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BEHLÜL ÖZKAN, From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012). Pp. 288. $ 38.00 paper.
The notion of vatan (patrie, homeland/motherland) is central to nationalism and nation-building, very much like the idea of a coimnon language or common history. In From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan, Behlül Özkan offers an original perspective on Turkish nationalism by placing geography, and particularly the concept of homeland, at the center of analysis and by examining how vatan evolved from the Ottoman times to the present. The main thesis of the book is that vatan is neither self-evident and innocent nor neutral and authentic as nationalists claim, but it is "discursively constructed" and is a result of political battles for control of national power. The concept of vatan not only reinforces nationalist identity and loyalty by creating a vital link between people and territory, but it also confers legitimacy on those in power who claim to be the defenders of the nation and its motherland. In a real sense, then, Vatan is an exploration of how the notion of motherland and a spatial/geographic understanding of collective identity played a role in the evolution of Ottoman and Turkish nationalisms, and in the making of a new state, in Turkish nation-building, Turkish foreign policy and Turkish politics.
The book is organized around four historical and thematic chapters that follow a more conceptually driven introduction that unifies the narrative. Chapter 1 traces the evolution of the conception of space and geography in the Ottoman Empire and provides a useful overview of the development of Ottoman nationalism in the nineteenth century around the idea of loyalty to a coimnon Ottoman vatan. Chapter 2 offers an intellectual history of the transformation of Ottoman nationalist ideas after 1908 and the emergence of a territorial Turkish nationalism by 1922. Defeats in the Balkan Wars and World War I, the imposition of the Treaty of Sèvres and the occupation of parts of Anatolia, all contributed to significant shifts in nationalist imagination and policy. "The loss of territories had a deep impact on the imagination of physical and mental boundaries of the vatan" (p. 101), as Özkan puts...