Nostalgia for the modern: Privatization of the state ideology in Turke

This dissertation explores the transformations that took place in Turkish political culture at the end of the twentieth century that shifted boundaries between political and apolitical, public and private. It focuses on the privatization of the Kemalist state ideology and politics as a new sign of legitimacy for the Turkish state and citizens as they try to locate themselves in the shifting power relations of the post Cold-War era. More specifically, it inquires how can the neo-liberal ideology, which aims to substitute the market for both society and the state, be translated into Turkish political culture, with its strong state ideology and powerful social memory of the authoritarian regime of the early Republic, recalling it as the only period in history when Turkish modernization has been successful.;This study is based on a close analysis of a significant moment in Turkish political life. During the fervently celebrated seventy-fifth anniversary of the Republic in 1998, Turkish politicians and politically active citizens debated and discussed the past, present, and future of Turkey. Turkish citizens reconciled between the memory of the state-led modernity of the 1930s and the pressures for a market-based modernity in the 1990s. First, they declared that citizens freely support the foundational principles of the Turkish Republic and Kemalist ideology. Practices such as spontaneous participation in anniversary celebrations or voluntary purchase of Ataturk paraphernalia were associated with free will rather than forced acts under state intervention. Second, they reevaluated the early years of the Republic as a period when citizens willingly adopted Turkish modernization. Representations of this past such as exhibits or life stories concentrated on the examples of private lives where citizens had transformed their lives in areas outside the authority of the state. In both cases the republican ideology was represented as popular commodity in the political market rather than as something imposed on people by the state.