AI Summary & Key Takeaways
AI InsightIn addition, after Atatürk's death, Turk-centered humanism was replaced by Western-centered Greco-Latin thought, and the left-wing identities of the intellectuals representing the Cultural Humanism movement were influential in the transformation of Kemalism's mental codes.
📌 3 Key Takeaways
Abstract
Kemalism, the founding ideology of the Turkish Republic, can be defined as Turkey's experience of modernization and becoming a nationstate. Kemalism had a holistic character in the Early Republican Period. After World War II, it started to be divided into different types and its function as an official ideology ended. The most common distinction regarding the types of Kemalism is right and left Kemalisms. Kemalism includes a nationalist idea system in building the modern nation-state. Identity policies have been implemented since the beginning of the 1930s, and the Turkish History Thesis and Sun Language Theory were essential here. Kemalism built a nation and realized it with an ethnocentric method pointing to nationalism. Thus, its place on the ideological scale is right-wing. However, leftist interpretations of Kemalism gained strength in the 1960s. Especially the intellectuals who came together around the Yön journal developed the leftist understanding of Kemalism. The present study aims to explain the mental transformation in the leftward evolution of Kemalism. In this study, in which the literature review method is used, Kemalism is accepted as a form of nationalism in terms of identity construction. The phenomenon that enabled the transformation from nationalism was the concept of Cultural Humanism, especially the Blue Anatolian Movement that emerged from it, which provided the transition from ethnocentrism to territorialism. In addition, after Atatürk's death, Turk-centered humanism was replaced by Western-centered Greco-Latin thought, and the left-wing identities of the intellectuals representing the Cultural Humanism movement were influential in the transformation of Kemalism's mental codes.