After the Muslims lost their contact with the age, they started a search in general terms. The efforts of the Ottomans with the syndrome of "backwardness" stand before us as a fact of history. The modernization efforts that started in the military field continued to cover other fields as well. Modernization efforts, initiatives such as reforms and improvements led to the emergence of liberation ideologies in the Ottoman intellectual world. There are four main currents that emerged at that time. These are Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism and Westernism.
II. After the proclamation of the Constitutional Monarchy, the Balkan Wars and the First World War, the ideas of Ottomanism and Islamism lost their effectiveness. The Republic, which was founded after the War of Independence, followed a policy on the axis of Turkism and Westernism. The Republic of Turkey aimed to internalize its new intellectual structure by not keeping its ties with the past strong or even ignoring it. He distanced himself from the policies that refer to religion and aimed to build a secular and modern nation instead. In order to realize the nation-building project, he made use of the Turkism movement as much as possible, and the Westernism movement in the settlement of the revolutions made with the desire to reach the level of contemporary civilization.
The process of becoming a nation-state was strictly carried out as a project of the single-party period. Some practices imposed during this period and the transformation efforts made left traces that would affect the later political history. With the transition to a multi-party system, we see that politics is driven by two tendencies. But in the political atmosphere that emerged after the 1960 Constitution, four main tendencies stand out.
The most important of these is the right-conservative line, which influences the majority of the people, represents the center of the political spectrum to a large extent, and prevents the people from displaying an oppositional stance by increasing their complacency. The main feature of this line is the hypocritical understanding of politics that increases the complacency of the people in favor of the dominant powers and the conflict between the people and the dominant powers. While right-wing politics did not see any harm in implementing the policies of the dominant powers, it did not neglect to carry out populist policies that would be pleasing to the public.
The second tendency is the secular left, which had a say in the construction of the Turkish state, acted as the engine of the Westernization project, tried to modernize the people as a product of a top-down, Jacobin understanding, and was at odds with the values and history of the nation. The left, which is open to innovation and should stand by the people, has largely become the representative of the official ideology in our country. The policy he developed is aimed at preserving the status quo created during the single-party and subsequent coup periods.
Another trend is the nationalist segment, which refers to ethnicity, prioritizes racial unity and unites it around an ideal, caresses the nationalist sensitivities of the ethnic origin to which it addresses, and produces policies with patriotic messages by taking these sensitivities into account. We can say that this tendency does not produce sound policies for the future, instead it tries to open up space for itself by activating emotions.
When we look at these three trends, we see that there is no problem with the current paradigm. On the contrary, the current paradigm takes advantage of these different trends to maintain its influence. In fact, all three tendencies think that their ideological preferences can better run the current system. They do not claim that the path taken is the right one, but that they can travel this path faster and effortlessly.