Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanism

by M. Hakan Yavuz

Making a country great again is a theme for nationalist authoritarians. Across countries with past experience as great powers, nationalist politicians typically harken back to a golden age. In Nostalgia for Empire , Hakan Yavuz focuses on how this trend is playing out in Turkey, a nation that lost its empire a century ago and which is now ruled by a nationalist authoritarian who invokes nostalgia for the Ottoman era to buttress his power.

Yavuz delves into the social and political origins of expressions of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire among various groups in Turkey. Exploring why and how certain segments of Turkish society has selectively brought the Ottoman Empire back into public consciousness, Yavuz traces how memory of the Ottoman period has changed. He draws from Turkish literature, mainstream history books, and other cultural products from the 1940s to the twenty-first century to illustrate the transformation. He finds that two key aspects of Turkish literature are, on the one hand, its criticism of the Jacobin modernization of Turkey under Ataturk, and on the other a desire to search the Ottoman past for an alternative political language.

Yavuz goes onto to explain how major political actors, including President Erdogan, utilize the concept of empire to craft distinctive conceptualizations of nationalism, Islam, and Ottomanism that exploit national nostalgia. As remembered today, the Ottoman past seems to be grounded in contemporary conservative Islamic values. The combination of these memories and values generates a portrait of Turkey as a victim of major powers, besieged by imagined enemies both internal and external. In mapping out how nostalgia is crafted and spread, this book not only sheds light on Turkey's unique case but also deepens our understanding of nationalism, religion, and modernity.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Middle East

336 pages, Hardcover

Published August 6, 2020

Reviews

[Fahad Qazi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Ottoman Empire ruled the Balkans, parts of Central Europe (Hungary and Romania), the Middle East, North Africa and the Red Sea littoral zone, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia, and parts of Georgia and Armenia. It ruled some or all of these regions for approximately 600 years. One of the most diverse empires in world history, it started in western Anatolia as a small principality but then quickly expanded to the Balkan regions in the 14th century. The Ottoman state was a Muslim empire, which fostered the coexistence of a large diversity of religions, languages, and ethnicities.34 It was a Muslim empire because its ruling elite was composed of Muslims, and Islam was a core element of its political legitimacy. Karen Barkey offers an apt analysis of the Ottoman Empire, explaining it was an effective state in its early periods because it was based on the principles of a “powerful symbiosis” of “the best warriors and administrators” with “religious men of many different persuasions: Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Sunni, and Sufi Islam.” This display of heterogeneity took place “because of exigencies on the ground, because people realized that they required allies, and because they understood that the construction of a new society, a better edifice, would have to incorporate rather than exclude.”


“The United States has never developed a policy specifically dedicated to transforming the structural-systemic causes of war and authoritarianism in the broader region. Turkey is poised to play a central role in ameliorating this unrest given its historical and geo-political weight in the region.54 Turkey has long been treated as a frontline state either against communism (1950–1991), against Iran of the Ayatollahs, or against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1991–present). Now it is seen primarily as a military base (i.e., İncirlik) in the war against ISIS. These regional conflicts have not presented a platform for delineating common interests or values. Turkey, for its part, as the emerging regional power reconciled with its Ottoman Islamic heritage, is no longer interested in serving as a US client state. It sees itself as a regional power seeking to bring order and development to a region deliberately fragmented by the post–Sykes-Picot Western imperial politics and interventions”

“How can Turkey move beyond nationalism or the post-nation-state? At the outset, it requires considering the objectives of renovating the country’s state structure, which some have referred to as the “New Turkey” and others have characterized as neo-Ottomanism. This process requires Turkish citizens to reinvent themselves, initially by shedding negative aspects of the past and then by incorporating the past experiences in productive ways. This is akin to the lingering effects of homesickness: being forced out of one’s vernacular conceptual world and condemned to live in exile.

A revealing analogy can explain this unique effect on a nation’s psyche. Children abandoned at an early age by a parent might struggle well into their adulthood to find their true self-identity. That quest can take various paths, leading either to positive or negative outcomes. Sometimes, these children, as adults, seem so lost and unfulfilled that they subconsciously want to believe the best about the parent who abandoned them years ago and, thus, re-imagine their traumatic childhood in the most idyllic terms. This might explain Turkey’s crisis of identity. Some religious conservative Turks believe they already live in a form of psychic exile: that is, in a stridently secular nation-state founded on the premise that the Seljuk and Ottoman Islamic heritage was something to be discarded. They still feel the impact of loss and abandonment that occurred a century ago. Neo-Ottomanism is about nostalgia, the longing for home, and the need to regain one’s own imagined past to ameliorate the traumas of the present while charting a course for a more hopeful future.”

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check my Substack: mazmhussain.substack.com/p/nostalgia-...

[Zach Slatter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book written by a fantastic professor!