Of Merchants and Nations: Foreign Trading Communities and Economic Nationalism What happens to foreign trading communities when economic nationalists come to power? Foreign merchants, differentiated in my study from citizens of colonial powers and political refugees, have travelled the globe in pursuit of economic opportunities for millennia. The question is: what happens to these foreign trading communities once economic nationalists, seeking to enhance the economic positioning of the majority national population, come to power? It is very important to study this question in an age of globalization with large numbers of foreign trading communities around the globe coupled with the current rise in popularity of economic nationalist leaders. To shed light on this question, I conduct a controlled case-study comparison. I compare the fate of the Greeks in Egypt in the aftermath of the 1952 Free Officers take-over, ending British colonialism in Egypt, and the fate of the Jewish community in Turkey at the dawn of the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, marking the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Nasser's policies led to the expulsion of the Greeks from Egypt whilst Ataturk's policies welcomed the Jews. In this study I rely on archival material, newspapers from that era, and a wealth of material from secondary sources. Although these two cases are historical they shed light on the actions of economic nationalists more generally within a historical moment in which economic nationalists came to power with clear policies towards foreign trading communities. Analysis of these cases has led me to the conclusion that economic nationalists will decide whether or not to expel a foreign trading community depending on that community's capital structure. A community's capital structure is determined on two dimensions: the amount of capital the community controls, and the class structure of the community. I argue that economic nationalists have the dual goals of seeking economic development through the acquisition of actual material capital and raising the general nationalist ethos through humiliating the once superior foreigners. In light of these goals, communities that are superior on both dimensions of the capital structure relative to the majority national population are more likely to be expelled than those inferior or equal to the majority nationals on both dimensions. Further research will explore what happens to communities who are superior on one dimension but inferior on the other, and test the validity of these conclusions in other cases.

Only during last decade, there had been a gradual improvement in the relations of Turkish governments towards the Arab nations. Although prior to millennium, the relations were on pull and push base, today's Turkey is trying to play a greater role in the Middle East, in a sense resembling to their Ottoman ancestors. When the new republic of Turkey attempted to redefine itself during the 1920s, clearly it was no longer the Ottoman Empire with its pluralistic and all-encompassing identity. Yet, different ethnic groups continued to coexist within its borders, and the definition of a Turkish national identity that would somehow take in these different groups seemed like a difficult task. As in all cases of nationality formation, here too the new Turk was to be defined against many "others" - Western Europeans, other Turkic nations, Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs. In many respects this is what Mustafa Kemal Atatmrk and Turkey's political elite were attempting during those fateful first years, and many of the period's reforms, from changes in dress codes to the language revolution, could be seen as aiming at this redefinition. In many cases such comparisons against others were transparent. The leadership did not try to hide its ambition to seem more West-oriented, or to disengage itself from the Greek culture that pervaded parts of Anatolia. The Arabs, however, present a different and intriguing case-study for this perennial 'other'. On the one hand, ever since their perceived betrayals in WWI, Arabs were rarely mentioned in public speech, and when they were, the terminology seems bland and neutral. On the other, so many of the reforms - language, alphabet, history, racial theory, call to prayer - were clearly meant to distinguish between the contours of a Turkish nation and those of an Arab one. While these feelings were shared by many in the elite and the public at large, we should bear in mind that sizeable groups in the new-born state saw things differently and were suspicious of the government's efforts to distance itself from the historic Turkish-Arab connection. Based on a close deconstruction of speeches, memoirs and newspaper articles from the period, my paper seeks to examine this gap and to describe the location of the imagined Arab other in the construction of modern Turkish nationalism.

I will explore the changing interpretation of history in nationalist culture in Turkey between 1960 and 1980. Rejection of the Ottoman past and the praise of pre-Islamic Turkish history was a central theme in the early years of the Turkish republic. By the 1960s, the revival of the Ottoman legacy had a marked impact. I will question the underlying causes of this shift. This analysis will be helpful in investigating the reception of this new concept of history and its implications for social and political culture, such as the idea of the ''eternal state'', self-differentiation from the colonial experience of other states; and how to perceive the minorities in the country and the nations in the former lands of the Empire like Jews, Armenians and Greeks. Secondly, I will try to flesh out the similarity of the Turkish case with other Mediterranean nation states. The 1960s seemed to be an appropriate period to question formative assumptions by Republican nationalists implanted in Turkish historiography. The ruins and legacy of long lasting wars were evanescing and early republican power holders were losing ground. The appeal to the Ottoman Past, however, took place in structured forms. What came from this partial analysis of the Empire was the revival of the Golden age of the 15th to 17th centuries, rather than the failures of the 19th century. In other words, the vast history of the Ottoman Empire proved to be a good asset. In my study, given the fact that the Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years, I will not treat the Ottoman History as a monolithic body and pay a special attention to the periodization of it, which is not underscored by the analysis on the invention of history in the Turkish case. Finally I will dwell on its ramification and complications. The Ottoman Empire had its own totally different social and juridical structure, territorial existence and cultural compositcon but the question of how to accommodate these with the realities of the mid 20th century was hardly answered.

Turkey's constitutional court ruled in June 2008 that the constitution could not be amended to allow women to attend universities wearing headscarves. The amendment passed by the Turkish parliament in February was held to be unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated Turkish constitutional principles of secularism. The ruling was widely seen as a political decision by the court to curtail efforts by the executive and legislative branches to liberalize Turkey's constitutional order. Moreover, the ruling was delivered as the court also considered a legal bid to close the governing Justice and Development party (AKP) - and ban the prime minister and seventy other members of the party from politics - a move viewed by some in Turkey as a "judicial coup." The challenge to the AKP was based on allegations that it was engaged in "anti-secular activities." In the event, the court narrowly avoided closing the party, but the attempted party closure coupled with the court's ruling in the headscarf case sent a chilling message to those who would seek to liberalize Turkey's Kemalist conception of secularism. This paper will argue that the headscarf case and the AKP closure case are recent examples of pathologies that have marked the Turkish republic's constitutional order since its founding. Secularization and Turkification were wrenching social engineering projects that left the emergent nation with deep cleavages that have yet to heal. Minorities that posed a challenge to the state's preferred notion of national identity were seen as a threat - like the Palestinians in Israel today, or the Jews of Europe in the past, the Kurds were transformed into an unassimilated "question" through the crucible of nation-building. Similarly, those who resisted the secularization strategy of subordinating church to state were deemed a lasting internal threat to the republic's national project. This paper will provide an overview of the Kemalist cultural revolution of the 1920s and 1930s to provide the historical context of Turkey's latter-day constitutional crisis. This overview contributes toward a broader argument concerning the dangers of the deployment of culture by the state in the service of national identity formation. The paper will conclude with my argument that liberalization requires a new approach to national identity. Such an approach entails an inclusive definition of citizenship that does not dictate the erasure of difference and creates room for competing conceptions of secularism in the public sphere.