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REPUBLIC OF PARADOX: THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS MINORITY PROTECTION REGIME AND THE NEW TURKEY'S STEP-CITIZENS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Abstract

This article focuses on the years after World War I, especially the first decade following the 1923 establishment of the Republic of Turkey, in order to analyze the position of minorities in the developing “we” of the new nation as projected by its political elite. Situating the discussion in the context of the League of Nations interwar minority protection regime, I demonstrate that the Treaty of Lausanne, which the Ankara government and the Allies signed in July 1923, played an important role in the conflicting treatment that minorities have since received in Turkey. The treaty's minority protection clauses entrenched divisions that had already been formed in the Ottoman Empire during the violence of the preceding decade, including the Armenian genocide. Moreover, reminding Turkish leaders of how 19th-century European imperial powers had used the cause of Ottoman Christians’ suffering as an excuse to infringe on Ottoman sovereignty, these clauses alarmed the Turkish political elite, especially as the “Great Powers” themselves were not bound by such minority protection guarantees. The goal of preventing a repetition of this unbalanced international power dynamic, which, according to the new Turkey's leaders, had led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, engendered paradoxical policies toward non-Muslim Turkish citizens; they have been largely excluded from a Turkness (Türklük) to which they were sometimes included, even forcibly included.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Betty Anderson, Mardiros Merdinoğlu, Abigail Jacobson, Nora Lessersohn, Hourig Attarian, Melissa Bilal, Gerard Libaridian, Christine Philliou, Ronald Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, Molly Nolan, Elizabeth Wood, Beril Tezeller Arık, Christopher Capozzola, Howard Eissenstat, Elizabeth Frierson, Zeynep Kezer, Mustafa Aksakal, and IJMES editors Sara Pursley and Beth Baron for their valuable feedback.

1 See Çoker, Fahri, Türk Parlamento Tarihi: Millî Mücadele ve T.B.M.M. I. Dönem, 1919–1923, vol. 2 (Ankara: Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Vakfı, 1995), 348Google Scholar.

2 The treaty was signed between “Turkey” (the Ottoman Empire) and “the Allied Powers,” meaning the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania, and the Serb-Croat-Slovene State. The full text is in The Treaties of Peace 1919–1923, vol. 2 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924), 959–1052.

3 Ibid., 973.

4 For recent studies on minority issues during the Conference of Lausanne, see Bayar, Yeşim, “In Pursuit of Homogeneity: The Lausanne Conference, Minorities and the Turkish Nation,” Nationalities Papers 42 (2013): 108–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Al-Rustom, Hakem Amer, “Anatolian Fragments: Armenians between Turkey and France” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2012)Google Scholar.

5 Quoted in Eissenstat, Howard, “The Limits of Imagination: Debating the Nation and Constructing the State in Early Turkish Nationalism” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 185Google Scholar.

6 According to the first census of Turkey, conducted in 1927, of the country's total population of about 13.5 million people, around 110,000 were Greek, 77,000 were Armenian, and 82,000 were Jewish. İçduygu, Ahmet, Toktas, Şule, and Ali Soner, B., “The Politics of Population in a Nation-Building Process: Emigration of Non-Muslims from Turkey,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008): 368–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note that the census figures are not completely reliable given how the questions were phrased, which categories were offered, and so forth. For more on this issue, see Dündar, Fuat, Türkiye Nüfus Sayımlarında Azınlıklar (Istanbul: Doz Yayınları, 1999)Google Scholar.

7 “Minority regime” refers to the interwar system that the League of Nations created for the newly established, expanded, or defeated eastern European states, wherein the concerned states accepted to formally commit to the protection of minorities and recognized the League as guarantor of that agreement. For the list of treaty-bound states and the minority stipulations common to all cases, see Preece, Jennifer Jackson, National Minorities and the European Nation-States System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7375CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Dr. Afetinan, A., Atatürk Hakkında Hâtıralar ve Belgeler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1959), 204Google Scholar.

9 These fears continue to inform Turkish policies. See Zarakol, Ayşe, “Ontological (In)Security and State Denial of Historical Crimes: Turkey and Japan,” International Relations 24 (2010): 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For a representative sample, see Bali, Rıfat, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri: Bir Türkleştirme Serüveni, 1923–1945 (Istanbul: İletişim, 1999)Google Scholar; Aktar, Ayhan, Varlık Vergisi ve “Türkleştirme” Politikaları (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000)Google Scholar; Okutan, Çağatay, Tek Parti Döneminde Azınlık Politikaları (Istanbul: Bilgi İletişim Grubu, 2004)Google Scholar; and Çetinoğlu, Sait, Ekonomik ve Kültürel Jenosit: Varlık Vergisi 1942–1944 (Istanbul: Belge Yayınları, 2008)Google Scholar.

11 For the first approach, see Eissenstat, “The Limits of Imagination”; for the second, see Rıfat N. Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri.

12 I do not suggest that religion, ethnicity, race, and language were not important to the construction of Turkness or that previous scholars have assumed them to be primordial. Rather, I emphasize that we should pay closer attention to the historical processes that made these factors politically important. For a sample of recent works in this subfield on Turkish nation-building, see Eissenstat, Howard, “Metaphors of Race and Discourse of Nation,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Spickard, Paul R. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 239–56Google Scholar; Çağaptay, Soner, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk? (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Baer, Marc David, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Üngör, Uğur Ümit, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. With its attention to the Peace Treaty of Sèvres and the role of the “outside threat” framing the boundaries of the insider-national, the following work is closer to my analysis: İçduygu, Ahmet and Kaygusuz, Özlem, “The Politics of Citizenship by Drawing Borders: Foreign Policy and the Construction of National Citizenship Identity in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2004): 2650CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 I am not aware of any study of the League's minority regime that discusses the Treaty of Lausanne substantially. For example, Carole Fink's excellent and now classic book, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, does not have much to say about the Lausanne Treaty or Turkish Jewry. One exception that takes the Ottomans and the Lausanne moment seriously is Weitz, Eric, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1313–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Bora, Tanıl, “İnşa Döneminde Türk Milli Kimliği,” Toplum ve Bilim 77 (1996): 168–92Google Scholar.

15 For an analysis of how European artistic productions depicted the Balkan Christians’ independence struggles using orientalist tropes, see Schick, Irvin Cemil, “Christian Maidens, Turkish Ravishers: The Sexualization of National Conflict in the Late Ottoman Period,” in Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History, ed. Schick, Irvin Cemil and Buturovic, Amila (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 273306Google Scholar.

16 On 1 May 1920, in the Grand National Assembly, Mustafa Kemal declared that within the national borders of the country for which they were fighting, “there are Turks, there are Circassians, and many other Muslim elements,” and that these borders were for “brother nations [kardeş milletler] who live in a mixed way and who have the same single purpose.” Atatürk, Mustafa K., Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, vol. 1 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1961), 7374Google Scholar.

17 The emphasis on military service in definitions of true national belonging necessitates a discussion of women's citizenship in the early Turkish Republic, a topic that I had to leave out. For a recent sample in this vast literature, see Sancar, Serpil, Türk Modernleşmesinin Cinsiyeti: Erkekler Devlet, Kadınlar Aile Kurar (Istanbul: İletişim, 2012)Google Scholar.

18 Suny, Ronald G., “Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Suny, Ronald Grigor, Göçek, Fatma Müge, and Naimark, Norma M. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1541CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The state did not have much incentive to conscript non-Muslims because cizye was its second most important tax income. In the Ottoman Empire, power and status derived from serving in the higher echelons of military and civil bureaucracy—from which non-Muslims were barred—and not from commerce and trade. See Zilfi, Madeline, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 121Google Scholar.

20 For space reasons I have excluded economic nationalism from my discussion here. See Akçam, Taner and Kurt, Ümit, Kanunların Ruhu: Emval-i Metruke Kanunlarında Soykırımın İzini Sürmek (Istanbul: İletişim, 2012)Google Scholar; and Üngör, Uğur Ümit and Polatel, Mehmet, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum, 2011)Google Scholar.

21 This does not mean that before the war, some Armenian groups did not work for an independent Armenia backed by Russia. But, for various reasons that had nothing to do with Armenians’ inherent, good-natured loyalty there was no wholesale, across-the-board “treachery” before World War I. Kaligian, Dikran, Armenian Organization and Ideology under Ottoman Rule (1908–1914) (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2009)Google Scholar.

22 Bloxham, Donald, “Three Imperialisms and a Turkish Nationalism: International Stresses, Imperial Disintegration and the Armenian Genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice 36 (2002): 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ekmekcioglu, Lerna, “A Climate for Abduction, A Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013): 522–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 The full text of the Peace Treaty of Sèvres is in The Treaties of Peace 1919–1923, 2:789–941.

25 For an informative discussion of why and how the British Empire did not sustain its support for Armenians, see Tusan, Michelle, “‘Crimes against Humanity’: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide,” American Historical Review 119 (2014): 4777CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Treaty of Lausanne VIII: Declaration of Amnesty, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/viii_-declaration-of-amnesty.en.mfa (accessed 5 January 2014).

27 For the evolution of international relations from a focus on territories to a focus on populations, see Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System.”

28 For a discussion of how, in view of the failed minority protection regime and the perceived success of the Greek-Turkish exchange, European policymakers turned to population transfer (including partition) as the preferred medium for dealing with multiethnic coexistence, see Moses, A. Dirk, Genocide and the Terror of History: The Quest for Permanent Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 353Google Scholar.

30 What Wilson really meant by “self-determination” is still debated. See Throntveit, Trygve, “The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History 35 (2011): 445–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Riga, Liliana and Kennedy, James, “Tolerant Majorities, Loyal Minorities and ‘Ethnic Reversals’: Constructing Minority Rights at Versailles 1919,” Nations and Nationalism 15 (2009): 461–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Also referred to as the “Little Treaty of Versailles,” the Polish Minority Treaty was signed between newly created Poland and the Allied Powers on 28 June 1919. Poland guaranteed that “Polish nationals who belong to racial, religious or linguistic minorities” (effectively, Jews, Germans, and Ukrainians) would not be discriminated against and that their culture would be protected. Responsibility for the enforcement of these minority protections was assigned to the yet-to-be created League of Nations. In 1934, one year after Germany left the League, Poland unilaterally renounced the Polish Minority Treaty. There was no response by the signatories. Fink, Carole, “The Paris Peace Conference and the Question of Minority Rights,” Peace & Change 21 (1996): 273–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Riga and Kennedy, “Tolerant Majorities,” 462.

34 Thio, Li-ann, Managing Babel: The International Legal Protection of Minorities in the Twentieth Century (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2005), 40Google Scholar.

35 Riga and Kennedy, “Tolerant Majorities,” 474–75.

36 The “Tanzimat syndrome” is alive in contemporary Turkey. See Yılmaz, Hakan, “Two Pillars of Nationalist Euroskepticism in Turkey: The Tanzimat and Sèvres Syndromes,” in Turkey, Sweden and the European Union: Experiences and Expectations, ed. Karlsson, Ingmar and Melin, Annika Strom (Stockholm: SIEPS, 2006), 2940Google Scholar.

37 İsmet Pasha, the head of the Turkish delegation, emphasized this point at the Lausanne Conference but was not taken seriously, not only because of the orientalist biases of his audience but also because of the wartime massacres of Ottoman Christians. For a discussion of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, see Emon, Anvar, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: “Dhimmis” and Others in the Empire of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 For a discussion of how the leading CUP and RPP cadres have long regarded the principle of national sovereignty as a prerequisite for being Western, see Kadioğlu, Ayşe, “An Oxymoron: The Origins of Civic-Republican Liberalism in Turkey,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 16 (2007): 171–90Google Scholar.

39 Bayar, “In Pursuit of Homogeneity,” 117–18.

40 Kieser, Hans-Lukas and Bloxham, Donald, “Genocide,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 1, ed. Winter, Jay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 585615Google Scholar.

41 Since the 1880s, Asian and Middle Eastern intellectuals have criticized such double standards. See Aydın, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Mazower, Mark, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe,” Daedalus 126 (1997): 53Google Scholar.

43 “Minority States” (states on which the minority treaties were imposed) resented such “injustice.” See Cowan, Jane K., “Justice and the League of Nations Minority Regime,” in Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Clarke, Kamari Maxine and Goodale, Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 270–90Google Scholar.

44 Cooper, John M., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

45 Kidwai, Mushir Hosain, The Future of Muslim Empire: Turkey (London: Central Islamic Society, 1919)Google Scholar and The Sword against Islam; Or, a Defence of Islam's Standardbearers: A Close and Critical Study of the Question of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, with Reference to the Memorandum of the Ottoman Delegates and Its Reply by the Council of Ten at Paris (London: Central Islamic Society, 1919).

46 Kidwai, The Future of Muslim Empire, quoted in S. Tanvir Wasti, “Mushir Hosain Kidwai and the Ottoman Cause,” Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1994): 255.

47 Kidwai, The Sword against Islam, quoted in Wasti, “Mushir Hosain Kidwai,” 259.

48 Ibid., 258.

49 Demir, Fevzi, Osmanlı Devleti’nde II. Meşrutiyet Dönemi Meclis-i Mebusan Seçimleri, 1908–1914 (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 2007), 333Google Scholar. I thank Bedross Der Motossian for this source.

50 Anayis (Yeprime Avedisian), Houshers (Paris: n.p., 1949), 188–91.

51 Note that Mehmed Şükrü did not deny that something bad had happened to religious minorities. He mentions that “they have been ruined” and that their existence came to an end. İsmet Pasha at Lausanne assumed this position, and later Mustafa Kemal replicated it. But they all also insisted that the minorities’ treachery necessitated and thus justified this treatment. Some contemporary scholars who do not accept that the wartime deportations of Armenians amounted to a genocide maintain a somewhat similar argument, claiming that because Armenians had provoked it (by creating rear-area security concerns in Eastern Anatolia) and because Ottomans were not prepared to devise a better military response to this challenge, the Ottoman counterinsurgency measures to relocate Armenians, as violent as they were, were understandable and justified, perhaps even deserved. See Erickson, Edward J., “The Armenians and Ottoman Military Policy, 1915,” War in History 15 (2008): 141–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For examples of works that analyze the intentions of the CUP without justifying them or shifting responsibility, see Bloxham, “Three Imperialisms and a Turkish Nationalism”; and Dressler, Markus, Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 100112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Karakoç, Ercan, “Osmanlı Hariciyesinde Bir Ermeni Nazır: Gabriyel Noradunkyan Efendi,” Uluslararası İlişkiler 7 (2010): 157–77Google Scholar.

53 The information is from Alexander Khadissian's report as published in memoir, Vahan Papazian's, Im Hushere (Beirut: Hamazkayin Press, 1952)Google Scholar. Both were members of the delegation. See Armenian Review 14 (1961): 10.

54 Aztarar, 30 January 1927.

55 The history of this double standard goes back to the early 19th century. For a discussion of how Europeans mobilized humanitarian intervention machinery in response to the suffering of Ottoman Christians even as they themselves were massacring “native” populations in the colonies, see Bass, Gary, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)Google Scholar; and Rodogno, Davide, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. What is unique about Rodogno's account is that he also analyzes the politics of nonintervention, which was dominant, for instance, during the massacres of Ottoman Armenians in the 1890s (see chap. 8).

56 Kidwai, The Future of Muslim Empire, quoted in Wasti, “Mushir Hosain Kidwai,” 255.

57 The other difference was that the 1924 constitution replaced the 1876 constitution's “sect” with “race.”

58 Gözübüyük, A. Ş. and Sezgin, Z., 1924 Anayasası Hakkındaki Meclis Görüşmeleri (Ankara: AÜSBF İdari Bilimler Enstitüsü, 1957), 436–40Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 436.

60 Ibid., 437.

61 Ibid. Emphasis added.

62 Ibid., 438–39. The transliteration of the text does not capitalize the terms musevi, ermenilik, and rum, which mean “Jewish,” “Armenianness,” and “Greek,” respectively. Terms such as “Türk,” “Fransa,” and “İngiliz” are capitalized.

63 Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

64 Berkovitz, Jay R., Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 89Google Scholar.

65 Scott, Joan W., The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 11Google Scholar.

66 Gözübüyük and Sezgin, 1924 Anayasası, 441.

67 Ibid. Emphasis added.

68 Yeğen, Mesut, “Citizenship and Ethnicity in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2004): 5166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Gözübüyük and Sezgin, 1924 Anayasası, 439.

70 Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 274–83.

71 Riga and Kennedy, “Tolerant Majorities,” 465. The number of Ukrainian schools in Poland dropped from 3,662 to 144 in the interwar period. Too often, clauses based on the numerus clausus principle kept minorities out of universities and the civil service. Motyl, A. J., “Ukrainian Nationalist Political Violence in Inter-War Poland, 1921–1939,” East European Quarterly 19 (1985)Google Scholar: 46, quoted in Mazower, “Minorities and the League,” 54.

72 For more on travel restrictions, see Kezer, Zeynep, Building the Nation-State: State, Space, and Ideology in Early Republican Turkey (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar, “Of Forgotten People and Forgotten Places.”

73 Law No. 2510, “Iskân Kanunu,” 14 June 1934. This law mainly targeted Kurds.

74 “Marsel Franko's Open Letter,” Tan, 6 March 1937. Reproduced in Aktar, Ayhan, “Cumhuriyet’in İlk Yıllarında Uygulanan ‘Türkleştirme’ Politikaları,” Varlık Vergisi ve ‘Türkleştirme’ Politikaları (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000), 127–29Google Scholar. Franko was the secular head of the Jewish community in Turkey.

75 Vahapoğlu, Hidayet M., Osmanlı’dan Günümüze Azınlık ve Yabancı Okullar: Yönetimleri Açısından (Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları, 2005), 151–52Google Scholar.

76 Deri, Mehmet, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar ve Azınlık Okulları: Rum-Yahudi Ve Ermeni Cemaatleri (Istanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2009), 169–71Google Scholar.

77 Many of these laws are still in effect. For an unprecedented memoir (in novel form) of a “Turk” teacher working in minority schools in the 1990s and early 2000s, see Keşmer, Emin, Bir Poşet İstanbul Toprağı (Istanbul: Siyah Beyaz Kitap, 2012)Google Scholar.

78 İnce, Başak, Citizenship and Identity in Turkey: From Atatürk's Republic to the Present Day (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 8384Google Scholar.

79 Kemal Kirişçi argued that Turkish nationalism was territorial rather than ethnic. Kirişçi, Kemal, “Dissaggregating Turkish Citizenship and Immigration Practices,” Middle Eastern Studies 36 (2000): 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among many other works that negate this claim, see Bayır, Derya, Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar.

80 Law No. 1041, “Şeraiti Muayyeneyi Haiz Olmayan Osmanlı Tebaasının Türk Vetandaşlığından Iskatı Hakkında Kanun,” 31 May 1927.

81 Çağaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism, 45.

82 Law No. 1881, “Matbuat Kanunu,” 25 July 1931.

83 Quoted in İnce, Citizenship and Identity in Turkey, 78.

84 For an overview of Kurdish rebellions, see Bozarslan, Hamit, “Kurds and the Turkish State,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4, ed. Kasaba, Reşat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 338–39Google Scholar.

85 Law No. 2525, “Soy Adı Kanunu,” 21 June 1934.

86 Türkiye Büyük Millet Mecisi Zabıt Ceridesi, vol. 23, period IV (21 June 1934), 246.

87 Ibid., 249.

88 The surname law has not been studied adequately. See Meltem Türköz, “The Social Life of the State's Fantasy: Memories and Documents on Turkey's 1934 Surname Law” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004); and Szurek, Emmanuel, “Appeler les Turcs par leur nom le nationalisme patronymique dans la Turquie des années 1930,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 2 (2013): 1837CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Koçak, Cemil, “Ayın Karanlık Yüzü: Tek-parti Döneminde Gayri Müslim Azınlıklar Aleyhinde Açılan Türklüğü Tahkir Davaları,” Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklaşımlar 1 (2005): 147208Google Scholar.

90 For a discussion of how the promulgation of the new Civil Code related to the negotiations at Lausanne, especially to the issue of the abrogation of the Capitulations, see Özsu, Umut, “Fabricating Fidelity: Nation-Building, International Law, and the Greek–Turkish Population Exchange,” Leiden Journal of International Law 24 (2011): 823–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 This was a contested process for all three communities. While we still lack a detailed analysis of how the Armenians experienced these developments, for Greeks and Jews, see, respectively, Alexandris, Alexis, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974 (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992), 135–39Google Scholar; and Rıfat Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri, 54–102.

92 See Oran, Baskın, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar (Istanbul: İletişim Yay, 2004), 7071Google Scholar.

93 There is a fine analysis of this debate in Bayar, “In Pursuit of Homogeneity,” 12–14.

94 Bali, Rıfat, Gayrimüslim Mehmetçikler: Hatıralar–Tanıklıklar (Istanbul: Libra, 2011)Google Scholar.

95 This subtitle is inspired by Pandey, Gyanendra, “Can a Muslim Be an Indian?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999): 608–29CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

96 Ovadia, Stella, “Yahudi Olduğumu Ne Unutmaya Ne de Hatırlatmaya Hakkın Var,” Birikim 71–72 (1995): 144–46Google Scholar.

97 In-depth studies that use primary sources in the minority languages are still lacking. For exceptions, see Bali's, Rıfat works on Jews, for example, The Silent Minority in Turkey: Turkish Jews (Istanbul: Libra, 2013)Google Scholar; on Greeks, see Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul; and Kamouzis, Dimitris, “A Minority in a State of Flux: Greek Self-Administration and Education in Post-Lausanne Istanbul (ca. 1923–30),” in State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey: Orthodox and Muslims, 1830–1945, ed. Fortna, Benjamin et al. (London: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar.

98 Lerna Ekmekcioglu, When History Became Destiny: Gender and the Re-making of Armenianness in Post-Ottoman Turkey (manuscript in progress).

99 Makdisi, Ussama, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), 2Google Scholar.