Wednesday, June 26, 2013
C1.23 (Oudemanhuispoort)
This paper examines Republic of Turkey’s policies towards and ideologies about its non-Muslim citizens in the 1920s. It also takes ethnically Armenian nationals of Turkey as a case study and analyzes how the leadership of this minority responded to Turkish policies. Despite the claim of the first Turkish constitution in 1924 that regardless of religion and ethnicity all people of Turkey were to be referred to as “Turks,” and despite the fervent secularization project, religion remained, much like the Ottoman era, the central aspect of a Turkish citizen’s identity that would determine if s/he was going to be included in the potential “we” of the new Turkish nation in the making. Non-Muslim non-Turks were reminded of this fact on a daily basis. Various regulations restricted their movement, settlement, employment, and even leisure. Yet this is more than a simple story of discrimination. Some state policies could be considered inclusive. For instance, the 1934 Surname Law which obligated all Turkish citizens to acquire a Turkish-language last name included non-Muslims as well. Even though for our standards this is plain discrimination (where a people’s difference is flattened out by the authoritarian state obsessed with homogenization) the non-Muslims who experienced this Law might have seen it as an invitation to belong to the new Turkey as “Turks.” The paper demonstrates that Armenian spokespeople responded to these regulations by re-fashioning their Ottoman Armenian presence into Turkish Armenian identity. They created communal survival strategies that included extreme displays of loyalty to the state center but a fierce promotion of Armenianness inside the realm that the state intervened less aggressively, that is the household.
