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Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Politics of memory and majoritarian conservatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Onur Bakiner
Onur Bakiner*
Affiliation:
International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, Email: obakiner@sfu.ca
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Abstract

There is unprecedented domestic and international interest in Turkey's political past, accompanied by a societal demand for truth and justice in addressing past human rights violations. This article poses the question: Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Drawing upon the literature on nationalism, identity, and collective memory, I argue that the Turkish state has recently taken steps to acknowledge and redress some of the past human rights violations. However, these limited and strategic acts of acknowledgment fall short of initiating a more comprehensive process of addressing past wrongs. The emergence of the Justice and Development Party as a dominant political force brings along the possibility that the discarded Kemalist memory framework will be replaced by what I call majoritarian conservatism, a new government-sanctioned shared memory that promotes uncritical and conservative-nationalist interpretations of the past that have popular appeal, while enforcing silence on critical historiographies that challenge this hegemonic memory and identity project. Nonetheless, majoritarian conservatism will probably fail to assert state control over memory and history, even under a dominant government, as unofficial memory initiatives unsettle the hegemonic appropriation of the past.

Keywords

Turkeymemorymajoritarian conservatism
Type
Analysis of Current Events
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , September 2013 , pp. 691 - 708
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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