Acceso usuarios
Erik-Jan Zürcher
This article is about the language ofpolitics andreligion in the Middle East. It argues that the "national" struggle of the Ottomans öfter the defeat ofthe Ottoman Empire in World War I was not aimed at the establishment of a Turkish state t äs later Turkish historiography has claimed. A careful analysis ofthe terminology employedby the leadership ofthe "national"movement in itsofficialdocumentsduringtheearlyphase (1918-1920) showsthatinsteadit based itselfon a corporate identity that was primarily religious: that ofthe Ottoman Muslims. The adoption ofsecular Turkish nationalism äs corporate political identity underlying the state was a later development, which tookplace öfter the establishment ofthe Republic ofTurkey in 1923. The vocabulary then changed accordingly, and even where the vocabulary stayed the same, the meaning changed, äs in the case ofthe central term milli 'national'.
