Reha Oğuz Türkkan and Pan-Turkist movement in Turkey (1938-1947)

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the discourse and activities of Reha Oğuz Türkkan, a leading representative of the Pan-Turkist revival during the Second World War in Turkey. The Pan-Turkist ideology, which began to develop among the Turkic peoples living within the borders of the Russian Empire at the end of the nineteenth century and targeted to establish a political and cultural unity among the all Turkic peoples from the Balkans to Central Asia, was carried to the Ottoman Empire by the Turkic intellectuals such as Yusuf Akçura, Ahmet Ağaoğlu ve Hüseyinzade Ali. Pan-Turkism, through the activities of the Turkist associations like the "Turkish Hearths", the serious trauma that the Balkan War created in the Ottoman-Turkish society and the contributions of the Ottoman-Turkish intellectuals such as Ziya Gökalp, Ömer Seyfettin, Moiz Kohen and Mehmet Emin Yurdakul, became a serious ideology and gained numerous supporters, including some of the leading members of the Committee and Union and Progress, which was the ruling party at the time. However, Pan-Turkism was not able to maintain its popularity after the foundation of the Turkish Republic and was rejected clearly by the Kemalist regime. In this period, although Zeki Velidi Togan and Nihal Atsız tried to keep Pan-Turkist ideology vivid, it lost a considerable momentum. Begin with the war; a clearly racist anti- Communist and militarist discourse accompanied Pan-Turkism, which was revived again by a new generation the leader of which was Reha Oğuz Türkkan and this continued until the end of the war. In addition to the new political athmosphere in the country, created by the Second World War, paradoxically, the Kemalist regime itself, which rejected Pan- Turkism officially, played an important role in the revival of Pan-Turkist ideology among the young generation which had been taught in the thirties the pseudo scientific theories like "The Turkish History Thesis" and "The Sun-Language Theory", which exalted Turks as race and showed Central Asia as the motherland of Turks, used to create a new national consciousness and Turkish identity by the regime.