Last week, we talked about the idea of nationalism as a fiction of superiority. This week, it is useful to look at the historical reflections of this idea of nationalism. Since we see today's response of this concept in modern times, we can start its historical course here. Factors such as the development of the bourgeoisie in Europe and the migration of cities with industrialization required central power. In the conjuncture of the period, nation states started to form when the church and the aristocracy lost their authority.
We cannot explain the formation of the nation state only by the power of the central authority. There is also a process of building a nation outside the state. A value was needed to hold the people living in the nation state together, and at this point the idea of creating a nation came into play. While Benedict Anderson defines the nation as the imagined political community in his book Imaginary Communities, he actually tries to show the reality in the nation's building process. The nation was fictionalized and this fiction was carried out in the center of an ethnic identity. Thus, yeast was found that holds the people together; it is also nationalism.
The course of nationalism in our country has progressed in the form of periodic, conceptual and understanding differences. We can group the nationalism's emergence on different concepts under three headings. The first is nationalism, which the Republic, which set out with the claim of a nation state, also reflects its founding will. Nationalism has risen on two concepts. Turkism as the founder is Westernism as the ideal of contemporary civilization. Since the practice was carried out with a downward understanding, it could not be adopted by the majority of the people.
The second is the sacred nationalism that emerges when the conservative mass cares about ethnic identity. Sacred nationalism preferred to refer to the values of the people in spite of the downward transformational efforts of the nationalist understanding. Adding values such as religion, flag and adhan, Turkish-Islamic synthesis emerged as a type of nationalism.
Sacred nationalism has been able to find its place in the understanding of the right that puts an ill-minded attitude to the people. This understanding, which also includes the anti-communist reaction, actually served as a propaganda language in which the right hugs the people. Thus, sacred nationalism was both a field of struggle against the left and a useful justification for the populist discourse of the right.
The third is citizenship formed by the blessing of the nation state and national borders, including Islamism. Unlike the strict secularism of nationalism, the populist language of sacred nationalism that uses the values of the people, citizenship is fed by a more Islamic discourse. But basically it does not reveal anything different from nationalism and sacredist nationalism.
This historical course of nationalism actually stems from the gradual realization of mental transformation. When we look at the people who have secular and Western worldview, they have adopted a nationalist thought through nationalism. The conservative mass of people met with a nationalist thought through sacred nationalism. The Islamist group, which should be opposed to the idea of nationalism and which has the awareness of the ummah, internalized the nationalist thought through citizenship.
This transformation enables the majority of the people to live with the comfort of the nationalist thought. Apart from this, those who object to this comfort, whether from ethnic difference, ideological anxiety or from a human point of view, can be labeled with various names.