Erik-Jan Zürcher on imperial nostalgia in Turkey and Britain

Erik-Jan Zürcher on nostalgia for empire in contemporary Turkey and the UK. The conversation is based on his recent lecture at the Istanbul Policy Center, “The Poison of Nostalgia”

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In the lecture you spoke about how you were personally disappointed by Britain's decision to leave the EU and Turkey's drift away from its EU accession path. Start by outlining this for us.

I think the Dutch perspective is particularly relevant to the Brexit side of things. Because as an Atlantic-oriented liberal country, the Netherlands had always imagined itself to be on the same page as Britain within Europe, ever since the UK joined the EU: Standing up for liberal values against statism and bureaucracy, that kind of thing. So it came as a rude shock to the Dutch public, and I would say particularly to the Dutch political and intellectual cultural elites, to discover that this feeling was not mutual, that it was not shared on the other side of the North Sea. It was more than just a disappointment, it felt like a rejection. I think it was felt particularly in countries like Holland and Denmark, countries that looked to a certain extent to the UK for guidance and coalition-building in Europe. They felt that they lost a senior partner. I was part of that. I travelled to the UK a lot, both as a tourist and professionally, and had a lot of contacts in London, Manchester, and other places. So it felt pretty brutal at the time. Of course, along with most of Western Europe, I think we were surprised because we did not gauge the underlying wave of resentment that had built up in the UK. So it's not something we saw coming.

On the Turkish side, my disappointment was more individual. I don't think it was something that was widely felt in Holland. But it was related to the fact that I grew up as a scholar in the 1980s and 90s when Turkey was very authoritarian, very nationalist and dominated by the military. I saw a movement in the early 2000s, with the emergence of the AKP and the sudden speed of rapprochement between Turkey and the EU, as something new and very hopeful. It was only in 1999 that the EU accepted Turkey as a candidate country. The AKP won its first election in 2002 and from then on things seemed to move at breakneck speed. This is something we now often overlook, but in those first three years of the AKP government, an enormous amount of legislation was passed and much of it dismantled the authoritarian state and empowered citizens or voters. So the course seemed to be set for Turkey's successful entrance into the EU.

At the time I was advising the Dutch government and also some European institutions on this accession process. So it was something that I, as a professional, felt invested in. And so the quick and very thorough cooling off of relations from the mid-2000s onwards - particularly from the end of the 2000s - was a big disillusionment.

Regarding the UK, the lecture explored how the link between Brexit and popular nostalgia for empire is more complicated than sometimes acknowledged. You argue that this nostalgia was an instrument rather than a root cause of Brexit-voting sentiment. What did you mean by that?

When the referendum happened back in 2016, both in the run-up to the vote and in its aftermath, there was a lot of publishing in the media that explained the Brexit decision very simply: Part of why the British have done this is that they are still nostalgic for the empire they once had. But when you read what has been published academically on the issue - and that by now is quite a substantial literature – you see that it is a bit more complicated.

The whole idea of nostalgia for empire itself is quite old. It was there at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century in Britain. At that time it was something that was promoted by imperialists themselves, actually. It had a particular form: It was a way of arguing that this empire - which was then at its height, which spanned the world and was still expanding - had been started by adventurers, entrepreneurs, and daring Brits from the 16th and 17th century onwards. In other words, this empire was an achievement of the British people and something that exemplified their specific and unique characteristics. The empire was not a gift; it was not something that had just happened to the British people. No, the building of empire was the result of their unique qualities. That discourse was later taken up after World War II by people on the Tory right, particularly Enoch Powell, and later also Margaret Thatcher. They used the same kind of discourse, arguing that the British people is a great people and the empire is a historical achievements that shows its unique enterprising, adventurous, risk-taking character, as well as its desire to spread things like the rule of law and free trade all over the world.

That is also something we can recognise in some of the rhetoric of the Brexiteers in the campaign for Brexit and afterwards - people like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. What they are basically saying is that the empire was an example of what the Brits can do when they are unleashed, when they are not held back, and so they can do it again. But this time it was not to be an empire, it was to be something they called “global Britain”. But the idea is the same: Once the British people are unleashed and their chains are loosened, then they will be able to accomplish these great things on a global scale, like the empire of old, because they have these unique properties. Those properties are often contrasted with some things that Brexiteers think are typical of continental Europe, things like statism, bureaucracy, control, lack of individual freedoms, lack of enterprise, etc.

So that's the link. It's not just that people like Johnson or Rees-Mogg hankered for the old empire, although they had a certain nostalgia for it. It was that they, like Thatcher and Powell before them, saw the British Empire as proof of the unique properties of the British people, which in their view were held back by being involved in the EU.

Turkish nostalgia for Ottoman Empire also goes back decades. Perhaps the first major popular and political expression of this nostalgia came in the 1950s under prime minister Adnan Menderes. Turgut Ozal in the 1980s also explicitly cited the Ottomans as a source of inspiration and example to follow. Later on, the Ottoman nostalgia of Necmettin Erbakan's Welfare Party took a much harder Islamist edge. How should we think about all these different forms of Ottoman nostalgia?

It actually goes back further than that. As an intellectual movement, you could say this nostalgia for empire starts a little earlier in the late-1930s and 40s with writers, poets and artists like Samiha Ayverdi and Necip Fazil Kisakurek. Among them, Necip Fazil Kisakurek is the only one to distil a political movement out of that. Of course, it was after the first democratic elections and the takeover by Menderes in 1950 that a space opened up for these people to express themselves much more freely, and also in which the powers that be, the Democrat Party government, were much more sympathetic to these kinds of ideas than the previous Kemalist government had been. So you certainly see more public expression of it in the Menderes era. And you also see that the Menderes government embraced some of it. Think of the celebration of the 500^th anniversary of the Conquest of Istanbul in 1953, which was really celebrated in a grand style. A whole fortress in Rumelihisar was then restored and its shantytown inhabitants were evicted. So it was a big thing then. But the main thing is that in that era, 1950-60, the doors were open for people to really express these ideas, as well as politically.