Faculty of Social and Political Sciences University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Associate Professor, Division of Social Science York University, Toronto, Canada

Abstract:

As in many global city-regions, the articulation of Istanbul into the world economy and culture goes further than the twentieth century. To be sure, Istanbul was born a global city as Constantinopolis, but its modern articulation begins in the late eighteenth century with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the growth of modern European capitalism and colonialism. The movement that was eventually crystallized as the Young Turks and its culmination in Kemalism with the birth of the modern Turkish Republic in the 1920s, was essentially a movement toward modernization of Ottoman culture and the making of a Turkish national identity based upon European models of the nation-state but and citizenship. This peculiar nationalist project had an ambivalent attitude-partly expressed in Mustafa Kemal's attitude-toward Istanbul in that it was identified with the old Ottoman order as opposed to the new Turkish national identity and citizenship symbolized by Ankara. While this ambivalence remained latent for most of the twentieth century, in the past two decades, with the introduction of a radical neoliberal regime of national governance, Istanbul reemerged as the vanguard of Turkish culture and economy, with all the contradictions that that role implied. This paper traces these various paths through which claims to citizenship have been made since the eighteenth century and highlights deep conflicts and contradictions of the nationalist project that increasingly became globalist in the twentieth century, which now Islam is able to exploit to advance its claims and versions of citizenship.