All Roads Lead “West”

“Kemalism” is the official ideology of the Turkish Republic based on the actions and spoken and written works of its founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Many scholars point to Kemalist reforms to show how Turkish society was reoriented away from its supposed “Ottoman” and “Middle Eastern” traditions and toward a “New Türkiye” closely aligned with the so-called “West” and its values. This article shows how the contemporary and historical contours of “European” and “Western” identity developed in reaction to Orientalist characterizations of Turks, exposes how conventional interpretations of Kemalism rely on Euro-American-centric attitudes and Orientalist binary logics that displace local Turkish forms of originality, and argues that Kemal embraced the multidirectional influences informing global developments to generate a novel historiography that would form the core of Kemalism. In so doing, this article has implications beyond Kemalism or Turkish and Ottoman identity and politics. Crucially, it provides a case study into the ways in which racialized people, such as Turks, mediate their relationships and cultivate their own agency and meaning-making with antagonistic “Western” forces or in predominantly “Western” institutions such as the League of Nations.