İttihatçılığın Laneti: İmparatorluk’tan Cumhuriyet’e Geçiş Döneminin Tarihyazımında Bazı Meseleler

Abstract

In the centenary year of the Republic of Turkey, there is a need for a new approach to history writing. The crisis that the AKP regime has dragged Turkey into has demonstrated the necessity of reevaluating post-Kemalist revisionism in Turkish Studies. The transitional period from the Empire to the Republic is a field dominated by post-Kemalist literature. This article aims to reevaluate the impact of post-Kemalist literature on historiography, particularly by revisiting commonly accepted assumptions and interpretations regarding the “Young Turk” Committee of Union and Progress. While post-Kemalist approaches, which have made significant contributions to the studies of identity and minority issues, have confronted the dark legacy left by the Young Turks on the Republic, attributing all the dark events in the history of the Republic solely to a Unionist curse can lead to flawed historical interpretations. First, in post-Kemalist literature, it is problematic to distort the continuity thesis from Unionism to Kemalism into a thesis of singularity and immutability. In fact, there lies a transformative process shaped by competition and conflicts beneath continuity. Second, although many post-Kemalist approaches exhibit a critical stance towards Turkish nationalism, they inadvertently strengthen a narrative of Turkism by falling into the trap of methodological nationalism. Instead of solely viewing the empire as a precursor to a future nation-state, it is necessary to examine it within its own context and timeframe. Understanding the diversity, variability, and relationality of nationalism, without neglecting the complexity of historical processes, requires analyzing it not as the cause or result, but as an influential factor. The issue of Young Turks will remain a subject of controversy in the second century of the Republic’s history because the Young Turks assumed simultaneously the dual roles of destroyers/perpetrators and founders/protectors during the transition from the Empire to the Republic. These two analytical dimensions should neither be considered separately nor contradictory.