This thesis attempts to trace the Arab sense of national belonging to the Ottoman state in the immediate prelude to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It analyzes Arab popular sentiment...Show moreThis thesis attempts to trace the Arab sense of national belonging to the Ottoman state in the immediate prelude to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It analyzes Arab popular sentiment toward the Ottoman state, specifically toward the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, CUP or Unionists) during the period between 1909 and 1914. In doing so, it seeks to deconstruct the post-Ottoman, Arab, nationalist, meta-historical narrative that commonly links the development of Arab proto-nationalism during the CUP period (1908–1918) with the creation of Arab nation states in the post-Ottoman period, in which the Arab (Sharifian) revolt of 1916 is often presented as the main event that gave way to that transition.Show less
This investigation is the result of a resarch on Turkish and Italian archives through which an attempt is made to revive the story of the Turkish air officers training in Fascist Italy between 1930...Show moreThis investigation is the result of a resarch on Turkish and Italian archives through which an attempt is made to revive the story of the Turkish air officers training in Fascist Italy between 1930 and 1932.Show less
This thesis reveals the networks of Édouard Herriot, the leader of the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party and the Mayor of Lyon, with the Young Turks and the Kemalists in the Ottoman...Show moreThis thesis reveals the networks of Édouard Herriot, the leader of the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party and the Mayor of Lyon, with the Young Turks and the Kemalists in the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey. The study displays Herriot's channels of communications and the influence of those relations starting from the 1908 Young Turk Revolution until the Atatürk's death in 1938. The thesis is divided into two parts in which it stand as before and after the Great War. In both parts, Herriot's role as an intermediary and the political go-between was contextualized. In the second part, the intellectual relations are exposed as well as his relations with the republican politicans, intellectuals, and the Kemalist elites. Therefore, the degree of influence generated from those relations are also discussed. The study is based on primary source material that were published in French, Ottoman Turkish (Turkish), and English.Show less
In this study is been examined the stance of the Kemalist elite towards liberalism as a competing political program of modernization and as one opposed to that of the RPP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi –...Show moreIn this study is been examined the stance of the Kemalist elite towards liberalism as a competing political program of modernization and as one opposed to that of the RPP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – Republican People’s Party) in the period of 1922-1945. According to the prevalent viewpoint in most of historical analyses of the early republican history of Turkey, the path to the formation of the new state and the viewpoint of the ruling elite clashed with the liberal ideal. The hybrid ideological nature of Kemalism, as the dominant trend of Turkish nationalism, and its distance from other existing paradigms is clearly captured by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)’s phrase uttered during the debate on the abolition of the sultanate, ‘Biz bize benzeriz’ (We resemble ourselves). Through the study of the government’s acts and the intellectual debates of the period, I show that certain aspects of liberalism, such as constitution, rule of law, popular sovereignty and representative government, are an organic part of any modern political system, including Turkey's, and that any state has to adopt at least some of them if it is to be regarded as modern.Show less
