Historical Legacies in Rising Powers: Towards an (Eur)Asian Approach

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Fisher Onar / Historical Legacies in Rising Powers

HISTORICAL LEGACIES

IN RISING POWERS

Toward a (Eur)Asian Approach

Nora Fisher Onar

ABSTRACT: This articles emanates from the observation that realms like theory andbroad comparison have typically focused on Western concerns and geography whileactors such as China and Turkey have been relegated to the undervalued field ofareas studies. Noting that this inhibits our ability to uncover important cross-re-gional comparisons, the author suggests that “former empires/rising powers”(FERPs) across (Eur)Asia are a promising unit of analysis. To make the case for theFERPs, the author embeds four cases—Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China—in a com-mon problematique, showing that their encounter with Western hegemony/modernity engendered three waves of confrontation vis-à-vis the legacies of empire.These confrontations entailed Eurocentric denial as well as Occidentalist reificationof native pasts, both of which are being superseded by what the author calls“authenticist” histories empowered by the crystallization of multiple modernities.The author then develops a theoretical framework to capture how reinvented pastsserve as sources of identity, normativity, and action. This approach enables anin-depth account of the Turkish case to show that both official and market actorsclaim continuity with an Ottoman-Islamic heritage from which a homegrown hu-manism is said to emanate. These narratives—and the tools through which they arepromoted from the cultural industries to public diplomacy—may be helping Turkeyand other erstwhile (Eur)Asian empires recalibrate national identity and interna-tional purpose at a time of global transformation.

The study of international politics has long been a western-centric enterprise.

As a result prestigious realms such as theory and broad cross-country studies

have typically focused on western concerns, while the task of understanding en-

tities like China or Turkey has been relegated to the undervalued realm of area

studies. The upshot is that International Relations (IR) as a discipline is arguably

Critical Asian Studies

45:3 (2013), 411–430

ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 03 / 000411–20 ©2013 BCAS, Inc. DOI:10.1080/14672715.2013.829313

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ill-equipped to understand the trajectories of rising powers in and beyond Asia,not least with regard to developing systematic comparisons between emergingactors.

Extant frameworks are especially impoverished in their ability to capture theway(s) history inflects upon practices and passions across Asia. For the conceptof “Asia” itself is imbued with vivid histories of colonialism, post-colonial sub-version, and reappropriation in an era of globalization.1 Yet, the popular notionof “BRICs,” for example, or the more explictly Asia-focused “Chindia,” tend tobe concerned exclusively with contemporary economic dynamism to the ne-glect of history.2 At the other end of the historicist spectrum, the longue durée

essentialism of Huntingtonian civilizationalism reifies the role of history inshaping geopolitical imaginaries. This results in a reading of the Confucian andIslamic worlds as hermetically sealed universes, as alien to one another as bothare said to be to the West.

A major reason for the ceding of the field to simplistic perspectives may bebecause experts on one or the other end of the continent3—the Middle East andEast Asia—are embedded in such tightly knit epistemic communities that we areshy of engaging in cross-fertilizing conversations. This is true even in the puta-tively more generalist study of IR across Asia, where the scope of researchtypically reflects national or, at most, regional rather than inter- or trans-Asianconcerns.4 These blinders, I contend, mean that we overlook important, uncov-ered (Eur)Asian connections, not least family resemblences between thetrajectories of former empires—the contiguous, traditional, precapitalist em-pires of the Ottomans, the Persians, the Russians, and the Chinese—and theirnation-state successors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

To help broker such a conversation and explore connections, I examine inthis article patterns of invocation of the past by pundits seeking to capture col-lective imaginations to steer future courses.5 This trend, which Kuan-HsingChen describes as a bid to “rediscover tradition” and “rewrite national histo-ries,”6 may or may nor respect actual historical facts; it nevertheless raises

412 Critical Asian Studies 45:3 (2013)

1. On these overlapping processes, see the seminal work of Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010).2. Coined in a Goldman Sachs report, the acronym “BRICs” refers to the rising economic powers

of the global South, namely Brazil, Russia, India, and China. “Chindia,” meanwhile, is creditedto an Indian parliamentarian. The term flags China and India as new centers of gravity in lightof their fast growth rates and large populations.

3. I view Europe, Asia, and the rendering of both as “continents” (rather than one continuousland mass) as reflective not of geographic fact but of geopolitical cartographic practices associ-ated with Western powers’ imperial enterprise of the nineteenth century. Thus, I strive to usethe somewhat less essentialistic if no less politicized rendering “(Eur)Asia” throughout this ar-ticle. That said, expediency sometimes necessitates use of the conventional terms.

4. See, for example, the countries surveyed in volumes from Tickner and Waever (2009) andAcharya and Buzan (2010).

5. Another approach would be to trace institutional and path-dependent legacies of imperialpasts in trans-Asian perspective. The ongoing conversation between practitioners of compara-tive historical sociology and historical institutionalist approaches to politics, on one hand, andinternational society, world-systems, and postcolonial scholars of international relations, onthe other, offers promising insights in this regard. Survey of this vast corpus, however, is be-yond the scope of the present study.

6. Chen 2010, 9.

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intriguing questions. What are the modalities of reappropriation of the past, es-pecially empire, for contemporary purposes? To what extent is thephenomenon elite-driven and/or a function of social or market forces? Is it apassive memory that impels toward a recapturing of forgotten (suppressed)identities, or is memory work across Asia actively part of an agenda? How are ap-propriations of empire shaped by the Eurocentric legacies of twentieth- centuryhistoriographies? And how do such narratives interact with Occidentalist ap-proaches that have sought to inverse the privileged positions of Europe in Asianimaginaries? Indeed, since reworking the past recalibrates the present, whatkinds of conflicts and what forms of convergence arise at the domestic, national,regional, and transregional levels when the recollection of empire becomes aproject? Does the remembrance of imperium entail a repositioning of the coun-try in the (Eur)Asian or even in the global spatial and geopolitical imagination?

Addressing such broad yet urgent questions requires an analytical frame-work that can rise to two major challenges in the study of former empires/risingpowers in (Eur)Asia. The first is the need to close the aforementioned gap be-tween area studies and international relations. This can be achieved through aplatform that embeds the very different (Eur)Asian actors in a common prob-

lematique, enabling us to compare modes of engaging the past while remainingattentive to the specificity of each case. To achieve this, I propose a novel unit ofanalysis: “former empires/rising powers,” or FERPs.7 I show that from Istanbulto Beijing, the FERPs have undergone three waves of grappling with historicallegacies steeped in Eurocentric denial and Occidentalist reification of the past;both, I contend, are increasingly confronted with a third approach that seeks tofuse what I call “authenticism” about the past with experiences of globalizedmodernity.

Having addressed the “what” question, I turn to the second challenge. Thisentails asking the “why,” “how,” and “who cares” questions, namely, why are weare seeing heightened interest in the past in former (Eur)Asian empires, howthis is being pursued, and to what effect? Addressing these questions requiresovercoming habits of “methodological nationalism”8 by examining the roles ofsub- and trans-state as well as national actors. Opening the nation-state box isimperative because the FERPs are by no means monolithic and the will to revisitthe past, like the resistance it engenders, is arguably as market-, society-, andtechnology-driven as it is a function of official agendas. I accordingly extractfrom the interdisciplinary literatures on pathways to modernity, on the onehand, and memory work, on the other, a rubric for mapping substantive appro-priations of history in rising powers across Asia today. This rubric can be used, Icontend, to map how revisionists from Istanbul to Beijing seek to recalibrateidentity, codes of conduct, and readings of place and purpose in today’s rapidly

Fisher Onar / Historical Legacies in Rising Powers 413

7. FERPs—a playful allusion to terms like BRICs, MIKTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey), andChimes (China, India, Middle East)—is distinguished from the descriptive emphasis of theseterms on country or regional designations, by its substantive focus on the role of history, em-pire, and their memory in shaping viewpoints in rising powers.

8. Beck and Snzaider 2006.

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evolving world.Having established the framework, I offer an intensive study of the Turkish

case. I show that despite a rich historical record encompassing multiple civiliza-tions, in Turkey today it is the Ottoman sultans who receive the lion’s share ofinterest and investment. This Ottomanist revival has captured the collectiveimagination across otherwise turbulent economic, social, and political bound-aries and loyalties. The trend involves both market and official affirmation of aTurco-Islamic identity that claims continuity with the Ottoman past while dis-playing strands of “authenticist” humanism vis-à-vis other groups. I close byreflecting upon the implications of the findings for Turkey’s trajectory, the rele-vance for other (Eur)Asian settings, and the prospects for a decentered platformfor comparative theorizing about the rise of former empires in (Eur)Asia.

Once and Future Kings? Imperial Legacies and Rising Powers

In this section, I fill out the conceptual contours of the novel unit of analysis,FERPs: former empires that are rising powers with (multi-)regional or global as-pirations. The focus is on entities that meet this description in the (Eur)Asianspace: Turkey, China, Iran, and Russia. The category may have purchase else-where, however, for actors such as Brazil and South Africa.

From Empire to Nation-State

In a generic sense, an empire is any entity that governs diffuse territories andpeoples. The structure of imperial governance may be likened to the hub andspokes of a wheel9 in which the militarily and/or economically dominant corenegotiates a separate settlement with each periphery group. This allows for flex-ible relations, which can be adapted on a case-specific basis to changingcircumstances. Such malleability helps account for why empires have proved tobe among the longest-lived of political formations. At their peak, empires offerwhat IR theorists call “hegemonic stability,” a Pax Sinica, Ottomana, or Ameri-

cana that permits far-flung trade and sufficient surplus to empower extensivedivision of labor.10 This, in turn, allows for the flourishing of urban and cosmo-politan cultures, particularly in the imperial core and its outposts in theperiphery.

When it comes to imperial decline and its aftermath, however, at least withregard to empires that crumbled over the course of the nineteenth and twenti-eth centuries, it is necessary to differentiate between the modern colonialempires of western Europe—Britain, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal—and the traditional geographically contiguous empires of (Eur)Asia, namely, theOttoman, Russian, Chinese, and Persian. In the former, cosmopolitan capitalsnotwithstanding, national identities and the institutions of nation-state gover-nance were consolidated before or during the imperial enterprise. This meant


9. Karen Barkey uses this metaphor extensively in her seminal Empire of Difference (2008).10. Postcolonial scholars object to this reading as a “fraudulent self-image” (Loomba et al. 2005)

insofar as systemic “peace” and “prosperity” often came at the cost of systematic enslavementof significant swathes of the population.

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that the loss of empire was not deeply disruptive to core identity and institu-tions.11 To be sure, a booming body of scholarship has shown that the view thatcores thrived irrespective of their peripheries is part and parcel of a Eurocentricanalytical apparatus blind to the ways periphery contributions were constitu-tive of core projects.12 The fact nonetheless remains that there was littlecognizance of this in the core in the aftermath of empire.13

By way of contrast, for the second group of (Eur)Asian empires, the processof imperial collapse was deeply traumatic. For they declined over the course ofextended encounters with the Western, nation-state empires whose (a) militaryprimacy during the period in question, (b) national model of social and politicalorganization, and (c) capitalist, industrializing mode of production compelledthe pre-national empires to reconfigure identity and institutions in the core aswell as in the periphery. This traumatic process of reconstitution entailed defen-sive modernization in which European models were borrowed for theparadoxical purpose of preserving autonomy from European powers. Doing solaid the foundations for the Eurocentrism—despite and to spite Europe—that


11. Hobsbawm 1997.12. See, for example, Hobson 2004.13. Hence the glib turn-of-phrase that Britain acquired and lost its empire in a fit of absentminded-

ness. Hobsbawm (1997, 14) points out that there were only three areas in which the loss ofterritories in the periphery impacted the metropole: first, when the role and structure of corearmed forces were affected by anticolonial uprisings; second, when there was massive repatri-ation of expatriate core subjects back to the metropole; and third, when there was immigrationfrom the former colonies. All of these are important phenomena to be sure, but only in the caseof Portugal did they cause long-term disruption to core institutions and identity.

A map of the ancient Persian empire created for the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1764.The decline of the geographically contiguous empires of (Eur)Asia, including the Per-sian empire, “was deeply traumatic,” this article explains. (Source: www.colombia.edu)

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would infuse nascent nationalisms in imperial successor states.Meanwhile, from Istanbul to Beijing, the process of defensive modernization

involved struggles between traditionalists and reformists. Often this resulted inprograms based on a selective approach to Western blueprints.14 The strategywas evident, for example in the willingness in many quarters to adopt Westernmilitary technologies which nevertheless was accompanied by rejection ofWestern and affirmation of so-called native values. Such attempts to engage theWest on a technical basis but resist Western norms were informed by romanticreadings of Islam, Orthodoxy, and Confucianism. Programs in this vein consti-tuted the antecedents of twentieth-century Occidentalism.

At the same time, other leading reformers were taking a more syncretic ap-proach, trying to graft Western practices onto indigenous values and institutions.A case in point was Sun Yat-Sen’s fusion of Enlightenment and Confusion ratio-nales in his call for a five-part division of powers based on Montesquieu, as wellas on classic Chinese admistrative branches (yüan). His Turkish counterpart,Ziya Gokalp, built on the German sociological distinction between civilizationand culture to claim that Turkey could join a Western civilization characterizedby certain techniques of economic, social, and political governance, while re-maining true to its Turkish-Muslim culture. Such approaches, much like today’sauthenticism, fused European-cum-universal and particularistic rationales tostake out new projects and positions for China and Turkey in the global order.

Ultimately, the interplay between these Westernist, selectivist, and syncreticapproaches toward blueprints on offer by the west culminated in programmaticarticulations of nationalism. Reformist and revolutionary elements—students,officers, and political exiles—were able to mobilize around such platforms, of-ten through the mechanism of secret societies established abroad. Theiractivities culminated in revolutions which took place in swift succession—1905in Russia,1906 in Iran, 1908 in Turkey, 1911 in China—bent on establishingconstituitonal monarchies.

Between Eurocentrism and Nationalism

The revolutions marked a major turning point in the process of transition fromempire to nation-states. Eventually captured by one or another faction withinthe movements in question, each revolution led to the foundation of a new statebased on a rupture with the immediate imperial past. Such transitions acceler-ated the reconstitution of the state along Western lines for the paradoxicalpurpose of avoiding enduring, formal colonization by the west. Nascent na-tional projects nevertheless reflected a self-colonizing, Eurocentric reflex, sincethe adoption of Western blueprints necessitated the reconfiguration of nationalframeworks along secularist and capitalist/communist pathways. Imposed fromthe top down, such programs caused considerable disruption in patently reli-gious and agrarian societies.15


14. For more on this spectrum, see Fisher Onar and Evin 2010 and Fisher Onar forthcoming.15. That said, the foundations for Westernist modernization had been laid by far-reaching if piece-

meal reforms pursued under the earlier imperial regimes.

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Fledgling nation-building elites across the FERPs sought to rally the popula-tion to their cause by recasting collective memory. Recognizing that a successfulnation is one whose citizens remember and forget the same things,16 the elitestrumpeted certain aspects of the past as the basis for a common future. To thisend, few invoked recently neutralized or defunct imperial dynasties whose pur-portedly backwards, barbaric, and despotic Islamic or Oriental orientationswere held responsible for imperial weakness in the face of Western powers.Thus, rejection of the recent past entailed a will to seek out ancient golden ages,“invented traditions”17 like the putatively egalitarian and proto-modernist tradi-tions of ancient Anatolian civilizations and/or Turkic tribal societies in the caseof Turkey, and the claim to continuity with the pre-Islamic glory days of theAchaemenid empire in the case of the Shah’s Iran.

At another level, the impulse to reject the recent past was steeped in the telosof (late) Enlightenment logics epitomized in the cultural revolutions under-taken by the founding fathers of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic ofChina, Kemalist Turkey, and, to a lesser extent, Pahlavi Iran. Revolutionary zealentailed abolition or subordination of the religious institutions of the ancienrégime, often accompanied by language reform that purged the national vocab-ulary of associations with the recent past. The will to rupture also was inscriptedonto nascent national imaginaries via school curricula and the inauguration ofnew holidays, monuments, and commemorative museums. Amnesia was sus-tained through the authoritarian state apparatus which came in both Soviet andChinese communist, and Turkish and Iranian capitalist variants.

The Occidentalist Reaction

If denial of the past was written into the foundations of and set the trajectory ofnational projects for decades to come, it also engendered resistance. At a diffuselevel, this was apparent in a sense of dislocation and displacement on the part ofeven eager adepts of the modernist mission due to the dissonance between theauthorities’ will to (Westernist) modernity and societal realities.

This postcolonial condition—the feeling Meltem Ahiska memorably de-scribes as “always being already late”18—gave rise to the Occidentalist impulse,which I define as the will to deny or subvert self-effacing Eurocentrism. This im-pulse was particularly salient among conservatives in the societies in question.Many mobilized around counterrevolutionary programs that tended, in moreor less sophisticated ways, to build on earlier selectivist Westernization. Somesimply reversed positive and negative significations of West and East, seeking toreclaim the Orient, or—in the Muslim-majority imperial successor states—Is-lam. A more nuanced variant likewise espoused by conservative— and oftenvery nationalist—modernists across the FERPs advocated pursuit of Westerntechniques in science, technology, and modes of production, above all industri-


16. Ernest Renan is of course the prescient and seminal figure to have recognized this phenome-non.

17. Hobsbwam and Ranger 1983.18. Ahiska 2005.

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alization. Yet, in keeping with the proto-Occidentalism of the late imperialperiod, they advocated avoidance at all costs of “Westoxification”—a termcoined by Iranian commentators to call for the preservation of essentially Is-lamic, Asian, or Orthodox values and spirituality said to be rooted in age-oldand monolithic civilizational structures. Both of these variants of Occidental-ism, with their inverted binaries or cherry-picking logics, reproduced throughreductionist readings of Western civilization the very Eurocentrism they soughtto deny.

A New Era? “Authentic” Pasts and Multiple Modernities

If the Occidentalist perspective achieved prominence with the Iranian revolu-tion, for the other (Eur)Asian imperial successor states—as well as forsignificant sections of the Iranian population—recent decades have borne wit-ness to a third wave of engagement of the past based neither on its denial nor itsreification. This approach arguably emanated out of the cherry-picking logic ofan earlier Occidentalism, but it is now characterized by an attempt to transcendboth the “linear, diffusionist accounts of European modernity” and the oldthird-worldism associated with Occidentalism by acknowledging instead zig-zagged pathways to modernity.19 Looking through this prism we see how acentury of cross-fertilization between so-called old and new, Eastern andWestern has resulted in social, economic, and political formations that neitherslavishly reproduce nor reject Western modernity. Rather they represent alter-native or multiple modernities that have universal features (e.g., urbanization,industrialization) and particular dimensions that reflect the singularity of eachFERP’s own trajectory (e.g., understandings of the public or the social). Thisperspective permits, in turn, readings of relations with the West and the pastthat both celebrate aspects of the indigenous experience while reinventing it toserve present-day agendas, not least with regard to commerce.

Four broad phenomena have empowered this approach. First, the monopolyof the nation-state as the main mnemonic community has been in rapid decline.This may be due to the rise of identity politics and the debunking of meta-narra-tives since at least the end of the cold war.20 Second, the revolution ininformation technologies has provided access to copious quantities of data withwhich to challenge, appropriate, reconstruct, and promote new narratives.Third, revisionism vis-à-vis both Eurocentric and Occidentalist approaches tothe past has been made possible by the growing economic wherewithal of thecountries in question due to their positions in the global economy as tradingstates or energy exporters. A burgeoning sense of confidence is increasinglycoupled with the embrace of an authenticist consumer culture in which indige-nous themes are reapppropriated and commodified in tune with thesensibilities of a globalizing, technology-savvy generation. Examples includethe epic historical dramas produced by the Chinese film industry and Ottoman-


19. Kalin 2011, 6.20. A further source was the emergence of the new social movements since the 1960s.

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themed soap operas in Turkey—items with demonstrable appeal to export aswell as domestic markets. Their glossy renditions of imperial history may alsorender Chinese or Turkish nostalgia for empire somewhat less threatening topublics in states that share the same post-imperial geographies. Last, but notleast, if such trends attest to the FERPs’ capacity to re-appropriate their past, thesharp decline in Western, especially European, geopolitical currency and softpower in the wake of American imperial overstretch and the Eurozone crisis hasalso given rise to anxieties. The decline of the Western anchor, for better or forworse, has fueled uncertainties about the emerging multipolar order. To ad-dress such anxieties, both politicians and publics in the FERPs are turning to thepast for referents with which to make sense of their evolving roles in a rapidlychanging world. For example, both Beijing and Ankara periodically seek to reas-sure intelocutors from their post-imperial geographies of the intrinscially softnature of their rise. Tellingly, in Africa—where both are scrambling, as it were,for influence—the desirability of Chinese or Turkish partners for African devel-opment is often contrasted with that of the West. According to such narratives,Chinese and Turkish engagement is steeped in putatively inclusive traditions ofimperial governance said to lend themselves to more mutually empowering ar-rangements than the zero-sum attitudes and conditionalities said tocharacterize Western engagement of the region.

It is thus possible to embed comparative analysis of the FERPs in a commonproblematique—the challenge posed by European-cum-Western modernity toerstwhile empires in (Eur)Asia. In response, pundits across the FERPs devel-oped three modes of response: Eurocentrism, Occidentalism, and multiplemodernities. But if these categories capture the substance of their responses, itis necessary also to develop a conceptual apparatus that captures how contestsover collective memory transpire in the FERPs today.

Confronting the Past: Identity, Normativity, and Action

The vast, interdisciplinary literature on memory work encompasses psycho-analytical, neurobiological, and socio-historical approaches.21 The firstextrapolates from the individual to the collective, providing a useful metaphorfor understanding how historical traumas shape collective identity through, forinstance, denial or fetishization of dramatic historical moments and patterns inthe construction of Self and Other. Neurobiological studies complement suchperspectives through notions such as flashbulb memory, which refers to thoseuniquely vivid and enduring memories of world-historical events that one isable to recall with near photographic detail and that enable alignment of one’s


21. The last often emanate from sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies—a discipline wellsuited to the study of collective memory in the media and digital age given its preoccupationwith matters of narrative and representation. Historians affiliated with the postmodernist turnin historiography are also actively engaged in the battle over collective memory, as both observ-ers and contestants (Jenkins 1991; Hutton 1993). Increasingly, political scientists and IR(international relations) specialists—traditionally skeptical of such soft fields of inquiry—have likewise become receptive in light of resurgent identity politics in the post–cold war,post–9/11 era.

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own life experiences withthose of contemporaries(e.g., “Where were you on9/11?”).22 In tandem withsocio-historical approachesto collective memory thataccount more systemati-cally for how memories arepassed from the individualto the collective throughlanguage23 or via the socialframeworks in which indi-

viduals are embedded,24 the literature on memory work enables us to theorizethe modalities of memory work afoot in FERPs today.

When traumatic events occur, such as those that generate flashbulb memo-ries, lively discussion furnishes a site for the constitution of a narrative field. Thetropes that define and the assumptions that govern such fields vary according toage, occupational, ideological, or ethnic affinities of the group in question. Forexample, the motifs of the “hundred years of humiliation” in Chinese politicaldiscourse or the Capitulation or Sèvres syndromes25 in Turkey reflect a collec-tive memory of the experience of Western intervention in Chinese andOttoman/Turkish affairs and translate into an enduring reading of Western poli-cies as infused with a neo-imperialist agenda. This results in persistent but fluidframeworks into which memories are channeled;26 yet such frameworks may bedeployed in variegated ways by members of different political, socioeconomic,


22. Talarico and Rubin 2003.23. Mitzal 2003.24. Halbwachs 1938; Nora 1989.25. This refers to the 1921 treaty that followed the Allied victory over the young Turk government

in World War I. It envisaged the dismemberment and division of the remaining territories of theOttoman Empire among the occupying British, Greek, Italian, and French forces. It also autho-rized the creation of an independent Armenia and Kurdistan. The Turkish nationalistmovement led by the Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Ataturk) mobilized a nationalist resistancemovement to ensure that the treaty was never implemented.

26. Bartlett 1932, 296.

Soldiers and students standoutside the 9/18 museum toremember and warn againstforgetting history and nationalhumiliation as China marks the81st anniversary of the 9/18 In-cident in Shenyang, LiaoningProvince, 18 September 2012.(Credit: Imaginechina via AP Images)

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or identity groups ranging from the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomin-dang to the Hong Kong film industry and liberal dissidents.27

Collectivities thus develop a habitus, a “system of durable dispositions to act”that are shaped by objective forces, but in turn capable of shaping unfolding tra-jectories.28 These repertoires about the past are handed down acrossgenerations via the spoken, print, and, today, electronic word. Yet, each newgeneration modifies its inheritance, infusing received frameworks with theirown collective experiences, aspirations, and material capacities.29 Wang Hui’sgenealogy of the idea of Asia in Chinese historiography30 offers a good exampleof this process at work. He shows how Chinese historians acted as an epistemiccommunity, but also as authorities with the power to inscribe the historical con-sciousness of the Chinese population. Adopting early on the Soviet version ofuniversal history, they relegated Chinese history, including that of empire, to thedefunct Asian mode of production, imprinting what I have elsewhere called“epistemological Eurocentrism”31 onto Chinese perspectives. Successive gener-ations of revisionist nationalist and liberal/westernized historical perspectiveslater challenged this narrative, while reproducing aspects of the self-erasing Eu-rocentric narrative.

Traditions thus transmitted are characterized by three characteristics: anidentity function, a normative function, and an hermeneutic function.32 That is,revisiting the past enables the affirmation of group bonds while providing animplicit or explicit code of conduct; it further enables the group to make senseof its place in the world. This allows for the narrative “keying” of the “alreadymeaningful primary framework” inherited from the past to present needs andfuture goals.33 An adaptive strategy, keying or reconfiguration is most likely tooccur in times of crisis or disruption to extant frames of reference.

This framework permits us to understand the imprint left by the transitionfrom empire to republic across the FERPs—a process traumatic both over thelongue durée and punctuated by moments of intense rupture and conflagra-tion. Such traumas gave rise to narrative fields populated by a range of tropesassociated with the three approaches to collective memory: Eurocentric (e.g.,will to [Western] civilization; negation of Asiatic “backwardness”); Occidentalist(e.g., condemnation of western decadence; lauding of Asian virtue); and multi-ple modernities (e.g., hybrid—and commodified—“Western” and “Asian”motifs). The theoretical framework also permits analysis in any given period aswell as across time, enabling us to map how agents and cohorts at the national,subnational, and transnational levels revisit narrative fields invoking seminal


27. Advances in communication technologies and economic and cultural globalization may befueling convergence in collective memories across space and time providing the basis for a cos-mopolitan habitus. (See, for example, Levy and Sznaider [2002] for a discussion of the socialbases of a burgeoning cosmopolitan consciousness.)

28. Bourdieu, cited in Calhoun 2003.29. Schils 1981.30. Wang 2007.31. Fisher Onar 2011.32. Mitzal 2003.33. Goffman 1974, 44.

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figures and episodes to recalibrate collective memory to present needs andagendas. Having thus engaged the challenge of overcoming the gap betweenarea and global perspectives and the blinders of methodological nationalismnoted above, I turn now to a case of attempted reconfiguration in a former em-pire/rising power, Turkey. I show that both market and government actors areincreasingly claiming continuity with an Ottoman-Islamic past mediated by anauthenticist reading of humanism said to emanate from Ottoman-Islamic ratherthan western values.

The Case of Turkey: Ottomanism

I define Ottomanism as the invocation of Ottoman precedents or legacies, realor imagined, to shape current-day trajectories.34 In this section, I interpret re-cent Ottomania35 with reference to official policies as well as high- and low-culture trends and practices. Honing in upon the growing popularity of Otto-man- themed cultural commodities epitomized by a recent blockbuster filmConquest 1453, I show that commercial reappropriation of key historical fig-ures and events dovetails with the worldview of Turkey’s ruling party. Suchreadings of the past reflect the multiple modernities approach to imperial lega-cies in which “echoes of empire”36 intertwine with aspirations to influence in anera of global power shift and globalization. In these readings, a reinvigoratedTurco-Islamic consciousness predicated on the claim of continuity with the Ot-tomans is moderated by a humanism steeped in authentic or hybrid rather thanwestern values. This reading of the Ottomans serves as a source of identity,normativity, and as a heuristic for navigating Turkey’s emergent role in its rap-idly changing neighborhood.

The rise and commodification of Ottomanism is attested to by developmentsat both state and society levels. In terms of national and foreign policy, it reflectsa tradition of neo-Ottomanism that has gained traction since the 1980s, whenliberal intellectuals joined forces with pious politicians to trumpet the long-ne-glected Ottoman heritage.37 They did so in a challenge to the monist andWesternist nationalism of the Kemalist republican tradition, citing Ottoman het-erogeneity as a source of pluralism both at home and in foreign relations at atime when, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey ceased being a frontierstate and found itself at the nexus of a reemergent and promising if troubledpost-Ottoman geography: the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

The approach became more pronounced38 in the 2000s when the country


34. Fisher Onar, forthcoming.35. Cagaptay and Cagaptay 2012.36. Nicolaidis and Sebe, forthcoming.37. For a genealogy dating back to the 1950s see Fisher Onar (forthcoming; see also 2009; 2011)

who traces the interplay between right-leaning and left-leaning strands of reengagement of theOttoman among professional and popular historians. While the former were nostalgic, the lat-ter, like their counterparts in China (see also Wang 2007), internalized the Marxist Orientalistcritique of Asian patrimonial empire and only became attracted to other aspects of the Otto-man experience, namely, its cosmopolitanism, with the broad conversion to politicalliberalism that transpired among many key figures in the Turkish left in the 1980s and 1990s.

38. For continuities and ruptures in the Turkish policy-makers’ representations of Turkey’s geog-

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gained the economic leverage to infuse substance into aspirations to multi-re-gional leadership under the auspices of the Justice and Development Party(AKP). This added momentum to neo-Ottoman aspriations as the AKP, whichwent on to displace the Kemalist establishment from its stronghold of power, isa coalition of pro-religious forces that have viewed republican negation of theOttoman past as a traumatic betrayal of national identity ever since the incep-tion of the Kemalist modernist project.39 The view that Turkey possessesunderutilized historical depth that it denied due to westernist social engineer-ing and that this, when combined with its geostrategic position, gives itunparalleled leverage at the intersection of multiple regions was set forthexplicitly in the best-selling book Strategic Depth by professor-turned-foreignminister Ahmet Davutoglu. In fact, the piece provided a sort of blueprint forTurkey’s much-touted foreign policy activism across the region.40 IbrahimKalin—chief advisor to Prime Minister Erdogan and driving force behind boththe Prime Ministry’s newly founded public diplomacy division and a leadingpro-government think tank SETA—likewise repeatedly invokes Turkey’s redis-covery of its Ottoman heritage as having enabled its emancipation from anarrowly Westernist orientation in which Turkey was typically dismissed as asecond-class player.

The notion of the AKP as a neo-Ottomanist actor accordingly came to bewidely employed by foreign policy pundits, especially among Turkey-watchersin Washington. Some interpret the agenda in a benign, authenticist vein, whileothers view it as a nefarious expression of pan-Islamist neo-imperialism.41 To besure, the Ottoman heritage does register some appeal among the region’sIslamists who were nostalgic for the calpihate banished by Ataturk.42 That said,movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria haveprofoundly nationalist and anticolonial as well as pro-religious characters andare also wary of any neo-Ottomanist pretentions on the part of Turkey. AKP lead-ers, cognizant of the discomfort that either benign or aggressive neo-Ottomanpaternalism can elicit in interlocutors across the region, from Christian succes-sor states such as Serbia and Cyprus to Arab nationalists, tend to avoid the term“Ottomanism” per se. Instead, they emphasize soft-power instruments such aspublic diplomacy, cultural institutes, and trade policy that are nevertheless in-formed by references to historical and cultural legacies.

Thus, AKP leaders invoke historical legacies as a source of identity, a code ofconduct, and a heuristic for action. They view Turkey as the heir of the Otto-man–Islamic tradition and suggest that this comes with a responsibility to play aleadership role vis-à-vis the region’s Muslims. In tandem, and with the charac-teristic attentiveness to hybridity of multiple modernities, the Ottoman’s


raphy, see Bilgin 2004.39. See, for example, Yavuz 1999; Çetinsaya 2007; Özyürek, ed. 2007.40. Fisher Onar 2012.41. See, for example, the views of prominent pundits like Taspinar 2008 and Walker 2009, on the

one hand, and Cagaptay 2009, on the other.42. Sayyid 1999.43. Cited in Tharoor 2011.

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cosmopolitan pluralism as well as Turkey’s historical and geographical role asbridge between civilizations are also cited as a rationale for engagement ofnon-Muslims in the post-Ottoman space in political but also in economic terms.In Erdogan’s words:

Whether it be in the Middle East or North Africa or anywhere in the world,our perception has in its core this wealth that is coming from our historicallegacy…we were born and raised on the land that is the legacy of the Otto-man Empire. They are our ancestors. It is out of the question that we mightdeny that presence…. But it’s established upon principles of peace. And itall depends on people loving one another without discrimination.43

Testifying to the official pursuit of an Ottomanist agenda through soft-powerinstruments is the newly inaugurated Yunus Emre Institute, which is in the pro-cess of establishing Yunus Emre Cultural Centers in fourteen countries fromAlbania to Japan.44 Named for a medieval Sufi poet and intended to promote in-terest in Turkey’s linguistic, cultural, and literary heritage in the vein of aConfucius or Goethe Institute, the foundation’s board of trustees includes emi-nent figures such as Turkey’s president, foreign minister, vice prime minister,minister of culture and tourism, minister of finance, and minister of education.As in a China keen on promoting an alluring yet nonthreatening image throughpublic diplomacy,45 the center is viewed as one of many instruments for promot-ing Turkish soft power in the former Ottoman space. This is evident in PresidentGul’s claim that the centers embody “Turkey’s invisible power” and serve to pre-serve “the vitality of her cultural heritage [which] is Turkey’s biggest power.”46

Economic policies, both in terms of official outreach and of support for busi-ness actors are also redolent of the multiple modernities approach in whichTurkey’s historically rooted soft power is underwritten by its (neo)liberal eco-nomic agenda for the region. One pundit has characterized the project as theneed to forge an Ottoman Common Market in an era of globalization, the mem-bers of which would be drawn from both the Muslim-majority and the Christian-majority successor states of the Ottoman Empire. The argument is that only inthis way can such states compete with nation-state great powers like the UnitedStates and China.47 As Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu put it, “if a country’seconomic structure does not furnish enough resources for that country to real-ize its ideals…it will be difficult for that country to pursue an honorable foreignpolicy.” That his understanding of what an honorable policy entails is informedby a sense of connectedness to the Ottoman and invocation of Ottoman prece-dents for his values and actions is apparent in his recent remarks to an AKP partycongress in Kayseri:

[One hundred years ago] an empire, an ancient state ended…. For an indi-cator of what we as functionaries of the AKP are trying to build for the next


44. The twelve others are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Egypt, Syria,Lebanon, Iran, Kazakhstan, England, and Belgium.

45. Legro 2006.46. Cited in Kaya and Tezcan 2011.47. Babahan 2012.

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100 years consider the lands we lost between 1911 and 1923, all thoselands from which we withdrew.… [B]etween 2011 and 2023 we will re-unite with our brothers in those lands. This is an obligatory historicalmission.48

The statement is powerful, not least for its play on the theme of 1923/2023,the foundation of the Turkish Republic and its one hundredth anniversary. Theyears are a trope in the narrative field that defines Turkish national identity andit is only recently that the referent has begun to appeal to pro-religious constitu-ents who have long read it as a celebration of Kemalist negation of Ottoman-Islamic empire. Recently, however, the trope has been appropriated by AKP fig-ures consolidating their newfound hold on the national project as a marker ofcontinuity with a glorious, imperial Ottoman-Islamic past.

National initiatives run parallel to efforts at the municipal level where theAKP also predominates. Istanbul and Ankara, for example, have been devotingextensive resources to restoring Ottoman-era monuments. They have also beenbusy inaugurating commemorative events like annual parades and festivities tocelebrate the conquest of Istanbul in 1453 and the return to Turkey of the tulipafter “150 years of exile induced by the negligence that came with industrializa-tion.”49 Istanbul accordingly boasts a new museum on the history of Islamicscience, while Ankara has its own belief and history museum. According to onecolumnist, such activities have meant that museum attendance since the AKPcame to power in 2002 has risen from 7 million in 2002 to 30 million today; suchtrends affirm that revisiting the past serves as a source of identity, normativity,


48. Davutoglu: 2012.49. 3. Uluslararasy Lale Festivali baslady 2008, Istanbul Muncipality website, available at www.ibb.

gov.tr/tr-TR/Pages/Haber.aspx?NewsID=15782#.UXAKio6Ixdg (accessed 12 April 2013).

Yunus Emre Fountain in Türkenschanzpark, Vienna. Monuments and institutesnamed for Yunus Emre, a medieval Sufi poet, aim to promote interest in Turkey’slinguistic, cultural, and literary heritage. (Credit: Nérostrateur / wikimedia.org, 2007)

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and purpose in Turkey today. As Bülent Erdanaç put it:Since 2002, our nation has reawoken. It has been understood that historyis consciousness, awareness, spirit. [In this period] it has been provenagain that [historical] consciousness is a sense of identity, which indicatesthe ties one feels to the lands in which one lives, which fosters and encour-ages young generations to recognize and learn the nation’s past, values,religion, language, and culture.50

The interplay between public policy and social imaginaries and the ways inwhich both are undergirded by Turkey’s recent economic dynamism is also evi-dent in the profusion of Ottoman-era motifs in high and pop culture in fieldsfrom art, architecture, and design, to fashion, advertising, and computer games.Suggestively, there has been a steep increase—one pundit claims 300 percentsince 2002—in books about the glory or final days of the Ottoman Empire. Inthe first few months of 2012 alone, thirty-two new titles appeared on these sub-jects.51 Heated public debates about Ottoman realities and legacies alsoregularly transpire between public intellectuals who can broadly be describedas affiliated with republican, liberal-leftist, and pro-religious camps52 and whodisplay varying degrees of attraction or resistance to the three main leitmotifs ofthe Ottomanist revival: Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Islam, and Ottoman cosmo-politanism.53

Catering to broader audiences are the outputs of the cultural industries.These include two big-budget TV miniseries that present glossy, whitewashedaccounts of Ottoman intrigues: “Magnificent Century” and “Ottoman Upris-ing.” These soap operas have shot to the top of domestic charts. Prominentcultural critic Murat Belge describes their lure in terms congruent with the fu-sion in the multiple modernities paradigm of authenticity and globalisticconsumerism.54 Such programs, he argues, offer a glamorous, romantic, fantas-tic, “sanitized” alternative to the “grey rationalism” of secular republicaniconography. While a number of secularist republicans in Turkey have tried torespond with cultural productions that present a softer rendition of theKemalist nationalist narrative, these lack the crosscutting appeal that Otto-manist referents appear to command both within and beyond Turkey. Indeed,series like “Magnificent Century” have proved a lucrative export item, com-manding three times the going rate for soap operas in places as far-flung andresource-challenged as Afghanistan. According to Turkey’s Ministry of Cultureand Tourism, between 2005 and 2011, some 35,575 hours of Turkish televisionprograming were sold to distributors in seventy-six countries from West Africato East Asia.55 According to the national broadcasting channel, TRT, revenuesfrom international sales of broadcasting rights have gone from a scantUS$20,000 in 2002 to sectoral revenue of $10 million today. In fact, TRT’s recent


50. Erdanaç 2012.51. Ibid.52. Fisher Onar forthcoming.53. Ibid.54. Belge 2012.55. Gul 2012.

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move to sponsor the high-punching series “Ottoman Uprising” is poignant inthat it marks the state-run channel’s bid for a seat on the profitable Ottomanistbandwagon. This presents a striking contrast to its earlier incarnation as the mo-nopolistic “voice of the [Kemalist] state, disseminating the unitary ideology andculture of Turkish republicanism.”56

An even more notable recent entrant into the market is Conquest 1453, the$17 million feature-length film—the most expensive Turkish production ever—about Mehmet II’s capture of Constantinople. The film, which took three yearsto make, has been watched to date by a record-breaking 5 million people. Its di-rector, Fatih Aksoy, met with 4,000 actors before casting unknowns in theleading roles so as to allow audiences to enter the Ottoman world unencum-bered by the “real lives” of celebrity actors. The film debuted in some 450venues across the country and also was screened for Turkish migrant audiencesin Britain and Germany.

In terms of content, the film is a swashbuckling romp with digitally engi-neered battle scenes featuring thousands of extras along the lines of a Brave-

heart, Gladiator, 300 Spartans, Hero, or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.True to the genre, Conquest 1453 features outrageous historical inaccuraciesand anachronisms. These are, in effect, testimony to the film’s congruence withthe multiple modernities approach to historiography and its fusion of Ottomanmotifs with contemporary sensitivities. The primary message is a Rambo-esquerendition of the narrative of Ottoman-Islamic heroism and virtue. This narrativeis predictably contrasted with the supposed cowardice and decadence of theByzantine Greeks. A secondary message—likewise echoing the official dis-course in which the Ottoman past represents a source of authenticist humanism—is one of tolerance. This is epitomized in the final scene of the movie—inwhich the ritual sacking of the city that Mehmet put a stop to only on the thirdday is occluded—in which Mehmet pledges to protect his new Slav/Christiansubjects by slapping a wet kiss onto the cheek of a cherub-like blond andblue-eyed child.

Similarly, the film’s subplots co-opt but subvert age-old clichés in light of to-day’s prerogatives. This is perhaps most salient in the love story between theOttoman champion Ulubatli Hasan and a beautiful Albanian convert to the Ot-toman cause. In the course of their courtship, she inculcates into the brawnyhero an appreciation for her right to work, conduct science, engage in warfare,have intimate relations out of wedlock, sacrifice her paramour for the cause ofher choosing, and presumably become a single mother, all the while employingOriental rather than Western idiom to rationalize her demands. Similarly,Mehmet (“the Conqueror” even in conventional English usage) is shown tohave a soft side, reaching out to his son after recalling the coldness he experi-ence at the hands of his own father and struggling with insecurity anddepression when the first attacks on the city fail.

A number of commentators have expressed dismay at the film’s bombastic


56. Price 1993, 674.

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ethno-religious nationalism and glorification of war. Pundits in this vein, fromrenowned composer Fazil Say to ex-patriot journalist Andrew Finkel, were par-ticularly dismayed by the self-aggrandizing message they believed the filmwould send to international audiences. Many others, however, including com-mentators from camps otherwise skeptical to Ottomanist revisionism, arguedthat the quality of the screenplay and acting was bound to be flawed in a film ofthis nature. What they appeared to be most impressed by was the quality of thefilm’s production, which was said time and again to prove that Turkey had ar-rived at an unprecedented threshold in terms of its ability to generateworld-class entertainment. Such views reflect a desire that the film and theOttomanist genre more broadly appears to have either met or piqued, namely,the will to affirm that Turkey has arrived at the “level of contemporary civiliza-tion,” a civilization that is, moreover, its own.57

Conclusion

The desire to claim authentic sources for contemporary initiatives in an era ofAsian ascendence and Western retreat appear to be animating comparable bidsto confront the past in other former empires/rising powers across (Eur)Asia. Inthis article, I have sought to demonstrate that the FERPs represent a promisingcategory for analysis that enables us to capture in a dynamic fashion the ways inwhich history is being deployed for present purposes.

To do so, I have sought to bridge the gap between IR and areas studies by em-bedding the FERPs in a common problematique in which the encounter withWestern hegemony/modernity engendered three waves of confronting the past:Eurocentric denial, Occidentalist reification, and what I have called the authen-ticism of multiple modernities approach. The last resonates with the cultural,social, and economic priorities of a world characterized by both globalizationand shifting balances of power. I have further shown that by mapping debatesover the past at the state, substate, and transstate levels, one can capture theways the reinvented past serves as a source of identity, normativity, and action. Ihave argued that in the Turkish case this is evident in the claim made by both of-ficial and market actors to continuity with the Ottoman-Islamic past from whicha homegrown humanism is said to emanate. Such a framework may be helpingTurkey to navigate its perennial identity crisis at a time of paradigm shift at homeand in the world.

The Turkish case raises a number of questions relevant to other former em-pires-cum-rising powers. Is nostalgia for empire part and parcel of thedisplacement or the reconfiguration of the nation-state in the era of globaliza-tion? Is there a correlation between the geopolitical and geocultural spacesinhabited by historical empires and emerging regional hegemons? How is nos-


57. The expression “contemporary civilization” is a trope associated with early republican na-tion-builders’ modernist project in which the term was used to denote Western practices andframeworks without directly alluding the West. Thus, the westernist project was portrayed as aemancipatory rather than as mimicry in keeping with the anti-imperialist and nationalist pre-rogatives of the nation-building agenda.

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talgia for empire and its fostering by market and state actors received byaudience and policy-makers in other countries which share post-imperial geog-raphies? In what ways do the roles played by private and public agents with theirrespective focus on the cultural industries and public diplomacy converge anddiverge? What are the implications for the imagination of a contiguous(Eur)Asian space and prospects for cooperation and conflict? This article hassought to develop a framework which can go some way to helping us addresssuch questions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: This article is part of ongoing work being done by Nora FisherOnar (Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey) toward a decentered approach to emerg-ing powers in international relations theory that accommodates insights from historicalsociology, intellectual history, and comparative area studies. She is currently writing amonograph on the subject and developing a collaborative research platform.

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Historical Legacies in Rising Powers: Towards an (Eur)Asian Approach

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