The Kurdish question also has a dimension related to socialization. This is also the most important dimension of the problem with respect to its solution. In previous articles, the issue of identity was examined and analyzed. I had tried to explain issues such as how identities are formed, that national identities can be developed on ethnic or civic bases, the geography factor—whether the land on which one lives forms a basis for identity—and how the official Turkish historical thesis, based on Central Asian roots, made the Kurdish question inevitable.
As I previously mentioned, the identity policies of the Turkish state constructed a national identity upon a fabricated historical thesis developed as a continuation of the identity policies of the Unionists. This identity was included in school curricula, and the entire national education was designed as the indoctrination of this identity. This is a long-term process. It may even be the Turkish state’s longest uninterrupted domestic policy.
Many governments came and went, and regime-level changes also occurred. But Turkey’s identity policy—what we might call Turkey’s factory setting—never changed and remained fixed. For more than 100 years, school curricula built on the state’s official historical theses, state mass communication tools, and the indoctrination of political discourses through public diplomacy and propaganda channels were imposed on society by quite effective methods. Furthermore, Turkish literature formed in this socio-cultural environment, the Turkish press and media (newspapers, radio, television, and later internet media), and academic research and educational institutions also adopted the constructed identity and contributed to its spread.
Turkish political parties shaped themselves around this identity—according to the position they took toward it—and created voter perception. What we may describe as Turkish nationalism is the various ideological interpretations of the identity that was created. Although there are many different interpretations, such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Atatürkist nationalism, ulusalcılık, the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, Nizam-ı Âlem-ists, Neo-Ottomanism, the common point—the foundation—of all of them is the ethnic nationalism built upon the Central Asian migration myth constructed by the state.
All political parties in Turkey fed off Turkish nationalism. Because Turkish nationalism was the mainstream ideological current centered on the Turkish nation, and for the Turkish (Turkophone) population—the voters—it had by then become the basis of self-identity. When the identity of the ummah entirely lost its influence at the beginning of the 1900s, Islamist or Islamic-conservative thought movements and ideologies also adopted the newly created Turkish identity and integrated it into their ideologies. Being national (“millilik”) became an important expression of reference and legitimacy for all parties. For example, Islamist Milli Görüş and socialist Milli Demokratik Devrim conceptualizations show this search. More clearly stated, the state’s nation and nationalism project succeeded.
Citizens living in Turkey and belonging to different ethnic origins adopted the Turkish identity—within the framework designed by the state—and in the way foreseen by the state.
Kurds were the only ethnic group that resisted this identity.
There are various reasons for Kurds taking a position against the artificially constructed Turkish identity and the historical discourse forming the origin of that identity. Some of these are as follows:
Kurds were numerous. They were concentrated in a particular geography. This geography was their historical homeland. They had existed in the Ottoman Empire relatively on the periphery. They had become Muslim much earlier than the Turkophones. They had not forgotten their language. The topography of the geography they inhabited partly isolated them.
Apart from this, because they were targeted by the Şark Islahat Planı and subsequent rigid state practices, they inevitably placed distance between themselves and the new state. Furthermore, the fact that progressive Turkophone circles also adopted the dominant state discourse and humiliated Kurds with national consciousness caused the Kurds to detach from the Turkish intelligentsia.
Kurds were accepted to the extent that they became Turkified. This attitude, which broke their dignity, caused many politicians and intellectuals among them to turn toward Kurdish nationalism. Kurdish nationalism was reactive. It placed opposition to assimilation at its center. It was influenced by other anti-imperialist nationalist movements. It created a kind of Third World Nationalism. It rightly took a position against Turkish nationalism.
It developed discourses against the Turkish nationalism’s reflexes of Turkish supremacism, rejection, and assimilation. Autochthony—being native—was the most important and foregrounded point emphasized by Kurdish national identity. Against the Central Asian migration myth of Turkish nationalism, an anti-imperialist locality and resistance discourse was developed. Turkish historiography never abandoned the discourse in which it defined itself as occupying and imperialistic, and correspondingly, Kurdish identity consolidated further on the basis of new nationalism.
In other words, the reality I emphasized in previous articles emerged: Turkish nationalism gave birth to Kurdish nationalism, and Kurdish separatism was the product of the Turkish state’s rigid policies.
In today’s Turkish sociology, division has occurred. Division does not begin with territorial division. It begins as division in identity. When the answers given to the question “Who am I?” form diametric contrasts, identity-based division reaches its final stage. It is not only “We are different.” The final stage is “We are your opposite.” Kurdish nationalism is the ideological and identity-based expression of the Kurds’ separation from Turkishness.
Turkey’s sociology is not a society. It does not meet the conditions of being a society by the criteria of sociology as a science. Kurds have broken away from this society in terms of identity. And moreover, this was not a choice. The Turkish national identity, with its anti-Kurd and anti-Kurdishness position, programmed this separation. What is even more interesting is that there is also no uniform sociological unity among Turkophones. This is a phenomenon that emerged more in the 21st century.
I have mentioned this sociological defragmentation many times in my writings. Defragmentation can be translated as splitting into parts. The Turkish collective—in addition to the Kurds—does not meet the criteria of being a society in sociological terms. Polarization is the key concept of this process. The Turkish collective is polarized to the extreme. Regarding the direction to which the future should proceed, the poles have very different imaginations and goals. Moreover, each pole calculates eliminating the others by seizing the state.
But it must be admitted that all these Turkophone collective parts unite when it comes to the Kurds. Although different Kurdish policies—due to strategic reasons, not principled ones!—may exist, their common point is the desire for Kurds to melt within Turkey, for their identity-based differences to be trimmed down and ultimately end. Turkophones, despite their ideological differences, perceive the Kurdish process of national awakening as a threat.
I am referring, of course, to the thinking, literate segment of the collective.
For ordinary citizens, the situation is even graver. The average Turkophone cannot understand the concerns, longings, and demands of the Kurds. They have been indoctrinated so as to conceive Kurdish separatism as arbitrary separatism, and they cannot escape the effects of this brainwashing. The state-produced collective irrational fears—the Kurds do not exist, and if they do, they are a threat; the state belongs to all of us, and Kurds are demanding extra rights; foreign powers want to divide the country by using the Kurds—constitute the most important constants of the average Turkophone’s mental map.
This situation makes Kurdish politics even more unchanging and equips it with dangerous mines. Even well-intentioned reforms are full of dangers for those who intend to undertake them.
