The state and the management of migration in Turkish history

The history of humanity is in a sense also the history of developments or changes arising from people's geographic mobility. That is why historians of civilization have generally recorded all civilizations as developments triggered by a great migration.

There have been no people who could found great civilizations while sitting still. And civilizations founded after settling in a place have owed their growth largely to not closing their borders to additional contributions, that is, new migrations, especially brain migrations.

It is well known that the US, today's great empire, was founded through mass migrations to the continent after its discovery. But that it owes its growth and development after its founding to continuing to receive migration from outside is a truth that all its founders accepted and made a founding philosophy.

The Anatolian geography gives the best testimony of how these waves of migration led to the rise and fall of civilizations. Thousands of years of archaeological excavations show this mobility most clearly as well.

During Byzantine, Seljuk and then Ottoman rule, the management of power also included the successful management of migration. In the end, the Ibn Khaldunian rule operated without fail, and it was the spirit arriving with new migrations that overthrew decayed orders and could establish a new and fresh order in their place.

This spirit is not always destructive; sometimes it can make a repairing and grafting contribution. It can be said that the Ottomans' 600-year rule was due to their being able to take this migration from its positive side and turn it into an opportunity.

With the successful body politics it carried out, the Ottoman state, through successful settlement policies, made different peoples able to contribute to the country's development, and produced from this population a long-lived political body. One of the strong sources of nourishment of this body was people imported from outside. State cadres were not distributed on the basis of a privilege coming from lineage; those competent at the job could be appointed all the way to the top, even if they came from the other end of the world or from the very bottom of the social strata. Merit-based employment, that is, meritocracy, regarded as a Western invention, was first practiced here.

The highest examples of brain migration took place in these historical periods; whoever had the knowledge, competence and merit needed for governing the country was included in that body regardless of religion or social stratum. For example, the technology that enabled Mehmed the Conqueror to conquer Istanbul was not provided only by the country's native human resources. What did Ottoman architecture, art and technology not learn from the Armenian, the Greek, the Jew fleeing Andalusia...

But, as is known, the First World War and then the War of Independence began a new period, for Turkey as much as for the world, in terms of the management of a political body fed by migration.

In this new period, Turkey categorically ceased to be a country receiving migration. Even so, the exchange process decided together with the 1924 Treaty of Lausanne radically changed the population of Anatolia; the non-Muslim element, whose population share before 1924 reached up to 30 percent, was removed from Turkey in return for the arrival of the Muslim element in Turkey, and thus it became a country 99 percent of whose population is Muslim.

Although a new page was opened with the Republic, it would not be possible for Turkey to escape entirely the responsibilities arising from this historical ontology. This responsibility was to keep the doors open to the migration to Anatolia, regarded as the motherland, of Muslim-Turks who found themselves in difficulty because of political upheavals in these geographies. That is why migrations continued to come from the Balkans in the thirties and forties. In the forties, the Ahiska Turks, Circassians and Caucasian peoples, driven from their homelands by Bolshevik oppression, took refuge in Turkey. In keeping with the experience and tradition coming from its history, or out of a responsibility stemming from its humanitarian stance, Jewish scientists who found themselves in difficulty in Nazi Germany also took refuge in Turkey in the thirties and forties, and they made very important contributions to the development of Turkey's young universities.

Subsequently Turkey opened its doors to a mass Bulgarian migration, especially in the eighties, and in the early nineties to the migration of the Kurds in Northern Iraq, whom Saddam attacked. All of these elements had to continue their belonging, which had been under Ottoman rule, now with Turkey.

Even so, the Republic of Turkey does not now categorically define itself as a "country of migration". This means it has no policy of regularly bringing a certain number of people from outside into citizenship. Turkey has no special policy of bringing into Turkish citizenship elements of a quality that can contribute to Turkey's national existence, its human composition, its political body.

But although it has no such policy, it has to open its doors to probably more asylum seekers than those who do have this policy. These asylum seekers of course come without planning, under extraordinary conditions, and carrying their own conditions to Turkey as well. They come with problems. They bring along the problems of the countries they come from.

A sociological analysis of the contributions that all these uncalculated migrations have made to Turkey's development has not been done sufficiently. But a thorough analysis that will be done will reveal that Republican-era Turkey has been very positively affected by this human mobility. Of course, a comprehensive sociological analysis to be made from this angle will surely reveal other dimensions as well.

Now, Turkey since 2013 has been facing a new and very comprehensive wave of asylum with the aftershocks of the Arab Spring process. There are Syrian asylum seekers numbering 3.7 million, and people who have taken refuge in Turkey because of the coup conditions in Egypt, the civil war conditions in Libya and Yemen, the American occupation in Iraq and the migrations caused after it by DAESH and Hashd al-Shaabi terror. This is a process that has been continuing for at least 7 years.

What are the people this process has carried to the country bringing with them? Are we merely watching their arrival and their becoming a part of Turkey? What are we doing to enable them to become an effective force in the country?

These matters need to be looked at as well. Of course in our following articles.