Where is nationalism rising, from whom to whom?

Issue 83 of Tezkire Dergisi has been published under this title. In an atmosphere in which nationalism is spoken of as constantly "rising," the title also draws attention to other dimensions of the phenomenon by alluding to the more informal senses of the notion of "rising." The news that nationalism is on the rise sends everyone, from politicians to artists, from merchants to academics, scrambling either to invest in nationalism stocks or, to put it another way, to cash out of them.

In fact, being surprised that nationalism appears in so many different places and on so many different tracks, and spinning a fresh story of "the rise of nationalism" out of it, is almost a historical routine. The truth is that nationalism is always rising, on every occasion.

This rise of nationalism can also be considered together with the connotations of informal language. Its voice suddenly rises, but this does not mean that it is accepted to the same degree by broader masses. Paradoxically, the more the voice of nationalism rises, the more the capacity to hold a nation together diminishes, because of the narrow discourse of those who raise their voices. For when nationalism rises, especially in a multicultural and multi-ethnic social structure, on the claim of relying on the dominant ethnicity, it has risen against the nation that claims to embrace the whole of society, and has undermined it.

Nationalism has essentially been on the rise ever since the French Revolution. As the most important narrative, supported by state apparatuses and providing the ideological legitimacy suited to the survival of those apparatuses, and for as long as it is an ideology that eliminates all other narratives, there is no limit to its rise. It is a narrative that modern nation-states established in order to bring themselves into being, and on which they later became dependent. It is an ideology without which the raison d'être of a state apparatus can no longer be conceived. Even though it has narratives of very different quality, different mythological stories, persons and symbols, its function does not change much.

Of course, how humane, how embracing and how friendly the mythology can be toward other people also raises both the quality of nationalism and its capacity to expand. The stories on which American nationalism rests, for instance, have had a limit in their emphasis on races. How the story Americans tell themselves strikes others and what it says to them also draws the limit of how far America can establish itself as a value throughout the world. The American identity is a historical process that melts people of every color, race and language from all over the world in a single pot, and being able to derive a story of nationalism from this mixture is a genuine achievement of the state. Samuel Huntington's famous book, in which he describes the formation of American identity and how and to what extent it has been embraced by the ordinary American citizen, asks "Who Are We?" Without doubt, in his book Huntington also points to an identity crisis that has emerged in the face of the great waves of immigration that have recently taken shape in the US and the domestic repercussions of the wars the US has entered in many parts of the world. This situation can shake the foundations on which nationalism in the US can rely.

One way or another, on behalf of the US, Huntington thought seriously about where a common identity, one that would make people feel like parts of a single political body, falters. Nationalism seeks to process the social diversity of nation-states as a story that arrives at a formula, within the integrity of a political body, in which the parts are harmonious and complement one another. If you build this on privileging a single ethnic group in a social structure with ethnic diversity, and try to build it on the denial, belittling or ridiculing of the other ethnic groups, it becomes difficult to secure this bodily integrity, and it generally requires the use of force. And these elements, controlled by force and repression, will always be the cause of a problem, a rage, a failure of integration that is bound to break out in the country. In such a society nationalism appears not as the grounds for social peace and for being one and together against others, but perhaps as the cause of tension and strife in society.

For that reason, rising nationalism stories do not, most of the time, point to the rise of a state or a nation. On the contrary, in many places rising nationalism is at the same time a manifestation of the erosion, beneath the surface, of the internal peace of society, even of the nation.

How rising nationalism is detected is a separate question as well. Behind the events presented today in many countries as rising nationalism, no serious national consciousness is rising; on the contrary, certain reactions that go no further than racism, bigotry or xenophobia are showing themselves. For from nationalism one expects, above all, a consciousness that will secure the integrity of a country and strengthen the organic functioning of the political body.

The ideal level of national unity is that it encompasses all the citizens of the country. The problem, however, is that in no period in which nationalism has been in circulation has it attained this maturity of consciousness. It has always needed an internal enemy to consolidate itself, internal enemies whose roots lie abroad. Communists, reactionaries, Kurds... In Turkey this ring has now been joined by refugees. Anti-Syrian sentiment, as a way of expressing nationalism, has in fact created a new pretext that summons back to the field at least some of the earlier enemies. Anti-Syrian sentiment and anti-Arab and anti-reactionary sentiment have been combined with new pretexts and updated bombast. Of course, the fact that Islamists have stood by Syrian asylum seekers as a humanitarian matter has also played a part in this merging.

In this issue of Tezkire, which has been published since 1991 and has lately been appearing under the editorship of Yunus Badem, young academics present a cross-section of different understandings and experiences of nationalism, from different countries and different periods, in this atmosphere of nationalism's renewed rise. The issue features articles by Fahri Yetim, "Different Versions of Nationalist Thought in Turkey and Their Points of Intersection"; Ömer Obuz, "The Foreign Bar Artists Issue as a Socio-Cultural Reflection of Nationalism"; M. Veysel Karataş, "The Ideological Hegemony of Left Elites in the Kurdish Nationalist Movement"; İlhami Aydın, "The Political Spirit in Cultural Fields: A Discussion Between Nationalism and Cultural Power"; Yegane Yiğit, "Muslims' Quests for Solidarity and Struggle on the Axis of Ummah and Nation Against Tsarist-Era Policies"; Uğur Kılınç, "The Role of Nationalist Motifs in Textbooks in the Early Republic Period in the Construction of the Nation-State: The 1923-1950 Period"; Merve Sultan Akçakaya, "A Qualitative Study on Urban Nationalism"; Fredinant Hasmuça, "The Nationalist Outlook of Albanians After the 1990s"; Fatma Kılınç Hatipoğlu, "The Reflections of the Irrational Nationalism of the Armenian Diaspora on Armenia"; Abdulkerim Diktaş, "The Understanding of Nationalism from the Perspective of Our Sources of Values"; and Yekta Şirin, "The Contribution of Native American Representations in Hollywood Productions to American Nationalism"; İlhan Bilici, Esra Ekiz and Beyzanur Olgun also contributed book reviews.

Let us continue our assessments on the rises of nationalism.