"Such Is the Republic": Vicissitudes in Atatürk's Anticipation of Post-Ottoman Turkey

Over the course of the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk–a former officer of the Ottoman Army–assumed leadership of the Turkish National Movement and became the first president of the Republic following its victory. In 1927, Atatürk recounted the war and his ascent to power in a seven-day address to the first congress of his Republican People’s Party. Immediately upon its delivery, this speech, “Nutuk,” became a state-sanctioned account of Turkey’s national history, and it has largely been treated as authoritative by sympathetic historians in the years since. Despite Nutuk’s ostensible influence on Kemalist history, however, two characteristics of the speech set it apart from subsequent instalments in the tradition. Firstly, it acknowledges that the Republic as it stood at the time was neither a product of premeditated ideological engineering nor purely a convenience of the postwar political climate. This nuance is most apparent in Atatürk’s denunciation of the office of Sultan-Caliph, which is initially muted and only later overt, and in his treatment of territorial severances, which he reimagines as necessary to bring about a desired ethnic homogeneity and thus preferable even if imposed by defeat. Secondly, Atatürk’s account of Turkey’s founding, which otherwise argues the gradual severance of the Ottoman and Turkish regimes, is complicated by his denial of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians between 1915 and 1921. Because it defends proponents of the old order and betrays a sympathy with it in doing so, Kemal’s twofold justification and obfuscation of genocide committed under the Ottomans suspends the narrative of growing Ottoman-Turkish dissonance that characterises the speech at large. These two facets of Nutuk illustrate how the document is more conservative in its claims about Turkey’s political and ideological foundation than the Kemalist histories that draw upon it.