Building Modern Turkey is a meticulously researched and very well written book for anyone interested in Turkey's transition from a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, polyglot empire to a modern unitary nation-state. The strong principal idea that cuts across the six thematic chapters is that modern national identity construction is a predominantly “spatial” concept – that the visual, architectural, urban, infrastructural and geographical strategies by which the new Kemalist regime made its ideology visible and disseminated it across the country were not simply physical manifestations of the Republican idea, but rather its constitutive ingredients. Power was not merely represented; it was produced through space and performance. Critical re-evaluations of the Turkish nation-building project (its authoritarianism, its suppression of religious or non-Muslim identities, its militarism and its paternalism) already constitute a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship, but the central role that space – especially symbolic and representational space – plays in this process is a relatively new area of inquiry to which the book makes a very significant and most welcome contribution.
The book is divided into three parts with two chapters in each. The first part focuses on the building of modern Ankara as the grand project of inscribing Turkey's regime change onto the landscape, both physically and symbolically. Deconstructing the republican myth of “tabula rasa” (that a modern capital city was miraculously built from scratch), Kezer explains how existing communal and commercial networks of old Ankara were dismantled and scarce resources were channelled to the southward expansion of the new city. She takes us through Ankara's master planning by German experts, the building of foreign embassies on locations that symbolized the Kemalist regime's newly forged diplomatic and geopolitical relationships with other nations and the opening of new arteries and residential neighbourhoods around the presidential palace where power was staged. What is most remarkable in these stories is how they were fraught with ambivalences, conflicts and incomplete trajectories. Master plans were made but what was actually implemented was almost invariably a compromised version, reflecting competing interests of different actors and shifting political priorities over time – from the ideals of liberal parliamentary democracy to the authoritarianism of Jacobin reformers who prevailed.
The second part of the book is a tour de force of scholarship bringing to the fore what is suppressed and silenced in official discourse – namely, the erasure of the received, religion-based Ottoman communal order to mould a secular and homogeneous society. The dismantling of vakifs (pious foundations) and the transfer of their assets to the state, the crackdown on vernacular, unorthodox Islam, the closing of tekkes (dervish lodges) and the banning of any sartorial expression of religious and communal affiliation are topics discussed as centrepieces of the republican “social engineering project of corporatist homogenization” (p. 104). The “minoritization” of remaining Jews, Armenians and Greeks (their numbers already diminished after the population exchanges, deportations and massacres of World War I) was the other component of this project, pushing them out of the public sphere, appropriating and repurposing non-Muslim properties and most symbolically, changing/Turkifying “foreign” place names in what Kezer calls “toponymical engineering” (p. 143). Again, what comes across so successfully is an attention to nuance, contingency and conflict rather than smooth narratives. While radical measures were put in place to suppress religious, non-Muslim or local identities, we are told that not only were these met with varying degrees of resistance rather than total submission, but also that republican leaders were often themselves ambivalent, recognizing the unifying power of faith and the centralizing potential of orthodox Sunni Islam which they effectively brought under strict state control.
The final part of the book, aptly titled “An imaginable community” with a nod to the late Benedict Anderson, looks at how infrastructure and public works were deployed as national integration strategies to expand communal imagination beyond local villages or towns to the entire national geography. The construction of an Anatolian railway network, the building of railway stations as generators of urban form, the emergence of a repeatable urban design template for “republican towns” across the country, the imposition of uniformity through prototype architectural projects for the key educational institutions of the Kemalist state (elementary schools, Girls’ Institutes and Halkevleri) are presented as compelling evidence for the nationalization of geography. This was a “militarized geography” (p. 166), Kezer tells us, where railways carried not only modernity and civilization, but also military troops and state power to suppress dissent and resistance (especially in the Kurdish regions in the east, the lasting legacy of which still plagues Turkey today). Yet, inconsistencies in implementation, reversals of policy, tensions between civic and military approaches to the eastern problem and an overall failure to resonate with popular sensibilities were plenty, once again casting republican nation building as a fitful, untidy and conflict-ridden process.
The research that has gone into the book is extensive, covering a wide range of archival primary material, secondary sources and visuals (photographs, cartoons and maps). Kezer's account also has remarkable contemporary relevance in the sense that the seeds of popular resentment planted by the radical strategies of the 1920s and 1930s explain so much about Turkey today. Ironically, the rise of political Islam since the mid 1990s has introduced not just a revanchist rejection of the Kemalist project, but also a resort to the same authoritarian measures and spatial strategies that Kemalists employed earlier, this time putting them in the service of a new, Islamist construction of national identity. This irony is not lost on Kezer, who concludes the book with a short Epilogue (written after the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013) in which the republican desire to homogenize, discipline and (re-)shape the population transcends its historical time frame and re-emerges as very much alive and well today. Ultimately, it is to this enduring statist impulse for authoritarian national identity construction in Turkey that the book offers a scathing critique.
