ABSTRACT
Anatolia and eastern Thrace historically have been home to a profusion of religious and ethnic groups. The fact that the Republic of Turkey adopted a coercively inclusive nationalism as its state ideology, which was in its own terms relatively successful with regard to safeguarding its territory, should not make us forget the non-Turkish, and non-Muslim voices without which neither pre-modern nor modern Turkish history could be legitimately told. The Ottoman openness to Jewish communities fleeing from Christian persecution is as much part of the Turkish legacy as the Young Turks’ genocidal politics against the Armenians, and the Republic’s inability to quell the Kurdish nationalist insurgency in the Southeast. On the other side, the ethnic and religious minorities of Turkey should not be reduced to mere victims devoid of agency. Nuanced analysis of the specific and multi-layered contexts of politics of discrimination and subversion, assimilation and separatism, terror from above and from below, ought to be preferred to simplistic black and white schemata. This said, however, the particular hegemonies expressed in an imbalance of power between state and subjects, majority and minorities, has to be taken into account.
