ASP - Subject Based Discussion by Emre Erol

“Refugee Roots of Turkish Nationalism: Turkey's “Founding Fathers” Legacy and Their Demographic Policies” 

In 1913, a group of military officers, civil servants and professionals, who are collectively known as the “Young Turks” established a monopoly on political power that would last until 1950, and their dominance would last for another generation in the fields of business, culture, and media. These elites were the “founding fathers” who shaped modern day Turkey in its formative years as they “built” a homogenous nation-state out of the remnants of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman Empire.

The “founding fathers” of Turkey, most of whom were born in the Ottoman Balkans and the Aegean, became refugees when these areas were lost in 1911-13. The earlier exposure of this elite to ethnic nationalism, economic incorporation and bourgeois modernity in the Balkans and the Aegean, together with the loss of their homelands at hands of newly emerged Balkan nation states decisively influenced their nation building project and gave it “Europeanizing / westernizing” outlook with authoritarian tendencies.

This lecture discusses the personal backgrounds and formative experiences of these “founding fathers” and discusses the influence of those on their demographic policies during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.