Reforms and Nation-Building in the Early Turkish Republic

The ruling elite is the segment of a given society who, by virtue of position, education or tradition, exercises power in political decision-making processes and oversees the implementation of the policies devised by them.

The first one was the systematic e ort of founding a new structure through extensive reforms which generated radical shifts and which were geared towards establishing and strengthening the new system until the end of the decade. The second marker was the elimination and/or suppression of the opposition or any perceived threat, especially as of 1925 after the Sheikh Sait Rebellion (Şeyh Sait İsyanı) and the issuing of the Law for the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükun Kanunu) that gave the government extraordinary rights.

The ensuing 1930s witnessed two priorities that characterized the decade. The first marker was the drive to secure and safeguard the newly established structure under a single party rule. The second characteristic of the decade was the shift to protectionist-statist industrialization policies.

The totality of all these reforms carried out in the 1920s and 1930s were geared towards one fundamental all-encompassing goal, namely the establishment of the envisioned system according to the ruling elite’s understanding of what modernity and modernization were.

A Kurdish Naqshbandi leader by the name of Sheikh Sait headed the uprising. Three different perspectives exist in historiography regarding the nature of the rebellion. e first approach regards it as the manifestation of Kurdish nationalism, which hoped for autonomy within the newly established Unitarian Turkish nation-state. e second viewpoint considers it a religious movement based on the fact that the leader was an Islamic brotherhood sheik and the rallying cries in the upheaval asked for the re-institution of the Sharia and the Caliphate. e third outlook interprets the revolt as a movement geared toward keeping the status quo. e social texture of the region was predominantly based on tribal understandings and the leaders were anxious that the modernizing policies of the Republic would dissolve this fabric and leave them at a disadvantage.

The Thesis was materialized in a volume published for a limited audience entitled e Outline of Turkish History (Türk Tarihinin Ana Hatları) and was presented at the First Turkish History Congress. It offered a nationalist perspective on history as an alternative to the existing Ottoman legacy of history writing which concentrated on an Islamic framework. In this way, the narrative attempted to contribute to the formation of the Turkish national identity by putting Turkishness at the center and it re-wrote history from that standpoint. At the same time, the text demonstrated a reaction against Eurocentric interpretations of history and European perceptions of the Turks as an inferior people.

The extreme purism of purging loan words and structures – particularly Arabic and Farsi vocabulary and forms – and the making of a national language devoid of its non-Turkish elements was at the core of the early Republican project of cultural transformation and identity-building.

Sun Language Theory contended that Turkish was the oldest language that developed on earth. Following this argument, it was regarded as the source of all languages spoken in the world. us, it attempted to establish Turkish as Ursprache (parent language) and complemented the Turkish Historical Thesis, which declared Turks as Urvolk.

The Board for the Research of Turkish History operating under the Turkish Hearths was responsible for developing the Turkish History Thesis.

The congresses and assemblies functioned as venues to prove the existence of the Turkish nation since antiquity as a civilization-builder belonging to the white race and to validate the declaration of Turkish as the root paradigm of all languages in the world.

The People’s Houses (Halkevleri) proved to be the most outstanding vehicle for promoting the core principles of the republican regime among the masses and had the mission of breathing life into the Turkish nation through their activities.

The Law for the Unification of Education (Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu) virtually detached all educational institutions and planning from the jurisdiction of religious authorities. It also established strict state control by granting the Turkish Ministry of Education an uncontested monopoly over matters of education.

The Darülfünun was closed down and was renamed İstanbul University (İstanbul Üniversitesi), and officially started education on August 1, 1933.

Enfranchisement refers to the granting of a right or privilege, especially suffrage which is the right to vote in political elections.

A new regulation in 1940, the National Protection Law (Milli Koruma Kanunu), became the legal foothold of all wartime economic measures. It gave the government extensive and exclusive rights to regulate and control all sectors of economic life ranging from production to distribution and from consumption to foreign trade.