Kemalist boundaries and beyond: Discursive constructions of secular identity in 21st-century Turkey

This thesis explores the discursive construction of secular national identity, both at the level of elite (media) communication and by ordinary citizens in the context of 21st-century Turkey. More specifically, it investigates how journalists of Turkey’s main secular newspaper articulate secular national identity via 222 opinion pieces in a period of lost hegemony. This dataset is paired with 23 semi-structured interviews with non-elite Turkish secularists in order to comprehensibly understand the discourse about Turkish secular identity.

By juxtaposing the theoretical frameworks of ethnosymbolism and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), this research offers a nuanced understanding of how such an identity is both constructed and contested through discourse, shedding light on the intricate interplay between cultural symbols, nationalism, power relations, and collective identities.

The datasets are analysed and interpreted using the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDS, identifying the legitimation strategies employed by the journalists. The analysis revealed that the journalists have been affected by an ontological insecurity embedded in the loss of identity and perceived threats to what they hold to be the only valid Turkish identity.

Results of the research indicate that the Kemalist secular identity as performed by the Cumhuriyet journalists was not necessarily shared by the secularists interviewed. Instead, it showed that a new secular identity has been emerging, one characterised by a number of ambiguities about what it means to be a Turkish secularist and rendering the borders of Us/Them more porous.

Against this background, the research suggests that Kemalism is no longer the only secular identity available to Turks and that historical definitions of, for example, democracy and modernity may no longer be tenable and require new lacunas of meaning. Thus, the study makes a significant contribution to the literature on national identity, in particular by showing the impact of ontological insecurity on identity construction.