourth-generation Euro-Turks, in particular, have developed
a cosmopolitan identity that highlights differences, diversity and
citizenship. `There are no perfectly authentic ethnicities. They are
rather combinations of the most recent cultural affiliations and are
continuously in transformation due to social interactions and
mobility. However, in Turkey, this transformational process had been
affected by the rise of the nation-state. Today it is not seen
appropriate by people to search one’s lineage because what may come
out of it may harm the idea of the nation-state,’ Kentel told Sunday’s
Zaman via phone from his office in Ä°stanbul.
There are, however, Turks who are willing to learn about their
lineage, too. For them, asking relatives, especially parents and
grandparents and the like, if possible, is naturally the most
traditional way to start their search. However, it is sometimes either
too late for many to discuss the matter with someone who might have
known about their family lines, or the information received in this
way is mixed with speculation and confusion and is thus not always
reliable. Learning about lineage extending as far back as the mid-19th
century is possible through an alternative method. Provincial and
district population and citizenship directorates, which are part of
the Turkish Interior Ministry’s General Directorate of Population and
Citizenship Affairs, can provide information regarding lineage upon
demand and free of charge. The general directorate currently holds the
records of 54,184 family trees, including those from the archives kept
by its subsidiary units, covering a time period since the second
quarter of the 19th century.
01 March 2009, Sunday
M. EDÄ°B YILMAZ Ä°STANBUL