Citizenship in a global world. European questions and Turkish experiences

Abstract:

This work looks at the radical changes and transformations taking place in Turkey and aims to provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Turkish modernity in a historical way.

The book is organised in four parts. Part one offers a theoretical and contextual approach to Turkish modernity and its republican model of citizenship. The first chapter examines the origins of the idea of citizenship in Turkey and raises questions about the compatibility of European traditions of citizenship rights and those of republican Turkey. The republican tradition is also a feature of chapter two, which argues that it works on a communitarian principle and therefore challenges the importance of individualism and diversity. The cultural foundations of Turkish citizenship are examined in chapter three which considers Turkish modernity as a process of Westernisation since the Ottoman empire of the nineteenth century.

Part two explores the citizenship debate in Turkey and the consideration given to the notions of state and democracy. Chapter five addresses the potential conflict between the notion of citizenship as membership of a nation or state and the view of citizenship as a position (as an empty space or as non-membership). The discussion moves in chapter six to the legal and constitutional foundations of citizenship in Turkey.

The third part examines three areas of Turkish modernity which have presented serious challenges to the republican model of citizenship in the 1990s - gender, entrepreneurship, and migration. Chapter seven looks at the first of these, in particular the construct of citizenship described as familial citizenship. The role of business leaders and business associations in the campaign for democratisation and citizenship rights is examined in chapter eight. The relationship between international migration and citizenship is the focus of chapter nine, which explores areas that the citizen senses a bond of attachment to the state. The issue of international migration continues in chapter ten which examines the plight of German Turks as they struggle to obtain citizenship rights.

Part four deals with the emergence in the last decade of claims for recognition and the politics of identity. The tensions arising from the Turkish secular approach to citizenship and the demands by Islamic groups for the inclusion of their cultural claims in the public sphere are explored in chapter eleven. The Kurdish question is addressed in chapter twelve, which proffers the solution which might be found in a non-ethnical approach to citizenship. The flip side to the Islamic argument is explored in chapter thirteen which looks at the position of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey.

The work will interest scholars and students engaged in political economy, comparative politics, globalisation, democracy and civil society, European studies, the sociology of modernity and Turkish politics.