Reproduction of Post-Colonial Mental Codes in Modern Turkey

Abstract

In establishing their new nation-state by waging war against the occupant Western countries during the aftermath of the World War I, the secular nationalist cadres who were educated in the Western-modern schools of the semi-colonial Ottoman State implemented a modernization project that acknowledged the superiority of Western values in order to “civilize” the society that they were attempting to build. These secular nationalist cadres gained legitimacy via running a national Independence battle against the colonialist imperialist powers, and they pursued a internal colonialism and local orientalism approach excluding the various social groups that existed in the periphery of their own nation-state from the political, cultural, social, and economic fields. However, different social groups resisted against this civilization project in various forms from the very beginning, and brought to power the “Islamist” Welfare Party (RP) in 1996 and then Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in 2002. As a response to this development, RP was discredited in the political and social arena and finally overthrown by a ‘post-modern coup d’état”, and AK Party faced a closure trail and the military e-memorandum. This article shall employ a post-colonial perspective to carry out a sociological discussion of the processes that fostered the mental codes of these “secular nationalist cadres” that were determined to modernize their nation-state at any cost.

Keywords

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• internal colonialism; post-colonialism; center-periphery; february 28 process; turkey
• i̇ç sömürgecilik; postkolonyalizm; merkez-çevre; 28 şubat süreci; türkiye