Does every society produce a nation?

At the root of many of the debates we are going through lie this and other related questions. Can we pursue the conditions of being a nation once we have become a society? What are the conditions for producing a nation out of a society, and can a nation be produced out of every society? Is it healthier to think of politics through being a nation, or through being a society?

The society's forming a wholeness within itself, and this wholeness's becoming an idea shared by all elements, must constitute the most important stage in the transformation of a society into a nation.

Even before reaching the stage of a nation, the idea that society is bound together within itself and connected, in an organic relationship, within the logic of a social division of labor among its members, has been the most important conception of society in Durkheimian sociology.

That society becomes more interdependent especially as it urbanizes has also been thought of as a kind of necessity produced by the urban division of labor. Indeed, that in the urban environment, compared with villages, people inevitably become extremely dependent on one another is a sociological result visible even to the naked eye. In fact these relations of dependence, as the scale of society grows and becomes more complex, become imperceptible and intensify to the point of making themselves forgotten.

Conversely, in larger cities, in cities with a metropolitan character, individualization or individual behavior reaches much higher levels. Here, although people are in fact much more dependent on one another, they forget this dependence to the same degree and display the highest examples of individuality, even individualism. After all, everyone is in fact fulfilling a function in society, performing a duty, and with this duty taking a role within the social division of labor. When anyone neglects his duty, the life of the whole society can be affected. A baker who does not produce bread, a public transport worker who does not come to work on time, or even a simple employee of the grid that supplies electricity to the city causes a disruption in the system.

In one respect, this person on whom everyone depends is himself, as an individual of society, dependent on others because of the conveniences, possibilities and needs that the duties of others bring to his life. Thus the social division of labor can be imagined as a field in which everyone depends on everyone. But paradoxically, in urban life this dependence and individualization/selfishness develop simultaneously. That is why it becomes very important to make this dependence a moral norm in society, and to load everyone, on account of this dependence, with a sense of indebtedness to his own existence, a consciousness of duty. This indebtedness and consciousness of duty can be secured by a level of civility that refers to higher values, or by a nationalist ideal.

Indeed, the most important problematic of all the first sociologists, and before them of all the social contract theorists, was "how such different people can form a society." We know that Hobbes, in his most outspoken form, likened man to man's wolf and said that society is made possible only by tyranny, by the desire to bring into line the particularist, irreconcilable interests of each.

All the other social thinkers, from Rousseau to Locke, from Marx to Durkheim, tried to understand how the reality called "society" is possible. After all, as a de facto situation, people live together, and from this togetherness an illusion of a holistic, common identity, common history, common religion and understanding can also be produced. This illusion presupposes social wholeness, and this presupposition is somehow shared by people. Yet the conflicts, tensions, groupings in society, and the not at all benevolent attitudes of these groups toward one another, continually put this perception of wholeness under interrogation. How can we call a structure full of elements gnashing their teeth at one another this much a society? And moreover, how could a nation be formed out of such a society?

The picture we have drawn is of course not a picture belonging only to Turkish society. The reality called society, wherever it appears, exists as much by the factors that hold it together, that make holding together possible, as by the factors that make one ask how it is able to stay together. Perhaps precisely for this reason, sociological thought tries to explain the togetherness of society's differences, of groups or individuals whose interests and concerns have diverged to the point of being able to gnash teeth at one another and who are in conflict. In other words, an important part of sociological approaches imagines society as a field of differences and conflicts rather than treating it as a homogeneous and uniform whole, as in the concept of "nation." While at times it has been discovered that these conflicts even provide society with a motivation that activates feelings of competition and solidarity for change and progress, at times they have also underlined that these differences create dysfunctions for the social division of labor.

Because the problematic of social wholeness, of political body integrity, is largely also a political problem, it has been a subject of special interest to all states, especially in the age of nation-states. On what basis national wholeness will be defined, and whether this definition will suffice to secure this wholeness, is the most important problematic of all national structures. After all, a clear fact brought out by studies of nationalism is that it is not so much nations that establish states as armed structures or states that create a nation suited to themselves. The nations created inevitably involve a project of social wholeness or integration.

On what basis social wholeness will be secured has to do with how much this common characteristic is embraced by all the people brought together and how much they are made to believe in the story of unification. But at least as much as this, it also has to do with how far the differences among the elements forming this wholeness can be ignored.

Since definitions of the nation in which a certain aspect of a certain element is brought to the fore and made everyone's property are inevitably discriminatory, they are bound to be repressive rather than unifying, and since we have seen in countless examples that what is repressed on account of a definition of the nation, we can now say, as a rule, returns sooner or later.