Türkiye'de milliyetçilik, yurttaşlık ve Aleviler: ?Öz-Türkler? ve ?Heretik Ötekiler?
Özet
Modern national citizenship institutionalizes democracy by making the principles of equality and liberty norms but also suppresses the collective rights of particular groups due to the expectation that the political community has to be a homogenous cultural community. Almost all academic studies on the conception of citizenship and the practices of particular national formations focus on which social, sexual and/or cultural groups are excluded from citizenship. Without discarding the possibilities of citizenship for gaining equality and liberty, this thesis tries to investigate and display the exclusionary discourses of the Turkish conception of citizenship institutionalized in the Turkish national social formation during the national identity construction period by taking into account this considerably significant contribution n the academic field.Therefore, starting from the Ottoman modernization, ethno-political (that is ethno-cultural versus political-territorial nationalisms) and religio-political (secular versus religious nationalisms) content of Turkish citizenship as well as its institutionalization in Turkish nation-state are taken up. Following this argument, Kemalist ethno-secular nationalism and conservative ethno-religious nationalism, two hegemonic versions of Turkish nationalism both of which have played determinant roles in the construction of Turkish national identity, are defined and discussed. Then, how the discourses of these two nationalisms have defined the Alevis as ?ambivalent citizens? is shown. For both nationalisms the Alevis are included in the national community as ?pure-Turks? but while secular nationalists excluded them by regarding them as an ?illiterate and superstitious? community illiterate, conservative nationalists did the same by regarding them as a ?deviant? community from the determinant codes of Sunni-Islam. Both the heterodox and syncretic belief system of the Alevis and the ethno-linguistic plurality of their identity increase the sharpening of love and hate polarities of the ambivalence. Hence, the Alevi ethno-religious identity has not been recognized officially yet.