Citizenship and the Nation State in Greece and Turkey (Social and Historical Studies on Greece and Turkey)

Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey

Of all the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey have moved the farthest in the direction of coping with the challenges relating to the transition to modernity. The goal of the series Social and Historical Studies on Greece and Turkey is to serve as a forum for discourse and dialogue between Greek and Turkish social scientists and historians, contributing to the ongoing theoretical debates in the international social science community, concerning the economic, cultural, political, and social aspects of modernity. Citizenship and the Nation State in Greece and Turkey brings together papers on a transdisciplinary dialogue on nation formation in Greece and Turkey as successor states of the Ottoman Empire, and on aspects of civil society in the two countries. The volume is divided into two parts: ‘Empire and Nation-State’ and ‘Nation and Civil Society’ and covers issues such as Turkish and Greek nationalism, the formation of the Greek State, the impact of the Greek War of Independence in transforming the Ottoman Empire, civil society in Greece during the post-Second World War period, the concept of citizenship as far as the rights of women are concerned in Greece and in Turkey, the production and reproduction of nation in the educational discourse. This book, alongside other books in this series, focuses on specific themes relevant to cutting edge theoretical debates within the international social science community, which the experiences of modern Greece and Turkey serve to highlight and enrich. Faruk Birtek is Professor of Sociology at Bogazici University, Istanbul. He taught at Yale, was a visiting professor at Bielefeld (Germany), Berkeley, and Michigan, and most recently Visiting Fellow at the Collegium Budapest. His work has been in the areas of social and political theory, and comparative historical sociology. Thalia Dragonas is Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Athens. She is also a member of the Board of the Greek Open University and of the Centre of Educational Research. Her work is on social identity, minorities, ethnocentrism in the educational system and prevention and promotion of early psychosocial health.

Social and Historical Studies on Greece and Turkey Edited by Faruk Birtek Bogazici University

Nikiforos Diamandouros European Ombudsman

Thalia Dragonas and Anna Frangoudaki University of Athens

Caglar Keyder Bogazici University

This unique series provides a forum for Greek and Turkish social scientists and historians, and a means of promoting academic dialogue between them and the wider, international community of social scientists. Each volume focuses on a specific theme that reflects current international academic debates on issues of major theoretical importance and seeks to contribute to these debates through analyses based on the Greek and Turkish experience. The first volume, Citizenship and Nation-State in Greece and Turkey, contributes to an important debate, which for the last decade and particularly after the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, has been the epicentre of theorizing by a significant segment of the international academic community.

This project would not have been possible without the support of the following institutions: the Kokkalis Foundation, the Eleni Nakou Foundation, the Bank of Greece, the University of Athens and Bogazici University. We are very thankful for their interest in the project and their generosity.

Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey Edited by Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas Social and Historical Studies on Greece and Turkey series

Series editors Faruk Birtek, Nikiforos Diamandouros, Thalia Dragonas, Anna Frangoudaki and Caglar Keyder

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contribution All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-31146-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–34783–1 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Introduction

vii viii x

PART I

Empire and nation-state 1 A history and geography of Turkish nationalism

1 3

CAGLAR KEYDER

2 The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914

18

KOSTAS P. KOSTIS

3 Greek bull in the China shop of Ottoman ‘Grand Illusion’: Greece in the making of modern Turkey

37

FARUK BIRTEK

4 Nation and People: the plasticity of a relationship

49

PADELIS E. LEKAS

5 ‘Do not think of the Greeks as agricultural labourers’: Ottoman responses to the Greek War of Independence

67

HAKAN ERDEM

PART II

Nation and civil society 6 Civil society and citizenship in post-war Greece NICOS MOUZELIS AND GEORGE PAGOULATOS

85 87

vi

Contents

7 Women’s challenge to citizenship in Turkey

104

YEV IM ARAT

8 Between duties and rights: gender and citizenship in Greece, 1864–1952

117

EFI AVDELA

9 Citizenship in context: rethinking women’s relationships to the law in Turkey

144

DICLE KOGACIOGLU

10 Greek and Turkish students’ views on history, the nation and democracy

161

THALIA DRAGONAS, BUV RA ERSANLI AND ANNA FRANGOUDAKI

Speculative thoughts on nations and nationalism with special reference to Turkey and Greece

190

ILKAY SUNAR

Index

193

Illustrations

Figures 10.1 Interest in religion and politics 10.2 Interest in history in geographical area

163 164

Tables 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

Views on nations and the national state How important are the following for you? Aims of the study of history What does history mean to you? What are your views on democracy?

162 165 165 166 167

Contributors

Yevim Arat is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Bogazici University, Istanbul. Efi Avdela is Professor of Contemporary Social History at the Department of History and Archeology, University of Crete, Rethymnon. Faruk Birtek is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Bogazici University, Istanbul. Thalia Dragonas is Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Athens. Hakan Erdem is Assistant Professor of History at the Department of History, Sabanci University, Istanbul. Buvra Ersanli is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Marmara University, Istanbul. Anna Frangoudaki is Professor of Sociology of Education at the Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Athens. Caglar Keyder is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, State University of New York, Binghamton and at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Dicle Kogacioglu is a PhD candidate in sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Kostas P. Kostis is Professor of Economic and Social History at the Department of Economics, University of Athens. Padelis E. Lekas is Assistant Professor of Historical Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Thessaloniki. Nicos Mouzelis is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics.

Contributors ix George Pagoulatos is Assistant Professor of Politics at the Department of International and European Economic Studies, Athens University of Economics and Business. Ilkay Sunar is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Bogazici University, Istanbul.

Introduction

This volume inaugurates what we hope will become an ongoing series of studies on the society and history of Greece and Turkey. The idea for the series was the outcome of an effort to initiate a dialogue among academics working on the intertwining histories of their respective societies. The project of publishing a joint series of volumes took some years to take shape. Following the initial workshop, the editors met several times in Istanbul and in Athens, comparing notes and sharing knowledge about the two societies and their history – all the while hoping to contribute to the mutual understanding of the two cultures. The present volume brings together papers from a seminar on citizenship and the nation-state that took place in Istanbul. The participants (the editorial board and the authors of the chapters included in the volume) engaged in a transdisciplinary dialogue on nation formation in Greece and Turkey as successor states of the Ottoman Empire, and on aspects of civil society in the two countries. Several subsequent meetings of the editorial board put the final product together. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part is entitled ‘Empire and Nation-state’. Chapter 1 by Caglar Keyder, could be described as a deconstruction of the nationalist narrative particular to the Turkish republic. The author investigates the historical conditions determining the various distinguishing characteristics of Turkish nationalism. Emerging out of the collapse of the Ottomanist project of modernizing the imperial state, Turkish nationalism was shaped in competition with the rival nationalisms of Christian millets.1 According to the author, Turkish nationalism evolved as a defensive ideology against the change of policy of the European powers supporting the separatist nationalisms inside the Ottoman Empire. Turkish nationalism opted for a foundational myth that was predominantly ethnic, narrating an unbroken ethnic history reaching back to an imagined past and an alien geography – Central Asia as the spatial referent of the nation. Republican nationalists, in contrast to anti-colonial nationalist movements, did not contest western civilization; rather, they located Turkey in a continuum with the West. The author concludes by tracing the effects on Turkish identity of the excessively instrumental nature of Turkish nationalism. Chapter 2, by Kostas Kostis, is a critical survey of the literature on the formation of the Greek state, which mostly defines it as a modern nation-state, along the manner of the nation-state form in Western Europe. This definition is considered

Introduction

xi

by the author to lead to a conceptual weakness, in the sense that the identification of the Greek state emerging from the Greek ‘revolution’ with the modern form of the nation-state is based on the implicit argument that the institutions giving it substance were western, or ‘bourgeois’. This argument could be made because the literature in question tends to overlook the Ottoman context within which the Greek state was shaped. Although the formation of the Greek state constituted a rupture with the Ottoman reality, it would be incorrect to speak of a modern nation-state, at least until late in the nineteenth century. All the characteristics of the exercise of power betrayed the lingering logic of the traditional or pre-modern state. Thus, until the decade of the 1870s, Greece experienced the strengthening of central power: a transitional period from the Ottoman past to the formation of a modern state. During the same decade, the first constituents of the country’s democratic government were articulated and materialized through the implementation of parliamentary majority rule and a decline in the power of the local elite. In the last part of his chapter, Kostis relates the process of the formation of the modern state to international conditions, the influence of the protective powers, and the competition with other neighbouring states. He concludes that the transformations observed after 1870 are primarily the product of changes in the interstate system. In order to be able to respond to conflicts in the Balkans, the political elites were pushed toward a reorganization of the military and diplomatic institutions of the state. In Chapter 3, Faruk Birtek uses conceptual tools from political theory to distinguish between the concepts of ‘public persona’ and ‘self-identity’, and concludes that the ethnic version of republican nationalism shrinks the space of dialogue between these two concepts, thus leaving itself vulnerable to the distortions of both of them. Birtek analyses the differences of self-identity in the Ottoman Empire during two periods, the Classical period with its particular millet system, and the reform period of the Tanzimat.2 He argues that in the classical millet system, self-identity is defined by the communal social space, thus both space and identity are fixed, in a way they are not negotiable. Ottomanism of the Tanzimat period is radically different. Individuals can negotiate among multiplicities of social spaces, since identities signify citizenship and they are ‘built into the system’; thus both space and identity become negotiable. He argues that the necessities of the republican order have destroyed the masterful socio-political ‘fine-tuning’ of the Tanzimat period with its political elitism incorporating all ethno-religious groups. Thus, the ethnic version of the republic has changed both public persona and self-identity, by absorbing self-identity into the public persona. This process has, according to the author, been strongly influenced by the Greek invasion in 1919. Because of this war, the Turkish republic emerged out of a particular context of nationalist mobilization, which has had important effects in shaping the particular mode of the Turkish republican construction. On the one hand, the war destroyed the Ottoman Empire and whatever it contained from its Byzantine past; on the other, it had a more important impact on the ensuing political structure in Turkey through fixing its republican identity to nationalist mobilization.

xii

Introduction

In his theoretical discussion on nationalism in Chapter 4, Padelis Lekas highlights its so-called ‘Janus-face’. Nationalism is an ideology of power amounting to carnage, persecution and domination, but, on the other hand, it is also an ideology employed in combating oppressive and exploitative regimes, and is thus instrumental to egalitarian and liberal demands. Despite its legacy of wars and ethnic cleansing, nationalism has been a major force in combating political orders relying on traditional modes of loyalty and domination; in legitimating the collectivity on the basis of a consensus of the members of the nation, instead of divine or hereditary rule. Lekas argues that the main interest in the study of nationalism is the appreciation of this antinomy. He points out that the historical specificity of nationalism is that it locates the source of individual identity within a culturally defined ‘people’, seen as the bearer of sovereignty, and the foundation of collective solidarity. Thus, nationalist rhetoric argues for the theoretical equality of the members of the nation in incorporating the anonymous and socially unequal individuals as historic agents in the unity of a nation’s peers. Lekas argues that the widespread appeal and success of nationalism in the past two centuries lies in the ambiguous relationship between the terms ‘nation’ and ‘people’, often used interchangeably in nationalist rhetoric. In its fusion with the construct of ‘the people’, the concept of the nation has proved to be particularly adaptable to historical circumstances. He concludes that this is largely because the nation is essentially perceived as classless and democratic, thereby concealing its intrinsic dividedness. In the last chapter of Part I, through a meticulous historical study of Ottoman documents, Hakan Erdem offers a novel perspective on the impact of the Greek War of Independence of 1821–28 in transforming the Ottoman Empire. In a Braudelian analysis of the nexus of various events, the author produces an analysis of how the Greek War of Independence, as the first full-fledged nationalist revolt in the Ottoman Empire, profoundly influenced the Ottoman establishment, and led to a process of reactive modernization. In order to deal with the revolt, the Ottoman state first started distinguishing between ethnic Greeks who did not participate in the rebellion and those who took up arms; then between the ethnic Greeks who started the rebellion and the non-Greek members of the Greek millet. The distrust of the authorities toward the political reliability of the Greek subjects was later extended to the Albanians, suspected for their favourable attitude toward the Greek rebellion. The Ottoman establishment reacted with a policy of mobilizing and alerting the Muslims in general and the ethnic Turks in particular. Turks, who had for some time been seen as politically reliable, gradually became the only group fully trusted by the Ottoman authorities. In the last part of his chapter, Erdem deals with the influence of the modern ideas of the age of nationalism on the members of the Ottoman ruling elite. Translating the documents written by the leaders of the Greek War of Independence, including concepts such as nation, citizen, people, republic, liberty, independence, welfare, public and the like, they were influenced by this new ideology. It was in this process that Turkish nationalism and republicanism were born. The second part of the volume is entitled ‘Nation and Civil Society’. The first chapter, by Nicos Mouzelis and George Pagoulatos, examines civil society in

Introduction

xiii

Greece during the post-Second World War period. Civil society is defined by the authors as the inclusion of citizens into the broad political, social, economic and cultural arenas of the nation-state, entailing the spread of corresponding rights in each sphere. The period from the end of the civil war in the late 1940s to the fall of the military junta in 1974 is labelled ‘the authoritarian era’, which is characterized by the reign of a ‘guided democracy’, where political as well as civil and social rights were restricted, while discriminatory policies prevailed as far as the cultural rights of ethnic and religious minorities were concerned. From 1974 onwards, there was a period of consolidation of democracy, with definite strengthening of civil rights. This process was underwritten by radical changes in the civil code. From the point of view of political rights, the authors consider this period as the most democratic era in modern Greek history. There are notable changes in the sphere of cultural rights as well: the current state practice tends toward positive integration of cultural minorities. Nevertheless, the massive immigration from Eastern Europe and the Balkans has fuelled xenophobia and racist attitudes among broad social strata. In terms of the spread of civil, political, social and cultural rights, the authors discern an overall positive trend. Nevertheless, given the authoritarian political past, the extension of civil and political rights was perhaps in Greece more a function of Europeanization than the result of a civil society-driven process. In Chapter 7, Yesim Arat analyses the concept of citizenship as far as the rights of women are concerned. She recounts the revolutionary changes that took place after the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923. The 1926 Turkish civil code accorded to women equal rights in divorce, inheritance and marriage, and women obtained the right to vote in 1934 – early for this part of the world. Arat points out that these important changes were imposed by the decisions of enlightened ruling elites (of men) in pursuit of national integration, and they were not the outcome of social struggle in which women participated. The ‘formal’ equality accorded to Turkish women is, in practice, invalidated by significant differences between genders in formal education and property ownership. It is also undermined by the widespread incidence of violence against women – not only within the family, but also practised by the state, such as in the case of virginity exams ordered by school authorities. Arat argues that important social change has taken place since the 1980s, mainly through demands by women to redefine their social and citizenship rights. She concludes that this struggle of women for their rights has had significant implications for democracy in Turkey; the fact that women spoke out, in their own name, in order to renegotiate the laws they have to follow as citizens has made them a vanguard of further democratization in Turkish society. In Chapter 8, Efi Avdela studies women’s citizenship in Greek society, through redefinitions of gender relations and changing conceptualizations of women as citizens during the 90 years between men’s suffrage (1864) and women’s suffrage (1952). Investigating the institutional framework, she argues that women were denied the autonomy required to be the bearer of citizenship rights, because of the predominance of ‘smallholding’ in economic organization, based on the principle of patriarchal domination. In an analysis of the changes in the representations of

xiv

Introduction

femininity Avdela finds that these relate to successive transformations in the discourse of advocates of women’s rights. At the turn of the twentieth century, the changing and often contradictory discourse on sexual difference defined the issue of women’s citizenship in terms of duties. During this period, women’s efforts to transform motherhood from a biological destiny to the basis of their inclusion in the political body made motherhood into a national mission. In the inter-war period, when the Greek feminist movement put political rights at the forefront of its struggle, women conceived motherhood as a social service. In both cases women attempted to politicize motherhood, thus undermining the public– private dichotomy. These discursive transformations led to the transition of women’s claims from emphasis on duties to emphasis on rights. Chapter 9, by Dicle Kogacioglu, examines the relation of women to the discourses and practices of the law, focusing on the everyday reproduction of gender inequalities. The author argues that, as far as the law is concerned, there are two major components of gender inequality in Turkey: first the discriminatory content of the legal texts, and second the non-application of egalitarian laws. She suggests that state feminism may be the key to understanding the lack of women’s equality in law, while the concept of state patriarchy can explain the non-application of the laws in practice. Several examples from empirical research document violence against women, and show the disjuncture between written law and legal practice as these relate to women’s everyday life. Kogacioglu concludes that the traditional and stereotypical ideas on women’s role in the family, which are reproduced (in different ways) by both state feminism and state patriarchy, enhance the power of the family as an institution, thus reproducing and sustaining the social and cultural order of gender oppression. In the final chapter, Thalia Dragonas, Buvra Ersanli and Anna Frangoudaki present the findings of an international multicultural study on youth and history, as far as the responses of Greek and Turkish 15-year-old students are concerned. The questions addressed to the students sought to elicit their views on nation and the nation-state, the importance they attributed to religion and politics, their perceptions with regard to the goal of history, and their conception of democracy. The analysis of Greek and Turkish students’ responses reveal that both groups are highly ethnocentric. They conceive nation as a natural and eternal phenomenon. In both countries students place a lot more importance on religion than they do on politics. In both groups, however, the importance attributed to religion is due less to religious belief and practice and much more to identification with the nation. The history of one’s own country is accorded the highest interest, while Greek youths are more past-oriented than their Turkish counterparts who look at the past but project into the future. Finally, both Greek and Turkish youths value democracy particularly highly. Analysing these findings, the authors relate the highly ethnocentric conception of students to their respective educational systems. In both countries history teaching is limited to national history, while the history of other countries serves the purposes of the national narrative. Religion as theology is not emphasized in either country’s textbooks, but it appears as part of the national definition in history. An a-historical conception is cultivated by

Introduction

xv

both educational systems, since all positive values accorded to the respective nations are presented as part of the particular national identity, with scant reference to interaction with other cultures. Finally, the authors speculate on a number of questions regarding history as taught in schools. In what could serve as a conclusion to the volume as a whole, they contemplate the potential benefits that would accrue to young generations if they were to understand the conflicts of the past in a way to actualize historical experience as knowledge, and how this would constitute a path toward peaceful coexistence and collaboration, as well as toward tolerant and democratic societies. The volume ends with a brief comment on nationalism by Ilkay Sunar, where he argues that the republican process in Turkey had the effect of standardizing the plurality and diversity of Ottoman culture into a uniform national culture. Sunar contends that nationalism does not only produce such a standard culture, but it also dissociates it from the social structure, by giving it a universalized civic character above ethnicity, religion and race. The Editors

Notes 1 Millets were the religious communities organized around the principal churches, for example the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian churches in the Ottoman Empire, which constituted the mainstay of the Ottoman administration. They were rather autonomous in their internal affairs and regulated a good part of the lives of their members including the judicial affairs pertaining to the issues of civil society. 2 The Tanzimat was a period of radical reform which started with the imperial edict of 1839 that granted full equality to all Ottoman males of all creeds and opened the way for non-Muslim citizens to have access to all political and administrative posts. The edict of 1839 could be rightly considered as a de facto Ottoman constitution.

Part I

Empire and nation-state

1

A history and geography of Turkish nationalism Caglar Keyder

Before the Republic Turkish nationalism was shaped in the general context of nineteenth-century ‘late-comer’ nationalisms following the German example, at a time when the First World War announced the end to all empires and nationalism gained a worldwide legitimacy. At the same time, it learned from, reacted against and was constrained by competing nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman reformers were primarily interested in state modernization, which, given that they were hoping to preserve the empire, could not be accompanied by a nationalist dimension. The elite was genuinely multi-ethnic and its members envisaged the possibility of an imperial transformation that would carry the Ottoman entity intact into the modern world. This allegiance to an Ottomanism should not be judged retrospectively as naive. The imperial elite of various confessions and ethnic origin commonly shared an optimistic faith in the viability of the empire – at least until the Balkan Wars. After 1912, both great power rivalry and intensified local nationalisms created an irreversible momentum toward the dissolution of the empire. In the larger arena as well, the First World War signalled an end to experiments attempting to modernize empires. As empires collapsed, nationalisms gained the victorious upper hand. Nationalist intellectual currents, however, had become a strong force among the various peoples of the empire before the war – despite the allegiance of some of their elites to the idea of Ottomanism. In other words, within each ethnic group there were Ottomanists, as well as nationalists. Although it is difficult to reduce these political differences to social positions, a persuasive argument claims that a reason for this intra-ethnic conflict (within Greek, Armenian and subsequently Arab peoples) is the existence of rival elites: elite rivalry and resentment against the old elites fuelled the nationalism of aspiring, nascent elites.1 The more established notables may have been staunchly Ottomanist, but a competing, perhaps more commercial group, opted for the mantle of nationalism – to some extent as an ideological arsenal against the traditional elites. No such competition of elites fuelled Turkish nationalism. That part of the elite which claimed Turkish descent was part of the imperial state class and necessarily felt bound to the Ottomanist project. As most merchants and newly enriched

4

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

business groups in the empire were Greeks and Armenians, a rival elite did not emerge. Whatever nationalism eventually arose from within the Turkish–Muslim elite, it did not have a distinct social base. The ‘Young Turks’ were the nationalists within the elite – distinguished by temperament rather than social base. Until after the First World War, Turkishness remained a notional construct which did not have a concrete point of reference. Miscegenation pervaded all ranks, starting with the dynastic family where it was the rule rather than the exception that the valide sultan (the mother of the heir apparent) was a converted Christian from a far corner of the empire or beyond. The ranks of the high officials similarly included converted Europeans attracted by employment opportunities. Especially after the Tanzimat schools were opened, provincial notables sent their sons to Istanbul to be educated where they were socialized in Ottoman ways. In other words, the ruling elite was Ottoman, and there was no opportunity for a sentiment of Turkishness to arise naturally as an ethnic supremacist ideology of the imperial centre.2 What the constituent elements of a Turkish culture would be, as distinct from the mixture that was the culture of the Ottoman elite, was not yet discovered or theorized – and, therefore, unavailable as a political platform. In fact, the very appellation ‘Turk’ was imposed from the outside on the empire and its population. Within the empire only the Anatolian peasantry, considered ignorant and wretched (and according to a popular saying ‘without comprehension’) were known as Turks. In Europe, the empire had long been referred to as Turkey, and its inhabitants, especially when the intent was to deride, as Turks. This choice, of course, was consistent with the implicit underlying trope suggesting that the empire was simply a despotic state where a Turkish yoke had been established by force on other, especially Christian, peoples. Thus, the appropriation of Turkishness by the elite would amount to an acceptance of the simplifying Western perspective on the cosmopolitan nature of the empire. Some faint glimmers of the intellectual beginnings of nationalist thought are discernible during the later decades of the empire and gradually acquire a more definite shape through interaction with competing nationalisms. Rather than a gradual process of ‘awakening’ however, it was the experience of imperial retrenchment and wars which finally and materially validated the promise of Turkish nationalism for the elite. In other words, nationalism was more a political choice by the elite than the result of a groundswell of accumulating sentiment incited by pioneering nationalist intellectuals. The life stories of three prominent nationalist intellectuals of the period illustrate this claim. Yusuf Akcura was born to a bourgeois and intellectual family of Kazan Tatars in the Russian Empire.3 His nationalism was of the pan-Turkic kind, originally formulated as a stand against Russian imperial domination. After an education in Paris, Akcura came to Istanbul and became one of the theoreticians and leaders of the Turkish nationalist movement. Ziya Gökalp was a Kurd from Diyarbakir, again a late arrival to the capital and a Turkish nationalist by choice rather than compulsion.4 His reasoning was pragmatic. Turkishness could be the glue in establishing cultural solidarity in the future state. Tekin Alp was a Central European of Jewish descent, for whom pan-Turkism (in which he wrote one of the

A history and geography of Turkish nationalism

5

principal texts) could not have been anything other than an intellectual exercise. We might add that Alexander Helphand, the famous socialist, writing under the pseudonym Parvus, was also active in Istanbul during the Young Turk period. He wrote articles and lectured in nationalist forums, all the while attempting to inject an anti-imperialist dimension into the awakening of Turkishness.5 Thus, nationalism in Turkey, as elsewhere, owed its delivery to the intellectuals; yet in this case the midwives disproportionately derived from new recruits. When we consider the more spontaneous expressions of hostility against the idea of a multicultural empire, once again we observe the preponderance of newcomers. An important material development which forced the Young Turks to take a stand in favour of a nationalist version of state modernization was the emergence, as the empire shrank in territory, of a revanchiste Muslim group, settling in Thrace and western Anatolia, after they were expelled from the newly lost territories. Forced to relocate in the retrenched empire, they introduced a significant factor into the body politic by becoming both the instigators and the implementers of exclusionary nationalism.6 They reacted to the hostilities that contributed to their ouster from recently lost lands, and embraced a supremacist Islamist or Turkish nationalist idea. In 1910, for example, a number of clashes occurred between resettled Muslims from the Balkans and Ottoman Greeks of adjoining villages, resulting in the pillage of property and the subsequent flight of Greeks to the other side of the Aegean. This geographical area, the Aegean littoral, was the scene of ethnic strife, more or less continuously between the 1909 coup by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the compulsory exchange of populations (whereby all the Greek Orthodox population left) in 1923.7 A similar dynamic was at work in the east as well. Here clashes with Armenians occurred, particularly in those areas of recent Kurdish settlement, where tribes were sedentarized by government order and granted land near Armenian villages, thus potentially competing for the same land which would be used for grazing animals, or, more likely, for expanding the arable. The principal episode of the pre-war period resulting in ethnic hostility between Muslims and Armenians took place in Adana and the Cilician region where Armenian land ownership was expanding and the ethnic power balances in the city and its hinterland were shifting rapidly. The degree of spontaneity in these cases of ethnic and proto-nationalist hostility is debatable. It is likely that there was official accommodation if not instigation in each case: by the CUP government in the Greek case, and by Abdulhamid, through his Hamidiyye battalions created out of Kurdish tribesmen, in the Armenian case. It is also true that Greek irredentism and Armenian nationalism provided the proximate context within which official reaction, evolving subsequently into nationalism, was articulated. The 1895–96 events leading to the massacre of thousands of Armenians, first in Cilicia, and subsequently, and unusually, in Istanbul, were provoked by Armenian nationalists hoping thus to attract European attention to their cause: competing nationalisms were fodder to the intricate game of Great Power rivalry. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 constituted a turning point in making nationalist rhetoric more popular. The loss of Salonica to the Greeks, the occupation of

6

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

Edirne and the Bulgarian army’s advance within a day’s march of Istanbul, leading to a quarter of a million Muslims fleeing and taking refuge in the capital, made the threat to the survival of the empire palpable. It was during this period that the urban population was for the first time incited and invited to participate in political life – in the direction of nationalist mobilization. This was the first instance when the CUP’s official policy, closely orchestrated by the ruling CUP elite, was validated on the basis of popular support.8 In the subsequent period of war, the nationalist discourse spread to the rest of the state elite. Less than a year after the onset of war, more than 200,000 soldiers and a large number of officers in the Ottoman army were lost on the Eastern front and in the Dardanelles. With few exceptions, the war losses were of the Turkish element – the same uncomprehending Anatolian peasantry and their officers who thereby discovered a common ethnicity. It was this discovery which laid the basis for a nationalist perspective on the dismantlement of the empire.

Ethnic stories There are silences in every nation’s history which belie an active effort to forget.9 The treatment in nationalist historiography of the First World War and the subsequent period of the reconstitution of the state is conspicuous in the enormity of the effort. The attempt is not simply to deny the occurrence of or the responsibility for a series of ethnic cleansings. This in itself would be difficult, but it would be drowned, as it often is, in a series of accusations and counter-accusations. What is more serious is that the subsequent formulation of the Turkish nationalist myth does not even acknowledge the previous existence of non-Turkish populations in the land which eventually became Turkey. But, in fact, without the events of that decade it would have been impossible to fashion an ethnic–nationalist myth. The facts are relatively straightforward. After the Balkan War debacle of 1912, attacks against Greek villages in Anatolia increased. The universal military service legislation of 1909 (in itself a positive move toward equality under the ideal of imperial citizenship) led to the conscription of Christians under possibly prejudicial circumstances which led to flights of young men abroad. When the war started, most Greek and Armenian conscripts were stationed in labour camps in the interior where many died (concurrently, Muslim youth were being massacred on the front). Then the events of the summer of 1915 occurred, during which between one-half and two-thirds of the Armenian population were killed, or died of deprivation and disease. When the war ended, the Greek army occupied most of western Anatolia. After three years of skirmishes (1919–22), the Turkish republican forces succeeded in liberating Anatolia and driving out most of the Greek Orthodox population of the former Ottoman Empire. An agreement between Athens and Ankara stipulated that the remaining Greeks, with the exception of those whose official residence was in Istanbul, would be subject to a compulsory exchange of populations. In 1913, one in five persons in the geographical area which is now Turkey was a Christian; by the end of 1923, the proportion had declined to one in forty.10

A history and geography of Turkish nationalism

7

It was against this background that Turkish nationalism, as the legitimating ideology of the new republic, was fashioned. It is easy to see why this nationalism opted for an ethnic version of the national narration. In other words, a concept of Turkishness was constructed which glossed over real diversity in an attempt to present the remaining population as homogeneous. Once again, this invention was a function of competing nationalisms that the imperial elite (now transformed into the republican elite) had had to confront. Against the presumed homogeneities of Greek, Armenian and Arab ethnicities, a similarly virulent Turkish ethnicity could be reclaimed. This was done through the construct of an unbroken ethnic history reaching back to a mythical past in an alien geography. What later came to be known as the ‘Turkish-history thesis’ was a direct instrument which served this need. To this day, schoolchildren learn that Turks populated all of Eurasia after their migrations from Central Asia.11 According to this teaching, the original, prehistoric inhabitants of Anatolia and of most of the proximate lands were of Turkish extraction. It thus became easy to recover the ancient populations of Anatolia into Turkishness. Hence, primary-school textbooks talk about Hittite and Sumerian Turks; and the official ideology has until recently endeavoured to deny a separate identity to Kurds. In its extreme versions in the 1930s, the thesis also included a corollary claiming an ur status for the Turkish language.12 The history thesis was logically necessary in order to argue an ethnicist nationalism. It had been stated until then in Ottoman historiography that Turks had gradually conquered Anatolia after the defeat of the Byzantine army in 1071; yet, after centuries of empire and religious conversion and intermarriage, Christians still constituted one-fifth of the population of the inherited lands. Hence, it was very difficult to argue that Anatolia was the homeland and its population ethnically pure. If, on the other hand, the ancient populations of Anatolia were proto-Turks, the new awakening would constitute the reclaiming of a lost essence. Besides permitting the elision of the recent past, this conceit also made it unnecessary to address potentially embarrassing questions, such as the size of the Turkish population that settled Anatolia (as compared to the already existing population under the Byzantine Empire) or the process of conversion to Islam during the intervening centuries. These two topics in particular are still found vexing by the guardians of the official line. During the 1970s, a dissertation which looked into the Muslimization of a Black Sea region during the sixteenth century and concluded that Christians converted with great frequency was published by a university press, but was pulled out of circulation.13 It is still difficult to research population estimates for the early Turkish settlement of Anatolia. The one proposition Turkish historians seem to agree on is the claim that economic difficulties and insecurity had contributed to a decline of the Byzantine population. But, even a cursory look at the history of ethnic groups in what is now Turkey reveals that conversions continued until recently. The Laz were perhaps the latest large-scale conversion in the nineteenth century. There is no documentation of Armenian conversions and the adoption of Christian-born women and children into the fold of Islamic families during the First World War. It is clear,

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

however, that the figures are in the hundreds of thousands.14 There must have been an additional wave during the compulsory exchange of populations in 1923–24, when some Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox must have found it easier to declare themselves Muslims. Ethnic nationalism survived the short-lived history thesis. Without specifically addressing the issue, official history managed to imply that the formation of the nation-state had returned Anatolia to its rightful heirs. Thus the conquest was now presented as a reclamation. This was because the Turkish element was the saviour of a land and people suffering under a decadent Byzantine tradition. The popular media, historical novels, cartoon strips, oral tradition and, more recently, TV programmes narrating the conquest of Anatolia almost always feature a handsome Turkish warrior who achieves his goal because a Greek (Byzantine) woman (usually the daughter or the wife of the Byzantine commander) falls in love with him. Hence it is the virile conquerors that revive the supine and decaying empire, in the well-rehearsed sexual metaphor.

The geography of the new nation The deserving and victorious Turkish population were presented as distinct from the previous inhabitants of Anatolia; no fusion or mixing could be admitted. In fact, this claim of purity is arguably the most crucial dimension of the nationalist discourse and constitutes its founding myth. According to this myth, present-day Turks are direct and uncontaminated descendants of a people who inhabited a territory in a distant land, ‘Orta Asya’ or Central (Middle) Asia, which furthermore was supposed to have undergone a major ecological transformation that caused the Turks to leave. In other words, the land of origin could only be imagined; it was irreclaimable not only because it was distant, but also because it was irreversibly altered. In nationalist writings and history books this imagined land was assigned crucial importance as the spatial referent of the nation. Otherwise, national history was curiously devoid of territorial reference; the elites did not adjust easily to the loss of empire and to the rump peninsula they ended up with. There was no glorification of geography, of holy sites, of physical character that sets space apart.15 Moreover, particular features of the geography were regarded with active suspicion: Izmir was considered infidel. The city had always had a non-Muslim majority of Greeks and Jews. During the nineteenth century, the newly arriving foreign population had changed its physical appearance and social character. Izmir had become a typical port-city of the late colonial era – cosmopolitan, and suspicious of localist solutions. And, as in all such cosmopolitan cities of the third world, it was regarded with suspicion and accused of belonging to a different universe when nationalism triumphed.16 The relationship with Istanbul was more ambiguous. On the one hand, Istanbul was Byzance. In their profoundly ambiguous relationship with the Ottoman legacy, republicans counterposed the steppe purity of Ankara to the luxe and volupté represented by the imperial capital. Republican historiography was critical of the sultans and their palace rule, which

A history and geography of Turkish nationalism

9

could be presented as a continuation of Byzantine pomp and intrigue. In its more radical versions, republican nationalism was militantly secular, which constituted another reason why Istanbul, which could be seen as the seat of caliphs and as an Islamic holy site, would be approached with suspicion. Furthermore, after the ethnic cleansing of the rest of the country, Istanbul still accommodated Greeks, Armenians and Jews, who dominated trade and industry at least until the 1950s. The active ignoring of selective aspects of national geography becomes apparent in the nationalist attitude toward the sea. In a country which is basically a peninsula, with a very long coastline, it is remarkable how paltry the population’s relationship with the sea has been. The major reason is that the coast was regarded as the domain of the Greeks. The coastal stretches were inhabited by those who were really not of us. Indeed, most of the coastal population of the empire – its sailors, fishermen and sea merchants – did not, by definition, derive from the Muslim Turkish element, because the term ‘Turk’ referred to Anatolian peasants and nomads. When the Greeks departed, the seaboard towns were left relatively empty until post-1960s urbanization filled them. Republican policy did not favour coastal trade which would be difficult to control from the centre. As a result, neither the Turkish merchant marine nor more general sea traffic developed until the 1980s. There is, for instance, no regular coastwise boat service either in the Black Sea or the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Travellers have to resort to buses for even the most inconvenient parcours.17 All this fits with the same sentiment which moved the capital from Istanbul to Ankara, declaring the former tainted and seeking to establish a fresh start, uncontaminated by Byzantine, Greek or Ottoman cosmopolitanism. The very move of the capital city to a place without significations, to a city where there is no there, in order to start the whole history anew, testifies to the desire to locate the new project in an abstract space devoid of history and symbolic weight. Hence a geography of nowhere was constructed, to correspond to the claim in the official discourse that our real geography was elsewhere. As the republicans opted for an inland nationalism focused on Ankara, the territory which was supposed to embody this nationalist sentiment came to reflect a selective appropriation of the ‘motherland’. Nationalist authors wrote about villages, about small towns, about the social transformation taking place in the ‘heartland’. The avoidance of previous significations is the ideal of modernizing nationalism: to construct a new motherland, preferably in an entirely new or alwaysoccupied territory, with no reminders of previous articulation into competing images of its population. This desire was shown at its most blatant with the frequent toponymic reconfiguring of Anatolia. In finding Turkic origins for place names, the government often summarily decreed a similar sounding name to replace the old Greek or Armenian. In some cases where a Turkish name had coexisted, it was allowed to remain, unless it too contained an unacceptable reference – for instance to an heterodox tradition. The ramifications of this denial of territory are manifold. Most obviously, it imparts a sense of non-belonging, a temporariness, leading to the belief that

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

continuous belligerence is necessary, in order to hang on to a right of existence. This is, in fact, a simple transformation and a Turkish mapping of the Christiancentric, crusader mentality which claims these holy lands as its own and regards the current occupiers as temporary settlers who should be driven out. The Greek megali idea, whose echo is ever present in Turkey’s foreign relations, thus becomes more pertinent because its premises are admitted by Turkish nationalism as well. Perhaps the destructive attitude toward the cities, where the creation of nowheres during the urbanization of the 1970s and 1980s has been the rule, is also an aspect of an attempt to reclaim geography. Orientalist perspectives on modern Turkey often remark on the shabby and temporary character of the built environment. This is, of course, a gloss on the earlier characterizations, with the barely concealed argument that the impermanence is as it should be, since the Turks are not the rightful occupiers of this geography.18 What is curious is that the validating behaviour of modern Turks (which is certainly due to factors deriving from rapid and recent urbanization and underdevelopment) is reinforced by the nature of the official nationalism which has been part of their ideological universe. This nationalism ceaselessly calls the population to arms and intransigence because the country is supposed to be surrounded by enemies whose continual endeavour is to oust the Turks from their land. The most memorable republican heroic poetry exhorts schoolchildren to defend every morsel of the motherland, and reminds them of the price in lives paid to retain it. There is no room in this armed-camp rhetoric to extol either the natural or the built environment, or to indulge in any pride of geography. What makes the motherland ours is the fact that we died for it and may do so again when we are called upon – not that we sing its charms. But, without a territorial base, nationalism necessarily becomes more ethnic. Since the privileged site of the founding myth was not geography, it never became clear why Anatolia was special, or why it was circumscribed by those particular borders – aside from the contingency of wars and treaties. While the abstractedness of the spatial dimension may have provided conditions of purity in the nationalist construct, it also made the teaching inaccessible, save as another litany to be committed to memory and spouted back. There is a flattening associated with nationalist geography which allows only isolated and reconstructed spaces and monuments into its cosmology. The annual celebrations of ‘liberation’, for instance, which commemorate the ousting of occupying armies and the entry of republican forces into a town, are always held in the same manner, in interchangeable Cumhuriyet Meydanis (Republic Squares) with an identical crude choreography featuring gazis (border warriors of Ottoman society, inspired by their Islamic conviction) dressed in period uniforms firing on representations of the enemy; and culminate with a ceremony involving the laying of a wreath on the Ataturk memorial.19 The ceremonies are those sanctioned by the government blueprint. They aim to glorify the heroism of the locals without, however, conceding a sense of difference due to locality. This is not a nationalism that is supposed to resonate with a people who were party to its construction; rather it is a lesson which should be learned and regurgitated.

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The uses of the nationalist construct When the nation-state came into being, its ideology was yet to be formulated; there was no ready sentiment which could be culled and refashioned into a serviceable nationalism. The First World War, although instrumental in awakening a national sentiment, had been fought in the name of the empire, not the Turkish nation, and the subsequent war with the Greek army had mostly been conducted with the same war-weary conscripts. This latter war was a relatively small affair compared to the Great War. The French and the Italians had, immediately after the start of the republican campaign, decided that their interests lay in accepting Ankara, rather than the Porte, as the legitimate government. Britain, which was ambivalent for some time, but was seen as the principal support behind Greece, also made it apparent that British forces would not be employed to defend territories occupied by the Greek army. Hence, the republican forces fought a localized Greek war where the demoralized Greek army was decisively routed in 1922, not an anti-imperialist liberation struggle which would lend itself readily to the creation of a nationalist mythology. Its restricted impact, in terms of the extent of the population it involved, meant that for the most part it attained the status of a heroic legend learned at school. By contrast, the military engagements of the Ottomans during the First World War, the war in the East and skirmishes with the local Christian populations during and immediately after that war, had had greater impact and were still fresh in people’s minds. The nationalist narrative as it was fashioned after the formation of the republic, however, did not dwell much on the experience of the First World War, and actively forgot the hostilities engaged in with the local Christians. Instead, the war against the Greek army was aggrandized as the war of liberation, in some versions billed as an anti-colonial war waged against colonial powers. In a situation where the great majority of the compatriots were not ideologically prepared and where the joint struggle considered to be the foundation of national construction had not been widely experienced, nationalism was bound to be a sentiment which had to be taught. The irony is that there was a common memory that united the new Turkish nationals. Most had been touched by it; it also constituted the fundamental precondition of the construction of a new state based on ethnic nationalism. This, of course, was the fact that, between 1915 and 1923, the Christians living in Turkey had disappeared. By choosing to entirely suppress (and repress) the memory of the Armenian massacres and the Greek deaths and exchange of populations, the republicans opted for an artificial history propping up an invented version of nationalism. The nationalist history which was supposed to affirm the cultural unity of the nation could not afford to build its links between the elite producing the ideology and the prospective clients of the ideology on acts which flouted the very virtues that it sought to foreground. This avoidance, however, was costly: it made the traditional lack of a common ground between the elite and the masses even more unbridgeable, while at the same time establishing a complicity of silence which worked to the detriment of mutual transparency.

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

The degree of violence exhibited during the ethnic clashes had been totally incommensurate with the life-world experiences of the populations prior to the events. Although material conditions had altered significantly during the last half of the nineteenth century, perhaps creating a potential for ethnic clash, Muslims and Christians lived together in towns and in many villages, and mostly coexisted in neighbourly relations. With the hindsight of the twentieth century, it is perhaps disingenuous to profess astonishment at ethnic strife. It should nonetheless be noted that there seems to have been a deep ambivalence on the part of the population toward the killings and expulsions. There can be no doubt, however, that there were material gains to the Muslim population deriving from the expulsion of the Armenian and Greek millets. Such gains must have contributed to the complicity characterizing the relations between the state and the populace of the early republican period. We may also surmise that they substituted for the lack of credible stories that genuinely resonated in the experience of the people. For, as argued above, it was not that such resonance could not be found in the history of the establishment of ethnic unity in Anatolia; rather, it was the perceived difficulty of utilizing this particular story as the basis of the elite–mass unity in carrying out the nationalist agenda. In the absence of credibly resonating stories, could the new formation rely on shared material reward? The republican elite seem to have thought so. Their attempt to highlight the patently incredible teachings of the history thesis, and their choice of eradicating all local variation in favour of a centrally propagated version of the national myth, illustrate their faith in the social engineering of an infinitely malleable subject population. Another dimension of the same phenomenon may be identified in the content of Turkish nationalist teaching, when counterposed to anti-colonial and thirdworld nationalisms of generally later vintage. Turkish nationalism was excessively instrumental, both as it was employed for social control, and for purposes of mobilization towards modernization. Instrumentality as a means of control and mobilization implies an inclination to fashion the content of the discourse in the direction of the targeted end. In the Turkish case this proved to be an easy task because the fashioning of nationalist discourse did not call for any negotiation with the masses. As I already argued, national sentiment was a late arrival on the scene, confined to the elite; but, more importantly, elements which potentially could resonate in popular feeling and experience were omitted from the nationalist discourse. This omission is more than silence: it may be qualified as the studied absence of resentment. In contrast to the anti-colonial sentiment which fuelled the majority of third-world national movements, Turkish nationalism did not exhibit an anti-Western nativism. The republican attempt to elevate a Turkish heritage was designed to compete with the European tradition on its own turf. It aimed to locate a Turkish presence in an already accomplished text, rather than challenging the text in a civilizational relativism. For this reason, Turkish reformers and their epigones were willing and apt followers of modernization theory, albeit avant la lettre. They saw their society as backward, but not essentially different. They were all Nehrus, and there was no Gandhi among them.20 Ataturk

A history and geography of Turkish nationalism

13

never wrote a text implying difference based on the positing of an authentic heritage. His major literary legacy is a political defence explaining the rationale for rebellion against the Ottoman government and justifying the elimination of his rivals.21 All his aphorisms, which are now inscribed in stone adorning official buildings, aim to instil national pride and self-esteem in order to exhort the population to advance on the Western path. This belief that Turkey was essentially a European entity derived from nineteenthcentury notions privileging the interstate arena, whereby Ottoman statesmen were indeed accepted as players in the Great-Power power game. Social and economic concerns or an awareness of underdevelopment remained a subordinate dimension of this conception. In later attempts to redefine the republican construction of the nation-state, a leftist strand essayed to present the episode as a victorious anti-colonial struggle; but this was a strained interpretation which gained credibility only because of the general environment of anti-liberalism in the 1930s. Even then, the anti-colonialism evinced in this view was far from a third-worldist civilizational challenge; instead it was closer to a developmentalism in the dependencia genre.22 The view that Turkey could be located in a continuum with the West was determined both by (lack of ) experience and interests. While the rift between the elite and the masses permitted the illusion of perceiving Anatolian peasantry as simply less developed, the project that the elite made its own also required the positing of an appropriatability, thus excluding the option of unbridgeable difference. Hence, for the nationalists, there was scant room for civilizational resentment or cultural contestation: they left that route to the Islamic movement. Indeed, starting with the Young Ottoman movement, political Islam had been very clear in its critique of westernizing reform and in its reaffirmation of civilizational difference. Motifs of holy war had been liberally deployed both during the First World War and the subsequent war against Greece. During the First World War, Arabs in particular had not been convinced by the declaration of jihad, especially since the CUP government had betrayed its Turkish nationalism and this call to holy war was transparently expedient. During the subsequent national struggle, however, an anti-colonial sympathy awakened, particularly among the Muslims of India, in which one of the significant elements was the fear that the Ottoman caliph might be deposed in the hands of Christians. While the material assistance from the Muslims of India had been welcome, a year after the declaration of the republic Mustafa Kemal had abolished the caliphate, much to the disappointment of those who hoped to forge an Islamic front in a worldwide struggle against colonialism. When Ankara embarked on the secularizing reforms of the early republic, all references to the Islamic ingredient of the ‘liberation struggle’ were erased from official history, and ‘westernization’ remained the only mobilizing ideology. Against this background, the republicans’ choice, to eschew an essentialist culturalism necessarily imbued with religious reference, is more understandable. A cultural opposition to the West would lead to the embracing of an authenticity constructed as primordial; and Islam was the only candidate. In a much quoted

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

verse, a poet speaking for the Islamic wing had declared the military struggle to be against ‘the monster with a single tooth left, that is called civilization’, in other words the decadent West.23 Such a formulation of difference was simply not available to the secularists who wanted to become part of the European civilization, which they did not find decadent. In fact, they heartily embraced all those ostensible dimensions that the other side probably found reprehensible and redolent of moral bankruptcy. Thus, in their attempt to distance themselves from the Islamic tradition, republican nationalists opted for a much less resonant version of national heritage. The problem was that, even within the secular spectrum, the choice of the particular founding myth referring national heritage to an obviously invented history, the deterritorialization of ‘motherland’, and the studious avoidance and repression of what constituted a shared recent experience, rendered Turkish nationalism exceptionally arid. It would seem that if the national struggle had been more protracted and genuinely anti-colonial, with widespread participation, there would have been greater opportunity for negotiating a different content for the secularist and modernizing version of nationalism which remained aloof and instrumental. In the absence of input from the masses, the nationalist ideology remained too much in the form of a lesson that had to be endured, with special uniforms to be taken out of mothballed storage, when designated anniversaries were celebrated with unsuspecting schoolchildren chanting the litany as required by their teachers sent from the Holy City. Perhaps this same preceptorial character explains the continued militancy of the state elite in propagating and defending their chosen version and their zeal in prohibiting and penalizing all deviation.

Notes 1 On Armenian nationalism, see Hovannisian, R. G., Armenia on the Road to Independence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1967); for Greek nationalism the collection of articles in Blinkhorn, M. and Veremis, T. (eds.), Modern Greece: Nationalism and Nationality (Athens: Sage-Eliamep, 1990), also Augustinos, G., ‘Consciousness and History: Nationalist Critics of Greek Society, 1897–1914’, East European Quarterly, 11, Spring (1977). Dawn advances the competing elites thesis in the case of Arab nationalism: see Dawn E. C., From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977); also see Zeine, N., The Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1973). 2 See, however, the arguments in Kushner, D., The Rise of Turkish Nationalism (London: Cass, 1977), according to whom a sense of Turkishness may be dated to an earlier period. While this may be the case, it seems that Turkish nationalism was a marginal intellectual option until the war, and it was regarded with suspicion by the ruling cadres of the Young Turks. 3 Georgeon, F., Aux origines du nationalisme turc, Yusuf Akcura (1876–1935) (Paris: Editions ADPF, 1980). 4 Parla, T., The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gokalp, 1876–1924 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); Berkes, N., The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964).

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5 Sencer, M. (ed.), Turkiye’nin Mali Tutsakligi, Parvus Efendi [Turkey’s Financial Servitude, Parvus Efendi] (Istanbul: May Yayinlari, 1977). 6 The numbers involved in this retrenchment, first in the 1878 war and then in the Balkan Wars, were vast – perhaps close to two million. 7 Hirschon, R. (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003); Ari, K., Buyuk Mubadele [The Great Exchange] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1995); Pentzopoulos, D., The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact on Greece (Paris: Mouton, 1962). 8 Ahmad, F., The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993); Zurcher, E. J. Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993). 9 The classic statement is from Ernest Renan, in ‘What is a Nation?’, reprinted in Bhabha, H. (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 10 Keyder, C., State and Class in Turkey (London: Verso, 1987). 11 Ersanli Behar, B. Iktidar ve Tarih, Turkiye’de ‘Resmi Tarih’ Tezinin Olusumu (1929–1937) [Domination and History, the Formation of the ‘Official History’ Thesis in Turkey (1929–1937)] (Istanbul: Afa Yayinlari, 1992). 12 Gunes Dil Teorisi is only the most blatant of the epicycles around Turkish nationalism of the 1930s. This particular ‘theory’ sought to prove that Turkish was an ur language, giving subsequent birth to all other languages. 13 Lowry, H. Trabzon Sehrinin Islamlasmasi ve Turklesmesi, 1461–1583 [The Islamization and Turkification of the City of Trabzon, 1461–1583] (Istanbul: Bogazici Universitesi Yayinevi, 2nd ed, 1998); also see Baer, M. D., ‘The Islamization of Turkish Cities’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 20, Spring (1999). 14 Obviously both historiographies prefer to ignore this massive conversion, but see Unsal, S., ‘Mardin: Aidiyet ve Suskunluk’ [Mardin: Belonging and Silence], Birikim, 124, August (1999). 15 For a discussion of territory and nationalism, see the essays in Hooson, D. (ed.), Geography and National Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 16 Keyder, C., Ozveren, E. and Quataert, D. (eds.), ‘Port-Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, 1800–1914’, special issue of Review, 16, 4, Fall (1993); Keyder, C., ‘Peripheral Port Cities and Politics on the Eve of the Great War’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 20, Spring (1999). 17 This is the paradox of the right to cabotage (national monopoly of internal maritime traffic) celebrated every year as one of the great nationalist achievements, which, however, left the country without a merchant or passenger fleet. 18 See, for example, Glazerbrook, P., Journey to Kars (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1984). 19 Orr, J. M., ‘Nationalism in a local setting’, Anthropological Quarterly, 64, 3 (1991); for a general, statement, see Billig, M., Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). 20 Chatterjee, P., Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1984). 21 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal (various editions), Nutuk [Speech]. 22 Especially in the left-wing version of Kemalist historiography which wants to see in the establishment of the republic the first anti-colonial struggle. Of course, the Ottoman Empire was never colonized and the foundation of Turkey was not accomplished through an anti-imperialist war – rather through the dismantling of an empire. The forerunners of dependencia theory in the Turkish context were found among the Kadro movement in the early 1930s. 23 The poet Mehmet Akif (Ersoy) in the same poem whose first two stanzas were made into the national anthem. The full stanza goes: If steel walls surround West’s horizons My frontiers are made of my chest filled with faith. Let it howl, do not fear: how could it choke such a faith That monster with a single tooth left, that you call ‘civilization’?

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References Ahmad, F., The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993). Akgunduz, A., ‘Osmanli Imparatorlugu ve Dis Gocler, 1783–1922’ [The Ottoman Empire and External Migrations], Toplum ve Bilim, 80, Spring (1999). Ari, K., Buyuk Mubadele [The Great Exchange] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1995). Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal (various editions), Nutuk [Speech]. Augustinos, G., ‘Consciousness and History: Nationalist Critics of Greek Society, 1897–1914’, East European Quarterly, 11, Spring (1977). Baer, M. D., ‘The Islamization of Turkish Cities’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 20, Spring (1999). Bhabha, H. (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Berkes, N., The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964). Billig, M., Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). Blinkhorn, M. and Veremis, T. (eds.), Modern Greece: Nationalism and Nationality, (Athens: Sage-Eliamep, 1990). Chatterjee, P., Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1984). Dawn, E. C., From Ottomanism to Arabism; Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977). Ersanli Behar, B., Iktidar ve Tarih, Turkiye’de ‘Resmi Tarih’Tezinin Olusumu (1929–1937) [Domination and History, the Formation of the ‘Offical History’ Thesis in Turkey (1929–1937)] (Istanbul: Afa Yayinlari, 1992). Georgeon, F., Aux origines du nationalisme turc, Yusuf Akcura (1876–1935) (Paris: Editions ADPF, 1980). Glazerbrook, P., Journey to Kars (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1984). Hirschon, R. (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Exchange between Greece and Turkey (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003). Hooson, D. (ed.), Geography and National Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Hovannisian, R. G., Armenia on the Road to Independence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967). Karpat, K. H., Ottoman Population, 1830–1914 (Madison,WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Kasaba, R. and Keyder, C., ‘Writing History: Armenians in the Empire’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 19, Fall (1998). Keyder, C., State and Class in Turkey (London: Verso, 1987). Keyder, C., ‘Peripheral Port Cities and Politics on the Eve of the Great War’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 20, Spring (1999). Keyder, C., Ozveren, E. and Quataert, D. (eds.), ‘Port-Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, 1800–1914’, special issue of Review, 16, 4, Fall (1993). Kushner, D., The Rise of Turkish Nationalism (London: Cass, 1977). Lowry, H., Trabzon Sehrinin Islamlasmasi ve Turklesmesi, 1461–1583 [The Islamization and Turkification of the City of Trabzon, 1461–1583] (Istanbul: Bogazici Universitesi Yayinevi, 2nd ed, 1998). McCarthy, J., ‘Foundations of the Turkish Republic: Social and Economic Change’, Middle Eastern Studies, April (1983). Orr, J. M., ‘Nationalism in a Local Setting’, Anthropological Quarterly, 64, 3 (1991), 142–52.

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Pentzopoulos, D., The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact on Greece (Paris: Mouton, 1962). Sencer, M. (ed.), Turkiye’nin Mali Tutsakligi, Parvus Efendi [Turkey’s Financial Servitude, Parvus Efendi] (Istanbul: May Yayinlari, 1977). Unsal, S., ‘Mardin: Aidiyet ve Suskunluk’ [Mardin: Belonging and Silence], Birikim, 124, August (1999). Zeine, N., The Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1973). Zurcher, E. J., Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993).

2

The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914 Kostas P. Kostis

Introduction Anyone interested in modern Greek history is aware of the plethora of studies on the formation of the Greek state. However, it would be difficult to argue that these studies allow a clear understanding of the mechanisms and the processes of the formation of Greek state. In large part the relevant research suffers from problems inherent to Greek historiography. Two of these are the most important. The first is the extremely abstract nature of the discourse, which makes no effort to get in touch with the data. The second is a procrustean use of theoretical models to fit the Greek and generally the non-Western European realities. The final result is, I think, obvious. Despite the large number of studies in political history, we actually know very little about the formation of the Greek state and the phenomenon of patronage which constitutes the passe partout concept of every theoretical undertaking, despite the criticisms it has been subjected to because of its limited heuristic ability.1 The problems begin with the very foundation of this state. This is not so much because it is difficult for us to understand the nature of the Greek ‘revolution’. Rather it is because we are unable to connect the pre-revolutionary reality with the result of the apostasia (defection) of 1821, to use the wording of a chronographer of the revolution, Ambrosios Frantzis.2 Scholars concerned with this issue are well aware of the problem. In a relatively recent study, Christos Lyrintzis poses the question in the following way: Perhaps the most important problem in the study of the Greek political scene as it was shaped after Independence, can be summed up in the analysis and interpretation of the process of transition from one system in which the presence of a strong Ottoman power dominated, to a system in which power was subjected at least to some degree, to the control of different agents and in which representative/participatory processes were put into place that were new to Greek society.3 Indeed, a primary question, the answer to which would solve many difficulties faced by students of nineteenth-century political history, concerns the process of

The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914

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transition from the systems of power and political domination prevailing during the Ottoman period to their respective institutions in post-revolutionary Greece. Up to here, there is no point of disagreement. Nevertheless, all those who have studied the political life of modern Greece tend essentially to overlook the Ottoman reality. This attitude can be observed as early as the formative years of the creation of the Greek state. Explicitly or not, it aims to disconnect the ‘Oriental’ past of the Ottoman domination from what is considered the ‘Western’ background of the post-revolutionary state. In other words, Ottoman reality is totally overlooked, reduced to the mere relationship between subjects (more particularly between notables and captains on the one hand and the ‘people’ on the other). This is probably because these relationships may be considered directly comparable to those of the post-revolutionary period, insofar as they concern the same individuals. In this way, however, the entire functioning of the relationships of power, as they were structured within a broader political system, the Ottoman Empire, disappear from the analysis. In other words, the transition from one system of political domination to another is not studied within the framework of the structures of power before, during and after the revolution. Consequently, the phenomenon of transition or continuity cannot be assessed. Instead, it is considered self-evident that the transition takes place through the adoption of a new institutional framework by the revolution, while at a local level the structures of power remain unaltered, riddled with patronage exchanges and the attempt to appropriate the state apparatus. Thus the modern Western-like institutions, which are summed up in the ‘national state’, work closely with the notables and the people whose actions are based on the logic of patronage relationships and who represent the traditional structures of Greek society. This is in the sense that the latter constitute the only element, which may offer coherence to the political and social structure of the modern Greek state, insofar as the powers of the market and the civil society are absent. All of this results in an extremely common interpretative schema: that of a traditional society eroding the institutions, which are intrusive and foreign to it, as a final product of the spurious construction called the Greek state.4 Inversely, the opposite schema, prevalent in mainly conservative political circles, expresses the same point of view. The introduction of foreign institutions into Greece led to the disorganization of traditional society and to the distortion of ‘Greekness’, which was the only guarantee of a successful historical course for the Greek state. Consequently, both these perspectives share a belief in the impossibility of the coexistence of a traditional society with the modernity of Western institutions. It is here that lies, in my opinion, the second weak point to be found in the problematic concerning the articulation of post-revolutionary political life, and which can be expressed by the lack of conceptual coherence and continuity.

The problem This conceptual weakness is connected with the identification of the state, which emerged from the ‘Revolution’, with the nation-state of Western Europe. The

20

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

reasoning hidden behind this identification is, at first glance, obvious. A national revolution, as the Greek one is considered to be, regardless of its other characteristics, cannot but lead to the creation of a nation-state. This argument is supported by the fact that the modern state acquires, and cannot do otherwise, in order to be legitimized within the Western state-system, European institutions, which are progressively strengthened throughout the entire nineteenth century. However, in this way one identifies the state, which was an outcome of the Greek revolution, with the modern, that is, the nation-state. At the basis of this argument, which in almost all cases is implicit, is the idea that this state is the product of a national revolution or, in accordance with the viewpoint that the institutions which frame it or give it substance, are of the Western variety.5 The latter poses many more substantial problems than it can solve. It also leads to the favourite sport of political scientists and historians, particularly those of Marxist orientation. All the interpretative efforts regarding the formation of the Greek state are reduced to measuring the deviations of state accomplishments from the ideal types that should have emerged and that naturally are represented by the Western European model. In other words, the problem of the formation of the Greek state is not far from being transformed into a moral issue, since some corrupt politicians or a corrupt social mass, depending on the political views of the author, prevented Greece from achieving the position which it deserved or deserves.6 In the more extreme versions of this viewpoint, such as that of Ion Dragoumis, the nation and the state find themselves in a continuous struggle, in which the former has its own ‘glorious’ destiny, free and independent of the hardships which the Greek state and, in an indirectly clear way, the Greek politicians continually heap on it.7 I previously characterized this problem as conceptual. The haste with which everyone rushes to characterize the Greek state as national creates some questions and contradictions. The international literature sees the modern state as the nation-state, the state that, at least symbolically, is born in the French Revolution and the great Reform Act of 1832 in England. Its being was not determined by the predicate national which is attributed to it, but by certain mechanisms for the management of power which lead to its uniqueness and, therefore, differentiate it from alternative state mechanisms. For M. Mann, for example, infrastructural power, that is the ability of the state to infiltrate civil society and to activate political decisions throughout the entire state, constitutes state power itself, primarily in present-day capitalist democracies.8 A. Giddens defines the nation-state as a bordered power-container and considers the processes of civil transformation and internal peace making as, among other things, the preconditions for its existence.9 The same holds for the views put forward by G. Poggi, according to which the modern state expresses the institutionalization of political power, shifting the problem in this way from the study of institutions to the processes through which political power is institutionalized.10 Thus, attention strays from the institutional level,11 and leads to the scale of the structure of power and how it is exercised. This, in my opinion, constitutes a very realistic approach to the study of the state, which is not simply an institution or

The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914

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even a set of institutions, but a way of organizing and exercising power. In reality, this final view is treated from a realistic perspective, as an entity in existence, as an organization that controls or attempts to control territory and populations. This realistic position offers a much greater heuristic freedom from the abstract models usually proposed and it creates the preconditions for a more productive analysis of the institutions. I contest the possibility of speaking of a nation-state, that is a modern state after the revolution. The fact that the latter constitutes a kind of rupture with the Ottoman reality does not allow us to assume a complete break with the power structures of Ottoman Greece. All the characteristics of power exercised, at least in King Otto’s Greece, point to the logic of the traditional or pre-modern state. We should not forget that, in this type of state, the government focuses mainly upon the management of conflicts within the framework of the ruling class. This was usually carried out in the most important urban centres and not so much through a systematic management of the whole territory which the state claims as its own, as in the case of modern states.12

A pre-modern state Therefore, I think that, at least until late in the nineteenth century, it would be incorrect to speak of a nation-state. Power constitutes a personal right and is exercised not by individuals, but by groups, the control of which constitutes a basic priority at the expense of territorial control. The way in which King Otto exercised power gives credence to such a view. This is also so in the case in which power, and more specifically state power, was handled by the local elite in the revolution of 1843. King Otto not only believed that every source of power and legitimacy emanated from himself as the divinely ordained sovereign: he implemented this belief, in managing power through the regulation and the control of the contradictory interests of the political parties and the factions, as J. A. Petropulos has demonstrated so well.13 There is nothing to indicate that the regime of King Otto pursued the development of mechanisms, using infrastructural power means that would extend the sphere in which the state exercised power to ever widening groups of the population, or that it would mobilize a growing volume of economic resources. Is there a clearer demonstration, regarding the way in which power was exercised by King Otto’s regime, than that of its utter indifference toward constructing a rudimentary communication network? This alone would have allowed the state direct penetration into the area it wished to control and would have multiplied the resources available for economic utilization.14 If eighteenth-century France created a road network allowing the sovereign’s direct control of citizens, in the Greece of 1864 one could see that ‘there are areas which state-power never touched’.15 It is thus at this point that we can observe not the non-existence, but the lack of interest in the fulfilment of one of the most fundamental goals of a modern state. The Greek state, like the Ottoman state, took a coherent position on the issue of borders. As I. Koliopoulos notes so penetratingly, the border zone of Greece and

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of the Ottoman Empire had the character of a military frontier, a quasi-undefined and uncontrolled area where military/bandit troupes moved, came into conflict and took shape.16 This was a practice diametrically opposite to that of the modern state for the control of populations, which requires strict control of the border and a zealous monitoring of the movement of populations to and from its territory. At the same time, the institutional framework constituted the only alternative way, related to the Ottoman model, of legitimizing the state’s existence at the international level and also of transforming the political discourse into a national one. Of course this holds, if we accept the identification of the institutional with the legal framework and do not seek the genuine functioning of every institution as formed through the action of the political agents. This is because, for instance, it is feasible to see the functioning of the Parliament, which was created with the revolution of 1843, as an aberration from the ideal prototype of parliamentarism. It is, however, difficult to understand the real significance of the Parliament in Greek political life, if we do not take into consideration the result of the struggle of the local elite for participation in state power, and that it functioned as an oligarchic structure of their political domination.17 At any rate, the entire system of ‘liberal’ institutions imported after the Greek War of Independence acquire a completely different content, if we take into account the fact that they play no arbitrating or intermediary role whatsoever as officially they should have,18 and that, to a great degree, they do not differ from the assemblies of the notables of the Ottoman period, except by name. Insofar as individuals, anonymous and equal before the law, are non-existent and the representation of local interests occurs through family and peripheral clientelism, it would be absurd to discuss parliamentarism and liberal institutions. Moreover, the logic of corruption, which coexists with the possession of state power, also constitutes an element of the traditional state and represents the right to office according to Weberian terminology. The words of Makriyannis in the National Assembly of 1844: ‘They (that is the eterochthones19) stayed so long and ate bread and turned our fatherland upside down. Let them go away now and we would eat the bread’,20 represent nothing more than a claim to the right to manage the public funds, a right acquired through participation in the administration of power. This, however, is a point of view that can only, to a very small degree, be considered as expressing the modern management of state power. In fact, it is the same redistributive logic that ruled the Ottoman administration. In this regard I believe that the use of the specific term (redistributive) by K. Tsoukalas21 in order to define the nature of the Greek state during the nineteenth century is very successful. This is something which underlines the continuities between the Ottoman and the post-revolutionary period.22 The same phenomenon moreover, is revealed, perhaps in a less impressive manner, but with greater significance for the nature of the state and of public administration, in another field. Despite the prohibition of tax farming and the performing of auctions on the part of civil servants and local authorities over a 50-year period (from 1833), their participation in these activities constituted their ex officio privilege, which was never contested in practice.23 Its acceptance,

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23

explicit or otherwise, by the majority of the personnel of the Greek state, political and not, implies a political consciousness far removed from the conception of the citizen of Western Europe and a practice which has nothing to do with the modern state. Having clarified these basic principles of the approach, I think that it is feasible to go on to a more specific analysis of the problem of the formation of the Greek state. I believe that a basic axis of this study should not be the model of the modern state. This should be used only to achieve a record of periodization.24 In other words, we should not apply ourselves to investigating the deviations of the achievements of the modern state from the ideal types suggested by the nationstate. This, as I have already mentioned, would lead us to completely misleading interpretations and fruitless analyses. On the contrary, our primary target will be the quest for and the recording of the goals of the Greek state. From this point onwards, we can assess its effectiveness in achieving these goals. In this way, I think that, to some degree, we are being ‘fair’ to the Greek state. This is because we will not insist that the regimes of King Otto or of Kapodistrias adjust to our demands and desires. Instead, we will search for their goals and judge them according to their ability to achieve those goals. I must add here that obviously this approach to the state may proceed providing only that states are seen as organisms, which exert control over people and territory.25 That is to say, this is only so in a realistic perspective and that the risk of moving on to a hypostasization of the state is always present. Regardless of this danger, however, an investigation of the aims of the state, in addition to its effectiveness, may disengage us from the addiction to Western reality, which is indirectly accepted to exist in the Greek state. I refer to an example, which is typical of this kind of approach. The choice of the regency to make King Otto leader of the Church26 has been considered by some intellectuals as a distorting influence of Protestant origin upon the Orthodox and consequently upon the traditions befitting a Greek, and by others as an achievement of modernist forces. Actually, this problem has two dimensions: on the one hand, the creation of an independent church; on the other, the suffocating control of the state over the church, at least until 1850. With regard to the first point, it would be difficult to imagine a newly born state abandoning one of the most fundamental mechanisms of control of its population, that is the patriarchate, to its opponent, the Ottoman Empire. Consequently, it is not accidental that, even from the time of the revolution, the autocephalous church was seen as a given and that only later would it be used as a point of conflict with King Otto’s regime and as a rallying point for the followers of the Russian party. The issue of the relations between the state and the church is not nearly so straightforward. As I have already mentioned, the complete subordination of the church to state power was considered a victory of modernism by some, and by others as a sort of alienation which Westernism brought forth. In both cases, the underlying perception is that of conflict between good and evil, which does not help much in understanding either the problem or the solution, and carries the

24

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analysis back to a normative framework from which it gains nothing. Furthermore, it oversimplifies a problem to which, even if we limit ourselves to the European experience of the first half of the nineteenth century, a variety of solutions were given, depending upon the national reality which it had to confront. In the Greek case, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the range of choice for state power was extremely limited. This is because the formation of a centralized state with the church, an all-powerful pole for the accumulation of political, economic and ideological power, remaining independent and indeed on friendly terms toward one of the three political parties of the period, was inconceivable. Therefore, attempts to interpret the position of the state toward the church based upon the schemas upheld by the agents of modernism or Westernization on the one hand, and tradition on the other, can offer nothing beyond legitimizing an apologetic political discourse. And this discourse refuses the state its right to act as an organism interested in its strength and its reproduction. The solution, provided for the issue of the relations of the church and the state was one which allowed the Greek state to incorporate the networks of power which passed through the church into its own mechanisms. The policy regarding monasteries and their holdings, as well as the tight control exercised upon the organs of decision-making of the Greek Church, are absolutely interpretable and understandable, if we take into account that all these factors worked to the advantage of some party mechanisms which were antagonistic to Bavarian domination. They also strengthened local powers which were not on friendly terms with its regime, and which developed parallel to the state systems of communication.27 Kapodistrias’s indifference to the imposition of similar controls on the church substantiates this point of view, exactly because he was in a position to control the church, because of his close ties with the Russian party.28 It is further supported mainly by the increasing indifference of the state in the following years toward imposing analogous regulations on the churches of the regions which it gradually annexed. The most characteristic examples are the churches of Crete and the Dodekanisos which today remain independent of the Greek Church. Finally, the gradual loosening of the control of the state over the church also substantiates this view. A classic example of this is provided by the laws ’ and A’ of 1852 when the church took the form of a public corporation and administered its affairs to some degree relatively independently of the state.29 The question of national lands and the overall trends in agricultural reforms is a similar issue. Many historians claim that the premature distribution of land supported agricultural reforms of a bourgeois nature. However, they overlook the physiognomy of the agricultural population itself and assume choices on its part, which could be supported within the logic of the market. Yet a point that is more important for our discussion was the intention of the Greek state to surrender, with uncertain consequences, the most important weapon of the peasant populations’ incorporation into its logic and practices. What is also overlooked is that the villagers and the notables were squatters or had trespassed upon a very large part of the national lands, while the plans for distribution instituted from time to time were resounding failures.30

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The policy followed by the Greek state, one of non-recognition of land ownership unless titles could be verified, remained a very powerful weapon for the control of the legality of each claim and finally of the whole population. On the other hand, it did not prevent squatting or trespassing. Of course, the cost was the underdevelopment of the land market, although this did not appear to concern the state. With its policy in the area of national lands, the Greek state finally succeeded in being formed in such way as to inhibit separatist movements and to integrate peasant populations without much reaction. These examples demonstrate just how rational the policies of the Greek state can be, if we consider them from a different angle.31 The impressive cohesion and rapid formation of the modern Greek state may have had as a cost fiscal weakness and a stunted economy. However, they had the benefit, incomparably more important in the eyes of the state administrators and in the logic of the formation of the state, of the creation of a state apparatus which with very limited means succeeded in absorbing local political elites and peasant populations, eterochthones and aftochthones (foreigners and natives) and in promoting itself as the only factor of legitimacy of political life. That is, they succeeded in the institutionalization of state power, to borrow the phrase of G. Poggi.

The winds of change Intuitively I would maintain that, until 1870–80, we have the phase of the strengthening of central power, a period which in many ways can be seen as transitional from the Ottoman reality to the formation of a national state. From then onwards, a series of indicators may convince us, although admittedly based on a quick reading of the empirical material, that we are passing to another phase in the history of the Greek state. I briefly mention the elements that underscore these changes. With the overthrow of King Otto a wave of introspection appears among the Greek politicians. The failures of the Crimean War and later of the Cretan uprising demonstrate the striking weaknesses of the Greek state within a changing environment and lead the new generation of politicians, who made their first appearance in those years, to seek new solutions to the economic problems of the state. The entire decade of the 1870s is replete with parliamentary discussions on the economic and administrative reforms required. From such a perspective one can also see the distribution of national lands of 1871, which on the other hand underlines the weakening of the significance of state ownership of land. The state appears to feel more self-confident, at least domestically, because externally the situation is reversed with regard to the preceding period, as I demonstrate below. Furthermore, during the 1870s, the Greek state begins its agonizing attempts to attain a compromise with its creditors. The achievement of this compromise will allow Greece to appeal once again to foreign capital markets to obtain loans. These will serve in its first attempt to construct a rudimentary road and rail network. Along with its economic dimensions, this undertaking signals the first real declaration of the Greek state’s intention to penetrate its territory. Until then,

26

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control mechanisms had been indirect, the interests assimilated or neutralized through negotiation. In direct relation to these changes, the military organization of the Greek state begins to undergo significant changes. Already by 1876, the government of A. Koumoundouros has attempted a new organization of the army, in order to respond to military enterprises of a major scale.32 The changes made by Trikoupis in the army, beginning in the 1880s,33 are directed toward the creation of the framework for long-term change in the military organization of the country aimed at fighting an external enemy and not of confronting domestic opponents. However, it was only the law P’, put forward by the Theotokis government (1906–08) that led to the complete separation of public security from the duties of the army. The latter is clearly forbidden to become involved in services outside its mandate.34 From the same perspective, the suppression of banditry – in essence the Dilesis massacre in the 1870s which constitutes the final major incident of banditry – underscores a new attitude of the state not to give in to violence. During the same decade, the first constituents of the country’s democratic government are articulated and materialize through the implementation of the parliamentary majority and with the reduction of the influence of the local elites around 1885. In the period 1875–85, these changes are expressed, on the one hand, according to K. Gardika-Alexandropoulou,35 through the shaping of a selfregulating political system, relatively free of institutionalized inequalities of power. On the other hand, for C. Lyrintzis they are expressed in the reduction, throughout the 1860s, of governmental–administrative interventions in the electoral process and in the coming to the fore of electoral competition as the field par excellence where the division of political power is judged.36 In direct relation with the limitation of the influence of local elites is the taxation of yoked animals through which the competition between the local elite and the central power reaches its formal end. On the one hand, taxation ceases to constitute a privileged mechanism of surplus distribution to the advantage of the social group of tax farmers. On the other hand, the political significance of the latter is reduced to nothing.37 Last but not least, in 1852 we observe the final and probably the most impressive peasant uprising. With the suppression of Papulakos’s movement, the country enters a phase of absolute peace with regard to peasant uprisings.38 Thus, the peasant population appears to have been integrated into the state mechanisms and the slogans which up to that point could incite them – for example, that the sovereign was of a different creed – apparently cease to stir them.39 We will have to wait until the final years of the nineteenth century and the uprisings connected with the raisin issue in order to find new social movements against the state power. However, they now take a different form and are of a different nature. It may not be at all coincidental that the year of the Papulakos movement is the year during which the law concerning the ‘emancipation’ of the church is implemented. What could these changes mean? They were cumulative. There is no doubt about it. They are concentrated into a time period of 30 years or perhaps even less. These are years in which the examples could of course have been multiplied.40 The success of a bourgeois class, which attempts to ‘modernize’ the state, would

The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914

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constitute an easy and rough solution to this problem, in the same way in which the pale industrial movement which appears in the years 1870–80 has led some to speak about the appearance of capitalism in Greece. I think that nothing of the kind holds, except of course if, beginning from the period of bourgeois transformation and looking backwards, we see things from the perspective of how they turned out. The entire period, which is being examined here, should be seen from its own perspective. A state apparatus asserts itself over populations, an apparatus which attempts to strengthen and reproduce itself broadly. The gradual achievement of some of its goals gives it the possibility of passing on to new targets. Therefore, if at least for the period of King Otto (1860–90), it is clearly impossible to speak of a modern state; for the period following his fall, a categorical rejection of the attempt which was made for some kind of ‘modernization’ of the Greek state would be superficial. Perhaps the most important questions that should be answered here are: What kind of modernization? Where does it find its motives? From where does it get its incentive?

External dependence and ‘modernization’ Up to this point, the formation of the modern Greek state has been confronted as a process with an exclusively internal dynamic. Restricting ourselves to observing the societies of the Greek peninsula alone would, however, pose severe limits to an understanding of the phenomenon. We must not forget that the Greek state is a product of international conditions, that its sovereignty for a long historical period had been curtailed, and finally that, on the geo-political scale, the protective powers constitute a far from negligible factor, in the sense that they determined positions and choices, internal dynamics and political conflicts. Finally, it should not be overlooked that, throughout the entire period under investigation here, the Greek state is in continuous competition with other states, a relationship which cannot but influence its own make-up. The overlooking of the consequences of the Greek state’s entrance into the interstate system upon its formation results from the response of historical and political scientists in the 1970s and 1980s to simplistic Marxist theories which attribute every problem of the Greek state to its dependence on foreign powers and their domestic agents. On the other hand, the internally oriented approach to the shaping of the Greek state which led to that response, leaves a series of unanswered questions behind it which in turn lead to the discovery of bourgeois classes about whom it is not worth speaking. The Greek state was created within the framework of the European Concert: its existence, in addition to its position in the geo-political system of the period, cannot be viewed outside of it. It was one of the states which was founded to play a mediating role in the functioning of the nineteenth-century international interstate system. Another example was Switzerland. From this point of view41 these factors also made up one of its new characteristics.42 Its behaviour in some sectors, primarily in foreign policy and on the issue of military organization, which in my opinion are fundamental factors in an understanding of the course of state

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formation, can be interpreted much more easily, if one takes into account this dimension of its existence. Between the Paris conference of 1815 and the Crimean War, the system worked to some degree effectively, based upon a stable balance of power, which the great powers could and did develop in the context of the European Concert.43 The small states like Greece made up a field of confrontation of the contradictions of the great powers, and this phenomenon is expressed both in the internal life of the kingdom with the existence of three ‘foreign’ political parties and in the foreign policy of the kingdom. The latter is continually oriented neither toward direct intervention in the diplomatic field, nor toward direct military confrontation with the opponent. It simply expects to obtain benefits only on the diplomatic front through inciting/warning of a problem,44 in the same way in which the creation of the kingdom was the result of the policy of the balance of power between the great European nations. The fact that the foreign policy of the Ottonian period displays so many fluctuations in its preferences for foreign powers cannot be attributed to any independent policy which King Otto attempted to follow. Rather it can be found in the articulation of international relations which compel the Greek sovereign to search for rifts in the relations between the great powers in order to reap benefits. This appears even more clearly from the position that the state took in the area of military organization. War in the period of King Otto is nothing more than a mission of bandit groups in the territory of the Ottoman Empire. The goal is not to gain territory, something which was impossible given the military strength of the Ottoman empire, but to exert pressure and to declare its presence at the conferences of the great powers. Perhaps it is characteristic of this fact that, during the Ottonian period, there was not a single attempt to organize an army which would be in a position to fight Turkey, nor any complaint that no such attempt was taking place. This was at a time when the Ottomans were totally reorganizing their military system. However, the diplomatic representation of the Greek state is slack, in fact often non-existent, since the presence of Greek diplomats in foreign courts would have little to offer in a period of the smooth functioning of the European Concert. The presence of foreign embassies in the Greek court was sufficient. With the Crimean War a significant change took place in the international balance of power. In contrast to the widespread belief which was common until that time that the future of the small nations was in the hands of the great powers, a feeling developed that they now held their fate in their own hands. Thus, the techniques involved in the change of the balance of power after 1854 result from an extremely well developed and refined system of alliances.45 These changes will also start to be reflected from a certain point onward in the foreign policy of the Greek state and in its very formation. The failures which Greek foreign policy registered during the Crimean War in 1850 and the Cretan revolution of the 1860s demonstrate its limits, but also those of the military organization of the state itself. From then on, a slow but gradual turn toward creating ties with the British sphere of influence begins and can also be seen in the search for Balkan allies, while at the same time the state itself gradually becomes conscious of its need for a new organizational goal.46

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The Balkan issue will play a catalytic role in state organization. A simple study of the budgets of the Greek state suffices to demonstrate the importance of war expenditures in the decade of the 1870s and after, and consequently that of the expansion of the state apparatus, and to underline the contrast with the Ottonian period.47 If O. Hintze, possibly influenced by his origins, considered military organization as the basic variable in state formation, C. Trikoupis vindicated him to some degree when, in 1890, he announced in Parliament that ‘the sound parts of the budget depend to a large degree upon the army and the navy expenditures’.48 The fact that until 1860 the budgets are put forward as measured and balanced, while after this period they employ the logic of large deficits and of rapid expansion is probably not a chance occurrence.49 Furthermore, the good housekeeping attributed to the Ottonian period was not simply an idiosyncrasy of the king, but a product of a different perception of the state concerning geo-political relations and state administration. The size of the budgets of the Greek state displays such intense variations from period to period that there is no significant scope for doubt on this point. Thus the Greek state orients itself more and more toward the formation of those mechanisms (military and diplomatic) which would allow it to participate on an equal basis in the Balkan competition. During the 1870s the decisiveness with which a solution is found for the debts of the War of Independence which had remained unsettled for five decades, underlines the immediate need for the readjustment of the state apparatus to the changing elements in the environment of the state. It was only through external borrowing that the Balkan states hoped that they could find themselves in the position to demand their share of the empire’s legacy. If, however, the direct changes brought about by the new international conditions were nothing but increased foreign and domestic borrowing, indirectly the consequences were more serious. Initially the need for participation in the interstate system meant reorganizing the army and the diplomatic corps. With regard to the former, one could stop at the consequences which something of this sort could have for the society itself. For example, the introduction of conscription was an initiative that would not leave the Greek countryside indifferent, since it would deprive it of labour. However, the more general reorganization of the army, which would allow it to participate in military confrontation, also meant reorganization of the state apparatus in order to respond to the needs of conscription, organization and support of a significant number of men and the handling of the new war technologies. However, as C. Trikoupis often stressed, the introduction of conscription surpassed the capabilities of the Greek state, and that was the reason why its implementation was curtailed and ineffective.50 The adaptability of the state apparatus to new demands appeared limited – and this observation holds for all the Balkan states. The absolute incapacity of the state to raise capital in a way that would serve its interests, but even more to utilize it rationally, was a product of this weak organizational adaptability. Modernization, of course, constitutes a framework, but also a reality which does not suit the Balkan case. In fact, we can observe the transmission of incentives from the international environment to which the states attempted to adapt. Thus,

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

with the exception of Romania, all the rest of the Balkan countries sooner or later proved themselves incapable of reorganizing in accordance with the demands of the international economy and politics. In the end they had to submit to international economic control. Only through such control could the institutional framework for raising and yielding return on borrowed capital be organized and a rudimentary framework for the rational management of public funds be put together. To put it briefly, the dynamic of change in the state apparatus does not seem to constitute an element inherent in the state’s nature. It emerges from external incentives and adapts to them. Thus the dynamics of the transformation observed after 1870 are a product of changes in the interstate system after the Crimean War that push the political elites toward the reorganization of the military and diplomatic apparatus of the state, in order not to lose contact with the dynamics of Balkan antagonism. The formation of the nation-state in Greece is a phenomenon which cannot be understood only through the process of internal accumulation, but is primarily the outcome of the country’s participation in the interstate system, as it is shaped after the Crimean War.

Notes 1 Lyrintzis, C., ‘ d  ‡ ‡ a e    Ef  19 b ’ [The Political and Patronage System in Nineteenth-century Greece], Ed Kc [Hellenike Koinonia], 1 (1987), 157–82. 2 Frantzis, A., E  d  kc   ‡‡c Ef [Synopsis of the History of Renaissance Greece], 3 vols (Athens: 1839), vol. 1, p. ’: Frantzis adopts the distinction between revolution and defection which is also used in Thucydides. Thus, defection ‘of those who suffer violence’ is juxtaposed with the revolution of ‘those who do not suffer violence’. Trikoupis, S., Ikc  Ed E  f‡ [The History of the Greek Revolution], 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: 1860), vol. 1, p. 311, also adopting in his turn the Thucycidian distinction, maintains that the Greek war ‘had the characteristics of revolution in the overturning of the regime and the characteristics of defection since Greece defected from the Ottoman empire which controlled it’, and, for this reason, he uses both these terms without differentiation. 3 Lyrintzis, C., T C  ‘ b’. Kc   d  A h  19 b [The Last of the Great Families: Society and Politics in Achaia in the Nineteenth Century] (Athens: Themelio, 1991), p. 13. 4 Diamandouros, N., ‘H ‡ ck   ‡ e   Ef   ‡ kc   f  19 b ’ [The Establishment of Parliamentarism in Greece and its Functioning during the Nineteenth Century], in D. Tsaousis (ed.), ‘O‡  Ed c  19 b [Aspects of Nineteenth-century Greek Society] (Athens: Estia, 1984), p. 57ff. 5 A term which is usually replaced by what is thought to be cosily identical to that of ‘bourgeois’. 6 For a typical articulation of this view, see Mouzelis, N., ‘The Concept of Modernisation: Its Relevance for Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 14, 2, October (1996), where the fact that the state is controlled by patronage and populist parties, in addition to its grotesque size, are the elements which made it resemble a monster. This is considered the main reason for its impotent reactions to the rapid changes in the international environment. As a result, the state is reduced to political parties and the political personnel.

The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914

31

7 Dragoumis, I., Ea  a [Greek Civilization] (Athens: Philomythos, 1914, last edn 1931); Veremis, T., ‘A a  ‡ a kf    C c kf . T ‡ck   kf K   a‡’ [From the Nation-state to the Nation without a State: The Experiment of the Konstantinopolis Organisation], in T. Veremis (ed.), Ed  a   ‡ a  Ef [National Identity and Nationalism in Modern Greece] (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, 1997), pp. 27–52. 8 Mann, M., ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, in M. Mann, States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 9 Giddens, A., The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 121. 10 Poggi, G., The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 18ff. 11 However, even if we remain at the institutional level, before we discuss modern or civil institutions in the modern Greek state, we should demonstrate that these institutions under discussion have a specific civil or modern physiognomy, something which I do not think is self-evident. Institutional regulations of the Antivassilia, for example, do not consist of anything more than elementary regulations for the functioning of a centralized state. In fact, it is perhaps not coincidental that, among all the areas with which the Ottoman regime was involved, only that of civil law did not attract its interest. It is always worthwhile to read Maourer, G. L., O Ea  a [The Greek People] (Athens: first German edn 1835, 1976), p. 397ff, in order to see the reasoning which hides the measures of the Bavarian regency and which I do not think justify the characterization of modern or bourgeois type for those institutions which were imported into Greece by the Bavarians. 12 Giddens, The Nation State, p. 57. 13 Petropulos, J. A., Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, 1833–1843 (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1968). 14 Synarellis, M., ka     f  Ef 1830–1880 [Roads and Ports in Greece, 1830–1880] (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the Greek Bank for Industrial Development, 1989). 15 Halikiopoulos, P. I., C‡ ‡kc Ef [Thoughts on Greece], 2 vols (Patras: 1864), vol. II, p. 44. 16 Koliopoulos, J. S., ‘ ‡c   k a   Ef  19 b ’ [Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece, 1821–1912], in T. Veremis (ed.), Ed  a   ‡ a  N‡a‡k Ef [National Identity and Nationalism in Modern Greece] (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, 1997). 17 Petmezas, S., ‘ a  k a  ‡ d ‡ c   Ef ’ [Political Liberation Struggles and National Integration in Greece], Ik [Histor], 2, September (1990). 18 Ibid., 99. 19 People who arrived in Greece after the War of Independence and took control of the army and civil offices. 20 Dimakis, I., H ‡ d ‡ d  1843    d  a   ‡‡ka [The 1843 Change of Regime and the Issue of Natives and Foreigners] (Athens: Themelio, 1991), p. 33. 21 Tsoukalas, K., Kd f    kf . H ka   a bk  Ef [Social Development and the State: The Formation of Public Space in Greece] (Athens: Themelio, 1981), p. 80. 22 This continuity appears even more clearly with regard to the issue of taxation. Despite the constitutional principles regarding taxation, which were determined by the revolution and are considered the foundation of the taxation policy of the Greek state, it is difficult to consider the very taxation logic which was adhered to as different from that of the Ottomans. The goal of collecting revenue which would support state power and

32

23

24

25 26

27 28

29 30 31

32

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey policy is expressed through improvements in the collection of taxes and not in an increase in the taxation capacity of the population through an increase in incomes. Related to this see Mitrophanis, G., ‘H kc  k‡ e kd

 Ef (1828–1862)’ [The Taxation of Primary Production in Greece (1828–1862)], unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Athens, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Athens (1992). The point of view which Halikiopoulos puts forward (C‡ ‡kc Ef , p. 77) that ‘Taxation is Turkish’ does not constitute a simple figure of speech but represents reality. Sideris, A. K., ‘H  kd ‡C  ‡kd  kc ’ [The Historical Evolution of our Agricultural Taxation], Ak‡c O

b  K   b E b [Archives of Economic and Social Sciences], 11 (1931), p. 370. As I hope will become clear as we go on, there is a clear break in the behaviour of the state during the nineteenth century and, contrary to the viewpoint of Tsoukalas, K   d  f  kf , p. 43, the articulation of a rudimentary periodization is possible. Skocpol, T., ‘Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’, in P. Evans, K. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 9. Pantazopoulos, N. I., Georg Ludwig von Maurer. H k   ‡khf ka

 kd k d  ‡ ‡ d

‡c [Georg Ludwig von Maurer: The Full Turn of Modern Greek Legislation toward the European Model], offprint, E d E‡kc  d N

b  O

b E b Ak ‡‡c   ‡ c  ‡ c [Scientific Annual of the School of Law and Economic Sciences], vol. I (Thessaloniki: Aristotelian University, 1968), p. 217; Konidaris, I. M., ‘H C ‡   ‡e  ‡c  E c  Ef ’ [The Genesis of the Autocephalos Regime of the Greek Church], in E. Chrysos (ed.), ‘E  C  a  ‡ C. H ‡a    ‡  e   e  ‡k  d ‡d    19  b  [A New World is Born: The Image of Greek Civilisation in Nineteenth-century German Science] (Athens: Goethe Institute, 1996), pp. 207–22; Metallinos, G., kf    kc. T

C   ‡ d  k‡c   ‡b‡k  ‡  e f  ‡  d ‡kc [Tradition and Alienation: Breaks in the Spiritual Progress of Modern Hellenism during the Post-Byzantine Period] (Athens: Domos, 1st edn 1986, 1994), pp. 227–48; Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft. Frazee, C. A., Oka   Ec  E d A ‡kc 1821–1852 [The Orthodox Church and Greek Independence, 1821–1852] (Athens: Domos, 1987), p. 162; Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft, p. 194 ff. During the Kapodistrian period, an ecclesiastical committee functioned which made suggestions to the governor, the latter holding decision-making power. As Petrou, I. S., Ec   d  Ef  1750–1909 [Church and Politics in Greece, 1750–1909] (Thessaloniki: Vanias, 1992), pp. 146–7 mentions, the policy of Kapodistrias was the model for the fundamental reshaping of the church in later years. Konidaris, G. I., Ed  kc  Ef  [The Ecclesiastical History of Greece], 2 vols, 2nd edn (Athens, 1970), p. 223ff. Dertilis, G. B., ‘Terre, paysans et pouvoir politique. Grèce, XVIII–XXe siècle’, Annales E.S.C., Janvier–Fevrier, 1 (1996), 87–8. Consequently, I disagree radically with the viewpoint of Tsoukalas, K   d  f  kf , p. 45, regarding the irrational functioning of the state. In the final analysis, rationality is determined by the aims pursued, and of course the aims of the Greek state were not to live up to the Weberian prototype of bureaucracy. Aspreas, G. K.,  d  kc  ‡Ck Ef  1821–1921 [A Political History of Modern Greece, 1821–1921], 3 vols (Athens 1922–30), vol. II, p. 77.

The formation of the state in Greece, 1830–1914

33

33 Veremis, T., ‘O  a  k a   Ef  19 b ’ [The Regular Army of Nineteenth-century Greece], in D. Tsaousis (ed.), ‘O‡  ‡d c  19 b [Aspects of Greek Society in the Nineteenth Century] (Athens: Estia, 1984), p. 170. 34 Aspreas, d kc , vol. III, p. 84. 35 Gardika-Alexandropoulou, K., ‘Parties and Politics in Greece, 1875–1885: Toward a Two Party System’, doctoral dissertation, King’s College, University of London (1988), pp. 308, 382. 36 Lyrintzis, T C  ‘ b’, p. 139. 37 Petmezas, ‘ a  k a  ‡ d ‡ c   Ef ’, 37. 38 Aroni-Tsichli, K., AkC ‡‡Ck‡   f Ef , 1833–1881 [Agricultural Uprisings in ‘Old’ Greece, 1833–1881] (Athens: Papazissis, 1989). 39 All of the peasant uprisings of the King Otto era and that of Papulakos, particularly, relegate us ideologically to a traditional system of political relationships in which an uprising constituted an attempt to restore order. Kotaridis, G.,  k  d ‡ f    ‡C [Traditional Revolution and 1821] (Athens: Plethron, 1993), in particular pp. 137 and 162. 40. It will suffice to stress the changes which are seen in the area of municipal administration and of public administration with the introduction of the law regarding the qualifications of public employees, an indication perhaps of the attempt to set up a Weberian-type bureaucracy and judiciary. 41 Schroeder, P. W., ‘The Nineteenth-century International System: Changes in the Structure’, World Politics, 1 (1986), 1–26. 42 The three new elements of international politics as they are shaped after 1815 are: the European Concert; the ‘cutting off’ of the European interstate system from the nonEuropean world; and finally the creation of a system of intermediary states, one of which was Greece. 43 Clark, I., The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 145. 44 It is in this way that we can explain the continuous shifts of King Otto’s foreign policy from one power to another, depending on the conjuncture which defines the European balance of power. 45 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, pp. 16–17, 134. 46 The fragmented perception of how the Greek issue could be solved also constitutes a source of friction between the supporters and the opponents of Trikoupis, even at the close of the century. At least for some members of Parliament of the Deliyiannis bloc ‘Greece must capitalize on the chance conditions occurring in one area or other and solve the upcoming issues one at time’, while for Trikoupis the issue has to be confronted in some unified way following the systematic military preparation which will allow Greece to confront Turkey: see Trikoupis, C., Aak‡ ‡  Bd (Athens, 1891), pp. 32–33. 47 Kostis, K., ‘Politiques financières’, finances publiques et contrôle financier international en Grèce (1881–1898)’, in G. Chastagneret (sous la direction) Crise espagnol et nouveau siècle en Méditerranée. Politiques publiques et mutations structurelles des économies dans l’Europe méditerranéenne ( fin XIXe–debut XXe siècle) (Casa de Velasquez: Publications de l’Universite de Provence, 2000). 48 Trikoupis, Aak‡ ‡  Bd, p. 9. 49 We must not forget that the internationalization of the European economies starts to obtain its own dynamics only from the 1860s and onward: see Berendt, I. T. and Ranki G., The European Periphery and Industrialisation, 1789–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 101. 50 Trikoupis, Aak‡ ‡ Bd, p. 57.

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References Aroni-Tsichli, K., AkC ‡‡Ck‡   f Ef , 1833–1881 [Agricultural Uprisings in ‘Old’ Greece, 1833–1881] (Athens: Papazissis, 1989). Aspreas, G. K., d kc  ‡Ck Ef 1821–1921 [A Political History of Modern Greece, 1821–1921], 3 vols (Athens, 1922–30). Berendt, I. T. and Ranki G., The European Periphery and Industrialisation, 1789–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1982). Clark, I., The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Dertilis, G. B., ‘Terre, paysans et pouvoir politique. Grèce, XVIII–XXe siècle’, Annales E.S.C., Janvier–Fevrier, 1 (1996), 87–8. Diamandouros, N., ‘H ‡ ck   ‡ e   Ef   ‡ kc   f  19 b [The Establishment of Parliamentarism in Greece and its Functioning during the Nineteenth-century], in D. Tsaousis (ed.), ‘O‡  d c  19 b [Aspects of Nineteenth-century Greek Society] (Athens: Estia, 1984). Dimakis, I., H ‡ d ‡ d  1843    d  a   ‡‡ka [The 1843 Change of Regime and the Issue of Natives and Foreigners] (Athens: Themelio, 1991). Dragoumis, I., Ea  a [Greek Civilization] (Athens: Philomythos, 1914, last edn 1931). Frantzis, A., E  d  kc   ‡‡c Ef [Synopsis of the History of Renaissance Greece], 3 vols (Athens 1839). Frazee, C. A., Oka Ec   Ed A‡ kc 1821–1852 [The Orthodox Church and Greek Independence, 1821–1852] (Athens: Domos, 1987). Gardika-Alexandropoulou, K., ‘Parties and Politics in Greece, 1875–1885: Toward a Two Party System’, doctoral dissertation, King’s College, University of London (1988). Giddens, A., The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). Halikiopoulos, P. I., C‡ ‡kc Ef [Thoughts on Greece], 2 vols (Patras: 1864). Koliopoulos, J. S., ‘ ‡c   k a   Ef  19 b ’ [Brigandage and Irredentism in Modern Greece, 1821–1912], in T. Veremis (ed.), Ed  a   ‡ a  ‡a‡k Ef [National Identity and Nationalism in Modern Greece] (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, 1997). Konidaris, G. I. E d kc  Ef [The Ecclesiastical History of Greece], 2 vols, 2nd edn (Athens: 1970). Konidaris, I. M., ‘ C‡   ‡e    ‡ c   Ec   Ef’ [The Genesis of the Autocephalos Regime of the Greek Church], in E. Chrysos (ed.), ‘E C a  ‡C . H ‡a  ‡e

 e  ‡k d ‡ d   19 b [A New World is Born: The Image of Greek Civilisation in Nineteenth-century German Science] (Athens: Goethe Institute, 1996), pp. 207–22. Kostis, K., ‘Politiques financières, finances publiques et contrôle financier international en Grèce (1881–1898)’, in G. Chastagneret (sous la direction) Crise espagnol et nouveau siècle en Méditerranée. Politiques publiques et mutations structurelles des économies dans l’Europe méditerranéenne ( fin XIXe–debut XXe siècle) (Casa de Velasquez: Publications de l’Universite de Provence, 2000). Kotaridis, G.,  k  d ‡ f    ‡C [Traditional Revolution and 1821] (Athens: Plethron, 1993).

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35

Lyrintzis, C., ‘ d  ‡ ‡ a e    Ef  19 b ’ [The Political and Patronage System in Nineteenth-century Greece], Ed Kc [Hellenike Koinonia], 1 (1987), 157–82 (in Greek). Lyrintzis, C., T C  ‘ b’. Kc   d  A ï  19 b [The Last of the Great Families: Society and Politics in Achaia in the Nineteenth-Century] (Athens: Themelio, 1991). Mann, M., ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results’, in M. Mann (ed.), States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Maourer, G. L., O Ea  a [The Greek People] (Athens: first German edn 1835, 1976). Metallinos, G.,  kf   kc. T C  ‡ d k‡c  ‡b‡k ‡ e  f  ‡  d ‡kc [Tradition and Alienation: Breaks in the Spiritual Progress of Modern Hellenism during the Post-Byzantine Period] (Athens: Domos, 1st edn 1986, 1994). Mitrophanis, G., ‘H kc  k‡e k d  Ef (1828–1862)’ [The Taxation of Primary Production in Greece (1828–1862)], unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Athens, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Athens (1992). Mouzelis, N., ‘The Concept of Modernisation: Its Relevance for Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 14, 2, October (1996). Pantazopoulos, N. I., Georg Ludwig von Maurer. H k  k ïf ka kd kd  ‡‡d  ‡c [Georg Ludwig von Maurer: The Full Turn of Modern Greek Legislation toward the European Model], offprint, E  d E ‡kc d N b   O b E  b Ak‡‡c  ‡  c ‡ c [Scientific Annual of the School of Law and Economic Sciences], vol. I (Thessaloniki: Aristotelian University, 1968). Petmezas, S., ‘ a  k a  ‡ d ‡ c   Ef ’ [Political Liberation Struggles and National Integration in Greece], ‘Ik [Histor], 2, September (1990). Petropulos, J. A., Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, 1833–1843 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). Petrou, I. S., Ec   d  Ef 1750–1909 [Church and Politics in Greece, 1750–1909] (Thessaloniki: Vanias, 1992). Poggi, G., The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Schroeder, P. W., ‘The Nineteenth-century International System: Changes in the Structure’, World Politics, 1 (1986), 1–26. Sideris, A. K., ‘H  k d ‡C    ‡k d   kc ’ [The Historical Evolution of our Agricultural Taxation], Ak‡c O b   Kb E  b [Archives of Economic and Social Sciences], 11 (1931). Skocpol, T., ‘Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’, in P. Evans, K. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Skocpol, T., States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Synarellis, M., ka     f  Ef 1830–1880 [Roads and Ports in Greece, 1830–1880] (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the Greek Bank for Industrial Development, 1989). Tilly, C., Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

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Trikoupis, C., Aak‡ ‡  Bd  f  ‡d d  k¨  e  kf   C 1891 [Parliamentary Address during the General Discussion of the State Budget for the Year 1891] (Athens, 1891). Trikoupis, S., Ikc  Ed E  f‡ [The History of the Greek Revolution], 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: 1860). Tsoukalas, K., Kd f    kf . H ka   a bk  Ef [Social Development and the State: The Formation of Public Space in Greece] (Athens: Themelio, 1981). Tsoukalas, K., ‘Kkf    c   Ef  19 b ’ [The State and Society in the Nineteenth-century], in D. Tsaousis (ed.), ‘O‡  ‡d c  19 b [Aspects of Nineteenth-century Greek Society] (Athens: Estia, 1984). Veremis, T., ‘  a  k a   Ef  19 b ’ [The Regular Army of Nineteenth-century Greece], in D. Tsaousis (ed.), ‘O‡  ‡d c  19 b [Aspects of Greek society in the Nineteenth Century] (Athens: Estia, 1984). Veremis, T., ‘A a  ‡ a kf    C c kf . T ‡ck   kf K   a‡’ [From the Nation-state to the Nation without a State: The Experiment of the Konstantinopolis Organisation], in T. Veremis (ed.), Ed  a   ‡ a  Ef [National Identity and Nationalism in Modern Greece] (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, 1997), pp. 27–52.

3

Greek bull in the China shop of Ottoman ‘Grand Illusion’ Greece in the making of modern Turkey1 Faruk Birtek

Introduction Regimes are shaped as much by their predecessors as by their rivals and adversaries, and in what follows I explore the uniquely privileged position of Greece in the founding of the Turkish republic. Much has been written about the Ottoman legacy in the contemporary Balkans and the Middle East, and much is being said with respect to the legacy of ‘Turcokratia’ for contemporary Greece, but almost no attention has been paid to the quite obvious phenomenon of the historical impact of Greece on the shaping of contemporary Turkey. If Turcokratia had any influence on the history of modern Greece, it was too uneven, elusive and indirect to be pinned down, nor are there concrete facts to determine its extent. The Greek invasion of Turkey in 1919, on the other hand, had a very definite and immediate impact and unquestionably shaped the ensuing political structure in Turkey at the expense of other alternatives (for example Sabahaddin’s Ottomanist project2). Greece had a highly formative influence on the fledgling Turkish republic, being its inadvertent accomplice in destroying whatever might have been left of the Byzantine Empire in the form of its Ottoman successor. It was the Greek invasion, terminating in the Kemalist victory, that brought about several things at once. It irrevocably destroyed the Ottoman Empire and whatever it still contained of its Byzantine past. It reset the lines of competition and conflict along the lines of The Homeric past of Troy and the Persian wars, so affecting Greek thinking even today where Greek–Turkish relations are concerned. Also, most important for us here because of its significance for the present, it set the particular mode of the Turkish republican construction and the future of Turkish society. It is this last point that I examine.

Theoretical framework I will begin with an issue germane to the nature of republican regimes and empires: that of citizenship. The separation of private and public realms is central to the question of citizenship. Here I look at the latter in comparative terms, considering the logic of the political rule of empires3 versus that of nation-states.

38

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

In essentialist terms, how do we begin to read the political logic inherent in empires and nation-states respectively concerning the type and extent of private realms likely to be safeguarded? Methodologically, in referring to the ‘inner logic’ of empires and nation-states I have Max Weber’s ideal types in mind. Let me start my discussion of the spheres of the public and the private by referring to a Hobbes–Locke distinction in political theory. Metaphorically speaking, in Hobbes we enter society in the nude: we are in a state of deshabillée, but acquire clothing as we enter; we thus derive our social existence from political society. In Locke, on the other hand, we enter society already equipped with our belongings, and it is political society that is designed to safeguard them. This is the essence of Locke’s social contract. Let us now distinguish between public persona and self-identity, two sides of a dialectic or at times competing relationship. For Hobbes, with self-identity emerging out of the public persona, the distance between the two is never theorized and may in practice be ignored. For Locke, using the same logic, we enter political society with our self-identity, and the public persona is there to allow it to flourish. So, exactly what is the logic of imperial orders, and the logic of nation-states, with respect to safeguarding self-identity? To look at the question in our historical context: how much can republican regimes in general, and the Turkish republic in particular, tolerate in their logic and and how much do they tolerate in practice the possibility of a full-blown notion of self-identity? I argue that, as was the case with France, the Turkish republic came out of a particular context of nationalist mobilization to give it a specific imprint, and it is such mobilizational contexts that bring the logic of nation-states to the fore. Historically, it was the French Revolution that fixed the nation-state in its republican form. The Turkish republic was a true child of the French Revolution, by fully and unreflectively inheriting both the nation-state and the revolution and so also inheriting a puritan, anti-libertarian and somewhat Jacobin temperament.4 There can be no doubt that the crucible, the defining period of the Turkish nation-state lay in the years 1912–22, with the most pivotal event being the Greek invasion of Smyrna in 1919. This particular historical period had a tremendous impact on the shaping of the Turkish republic. Obviously, there were major demographic changes at this time, but a crucial aspect of these changes that is often overlooked is the tremendous amount of ‘light’ conversion that was also taking place when identities were being defined and redefined as people opted to align with one side or the other. Let me illustrate this with a true story. A cousin of mine, having qualified for a pension with the death of her father, had to go to the state registration bureau for her father’s records. Hüseyin Bahri Effendi had been a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Turkish republic, a member of the political elite and a distinguished gentleman of his period. Looking up his records she discovered to her great surprise5 that Hüseyin Effendi, born somewhere in or near Thessaloniki, was actually registered under the name Hristo Bahri. Hristo Bahri became Hüseyin Bahri sometime between 1912 and 1922. Now, the ‘conversion’ that had taken place in

Greece in the making of modern Turkey

39

this case was not really a conversion in its proper sense, but what I have termed a ‘light’ conversion. He perhaps never became a true Muslim, and he probably had never been a good Christian either, though he certainly must have been baptized to bear the name Hristo. I remember him well in his later years as someone who enjoyed his glass of raki every night, including during the Ramadan and even when he was sharing a house with his father-in-law, a retired high official of the Hamidian period who punctiliously performed his prayers five times a day. We shall never know how much of Hüseyin had already existed in Hristo and how much of Hristo remained in Hüseyin, and perhaps he himself would not have cared to say because he was already too ‘modern’ to think in religious terms. This anecdote, one of many like it from the period 1912–22, illustrates that people made choices about their identities and where they stood in the new construction. This choice was not at all a religious one; it was a question of which society, which geographical area they were to belong to, which heritage, which tradition they would personally profess. Due to the particular political structures suddenly emerging and submerging, this was a decision that had to be made by many, and what most specifically defines the period 1912–22 is people’s geographical and psychological transits. This was a period of demographic definition and redefinition, a period of redefining individual identities. By the end of the nineteenth century, communal boundaries had already become porous and fuzzy, at least for a good part of Turkey’s urban population and the country’s elite.6 This makes it misleading to talk about the homogeneity of political views at the communal level – already so evidently heterogeneous for the elite, as best evinced by the parliamentary debates of 1877–78 – contrary to the reified categories which guide today’s retrospective rereading of the histories of modern Greece and Turkey. In this respect it was perhaps not only the Greek invasion and the subsequent war, but also the post-war treaties which eventually came to reify the boundaries and over-define the communities – a process of bureaucratic zeal from which a great many people at the time had to suffer, all emanating from the Wilsonian chic of the period. It is in the light of the above context that I see the Greco-Turkish war as ‘the founding myth’, the pivotal experience that would lead to the creation of the Turkish nation-state. The founding myth of the republic, built around that war, carries the tremendous burden of building the idea of citizenship. Whether the war was truly against the Greeks or not is irrelevant here. What matters is that the republic was created out of a mobilizational ideology: it emerged out of a particular context of nationalist mobilization that had the greatest defining consequence for later years. Beyond the myth, beyond the virtual reality remembered today, there then existed another reality that substantiated the social mobilization of the period. This reality was shaped by President Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918. While Wilson was talking about building a New Order – in other words, the nation-states – it was not really nation-states he was promoting. Knowingly or unknowingly, Wilson was creating the ethnic state, carving out new states based on ethnicity. Wilson’s project thus encompassed the Greek Idea. For the Greeks, it made their mission

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modern, European, ‘with the times’, avant-garde – and so perhaps also the source of their hubris. It was this project of the ethnic state that would have a tremendous impact on the new political geography of the region in conflict with the pre-existing imperial order. Historical data show that the local resistance movements, which later came under the umbrella of the Kemalist movement and eventually led to the republic, arose in the areas where there were greatly mixed populations.7 It seems, as reflected in their declarations at the time, that the local populations were worried about their place under the new political system of distribution, about whether they would be made part of a Greek, Armenian or some other ethnic group’s political hegemony. There are two important points in the preamble to one of these declarations which categorically states: ‘We shall fully guarantee the rights of the minorities in the region, yet we shall not be overwhelmed by alternative political organizations.’ This shows that, first of all, the republic came about in a context of national mobilization, and, second and most important, it was a response to projects of ethnic partition. At that juncture, the Kemalists found themselves having to deal with Islamic sentiments. During its early mobilization activity, after 1919, Kemalism had to have recourse, at least at the popular level, to emergent pro-Islamic sentiments. However implicitly, its mobilization had to convey the message that traditional Islamic ways were threatened by non-Islamic political entities. Good secular Ottomans though they were, Kemal and his supporters could easily manage this political environment. These two sources of mobilization (the threat of ethnic partition and the disruption of traditional Islamic ways) had two consequences. One was Kemal’s later radical laicism which was to free him from the Islamic support he had initially created during his early mobilization. As a bone fide late Ottoman, once in power, he would remain true to the modernism of his project by becoming radically anti-religious. Only in this way could he also avoid being trapped by the Islamic mode of the war of emancipation. Kemal had succeeded by fighting, under the pretext of protecting tradition, only to create later an anti-traditionalist and anti-Islamic regime. The second, and for us the more important and highly ironic consequence that followed from that mobilizational context of the post-1919 period, was that, when the Kemalists wanted to build a secular, republican nation-state, they engaged in an exchange of populations based on religion, thus reducing public identity to a single, often dormant factor. This was almost a step back to the eighteenth century. For example, the Turks and the Greeks were in a quandary when it came to the Turkish-speaking Karamanli, who were anomalous Orthodox Rum whose prayer books were in the Turkish language but written in the Greek script. Because of the religious criteria, for the population exchange the Karamanli were eventually deported to Greece – much against their will and to a greatly uncertain future. It is truly ironic that, while during the last hundred years of the Ottoman state citizenship did not require a profession of Islam but was ecumenical (if I may use

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the word loosely), the secular republic was basing its citizenship on religion! So what happened was that the republic originally constructed citizenship on a mobilizational definition of the concept that would later become a tremendous burden when it tried to struggle (unsuccessfully) against this same ethnico-religious definition. This was a huge burden for the nation-state at its inception in 1923, and one from which it has not yet freed itself.8 What matters for us here is that the Greek invasion and the Turkish response to it created a radically new political context that made the aforementioned exigencies so enduring. This new context enabled Kemal to put an end to what one might call the Ottoman Grand Illusion. (The late Ottomans’ conception of political order is very like the one depicted in Renoir’s great film, ‘The Grand Illusion’ – very similar to the ways of the Prussian aristocrat in that film.) Rauf Bey, the ex-commander of the Hamidiye, the Ottoman battleship known for its great valour and success during the Balkan Wars, and General Townsend, the English commander of the Mesopotamian campaign who had been staying at the Grand Hotel Pera Palas as a guest (a euphemism for custody) of the Ottoman government, had been good friends prior to 1918 when Rauf went to sign the Treaty of Mudros on 30 October 1918. As a naval officer, Rauf Bey would also have full confidence in his British counterpart Admiral Calthorpe, a friend of Townsend, who represented the Western powers at Mudros; they all understood and trusted each other. The treaty – which ended the First World War and listed various provisions for the Western powers that Turkey, being on the losers’ side, had to accept – was a gentlemen’s agreement. Although there was mention of the possibility of occuping the Ottoman ports and disarming the Ottoman armies in the treaty, it was not thought that it would ever be necessary to ‘occupy the Ottoman ports, to intervene directly’ etc. They would simply ‘work things out’ when the time came, meanwhile leaving it to trust and camaraderie. That was the Old World, the world of the grand illusion, which ended a few years later and was taken over by personalities of the New World. When these new people came in to enforce the treaty, neither Rauf nor the others would survive.9 The Greco-Turkish War was crucial in this regard; it purged the empire of all things Ottoman. History privileged Kemal: he was there to construct the republic in defiance of Ottoman order. The Ottoman Empire’s grand illusion simply could not withstand the reality of the Greek invasion. Indeed, the entire population reacted to the Greek invasion in a manner completely different from that of other invasions. Only a few days later, in total defiance of the occupation forces in Istanbul, one of the country’s largest political rallies took place. Women too for the first time took the podium as keynote speakers. The radical situation reflected radical feeling. The Ottomans had not lost the 1914–18 war to Greece; Greece had not been a party to that war; the Smyrna landing seemed to them most unfair. Before that, there had not been much mobilization; people simply took the occupying forces for granted unless there was some immediate conflict. However, the threat of a Greek occupation really galvanized the people when the Greek army landed in Smyrna in May 1919. The event would change the entire historical scheme and pave the way for the Kemalist movement’s rise to power.

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Let us now ask how, when we look at the nation-state, and view citizenship as its foundation stone, we are to evaluate the relationship between the two? I find myself influenced in the matter of citizenship in the modern republican context by Tocqueville’s criticism of the French republic and the French Revolution. As far as identity in this new context of change and turmoil is concerned, the respective predicaments of Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo and Jean Valjean of Les Misérables are highly illustrative. For Jean Valjean the agony was how to reconcile his various self-identities while choosing a particular public persona; for the Count of Monte Cristo the dilemma was that he had to make constant political decisions on how not to mobilize his past history. Both are stories of reconstructing, picking and dropping identities in times of flux and change, of repression and movement; both are stories of personal ordeals with undertones of political choice and public morality. So, when it comes to the idea of citizenship in the context of the republic, there are really two dimensions. First of all, it is a mobilizational factor. The nationstate is built on a mobilizational ideology: it is much more successful in resource mobilization than any imperial order could possibly be, because of its capacity to engender a strong volitional dimension. Second, and because of this volitional core, citizenship in the nation-state is a political institution built on a rigorously exclusionist, self-defined public space; because of its ‘normalizationist’ (in the French sense of the word) logic that the volitional core demands, it is intolerant of any sub-groupings that might presume to exist within the national society. It cannot, because of its logic, accommodate bases of identity created outside the republican space. So the danger with the republic is that, while it tries to eliminate primordialism, it lays itself open to possible kidnap by a particular monological retribalization. In other words, as it shrinks the dialogical space between the public persona and self-identity, it leaves itself vulnerable to the distortions of both when under real or imagined duress.

Social space and the Ottoman public identity: singularity of style, diversity of belief Now returning to our empirical cases in hand, what can we suggest about the difference between the nation-state and the empire with respect to self-identity and public persona? Let us separate the Ottoman Empire into two historical periods and begin with the Classical period and its particular millet system. In this, communal structures and common liberties were safeguarded as part of the logic of absolutist rule, but of course, for the same logical reason, the concept of individual liberty is largely absent. So in one sense the Classical millet system allows a great deal of freedom and liberty at the communal level that the nation-state cannot allow, yet it prohibits any individual liberties that might try to emerge. Selfidentity is coterminous with communal space; identity is defined by social space. Space and identity are fixed, they are not negotiable. Sociability in the Classical period is the skill to develop, the ability to ‘read’ where and in what capacity self-identity may be expressed within the communal space to one’s best advantage.

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So to be a good citizen and thrive depends on how well one makes use of the space where the identity is lodged and intuits its boundaries in one’s best interest. In the subsequent Tanzimat period, however, something else happens. The main difference between the Classical Ottoman and Tanzimat periods with regard to identity is that, in the latter, multiple identities are normatively built into the system. In the earlier period Ottomanism refers exclusively to the fabricated singularity of a virtual elite which does not exist except as functionaries of the state, as ‘pure’ public persona. So to set up its class/elite boundaries in the absence of any trimmings of birthright during the Classical period, the virtual elite had to develop its own elite language, its court poetry, and in particular its own manners and style as a means to homogeneity for an artificially created class – a habit which continues into the later period as the mainstay of Tanzimat’s inter-ethnic Ottomanism. Classical Ottomanism was essentially a ‘club society’; Tanzimat extended it to a larger population, cutting across religious lines but only with further emphasis on the urbanity of manners and discourse, of style and language. Thus once more an imagined class was created but now much wider in scope and with full recognition of the multiplicities or, better, of the multi-layers of identity. In the Classical context, someone with the privilege of participating in society extra-communally exercised an extension of an identity derived from participation in that virtual (i.e. invented) institution of the state elite – a public persona with minimal self-identity, pretorian guards being the only ‘citizens’. During the Tanzimat period, however, multiple identities came to signify citizenship, as individuals now negotiated among multiplicities of social spaces. Of course, some were better placed than others to negotiate, which is also perhaps why the urban elite became more bona fide Ottoman – a criterion for the apex of public identity, the aspired elite status. The possibility or, better, the capacity of carrying multiple identities is what it meant to be a true Ottoman in the Tanzimat era – something the republican period could never tolerate because of its very logic. What lay at the basis of the Ottoman Grand Illusion was its notions of civility and citizenship. Thinking in structural terms, Ottoman social pluralism of the Tanzimat period10 was thus intimately connected with Ottoman political elitism. This political elitism incorporated all ethno-religious groups in the public/political realm without dissolving their private/communal moorings. Using privilege and opportunity, it constantly strove to buttress and structurally entrench the superiority of the former over status/personal identity, but never eroded it altogether. It was this masterful socio-political fine-tuning, this otherwise most delicate balance, that was destroyed by Wilson’s doctrines and the First World War. That forceful rupture is perhaps the reason for most of the otherwise inexplicable instabilities still troubling the area. In summary, in the Classical Ottoman Empire, personal space defined identity, while in the nineteenth century both become negotiable, and that is what is most fascinating. By choosing the identity one is to marshall, to ‘perform’ (in the Goffmanesque sense), one also sets out to define that particular social space, and could purposefully contextualize it with regard to its relevance to the realms of the public and the private. In other words, by insisting on a particular aspect of

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social identity, the present space becomes a specific social context of set privilege and obligation, legal or otherwise, pertaining to the public and/or private spheres. Social space therefore becomes negotiable for marshalling the relevance of particular aspects of social identity over others, without minimizing the claims for a full public persona. Thus, before the reformed empire, in the Classical period, the skill of sociability was hidden in the capacity to use one’s fixed social space to one’s best advantage; identity and social space were coterminous. With Tanzimat, another dimension emerged. Tanzimat’s liberalism lay in making both identity and space legitimately negotiable. Now one could legitimately inhabit different social spaces, each pertaining to a particular aspect of one’s selfhood – as best illustrated by the lives of Mousouros Pasha and other non-Muslim members of the political elite. When Mousouros, an Ottoman par excellence, stood at the apex of Ottoman bureaucracy, he was also a devout Orthodox Christian, and very much a proud member of his Rum community. This was the multilayeredness of Ottomanism, and perhaps the term multilayeredness defines the Ottoman system much better than multi-ethnicity. Here skill and sociability mattered much more. They pertained to a double capacity for mobilizing opportune space, for declaring a particular aspect of identity for contextual relevance, and so for setting a particular matrix for that particular social interaction. All this was achieved by most meticulous use of the particular set of manners, style and etiquette that defined the situation and the layer chosen for that intercourse, almost like the opening rounds in a game of bridge.11 Citizenship therefore required urbanity and social skill; it was marked by one’s orientation and manners; it was volitional, and its texture negotiable and context-defining. A successful adoption of an Ottoman identity and citizenship, and virtuosity in manners and discourse, therefore, meant participation in elite status. It thereby fulfilled aspiration and ensured mobility, activated in the nineteenth-century society by political, social and economic expansion. Etiquette and style, urban diction and erudition, polished manners and adopted morals became the marks of a fully exercised, socially legitimized public persona of an Ottoman, who privately possessed multiplicities of identities which he could pick up and drop as he wished. Accordingly, citizenship could stretch over primordial ties and local anchors; it would reward identity without severing it from its communal grounding, protection and leverage. It is this ‘expansive’, ‘enlarging’ dimension that makes T. H. Marshall’s view of citizenship much more fitting for the Tanzimat order than for the republic, notwithstanding the wrong use of it by many academics who have only rediscovered Marshall’s category of citizenship in the republican context. Tanzimat’s notion of civility and citizenship was at the core of Sabahaddin’s liberal empire and its particular political economy. Both were radically destroyed by the mobilizational context engendered by the Greek occupation in 1919, which resulted in the republic, with its deliberate destruction of the late Ottoman world, and purged it of its grand illusion. One final anecdote may further illustrate my point.12 At the end of the Balkan Wars the Ottomans were defeated and the Ottoman administration retreated from

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Bulgaria. However, certain Ottoman Islamic vakifs (foundations) remained, so the Ottomans sent a delegation to Bulgaria to negotiate the future of these vakifs. The cabinet dispatched two expert ministers: the minister of public reconstruction, and the minister for public accounts. Now one of these was Greek Orthodox, and the other Jewish. In an afterthought the cabinet considered it would seem ridiculous to the Bulgarians if they were expected to negotiate the Islamic vakifs with two non-Muslims. So they decided to replace the Jewish minister with Mehmet Effendi, a Muslim. The Greek Orthodox minister remained, because he would know best how to deal with Orthodox Bulgarians. There are two observations to be made with regard to this. One is that the cabinet had no difficulty discussing the dilemma. They could actually say, in so many words, ‘We can’t send two non-Muslims, we need a Muslim there, so let’s find a Muslim to send along with the Greek’. The second interesting point is that this discussion was official, and documented in the minutes. No less remarkable is the fact that the chief officer of the cabinet who took the minutes includes in his memoirs the following personal observations: ‘It was really a mistake not to send Süleyman Effendi [who was Jewish]. Mehmet Effendi was so incompetent that he lost all the vakifs. We really should have sent the Jewish member to save the Islamic heritage in Bulgaria.’ In the republican period, the cabinet could not possibly have discussed this kind of issue. They would not have had the appropriate categories to accommodate this dilemma. It is my contention that the Greek invasion helped to create a mobilizational republic and its monistic discourse. When the republic’s monistic insistence can so radically displace multiplicities, there is the risk of the singularized public persona taking over individual identity unless sufficient safeguards are built into the system. We can now rephrase Marx’s critique of Kant as a question: How can an essential aspect of the Enlightenment, namely citizenship, be preserved as the seedbed of self-growth and self-development, and be safeguarded from being overcome by the praxis of its particular natural history, a history that turns citizenship into a mould of a monistic self-identity? To what extent can enlightenment withstand mobilization? Could it be that republics, the true political form of the Enlightenment, are more vulnerable in this regard than pre-modern empires, because of their innate ‘regime logic’, to withstand mobilizational exigencies? In this chapter, I have taken some preliminary steps toward drawing a map with comparative essentialist logic, à la Weber, of the fault lines of various regime types – that is, to understand where and how they crack under severe pressure – using the category of citizenship for that endeavour.13

Notes 1 This chapter is to some extent a continuation of an earlier essay, Birtek, F., ‘Tu˝rkiye Cumhuriyeti: Bir Çagdavlavma/Ça ˇ gdavlavamama ˇ Projesi: Bir Deneme’ [The Turkish Republic: A Project of Modernization and Non-modernization], Cogito, 15, Summer (1998), 170–84, which examines the ‘costs to liberty’ that republican regimes incur

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2

3

4

5 6

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey when they so readily and with great ease take on mobilizational functions. I am deeply grateful to an early reading of Ilkay Sunar’s brilliant article in this current volume, on ‘modernity’s attempts to disembody “culture” ’ as part of its innate logic. It inspired my parallel thinking on self-identity and citizenship. Also it was Deringil’s recent research on conversions in the nineteenth century, that obliged me to develop the concept of ‘light’ conversion here. Furthermore, I am grateful to Deringil for being party to our joint concept of fine-tuning. See Deringil, S., The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). Lastly, I am very much indebted to my conversations with Daniel Chirot for alerting me, among other things, to possible repressive cores in many historical projects of liberational intent. Sabahaddin, an important political figure of the pre-First World War period, who may well be regarded as an Ottoman Tocqueville, had the political vision of a liberal empire. This also had its appropriate political economy, which people forget when they now try to resuscitate him today. However, without his political economy he would have been no better than a dreamer. For an appreciative assessment of Sabahaddin’s political project including the relevant political economy, see Birtek, F., Essays in Historical Sociology: Recovering the Ottoman Political Atlantis (forthcoming). ‘Empire’ is of course a very broad category. My specific reference here is to what I shall later call pre-modern empires which would in particular include the Ottomans and the Habsburgs of the late nineteenth century. They are pre-modern, as opposed to both the ancient empires and the modern ones of the British and the French in the nineteenth century. For the beginning of this cursory classification, I am grateful to my colleagues in our Empires study group at the universities of Bogaziçi ˇ and Michigan, in particular to Professor Fred Cooper, and more generally to the members of the Empires workshop we held at Bogaziçi ˇ University in 1998. Birtek, ‘Turkiye Cumhuriyeti: Bir Ça gdavlavma/Ça ˇ gdavlavamama ˇ Projesi: Bir Deneme’, and Birtek, F. ‘The Turkish Adventures of the Durkheimian Paradigm; or the Vicissitudes of its Successful Political Practice: Does History Vindicate Mr Labriola?’, Il Politico, 1991. It is her surprise that is really surprising; and part of the argument here is an attempt to situate this surprise. There is much irony here. In Birtek F., ‘The State and the Transition to Capitalism in England and Turkey: A Structural Model’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Berkeley, CA (1978), it was argued that, while the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century incorporated the non-Muslim elites into the Ottoman administration and embraced them as bone fide Ottomans, Western powers actively present, taking on the self-appointed role of protectors of the Christian populations, frequently intruded between the local commercial interests and the state in the name of free trade and the like, creating thus a tendency to politically disenfranchise the Christian populations, with the even more radical consequence of finally leaving them out of the political equation altogether when the republic was finally constructed. It was argued that at the points of ‘intense meeting’ with European capitalism, in particular in ports where this meeting was most immediate and thorough, a ‘phantom bourgeoisie’ would arise to become the harbinger of local nationalism in rebellion against the constrictive economic nature of what they saw as the archaic character of the Ottoman system. Yet the immediate availability of the Western powers to act as their interlocutors had the consequence of dampening their political struggle, and perhaps eventually further disenfranchising them to a point where they would become politically even less effective than they had been in the pre-reform period – hence the term phantom bourgeoisie. In that sense, embourgeoisement at times would lead the discontented bourgeoisie into an alien garb and estrange them not only from the political struggle within the empire, but also from their local geography. The Greek example, on the other hand, coming before the period of reform, would escape both the Ottoman incorporation and the direct European

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7 8

9

10

11

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presence. The Greek bourgeois rebellion would take a form more true to a nineteenthcentury bourgeois nationalist rebellion in pursuit of overthrowing an archaic, despotic regime for ‘liberty and progress’. For this deduction I am indebted to Tanor’s excellent study: Tanor, B., Tu˝rkiye’de Kongre I·ktidarları (1918–1920) [Congress Governments in Turkey, 1918–20] (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Ku˝ltu˝r Sanat Yaynclk, 1998). There is yet another danger when a republic is created out of a nationalist struggle: knee-jerk reactions are built in that create an inward-looking, insular, isolationist mentality. In fact, tremendous credit has to be given to Kemal for his ability to overcome that obstacle, at least to some extent. If it had not been especially for Kemal but also his cadres’ commitment to westernization, it would have been very difficult to pull the republic out of its state of insularity and self centredness. Of course, one important rupture was when the Great Depression in 1929 severed ties with the West and reinforced the inward-looking ethos of the republic in spite of Kemal’s serious attempts to the contrary. The gentlemen made war and the post-bellum bureaucrats stepped in to decide about the spoils when the time came to write the treaties. I am not sure that this is in part what turned T. E. Lawrence off, but the way Allenby was so abruptly dismissed from the sirdarship of Egypt a few years later is the model I have in mind for the transition from war to the peace-time politics after the First World War. The ‘carpetbaggers’ were men of different temperament; the men of the backroom moving to the front had no patience with the gentlemanly agreements, mutuality and camaraderie of the military and especially of the naval staff. The navy had been the bastion of the rules of chivalry which Walter Scott had revived – and invented – for the late nineteenth century, and which Renoir described so well in the person of the Baron as a contrast to his French bourgeois prisoner. Incidentally, it is impossible to say on which side Renoir stands in the film. In this successful articulation of the exigencies of the political rule of a particular patrimonial authority with a particular type of social organization typified by the immobility of its social units, we should seek the explanation of the terrain which we today in our contemporary vision anachronistically call tolerance. The maximization of local liberties under the Ottoman rule was not due to an anthropomorphic sense of tolerance – which, after all, is a characteristic of human personality and not an appropriate concept for societies – nor to a cultural norm of benevolence. If these had been the reasons it would have been much more precarious and open to the whims of history and to the rapid erosion of time. My contention is that the optimization of local liberties was due to the exigencies of the Ottoman brand of patrimonial rule that partly relied for its successful logic, upon the disjointed and, in the long run, static nature of a communally reproduced social organization. Once this theory is accepted, then what in retrospect appears to be religious tolerance and ethnic libertarianism becomes less ephemeral and less precarious, given that these are necessities of the expansive interests of a control-oriented political authority – that is, they are parts of the maximization of political interests. When we come to the nineteenth century, with the Tanzimat reforms and the subsequent constitutionalism, this particular Ottoman social formation could, by way of natural extension and alongside the other changes during the nineteenth century, evolve into what we might call Ottoman social pluralism. A better analogy might be the very careful and measured use of tu/vous in French and du/Sie in German, and the delicate transitions between the two, or even the most fascinating exceptional circumstances when one deliberately employs a mixture of the two forms of address, ‘dancing’ to control the space, the nature of the intercourse, and momentarily recalling and shifting the relevant aspect of self-identity, all representing negotiation in the most ultimate sense. Cases when roles demand a fixed tu and vous, allowing no negotiation at that level, in turn best illustrate the Ottoman Classical system.

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12 I have taken this account from Tanor, A. F., Görüp, I·vittiklerim [What I have Heard and Seen] (Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu, 1952). 13 Here let me further pursue, at the most rudimentary level, a paradigmatic comparison of the three Ottoman regime types with regard to their potentialities for citizenship. (1) In the Classical period arising from Mehmet II’s formulation we have two sets of population. The first was the rootless, exclusively convert, political elite in need of a specific court language to militate against any alternative ethnic predisposition, embedded in the state as its permanent staff and administration, ruling as a class with a Mandarin-like ideology of political pragmatism, and for whom perhaps the term Ottoman is best applied. They in many ways represent pure public persona with little room for self-identity. The rest of the population has no political presence but only a communal identity within which the self is fully absorbed and hence almost nonemergent. (2) In the Tanzimat period a larger segment of the population to be termed Ottoman – mostly urban, that urbanity partly extending to the provincial elites – can individually negotiate the realms of the public and the private through their expressions of sociability and management of public space and, hence, are lodged in an institutional matrix which encourages the emergence of a more developed self-identity and a strong public persona. (3) Lastly, a republican political form in which self-identity is taken over by public persona, hence ending with a lop-sided practice of citizenship if we, true to our earlier definition, identify citizenship in the ‘robust’ sense when the private and the public realms are protected for their separate and expansive expression by a matrix of political institutions. Consequently, in this last example, with a swollen category of public personae, any enlarged demands for self-identity are likely to be erroneously processed as demands for a fracturing of the public persona and a weakening of the republican form.

References Birtek, F., ‘Tu˝ rkiye Cumhuriyeti: Bir Çaˇgdavlavma/Çagdavlavamama ˇ Projesi: Bir Deneme’ [The Turkish Republic: A Project of Modernization and Non-modernization], Cogito, 15, Summer (1998), 170–84. Birtek, F., ‘The Turkish Adventures of the Durkheimian Paradigm; or the Vicissitudes of its Successful Political Practice: Does History Vindicate Mr Labriola?’, Il Politico (1991). Birtek, F. and Toprak, B., ‘The Conflictual Agendas of Neo-Liberal Reconstruction and the Rise of Islamic Politics in Turkey’, Praxis International, 13, 2 (1993), 192–212. Deringil, S., The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Overlook Press. 1973). Tanor, B., Tu˝rkiye’de Kongre I·ktidarları (1918–1920) [Congress Governments in Turkey, 1918–20] (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 1998). Tu˝rkgeldi, A. F.: Go˝ru˝p, I·s¸ittiklerim [What I have Heard and Seen] (Ankara: Tu˝rk Tarihi Kurumu. 1952).

4

Nation and People The plasticity of a relationship Padelis E. Lekas

Shortly after the suppression of the 1848 revolutions and the subsequent resurgence of nationalist feeling in continental Europe, John Stuart Mill wrote that nationalism makes us indifferent to the fate of our fellow human beings unless they bear the same name and speak the same language. Hence nationalism was to be seen as a modern variety of barbarism, generating emotions that in practice proved much stronger than the love of freedom. Only ten years later, however, Mill arrived at the reluctant conclusion that the main tenet of nationalist ideology (namely, the call for the unification of all members of a nation under their own government) appeared to be in accord with the ideals of freedom and the democratic principle that ‘the question of government ought to be decided by the governed’.1 It is evident that there is a contradiction here – a contradiction which has perplexed all students of the nationalist phenomenon ever since, and which is usually expressed in the persistent debate about the so-called ‘Janus-face’ of nationalism. Is nationalism fundamentally ‘good’ or ‘bad’, liberal or tyrannical, progressive or reactionary?2 That nationalism has been identified with all imaginable forms of cruelty, oppression and exploitation there can, of course, be no doubt. Examples are gruesomely plentiful and need no recounting. In a sense though, the maladies of nationalism can be seen as quite ‘normal’ symptoms of what is, after all, an ‘ideology of power’. For it is to power that nationalism aspires, as, again, it is power that nationalism legitimates and preserves when it establishes its own political arrangements in the form of the nation-state. Accordingly, the repugnant features of nationalism may largely be seen as the inevitable cost of its very success. The transition from the quest for an ideological utopia to the Realpolitik of the nation-state is bound to bring out the intrinsic divergence between the ‘egalitarian symbolic values’ and the ‘hierarchical operational values’3 of this specific ideological movement too.4 Nevertheless, pointing out the cost nationalism entails as an ideology of power is rather commonplace and certainly of little analytical value. For it surely cannot be but a truism to say that the abstract levelling of differences may in practice lead to the concealment of real inequality and oppression.5 What seems, then, of primary interest in the study of nationalism is the understanding of the ‘symbiosis’ of two starkly antithetical elements within one and the same ideological discourse. On the one hand, we are confronted with the

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inescapable brutality of nationalism qua power: of its functionality in serving sectional interests; of the one-sided appropriations of nationalist symbols by particularist concerns; of the eclectic invocation of the national interest in the exercise of partisan politics; and of the appeal to the national sentiment against all kinds of ‘national enemies’ for the purpose of relieving social and political tensions. On the other hand, this is an ideology which has also been employed in combating illiberal and exploitative regimes; for it is equally beyond doubt that the aspirations nationalism has often fostered in modern history were inextricably linked to egalitarian and liberal demands.6 One has to admit, for instance, that since its first appearance in Western Europe the notion of national selfdetermination has been intertwined, to a greater or lesser extent, with the concepts of citizenship and universal franchise, of popular sovereignty and of democratic politics.7 How then can we start to come to grips with such an intrinsic plasticity? Evidently, it is of no theoretical use to vacillate between the two facets of nationalism according to the individual circumstance we happen to encounter. The ‘images of savagery’ produced by nationalism are paired with images of ‘enlightenment and justice’8 to render the idiographic approach entirely insufficient for comprehending the inherent contradictions of the phenomenon. Let us see what is probably the most prominent example of this constant dilemma. What are we to make analytically of the notion of ‘national interest’ under which nationalism seeks to subsume the individual wills of all members of the nation? The intensity and extent of this subjection are of course indicative of the ‘tolerance margin’ that each nationalism allows for in various historical circumstances. The concept of ‘national interest’ is usually construed in a strict and narrow sense which identifies it directly with raison d’ état – d’ état nationale, needless to say. Yet, underneath such a conventional association lie the particular imaginings about the texture of national identity that accompany each single historical instance of the political ideology of nationalism. Is this identity mainly political, economic or cultural? Is the nation itself imagined primarily as a ‘state’, a Zollverein or a patrie? Does national interest have to do with an a-historical conception of Volksgenosse, of a collectivity of supposedly like-made and likeminded humans sharing the same blood, language or history? Or is it to be derived from the volonté generale of a commonwealth of multi-ethnic citizens comprising a national democratic state? Such questions that inevitably recall the wellknown distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism make it impossible to derive national interest in abstracto from any other single form of collective identity, be it class membership, citizenship or race. This only goes to show that the very concept of national interest is a rather elastic ideological construction and, as such, open to many interpretations and uses. At any rate, it seems to be an invariable attribute of all forms of nationalism and its negative side consists of the fact that one of the most hideous and abominable crimes of our times is taken to be that of high treason perpetrated against one’s nation. It should be pointed out, however, that this modern version of l`ese-majest`e turned l`ese-nation9 is not supposed to be committed just against an actual polity

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(that is, the nation-state) but against the higher entity of equals which defines and legitimizes it (that is, the nation). The nation transcends the nation-state both in ideological significance and emotional charge, precisely because it cannot be identified with any specific socio-political actuality or with any sectional interests.10 There is, however, a positive side to this, too. The ideological erasure of difference in the imagined nation entails that all (real or potential) members of the national collectivity are, theoretically, equal participants in it, with no social preconditions attached. National interest can thus be seen not only as an ideological veil obfuscating social inequality. It can also be perceived (as in fact it is, by millions of committed nationalists) as a noble manifestation of the demand for equal social worth by and to all partakers of the nation. The national communality creates this paradoxical (albeit genuine) sense of ‘horizontal comradeship’, which seems to be an indispensable element for understanding the supreme loyalty it demands (and extracts) from the homo nationalis, regardless of his or her social extraction and worth.11 This is borne out by the complex trajectory nationalism has traversed over the past two centuries all over the globe. It is a history which does not amount only to carnage, persecution or servitude; it also points to the close linkage between nationalist aspirations, on the one hand, and democratic struggles, on the other. The dramatic spread of nationalist beliefs from the French Revolution onwards is undoubtedly associated with the idea of political egalitarianism.12 The modern ‘body politic’ is comprised of equal ‘citizens’ who, however, are understood primarily as ‘nationals’.13 In this light, nationalism ought to be seen as a major (if not the principal) ‘revolutionary’ ideology of modern times – which it has indeed proved to be many times over in its relatively short life.14 Nationalism has been a major force in superseding standing political orders that had relied on traditional modes of loyalty and domination. It has shifted the focus of the legitimation of collective life from divine or hereditary rule and custom to conscious participation and active consensus amidst the theoretically equal members of a newly defined entity, the nation. Nationalism has thus aimed at the creation and consolidation of hitherto unknown socio-political units by transforming existing state bodies and reshaping them into novel configurations. In the nation-state aimed at or supported by nationalist ideology, there can exist in principle no precedence based on pre-given social rights, political status or economic privilege; all these are expunged by the all-levelling conformity to common cultural traits and ideological principles. By the same token, it could be said that the democratic and revolutionary properties of nationalism are historically intrinsic to the phenomenon. They cannot be brushed aside, no matter what the circumstances under which nationalism emerges or the consequences it brings about. In the nationalist discourse, a democratic and egalitarian content appears to be ascribed, almost by necessity, to the membership of a nation – that is, to that socio-political community of modernity par excellence, which is grounded primarily on existing or constructed ‘cultural’ criteria. And this is so, since all the composite parts of the modern nation are in principle defined as co-equal heirs to and legatees of the same and purportedly uniform cultural heritage.15

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One cannot, therefore, underestimate the historical significance of the synthetic and cohesive nature of the nationalist discourse. Nationalism does indeed ‘invite the masses into history’16 by incorporating the (anonymous and perhaps socially inferior) individual as a historic agent in a broad unity of imaginary peers.17 What is more, the importance of egalitarianism in nationalist rhetoric, combined with the urge for the ‘return to the roots’ that springs from the nationalist obsession with the past, is often evinced in the romantic idealization of the ‘lower’ classes in society.18 This synthetic aspect is unmistakably reflected in the widespread fusion of the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘people’. It is admittedly a conceptual association which has more than one side to it and which, furthermore, is not encountered only in nationalist rhetoric per se. For instance, the first known confluence of the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ is found in Rousseau’s writings, where of course the republican and democratic overtones of the fusion are unmistakable.19 In the French Revolution itself, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen in effect amalgamates the two notions, stating expressly that the principle of sovereignty lies in the nation.20 In an altogether different context, one is constantly reminded of the convergence of the two notions within the same term in the German language (Volk). The pairing in this case is most important in its implications, given the influence of the German case as a prototype for the majority of the ‘ethnic’ forms of nationalism. Yet, the most pronounced versions of the union of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ have emerged in non-Western contexts wherein what could perhaps be termed ‘popular nationalism’ is to be found in almost every manifestation of resistance against foreign (colonial or other) oppression and exploitation.21 In a sense the confusion owes as much to the pliability of the idea of the ‘nation’ as to the notoriously ambiguous conceptualization and flexible usage of the notion of ‘people’. An additional difficulty in this respect springs from the fact that the identification of the ‘people’ in each particular conjuncture is, by sheer practical necessity, marred by ‘exclusionary tendencies’.22 Or, in other words, the ‘people’ too cannot but be defined by restrictive criteria of one sort or another. Given, then, the elasticity of both terms, it is no wonder that the more or less simultaneous emergence of nationalism and mass politics in modernity should have led to the close linkage of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ into conceptually vague but practically workable political units.23 After all, self-government requires some definition of the community that is to be the ‘self’, a definition going beyond abstract cultural differentiae and taking account of existing sociopolitical realities.24 Still, it seems, it is to nationalism that such a fusion owes the most. For it is nationalism (by its palpable accentuation of existing cultural differences and by its effective channelling of primordial emotions) that has brought, in one guise or another, the integration of the ‘people’ into the ‘nation’.25 At this point it is worth stressing another strange property of nationalism: namely, its ability to intertwine, in practice, with other political ideologies which may in essence run against nationalist principles. Liberalism is a case in point as already mentioned. But socialism too falls into the same category. The evidence

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in this case is overwhelming. It includes the awkwardness of socialist thought with regard to the nationalist phenomenon which can be traced back to Marx himself; Lenin’s pragmatic compromise with the principle of nationality after the Bolshevik Revolution; the ambivalent attitude of the Austro-Marxists. It also includes the uneasy blending of Marxism–Leninism with nationalism within the framework of the Third International in the 1930s; the anti-Nazi struggle turned ‘patriotic war’ in the Soviet Union; and the mobilization and insurrection for social qua national liberation in the Third World during the post-war period. All testify both to the powerful attraction of socialism to nationalism, as well as to the phenomenal adaptability of the latter to it.26 What astonishes the student of nationalism in similar cases is that the eschewing combinations with either liberalism or socialism seem almost invariably to weigh in favour of the particularist message of nationalism and against the universalist or internationalist calls of its ideological partners.27 Nationalism comes to dominate and eventually absorb all other forms of ideological discourse it happens to encounter. Why is this so? Is it because nationalism can thrive on any kind of social and political discontent?28 But this can also work the other way around for its circumstantial bedfellows. They too can presumably exploit national antagonisms for their own ends. Obviously, one has to break out of this formalist dilemma and seek the reasons for nationalism’s primacy elsewhere – namely, in the ‘nation’ having been the most inclusive and workable entity of any other form of imagined community in modernity. Its pliable breadth has so far proved to be sufficient for the accommodation of a very large measure of internal difference,29 offering open entry to all presumed partakers of a particular national ‘culture’. The strength emanating from the cultural emphasis of nationalism is further intensified by its ready adaptation to socio-political realities; and this effectively involves its ability to incorporate borrowed concepts and ideals that are tailored down to ‘national’ proportions. Nationalism appears in all cases to come out the better. But this again, we may venture to suggest, has to do with the infusion of populist connotations into the nationalist discourse in all conceivable manners and forms. Social differences tend to dissolve into various shades of national egalitarianism only to boost the appeal of nationalism; for it surely cannot be accidental that its popularity increases through its combination with (and dominance over) other ideological movements of modernity. Nationalism is indeed a heady drink but, as Hobsbawm rightly points out,30 it becomes especially intoxicating when drunk as a cocktail. A short excursus is necessary here. The rise of nationalism hand in hand with mass politics, those ‘two factors which stimulated the worship of the people as a secular religion’,31 forms, of course, a historical rather than a logical association.32 Evidently, the notion of national self-determination is axiomatically based on underlining the uniqueness of one nation vis-à-vis other similarly defined, homologous communities, that is, with regard to ‘other’ nations. In this sense, it is logically incompatible with an ecumenical conception of human nature and human rights.33 Nationalism cannot but be by definition a ‘divisive’ ideology, since it accords differential rights in lieu of its own separation of humanity into

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distinct and insular entities, into ‘different’ nations. Let us remember here the subtle reminder by Anderson that ‘no nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind’.34 Consequently, the exclusivity inherent in the idea of national selfdetermination by right of national uniqueness surely perverts the abstract fundamentals of the project of the Enlightenment. This, of course, is just another way of saying that nationalism lies beyond the bounds of substantive rationality. On a more concrete level, too, the nationalist premise directly contradicts the valueprinciple of individual freedom, for, whatever the pretensions to the contrary, one is hardly left free to choose which nation to belong to, regardless of the democratic and egalitarian imaginings this may be invested with.35 Furthermore, while it is true that as a modern ideology nationalism requires the conscious and active concurrence of its members, it hardly leaves them much choice to do otherwise, if they so wish: one simply must have a nation, as if this were a question of gender or race. A daily plebiscite (in Renan’s famous words) the nation may well be, but not to vote in it is utterly inconceivable. Nationalism, therefore, dilutes the concept of individual volition into that of an ideologically predetermined collective will; after all is said and done, the nation does not constitute a body one can join or leave according to desire. Even the supreme loyalty which the nation demands (and extracts at heavy penalty) from its members can hardly be taken as an unforced or unconstrained request: ‘my nation, right or wrong’. This cardinal emotion governing the actions of committed nationalists the world over cannot but be, at least in principle, incompatible with free choice.36 Although, then, both nationalism and modern democratic politics appear to be embedded in individuation, they remain essentially incommensurable, because within a nation’s confines democracy is necessarily tailored down to the constraints of a heavily ideological and therefore partial identity.37 Nationalism has indeed been the historical complement of the demand for social and political liberalization, but it has done so by concealing a substantive shift from individual freedom to the collective national order. This, as argued above, cannot but be imagined as undifferentiated, uniform and ultimately restrictive. A nation may well be perceived as ‘a community of equal citizens’,38 but, in essence, this boils down to an equality of the ‘obligation’ to belong to one and to behave accordingly.39 It is certainly not an equality in free choice for it rests on the nationalist identification with an imagined entity that seems to possess its own will, over and above its member parts.40 The individual citizen defined primarily as a ‘national subject’ has no existence outside this ‘categorical identity’41 and, therefore, can exercise no freedom outside his or her nation. As Hayes aptly observed almost 70 years ago, ‘the nation may do whatever it will; the individual may do only what the national state determines’.42 However, the historical specificity of nationalism, that which distinguishes nationality from other forms of identity, is that nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a culturally defined ‘peoplehood’, which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty, the central object of loyalty, and the foundation of collective solidarity.43 On that basis, it could be suggested that the particularity of nationalism vis-à-vis other modern ideologies is that its sole agent, the nation, is

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perceived as internally unified in a substantial or even absolute way. The nation is imagined as a singular collectivity that bears no internal differentiation of any consequence and, therefore, ought to be treated as a self-contained entity that differs only from ‘other’ nations. Even when the existence of internal divisions is acknowledged, nationalism tends to underrate their importance by relegating them to a temporary or inconsequential status.44 All instances of intra-national strife are accordingly treated as exceptional aberrations from the natural state of affairs, which of course has to be continuously restored.45 This, incidentally, seems to be the ‘rationale’ behind the calls for ‘national unity’ and ‘national concord’ encountered in most nationalist ideologies. Regardless, then, of the tolerance nationalism may display, the culturally defined polity of the nation cannot be imagined but as essentially homogenous and unified. The ‘conjunction of culture with politics’46 effected by nationalism can mean only that the presumed homogeneity of the cultural entity assumes a directly socio-political content.47 This is why the national interest is placed before and above all else, effectively blocking off other possible articulations of interest.48 Still, for such a priority to be accorded, the nation itself has to be perceived as socially and politically indivisible too – as ‘interestless’ itself.49 ‘Patriotism is of no class or creed and hearts may beat as warmly for Ireland in a castle as in a cabin’, proclaimed the Irish nationalist J. O’Leary in the last century.50 And it is precisely on such grounds that the idea of nation qua people can flourish.51 The ‘nation-people’ is perhaps the most telling instance of the cohesive potential of nationalism. A nation imagined along populist lines has proved to be a most effective ideological framework for the integration of social difference in modern societies. In this sense, it might be suggested that ‘popular nationalism’ shortens the distances within what Bourdieu calls ‘social space’,52 by forging powerful images of identity between otherwise disparate interests. It is certainly this particular element in the nationalist discourse that greatly enhances nationalism’s claims to legitimacy by rendering credence to its claim of undiscriminating representation of the national community as a whole. Smith is therefore quite correct when he remarks that ‘populism is a logical extension of one element in nationalist doctrine, the supremacy of the nation’.53 But this works the other way around too. The image of the ‘nation as people’ has also proved capable of diffusion down through the social structure, cutting across existing social differences and thus allowing nationalism to exert its dominance over potentially antagonistic ideological imaginings. As the Radical Nationalist John Bright put it incomparably back in the nineteenth century, ‘If a class has failed, let us try the nation!’54 It goes without saying, of course, that, even in its populist guise, nationalism on its own can neither bridge social cleavages nor expunge their experience. What it can do, however, is accommodate them under its own ideological umbrella. It can do so in such ways that they come to appear as transient grievances that are not to be allowed to disturb the pre-given unity of the national community. Nationalism makes clashing interests look ‘reconcilable’55 precisely because most of them can merge, according to individual or collective preference, inside

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the melting pot of the imagined nation. An interesting offshoot is that, in spite of the revolutionary drift in its message, nationalism can thus be kaleidoscopically perceived as an essentially cohesive and ultimately peaceful force in society. Such ideological appropriations strengthen the appeal of nationalism by broadening the imaginings with which its adherents (existing or prospective) can identify. We thus come to yet another paradox; that of a fundamentally divisive ideology relying for its strength on the sheer social inclusiveness of its message. The ‘political expediency of vagueness’56 should not be underestimated here. It is a key element both in the malleable imaginings of the nation and in their remarkable adaptability to different historical circumstances. And, as far as potential ideological rivals are concerned, it turns what would otherwise be just a tactical expediency into a firm strategic advantage. But there is another side to this. The inborn ‘classlessness’57 of the nationalist discourse is indeed its strong point but only as long as all other forms of collective identity can remain contained within the boundaries specified by the overarching and all encompassing ‘nation people’. No internal differentiation of any significance can be allowed to spill over the national brim and assume supranational dimensions without the cherished unity of the nation being questioned and without the appeal of national egalitarianism suffering as a consequence. Hence ‘popular nationalism’ blossoms on condition that all major instances of internal differentiation can ultimately be dealt with inside its own discourse. Otherwise, should its ever-shifting social anchorage be exposed, its very breadth and ambiguity turn against it. This constant danger reveals the inherent precariousness of nationalist ideology, especially in its most pronounced populist versions, and goes a long way in explaining its need for that which Gouldner and Peterson would describe as ‘conflictual validation’.58 When endangered, the unity of the nation can best be confirmed by the outward channelling of internal tensions, and this tendency is bound to be more noticeable, the more egalitarian and populist the rhetoric employed by nationalism. The undercurrent leading from socio-political discontent to national aggressiveness gathers momentum when claims and expectations of national uniformity, equality and conformity are set high. ‘Popular nationalism’ does exactly that. ‘War’, as Heinrich von Treitsche’s dictum has it, ‘is a sharp medicine for national disunion and waning patriotism’.59 This is indeed the ideological terrain in which it finds its greatest applicability.60 There is, of course, no doubt that the complex relationship between ‘nation’ and ‘people’ cannot be dispensed with by theoretical speculation alone. It forms a major explanatory problem, which has not yet received exhaustive treatment and, as such, remains a challenge to the study of nationalism. This, however, may be due to our overall inability to fully grasp the nature and versatility of nationalism with our given conceptual apparatuses. Nationalism’s mystique lies largely in its unexpected range of mutations, which perplex us precisely because they manage to combine incommensurable ideals, thereby producing logically discrepant yet historically effective symbolism. And the marriage of ‘nation’ to ‘people’ exemplifies fully this ‘chameleon-like ability’61 of nationalism – its

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capacity to transmute itself according to the perceptions and needs of different communities and of competing strata, classes, factions and individuals within them.62 It thus alerts us to the need to study this most salient component of modernity ‘both as dominant ideology and as liberating antithesis’.63 Almost inevitably, however, one is tempted to further speculate about the heuristic value of this semantic plasticity, especially in a comparative context. An interesting research agenda springs to mind. How, for instance, has the linkage between the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ affected the history of different nationalist ideologies? And, inversely, which historical circumstances have facilitated similar combinations? What has been the involvement of other ideologies and political traditions in the construction of particular nations qua peoples? Can any spatial or temporal correlation between nationalist ideologies be detected on that score? Is there any observable ‘symmetry’ between directly antagonistic nationalist ideologies with regard to the populist imaginings of their respective nations? What is the significance to be accorded to the overt or implicit ways in which the amalgamation of ‘nationhood’ with ‘peoplehood’ is effected in particular forms of nationalism? On a more concrete level, such questions regarding the spectrum, content, form and effect of ‘popular nationalism’ seem especially pertinent in the study of ‘Eastern’ (and, more especially, Balkan) nationalist ideologies and movements. A major (if only ‘technical’) reason for this is that their strong similarities on other scores provide the opportunity for conducting comparative research based on what Mill had predicated as the ‘method of agreement’.64 If anything, there seems to be little doubt that nationalism in the region belongs to the ‘Eastern’, ‘ethnicgenealogical’ variety. This assumption is sustained by the intensity of the ideological struggles that have accompanied attempts at defining and delimiting the nations in question, principally by force of ethnic–cultural differentiae. It is also borne out by the strong irredentist, expansionist or imperialistic streaks in their historical development; and by their commensurate records at forceful cultural engineering, conducted within the boundaries of the respective nation-states. Comparative research can therefore profit by focusing on such independent variables as the differential presence, mode of transformation and overall effect of populist elements in the various forms of nationalist discourse articulated in the region. These may go a long way in elucidating some of the undeniable differences that also exist between the various Balkan forms of nationalism, in terms of social cohesion, overall political orientation, internal ‘tolerance margin’ and outward direction. Let us therefore conclude this theoretical exploration with a short list of the themes around which the study of the Greek case may be productively organized. In the long (arguably the longest in the region) historical trajectory of Greek nationalism, there is strong prima facie evidence to suggest that the nation has been imagined in terms of a socially inclusive and strongly egalitarian entity. Ethnos (nation) and laos (people) have thus found themselves together in various forms of ideological admixture, as closely related or even identical concepts. The indications are certainly there. The Greek Enlightenment preceding the War of Independence, for instance, carried in its major manifestations a strong

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revolutionary resonance, replete with liberal and egalitarian overtones. By and large, the ‘nation to be reborn’ was imagined as a socially homogenous entity which by its liberation from the Ottoman yoke would also shed all the inequities of the past. The Revolutionary War itself is another case in point, as most social grievances that sprang up during its span (especially with regard to land distribution) were couched in nationalist rhetoric. It is, therefore, arguable whether the appeal and legitimizing force of Greek nationalism in checking traditional clashes of interest and power during the years of struggle owed much to such built-in ‘populist’ elements. These were also reflected in the anti-aristocratic drift of the various instances of constitution-making during the revolutionary period, a feature that remained alive in the post-revolutionary years up to the mid-nineteenth century. The nationalization cum popularization of the monarchical institution in the state-making phase of the nineteenth century is yet another example. Both the Wittelsbachs and the Glücksburgs were brought in to reign over a national society which, however, imagined itself as essentially anti-hierarchical and free of internal divisions. Both dynasties had therefore to deal with various constitutional wrangles that were largely the expressions of the democratic aspirations and demands of a people who at the same time were seeking their legitimatization as a nation. This legitimatization itself has been an ongoing process carried out through the construction of a national identity drawing its main differentiae from the idealization of popular culture which has been thought to confirm the inalienable ingredients of Greek culture through the ages. In the romantic ambience of the nineteenth century, in particular, the upsurge of folk studies followed closely upon the value judgements propounded by nationalist historiography to produce distinctly ‘populist’ imaginings of the Greek nation. Besides, the main ideological clash of the era revolved around the question of which linguistic idiom was thought to reflect the innate virtues of the ‘psyche’ of the Greek nation. And it is interesting to note that, within this nationally inspired struggle, the supporters of the demotiki (vernacular) against the katharevoussa (archaic) resorted to arguments that brought together explicitly the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘people’. This ideological fermentation was bequeathed to the twentieth century in many guises. One may single out the quest in the 1930s for the meaning of ellinikotita (Greekness), that is, the set of values constituting the ‘genuine’ national identity. The whole process bears witness to the ongoing idealization within a nationalist setting of the lower classes of society. A striking instance of the confluence of ‘nation’ and ‘people’ emerged during the Axis occupation of the Second World War (1941–44). The tremendous mass mobilization achieved by the main resistance organization in Greece, EAM, owed much to the politically effective transposition of those two ideological entities. This was something which brought home the message that the liberation movement was fighting a ‘social’ as well as a ‘national’ struggle. Thousands of Greeks rallied to its cause, many of them fighting in its armed branch, the national popular liberation army (ELAS).

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A final pointer to the usefulness of the proposed line of research comes from recent years. It is as yet unsettled how much the fiercely nationalistic rhetoric of the panhellenic socialist movement, PASOK, eased the socialists’ accession to power in 1981, after a long reign of the right wing in the decades following the Civil War of 1946–49. Whether, in order to gain office, the reformist forces in Greek society had to express themselves at the time through deliberately vague ideological politics, combining as it did nationalist and populist slogans, is an exegetical question which remains unanswered. And I propose that it cannot be addressed without reference to the effective fusion of ‘nation’ and ‘people’, holding great sway in Greece over alternative collective identities such as those of class or citizenship.

Notes 1 Mill, J. S., ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, in J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, 1st edn 1861 (London: Dent, 1972), p. 361. 2 The relevant literature abounds with references to this perplexing ambiguity of nationalism. Among the earlier works, see Kohn, H., The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1944), p. 3; Hertz, F., Nationality in History and Politics (New York: Humanities Press, 1950), pp. 262–70; Emerson, R., ‘Nationalism and Political Development’, Journal of Politics, 22, 1 (1960), 18–20; Kedourie, E., Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960), pp. 89–90; and Symmons-Symonolewicz, K., ‘Nationalist Movements: An Attempt at a Comparative Typology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 7, 2, (1965), 226–7. 3 Matossian, M., ‘Ideologies of Delayed Industrialization: Some Tensions and Ambiguities’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 6, 3 (1957/58), 227–8. 4 On this point, see also Akzin, B., State and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), pp. 67–8; Breuilly, J., ‘Reflections on Nationalism’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 15 (1985), 75; Giddens, A., The Nation-state and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 220; Giddens, A., Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 178; and Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990), p. 91. Hayes, C. J. H., ‘Two Varieties of Nationalism, Original and Derived’, Proceedings of the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland, 26 (1928), 73–4 was among the first students of nationalism to draw the distinction between nationalism as a utopia and nationalism as raison d’état. On the ‘nexus of reaction and official nationalism’, see also Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 83, 99. 5 Berlin, I., ‘The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism’, in I. Berlin (1990), The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 261. 6 See Nairn, T., The Break-up of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 24, and Giddens, A., A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 193. On a more general plane too, we should remember that the quest for logical consistency is evidently out of place in the study of ideology: see Doob, L. W., Patriotism and Nationalism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 154; and Breuilly, J., Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 17. 7 Compare inter alia, Cobban, A., The Nation State and National Self-determination (London and Glasgow: Collins, 2nd edn, 1969), pp. 62–3. Marshall, T. H., ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), and Marshall, T. H., Social

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19 20 21

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Hutchinson, 1975) was the first to point to the significance of nationalism as a critical factor in the history of social rights and citizenship, and especially in the stimulation of the demand for the recognition of equal social worth. Deutsch, K. W., Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 53. Palmer, R. R., ‘The National Idea in France before the Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1, 1 (1940), 96. Smith, A. D., Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1983), p. 178. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 16 captures this point admirably when he explains that the nation ‘is imagined as a “community”, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.’ Talmon, J. L., The Unique and the Universal (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), pp. 24–6. Touraine, A., ‘The Idea of Revolution’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 2–3 (1990), 123–4. Kohn, H., ‘Nationalism’, in de A. Crespigny and J. Cronin (eds.), Ideologies of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 149; Thompson, D., Europe since Napoleon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 588–9; Smith, Theories of Nationalism, pp. 81–3; and Hinsley, F. H., Nationalism and the International System (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), p. 52. Hence the ‘undefined universality’ of the nationalist message for all and sundry partakers of the nation (Hobsbawm, E., ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 11); see also Eriksen, T. H., Ethnicity and Nationalism (London and East Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1993), p. 102. Evidently, stressing this point entails the circumvention of the distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalisms. But I would venture to suggest that the issue of a ‘cultural’ set of criteria for nationhood holds true not only for ‘ethnic’ nationalism as intended; ‘civic’ nationalisms too would, in the final analysis, have to be defined by their respective political ‘cultures’. As Howard, M., ‘Ethnic Conflict and International Security’, Nations and Nationalism, 1, 3 (1995), 291 points out with regard to the case of the United States (that is, the civic nationalism par excellence), ‘the national or political nationalism of the Enlightenment has always needed to be powerfully reinforced by cultural nationalism if it were to be extended beyond the narrow ranks of a highly cultured elite’. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, p. 340. Renan, E., ‘Qu’ est-ce qu’ une nation?’, in E. Renan, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I., 1st edn 1882 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), pp. 889–90 was the first to single out this crucial trait of a nation – that is, the anonymity of membership. See also Smith, A. D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 136, and Gellner, E., Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 6. This is especially true of the peasantry, which is often regarded as the veritable repository of national values. Compare, inter alia, Hofer, T., ‘The Ethnic Model of Peasant Culture: A Contribution to the Ethnic Symbol Building on Linguistic Foundations by East European Peoples’, in P. F. Sugar (ed.), Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1980); Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1790, p. 103; and Gellner, E., Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 29. Carr, E. H., Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 7. Jay, R., ‘Nationalism’, in R. Eccleshall et al. (eds.), Political Ideologies (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1994), p. 157. The terminological slippage in this case sounds even more natural. In the Third World, ‘people’ and ‘nation’ become indistinguishable even for Hans Kohn (Kohn, H.,

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22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

61

‘Changing Africa in a Changing World’, Current History, 41, 242 (1961), 194: ‘In the age of nationalism peoples wish no longer to be objects of a history made by others but wish to feel themselves active agents of their own history’ (emphasis added). Calhoun, C., ‘Nationalism and Civil Society: Democracy, Diversity and SelfDetermination’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 311. Hobsbawm, E., ‘Mass-producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 264–5. Kamenka, E., ‘Political Nationalism – The Evolution of the Idea’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), p. 14. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, p. 581. For the composite and contradictory relationship between nationalism and socialism, see Davis, H. B., ‘Nations, Colonies and Social Classes: The Position of Marx and Engels’, Science and Society, 29, 1 (1965), 26–43; Davis, H. B., Nationalism and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Haupt, G., Lowy M. and Weill, C., Les marxistes et la question nationale, 1848–1914 (Paris: Maspero, 1974); Gellner, E., ‘Ethnicity between Culture, Class and Power’, in P. F. Sugar (ed.), Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara, CA, and Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1980); Connor, W., The National Question in Marxist–Leninist Theory and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Szporluk, R., Communism and Nationalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Nimni, E., Marxism and Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1991); and Schwarzmantel, J., ‘Nation versus Class: Nationalism and Socialism in Theory and Practice’, in J. Ciakley (ed.), The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (London: Sage, 1992). The awkwardness of Marxism towards nationalism can probably be encapsulated in the following statement by Gramsci, A., ‘State and Civil Society’, in Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 240: ‘To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national” – and it is from this point of departure that one must begin.’ On the coexistence of nationalism with socialism in the Third World, see Worlsey, P., The Third World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2nd edn, 1967), pp. 93–103; and Smith, A. D., Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979). ‘Whether a political culture is Liberal, Conservative, Fascist, or Communist, it is always national.’ Bluhm, W. T., Ideologies and Attitudes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), p. 60. Fishman, J. A., Language and Nationalism (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1972), p. 29. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, p. 167. Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Cardinal, 2nd edn, 1989), p. 143. Mosse, G. L., The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), p. 4. Or, as Gellner, E., Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 151 would put it, it is a sociological necessity but a logical contingency. Lord Acton (Acton, J. E. E. D., ‘Nationality’, in The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London: J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence, 1907), pp. 289–90 was the first to point this out; and most students of nationalism ever since seem to agree on that score, namely that there is no immanent relationship between nationalism and the universalistic, democratic aspects of modernity. See, inter alia, Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, pp. 191–2; Kedourie, Nationalism, pp. 79–80; Wertheim, W. F., ‘Nationalism and Leadership in Asia’, Science and Society, 26, 1 (1962), 1–2; Friedrich, C. J., Man and His Government (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 560; Hinsley, Nationalism and the International System, p. 48; and Smith, A. D., ‘History and Liberty: Dilemmas

62

33

34 35

36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey of Loyalty in Western Democracies’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9, 1 (1986), 48. On this point, see also Giddens, The Nation-state and Violence, pp. 216–18. For a dissenting view, see Morgenthau, H., ‘Nationalism: A Dilemma’, in U. G., Whitaker (ed.), Nationalism and International Progress (San Francisco, CA: Chandler Books, revised edn, 1961), pp. 188–9; and Connor, W., Ethnonationalism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 23. Gellner, E., ‘Introduction’, in S. Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism (Budapest, London and New York: Central European University Press, 1995), pp. 2–3 sees this incompatibility in terms of a conflict between two mutually exclusive moralities, that is, Kantian universalism and Platonic particularism. See also Binkley, R. C., Realism and Nationalism 1852–1871 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 2nd edn, 1963), pp. 27–31. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 16. There is probably no need to argue at greater length the ethical and philosophical weaknesses of nationalism. Suffice it to quote from no less an astute observer than George Orwell (Orwell, G., Such, Such Were the Joys (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1953), pp. 73–4) who captured vividly the fundamental irrationality of the nationalist discourse. ‘By nationalism I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad”. But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good or evil, and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.’ An extreme demonstration of this is afforded by the poet Gottfried Benn in his nationalist apologia for joining the Nazis: ‘On purely personal grounds I declare myself for the new State, because it is my Volk that is making its way now. Who am I to exclude myself; do I know anything better? No! Within the limits of my powers I can try to guide the Volk to where I would like to see it; but if I should not succeed, still it would remain my Volk. Volk is a great deal! My intellectual and economic existence, my language, my life, my human relationships, the entire sum of my brain, I owe primarily to this Volk. My ancestors came from it; my children return to it.’ (Quoted in Fest, J. C., Hitler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 635). Haugen, E., ‘Dialect, Language, Nation’, American Anthropologist, 68 (1966), 928. Hroch, M., ‘How Much Does Nation Formation Depend on Nationalism?’, East European Politics and Societies, 4, 1 (1990), 108. ‘Whether a nation consists of equals or non-equals is of no great importance … for society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest.’ (Arendt, H., The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 39. Kedourie, E., ‘Introduction’, in E. Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York: Meridian Books, 1970), pp. 31–6. Calhoun, ‘Nationalism and Civil Society’, p. 26. Hayes, C. J. H., The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 69. ‘The “people” is the mass of a population whose boundaries and nature are defined in various ways, but which is usually perceived as larger than any concrete community and always a fundamentally homogenous, and only superficially divided by the likes of status, class, locality, and in some cases even ethnicity.’ (Greenfeld, L., Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 3.) Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics, p. 10. Greenfeld, Nationalism, pp. 3–4, 487. Smith, ‘History and Liberty’, p. 156. Kamenka, ‘Political Nationalism’, p. 10. Giddens, The Nation-state and Violence, p. 221.

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49 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 131. 50 Quoted in Coakley, J., ‘The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements and Expectations of Nationalism’, in J. Coakley (ed.), The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (London: Sage, 1992), p. 1. 51 ‘As Pierre Villar has pointed out, what characterized the nation-people as seen from below was precisely that it represented the common interest against particular interests. . . .’ (Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 20) 52 Bourdieu, P., Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 53 Smith, Theories of Nationalism, p. 264. 54 Quoted in Briggs, A., Victorian People (Harmonsworth: Pelican, 1985), p. 233. 55 Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939) p. 297. 56 Penrose, J., ‘Reification in the Name of Change: The Impact of Nationalism on Social Constructions of Nation, People and Place in Scotland and the United Kingdom’, in P. Jackson and J. Penrose (eds.), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (London: UCL Press, 1993), p. 32. 57 Smith, A.D., ‘Introduction: The Formation of Nationalist Movements’, in A. D. Smith (ed.), Nationalist Movements (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 24. 58 Gouldner, A. W. and Peterson, R. A., Notes on Technology and the Moral Order (Indianapolis, IN Bobbs-Merill, 1962). 59 Quoted in Guibernau, M., Nationalisms: The Nation-state and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 8. 60 On war and nationalism, see Hertz, F., ‘War and National Character’, Contemporary Review, 171 (1947), 274–81; Smith, A. D., ‘War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-images and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4, 4 (1981), 375–97; and Guiomar, J.-Y., La nation entre l’ histoire et la raison (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1990), pp. 22–45. 61 Smith, A. D., Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995), p. 13. 62 Lele, J., ‘The Two Faces of Nationalism: On the Revolutionary Potential of Tradition’, in J. Dofny and A. Akinowo (eds.), National and Ethnic Movements, (Beverly Hills, CA, and London: Sage Publications, 1980), p. 201. 63 On this point, see also Minogue, K., Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 1967), p. 153. 64 Mill, J. S., Philosophy of Scientific Method, also published as A System of Logic, 1950 (New York: Hafner, 1881).

References Acton, J. E. E. D., ‘Nationality’, in The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London: J. N. Figgis & R. V. Laurence, 1907). Akzin, B., State and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1964). Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Arendt, H., The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Berlin, I., ‘The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism’, in I. Berlin (1990), The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1972). Binkley, R. C., Realism and Nationalism 1852–1871 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 2nd edn, 1963). Bluhm, W. T., Ideologies and Attitudes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974). Bourdieu, P., Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Breuilly, J., Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982). Breuilly, J., ‘Reflections on Nationalism’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 15 (1985), 65–75. Briggs, A., Victorian People (Harmonsworth: Pelican, 1985).

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Calhoun, C., ‘Nationalism and Civil Society: Democracy, Diversity and Self-Determination’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939). Carr, E. H., Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945). Coakley, J., ‘The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements and Expectations of Nationalism’, in J. Coakley (ed.), The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (London: Sage, 1992). Cobban, A., The Nation State and National Self-determination (London and Glasgow: Collins, 2nd edn, 1969). Connor, W., The National Question in Marxist–Leninist Theory and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Connor, W., Ethnonationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Davis, H. B., ‘Nations, Colonies and Social Classes: The Position of Marx and Engels’, Science and Society, 29, 1 (1965), 26–43. Davis, H. B., Nationalism and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). Deutsch, K. W., Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Knopf, 1969). Doob, L. W., Patriotism and Nationalism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1964). Emerson, R., ‘Nationalism and Political Development’, Journal of Politics, 22, 1 (1960), 3–28. Eriksen, T. H., Ethnicity and Nationalism (London and East Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1993). Fest, J. C., Hitler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Fishman, J. A., Language and Nationalism (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1972). Friedrich, C. J., Man and His Government (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963). Gellner, E., Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964). Gellner, E., ‘Ethnicity between Culture Class and Power’, in P. F. Sugar (ed.), Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1980). Gellner, E., Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gellner, E., Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). Gellner, E., ‘Introduction’, in S. Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism (Budapest, London and New York: Central European University Press, 1995). Giddens, A., A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1981). Giddens, A., The Nation-state and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985). Giddens, A., Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Gouldner, A. W. and Peterson, R. A., Notes on Technology and the Moral Order (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1962). Gramsci, A., ‘State and Civil Society’, in Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). Greenfeld, L., Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Guibernau, M., Nationalisms: The Nation-state and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Guiomar, J.-Y., La nation entre l’ histoire et la raison (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1990). Haugen, E., ‘Dialect, Language, Nation’, American Anthropologist, 68 (1966), 922–35.

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Haupt, G., Lowy M. and Weill, C., Les marxistes et la question nationale, 1848–1914 (Paris: Maspero, 1974). Hayes, C. J. H., ‘Two Varieties of Nationalism, Original and Derived’, Proceedings of the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland, 26 (1928), 70–83. Hayes, C. J. H., The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Hertz, F., ‘War and National Character’, Contemporary Review, 171 (1947), 274–81. Hertz, F., Nationality in History and Politics (New York: Humanities Press, 1950). Hinsley, F. H., Nationalism and the International System (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973). Hobsbawm, E., ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hobsbawm, E., ‘Mass-producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Cardinal, 2nd edn, 1989). Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hofer, T., ‘The Ethnic Model of Peasant Culture: A Contribution to the Ethnic Symbol Building on Linguistic Foundations by East European Peoples’, in P. F. Sugar (ed.), Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara, CA, and Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1980). Howard, M., ‘Ethnic Conflict and International Security’, Nations and Nationalism, 1, 3 (1995), 285–95. Hroch, M., ‘How Much Does Nation Formation Depend on Nationalism?’, East European Politics and Societies, 4, 1 (1990), 101–15. Jay, R., ‘Nationalism’, in R. Eccleshall et al. (eds.), Political Ideologies (London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1994). Kamenka, E., ‘Political Nationalism – The Evolution of the Idea’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London: Edward Arnold, 1976). Kedourie, E., Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960). Kedourie, E., ‘Introduction’, in E. Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York: Meridian Books, 1970). Kohn, H., The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1944). Kohn, H., ‘Changing Africa in a Changing World’, Current History, 41, 242 (1961), 194–216. Kohn, H., ‘Nationalism’, in de A. Crespigny and J. Cronin (eds.), Ideologies of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Lele, J., ‘The Two Faces of Nationalism: On the Revolutionary Potential of Tradition’, in J. Dofny and A. Akinowo (eds.), National and Ethnic Movements (Beverly Hills, CA, and London: Sage Publications, 1980). Marshall, T. H., ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). Marshall, T. H., Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Hutchinson, 1975). Matossian, M., ‘Ideologies of Delayed Industrialization: Some Tensions and Ambiguities’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 6, 3 (1957/58), 217–28. Mill, J. S., ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, in J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, Ist edn 1861 (London: Dent, 1972).

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Mill, J. S., Philosophy of Scientific Method, also published as A System of Logic, 1950 (New York: Hafner, 1881). Minogue, K., Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 1967). Morgenthau, H., ‘Nationalism: A Dilemma’, in U. G. Whitaker (ed.), Nationalism and International Progress (San Francisco, CA: Chandler Books, revised edn, 1961). Mosse, G. L., The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). Nairn, T., The Break-Up of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977). Nimni, E., Marxism and Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1991). Orwell, G., Such, Such Were the Joys (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1953). Palmer, R. R., ‘The National Idea in France before the Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1, 1 (1940), 95–111. Penrose, J., ‘Reification in the Name of Change: The Impact of Nationalism on Social Constructions of Nation, People and Place in Scotland and the United Kingdom’, in P. Jackson and J. Penrose (eds.), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (London: UCL Press, 1993). Renan, E., ‘Qu’ est-ce qu’ une nation?’, in E. Renan, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, Ist edn 1882 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947). Schwarzmantel, J., ‘Nation versus Class: Nationalism and Socialism in Theory and Practice’, in J. Ciakley (ed.), The Social Origins of Nationalist Movements (London: Sage, 1992). Smith, A. D., ‘Introduction: The Formation of Nationalist Movements’, in A. D. Smith (ed.), Nationalist Movements (London: Macmillan, 1976). Smith, A. D., Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979). Smith, A. D., ‘War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-images and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4, 4 (1981), 375–97. Smith, A. D., Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1983). Smith, A. D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Smith, A. D., ‘History and Liberty: Dilemmas of Loyalty in Western Democracies’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9, 1 (1986), 43–65. Smith, A. D., Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995). Symmons-Symonolewicz, K., ‘Nationalist Movements: An Attempt at a Comparative Typology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 7, 2 (1965), 221–30. Szporluk, R., Communism and Nationalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Talmon, J. L., The Unique and the Universal (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965). Thompson D., Europe since Napoleon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Touraine, A., ‘The Idea of Revolution’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 2–3 (1990), 121–41. Wertheim, W. F., ‘Nationalism and Leadership in Asia’, Science and Society, 26, 1 (1962), 1–14. Worlsey, P., The Third World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2nd edn, 1967).

5

‘Do not think of the Greeks as agricultural labourers’ Ottoman responses to the Greek War of Independence1 Hakan Erdem

Considering the deep impact it had on the Ottoman Empire, the Greek War of Independence is a subject strangely neglected by Ottomanists. The same cannot be said for non-Ottomanists, among them Greek historians who addressed the issue in great detail for understandable reasons. However, the history of the Greek War of Independence is, to a large extent, written without recourse to the pertinent Ottoman documentation. This is all the more surprising in view of the vast numbers of documents in the central Ottoman archives, some of them in the Greek language, on the Greek War of Independence. It appears that a good 10 per cent of the over 50,000 catalogue entries in one classification only, that is, the hatt-i humayun (imperial decrees), is related to the Greek War of Independence. That said, my task within the limits of this chapter is not to rewrite or revise a familiar story but rather to offer some insights into the way in which the Greek War of Independence was perceived by the Ottoman centre and, more importantly, to assess the role of the Greek war in transforming the Ottoman Empire. There can be little doubt that the Sheriat provided the legal framework within which the Greek revolt was dealt with. This is of course not to say that everything the Ottoman government did could be justified or explained by the Sheriat. However, religion was indeed a potent, multifunctional weapon in the Ottoman arsenal, used equally adroitly to justify the treatment of the rebellious subjects or to create a more corporate Muslim–Ottoman identity which did not allow much for ‘internal’ dissension. One of the first discernible effects of the first full-fledged nationalist revolt in the Ottoman Empire was to bolster the Islamic establishment. The rulers of the empire once more began to speak the language of the holy war against the infidels. Paradoxically enough, at the end of the crisis, thanks to such momentous changes as the abolition of the janissary army, the disappearance of the – coalition between the Ulema (Islamic learned class) and the janissaries or the establishment of a conscript citizen army, the Ottoman Empire was ready as it never had been to accept modernity together with its nation-state building tools. The Ottomans were facing a secessionist rebellion whose leading intellectual cadres at least thought that it was attempted in the spirit of building or rebuilding the Greek nation. Nationalist or not, for the Ottomans the Greeks had abrogated the dhimma/zimmet (pact) that regulated relations between the so-called zimmis (protected minorities) and the Islamic state. The repudiation of the pact necessitated

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a return to the state of affairs prior to the entry of the Greeks into the Ottoman world as zimmis and made them once more harbis (warring non-Muslims) who were liable to several penalties. The Ottoman retributions were therefore as swift as they were anticipated. There is some evidence that the Ottoman government at least initially did not have blanket policies regarding the whole Greek millet but treated local communities on an individual basis. The Ottoman state had to make distinctions on two separate levels. First, it had to differentiate the ethnic Greeks who started the rebellion from the other non-Greek members of the Greek millet, such as the Wallachians and Bulgarians who remained neutral. Second, it had to separate those ethnic Greeks who did not rise up in rebellion from those who physically opposed the Ottomans in armed conflict. This is not to say that the state always had the means or willingness to ensure the smooth implementation of such a policy. It is, however, important to note that the Ottoman government legitimized or tried to legitimize its repressive measures against a background of the law of war under Islam. However, one has the feeling that, as the revolt dragged on, the Ottoman state went beyond the technical, legalistic framework provided by the Sheriat and began to take ‘pre-emptive’ and purely administrative measures. In a period of continuous crisis, perceptions had a serious potential of turning into reality. One of these perceptions was related to the suspicions of the Ottoman centre that there was a link between the Greek rebels and the Albanians. New Ottoman policies followed suit. Last but not least, the ideas expressed by the leaders of the Greek War of Independence proved to be a major channel through which the rulers of the Ottoman Empire made their acquaintance with the modern ideas of the age of nationalism.

The Greek War of Independence as repudiation of the Zimmet (Dhimma) Shortly after the proclamation of the Greek revolt by Alexander Ypsilantis on 24 February 1821 in the Danubian principalities, the Ottoman commander in Vidin, Dervish Mustafa Pasha, wrote to the centre and asked for fresh instructions, supplies and soldiers. According to the pasha, the situation was bleak. Ypsilantis had already ‘captured’ Moldovia and was about to enter Wallachia. The boyar (nobles) and people of Bucharest were not concerned about the revolt as much as they were about the entry of the ‘Ottoman soldiers’ into the principality on the grounds that they would all suffer. The instructions of Mahmud II to Grand Vezir Haci Salih Pasha on the issue are very revealing about the initial responses of the sultan and how he approached the problem. The sultan, suspecting that the Russians were behind Ypsilantis despite strenuous Russian denials, was of the opinion that Ypsilantis’s action put the two empires on a collision course and that war with Russia was in the offing. He was equally sure that, as in the past, the nobles of the principalities would lean toward the Russians. Therefore, his priority was to deploy soldiers in the Principalities to bolster the defences against the Russians. However, operating under treaty obligations, the sultan was not allowed to send troops to the principalities without the consent of the

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Russians. Sending troops there would definitely invite Russian adversity. One way to do it, went on the sultan, was to issue calls for a general mobilization in Rumelia, ‘ostensibly to punish the rebellious subjects in Moldovia and Wallachia without disclosing any news of a campaign against Russia’. The sultan expected that many people would enlist in the hope that they would gain property. This was of course an open reference to the plunder of the belongings of the rebellious reaya (subjects). The sultan, as the sovereign of the Islamic state, was very conscious of his rights to declare a group of his subjects rebels, who would then be treated as harbis. The problem with this approach was that the reaya was not in rebellion yet. Therefore, it was an extremely dangerous policy to follow, capable of creating a real rebellion on a massive scale. It seems that the sultan could more easily afford to declare some of his subjects rebels than to declare war on Russia. Of course, it should be noted that he did not order such a course of action, but that it occurred to him that this was a viable option. He simply wanted the erbab-i shura (men of council) to discuss the matter in detail in great secrecy at the house of the chief jurisconsult. If they found it istihsan (worth recommending) it was to be carried into practice. He added that Muslims should unite and love each other; they should leave pomp and splendour and acquire a state of bedeviyyet (mobilization, literally nomadism) to protect the religion of Muhammad.2 Luckily for the sultan and for all, Ypsilantis’s military adventure turned out to be a flop. The Russians did not intervene. His pleas fell on the deaf ears of the non-Greek subjects who did not rise up in rebellion. He escaped to Austria after a brush with Ottoman forces. A disaster was averted. However, more was to come. As the Greek War of Independence unfolded, countless similar arguments were made and carried into practice by the rulers of the empire. The Greeks of the Morea rose in rebellion and Mahmud would soon have to deal with many of his actual subjects in full rebellion. Without going into too much detail, a few examples belonging to different phases of the revolt will suffice to show how the Ottomans dealt with it and how indeed they themselves were radicalized and profoundly influenced by it. On 4 November 1821, Vahid Pasha, the commander of the Ottoman punitive forces on Chios, wrote to the centre in jubilant tones that his forces were all victorious against the ‘infidels’ on the island. According to the pasha, the ‘victorious soldiers had taken booty and slaves in quantities never seen and heard of before’. For the pasha this was simply a punishment for treason. He went on to say that he was now sending the ears and heads of such executed prominent rebels as priests and standard-bearers. The sultan ordered them to be displayed in an exemplary style.3 In similar fashion, Resid Mehmed Pasha, the governor-general of Rumelia, wrote to the centre to communicate the good news when Missilonghi fell to the Ottoman forces. According to him,4 among the Greek rebels most of the males were put to the sword whereas women and children were enslaved.5 In another more detailed report, the governor-general gave the number of executed as 2,750.6 According to a dispatch of the governor of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha, to his own agent in Istanbul, Necib Efendi, the Egyptian troops implemented similar measures against the Greek rebels on Crete. As the pasha broke the news to his steward, the

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Egyptian commander Huseyin Bey roamed the island with his troops to ‘intimidate the infidels and to let them have a taste of Islamic vigour’. He executed some 400 people and enslaved a further 3,000. Huseyin Bey wanted to finish the matter off by killing those ‘infidel rebels’ who persisted in ‘banditry’ and by ‘extending pardon to those who accept subjecthood’. Pleased by the news, Mahmud II7 approved of Huseyin Bey’s course of action, saying ‘They are honoured with (a great) conquest. I am very pleased. May God Almighty always grant victories to the Muslims everywhere, Amen.’8 Armed with the stipulations of the Sheriat on the law of war, the Ottoman rulers used other methods, such as exile and confiscation of property not to mention imprisonment, to suppress the rebels.9 However, not all was going smoothly. This was the case even within the very boundaries of the age-old, therefore commonly known if not shared, norms of the Sheriat. In fact, there were violations of the law of war by several parties. It was one thing to speak the language of the cihad (holy war) to motivate soldiers and people, and it was another to be able to control them. Sometime in 1822, possibly in August or September, Grand Vezir Haci Salih Pasha wrote to the sultan in detail on the problem of the illegal enslavement of Greek subjects. Quoting Mustafa Pasha, the commander of the Dardanelles forts, the grand vezir informed the sultan that the soldiers were plundering the pardoned reaya villages and enslaving the inhabitants on Chios. The soldiers therefore had no pencik (title deeds) to prove that they had paid the tax due to the state and that the slaves in their possession were legally enslaved. Mustafa Pasha knew perfectly well that he had to stop these soldiers at Gallipoli: his problem, however, was that such a measure ‘would cause gossip of people’. He therefore asked for clear instructions. The grand vezir took the matter to the consultative council convened at the chief jurisconsult’s office and asked the chief jurisconsult to expose the Sheriat’s point of view on such slaves enslaved after the granting of a pardon. The Seyhulislam was categorical on the issue. He issued a fetva (religious ruling) that no pencik were needed for the men and women enslaved by the soldiers in pardoned areas as they were free and reaya, and that it was illegal to buy and sell them. The grand vezir suggested that an imperial rescript together with the fetva should be sent to Mustafa Pasha, instructing him to seize those illegally enslaved from whoever possessed them and also to communicate with the commander of the Ottoman forces on Chios to arrange for their return to their vatanlarina (country). However, the grand vezir was very conscious that the problem would not go away by the simple issuing of a ferman (imperial edict) and fetva. To force soldiers to release their prey required a hard-nosed government that apparently did not exist at the time. He therefore made another suggestion. He offered to write to Mustafa Pasha, instructing him to try to implement the rescript. However, in case the ‘scoundrels’ displayed any impertinence, Mustafa Pasha would be better advised not to seize the slaves from them by force. Instead, he should ‘tell them in a nice way’ that the Sheriat did not allow the buying and selling of these people and that it was religiously forbidden to employ them as concubines. Thus, the problem would be avoided. In the meantime, the warden of the slave dealers’ guild in Istanbul had to be warned that

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slaves without pencik should not be offered for sale in the market. As usual Mahmud’s orders on the issue were brief. He approved the grand vezir’s suggestions, remarking that ‘any situation against the Sheriat is not permissible’.10 On another occasion the sultan was very indignant about the way his Greek subjects were treated by some of his soldiery. His response stands in stark contrast to the somewhat lukewarm Ottoman response in the above case. The difference, however, is easy to explain. The sultan and his men regarded the Chiotes as rebels who deserved every punishment. Even the pardoned reaya were, after all, culprits not so long ago. Alienating the soldiers who suppressed the rebellion on a technicality was not good policy. However, in the follwing case, the reaya did not rise up in rebellion at all and kept their pact with the state all along. Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 1821, the Ottoman government received a plethora of complaints about the behaviour of some marines in the Dardanelles region. The ayan (notable) of Gelibolu (Hasan Aga), the commander of the Dardanelles forts (Ali Sefik Pasha) and the rear-admiral of the imperial fleet (Riyale Bey) wrote in unison to the centre about the disastrous and unacceptable behaviour of the marines in the area. According to the ayan of Gelibolu, some illnatured and ill-mannered people of Gelibolu found an opportunity when some marines arrived in the town on merchant ships furnished by the Istanbul merchants. They incited the marines to attack the reaya quarters. Despite appeals for calm and order, the marines plundered all the reaya houses and even committed murders. They took some 300,000 gurus worth of plunder with them and set sail from Gelibolu. According to Ali Sefik Pasha, they did the same in Canakkalesi before they raided and plundered the reaya in the Maydos Gulf area. The pasha warned the centre that if these marines were not stopped there would be a ‘great massacre’ in the area. The Riyale Bey also wrote in great alarm. When he sent a pursuivant to admonish them, the marines displayed their weapons to him, saying ‘We do not recognize the admiral! We shall now plunder the villages of Kum Kale and of the Island of Imroz!’ Uneasy about the ties between the janissaries and the marines, the grand vezir brought the reports to the notice of the janissary aga. After some deliberation, the janissary aga, his officers and also the merchants of the kapan disowned the marines, claiming they were not janissaries but miri levendat (irregulars) recruited by the state. The grand vezir condemned the marines’ action in bold words. He pointed out that the method adopted by the state to suppress the rebellion was to destroy those who were conspirators but leave the others in peace. Such were the declarations of the state. Plundering and killing the poor harmless reaya without any reason and in violation of the established patterns could not be condoned at all. Otherwise, all the reaya would be in sorrow and terror. If they escalated such a course of action and infected other regions, ‘the law and order of the land would deteriorate’ beyond any control. Moreover,11 as these soldiers were intent on nothing but plunder they would not be of any use at all in suppressing the rebellion.12 The grand vezir suggested that the admiral of the fleet should be sent to the region and given instructions to take back the plundered goods of the reaya. Mahmud, who on a different occasion not long before wanted to mobilize the

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common people with promises of plunder in the principalities, was furious. He chided the grand vezir for treating the matter lightly and ordered many more troops under different provincial governors to reach the area. His orders were stern indeed. He kept referring to the marines as plunderers, bandits or rebels and ordered their execution the moment they left their ships as if they were the Greek rebels. He also issued warnings that all these problems emanated from the fact that the imperial navy was not yet ready. Issuing a deadline, he warned his own officials that if the fleet could not be sent by a particular date he would punish all in ‘unimaginable ways’. Providing a foretaste of what was in store for the janissary army, he also scolded the grand vezir for seeking the consent of the janissary officers.13 The sultan’s message was clear. It was up to him, in his capacity as the leader of the Islamic community, to declare some of his subjects rebels or decide upon the way in which they would be treated. Mahmud had no intention of alienating his prerogatives. However, despite this stance of the sultan, ‘irregularities’ of the kind described above became endemic during the long years of the Greek war. On one occasion, for example, the commander of the Kandiye fort on Crete, Hasim Pasha, wrote to the centre and bitterly complained that the janissaries could not be prevented from killing the ‘innocent reaya’ in Kandiye and Hanya. He was powerless to interfere.14 On another, at the very beginning of the Greek revolt in 1821, the voyvoda (ruler appointed by the Ottoman administration) of Istankoy island, Mehmed Sherif, reported to the centre the difficulty with which a massacre of the reaya was thwarted, although not before the actual killing of some 60 or so individuals. According to him, during a skirmish between the Ottoman forces and some Greek pirate vessels that attacked the island, a wounded black soldier cried out that he had been fired at by the reaya. His fellow soldiers accordingly attacked them.15 Physical repression was not the only method to quell the rebellion, nor was it an end in itself. In fact, there is enough data to establish that the main concern of the Ottoman administrators was to force or persuade the reaya to assume their status as zimmis. Consequently, they fought a prolonged campaign which almost defeated the purpose by devastating the provinces inhabited by the Greeks. In 1828, after all the major battles of the war had been fought, the Ottomans felt that they could reimpose dhimmitude once more on the Greeks. The Greek patriarch, no doubt with the knowledge of what was expected of him, wrote a memorandum for the Sublime Porte in which he suggested a way out. According to this scheme, the Greek rebels would nedamet ve istiman (repent and ask for pardon) and their past crimes would be forgiven. Although the rebels’ property, land and real estate were legitimate spoils, it was up to the uluyulemr-i Islam (Islamic sovereign) to return them to the reaya as he recently did in the case of the reaya of Athens. As in old times, the Muslims in the Morea would live in their castles, living in their old places. The reaya would pay their cizye (poll tax on non-Muslims) and other taxes and keep their old churches. Of course, the reaya would give up all the war materials they possessed. The Ottoman state16 would also forgive their unpaid cizye taxes and extend a tax relief for a year.17 In essence, the backbone of the

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patriarch’s ‘offer’ was a return to the status quo ante. As such, it was music to Mahmud’s ears. The best he could offer was to start anew. What Mahmud and his men failed to see was that some of the reaya had no wish whatsoever to be zimmis again. The Ottomans for their part were not ready at all to accept Western or Russian mediation in the question, nor were they ready to reconcile themselves with the prospect of a section of the reaya breaking free from their empire. It took a full-scale war with Russia to get to that point.

Exclusion of the Greeks from state service We have seen that the Ottomans regarded the Greek revolt as repudiation of the Zimmet and proceeded accordingly. The Ottoman government tried to distinguish those groups that rose in actual rebellion from the ones that remained loyal subjects. We also have evidence that, despite the great degree of homogeneity or consistency in their policies, the Ottomans preferred to deal with local communities on an individual basis. The archives are full of documentation containing identical information about the treatment of a certain local group of Greeks in the case of, say, terms of re-entry into Ottoman subjecthood. The Ottoman government seems to have abstained from blanket action in matters pertaining to the status of its Greek subjects as zimmis. However, one should not jump to conclusions that the Ottoman government had never implemented policies concerning all the Greeks. On the contrary, we have evidence that, in matters which did not directly touch on the status of Greeks as zimmis, the Ottoman government had a number of measures discriminating against its Greek subjects. Exclusion from state service was a common Ottoman response. One could stay a zimmi, yet be dismissed from office because there was nothing to compel the state to continue to employ people, individuals or groups, belonging to an ethno-religious group of which some of its members were in rebellion against it. In other words, it was suspicion, founded or unfounded, that motivated the state to take action. Not surprisingly, no religious authority is cited in such cases of exclusion or dismissal. They were of an entirely administrative nature and perhaps better reflected the mood of the times than the sheri sanctions which were fairly well established, expected and therefore frozen or stale. The dismissal of the chief dragoman of the Porte and the subsequent transfer of the service from the Greeks to the Muslims is a well known and well recorded response of the Ottoman government motivated by the Greek rebellion. The question of why anyone should lose his job in a merit-based, patrimonial empire solely on the grounds that he had ethno-religious ties to a group of people was not even raised with the implicit assertion that it was only too natural. When we consult the contemporary Ottoman documents, this image of the Ottoman Empire as the blissful place where people were treated in line with their merit is a little tarnished, at least in the war years. Sometime in 1824–25 the grand vezir wrote a report to the sultan on the question of finding suitable revenues for the chief dragoman’s office. The language used by the grand vezir on the occasion leaves no place for doubt that the dismissal of the chief dragoman was a part of a larger

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whole. Asking for new resources and complaining that no money earmarked for the office came from the Morea, the grand vezir reminded the sultan that ‘this service too had previously been liberated from the employment of the infidels’.18 The political reliability of their Greek subjects was a question that troubled the minds of the Ottoman administrators. We learn from a document that it was Sultan Mahmud himself who decided that the Ottoman chargés d’affaires abroad, who were ethnic Greeks, should be dismissed from office. The sultan on one occasion, after perusing the translations of the reports from the chargés d’affaires in Vienna, Paris and London, became persuaded that his Greek officials were bent on reporting some nonsense for ‘deceiving and scaring’ the Sublime Porte. He gave orders that they must be dismissed since they belonged to the Greek millet and there could be no confidence in them from that time on. If the powers insisted on the necessity of appointing chargés d’affaires in their countries, they should be placated with the answer that Muslim officials could be appointed after the rebellion was put down. The grand vezir informed the sultan that his orders were fulfilled and Mahmud reiterated his stance: ‘We feed the enemies of our state by giving them an annual salary of 30,000 kurus! If necessary Muslims can be appointed in their place. This way they will learn languages, too.’19 Greek sailors, who served in the Ottoman navy and usually came from the Aegean islands, were another group of people affected by this policy of replacing Greeks with Muslims. In the spring of 1821 the Ottoman government received information that Alexandros Ypsilantis had written to the sailors of Hydra and asked them to provide vessels for the revolt. Some 150 light vessels were reported to have joined the rebels.20 It happened that there were many sailors from the island of Hydra under Ottoman pay. The Ottoman admiral of the fleet, Ali Bey, intercepted a copy of Ypsilantis’s proclamation of the revolt addressed to the reaya of Hydra, heightening his suspicions. He consequently inspected the Greek sailors in the navy and found that some of them already sported the rebel flag tattooed on their arms. The admiral was firmly persuaded that, despite their professed loyalty as subjects, some of the Greek captains, notably Captain Manol, were in correspondence with the rebels. Without being able to produce any hard evidence, he wrote to the centre that Captain Manol wrote letters to the rebels to the effect of ‘What are you waiting for? Face the navy immediately. You from without and we from the within, let us manage something.’ He had Manol jailed as ‘Manol’s secret thoughts and inborn feelings of treason became clear by the day from his attitudes and the way he behaved’. Sudh suspicion was too much to bear. The admiral had Manol and 11 others hanged.21 No doubt under the influence of similar incidents and reports, the Ottoman government took radical action and dismissed all the Greek sailors from naval service. The Kapudan Pasha (lord high admiral) of the empire had some Greek sailors removed from service on the grounds that ‘under the present circumstances there can be no trust in the Greek millet and especially in the reaya of the islands’. The Greek sailors were incarcerated in the arsenal prison. The kapudan pasha contracted some Neapolitan sailors to take their place. They were ready to serve for a monthly salary of 100 gurus. The grand vezir pointed out that ‘even

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the most skilful Greek sailors’ had always worked in the past for a salary of 40 gurus. The sums offered to the Neapolitans were exorbitantly high. Second, the Neapolitans, as subjects of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, appeared to be from a bitaraf millet (neutral state). However, these people, noted the grand vezir, had rebelled against their own king not so long ago. They were reconciled with their king only when the Russians mediated, and they can be regarded as Moscovites now. Therefore, the grand vezir insinuated, they were as unreliable as the Greeks. His suggestion was to enlist Muslim sailors from the Trabzon area of the Black Sea, from Crete and Rhodes in the Aegean and from the Arabic provinces. According to him, the sailors recruited from the fellah (the landless rural population of Egypt) were even more skilled in the art of the seas than Western sailors. Mahmud endorsed the grand vezir’s suggestion. His orders were clear: ‘After this conspiracy of the Greeks, it is not permissible to employ them in the Imperial Navy. It is most necessary to recruit Muslim sailors. Find and fetch them right now!’ 22

Mobilizing muslim public opinion The mistrust felt by the Ottoman rulers against the Greeks was only matched in its intensity by their desire to mobilize Muslim public opinion. Even in areas such as the capital, removed from the hotbeds of the rebellion, the Ottoman government was extremely sensitive about any sign of insurgence by the reaya; accordingly, it issued calls for a general state of alert by the Muslims. In retrospect, it is incredible that the Ottoman government should seriously entertain any thought that the reaya in the vicinity of the capital posed any threat to its security. Yet, from 1821 to 1822 the lord high admiral searched the Princes’ Islands thoroughly for any weapons that the reaya might possess. The search produced a meagre number of weapons and 13 ‘Croats’ who had a reputation for a predilection for arms.23 The same Ottoman government tried hard to pass on the message that everything was under control by stifling whispers and gossip. Two individuals, an Armenian known as Shalci Zohrab and a Greek called Dimitraki, were arrested for spreading ‘rumours and false news’ in 1821. Asked about their punishment, a perplexed Mahmud penned his orders in a reflective mood: ‘Oh, my God! So many of them were executed yet the infidels persist in what they are doing! Hang these two in Arnavutkoyu! Attach placards round their necks telling people that they dared to spread rumours to sow discord among the Muslims!’24 Unfortunately, we do not know what kinds of rumours were being spread by these two unlucky individuals. That the people of the capital were ready to believe anything, including a full-scale rebellion by the reaya in support of an advancing Russian army from the Black Sea, can be gleaned from the following episode. Sometime from 1824–25 a merchant known as Kor Dimitrinin Oglu broke the news to a certain Cebecioglu, an inhabitant of the village of Uskumru, that the Greeks and Bulgars had convened for a conspiracy at Burgaz and Duzdagh at the mouth of the strait. The authorities made a quick search and discovered that the reayas were in their usual place. However, the merchant himself disappeared. The authorities decided that he could only be a spy trying to demoralize the people of the capital. They started a manhunt.25

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It seems that for the Ottoman government, dealing with rumour-spreading individuals or would-be spies was a small price to pay to alert and mobilize Muslim public opinion. We have seen above the way in which Mahmud himself gave instructions that Muslims should put themselves into a state of mobilization. From an undated pre-1826 report of the grand vezir we learn that the Ottoman government indeed issued orders time and again to the effect that ‘all Muslims should be mobilized and arm themselves’. This was a decision, reminded the grand vezir, ‘taken unanimously in the consultative council’. The grand vezir observed that some people went around armed and some did not. His dilemma was whether to reissue the orders for a general arming or not. The city was very tranquil. Ordering people to arm themselves could be misunderstood by some people and ‘the present order and tranquillity might suffer’. On the other hand, the Greek revolt was still raging and the Russian ambassador was not around yet. Moreover, the Ottoman government used a very determined language to the Europeans stating that ‘the Sublime State and the totality of the Islamic millet had left its peace and would never demobilize’. His ‘little solution’ was not to reissue the orders for the general public but to give discreet instructions to all government employees that they should go around armed. In this way the people would imitate them and the enemies would see that mobilization was still in effect. However, great care would be taken to ensure that the prevailing peace and tranquillity continued; ‘nobody should be given permission to fire into the air even by accident’. Accepting the grand vezir’s argument that the security of the capital should not be put in jeopardy, what lay closer to Mahmud’s heart was still the preservation of the armed mobilization of the people. He commented philosophically: ‘This arming question is a delicate one that requires great care. The common people are inclined to pleasure and comfort. Therefore if we leave them on their own, everybody would discard their weapons!’ 26 In 1828, long after Navarino but before the actual commencement of hostilities with Russia, the Ottoman government made a public declaration. The declaration was in essence a call for cihad (holy war). However, it merits close scrutiny as a rare document offering us valuable insights into how the Ottoman government presented the whole question to its public in a heroic or grand narrative designed to mobilize it for yet greater tasks. The declaration opens with a blunt statement that, as the Muslims were natural enemies of the ‘infidels’, all the ‘infidels’ but especially the Russians were mortal enemies of ‘the Islamic millet and the Sublime State of Mohammed’. The Russians, thanks to no small extent to the ‘destroyed Janissary bandits’, had been invading and conquering so many Islamic territories in a piecemeal fashion for the last 50 or so years. In order to implement their rotten conspiracy against the Ottoman reign with ease, they had clandestinely provoked and incited their co-sectarians, the Greek millet. The Greeks in their turn united with each other as a millet. They rebelled here and there and displayed the utmost treason against the Islamic millet. Their aim was nothing short of destroying the Ottoman state once and for all. Thank God these conspiracies of the infidels were discovered before they took place. Many of the bandits were put to the sword. However, the main culprits, the bandits of the Morea and of the

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islands who started it all by martyring so many Muslims and enslaving so many children and females at the beginnings of the conspiracy, continued to battle with Muslims. They called themselves, what unspeakable nonsense, the Greek government! (kendulerine Yunan hukumeti itlakiyla lisana alinmaz turrruhat ve senaata). The land troops of the empire were after their salaries; the navy could not be put to good use because of its ancient disorderliness. So, not only Russians but the English and the French too joined the mêlée claiming that their trade was suffering from the war. Their real aim was to cause the Greek millet to leave Ottoman subjecthood and to institute an independent government. Their offer of autonomy for the Greeks was totally unacceptable. God forbid, if this matter of autonomy was accepted, all the mixed provinces of Rumelia and Anatolia will be taken by the infidels. The reaya and the Muslims will swap roles. ‘Perhaps, they will turn our mosques into churches tolling their bells’, warns the declaration. Therefore, these offers could not be accepted from the viewpoints of reason, the Sheriat, the state and the millet. It was known all along that the response to these offers had ultimately to be given by the sword! However, the state held talks with them to maintain the Muslims’ peace and to gain some time. The Russians who were deeply upset by the military reforms of the Ottoman state were not satisfied by the Ottoman concessions. Together with their allies, they finally attacked and destroyed the Ottoman navy at Navarino. Notwithstanding, they claimed that the responsibility belonged to the Ottomans. The Ottomans pretended that such was the case and used ‘dissimulation’ to gain time, offering terms to accept the rebels once more as subjects. At long last, when the ambassadors could not get the kind of concessions for the territory they called arz-i Yunan (Greece) they left the Ottoman capital. Now, as Rumelia and Anatolia alone had innumerable Muslims, the Sheriat would not permit the surrender of the country, of families and property to the infidels. Countless past generations of Muslims had never shunned battles on the grounds of numerical superiority in any of the gazas (victorious religious wars). With unity of purpose they fought and put to the sword millions of infidels. Whenever the Muslims united their hearts, God and the spirit of his prophet together with the gayb erleri (saints) would lead them to great victories. Therefore, the declaration informed the public, the Western proposals would be refused. If they accepted the Ottoman proposals that was fine. If they refused and united among themselves in accordance with the maxim, all the infidels are of one millet, the Muslims too would unite and rise to their feet to fight for the sake of their religion and state. The great statesmen and religious scholars and perhaps all the Muslims were unanimous on this point. This coming war had nothing to do with the previous wars that were pursued by the state and that were about land and boundaries. As explained, the goal of the infidels was to eradicate the Islamic millet from the face of the earth. This war was a war of religion and of the millet (din ve millet gavgasi). Muslims should spend their own money for that purpose and not ask for salaries or wages, as the gaza and cihad were obligatory for all, great and small (gaza ve cihad farz-i ayn olmus).27 We shall return to this remarkable document later. Suffice it to say for now that the declaration censures those Muslims who were after their wages and salaries.

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The impersonal tone of the declaration does not permit us to know who these people were, apart from the fact that they were salaried land troops. Whoever they were, they were clearly in the wrong. It seems that not all Muslims ‘united their hearts for the sake of cihad and gaza’.29

The Greek impact on the development of the Ottoman political language The impact of the Greek War of Independence on the evolution or the development of Ottoman political language is more difficult to assess than the other, more visible Ottoman responses. The whole episode presents a major channel, though neither the sole nor the earliest, through which the modern ideas of the Western revolutions reached the Ottoman Empire. What would Mahmud and his men think when they saw vatan29 in the sense of la patrie on many documents? How did they find such concepts as nation, citizen, people, republic, assembly, liberty, freedom, independence, well-being, prosperity, national rights, public and public vote? How in fact, did, the Ottomans translate the whole jargon of nationalism into their language? More important, how far were they themselves influenced by this new ideology? A copy of the famous proclamation of the Greek revolt by Alexandros Ypsilantis exists in translation in the Ottoman archives. The document was also published in English.30 The sultan, it seems, still had excellent translators; the differences between the English and Ottoman translations are negligible. The thing that makes the document interesting is the very fact that it is a translation. It seems that the Ottomans were intensely curious about, or interested in, what the Greek leaders were saying. Hence, the Ottoman translations of the captured Greek documents, in addition to internal correspondence among the leaders of the revolt, public declarations or letters addressed to the Ottomans by the leaders of the Greek War of Independence, as well as contemporary Ottoman comments on Greek action, provide us excellent material in the search to find some answers to the questions posed above. The first surprise of an Ottoman reader would be in seeing that a group of people labelled in an oddly archaic way, that is as Yunaniler (Hellenes) instead of the familiar Rum (Romans) was being invited to join a revolt against the Ottoman state. Their aim, as amply stated by the promulgator of the proclamation, was to secure istihkaklar (rights) and serbestiler (liberties) as had been done by the Europeans to reach nothing less than serbestiyet (full freedom) and to be successful and prosperous. It was, in fact, the motherland (vatan, vatanimiz) that issued the call for the revolt. The Europeans who were busy with their worldly prosperity (refahiyet-i dunyeviye) were simply willing to see the Greek lands (Rum memleketi) liberated as a token of their gratitude for the ancestors of the Greeks who gave them the sciences. It was also clear that many Europeans who strove/loved freedom would join the Greeks. What Greek heart would remain indifferent to the call of the motherland? (vatanimizin davetine aya kangi kalbi Yunani bitaraflik tarafina meyl edebilir). ‘O brothers and compatriots’

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(Ya karindas ve hemvatanlar) interjected the proclamation, with very little effort, the Greeks would reach freedom and all sorts of prosperity. Nobody could afford to remain neutral unless they wanted their nation (millet) to be destroyed and more miserable than all other nations. The Greek nation would convene and all affairs would be submitted to the councils and committees (cumhur ve suralari) composed of elders, chiefs (kocabaslari) and community leaders (millet baslari) who would be elected by the public vote (aray-i amme). It was time to unite. All those who were in the service of the governments of various states (duvel-i muhtelife hukumetleri) should get their employers’ consent to enter the struggle. How could a gang of servants and hirelings (hadem ve mustecir taifesi) oppose human beings (halaik) who strove for their freedom and independence (serbestiyet ve istiklal)? The brave Hellenes (secaatlu Yunaniler) would once more introduce liberty to the land of Greece (Rumeli arazisi) by fighting like their illustrious ancestors on the mountains of Maratiye and Mahçova (Marathon and Thermoplyae). They had fought against the Persians (Acemler) whose successors were even more cowardly than they were. Thinking that Mahmud and his men would not be interested much in classical Greek history, the only part of the proclamation purged by the anonymous translator was where the names of several ancient Greek heroes were enumerated. After a half-hearted attempt in which he mentions Ebamenonda (Epameinondas) and Tirasbulo (Thrasyboulos) by name,31 he chooses to say ‘etcetera’ and omits a whole range of heroes.32 When Mahmud encountered the above proclamation, he also possessed two other letters written by Ypsilantis to the Greeks in the principalities and to the members of the Philiki Etairia which the Ottomans translated simply as ‘friendly company’ (dostane sirket). They repeated very much the same ideas. The Ottoman historian Ahmed Cevdet Pasha had included a copy of another letter by Ypsilantis addressed to the Greek clergy, chiefs and all the compatriots. It is likely that Cevdet touched up the translation of the letter and made it sound not out of place in his time. For example, for compatriots we do not have hemvatan but the completely modern sounding vatandaslar. Similarly, the letter spoke of ‘national rights’ (hukuk-u milliye), ‘the various classes of the nation’ (esnaf-i mutenevvia-i millet), ‘the Great Powers of Christendom’ (duvel-i muazzamay-i Hristiyaniyye). Even so, the major concepts such as freedom (serbestiyet), independence (istiklal), nation (millet), motherland (vatan), people (kavim), public (amme) would not be out of place in Mahmud’s day at all.33 Mahmud and his top men in Istanbul were not the only ‘privileged’ group of people who were exposed to the language of nationalism coming from the Greek channel. An obscure field commander like Governor of Tirhala, Mahmud Pasha could have had his chance of becoming familiar with Greek nationalism when he received a letter from Dimitrios Ypsilantis, brother of Alexander. There, Dimitrios talked of the Hellenic soldiers (Yunan askeri) under his command and invited the Ottoman commander to fight not like a thief but as a soldier who would observe the rules of war and not attack the unarmed civilians. In a manner rather unbefitting a rebel army leader, he invited the pasha to fight in a manner befitting a state. As was the custom among the romantic aristocrats of the time, his words were written in a friendly, gentlemanly,

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detached yet condescending manner. He warned the pasha to prepare himself for battle and to control his soldiers if he did not want to be ashamed. Dimitrios’s big news for the pasha, however, was broken to him in a more strongly worded formula: ‘Pray not to think of the Hellenes as agricultural labourers, they are a better nation than you are.’ (Yunanileri irgad zannetmeyin anlar sizden ala bir milletdir.)34 The apparent ease with which these concepts were translated into Ottoman Turkish is truly amazing. This, to a great extent, was because the old words such as millet or vatan were used in a new context to denote new concepts. Similarly, many modern sounding concepts such as serbesti (liberty) and serbestiyet, serbestlik (freedom) had already a veritable past behind them going back at least to the end of the eighteenth century.35 Incidentally, the translation of Ypsilantis’s proclamation uses hukumet (government), a pseudo-Arabic word, as clearly different from devlet (state) in the same formulation, duvel-i muhtelife hukumetleri (governments of various states). This is, I think, a slightly earlier example in writing of a modern usage of hukumet/hukuma than the one provided by Bernard Lewis, namely a memorandum by Sadik Rifat Pasha.36 We have seen above that one fear of the Ottoman government was that the Westerners and the Russians would turn the Rum millet into an independent government (hukumet-i mustakile). In fact, when reading the Ottoman documents, one has the feeling that the word hukumet was used in a very casual way, indicating still more familiarity. For example, Yusuf Pasha of Serez, when reporting the internal bickering of the Greeks, wrote in a disdainful manner ‘it is clear that the government of such bandits would have such results’(bu misullu eskiyanin hukumetleri böyle netice verecegi derkar).37 It should be stressed here that the new meanings of the words did not supplant the old ones at all. The very same words meaning different and sometimes opposite things continued to exist side by side. For example, when the grand vezir used the word vatan to denote the birthplace of the captives from Chios he had not the faintest intention of denoting a political entity. Similarly, when Seyyid Ali Pasha used the word cumhur to describe the mob he had no intention of conveying the meaning of an elected assembly, unlike the translator of the Ypsilantis proclamation where he uses the words cumhur ve suralari. Needless to say, this creates many difficulties and confusions and calls upon the discretion and intense watchfulness of the reader. The most problematic word is millet. It is problematic because, depending on the context, an Ottoman of the Mahmudian era could mean at least five different things by it. First, millet in the traditional sense refers to a non-Muslim, basically religious community led by a patriarch and subservient to the Islamic state in accordance with the zimmi law. Second, millet is used in the sense of a state without any comments on the style of its government. The above reference to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies as ‘a neutral state’ (bitaraf millet) is an example of this second usage. Third, millet can be used in the sense of the community of believers, as in millet-i Islamiye. Fourth, millet is used to describe what the Greek leaders were striving to inculcate, that is ethnos (or nation) rather than the genos. And last but not least, millet is used

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in a hitherto unattested manner, to denote a specific tribe or ethnic group without paying attention either to religion or to the political aspirations of that ethnic group. Hence, we have, for example the Sirp milleti (Serbian millet) and the very widespread form the Arnavut milleti (Albanian millet). How then, is one to know in an age of nationalism and nationalist struggles what is meant by Greek millet or even by millet-i Islam? Luckily for the historian, beginning from the Mahmudian era, in Turkish a very functional division developed between Yunan/Hellenic (ultimately from Ionia) and Rum (Roman). Yunan is used to denote anything to do with independent Greece, while Rum is used to denote anything Greek but outside Greece. Reluctant as the tone of the 1828 cihad declaration was to recognize an entity called the Yunan hukumeti (Greek government) or arz-i Yunan (Greece), it freely referred to the islands in the Aegean as Yunan adalari (Greek islands).38 So if the text in question is talking about the ‘treason of the Rum millet’ this is a reference to millet in its traditional, first meaning. The evolution of the word millet in its Islamic context is much more problematic. One has the feeling that the very compounds Islam milleti or millet-i Islamiye are in effect a response to millet in its newly found meaning as nation. Later in the nineteenth century, the terms Osmanli milleti or millet-i Osmaniyan would be coined to denote all Ottoman subjects or a single Ottoman political unit without religious discrimination. In this period I have not come across a single reference to a Turkish millet in any of the meanings exposed above. However, I should add that the term did not have to wait for republican times to be used. The Young Turk Ahmed Riza Bey, for one, used the term Turk milleti (Turkish nation) in an uninhibited manner as early as 1894 in a memorandum he wrote for Sultan Abdulhamid II.39 Even today the modern Turkish word for nation, ulus, does not entirely supplant millet. It was a very long journey for a word used in the Koran itself to come to mean nation. A similar fate befell vatan which was used with even more confidence and certainty than millet, thanks to its physical and geographical connotations. When the Ottoman nationalist intellectual Namik Kemal wrote a very influential play set around the defence of a town in the Ottoman Balkans during the Crimean War, he very consciously named it Vatan yahud Silistre (Silistra or Fatherland). I do not claim that words such as millet or vatan were, in their new meanings, used for the first time in the documents translated from Greek. The Ottomans had many other, more direct, conduits, such as their ambassadors, informing them of the developments in Europe. The real importance of the Greek War of Independence for the Ottomans was that it brought nationalism home. Ideas circulating abroad from the Enlightenment and the Western revolutions onward began to be heard from closer quarters. The Ottoman administrators could no longer afford to treat nationalist ideas as distant curiosities of the French Revolution. Inescapably, they came to realize that nationalism was a potent force to fight against, usually by the adoption of the same tools used by their opponents. This brings us to the question of influence. The 1828 appeal to the public for cihad and gaza merits a revisit here as a starting point. This cihad declaration is predictably permeated by a very strong

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sense of ‘us’ as Muslims. It has no fewer than seven references to millet-i Islamiye and another one to mecmu-u millet-i Islamiye (the whole Islamic millet) not counting many interchangeably used formulas such as ehl-i Islam (Muslims). There can be no doubt as to the identity of its recipients or target audience. It is written in a frank, colloquial style which is strikingly different from the Machiavellian tone employed by Mahmud and his men in their in-house correspondence. It is full of allusions such as the gayb erleri (guiding ‘saints’, literally men of the occult world) calculated to appeal to the popular beliefs of the masses. Its main message seems to be clear and straightforward enough. Since the ‘infidels’ were acting in unison among themselves as a millet to destroy the Islamic millet and the Ottoman state, the Muslims too should do the same. The pursuit of happiness was one of the driving themes in the Ypsilantis declaration. Its mirror image can be seen in the cihad declaration. The difference was that the Muslims were not offered a future well-being, but were urged to fight to protect the present one by hurrying to the defence of their families and property. The declaration carefully underlined this point that the struggle was not an ordinary war pursued by the state for such mundane trivia as border readjustments. It was a matter of life and death and individual Muslims had much at stake. It was a total struggle, a war about the very existence of the religion and the millet. On the surface the Ottoman response seems extremely archaic and not at all touched by the recent developments from 1821 on. Indeed, one is left wondering if the old language of cihad and gaza could be sufficient to counter the romantic, strong, elated language of the Greek nationalist leaders or for that matter the Russian arms? However, it must be pointed out that religion can be and often is an indispensable weapon in the arsenal of nationalism, a secular ideology. The Greek leaders themselves made frequent references to religion and religious symbols despite their adherence to the idea of reviving the might and glory of Classical Greece. To make a point one can say that the very nationalistic Young Turks, too, wanted to mobilize the masses with the jargon of the cihad during the First World War. Therefore, I am inclined to think that the language used by the Ottoman rulers in texts such as the above declaration was a harbinger of things to come. The Ottoman administrators and, later on, intellectuals would make enormous efforts to develop a new Ottoman identity to counter the challenge of the modern. It is true that the Ottomans would have a different nationalism/patriotism of their own during the so-called reform period, the Tanzimat. If any comparisons need to be drawn, theirs was similar to the ‘official nationalism’ of the other sister empires, the Russian or the Hapsburg, not like the German or Greek type.40 What did Turkishness mean in this larger Ottoman identity? How did it come to be synonymous with that identity and then supplant it long before the republic? These questions provide a very fertile field for research. Suffice it to say here that one great Ottoman statesman, Mustafa Resid Pasha, not so long after the recognition of Greece as an independent state by the Ottomans could speak of the multi-ethnic empire as ‘Turkistan’ (read Turkey) much in the fashion of a British official referring to the ‘English Empire’. Mustafa Resid, too, was a graduate of the Greek War of Independence. He actively participated in the

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campaign in his capacity as seal-bearer to a relative, Seyyid Ali Pasha, whose views on the Albanians we have quoted above.41

Notes 1 This chapter is part of a research project funded by the Bogazici University Research Fund. 2 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/45968, 1236-1821. 3 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/24277, 6 Safer 1237-4 November 1821. 4 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38314-A, 1241-1826. 5 Resid Mehmed’s letter. 6 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38314, 21 Ramazan 1241-30 April, 1836. 7 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38285, 11 Rebiyulevvel 1239-16 November 1823. 8 Mehmed Ali Pasha to Necib Efendi. 9 For the banishment of people of Chiote origin to Anatolia from Istanbul, see for example BA/Hatt-I Hümayun/39855 and 38010. For confiscation of property see ibid., 16447 and 16453. 10 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/37993, n.d., possibly August–September 1822. 11 The grand vezir’s report. 12 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/52412. 13 Mahmud’s imperial order. 14 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/37888-J, 19 Zilkade 1239-17 July 1824. 15 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38470 and enclosures A–D, 1236-1821. 16 Translation of the patriarch’s memorandum. 17 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38100-B, 1243-1828. 18 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/21304, 1240-1824/25. 19 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/52282, 1236-1821. 20 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/40280, 10 Shaban 1236-14 May 1821. 21 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/36094, 13 Ramazan 1236-14 June 1821. 22 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/51316, 1236-1821. 23 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38499, 1237-1821/22. 24 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/51768, 1236-1821. 25 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/52582, 1240-1824/25. 26 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/16449, n.d. 27 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/51356, 1240-1828. There are 11 identical copies of the declaration preserved in the classification. 28 Ibid. 29 Lewis, B., ‘The Ottoman Legacy to Contemporary Political Arabic’, in L. Carl Brown, Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 209–10. 30 Clogg, R., The Movement for Greek Independence 1770–1821 (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 201–3. 31 Translation of Ypsilantis’s proclamation. 32 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/40280-D, 24 February 1821. 33 Letter by Ypsilantis, 1309, dated 8 October 1820 in Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, 1309–1892, Tarih-i Cevdet [History], 2nd edn (Istanbul: Matbaa-I Osmani), pp. 248–50. 34 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/37885-C, 30 December 1828. D. Ypsilantis to Mahmud Pasha. 35 Lewis, B., ‘Serbestiyet’ [Liberty], Istanbul Universitesi Iktisat Fakultesi Mecmuas, 41, 1–4 (1985), 47–52. 36 See Lewis ‘The Ottoman Legacy’, pp. 209–10. 37 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/38785-C, 11 Muharrem 1239-18 September 1823. 38 BA/Hatt-I Humayun/51356.

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39 Aktepe, M., ‘Turkiye’de Akademi Meselesi ve II.Abdulhamid’e Dil Akademisi Hakkinda Sunulan Layiha’ [The Academy Question in Turkey and a Memorandum on the Language Academy submitted to Abdulhamid II ], Belgelerle Turk Tarihi Dergisi, 9, July (1968), 26–37. 40 Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 83–111. 41 Kaynar, R., Mustafa Re¸sit Pasha ve Tanzimat [Mustafa Resid Pasha and the Tanzimat] (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1954), p. 610.

References Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, 1309–1892, Tarih-i Cevdet [History], 2nd edn (Istanbul: Matbaa-I Osmani). Aktepe, M., ‘Turkiye’de Akademi Meselesi ve II.Abdulhamid’e Dil Akademisi Hakkinda Sunulan Layiha’ [The Academy Question in Turkey and a Memorandum on the Language Academy submitted to Abdulhamid II ], Belgelerle Turk Tarihi Dergisi, 9, July (1968), 26–37. Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Clogg, R., The Movement for Greek Independence 1770–1821 (London: Macmillan, 1976). Lewis, B., ‘Serbestiyet’ [Liberty], Istanbul Universitesi Iktisat Fakultesi Mecmuas, 41, 1–4 (1985), 47–52. Lewis, B., ‘The Ottoman Legacy to Contemporary Political Arabic’, in L. Carl Brown, Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Kaynar, R., Mustafa Re¸sit Pasha ve Tanzimat [Mustafa Resid Pasha and the Tanzimat] (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1954). BA/Hatti-Humayun (imperial decrees).

Part II

Nation and civil society

6

Civil society and citizenship in post-war Greece Nicos Mouzelis and George Pagoulatos1

Some definitions Civil society, like most key notions in the social sciences, is a polysemic concept; its meaning varies with the changing contexts, the changing theoretical and practical debates in which it is embedded. For instance, in the old debate on the dynamics and ways of overcoming absolutist forms of domination, civil society was conceptualized as a system of relatively autonomous associations interposing themselves between ruler and ruled – as corps intermediaires protecting the people from state authoritarianism.2 On the other hand, when the issue is one of overcoming the obstacles the feudal or patrimonial state poses to the development of industrial capitalism, civil society (in the work of Marx, for instance) is considered as being ‘bourgeois society’ tout court. Finally today, as the key political and social debate tends to focus on ways of limiting both the profit logic of the market and the authoritarian/bureaucratic logic of the state, civil society is conceptualized as a ‘third sphere’. That is, it is seen as a space of voluntary, non-profit organizations performing vital functions by following a logic of solidarity.3 It is also conceived of as an ideal project that aims at creating a non-traditional solidarity based on a logic of universalistic inclusion into the ‘imaginary community’ of the nation-state.4 Taking into account the last two interrelated conceptualizations of the term, one can argue that, in the conditions of late modernity, a strong civil society entails two basic dimensions. From the point of view of actors (using Lockwood’s well-known distinction, from the point of view of social integration),5 it entails the autonomous rather than heteronomous inclusion of citizens into the broad arenas (political, social, economic, cultural) of the nation-state. To use T. H. Marshall’s theory, autonomous inclusion entails the spread of civil, political, socio-economic and, we would add, cultural rights to all citizens.6 From an institutional or systemic point of view (that is from the point of view of Lockwood’s system integration), a strong civil society entails a balance between the major institutional spheres or subsystems of modernity, whereas a weak civil society always entails various forms of imbalance as one sphere colonizes, that is, imposes its own logic, on all other institutional spheres.7 In Habermassian terms the major pathology of late capitalist societies consists of

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a marked institutional imbalance between what he calls the ‘system’ (the economy and polity) and the ‘lifeworld’ (the social and cultural spheres). For instance, the fact that those having economic capital can, via the ownership/control of the mass media, buy more or less automatically what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, is a clear indication of an institutional imbalance. The logic of the economic subsystem penetrates and colonizes the cultural subsystem. To move from imbalance to balance would entail a greater autonomy of the cultural subsystem. It would entail devising mechanisms which would give to the actual producers of culture (writers, artists, intellectuals) and to those who are its legitimate transmitters (teachers, priests, parents) more power than to the owners of economic capital.

Civil society and citizenship in the early post-war period, 1944–67 After the defeat in the late 1940s of the communists in the protracted Civil War, the victorious coalition of nationalistic and pro-Western Greek forces established a regime of guided democracy in the country. It was ‘guided’ in the sense that the throne and the victorious anti-communist army played the dominant political role, setting, in a clearly unconstitutional manner, strict limits as to what was and what was not allowed to happen on the level of parliamentary politics.8 This post-Civil War guided democracy, or what Tsoukalas calls ‘the deeply original phenomenon of an authoritarian regime . . . built under the auspices of a democratically organized parliamentary state’,9 was the way in which Greek post-war society, in a most traumatic manner, internalized the Cold War division. Civil War and the anti-communist witch-hunt until 1974 legitimated semi-institutionalized mechanisms of repression, provided a pretext for the advent of the colonels in April 1967, and can even be held responsible for the deep polarization between Left and Right in the post-authoritarian period. Clearly, the communist defeat in the Civil War ensured that Greece remained part of the Western system laying the groundwork for its post-war economic development and its post-1974 democratization and Europeanization. However, the social cost to be paid for that was particularly high. The pre-dictatorship period from the viewpoint of social integration During the 1944–67 period, the situation of civil society seen from the perspective of citizens and their rights was clearly negative. Civil rights were restricted because the rule of law and the rights of free speech, free association and so on were enjoyed mainly by the non-communists, and particularly the ethnikophrones (those who think ‘patriotically’, who are ‘nationally-minded’). Indeed the freedom of association of the ethnikophrones camp practically extended to the creation and operation, under the authorities’ full tolerance and complicity, of various para-state organizations that formed the state’s long arm in the political repression of left-wing citizens. Some of these organizations operated in a more

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clandestine manner within the army. It was from their ranks that the protagonists of the 1967 junta rose. The various means of discrimination against left-wing citizens included the institutionalization of the so-called ‘certificate of national probity’ as a formal prerequisite for access to all kinds of public resources including public employment. To that should be added the systematically demeaning treatment of left-wing citizens by the authorities, especially in the countryside. Like civil rights, political rights were also restricted. Rights of political representation were severely curtailed, while active communists were exiled to concentration camps. The Greek Communist Party was banned, and its place was taken by the left-wing Union of Democratic Left (EDA), whose functioning was barely tolerated. While the right to vote was not denied to communists and leftwing sympathizers, it was severely compromised, particularly in the countryside where various repressive mechanisms, such as the para-state organizations mentioned above, ensured that villagers voted ‘correctly’.10 In the characteristically Cold-Warlike nationalistic polarization of that time, it was not just conservative or liberal bourgeois political forces pitted against the communists and their fellow travellers. More than asserting a simple politico-ideological conflict, the ideological discourse of the post-war state depicted the entire Greek nation in defence against its ‘internal’, ‘organic’ enemies. Concerning social rights, the first point to stress is that, relative to states in Western Europe, the Greek state allocated very few resources for welfare purposes. Welfare functions were still considered the responsibility of the family and the local community.11 While unemployment was largely left to be taken care of by emigration, the particularistic targeting of economic and financial resources substituted for the lack of a Keynesian universalistic welfare state.12 Thus, the meagre resources available were distributed according to clientelistic, partypolitical criteria. Those who had been on the losing side in the Civil War were systematically discriminated against – whether in the sphere of pensions, state medical services or state-created jobs to reduce unemployment. The lack of a Keynesian-type welfare state in the 1944–74 period can be attributed to a confluence of reasons. First, it was highly compatible with the authoritarian-leaning and later plainly authoritarian political regime – as also exhibited in the other two outright authoritarian countries of Southern Europe, Spain and Portugal, which coincided with Greece in state corporatism and the lack of welfare state institutions.13 If government could do away with labour demands through the political repression of left-wing labour unions and the appointment of regime-friendly union leaders, then no need existed for seeking to induce labour co-operation through welfarist concessions and inclusion in neo-corporatist arrangements. Second, the impact of Keynesianism itself on the dominant Greek post-war economic elites was limited.14 Instead, leading German-bred economic policy-makers, such as the governor of the Bank of Greece Xenophon Zolotas, regarded Keynesianism as a recipe for advanced industrialized countries, inapplicable in the case of an underdeveloped economy on the road to industrialization.15 They were thus more closely attuned to a mixture of orthodox policies emphasizing monetary stability and a balanced ordinary budget, with a developmental

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orientation (the post-war orthodoxy in many developing countries) committed to the build-up of an industrial infrastructure.16 Third, the above ideological orientation of economic policy-makers was inseparable from the politico-economic and structural path dependencies created by Greece’s reliance on the Marshall Plan aid and subjection to US hegemony.17 Finally, conservative governments of the post-war period aimed at regime stability and popular acquiescence through the consolidation and expansion of a conservative-minded bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, whose welfare was pursued through particularistic policies such as selective state loans, licenses, concessions and jobs. These could cement clientelistic patterns of relations more easily than universalistic welfare state institutions, which would have also contravened the policy-makers’ aversion to consumption spending instead of a full-fledged direction of resources to investment.18 In the sphere of cultural rights, the small number of so-called SlavoMacedonians in northern Greece and, more importantly, the large Muslim minority in Thrace, did not have the right of self-definition. Although a large number of the Muslim community in Thrace were formally citizens of Greece, in terms of ethnicity and culture they were Turks. They were not permitted to call themselves Turks, however; they were also not allowed to form cultural associations related to their ethnic character. This was coupled with severe economic and social forms of discrimination and exclusion practised by the local authorities (with the tolerance of the central government) vis-à-vis the Muslims in Thrace. As a result, not only the Greek communists but also the Turks in Thrace were treated as second-class citizens.19 As far as other religious minorities were concerned, in this period there were also milder forms of authoritarianism exercised by the Greek Orthodox Church (an administrative extension of the Greek state) vis-à-vis non-Orthodox Christians (Catholics, Protestants), as well as minorities officially branded by the Greek Orthodox Church as ‘sects’ (old calendrists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on). The activity of the latter was severely constrained under the guise of the constitutional (in the 1952 constitution) prohibition of proselytism, aimed at curtailing the activity of the non-Orthodox religious churches. The proselytism clause was also included in the constitution of 1975 under the concerted pressure of the Greek church; though theoretically meant to apply indiscriminately, in practice it was repeatedly used by judicial authorities to justify the selective persecution, especially of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Evangelicals.20 In the authoritarian-prone or outright authoritarian political regime of the early post-war era, discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities was but one aspect of a generalized repression of cultural rights. It would be hard to expect that a state apparatus driven by the attachment to a highly provincial version of nationalistic feeling would display understanding and tolerance to lifestyles that diverged from the prevalent norms of ‘acceptable’ behaviour. Undoubtedly, the value of cultural rights as a defining principle of legitimate state behaviour is a relatively recent acquisition of mainstream political and jurisprudential discourse. Such historical contextualization certainly acts as a mitigating factor when evaluating the culturally repressive tendencies of the post-war regime, but it does not

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annul the validity of the at least factual account. Indeed, an authoritarian tendency permeated the treatment of other non-ethnic, non-religious cultural minorities by public authorities (a graphic example of which was the proverbial law against ‘teddy-boyism’). This tendency emanated perhaps from an attitude of excessive austerity at secondary or higher education institutions and culminated with street-level petty repression exercised by police authorities. The pre-dictatorship period from the viewpoint of system integration If one looks now at the same situation from a more systemic point of view – in Lockwood’s terms, if one shifts the focus of analysis from social to system integration – the most striking feature undermining civil society was the pervasive colonization of most institutional spheres by the state and party system. This early period witnessed an extreme form of ‘partitocracy’: the logic of political partisanship and party clientelism permeated the whole of society and undermined the specific logic of all institutional subsystems, from education and sports to recreation and religion. Furthermore, the same partitocratic principle applied also in the economic sphere, where crony capitalism flourished. The route to enrichment or the accumulation of capital lay less via competition in the market place, and more via competition for the right political patrons, the right political contacts facilitating access to loans granted on a clientelistic basis by the state-controlled banking system.21 In such ways the institutionalized mechanisms guaranteeing the protection of domestic industry also ensured the mutually accommodative patronage of state actors over the economic life of a severely atrophic civil society. In other words, the underdevelopment of civil society in the post-war period, or its virtual suffocation under the tutelage of a domineering state and party system, was causally related to two paramount structural constraints, pertaining to the economic and the political sphere respectively. The first had to do with the economy’s incomplete stage of development: a late-late industrializing market economy,22 seeking to enable the accumulation of investment capital in selected manufacturing sectors through the activism of an interventionist state. The second had to do with the precarious and flawed nature of the country’s nominal democratic institutions: the institutionalized anomaly of extra-constitutional centres of power; the non-existent democratic party tradition; and the lack of universalistic institutions safeguarding civil rights and equal treatment under the law. Under these conditions, upward socio-economic mobility or even mere socio-economic survival were predicated upon the patronage of highly visible party barons viewed under the magnifying lenses of extreme social insecurity as the vital key-holders of power. Thus, the relative backwardness – both socio-economic and political – of post-war Greece collaborated in enhancing a widespread sense of social vulnerability. In a rapidly urbanizing country, with rural, broadly uneducated masses flowing into the cities to be welcomed by a non-existent welfare state, this vulnerability only served to entrench the traditional grip of clientelism over political society.

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Civil society and citizenship in the post-dictatorship period, 1974–99 The seven-year dictatorship (1967–74) constituted the extreme form of pathology of the repressive post-Civil War state and the ideological pillars of anti-communism and ethnikophrosyne (national-mindedness) on which it was founded. Its culmination into a national crisis of tragic proportions over Cyprus deprived the extreme right of any claim to an effective defence of national interest even in the eyes of bona fide conservatives. This facilitated the shedding, by the conservative camp, of its authoritarian legacy and its redefinition and transformation, under the leadership of Constantine Karamanlis, into a mainstream centre-right, democratic, Europeanist party. The symbolic weaning of the New Democratic (ND) party from the authoritarian-prone, post-war conservative camp, an objective concurrent with that of democratic consolidation, was pursued through a number of measures. These included the raising of social expenditure to reach the respective West European levels and recourse to nationalization – in other words, the adoption of what were then still considered progressive, left-leaning economic policies. Both policies were continued and intensified by the 1981 PASOK government of Andreas Papandreou. The pronounced economic expansionism and redistributionism of the 1980s (with the brief exception of a 1985–87 stabilization programme) accelerated the socio-economic inclusion of marginalized left-leaning social strata, following their political emancipation. However, this populist-driven ‘expansionism in one country’ had a grave cost for the national economy, bequeathing a heavy constraint to Greece’s effort to achieve economic integration with the European Union (EU) in the 1990s. If the establishment of the colonels’ dictatorship dramatically accentuated the civil-society weaknesses of the early post-war period, its fall in 1974 inaugurated a period of considerable progress in the sphere of citizens’ rights. The reestablishment of a parliamentary system that included a legalized Communist Party and the attenuation of discrimination against adherents of the political Left meant a considerable spread of civil, political and social rights over the entire population. The outburst of politicization that naturally followed after the colonels’ long freeze over political life accelerated the internalization of these rights by the post-authoritarian Greek society, albeit at the cost of a pervasively contentious political atmosphere and a litany of maximalistic demands. The latter had much to do with the traditional persecution of the Left, the absence of the trade union movement from the politics of democratic transition,23 the dissociation of PASOK from the mainstream of West European social democracy and its tiers mondiste tendencies,24 as well as the inadequate modernization of the Conservative Party’s political practice and discourse. On the other hand, new systemic/institutional imbalances were created that undermined what strength civil society was gaining. One of them resulted from the fact that the pre-dictatorial non-communist parties were becoming mass parties, but without democratizing, that is, without shedding their predominantly clientelistic, populist or even (in the case of PASOK) messianic tendencies. Only

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in the 1990s did these features somehow begin to recede in the two larger parties, PASOK and ND. But, overall, partitocratic elements in the socio-political system were intensified in the post-authoritarian period. All through the late 1980s political parties competed for the control of organized groups and trade unions. Later, as additional civic, non-governmental organizations timidly began to emerge, political parties continued to pursue the colonization of the sphere of associations. Thus, over the post-authoritarian period, the balance between the party system and civil society was skewed at the expense of the latter. Another imbalance was the rapid opening of the economy to global competition brokered through the process of European integration. The Greek state was, however, because of its profound weaknesses, unable to play a fully constructive role. At a preliminary level, the weakening of state influence in the face of an expanding and internationalizing private economy amounted to an indirect positional strengthening of the civil society vis-à-vis the partitocratic state. With the expanding realm of the market, however, a growing systemic imbalance began to emerge. Over the 1990s, the logic of the market gradually enlarged its scope of influence, this time permeating the autonomous realm of civil society. Overall, it can be said that the tension between economic pressures for adjustment and socio-political resistances to it (the latter typically comprising coalitions of stateprotected interests) was one of the dominant conflicts over the 1980s and 1990s. This tension coincided with a process of the gradual disentanglement of civil society from the smothering influence of partitocracy and the state. The post-dictatorship period from the viewpoint of social integration In terms of civil rights, the legalization of the Communist Party and the obsolescence of the post-war anti-communist ideology meant first of all a strengthening of the rights to free speech and free association. Added to this decisive improvement were radical changes in the civil code that terminated institutionalized infringements on constitutionally protected principles and civil rights (such as religious tolerance and gender equality) by the family law until then in force. These reforms of the early 1980s enhanced the rights of women within the sphere of matrimony, established the possibility of divorce by mutual consent, terminated the legal discrimination against children born out of wedlock and allowed the choice between a religious or civil marriage ceremony.25 On the negative side must be mentioned the persistence of an extremely cumbersome and formalistic judicial apparatus, and a government refusing to implement court decisions that supported citizens’ claims against the highly inefficient and corrupt state bureaucracy. Such matters ranged from inadequate compensation in cases of compulsory expropriation to other forms of mistreatment at the hands of state authorities. This institutionally entrenched precedence of an illdefined raison d’ état over citizens’ rights derived from a jurisprudence tradition of legal positivism that viewed the state as the source of authority over individual rights.26

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There are hopeful signs that this trend may be weakening. An important step in that direction was the establishment in 1998 of the office of the ombudsman as an independent administrative authority with the task of protecting citizens from rights violations, abuses, mistreatment or general malpractice on the part of the public administration. Well over 8,000 such claims of citizens reached the office of the ombudsman in 1999 alone.27 A report produced by the same body underlined a mismatch between the legal and constitutional framework enabling effective human rights protection and the actual practice of public authorities which lags substantially behind the formal legal requisites. A considerable number of human rights violations are attributed to organizational and human resource deficiencies of the wider state machine. An example is the practice of certain public services of declining to respond to citizens’ questions or petitions on the grounds of lacking the necessary means or personnel to do so.28 The situation is ambivalent in the political sphere as well. It is true that the spread of political rights has been enhanced by the abolition of the throne, the curtailment and abolition of the army’s capacity for interfering in parliamentary politics. This is also the case for the unhindered functioning of the Greek Communist Party, the elimination of electoral fraud and the cessation of repressive political practices in the countryside. All these developments have formed the legacy of the post-authoritarian period, marking the post-1974 Third Republic as the most democratic era in modern Greek history. It is equally true, however, that the major parties acquired mass organizations, but without abandoning or marginalizing their clientelistic orientations, so that the phenomena of nepotism and corruption also took on mass dimensions. When the parties for the first time had the organizational capacity to reach the country’s remotest villages, and given the hugely increased resources now at their disposal, they were able to indulge in clientelistic practices on a much more massive scale. This transformed the highly personalistic and local baron-based clientelism of the past into a form of bureaucratic clientelism.29 It is not surprising, therefore, that informal, quasi-clandestine networks of clients, state bureaucrats and politicians came to permeate the social pyramid from top to bottom, undermining the universalism upon which the rule of law is premised. All this took place at the expense of citizens unable or unwilling to become involved in such dealings. It should also be noted, however, that reforms over the 1990s undercut traditional bastions of clientelism. Thus, the curtailment of the public enterprise sector through privatization and the liberalization of the financial system, which forced statecontrolled banks to operate efficiently and competitively, limited the overall state domain potentially subject to clientelistic arrangements. In addition, the institution of general exams as a precondition for being hired in the public sector further eroded the scope of particularism and patronage, raising hopes for more meritocracy in the public employment sector. In general, the European integration process has provided crucial political backing and momentum for domestic policy reform initiatives aimed at restructuring and modernizing the wider government machine. In the sphere of social rights, Andreas Papandreou’s PASOK government considerably increased the funding allocated to education and health. It also

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created the national health system (ESY), within which all citizens have the right to free medical treatment. However, the ESY has been heavily fragmented and inefficient, and has cohabited with probably the largest private health sector in all of Europe.30 Moreover, the ESY has been to a large extent corrupt (a bribe to the doctor is often a precondition of adequate treatment), thus seriously undercutting the citizens’ right to free health services. A parallel claim can be made with reference to education, where private spending (mostly cram schools, private tutorials and so on) is estimated to exceed 50 per cent of public spending.31 Such cases indicate the quality gaps resulting from the inadequate provision of services by the public sector. They point perhaps to the need for upgrading the state provision of certain social services by officially assigning the production of some of these services to qualified private sector providers, instead of tolerating the unofficial operation of a parallel private market for these services. With regard to unemployment, the relative enfeeblement of the unions under conditions of accelerating globalization has led to a situation where part of the labour force (particularly the young) has few chances of being integrated into the labour market. These individuals have even fewer chances of being supported on a long-term basis by state unemployment benefits – though the familialist structures of Greek society are still cushioning the adverse effects. Though inequality and poverty were significantly reduced between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, they remain quite high compared with the EU standard.32 Moreover, the economic collapse of the Eastern European countries from the beginning of the 1990s has transformed Greece from an immigrant-exporting country in earlier decades to an immigrant-receiving country. The dynamics of globalization, combined with the large percentage of immigrant workers, are resulting in a twothirds/one-third social split that is undermining social cohesion and creating an increasingly underprivileged or peripheralized section of the population. Finally, the situation of cultural rights is again a mixed one. The discriminating practices against the Muslim minorities in Thrace have weakened, and the former Foreign Minister George Papandreou had hinted that the right to individual selfdefinition would have to be granted. Quite importantly, the government legislated affirmative action policies, such as the establishment of preferential quotas for the entry of minority Muslim students in state universities, aimed at increasing the available opportunities for Greek citizens of a different ethnolinguistic and religious background. In such ways, the current state practice vis-à-vis ethnolinguistic minorities is increasingly leaning toward positive integration, in sharp contrast with the assimilation efforts of the not-too-distant past. Less commendably, the massive emigration from Eastern Europe and the northern Balkans (especially from Albania) has fuelled xenophobia and racist attitudes among broad social strata. But, unlike other EU countries, such as France and Austria, rapidly growing xenophobia has not led to the emergence of extreme right-wing parties (with one small exception) or the spectacular strengthening of xenophobic fractions within the existing parties. This is an undeniably encouraging situation, which can be attributed to the Greek political system’s increasingly centripetal two-party structure. On the other hand, efforts to extend social rights

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to the large masses of incoming immigrants have been restrained. Greece’s record of naturalization of foreign immigrants remains low, and the state has been preoccupied by the need to respond to the public safety concerns fuelled by the constant entry of large numbers of illegal immigrants.33 There has been little change in the matter of religious minorities. Laws (instituted in the 1930s during the Metaxas dictatorship) persist, restricting in certain areas the rights of both non-Orthodox Christians and the so-called Orthodox sects. This means that the illiberal features of the earlier post-war period still exist – despite the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg having condemned such authoritarian practices.34 The EU pressure for religious liberalization has been counterbalanced by the policies of Archbishop Christodoulos, who is firmly set against any change in the status quo. He is also opposed to any attempt at separating church and state – a separation which, in the Greek case, is a basic precondition, if all citizens, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, are to have equal rights in the cultural sphere.35 The post-dictatorship period from the viewpoint of system integration If we now shift our attention from social to system integration, that is, from actors’ rights to institutional imbalances and their impact on civil society, we can see a decline of old imbalances and the rise of new ones. Yes, the tendency of the party-political element to penetrate and undermine the autonomous logic of all other institutional spheres is in relative decline. The postmodern mood of the young and the malpractice and generalized political corruption mentioned above make citizens less and less interested in party politics. As a result of their disenchantment with the existing parties, the ability of the latter to control developments in institutions such as the universities as well as some professional associations has been markedly reduced. Though parties retain a prevalent role in civic and political life (and the political system retains its basically bipartisan character), there are signs of a widening trend toward more civic autonomy from party-political dependence as the recent spread of independent non-governmental organizations indicates. But, if the colonization of the life world (to use Habermas’s terminology) by the state and party system is weakening, colonization by the economy is on the ascent. The most striking indication of the shift from partitocracy to plutocracy, from party-political to market colonization is the increasing dominance of a few economically powerful individuals who, via control over the media, exercise enormous influence, and even to a large extent shape the country’s political and cultural developments. The accumulation of power in the hands of this new oligarchy is interrelated with the disappointing underdevelopment of independent regulatory bodies aimed at safeguarding market competition from monopoly or oligopoly collusion, and imposing rules of conduct in the areas of their jurisdiction. For example, the Competition Committee has been underperforming for years, squeezed by the lack of adequate government funding. The Committee on Radio-Television has confronted debilitating constraints in its ability to impose

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penalties on rogue but powerful television producers. Other sector-specific regulatory bodies have been often ‘captured’ by state supplier interests. Of course, the power of economic capital and its ability to buy political and cultural capital is not a new phenomenon.36 What is new is, first, the unprecedented influence of the mass media in general, and of television in particular, in shaping people’s identities and creating values and lifestyles. The second new factor is the concentration of control over these media in the hands of a few moguls who are in no way accountable to the public they address. In other words, the global Murdoch syndrome is seen in Greece too. The owners of mass media constitute a centre of power that no politician can challenge without committing political suicide. Their power is enhanced by their dominant position in a number of (mostly protected) business sectors (telecommunications, information technology, constructions, state supplies and so on). From this point of view, today’s so-called diaplekomena symferonta (intermeshed interests) undermine the autonomy of parliament in a similar (though by no means systematically comparable) way as the institutional complex of the throne and the army in the early post-war period. The phenomenon can be regarded as one of the perverse effects of the otherwise positive development of the liberalization of radio and television from the end of the 1980s. Liberalization ended the monopoly of state-controlled television, which had often become a mechanism of shameless and unrestrained government propaganda. However, the gains in pluralism and freedom of information were somehow offset by a Gresham-like quality race to the bottom, as private channels competed to attract the mass audiences that would allow sufficient profit. Moreover, the rise of television programmes into the centre of public attention transferred the epicentre of political importance from the Parliament to the talk-show studios, thus further eroding the legislature’s institutional role. More importantly, the high political visibility offered by privately owned radio and television has constituted the new object of desire of competing politicians, increasing their dependence on media owners and raising the stakes (and consequent economic costs) of publicity. As in many other Western democracies, the soaring financial costs of political campaigning, largely a result of the growing professionalization of electioneering, have raised party dependence on so-called ‘political money’. The unprecedented power enjoyed by media moguls has had a lot to do with this nexus of interdependence at the level not only of party or government but individual politicians as well. The inevitable control of state resources (including public contracts, favourable selective legislative arrangements and administrative measures) by governments in power and the penetration of media owners into a wide range of high-stake business activities perpetuates the umbilical cord between politics and business as a mutually accommodative relation of dubious transparency or legitimacy.37

Some concluding remarks In terms of the spread of civil, political, social and cultural rights, it is possible to discern an overall positive trend, leading from the early post-war guided democracy

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to the consolidation of a more genuine parliamentary system in the post-junta period. On the other hand, in terms of the balance/imbalance of institutional spheres, the early partitocratic imbalance has become plutocratic in the past one or two decades. The diaplekomena interests have been exercising a type of control in the political and cultural spheres that seriously attenuates the autonomy and vitality of Greek civil society. Both developments, at the actors’ level and at the systemic level, correspond to substantial transformations of the state – civil society relationship. In the post-war period the state assumed an assertive role at two levels. First, Greece developed a state-directed, or at least state-assisted, market economy; and, second, it maintained a protracted post-Civil War division. Both frameworks necessitated a commanding state presence over an infirm civil society, either as a mechanism of active influence over the economic process or as a mechanism of repression of socio-political dissent. The availability of such socio-political and economic control, via clientelism or sheer repression, in the hands of the political forces in power vested the post-war state – civil society configuration with a distinctly partitocratic character. The post-authoritarian period transformed that configuration. While clientelism persisted, repression was rendered obsolete as a means of political control. Though certainly responding to long-suppressed socio-political demands, the extension of civil and political rights was perhaps more a function of Greece’s democratization-cum-Europeanization than the result of a civil society-driven process. In any case, the entire post-authoritarian period meant a consistent strengthening of civil, political and cultural rights, and in that sense the transfer of power from the state to an awakening civil society. The strengthening of clientelism under the combined conditions of hyper-politicization, polarization and an organizational restructuring of political parties led partitocracy to its peak in the 1980s. By the 1990s, however, partitocracy was bound to wither under the winds of spreading political de-ideologization, public cynicism and increasing professional opportunities in the private sector. On a reverse trend, perhaps the most notable consolidation of state presence in the post-junta era (especially over the 1970s and 1980s) was in the sphere of social policies; that, however, also amounted to the strengthening of civil society through the invigoration of social rights. Finally, in the economic sphere, after reaching a climax between 1975 and the end of the 1980s, state activism receded over the 1990s, surrendering traditional bastions of often clientelistic control (financial services, radio and television, public works, various industrial sectors) to the competing (or colluding) forces of the private economy. Consequently, and despite its important beneficial effects, the rolling back of state interventionism (being incapable of a transformation into adequate regulatory power) also signified the shift to a different form of colonization of civil society – this time by a highly oligopolistic and politically collusive private capital. At a broader level, these developments in the post-authoritarian era reflect a reprioritization of state objectives. Quite consistently with the Southern European pattern,38 the period of transition to and consolidation of democracy was

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characterized by the primacy of politics. That is, it was marked by the nearly unrestrained subordination of economic policies to the political objectives of consolidating the new democratic political regime, or at least consolidating the governing party’s grip on power. However, into the 1980s, the primacy of politics reached its limits of economic sustainability, combined with the intensifying pressures of the European and global political economy. The reprioritization of economic governance became more manifest in the 1990s, when the primacy of politics can be claimed to have given place to the primacy of economics. The latter implies the increased salience and urgency of ‘objective’ economic pressures, as well as a new bipartisan convergence over economic policy and the concerted employment of political strategies at the service of boosting the effectiveness of economic adjustment. Correspondingly, the first post-authoritarian phase brought an emphasis on the spread of civil, political, social and cultural rights, thus enhancing the preconditions for the political enfranchisement of civil society. The second postauthoritarian phase was keener in divesting the state of some of its economic power, thus precipitating, however, the systemic imbalance described above, that is, the colonization of various civil society spheres by the private economy.

Notes 1 We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Chryssa Hatzi, Manos Matsaganis, Euclid Tsakalotos and Panos Tsakloglou. Special thanks to Nikiforos Diamandouros for his diligent reading of and insightful notes on the manuscript. 2 Alexander, J. C. (ed.), Real Civil Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 3–4. 3 Cohen, C. and Arato, A., Civil Society and Political Theory (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992). 4 Alexander, Real Civil Societies. 5 On the key distinction between social and system integration, see Lockwood D., ‘Social Integration and System Integration’, in G. K. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change (London: Routledge, 1964). 6 Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York, Garden City: Doubleday, 1964). 7 In this sense, a strengthening of civil society is not tantamount to a strengthening of the market, as a part of the current literature of Eastern Europe tends to assume. Though civil society should be regarded as inclusive of private economic activity, and though the abolition of hierarchical/authoritarian social formations is facilitated by market liberalization, the subsequent hypertrophy of the market at the expense of other major institutional spheres may in effect undermine the strength of civil society. 8 Mouzelis, N., Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 105–15. 9 Tsoukalas, C., ‘The Ideological Impact of the Civil War’, in J. O. Iatrides (ed.), Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 320. 10 Tsoukalas, C., The Greek Tragedy (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 143ff. 11 Esping-Andersen, G., The Three Worlds and Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 12 See Petmezidou-Tsoulouvi, M., KC a‡   d d [Social Inequalities and Social Policy] (Athens: Exantas, 1992).

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13 See Schmitter, P. ‘Organized Interests and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe’, in R. Gunther, N. P. Diamandouros and H.-J. Puhle (eds.), The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Seferiades, S., ‘‡a c    d: O ‡ a   a k  a   kc (1962–1967)’ [Assertive Movement and Politics: Greek Trade Unionism before the Dictatorship (1962–1967)], Greek Review of Political Science, 12, 34 (1998). 14 Psalidopoulos, M., K‡id ‡kc  ‡ d  d  d: e  k a  [Keynesian Theory and Greek Economic Policy: Myth and Reality] (Athens: Kritiki, 1990). 15 See Karamesini, M., ‘Aka ‡ ‡ a kf   ‡ka‡ ‡k

d   K‡i  

e. Mk

 d ‡ C kc    a  a ’ [Authoritarian Post-war State and Particularities in the Application of Keynesianism: Macroeconomic Expansion without Social Contract], in (collective) H ‡ d c f   kb ‡  ‡ d ‡kc (1945–67) [Greek Society during the First Post-war Period (1945–67)] (Athens: Sakis Karagiorgas Foundation, 1994). 16 See Kazakos, P., H ‡ d  c  ‡  ‡ d ‡kc [The Greek Economy in the Post-war Period], mimeo (1999). 17 Fatouros, A., ‘Building Formal Structures of Penetration: The United States in Greece, 1947–1948’, in J. O. Iatrides (ed.), Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1981). 18 This section draws on Pagoulatos, G., Greece’s New Political Economy: State, Finance and Growth from Postwar to EMU (London: Palgrave, 2003). 19 See Minority Rights Group International, Report: The Southern Balkans, 94, 4, October (1994). 20 Pollis, A., Kkf, c  kb  b    E f [State, Law and Human Rights in Greece] (Athens: Foundation of Mediterranean Studies, 1988), pp. 54–55. After the mid-1970s the Greek courts often attempted to interpret the constitutional prohibition of proselytism in a liberal spirit, by narrowing it down to the dissemination of religious faith that takes place through illegal means, through the exercise of pressure or blackmail or through exploiting the naiveté of the other party. But, as Koumantos notes, the use of such means is already illegal and prohibited under penal law, which should thus render any specific constitutional clause, at best, redundant (Koumantos, G., ‘H 

kc   ‡c  a  ‡‡ck 

‡ d ’ [Democracy is Measured by its Treatment of Minorities], Kathimerini, 1 February (1998). 21 On the clientelistic nature of Greek society and politics, see Petropulos, J., Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968) (for the early nineteenth century) and Legg, K. P., Politics in Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969). 22 Mouzelis, N., Politics in the Semi-periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialisation in the Balkans and Latin America (London: Macmillan, 1986). 23 Contrary to the case of Spain, where trade unions played an important role in the process of transition to democracy: see Maravall, J.-M., ‘Politics and Policy: Economic Reforms in Southern Europe’, in L.-C. Bresser Pereira, J.-M. Maravall and A. Przeworski (eds.), Economic Reforms in New Democracies: A Social Democratic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Zambarloukou, S., ‘ a c    ka k‡  a  ‡ ‡d Ef:  kd k C’ [The Trade Union Movement and State Interventionism in Post Authoritarian Greece: A Comparative Approach], in C. Lyrintzis, E. Nikolakopoulos and D. Sotiropoulos (eds.), Society and Politics: Facets of the Third Hellenic Republic (Athens: Themelio, 1996). 24 Verney, S., ‘Panacea or Plague: Greek Political Parties and Accession to the European Community, 1974–1979’, PhD dissertation, King’s College, University of London (1994).

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25 Koumantos, ‘H kc   ‡c  a  ‡‡ck   ‡ d’; Koumantos, G. and Stambelou, C., ‘Greece: Digesting the New Family Law’, Journal of Family Law, 28, 3 (1989–90). 26 A 1997 piece of legislation has brought about a notable improvement by allowing citizens to raise financial claims against the state and – if adjudicated – mandating the latter to pay. The record of application, however, has not been entirely satisfactory. 27 Ombudsman, Ed E‡   1999 [Annual Report for 1999] (Athens, 2000). 28 Report of the deputy ombudsman, cited in Kathimerini, 7 November 1999. 29 Lyrintzis, C., ‘Political Parties in Post-junta Greece: A Case of Bureaucratic Clientelism?’, West European Politics, 7, 2 (1984), 99–118. 30 Matsaganis, M., ‘From the North Sea to the Mediterranean? Constraints to Health Reform in Greece’, International Journal of Health Services, 28, 2 (1998), 339–40. 31 Point owed to Panos Tsakloglou. 32 Mitrakos, T. and Tsakloglou, P., M‡ C  a  b‡  E f f  ‡ ‡d ‡kc  [Changes in Overall Inequality and Poverty in Greece in the Post-authoritarian Period], Department of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Discussion Paper 97, July (1998), pp. 26–7. 33 Baldwin Edwards, M. and Fakiolas, R., ‘Greece: The Contours of a Fragmented Policy Response’, in M. Baldwin Edwards and J. Arango (eds.), Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe, Special Issue of South European Society and Politics, 3, 3 (1999). 34 Over the decades, a nexus of legal and administrative impediments were placed on the exercise of non-Orthodox religious faith, from the public administration refusing to appoint non-Orthodox citizens to certain positions, to the imposition of tax levies and other discriminatory charges on the activities of non-Orthodox communities, to the granting of a state licenses for the establishment of a non-Orthodox houses of worship subject to the permission of the local Orthodox bishop (Koumantos, ‘H kc   ‡c  a  ‡‡ck   ‡ d’). It is a positive sign that most of these restrictions have been or are in the process of being challenged or abolished. 35 Since cultural rights (such as the choice of a particular individual lifestyle including religious, artistic or sexual orientation) involve freedom of expression, they are hard to separate from stricto sensu civil rights. In the broader sense, they can all be regarded as forming part of a citizen’s right (vis-à-vis the state) to ‘equal concern and respect’: see Dworkin, R., Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1987), p. 272ff. Such a right could be considered violated by the mandatory inclusion of religious courses in the school education curriculum, or the entry of the citizen’s religious identity on public identity cards (finally abolished in 2001 despite fierce resistance by the church) both derivatives of the non-separation of church and state. 36 Bourdieu, P., Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 37 Again some positive initiatives are worth mentioning, including the creation of the Greek chapter of Transparency International on the NGO side, as well as new anticorruption legislation expected to bolster efforts to confront mostly middle–upper-level public sector corruption. 38 Maravall, ‘Politics and Policy’; Gunther, R., Diamandouros, N. P. and Puhle, H.-J. (eds.), The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

References Alexander, J. C. (ed.), Real Civil Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Baldwin Edwards, M. and Fakiolas, R., ‘Greece: The Contours of a Fragmented Policy Response’, in M. Baldwin Edwards and J. Arango (eds.), Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe, Special Issue of South European Society and Politics, 3, 3 (1999).

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Bourdieu, P., Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Cohen, C. and Arato, A., Civil Society and Political Theory (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992). Dworkin, R., Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1987). Esping-Andersen, G., The Three Worlds and Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Fatouros, A., ‘Building Formal Structures of Penetration: The United States in Greece, 1947–1948’, in J. O. Iatrides (ed.), Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1981). Gunther, R., Diamandouros, N. P. and Puhle, H.-J. (eds.), The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, MO: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Karamesini, M., ‘A k a ‡ ‡ a kf    ‡ka  ‡ ‡ kd

 K‡i  e. M k  d ‡ C  kc   a a ’ [Authoritarian Post-war State and Particularities in the Application of Keynesianism: Macroeconomic Expansion without Social Contract], in (collective) H ‡d c  f  kb ‡ ‡ d ‡kc (1945–67) [Greek Society during the First Post-war Period (1945–67)] (Athens: Sakis Karagiorgas Foundation, 1994). Kazakos P., H ‡d  c  ‡ ‡ d ‡kc [The Greek Economy in the Post-war Period], mimeo. (1999). Koumantos, G., O‡‡ a c  [Family Law], vols I–II (Athens: Sakkoulas, 1988). Koumantos, G., ‘H k c  ‡c a  ‡ ‡ck   ‡  d ’ [Democracy is Measured by its Treatment of Minorities], Kathimerini, 1 February (1998). Koumantos, G., and Stambelou, C., ‘Greece: Digesting the New Family Law’, Journal of Family Law, 28, 3 (1989–90). Legg, K. P., Politics in Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969). Lockwood, D., ‘Social Integration and System Integration’, in G. K. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds), Explorations in Social Change (London: Routledge, 1964). Lyrintzis, C., ‘Political Parties in Post-junta Greece: A Case of Bureaucratic Clientelism?’, West European Politics, 7, 2 (1984), 99–118. Maravall, J.-M. ‘Politics and Policy: Economic Reforms in Southern Europe’, in L.-C. Bresser Pereira, J.-M. Maravall and A. Przeworski (eds.), Economic Reforms in New Democracies: A Social Democratic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York, Garden City: Doubleday, 1964). Matsaganis, M., ‘From the North Sea to the Mediterranean? Constraints to Health Reform in Greece’, International Journal of Health Services, 28, 2 (1998), 333–48. Minority Rights Group International, Report: The Southern Balkans, 94, 4, October (1994). Mitrakos, T. and Tsakloglou, P., M‡ C  a   !b‡  Ef  f  ‡ ‡d ‡kc [Changes in Overall Inequality and Poverty in Greece in the Post-authoritarian Period], Department of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Discussion Paper 97, July (1998). Mouzelis, N., Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978). Mouzelis, N., Politics in the Semi-periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialisation in the Balkans and Latin America (London: Macmillan, 1986). Ombudsman, Ed E‡   1999 [Annual Report for 1999] (Athens, 2000).

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Pagoulatos, G., Greece’s New Political Economy: State, Finance and Growth from Postwar to EMU (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003). Petmezidou-Tsoulouvi, M., KC  a  ‡  d  d [Social Inequalities and Social Policy] (Athens: Exantas, 1992). Petropulos, J., Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1968). Pollis, A., Kkf , c  kb  b   Ef [State, Law and Human Rights in Greece] (Athens: Foundation of Mediterranean Studies, 1988). Psalidopoulos, M., K‡i d ‡kc  ‡d d  d: Me  k a   [Keynesian Theory and Greek Economic Policy: Myth and Reality] (Athens: Kritiki, 1990). Schmitter, P., ‘Organized Interests and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe’, in R. Gunther, N. P. Diamandouros and H.-J. Puhle (eds.), The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Seferiades, S., ‘‡a c    d: O ‡ a   a k  a   kc (1962–1967)’ [Assertive Movement and Politics: Greek Trade Unionism before the Dictatorship (1962–1967)], Greek Review of Political Science, 12, 34 (1998). Stavros, S., ‘Citizenship and the Protection of Minorities’, in K. Featherstone and K. Ifantis (eds.), Greece in a Changing Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Tsoukalas, C., The Greek Tragedy (London: Penguin, 1969). Tsoukalas, C., ‘The Ideological Impact of the Civil War’, in J. O. Iatrides (ed.), Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1981). Verney, S., ‘Panacea or Plague: Greek Political Parties and Accession to the European Community, 1974–1979’, PhD dissertation, King’s College, University of London (1994). Zambarloukou, S., ‘ a c    ka k‡  a 

‡ ‡d ‡f:  kd k C’ [The Trade Union Movement and State Interventionism in Post Authoritarian Greece: A Comparative Approach], in C. Lyrintzis, E. Nikolakopoulos, and D. Sotiropoulos (eds.), Society and Politics: Facets of the Third Hellenic Republic (Athens: Themelio, 1996).

7

Women’s challenge to citizenship in Turkey1 Yevim Arat

Politics of identity radically challenged the ideal of universal citizenship. Demands for recognition of differences unmasked formal discourses of universal rights that the concept of citizenship traditionally harboured. Claims to equality which ignored differences or particularities were deemed to be insufficient to accommodate needs for equal recognition that different groups demanded. Feminists contributed to this challenge as they insisted on the concept of substantive as opposed to formal rights. They exposed how the allegedly neutral, seemingly universal concept of liberal citizenship was based upon male norms and male experiences.2 In order to benefit from rights of universal citizenship, women had to become like men and deny the female roles the society cast upon them. Feminists offered alternative concepts of citizenship where women’s different experiences could be addressed and accounted for.3 Feminists and women of different persuasions challenged citizenship in the Turkish context as well. In this chapter, I discuss how the secular feminists and Islamist women challenged the concept of citizenship in Turkey. As was the case in the West, women in Turkey contested the implications of their formal citizenship rights. They aimed to expand not only the parameters of their formal rights in search of formal equality to men, but they also sought substantive equality as citizens. I would like to argue that these demands to improve women’s predicament served also to challenge, if not redefine, the manner in which citizenship rights have been traditionally granted by the state in Turkey. Women’s claims for their rights served as claims for ‘citizenship from below’4 rather than citizenship as a ‘ruling class strategy’ whereby rights are given from above in order to promote social integration in the polity.5

Citizenship and gender in Turkey Citizenship evolved in Turkey not as a result of a revolutionary social struggle from below where masses demanded their rights against those who withheld them, but as a result of the choices made by enlightened ruling elites in pursuit of national integration. From 1923 onwards, the founding fathers set the rules for citizenship by discarding the religious legal structure of the polity, adapting a secular legal framework, extending suffrage to women and defining the rights and

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responsibilities between the state and its individual members. Even though, prior to the foundation of the republic, women had raised vibrant voices demanding rights, the founding fathers assumed that there had been a tabula rasa, when they stepped in to grant women the rights that would suit their particular project of modernity. Consequently, women’s rights defined by law were crucial both for the project of modernity that the state elites envisioned as well as for the women who would practise those rights. In 1926 a new civil code was adapted from the Swiss civil code which helped define women’s citizenship in relation to men, and in 1934 suffrage was granted to women. The civil code gave equal rights in divorce, inheritance and marriage to women. It required that a civil marriage be contracted rather than a religious one. The civil code was singular as a secular code in a Muslim country. The republican elites decided unilaterally that the religious laws which defined personal status had to be replaced. The minister of justice of the time helped introduce the new code, and argued that: It should not be doubted that our laws that receive their inspiration from the immutable judgements of religion and are still linked (in continuous contact) to divine law are the most powerful factor in tying the Turkish nation’s destiny to the stipulations and rules of the Middle Ages, even during the present century. The Ministry of Justice deems the Swiss Civil Code, which is the most recent and most perfect of its kind, as a civilized work that will satisfy the boundless intelligence and ability of our nation.6 Such a move was inconceivable in the Middle Eastern context as late as 1980s. It was with much difficulty that minor adjustments could be made in Islamic law to restrict polygamy in Egyptian women’s favour in 1985.7 In the more progressive Tunisian code, mothers gained the right to guardianship of a child in case of the father’s death as late as 1981.8 Yet, the 1926 Turkish civil code had its patriarchal biases which prevented women’s formal equality to men. Once married, according to the civil code, the husband was declared to be the head of the family and made responsible to provide for his wife and children (Article 152). He represented the marriage union (Article 154) and established the place of residence for the family (Article 21). Similar biases existed in other codes as well. For example, the Turkish citizenship law allows both men and women to pass their citizenship to their children independent of the citizenship of their spouses.9 Both men and women can retain their citizenship if they marry a non-citizen. However, Turkish women, if married to non-citizens, cannot pass their citizenship to their foreign spouses while men can.10 With its strengths and weaknesses, the republican legal framework expanded the opportunities women had to improve their status relative to what it was before. The founding fathers ‘knew the best interests of women’ and did not need to collaborate with them or expect their active participation in support of their rights. On the contrary, women were expected to be grateful beneficiaries of those rights given to them by their protective patriarchal fathers.

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Formal equality and women’s citizenship In the past two decades, women acted in concert to contest the inequalities that existed in law. They successfully protested particular articles of the civil and criminal code since the early 1980s as they demanded an overall amendment of the civil code to insure formal equality. Article 159 of the civil code, which required husbands to grant permission for their wives to work outside the home, was repealed. Article 153, which required that wives assume their husbands’ last names, was revised so that women could keep their maiden names before their husbands’ last names. Article 438 of the criminal code, which granted a reduction in punishment to a rapist when his victim was a prostitute, was annulled. Articles 440 and 441 of the criminal code, which had double standards for men and women in cases of adultery, were annulled: before the change, a married women was considered to have committed adultery if she had sexual intercourse even once with a man other than her husband, whereas a man could be charged with the same crime only if he could be shown to have had a continual relationship with another women besides his wife. Finally, the civil code was thoroughly amended and began to be implemented as of 1 January 2002. Since the mid-1980s women of different persuasions have exhibited a united front to have the civil code amended. The Turkish Women Jurists’ Association proposed an amendment to the civil code to advance formal equality of men and women. In 1993 a petition with more than 100,000 signatures was presented to the president of the Grand National Assembly and the minister of justice. Requirements of international decrees such as the United Nations Covenant on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and Turkey’s candidacy to the European Union, which precipitated the democratization process in the country, helped finalize the amendment. The new code abolished the supremacy of the husband in the marriage union: he is no longer the formal head of the family, nor solely responsible for representing the marriage union (Articles 152 and 154 before the amendment). Perhaps the most radical change in the new code is the nature of the property regime. Before the amendment, the civil code maintained the ‘separation of property’ within marriage between spouses, in apparent conformity with the principle of equality. However, because many married women were housewives who did not earn an income outside the home, property bought during marriage was bought with the money the husbands earned and registered in the husbands’ names. The wives who subsidized their husbands’ labour outside the family with their domestic labour were not compensated. The amendment introduced the ‘sharing of property’ regime, which required the divorced husband and wife to share the property, acquired during the marriage union regardless of who formally owned it. This amendment, though advocated by a majority, sparked a controversy even among women and feminists. Some women had reacted to the sharing of property regime on the grounds that it would violate the principle of equality and encourage the division of labour along gender lines. The columnist Gülay Göktürk waged a war against women’s groups who

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advocated the sharing of property regime, because she believed that protecting the housewives would encourage women to continue being housewives.11 This would discourage women from working outside the house for income and from aspiring to have careers that could sustain them on their own. In a series of acrimonious columns, she decried the feminist consciousness that upheld women’s differences under the prevailing Turkish circumstances and wrote in support of an orthodox egalitarian stance. Feminists responded in defence of the proposed amendment and it was their proposal which was ultimately accepted.12 Attempts to advance women’s formal equality to men in citizenship involved controversy as to what constitutes the substantive meaning of equality. Those who sought to financially acknowledge the work of women within the family prevailed. After the amendment was legislated, the majority of feminists protested against the parliamentary resolution which made the amendment exclude divorced women who married before the amendment was put into effect.

Formal versus substantive equality in Turkey Feminist critiques have taught us that formal legal equality is different from substantive equality.13 Women experience citizenship very differently from how it is set out in the formal legal framework. It is assumed that citizens of a secular liberal democracy signed their social contract with the state to become equal bearers of rights and responsibilities, irrespective of gender roles. However, if the rights and responsibilities of citizenship allow one the protection of one’s ‘life, liberty and property’ and expect one to vote and be voted into office, pay taxes and serve in the military when needed, then one is implicitly expected to assume the gender roles associated with men. It is men who earn more money than women, who have the money or the property to pay taxes, who are voted into political office and who go into military service when needed. Similarly, it is men’s property that is protected because women simply own much less property than men, while women have difficulty protecting themselves against physical violence. Because women are less educated than men, freedom of speech and thought have also been male privileges in practice if not in theory. The list could be elaborated and extended. Examples could be drawn from Turkey. In Turkey, even though suffrage was extended to women in 1934 and they did not have any special requirements for voting or election to political office which were different from those of men, the percentage of women in the National Assembly has never been more than 4.5 per cent. Despite the organization of some women around the Association to Support and Educate Women Candidates (the Turkish acronym of which is KADER), founded in 1997 to promote women parliamentarians, only 23 and then 24 women entered the 550-member parliament in the 1999 and 2002 elections respectively. According to statistics gathered in the 1990s, in urban areas, only 4.66 per cent of property that has been registered is owned by women, while 77.96 per cent is owned by men.14 Thirty one per cent of women and 10 per cent of men are illiterate.15 Only 1.85 per cent of women and 4.22 per cent of men are university graduates. In urban areas, the

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labour force participation of women and men is 16.1 per cent and 69.2 per cent, respectively. Of those who work as unpaid family workers, 65 per cent are women and 14 per cent are men.16 Beyond these statistics, violence that women are exposed to reaches frightening proportions; a study carried out in the villages of south-east Anatolia in 1995 found that 76 per cent of women were beaten from ‘time to time’.17 Beneath these statistics are the entrenched patriarchal traditions in the country. Even though there are no legal grounds for it, high school principles and dormitory superintendents have been known to send girls suspected of intercourse to virginity exams. In 1992, there were two suicide cases of high-school girls who were ordered by school authorities to have virginity examinations.18 Women in police custody and political detainees are also known to have been exposed to forced virginity exams. It has been argued that, through these state-enforced virginity exams, the state extends its mechanisms of surveillance into the preservation of women’s modesty that was traditionally undertaken by the kinship network.19 ‘Honour killings’ are another violent manifestation of the prevailing patriarchal norms irreconcilable with citizenship rights. A primary duty of the state toward its citizens is that of insuring ‘security of life’. Women who are accused of disobedience or disgracing the family name because of their allegedly immodest relationships with men are murdered by a male kin to clean the family name. Even though honour killings might not be common and the few instances which have taken place in eastern and south-eastern Turkey where feudal family relations still prevail have been widely publicized,20 the state has not taken any effective action to prevent them or provide effective punishments which could act as deterrents.

In search of substantive equality From the mid-1980s, women contested their status with regard to citizenship. They worked, as mentioned above, to have the legal framework amended to make it more egalitarian. In the process they tried to reformulate the principle of equality which shapes the prevailing conception of citizenship, so that it could promote substantive equality in practice. They upheld the principle of difference as opposed to sameness in defining the criteria for equality. As such they advocated positive discrimination to make women substantively more equal to men. Feminists, among a larger group of women who lobbied to redefine the rights and responsibilities pertaining to women’s citizenship, contested not merely the content of their citizenship rights but also the way in which they were given. They criticized the republican framework where the founding fathers used women’s citizenship as a ‘ruling class strategy’ to promote westernization, arguing instead that the time had come for them to define their rights as they deemed necessary, in their own name, for their individual benefit.21 Feminists declared themselves ready to struggle for their rights, so that the contract of citizenship between the state and its female members could be redefined and better realized. In the

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Turkish context, where communal priorities had traditionally stifled individual prerogatives, feminists upheld the secular liberal contract the state formally adhered to rather than contesting it in principle, working instead to realize its full potential. A critical feminist initiative which had implications for women’s citizenship was the fight against domestic violence. Various women’s groups and feminists prioritized domestic violence as a critical issue around which they mobilized societal support. Feminist groups demonstrated their most significant public presence on this issue. When the feminists organized their first public demonstration against domestic violence in May 1987, they knew from common experience and observation that the beating of women within families was prevalent. Research on domestic violence followed, and documented its frightening prevalence that cut across class lines. Meanwhile feminists, first in Istanbul (1990), then in Ankara (1991), established foundations to open shelters and help women exposed to domestic violence. Their initiatives trickled down as the state and various municipalities opened shelters in towns and provinces. Attempts to amend legislation and policy suggestions made to alleviate the problem heralded the expansion of women’s rights of citizenship.22 In 1998, the law for the protection of the family was passed to protect women against violence. According to this law, the public prosecutor can file a suit against a spouse who has committed violence, keep that spouse from coming home for up to six months and prevent him/her from persecuting and bothering the victim at the workplace. Protecting women from domestic violence remains a challenge. Culturally the family is deemed sacred, and reporting domestic violence would threaten this sanctity. The woman who does try to file a complaint would be and is confronted with police who usually urge women, if they do not ridicule them, to go back to their husbands rather than file a complaint. It has been argued that reports about victimized women prepared by doctors as well as the police do not always reveal the truth and attempt to cover up the incidents.23 For those cases of domestic violence that make it to the courts, there are similar problems. Judges consider regional traditions and customs, for example the beating of women, as extenuating circumstances and thus legitimize the prevailing patriarchal violence toward women. A further problem is the terms of punishment which remain far from being a deterrent. Most prison sentences are given for seven days, even though the law does suggest up to 30 months’ imprisonment in cases of domestic violence. Feminists advocate other means to ensure protection to those exposed to domestic violence. They argue that civil servants – such as police, doctors, health and legal administrators – with whom victims of violence come into contact should be given special training and should collaborate on how to deal with the victims. They propose that special family courts with specially trained judges be set up to adjudicate over issues concerning domestic violence and that victimized women receive free legal consultation. They also propose that crisis centres where victims of violence can seek immediate protection be established, and that the number of women’s shelters be increased so they are available in every district.24

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These women also seek to expand the concept of domestic violence to include rape within the family.25 The agenda that the feminists in Turkey offer might seem only too familiar to those that have existed in the West. Turkish feminists never deny the influence of Western feminism. To those leftists who attack them for imitating the West, they have been known to retort that socialism did not blossom on the plateaux of Konya (in central Anatolia) either. In their more reflective modes, as was the case when the monthly feminist magazine Pazartesi prepared its cover story on the prospect of indigenous Turkish feminism, they argue that the possibility still needs to be worked out.26 Even though the feminists in Turkey might share the goals of feminists in the West, the context in which these goals are worked out is different. The fact that the new law concerning domestic violence had to be ratified in a parliament with conservative, traditional Turks – including the more radical Islamist parliamentarians who grew up in the patriarchal culture that legitimized domestic violence and accommodated honour killings – is a critical difference which changes the parameters of the debate in Turkey. In the Turkish context, communal values rather than liberal individualism continue to exert their influence in undermining women’s citizenship rights. In a polity where the state defines the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and where the patriarchal culture legitimizes violence toward women such that even women are made to endorse it (as empirical research attests), a liberal rhetoric which prioritizes the individual rights of women as human beings is more radical than is the case in the West. The local Turkish context privileging communal norms rather than individual rights makes the secular feminist quest for formal and substantive citizenship rights unique.

Islamist women and substantive equality It is not merely secular feminists, but also Islamist women who contest their citizenship rights. Since the mid-1980s, Islamist women, including those who called themselves Islamist feminists, have intensely criticized the parameters within which women’s citizenship was defined. They demanded a new framework which could better accommodate their religious convictions. At one level, criticisms of Islamist women paralleled criticisms of secular women to the extent that both mainly targeted the republican project of modernity and its implications for women. However, secular women sought to empower themselves and to ameliorate their predicament within that project. The Islamist women were critical of the Western norms adopted through that project. Even though their views and criticisms mellowed over time and were influenced by those Western norms they criticized, Islamist women argued that the process of westernization made Turkish women imitate their Western counterparts and endorse their problems, including their feminism. Cihan Aktas, a leading Islamist women’s advocate, argued that ‘some privileges that were granted to some women as rights could mean injustice to others’.27 She elaborated with sarcasm that the process of westernization gave women the right to go to Europe to follow fashion

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closely, to snuggle into their furs in winter and to wear their bikinis during summer. For others it was the right to become prostitutes and dancers, to exhibit their bodies without control to fulfil a ‘social’ duty. Still others had gained the right to work the double shift with meagre wages as secretaries, cleaners, nurses and so on, to come home late at night to do their housework and to forgo their right to educate their children.28 According to Aktas, feminists who articulated these concerns had problems themselves. Liberation and difference could not make women happy and satisfy their hunger. Feminists included the ‘psychologically sick, those in search of adventure who ran after fantasies, dumb socialites who aspired to give colour to their lives and finally those who equated being a feminist with being enlightened, elite, progressive and Westernist’.29 The feminist movement could not go beyond a limited narrow circle, could not reach large masses and, as a reaction to its imitative culture, could not find a base for itself. Islam could redefine rights that the republican state had so narrowly defined in imitation of the West. However, first the parameters within which Islam was circumscribed had to be enlarged. Islamist women, those who used Islam as an explicit political ideology to define themselves, had to wage a fight to have themselves accepted publicly rather than merely privately. The most visible and politically critical battle was fought in defence of women’s right to cover their heads in any public space, as they claimed Islam dictates. Women’s right to education, their right to practice their religion free from obstruction, as well as their duties to abide by the laws of the state, were contested in this battle. On the other hand, the duties of the state toward its citizens in protecting them from religious fundamentalism emerged as an issue. The republican state which defined secular citizenship rights did not merely seek the separation of religion and the state, but also effectively exercised control over religion, through various institutions of the state. Within this framework, the goal was to confine religion to the private realm and monopolize religious authority in the public realm through the state. Head covering was prohibited in public offices or educational institutions, because it was deemed to stand for and propagate a religious ideology perceived to be inimical to the secular foundations of the republic. Until the mid-1980s, this particular definition of religious rights remained uncontested. When women began attending universities with covered heads in the mid-1980s, the state, particularly its higher courts and various secular constituencies, duly interpreted this as an act of protest against the secular principles of the state. A tug of war ensued between the state, its loyal secular constituency and the Islamist women concerning their alternate definitions of citizenship rights. Islamist women, supported by Islamist men, waged an ongoing protest engaging in demonstrations and boycotts. The religious Welfare Party which came to power in 1996 as the dominant partner of a coalition government promised to allow women’s head covering in public institutions as a critical building-block of its campaign. In turn, women supported the Welfare Party in large numbers. They worked as party activists to mobilize other women. Before the local elections of March 1994, 18,000 women worked

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in the Welfare Party campaign in Istanbul.30 After the 1995 elections, the Ankara women’s commission of the party registered 65,000 women members in February 1996 only.31 During its term in office, the Welfare Party raised the issue again and again as a bargaining chip toward its coalition partner that was reluctant to lift the ban on head covering. The Welfare Party was closed by the constitutional court in 1998 and the formal prohibition of head covering in public offices and universities remained. The Virtue Party replaced the Welfare Party. It was also closed by the constitutional court because it was a continuation of the Welfare Party. The Justice and Development Party which split from the Virtue Party after its closure and came to power with 34 per cent of the vote as a single-party government in the 2002 elections remains unable to tackle the problem in the short term. When the head of the Parliament came to see the President of the Republic and his wife off on a foreign visit, he was accompanied by his own wife whose head was covered: reactions followed. The president and the leader of the opposition in Parliament duly reminded the government of the meaning, or rather the threat, of the headscarf, enshrined by various constitutional court decisions.32 The prime minister responded by explaining that resolving the headscarf controversy was not their priority. Even though the Justice and Development Party would like to resolve this issue by allowing for headscarves, the party leaders realize that there needs to be a larger political coalition and consensus than is available. The headscarf issue remains a serious challenge to the republican concept of secularism. The meaning of the headscarf and how to recognize the citizenship rights of those who insist on wearing it seems likely to continue to be a problem. Islamist criticism of the secular republican concept of women’s citizenship, and the attempts to extend religious rights in the public domain are not unproblematic. To the extent that Islamist women are promoting a religious world-view through their demands to wear their headscarves in public spaces, they are promoting their contract with God, at the same time as they attempt to change their contract with the state. While the contract of citizenship with the state might have its formal and substantive limitations, the contract with God might leave women defenceless to shape their predicament. The secular contract allows women to contest its terms, while in the sacred contract it is God who dictates the terms. Women who refer to their secular citizenship rights to extend their religious rights paradoxically might be promoting a world-view where their capacity to shape their lives might be irrelevant. However, there is empirical evidence which indicates that headscarved women might not be as threatening as they are assumed to be and that they have no intention to dispense with the existing secular framework. Even the few who do prefer an Islamic code conceive of it in terms of the secular norms which prioritize their individual rights in relation to men.33

Conclusion In the Turkish context, citizenship has been defined by the ruling elites as a ‘ruling-class strategy’ to westernize and modernize the polity. The concept has been engendered both through the formal legal framework as well as through

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women’s experiences of citizenship. The secular republic which promised men and women allegedly equal rights and responsibilities of citizenship based on a liberal contract failed to deliver them in practice. Even though the formal legal framework progressively became more egalitarian, substantive equality could not delivered to women in various realms, including education, economy, political representation and security. From the mid-1980s, women contested the marked differences that existed between themselves and men. They challenged the way in which their citizenship rights and responsibilities were defined in their name by the ruling elites. There was a radical demand to define citizenship from below as a result of the struggle and the bargaining with the ruling elites. Both secular feminists and Islamist women were involved in revising citizenship as a ruling-class strategy whereby rights were given from above for purposes defined by the ruling elite. Substantively, women’s protests expanded the confines of citizenship. Secular feminists who rallied and succeeded to have the legal codes amended to make them more egalitarian and others who pushed for legislation to protect women from domestic violence all demanded that women’s rights be extended and that the responsibilities of the state toward women be more inclusive. Radical feminists brought in the concept of positive discrimination in order to protect women from physical violence. They demanded that women be treated differently, specially and ‘unequally’ so that substantive equality in citizenship between men and women could be sought. Islamist feminists challenged the fairness of republican secularism that excluded them from the public domain and struggled to extend their rights to practice and to propagate Islam in the public realm. They articulated their differences from secular women who did not cover their heads. While the extent to which a liberal contract of citizenship could be compatible with Islam was problematic, Islamist women used the benefits of the secular legal framework to elaborate their rights. Islam maintained a contract between an almighty God and the believer, where God set the sacred terms rather than the contracting individual. Women’s attempts to redefine their contract with the state exhibited the gendered nature of citizenship in Turkey and the directions in which it could be re-gendered. Women’s claims to their citizenship rights had significant implications for democracy in Turkey. If equal participation is at the heart of democratic experience, then women liberated the democratic tradition that was confined to orthodox structures of politics and biased in favour of male political participation. As women organized, independent of political parties and parliaments, through rallies and demonstrations or through women’s groups within civil society, they expanded the parameters of democratic participation. Limitations to this expansion must be remembered. Achievements of the women’s groups, both secular and Islamist, were more important at the formal and/or discourse level than in the lives of large numbers of women. Domestic violence is yet to be effectively curtailed and economic, political and social equality is yet to be substantively achieved. The demands of Islamist women are yet to be accommodated within a liberal, secular legal framework in Turkey. Unless the

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Islamist women publicly claim their allegiance to the secular system and restrict their observance of Islamist law to the headscarf issue, the prospects of reconciliation could be dim. Despite these problems, women speaking in their own name to rewrite the laws they have to obey needs to be appreciated as a harbinger of further democratization.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter, written before the amendment of the civil code in 2001, is included in Suad Joseph (ed.), Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse University Press, 2000). 2 Elshtain, J. B., ‘Antigone’s Daughters’, Democracy in the World, 2, 2 (1982), 46–59, reprinted in Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 363–77; Dietz, M., ‘Context is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship’, Deadalus, 116, 4, Fall (1987), reprinted in Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 378–400; Jones, K., ‘Citizenship in a Woman-friendly Polity’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15 (1990), 711–812. 3 Young, I. M., ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’, Ethics, 9 (1989), 250–74, reprinted in Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 401–29 advocates a differentiated concept of citizenship to integrate diversity and claim universal rights at the same time. 4 Turner, B., ‘Outline of a Theory of Citizenship’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso Publishers, 1992). 5 Mann, M., ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 21 (1987), 339–54. 6 Quoted in Davison, A., Secularisms and Revivalism in Turkey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 198. 7 Talhami, G. H., The Mobilization of Muslim Women in Egypt (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. 102–22. 8 Charrad, M., ‘Becoming a Citizen: Lineage versus Individual in Tunisia and Morocco’, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 83. 9 Arin, C., The Legal Status of Women in Turkey, Women for Women’s Human Rights Reports, 1 (1997). 10 Nomer, E., Vatandaslik Hukuku Dersleri [Law Courses on Citizenship] (Istanbul: Fakülteler Matbaasi, 1982), p. 56. 11 Yeni Yüzyil, 11, 15 and 18 November 1997. 12 Pazartesi, January 1998, pp. 1–5. 13 Pateman, C., The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Jones, ‘Citizenship in a Woman-friendly Polity’. 14 The Status of Women in Turkey, The Turkish National Report to the Fourth World Conference on Women, May 1994 (Ankara: Bizim Büro Basimevi, 1994), p. 61. 15 The Status of Women in Turkey, p. 62. 16 The Status of Women in Turkey, p. 68. 17 CEDAW Report; Second and Third Periodic Reports of State Parties: Turkey (1996), p. 31. 18 International Women’s Rights Action Watch (IWRAW) 1997 IWRAW to CEDAW Country Reports on Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Slovenia, Morocco, Turkey, Philippines (H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, 1996), p. 34. 19 Parla, A., ‘The “Honor” of the State: Virginity Examinations in Turkey’, Feminist Studies, Spring (2001), 65–88. 20 Pazartesi, April 1996.

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21 Tekeli, S., ‘Tek Parti Döneminde Kadin Hareketi de Bastirildi’ [Women’s Movement was also Suppressed during the Single Party Era], in L. Cinemre and R. Cakir (eds.), Sol Kemalizme Bakiyor [The Left is Looking over Kemalism] (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1991); Sirman, N., ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 3, 1 (1989); Arat, Y., ‘The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey’, in S. Bozdogan and R. Kasaba (eds.), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 95–112. 22 Pazartesi, November 1997, p. 11. 23 The Status of Women in Turkey, p. 39. 24 Arin, C., ‘Kadina Yönelik Siddet Açisindan Türk Hukuku’nun Kadina Yaklasims’ [Turkish Law Regarding Violence toward Women], in Evdeki Terör [Terror at Home] (Istanbul: Mor Cati Yayinlari, 1996), p. 138. 25 Yüksel, S., ‘Özyuvadaki Tecavüz, Mor CatiKadin Siginagi Vakfi’ [Rape at Home, Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation], in Evdeki Terör [Terror at Home] (Istanbul: Mor Cati Yayinlari, 1996), pp. 117–121. 26 Pazartesi, September 1997. 27 Aktas, C., Kadinin Serüveni [The Adventure of Woman] (Istanbul: Girisim Yayincilik, 1986), p. 211. 28 Aktas, Kadinin Serüveni, p. 212. 29 Aktas, Kadinin Serüveni, p. 221. 30 Pazartesi, September 1995, p. 2. 31 Yeni Yüzyil, 6 March 1996. 32 Radikal, 25 November 2002. 33 Arat, Y., ‘Group Differentiated Rights and the Liberal Democratic State: Rethinking the Headscarf Controversy in Turkey’, New Perspectives on Turkey, Fall (2001), 31–46.

References Aktas, C., Kadinin Serüveni [The Adventure of Woman] (Istanbul: Girisim Yayincilik, 1986). Arat, Y., ‘The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey’, in S. Bozdogan and R. Kasaba (eds.), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 95–112. Arat, Y., ‘Group Differentiated Rights and the Liberal Democratic State: Rethinking the Headscarf Controversy in Turkey’, New Perspectives on Turkey, Fall (2001), 31–46. Arin, C., ‘Kadina Yönelik Siddet Açisindan Türk Hukuku’nun Kadina Yaklasims’ [Turkish Law Regarding Violence towards Women], in Evdeki Terör [Terror at Home] (Istanbul: Mor Cati Yayinlari, 1996), pp. 130–9. Arin, C., The Legal Status of Women in Turkey, Women for Women’s Human Rights Reports, 1 (1997). CEDAW Report; Second and Third Periodic Reports of State Parties: Turkey (1996). Charrad, M., ‘Becoming a Citizen: Lineage versus Individual in Tunisia and Morocco’, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 70–87. Davison, A., Secularisms and Revivalism in Turkey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Dietz, M., ‘Context is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship’, Deadalus, 116, 4, Fall (1987), reprinted in Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 378–400. Elshtain, J. B., ‘Antigone’s Daughters’, Democracy in the World, 2, 2 (1982), 46–59 reprinted in Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 363–77.

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International Women’s Rights Action Watch (IWRAW) 1996, 1997 IWRAW to CEDAW Country Reports on Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Slovenia, Morocco, Turkey, Philippines (H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota). Jones, K., ‘Citizenship in a Woman-friendly Polity’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15 (1990), 711–812. Mann, M., ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 21 (1987), 339–54. Nomer, E., Vatandaslik Hukuku Dersleri [Law Courses on Citizenship] (Istanbul: Fakülteler Matbaasi, 1982). Parla, A., ‘The “Honor” of the State: Virginity Examinations in Turkey’, Feminist Studies, Spring (2001), pp. 65–88. Pateman, C., The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). Pazartesi, September 1995; April 1996; September 1997; November 1997; January 1998. Radikal, 25 November 2002. Sirman, N., ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 3, 1 (1989). The Status of Women in Turkey, The Turkish National Report to the Fourth World Conference on Women, May 1994 (Ankara: Bizim Büro Basimevi). Talhami, G. H., The Mobilization of Muslim Women in Egypt (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996). Tekeli, S., ‘Tek Parti Döneminde Kadin Hareketi de Bastirildi’ [Women’s Movement was also Suppressed during the Single Party Era], in L. Cinemre and R. Cakir (eds.), Sol Kemalizme Bakiyor [The Left is Looking over Kemalism] (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1991). Turner, B., ‘Outline of a Theory of Citizenship’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso Publishers, 1992). Yeni Yüzyil, 6 March 1996; 11, 15, 18 November 1997. Young, I. M., ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’, Ethics, 9 (1989), 250–74, reprinted in Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 401–29. Yüksel, S., ‘Özyuvadaki Tecavüz, Mor CatiKadin Siginagi Vakfi’ [Rape at Home, Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation], in Evdeki Terör [Terror at Home] (Istanbul: Mor Cati Yayinlari, 1996), pp. 117–21.

8

Between duties and rights Gender and citizenship in Greece, 1864–19521 Efi Avdela

In recent scholarship, the Greek constitution of 1864 in which adult male suffrage was established is described as the founding institution of liberal parliamentarism in Greece, based as it was on the principle of popular sovereignty.2 In another reading, the 1864 constitution provided Greek men with political rights, their civil rights being safeguarded by the very establishment of the nation-state and the state-sponsored rural smallholding, while the absence of their social rights was at least covered by family relations.3 In fact, the early and growing predominance of petite-bourgeoisie or smallholders in both country and town in the form of small, family-based productive units and self-employment, and its centrality in the economic, social and political developments of Greece constitute a recurrent theme of recent historical research into the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Greece. The relation between the predominance of smallholding and the early – by European standards – establishment of adult male suffrage has often been addressed by historians.4 Anthropologists have attributed this predominance to a cultural model of household autonomy that they have termed the noikokireoi model of family organization, characterized by the hierarchical organization of domestic kinship and division of labour.5 I have argued elsewhere that this model, which aimed to secure the male head of the family a livelihood independent of both waged work and state regulation, has played an important role in the formation of wage-earning and professional strategies for both men and women in different social milieus.6 In this chapter I investigate the institutional framework in which this model has been inscribed and, more particularly, the way in which the different legal status of men and women affected their citizenship rights and duties and produced differentiated and changing representations of citizenship. Despite the fact that neither the constitution of 1864 itself nor the electoral legislation that subsequently gave precise content to its provisions stipulated male gender as a necessary qualification for suffrage, the issue of the female vote was then – and for a long time after that – perceived as a joke and an absurdity. The absence of any protest, either within or outside the National Assembly, against women’s exclusion from political representation at that time speaks of the widely accepted view that women constituted a particular category of ‘non-citizens’ defined as they were by their natural attributes as wives and mothers. It was precisely because of their ‘specific qualities’ that women, independently of their

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marital status, property or education, were excluded from the public realm in general and from the exercise of politics in particular.7 Yet, while adult Greek men were being granted political rights without exception based on property or status, a new discursive field was being elaborated with respect to the role and position of women in Greek society, based on the biological foundation of sexual difference.8 Reference to biology for the elaboration of ‘woman’s proper place’, which was to dominate the debates on the ‘woman question’, however, took various divergent and even competing, yet often classbounded, forms. Doctors, educators, philosophers and reformers of all sorts, men as well as women, set out to carve a new positive model for women, adapting the theory of biological determination to the needs of the ascending middle classes and the related diffusion of nationalism. As elsewhere, this model was based on the assumption that women’s biological and social differences prescribed the fulfilment of the ‘domestic ideal’ as their natural vocation, yet assigned to ‘female virtues’ and especially motherhood a wide social and national significance.9 Recent international research has shown that the historical process through which women’s bodies have been discursively structured as maternal has constituted the basis for women’s exclusion from politics, restricting them to the domestic domain of the private sphere, that is, the family. The establishment of democracy coincided historically with women’s exclusion from the res publica. In many cases women were denied political rights until late in the twentieth century. A female version of citizenship which was based on women’s identification with motherhood was constructed in discourses as well as in practices.10 The feminist contesting of this version and the claim to statutory equality between the sexes had limited appeal everywhere, and political rights were granted to women out of political concerns that were irrelevant to their citizenship rights.11 Greek women were not granted the vote until 1952. Yet, in the 90 years between men’s and women’s suffrage the issue of women’s political rights was only part of a wider debate on their position and role in Greek society, a debate that was to continue long after that. This debate was in most parts centred on aspects of women’s citizenship other than the vote. The educated middle-class women, who first claimed rights for their sex during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, limited themselves to demands for civil and social rights, mainly the right to education and paid work, and the reform of their legal status within the family. They repeatedly qualified these demands as prerequisites for the fulfilment of the female vocation while stressing that the issue of women’s votes was premature for the case of Greece.12 The discourse of sexual difference in its varying, changing and often conflicting versions proved to be long lasting, dominating this debate throughout the period. For the most part it defined the issue of women’s citizenship in terms of duties. It was only during the inter-war years when the claim for social, economic and political equality between men and women was framed that an alternative definition of gender relations emerged for a limited period of time, focusing on the rights that derived from the common human condition of the two sexes. The distinction between the civil, political and social elements of citizenship and their historical constitution make up the core of T. H. Marshal’s theory of

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citizenship formulated some 50 years ago.13 As has been repeatedly noted, the influence of this theory is based on the expansion of the notion of citizenship beyond the realm of politics by the addition of civil and social ‘elements’; that is to say by focusing on the relation of the citizen to the community.14 This version of citizenship is based on the prerequisite of citizen autonomy in the context of the legitimization and on the delimitation of the citizen rights and duties. In other words, it raises the issue of the characteristics of citizenship and therefore the problem of the inclusion or exclusion of those individuals or groups who do not possess them. The taxonomy proposed by Marshal has been under severe criticism because it identified the historical construction of citizenship with white, Western, middle-class men.15 The historical succession of the different elements of citizenship, according to Marshal – that is, the granting of first civil, then political and finally social rights – and its relation to social class, has been demonstrated to be irrelevant for women. In most historical cases women were banned from political rights long after they were granted restricted civil and social rights. Research has also highlighted the various attempts by women to expand the narrow definition of citizenship established in European societies in the nineteenth century by demanding rights for their sex in the name either of the social duties ordained by the recognition of sexual difference, or in the name of the rights deriving from the common human condition of men and women, or more often by some paradoxical combination of the two.16 In the Greek case, the historical importance of kinship in social, economic and political relations raises the question of the institutional framework on which family relations were based, that is, the legal prescriptions in respect to the rights and duties of different family members toward one another and to the community at large. In fact, women’s exclusion from political rights was considered to be a natural consequence of their subordinated position in the family, where the husband and/or father was recognized as head and master. Yet the legislative consolidation of this subordination was full of equivocation. Until the establishment of the civil code in 1946, it seems that women’s legal position in the family was determined in an indefinite manner. I argue here that, with the redefinition of gender relations according to the needs of the ascending middle-classes and the related diffusion of nationalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the fluidity of the legislative framework for family relations allowed middle-class women to publicly formulate demands for rights presented as requirements for the performance of their duties to the community. However, the contradictions and limits of this discourse has led subsequent generations in the inter-war period to the explicit claim of political equality for women as a right deriving from the constitutive principles of the polity and as a precondition for any improvement in their position. The indeterminacy of women’s formal position in the family was illustrated by the changing demands concerning the legal reform of family relations during the long period before the establishment of the civil code. Legislation remained largely the same. However, the right to hold and manage property and income, to conclude valid contracts and to participate in the administration of justice, on the

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one hand, and the right to education and social provision (Marshal’s civil and social rights), on the other hand, were more important for middle-class women at the turn of the century than they were for professional women of the inter-war years. The latter put emphasis on the right to political representation and equality at work. Yet, in both cases these women’s intervention built a political discourse destined to surpass their exclusion from the public realm. The fact that male adult suffrage was granted at the same time that the new domestic ideal was being crystallized led to the discursive distinction between a male public and a female private domain; it was this separation that women’s public discourse repeatedly attempted to overcome. Using existing research, I focus my investigation on two separate moments of the long period under investigation, in which advocates of women’s rights attempted to expand the notion of the political beyond the narrow limits of suffrage. I confine my investigation to women from the same social milieus as advocates of their rights, that is the educated, urban and all the more often professional women, for whom education constituted a social marker. Men and women did not enjoy the same civil rights in Greece. In fact, the question of women’s civil rights is rather complex. Since the establishment of the Greek state and until the promulgation of the civil code in 1946, their legal position remained virtually unchanged and was defined by an amalgam of local customs, Roman and Byzantine law and modern jurisprudence.17 Jurists defined women’s legal position as the following: while they were subjects of law with respect to their penal responsibilities and were subject to tax payment, they were not admitted as witnesses or jurors and were not recognized as having the authority to conclude valid contracts.18 The main discrepancy between men’s and women’s civil rights, however, was in their position in marriage. In fact, as a prominent jurist put it as late as 1933, the problem was not ‘woman’s capacity in civil law, but married woman’s capacity’.19 In a society where marriage was an unchallenged universal cultural and social situation, this meant that the vast majority of women, married at a very early age,20 did not have independence vis-à-vis the law. Yet, things did not seem to be as rigid as the common law doctrine of coverture dictated for English women, where it was said that ‘on marriage a woman died a kind of civil death’.21 According to the prevailing Roman law, marriage did not prevent Greek women from autonomous ownership of their property and income. Yet, from what legal commentators assert and evidence suggests, the personal relations of the spouses were governed by ‘the principle of men’s supremacy’22 in family relations, thus recognizing their full authority over all members and things of the household. As a result, married women usually did not have the power to administer their property and income, mostly but not exclusively accorded to them in the form of a dowry; to sit on family councils; or to obtain custody of children, even if the law did not explicitly prevent them from doing so.23 Furthermore, a married woman was not permitted to start an enterprise without her husband’s permission.24 Economic dependence was the lot of most middle-class women, since in marriage the husband was given the usufruct of his wife’s property

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and the only professional option open to unmarried or widowed middle-class women until late in the nineteenth century was teaching. New meanings of womanhood, according to the assumptions of the different natural and social vocation of each sex, were elaborated during the last decades of the century. Women’s subjection to unregulated patriarchal authority in the family was to be presented by the advocates of women’s rights as contradictory to the interests of the state. For the state, motherhood was a vital social and national mission for the formation of future citizens, and consequently deserved to be protected. As has already been noted, few people advocated women’s suffrage before the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – a period characterized by the revival of nationalism and by ideological rigidity, but also by the consolidation of liberal political institutions – educated women, both married and single, systematically put forward their claim to be recognized as members of the nation. The locus for the re-evaluation of women’s attributes in general and women’s citizenship in particular was what has been coined as ‘female national action’,25 Part of a wider discourse on women as ‘mothers of the nation’ that had been elaborated during the same period. This development contributed to women’s incorporation into the national body, while reproducing their subordinate status as second-class citizens. Earlier studies have brought into focus the gendered character of nationalist discourse in nineteenth-century Greece.26 By the end of the century, in the context of the Eastern question and the nationalist fervour that overtook the country, the nationalist discourse assigned women a decisive role in the fulfilment of the civilizing mission of Hellenism and the realization of the irredentist ideal. This discourse, in the Greek case as in others, had a strong evolutionist and Eurocentric character.27 Women were considered to be a crucial component of national edification: their assumed moralizing and civilizing qualities ascribed to their nature, defined in its turn by motherhood, meant that they regarded themselves as having the ability to rehabilitate society and, by extension, the entire nation.28 In this context, female education became a crucial issue. The necessity of elementary education for male and female children alike had already been promoted by revolutionary intellectuals since the 1820s.29 Yet, in practice and throughout the nineteenth century, Greek women’s right to education and social provision constituted an example of what Marshal has called the ‘divorce of social rights from the status of citizenship’.30 Historical research in Greek women’s history has amply demonstrated how female education since the 1860s became the battleground for the elaboration of the new meanings of womanhood. The state’s incapacity to guarantee girls’ elementary education, which was presumed compulsory, and its total negligence toward their secondary education which was left entirely to private initiative, generated heated debates as to the purposes and directions of women’s access to knowledge. In the context of these debates the few educated and professional middle-class women at the time were given the opportunity to formulate their own conceptions as to the educational prerequisites for securing women’s social and national mission. For them, female education ought to prepare girls for their future duties as wives and mothers, broaden

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their professional options if need be and render them useful for the community. And, since motherhood was acclaimed as a social mission, female education was gradually transformed from a dikaioma (right) to a kathikon (duty). Mothers had to be educated in order to ensure the appropriate education of future citizens and patriots. Considered as the prerequisite for women’s intellectual and moral elevation, this education was conceived as differentiated not only across gender but also across class lines.31 Female education, claimed systematically by the first women writers, became the starting point for educated women’s public activity, initially through mixed educational societies. Inscribed in the context of a wider reforming action of the emerging middle classes during the last decades of the century in the context of nationalist effervescence, this intervention was soon extended to charitable activities and the creation of the first women’s associations and ladies’ committees.32 By the end of the century, the three female figures corresponding to the only versions of middle-class women’s public activities that were not automatically condemned were the philanthropist, the teacher and the writer. They signified the integration of women’s activities in the realm of social action and their familiarization with the duties and obligations of the female citizen beyond the narrow field of party politics. As elsewhere, the emergence of the social as a separate public realm independent of the political gave middle-class women the possibility of claiming it as a locus destined primarily for the employment of their ‘female virtues’ through their public intervention, and hence the path to their social citizenship.33 Yet, in the Greek case, this separation was never complete, since nationalism operated as a unifying element, cutting across both fields and allowing educated women to politicize their social activities.34 Historians have repeatedly acknowledged that the publication in 1887 (and for the next 30 years after that) of The Ladies’ Journal, edited by Kallirroe Parren, inaugurated the first systematic contesting of the position of Greek woman. Earlier studies identified the publication of The Ladies’ Journal with the rising of a feminist consciousness in Greece.35 Yet subsequent scholarship has highlighted the discursive and ideological displacements that can be observed during the 30 years of the journal’s publication with respect to the analyses and demands composed by Parren and her associates.36 In professing women’s ‘intellectual and moral emancipation and emancipation through work’, the journal put forward claims for legislative reform of women’s family status, education and professional options, systematically disclaiming political rights. Inscribed in the discourse of sexual difference, the intervention of Parren and her associates attempted to formulate what recent research has termed the Greek version of emancipation.37 The ‘moderate’ emancipation that Parren claimed did not question women’s biological and social differences. On the contrary, it aimed, in the name of these differences, to provide women – and especially middle-class women – with a positive model of social and national citizenship. Parren called for the lifting of women’s social exclusion and for the right to socially and nationally useful education and professional activity. Basing her ideas on the concept of patriotic motherhood, Parren demanded the reform of marital relations, practical

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and domestic education as well as the right to professional qualifications that would secure economic independence in accordance with female virtues. Her concept of womanhood was based on the duty of all women to ‘seek any kind of work that would ensure the prosperity of her household and the moral glory of her country’.38 With respect to women’s position in the family, research has already highlighted the contradiction deriving from the analysis of the family by The Ladies’ Journal on the basis of sexual difference.39 Parren had no doubt that women’s principal vocation was marriage. She even declared in the first issue of The Ladies’ Journal her recognition that ‘man’s will should axiomatically prevail not only in the polity, but also in the family’.40 Women’s rights depended ‘on the particular services that women were being called to offer as mothers (to the nation, to society or to the polity)’. Thus, the editor of The Ladies’ Journal was adopting the national and social role that women of her class were accorded by the dominant ideology of her time.41 However, from the start, in focusing on the model of middle-class marriage, she denounced the terms of this marriage and the hypocrisy underlying the recurrent formula that the household is the ‘woman’s kingdom’. The husband had all power even on matters considered to pertain to the competence of the wife, whose legal status was thus identified with that of minors and criminals.42 Parren considered the treatment of women as minors, who were then exposed to the abusive use of power which the law as well as society granted men, to be even more serious than social hypocrisy.43 The relevant writings, scattered over the years in The Ladies’ Journal, specified the measures to be taken. At first the demands concerned women’s, that is middle-class women’s, rights to manage their own property and income, to the custody of their children in the event of widowhood or divorce for liability of the husband, to participate in family councils for orphaned children and to be accepted as witnesses in any notarial act and in civil cases in general. Later the demands to protect girls from compliant parents and prospective fiancés by raising the age of majority for girls from 12 to 16 years and making the securing of women’s property in marriage compulsory were added. In fact it was once again the issue of the pending civil code that was raised.44 It has already been noted how central the issue of women’s work was in The Ladies’ Journal. It has been maintained that Parren’s argumentation in favour of work was bounded by the ‘problematic coexistence’ of contradictory arguments inherent in the notion of sexual difference: she conceived women’s work as a right as well as a duty, insisting on the need to maintain a strict sexual division of labour.45 In fact, Parren distinguished between women’s work in three classbounded categories, irrespective of their marital status: ‘charitable’, ‘progressive’ and ‘bread-winning’, with the first concerning the ‘superior classes’, the second ‘the multitudinous middle classes’, while the third concerned the ‘lower classes’.46 Her main concern was for work for women of her own social position, for whom she claimed new professional options as well as more involvement in the family enterprise and whose every conquest she systematically celebrated in her journal.

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The concern of The Ladies’ Journal with the condition of working-class women was also focused on their preparation for combining waged work with being good wives and mothers. Yet, while professing the preventive character of charity, Parren repeatedly criticized the reforming public activities of middle- and upper-class women of the period for their insufficient focus on practical intervention. As the first wave of industrialization in the 1870s and 1880s revealed the new image of the working woman and child, Parren frequently denounced the absence of any state regulation for their protection. Together with her associates and other ladies’ committees, she also set out to undertake the preparation of women of the lower classes for waged work as well as for domestic duties.47 In fact, these women’s logic was not far from the logic of the reformers who instituted protective regulations in the first decade of the twentieth century. According to these, working-class women had to be protected because of their physical weakness, but mostly in order to preserve their primary duties as potential or actual wives and mothers. In other words, they were granted protection precisely because they lacked the autonomy that was considered the prerogative of citizenship. Yet this convergence stemmed from different reasoning. While for state reformers working-class women’s vulnerability derived from their physical inferiority, for women reformers it was a product of their class and gender position.48 In the 30 years of publication of The Ladies’ Journal, Parren never ceased to disclaim women’s political rights. It has been recently argued that she was forced to do so in response to the constant severe reactions against any prospect of women’s political emancipation that were being formulated by intellectuals, both men and women alike.49 However, Parren did not perceive her intervention as being less political for that. From the beginning she made it clear that her aim was ‘to prove the real vocation [of our sex] in the family as well as in the state’.50 In her view, women’s politics had two distinct dimensions: first, their rights ‘as a person and as a citizen’ in the name of justice and national interest;51 second, their de facto if informal mingling in party politics through the influence that they exercised on those around them. We have already mentioned the reforms that the editor of The Ladies’ Journal and her colleagues considered necessary for women to be able to adequately fulfil their duties as wives and mothers: they concerned education, work and family relations. Nevertheless these fields were perceived as highly political. They constituted the requirements for the construction of a positive version of female ‘politics’, that is women’s public action compatible with the vocation dictated by their sex. For Parren, women were being educated as citizens, and in fact politevondai (acting in politics) precisely through their participation in educational, charitable and national activities, and to a lesser extent in professional work. ‘Women’s politics’, usually corrupted by men’s politics, had to undergo a radical modification in order to prove that it was actually ‘superior to the politics of men’.52 The demands that some educated middle-class women formulated in the decades before and after the turn of the century were phrased in accordance with predominant definitions of womanhood. According to their logic, women’s citizenship was not an abstract notion of rights, but the outcome of a vocation,

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a collective duty deriving from female virtues and patriotic motherhood.53 However, this duty, if it was conceived as separate from any notion of political rights, was nevertheless considered highly political, delineating a female version of politics. This framework was only overturned during the inter-war years, with the emergence of a new movement in the context of which women’s civil, political and social rights were claimed in the name of the democratic principle and universal human rights. The formulation of such a radical agenda was made possible because of the prevailing ideological assumptions and the general political and social circumstances of the inter-war years. In the aftermath of the country’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War in 1922, which ended a long period of effervescent nationalism, the inter-war period was characterized by liberalism, industrialization, political and social reform and the growing representation of a wider range of social groupings. Research has highlighted the differences between this period of structured feminist organizations which were affiliated to international ones and systematically claimed social, economic and political equality for women, and the previous one.54 Feminist demands now centred around political rights and the right to equal work. Inter-war feminists based their demands for women’s equality on the concept of dikaioma (right). They elaborated a view of female citizenship that stressed similarities and not differences between men and women and invoked women’s inclusion in the political community. In fact, women’s visibility in the public realm, in paid work as well as in social contention, was to become a constitutive element of social and political life in the inter-war years. The centrality and novelty of the issue of political rights in the discourse of inter-war feminists and the vivid apprehension that it raised among intellectuals and politicians has attracted the interest of feminist historians for some time now.55 Less research has been done in respect of other feminist demands of the period, concerning what were considered to be the necessary legislative reforms. Feminists developed a twofold strategy. On the one hand, they demanded the right to vote as a precondition to political equality. On the other hand, they viewed legislative reforms as a precondition for their civil and social equality, and they especially targeted the existing laws regulating work, the family, unwed mothers, education and prostitution. The logic supporting these claims was not the same throughout the period nor among the different organizations. Debates on these issues reveal the slow and ultimately incomplete break with the ideology of sexual difference, concealed behind the radical novelty that represented the systematic demand for political rights. Women’s restricted civil rights continued to preoccupy inter-war feminists, as middle-class women entered paid work in growing numbers and female education was at last being undertaken by the state. All feminist organizations demanded that women have the rights to serve as witnesses and jurors, to obtain custody of children, to participate in family councils, and to start a commercial business.56 It is interesting to note, however, that, while the legal framework remained more or less the same, the list of demands concerning reforms in family relations and the legal

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status of women in general displayed noticeable differences from those of the previous period.57 Women’s civil rights had so marginal a place on the feminist agenda of the period that one is tempted to speculate on the influence of social practice on the successive interpretations of an unfixed and heterogeneous legislative framework.58 Nevertheless more radical claims were now added even if only by the more radical organizations. These were equality of rights between parents with respect to children; equal treatment in demands for divorce; protection for the ‘natural child’ and his or her mother; and ‘pursuit of fatherhood’, that is the right of illegitimate children to legally claim recognition by their father; finally the abolition of state-regulated prostitution and the penalization of clients.59 The League for Woman’s Rights (Syndesmos Ellinidon yper ton Dikaiomaton tis Gynaikos) was the most important active and radical organization of the period, which was affiliated to the International Alliance for Women’s Suffrage. It placed these last two issues at the centre of its demands for legislative reform, along with political rights and equality at work.60 By bringing those forms of femininity that had up to then been concealed from the public gaze as shameful and unnatural to the forefront of public debates, these claims represented the novelty of the feminist analysis of gender relations. They stressed the state’s responsibility to legally protect women in need or victims of male abuse, to recognize them as subjects of citizenship rights instead of as targets of charity intervention. However, issues such as the protection of unwed mothers and the denunciation of the double moral standard in the legal treatment of prostitutes, which implicitly questioned the dominant version of femininity, were met with growing resistance by other women’s organizations of the period as well as by male intellectuals.61 In fact, inter-war feminists were mostly divided with respect to women’s social rights, be it the protection of motherhood or protection at work. In a way, these divisions were reproducing the divergent position of each organization as to the appropriate strategy for attaining the vote. They all agreed that the goal of their common struggle was the ‘assimilation of women’s position to the position of men’.62 However, for some – like the National Council of Greek Women (Ethniko Symvoulio Ellinidon), member of the International Women’s Council, or the Socialist Association of Women (Socialistikos Omilos Gynaikon), member of the International of Socialist Women, albeit from different perspectives63 – this goal could not be attained without a long process. This process would involve the preparation of women for equality, a systematic acculturation to the notion as well as to the exercise of rights; in the meantime, they would continue to need protection in order to be able to perform their duties. For the feminists of the League, on the other hand, statutory equality was the only acceptable and rightful means for women’s protection, be it as wives, mothers or workers. Therefore, they opposed any protective measure that differentiated women’s position from that of men in the name of their constitutional physical, moral or social weakness. The only protection that they considered necessary and due to women was the protection of motherhood.64 The debates on the different meanings of motherhood are relevant here. If in the early 1920s some feminists could publicly claim that women’s autonomous

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development should not be hampered by anything, not even by motherhood, the burdens of which should be undertaken by the state, they were immediately made to understand that similar views were detrimental to the feminist cause.65 Soon most inter-war feminists came to conceive motherhood as a social service that women rendered to the polity, equivalent to military service and almost synonymous with womanhood.66 Yet, if motherhood was a social service, it had to be protected by the state in the name of justice and not as a female weakness: in that case protection was a right due to women for performing their duty toward the community. It was the feminist conception of social provision that ultimately linked the analysis of unwed motherhood, prostitution and family relations in a proposition of women’s social citizenship, along with the main claim for political citizenship. For feminists, social provision meant that the state had to intervene legally to restore social justice and attend to its citizens in need, and that was what distinguished it from charity. They conceived social welfare as being based on social solidarity and social consciousness, on prevention and precaution. It was for this reason that, apart from the demands already mentioned, they also asked for measures to be introduced in favour of working mothers, such as the creation of a maternity fund, kindergartens, youth summer camps, sponsored messes for schoolchildren and so on.67 The debates on the projected establishment of a social security system in the 1930s gave them the opportunity to specify their demands for the social welfare of working mothers. They asked for the insurance of motherhood in the form of substantial pregnancy and breastfeeding allowances, and promoting the payment of family allowances directly to women in person.68 At the end of the inter-war period, the memo submitted by the Committee of Women’s Organizations to the Commission for Constitutional Revision demanded that motherhood should be constitutionally defined as a ‘social function’ under state protection, independently of its legal status.69 All inter-war feminists considered paid work a right for women.70 Yet they were not unanimous about its relation to the duties of motherhood. Married women’s right to work, which was subjected to growing attacks in the 1930s, was an important aspect of the debates surrounding women’s rights and duties, a locus where diverging conceptions of citizenship were being formulated. The feminists of the league were in the minority in opposing differentiated treatment of women workers through protective measures that they believed confirmed their inferior position in the labour market. Feminists insisted on underlining their differences from conservative analyses of motherhood, which considered it incompatible with any kind of women’s public activities, and especially paid work.71 Furthermore, the 1931 constitution of the revisionary committee for the civil code brought married women’s right to freely engage in waged work to the centre of public debates, as the prevailing opinion of its members was against it, provoking the reaction of feminists.72 The feminist debates on the demands of women employees to be able to leave service before men, if married with children, illustrate the complexity of the project of equality in relation to the paradoxes inherent in women’s citizenship. This was even more so since the debate concerned female civil servants whose position as citizens without rights was made all the more apparent.73 Underlying both

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debates, on working women’s protection and on the terms of employment of female civil servants, were confrontations between two conceptions of womanhood, one based on sexual difference and the other on human equality. The consistency of this confrontation is made plain in the outcome of the feminists’ campaign which was disproportionate to the intensity of their mobilization. Their sole significant gain was the institutionalization of a decree in 1930, which granted women the right to vote at a municipal level. According to its provisions, however, this right only concerned literate women over the age of 30: therefore, it actually limited potential female voters to a mere 9.6 per cent of the adult female population.74 The constitutional paradox of these stipulations did not go unnoticed at the time since they defined the franchise as being conditional to certain qualifications and therefore, by limiting it to a specific category of ‘the people’, they undermined the prevalent democratic principle. By then, however, the wider political context had made the claim for women’s equality increasingly irrelevant. Repetitive violations of the democratic regime, widespread attacks against the universality of male suffrage and the instituting of anti-communism as a state ideology in the name of national interests, had restricted the application of the democratic principle. In a period when authoritative forms of political practice gained momentum while the principle of the sovereignty of the people became more of an empty letter, the feminist insistence on equality as a right seemed to be untimely and unattainable. As research has shown, the country’s political adventures over the next 20 years brought new political priorities to the forefront, resulting in the creation of an all the more clearly differentiated progressive and conservative women’s camp. Yet, for both, women’s allegiance was once again made in the name of ‘female nature’ and ‘patriotic motherhood’. For example, for the new anti-fascist women’s front, women’s political rights were indispensable for the fulfilment of their natural areas of competence, that is, motherhood and the preservation of life and peace.75 Women were granted the vote in 1952 and wider political rights in 1955, in an attempt to improve the country’s international status in the aftermath of the Civil War. By then the subjection of married women to male authority had already been sanctioned by the civil code of 1946. Their subordinated position in the labour market had also been confirmed by the differentiation of minimum wages along gender lines in 1937, as well as by the existing sexual division of labour. As a result, their civil and social rights were seriously curtailed. Until the equality of the sexes was constitutionally established in 1975, their only gain was the possibility to leave a public post after 15 years of employment when married and the right to limited maternity leave and allowances when insured. In the meantime, and one is tempted to argue since then, Greek women’s civil, social and political rights have not actually been negotiated in terms of law and government but in terms of gender relations in everyday life. Up to now, we have examined the legal position of women in the family and in the polity during the period 1864–1952, as well as the discursive transformations of the claims articulated by advocates of women’s rights. We have also speculated

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on the adjustment of the legislative framework defining family relations – the absence of a nationally unified civil code until very late – to social practices. A number of questions arise from this. Which of these three dimensions of the issue of gendered citizenship was prevalent in the Greek case? Are there any connections between the relatively limited weight of claims for reforming women’s legal status, the severe reactions against prospects of women’s political emancipation, and the specific relation of Greek society to the state? Evidence suggests that the indeterminacy of the legislative framework defining family relations left to social practices the delimitation of rights and duties of men and women not only in the family but also in society at large. In other words, the forms that the principle of male supremacy, on which the noikokireoi model was based, took, in everyday relations, were not fixed but constantly negotiable. It even seems that the forms of family relations inherent to this model presented important variations across time as well as between social groups.76 The fact that women were formally denied political rights on the basis of this very principle, that is to say they were denied the autonomy required by the bearer of citizenship rights, has often obscured the actual possibilities that this fluidity allowed. Viewed from this perspective, claims for women’s rights acquire new meaning. In this chapter I have identified two moments in which demands for women’s rights were being articulated. Women activists at the turn of the century focused their intervention on women’s civil and social rights, whereas the feminist movement of the inter-war years put political rights at the forefront of its struggle. In both cases the contest over the meaning of motherhood constituted an important arena of legitimization for women’s claims, albeit in radically different ways. In their constant efforts to transform motherhood from biological destiny to the basis of women’s inclusion in the political body, they invested it with radically different meanings. While the women associated with The Ladies’ Journal strove to endow motherhood with a national mission, inter-war feminists conceived it as a social service. In both cases, the integration of women into the polity was attempted by means of ascribing motherhood with the meaning that in each period was considered to be most compatible with dominant conceptions of citizenship, and the rights and duties inscribed in the relation between civil society and the state. In other words, they both attempted to politicize motherhood and in doing so they undermined the public–private dichotomy. In this sense it would be mistaken to measure their effect through the extent of the legislative reforms instigated by their actions. My contention is that their influence should be assessed indirectly on the basis of the reactions they provoked. Would it be wrong to assume that these reactions were, at least at first, not so much the outcome of an already fixed configuration of gendered relations resisting change, as the product of a set of power relations under constant negotiation? With the growing expansion of women’s public activities, however, the need for the formal modification of their legal status in the family, at work, in the polity, was made all the more pressing. If the articulation of the demand for women’s statutory equality was one outcome of this process, the other was the legal consolidation of their dependent position. Women gained political rights

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only shortly after their subordinate position in the family and in the labour market was finally fixed, that is after they lost their entitlement to civil and social rights. This fact had lasting effects on the content and meaning of their citizenship and on the quality of the relation of civil society to the state at large.

Notes 1 I wish to thank Gisela Bock, Eleni Fournaraki, Marina Meidani, Karen Offen, Akis Papataxiarchis and Angelika Psarra as well as the editors of this volume for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. A lot of important work on the subject has been published internationally since the final version of this chapter was submitted in late 1999. It has not been possible to acknowledge in the footnotes but the most relevant of this material. 2 Sotirelis, G. C., e  ‡ C  E

f 1864–1909. I‡ c  kf   d kc [Constitution and Elections in Greece 1864–1909: Ideology and Practice of Universal Suffrage], foreword by A. Manesis (Athens: Themelio Publications, 1991). 3 Liakos, A., Ek c    d  M‡ a ‡. T  ‡C k‡c Ek c   f     b ‡ b [Work and Politics in the Interwar Years: The International Labor Office and the Emergence of Social Institutions] (Athens: Foundation for Research and Culture of the Commercial Bank of Greece, 1993). 4 Hatziiossif, C., H k f ‡ d: H  c  ‡

 d  c 1830–1940 [The Old Moon: Industry in the Greek Economy, 1830–1940] (Athens: Themelio Publications, 1993), and Hatziiossif, C., ‘kc  ‡‡ C

C ‡ , k‡ ka ‡ e ‡  ‡ d   d  19  b’ [Democracy and Clientelist Relations, Three Recent Analyses of Greek Politics in the Nineteenth Century], Md [Mnemon], 16 (1994), 167–97; Dertilis, G. B., ‘Introduction: Structuration sociale et spécificités historiques (XVIIIe–XXe siècles)’, in Georges B. Dertilis (ed.), Banquiers, usuriers et paysans: Réseaux de crédit et stratégies du capital en Grèce (1780–1930) (Paris: Découverte, 1988), pp. 11–32; Sotirelis, e  ‡ C  E

f 1864–1909. 5 Sant Cassia, P. and Bada, C., The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-century Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Papataxiarchis, E., ‘La valeur du ménage: Classes sociales, stratégies matrimoniales et loi ecclésiastique à Lesvos au 19e siècle’, in S. Woolf (ed.), Espaces et familles dans l’Europe du Sud à l’âge moderne (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1993), pp. 109–42. 6 Avdela, E., ‘Genere, famiglia e strategie del lavoro in Grecia’, Passato e Presente, 15, 41 (1997), 145–63. 7 Sotirelis, e  ‡ C  E

f 1864–1909. For legal debates on the issue of women’s vote in 19th century Greece, see now Fournaraki, E., ‘E c c a   ‡‡c d d;’ K d  d c   ‡ a   j  a    d  Ef  19  b [‘Why is she deprived of the vote?’ Universal male suffrage and women’s exclusion from politics in 19th century Greece], Md [Mnimon] 24 (2002): 179–226. 8 Fournaraki, E., ‘ “Institutrice, femme et mère”: Idées sur l’education des femmes en Grèce du XIXe siècle (1830–1880)’, PhD thesis, vols. I–II, University of Paris 7 (1992); Varikas, E., H ‡C‡k   Kk b. H C‡    ‡   d

‡c   E

f, 1833–1907 [The Ladies’ Revolt: The Birth of Feminist Consciousness in Greece, 1833–1907] (Athens: Foundation for Research and Culture of the Commercial Bank of Greece, 1987).

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9 Offen, K., ‘Contexualizing the Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-century Europe (1789–1914)’, in R. Bridenthal, S. M. Stuart and M. E. Wiesner (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd edition (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 327–55; Bock, G., Women in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 10 Butler, J. and Scott, J. (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); Rossi-Doria, A., Diventare cittadine. Il voto alle donne in Italia (Florence: Giunti, 1996); Frader, L. L., ‘Social Citizens without Citizenship: Working-class Women and Social Policy in Interwar France’, Social Politics, Summer/Fall (1996), 111–35; Canning, K. and Rose, S. (eds.), ‘Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities’, Special Issue, Gender & History 13, 3 (2001). 11 Tilly, L. A., ‘Women, Work and Citizenship’, International Labor and Working-class History, 52 (1997), 1–26; Tilly, L. A., ‘Women, Work and Citizenship: Response to Comment’, International Labor and Working-class History, 53 (1997), 179–81. 12 Psarra, A., ‘MCk d c ; EC ‡C   ‡c ‡k C (1870–1920)’ [Mother or Citizen? Greek Versions of Female Emancipation (1870–1920)], KC k  ‡c M‡‡ b  Ek‡b   c [Centre for Women’s Studies and Research Diotima], T e    f: Ec ,  c‡   a  c [The Gender of Rights: Power, Women and Citizenship] (Athens: Nefeli Publications, 1999), pp. 90–107. 13 Marshal, T. H., ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in T. H., Marshal and T. Botomore, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto, 1992), pp. 3–51. 14 Van Steenbergen, B., ‘The Condition of Citizenship: An Introduction’, in B. Van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 1–4; Bottomore, T., ‘Citizenship and Social Class, Forty Years On’, in T. H. Marshal and T. Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto, 1992), pp. 55–93; Tilly, C. (ed.), Citizenship, Identity and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 15 The list of relevant literature is long. For their relevance to the present discussion, see Lister, R., ‘Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis’, Feminist Review, 57 (1997), 28–48; Frazer, N. and Gordon, L., ‘Civil Citizenship against Social Citizenship?’, in B. van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 90–107; Jost, H. U., Pavillon, M. and Valloton, F. (eds.), La politique des droits. Citoyenneté et construction des genres aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1994); Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political; Tilly, ‘Women, Work and Citizenship’, and KC k  ‡c M‡‡ b  Ek‡b   c , T e    f. 16 Tilly, ‘Women, Work and Citizenship’; Scott, J. W., Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Offen, K., European Feminisms, 1700–1950. A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Historians have long been debating the relevance of the classification of historical movements for women’s rights according to their emphasis on difference or on equality. See Psarra, A., ‘"‡  a: H C,  ka,   c‡’ [Feminism: Word, Time, Meaning], c [Whirl], 6 (1993), 31–54. 17 In spite of the consecutive attempts since 1835 for the drafting of a civil code. See Pitsakis, K. G., ‘E  d’ [Introduction], in K. Armenopoulos, ka‡k Na  d Ef [Drafts of Laws or The Six Books], edited by K. G., Pitsakis (Athens: Dodoni Publications, 1971), pp. ’- k ’. 18 Krassas, A., e Ae  c. ’: O‡‡ a c  [System of Civil Law IV: Family Law] 5th edn (Athens: 1927); Roïlos, G. L., Aa Kb: O‡‡ a c  [Civil code: Family Law], Part I (Athens: 1946). 19 Demertzis, K., ‘T   b   a ‡   ‡‡c ’ [Woman’s Rights in the Family], Ec [Greek Woman], 13, 12 (1933), 237. 20 Marriage was legally permitted for girls at the age of 12.

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21 Davidoff, L. and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 200. 22 Roïlos, Aa Kb, pp. 54–5. 23 Krassas, e  A e  c . For more details see Law X’ on minors and their tutelage, emancipation and custody, E ‡kc   ‡ ‡ (Government Gazette) 42, 23.8.1861, pp. 283–93. In fact, the law recognized the mother as having the right to obtain custody of her children or sit on family councils in the case of father’s loss of paternal power or in the case of his death. However, practice often dictated otherwise. 24 Stipulated by commercial law since 1835. See Karakatsanis, I., E ka Na  Ea  [Manual of Commercial Law] (Athens: 1930). 25 Women’s active engagement in the 1897 Greco-Turkish War in the organization of fund-raising, nursing and relief activities is considered the high point of this action. See Avdela, E. and Psarra, A., ‘Engendering “Greekness”: Women’s Emancipation and Irredentist Politics in Nineteenth-century Greece’, Historia. Journal of the Historical Society of Israel, 5 (2000), 109–21. 26 Varikas, E., ‘Gender and National Identity in Fin de Siècle Greece’, Gender & History, 5, 2 (1993), 269–83. 27 Rendall, J., ‘Citizenship, Culture and Civilization: The Languages of British Suffragists, 1866–1874’, in C. Daley and M. Nolan (eds.), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Melman, B., Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 28 Fournaraki, E., ‘d   d  e e   Ef   19  b ’ [Physical Education of the Two Sexes in Nineteenth-century Greece], k f   Tkc  ‡ e  c : O ka     kc .    kc    d c      ‡a   [Acts of the III International Symposium: Times of History: For a History of Childhood and Youth] (Athens: Historical Records of Greek Youth, 1998); Varikas, H ‡C‡k  Kkb. 29 Ziogou-Karastergiou, S., H MC E c‡   kb   Ef (1830–1893) [Girls’ Secondary Education in Greece (1830–1893)] (Athens: Historical Archives of Greek Youth, Youth Secretariat, 1986). 30 Marshal, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, p. 15. 31 Ziogou-Karastergiou, H MC E c‡   kb; Bakalaki, A. and Elegmitou, E., H ‡ c‡ ‘‡    c ’     ‡c  d  . Aa   ck   ‡  e kf  C   ‡ ‡d ‡ kke   1929 [Education in Household and Female Duties: From the Foundation of the Greek State to 1929] (Athens: Historical Archives of Greek Youth, Youth Secretariat, 1987); Fournaraki, E. (ed.), E c‡   d   kb. E  c k    c (1830–1910): ‘E  a [Education and Training of Girls: The Greek Situation (1830–1910): An Anthology] (Athens: Historical Records of Greek Youth, Youth Secretariat, 1987) and Fournaraki, ‘Institutrice, femme et mère’; Varikas, H ‡C‡k  Kkb. 32 For the first women’s associations and ladies’ committees, see Psarra, ‘MCk d  c; Korasidou, M., O f   A b    ‡k ‡C  . b‡    kc   ‡ d k‡e    19 b [The Poor of Athens and Their Therapists: Poverty and Philanthropy in the Greek Capital in the Nineteenth Century] (Athens: Historical Records of Greek Youth, Youth Secretariat, Centre for Neohellenic Research, National Research Foundation, 1995); Ziogou-Karastergiou, S. H MC E c‡   kb; and [Anonymous] ‘Kf   ‡ Ad   ‡c ‡c f ‡kf ka ’ [Catalogue of Women’s Associations in Athens in Order of Seniority], H‡k a    E ‡kc   Kkb [Diary of The Ladies’ Journal], 12 (1900), 134–6.

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34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47

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There are interesting analogies with the case of Bulgaria. See Daskalova, K., ‘Bulgarian Women in Movements, Laws, Discourses (1840s–1940s)’, Bulgarian Historical Review, 1–2, (1999), 184–200. Cova, A., Maternité et droits des femmes en France (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Paris: Anthropos, 1997); Riley, D., ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan Press, 1988); Poovey, M., Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). With respect to the relation between gender, citizenship and nationalism, there are noticeable analogies with the case of Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See Badran, M., Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Baron, B., The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994). Varikas, H ‡C‡k  Kkb. Sklaveniti, K., ‘T  ‡c C  1908–1918’ [Women’s Periodicals 1908–1918],  f [I Read], 198 (1988), 13–22; Psarra, A., ‘T   ak  ‡ k C  d H “‡ d”   c  K  kka  kkC’ [The Novel of Emancipation or The ‘Wise’ Utopia of Kallirroe Parren], ‘Addentum’ in K. Parren, H X‡k ‡ C [The Emancipated Woman] (Athens: Ekati, 1999), pp. 407–86. Psarra, ‘MCk d c ’; and Psarra, ‘T   ak  ‡ k C ’. [Parren, K.], ‘Ek b‡!’ [Let Us Work!], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 6, 279 (1892), 1. Varikas, H ‡C‡k  Kkb. [Parren, K.], ‘kak  ’ [Programme], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 1, 1 (1887), 1. Varikas, H ‡C‡k  Kkb, p. 223; Avdela, and Psarra, ‘Engendering “Greekness”. [Parren, K.], ‘O a     c‡   a’ [Our Laws and Women’s Domains], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 5, 218 (1891), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘K f ‡ ‡c  Ck   b ‡ kkc‡ ’ [More Urgent Reforms in Favor of Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 9, 407 (1895), 1–2. See for example [Parren, K.] ‘A Ec‡   a’ [Greek Women and the Law], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 16, 732 (1903), 1–2; [Parren, K.], ‘A Ec‡   a’. B’ [Greek Women and the Law: B], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 16, 733 (1903), 1–2; [Parren, K.],’ O  ‡‡e‡k   c‡’ [Liberals and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 995 (1910), 1361–3; Parren, K., ‘A  c‡   kc’ [Women and Patrimony], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 979 (1910), 977–8; Parren, K., ‘O  c a   c‡’ [The Old Laws and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 994 (1910), 1342–3; Parren, K., ‘Na    c ’ [Laws for Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 25, 998 (1911), 1459–60; Kalapothaki, M., ‘O E a e‡  Ec  f  1909’ [The National Union of Greek Women in 1909], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 988 (1910), 1232–36. Varikas, H ‡C‡k  Kkb. [Parren, K.], ‘Ek b‡!’. See also [Parren, K.], ‘kC ‡  ‡kf#  c‡’ [Women Should Be Working], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 5, 229, (1891), 1–2; [Parren, K.], ‘O fk‡  Ck  b  ’ [Men in Favour of Our Struggle], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 14, 617 (1900), 1–3. Bakalaki and Elegmitou, H ‡ c‡ ‘‡   c’     ‡c  d ; Korasidou, O f   Ab   ‡k ‡ C .

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48 Avdela, E., ‘ “To the Most Weak and Needy”: Women’s Protective Labor Legislation in Greece’, in U. Wikander, A. Kessler-Harris and J. Lewis (eds.), Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States and Australia, 1890–1920 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 290–317. 49 Psarra, ‘MCk d c ’; and Psarra, ‘T   ak  ‡ k C ’. 50 [Parren, K.], ‘kak  ’. 51 [Parren, K.], ‘T ‡e‡  ‡c  ‡ k C  ’ [What Do We Mean by Women’s Emancipation], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 8, 387 (1895), 1–2. For earlier uses of the term ‘citizen’ in relation to the social aspect of the female vocation, see Kehagia, K., ‘    c ‡C , d  a ‡C ‡ ‡  Z

‡c  f   d  k ‡c’ [Pedagogical Studies, or Speeches delivered at Zappeion during the Awarding of Prizes] (1876), in E. Fournaraki (ed.), E c‡   d  kb; in relation to diverse female activities, [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    c E c’ [Women and Municipal Elections], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 9, 410 (1895), 1–2; Vallinda, M. I. ‘T  d   a k  kc ’ [The Woman’s Duties to the Nation], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 8, 365 (1894), 1–2. For the opposition between ‘citizenship’ and ‘motherhood’ in the same period, see Psarra, ‘M Ck d c ’. 52 Parren, ‘A  c‡   kc’. See also Parren, ‘O  c a   c‡’ for a positive version of ‘women’s politics’. Compare Psarra, M Ck d

c . For women already involved in politics, [Parren, K.], ‘KCk , C   c‡’ [Government, Bills and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 1, 42 (1887), 1–2. For women’s politics corrupted by men, [Parren, K.], ‘H !d   c‡’ [The Vote and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 6, 258 (1892), 1–2; [Parren, K.], ‘T ‡e‡  ‡c  ‡ k C  ’; [Parren, K.], ‘K f ‡ ‡c  Ck   b ‡ kkc‡ ’; [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    c E c’; [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡  ‡ c’ [Women and the Elections], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 12, 562 (1899), 1–2; [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    d. T k d ’ [Women and Politics: The Backstage], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 12, 563 (1899), 1–2; [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    d’. A’ [Women and Politics: I], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 12, 565 (1899), 1–2; [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡   Bd’ [Women and Parliament], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 15, 694 (1902), 1–2 (‘women are involved in politics the wrong way’); Parren, K., ‘A ‡ c’ [Elections], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 26, 1018 (1912), 1913–14; Parren, K., ‘H  d   c‡’ [Politics and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 29, 1061 (1915), 2713–14. 53 For the relationship between women’s vocation and duty in contemporary Greece, see du Bouley, J., ‘Women – Images of their Nature and Destiny in Rural Greece’, in J. Dubish (ed.), Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 139–68. 54 For the first decades of the twentieth century, see Sklaveniti, ‘T  ‡c C  1908–1918’; for the inter-war period, Avdela, E. and Psarra, A. (eds), O ‡  a  Ef  M‡ C . Mc c [Feminism in Inter-war Greece: An Anthology] (Athens: Gnossi Publications, 1985). 55 Avdela and Psarra, O ‡  a  Ef  M‡ C ; Samiou, D., ‘T  f   b  Ec (1864–1952)’ [Greek Women’s Political Rights (1864–1952)], Md  [Mnemon], 12 (1989), 161–72. 56 e‡ Ec  Ck    f    a. Td   ‡e Eb‡  Ck  $d   a. ‘Ek : Ad [League of Greek Women in Favour of Woman’s Rights, Section of the International Alliance for Woman’s Suffrage. Seat: Athens].    b   Ec . A’ C

Gender and citizenship in Greece, 1864–1952

57

58

59

60

61 62 63 64

135

kf‡   C 1920 [For the Rights of the Greek Woman: First Year of Action of the League 1920], (n.p., n.d.); Gaïtanou-Gianniou, A., ‘T A’ ‡d  C k k  c   ka      e’ [The First Panhellenic Conference for the Protection of Motherhood and the Child], E c [Greek Woman], 10, 11 (1930), 225–34. Stouditou, A., ‘H  c   C  c ‡’ [Woman and Social Security], E c [Greek Woman], 13, 4 (1933), 66–7. See [ [Anonymous], ‘La femme Grecque’, E c [Greek Woman], 13, 7–8 (1933), 153–60 for changes in legislation concerning women’s civil status: the law on divorce (24.6.1920) stipulated that in the case of the husband having committed adultery the court could deny a request for divorce submitted by the wife; the law on the sale of dowry (18.4.1918) stipulated that a woman’s property in the form of dowry could not be sold without permission of the court and the consent of the woman; the law on wills (14.5.1911) stipulated that women were not accepted as witnesses. For protests against the law on divorce, see e ‡  Ec  Ck  f    a [League of Greek Women in favour of Woman’s Rights],   b   E c [For the Rights of the Greek Woman and [Anonymous], Na 2228 ‡kc c   ‡c  ‡kc e ‡C‡ [Law 2228 on Divorce and Relevant Official Reports] (Athens: G. I. Vassiliou, 1921). Stouditou, A., ‘H a   ‡f  a  f  k’c  e

c’ [The Capacity of Married Woman in Our Law], O Ab     c [The Struggle of Woman], 164 (1933), 3–4; Stouditou, A., ‘H a   ‡f  a  f  k’c  e c’ [The Capacity of Married Woman in Our Law], O Ab     c [The Struggle of Woman], 165 (1933), 4, 6. Theodoropoulou, A. S., T ‡ C  ‡c  Ck   ‡ ‡e  [The International Women’s Conference in Geneva] (Athens: Feminist Library, 1920); Theodoropoulou, A. S., O Ab     c [The Struggle of Woman] (Athens: Feminist Library, 1923); Gaïtanou-Gianniou, A., ‘T  C k  Eb  ‡c    kd d‡’ [Conference of Greek Lycees and the Historical Truth], E c [Greek Woman], 1, 4–5, (1921), 102–5; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, A., ‘To  C k  Eb  ‡c   ‡ c  ’ [Conference of Greek Lycees and its Legislation], 1, E c [Greek Woman], 1, 6–7, (1921), 158–68; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, A., ‘T  C k  Eb  ‡c   ‡ c

 ’ [Conference of Greek Lycees and its Legislation], 2, E c [Greek Woman], 1, 8 (1921), 217–19; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, ‘T  C k  Eb  ‡c   ‡ c  ’ [Conference of Greek Lycees and its Legislation], 3, E c [Greek Woman], 1, 9 (1921), 244–9; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, ‘T A’  ‡ d   Ck

kc    ka    e’. It is interesting to note that the 1921 articles by Gaïtanou-Gianniou constitute one of the rare occasions when the politics of Kallirroe Parren of the time were criticised by inter-war feminists as ‘conservative’. References to the legacy of The Ladies’ Journal are rare in the inter-war feminist press. Theodoropoulou, O Ab     c; [Anonymous], ‘H d     ka  ’ [The Pursuit of Fatherhood], O Ab     c [The Struggle of Woman], 31, 1 (1926); Th.[eodoropoulou], A., ‘E‡k ‡c ‡‡kd ‡’ [Profitable Enterprises], O Ab     c [The Struggle of Woman], 120–1 (1930), 1–2; Papadimitriou, A., K  d  kd ‡ C ‡kc b C  [Social and Historical Study on Natural Children] (Athens: Feminist Library, 1922). Gaïtanou-Gianniou, A. ‘T A’ ‡d  C k’. Antoniadou, S., ‘A c ka ’ [Instead of a Prologue], E c [Greek Woman], 1, 2 (1921), 47. Avdela, and Psarra O ‡ a  E f  M‡ C. On women’s paid work and on working-women’s protection, see Avdela, E.,  a f  C   e. K‡ka   ‡kc f e  

 a C, 1908–1955 [Female Civil Servants: The Sexual Division of Labour

136

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in the Public Sector, 1908–1955] (Athens: Foundation for Research and Culture of the Commercial Bank of Greece, 1990); Avdela, ‘To the Most Weak and Needy’. 65 Miranda, ‘O “‡ Ck‡”  C  Ck    f    b’ [‘Mondays’ of the League for Woman’s Rights], Ec [Greek Woman], 1, 3 (1921), 81. 66 Theodoropoulou, O Ab  " c ; Desipri, M. G., H  c    d ka [Woman and Social Welfare] (Athens: Feminist Library, 1922); Th.[eodoropoulou], A., ‘"‡  a   ka  ’ [Feminism and Motherhood], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 163 (1933), 1–2. 67 Desipri, H  c    d ka ; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, ‘T Ck 

 E b ‡c    k d d‡ ’; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, ‘T Ck   E b ‡c   ‡c ’, 1; Gaïtanou-Gianniou, ‘T Ck   E b ‡c   ‡c ’, 2; GaïtanouGianniou, A. ‘T Ck   E b ‡c   ‡c ’, 3. 68 Svolou, M., ‘O ‡‡ f ‡ a ’ [Family Allowances], O Ab   c [The Struggle of Woman], 32 (1926), 3–6; [Anonymous], ‘O   C  c‡ . T  a  ’ [Social Insurance: Memo of the League for Woman’s Rights], O Aba  aca [The Struggle of Woman], 177 (1934), 3–4; Stouditou, ‘H  c    C  c‡ ’; Someritis, S., H d ‡k c    d fd  [Waged labour and Its Social Security (Athens: Annex of Socialist Review, 1933); Rousopoulou, A., kb ‡c d d   ‡k d  ‡c [First Elements of Social Policy and Labour Legislation] (Athens: Flamma Publications, 1937); Rousopoulou, A., ‘E a f  C    c‡  d’ [Marriage and Child Allowances to Women Employees], Ec [Greek Woman], 18, 4, (1938), 73–4. 69. See the memo at the Zoïtopoulos-Zioutos Archives, file 67, typescript. I thank Katerina Mavrokefalidou for allowing me to access her father’s archives. See also O Ab   c [The Struggle of Woman]. 193–4 and 195–6 (1935). For the committee and the new women’s front of the late 1930s, see Psarra, A., ‘Xk a   ‡ f  (1934–1948)’ [Annals of a Transition (1934–1948)],  f [I Read], 198 (1988), 29–36. It should be noted, however, that in inter-war Greece, motherhood was not at the centre of feminist politics, as recent historical scholarship has shown for other countries. For the relation of ‘maternal politics’ to the construction of welfare states and the importance of motherhood in claims for women’s citizenship, see Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes; Frader, ‘Social Citizens’; Pedersen, S., Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Koven, S. and Michel, S. (eds.), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Land, H., ‘Introduction’, Gender & History, 4, 3 (1992), 283–92, special issue on ‘Motherhood, Race and the State in the Twentieth Century’; Skocpol, T., Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Bock, G. and Thane, P. (eds.), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). 70 The issue has been publicly debated since the beginning of the century. Most considered women’s paid work an inevitable if sometimes undesirable reality. See Sklaveniti, ‘T  ‡c C  ’ and Avdela, ‘To the Most Weak and Needy’. 71 Gaïtanou-Gianniou, ‘T A’  ‡d  Ck ; [Anonymous], ‘T Ck  k c  M ka      d H c ’ [Conference on the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 127 (1930), 2–4; and Svolou, M., ‘Ek c   ka ’ [Work and Motherhood], O Ab   c [The Struggle of Woman], 127, 4 (1930), 7–8.

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72 Stouditou, A. ‘H  a   ‡f  a’. On these debates, see Demertzis, ‘T   b   a’; Roïlos, ‘Aa Kb’; and Gazis, A., ‘O E‡Ck  B‡ #C     a c ’ [Eleftherios Venizelos and Private Law], in G. T. Mavrogordatos and C. Hatziiossif (eds.), B‡‡ a   a ‡k a [Venizelism and Bourgeois Modernization] (Iraklion: Crete University Press, 1988), pp. 45–66. This point constitutes a noticeable difference between the Greek and other cases. Middle-class married women’s control over their property and their right to freely engage in professional work have been central issues in several European countries since the end of the nineteenth century and were at the basis of important mobilization and debate. See Käppeli, A.-K., ‘Scènes féministes’, in G. Duby and M. Perrot (eds.), Histoire des femmes en Occident, t. 4, G. Fraisse and M. Perrot (eds.), Le XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1991), pp. 495–525; Offen, European Feminisms. 73 Avdela,  a  f C e. 74 Women who qualified as voters participated in the municipal elections of 1934. Samiou, ‘T  f   b  Ec’; Avdela and Psarra, O ‡  a  Ef  M‡ C . 75 Psarra, ‘Xk a   ‡ f ’. 76 Loizos, P. and Papataxiarchis E., ‘Introduction: Gender and Kinship in Marriage and Alternative Contexts’, in P. Loizos and E. Papataxiarchis (eds.), Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 3–25.

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[Parren, K.], ‘f  ‡k c ’ [Marriage and Work], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 1, 35 (1887), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘KCk , C   c‡’ [Government, Bills and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 1, 42 (1887), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘O a     c‡   a’ [Our Laws and Women’s Domains], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 5, 218 (1891), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘kC ‡  ‡kf#  c‡’ [Women Should Be Working], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 5, 229 (1891), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘H !d   c‡’ [The Vote and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 6, 258 (1892), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘Ek b‡!’ [Let Us Work!], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 6, 279 (1892), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘T ‡e‡  ‡c  ‡ k C  ’ [What Do We Mean by Women’s Emancipation], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 8, 387 (1895), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘K f ‡ ‡c  Ck   b ‡ kkc‡ ’ [More Urgent Reforms in Favour of Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 9, 407 (1895), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    c E c’ [Women and Municipal Elections], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 9, 410 (1895), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡  ‡ c’ [Women and the Elections], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 12, 562 (1899), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    d. T k d ’ [Women and Politics: The Backstage], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 12, 563 (1899), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡    d’. A’ [Women and Politics: I], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 12, 565 (1899), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘O fk‡  Ck  b  ’ [Men in Favour of Our Struggle], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 14, 617 (1900), 1–3. [Parren, K.], ‘A  c‡   Bd’ [Women and Parliament], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 15, 694 (1902), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘A Ec‡   a’ [Greek Women and the Law], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 16, 732 (1903), 1–2. [Parren, K.], ‘A Ec‡   a’. B’ [Greek Women and the Law: B], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 16, 733 (1903), 1–2. Parren, K., ‘A  c‡   kc’ [Women and Patrimony], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 979 (1910), 977–8. Parren, K., ‘O  c a   c‡’ [The Old Laws and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 994 (1910), 1342–3. [Parren, K.], ‘O  ‡‡e‡k   c‡’ [Liberals and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 24, 995 (1910), 1361–3. Parren, K., ‘Na    c ’ [Laws for Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 25, 998 (1911), 1459–60. Parren, K., ‘A ‡ c’ [Elections], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 26, 1018 (1912), 1913–14. Parren, K., ‘H  d   c‡’ [Politics and Women], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], B, 29, 1061 (1915), 2713–14. Pedersen, S., Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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Pitsakis, K. G., ‘E  d’ [Introduction], in K. Armenopoulos, ka‡k Na  d Ef [Drafts of Laws or The Six Books], edited by K. G. Pitsakis (Athens: Dodoni Publications, 1971), pp. ’- k ’. Poovey, M., Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Psarra, A., ‘Xk a   ‡ f  (1934–1948)’ [Annals of a Transition (1934–1948)],  f [I Read], 198 (1988), 29–36. Psarra, A., ‘"‡  a: H C,  ka,   c‡’ [Feminism: Word, Time, Meaning], c [Whirl], 6 (1993), 31–54. Psarra, A., ‘MCk d c ; EC ‡C   ‡c ‡k C (1870–1920)’ [Mother or Citizen? Greek Versions of Female Emancipation (1870–1920)], KC k  ‡c M‡‡ b  Ek‡b   c [Centre for Women’s Studies and Research Diotima], T e    f. Ec ,  c‡   a  c [The Gender of Rights: Power, Women and Citizenship] (Athens: Nefeli Publications, 1999), 90–107. Psarra,, A., ‘T   ak  ‡ k C  d H “‡ d”   c  K  kka  kkC’ [The Novel of Emancipation or The ‘Wise’ Utopia of Kallirroe Parren], ‘Addentum’ in K. Parren, H X‡k ‡ C [The Emancipated Woman] (Athens: Ekati, 1999), pp. 407–86. Rendall, J., ‘Citizenship, Culture and Civilization: The Languages of British Suffragists, 1866–1874’, in C. Daley and M. Nolan (eds.), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1995). Riley, D., ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan Press, 1988). Roïlos, G. L., Aa Kb. O‡‡ a c  [Civil Code: Family Law], Part I (Athens: 1946). Rossi-Doria, A., Diventare cittadine. Il voto alle donne in Italia (Florence: Giunti, 1996). Rousopoulou, A., kb ‡c d d   ‡k d  ‡c [First Elements of Social Policy and Labour Legislation] (Athens: Flamma Publications, 1937). Rousopoulou, A., ‘E a f  C    c‡  d’ [Marriage and Child Allowances to Women Employees], Ec [Greek Woman], 18, 4 (1938), 73–4. Samiou, D., ‘T  f   b  Ec (1864–1952)’ [Greek Women’s Political Rights (1864–1952)], Md  [Mnemon], 12 (1989), 161–172. Sant Cassia, P. and Bada C., The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-century Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Scott, J. W., Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Sklaveniti, K., ‘T  ‡c C  1908–1918’ [Women’s Periodicals 1908–1918],  f [I Read], 198 (1988), 13–22. Skocpol, T., Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Someritis, S., H d ‡k c    d fd  [Waged Labour and Its Social Security] (Athens: Annex of Socialist Review, 1933). Sotirelis, G. C., e    ‡C  Ef 1864–1909: I‡c  

kf   d kc [Constitution and Elections in Greece 1864–1909: Ideology and Practice of Universal Suffrage], foreword by A. Manesis (Athens: Themelio Publications, 1991).

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Stouditou, A., ‘H  c     C  c‡ ’ [Woman and Social Security], Ec [Greek Woman], 13, 4 (1933), 66–7. Stouditou, A., ‘H  a   ‡f  a  f  k’c e c ’ [The Capacity of Married Woman in Our Law], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 164 (1933), 3–4. Stouditou, A., ‘H  a   ‡f  a  f  k’c e c ’ [The Capacity of Married Woman in Our Law], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 165 (1933), 4, 6. Svolou, M., ‘O ‡‡ f ‡ a ’ [Family Allowances], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 32 (1926), 3–6. Svolou, M., ‘Ek c   ka ’ [Work and Motherhood], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 127, 4 (1930), 7–8. e‡ Ec  Ck    f    a. Td   ‡e Eb‡  Ck  $d   a. ‘Ek : Ad [League of Greek Women in favour of Woman’s Rights. Section of the International Alliance for Woman’s Suffrage. Seat: Athens],    b   Ec . A’ C kf‡  C  1920 [For the Rights of the Greek Woman: First Year of Action of the League 1920]. Theodoropoulou, A. S., T ‡C " ‡c Ck  "‡‡e [The International Women’s Conference in Geneva] (Athens: Feminist Library, 1920). Theodoropoulou, A. S., O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman] (Athens: Feminist Library, 1923). Th.[eodoropoulou], A., ‘E ‡k‡c ‡ ‡ kd‡ ’ [Profitable Enterprises], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 120–1 (1930), 1–2. Th.[eodoropoulou], A., ‘"‡  a   ka  ’ [Feminism and Motherhood], O Ab  " c [The Struggle of Woman], 163 (1933), 1–2. Tilly, C., (ed.), Citizenship, Identity and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Tilly, L. A., ‘Women, Work and Citizenship’, International Labor and Working-class History, 52 (1997), 1–26. Tilly, L. A., ‘Women, Work and Citizenship: Response to Comment’, International Labor and Working-class History, 53 (1997), 179–81. Vallinda, M. I., ‘T  d   a k  kc ’ [The Woman’s Duties to the Nation], E ‡kc  Kkb [The Ladies’ Journal], 8, 365 (1894), 1–2. Van Steenbergen, B., ‘The Condition of Citizenship: An Introduction’, in B. van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage 1994), pp. 1–4. Varikas, E., H ‡C‡k  Kkb. H C‡  ‡ d ‡c  Ef , 1833–1907 [The Ladies’ Revolt: The Birth of Feminist Consciousness in Greece, 1833–1907] (Athens: Foundation for Research and Culture of the Commercial Bank of Greece, 1987). Varikas, E., ‘Gender and National Identity in Fin de Siècle Greece’, Gender & History, 5, 2 (1993), 269–83. Ziogou-Karastergiou, S., H MC E c‡  kb  Ef (1830–1893) [Girls’ Secondary Education in Greece (1830–1893)] (Athens: Historical Archives of Greek Youth, Youth Secretariat, 1986).

9

Citizenship in context Rethinking women’s relationships to the law in Turkey1 Dicle Kogacioglu

Introduction In Turkey the legal context is characterized by gender inequalities. This chapter examines the relation of women to codes, discourses and practices of the law, focusing on the everyday reproduction of gender inequalities. I begin with the premise that women’s relationship to the law in general has important implications in terms of women’s citizenship. I draw a working definition of modern citizenship in the first section of the chapter. Throughout the chapter I deploy this ideal typical definition as an analytical tool to examine women’s relationships to the law. There are two major components of gender inequality in the law in Turkey. The content of the legal texts is the first one of these. I discuss this problem with examples drawn from the laws in the second and third sections of the chapter. In the fourth section I discuss another problem: the non-application of the laws. I elaborate this with statistics showing the extent of this non-application and women’s lack of access to legal measures. After elaborating on the nature and extent of these problems, I try to explain them in the context of feminist literature on women’s citizenship in Turkey and other parts of the world. I suggest that, while state feminism may be explanatory of the problems in the legal texts, the concept of state patriarchy can offer a way to understand the problems of practice. These two problems can be separated only at the analytical level, as they are intimately related to each other in the everyday experiences of women. In Turkey there is a social and cultural order that displays characteristics of both state feminism and state patriarchy. Most of the experiences of women in Turkey show symptoms of both of these in an interrelated fashion. Later on in the chapter I draw from my research on legal practices of the lay people in Istanbul in order to give examples of this interrelation. I argue that more fruitful ways of understanding the above problems can be created through focusing on the interrelations of these two phenomena by giving equal weight to both. This requires a shifting of perspective. Rather than examining the course of development vis-à-vis the persisting traditions, we can study the institutional and extra-institutional mechanisms effective in the reproduction of gender inequality.

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A detour on citizenship Modern citizenship is a multifaceted concept with various components. In historical theoretical debates2 the composites of the term are charted out relating historical developments to subsequently developing social and institutional contexts. There are also analyses with more critical orientations, especially in terms of the social situatedness of the citizen person.3 They try to point to the fact that ‘the citizen’ contemplated in abstracto always had political connotations in social life. Individuals always stood at the nexus of positions of gender, race, class and other social structures of inequality and this had significant political impact upon them, as well as on the polity at large. Citizenship is also a hotly debated issue in efforts to develop visions of substantively more egalitarian institutional structures. In these debates a major tendency is to reinterpret the central ideas which include political community, individual, public, and so on.4 All of these works share a set of ideas on modern citizenship, although the ways in which they approach these features differ, from seeing them as celebrated characteristics to targets of criticism. In this section I sum up these ideas in an effort to develop a working definition of modern citizenship. This is an ideal type in the Weberian sense. It is an abstraction and exaggeration of features of citizenship that partially exist in certain social contexts at certain times. Its purpose is not to provide a definitive explanation of what citizenship is but to sharpen my analysis. It aims at concretizing what I mean by modern citizenship, which is mainly drawn from the features of citizenship deployed in these debates. This is important because in the later sections of the chapter I use this ideal type as a lens, through which I examine women’s relationships to the law in Turkey. My aim here is to formulate some observations of my own on citizenship in a critical fashion. My priority is not to make contributions to citizenship scholarship. This is the reason why the ‘citizenship’ I develop below may seem flat; yet it should be remembered that my specific usage here is limited to deploying it as an ideal type in order to clarify women’s relations to the law in modern citizenship terms. Modern citizenship implies the notion of the individual, which is cast as its unit. Its existence is assumed and it operates through this unit. Through this assumption and methods of operation, citizenship institutionalizes and reproduces the individual. Secondly, it implies equidistance of members of the polity. In this conception every individual regardless of sex, race, age and ethnicity is to be recognized by the state as a citizen and is to have the same distance from state institutions. It is presumed that the national identity of citizenship renders other forms of loyalty in the public domain such as kinship and ethnicity insignificant.5 This process of the creation of equidistance does not mean the eradication of all differences, and inequalities, that stand in the way. They continue to exist, yet are to be experienced in a separate domain: the private. This domain and its regulation constitutes the third characteristic of citizenship; a politico-cultural distinction between public and private domains. Here the public domain is that in which individuals actively relate to the state and to other individuals outside the primordial groups of family, clan, tribe and so on. In the public domain people

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‘freely’ entertain their interests, associate with other individuals in order to either directly engage in systems of political representation, or indirectly affect state policies. The private domain is the place of intimacy and of differences. The relations, differences and inequalities, are to be lived in this domain. Private is also that domain in which one may not be so free to choose. Finally, modern citizenship entails a national political community with its institutions penetrated into the everyday life of the population in a relatively homogenous pattern. It implies that everybody goes through relatively similar processes in becoming a citizen and in sustaining this status. Here of course the central assumption is a framework for the operation of institutions in line with formally defined and impersonally implemented procedures. The law is supposed to be the backbone of this process. Legislated codes and the operation of the legal institutions in line with these codes are to set the framework of the actualization of this principle. In this vein it is assumed that the operation of the legal institution itself is to be in line with this formal egalitarianism and impersonal operation schema. After this brief detour I now turn to the laws in Turkey and examine their implications for women in Turkey.

Problems of the legal texts Turkey has a legal framework that does contain an important component of the equidistance principle of modern citizenship. Women’s suffrage is crucial in the state’s recognition of women as individual citizens. Equal rights to inheritance, divorce, marriage and women’s capacity to become witnesses are other important components of this recognition. These codes establish the basis for principle equality before the law for the two genders as most succinctly formulated in Article 10 of the constitution. By virtue of the egalitarian nature of these laws, the citizenship principle of equidistance takes its place in the legal texts. These general principles notwithstanding, there are many laws in the legal framework that render women unequal. For instance Koyuncuoglu, a lawyer and head of the Women’s Rights Commission of the Istanbul Bar Association notes about the civil code: ‘equality of genders that exists in the code in a general manner does not continue in family law’.6 Some of the articles in the civil code violating the citizenship principle of equality before the law and equidistance from state institutions include the following. Article 152 posits the husband as head of the family and the person primarily responsible for selection of residence for the family; nutrition; and other requirements of spouse and children. The division of labour formulated in the legal framework continues with Article 153. This article states that the wife is the assistant and counsellor of the husband to the extent of her capabilities in order to establish shared happiness. The same article also defines women’s role as follows: ‘The wife takes care of the house.’ Moreover, Article 21 of the civil code states that, in marriage, the residence of the wife and children is to be the husband’s residence. In marriage, wife and husband have joint custody of their children, yet the husband is presented so strongly as the decision maker that, when they are in disagreement, the final word is that of the husband (Article 263 of the civil code).

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In these articles and in a number of others echoing similar reasoning, men are cast as decision makers, managers and breadwinners. Women are cast as helpers in the decisions and the ones primarily responsible for domestic work. Through such a differential distribution of roles and responsibilities within the family, the law effectively allows space for the creation of inequalities. In the same vein, it allows for naturalization of inequalities in the guise of simple differences. Laws other than the civil code are not exempt from problems either. A common tendency in a number of laws is differential punishment based on women’s marital status and/or whether a woman is a virgin or not. Thus the assessment of punishment has a component of identifying factors unrelated to the nature of the crime or the circumstances surrounding it. Women’s positions and identities in relation to the institution of family become an important determinant of punishment. The laws accept and reproduce a certain ideal of family where virginity is of key importance and women’s lives carry more weight if they are married. For instance, the law on the abduction of girls,7 women and young men sets the punishment to a jail sentence of three to ten years. The determination of the number of years in this specified range is entirely left to the judge, with one major exception: if the kidnapped person is a married woman, this punishment cannot be less than seven years. I shall return to this phenomenon of differential punishment later with examples from my field research. Here, suffice it to say that these provisions violate the principle of equality before the law as well as the citizenship principle of equidistance from state institutions. The laws play an important role in the reproduction of certain so-called traditional crimes as well. In the so-called honour killings, members of the family may kill a woman because of her sexual relations that they do not approve of. Significantly, in court cases about these killings the clauses of provocation on a high level are applied. The punishments can be reduced with the understanding that killing in order to re-establish family honour is partially legitimate. In the same vein, if a man kills his wife, or another kinswoman, after finding out about her adultery the punishment is reduced to one-eighth of the normal punishment for manslaughter,8 with the same reasoning of provocation. Through such lack of de jure discouragement of such crimes, the law de facto allows space for their reproduction. Indeed family and family honour are such key constituents of the Turkish legal framework that they can be uttered in partial legitimation of even infanticide and abandonment of a child. In the criminal code manslaughter is differentiated from another crime entitled ‘infanticide for family honour’ (Article 453). The punishment for this crime is only four to eight years instead of the 24 to 30 years in ‘regular’ manslaughter. Likewise, according to Article 475 of the criminal code, if members of the family abandon an illegitimate child the punishment is reduced to somewhere in the range of one-sixth to one-third of the regular punishment for the crime. Again, with such reductions, the law loses its discouraging effect and becomes part of the reproduction of these crimes. In these ways, the legal framework essentially protects the continuity of the legitimacy of arguments based on family and family honour vis-à-vis arguments

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of women’s (and children’s) individual rights. This is parallel to the differentiation of women’s identities in relation to ideas of family discussed above. Indeed, the very classification of the criminal code reflects this differentiation. For instance, rape and harassment are not under Section 9, dealing with crimes against individuals. They are under Section 8 of the criminal code, which delineates punishments for felonies against ‘public manners and family order’.9 Significantly this is the section where, for instance, articles on indecent and obscene material are placed.10 Thus such acts are conceptualized not as felonies against women’s bodily integrity – that is, against their individual space – but as felonies against the public norms and, yet again, the order of the family. As far as women are concerned, the order of family and their role in it seems to be even more important than their individuality. The continuity of the family constructed in this specific fashion appears worth the sacrifice of women’s citizenship. Problems in the legal texts mentioned so far do not seem likely to change over time either. The very history of efforts to change and revise the civil code in the direction of an egalitarian gender framework is telling in this respect. These efforts began as early as 1951.11 In 2003, despite a multiplicity of such efforts, the civil code of 1926 stands essentially intact. Despite a few changes made, especially with feminist efforts,12 it has not gone through any major reform. The latest and most comprehensive push, led by multiple lines of feminist efforts, still has not been concluded after the founding of a commission in 1994 to devise the first draft law in republican history. Although there is some level of variance in the ways in which different legislatures have handled gender inequality, this has not resulted in any major change in legislative acts. This historical continuity demonstrates that problems of legal text cannot be explained away by the characteristics of political currents or by their ideologies. Tensions regarding women’s identities as members of the family rather than as individuals with their own paths of self-actualization might as well be one of the basic constituents of the republican legal framework and conceptions of polity.

Understanding problems of the legal text and state feminism Since the early 1980s, feminist scholars and activists have discussed women’s citizenship. Mainstream ideas of women’s alleged liberation by the republican codes and reforms have been questioned. In these debates state feminism has been suggested as an analytical tool. It is used to denote a multiplicity of phenomena in the context of Turkey ranging from political discourse, the republican nationalist perspective on women or strategies of the state elites and the historical development of the legal system.13 Interestingly, the phenomena discussed in these works are not unique to Turkey. For example, there are debates around these features through various uses of the term state feminism in a variety of countries, such as Syria and Iraq.14 Its use for multiple phenomena has caused some level of elusiveness around the concept of ‘state feminism’. In order to avoid this problem, I shall sketch my

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definition of the term after which I turn to an examination of its relation to the legal texts. I call state feminism a cultural and social order within which a strong and centralizing state has a project of social transformation for development and modernization. One of the strategies deployed in this transformation is inviting women to the public sphere to take part in some parts of professional life. Within this framework, certain rights are granted to women and women can turn these into individual paths of self-actualization. Hence the word ‘feminism’. In addition to these developments, the institutional and discursive structures supporting the existence of women in the public sphere are severely limited. This has to do with the fact that the state bases its legitimacy on a specific notion of family. However, an open-ended self-actualization of women often means a transformation of this social unit. Thus when in conflict with the family, the emancipation of women offered by the state comes to an end since the reason why this freedom is given to women is not for its own sake, but for the national project of social change deemed necessary by the state. Hence the word ‘state’ in the term state feminism. In this politico-cultural context, women’s double roles and doubly unequal positions in the public and private domains are the leading enabling factors which allow the state to support its power and control via the family. Women are important and should be developed, just as family is important. National development is to occur through the development of the family. Thus women’s subordination in this fashion becomes one of the important components of the state’s enduring national commitments and projects. In Turkey, with regard to state feminism, women are expected to perform their roles as wives and mothers in addition to their commitments in the public sphere with very low levels of institutional support available to them in this domain. This limits not only their professional careers, but their everyday life as well. Women often find themselves in positions, where they are able to minimally express their gender identities in the public sphere, while gender role differentiation is still definitive in terms of the division of labour within the household. Whenever their individual self-actualization contrasts with the ideal and practice of the family the latter is to prevail. Women often have difficulty in sustaining a multiplicity of delicate balances: between their workloads in professional and household domains; between the a-sexuality expected from them in their public life and in the sexual roles they feel the need to perform in the private domain.15 Problems with the legal texts discussed above are related to the features of state feminism in Turkey. Obviously, it is not reducible to the intentions of the state elites, but has to do with the critical interrelation between the political and legal at play in the domain of institutions. Here I insist on calling this a social and cultural order instead of, for instance, a strategy of the state elites. These are not only intentions or strategies of the state elites, political discourses or features of citizenship institutions. The historical continuity of these phenomena, as elaborated earlier in this chapter, signals that this could not occur solely through bureaucratic structures or through the deployment of force on the part of the state. On the contrary, as they begin to be accepted as normal, they are reproduced in the cultural domain as ideas, symbols and

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discourses in and through the subjectivities and daily life practices of social actors, both male and female. From socialization of new generations to education, and to systems of political representation, from women’s participation in the labour force, women are primarily defined by their roles as wives and mothers. The term state feminism has also received criticism. Arat, for instance, rightfully claims that it is problematic to label efforts that do not directly target the selfactualization of women as feminist.16 Clearly, state feminism is a patriarchal order induced and sustained by the state. Yet, I use the term feminism here in order to highlight the potential which the state assigns to women in domains outside of the family. This is important as the connotation of patriarchy is a traditional order and the empowerment of women is often equated with their existence outside the family. Yet, as we saw above, women’s existence in the public sphere does not always lead to a direct and net empowerment. The term state feminism reminds us that state initiatives often take on complicated implications in terms of power distribution in gender relations. It also helps to differentiate a different socio-cultural order, which I discuss in the following section, from state patriarchy. For this reason I would like to continue using this term, especially in the larger perspective I have described above.

Problems of practice Women’s disadvantageous relations to the law in Turkey are reproduced not only through problems in the legal texts. As problematic as the laws are, their nonapplication constitutes a further problem. Where women are concerned, laws are often not applied to their conflicts. This is mainly because of their lack of access to these laws and the legal authorities. This problem is by no means a matter of exceptional cases or extremely dire circumstances of the victims. It is, I shall argue, a structured and routine phenomenon that a majority of women face during their lives in various situations. Results from a quantitative research project conducted in Umraniye in Istanbul, and in eastern and south-eastern Turkey, reveal this in striking fashion.17 In Umraniye, a municipality of Istanbul with a half million residents, 41 per cent of women state that they need the permission of a family member to leave the house alone in the daytime. To go out in the evenings, this proportion increases to 96.2 per cent. This is a violation of the right to travel, according not only to human rights norms, but also to the Turkish constitution (Article 23). In eastern and south-eastern Turkey, despite the legal norms establishing equal share in inheritance for all children, only 26 per cent of women state that a girl child’s share of inheritance will be determined according to the civil code. This is a clear indication of not only the non-application of the laws, but also of the social expectations of women in this direction. This shows how normal the phenomenon is for women. Women do not expect the equality formulated in the legal texts to apply to their situations in the first place. In Umraniye, 28.6 per cent of married women and 60 per cent of married women in the south-east and the east have never had any schooling. This is an obvious violation of the constitutional right to education (Article 42).

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Despite the recent abrogation of the civil code article that required women to gain permission from their husbands in order to work outside the home, for more than 50 per cent of married women living in Umraniye, this decision still belongs to their husbands. This is another open violation of the amended civil code as well as the constitutional right to work (Article 49). More than 30 per cent of married women in south-eastern Turkey, state that their husbands decide which party they will vote for. This is a direct violation of the right to vote codified in Article 67 of the Turkish constitution. In all these and similar cases, members of the family and the kinship group, very often male members of these units, become those who usurp and/or use women’s inseparable rights. By clarifying the patterns, these results show that there is nothing exceptional about these cases. On the contrary, they are a part of the normal flow of everyday life. The existence of laws prohibiting any usurpation of another citizen’s rights (such as Articles 23 and 24 of the civil code setting the unit of application of the law strictly as individual and firmly stating that individual rights cannot be renounced, limited or transferred to someone else) has no effect because there is no practical upholding of these laws in daily life. There are significant gaps in terms of the application of law in the lives of female citizens. This picture, in relation to the ideal type of modern citizenship, implies that the relatively homogenous penetration of institutions, operating in ways that are made uniform by law, into the everyday lives of the population has not occurred. This also means that there are problems of women’s citizenship in terms of the principle of equidistance from the state. These women cannot deploy their citizenship potentials and therefore are further from the state and its institutions relative to a multitude of fellow citizens.

Understanding problems of state practice and state patriarchy Academic scholarship on problems of practice is remarkably weak. Many scholars are aware of this problem.18 They note that problems of state feminism and problems of the legal texts are only part of the picture and that these laws can be applied only in a limited number of situations. Yet systematic analytical and theoretical efforts are very much missing in this area.19 This phenomenon has encountered persistent trivialization in the mainstream. While the feminist movement has been able to draw attention to problems with the legal texts, it has not been able to bring problems of practice on to the public agenda. The lesser use made of the law by women and cases where laws are not applied are cast as exceptional. Such cases are often perceived as the product of exceptional circumstances or the extremely dire circumstances of the victim. Thus these social patterns come to be defined as individual cases. In the rare cases when the problems of practice do receive recognition as social phenomena, they are framed within discourses of modernization and development. These patterned practical problems that women face in daily life are constructed as remnants of traditions. An opposition is perceived between ‘traditions’

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or ‘ignorance’ and the deeds of the modern law with its emancipating codes – via, of course, a complete glossing over of the problems of the legal texts discussed above. Most often, education is cast as a factor that will be the cause of the diffusion of the use of the laws. Women who have been given the extensive right to education are to learn their rights and then to apply them actively. The fact that these rights are not backed up by institutional measures in the everyday lives of women is left out of the picture. When perceived as such, the disjuncture between the law and its application is assumed to wither away with the march of progress of these two republican modern institutions; law and education. In this paradigm, a diffusion of reforms from the more educated upper echelons of society, from urban to rural, from west to east and so on is presumed. The only problem acknowledged remains the persistence of traditions vis-à-vis these two modern institutions. Here the term ‘persistence’ is significant, since it connotes the definitive termination of these phenomena in the near future. Thus the problems faced can only be temporary. Next to its temporal unilinearity and determinism, this discursive structure allows no space for a problematization of women’s problems in their own terms. Women or other disadvantaged groups will take their share from this progress as citizens, without problems and without any necessity for further efforts targeting them. Traditions will gradually disappear vis-à-vis development of the nation. Therefore it is not the problems of women, which have to be talked about, but the course of development. Yet, the problems of women in this area can be called traditions only in the sense of continuity with the past. It should not be forgotten that for 75 years these problems have been experienced under the social and political order of a nationstate claiming to be modern with regard to its citizens and with its institutions, as opposed to subjects. For this reason its non-intervention is extremely significant. It is clear that the state institutions do not penetrate into the daily lives of women and effectively leave this area to the control of family. Thus one of the most important features of citizenship – its institutional presence and availability in everyday life – is not actualized. This gap between the legal codes and their application is constitutive of patterns; it creates and sustains certain lines of legitimate practice. In the seventy-fifth year of the republic, the time span is too great and the problems too widespread to be explained as a persistence of tradition. There has to be some reproduction of this tradition in the times of the republic and the patterned disjuncture between the legal text and practice is a very important element of this reproduction. The statistics I have cited above and these symptoms are reminiscent of contexts like Lebanon where the state allows parallel laws to exist.20 In contexts of state patriarchy we see a cultural and social order where the state delegates the realm of family to the jurisdiction of customary and/or religious rules. In this way it does not try to undo the existing traditional structures. Instead it builds its power upon them through the partial or total exclusion of women from citizenry. Women are not addressed directly or invited into the public sphere. They are only addressed indirectly through and represented by male members of kinship groups.

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Thus by not intervening, the state endorses or at least allows the reproduction of these ‘traditional’ units. The absence of state-enforced programmes targeting these women and their unequal access to the structures of citizenship becomes the new basis for their age-old inequality. The state, by not directly addressing these women, effectively supports and sustains the domination of male family members within their families. As a consequence, women are defined almost completely by their roles and identities in the areas of the family and kinship group. The crucial difference between Turkey and the contexts of state patriarchy are the discrepancies in the official rhetoric and the legal status of women. As mentioned above, official rhetoric and the application of laws to a certain extent display characteristics of state feminism, yet the absence of the application of law in everyday life shows properties of state patriarchy. For this reason the regular and routine disjuncture between legal texts and practice is extremely significant, as this disjuncture allows de facto for the existence of a different set of power structures side by side with state feminism.

Interrelations of the problems in daily life While state feminism is about the state calling women to the public sphere and endowing them with rights for the nation and the family’s good, in state patriarchy the state does not address these women as citizens but speaks to them through the males of their family. While the former is visible in laws, the non-application of laws in a patterned fashion may have created state patriarchy. In other words, the problems of women with regard to the law are twofold. First, the significant presence of the family is forced upon female citizens in the content of the legal texts. Second, there is the conspicuous absence of the law and state power in women’s daily lives. Thus we see features of both state feminism and state patriarchy in Turkey. The social and cultural order of Turkey displays characteristics of both these socio-cultural orders which in turn makes things doubly difficult for women. In this way the grid of state–family combines to develop a hybrid order where patterns of these two social and cultural orders exist simultaneously. Here I would like to emphasize once more that these patterns can be separated only analytically as they continue to stand enmeshed and embedded within each other in modern-day Turkey. As to how these two dynamics become enmeshed between one another in the daily lives of women I give examples from my fieldwork in Yenipazar,21 Istanbul. I have been conducting semi-structured interviews with lay people on how they perceive and practise law. Provoked by my questions, most of my informants go on to relate multiple episodes from their life stories. The following consists of episodes from the lives of two such women. The examples are not unusual or extreme cases. I come across similar experiences in almost every interview I conduct with women. What made me choose these episodes specifically is the fact that they have experienced these problems in a compressed fashion, over relatively short periods of time.

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Ayse22 is a 31-year-old divorced woman who has been working as a cleaning lady for the last three years. Her parents married her off at the age of 16 to a person of their choice. This is a problem of the legal text. The law states that, legally, minors have to give their consent for marriage. This consent, however, is based on a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to be asked by a civil servant in front of witnesses. There is no mechanism to determine whether consent was extracted by force or abuse. Also it is very problematic that the minimum age of marriage for females is 15, while it is 17 for males. This difference between genders allows families to marry their daughters off early, and before they are considered legally competent. Evidently it is against the principle of equality and equidistance from state institutions. It is also significant that for both genders the age of marriage is less than 18, which is the age of competency for all other legal procedures. Ayse, for instance, states: ‘I was still a child then.’ This marriage and its continuation is also an example of a problem of practice. Article 118 of the civil code gives individuals leeway to render marriage contracts invalid if they can establish that at the time their act was involuntary. Ayse never knew or used this in facing her problems. Even at the time of our interview, 15 years after her marriage, she had no awareness of such a right. After the wedding, Ayse and her spouse lived in Istanbul for about a year; then her husband took her to Kars, a far eastern province where he comes from originally. This was very far away from her family in Istanbul and her extended family who were then in Sivas. Once in Kars, they began living with her husband’s extended family. Due to her less powerful status vis-à-vis her husband’s family Ayse had to take on a large portion of the household duties along with the care of her sister-in-law’s children and the care of her elderly mother-in-law. After a while her husband started talking about ‘taking’ a second wife (which is completely illegal according to Turkish law but possible in practice). When she displayed resistance to this idea and to her husband’s habitual drinking, violence started. It escalated to the level of beatings with metal chains. Ayse’s loss of touch with her support networks and her consequent disempowerment was one of the key components of the events that followed. This is very much related to a problem of the legal text . Moving to Kars was an act her husband performed with the comfort of Article 21 of the civil code, conforming that the wife’s residence is that of the husband’s. Although there are Supreme Court rulings, but no open statement in the civil code, stating that the husband should provide a separate household for the woman, Ayse (similar to many women in her circumstances) had no information on these rulings. Here we see once again problems of practice in relation to problems of the legal texts playing a key role in causing Ayse’s disempowerment. Ayse’s narration of her experiences continues with a long story of escape, which again is related to the absence of shelters and a legal framework23 which she could use in her situation. I now turn to an episode from another woman’s narrative of her experiences. Emine is 26 years old and was raised in Istanbul. While in high school she entered into a sexual relationship with her boyfriend whom she had no intention of

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marrying. When her family found out about their involvement they were infuriated. They threatened to take her to a virginity exam unless she told them the truth about her relationship. Being very afraid and anxious she admitted to having had a sexual relationship with her boyfriend. Still the family forced her, probably as a punishment, to go to the police station where a distant relative was working as a policeman. Accompanied by him they took her to a state hospital for a virginity test. She related that this was the worst experience in her entire life, even worse than the threat of being killed that would follow shortly. The practice of virginity exams stands precisely at the intersection of problems of practice and legal texts. It is established as a legal and medical procedure to understand whether the hymen is intact. Its legal justification is as a procedure to understand whether rape has occurred or not. It is also directly related to the differential punishment of crimes according to the female victim’s family and sexual status, as discussed in the second section of this chapter. Rape, for instance, has a more severe punishment if the assault is targeted at a virgin. Again, we see the differential valuing of women according to their status within family. Another problem of the legal text concerns the situation of minors vis-à-vis the virginity tests. According to the law, legal minors have to obey their parents and undergo virginity exams even if the issue is not rape, as in Emine’s case. In contrast to the case of marriage, where at least nominal consent is sought, in virginity exams there is no need for provision of consent. It is also highly significant that there is no scrutiny of parents’ objectives concerning whether or not their daughters should go through such an invasive and degrading treatment. In short, since minors have no legal say in determining when and how they undergo virginity exams, this results in the significant potential for its use in degrading female minors instead of documenting the crime of rape. In this narrative, as in many others, we observe that the virginity exam constitutes a mechanism for punishing women who are considered to have violated moral rules through their sexual activities and for providing a declaration of hatred or revulsion toward these women. In relation to the practice of virginity exams, problems of practice are also at play next to problems of the legal text. Here Emine mentions that she consented to sex, so there was no charge of rape or violence of any kind and she was taken to the police station. According to the legal text, not only rape but taking a girl’s virginity with the promise of marriage is also a felony. In this case, however, Emine made it clear that she had consented to sex. There was no justification for the exam whatsoever. Still the policemen sent her to a state hospital. Here we see a problem of practice. This is related to the generic problem of Turkey’s legal context where often policemen take charge of the investigation rather than prosecutors. In cases such as this one, the policemen are more likely to order virginity exams than prosecutors. Problems of the legal texts are thus combined with the problems of practice and caused Emine to go through a very degrading experience. Obviously, this event does not fit into any of construction of individuality or equidistance from state institutions in citizenship terms. Later on, when the result of the virginity exam turned out negative, as Emine expected, the family and Emine returned to the police station. In front of four or

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five policemen the family discussed Emine’s fate. There emerged three options: to kill her (which would become one more honour killing); to abandon her by not allowing her to come back home; or to accept the situation. These discussions that involved premeditation of murder and the abandoning of a minor took place at the police station, an institution of citizenship that is supposed to prevent any such acts, in line with the written codes. Here we see a case of problem of practice. Finally, the family decided on the second option and Emine’s story unfolded with her searching for places to stay and, in the end, literally begging her boyfriend to marry her. This situation led to a marriage that was very unequal in terms of power distribution as she had no support vis-à-vis the husband’s family’s accusations of promiscuity and of tricking their son into marriage. Violence and divorce followed. In the meantime they had a son whose custody was given to Emine. The judge assigned a very low alimony because the husband lied in court about his actual income and the police units did no effective research on his financial status. Again we see a problem of practice. To this day she does not even receive this very low alimony.

Conclusion The above examples are intended to illustrate how the routine and patterned disjuncture between written law and legal practices relate to the problems of the legal texts. In these ways women’s individual citizenship rights are breached at the expense of family and family-related ideas and ideals. I suggest that in Turkey there is a hybrid social and cultural order that displays characteristics of both state feminism and state patriarchy. Problems of the legal text are an important feature of state feminism. Non-intervention of state institutions into the everyday lives of female citizens is a crucial component of state patriarchy. What is interesting in terms of state feminism and state patriarchy is the fact that both of them reinforce the family as an institution. If we cannot chart the intricate and socio-culturally patterned ways in which these two dynamics affect women’s lives then our analyses will be incomplete. As it is, through the very enmeshing of these two power structures in the domain of family, women face the ultimate levels of inequality. State feminism and state patriarchy reproduce notions and practices around the central idea of women’s primary roles being those of the family. Although they do this through different discourses, symbols and practices, they interact in a critical fashion. Indeed ideals and practices of the family are the key element that sustain the social and cultural order in Turkey featuring characteristics of both state family and state patriarchy simultaneously. In terms of women’s citizenship, this common line might be the most important hurdle against women’s active and complete deployment of their legal entitlements. What lies ahead for students of gender in Turkey may be a critical investigation of the relation of family with other institutions both in the domain of discourses, the written legal discourse being one, and in the domain of practice. This is likely to

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yield not only important insights about women’s situation but also about citizenship in general and the larger system of political governance in Turkey.24

Notes 1 The research upon which this chapter is based was partially funded by a grant from the MEAwards Programme in Population and the Social Sciences, the Population Council, WANA Regional Office, Cairo. 2 Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, KS: Double Day, 1964); Giddens, A., The Nation-state and Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Mann, M., ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 21, 3, August (1987); Somers, M. R., ‘Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy’, American Sociological Review, 58 (1993); Tilly, C., Where Do Rights Come From?, paper prepared for the Wilhelm Aubert Symposium (1990); Turner, B. S., ‘Personhood and Citizenship’, Theory, Culture and Society, 3, 1 (1986). 3 Young, I. M., ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’, in S. Gershon (ed.), The Citizenship Debates (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Phillips, A., Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Fraser, N., Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 4 Mouffe, C. (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992); Kymlicka, W., ‘Multicultural Citizenship’, in S. Gershon (ed.), The Citizenship Debates (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); D’Entreves, M. P., ‘Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Citizenship’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992). 5 Needless to say equidistance and equality are some of the most contested terminologies in this framework. Without going into this, however, let me state that by equidistance I mean a formal equality of individual citizens before the state institutions that are to work impersonally with relatively standardized procedures. 6 Koyuncuoglu, T., ‘Medeni Kanun ve Kadin Haklari’ [The Civil Code and Women’s Rights], in A. Berktay-Hacimirzalioglu (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998), p. 58 7 In this law, as elsewhere, the term ‘girl’ means virgin woman. It is very clear in this specific article, for instance, because it deals with ‘competent’ individuals, that is, people aged 18 or over. 8 According to the same article, this reduction is four to eight years instead of life in prison, five to ten years for capital punishment. 9 Adab-i Umumiye, ve Nizam-i Aile (Turkish criminal code: Articles 414–417 and 421), pp. 138–41. 10 Arin, C., The Legal Status of Women in Turkey, Women for Women’s Human Rights Reports, 1 (Istanbul: WWHR, 1997). 11 Information gathered from the Ministry of Justice. 12 When changes do happen, they are not exempt from problems. For instance, Article 153 stating that the wife has to take her husband’s family name was amended in May 1997. A woman is now free to choose between taking the husband’s last name together with hers or only that of her husband. Legally the option of using only her own surname is still not viable for a woman. 13 Tekeli, S., Kadinlar ve Siyasal Toplumsal Hayat [Women and Social and Political Life] (Istanbul: Birikim Yayinevi, 1982); Tekeli, S., Kadinlar Icin [For Women] (Istanbul: Alan Yayinevi, 1988); Kandiyoti, D., Cariyeler, Bacilar, Yurttaslar; Kimlikler ve

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Toplumsal Donusumler [Concubines, Sisters, Citizens: Identities and Social Transformations] (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1996); Kandiyoti, D., ‘Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Sirman, N., ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 3, 1, Fall (1989). Joseph, S., ‘Elite Strategies for State Building: Women, Family, Religion and the State in Iraq and Lebanon’, in D. Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991); Rabo, A., ‘Gender, State and Civil Society in Jordan and Syria’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London: Routledge, 1996); Cagatay, N. and Nuhoglu Soysal, Y., ‘Uluslasma Sureci ve Feminizm Uzerine Karsilastirmali Dusunceler’ [Comparative Notes on Nationbuilding and Feminism], in S. Tekeli (ed.), 1980’ler Turkiye’sinde Kadin Bakis Acisindan Kadinlar [Women in the 1980s Turkey from the Perspective of Women] (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1990). A similar distinction is also drawn between public and private patriarchy, especially in Western contexts. See Walby, B. S., Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Despite the agreed-upon fact that state feminism has been a very important factor in the formation of women’s subjectivities, the ways in which this has occurred has not been explored. In the case of Turkey, for instance, this has meant a life full of tension for individual women. The woman that is westward looking but not too westernized, educated, working, yet quietly balancing domestic duties with her work life, active yet modest and asexual in the public sphere, has been the ideal for a majority of republican women: Kadioglu, A., ‘Cinselligin ˙Inkari: Buyuk Toplumsal Projelerin Nesnesi Olarak Turk Kadinlari’, [Denial of Sexuality: Turkish Women as Objects of Grand Social Projects], in Berktay-Hacimirzalioglu, A. (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998); Durakbasa, A., ‘The Formation of Kemalist Female Identity: A Historical–Cultural Perspective’, unpublished MA thesis, Istanbul, Bogazici University, Department of Sociology (1987). In terms of the ways in which these women lived their womanhood it is clear that: ‘These women not only have had to fight for going out to and existing in the public sphere, but also had to struggle to be and stay as women.’ (Sirman, ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History’.) Arat, Z., ‘Kemalizm ve Turk Kadini’ [Kemalism and the Turkish Woman], in A. Berktay-Hacimirzalioglu (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). Ilkkaracan, I. and Ilkkaracan, P., ‘Kuldan Yurttasa: Kadinlar Neresinde?’, [From Subjects to Citizens: Where do Women Stand?], in A. Unsal (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Tebaa’dan Yurttas’a Dogru [From Subject toward Citizen in the Republican Seventyfive Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). All the figures are taken from the research ‘Woman as Citizens’ conducted by Women for Women’s Human Rights, as part of a larger research project ‘Women and Law’. It was conducted in Umraniye, and in eastern and south-eastern Turkey in the years 1996 and 1997. A stratified, clustered sampling was used and a total of 1,129 women were surveyed. Kandiyoti, Cariyeler, Bacilar, Yurttaslar; Sirman, ‘Feminism in Turkey; Arat, Y., The Patriarchal Paradox: Women and Politics in Turkey (Rutherford, CA: Fairleigh Dickinsion Press, 1989). The only research that has been done so far on this topic is by Ilkkaracan and IIkkaracan. It is very important in documenting the extent of the problem, using quantitative data. Joseph, ‘Elite Strategies’. Yenipazar is a pseudonym I use for purposes of anonymity for the district I studied. Yenipazar is a municipal district of mostly first- and second-generation migrants to Istanbul: they have low incomes, low socio-economic status and live in informal housing.

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In these respects Yenipzar is comparable to Umraniye studied by Ilkkaracan and Ilkkaracan, ‘Kuldan Yurttasa). 22 The names I use are pseudonyms for concerns of confidentiality. 23 At the time of her escape, the law on the protection of family, which was lobbied intensely by feminists, had not been passed. In 1998 it came into action. This law grants protection orders to spouses in the face of violence. Yet, again because of the absence of institutional measures and the non-co-operative attitudes of police, the application of this law is currently very problematic. Even if this law were in effect at the time of Ayse’s escape, it is very likely that she would have been unable to use it. 24 I am grateful to Nukhet Sirman for her invaluable insights, comments and resources. I also thank her for her editorial input on earlier versions of this chapter.

References Ahmad, F., The Making of Modern Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1993). Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). Arat, Y., The Patriarchal Paradox: Women and Politics in Turkey (Rutherford, CA: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1989). Arat, Z., ‘Kemalizm ve Turk Kadini’ [Kemalism and the Turkish Woman], in A. BerktayHacimirzalioglu (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). Arin, C., The Legal Status of Women in Turkey, Women for Women’s Human Rights Reports, 1 (Istanbul: WWHR, 1997). Cagatay, N. and Nuhoglu Soysal, Y., ‘Uluslasma Sureci ve Feminizm Uzerine Karsilastirmali Dusunceler’ [Comparative Notes on Nationbuilding and Feminism], in S. Tekeli (ed.), 1980’ler Turkiye’sinde Kadin Bakis Acisindan Kadinlar [Women in the 1980s Turkey from the Perspective of Women] (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1990). D’Entreves, M. P., ‘Hannah Arendt and the Idea of Citizenship’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992). Durakbasa, A., ‘The Formation of Kemalist Female Identity: A Historical–Cultural Perspective’, unpublished MA thesis, Istanbul, Bogazici University, Department of Sociology (1987). Fraser, N., Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Giddens, A., The Nation-state and Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Ilkkaracan, I. and Ilkkaracan, P., ‘Kuldan Yurttasa: Kadinlar Neresinde?’ [From Subjects to Citizens: Where do Women Stand?], in A. Unsal (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Tebaa’dan Yurttas’a Dogru [From Subject toward Citizen in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). Ilkkaracan, P., ‘Dogu Anadolu’da Kadin ve Aile’, [Women and Family in Eastern Turkey], in A. Berktay-Hacimirzalioglu (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). Joseph, S., ‘Elite Strategies for State Building: Women, Family, Religion and the State in Iraq and Lebanon’, in D. Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991). Kadioglu, A., ‘Cinselligin ˙Inkari: Buyuk Toplumsal Projelerin Nesnesi Olarak Turk Kadinlari’ [Denial of Sexuality: Turkish Women as Objects of Grand Social Projects], in

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Berktay-Hacimirzalioglu, A. (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). Kandiyoti, D., Cariyeler, Bacilar, Yurttaslar; Kimlikler ve Toplumsal Donusumler [Concubines, Sisters, Citizens: Identities and Social Transformations] (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1996). Kandiyoti, D., ‘Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Koyuncuoglu, T., ‘Medeni Kanun ve Kadin Haklari’ [The civil code and Women’s Rights], in A. Berktay-Hacimirzalioglu (ed.), Yetmisbes Yilda Kadinlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in the Republican Seventy-five Years] (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayinlari, 1998). Kymlicka, W., ‘Multicultural Citizenship’, in S. Gershon (ed.), The Citizenship Debates (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Ludtke, A. (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Mann, M., ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 21, 3, August (1987). Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, KS: Double Day, 1964). Mouffe, C. (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992). Phillips, A., Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Rabo, A., ‘Gender, State and Civil Society in Jordan and Syria’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London: Routledge, 1996). Sirman, N., Kamusalla Ozel Arasinda Kadin Mucadelesinin Yeri [The Position of Women’s Struggles Between Public and Private], paper presented at the World Academy of Local Democracy Conference (Istanbul, 1999). Sirman, N., ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History’, New Perspectives on Turkey, 3, 1, Fall (1989). Somers, M. R., ‘Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy’, American Sociological Review, 58 (1993). Tekeli, S., Kadinlar ve Siyasal Toplumsal Hayat [Women and Social and Political Life] (Istanbul: Birikim Yayinevi, 1982). Tekeli, S., Kadinlar Icin [For Women] (Istanbul: Alan Yayinevi, 1988). Tilly, C., Where Do Rights Come From?, paper prepared for the Wilhelm Aubert Symposium (1990). Turner, B. S., ‘Personhood and Citizenship’, Theory, Culture and Society, 3, 1 (1986). T. C. 1982 Anayasasi [Turkish republic, 1982 Constitution] (Ankara, Say Yayinlari, 1999). Turk Ceza Kanunu [Turkish Criminal Code] (Ankara: Alkim Yayinevi). Turk Medeni Kanunu [Turkish civil code] (Ankara: Alkim Yayinevi, 1997). Walby, B. S., Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Yirmibesoglu, V., Compilation of newspaper articles on honour killings, presented to WWHR (Istanbul: WHHR Archive, 1997). Young, I. M., ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’, in S. Gershon (ed.), The Citizenship Debates (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

10 Greek and Turkish students’ views on history, the nation and democracy Thalia Dragonas, Buvra Ersanli and Anna Frangoudaki

Introduction The data for this chapter are drawn from an international, multicultural study called Youth and History: The Comparative European Project on Historical Consciousness among Teenagers. This study investigated historical associations, interpretations, political opinions and attitudes of adolescents in Europe.1 Educational research concerned with history in the broader European context is rather scant, and has in the main been concerned with theoretical questions. Moreover, the greatest bulk of the existing work has addressed educational history and policies, the development of curricula and means of instruction. Empirical research on how students, who constitute a central element in the teaching and learning process, make sense of history is relatively rare. This is precisely the scope of the above study which aims at understanding students’ historical and political socialization; their interpretations of the past; their perceptions of the present and expectations for the future; as well as their linkage of the time levels mentioned above.2 For the purpose of the present chapter, a number of responses provided by the Greek and the Turkish students were isolated and analysed separately. The analysis reveals great similarities between the two groups, particularly as to their representations of their respective nations, religion and politics. The ethnocentric attitudes of both national groups are definitely shaped by the educational system. School is among the most important institutions involved in the production and reproduction of social representations, interiorization of meanings, conceptions and interpretations that engender the attitudes and practices of individuals. This chapter is an initial, collective, analytical approach to the responses furnished by the Greek and Turkish adolescents. We present the data, followed by a socio-psychological explanation of the way these youths make sense of concepts such as history, nation, religion and family. In the third section, we relate some of the responses of the Greek and Turkish students to their respective educational systems, and, more particularly, to the school textbooks.

Description of the study During the 1994/95 academic year, 31,611 students from 27 countries,3 responded to a pre-coded questionnaire. It consisted of 48 questions, on a five-point scale,

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each comprised of several sub-questions with a total of 280 items. At the time of the study, the students were 15 years old and attending the last year of compulsory education. The sample was selected randomly and was stratified by geographical region within each country.4 The original version of the questionnaire was in English. Thus each participating country had to follow standard translation and retranslation procedures in producing the questionnaire into their national language. For the purposes of the present chapter, certain responses of the Greek (N & 1,724) and Turkish adolescents (N & 1,229) were isolated, and similarities and differences between the two were investigated in depth.

Student responses5 Differences and similarities in response patterns between Greek and Turkish students are presented in this section while the statistical analysis of the specific results can be seen in the respective tables. The first set of item questions we were interested in, concerned the students’ views on nation and the national state (see Table 10.1). Two factors from the analysis regarding the students’ understanding of nations and national states demonstrate a differentiation. The first is a definition of nations as non-eternal

Table 10.1 Views on nations and the national state Factor 1

Nations are natural entities, unified by common origin, language, history and culture Nations represent a will to create a common future, despite cultural differences in the past The claims of national groups for a state of their own was one main cause if war in recent centuries Mean Nations are born, grow and perish in history, just like everything else National states should give an essential part of their sovereignity to a supranational organization Mean Note *** One-way Anova, Scheffé test, p % 0.01.

Factor 2

Greece

Turkey

0.725

0.800

0.717

0.507

0.544

0.571

7.337

7.310

Greece

Turkey

0.767

0.377

0.694

0.859

4.226

4.047 ***

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phenomena denoting a concept of historicity or transitoriness, and a sense of detachment from the concept of nation. (‘Nations are born, grow and perish in history, just like everything else’ and ‘National states should give an essential part of their sovereignty to a supranational organization.’) The second is a definition of nations as natural, eternal phenomena (‘Nations are natural entities, unified by common origin, language, history and culture’). Along with this notion is the item ‘Nations represent a will to create a common future, despite cultural differences in the past’. When the questionnaire was constructed, this item was meant as a free-willed fusion of the nation’s members, that is in contrast to the idea of nations being natural entities. However, we believe that students responded to the notion of a ‘common future’ and thus stressed the continuity characterizing eternal nations. The claims of national groups for a state of one’s own as ‘a main cause of war in recent centuries’ also emphasizes the importance of nation-states in the mind of the adolescents.6 Interestingly, this notion of the state as an eternal phenomenon, as revealed by the factor means (M & 7.34 and M & 7.31 for Greek and Turkish factors respectively), is much more favoured than the notion of the state as a transitory phenomenon (M & 4.23 and M & 4.05). Figure 10.1 shows the students’ answers to two separate questions ‘What does religion mean to you?’ and ‘How strongly are you interested in politics?’ In both countries students place a lot more importance on religion than they do on politics. It is worth mentioning that Turkish and Greek youth accorded more importance to religion than did all the other youngsters in the entire study. Students were asked how much interest they have in the history of various geographical areas (covering a spectrum from ‘one’s own locality’ to the ‘world outside Europe’ (see Figure 10.2).8 Both Greek and Turkish students gave a very

Importance of religion

Greece

4,00

3,00 Interest in politics 2,00

1,00 1,00

2,00

Figure 10.1 Interest in religion and politics.

3,00 Turkey

4,00

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5,0 The history of your country The history of your immediate locality

Greece

4,5

The history of Europe

4,0

The history of your region

3,5

The history of the world outside Europe

3,0 3,0

3,5

4,0 Turkey

4,5

5,0

Figure 10.2 Interest in history in geographical area.

high score for ‘the history of their own country’ which was indeed the highest among all the other respondents in the study (M & 4.54 for the Greeks and M & 4.49 for the Turks). The nation-state clearly dominates students’ historical interest. A telling question, revealing information on several levels, is the one investigating the important values of life. It is worth isolating the factor denoting ethnocentrism, which also has a high value, as well as the factor referring to the private sphere (see Table 10.2). ‘My country’, ‘My religious faith’, ‘My family’ cluster together in the case of Turkish youth and ‘My religious faith’, ‘My country’ and ‘European co-operation’ cluster together for the Greek youth. The triptych ‘one’s country’, ‘one’s religious faith’ and ‘one’s family’, is the constitutive element par excellence of national sentiment bridging notions such as homeland, community, togetherness, attachment and representations of morality. Religion, family and the nation embody values and principles that elicit strong emotional reactions. Greek students replace the item referring to ‘family’ with that of ‘European co-operation’, thus incorporating European co-operation in their ethnocentric conception converting it to a Eurocentric one. ‘Family’, in the case of the Greek students, appears in the factor denoting the private sphere. ‘Friends’, ‘Family’, ‘Hobbies/personal interests’ make up the Greek factor, while ‘Hobbies/personal interests’, ‘Friends’, and ‘Money and wealth for myself ’ make up the respective Turkish factor. The ethnocentric image is complemented with the answers on the question investigating students’ perceptions with regard to the aims of the study of history (see Table 10.3). Greek adolescents believe strongly, more than any other nationals, that the paramount aim of historical study is knowledge of the past, and

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Table 10.2 How important are the following for you? Factor 1

My religious faith My country European co-operation Family Mean

Factor 2

Greece

Turkey

0.746 0.672 0.545

0.736 0.754

9.429

Greece

Turkey

0.788 0.652 0.530

0.717

0.706 9.615 ***

Friends Family Hobbies/personal interests Money and wealth for myself Mean

6.120

0.765 0.425 5.698 ***

Note *** One-way Anova, Scheffé test, p % 0.01.

Table 10.3 Aims of the study of history Means

Greece Turkey

Knowledge of the past

Understanding the present

Orientation of the future

4.26 4.05

3.11 3.56

2.91 3.78

believe less than any other that the main aim of historical study is understanding the present and orientation of the future. These extreme scores are not encountered in the Turkish data. In nearly every country the present is a bit more important for the adolescents than the future. Turkey is one of the very few exceptions. Turkish students are much more future-oriented than their Greek counterparts. To the question ‘What does history mean to you?’ Greek and Turkish students answered similarly with regard to the moralistic and instructive aspect of history (see Table 10.4). History ‘shows the background of the present way of life and explains today’s problems’; provides ‘a number of instructive examples of what is right or wrong, good or bad’; gives ‘a chance for myself to learn from failures and successes of others’. A particular block of questions asked students ‘how much interest they have in various kinds of history’ and to rate items ranging from the everyday life of ordinary people to wars and to distant foreign cultures. For the purpose of the present discussion, we isolated the item referring to ‘the making of nations’. Turkish adolescents gave the highest value of all the other nationals (M & 3.46), and Greeks followed quite closely (M & 3.26).

166

Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey Table 10.4 What does history mean to you? Factor 1 Greece Shows the background of the present way of life and explains today’s problems A number of instructive examples of what is right or wrong, good or bad A chance for myself to learn from failures and successes of others Mean

Turkey

0.780 0.594

0.722 0.863

4.872

6.247***

Note *** One-way Anova, Scheffé test, p % 0.01.

The question investigating students’ conception of democracy comprised three choices: (1) four affirmative traditional definitions, (2) two critical definitions belonging to the modern democratic conception, and (3) three negative definitions rejecting democracy. The factor analysis of the Greek and Turkish data presents a very similar conception of democracy (see Table 10.5). The combined factors (as well as the factors of each country separately) distinguish the positive from the negative definitions of democracy. What is even more important is that they clearly distinguish the negative anti-democratic from the critical definitions, that is, the welfare state and gender equality. It is also interesting to note that in the factors of both countries, as well as the combined factor, one among the critical conceptions according to which democracy ‘should’ include the welfare state, and its affirmative definition as ‘rule by law and justice and protection of minorities’ cluster together for both samples. The Greek and Turkish youths project an optimistic image concerning the way the young generation, in both countries, understands political concepts and values. The three negative definitions rejecting democracy cluster together, and are equally quite low for both Greek and Turkish students in comparison with the affirmative definitions of democracy. To summarize the main findings, we note that the responses of both Greek and Turkish students are highly ethnocentric. The nation is represented as a natural, eternal phenomenon, as an organic system of value codes and communication practices that have been established over time, thus acquiring an element of uniqueness. Religion is of paramount significance, contrary to politics that are undervalued, and the notions of ‘country’ and ‘religion’ cluster together. Looking at the rest of the data, we tend to believe that the importance attributed to religion refers much less to religious belief and practice and much more to identification with the nation and belonging to that nation. The history of one’s own country is accorded the highest interest (more than any other kind of history), while Greek youths are more past-oriented than their Turkish counterparts who look at the past but project into the future. It is commonplace that nationalistic discourse places heavy emphasis on the past. However, nationalistic discourse draws heavily from

7.62 7.53 7.89

5.378*

7.13 7.11 6.92

5.078

Notes *** One-way Anova, Scheffé test, p  0.01; * p  0.05.

It is not real until women and men have equal rights in all situations Mean

It should include the welfare state It is rule by law and justice and protection of minorities Mean

The result of a long process of trial and error through times It is the finest legacy of classical Greece It is government of the people, for the people and by the people Mean

It is a system of weak government not appropriate in times of crisis No more than acclaim of some party leaders in elections A pretence, hiding the fact that the rich and powerful have always won in history Mean 0.810 0.762

5.893***

0.741 0.636 7.216

Turkey

0.742

Greece

Greece

Turkey

Factor 2

Factor 1

Table 10.5 What are your views on democracy?

0.982 3.160***

0.870 5.26

3.318***

Turkey

5.345

Greece

0.803 0.688

0.622

Turkey

Factor 4

0.848 0.597

Greece

Factor 3

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

the past in order to legitimize the present and project into the future.7 In that sense one could claim that Turkish youngsters may adhere to the nationalistic principles more fervently. In both Greece and Turkey the family culture of relatedness is prominent and high values are placed on close-knit interpersonal ties and interdependence, rather than independence.8 Interestingly, however, family, in the case of the Greek adolescents in the present study, is placed within a more private sphere, along with friends and personal interests, whereas in the case of the Turkish youths, it is part of their national identity. Thus Europe clusters with nation and religion. The ethnocentric perception is broadened into a Eurocentric one. As explained later in the chapter, this tendency results from the dominant ideology evaluating peoples according to the stereotype of the superiority of the Western and Northern European industrialized zone. Greek students position Greece among the lower ranks of this ‘noble’ European family and thus resort to a defence strategy, whereby they identify with the European Union and the allegedly superior Europeans. According to the analysis of the international data, the countries with the more secure democratic outlook among all the rest (positively endorsing the affirmation of democratic definitions, and rejecting the negative definitions) are Italy, Greece and Turkey.9 This fact should, we suggest, be understood on a second level of analysis, and not as an indication that Greek and Turkish adolescents have a stronger attachment to democracy than for example their British, Swedish, French or other counterparts. It should be seen, as suggested elsewhere for the Greek students10 as an indication that they appear to cherish democracy more than other nationals. This is precisely because they feel it needs to be defended and they do not take it for granted as the students from the older democratic countries probably do. As for the Turkish students, democracy seems to be a necessity for the future, as a status symbol, rather than a code of behaviour of everyday life.

A socio-psychological discussion of students’ responses An understanding of national belonging and nationalism requires investigation of the seemingly obvious ideological assertions, such as the emphasis on and the idealization of the past as responsible for the distinct and unique character of the nation. It is the notion of uniqueness of the nation that requires its consolidation in an equally unique historical uninterrupted continuity. In an attempt to discuss the findings from the perspective of national belonging and to explore the implicated psycho-social dimensions, we adopt a double approach suggesting, on the one hand, that this belonging is a fundamentally a-historical need, while on the other that it is conditioned by historical circumstances. If the nation is conceived as an ‘imagined community’,11 then the history of the nation refers to a social representation.12 Acts of collective imagination, together with acts of collective remembering and forgetting, are necessary for the existence of a nation. What is imagined is more than an image of the community,

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its past and its imagined destiny. The self as a member of the community is also to be imagined. In other words, in terms of mental functioning, it can be placed somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious. The sense of group identification could thus be considered a fundamental, a-historical human need. However, this belonging is at the same time conditioned by historical circumstances by a principle sustaining the harmony of political and national unity. National belonging, claims Hobsbaum,13 cannot be the product of a group of human beings defining themselves, unless there are implicated specific political objective or claims. In this sense, the nation is also the outcome of a considered and self-conscious project. One can thus draw a distinction between national belonging and nationalism. The former is a manifestation of an inner need constituting a necessity for the social systems and for the development of the individual; the latter is a political project. Since the aim is to analyse self-determination, a good point to start from is the concept of identity itself, applicable both to individual and groups. Nationalist imagination is constructed around the first person plural. It is an imagining of who ‘we’ are. This imagining links the self with a category, as described in the social–psychological theories of social identity.14 Collective representations not only constitute, but define individual and collective identity. In talking about identity, we briefly and schematically outline that the sense of identity is the result of a process of continuous interactions among three integrative relationships. The first is spatial integration, aiming at the differentiation between the self and the non-self. The second is temporal integration, denoting continuity in time of the feeling of being oneself. The third is social integration, referring to the relationship between aspects of self and external objects, using projective and introjective mechanisms of identification.15 In other words, when we talk about identity, we refer to the relationship between self and non-self; the continuity in time of the feeling of being oneself. That is to say, we refer to the memory of the self; and the process of continuous reformation, to which identity, that is not a ‘given’ but a ‘becoming’, is subjected. Analysis of the process of socialization demonstrates the role performed in a given culture at a given historical moment by a dominant set of norms, values and attitudes. It constitutes a kind of measure against which every member must compare him/herself in the course of his/her development. We refer to the ego ideal, which is a central reference point in the development of the identity of all the members of that culture. It guarantees that all the members of a society share the same object.16 In exchange for their inevitable arbitrariness, the norms, rules or principles are acceptable, because they offer the security of belonging to a social system. They assure the certainty of those elements that are indispensable for the individual’s construction of his/her identity. Thus social perpetuation and personal identity are but two aspects of the same process. We may take the above point further, if we resort to a comparison between the so-called modern and pre-modern traditional societies.17 We refer to the relationship between time (past and present) and type of society. In traditional societies, time

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Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey

is perceived as repeated in a cyclical fashion and social relationships are reproduced consistently and ‘naturally’, while, in modern societies, there is a radical rupture with the traditional conception. Time here is linear, measurable and irreversible.18 Another dimension, perhaps the most important, is that modernity gives rise to a new system of human relationships and to the emergence of the individual as an acting agent. The pre-modern identity can be very generally understood as externally/heteronomously determined.19 Among traditional pre-modern societies the formation of the individual occurs along established paths. These are clearly defined by rites of passage that conclude with the attainment of community membership with full rights. This process guarantees the equilibrium and the perpetuation of a practically automated system. In contrast, modern societies signal the departure from given points and are characterized by movement, flux, change, unpredictability. They recognize temporality and renounce the concept of transcendence, thus admitting the diachronous and synchronous possibilities of multiple identities.20 From the point of view of the richness and variety of the system, this undoubtedly represents an advantage. On the other hand, it creates a considerable problem with respect to cohesion and perpetuation. Modern societies have confronted this challenge by turning to ideology. Ideology, however, plays the role which mythology used to play in traditional societies. It is a temporal product that requires continuous negotiation. Such is the case of the ideology of nationalism. On the basis of the classical Durkheimian sociological argument,21 according to which a progressive differentiation of modern societies fragments collective identities, nationalism seems to play the role of creating a new kind of collective identity. Drawing from the past has a strong functional content, nourishing the collective fantasy of security accorded by the traditional society, in contrast to the multiple destabilizing changes in the present and the unpredictable threats of the future represented by modernity. The erosion and break-up of the traditional order of things strengthen the sense of belonging to new collectivities. This, owing precisely to their past quality, will refute the ambiguity and uncertainty of social change. In other words, new, but old-looking, identities are required which will draw from the past and transcend discontinuities in time. The past has a consolatory effect upon the loss of what is known, given and secure.22 Threatened individuals protect themselves by reconstructing the past, and creating a world which is stable and orderly and a place in which one is not subject to random happenings. The dependence of the ‘nation’ on the specific state of societal development is rarely taken note of in the field of social psychology.23 The conception of the past as past and gone can only be conceptualized by societies under transition, under continuous change. It is modern societies no longer unconsciously experiencing tradition which try consciously to reconnect with their past.24 Such is the case of Greek society, the course of which is characterized by a number of discontinuities. Greek society is no longer tied to a traditional mode of functioning but often turns back towards the reassuring past. Despite the radical transformations in a short period of a few decades, there is still resistance to change, especially with

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regard to social roles, traditional hierarchies and gender relations.25 The highly ethnocentric responses of the Greek adolescents can be interpreted as a quest for a new kind of collectivity to which one can belong and through which one can define one’s own social existence. A similar assertion can be made for Turkish society as well, oscillating between a collective and individualistic mode of relating.26 In this sense, the nation constitutes a strong point of attraction. This is precisely because it represents a modern abstraction that proposes a collective ideal, setting aside social conflicts while at the same time reproducing the sense of continuity with the traditional order of things. Parenthetically, we should mention here that responses of Greek students to other sets of questions reveal a strong tendency of the youngsters to de-emphasize the role of social conflicts in the course of history.27 In nationalism there is a continuous intermarriage of time, a mythical function of an invented past, an interpretation of the present, a prophecy for the future, merging nostalgia with utopia. We would like to expand on the point that nationalism contains a comforting element for the loss of security and safety in the process of modernization, representing, thus, an alternative sense of belonging. We need to consider the students’ responses, not only in relation to the condition of modernity but also to their age, that is, adolescence. Both are circumstances characterized inherently by intra- and inter-personal negotiations of the self–other balance in order to achieve further steps in the direction of autonomous functioning. Both contribute to the challenge of self-definition, that is, of what is regarded as self (or subject), that is structured, lost, and then reformed. Both adolescence and modernity, naturally each one at their own level of analysis, are faced with the disruption of classification and of a given social order, creating an uneasiness with ambiguities and ambivalence which disturb and destabilize neat boundaries and borders. There is an underlying fear of chaos, generated paradoxically by an awareness of diversity and the possibility of transformation. This point needs to be complemented by the more general observation that both modernity and adolescence are characterized by a duality, in which rapid and incessant change and the fragmentation that ensues, are also accompanied by constant projects which attempt the conservation and indeed invention of traditions.28 It is useful to connect this duality with the emphasis on the striving for classificatory order and the ambivalence it generates, for it yields important insights into the emphasis students place on the security provided by the concept of the nation and that of religion.

The nation as narrated by school history In this third section we relate the ethnocentric responses of both Greek and Turkish students to the educational system, and in particular to the way history is narrated in the school textbooks. School textbooks constitute a means par excellence of producing and reproducing social representations of national self and national other and of formulating concepts, such as nation, citizenship, democracy and national identity.

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Turkish school history We first look into the recent and earlier history and civics textbooks used in Turkish schools and we draw upon the way ethnocentrism, nationalism and citizenship are represented. The history of standardized official textbook writing, in accordance with nation-building aspirations, was launched with two famous history congresses during the 1930s. The First Turkish History Congress (1932) and the Second Turkish History Congress (1937) prepared both the ideological and stylistic features of ‘new’ historiography in Turkey. The pivotal contribution to the confused search for identity by the Young Ottomans and the Young Turks was the magnification of ethnicity.29 This stress point was further accentuated by spatial (Central Asia, Anatolia, Europe), temporal (pre-history, present) and operational (military, political accomplishments) legends. In this enterprise, mythical narration and pragmatic considerations coexisted, denying the contemporary developments in history writing. Contrary to the expectations of the political leadership, the method did not work for the advancement of national self-esteem and international preparedness but the legend tamed heterogeneity. All kinds of differences were shelved away. Ethnos prevailed as the material for history lessons, bridging Central Asia to the far West, that is America, with a focus on Anatolia as the only line of effectiveness which had ever existed in world civilization. The level of this exaggeration was reduced over the following decades, but the mental set created by the official history thesis persisted. It was revolutionary, pragmatic and methodologically confused, changing focal points with changes of government, either denying or appropriating specific places, periods, heroes or events.30 In the recent history textbooks in Turkey, history, country – that is the territory, the motherland – and the nation come together. They are explained in direct relation with one another and at times used interchangeably. The nation is seen as the main moving force for historical change and development: ‘As a nation one should be active in shaping history; the nation should be the subject not the object of history’; ‘Historical development is the end product of the competition of nations with one another’.31 In the introductory chapter of History I for the ninth grade, historical knowledge is also described as the ‘subject of all political action in the past’. The following explanation is exactly contrary to the above interpretation representing nations as the original moving force: ‘Historical knowledge enlightens international relations and arranges, orders and prepares them.’32 This position explains why Turkish students in the present survey expect a lot from history lessons, since they are taught that they need it to learn about the past, to understand the present and to make decisions about the future. The function and goal of history is related to the past, present and future in a very pragmatic, instrumental way. History lessons are necessary so that ‘previous errors are not repeated’. History acquires a pragmatic purpose: to enlighten all phases and levels of political action. In short, in school textbooks nations are presented as creating history and historical knowledge as reinforcing the nations.

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One could claim here that school textbooks contain a strong realistic view of the world, that is they present history as nations in rivalry or as international political action. On the other hand, the winners and losers in this historical rivalry are not equally realistically presented. Turkey is the main focus. The political will of no other nation, or empire or civilization is recognized to have had a considerable impact on the shaping of Turkey at any stage. Thus, while Turkey is constantly presented as the ‘subject’ of history, the other nations do not appear equally as historical subjects. Until two decades ago, even the impact of the Ottoman Empire was indirectly narrated. Continuities were not outlined; discontinuity was magnified. This specific attitude implies that only politically sovereign nations can shape and write history, and thus history as a discipline is a modern phenomenon. However, when we look at the complementary disciplines of history, everything but politics and economy is listed.33 Thus a contradiction looms large. Politics is not recognized as a discipline, while history is primarily described as political will and political action. In other words, history is narrated in school in such a way that politics as a complementary discipline is not even necessary. Hence the narration of nationalism becomes the sole interpretation of history as a whole. In the 1998 civics textbooks, the nation is presented as having both objective (linguistic, religious and racial) and subjective (historical, psychological and cultural) features. The everlasting characteristics of the Turkish nation (ancient and modern) are listed as follows: ‘For the Turkish nation independence is of primary importance; the Turkish nation has always established great states; the Turkish nation has high ethical values; Turks keep their word; they are loyal to their friends, relatives and family; they never downgrade people who are temporarily under the protection of the Turkish state; they treasure honour and honesty; they show great hospitality; they are civilized and peaceful; they never resolve their differences by going to war, unless they are under serious pressure; they never torture people, not even the enemy.’34 In Turkish schools, religion (as featured in the history and civics books) is not a subject aimed at shaping national identity. However, the cultural impact of Islam is an integral part of national identity for all Turkic peoples. When most of the Turks, in a variety of geographical areas, chose the Muslim religion during the later Middle Ages, the political tradition of the pre-Islamic Turks was integrated into the new identity and an accentuated reaction to Arab dominance further strengthened the political will of the Turks. There is a special history book for a secondary education elective course entitled Islam Tarihi (History of Islam). Even that book does not teach Islam as a feature of identity. Pre-Islamic Turkish traditions are described as generally in accordance with Islamic principles: ‘Therefore, Turks accepted Islam willingly without force.’ Immediately following this assertion, it is stated that ‘the Turks soon grasped the leadership of Islamic religion’.35 Here we observe the significance of political will as well as the nationalization of religion. In the introductory pages of the same book we read the following: ‘Turks have adopted Islam since the eleventh century. After this period Turkish history is also treated as the history of Islam. In the centuries ever since, our nation has acted as the leaders of Islam as well as the

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protector of Islam. Today, too, Turkey has a significant position among Islamic societies: The existence of seven independent Turkic Republics is the signal that the next century will be the century of Muslim/Turkic Century.’36 This attitude shows that Islam is seen as part of the Turkish political presence, particularly where today’s Turkic Republics are concerned. The Turkish Republic is not treated as one of the Islamic countries, but as the best of Islamic countries, and the best Turks are believed to be in Turkey. Thus a significant methodological problem, stemming from such a narration, is that ego boosting is undertaken, disregarding any influence from outside. All positive values having nothing to do with either positive or negative interaction are inherent in the Turkish identity. This, in fact, is a refutation of history as a discipline. On the other hand, the political authorities of the post-military intervention in 1980 decided to strengthen Islamic identity. The religious secondary schools (considered to be professional/technical schools) were upgraded in status during these years, and the graduates of these schools were allowed to take the university entrance examinations, and in this way became integrated into the general education system. Very recent research shows that the number of students attending Imam Hatip schools increased 27 times between 1970 and 1998.37 In brief, the national self is predominantly based on ethnic patriotic qualities. Religion, rather than assuming a separate identity, complements what is national and highlights the sui generis nature of Turkishness. On the image of others The country, the motherland, that is, the territory, is the focus of historical narrative. Since the 1930s, in the formative years of the Republic, there has never been a separate history book or subject called ‘world history’, nor an extensive separate section on general/world history. In the 1920s, however, there were courses, mainly at university level, on general history and the history of states.38 The books used since the mid-1990s are the two volumes called History I and History II as mentioned above, and a third volume on Atatürk’s principles and reform. The first two are meant to cover Turkic, Islamic, Ottoman, European history and, finally, the history of the Republic. In these books we observe the assimilation of certain parts of the world, under the chapters entitled ‘Turkic History’ ‘Islamic History’ and ‘Ottoman History’ along with ‘European History’. For antiquity, the focus is on the territory and the surrounding civilizations. In fact, the neighbouring civilizations are treated in a few paragraphs. For the Middle Ages and the early modern ages, Islamic and Ottoman history embrace these surrounding civilizations which are indirectly presented as Turkish ‘spheres of influence’. The cultural, social and historical diversity present in the area seems to be a sub-category of the higher identity: Islamic/Turkic. In spite of all these limitations, while the ancient, middle and early modern ages extend to various regions, the history of the Republic seems to be radically isolated from the rest of the world. The exception here is its involvement in the First World War and the impact of the Second World War. The political will

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of the Turks, that is the nation, is always there. The will of other societies and civilizations are appended to chapters without any emphasis on interaction.39 This is obvious, for example, in the sections on Byzantium. Actually no other political will, other than of republican Turkey, seems to be significant. But then, the history of republican Turkey is confined to two and a half decades from 1920 to 1945, the ‘golden age’ of Turkey’s modern history.40 Briefly, history, nation and country come together to explain the development of Turkey and the region, while the history books are not called ‘Turkic History’ or ‘History of Turkey’ but just ‘History’. However, there are books with these titles for supplementary elective courses. Accordingly, the findings of the present survey show that Turkish students do not have any interest in countries, states or societies other than their own. The political inherent In Turkish schoolbooks, the notion of democracy in the modern ages is generally treated as justice and equality. It is indirectly defined as republicanism, that is the sovereignty of the people. Although a republican government can be democratic or not, in Turkish history and civics books, all definitions of democracy apply to republicanism, in the sense of a government based on the people’s consensus and the rejection of monarchic and dynastic principles. There is no trace of liberal democracy in the definitions. The accountability and right of recall from political office, the opportunity to participate in every way, do not complement one another in these definitions of democracy. The narration and definition of democracy in two civics books41 for the eighth grade, is made on three levels. It begins with ‘democracy in the family’, followed by ‘democracy in school’ and ‘democracy’ in general, meaning the historical development of the concept of democracy. Democracy in the family is described in a normative way, presenting the traditional division of labour (‘the father is the head of the family and the mother takes care of the house’) as a ‘rule of law’. This is accompanied by its exception ‘if necessary’, the mother contributes to the budget of the family. Although ‘respect’ for different opinions is praised, this respect is presented normatively as in an etiquette text describing conventional rules of personal behaviour in a polite society. Problems and happy days should, according to the books, be shared by family members and family reputation should be preserved. As far as democracy in school is concerned, codes of behaviour are outlined, some of which are general (etiquette), and others specific to school (such as regularly attending classes). There is also mention of respect for different opinions, the necessity to maintain the school buildings and so on, as well as to preserve the reputation of the school. The above is followed by a section entitled ‘What is democracy?’, divided into four subsections: ‘sovereignty of the nation’, ‘freedom and equality’, ‘public freedom’ and ‘political freedom’. There follow other sections, such as ‘democracy of the ancient Turks’, ‘development of democracy under Islam’ and ‘democratic movements in the Ottoman Empire’. In the history books, there are similar sections.42

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In the civics books, reforms are explained in such a way as to present democracy as equivalent to the republican welfare state. Finally, republican democracy is taken up. In this subsection, democracy is defined as parliamentary rule with a multi-party system and universal suffrage, accompanied by some examples from recent political history. One example is the 1950 change of government in power through elections. There is, nevertheless, no explanation in the text of how and by whom this new party ‘was removed from state administration’, what precisely the conflict was ten years after having ascended to power through elections; that is there is no mention of the 1960 military intervention. Another example given as a democratic accomplishment is the introduction of separation of powers in the 1961 constitution. We should note here that these fragmentary references to the political history of the 1950s and 1960s do not exist in the history books. The last section in these civics books, ‘today’s understanding of democracy’, presents the role of the political parties. Power and opposition are put forward with the following statement: ‘The party in power should use all state facilities to get rid of opposition, and opposition should accept the programme of the party in power.’43 There are no examples of today’s understanding of democracy, which is thus defined as authoritarian democracy rather than liberal or social democracy. This section is followed by a brief description of totalitarian regimes, but again no examples are given and no totalitarian regime is mentioned by name. Finally, the short section on totalitarian regimes is directly followed by a section on ‘terror, anarchy and threat’, both domestic and international. The notion of democracy has shifted to competitiveness between the elites, political actors and so on. Notions and principles that form the modern idea of democracy, such as different loyalties for political activity, the new styles of decentralization, the guarantee of minority rights, the guarantees of individual rights, are not mentioned in the civics books. As far as history textbooks are concerned, these concepts are not mentioned either, albeit for ‘a technical reason’. The contents of the elementary-school history books also come to an end in 1945 when the multi-party regime was just beginning in Turkey. Thus, there is no reference to a multi-party regime, universal suffrage, alternating governments or the founding of mass organizations (for example, trade unions). Nor is there any reference to interruptions of democracy by extra-parliamentary forces (interventions followed by restoration of parliamentary democracy by new parties), the founding of non-governmental organizations, freedom of the media and so on. All the above are absent from the history books, through the omission of politics, by its consideration as a different and complementary course. There is nevertheless in the above omission, a politically significant intention of silencing all conflictual or controversial issues in school. Turkish students, when compared to Greek students, place more emphasis on the statement that democracy ‘is not real until women and men have equal rights in all situations’. This must emerge from two sources: the image of women in Turkic cultures, and Atatürk’s accomplishment in granting women political freedom.44 If we summarize the contents of the earlier as well as the more recent schoolbooks, we come to the following realization. The Turkish authorities expect a lot

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from history classes, both on a pragmatic and on a positivist level. The books include a number of contradictory goals, as is apparent from the methodological deficiencies of the contents, such as the explanatory references of what democracy is, contained in the sections concerning the Ottoman era, but missing from the sections concerning the Turkish republic. All references to other nation-states and other cultures do not aim at teaching students history. Rather, they appear as a kind of peripheral information to the central focus, which is ethnocentrism. The understanding of politics is not directly related with differing opinions, but the political process is presented as a unifying force, inspired by an anonymous consensus; the communitarian sense of belonging is strong; individualism lags behind or is limited to ‘personal wealth’. One may claim here that Turkish history education is defensive political education, ignoring a lively narrative of identity. Comparing Turkish with German and British textbooks can be helpful to highlight this approach. While British textbooks ‘offer a strong and unbroken identification with the national past, the West German textbooks are difficult and problem-oriented, trying to teach history through a description and analysis of processes and structures’.45 Although the German textbooks are ‘embedded in a wider European context’, Turkish history textbooks imply either the isolation of Turkey or the assimilation of the whole region extending to Central Asia and Central Europe. History is seen as a kind of official shield, needed to defend the Turkish people, without, nevertheless, precise references as to whom they need to defend themselves against. This defensive education does not seem to provide the Turkish individual with self-esteem, nor the Greek for that matter, as is shown below. Rather it forces him/her to a collective thinking which requires less responsibility for civil rights. Greek school history Greek students’ ideas and attitudes towards their own and other nations are not the sole product of school, but they are, highly concordant with the ethnocentric conceptions contained in all the school textbooks, and particularly those of history. A highly ethnocentric conception Analysis of the curricula46 shows that the Greek school strongly sustains ethnocentric conceptions. Content analysis of current Greek history, geography and language textbooks47 reveals that nations are presented as fundamental and almost natural entities, seen outside history and time. As mentioned above, in the survey under question here, both Greek and Turkish students understand history as having an instructive and mainly moralistic purpose. As far as Greek students are concerned, the moralistic goal of history is definitely a message produced directly or indirectly through almost every school textbook. This is because the teaching of history in Greek education does not provide pupils with conceptual tools that would permit them to understand the conflictual historical process and the current social reality. Instead, the school

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textbooks employ a double standard of values, qualifying the same ‘national’ characteristics as positive or negative, depending on their reference to the Greeks or to other national entities. For example, the expansive national policy of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is described as a national right for the Greek state and as the aggressive expansionism of the other Balkan states. The claiming of territories is presented as a right for the Greek state and an aggression for all the others. Victory in the battlefield is said to be the consequence of heroism for the Greeks and the result of massacre by any other nationality. Moreover, the school textbooks describe the national entity as if it had no internal boundaries, and the authors deal with all kinds of social conflict of the past, with moral condemnation instead of interpretation. Thus social conflicts internal to the national group are described in moral terms as ‘fratricides’. They are neither rationalized nor presented as choices made among other possible ones. Rather they are viewed anachronistically as the arbitrary prevalence of wrong against right. This is furthermore reinforced by the ‘exercises’ contained in history textbooks. In a few words they recap the ‘lesson’ given by the particular narration of the day, separating the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ and contributing to the creation of rigid presentations. Students are constantly asked to ascribe to this double standard logic which inhibits any subtlety in dealing with the past and therefore any critical assessment of the information provided by the book. The historical information provided by the books is also given the status of the truth, based on the veracity of the events narrated. Over the last 20 years there has been an expressed intention for objectivity and a modern historical approach, served by the use of notions like ‘social formation’ or the reference to the economy and to social life (besides the history of war and politics). However, history is still the truth about the past, totally excluding the notion of the interpretation of events. Objectivity, furthermore, is not only constructed through the narrative on objective events, but it is also invoked by an extensive use of sources, accompanying the history textbooks of secondary education. These sources represent a selection of documents (mainly pieces of literature or testimonies contemporary to the events described), which construct a complementary historical narrative aimed at consolidating the message of the events described in the main text. These documents, giving no alternative versions of the events they refer to, are called sources. Thus they greatly reinforce the objectivity and truth of the information provided by the books. The survey in question shows that Greek students make an anachronistic reading of the past. We suggest this to be a direct product of school textbooks, since they contain a unique definition of the nation, described as given outside time and space. The national entity, defined through the alternative use of the terms ‘Hellenism’, ‘the Greek people’ or ‘the Greeks’ and ‘Greece’, is considered as given outside the context of history and of geography. The use of the term Hellenism helps the historical narrative to avoid obvious anachronisms and contradictions, while indirectly presenting the Greek nation as everlasting. This a-temporal and anthropomorphic subject is transcending both geography and history, since it is used to define the Greeks from the Minoan times all the way

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through to the eighteenth century. It thus serves as a basis for a valorization of events, acts and cultures over time. Next to the term Hellenism, Christian Orthodoxy is also used as a generic term defining the Greek nation. Religion as theology has a rather limited presence in Greek school textbooks. Nevertheless, religion is presented in an indirect and constant way in almost every schoolbook, as a one of the two main facets of national identity (the other being the a-historic, diachronic Greekness). In other words, without getting into the argument concerning the complex issue of religion in Greek society, we suggest that the finding on the very high importance which Greek students grant religion is an indication of their nationalistic attitude rather than a religious one. They accord this great importance to religion, because they accord it similarly to the nation. It would be impossible for the Greek students to see their nation as anything but a group of people related by a common language, common origins/ancestors and having a history and a culture of its own. This conception constitutes both a direct or indirect but ever-present truth contained in almost every school textbook. The very high importance which books accord to the national interest produces an understanding of the nation-state as having no internal boundaries or comprised of social groups with no conflictual interests. The historical narrative often directly supports a conception of the nation-state as composed of individuals having one and the same interest. Moreover the already mentioned notion of fratricide, used in order to condemn past social conflicts, directly suggests the natural bonds of blood binding the members of the national family together. This image is greatly reinforced by silence on the historical process of the formation of nations, as well as on any internal differentiation, and on all the concrete acts of suppression of alterity within the national group by the Greek state, especially during the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth century. The everlasting Greek nation, moreover, is described as fighting since very ancient times to conserve its main national characteristics and its particular national idiosyncrasy. The overly positive evaluation of the nation is based on this notion of the conservation of an inherent capacity of the Greeks. Besides their everlasting resistance against foreign aggressors, they have, because of this capacity, been able to conserve their Greek language and culture, during long periods of foreign occupation, first by the Roman Empire, then the Francs and finally the Ottoman Empire. The repeated notion of the conservation of the Greek cultural traits (from antiquity to present) is accompanied by an evaluation of cultural influences, which through information, but also silence and omission, produces the indirect, albeit definite, message of cultural homogeneity. First of all, as far as the Greek culture is concerned, it is never presented as bearing any influence from any other culture. Exceptions here are influences from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which, nevertheless, are systematically accompanied by reference to the ancient Greek culture having shaped the main movements founding the European civilization. Moreover, there are direct references to the important influence which the Greek culture had on the Roman civilization, and later on the

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Ottoman one, since the Byzantine Empire is described as purely Greek. Finally, cultural and other influences that were transferred from Europe to other continents are often mentioned especially in geography textbooks, but never the reverse. As a result, an indirect but powerful evaluation is constructed, concerning the notion of cultural influence. It is not seen as a consequence of culture contact and intermixture, but it definitively appears as a process that is always one-sided. Cultural influence is the outcome of cultural prevalence. This powerful message necessarily leads in two directions. If influence is the unilateral effect of a higher culture towards a lower one, bearing influences becomes by itself an indication of inferiority. The intellectual superiority ascribed by the school historical narrative to the Greek people is indirectly underlined through emphasis on uninterrupted millenary continuity, resistance to influences and the supremacy of the ancient Greek civilization. The latter is seen as having shaped the evolution of the European civilization as superior to all others on earth. The Greek national myth and its relation to the Ottoman and Turkish culture As far as the denial of the existence of influences upon the Greek culture is concerned, recent survey data on Greek teachers’ representations48 show that a considerably high percentage of Greek teachers deny the existence of any influences upon the Greek culture, other than ancient Greek and Byzantine. Thus, in Greek schools, both textbooks and teachers deny the obvious, since the denial of cultural influences is disputed, not only by an elementary historical approach, but also by mere common experience (cultural influences are present, they are sensed and acknowledged by everybody in social reality). We suggest here that this contradiction acquires its full logic if we relate the denial to the history of the country, that is to its relations with the Ottoman Empire and the republic of Turkey. If the dominant national myth of the Greek nation is that of millenary conservation and the implied purity of its culture, the influences denied are primarily the Ottoman and Turkish ones. This argument is supported by the above-mentioned data on teachers’ representations, which contain the following telling contradiction. Greek teachers answered two questions on cultural influences. A large percentage responded to the first that the Greek culture has not been influenced by the Turkish culture, while an equally high percentage responded to the second that Greek culture has been negatively influenced by the Turkish culture.49 This inconsistency shows that Greek teachers do not want to publicly acknowledge that their culture bears Turkish influences. This finding could perhaps be related to the history of conflictual relations between Greece and Turkey, as well as to the continuous friction between the governments of the two countries. However, we suggest here that, contrary to appearances, it is not related to a negative attitude towards the Turkish people, but is a product of the discriminatory Eurocentric stereotype still dominant, even if continuously challenged, in all countries.

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There is an arbitrary taxonomy that places Western European culture above all others in the world. This is not only a stereotype still dominant in almost all European countries, but also one of the most powerful beliefs of our time. According to this belief, Western European civilization has had some unique historical advantage, or/and some special quality of culture, which gives this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities in history, and to the present.50 This powerful belief, recently defined as Eurocentrism51 and now under criticism, inferiorizes all cultures other than European ones, but also all those other than the dominant cultures in each country, regional or social, as well as the countries considered as belonging to the periphery, as well as to the East (in both its geographical and political connotation) or to the South of Europe (in both its geographical and economic meaning). As far as Greece is concerned, the Eurocentric taxonomy inferiorizes this country which belongs to the South, and has Eastern, in the sense of Levantine, cultural influences. At the same time it accords great prestige to ancient Greece, accepting the products of classical ancient Greek culture as being of universal value, and acknowledging from various sources their important impact in shaping the allegedly superior European civilization. As a result, antiquity becomes a huge ideological trap. Once the Eurocentric stereotype is accepted, the national social and cultural present is reflected in this Eurocentric mirror as seriously undervalued, precisely because this social and cultural present is obviously not shaped solely by ancient Greek influences. Thus, the dominant discourse on the nation has to deny the present Greek culture, by using it as a screen on which to project the highly prestigious values of antiquity. In the black box of ideology, those who shape the younger generations replace history by the totem of glorious ancestors going back thousands of years, as if the inferiority felt now could be diffused into eternity. The trap moreover has serious effects. The evaluation contained in the nationalistic myth is harmful to any kind of positive relation of Greek youth with ancient Greek culture and its products. Moreover, by hearing repeatedly that Greek antiquity is the only part of the national culture which renders Greeks equal members of the aristocratic European family, the Greek students are taught the self-damaging discriminative idea that part of their cultural identity contains inferior elements. Closely related to the latter is a very important effect concerning the relation of the Greek youth to the European Union. The students in the survey adhere very enthusiastically and optimistically to the EU, and furthermore include ‘European co-operation’ as part of the values of ‘my religious faith’ and ‘my country’. In spite of their enthusiastic adherence to the European Union, almost half of the Greek students feel that the adjective European does not fit the Greek people.52 This difficulty observed in the students’ self-recognition as Europeans has a lot to do with their national self-image constructed by school. This image is harmed by the arbitrary taxonomy on the alleged Western European superiority, and it ill prepares Greek youth for a European future, where they could have strong negotiating positions, and they would be able to create successful alliances in the European context.

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Considering all the above, the fact that Greek students accord a very high importance to the past becomes part of the identity constructed by school. We have already suggested elsewhere53 that official educational discourse provides Greek students with a very ambivalent national self-image, which accords them European superiority by concealing their oriental inferiority with an Ancient Greek mask. This is of course damaging to the formation of a national identity. It produces a national identity which is ambivalent and fragile, while the Greek youth today need a national self-image secure enough to be both self evaluating and anti-xenophobic. The arbitrary taxonomy on the alleged Western European superiority is finally damaging to a process of educating young generations to build a harmonious coexistence with all other people, and particularly, in this context, with the Turkish people. In the ideological trap described above there is a close relationship to the Ottoman past of the Greeks and the common cultural traits which they share with the Turkish people. It is specifically these Eastern cultural traits that are inferiorized by the Eurocentric taxonomy. But then, the Eurocentric taxonomy is particularly powerful. As far as the Greek and the Turkish people are concerned, instead of rejecting this taxonomy through the powerful argument that it is an ideology belonging to the age of colonialism, both educational systems seem trapped in it. The official Greek discourse offers to young generations proofs of their equality to the allegedly superior Europeans, based on the importance which Greek antiquity had in shaping the European civilization. At the same time, the official Turkish discourse offers the respective younger generations equivalent proofs of their equality to the alleged superior Europeans, based on their belonging to a nation many millennia older than the Germans, the English or the French.54 This ideological trap, familiar to all accepted taxonomies of superiority versus inferiority of human groups, is greatly assisted by the absence of consistent information in Greek school textbooks about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Although the Ottoman Empire is present in a large percentage of the books’ contents, this is due mainly to the importance accorded to the Greek War of Independence and the creation of the Greek state. All events related to the Ottoman Empire that are included in the school textbooks are necessary to the narrative of the national history and its course. Otherwise, there is no systematic information about the history of the Ottoman Empire and its evolution. All events related to the Ottoman Empire that are included in the textbooks are necessary to the narrative of the national history and its course. The Turkish Republic and its history are even less present in the Greek school textbooks, in the sense that the only information provided concerns the conflicts between the two states. This is mainly the 1922 war, seen from a unilateral point of view, and the occupation of part of Cyprus by the Turkish army in 1974. This absence is also relevant to the fact that what the Greek school textbooks call ‘world history’ is based on pieces of information about the history of the so-called Western world. It concerns mainly the period of the Renaissance,

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the ‘discovery’ of other continents, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the entire Napoleon period and American Independence. The history of the major European states and Russia is mainly narrated as the history of the great powers. That is to say, these countries are included in the historical narrative only as counterparts having something to do (positive or negative) with the Greek nation or state. Finally, the history of ancient civilizations other than the Greek holds a very small place, while the history of all the Balkan countries is absent. There is altogether very little information about the history of the twentieth century, with the exception of the First and Second World Wars. The case of geography textbooks is interesting because they are quite different. They contain precise information on almost all countries, as well as numerous references to almost all other peoples living on our planet with special emphasis on the geo-ecological dimension. However, the way in which civilization is defined and peoples are classified according to their cultural significance reflects a strong Eurocentrism, but one in which Greek civilization is the greatest, the basis and cradle of European culture. The fact that the historical information provided about other nations and states concerns mainly the ones the Greeks have been in conflict with over various periods, from antiquity to the modern times, is a last negative side-effect of the highly ethnocentric presentation of history in general.

Conclusion The analysis of both Greek and Turkish students’ responses reveals that they are highly ethnocentric. Students view the nation as a unique, natural entity united by language, religion, origins and cultural traits. They are interested exclusively in their own history and in particular in the history of the formation of the nation. In this chapter we account for students’ responses by turning, on the one hand, to the socio-psychological dimensions of national belonging and, on the other, to the specific educational systems. National belonging is a fundamental human need safeguarding cohesion and perpetuation. Modernity, by introducing the notions of movement, change, unpredictability and the possibility of multiple diachronous and synchronous identities, disrupts the feelings of cohesion and perpetuation. The break-up of the traditional order of things strengthens the need of belonging to a collective identity denouncing the ambiguity and uncertainty of social change. Both Greek and Turkish societies vacillate between a collective and individualistic mode of relating and experience discontinuities, hence the emphasis placed on the nation by the youths in both countries. We draw analogies between modernity and adolescence in the sense that both create conditions of fragmentation, diversity, the possibility of transformation and a consequent need for order and security. We thus maintain that it is also the destabilizing effect of adolescence that makes the youths turn toward the imaginary security provided by nation and religion. The ethnocentrism revealed by students’ responses is also characteristic of the educational systems of both countries.

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In both educational systems, history is highly ethnocentric. It is limited to national history, and each nation is seen as the main subject of history, marching through time and mainly defending the nation’s territories. All historical information about other nations, states or cultures is marginal; the history of the other country is absent and, in both Greek and Turkish textbooks, references to the other country’s history serves the purposes of the narrative on national history. Religion as theology is not emphasized in either country’s textbooks, but it appears in both as part of the national presence in history. An a-historical conception is cultivated by both educational systems, since all positive values accorded to the respective nations are presented as part of the particular national identity, having nothing to do with other peoples or cultures, interaction or intermixture and counter influence. It is obvious from the above that, in both educational systems, history is still a reproduction of the romantic version of the nation formulated as a rhetoric of past glory and national destiny. This means that history as a discipline is still seen as a means to imbue younger generations with love for their country. But this patriotism is considered to be effective when based, not on historical inquiry and a critical understanding of the past, but on a confirmation of images of the past constructed in times when the respective nation-states were being formed, consolidated and made cohesive. A number of questions arise from all the above. Is the traditional conception of history taught in the schools of both countries fit to answer the needs of present times? Would the young generations of both countries gain from acquiring new capacities to cope with a rapidly changing world around them, to rationalize the conflicts of the past between their respective nations and all others, in such a way as to be able to use historical experience as knowledge? Could this knowledge eventually make possible the path towards peaceful coexistence and collaboration, as well as towards a tolerant and democratic society in the present, both of which require the understanding that they proceed through elaborate and studied compromises? Does this new conception necessitate new historical information to be included in the respective schools in order to provide the students in each country with information about the history of the other nation, as well as information on the national history from the point of view of the other? Finally, in approaching the above-mentioned deeper historiographical problems in the textbooks, and deciphering the basic methodological knots related to time, place and interaction in both countries is it going to help students in both countries?

Notes 1 Angvik, M. and von Borries B., Youth and History (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 1997). 2 Borries von, B., ‘What Were We Looking For and What Did We Find? Interesting Hypotheses, Methods and Results of the Youth and History Survey’, in J. van der Leeuw-Roord (ed.), The State of History Education in Europe (Hamburg: KorberStiftung, 1998). 3 The following countries participated in the study: all the Nordic countries – Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland; from the post-Soviet countries and the Baltic states – Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and the Ukraine; the eastern central European

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6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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countries – Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia; the south-eastern European countries – Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey; south-western Europe – Spain and Portugal; western central Europe – Germany, Italy (including a sample from south Tyrol), Belgium (the Flemish community only) and the Netherlands; Western Europe – France and Great Britain (including a sample from Scotland); the Middle East – Israel (including a sample of Israeli-Palestinians) and the Palestinian Authority. Some of the questions, together with a few others, were put to the students’ history or social studies teachers. Thus the study also includes information from 1,250 teachers. For the analysis of the responses we followed the same statistical procedure which was used for the entire ‘Youth and History’ data (Körber, A., ‘Historical–Political Concepts’, in M. Angvik and B. von Borries, Youth and History, vol. B (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 1997). We computed a factor analysis, employing principal component analysis as an extraction method and varimax with Kaiser normalization as a rotation method, in the various sets of questions jointly for both population groups. Thus we arrived at sets of factors which represent the average structure of the respective questions in both countries. Since this average could be an artefact, only representing an artificial average, inapplicable in any separate group, we replicated the factor analysis in each group, and compared each one with the overall solution. The overall factor scores and the separate scores were correlated separately for each group. A significant correlation of an overall factor with each sub-sample factor signified the applicability of the overall factor as a measurement for the corresponding construct in each country. In other words, not all factors were comparable in both population groups. Subsequently, a one-way ANOVA was performed comparing factor means of common factor, in order to assess variations across the two population groups. The Scheffé test, detecting multiple comparisons and the formation of homogeneous subsets denoted whether the responses of Greek and Turkish students form homogeneous groups, or whether they stand separately. Tables 10.1 – 10.5 and Figures 10.1 and 10.2 present the factor analysis results, the pictorial representation of means along the two axes denoting each country, or simple descriptive statistics. Results refer either to groups of items under the same question, or to separate items extracted from a larger set of questions. This is specified accordingly in each case. The original questionnaire contained six items. However the item ‘National groups have the right to go to war to make their own state’ was omitted from the Turkish version. Thus the item was excluded in the analysis of Greek–Turkish comparison. Jay, R., ‘Nationalism’, in R. Eccleshall et al. (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1994). Mousourou, L., ‘A ‡ d  C‡    a ‡k a’ [Urban Family and Social Transformation], in S. Tsitoura (ed.), $kc   oC‡ [Family Care] (Athens: Greek Society of Social Pediatrics and Health Promotion, Greek Society of Prevention of Neglect and Child Abuse, 1990); Kagitcibasi, C., Culture of Separateness – Culture of Relatedness, 1984: Vision and Reality (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985). Körber, ‘Historical–Political Concepts’. Frangoudaki, A. and Dragonas, T. (eds.), ‘T ‡c   kc ;’ E‡k a  ‡ c‡ [‘What is Our Country?’ Ethnocentrism in Education] (Athens: Alexandria, 1997). Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Nora, P., Les lieux de mémoire: La république, la nation, la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Tajfel, H., Human Groups and Social Categories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Guerra, G., ‘Psychological Aspects of National Belonging’, Ricerce de Psicologia, 4 (1992), 121–38.

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16 Jacques, E., ‘Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety’, AAVV New Directions in Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock Publications, 1955). 17 Guerra, ‘Psychological Aspects’. This chapter is not the place to go into the discussion of traditional and modern societies. These two concepts cannot be taken as denoting selfevident, crystallized or ‘pure’ forms. Traditional and modern elements are always in a dialectical relationship. For the purpose of our own discussion, we limit ourselves to the notions of time and social relationships with regard to the process of modernization. 18 Nora, Les lieux de mémoire. 19 Lash, S. and Friedman, J., ‘Introduction: Subjectivity and Modernity’s Other’, in S. Lash and J. Friedman (eds.), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 20 Rattansi, A., ‘ “Western” Racisms, Ethnicities and Identities in a Postmodern Frame’, in A. Rattansi and S. Westwood (eds.), Racism, Modernity and Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 21 Durkheim, E., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1983). 22 Lekas, P., ‘O ‡a a ’ [National Time], C, 7 (1998), 185–241. 23 Lippert, E., ‘On the Psychology of the “Nation” ’, Ricerche di Psicologia, 4 (1992), 107–19. 24 Eisenstadt, S. N., Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1973). 25 Mouzelis, N., Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978). 26 Sen, S., Turk Aydini ve Kimlik Sorunu [The Turkish Intellectual and the Problem of Identity] (Istanbul: Baglam Yayinlari, 1995). 27 Askouni, N., ‘Greek Adolescents’ Perceptions of Social Change: An A-historical Interpretation of Society’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 18, 2, October (2000), 255–68. 28 Lash, S. and Urry, J., The End of Organised Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). In connection with this argument it is worth noting that the construction of a period of adolescence and the ‘teenager’ are important characteristics of a period related to changes in the structure of society. As Martin (Martin, B., A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) has argued, the construction of adolescence can provide a period of ‘liminality’, where the structured routines of everyday social and cultural life are broken down. 29 Mardin, S., Continuity and Change in the Ideas of Young Turks (Ankara: Yenisehir Matbaası, 1969). 30 Ersanli, B., Iktidar ve Tarih, Türkiye’de Resmi Tarih Tezinin Oluvumu (1929–1937) [Political Power and History: The Formation of the Official History Thesis in Turkey] (Istanbul: AFA, 1992, expanded edn 1996); Ersanli, B., ‘Processing Historical Knowledge in School Books: Time, Space and Action’, in A. Kazamias and M. Spillane (eds.), Education and the Structuring of the European Space (Athens: Seirios Editions, 1998). 31 Tarih I [History I] (Ankara: Milli Egˇitim Bakanlıgˇ ı Yayıncılık, 1993), pp. 1–5. 32 Tarih I, p. 12. 33 Tarih I, pp. 15–17. 34 Vatandavlik ve Insan Hakları Egˇ itimi [Citizenship and Human Rights Education] (Basimevi: Anadolu Üniversitesi, 1998), p. 5. 35 Islam Tarihi [History of Islam] (Istanbul: Koza Yayıncılık, 1993), pp. 102–3. 36 Tarih I, p. 13. 37 TUSIAD Raporu [Report of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association] (1999), p. 80. 38 Ergin, Osman N., Maarif Tarihi [History of Education], vol. 5 (Istanbul: Osmanbey Matbaası, 1943). 39 Vatandavlik Bilgileri [On Citizenship] (Ankara: TTKB, 1985), Vatandavlik ve Insan Hakları Egˇ itimi 8 [Citizenship and Human Rights Education] (Eskisehir: Milli Egˇitim Bakanlıgˇ ı, 1998).

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40 It is in the textbooks published between the 1950s and in 1970s, by Enver Ziya Karal, that republican history was brought up to the present. Since the late 1980s, the history of the Republic stops by the end of the Second World War, when the single-party authoritarian regime was questioned. 41 Vatandavlik Bilgileri III [On Citizenship III] (Ankara: Milli Egitim Bakanligi, 1993), Vatandavlik ve Insan Hakları Egˇ itimi 8. 42 Tarih I, p. 109. 43 Vatandavlik ve Insan Hakları Egˇ itimi 8, p. 72. 44 Kalecikli, K., Inkilap Tarihi ve Atatürkçülük [History of Reform and Ataturkism] (Istanbul: Gendas, 1995). 45 Berghahn, V. and Schissler, H., Perceptions of History: An Analysis of School Textbooks (Oxford: Berg, 1987). 46 Avdela, E., Ikc   ‡c [History and the School] (Athens: Nissos, 1999). 47 Frangoudaki and Dragonas, T ‡c   kc . 48 Dragonas, T., Frangoudaki, A. and Inglessi, C., Beyond One’s Own Backyard: Intercultural Education in Europe (Athens: Nissos, 1996). 49 The first question directly requested the teachers’ opinion on the ‘extent’ of influences from various sources (including the Turkish culture), while the second asked teachers to evaluate whether influences from various sources (including the Turkish culture) have been positive or negative. To the first question, as far as ‘Turkish culture’ is concerned, 42 per cent of the teachers answered ‘not at all’ and 43 per cent ‘a little’ (only 14 per cent noted that Turkish culture has influenced Greek culture ‘a lot’). To the second question, as far as the Turkish culture is concerned, 79 per cent answered ‘negatively’. 50 Blaut, J. M., The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). 51 On the term of Eurocentrism and its content, see Clay, J. and Cole, M., ‘Euroracism, Citizenship and Democracy: The Role of Teacher Education’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2, 1 (1992), 75–88; as well as Amin, S., Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), and the controversial reviews and articles on this book, for example, by S. Begley, Newsweek 13, 23 September (1991), by G. Bowersock, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3, Winter (1991), by J. Gabriel, Science as Culture, 6 (1989). 52 According to a question added in the national questionnaire, the Greek students consider that the adjective European fits the Greek people in the following percentages 41 per cent ‘a lot’, 49.5 per cent ‘a little’, and 8.8 per cent ‘not at all’. 53 Frangoudaki, A. and Dragonas, T. ‘Greece between Tradition and Modernity: In Search of an Equal Place in the European Taxonomy of Peoples’, in M. Angvik and B. von Borries, Youth and History, vol. A (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 1997). 54 Copeaux, E., Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste 1931–1993 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1997).

References Amin, S., Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989). Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Angvik, M. and von Borries B., Youth and History (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 1997). Askouni, N., ‘Greek Adolescents’ Perceptions of Social Change: An A-historical Interpretation of Society’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 18, 2, October 2000, 255–68. Avdela, E., Ikc   ‡c [History and the School] (Athens: Nissos, 1999). Berghahn, V. and Schissler, H., Perceptions of History: An Analysis of School Textbooks (Oxford: Berg, 1987).

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Blaut, J. M., The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). Borries von, B., ‘What Were We Looking For and What Did We Find? Interesting Hypotheses, Methods and Results of the Youth and History Survey’, in J. van der Leeuw-Roord (ed.), The State of History Education in Europe (Hamburg: KorberStiftung, 1998). Bourdieu, P., La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979). Clay, J. and Cole, M., ‘Euroracism, Citizenship and Democracy: The Role of Teacher Education’, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2, 1, (1992), 75–88. Copeaux, E., Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste 1931–1993 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1997). Dragonas, T., Frangoudaki, A. and Inglessi, C., Beyond One’s Own Backyard: Intercultural Education in Europe (Athens: Nissos, 1996). Durkheim, E., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1983). Eisenstadt, S. N., Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York: Wiley, 1973). Ergin, Osman N., Maarif Tarihi [History of Education], vol. 5 (Istanbul: Osmanbey Matbaası, 1943). Ersanli, B., Iktidar ve Tarih, Türkiye’de Resmi Tarih Tezinin Oluvumu (1929–1937) [Political Power and History: The Formation of the Official History Thesis in Turkey] (Istanbul: AFA, 1992, expanded edn 1996). Ersanli, B., ‘Processing Historical Knowledge in School Books: Time, Space and Action’, in A. Kazamias and M. Spillane (eds.), Education and the Structuring of the European Space (Athens: Seirios Editions, 1998). Frangoudaki, A. and Dragonas, T. (eds.), ‘T ‡c   kc ;’ E‡k a  ‡ c‡ [‘What is Our Country?’ Ethnocentrism in Education] (Athens: Alexandria, 1997). Frangoudaki, A. and Dragonas, T., ‘Greece between Tradition and Modernity: In Search of an Equal Place in the European Taxonomy of Peoples’, in M. Angvid and B. von Borries, Youth and History, vol. A (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 1997) Gellner, E., Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: (Basil Blackwell, 1983). Guerra, G., ‘Psychological Aspects of National Belonging’, Ricerce de Psicologia, 4 (1992), 121–38. Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Islam Tarihi [History of Islam] (Istanbul: Koza Yayıncılık, 1993). Jacques, E., ‘Social Systems as a Defence against Persecutory and Depressive Anxiety’, AAVV New Directions in Psychoanalysis (London: Tavistock Publications, 1955). Jay, R., ‘Nationalism’, in R. Eccleshall et al. (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1994). Kagitcibasi, C., Culture of Separateness – Culture of Relatedness, 1984: Vision and Reality (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985). Kalecikli, K., Inkilap Tarihi ve Atatürkçülük [History of Reform and Ataturkism] (Istanbul: Gendas, 1995). Körber, A., ‘Historical–Political Concepts’, in M. Angvik and B. von Borries, Youth and History, vol. B (Hamburg: Korber-Stiftung, 1997). Lash, S. and Friedman, J., ‘Introduction: Subjectivity and Modernity’s Other’, in S. Lash and J. Friedman (eds.), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Lash, S. and Urry, J., The End of Organised Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

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Lekas, P., ‘O ‡ a ka’ [National Time],  C , 7 (1998), 185–241. Lippert, E., ‘On the Psychology of the “Nation” ’, Ricerche di Psicologia, 4 (1992), 107–19. Mardin, S., Continuity and Change in the Ideas of Young Turks (Ankara: Yenisehir Matbaası, 1969). Martin, B., A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Mousourou, L., ‘A ‡ d  C‡    a ‡k a’ [Urban Family and Social Transformation], in S. Tsitoura (ed.), $kc   OC‡ [Family Care] (Athens: Greek Society of Social Pediatrics and Health Promotion, Greek Society of Prevention of Neglect and Child Abuse, 1990). Mouzelis, N., Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978). Nora, P., Les lieux de mémoire: La république, la nation, la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Rattansi, A., ‘ “Western” Racisms, Ethnicities and Identities in a Postmodern Frame’, in A. Rattansi and S. Westwood (eds.) Racism, Modernity and Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Sen, S., Turk Aydini ve Kimlik Sorunu [The Turkish Intellectual and the Problem of Identity] (Istanbul: Baglam Yayinlari, 1995). Tajfel, H., Human Groups and Social Categories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Tarih I [History I] (Ankara: Milli Egˇ itim Bakanlıgˇı Yayıncılık, 1993). TUSIAD Raporu [Report of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association] (1999). Vatandavlik Bilgileri [On Citizenship] (Ankara: TTKB, 1985). Vatandavlik Bilgileri III [On Citizenship III] (Ankara: Milli Egˇ itim Bakanl gˇ , 1993). Vatandavlik ve Insan Hakları Egˇitimi [Citizenship and Human Rights Education] (Basimevi: Anadolu Üniversitesi, 1998). Vatandavlik ve Insan Hakları Egˇ itimi 8 [Citizenship and Human Rights Education] (Eskisehir: Milli Egˇ itim Bakanlıgˇı, 1998).

Speculative thoughts on nations and nationalism with special reference to Turkey and Greece Ilkay Sunar

The remarks that follow were inspired by a conference I attended some years ago in Ankara. I was invited to the conference commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish republic. There were four sections to this huge conference; I was assigned the task of attending the sessions on national culture and national identity and of presenting an over-all view on papers discussed in the sessions at the closing session of the conference. There were 23 sessions within this large section; although I could not attend all of the sections, I did read the distributed papers and summaries. What follows is my interpretation of what I saw, heard and read. This trip to Ankara was a kind of field trip for me. What I witnessed was a celebration in the form of a conference in which the papers in the section that I attended addressed themselves to the question of constructing a national culture. There were many papers on language and language reform: how a new official Turkish was constructed and fabricated – the language of the Turkish Broadcasting Corporation (TRT), you might say. There were many papers on the writing or rewriting of history: again, the papers were telling essentially the story of how history, with the founding of the republic, was reproduced and reconstructed. Then there were sessions on anthropology, cinema, the theatre, the press, literature are so on. Again, what I was hearing from the speakers presenting their papers was about the production of a national culture and the way in which this culture was disseminated through the press, universities, research centres and village institutes. As I attended the sessions, read the papers and summaries, it struck me that the common theme that tied all of the papers together could be summarized in a single concept: standardization. The sessions were telling the story of how through the cinema, theatre, archaeology, language reforms, rewriting of history, institutes, centres, the press and universities a standard culture was being produced and disseminated; a culture that was essentially in contrast with the plurality and diversity that marked the pre-republican Ottoman culture. This indeed was what nationalism was about: the production of a standard language, history and culture. The story had good and bad characters. The diversity and plurality of Ottoman culture were considered to be an obstacle to development; standardization was the key leading to modernity. Modernization entailed standardization and homogenization

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of culture, whereas tradition was bogged down in diversity and heterogeneity of cultures. The story was basically about the standardizers involved in the construction of a nation-state, a national culture and a national identity, and who had to work against the background of a multicultural empire. The Ottoman Empire, as you well know, under a unifying political roof encompassed a rich variety of cultures. It was a system based on cultural differences; a man was what he spoke, ate, wore, sung and believed. The high culture of the political elite had attained a level of uniformity that was confined to the elite and different from local cultures that differed from each other. Culture, in short, underwrote social structure. The niche within which people were ensconced was culturally defined. Social structure was embedded in culture: the status system was inscribed into cultural differences and the Ottomans intended to keep it that way. Nationalism entails a conception of culture disassociated from social structure. Let me illustrate this with an example. Remember that Marx claims that labour becomes disassociated from its social moorings with capitalism when labour becomes free and commodified. In pre-capitalist society, labour was embedded in society and culture, and, hence, fixed and immobile. Mobility becomes possible when labour is released from its social and cultural underpinnings. What happens to labour in Marx’s account of the transition from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist economy happens to culture in the transition to nationalism. Culture is emancipated from social structure. Under the auspices of the state and cultural experts, it becomes standard and common currency and the basis of mobility – all of these, in turn, being the distinguishing marks of modernity. Nationalism serves to usher in modern society. What is specific to Turkey and Greece in this general process of standardization of culture are the different modalities within which public and private and ethnic and civic components of nationalism are mixed. In constructing nationalism the domain of the public and private is reconstructed as well. In the case of Turkey, as pointed out by Yesim Arat, the private domain was very narrowly defined. It was basically confined to the household, or the family. The Ottoman conception of the private domain was much larger. The private domain was covered by what was considered as social – and the social or society encompassed the multicultural millet system. It could be said that the millet in the Ottoman Empire was considered as part of the private domain. While the private domain was widely defined the political domain was narrow – the reverse of the republican nation-state. What we witness today with the re-emergence of multiculturalism worldwide is a kind of ottomanization where identity is not confined to the narrow sphere of the individual or family but recognized as the characteristic of a group. Let me redefine nationalism: culture must be standardized and each standard culture must possess its own political unit. What we witnessed in the Ankara congress was the tale of this standardization process as culture was disassociated from society and reappropriated by the state – this was a culture liberated from its traditional entrapments and freely available to all through state-mediated

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construction of history, language and education. While religion was privatized, language and history were appropriated by the state. Nationalism does not only standardize but it universalizes culture. A universalized standard culture that is civic in character is above ethnicity, religion, race and so on. But I suppose, both in the case of Turkey and Greece, the standard universal culture was less than civic and more a mixture of ethnic and civic. For instance, although the standard Turkish disseminated by the state was constructed to correspond to none of the local dialects, nevertheless it was Turkish. I would suggest that in studying nationalism in Greece and Turkey, the specific mix of ethnic and civic components and the specific boundaries of private and public would give us interesting insights into modalities of nationalism. Let me end by saying that it is nationalism that creates the nation and not the other way around. Some elements that go into making a nation through nationalism may in some rudimentary way be there available for construction. But it is a long way from the simple existence of these elements to their particular construction by cultural experts that forge a standard culture that becomes the means for the melting down of diverse traditions, and the mobilization and incorporation of people into national mass culture. Hence, nationalism uses the language of the Gemeinsanschaft, while it creates a society of the Gesselschaft type. Thus, culture promoted by nationalism is perfectly in accord with modernity. It bears all its characteristics: standard, codified, context-free and generic.

Index

Abdulhamid 5 Aegean littoral 5 Akcura, Yusuf 4 Aktas, Cihan 110–11 Ali Pasha, Mehmed 69 Anatolia 8, 9, 10; Turkish settlement of 7 Ankara 8, 9 Atatürk see Kemal Pasha, Mustafa borders: Greek issue of 21–2 budget: Greek state 29 Cebecioglu 75 ‘certificate of national probity’ 89 Christodoulos, Archbishop 96 citizenship 119, 145–6; Greece 117; Marshal’s theory of 118–19; Turkey 40–1, 42, 44, 104–5, 112–13 civil code, Turkish 105, 146–7; amendment 106, 148; case studies of problems of practice 154–6; problems of practice 150–3 civil rights: Greece 120; post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 93; post-war Greece (1944–67) 88–9 civil society 87–8; post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 92; post-war Greece (1944–67) 88, 91, 98–9 clientelism 91 ‘club society’ 43 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 5, 6 communists: discrimination against 89; post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 92; post-war Greece (1944–67) 88

cultural rights: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 95–6; post-war Greece (1944–67) 90–1 culture: standardization 190–1 democracy: students’ views 166, 167, 168; in Turkish schoolbooks 175–6 Dervish Mustafa Pasha 68 differential punishment 147 Dimitraki 75 domestic violence: Turkey 109–10 economy: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 93 elite rivalry 3–4 elitism 3–4, 43 ethnic groups: Turkey 6–8 ethnic hostility: Turkey 5 ethnic nationalism 10, 50 ethnic state 39–40 ethnikophrones 88 ethnocentrism 164, 166, 183; in Greek schoolbooks 177 Eurocentrism 181–2 family honour: Turkish legal framework 147–8 female education: Greece 121–2 ‘female national action’ 121 feminists: Turkey 108, 110 foreign policy: Ottonian period 28 Frantzis, Ambrosios 18 gender inequality: Turkey 146 Giddens, Anthony 20 Gokalp, Ziya 4 Göktürk, Gülay 106–7 Greco-Turkish War: influence on Turkey 41

194

Index

Greek culture: denial of Ottoman and Turkish influences on 180, 182; in Greek schoolbooks 179–80 Greek millet 76–7 Greek Orthodox Church 90 Greek sailors: dismissal 74–5 Greek state 19; 1870s–1880s 25–7; formation 18, 20, 22, 25, 27–8 Greek War of Independence 67–73 Haci Salih Pasha 68, 70, 71, 73–4, 75 Hasim Pasha 72 headscarf controversy 111–12 health system: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 95 Helphand, Alexander 5 Hintze, Otto 29 history, study of 184; in Greek schoolbooks 177–80, 182–3; students’ views 163–4, 165, 168; in Turkish schoolbooks 172–7 ‘honour killings’ 108, 147 Huseyin Bey 70 individual identity 54, 169–70 Islam: Turkish attitude 173–4 Islamist women 110–12 Istanbul 8–9 Izmir 8 ‘Janus-face’ nationalism 49 Justice and Development Party (Turkey) 112 Kapodistrias 24 Karamanli 40 Karamanlis, Constantine 92 Kemalist movement 41 Kemal Pasha, Mustafa 12–13, 40, 41 Kor Dimitrinin, Oglu 75 Koumoundouros, Alexandros 26 Ladies’ journal, The: and female emancipation 122–4 land ownership 24–5 ‘light’ conversions 38–9 Lyrintzis, Christos 18 Mahmud II 68, 69, 70, 71–2, 73, 74, 75, 79 Manol, Captain 74 Mehmet Effendi 45 military conscription: Greek state 29; Turkey 6

military organization: Greek state 26, 29 Mill, John Stuart 49 millet: evolution of the word 80–1; system 42, 191 mobilization 40–1, 42, 45 motherhood 126–7 Mousouros Pasha 44 Murdoch syndrome 97 Muslim minorities: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 95; post-war Greece (1944–67) 90 Mustafa Pasha 70 ‘my nation, right or wrong’ 54 ‘nation’ 52, 56–7, 170; in Greek schoolbooks 178–9; students’ views 163; in Turkish schoolbooks 173 national belonging 168–9, 183 ‘national interest’ 50–1, 55 nationalism 49–50, 51–2, 53–4, 168–9, 170, 171, 191–2; Greek 57–9; Turkish 3, 4, 7 ‘national state’ 19; students’ views 163 nation state 20–1; def 20 New Democracy Party (Greece) 92, 93 noikokireoi model 117 ombudsman, office of the 94 ‘Orta Asya’ 8 Otto, King 27; and church 23; exercise of power 21 Ottoman grand illusion 41 Ottomanism 3, 43, 44 Ottoman reality 19 Ottoman reformers 3 Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) 59 Papandreou, Andreas 92, 94 Papandreou, George 95 Papulakos’s movement 26 parliamentarism, Greek 22 Parren, Kallirroe: female emancipation 122–3; women’s political rights 124–5; women’s position in the family 123; women’s work 123–4; working women’s protection 124 ‘partitocracy’ 91 Parvus see Helphand, Alexander peasant uprisings: Greece 26 ‘people’ 52, 56–7 plutocracy, Greek 96–7 political language: Ottomans’ 78–82

Index political parties: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 92–3, 94, 96 political rights: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 94; post-war Greece (1944–67) 89 political theory, Hobbes-Locke distinction in 38 ‘popular nationalism’ 55–6, 57 ‘principle of men’s supremacy’ 120–1 property rights: Turkey 106 proselytism 90 public identity 38, 43, 44 public opinion: mobilizing 75–8 Rauf Bey 41 religion: in Greek schoolbooks 179; students’ views 163–4, 166; in Turkish schoolbooks 173–4 religious conversion: Turkey 7–8 religious minorities: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 96; post-war Greece (1944–67) 90 republican nationalists 13–14 Resid Mehmet Pasha 69 sea: Turkish attitude towards 9 self-identity 38; Classical Ottoman period 42–3; Tanzimat period 43, 44 ‘sharing of property’ regime 106–7 Sheriat 67, 70 Sherif, Mehmed 72 socialism 52–3 social space 43–4, 55 state and church: Greek state 23–4 state feminism 148–9, 150, 153; def 149; Turkey 144, 149 state patriarchy 144, 152–4 state power: Greek state 22, 24 state service: exclusion of Greeks 73–5 substantive equality: Turkey 108, 109–10 Süleyman Effendi 45 Tekinalp 4–5 Townsend, General 41 Trikoupis, Charilaos 26, 29 ‘Turcokratia’ 37 ‘Turk’/Turks 4, 9; descendancy 8 Turkey 38; European entity 12–14; influence of Greek invasion 37, 44–5;

195

reaction to Greek invasion 41; resettled Muslims 5 ‘Turkish history thesis’ 7 Turkish nationalist construct 11–14 Turkish nationalist teaching 10, 12 Turkish Women Jurists’ Association 106 unemployment: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 95 Union of Democratic Left (EDA) 89 Universal military service legislation, 1909 6 Vahid Pasha 69 values of life: students’ views 164 virginity examinations 108, 155 Virtue Party (Turkey) see Welfare Party welfare measures: post-dictatorship Greece (1974–99) 94–5; post-war Greece (1944–67) 89–90 Welfare Party (Turkey) 111–12 Wilson’s Fourteen points 39 women’s citizenship rights: Turkish 108–9, 113–14 women’s civil rights: Greek 120, 125–6 women’s legal position in family: Greek 119 women’s political participation: Turkish 107, 111–12 women’s political rights: Greek 118, 125 women’s rights: Greek 119–20, 128–30; Turkish 105, 156–7 women’s right to work: Greek 127–8 Young Turks 4, 5 Youth and History: The Comparative European Project on Historical Consciousness among Teenagers 161 Ypsilantis, Alexander 68, 69, 74, 78 Ypsilantis, Dimitrios 79–80 zimmet 67–8 zimmis 67, 73 Zohrab, Shalci 75 Zolotas, Xenophon 89