Neo-Ottomanism as an Alternative Narrative of National Identity

Abstract

Building on the theoretical basis for dealing with emotions, politics and symbols together, this chapter takes a historical perspective on Neo-Ottomanist narratives. Drawing on its historical manifestations in modern Turkey, it suggests that the current wave of Neo-Ottomanism is a new and alternative national narrative to the Republican one. It reveals the implications of how Neo-Ottomanism characterized the spirit of the country in the 2000s, not only for the elite, but for much of Turkish society. It thus paves the way for a discussion of the emotional motives behind Neo-Ottomanism.

To understand the narrative of Neo-Ottomanism in Turkish politics and the symbols that accompany and give substance to it, one must first trace its history. This involves considering more closely from the outset the implications of the narrative of Ottomanism and Neo-Ottomanism, which spans nearly a century. While this study focuses on the symbolic manifestations of Neo-Ottomanism in the 2000s, the political narrative is clearly not specific to the period of AKP rule; Neo-Ottomanism has circulated throughout the history of the Republic of Turkey at different moments and through different political actors. What, then, makes the AKP period particularly notable within the context of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative? The answer lies in the transformation, by various symbolic means, of this narrative of a glorious past into the constituent of an alternative national identity, one which has come to dominate both the political and social fields.

This chapter proposes archaeology of the narrative of Ottomanism and Neo-Ottomanism, exploring the particular moments, frames of meaning and motives of its deployment. I will look at how the appearance of this narrative in the 2000s differs from past uses, and explore the political and social manifestations of these distinctions. To what kind of symbolic universe does contemporary Neo-Ottomanism correspond, for the political field and the people? In which aspects of daily life, through what forms, do we encounter Neo-Ottomanism? Which emotions does it call up? Which emotions does it invest in? These questions will help us to look more closely at Neo-Ottomanism’s actual symbolic sites, and thereby enable a reading of symbolic politics focused on emotions—something seldom discussed in Turkey.

Turning, then, to the historical exploits of Neo-Ottomanism, let us begin by noting that in its uses as a political narrative, it proceeds along two main axes: foreign policy and national identity. However politically disjointed these axes may appear, in the coming pages it will become clear just how symbiotic their relationship is. In this chapter, I will examine how the narrative of Neo-Ottomanism has been framed and deployed throughout Turkish history in terms of both foreign policy and national identity. The overall aim of this chapter is to understand the role that this narrative plays in attempts to construct and reconstruct national identity.

3.1 The Birth of the Ottomanist Narrative as a Governmental Strategy

While the concept of Ottomanism (the meanings it contains and those attributed to it) has undergone dramatic shifts throughout Turkish history, it initially emerged in the nineteenth century—during the Ottoman state’s decline. Historians hold that this narrative was framed and put into circulation by ruling elites at the time as a constitutionalist project of equal citizenship, a means of keeping the Ottoman Empire alive during a period of dissolution. Between the Tanzimat-era reforms (1839–1876) and the First World War, Ottomanism emerged as a strategic political narrative that aimed to unite imperial subjects with varied religious and ethnic affiliations through a kind of shared or supra-identity (Çetinsaya, 2013, 361). Throughout the 1800s, and while the empire was facing nationalist and separatist movements in the Balkans, a group of Ottoman-Turkish intellectuals, later known as the Young Ottomans, led efforts to create a new shared narrative of identity for Ottoman subjects, with the aim of preventing the dissolution of the empire. It was thought that identification with this new identity (which was meant to supersede extant religious, ethnic and local differences) would serve as an adhesive for Ottoman society and state. As such, the ‘basic effort of the Young Ottomans, was to construct a new form of social capital, one that emphasized cultural, traditional, and historical unity among members of the empire’ (Ongur, 2015, 418). The aim was to circulate a narrative of collective identity that might transcend by rendering secondary all pre-existing, heterogeneous forms of identity through creating an imagined Ottoman millet¹ based on the principle of religious, ethnic and linguistic pluralism. From this perspective, Ottomanism became a new technique of government, one that emerged in a particular historical period, touted a vision of cultural plurality and, through its aim of dissolving differences into a single melting pot, heralded a modern system of citizenship (Çolak, 2006, 590).

The Young Ottomans, a group made up mostly of bureaucrats, artists and journalists, put significant energy into spreading Ottomanism both culturally and politically. In order for this new form of identity to be embraced by both ruling elites and the people, the Young Ottomans began to underscore notions such as a shared country and a shared past—as exemplified in literature by Namık Kemal, or by the journalism of İbrahim Şinasi—capable of bringing society together. The ideals that Ottomanism contained (the idea of citizenship, freedom, equality and the imagining of a shared country) were ultimately crushed under the force of ethno-nationalist trends within the empire, and rendered useless by major territorial losses. As a result, after the First World War, the narrative largely dropped out of official circulation (Onar, 2009, 231). Yet the trend towards modernization continued through other avenues. When the ideals of Ottomanism failed to take hold, a new prominence was given to one of the empire’s other dominant elements of identity: Islam. This set in motion the search for a synthesis of Islamic identity and modernization, undertaken to prevent the collapse of the state and the people. In 1876, Sultan Abdülhamid II announced the transition to a constitutional regime of government through the creation of an assembly, espousing a vision of government deeply coloured by an Islamism that aimed to grow its imperial ambitions, particularly in Islamic territories where Muslims were the majority.² However, with the growing strength of Arab nationalism and the eventual Arab revolts of the First World War, hopes that an Islamist approach would help the government were dashed. As of the First World War, the common Ottoman identity was narrowed down within the framework of Turkism.³ Across this pursuit of a shared identity, the question of how Islam (a chief component in the identity of the state) was to be situated within the emergent modernization movements became one of the most controversial issues of the time (Koyuncu, 2014, 37–38).

The period of National Struggle (1919–1923) was set in motion by Mustafa Kemal and his associates, former Ottoman pashas. Together, they made up the cadre of the republic, adopting a more secular vision throughout Ottoman attempts at modernization (Koyuncu, 2014, 39). Compared to previous periods, the quest for a shared identity proceeded along a fairly consistent axis in this period. The War of Independence, which began in 1919, was carried out on two fundamental grounds: Islam and Ottomanism. In the period between 1919 and 1922, the word Osmanlı (Ottoman) was used with particular frequency in official speeches, correspondence and verdicts.

Consequently, it would certainly not be incorrect to say that those who organized the movement in Anatolia brought forward ‘Ottoman’ and Ottomanism (if not at the level of ideology, then at least at the level of discourse) as a form of belonging, and something in the name of which one could go to war. Yet by the end of this period, and in particular after the recapture of Izmir, the leaders of this movement, taking advantage of the amphilogism of national (millîci) terms, quickly began to distance themselves from the use of modes that called to mind religion, Islam, the sultanate, and the caliphate, and instead began to foreground rather more nationalist (ulusalcı) facets. (Çalış, 2001, 390–391)

This historical perspective argues that the role played during the war by Islam and ‘Ottoman’ (in the sense that this shared identity fuelled the War of Independence) had no place in the official history of the Republic of Turkey, which was founded after the war. In the years following the declaration of the republic, state elites set out to construct the nation-state on the bases of secularism, putting in motion acts requiring the erasure of the Ottoman-Islam tradition from history. Since a new national identity was being constructed, the Ottoman past became increasingly perceived as an ‘old civilization framed by a religious view’, or a ‘spectre preventing the maturation of Turks by suppressing their essence’. Therefore, ‘Ottoman’ became the ‘other’ of Turkish national identity (Bora, 2009, 41–42).

In accordance with the newly secular regime, a number of changes were enacted during the republic’s foundation and thereafter: the removal of the sultanate and the caliphate; the repealing of the Hıyanet-i Vataniye Kanunu (High Treason Law), and the banning of the Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Progressive Republican Party) after it was accused of clandestinely supporting the sultanate, encouraging reactionarism and, by striving for the return of Islamic law and the Caliphate, plotting to destroy the established order (Zürcher, 2013, 40–50). The abolition of the Arabic calendar and alphabet and their replacement with the Gregorian calendar and Latin alphabet prevalent in the West ensured that ties were broken, both officially and socially, with Islamic daily practices and intellectual literatures (Onar, 2009, 232). The change of alphabet was a signal that the new regime had turned its face from East to West, and that it was putting cultural and historical distance between itself and the Ottoman Empire (Çınar, 2001, 370). Particularly throughout the 1930s, the Turkish Historical Society attempted to fashion a new national mythology, discounting Ottoman history and culture in favour of a narrative of the past centred on Central Asia and Anatolia. This was done through the creation of texts such as the Turkish History Thesis and the Sun Language Theory. The founders of the new regime, motivated by westernizing and civilizing discourses, wrote off the Ottoman period as a dark age that had distanced Turks from their essence (Çolak, 2006, 590). Ottomanism was explained, and its meaning fixed, as the opposite—the adversary, even—of a new national identity designed within the framework of Western ideals. According to Etienne Copeaux, Turkish historiography ‘is constructed upon Turkism, as a national feeling founded on the rejection of Muslim, Arab-Iranian culture, and of an Ottoman culture that was too cosmopolitan in scope to be able to constitute the basis for nationalism’ (2000, 16). Consequently, the republican project, which endeavoured to align itself with popular religious values, gave rise to a tension between the cultural field (the people) and the political field (secular, pro-Western elites) (Öğün, 2013, 537).

It is perhaps as a result of this tension that the idea of Ottomanism emerged as an ever-present spectre whose birth or death was never explicitly announced by the new regime.⁴ According to Çalış, however paradoxical it may seem, the Republic of Turkey was in fact the architect of this spectre, which was caught between two spaces and thus perpetually haunting the nation. From 1918 onwards, the founders of the new regime would not allow Ottomanism to perish or to be put to rest completely. During the War of Independence, the spirit of the Ottoman was summoned to Anatolia, and after the war, in the period leading up to the abolition of the sultanate, it was pushed to the periphery and marginalized. In the revolutionary period, meanwhile, the founders repeatedly summoned the Ottoman as the antithesis, even the adversary, of the republic, thus justifying the creation and implementation of radical changes. Oppositions such as old/new, traditional/modern and Ottoman/Turk were used to provide legitimacy to the incoming regime, distinguish the new from the old and demarcate borders. Consequently, the process of constructing a new national identity progressed through the deliberate forgetting, or rendering forgotten, of a range of components of identity related to the country’s Ottoman past. This process encompassed various societal and cultural institutions—from the education system to dress codes, from sports to the alphabet and even everyday memory (Ongur, 2015, 416).

Today, particularly in conservative Islamic writing, the argument is often made that the new national identity declared alongside the republic paved the way, historically, for a deep cultural fracture. From this perspective, the 1920s saw a rupture with the past. The trauma that this rupture created in the society still manifests today, the literature underscores, in various social and political instantiations. A distinct line is thus drawn between the modernization drives of the Ottoman period and those that began with the declaration of the republican regime. For instance, Murat Belge claims that there are clear differences between republican reformism and that of the Ottoman period. He suggests that while the aim of the Ottoman period was the establishment of the new, the republican period went further, systematically doing away with a great many things coded as ‘old’ and ‘useless’. It is at this critical point that he locates the radicalism of the republic, and it is precisely this radicalism that he sees as the cause of the cultural fracture (2013, 98). Today, too, much of the discussion around Neo-Ottomanism centres on a ‘return of the repressed’, a consequence of the republican regime having presented a clear break with its Ottoman and Islamic past.

3.2 The Spectre Haunting the Republic

Fundamentally, Ottomanism has never been a structured, conceptual, theoretically consistent and complete line of thought (Ongur, 2015, 416). Because of this, it is unable to contend with other ideologies that run counter to it, and it cannot be truly resuscitated in a manner adapted to the conditions of the republican regime. Still, throughout the early republican period, the idea of Ottomanism functioned as a port giving shelter to a generation of intellectuals from the Islamic tradition. The efforts of figures such as Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Münevver Ayaşlı, Samiha Ayverdi and Erol Güngör to lay claim to an Ottoman past allowed them to construct an Islam-heavy Ottoman narrative, and to establish Islamist identities decked in new, conservative attire. In this way, they were able to remain to some degree exempt from the state’s surveillance and suppression of groups related to Islam and Islamism (Ongur, 2015, 420).

In addition to the ideological and intellectual persistence of this generation, the Ottoman spectre also lived on, if weakly, in the political and social structure of the new regime through popular culture. Particularly with the shift to a multi-party system and the rise to power of the Democrat Party (DP), the recent past, which had been suppressed for nearly twenty-five years, re-emerged. It is not possible to understand the impetus behind this invocation of the past without first touching on the DP’s role on Turkey’s political stage. With the slogan ‘Enough! The People Have a Say!’ the DP came first in the 1950 elections, securing 55.2% of the vote and overturning the single-party rule that had been in place since 1923. The DP’s campaign implied that the Islamic conservative reaction to the republican revolution came fundamentally from the people. Through its slogan, the supposed tension between secularist-authoritarian powers and the people first found its verbal expression in party politics. After assuming power on the back of this populist slogan, the party set about building an alternative conception and discourse of national identity that opposed the republican definition of it (Mert, 2013, 315). Consequently, there were clear efforts throughout this period to revive both Islamic traditions and the Ottoman spirit of the recent past. For instance, history books began to devote more space to the Ottoman Empire and its political and social systems, and portraits of Ottoman sultans by leading figures in Ottoman art were included in La Turquie Kémaliste, a journal that since the early 1930s had been seeking to prove Turkey’s civilized nature to Western countries (Çolak, 2006, 591). Although the DP did not directly serve the goal of eroding the secular state structure, it nevertheless—through institutional and cultural initiatives—aimed at keeping alive, keeping in memory and normalizing Islamic and Ottoman social traditions, as well as circulating these traditions as part of a reconstructed national identity. Their related educational initiatives included the opening of İmam Hatip schools, the establishment of a faculty of theology at Ankara University and the introduction of optional religious lessons into the primary school curriculum, as well as the general encouragement of radio programs with religious content, and the prioritization of Islamic-Ottoman thought through conferences and the work of leading intellectual figures including Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Sezai Karakoç, Münevver Ayaşlı, Nurettin Topçu and Cemil Meriç (Ongur, 2015, 420). In this period, the Islamic call to prayer began once again to sound out in its original form, and an intellectual generation with a persistent claim to the Islamic-Ottoman past strengthened its presence in the intellectual and cultural domains through publications like Selamet magazine and other Islamic journals (Subaşı, 2005, 226–227). Necessarily silent throughout the single-party period, publications representing Islamist thought started to appear in the late 1940s and increased during the 1950s. In short, the era of the DP can be considered a period of intellectual ferment for all branches of the Turkish right, particularly Islamism (Bora & Ünüvar, 2015, 159).

Critiques of the single-party period by intellectuals with Islamic-Ottoman views generally stemmed from four points. Foremost was a focus on the enforced discontinuity and rupture between the Ottoman and republican periods of Turkish history. Examples of this line of criticism include Sezai Karakoç’s emphasis on the need for a structure of history that assumes continuity, Peyami Safa’s characterization of a nation that has departed from historical continuity as ‘schizophrenic’ and Necip Fazıl Kısakürek’s identification of the Tanzimat reforms, the constitutional period and the republic as the three reasons for Turkey’s historical decline. Another critique held that the relation republican elites envisioned with the West or Westernization and their perception of modernity were interruptions in the history of Turkey, and resulted in a decline in power. For instance, for Kemal Tahir, the Ottoman Empire’s dependency on the West had brought about its imprisonment, while for Nurettin Topçu neither distance from religion nor an embrace of Westernization would heal the wounds of history; instead consciousness of a shared nation and history would bind Turkish citizens tightly to one another. As conservative Islamic intellectuals saw it, far from providing a remedy for the wounds of Ottoman-Turkish history, Westernization was their very cause (Ongur, 2015, 421).

Fundamentally, intellectuals in this tradition distinguished themselves from their antecedents in the Ottoman period through their adoption of Turkishness as an identity. They also distinguished themselves from the defenders of the official ideology through their recognition and adoption of the cultural roots of Turkishness (particularly Islam) in the Ottoman period. This perspective was crystallized in Kısakürek’s saying, ‘For us, a Turk is a Turk when a Muslim’. The final key component that characterized the ideas of this generation of intellectuals was the longing to return to an Istanbul-centric Turkey. They objected to the new official ideology that depicted the administration of Ankara and the government of Istanbul as entirely opposite. Undergirding this objection was the idea that, at the symbolic levels, the neglect of Ankara as the seat of power discounts both the victory of the Ottomans against the Byzantine Empire (with Fatih Sultan Mehmed’s conquest of Istanbul in 1453), and the victory of Islam over Christianity. For instance, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı underscored the enormous importance of the conquest in terms of the culture and history of Turkey, stating that even if Turks never achieved another success like it, this victory alone would be sufficient as a source of honour and pride (Ongur, 2015, 422). Each of these critical tropes put forth by Islamic conservative thinkers during the DP period would eventually constitute the core of a Neo-Ottomanist narrative that would be extensively incorporated into political discourse in Turkey in the years to come.

As is well known, the rule of the Democrat Party came to an end with the military coup of 27 May 1960 and the execution of party leader Adnan Menderes. It would not be inaccurate to say that for the political right this era was characterized by an emotional climate of relative confidence, followed by disappointment and fear upon Menderes’s execution. During this period, the emotional heritage engendered by the recalling and remembering of the Ottoman past persisted in subsequent centre-right parties.⁵ After the coup in 1960, with the adoption of an Ottomanist discourse by centre-right parties, the idea took hold that the right-wing political position—which would fight against an ascendant left-communist wave in the 1960s—could only gain strength by resuscitating the Ottoman-Islam past and its spirit, as well as the emotions accompanying them. Throughout the 1960s, institutions such as the Associations of the Struggle Against Communism, the Association of National Turkish Students, the Association of Struggle, and the Free Thought Club, as well as newspapers and journals including Milli Düşünce, Milli Gençlik, Mücadele, Yeniden Milli Mücadele, Diriliş and Büyük Doğu effectively adopted Ottoman-Islamic thought (Ongur, 2015, 421–422). In the two decades following 1960, right-wing political parties and the army embraced the Ottoman-Islamic past as a means of dealing with communism, and developed relations with political Islam. In the years between 1971 and 1980 in particular, the military sought to find common ground with the ‘old enemy’ against the newly emerging enemy, communism. This tendency was characterized by the idea of a ‘return to Turkish national culture’ seen as the result of a synthesis between Islam and the Turkish past. Copeaux notes that this vision—known as the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, which grew into a semi-official ideology in Turkey after 1980 (2000, 9)—was not limited to any specific political group, and, for this reason, presents analytical challenges (2000, 56).

The maturation of the notion of a Turkish-Islamic synthesis, which was strategically put forward in an effort to return Islam to its place within the historical narrative, made it possible for elites who had adopted an Islamist political line, and who were able to organize by the 1960s, to regroup politically and to begin asserting their presence, coming together as the National Party of Order (Milli Nizam Partisi, or MNP) (Türk, 2014, 162). Those who adopted this line, the basic political aim of which was to re-Islamify Turkish history, continued to make use of the imagination and imagery of the Ottoman Empire for Islamist aims. In this tradition, which in Turkish political history is known as the National Vision Movement, national-ness (millilik) was emphasized in contrast to the non-national-ness and Western mimicry that allegedly characterized other political ideologies. As such, this descriptor contains not worldly or national (ulusal), but religious and pan-Islamist (ümmetçi) meanings (Çakır, 2005, 544). The leader of the movement, Necmettin Erbakan, noted: ‘National Vision is four things of our people: their faith, their history, their identity, and themselves’. To him, the victory of Malazgirt, the conquest of Istanbul and the Independence War were won through the National Vision. Yet with republican modernization, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) made its presence known as the ‘leader of a movement rotting the spiritual roots of the people’. Erbakan would later say of secularism that it ‘is a word that doesn’t exist in our people’s world of meaning, and has for years been deployed in our country as the enemy of Islam’ (Türk, 2014, 165–195). When viewed from this perspective, it is evident that the National Vision Movement embraced the Ottoman Empire and Ottomanism in favour of Islam, and thus adopted an ideology that was openly at odds with the official one.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the republic’s strict narrative of national identity was eroded somewhat, both by intellectuals who persistently invoked an Ottoman-Islamic past and by criticism of an Islamist tradition that had for the first time found a space for expression in the political domain. These critiques were of the utmost importance in terms of (a) alternative constructions of national identity, which were put forward in the years that followed and found a counterpart in the political and social field, and (b) the Neo-Ottomanist narrative that became a component of political jargon. In short, the thirty years between the 1950s and the 1980s laid the groundwork for the Turkish-Islamic synthesis by making religion a basic part of Turkish national identity and thereby attempting to restore the place of Islam within historical discourse (Copeaux, 2000, 9).

3.3 The Neo-Ottomanist Narrative as a Remedy for a Crisis of Identity: The 1980s

In the 1980s, it became possible to speak of Ottomanism (a spectre constantly summoned for rather more pragmatic and emotional motives) as a powerful political narrative in its own right, and to put it forward as a key component of political jargon. One of the most important figures here was Turgut Özal, who would prove effective in enabling the return of the repressed—the Ottoman—in the political domain (Çalış, 2001, 394). Throughout his terms as prime minister (1983–1989) and president (1989–1993), Özal, the founder of the Homeland Party, made use of the narrative of an Ottomanist past characterized by power and magnificence as a tool for reinvigorating collective memory and collective self-confidence after the 1980 military coup.

Neo-Ottomanism circulated at this time as a component of a new national identity interlinked with a new vision for foreign policy and the idea of a Turkish-Islamic synthesis. During the 1980s, Turkey was reshaped in many ways both domestically and in its foreign relations. Among the factors that point to this decade as a novel period in political and social history are a number of developments specific to internal politics: the adoption of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis as an official ideology following the military coup of 12 September 1980; the related rise of Islamist politics; and the emergence of a new conservative bourgeoisie with economic and political transformations in Anatolia. Domestically, the post-coup government and Özal’s rise to power, together with great transformations tied to regional and international developments, paved the way for Neo-Ottomanist discourses and pursuits to emerge and become matters of discussion (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 39). The need for restoration necessitated reconciliation: that of Western discourses and policies with those of Islam, of progress with conservatism, of the free market with the state, and, ultimately, of the Republic of Turkey with its Ottoman past (Ongur, 2015, 423). Consequently, Neo-Ottomanist narratives in the 1980s were a pragmatic, with ill-defined borders, yet unifying motif that resulted from the dialectical interaction of domestic and external dynamics, and brought about national belonging of a sort, as well as creating an atmosphere of self-assurance.

In the period following the military coup, Turkey was mired in a profound crisis of national identity. Internal conditions made it necessary for the country to define itself anew. The rise of political Islam and the Kurdish liberation movement were critical developments that prompted a re-evaluation and interrogation of forms of belonging at the collective level. The rediscovery of various pasts that had been hitherto marginalized in the official narrative of history was conducive to the emergence of alternative forms of social memory and their articulation within political discourse. Kemalist attempts at modernization through disregarding and denying diverse histories in favour of a simplistic narrative of national identity had been unsuccessful. This homogenizing strategy had created feelings of neglect and marginalization, and thus, after the Kemalist era people were eager to reclaim their distinct identities, leading to a resurgence of pluralism in domestic politics (Çolak, 2006, 589). Two tendencies ran parallel: this demand for a renewed pluralism, and calls for a return to the Ottoman model (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 37). According to Özal, because the country’s ethnic and religious diversity were not sufficiently attended to in the Republic of Turkey’s official definition of national identity, a social problem of belonging emerged. Consequently, the pursuit of a supra-identity in which different identities might find expression led Özal to follow a domestic path that culminated, once again, in Ottomanism (Çalış, 2001, 397). In this context, it seems reasonable to conclude that during the Özal period, Neo-Ottomanism was formulated on a selective reading that embraced Ottoman practices of government based on pluralism and tolerance (Yavuz, 2020, 110).

Viewed this way, the Özal period can be considered one in which Ottoman heritage, for the first time, was given significant space: there was space for the awakening of collective memory, for the redefinition of national identity and for the ‘reconstruction of the present’ (Onar, 2009, 233). The Ottoman past was remembered through the establishment of a grand narrative about the shared history of a people. Özal, who came to the political stage as a civilian leader following the strict post-coup military government, functioned—both through his gentle and pragmatic image and through his recalling of the grand Ottoman past—as a symbolic figure of relief for the people. More importantly, he represented the promise of a grand future. The narrative of Neo-Ottomanism found a new voice during the Özal period, particularly within the Ankara-based right-wing journal Türkiye Günlüğü. Journalists including Cengiz Çandar and Nur Vergin, through their suggestions that the country needed to ‘make peace with its history, have recourse to what’s real, and to not fear itself’, attempted to substantiate the narrative of Neo-Ottomanism. Affirming the Ottoman Empire as a pluralist order based on tolerance, they criticized Kemalism, which they thought had had its day and was due a transformation (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 38–40).

Unsurprisingly, Islamist elites played an effective role in the configuration of a new narrative of national identity, one that embraced the Ottoman past, during the Özal period. The rise of this group to a position where they could define a discursive vision within Turkish politics happened in tandem with their gradual inclusion in the upper ranks of the economy, the cultural sector and the bureaucracy. They now had their own capital and publications, and through these they broadcast their critique of Kemalist ideology. Just how much space was opened up for Islamist elites in the post-coup period can be seen by comparing the power of Islamists in the media before and after 1980. While Islamist journals and newspapers accounted for 7% of the market share prior to the 1980s, by 1996 this proportion had jumped to 47%. Additionally, during this time, academics with traditional Islamist backgrounds began to settle into universities across Anatolia. Through an interrogation of the state, society, identity and history by Islamist intellectuals such as İsmet Özel and Ali Bulaç, and journalists including Fehmi Koru and Abdurrahman Dilipak, the symbolic capital that enabled the politicization of Islamist identity became more prominent (Yavuz, 1998, 31–34). Ultimately, a Neo-Ottomanist narrative found appropriate conditions for a discursive expansion in domestic politics under Özal, through right-wing politics more generally and in Islamist political factions specifically.

Still, while the Neo-Ottomanist narrative of the time was one internally laden with promise and the hope of unification, it made its presence felt internationally with an expansionist political vision. Foreign policy developments were certainly significant here. Since the 1980s, an international process that paved the way for Turkey’s joining of the neoliberal global order, the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the flaring up of ongoing ethnic conflicts created the perception that important geopolitical opportunities were emerging for Turkey. These developments strengthened approaches that defined, criticized and re-evaluated the extant axes of Turkish foreign policy (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 38). In particular, in criticizing both how the National Pact was interpreted and the principle of ‘peace at home, peace in the world’, right-wing elites called for the abandonment of tendencies such as status quoism and Westernism. They argued that Turkey should realize its own power and make use of its international potential, and that the way out of the historical consciousness that is squeezed between Edirne and Van lies in the rediscovery of the Ottoman heritage (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 38). After all, from the late 1980s and early 1990s, countries that had once been a part of the Ottoman Empire were on the international agenda, which inevitably led to a resurgence of remembering the Ottoman past (Çalış, 2001, 400). For example, in an interview with the journal Türkiye Günlüğü, Özal emphasized that Turkey was the heir to the imperial civilization of the Middle East and the Balkans, and that the ‘gates of necessity’ standing before the country had been opened. He claimed that the twenty-first century was set to be the century of the Turk, suggesting that such an opportunity came about only once every 400 years and that therefore Turkey must create a sphere of influence in the region spanning from the Balkans to Northern Iraq and Syria, even as far the Adriatic (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 38). The foreign-policy-centred narrative of Neo-Ottomanism constructed in the Özal period was thus established with reference to an expansionist desire connected with the Ottoman imperial past.

This early Neo-Ottomanist narrative prioritized by Özal receded with his sudden death in 1993. In the period that followed, while the incendiary nature of the Kurdish issue dominated an agenda focused on armed solutions, an emphasis on secular politics again took root in political discourse (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 39). The core reason why the Özal period was significant in terms of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative was its resuscitation of an image of the past that, in eighty years of state discourse, was sensed but could not find a place for itself, was known but not voiced, which existed but was concealed (Çalış, 2001, 403). This imagining brought with it a change of sorts in the emotional climate. From both a political and social perspective, after many painful years, not only the remembrance of an Ottoman past, but its resuscitation through an entirely fabular timbre (pluralism, imperial power and so on), created a climate of hope for both the present and the future. Even if it is difficult to identify any consequential effect on foreign policy, the Neo-Ottomanist narrative, expressed for the first time in the Özal period, was unique and pioneering in terms of how it sparked a reckoning with the republic. This reckoning was taking place for the first time in the political arena, and at the state level.

3.4 The Auspicious Alliance of Turkishness and Islam: The Neo-Ottomanist Wave of the 1990s

There was general interest in the domestic politics of the post-Özal period in Neo-Ottomanism as a formula for cultural pluralism. This narrative gradually gained power; its construction of a grand past, which for many years had seemed distant and lost, was, by the 1980s, able to be articulated for the first time; it was put forth as a component of national identity, something desirable. In the 1990s, Islamist elites were particularly successful in linking the narrative of Neo-Ottomanism to Islam. When the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP), under Erbakan, the leader of the National Vision Movement, came first in the 1995 elections and subsequently established a coalition with the True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi, or DYP), Turkey had a prime minister who based his political identity on Ottoman-Islamic heritage (Çolak, 2006, 595; Yavuz, 1998, 20). Consequently, the agenda was once again marked by discussions of national identity and efforts to reconcile modern-day Turkey with the Ottoman past, as well as a desire to settle accounts with Kemalism.

Members of the RP imagined Ottomanism as a combination of Turkish and Islamic identities. In this sense, it represented a continuation of Özal’s Neo-Ottomanist vision, though in more strikingly Islamist colours (Bora, 1996, 23). To be sure, a basic motif did distinguish the Neo-Ottomanism of these Islamist elites from that of the Özal period: revanchism. From the perspective of elites, their strongly Islamist-tinted Ottoman narrative was not simply about coming to terms with the republic; it was a tool for refashioning the present and future, and one with a vindictive impulse. In order to create a legitimate basis for such revanchism, it was first necessary to gather support from the people. Throughout the second half of the 1990s, the RP’s ruling elites worked to integrate Ottoman arts, culinary practices and architectural forms into social life, particularly in large urban areas. At this time, official ceremonies started to be organized as alternatives to the secular ceremonies of the republic. In particular, attempts were made to symbolically rewrite the identity of Istanbul (in opposition to Ankara as the capital of the Republic) as the Ottoman-Islamic cradle of the Turks and, in a sense, their source of greatness and pride. This effort both implied a challenge to the Ankara-centric definition of national identity in official ideology, and marked Istanbul (conceived of as a symbol of Ottoman civilization and power) as a site representing the emergence of a new national identity. The then-mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, organized a series of activities meant to recall and conjure up the Istanbul of the Ottoman Empire. The Conquest of Istanbul was turned into a mass celebration, and activities memorializing Fatih Sultan Mehmed, the historic actor considered to have transformed Istanbul into an Islamic city, also started to draw more participants (Çolak, 2006, 595–596). Throughout Erdoğan’s mayoralty, the 29 May celebrations of the Conquest took place under the slogan ‘a reconquest’. In light of its implications, this slogan can be regarded as a proclamation, announcing that nearly eighty years of the absence and suppression of Islamic political identity had come to an end. Moreover, this ‘good news’ was marked with events intended to include not just Turkey, but all Islamic states; the 1996 ceremony accordingly featured representatives from other Muslim countries. In his opening speech, Welfare Party leader Erbakan shared with the entire Islamic world the news that, 543 years after the conquest of Istanbul, they were on the eve of a reconquest (Çınar, 2001, 382). These celebrations during the RP period served not only to exalt and recall the glorious Ottoman past, but also to render the Conquest part of an Islamist historical narrative. The Islamic aspect of the Conquest was foregrounded to the extent that during the 1996 celebrations mass prayers were held in İnönü Stadium, led by an imam (Çınar, 2001, 365–376). These celebrations, institutionalized and ritualized in domestic politics by the RP government, constituted the most powerful sign of Neo-Ottomanism in this period.

Perhaps predictably, in the RP era, a symbolic war was openly initiated between the cultural expressions of Neo-Ottomanism and republicanism. In 1996, immediately after the party formed a coalition government with the DYP, there was talk of building a large mosque in Taksim, a square widely seen as symbolic of modern Turkey. The new government also announced plans to take down the Byzantine city walls, while the serving of alcoholic drinks in the Cemal Reşit Rey concert hall was banned, and suitable spaces there were converted into prayer rooms. In the same venue, religious and local groups were added to a repertoire that previously featured only Western music (Koyuncu, 2014, 54). Far more than a desire to reckon with the Kemalist regime from an Islamist perspective, such attempts by the RP, during their brief period in power in the 1990s, can be interpreted as symptoms of a desire for revenge and redress that is all too familiar today.

Such was the domestic situation. When it came to foreign policy, the Neo-Ottomanism of the RP period bore certain resemblances to that of the Özal period, in terms of the imperial vision evoked by such slogans as ‘Leader Turkey’ or ‘Make Turkey Great Again!’. Yet its content differed from the narrative established by Özal, both in its strong emphasis on Islam and in Erbakan’s anti-Western stance. Thus Erbakan, fiercely critical of Turkey’s westward turn during the Republic, promoted projects including an Islamic NATO and a United Nations of Islam, and attempted to substantiate his foreign-policy vision by strengthening ties with countries like Iran, Malaysia and Libya and by establishing relations of paternalistic responsibility at the discursive level with Bosnia, Chechnya and Palestine. Unlike under Özal, the Neo-Ottomanism of Erbakan’s foreign policy was a movement that was ‘not a part of a global strategy, but that attempted to resist neoliberal globalization’ (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 40–41). The ideological-intellectual background for this approach consisted of both an emphasis on Ottoman world dominance and an imperial desire to once again be the leader of Muslim countries by turning Turkey’s face eastward.

The RP period came to an end on 28 February 1997 in what became known in Turkish history as the ‘Postmodern Coup’. The coup followed a series of developments thought to pose a threat to the republican regime: Erbakan’s hosting of an iftar meal for leaders of religious orders at the prime minister’s residence, his participation in the 1997 ‘Jerusalem Night’ in Sincan, and the organization by various radical Islamist groups (Aczmendiler, Hizbullahçılar) of demonstrations and various activities that made the news.⁶ Ultimately, Erbakan was forced to resign and the party was disbanded. The Islamic conservative tradition fostered a narrative based on victimhood and the notion that the declaration of the republic had led to the silencing and suppression of their collective identity, as well as marking a break with the past. This tradition, which functionalized the Ottoman past as a lifeboat, as it were, entered a wholly new phase after the events of 1997 for the restoration of this state of mind.

3.5 Re-establishing Ottomanism as the Constituent Narrative of National Identity: The AKP Period

Having engendered a historical fracture and disjuncture within the National Vision Movement, the events of 28 February in many ways heralded a new period for Islamist elites in Turkey, and for Neo-Ottomanist pursuits and practices. A seperation had been reached between two groups within the movement, the traditionalists and the reformists. This seperation was eventually realized in 2001, when reformists established the Justice and Development Party (AKP). During the 2002 general election campaign, the party took to the political stage under the adopted label of ‘conservative democrat’, thereby rejecting Islamism, the constituent element of the party founders’ political experience. The AKP emerged from the elections as the sole power; a milestone and a sign of a new phase in Turkish politics and in the Neo-Ottomanist narrative that would prove long-lasting. Since 2002, Turkish society has been involved in an experiment that, with increasing intensity, not only reminds it of its Ottoman past but also invites deep emotional investment in an Ottoman narrative. This experiment has seeped into every domain of life—from everyday practices to the media, from political discourse to policies. This period is characterized by an ethos that we might call ‘banal Ottomanism’ (Ongur, 2015, 417). Building on Michael Billig’s work (1995), which defined banal nationalism as a form of nationalism that draws its strength and longevity from its effective visibility and reproducibility in social life, it seems useful to conceptualize the Neo-Ottomanist narrative of the AKP period as banal Ottomanism in light of its manifestations in the daily life. Here, the symbolic sites of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative are continuously reproduced through the participation and partnership of the people; they are normalized and repeated to the point where they have become banal yet also sanctified as a national habitus.

It is not surprising that the political discourse of the AKP is characterized by acts of remembering and evoking the Ottoman past, central as such elements are to this discourse. As I have noted, Neo-Ottomanism was present in various levels of centre-right political discourse in Turkey well before AKP rule. It is fairly unremarkable that the AKP adopted a domestic and foreign-policy position and discourse centred on the Ottoman Empire, both because of the continuity and analogous relationship the party established between itself and the Menderes and Özal governments, and because a large number of the party’s cadre came from the National Vision tradition and an Islamist background (Ongur, 2015, 424). What is noteworthy is how much progress the AKP—relative to its predecessors—made at the symbolic and social level in remembering and recalling the country’s Ottoman past. The primary reason for the party’s political success is no doubt economic; additionally, it has held political power for quite some time. Yet the Neo-Ottomanist narrative resonated strongly with the society. It also seems important to acknowledge that the narrative met the emotional needs of another segment of Turkish society; people who were not part of the Islamist conservative base but who found a place for themselves within the narrative embraced it as well.

In the literature on the AKP and its Neo-Ottomanist tendencies, one finds an overwhelming focus on foreign-policy dimensions. Yet, in my view, what differentiates the AKP period from those preceding it is the extraordinary importance given to the social dimension of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative. Unlike before, this narrative is not limited to amphibious political discourses and foreign-policy moves; it presents something earthly, as it were, to society. It sets out to correct what is framed as the ‘mistake’ of forgetting Turkey’s ‘glorious history’ (Ongur, 2015, 425).

Here, before considering the various symbolic means through which the Neo-Ottomanism of Turkey in the 2000s was established, it is necessary to dwell for a moment on how this narrative developed and spread in the context of foreign policy. Since foreign policy in the AKP period is an arena in which ideological struggles that continuously emphasize the Ottoman heritage of Turkey throughout its history and efforts to recall the Ottoman past and, thereby, to construct a new national identity take shape in a powerful way. Conducting a political and sociological analysis of the AKP’s Neo-Ottomanism involves looking at how this discourse has impacted international relations. For:

[…] foreign policy is not simply a field of diplomatic relations with its own codes and rules. At the same time, it comprises a social process, the contours of which are determined by a form of national identity that certain agents strive to make dominate in a country. What’s more, this identity, which at base marks what is beyond or outside it, is filled with particular content. (Saraçoğlu, 2013, 56)

The AKP’s foreign-policy views were articulated by Ahmet Davutoğlu, one of the party’s founders, long-time advisor to the prime minister, the country’s minister of foreign affairs between 2009 and 2014, and the prime minister between 2014 and 2016. Davutoğlu’s term in the ministry was also a period in which the symbolic manifestations of Neo-Ottomanism were actively aired and found a receptive audience in Turkey. Davutoğlu’s ideas, which would mature in the 2000s, were shaped within the political/intellectual environment of the aforementioned journal Türkiye Günlüğü, a platform for Neo-Ottomanist debates in the 1990s. One of the main ways in which Davutoğlu constructed ‘the Ottoman’ within a narrative framework is clearly seen in his 2001 book, Strategic Depth (Stratejik Derinlik). There, Davutoğlu criticizes the insufficient theorizing of Neo-Ottomanism in the 1990s, stating that such debates remained at the journalistic level and failed to reach the society (Davutoğlu, 2005, 90). He describes Ottoman heritage as the most genuine identity of Turkish society, its unchanging essence or core. This core, notes Saraçoğlu, is a ‘potential power that distinguishes the society of Turkey from other nations, that brings it to an exceptional position on the stage of history, and that rescues it from ordinariness’ (2013, 59). And yet, according to Davutoğlu, this potential went untapped for years due to an understanding of foreign policy based on Kemalist principles. Davutoğlu criticizes Turkey’s traditional foreign-policy approach for lacking initiative and supporting the status quo; for being passive, conflict-producing and security-focused. He proposes a clear break with the previous period (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 43), and holds that a new foreign-policy vision would have to embrace the historical heritage of the Ottoman era. Further, Turkey would have to play an active role in regions once within Ottoman borders, thus becoming a regional power. Davutoğlu objects to the nation standing on the sidelines, particularly regarding developments in the Middle East (Özcan, 2010, 79–82). He underlines that Turkey can no longer simply be a passive country, a bridge between civilizations, but must become an active actor in the region, the natural successor of an Islamic civilization formerly occupied by the Ottomans (Saraçoğlu, 2013, 63).

Davutoğlu’s writing on Turkey’s foreign policy in the 2000s implicitly adopts a Neo-Ottomanist vision, revising and attempting to situate it within a conceptual framework in order to rescue Neo-Ottomanism from its ideologically incoherent character in previous periods (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 43). His direct references to a Neo-Ottomanist narrative are ultimately motivated by its expansionist associations (Saraçoğlu, 2013, 61). The fundamental point of departure for this narrative, as before, is a critique of Kemalism. Davutoğlu’s new foreign-policy vision contains three core critiques: ‘To him, the republican project alienates its own society from its history (its Ottoman past) through the education system, from its geography through foreign policy (particularly the Middle East region and the Balkans), and from its religion and culture through ideology’ (Uzgel & Yaramış, 2010, 42).

Throughout Strategic Depth, the Ottoman past—suppressed since the establishment of the republican regime—is depicted as a hidden jewel, waiting to be strategically valued. The idea of Ottomanism Davutoğlu emphasizes is not only a vision of foreign policy, but also a draft of the design for an ideal society. As Saraçoğlu shows, Davutoğlu’s book makes the case for the ‘need of a “human element”, a society that will adopt and reflect it in its structure, if a foreign policy in line with the Ottoman past is to come to fruition’ (Saraçoğlu, 2013, 60). Indeed, the text reveals the ideological sources behind Neo-Ottomanism’s current social visibility and prominence. What distinguishes the Neo-Ottomanism of the AKP from that of its predecessors is its successful implementation of this much-needed ‘human element’.

Saraçoğlu argues that through its emphasis on Neo-Ottomanism, AKP foreign policy presents the conceptual basis and symbolic components for a new understanding of nationalism (2013, 52). He goes on to say that this wave, characterized as Islamic conservative nationalism, is in the process of becoming the official ideology of Turkey. Jenny White, meanwhile, terms this wave ‘Muslim nationalism’ and notes that its character rests on the successes of the Ottoman Empire. In this sense, she argues that it constitutes a break with the Kemalist state project (2013, 24). The nationalism of the AKP, in a manner distinct from its various Kemalist iterations or from the nationalism represented by the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), gives substance to the concept of a people or nation (millet) with shared Islamic-cultural elements and an emphasis on the Ottoman past. From this perspective, it is clear that, in the way millet is imagined in official discourse, the emphasis on associations with ‘Turkishness’ has dramatically decreased in favour of associations with the Sunni Islam of the Ottoman Empire.

In line with such a definition of the nation, another core element of nationalism, the historical national interest, is defined as regaining the political might of the Ottoman Empire, which is thought to represent the period of the nation’s rise to prominence, and the recently circulated goal of a ‘Greater Turkey’ is shaped by references to an idealized Ottoman period. (Saraçoğlu, 2013, 55)

The attempt to make the Ottoman Empire and its power a component of a foundational national identity both remakes the identity of the Republic of Turkey in the context of a new official ideology, and signals the establishment of a new social hegemony. References to shared cultural values tied to Sunni Islam and to an Ottoman historical legacy make up this national identity (Saraçoğlu, 2013, 55). However much the contents of this ‘new’ identity call to mind the Turkish-Islamic synthesis in its post-1980 form, there is a basic difference between them. As the foundations of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, Turkishness and Muslimness existed in an equal relationship, allowing no sort of hierarchy. The national identity that the AKP has attempted to construct, meanwhile, rests on Islam and Muslimness as its core components, and these elements do not necessarily need synthesis with the idea of Turkishness (Saraçoğlu & Demirkol, 2015, 307). Similarly, one is struck by a fundamental difference between AKP nationalism and the understanding of nationalism adopted by the National Vision tradition: although both political positions operated on the same level in terms of how they embrace the Ottoman past and Islam as chief elements of national identity, the nationalism of the AKP departs from the nationalism of the Islamic political tradition (and the anti-capitalist discourse adopted by Erbakan) through its engagement in neoliberal capitalist developments.

Ümit Kıvanç, analyzing the framework of meaning and mood upon which Davutoğlu’s book is based, describes the work (in a way that both evokes and goes beyond Saraçoğlu’s argument) as an ‘Islam-Turk synthesis’, ‘rooted in Islam, with the emphasis on Turk withdrawn’, as distinct from ‘the Turkish right’s concept of Ottoman that we’re accustomed to’. Furthermore, according to Kıvanç, this amalgamation cannot be considered a synthesis, for Muslimness is conceived of as an essence, a fundamental material that lends it its distinct character, whereas what is Turkish appears like a ‘shell’ upon this amalgamation, a ‘protective armour’ (2015, 24–78). For Kıvanç, one of the key ideas in Davutoğlu’s book is ‘reconstructing social psychology through self-confidence’. At the same time, this idea also implies that something in the past has disappeared:

You fabricate a mask for yourself from your past, you carve out something to wear from your geography, and when you wear these and head out into the neighbourhood, everyone is afraid of you. Yes, I perhaps caricatured this too much, but the orientation is correct. Just this emphasis is off: it’s not the fear of others, it’s basically your feeling of what you are capable of. (Kıvanç, 2015, 82)

Kıvanç’s diagnosis constitutes the basic point of departure for this book, which argues that, at its core, the Neo-Ottomanist narrative today corresponds to the particular emotional needs of the Turkish society, to their desire to see themselves as ‘powerful subjects’. It suggests that this desire—which has in fact been the emotional experience of the Turkish right, and in particular of Islamic conservative elites, throughout the history of the republic—was first forcefully articulated, then transmitted to the masses as heritage and, more importantly, today has metamorphosed. This book discusses how the collective identity of the AKP, which rests on a rigid narrative of aggrievement (Aydın & Taşkın, 2015, 18) is characterized by feelings of victoriousness and narcissism.

3.6 The Spectre in Corporal Form in the AKP Period: Banal Ottomanism

Narratives of national history are constructed through the frequent use of historical symbols, which create a sense of shared continuity, memory and destiny among members of a nation, and thus create national identity (Koyuncu, 2014, 79). Consequently, in no historical period have the elements of national identity that define a nation been stable or unchanging in character; rather, as instruments of hegemonic struggles situated in different political contexts. Copeaux argues that the narrative of national history in Turkey represents a conflict between Kemalism, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis and Islamism, and is used as a symbolic weapon in the struggle to seize political and social control. According to him, behind contemporary conflicts and tensions lie not so much economic and strategic factors, but desires related to issues of identity. In other words, such tensions rest more on feeling than on thought (2000, 10–11).

Since 2002 (and with particular intensity since 2009), the AKP’s domestic and foreign policies, both of which are characterized by the framing and circulation of a Neo-Ottomanist narrative, have fundamentally entrenched the fiction—and feeling—of a new narrative of national history and national identity. It is now clear that this narrative has become hegemonic to a very effective degree, owing to the symbols that have circulated in the social field. This new ethos could be termed ‘banal Ottomanism’, inspired by Michael Billig’s conceptual work on banal nationalism. Banal Ottomanism has seeped into the capillaries of institutions and into political, cultural and social life: from language to architecture, from education to the media, from national rituals to the practices of everyday life. For nearly a century, an Ottoman spectre—at times rendered invisible in Turkish politics, at times surfacing—has haunted political terminology, the gaunt agent of amphibious political discourses. Now, we are witnessing for the first time that it has taken corporeal form; it has been revived as a hale and hearty element of national identity of Turkey.

One characteristic that makes the AKP period notable in the context of the Neo-Ottomanist narrative is its success in calling to mind the Ottoman past primarily through political discourse and the imagery of its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. When we look at the lexical repertoire that dominates contemporary political language, we often encounter such concepts as ancestry, civilization, conquest, resurgence, reascension, restoration and the ‘new Turkey’, all of which recall ‘the Ottoman’ and (to put it lightly) contain a critique of the republican regime. In particular, the concept of a ‘new Turkey’ occupies a central place in a discourse tied to the critique of the republican regime through its deeply negative emphasis on the old, and, thereby, to praise of the Ottoman period. ‘New Turkey’ ‘desires to produce anew the absolute other of modernity (the Ottoman) and a past era of bliss; it constructs a fantasy of a sociality meant to recall an ideal, distant past’ (Açıkel, 2012, 14). Açıkel’s emphasis here on novelty, while pointing to the AKP’s tendency to see itself as the powerful subject of history, also refers to a historiography that aims to underscore the insignificance and vacuousness of the republican period. In this sense, he calls attention to the discourse of ‘new Turkey’ as both a historiography related to the past and an attempt at historical construction related to the significance of contemporary practices. He diagnoses the basic characteristic of these initiatives as the need for redress and the expectation of a restoration of honour grounded in the past. He suggests that what is ‘new’ in the AKP period is ‘neither Turk-Islam ideology’s familiar melancholy for an era of bliss, nor a mood of vigorous mourning of the past, nor the precedent of unloading one’s historical disappointments onto one’s opponents’. What is new, rather, is the rise of ‘conservative Islamist social engineering’, which relies on this discursive storehouse (2012, 14–15). Indeed, under no other government that appealed to Ottomanism as a narrative of national identity was such political messaging so strongly received by the people. The AKP’s promise of a ‘new Turkey’ implies that a link (that Ottoman and Republican modernization had allegedly severed) would be re-established between society and the state, and that it would realize the dreams of a society in search of its own state. In this light, the AKP’s talk of a ‘new Turkey’ is received by the people as good news, heralding the end of a nearly two-hundred-year-long nightmare dating back to the days of Mahmud II (Açıkel, 2012, 16).

In addition to the political discourse constructed around the ‘new Turkey’, the AKP has taken steps to restore the magnificent past by reviving discussions about the Ottoman language and by establishing the language as a foundational element of national identity. Erdoğan is, perhaps, the most fundamental agent in such endeavours, as evidenced by the Ottoman terms he has favoured during the years of his party leadership, particularly in his speeches, and by his frequent and open criticisms of the republican regime’s reforms and hegemony over language. A 2012 speech Erdoğan gave at the Constitutional Symposium on Language provides a concrete example of his stance:

Operations carried out on Turkish language did away with the most important communication between our history and today, the most important bridge, which is having the same language. They cut our jugular, so to speak. This is quite important. To remove such terms as muhayyile, tasavvur, inkişaf, mücerret, müşahhas, or aklıselim because they came to Turkish from other languages, and to substitute them with other words can never, never supply the same meaning, the same sense.⁷

Erdoğan’s emphasis here on historical continuity contains a heated criticism of language policies after the declaration of the republic. The reforms, implemented during the transition to a republican regime, that modified the language (one of the main elements of national identity and culture) are presented as an instrument for separating the people from their past, even a means of destruction. Erdoğan urges redress for this historical rupture. Similarly, in a 2014 speech at the 5th Council on Religion, Erdoğan touched on the Ottoman language’s links to historical consciousness; here we see him criticizing republican language policies in an even more pointed tone:

Despite efforts to sever our ties with our books, our works of art, our letters, our archives, thank God, Turkey’s men of learning are standing up. So, here, in the five-day Council on National Education, you see that today the Ottoman language is on the agenda. There are some who are upset by the children of this country learning Ottoman. In fact, this is the Turkish that doesn’t age, you see. It’s not something foreign; through this, we will learn the truths. They ask, ‘Are we going to teach people to read gravestones?’ That’s precisely the problem. A history lies there on those gravestones, a civilization, and can there be any greater form of ignorance than for a generation to not know who lies in its own graves?!⁸

In the AKP period the desire to revive the Ottoman language was not limited to discourse. For instance, the Ministry of National Education signed an agreement in 2012 with the Hayrat Foundation, which offers free Ottoman language courses across Turkey and in a number of sites in Europe (Ongur, 2015, 426); seemingly an important step towards ensuring, through education, the central place of the Ottoman language in social and cultural life. Again, in the 19th Council on National Education, it was decided that Ottoman would be made mandatory in Anatolian Imam Hatip High Schools,⁹ and an elective course in other state schools.¹⁰

There are many other examples of actions taken to revive Ottoman heritage through the official state education institutions. An abbreviated list of examples to integrate a reconstructed national history and a new construction of national identity into formal policies via the education system includes; the presence in state schools of portraits of Ottoman monarchs remembered for their ‘successes’ (e.g. Fatih Sultan Mehmed, Abdülhamid II), alongside portraits of Mustafa Kemal; generous space afforded to Ottoman history in the official curriculum; the decision to rewrite the curriculum to teach ‘The Principles and Revolutions of Ataturk’ in a more ‘objective and realist’ fashion; and the naming of an initiative to technologically update state schools, the ‘Fatih Project’. One should note that efforts to revive symbolic representations of Ottoman-ness have taken place not just in primary and secondary schools, but also in universities. In particular, the naming of universities (Fatih Sultan Mehmed University, Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Kanuni University, Bezmialem University) opened since 2006—part of a project to instate a university in every province—not only gives a sense of the current interest in the Ottoman past; it also shows how the education system has been mobilized to render this interest an ordinary part of society (Ongur, 2015, 427).

Moreover, some of the most powerful symbolic representations of Neo-Ottomanism in the AKP era manifest spatially and architecturally. Alongside the many buildings that have been constructed or restored in a manner consonant with Ottoman-Seljuq architecture (and that have been praised on such grounds), new buildings that suffuse the spaces of everyday life are now among the chief instruments of a policy of remembering the Ottoman past. Such initiatives include the construction or restoration of mosques (Çamlıca, Mimar Sinan, Süleymaniye, Fatih and Bayezıt), as well as the restoration of old Ottoman palaces (Topkapı, Dolmabahçe, Beylerbeyi), public buildings (Çağlayan Courthouse) and museums and parks (Ongur, 2015, 426). These projects, examples of a nostalgic urban architecture, should be read as part of an attempt at the ‘restoration of a glorious past’ through contemporary cultural codes. Yet to critics, these contemporary representatives of some distant past appear ‘at best as real as an amusement park’ due to ‘their baseless historicity, collage style of architecture, construction techniques, and materials’ (Adanalı, 2015, 121). The preponderance of buildings in everyday life that have supposedly been constructed or restored based on Ottoman/Seljuq architecture offers the most concrete example of Neo-Ottomanism being translated from the political to the social field. And yet in such initiatives the narrative of Ottomanism ‘is reduced and displayed as a rootless, decorative material’ (İnal et al., 2015, 17). Experts have criticized this architectural approach accordingly:

From the sheathing of extant school buildings to the construction of new schools; from facade work on buildings on the main street of old squatter neighbourhoods to courthouses; from police stations to buildings of the office of mufti; from the meaningless gates built at the entrance of Ankara to Erdoğan’s AKSaray; from convention centres to the Istanbul International Finance Center – it’s an amorphous aesthetic, preferred for buildings and spatial interventions made across very wide spaces, described as Ottoman-Seljuq or sometimes Ottoman-Turkish architecture, yet not constituting a meaningful whole. (Adanalı, 2015, 122)

Neo-Ottomanist architecture, on display in a range of everyday spaces, demonstrates how culture has been weaponized by the AKP and lays bare the symbolic importance of space in the construction of national history and national identity. These buildings are spatial expressions of an attempt to reckon with the republic, affirming claims that architectural practices in the AKP period have revanchist motives. One of the most concrete indications of this motivation is the construction of AKSaray (architecturally one of the AKP’s largest and most controversial acts) on the lands of the Atatürk Forest Farm. Whereas the Saray (Palace) was initially used as the prime minister’s headquarters, it has since been given to the president, and while it was originally known as AKSaray, today it is referred to by the media, elites and people more broadly as the Külliye¹¹ of the Presidency or of Beştepe. Because it was constructed in a high-priority protected zone, it remains in a legal grey area, and symbolizes the ideological tension between the AKP and the party’s opponents.

The AKP offers further compelling examples of the invention of national rituals, both through their reckoning with the republic and their drive to establish a new national identity and national mood. In this sense, the Conquest Festivities stand out, both symbolically and in terms of their organization. Erdoğan’s effort to make the celebrations a mass phenomenon during his time as the mayor of Istanbul—while part of the Refah Party—were successful; under the AKP’s reign, the Conquest began to be celebrated like an official holiday. Behind the transformation of these celebrations into a mass phenomenon lies not simply the enthusiasm shown by AKP’s base, but a process that began with Kenan Doğulu’s (a Turkish pop singer) free concert in 2005 at the Yedikule fortress. This move seems to have effectively turned the anniversary of the Conquest (which had previously chiefly appealed to Islamic conservatives and remained somewhat peripheral as a result) into something widely enjoyed: a major public event. Since 2005, the Conquest Festivities have become an ostentatious symbol of a narrative of national history, with the aesthetic assistance of resplendent light and sound shows, big budgets and performances by popular artists (Koyuncu, 2014, 95–101). Sibel Özbudun notes that with the Conquest Festivities the AKP has attempted to substitute the secular, Westernist republican imaginary with a new image—religious/Islamist, Ottomanist and heavily market-oriented (2015, 226). Further, the extraordinary significance attributed to them by those in power and the profound interest shown by the people grows by the day. The celebrations also imply that this new historical narrative of the nation was set in motion not with the declaration of the republic, but with the conquest of Christian Istanbul by the Muslim Ottomans. Furthermore, the fact that the celebrations take place on 29 May every year demonstrates the AKP’s intention to reckon with the republic at the symbolic level, because the date overshadows ceremonies on 19 May that mark the day Mustafa Kemal set out for Samsun, triggering the War of Independence. As a type of social engineering mean to dismantle the official republican narrative of history (Özbudun, 2015, 224–227), the Conquest celebrations seem to have already taken the latter’s place within the social field.

Relatedly, Istanbul (esteemed for its place in Ottoman-Islamic history by Islamic elites) has been heartily embraced throughout AKP rule as a constituent site of nostalgic interest in the Ottoman past. In this new period, we witness the reclaiming not of the Ankara of the republic, but of the Istanbul of the Ottoman Empire. Among the steps taken to turn Istanbul into a magnificent showcase, as the heritage and representative of a magnificent Ottoman past, one can list such spectacular initiatives as the construction of Marmaray, the Canal Istanbul Project, the third bridge across the Bosporous, and the third airport in the city (Ongur, 2015, 427). It is noteworthy that in the AKP period this hierarchy of value, which, between Ankara and Istanbul, prioritizes and advances the latter, is filled with loaded implications concerning settling scores with the republic. In short, Istanbul possesses great symbolic value as one of the major constituent spaces for a new national identity.

Other moves the AKP has made to further a Neo-Ottomanist narrative are the regular hosting of and widespread participation in conferences commemorating major Islamic thinkers such as Mehmed Akif and Necip Fazıl, and the creation of free courses in municipal public education centres to revive Ottoman-era arts like calligraphy and marbling. Efforts to make Neo-Ottomanism visible in society are driven not only by the government, but by the market too. Naming luxurious housing projects OttomanLife¹² or Cihannüma Villaları (Pinnacle Villa),¹³ so as to evoke the Ottoman Empire or give a sense of Ottoman grandeur and lifestyle; the rise of an Ottoman trend in the fashion sector and the staging of runway shows accompanied by Janissary marches—such is the speed with which the market has attached itself to the ethos of the ‘new Turkey’.

At this point, it is worth noting the vital role of the media in facilitating the mass adoption of the AKP’s Neo-Ottomanist wave. Indeed, particularly since 2010, when the party began pushing this narrative in earnest through popular culture, the media has functioned as a channel for circulating motifs and symbols that evoke the Ottoman Empire, whether through advertisements or the news, television dramas or entertainment shows. Three indications of how a Neo-Ottomanist narrative has been established and spread via the media are (a) the success of the 2012 film Fetih 1453, which holds the distinction of being the biggest budget and most watched Turkish film; (b) Erdoğan’s visit to the set of Diriliş Ertuğrul, a series broadcast on TRT (Turkish Radio and Television Corporation); and (c) the reception of Prime Minister Aliyev at AKSaray, accompanied by music from the same television series. Nevertheless, and thankfully, one can also cite instances where the media was not bound to the styles of remembering the Ottoman past that the AKP configure: the series Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century), which began airing on Star TV in 2011 and for three years enjoyed high ratings and received dozens of awards, angered conservative nationalist groups, who complained to the media regulatory body RTÜK¹⁴ about the emphasis on Kanuni Sultan Suleyman’s harem experiences and on sexuality. The then-vice-Prime Minister Bülent Arınç initiated legal proceedings against the series and ensured that its creators received a warning from RTÜK. The criticism of Muhteşem Yüzyıl also caught the attention of then Prime Minister Erdoğan:

We have no such ancestor. We know no such Kanuni. We knew/recognized no such Sultan Suleyman. He spent thirty years of his life on horseback. In the palace, things didn’t happen like you see in those series. We need to know and understand this well. And I publicly condemn the directors of those series and those owners of television. And though we have warned the relevant parties about this matter, we are waiting on the courts to deliver the necessary decision.¹⁵

In this new period, the Ottoman Empire as the foundational component of national identity and a national mood is clearly depicted and glorified as a ‘golden age’. Consequently, all symbolic representations that fall outside the selective readings of those in power that highlight the Ottoman sultans’ loyalty to Islam, their heroism and morality, are prone to conservative reactions. Public discussions during Muhteşem Yüzyıl’s time on air offer the most concrete example of this. Ironically, this series in fact increased people’s interest in the Ottoman Empire (Aydos, 2013, 8–14).¹⁶

Here, it is crucial to note that social media is among the most visible and most powerful channels through which the Neo-Ottomanist wave is articulated. On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages set up by AKP supporters such as Osmanlı torunları, AK Gençlik, Osmanlı 1453 or Ecdat Osmanlı, young people’s interest in the Ottoman past is on full display. Particularly noteworthy is imagery depicting President Erdoğan alongside Fatih Sultan Mehmed or Abdülhamid II, or portraying him as the saviour of a people. For instance, text on an image combining the portraits of Sultan Abdülhamid and Erdoğan declares, ‘The 90-year-long advertising break of a 600-year-long film is over, we’re coming!’, heralding the return of the Ottomans in 2023. Erdoğan is described as the last Ottoman sultan, accompanied by the phrase ‘My [founding] father, we follow in your footsteps’ (‘Atam İzindeyiz!’).¹⁷ In these images, derogatory, spiteful and revanchist language is directed towards the republican regime and towards Mustafa Kemal. On YouTube, there are several videos which create myths about otherworldly connections between Fatih Sultan Mehmed and Erdoğan.¹⁸ On the same platform, alternative music groups like Osmanlı-Rap Tim or Ayyıldız Tim release songs loaded with Ottoman references.¹⁹ In short, social media, as a mechanism that allows narratives to be expressed through different technical means and in a particularly affecting manner, is a crucial tool in creating emotional responses to Neo-Ottomanism.

The adoption and glorification of Neo-Ottomanism by society has, to an unprecedented degree in the past decade especially, made it possible for this narrative to be bolstered by various supposedly independent political organizations. Since the election of 7 June 2015, an organization named the Ottoman Hearths, which has been found responsible for attacks on the offices of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the newspaper Hürriyet, have been perhaps the most visible of these. Yet this group has a rather short history. They began by putting out a journal of the same name in 2005 and in 2009 set up an organization ‘with the aim of researching, recognizing, and publicizing Ottoman culture, manners, and customs’. Through youth organizations, women’s groups, university and provincial chairs, they function as a civil initiative that calls to mind the structure of the Idealist Hearths (Ülkü Ocakları, or Grey Wolves). The number of Ottoman Hearths agencies opened in provinces in Turkey and in Europe grows by the day. Although following the acts of 7 June the AKP has denied any ties, organic or formal, with the Ottoman Hearths, announcements on the latter’s website speak often and openly of owing their existence to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a number of AKP politicians have paid visits to this group’s branches, adding weight to interpretations that the Ottoman Hearths act as the ‘palace’s paramilitary power’.

What I call the spectre of Ottomanism has been reincarnated in social and cultural life in Turkey since the 2000s. Examples of its re-emergence are not limited to those mentioned above. Today, through symbols and discourses gathered from selective readings and superficial characterizations of the Ottoman past, Neo-Ottomanism has, for the first time in the history of the Republic of Turkey, transcended the narrow confines of political debates and taken hold at the very heart of everyday life. Both by the elites and by the people, it has been transformed into a powerful instrument for a particular kind of ideological and emotional performance. A counter-hegemonic memory of national belonging, one that glorifies the Ottoman past and activates the emotions of collective pride and jouissance, has taken the place of the republican legacy that was hegemonic for nearly a century. During the AKP rule, Neo-Ottomanism has functioned as an engine for the transition to a new collective and national emotional phase. Furthermore, it finds a receptive audience far beyond the AKP and its supporters. Its spread, and its contagion, necessitates an emotional snapshot of this very moment.