INTRODUCTION

The end of the Cold War brought about a tremendous change in relations between Turkey and Russia, archrivals over the past five centuries. In 2004, thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, once perceived as an imminent threat to Turkey’s very survival, has become Turkey’s largest trading partner. Similarly, post-communist Russians made up the largest share of tourists in Turkey’s ever-growing tourism industry that year. The spectacular size of the unofficial “shuttle trade” between Turkey and Russia has lead to an underestimation of the volume of Turkish-Russian trade, making Russia an even more important trading partner than the official figures already suggest once unofficial trade is factored in. Moreover, the labor-intensive nature of the products exchanged in this trade demonstrates how the impact of Turkish-Russian trade may be much greater than even the stunning official figures suggest.
Furthermore, trade and tourism are only two dimensions of a Turkish-Russian partnership that also features ever-deepening military-strategic and political aspects. Turkish generals do not talk lightly about Turkey’s foreign policy and grand strategy. But when they do, history takes notice. In a surprisingly overlooked speech, the Secretary General of Turkey’s once all-powerful National Security Council, General Tuncer Kilinc, speaking at the conference “How to Establish a Peace Belt around Turkey” held by the Military Academies Command in March 2002, expressed frustration at the European Union’s policies towards Turkey and said that Ankara needs to start looking elsewhere for new allies. He singled out Russia as potentially the most strategic partner of Turkey and proposed the formation of an “alliance” with this country.^[1] This statement, made in the middle of heated debates over Turkey’s prospective membership in the European Union (EU), came as an overwhelming shock to those who had ignored the trends and radical shifts in Turkish foreign policy and military strategy over the last decade.^[2]
This paper looks at the origins of a newly emerging intellectual phenomenon in Turkey, namely, that of Turkish Eurasianism. This movement imagines, for the first time, a common future for Turkey and Russia, and places this future hope at the heart of a global geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural vision. Given the two countries’ extraordinary economic ties as well as their burgeoning military-strategic and political cooperation, focused analysis of Turkish Eurasianism is all the more essential. The analysis of Turkish Eurasianism presented in this paper highlights the centrality of geopolitics to the Turkish nationalist imagination. It is an open question as to whether this over-emphasis on geographical “location” is unique to Turkish nationalism or whether there are other nationalisms that place a similar importance on geographic considerations elsewhere in the world. No matter what one’s belief, the fact that Turkey’s location in the world is part of an intense, open, and ongoing debate that occupies the center-stage in the country’s public discourse as it enters the 21st century is undeniable. Turkey’s geographical dilemma, or the severe condition of civilizational confusion that Turkey suffers from according to Samuel Huntington, is as lively and real today as it was a decade ago, if not even more so. Turkey’s ongoing engagement with the EU has intensified the urgency of the perennial question of “who are we?” which is intricately connected for the Turks, as this paper will argue, with the question of “where are we?”

“RECONCILIATION THROUGH THE PAST” AS A PREREQUISITE FOR BUILDING A COMMON FUTURE

Weaving together analogous features of Turkish and Russian history into a master-narrative about Eurasian identity that sees the ominous West as the “other,” Turkish Eurasianism is clearly an attempt to reconcile and overcome five centuries of uninterrupted rivalry and enmity between Turkey and Russia by re-interpreting history. In the case of Turkish Eurasianism, such reconciliation is partly realized by creating, or rather resuscitating, heroes that partake in both Russian and Turkish history, such as Sultan Galiyev. The historical influence of the Crimean and Volga Tatars on the development of the Turkish intelligentsia and national consciousness provides a number of historical personalities that the Turkish Eurasianists favor in their narratives. Judging on the basis of the tone adopted by Turkish Eurasianism, this narrative appears to be “tragic” one. Turkish Eurasianism depicts Turkey and Russia as two “brother nations”, which were compelled or “fooled” to fight each other for five centuries and “bled to death” by the cunning and to the benefit of Western powers. Turkey and Russia are depicted as being naпve in opposition to a clever and evil West.
Where does the need for such historic reconciliation come from? Turkish Eurasianism as a master-narrative is not simply descriptive, but also prescriptive. The past is reinterpreted and historical “blood feuds” are reconciled in order to “legitimate a common future”. To illustrate with a domestic analogy, in order for two families to initiate a marriage between their children, they first have to confront and settle any serious feuds they may have had in the past, legitimizing the future in terms of the past. Reconciliation through the past by historical reinterpretation is a necessary component, in fact an absolute prerequisite, for the realization of a future “Eurasian state”.

TURKISH EURASIANISM AS THE “FOURTH POLE” OF THE TURKISH INTELLECTUAL LANDSCAPE

Scholars who study Turkish nationalism and identity formation in its historical context have identified three intellectual currents in respect to Turkey’s identity and place in the world: Pan-Turkism, Pan-Islamism, and Westernism, of which the latter can also be described as Pan-Westernism today in light of Turkey’s ongoing bid to join the European Union, the penultimate Western entity in this regard. Yusuf Akзura, a prominent Turkish nationalist ideologue second only to Ziya Gökalp in his impact, discussed these three intellectual trends and argued in favor of Turkism in his extremely influential Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset.^[3] Already in 1918, Gokalp attempted a synthesis of these categories in Türkleşmek; İslamlaşmak; Muassırlarşmak (Turkification, Islamification, Contemporanization^[4] ), proving that these categories had already achieved widespread acceptance even then.^[5]
This tripartite model of thinking about Turkish identity persists to this day in the work of both Turkish and Western scholars.^[6] Some scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, believe that these divisions represent the incompleteness of Turkish identity formation and indicate a recipe for disaster, making Turkey “the most obvious and prototypical torn country” in its cultural disorientation.^[7] Yet even Huntington, in taking the Islamist-Westernist-Turkist division as his referential frame, testifies to the widespread legitimacy this trinity commands. Conceptualizing Turkey’s options after the Cold War, he strictly adheres to the three classical options: “Having rejected Mecca [Islamism] and then being rejected by Brussels [Westernism], where does Turkey look? Tashkent [Turkism] may be the answer.”^[8] What Huntington or anyone else could not have imagined at the time was that, in fact, some intellectuals – the so-called Eurasianists – have suggested “Moscow”.
This paper will trace the emergence of Eurasianism as a “fourth pole” within the historically tripartite division of the Turkish intelligentsia. Turkish Eurasianism, which started first among a marginal clique of socialist leaning Kemalists, later rapidly spread to include ever broader circles of socialists and Kemalists and influenced substantial groups of Turkist nationalists and even some Islamists, while provoking vociferous reactions from the Westernizers.
Because the definition of Eurasianism is vague, it will be broadly defined as a geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural/civilizational vision for the purposes of this paper, premised on the cooperation of Turkey and Russia or Turkic and Slavic peoples, as the dominant Eurasian nations. This is how Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetzkoy, the chief progenitor of Eurasianism, defined the ideology in the 1920s.^[9] The definitional criteria of Eurasianism will be elaborated on further throughout this paper as its different dimensions are discussed with reference to the work of Attila Ilhan.

CONJECTURES, MORE CONJECTURES^[10] : FROM THE PARTICULAR TO THE GENERAL AND VICE VERSA

The next section of the paper will put forward a few conjectures that will place Turkish Eurasianism in its particular (Turkish) and general (theoretical) context: First, it should be noted that Eurasianism itself is likely to mirror post-Ottoman, latent imperial ideology, which Ilhan considers Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism to similarly represent. Second, Eurasianism differs even as an imperial vision from Pan-Turkism, Pan-Islamism, and Ottomanism in that previous imperial ideologies were premised on explicit Turkish leadership, whereas a tacit acceptance of Turkey’s participation, not as leader, but as partner or assistant (even as the most important one) to a superior great partner in the form of Russia is evident for the first time in Eurasianism. Third, Eurasianism and Europeanism are conceived of in dialectic opposition, as the Eurasian Idea is mostly a “reaction” to an established and evolving European Idea that has gone on the offensive. As such, Eurasianism replicates the idealistic and universalistic features of the European Idea, even as it inverts these so as to preserve its counter-hegemonic posture, cleansing itself from ethnic, racial, and religious overtones to the extent that the European Idea is free from these particularistic elements.^[11]
Fourth, given their semi-peripheral or maybe even peripheral role in the world economy and culture with pressures of globalization increasing on peripheral nations, it is possible for Turkey and Russia to adopt whatever the predominant counter-hegemonic discourse happens to be at any historical juncture, be Slavophilism or Eurasianism, Pan-Turkism or Pan-Islamism. It is also possible that under democratic conditions, the elitist Westernizing discourse will not be sustainable in Turkey and perhaps even less so in Russia.
Fifth, a new kind of “regionalism” is introduced both as an expression of the processes of globalization and as a reaction against these processes.^[12] In this connection, it was a novel suggestion from the socialist perspective to propose a new conference to unite Third World nation-states resisting hegemonic globalization.^[13]
Sixth, it would make intuitive sense if the success of Turkey’s bid to join the EU were to be inversely correlated with the appeal of Turkish Eurasianism; however, that relationship may be more complicated than simple inverse correlation. On the contrary, Turkey’s ongoing engagement with the European Idea provides – and will continue to provide even in the event of acceptance and integration with the EU – a pool of resentment and antagonism that could serve to attract people to Turkish Eurasianism.
Seventh, Turkish Eurasianism as an imperial ideology is an example of a prolonged “post-imperial trauma.” Post-imperial traumas survive longer and are even reinforced further when the former imperial center remains as an independent country and does not bear the brunt of foreign occupation, military humiliation, and the subsequent post-war re-education from above by an outside power as was the case not only with all three belligerents of World War II, but also with the liberated Eastern and Western Europe, consequently reconstructed and re-educated by the United States and the USSR. As Kemalists, socialists, and Turkists never tire of proudly boasting, Turkey has never been occupied and never lost its independence as such. In fact, Turkey is the only country among the losers of both World Wars, which rejected the post-war settlement and reversed its final outcome through successful military campaigns.^[14] Germany’s effort in World War II was an attempt in this direction, but of course, it failed, and along with it failed the similar revisionist visions of its collaborators in that war, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, all of them losers from World War I.^[15] As a consequence, all had imperial visions of one kind or another exorcised out of public discourse in the course of post-war “re-education”, undertaken by the U.S. in Western Europe (West Germany and Italy) and by the USSR in Eastern Europe (Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, part of Austria). None of the losers in both world wars voluntarily gave up their visions of imperial grandeur. They all had to be subjected to full-scale foreign occupation and wholesale re-education from above by an outside power.^[16]
Eighth, a movement such as Turkish Eurasianism and the Turkish-Russian analogies posited by Attila Ilhan should provoke us to rethink the notions of Middle Eastern and Post-Communist Studies. We may need to consider redrawing the boundaries of these areas of academic inquiry. This process is already underway. Ilhan suggests that Turkey and Russia the systems most similar to each other and, even if one does not agree with Ilhan’s argument, one can still follow his provocative suggestion in considering Turkey and Russia as more alike than either Turkey and Saudi Arabia (as the Middle Eastern Studies would suggest) or Russia and Slovenia (as the post-Communist Studies would suggest).
In this paper, Turkish Eurasianism will be outlined and discussed in detail with reference to the thinking of Attila Ilhan, the chief progenitor of Turkish Eurasianism. It was Ilhan who consistently wrote on the subject of the Turkish-Russian alliance, even during the fervently Russophobic Cold War, and who single-handedly popularized the idea of a historically embedded Turkish-Russian alliance preordained by geopolitics and nature. He reintroduced future heroes of Turkish Eurasianist thinking, such as Sultan Galiyev, Mulla Nur Vahidov, and Ismail Gasprinskiy, from complete obscurity. The present form of Turkish Eurasianism owes its existence to him. Even as Turkish Eurasianism became relatively popular in the late 1990s, it was his writings in which Turkish Eurasianist thinking found its most articulate and refined argument as a “master-narrative”, as an ideology distinct from all others.

ATTILA ILHAN: THE FATHER OF TURKISH EURASIANISM

Attila Ilhan^[17] (born 1925) drew impressive parallels between the historical and present conditions of Russia and Turkey throughout his voluminous works^[18] , weaving these analogous features together into a “grand narrative” that is both descriptive and prescriptive. His value-laden division of Turkish history into certain periods provides an appropriate starting point in analyzing his work:

<strong>Turkish History according to Attila Ilhan:</strong>
<table border="1" width="75%">
<tr>
<td width="22%"><font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="3"><p align="center">Ilhan’s value
judgment</font></td>
<td width="78%"><font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="3"><p align="center">Period I: 1800s
(1838)-1919, “Prologue” </font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><font SIZE="3"><p align="center">WORST</font></td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3">Tanzimat Reforms/ Informal Colonization of the Ottoman
Empire. Diagnosis of “capitalist underdevelopment” most clearly observed. Russia and
Ottoman Turkey “bleed to death” in perpetual warfare.</font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><p align="center"> </td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3"><p align="center">Period II: 1919-1938,

“Foundational Moment / Double Revolution and the ‘Golden Age’” </font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><p align="center"><font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="3">BEST</font></td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3">Bolshevik Revolution & Turkish Independence War /
Kemalist Revolution. Kemalist Turkey & Bolshevik Soviet Russia: strongest alliance.
Western imperialism defeated. Third World revolution initiated.</font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3"><p align="center">Period III: 1938-1990s,

“Interregnum: Counter-revolution and Imperialist Cooptation”</font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="3"><p align="center">BAD</font></td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3">Counter-revolution at home & co-optation abroad in both
countries. Turkey joins NATO. Liberalization and “dependent development”. Pro-Western
Turkey used as a peon of imperialism against USSR.</font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </font></td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3"><p align="center">Period IV: 1990s-present,

“Revival: preparing for the ‘second coming’ of Eurasianism” </font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="22%"><font FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE="3"><p align="center">OPTIMISTIC</font></td>
<td width="78%"><font SIZE="3">History repeats itself: conditions of the 1920s reemerge.
West breaks down USSR. Attempts to “divide and control” Turkey. Kemalist revival in
Turkey. Putin revives Eurasianism in Russia. Increasingly anti-Western Turkey rapidly
moves closer to Russia.</font></td>
</tr>
</table>

Instead of going over his meticulous interpretive description of each period one by one, it is more useful to focus on the general theses and themes that Ilhan develops and pursues throughout his description of the four periods.

PROLOGUE: THE SEMI-COLONIAL STRUCTURE OF OTTOMAN TURKEY AND TSARIST RUSSIA

Historically, the perpetual warfare and “blood feuds” between Tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey is blamed on the the cunning of British and French diplomacy, which sought to protect Europe from “the two barbarians at its gates” by perpetuating the conditions under which Turkey and Russia fought and “bled” each other “to death,” allowing Europe to survive and to advance its interests eastward into formerly Russian and Ottoman spheres of influence:

“In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire lost its previous glory… Such that for the Christian, capitalist, and imperialist West, the old Eastern Danger slowly turned into the Eastern Question, which meant “partitioning”. The real danger emerged to be Russia, which was expanding… it was a simple thing that the West had to do. It had to keep the Ottoman Empire under its control and use it against Russia! This was the strategic calculation behind the Tanzimat reforms; in fact, Reshit Pasha’s special advisor, M. Cor, does not hide this truth, saying “…We think it to be imperative that the Ottoman Empire constitute a barrier against Russia.” …The “system” forced the two great Eastern powers to bleed to death as it was wringing its hands with pleasure. This is the common observation of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] and Vladimir Ilich [Lenin] in the 1920s and it is true; after all, isn’t it this observation that brought the two young states, the Turkish Republic and the USSR, together in a common struggle against imperialism?”^[19]
What is interesting about Ilhan’s interpretation is not that he “discovers” the British/French (and later American) geopolitical motives to support Turkey in containing Russia, but that he presents them as if they were the result of a giant conspiracy. Implicitly counterfactual, Ilhan claims that if it had not been for the cunning of Western imperialism, Russia and the Ottoman Empire would not fight each other but would rather fight against the West.
The period of the Ottoman Empire’s semi-colonization starts with the Tanzimat reforms and the Baltalimani Free Trade agreement with England, both of which took place in 1838, representing Turkey’s political and economic integration into the capitalist world-system. Ilhan’s approach to economic liberalization, both in the late Ottoman and post-1945 republican periods, bears striking resemblance to neo-Marxist and dependency schools of thought.^[20] He emphasizes the de-industrialization and the “development of under-development” through economic liberalization, both in the Ottoman Empire and in post-1945 Turkey. As such, he shares much in common with the major economic historians of the Middle East, though his interpretation is more laden with negatively evaluation.^[21] Ilhan argues, along with a long list of contemporary Turkish intellectuals, that the European Customs Union, of which Turkey became a member in 1996, simply brought back the “capitulations regime” of the 1838 treaty, which led to the pauperization of the Ottoman/Turkish economy and society.^[22] Using “analogical argumentation”, Ilhan forecasts the destruction of the Turkish economy and society at the hands of the European Customs Union.
Ilhan argues that in a semi-colonial country like the late Ottoman Empire or post-1950s Turkey, seeming political/ideological divisions are merely reflections of competing imperialisms (British, French, Russian, American, European, etc.) and not representative of the popular will.^[23] He provides lists of grand viziers, each of whom was identified via his allegiance to a European power. For example, Sait Halim Pasha, Mustapha Resit Pasha, and most of all the grand viziers were pro-British; Enver-Cemal-Talat Pashas of the Committee on Union and Progress (CUP) were all blatantly pro-German; Mahmut Nedim Pasha was known as “Nedimov” due to his Russophilia (the only one in this category)! For Ilhan, it is impossible for genuine democracy to develop under these conditions. Even the most formally democratic arrangements will simply allow for a freer expression and reflection of the international balance of power in a supposedly “national” parliamentary forum. Hence, the Tanzimat reforms of the 1830s (pro-British) and the constitutional revolution of 1908 (pro-German) did little else than ease the realization of Western imperial plans vis-а-vis Turkey. Only a radical break with the capitalist-imperialist system at home and abroad, and a concomitant change in Turkey’s foreign relations, the only example of which Ilhan finds in the Kemalist revolution, can bring about “true” democratization and the free expression of the popular will.
One of the most distinctively analogous features of Turkey and Russia is the cultural/civilizational gap between the elite and the masses, which again, like all “evil”, has in its origins in efforts to Westernize the countries during the Tsarist and the late Ottoman periods.^[24] Political and economic liberalization during the late Ottoman period, especially the so-called Constitutional period, was detrimental to Turkish society because it created an alien, Westernized bourgeoisie, composed of European levantens^[25] and local Christians:

“The bourgeoisie during the constitutional period^[26] was either levanten or outright foreign. In any case, it was monarchist. Following Independence, the place they left was filled by Muslim and some Jewish “locals” who came from Rumelia (the Balkans). Ankara tried to produce a national bourgeoisie from this core... in fact, this proved a difficult task because these are both a la franca, and mostly freemason. They viewed Anatolia like the foreign merchants they replaced.”^[27]
The Westernizing reforms of the Tanzimat period incorporated the Ottoman Empire into the capitalist world economy as a semi-colonial and peripheral entity. Yet Tanzimat also created a “psychological rupture”, a cultural estrangement between the intellectuals turned elites and the masses who nonetheless look to the intellectuals for their salvation:

“Who warns the people against the political and economic oppression of foreigners? The intellectuals! That’s why the “system” attempted to “domesticate” the intellectuals from the very beginning. To this end, it used cultural alienation. Missionary schools constituted beachheads of this widespread alienation... There were 30 British schools with 2,996 students; 60 French schools with almost 9,000 students; 15 German schools with about 1,500 students; and 435 American schools with around 20,000 students in the late Ottoman period...”^[28]

The cultural alienation of the elites in general and intellectuals in particular has been a popular subject in Tsarist / Russian, Ottoman / Turkish, and Safavid / Iranian discourse ever since their encounter with the West.^[29] The charac-ters of Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Felatun Bey in Ahmet Mithad’s Felatun Bey and Rakэm Efendi, and Ja’far Khan in Hasan Moqaddam’s Ja’far Khan is back from Europe are all literary caricatures of elites who slavishly imitate the Western ways of living, corrupting themselves and society.^[30] In the case of Russia, the cultural break between the elite and the masses, sometimes referred to as the “hour-glass society” or “torn country” phenomenon is probably more profound than in most other countries, including Turkey.^[31]
In sum, Attila Ilhan argues that the difference between elite and masses is only one of “degree” in “normal” Western countries, where the elite is simply materially better off than the masses, but shares the same “culture”. In contrast, in Russia and Turkey, there is a difference in “kind” (i.e. nature) between the elite and the masses, where the elite has a Western culture and belongs to a different civilization than the non-Western, Asiatic / Eurasian culture of the masses. The same conditions holds even more so for the intelligentsia, and since the intelligentsia plays a key role in both Russia and Turkey, most important of these countries’ woes result from the elites’ cultural alienation from the masses.^[32] Ilhan’s remedy is the same in both cases: the elite should shrug off the alien culture and articulate its own “national cultural synthesis” in a modern framework.^[33]
The rupture between the elite and the masses is also important in that this rupture profoundly impedes genuine democratization in both countries. A reason why egalitarian (Bolshevik and Kemalist) revolutions degenerated into bureaucratic authoritarianisms in both countries is because the “Westernized bureaucratic elite” and “comprador bourgeoisie” (Ilhan’s own usage) stubbornly defended its privileges through institutions that are thoroughly anti-democratic and are designed to prevent a breakthrough to power by the masses.^[34] The elitist/nuclear, secretive/exclusionary, anti-democratic / oppressive structure of Turkish and Russian political parties is due to the Narodnaya Volya influence and to the nihilism of Nechayev, which infused the Russian system and influenced the Turkish party system through the Balkans, especially through Romanian and Bulgarian (“Centralists”) guerrillas.^[35] Even worse, the first Turkish political parties (the Young Turks and the Committee on Union and Progress) aped the secrecy of the Italian Masonic Lodges and Carbonari around Thessalonica.^[36] Asserting direct and personal connections between Narodnaya Volya and the under-development of Turkish democracy and civil society, Ilhan traces Nechayev’s corrosive nihilist-narodnik influence on Turkish political system to Hüseyinzade Ali, who studied in Petersburg and later became one of the founders of the CUP, the first and most influential political party in Ottoman Turkey.^[37] The CUP became the prototypical model for all Turkish political parties that followed, beginning with Republican People’s Party (RPP) in the Republican Era. The elitist, secretive, and conspiratorial organizational form is responsible for the rise of the apparatchik.

MOMENT OF FOUNDING: CONFRONTATION WITH THE WEST; REVOLUTION AND GOLDEN AGE

According to Ilhan, the foundational moment for both Russia and Turkey came in their simultaneous confrontation with the imperialist West and their “double” revolutions (1917 Bolshevik; 1919 Kemalist). This inaugurated a “golden age” of peace and prosperity, and the beginnings of a new world order. Kemalism, Turkism, and Leninism are all different expressions of the same anti-imperialist struggle.
“Turkism” originated in Russia, among the Tatar intelligentsia of the Crimea and Volga region in reaction to Russian imperialism. Yet, according to Ilhan, “original” Turkism was anti-imperialist, but not anti-Russian! This is especially difficult to understand since it was the Russian Empire these original Turkists were reacting against. Here, Ilhan supports his claim with quotes from the most renowned Jadids, especially the Crimean Tatar intellectual, Ismail Bey Gasprinski, “Imagine that Russia established friendly ties with Turkey and Iran… If it can get the support of Turkey and Iran, Russia would be a relative of all eastern Muslims and undoubtedly will become the leader of the Muslim nations and civilizations…”^[38]
Ismail Gasprinski is one of the figures that Ilhan rehabilitated and raised to heroic stature. Gasprinski is extremely Russophilic and is nonetheless respected as one of the progenitors of a Turkish consciousness and nationalism. Gasprinski is unequivocally supportive of Russophilic visions, claiming that “my travels and observations have convinced me that no people treats a subjugated and generally alien tribe as humanely and as sincerely as do our big brothers, the Russians.”^[39] The great role of the Crimean and Volga Tatars in the making of Turkish nationalism creates the aura of a mystic connection between the modern Turkish nation and the Russian lands.^[40]
As a socialist who places his egalitarian ideology at the heart of his Eurasianist vision, Ilhan wants to recover anti-imperialism as the original “core” of Turkism. From Gasprinski to Akзura, from Resulzade to Velidov, from Gökalp to Agaev, he finds that Turkism had staunchly anti-imperialist beginnings.^[41] Yet he strenuously tries to depict the anti-imperialism of original Turkism as being anti-Western and not anti-Russian, a difficult position to sustain. He then accuses Turkists of having deviated from their original position during and after World War II, when Turkism became a “stooge” of German^[42] and American imperialism.^[43] “What a tragic fate,” Ilhan exclaims, “to set off on the journey from the anti-systemic ‘Turkish Hearths’ and arrive at the ‘Idealist Hearths’ in the end, subservient to the very system that you set out to oppose.”^[44] He mentions that an earlier precedent was set by the German cooption of the Young Turks and their use of Pan-Turkism against Russia in World War I, or even the earlier German cooption of Abdulhamit’s Pan-Islamism against both Russia and the British Empire.^[45] In his usual narrative style, these analogous features of Turkish history are used to foreshadow and argue against the attempt by the United States to use Pan-Turkism against a much weakened Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[46]
Via these historical comparisons, Ilhan appropriates the cherished tradition of Pan-Turkism for the Eurasianist vision. He downplays the differences between Turkists, socialists, and Kemalists and imagines all of these groups to be united in a “Gramscian historical bloc” (Ilhan’s own usage) against Western imperialism as was the case during the Turkish Independence War. This historical bloc has Russia at its core.

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION, THE TURKISH WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, AND THE CONNECTION TO “SULTAN GALIYEV”

In his writings, Ilhan is mostly concerned with recovering a relatively small slice of history, namely the 1920s and early 1930s, especially the time of the Turkish War for Independence (1919-1922). His interpretation of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) and Vladimir Ilich (Lenin) as “self-conscious comrades in the same struggle against the West” is at the core of his appropriation of his most cherished period in modern Turkish history. By appropriating the Turkish War for Independence in conjunction with the October Revolution for his Eurasianist vision, Ilhan hopes to show how the existence of Turkey and Russia were (and still are) tied via this defining moment of history. Finally, he discovers Sultan Galiyev, the Tatar Muslim National Communist from Kazan, and elevates him to saintly status, bestowing him with a messianic message and giving him the honor of having began the process of Third World liberation. Bringing Eurasianism and socialism together in the title of his recent book, Ilhan suggestively paraphrases the first line of the Communist Manifesto: “Sultan Galiyev: The Ghost Haunting Eurasia.”
Sultan Galiyev, a Tatar communist from Kazan, saw a basic flaw in Eurocentric Marxism. “There is no blessing in the Western proletariat; revolution will definitely come from the oppressed nations, that is, colonial or semi-colonial Eastern nations. And that’s why we should primarily give a hand to these countries.”^[47] Acting upon this observation, Galiyev consistently urged and allegedly convinced Lenin that a world revolution is possible only through liberating the Third World.^[48] To this end, Galiyev, Vahidov, and other Tatar Muslim National Communists suggested creating a “Turan Socialist Republic” as the springboard for the socialist revolution in “the Muslim East and Asia, whose peoples are proletariat by nature”:

“While I was examining Sultan Galiyev and Nur Molla Vahidov, I discovered to my amazement that in the first union treaty that the Volga Tatars persuaded Lenin and Trotsky to accept that the first Turkish Republic that would join the USSR was supposed to be a great Turan Socialist Republic, encompassing Kazan, Crimea, and the Bukhara Khanates. This is what later made Stalin an enemy of Galiyev.”^[49]

The mythical agreement between Galiyev and Lenin is elevated to the stature of a sacred “covenant” of Third World revolutionary socialism in an Eurasianist framework. It is repeatedly mentioned as a factual reminder of Lenin’s original wish and a source of legitimacy for the Galiyev’s cause.^[50] In another counterfactual implication, Ilhan suggests that world revolution could have been achieved had the Soviet Union followed Galiyev’s Third Worldist interpretation of socialism. He also claims that the League of Non-Aligned Nations and the Third World socialist movements of the 1960s were but a “dispassionate replay of Galiyev’s vision” of an Oppressed Peoples’ International or a Colonial International.^[51]
Ilhan argues that Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and Vladimir Ilich (Lenin) perceived each other to be fighting on the same front against Western imperialism. Atatürk was not pro-Western, but was rather the anti-Western forerunner of Third World liberation with a very Leftist ideology. Realizing that the real contradiction is between the oppressor and the oppressed nations, and noting that the Turks are an oppressed nation, both Atatürk and Sultan Galiyev downplayed class differences among the Turks and mobilized the nation as if of one class because it was one class in relation to the West.

“...at the stage in which the anti-imperialist struggle found itself in the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal was of the opinion that class contradictions could be pushed into a secondary position. In this he is in agreement with Sultan Galiyev, just as he is in agreement with Dr. Sefik Husnu in his analysis of the class structure in Turkey! Since the non-Muslim and comprador bourgeoisie was purged in 1920’s Turkey and the estates and wealth of Greek and Armenian merchants and landlords were distributed among the people, it is debatable whether we can talk about an opposition based on class distinction...”^[52]

Ilhan makes ample use of Mustafa Kemal’s statements in the same vein:

“I feel the need to confirm, once again, that Turkey’s struggle today does not belong to Turkey alone...Turkey is making a great and important effort. Because what Turkey is defending is the cause of all the oppressed nations, of all the East, Turkey is confident that the Eastern nations that are with him will remain with him until this effort bears fruit...” (July 1922)^[53]

In a much more celebrated and famous passage after the War for Independence, Atatürk says:

“Look at the sun that is about to rise from the East! Today, just as I see the dawn breaking, I see the awakening of all Eastern nations from afar. There are many brother nations that will arrive at their sovereignty and freedom…”^[54]

In this connection, Lenin was fully supportive of Mustafa Kemal’s Third Worldist vision:

“Vladimir Ilich [Lenin]... told Aralof [the Soviet ambassador to Ankara]: “he [Mustafa Kemal] is fighting a war for independence against invaders; I believe that he will break the pride of imperialism, and will wipe out the sultan and his entourage. We should help him, that is, the Turkish people.”^[55]

The Muslim National Communist, Sultan Galiyev is again the first to endow the Eurasianist vision with a Marxist-socialist legitimacy by claiming that the real Marxist “contradiction” is between the oppressor and oppressed nations. “The real great (majeur)^[56] contradiction is between the Turkish nation and the capitalist system, and Mustafa Kemal observed this very well and has acted upon it.”^[57] Thus, while not being identical, Kemalism is “open” to socialism:

“Kemalism and socialism – and even communism – are not one and the same. One of them was a national democratic revolution, the other one an international revolution. Nonetheless, what is not to be forgotten and paid attention to? Is it that both of them were anti-imperialist? This is still the common denominator.”^[58]

In his usual style, Ilhan sometimes gives a personal story linking his theoretical construct about Third World socialism with real life experiences of revolutionary characters.

“The character Borodin in Andre Malraux’s Les Conguerants is a real Bolshevik…according to Tibor Mende’s Des Mandarins a Mao (Le Seuil, Paris, 1962) the same Borodin lived in Ankara during the War for Independence: “...Mikhail Borodin, who has been in similar missions in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal, came with the military and civilian experts to help re-organize the Kuomintang.””^[59]

The “real” character of Borodin thus connects the three revolutions that shook the world in the early 20th century, namely, the Russian, the Chinese and the Turkish, also lumped together by an American philosopher at the time.^[60] Ilhan weaves these connections, real or mythical, into a grand narrative of world revolution and liberation.
Ilhan lays claim to Kemalism, socialism, and Turkism are claimed in their “original” forms, translating them into Eurasianism in foreign policy and international relations. The distinctive feature and core of Atatürk’s foreign policy consisted of a strong alliance with the Soviet Union bolstered by a web of regional security networks in the Balkans and the Middle East. The “golden age of Kemalism”^[61] is inextricably linked to cooperation with the Soviet Union, not only in foreign policy, but also in domestic affairs. Most importantly, the planned economy and rapid industrialization, a remarkable achievement of Kemalism in the 1930s, is attributed to the recommendations of Soviet planners:

“…a Soviet delegation, headed by the skilled Soviet expert, Professor Orlof, came to Turkey and within a relatively short period of three to four months, provided us with a positive and practical plan… The team of Soviet experts, even more importantly, suggested the need to enter into the iron and steel industries…and they assured us that our country is capable of establishing this industry…”^[62]

Ilhan contrasts the positive and well-intentioned recommendations of the Soviet experts with the negative and baleful recommendations of Western economic advisors, who discouraged Turkey from pursuing heavy industrialization and rather urged the development of agriculture, transportation, and light industries with the ominous ulterior motive of keeping Turkey as an underdeveloped, agricultural Third World country.

INTERREGNUM (1938-1990S): COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND IMPERIALIST COOPTION

The “golden age” of Turkish-Soviet cooperation was abandoned immediately after Atatürk’s death, when “Ismet Pasha, the fascist” hurried to ally Turkey with the West, first cutting secret deals with Nazi Germany against the USSR, then signing onto the anti-Soviet Atlantic Declaration after World War II.^[63] Interestingly enough, the two ideologies that supported the golden age, Leninism and Kemalism, were subverted and degenerated into personality cults in a strikingly similar fashion, by Stalin and Inönü, both of them evil dictators in Ilhan’s view.^[64] The Kadro^[65] , an intellectual group attempting to formulate Kemalism as a social revolutionary ideology with an international dimension that stood for the “true” followers of Atatürk’s message, were ruthlessly purged by “Inönü, the fascist”, just as the “true” followers of Lenin were purged by Stalin.^[66]
Ilhan adds organizational and cultural dimensions to his thesis of the “subversion of the Kemalist doctrine”. He argues that while Kemalism as implemented by Atatürk was a bottom-up democratic process that gave sovereignty to the people, Inönü reorganized the party top-down following Atatürk’s death, bureaucratizing it with a strict hierarchy and trying to emulate the Nazism and Fascism that he and his associates, especially Recep Peker, admired.^[67] In fact, Recep Peker, after his visit to Nazi Germany proposed the reorganization of the RPP along the lines of the NSDAP, a proposal that was rejected with fury by Atatürk.^[68] Following Atatürk’s death, Inönü became president and Peker his prime minister and the two, with the support of General Fevzi Pasha, realized their plan for a reorganization along Fascist lines.^[69] The democratic, progressive, mass party that was Atatürk’s RPP was transformed into an elite, regressive, and reactionary party by a Turkish apparatchik, by Inönü.
Apart from exorcising the democratic spirit that infused the revolutionary organization that was Atatürk’s RPP, Inönü superimposed an elitist, pro-Western cultural program based on a Greco-Roman culture alien to the Asiatic Muslim Turks. Whereas Atatürk tried to synthesize an original, modern culture out of the cultural and historical sources of the Muslim Turks, Inönü copied and superimposed a ready made modern culture based on Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian sources. Atatürk attempted to synthesize a modern, secular cultural out of the Turks’ Seljuk-Ottoman heritage that was distinct but related toArab-Persian Islamic civilization. Inönü’s betrayal of Atatürk’s cultural policy is a major theme of most of Ilhan’s writings on culture and literary criticism.^[70]
In sum, the subversion of the original socialist-Leninist and Kemalist doctrines is yet another analogical construction of Ilhan’s thought. The unfaithful followers (Inönü and Stalin) of Atatürk and Lenin distorted the original message of their predecessors’ revolutionary ideologies, exorcising their anti-systemic spirit. Moreover, they also turned these ideologies upside-down, making them serve the exact opposite of their original purpose. In this vein, Stalin subverted socialism into a tool of Russian imperialism with a totalitarian agenda, while Inönü subverted Kemalism into a pro-Western cultural policy that in fact serves, rather than challenges, Western imperialism.

REVIVAL (1990S-PRESENT): PREPARING FOR THE “SECOND COMING” OF EURASIANISM

There is an inextricable link between Ilhan’s historical analysis of the Turkish War for Independence and the Bolshevik Revolution, on the one hand, and his prescriptions for the present-day Turkey and Russia, on the other.
Ilhan’s argument is an aesthetic construction that posits a perfect, flawless, and impeccable analogy between the socio-economic and political structure of present day Turkey and the prevailing structures of the late Ottoman period, especially during the Turkish War for Independence. During the War for Independence, Islamists, liberals, and ethnic separatists were aligned with the Western occupying powers and the pro-Western Sultan in Istanbul, much as these same groups are aligned with the European Union, the United States, and the pro-Western bourgeoisie in Istanbul in present-day Turkey. Ottoman Turkey’s semi-colonization went hand in hand with political and economic liberalization, just as is the case in present-day Turkey according to Ilhan.
More importantly, Ilhan perceives the position of Turkey and Russia in the post-Cold War international system to be identical to their position in the 1920’s. Having built these one-to-one analogies, Ilhan anticipates that, since Turkey is going through the exact same political and economic processes and realignments that it went through in the late Ottoman period, then it will also reach the exact same climax: the attempted partition of Turkey by Western powers, hopefully to be followed by Turkey’s liberation from Western imperialism by a bloc of Kemalists, socialists, Turkists, and anti-Western, “genuine” Muslims with the help of Russia, the original and perennial ally of Turkey against the West. Ilhan’s entire work can be interpreted as preparing for that fateful confrontation with the West, when Turkey and Russia should and will be on the same side.
Ilhan argues that the threats Turkey faces in the post-Cold War context are identical to the ones Turkey faced in the late Ottoman period that eventually culminated in the War for Independence. History is repeating itself. The USSR and Yugoslavia were victims of Western imperialism; Turkey is next on the agenda, but the resilience of Kemalism has protected it so far. Ilhan asks “why did the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia disintegrate?”

“The masters of the New World Order are not only enemies of socialism, a country that is big and nationalist – even if it is capitalist and liberal – is not to their benefit. They cannot forget what a disaster Japan caused. That is why they find it in their interest to divide up big or potentially big countries, even if these countries choose the most atrocious forms of liberalism. The disasters that befell Russia and Yugoslavia in the last decade of the 20th century are open evidence of this. But of Turkey?”^[71]

Ilhan then proceeds to explain how the West, “the system”, has been trying to carve up Turkey since the founding of the republic, as a “blood feud” exists between the imperialist system and Republican Turkey, seen as the first Third World country to defy the system. Western efforts to divide up Turkey intensified after the Cold War:

“…there is a plan, and everything is made to proceed towards its realization… let’s remember Tagaris’s report, Onus Probandi, The Burden of Proof… General Achille Tagaris is the president of the Greek Strategic Research Institute and his report is a direct preparation of how Turkey could be broken up. Do you know what this man focusing on mosly? Turkey’s demographic structure! First, the numbers that the Turks give in population censuses are wrong [Tagaris claims]. We are exaggerating these numbers. There aren’t 40-46 million Turks in Anatolia… because Asia Minor is home to a very mixed group of nations and peoples. There are at least ten million people among the minorities, such that we should count the Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Cherkess, Bulgarians… Isn’t it a fact that these people living in Asia Minor were living there even before theTurks came and conquered these places? Of course, it is their right to establish independent states… he deals most with the Armenians and the Kurds.”^[72]

Following the Turkish takeover of Northern Cyprus, “the system” realized that Turkey became “unnecessarily strong” for its subservient role and “the Cold War against Turkey” began. It began with Armenian (ASALA) terrorist attacks against Turkish diplomats in the 1960s, “when the Turkish Armenians showed the decency not to respond to these provocations, it continued with provocations aimed at the Kurds.”^[73] At the level of foreign policy, the Turkish prime ministers Menderes and Demirel were toppled by pro-American military takeovers in 1960 and 1980 after they announced their intention to pursue better relations with the USSR and the Arab south.^[74]
In contrast, Presidents Yeltsin and Özal were neo-liberal peons of the West who attempted to expedite the disintegration of their respective countries through economic and political liberalization. Their unanticipated, early fall shows the crisis of the Western project.^[75] Putin, on the contrary, is on the right track to build Eurasia as the “fourth pole” against the United States and Europe while East Asia will constitute the third pole with which Eurasia will cooperate in balancing the other two poles.^[76]
In stark contrast, Ilhan interprets the European Customs Union agreement that Turkey signed in 1996 as a replay of the 1838 Baltalimani trade agreement that the Ottoman Empire signed with Britain, stipulating the opening of the Ottoman economy to British goods, which led to the rapid demise of Ottoman industries. Following his usual “analogical argumentative” style, Ilhan anticipates the total pauperization and peripheralization of the Turkish economy.^[77]
By arguing that there is a deliberate Western plan to partition Turkey, just as there was a plan to divide up Yugoslavia and the USSR, Ilhan explicitly asserts a unity of interests and a common destiny between Turkey and Russia (and to a lesser extent, Yugoslavia) vis-а-vis Western imperialism. He further warns that if Turkey does not renounce its EU candidacy, market liberalism, pro-Western cultural policy (foreign language education, etc.) and the like, it will disintegrate and pro-Western Kurdish and Armenian entities will be created in its midst, while some Turks themselves may be Christianized.^[78]
Turkey’s bid to join the European Union is the culmination of six decades of counter-revolution aimed at reversing Atatürk’s anti-imperialist, anti-Western program of modernization. Ironically, it amounts to surrendering Turkey’s sovereignty to the very European great powers that Turkish natio-nalists headed by Mustafa Kemal fought against in the War for Independence (Britain, France, Italy, and Greece). Turkey is going through another independence war against the European Union and the United States, and the only international configuration that will allow Turkey to win this second war is an alliance with Russia – its same ally from the first war for independence.
I would briefly suggest that Ilhan’s fervent opposition to the European Union, which distinguishes him and some socialists, most Kemalists, and almost all Turkists from the liberal pro-Western camp in Turkey, is the primary reason why his Eurasianist message found and still finds an ever expanding audience. What unites a Maoist such as Perinзek with an anticommunist Turkist such as Zeybek and a Kemalist “dinasaur”^[79] such as Зeзen and the Bonapartist, Kemalist youth of the Türk Solu around a Eurasianist project sharing the common features of Attila Ilhan’s thinking is precisely their opposition to Turkey’s membership in the European Union, which has been the central issue of Turkish politics since Turkey’s entry into the European Customs Union in 1996.

ESSENTIALIST CLAIMS ABOUT TURKEY AND RUSSIA (ON RACE, CULTURE, AND GEOPOLITICS)

Ilhan contends that there is no discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or language in the “essence” of Turkish civilization. Quoting Niyazi Berkes, he argues that

“Traditionally with the Turks, race, religion, blood, heritage, and even language have not been the foundation of social unity. Since Turks accept pluralism in all of these categories and reject uniformity the essence of their societal unity has been either “occupational unity” or “administrative-state unity”. The Turk, in history, exists mostly within these two concepts. Turks never established theocratic, aristocratic, or racial regimes… Turks are indeed deserving of attention as a humanistic people, but these qualities make them vulnerable against two events, when their economy or their state is shaken. Once their economy or state is destroyed, they completely lose their sense of direction…”^[80]

Ilhan makes a similar case for Russian civilization, in which he imitates scholars who emphasize the “service state” nature of the Russian state, Russia’s tolerance towards Muslims, or Russia’s benign tendencies toward assimilating minorities.^[81] He seems to agree with Gasprinski’s contention that “there is no nation on Earth which treats alien subjects as humanely as Russia”, though one would suspect Ilhan to think that Turkish-Islamic civilization is even more tolerant than Russian civilization. Ilhan’s view is somewhat similar to that of Trubetzkoy, the “father of Eurasianism” because Trubetzkoy himself argues against racism in his article On Racism, implicitly maintaining that racial politics is alien to Eurasian peoples, Russians and Turanians alike since Eurasians are a mixed people by nature of their composition.^[82]
Ilhan argues that the Turkish-Islamic and the Russian-Orthodox civilizations are inherently similar to each other and different from and opposed to the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian Western civilization. Implicit in this “analogical argumentation” is the hope that their similar worldview as such will inevitably draw Turks and Russians together. To the extent that this argument is made explicit, it is inextricably linked to the absence of racism and similar homogenizing tendencies in Turkish and Russian civilizations. Quoting Alphonse de Lamartine’s^[83] evaluation of the Ottoman Empire, Ilhan notes that Lamartine finds the Ottoman Empire’s failure to assimilate and homogenize its subjects into the Turkish-Islamic culture to be its most important flaw and the main reason behind its ultimate demise. Lamartine further claims that this assimilationist/homogenizing tendency, or the lack thereof, to be the distinguishing feature between the successful Greco-Roman tradition and the inferior Asiatic Empires. Ilhan accepts Lamartine’s argument as it is and turns it on its head by asserting that the lack of a homogenizing tendency in the Turkish and other Asiatic civilizations, including Russian civilization since he considers Russia to be Asiatic, to be the proof of their inherent humanism, which he critically contrasts with Western civilization.
In Ilhan’s writing, geopolitics is posited as a scientific discipline with a geographically determinist, inevitable logic. According to this logic, Turkey and Russia are essentially bound to ally against the West. Geopolitics conceived as such also constitutes the theoretical core of Russian Eurasianism, whether in its classical form found in Trubetzkoy’s writings or in the expressions of contemporary Eurasianism by its leader, Aleksandr Dugin.^[84]

CONCLUSION: “ALTERNATIVE GLOBALIZATIONS” AND “COUNTER-HEGEMONIC VISIONS” IN POST-COMMUNIST EURASIA: THE EXAMPLE OF TURKISH EURASIANISM

In concluding this brief, introductory examination of Turkish Eurasianism, one has to reemphasize two aspects in particular that were already mentioned briefly at the beginning of this paper. First, Turkish Eurasianism, maybe even more than its Russian counterpart, has to be considered as a counter-hegemonic vision. Counter-hegemonic visions usually emerge in reaction to existing hegemonic projects: Visions of African Unity, the Bandung Conference^[85] and the League of Non-Aligned Nations, pan-Arabism of different stripes, “Bolivarism” and Latin American Unity, the Soviet Union itself and even Yugoslavia, visions for Balkan Unity and Baltic cooperation, and even the anti-imperialist pan-Islamism of Jamaleddin Afghani and likeminded aspirants.
Secondly, Turkish Eurasianism is a good example of the alternative globalizations that are currently underway albeit unnoticed by the mainstream media and the scholarly community alike. Globalization is often misperceived as the interaction of “local” cultures with a global “standard” techno-culture (read “Anglo-American culture”). Even if the resultant culture is described as being mutually constituted by the Anglo-American “standard” and “local” cultures, this depiction suggests a very “centralized” and unipolar vision of globalization that supposedly produces a suspiciously homogenous mongrel culture around the world. However, Turkish Eurasia-nism exemplifies an attempt, also part of the globalizing processes, by some of these “locals” to forge a new understanding of their past, present, and future interaction with other “locals”, and to construct a supra-nationalist myth around these new understandings. What is excluded from this new identity construct is the presumably omnipresent Anglo-American culture. Western European identity is present by being rejected, as Turkish Eurasia-nism, like its Russian counterpart, is build on a negation of what Ilhan calls the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman civilization and what Trubetzkoy calls the Romano-Germanic civilization.