Imagining the Kurdish Nation
This chapter provides a critique of the existing literature on the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey and highlights the difference between religiously motivated Kurdish uprisings such as the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925 and modern nationalist uprisings. Havi
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Imagining the Kurdish Nation
This chapter argues that the contemporary Kurdish nationalism as a resistant ethnic movement emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unlike early elite nationalisms, the contemporary Kurdish nationalism is not based on the manipulation of the Kurdish masses by elites or feudal lords but the internalization of the nationalist sentiments by the Kurdish masses. This does not mean that the Kurdish elite did not play any role in the formation of the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. Rather, although nationalist sentiments were formulated and disseminated by the Kurdish elite, the contemporary Kurdish nationalism as an ethnic mobilization emerged only when these sentiments were internalized by Kurdish masses, not when the elite used religious or other sentiments in the process of realizing a nationalist society. It is true that ethnic identities are not a cultural given but a product of a constitutive process.1 However, they are not constructed by elites alone. Rather, they are constructed by articulatory performances of both the elite and masses. The main motivation behind specific articulatory (and therefore constitutive) performances instead of others leading non-nationalist imagination of society is the disadvantageous position of articulators “in a power context”.2 These three conditions of ethnic resistance mobilization, a constitutive process, the merge of the elite and masses in articulatory practices, and politics of domination and exclusion, appeared available in the late 1960s and 1970s when the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is considered.
© The Author(s) 2017 A. Balci, The PKK-Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s Regional Politics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42219-0_3
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The politics of domination and exclusion was available in the early republican period and therefore many students of the Kurdish nationalism in Turkey argued that the Kurdish nationalism is the inevitable and logical result of the Turkish nationalism, which denies the existence of the Kurds within the borders of the Turkish state and accordingly assimilates those who speak Kurdish into Turkish identity.3 For them, the Kurdish nationalism emerged in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the Turkish nationalism turned into a hegemonic ideology of the ruling class.4 To cite an example, the 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion “was ethno- politic rebellion as much as it was religious and tribal since it embraced a resistance against the nationalization of non-national space” in Turkey.5 Put simply, the first Kurdish nationalist mobilization emerged when the Turkish state started to nationalize the public space through consecutive nationalist steps such as the promotion of being Turk or accepting Turkish culture as a condition for party membership in the 1923 program of the ruling People’s Party,6 the enactment of Turkish as the sole language in the law courts in March 1924,7 the emphasis on being Turk as the definition of citizenship in the 1924 constitution (29 October),8 and the transfer of the land of large landow
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