History Memes

Huh, I always thought Divide+Rule was a day 1 British Empire policy.

Sure, but, you know, day 1 of when the British Empire starts to actually rule the territory.

I wonder if Ataturk tried to overcome the failure of the Ottoman nationalistic ideals by (ineffectually, and selectively) putting forward the idea of an “anatolian identity”

Well, the thing about the very late Ottoman nationalism just before WW1 was that it was... very much Turkish nationalism. Enver Pasha and many of his fellows in the CUP were outright 'scientific' racists of the European sort, only with the Turkish people on top and all others as half-cultured barbarians. Funny enough, the idea of an Ottoman identity was arguably stronger (and more effective) before the rise of 19th century nationalism, as the Ottoman Empire, like the Roman Empire before it, previously allowed and accepted a broad range of ethnicities and religions as common (and high-ranking) participants in the government.

Ataturk's attempts to make an 'inclusive' Turkish identity was almost certainly influenced by the genocide-mad failures of the CUP. "Ne mutlu Türküm diyene" became so central precisely because of what it implied: "How happy is he who calls himself a Turk." A civic nationalism that welcomed all who were willing to claim to be a part of the national community. Ataturk, funny enough, would be part of the CUP coup (if only a minor one) in 1908, but his loud blathering about "democracy" ended getting him reassigned to ~~Antarctica~~ Libya while the coup worked out their political assignments, to prevent him from interfering.

Of course, Ataturk still had some ethnonationalist leanings - particularly the insistence on the Turkish language - but he cast off the biological essentialism and most of the pan-Turkic ideals (especially in emphasizing the supposed antiquity and continuity of Anatolian Turkiye, instead of the shared nomadic roots) of the CUP.

I would argue that Ataturk's nationalism was actually extremely effective - Ataturk's conception of Turkishness was the conception up into the modern day. The issue is that his own conflicts* and contradictory policies with the Kurds meant that that particular wound never healed itself.

*Ataturk was MUCH less hostile towards the Kurds than later Turkish governments - but the Kurds were, at the time, largely conservative and traditionalist, and Ataturk was busy, you know, banning clothing for being too feudal and trying to sort out a government that WOULDN'T be filled with Islamist or Ottoman throwbacks. So there was a certain level of expedience there in being willing to shift policy on them as-needed - rarely a recipe for lasting solutions, or trust between government and governed.