On “Post-Kemalism” or How to Stop Worrying about Politics and Love History

Abstract

How can we explain the fact that an impartial history of the Turkish revolution, understood in its broadest sense, i.e. from 1908 to the early 1940s, has yet to be written? The explanation lies in the fact that, in Turkey, the writing of history has never ceased to mirror political contention. Just as the old official "Kemalist" historiography was systematically revisited from the 1980s onwards, so the so-called "post-Kemalist" historiography needs to be critically examined. This history will have to take account of the plurality of tendencies (liberalism, ultra-nationalism, anti-imperialism) within an overall project that, despite its contradictions and gropings, can be defined as democratic and developmentalist; it will take account of the socio-cultural realities of a country that was still underdeveloped, without neglecting the international context, marked by European wars and colonization. Finally, it will avoid the presentist bias that selectively seeks the supposed causes of the current political situation in the more or less distant past.

Keywords

• historiography
• Kemalism
• revolution
• post-Kemalism
• democracy