Immigration in Early Republican Turkey
Panel, 2024 Annual Meeting
On Wednesday, November 13 at 2:30 pm
Panel Description
In the 1920s and 1930s, Turkey was a country of refugees. In previous decades, Muslim refugees arrived from Crimea, the North Caucasus, and former Ottoman territories, including Crete, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. About two million Muslim refugees arrived in Ottoman Anatolia during World War I. In the interwar period, over 800,000 new refugees and immigrants arrived from Bulgaria, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The new republican regime certainly needed the newcomers. Following the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Orthodox Greeks, and because of high mortality in World War I, the country faced a severe shortage of skilled and unskilled labor. For Kemalist authorities, new Muslim immigrants presented an opportunity to fill that gap in the labor market but also a challenge in the ongoing project of linguistic and cultural Turkification.
This panel proposes several contributions to the study of migration in the early Turkish republic. First, panelists seek to overcome compartmentalization in the study of interwar immigration by placing refugee resettlement within broader social, political, and economic processes in the late Ottoman and early republican eras. Second, panelists prioritize non-state sources, such as newspapers and oral histories. The field remains strongly focused on the state, with overreliance on state records. Non-state evidence allows us to conceptualize immigrants as transnational actors who maintained ties to their countries of origin and skillfully navigated settlement policies. Finally, while existing literature on immigration has extensively analyzed the interactions between the Turkish state, Turkish citizens, and Balkan immigrants, this panel explores how immigrants perceived one another and how disparities in their legal status influenced their integration into Turkish society.
Paper 1 focuses on the interwar migration of non-Turkic Muslims from Yugoslavia and the role these migrants played in crafting the Turkish national character and the processes of state-building in the early Turkish republic. Paper 2 explores the evolution of the term “muhacir” (refugee or immigrant) in early republican Turkey, and its shifting emphases on a migrant’s Muslim identity, Turkish or Turkic ethnicity, and national origin. Paper 3 examines the divergent regulatory frameworks for Balkan immigrants in republican Turkey, contrasting the experiences of independently arriving migrants with those settled and assisted by the government. Paper 4 focuses on the lobbying of the “Gayrimübadiller Cemiyeti” (Society of Non-Exchangees), a rare non-governmental organization in the early republican era, exploring its use of concepts and categories in the framework of refugee settlement.
Disciplines
Participants
Presentations
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This presentation focuses on the interwar migration of non-Turkic Muslims from Yugoslavia to Turkey - migration that became an important element in nation building processes for both states newly created after World War I. The Turkish Republic inherited the Ottoman flow of migrants and continued to be perceived as a safe haven for Muslim minorities fleeing various oppressive regimes, even when they were not Turkish. Faced with the continued influx of migrants from the Balkans, Turkey pursued a regional policy of normalization with the Balkan states that would also regulate travel and migrant properties in their home countries to somewhat offset the costs of migrant settlement. Furthermore, Turkey went on to conclude population transfer agreements where the parties considered the Greek-Turkish population exchange as an example of success. The legacy of Ottoman migration policy, the experience of Ottoman immigrant management, and the large numbers of already naturalized immigrants represented an important precedent in continuation of such practice in Turkey. Turkish asylum policy defined the non-Turkic migrants as those “affiliated with Turkish culture” to encompass the mostly Slav and Albanian Muslims fleeing violence, discrimination, and dispossession in Yugoslavia. The non-Turkish speaking migrants were accepted as muhacir, but they were also ecnebi, so measures were taken to integrate them into the Turkish national body through settlement laws and naturalization processes that did not always materialize as planned. At the same time, Yugoslav and Albanian Muslims – officials and migrants – lobbied to discourage migration, while some even managed to return. Based on Turkish and Yugoslav sources, this study analyzes the significance of migration in nation-state building processes in the early Turkish Republic, and the roles migrants came to play in crafting the national character and state policies of their new homeland well into the twentieth century.
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This paper examines the concept of “muhacir” (refugee or immigrant) in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. The term “muhacir” is a key migration category in late Ottoman and Turkish history, yet it remains poorly understood because of how often its meanings shifted and how widely it has been applied.
The category of “muhacir” came into widespread Ottoman usage after the Crimean War of 1853–56. While it legally applied to all immigrants irrespective of their faith, Ottoman administrators typically used it only for Muslim refugees from the Russian Empire, perhaps staying close to the traditional meaning of the term in Islamic history, denoting a Muslim refugee escaping religious persecution to a Muslim country. By the 1880s, the term was occasionally used for non-Muslim immigrants, such as Jewish immigrants in Palestine. In 1913, the Ottoman government linked the category of “muhacir” to one’s manner of naturalization, with only those whose former nationality had been canceled entering the empire as “muhacir.”
In early republican Turkey, “muhacir” remained the dominant term to describe incoming refugees and immigrants. Unlike the Ottoman administration, republican authorities introduced stricter admission policies for foreign Muslims. At different times, Ankara prioritized different elements of migrants’ identities: a religious identity (Muslim), an ethnic identity (Turkish or Turkish-adjacent), or national origin. A “muhacir” was no longer any refugee or immigrant but a certain kind deemed assimilable into, and beneficial for, Turkish society. On the legal plane, the term coexisted, and sometimes overlapped in usage, with mülteci (refugee) and mübadil (exchangee).
Based on research in Cumhuriyet Arşivi (Republican Archive) and Turkish newspapers, this paper explores contested meanings of the category of “muhacir.” This study contributes to our understanding of (a) how the boundaries of the Turkish nation were constructed; (b) the legacy of Ottoman migration in the republican period; and (c) the relationship between the Turkish state and foreign post-Ottoman Muslims.
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This presentation investigates the divergent regulatory frameworks that shaped the experiences of independent (serbest) and state-sponsored (iskanlı) immigrants from the Balkans who moved to Republican Turkey. While the first group came to modern-day Turkey on an individual basis and struggled to obtain financial assistance, the latter group was settled and assisted by the Turkish government.
The varying legal definitions of immigrants complicated the state’s immigration policies since the late Ottoman Empire. A growing number of Balkan Muslims sought to leave their ancestral lands for Anatolia and Eastern Thrace. State authorities could not standardize the process by signing bilateral treaties with Balkan countries due to the complicated international environment in the Balkans and wars between the Ottoman Empire and its successor states.
Kemalists faced similar problems in the 1920s. Though the Greco-Turkish population exchange set the standard for the forced transfer of populations between the two countries, thousands of Balkan Muslims who intended to migrate to Turkey did not enjoy a similar arrangement. There was no concrete agreement for immigrants especially those from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). The settlement laws of 1926 and 1934 regulated the settlement of immigrants but legal ambiguities and their repercussions on independent immigrants persisted well into the Cold War. While treaties provided a structured support system for state-sponsored immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania, which contributed to a relatively smooth integration, the absence of similar arrangements and material endorsement from the state posed unique challenges, such as transferring their properties, for independent immigrants due to property transfer limitations, and a lack of comprehensive state support.
While scholars have focused on differences between Turkish and non-Turkish communities and country-based analysis, the complexities of navigating an unregulated immigration landscape have remained unstudied. By drawing on diplomatic treaties, international conventions, diplomatic correspondence, parliamentary speeches, oral history accounts, and newspaper articles, this presentation sheds light on the socioeconomic and legal barriers that Balkan immigrants encountered in Turkey.
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In the late 1920s and 1930s, the Muslim “non-exchangees” (gayrimübadiller) were a vocal, well-organized and well-connected pressure group in Turkey. From ca. 1926 until at least 1933, they regularly held congresses, lobbying for the Turkish government to compensate them for their property in Greece, which had been seized by the Greek authorities.
“Non-exchangee” (gayrimübadil) referred to those people not subject to the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This included Ottoman Muslims who had left Greece prior to the beginning of the First Balkan War on 18 October 1912. According to Protocol No. IX appended to the Treaty of Lausanne, these Muslims could either continue to enjoy their property rights in Greece (as absentees) or freely dispose of their estates. They could also use the assistance of the Mixed Commission to sell their property, which, de facto, had been seized by the Greek state. Their counterparts were Greek citizens owning property in Turkey.
The gayrimübadil society remains severely understudied, probably for two reasons: most of its members were not poor, and they self-organized quite effectively. They thus contradict the widespread prejudice of all immigrants having been poor and without a voice of their own. In this paper, I shall focus on the gayrimübadil congresses that were held in the 1930s through newspaper articles, which have not been studied yet. The aim of the paper is twofold: first, I will analyze how this privileged group made use of the vocabulary of need and compensation actually developed for refugee settlement. I will argue that they used these categories for their own needs. Second, I am interested in the ways in which gayrimübadil positioned themselves vis-à-vis exchangees and other groups of immigrants.
