Running away from the persecution of the Nazis, hundreds of German professionals found a safe haven in Turkey in the 1930s. Ironically, the refugees, who had just lost their German citizenship because of their Jewish background, proved of great use to the young Turkish Republic in its nation-building project, precisely because of their German heritage and expertise. The confluence of the two groups in history – modernist exiles who fled Nazi Germany and Kemalists in Turkey – led to a drastic change in the institutions of Turkish culture. While the presence of the émigré scholars contributed to its success, it also contributed to its failure because it strengthened the resentment among the populace against the rigid Kemalist policies pursued in the 1930s and 40s. Nation-building through music and the arts, seemingly a rather innocuous aspect of the Kemalist project, became instead one of the most contentious of all its aspects. The cultural transformation pursued by the Kemalists has been contested and controversial almost from the start and increasingly so in recent decades. But it nevertheless constitutes one of the most striking examples of the power that transnational networks and influences have to re-shape existing social, political, and cultural norms. Thus even while the German émigrés contributed significantly to the success of Kemalist nation-building, a strong resentment against the émigrés, the so-called “foreign imports” with their elite state sponsorship and their rigid cultural policies, also hindered the Kemalist project—and in the long term contributed to the backlash against it. My research aims to shed light on modernity in a non-Western context by uncovering the stories of the most under-researched refugee groups: artists, musicians, and humanities professors. By examining the transnational encounters in music, visual arts, and humanities education from the 1930s to the 1970s, I aim to explore how the cross-territorial forces in the form of ideas and a real dialogue between multiple actors conditioned the Turkish nation-building processes as a dynamic space of decision-making.

This research analyzes the dissident intellectual reactions towards the secular-nationalist modernization project of the Kemalist regime in Turkey. Shortly after monopolizing power in the mid-1920s, the Kemalist regime established a strong hegemony with a solid support base, primarily the urban educated strata and the intelligentsia. Yet despite its hegemony, the Kemalist regime drew significant criticisms from a viable segment of progressive intellectuals. Drawing on political and social theories of Antonio Gramsci and ?erif Mardin, I argue that dissident intellectuals constituted a significant intellectual challenge against the Kemalist project by producing alternative, counter-hegemonic, progressive narratives. Moreover, unlike the Kurdish or Islamist opposition to the regime, the dissident intellectuals appealed to the same social strata from which the Kemalists drew support. I rely primarily on the works of Sabahattin Ali, Naz?m Hikmet, Sabiha Sertel, and Orhan Kemal, aiming to understand how they understood political and economic independence, social transformation, and socioeconomic development. Furthermore, I explore their interactions with the state apparatus to understand how intellectual-regime relations ultimately influenced hegemonic struggles in Turkey. I show that dissident progressive intellectuals’ interaction with the regime and their challenge to its hegemony signaled the attitude of consequent Turkish governments towards the progressive intelligentsia. Even though they did not aim to take over the state apparatus and posed no direct challenge against the state authority, the regime understood and treated the dissident intellectuals as a security issue. While ultimately unsuccessful in breaking the Kemalist hegemony and effectively repressed by the state, dissident intellectuals had significant influences in Turkey’s intellectual history. They influenced the intellectual and social opposition against the Democrat Party government in the late 1950s. Moreover, they left ideological – though not strategic – blueprints for Turkey’s post-1960 progressive movements. Ultimately, my research on dissident progressive intellectuals contributes to Turkish intellectual and social histories. Furthermore, I add to contemporary debates, academic and public, on the relations between intellectuals and authoritarian regimes, and on alternative, counter-hegemonic models constituted by the intelligentsia.

In this paper, I argue that Ahmed R?za Bey reimagined Auguste Comte and Pierre Laffitte’s positivism in order to develop a critique of European imperialism and imagine a form of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism in his 'La Faillite morale de la politique occidentale en Orient' (The Moral Bankruptcy of Western Policy towards the East). Accordingly, I first introduce some of the core positivist claims from French thinkers, specifically Auguste Comte and Pierre Laffitte, focusing on how they indirectly justified colonial rule by advocating developmentalism and setting Europe as a norm. I then show, in the context of debates about Ottoman modernization, how Ahmed R?za accepted and modified key connections made between positivist “method” and European hegemony in order to foreground an alternative vision of world order and the place of the Ottoman Empire, and the Muslim world at large within it. In this sense, Ahmed R?za’s efforts could be viewed as a form of worldmaking for the Ottoman (and by extension, Muslim) presence in the civilized world. In conclusion, I argue for the ambivalence of such a critique, andinterrogate whether it is a useful tool to achieve equality amongst nations, an end Ahmed R?za claims to pursue. This form of positivism was taken up by Ahmed R?za Bey as part of the broader movement to modernize the declining Ottoman Empire in the face of European aggression. The adoption of these Western inventions marked a break with the Islamic thought and traditions that had served as the foundation of the Ottoman Empire up to that point. While Ahmed R?za advocated for the adoption of positivism’s conception of science as a force for development, he critically rejected the notion of the West as the standard of development, and instead chose to emphasize the ways Islamic civilization had contributed to world development. At the same time, he forcefully criticized European colonialism as regressive rather than as a force of progress and development. Instead of fulfilling the promise of positivism, the West had betrayed it. By appropriating the logic of positivism to critique European imperialism and call for a new world order based on the equality of peoples, Ahmed R?za was engaging in a project of worldmaking.