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Modernities of the Past

Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. By Esra

Ozyurek. Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2006. 227 p.

ISBN-13: 978-0822338956

I was raised in Turkey in a practicing Muslim family dedicated to fighting against

Kemalist-secular ideology of the state and as attended a public schools where this

official ideology was being taught with passion. I learned to keep my critical

comments about the regime to myself pretty quickly. At school Kemal Ataturk was

depicted as a brilliant commander of the national war of independence, who had

saved the country and fashioned Turkey into a modern Western republic. At home,

my beloved grand father would speak about the manner in which that apostate

(kafir) betrayed the only true Islamic state, the Ottoman Empire. 1

This opposition was vivid in my mind as I read Esra Ozyureks book Nostalgia for

the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey.

I was in my senior year of high school when this book was published in Turkish and

I was amazed by the way she criticized Kemalism, even though she belongs to a

family of well-known Kemalists politicians in Turkey. Six years after its publication,

the book is still relevant in its description and analysis of the complex relation of a

secular state with its citizens.

1To see a striking account of this schizophrenic dilemma the opposing perspective
of Iranian secular youth under the Islamic state, Varzi, Warring Souls, 2006.
Kemalism has been one of the most influential fields for the scholars of

Turkish politics. Mustafa Kemal Ataturks ideal to constitute a modern and

Westernized state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire were epitomized by his

followers in six main principles; republicanism, populism, secularism,

revolutionism, nationalism and etatism. These principles were named as six arrows

of Kemalism and at the same time they form the essential policies of Republican

Peoples Party (CHP) which was founded by Ataturk himself and was the first

political party in Turkey. With Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and

everyday politics in Turkey, Ozyurek enriches this literature from the perspective of

a scholar who has distanced herself from the Kemalist circles she grew up in as the

daughter of a prominent Kemalist, a parliamentary deputy of RPP.2

In the book Ozyurek argues that secular state ideology is privatized through

nostalgia. She analyzes the ways in which the Kemalist ideology had penetrated into

the private sphere of the citizens along with the neoliberal market reforms. By

portraying a glorious, modernized and opposition-free3 understanding of past and

adopting this passion for nostalgia to the consumerist demands of the market, in the

age of neoliberal market reforms, Kemalist state ideology expanded its scope, which

is thought to be within the boundaries of the public sphere, into citizens private

2 Esra Ozyureks father Mustafa Ozyurek was elected for the National Assembly in
2002, right after she completed her ethnographic study. Her critical stance against
Kemalism appeared in the mainstream media and she mentions the tensions she
had with her family and friends in the book.
3 In the interviews that Ozyurek conducted with self-identified Kemalists(she uses

the term secular to define her interviewees), followers of the Kemalist ideology
claim that under the Kemalist single-party regime, all citizens obeyed the
authoritarian state out of their love for their leader, Ataturk.
spheres. Though this expansion was initially a reaction to the invasion of the private

sphere by anti-Kemalist groups,4 it allowed the state to expand its sphere of

influence. Through the employment of new spaces created by neoliberal policies,

what was previously defined as official state ideology ceased to be limited by public

sphere. These transformation mark a new form of governmentality5 which replaces

authoritative state apparatuses with a different kind of subjectivity based on

personalized relations such as love and volunteerism. Ozyurek traces these

changes in the life stories of first generation Kemalists, museum exhibitions, and

commodification of the objects that represents Kemalist ideology, celebrations of

official holidays and finally alternative versions of nostalgia by non-seculars in

different chapters of the book.

In the first chapter on biographies of first generation Kemalists, Ozyurek

highlights defeminized attitudes of the old Kemalist women who privilege

deemphasizing their femininity in order to be respectable subjects in the public

sphere. These women thought of themselves as objective, rational subjects and

judge headscarved women because of their choices. This analysis of the self-

conception of the first generation Kemalist women is a striking example of the

predetermined conditions of the public sphere as Talal Asad argues in his famous

article Religion, Nation-state,secularism.

4 Such as Islamists and Kurds who were suppressed under the corporatist Kemalist
regime. In 1980s Islamists started to use new opportunity spaces that were created
by market reforms effectively and became more visible in daily life, Ozyurek argues
pg.X
5 Foucault, M. (1991). 'Governmentality', trans. Rosi Braidotti and revised by Colin

Gordon, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect:
Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87104.. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Following her analysis of the interviews, she tries to understand in a

neoliberal context, how the relations of the citizens with the state evolve from a

paternal tie to a voluntary, personal affair. Along with this privatization of the state,

one of the most prominent symbols of the Republic - the statues of Ataturk, were

commodified and were moved to the private sphere. Celebrations of official holidays

were transformed as well, formal activities organized in the schools with obligatory

attendance of school kids left their places to free pop music concerts held in the

streets, open to everyone. Lastly, she specifies how Islamists employed this concept

of nostalgia differently than Kemalists in the reproduction of the past in a

legitimizing argument for their political presence.

Although Ozyureks work offers a strong account of the intertwined relations

of public and private in the Turkish context, the book could be considered

problematic in certain respects. To start with, her careless use of terminology

overshadows the persuasiveness of her arguments. For example, despite the fact

that she gives a brief historical background in the beginning, she neglects the

nuanced meanings of terms like etatism or seculars.6 Etatism in Republican

history is far from signaling an anti-liberal, pro-Soviet understanding. It was defined

in 1931 Republican Peoples Party Congress as individual enterprise was to retain a

fundamental role in the economy, but active government intervention was

necessary to boost the nations welfare and the states prosperity. In the absence of

6Ozyurek employs terms such as secular or Islamists to draw an analysis of the


struggle between adherents of Kemalism and other opposition groups. It should be
noted that this imprecise use of terminology pictures those groups as monolithic
entities which is highly problematic in terms of reflecting the pluralist structure of
the society. However, I am using these terms to be consistent with the original text.
private capital in a post-war context, the state had to employ the import-

substituting Industrialization as many so-called third world countries did that time.

Her portrayal of state ideology on economic development is based on a closed, state-

led system. But she fails to give us the background information of this policy

compelled by conditions of the time. Ozyureks choice of interpreting Kemalism is an

intentional conceptual stretching in order to support her arguments. In fact, as

every student who has a basic knowledge of Turkish politics, she must be aware of

the pro-privatization, liberal tended views of Kemalism.

Ozyurek insists that the yearning for the wealthy and peaceful past arises

from Kemalists sense of nostalgia and the longing for the 1930s implies that notions

of time and progress are reversed in Turkey and that the golden era of Kemalism is

left behind.7 However, her narration of Kemalist disappointment and resentment is

not derived from the loss of status and affluence but rather because of the loss of the

monopoly over resources. Ozyurek correctly refers to this power struggle between

seculars and other groups and the distribution of resources that underlies this

struggle. However, her overemphasis on neoliberalism exhibits new holders of

power as non/anti-seculars, which is incorrect.

Similarly, in some parts, her overreading of data weakens her argument. In

the first chapter, she notes how dates of personal significance, such as birthdays,

7 An interesting example of this reversed modernity which is based on Turkey is


going back in time in the modernization process, could be seen in this commercial.
This commercial was filmed before the national elections and its main idea is if
Islamists come to power, time would be reversed hundred years because of the
possible loss of all modernist, secular acquisitions of Kemalism.
wedding anniversaries etc, are embedded with dates significant to state activity.

She interprets this as the penetration of state ideology into the private sphere in the

course of neoliberalism. However, as it could be seen in many historical documents,

this is not a new phenomenon. Rather, during the Ottoman Empire people usually

used official state events as reference points for personal histories. Even more

troubling is Ozyureks claim that a girl in white clothes represents the Republic as a

part of patriarchal Middle Eastern culture. Not only does this claim seem guilty of

an Orientalist stance, but also demonstrates her scholarship of nationalism is

ignorant of how the female body is used by fascists regimes of Europe in the nation-

building process. 8

Another example of Ozyureks misuse of data can be found in the last

chapter, where she claims that the Islamist Virtue Partys alternatively constituted

nostalgia is an indication of their adherence to the basic values of the Republic,

which they interpreted differently from the secular Kemalists as religion. At best

Ozyureks reading is nave. She neglects the possibility of Islamists using Ataturks

pro-Islamist speeches during the war of independence to demonstrate his

hypocrisy. She rightly refers to the prior alliances between Islamists and Ataturk

and the Kurds and Ataturk. But, she merely assumes the Virtue Partys efforts to

justify their presence in the political arena through their respect for the Republic

and its leader, without considering alternatives. This is not to argue that one can

speculate about the hidden agenda or secret strategies of the Virtue Partys

8Mosse,Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern


Europe, 1985.
members, the problem here is Ozyureks faulty interpretation of the data to support

her hypothesis.

Yet, despite these deficits, Ozyurek presents a revealing study of the interrelations

between the public and the private, aiming to show that the boundaries between

these spaces are artificial results of the power relationships. Unlike the assertions of

the secularization thesis, the state and the society, the private and the public

continually shapes and influences each other.

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