Kemalism in The Era of Totalitarianism

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Kemalism in the Era of Totalitarianism: A Conceptual
Analysis
Dragoş C. Mateescu a
a
Izmir University of Economics, Turkey
Online Publication Date: 01 June 2006

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Kemalism in the Era of Totalitarianism:

A Conceptual Analysis1
DRAGOŞ C. MATEESCU S
C
E
[D
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]I
Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

720DragosMateescu
dragos.mateescu@izmirekonomi.edu.tr
00000June
Turkish
10.1080/14683840600714624
FTUR_A_171430.sgm
1468-3849
Original
Taylor
2006 and
& 2006 Ltd
Studies
Article
Francis
(print)/1743-9663
Francis (online)
ABSTRACT The resurgence of interest in the concept of political religions and its various
ideological and institutional facets gained a significant impetus with Emilio Gentile’s contri-
bution to the field. However, Gentile’s conceptual construction has not yet been applied
specifically to the study of Kemalism as the predominant doctrine of Turkey’s transformation
from an empire into a nation-state. This essay is based on the assumption that such an
approach is possible and evaluates theoretically the applicability of Gentile’s definitions of
political religions and totalitarianism within the Turkish context of change as shaped under
the principles of Kemalism in the first part of the 20th century.
Kemalism is the name given to the official doctrine guiding the Turkish political
establishment in its secular, republican era, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s,
following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its principles have endured success-
fully the challenges of many rivals in time. One by one, consecrated ideologies
ranging from extreme left to extreme right were pushed aside by Kemalism as
concentrated in the emblematic figure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, father of modern
Turkey and initiator of the reformist current bearing his name. In spite of having
little in common with the morphology and metabolism of classical ideologies,
Kemalism received and continues to receive much academic attention at least as a
set of principles closely resembling an ideology. Scholars usually tend to associate it
with populism, nationalism, secularism, or statism and portray it as centered on a
rather authoritarian image of Atatürk. Biographers, too, take sides in this debate
about Kemalism and its central political figure. Patrick Kinross, for instance,
portrays Mustafa Kemal as a Turkish hero and attributes his authoritarianism to the
historical context in which such political practice was the rule rather than the excep-
tion.2 Andrew Mango, on the other hand, adopts a viewpoint more anchored in our
contemporary political values and sheds more light over the authoritarian features of
a leader who was “always right.”3 However, despite the sometimes naïve compari-
sons between Kemalism and Fascist or Communist dictatorships, there has been no
serious examination of the political making of the doctrine from the vantage point of
Correspondence Address: Dragoş C. Mateescu, Izmir University of Economics, Sakary Caddesi 156,
S
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E
[D
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Balcova, Izmir 35330, Turkey. Email: dragos.mateescu@izmirekonomi.edu.tr
ISSN 1468-3849 Print/1743-9663 Online/06/020225-17 © 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14683840600714624
226 D. C. Mateescu
the ideological substance of totalitarianism, particularly what is now commonly

known as political religions. This study aims at opening a door in the direction of
such research. To this aim, Emilio Gentile’s theory of political religions is first
corroborated with other related ideas in the field and then applied to certain data we
have about the Kemalist discourse in the early republican era in Turkey. The
concept of political religion is viewed as essential for understanding authoritarian or
totalitarian political systems. In particular, the tendency of these systems as to open
themselves to the masses in the shape of discourses fabricating identity stories that
exclude authoritatively the other has been illustrated with substantial evidence.
Here, the Kemalist discourse refers to the public statements and attitudes of Atatürk
and his main collaborators. It is the main premise of this study that defining the
early Turkish Republic as resembling a proto-totalitarian regime would represent an
act as extreme as totalitarianism itself. Emilio Gentile stresses that the sacralization
of politics has not led automatically in all cases to the establishment of totalitarian
regimes. He therefore clearly states that “the sacralization of politics has been both
democratic and totalitarian.”4 Totalitarian or not, the Kemalist regime did start and
carried on successfully a revolution in Anatolia. Sacralized as it is even nowadays in
Turkey, Kemalism, this essay suggests, would rather fall in the democratic category.
Its very objective was modernization through democratization, however Kemalism
defined democracy as such initially. We begin here, then, with an investigation of
the concept of political religion.
The Sacralization of Politics and Political Religions

The study of political religions is a relatively new academic field. According to
Stanley G. Payne, it was born in the first half of the 20th century and has grown
more rapidly over the last decades.5 Seen as an essential component of the political
mechanism of the authoritarian or totalitarian regime, which Emilio Gentile labeled
as “La Ecclesia del Leviathan,” the sacralization of politics is to be distinguished
from the sacralization of political power, and it appeared not accidentally after the
French and American Revolutions. In short, the separation of politics from religion
over the centuries offered the possibility for political forces to develop gradually a
civil religion of their own, culminating with the political religions of extreme nature
in the case of Fascist and Communist totalitarianisms.6 Emilio Gentile’s study of
political religions and totalitarianism lays at the foundation of this discipline in the
20th century. As Marina Cattaruzza enthusiastically pointed out in a speech on the
occasion of Gentile’s receiving the 2003 Sigrist Prize, “He was the first to develop a
set of ideal types which delineate the separate spheres of civic religion, political
religion, and politicized religion.”7
The process by which a political religion is born is the sacralization of politics, that
is, “the formation of a religious dimension in politics that is distinct from, and auton-
omous of, traditional religious institutions” (italics in original).8 The sacralization of
politics is therefore a modern phenomenon whose appearance became possible only
after the official separation of the political institutions from the traditional religious
Kemalism in the Era of Totalitarianism 227
institutions, particularly after the French and American Revolutions. Gentile differ-
entiates between the civil religion as an American idea, and the political religion that
he sees as a French alternative.9 The main differences between the two forms of
sacralized politics are to be found in their relations with the individual, the existing
traditional religions, the alternative political ideologies, or the community as a
whole. Civil religion, for instance, seems to be capable of cohabitating with an indi-
vidual enjoying a degree of autonomy from the politicized community. In addition,
it seems to be accepting coexistence with traditional religions and even with other
political ideologies provided that the “civic creed” it proposes is at the axiological
top of all accepted values in the political community.10 The political make of the
United States as developed since the American Revolution down to present is often
given as an example of a context in which a paradigmatic type of civil religion
appeared. Political religion, on the other hand, is significantly defined by Gentile as
“the sacralization of an ideology and an integralist political movement that deifies
the mythical secular entity” (author’s italics).11 Unlike civil religions, political reli-
gions refuse cohabitation with ideological alternatives and claim the primacy for the
community while denying it to the individual in the Roussean tradition of thought.
As concerning the traditional religion, a political religion rather tends to subordinate
it by incorporating it into the new, revolutionary cult. Scholars of Turkish modern-
ization could agree that, in the making of the post-Ottoman Turkish political identity,
Kemalism tended to act more like a political rather than a civil religion. This essay
suggests that such an idea is valid but also points at some civic aspects of Kemalism.
The conceptual mechanism of analysis being built here would certainly be
incomplete without the incorporation of a particular idea contributed to the field by
Mark Juergensmeyer. In a book published in 1993, he pointed at the importance of
ideology in the emergence of religious nationalism as contending against secular
nationalism. Juergensmeyer views them as two competing species of the same
genus simply because of the similarity of their social functions. They both attempt
to explain the human society. They both offer final solutions to the question about
how we should live, one that recurs obsessively throughout the entire history of
political thought. The term Juergensmeyer prefers as a name for the genus indicated
above is ideology of order, and the reason for choosing it is explicitly stated by the
scholar as being the fact that he is dealing with concepts that practically legitimize
authority, that is, they are political in nature.12 In other words, nationalism as and
when becoming a political religion is indissolubly linked to its own ideology, which
in turn is an ideology of order. The same syllogism is applicable to both religious
and secular nationalism. The scholar then admits using the word “with a certain
amount of trepidation” because of the potential flammability of the concept. He
points at the fact that the term ideology “originated in the late eighteenth century in
the context of the rise of secular nationalism. A group of French ideologues, as they
called themselves, were attempting to build a science of ideas based on the theories
of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and René Descartes that would be
sufficiently comprehensive to replace religion.”13 There appears to be, indeed, an
intimate relation in our recent history between ideology and the nation versus
228 D. C. Mateescu
religion but one in which the two young allies were obviously determined to
appropriate the means, symbols, and techniques that made traditional religion so
successful for thousands of years. This alliance between ideology and nation, so
much eager to replace religion, did appear on the world political stage long before
the French and American Revolutions and it is quite certain that it would not have
had much chance of success without the incendiary force of those crucial events. Be
they civil or political, the religions that both revolutions inaugurated did propose
their own ideologies of order as an alternative to and, especially in France, as
against the traditional religion. These practical models proposed by Gentile are thus
confirmed when viewed in this more theoretical perspective. It was, then, not
accidental that the secular reformist movement in Turkey, one that started quite long
before Mustafa Kemal, followed from the very beginning the French model of
revolutionary change. The Turkish Revolutionary leaders, in general, appropriated
the French historical legacy and adapted it to their own context. They generally
appreciated the ideas and ideals of the French Revolution as their final goal. Toward
the final years of the Ottoman Empire, these ideals developed a more and more
intimate relation with the concept of nation.14 The official ideology that promoted
such a profound political change in Turkey beginning with the abolition of the
Empire and the Caliphate, Kemalism, was also in a special relation with the idea of
nation. In fact, it actually contributed decisively to the very creation of the modern
Turkish identity.
Emilio Gentile acknowledges Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron as the first to
have introduced the concepts of political and secular religion in political thought.15
However, his contributions considerably refined the domain. He made, for instance,
an observation with particular relevance within the context of our analysis of
Kemalism. That is, “the sacralisation of politics […] has revolutionary, democratic
and nationalist origins.”16 Indeed, all the modern political revolutions waved the
flags of profound social and political changes in and through the nation. The French
slogan of liberté, egalité, fraternité was only modified later by the particular
Communist understanding of, say, equality or by the Nazi understanding of all three
ideals. The essence and the purpose of the revolution qua revolution remained basi-
cally unchanged and they addressed invariably the sanctified soul of a nation. It
continued to address the demos and thus adorn itself with the democratic aura. It
always took a national identity or simply unburied one, as in the Turkish case, to
place it at the heart of the revolutionary action as its religious cradle. It was then
almost natural that three of Kemalism’s six fundamental tenets were revolutionism,
nationalism, and populism, each of them understood in a particular way in Turkey.
Populism, for instance, is the Kemalist conceptualization of the Turkish republican
understanding of democracy in line with the ideas of the Ottoman reformists who
interpreted the concept as describing a closer relation between the ruler and the
ruled.17 The Turkish understanding of revolutionism, nationalism, secularism or
statism is also original, as it will be illustrated throughout this essay.
Another aspect central to such political movements and to Kemalism as well is
the attempt at creating or at least modeling a new man, the new citizen of the polities
they establish, in line with their own anthropomorphic conceptions. It is particularly

this feature that makes them eventually similar to traditional religions. As Steward
Elliot Guthrie remarked, both secular thought and religion tend to anthropomorphize
the phenomena.18 However, the centrality of the human individual is only apparent.
Revolutionary political movements, in a way similar to that of traditional religions,
tend overwhelmingly to coagulate and massify the society around their proclaimed
ideals. These movements annul individuality in the name of a model of the individ-
ual they impose and not in name of the individual as he or she is in a purely Heideg-
gerian, un-modeled sense. The observations made by Juergensmeyer are correct
then and, indeed, ideologies of order can come to make sense only when success-
fully containing the individual in their scheme of things. Political religions are thus
not accidentally built on the solid foundations defined as mass movements and
develop particularly out of what Gentile indicates as “a new belief relationship
between the masses and their leaders.”19 This direct link between the masses and the
leader is another important channel through which a political religion is built in
paths that are virtually similar to those concerning traditional religions.
Following an analysis of the particular case of Fascism as the “prototype for total-
itarian religions,” Gentile reaches the conclusion that they share some essential
characteristics. In brief, they are: the primacy of the myth and the explicit “appeal to
the irrational as a politically mobilizing force”; the centrality of the “charismatic
leader as the interpreter of the national consciousness”; and an “obligatory code of
ethical commandments” accompanied by a “collective political liturgy in order to
celebrate the deification of the state and the cult of the leader” (italics in original).20
When coupled with the nationalist tendencies of modernity, political religions tend
eventually to turn society into the mass worshiping that Benedict Anderson has
labeled as the imaginary national community. Indeed, in such a context, people do
not actually come to worship a transcendental authority as in the case of a traditional
religion. Instead, they come to worship themselves in their new identity as tailored
by the revolutionary political leadership.21 The veiling effect suggested here is also
confirmed when viewed from the perspective of the cognitive theory of religion
itself. While holding that religion is a form of anthropomorphism, Guthrie admitted
that there is some small truth in the comfort thesis of religion which maintains that
the religious cognitive act is motivated in men not by their desire to know. On the
contrary, people’s desire as not to know about reality pushes them in the arms of a,
thus, comfortable religious definition or story of reality.22 One should suspect that,
in the case of a political religion, this comfort thesis might be more than a “small”
truth. The explicitness of the appeal to the irrational in the case of political religions
can then be viewed as the perfectly logical appropriation of a method of the
traditional religion by the secular, political religion. Gentile, who defines it as
mimetism, also approaches this aspect. According to him, a political religion acts in
a mimetic manner toward the traditional religion by simply replicating its dogmas,
myths, ethics, and liturgy.23
The above excursion into the theory of political religions occasions a few concep-
tual clarifications. First, the theory suggests that a political religion is profoundly
230 D. C. Mateescu
revolutionary—it arises in times of political collapse to build a new establishment

on the ruins of a former one. It is also poised for an attack on the traditional religion
aiming at either appropriating its domain or simply eliminating it from the public
realm. To this end, a political religion proclaims the centrality of reality and discour-
ages the affirmation of the absolute centrality of a transcendental God. It defines
that reality most often in terms of the nation and the national, which thus become
worshiped markers of identity and, at the same time, principles legitimizing political
authority. It feels uncomfortable with other ideologies since they would naturally
propose alternative interpretations of reality. A political religion evolves around the
image of a charismatic leader whose name and image become associated with the
deification of the state as defined by the revolutionary political establishment.
Strictly cognitively, it is maintained in this study that a political religion may rather
fit into the comfort theory of religiousness in the sense that it develops a veil-
identity of a people, one making possible purgatorial rites for the purification of a
nation. The old establishment is thus associated with corruption while the new is
portrayed as the right one for the nation. A political religion is therefore a form of
political narcissism physically taking place under the auspices of state institutions.
The state becomes the cathedral of a celebrated holy reality replacing, including, or
simply eliminating God from the public stage where power is distributed. While a
political religion is to be found at the foundation of all totalitarian regimes, it does
not necessarily end in totalitarianism. An essential characteristic of a political
religion is that its principles are usually encoded in an official ideology understood
here as an ideology of order proclaiming the primacy of the political community
over the individual. In what follows, this conceptual sketch is employed in the
analysis of some aspects of Kemalism considered relevant within this context.
Was Kemalism Originally a Political Religion?

On October 29, 1923 the then young Turkish Grand National Assembly officially
declared the Turkish state as a Republic and elected Mustafa Kemal as the country’s
President with 158 unanimous votes but more than 100 abstentions. A few months
later, on March 3, 1924, the Caliphate was abolished and the Caliph’s family
deported. In this way the country started its republican era under the leadership of
Mustafa Kemal and, later, his Republican People’s Party. The principle of national
sovereignty had been for the first time proclaimed in Turkey with the short but very
important Constitution of 1921. That document was not regarded as a constitution in
the full sense of the word by the ruling class but as one addressing only the urgent
constitutional needs of the emerging state. In 1924, the Grand National Assembly
adopted a new Constitution that preserved in its text the concept of national sover-
eignty and reconfirmed, in Article 4, that the Assembly was the sole representative
of the Turkish nation. Article 5 proclaimed that both legislative and executive
powers were given to the Assembly, while Article 7 stated that the executive author-
ity would be exercised by the Assembly through the President of the Republic and a
Council of Ministers appointed by the President.24 Special provisions drafted by
Mustafa Kemal and his main collaborator, İ smet İ nönü, on the evening of October
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28, 1923 entitled the President “to chair the assembly and the cabinet whenever he
wished.” Thus, both the legislative and the executive powers were concentrated in
the hand of one man who viewed this as the only way in which further reforms could
be rapidly and coherently initiated and implemented.25 The reformation process
started, therefore, under the technically authoritarian leadership of one man and was
to transform profoundly the entire establishment. In only 15 years, a revolutionary
movement toward the Westernization of the country was to take impetus from the
ideology later called Kemalism (Kemalizm) or Atatürkism (Atatürkçülük) after the
surname taken by Mustafa Kemal in 1934. The centrality of the charismatic leader
in Gentilean terms was to be strengthened later, and even in today’s Turkey it can be
seen and felt in both the public and private space as an icon of secularism and repub-
licanism.
A reputed biographer of Atatürk maintains that Kemalism was born on
December 24, 1919 when the leader gave a speech in which he quoted the
profoundly patriotic verses of Ottoman poet Namık Kemal and then announced with
excitement that “another Kemal has now sprung from the nation’s breast.”26
However, Kemalism as a set of concepts and, finally, as an articulated ideology was
far from being born at that date and maybe, some say, it was never to become one.
Instead, it should rather be described as a mere set of political practices inspired by
the tendency of Atatürk’s followers to praise reformist action over written words.27
Nevertheless, any student of Kemalism in Turkey and elsewhere can refer to an
important document explaining the principles of Atatürk and entitled simply Nutuk,
the text of the six-day speech given by Mustafa Kemal before the Grand National
Assembly between October 15 and 20, 1927. The speech represented the first
official and coherent account of Atatürk’s actions and reforms over the previous
years. One particular fragment in the speech sheds light upon Atatürk’s leading
principle in the initiation and implementation of reforms. Talking about the political
process that led to the abolition of the Sultanate in the aftermath of the bloody War
for Independence, he tells how he cut short the heated debate in the Grand National
Assembly by stating that:
Sovereignty and kinship [Sultanate] are never decided upon through discussion
or academic debate. Sovereignty and kinship are taken by strength, by power
and force. It was by force that the Ottomans seized the sovereignty and kinship
of the Turkish nation and kept them for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation
has rebelled, has put a stop to these usurpers, and has effectively taken sover-
eignty and kinship into its own hands. This is an accomplished fact. The ques-
tion under discussion is not whether or not we should leave kinship and
sovereignty to the nation. […]—the question is merely how to give expression
to it. This will happen in any case. If those gathered here, the Assembly, and
everyone else could look at this question in a natural way, I think they would
agree. Even if they do not, the truth will still find expression, but some heads
may roll in the process.28
232 D. C. Mateescu
The fragment above confirms the emergence of the Turkish nation as a central
political principle for the first time in that people’s history. In the millet system
of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman elite would not even identify itself as
“Turkish” but as “Rumi,” in Byzantine tradition, while the predominant language

was a complex mixture of Farsi, Arabic, and Turkish to fit the semantic needs of
the Sultan’s and Porte’s bureaucracy. The “Turk” was actually the word used by
the elite for denominating the uneducated, poor peasants of Anatolia, or by Euro-
peans to denominate the Ottomans, while the Turkish language was that spoken
by the raâya, the peasants.29 Atatürk inaugurated an era in which Turkishness
was to become the prime identity marker for the republican political system and
the seeds of a particular type of nationalism were also laid. Rather inclusive than
exclusive, the danger of the Turkish nationalism springs precisely out of this
inclusiveness. The pre-Kemalist reformists in the Ottoman Empire were far from
such a strong assertion of their Turkish identity. A classic study of Niyazi
Berkes in the development of Turkish secularism occasioned a detailed analysis
of the role played by the Turkish identity in the reformation process at that time.
Berkes concluded that following the Tanzimat reforms in the mid-19th century,
for instance, the Islamic foundations of the Ottoman sovereignty were already
seriously shaken but “it was not even a sovereignty sustained by a Turkish
‘nation’, as that did not exist either in the modern sense of nationality, or in the
sense of religious community.” Berkes also points at the lack even of a class
support for the Ottoman sovereignty since the country’s “usurer-capitalists and
adventurous speculators did not constitute a rising class capable of creating a
modern nation.” Berkes’ study concludes then that the Ottoman sovereignty
could have been based in the 19th century only on three main pillars: the Turk-
ish people, the tradition of Islam, and the Western protecting powers.30 Islam
was already compromised since with the Şeriat as the central source of law the
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Empire was obviously collapsing in the face of much stronger and often unreli-
able Western powers. Atatürk’s hammer-blow to the Ottoman sovereignty in
1923 derived then logically its source of power from the only pillar not yet polit-
ically relevant at that time in the Empire but seen by him as a potentially over-
whelming force.
The Kemalist ideology was crystallized in time as the reformist tide encountered
various hurdles. Initially associated with the four principles of nationalism
(milliyetçilik), secularism (layiklik), republicanism (cumhuriyetçilik), and populism
(halkçılık), two others, statism (devletçilik) and revolutionism (inkilabçılık),
respectively, were added in 1931. It is nowadays widely accepted that nationalism
in the particular Kemalist understanding of it permeates all the other “arrows” of
the ideology. It is also accepted that “Kemalist nationalism still marks the ideolog-
ical and formative foundations of official discourse in Turkey.”31 Thus, the
national per se as an essential element of a political religion was more than present
in the case of Kemalism. Moreover, within the context of the analysis undertaken
here, the centrality of nationalism in the Kemalist ideology is of a particular
importance.
The Particularities of Kemalist Nationalism

The Kemalist understanding and employment of the concepts of nation and nation-
alism does not depart much from the conceptual lines drawn by classical defini-
tions.32 However, it also contains more than that. The amalgamation of nationalism
with secularism—and particularly with statism—has been decisive in making
Kemalist nationalism subtly different from its European counterparts.
The population of the Turkish Republic is in the majority of Turkish ethnic
origins, but there are also significant numbers of other ethnic groups. One Turkish
scholar mentions Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, Arabs, Lazes, Abkhazians,
Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. Moreover, the Kurds currently represent the largest
minority and constitute from 15 to 20 percent of the country’s population.33 At the
time of the Kemalist change, statistics were much less precise and the situation was
slightly different in the sense that the Empire was organized not along national/
ethnic lines but rather along religious lines in the millet system. The word meant
“religious group” in the Ottoman Empire, and only with the patriotic ideas propa-
gated by intellectuals such as Sadık Rıfat Pasha and others during the reign of Sultan
Mahmud II in the early decades of the 19th century did it come to mean “nation” in
the contemporary sense in Turkish language.34 The system survived as part of the
Ottoman political system until its demise and it did not recognize the existence of
ethnic groups but only the existence of the Muslim people and the others, that is, the
Christians, Jews, and other religious groups throughout the empire. The notion of
different ethnic groups within the Muslim majority, on the other hand, was simply
unconceivable, since all were seen by the authorities as people of the same spiritual
share and subjects of the Sultan as both temporal ruler and Şeyhülislam or Caliph, as
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well as subjects of the basic law encoded in the holy Şeriat. However, the divine
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texts were not the only legislative bond for the Muslim Ottoman “nation.” As Hugh
Poulton pointed out, the absence of a constitution until the first Ottoman Constitu-
tion was adopted in 1876 did not mean that the Şeriat was the sole source of law.
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While the Islamic law was seen as the work of God and thus not subject to any
change, reality made necessary various interpretations and even the consideration of
secular sources of law. The Turkish–Iranian practice of urf (secular law-making)
had been incorporated by the Seljuk dynasty in the first Turkic Empire long before
the sons of Osman (Ottomans) took over the reign. All these upheavals led to the
formation of the body of public law known as kanun. In Berkes’ words, “enacting
temporal kanun was becoming gradually a more or less systematized process
towards the creation of a body of public law separate and even contradistinct from
the Şeriat law.”35 Allegiance to the Sultan in his double quality as temporal ruler
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and Şeyhülislam was the essence of this order. Replacing this head at the top of the
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system was to be, therefore, a double effort. While Kemalist secularism could
address the issue of religious leadership, its statism could have dealt with the tempo-
ral leadership of the Sultan. However, things were just not that simple. The secular
aspect of the Ottoman legislative practice was of Mongol origins and absolutist in
essence. The urf was therefore seen as a source of an absolute authoritarianism à la
234 D. C. Mateescu
Mongole, in the words of Şerif Mardin, and “one consequence of this was that secu-
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lar legislation suffered from guilt of association.”36 Only the mere affirmation of the
secularity of Kemalism soon after the official collapse of the Ottoman Empire
would not have been enough to grant it legitimacy.

That is why the idea of nationalism emerged within the Kemalist context in a way
distinguished from other European patterns. It is apparently easy to agree with diag-
noses such as Poulton’s for whom “Kemalist nationalism was essentially totalitar-
ian” when thinking of its manifestations toward other ethnic groups in the early
decades of the Republic.37 One only has to read the accounts of the reaction against
the Kurdish rebellion of 1925. Andrew Mango’s biography of Atatürk presents the
facts apparently as to fit Poulton’s epithet. The leader of the rebellion, Sheik Said,
was captured on April 15, 1925 after a 25,000-strong Turkish force defeated his
approximately 15,000 fighters. During the trial that followed in the city of
Diyarbakır, the Sheik “insisted that his sole aim was to establish an Islamic order
based on the Şeriat,” but a defector from his camp assured the judges that the Sheik
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was actually set to establish a Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. This served the
purpose of the prosecution, which was determined to prove that the mentioning of
“Kurdistan” and the “Kurds” meant that the aim of the rebellion was the establish-
ment of an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey.38 Not long after those
events, in the early 1930s, Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, Justice Minister under Atatürk
and one of the Kemalist ideologists, offered a declarative expression of the govern-
ment’s understanding of the “nation” for that government. He asserted that “Turks
are the only masters and owners of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish
stock have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.”39
However, attributing totalitarian tendencies to the Kemalist view of nation and
nationalism might be hazardous for a few reasons.
First, we must not pass superficially over the profoundly inclusive definition of the
nation in the early Kemalist era. The very program of the Republican People’s Party
in the 1930s, at a time when it was Turkey’s single party, openly defined the nation
as a “social and political formation comprising citizens linked together by the commu-
nity of language, culture, and ideal.”40 This political understanding of the nation
somehow meets the definition later given by Benedict Anderson and signals the
Kemalist recognition of the imagined or fabricated nature of the concept. The nation
was for the Kemalists, at the same time, a community established by political decision
and an ideal. The pragmatism of this definition of the nation is illustrated by numerous
public declarations of Atatürk himself and of other Kemalist ideologists. The fierce
nationalism of Mahmut Esat Bozkurt should be judged in direct connection with the
Kurdish revolt of Sheik Said in 1925 and the perceived danger arising at that time
from that issue. Years later, in 1938, the same Bozkurt wrote on the same theme with
a different tone. The view about the role of the single party was also placed in a prag-
matic connection with the meaning of the nation by Bozkurt stating that:
No party in the civilized world has ever represented the whole nation as
completely and as sincerely as the Republican People’s Party. Other parties
defend the interests of various social classes and strata. For our part, we do not
recognize the existence of these classes and strata. For us, all are united. There
are no gentlemen, no masters, no slaves. There is but one whole set and this set
is the Turkish nation.41
This statement reminds one more time of the vision of the American Founding Fathers
than that of any European understanding of the nation at that time, and this view was
also the one propagated by Atatürk himself in his public speeches. The following
statement from his memorable Speech is particularly significant at this point:
I am neither a believer in a league of all the nations of Islam, nor even in a

league of the Turkish peoples. Each of us here has the right to hold his ideals,
but the government must be stable with a fixed policy, grounded in facts, and
with one view and one alone—to safeguard the life and independence of the
nation within its natural frontiers. Neither sentiment nor illusion must influence
our policy. Away with dreams and shadows! They have cost us dear in the
past!42
Atatürk thus expressed his vision of the national territory “away from dreams” but
in the pragmatic terms of the nation’s capacity of defending those borders. He
derided Wilson’s principles because, in his opinion, the American President did not
understand that national borders are those that a nation can physically hold with
bayonets and not the ones it dreams of. The soldier in him was stronger than the
politician and this made even the most heated of all ideologies—nationalism—be
conceptualized in his words in most pragmatic terms.43 Energetic as it was in prac-
tice, Kemalism promoted a rather rational and originally civic discourse on nation
and nationalism. Not accidentally did the People’s Party eventually repudiate the
irrational tendencies of some factions viewing the nation in religious or racial terms.
The Islamic cultural component was to be eliminated by the Kemalists naturally by
virtue of their decided option for secularism. The theme of race did not take over the
Kemalist establishment in its entirety regardless of how tempting it was at a time
when in Europe racial legitimizing principles became state policies. Turan, the
imagined homeland of all Turks from Anatolia to Central Asia, was, indeed, a
common theme in school education with the propagation of the inspired verses of
Ziya Gökalp, a poet so dear to Kemalists. However, the notion of race was eventu-
ally eliminated from the regime’s definition of nation and nationalism. In practical
terms, the Turkish “race” and Turan were imaginary concepts overlapping with real
states, including the USSR, that occupied those territories. Atatürk simply did not
want political trouble and thus asserted loudly his pragmatic principle so valid in
both domestic and foreign affairs: “Away with dreams and shadows! They have cost
us dear in the past!”
Even the competition within the People’s Party over the definition of Kemalism
suggests a relative openness of the mainstream party ideologues. The very fact that
Kemalism was considered open for conceptualization meant it could not be
236 D. C. Mateescu
considered what Gentile called a sacralized ideology. At least three groups were
competing for the propagation of their own understanding of Kemalism. One was
the central, mainstream group around Atatürk and his closest collaborator, İsmet
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İnönü. Trying to win them over were two other groups engaged on leftist and right-
]
ist political lines—the Kadro group (Kadrocular) and the Ülkü group, respectively.
Both these names were actually the names of the two journals edited by the groups
in question. In the first issue of Kadro, the authors decried that Turkey was
experiencing a permanent revolution without, however, an ideology to guide this
revolution. The statement runs as it follows:
Turkey is in a state of revolution. This revolution has not yet ended. The
revolution is not an impartial order. Those who live in it, whether they support
it or not, must participate and conform to it. Revolution means unconditional
attachment of wills of the adversaries to the wills of those who support it. The
will and interest of the revolution is represented by the wills of a conscious
vanguard Kadro (cadre) […]44
It is obvious that the Kadro version of Kemalism demanded unconditional

allegiance from the citizens in the name of what they proclaimed as the nation’s
revolutionary ideal. Moreover, the “conscious vanguard” of cadre claims that it can
represent the “will and interest of the revolution” in a perfectly Roussean reflex,
while the declared sympathies of the Kadrocular for the economic socialism leaves
no doubt about their main source of inspiration in the early 1930s. Some authors
maintain that the Kadro journal was forced to stop publication due to its financial
sponsor, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, being appointed ambassador.45 However,
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other accounts from groups even closer to Atatürk suggest a different story. Their
frequent visits to Soviet Russia and their open enmity toward the capitalist-imperial-
ist system, together with fears among the conservative Kemalists that the group was
propagating dangerous foreign ideologies, determined Atatürk to intervene and stop
the activities of the Kadro group. That happened in spite of the group’s explicit
support for the single-party system and the dominance of a leader through an exclu-
sive elite. Necip Ali, one of the conservative Kemalist ideologues, rejected Kadro’s
ideas about the state, for instance, simply because in his view the strange Kadro
concept of “social nationalism” was placing the state above national will and this
was against the original Kemalist principle of statism according to which the state
was the outcome of the national will.46
As regarding the Ülkü group, it appeared initially as a reaction to the Kadro devi-
ations. The first issue of the journal bearing the same name appeared in February
1933, two years after the appearance of Kadro, but outlived its rival. Kadro was
closed in 1935 while Ülkü continued to be published until 1950. A recent study of
the movement advocates the idea that the journal was launched so as to create and
promote “an ideology of the revolution, and to further the institutionalization of this
ideology by and within the People’s Houses.” As Recep Peker, another prominent
Kemalist ideologue, wrote in the first editorial, the journal would publish the articles
of those people who believed in the “great cause” and intellectuals were welcome to
write there in order to enlighten and “amalgamate” people, thus rescuing them from
the “individual life.” The translation by Ertan Aydın of Recep Peker’s text reads as
follows:
Ülkü has assumed the task of gathering people for the ideological and moral
institutionalization of the revolution. Accordingly, the primary role of the man
of idea and art is to make the national and collective endeavor understood, and
direct it to the current and future requirements. Furthermore, Ülkü aims at
creating a national revolutionary culture from this collective endeavor and at
inculcating a collective solidarity on the basis of this culture. In this sacred
task, Ülkü will be a moderator.47
Since the journal long outlasted Atatürk himself, it is certain that the leader
approved of the movement’s program. Ertan Aydın points decisively in his study at
solidarism as an “axial notion” for the Ülkü view of nation-building. The concept
actually sums up all the other views, for it indicates precisely the inclusive nature of
Turkish nationalism as the particularity already invoked throughout this essay.
Coupled with the traditional Turkish view of the state as an overlord—one strength-
ened by the presence of statism among the Kemalist principles—this gave birth to a
post-Ottoman ideological mutant in the name of which, contrary to Atatürk’s
beliefs, many dreams have been nurtured with the cost of many lives. However, as
his own political discourse indicates and that of the Kemalist elite confirms, Atatürk
did not initially appear as the charismatic leader at the very center of the Kemalist
politics, or as a model for a new Turkish individual. Most of the statues we see
nowadays all throughout Turkey were not erected during his lifetime but after. As
concerning the political debate in general in Turkey during Atatürk’s reign, it is
interesting for our analysis to note that the leader himself was willing to contribute
to the establishment of other parties as alternatives to the Republican People’s Party.
Stephen R. Di Rienzo stressed the non-optional nature of religion as a principle of
order “through the creation of a unifying belief system which binds the individual
and the community symbiotically and periodically reaffirms itself through a series
of festivals and rituals.”48 The non-optional nature of religion is then corroborated
by Di Rienzo with the political religion developed by National Socialism in Hitler’s
Germany. In Gentile’s view, too, a political religion feels rather uncomfortable
about coexistence with other ideologies. This, however, could not apply fully to
Kemalism in the times of Atatürk. Even during the first years of the Republic, oppo-
sition feelings arose against Atatürk’s authoritarianism. The opponents were former
companions of Mustafa Kemal during the War of Independence—Karabekir, Ali
Fuad, Rauf, Refet, or Dr. Adnan. Generally labeled as liberals, they did not oppose
Atatürk’s being in power as such but only his authoritarian government. They
formed the Progressive Republican Party (PRP) on November 17, 1924 and soon
gained 29 seats in the Assembly through the defection of deputies from the Republi-
can People’s Party. The new party pledged support for liberal economic reforms and
238 D. C. Mateescu
decentralization. Despite the nervousness of Mustafa Kemal’s supporters about the

emergence of an official opposition, the leader himself refrained from open action
over the issue by, for instance, not authorizing a purge of the People’s Party. Patrick
Kinross suggests that Atatürk even replaced the conservative İsmet İnönü as the
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head of government with the more liberal Fethi Okyar just to “appease the opposi-
tion,” and Mango at least does not deny this aspect.49 The next year, on June 3, the
party was to be closed by the government, but not because of Atatürk’s fear of oppo-
sition as such. In a letter in response to the questions sent by a Times correspondent
right at the time of those events, on December 11, 1924, he declared that political
parties “were a natural feature of republican regimes.”50
The banning of the PRP is then to be understood in the historical context as a
natural response to the dangerous rise of Kurdish and other armed opposition forces
throughout the country. The confirmation of such a hypothesis came only five years
later when the second opposition party had the same fate. Moreover, this second
party was founded at the suggestion of Atatürk himself. The leader was eager to
establish grounds for a political debate in the Assembly so as to dissipate the accu-
mulated public disappointment within the context of the world economic depression
that was badly affecting Turkey too. Additionally, he is reported to have started
fearing that his name would later be associated with the label of a dictator. Kinross
quotes Atatürk saying, “I do not want to die without bringing the regime of personal
rule in Turkey to a close. I want to create a liberal Republic.”51 He personally
mandated Fethi Okyar, the liberal, with the founding of the Free Republican Party
(FRP) so as to attract and thus keep under control the real opponents of the Kemalist
regime. This democratic experiment was short-lived and most analysts agree that it
was both premature and dangerous in Turkey at that time.52 On September 4, 1930
Fethi Okyar was welcomed in Izmir where he was to set up the local organization of
the FRP. The locals obviously saw in him a hope for change since a significant
crowd gathered to welcome him. However, violence soon erupted and the offices of
the RPR were stoned. The police intervened and a 12-year-old boy was killed by
gunfire. On September 7, 1930, an opposition meeting of protest gathered more than
100,000 people. In other parts of Turkey news of a successful opposition was stir-
ring the Kurdish and the religious feelings of the conservatory clergy. In November,
Fethi accused the government of manipulating elections and eventually dissolved
the Free Republican Party, motivating that it should not and could not struggle
against the founder of the Republic.
Conclusion
Authoritarian by context and conjuncture, original Kemalism cannot be defined as
authoritarian in itself, and it was far from totalitarianism. The analysis undertaken
here started with the conceptualization of a mechanism gravitating around the
notion of political religion. It could not touch all the aspects presupposed by that
conceptual mechanism, and neither was the intention of the author to do so. It rather
opened new perspectives on the issue and suggested a few potentially fruitful
directions of research. First, Kemalism in the times of Atatürk seems to be far from
the specter of the Gentilean definition of a political religion and even far from being
a political ideology in the contemporary sense of the concept. Despite being propa-
gated by a charismatic leader, it did not propose that figure as the model of a new
man. It did claim national support for an imagined ideal, and it did define that ideal
in its own terms, but it did not explicitly act on a non-optional basis. As an ideology
of order, Kemalism did impose a rather bizarre understanding of democracy and
founded its argument on an even more bizarre version of nationalism. The solidar-
ism and inclusiveness underlying this imposition effort were, however, far from the
tendencies manifested in the totalitarian or authoritarian regimes of Europe. Even
the tendencies to claim the primacy of the community against that of the individual
as expressed to the extreme by the Kadro movement died through association with
the communist ideology dubbed as foreign and harmful to the nation. As concerning
the deification of the state, it would be hazardous to claim that it started or reached a
particularly high level with Kemalism. Metin Heper’s research concerning the
primacy of the center over the periphery throughout the Ottoman and Turkish
history gives precious clues about the origins of state deification in the Turkish
political culture. He wrote in 1980 that:
With the merger of the state and religion, the supremacy of the state in the
Ottoman polity was guaranteed. […] The ruling groups in time became the
servants of the state rather than those of the sultan. The sultans lost their charisma;
charisma was gradually attributed to the state. The sultans could now be deposed
in the name of the state. The state was seen as the provider of nizam (order).53
A serious inquiry into the meanings attached traditionally in the Turkish culture to
fundamental political concepts would undoubtedly reveal much more than a study
of the country’s political culture employing exclusively Western European under-
standings of those concepts. Regarding the religiousness of Kemalism as perceived
today in the public and even private spheres of life, scholars should not be surprised
to find its sources in the post-Atatürk political developments. Usually, it is not
principles that generate religious feelings about them but their subsequent interpre-
tations and distortions. In that direction of research, this paper may only represent a
starting point.
Notes
1. A previous version of this essay was presented at the ASEN Conference “Nation and Empire” at the
London School of Economics and Political Science, April 20–21, 2005.
2. Patrick Kinross, Atatürk—The Rebirth of a Nation (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999).
3. Andrew Mango, Atatürk—The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock and New
York: The Overlook Press, 2002), pp.457–67.
4. Emilio Gentile, “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the
Question of Secular Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol.1, No.1
(Summer 2000), p.24.
240 D. C. Mateescu
5. Stanley G. Payne, “Emilio Gentile’s Historical Analysis and Taxonomy of Political Religions.
Review Essay,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol.3, No.1 (Summer 2002), p.122.
6. Ibid., pp.123–4.
7. Marina Cattaruzza, “Speech in Honour of Emilio Gentile on the Occasion of His Receiving the 2003
Sigrist Prize,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol.5, No.1 (Summer 2004), p.4.
8. Gentile, “The Sacralisation of Politics,” p.21.
9. Payne, “Emilio Gentile’s Historical Analysis,” p.123.
11. Ibid., p.25.
12. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p.30.
13. Ibid., pp.30–1.
14. Kemal Karpat, Turkey’s Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), p.8; Paul
Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,” in Jakob M. Landau (ed.), Atatürk and the Moderniza-
tion of Turkey (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), p.27; Mango, Atatürk, pp.49, 276, 374.
16. Ibid.
17. Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,” pp.31–3.
18. Stewart Elliot Guthrie, “Religion: What Is It?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol.35,
No.4 (December 1996), p.416.
20. Ibid., p.40.
21. Payne, “Emilio Gentile’s Historical Analysis,” p.125.
22. Guthrie, “Religion: What Is It?,” p.417.
24. Ergun Özbudun, “Constitutional Law,” in Tuğrul Ansay and Don Jr. Wallace (eds.), Introduction to
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Turkish Law (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), p.21.

25. Mango, Atatürk, p.394.
26. Ibid., p.262.
27. Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,” p.25.
28. Translation adapted from Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p.258.
29. Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf, and Crescent (London: Hurst and Company, 1997), p.43; Yael
Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State—Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002), p.10; Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey
(New York: Routledge, 1998), p.192.
30. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, pp.201–2.
31. Berdal Aral, “Turkey’s Insecure Identity from the Perspective of Nationalism,” Mediterranean
Quarterly, Vol.8, No.1 (Winter 1997), p.78.
32. See, for instance, John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1985), p.3; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp.5–7; Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in
History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p.3.
33. Muhittin Ataman, “Özal’s Leadership and Restructuring of Turkish Ethnic Policy in the 1990s,”
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.38, No.4 (October 2002), p.123.
34. Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought—A Study in the Modernization of Turkish
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Political Ideas (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp.174, 189.

35. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, p.132.
36. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p.103.
37. Poulton, Top Hat, p.128.
39. Quoted in Ataman, “Özal’s Leadership,” p.126, from Kemal Nezan, “Kurdistan in Turkey,” in Gerard
Chaliand (ed.), People without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1980).
40. Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasi Partiler, 1859–1952 [Political Parties in Turkey] (Istanbul:
Doğan Kardeş, 1952), p.585, in Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,” p.29.
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41. Quoted in Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,” p.33.

42. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nutuk [Speech] (Ankara: AKDTYK, 1989), pp.ii, 6–7.
43. Poulton, Top Hat, pp.92–4.
44. Ertan Aydın, “The Peculiarities of Turkish Revolutionary Ideology in the 1930s: The Ülkü Version
of Kemalism, 1933–1936” (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of Political Science and Public
Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2003), p.108.
45. Mustafa Türkeş, “The Ideology of the Kadro [Cadre] Movement: A Patriotic Leftist Movement in
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Turkey,” in Sylvia Kedourie (ed.), Turkey Before and After Atatürk (London: Franck Cass, 1999),
p.101.
46. Aydın, “The Peculiarities of Turkish Revolutionary Ideology,” pp.111–2.
47. Ibid., pp.120–1.
48. Stephen Di Rienzo, “The Non-Optional Basis of Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions,” Vol.3, No.3 (Winter 2002), p.77.
49. Kinross, Atatürk, pp.394–6; Mango, Atatürk, pp.418–20.
51. Kinross, Atatürk (1999), p.450; Mango, Atatürk, p.472.
52. Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasi Partiler, p.622 ff; quoted in Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey,
p.280.
53. Metin Heper, “Center and Periphery in the Ottoman Empire. With Special Reference to the
Nineteenth Century,” International Political Science Review, Vol.1, No.1 (January 1980), p.85.

Kemalism in The Era of Totalitarianism

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Kemalism in the Era of Totalitarianism:

Izmir University of Economics, Turkey

Balcova, Izmir 35330, Turkey. Email: dragos.mateescu@izmirekonomi.edu.tr

ISSN 1468-3849 Print/1743-9663 Online/06/020225-17 © 2006 Taylor & Francis

the ideological substance of totalitarianism, particularly what is now commonly

The Sacralization of Politics and Political Religions

they establish, in line with their own anthropomorphic conceptions. It is particularly

revolutionary—it arises in times of political collapse to build a new establishment

Was Kemalism Originally a Political Religion?

“Turkish” but as “Rumi,” in Byzantine tradition, while the predominant language

The Particularities of Kemalist Nationalism

would not have been enough to grant it legitimacy.

is the Turkish nation.41

I am neither a believer in a league of all the nations of Islam, nor even in a

It is obvious that the Kadro version of Kemalism demanded unconditional

decentralization. Despite the nervousness of Mustafa Kemal’s supporters about the

Turkish Law (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), p.21.

Political Ideas (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp.174, 189.

41. Quoted in Dumont, “The Origins of Kemalist Ideology,” p.33.

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