From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey

BEHLUL OZKAN, From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012). Pp. 288. $ 38.00 paper.The notion of vatan (patrie, homeland/motherland) is central to nationalism and nation-building, very much like the idea of a coimnon language or common history. In From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan, Behlul Ozkan offers an original perspective on Turkish nationalism by placing geography, and particularly the concept of homeland, at the center of analysis and by examining how vatan evolved from the Ottoman times to the present. The main thesis of the book is that vatan is neither self-evident and innocent nor neutral and authentic as nationalists claim, but it is "discursively constructed" and is a result of political battles for control of national power. The concept of vatan not only reinforces nationalist identity and loyalty by creating a vital link between people and territory, but it also confers legitimacy on those in power who claim to be the defenders of the nation and its motherland. In a real sense, then, Vatan is an exploration of how the notion of motherland and a spatial/geographic understanding of collective identity played a role in the evolution of Ottoman and Turkish nationalisms, and in the making of a new state, in Turkish nation-building, Turkish foreign policy and Turkish politics.The book is organized around four historical and thematic chapters that follow a more conceptually driven introduction that unifies the narrative. Chapter 1 traces the evolution of the conception of space and geography in the Ottoman Empire and provides a useful overview of the development of Ottoman nationalism in the nineteenth century around the idea of loyalty to a coimnon Ottoman vatan. Chapter 2 offers an intellectual history of the transformation of Ottoman nationalist ideas after 1908 and the emergence of a territorial Turkish nationalism by 1922. Defeats in the Balkan Wars and World War I, the imposition of the Treaty of Sevres and the occupation of parts of Anatolia, all contributed to significant shifts in nationalist imagination and policy. "The loss of territories had a deep impact on the imagination of physical and mental boundaries of the vatan" (p. 101), as Ozkan puts it. In other words, vatan is not self-evident and is "discursively constructed," but realities on the ground, such as military defeats and territorial losses, indeed became critical factors in how nationalists imagined vatan and its boundaries. Intellectuals such as Ziya Gokalp who promoted the idea of Turan as national home modified their positions from a romantic to a more pragmatic vision of the vatan. Leaders of the Anatolian resistance movement adjusted their position on national borders in response to the changing military and diplomatic circumstances. It was in the context of war that a new Turkish nationalist movement emerged with the goal of establishing a new nation state. Here Ozkan argues that imagining a new vatan and a new state freed the nationalist movement from the predicament of Ottomanists, Islamists, and Pan-Turkists of how to save the Ottoman state and Ottoman vatan. Others might argue it was precisely because they saved parts of the Ottoman vatan that the nationalists were in a position to re-imagine vatan and that the new nationalist regime found support among the Muslim population of Anatolia. This chapter takes a critical stance toward Turkish nationalist historiography on the War of Liberation and offers subtle rehabilitation to such Ottoman statesmen as Damat Ferit Pasa. Readers might want to compare Ozkan's assessment of the motivations behind Mustafa Kanal's and ismet inonu's decisions during and at the end of the war with other recent scholarship such as George Gawrych's The Young Ataturk.Chapter 3 turns to geography textbooks in explaining how education, particularly geography education, has been an important ideological tool not only for fostering nationalist feelings by nationalizing space and building a spatial consciousness about the homeland, but also for legitimizing the regime. …