Turkey, like many other states around the world, has become increasingly interested in “its” diaspora (
Mügge 2012;
Ünver 2013;
Aksel 2014;
Aydin 2014;
Öktem 2014). What that diaspora constitutes, and how it is to be engaged, however, are questions that are intimately tied up with larger questions regarding Turkey’s identity and its role in the world. Turkey has long had official connections with communities of citizens living in Europe, especially in Germany (
Østergaard-Nielsen 2003a,
b,
c). Yet it has only recently begun to use the term “diaspora” and to conceptualize diaspora engagement policies as a way of enhancing its soft power.
7 In this section of the article, I place current “diaspora engagement” policies — namely the establishment in 2010 of the Office for the Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) — in their historical context by providing a brief overview of how the policies of Turkey have historically both generated and engaged “its” diaspora(s) before then turning to a discussion of contemporary trends in Turkish diaspora engagement.
Post-Ottoman Nation-Building
A first wave of “diaspora formation” activities can be traced back historically to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the period of post-Ottoman nation-building.
Brubaker (1996) has argued that diasporas can be formed by two processes — people crossing borders and borders crossing peoples.
8 The first half of the twentieth century saw both of these processes occurring in the area of contemporary Turkey, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire leading to the establishment of new state boundaries which divided populations that shared religious or linguistic affinities. It would be hard to speak of “diasporas” as such during this period, however, as identities were much more fluid, with individuals holding multiple religious, linguistic, and ethnic identities that only became reified with the insertion of nationalist discourses into the old imperial framework (
Mylonas 2012).
In terms of “people crossing borders,” the Armenian expulsions or genocide, the Greek population exchanges of 1923, and the exodus of Assyrian Christians during the same time period all created “diaspora” groups, although both the Armenians and Greeks saw the creation of titular nation-states outside of Anatolia. In terms of “borders crossing peoples,” this created islands of “beached” or “accidental” Muslim/Turkish diaspora populations in modern-day Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, and Northern Iraq and Syria, as well as a Kurdish “diaspora” that stretched across Turkey and the former Ottoman provinces of Iraq and Syria.
The period of Turkish nation-building under a secular Kemalist ideology between 1923 and 1950 saw a simultaneous attempt to homogenize an identity within the territorial borders of the newly created Turkish state, as well as a general rejection of irredentism or pan-Turkism (which had been an important political ideology in the late Ottoman period). Thus, it was argued that “the folk which constitute the Republic of Turkey constitute the Nation.”
9 This period of closure, defined by a statist period of nation-building and reinforced by the geopolitical constraints and realities of the Cold War, included a state-driven economic model which laid the foundations for developments that were to eventually give rise to the emergence of a new type of diaspora via labor migration to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and political exile in the 1980s.
1960s and 1970s Labor Migration between Turkey and Europe
Whereas the end of the Ottoman Empire and early Turkish nation-building generated Armenian and Greek diasporas with historical ties to the territory of modern Turkey, the existence of communities of Turkish citizens and their descendants in Germany and other Western European countries has its origins in state policies of both the sending and receiving states of the time. There was a coincidence between the need of states such as Turkey to export labor to relieve unemployment and the need for labor in Europe that emerged during the postwar economic boom period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The German guest worker (
gastarbeiter) system of migration “was devised and operated during a period of virtually full employment characterized by around 0.5 percent unemployment rate” (
Bhagwati, Schatz, and Wong 1984, 278). Following the end of World War II, there was a shortage of labor throughout Western Europe. For countries experiencing decolonization, this shortage was filled in part by “repatriates.” In the case of Germany, however, the labor shortage was filled initially primarily by refugees from Eastern Europe. By 1950, nine million refugees had crossed over from the German Democratic Republic (
Kindleberger 1967, 30–31). However, this labor supply was cut off with the building of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the iron curtain over Eastern Europe.
Turkey, like other Mediterranean countries, began to send migrant labor to Germany and other states in Western Europe. In July 1960, representatives of German employers established a recruitment bureau in Istanbul in order to channel workers to West Germany. A bilateral agreement between Germany and Turkey was signed on October 30, 1961, which made the
Bundesanstalt für Arbeit (BfA) responsible for setting up recruiting agencies in Turkey. The government recruiting office was responsible for linking German employers with potential labor recruits in Turkey. The bilateral agreement created an official framework for workers’ migration and outlined such issues as levels of migration, benefits to workers, responsibilities of sending and receiving country, and so forth, and was revised in 1964 (
Akgündüz 1993, 155). In 1961, there were approximately 7,000 Turkish citizens living in Germany (
Leggewie 1996, 81). In the period between 1968 and 1972, 500 to 600 German recruitment offices operated throughout the Mediterranean region (
Rist 1979, 412). In 1969, 80.8 percent of Turkish migration to Germany went through the official recruitment system (
Castles and Kosack 1985, 41–42).
During the same period, the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey’s state interests and official migration policies also had an impact on the expansion of a migratory flow from Turkey to Germany. Turkish policymakers sought to use labor emigration as a means of fulfilling several policy objectives, including the reduction of unemployment, the alleviation of some of the infrastructural strain resulting from internal rural to urban migration, and the increase of foreign exchange reserves through remittances. As
Keyder and Aksu-Koç (1988, 7–10) note, the state-driven economic policy of import substitution industrialization (ISI) which Turkey pursued during this period provided an incentive for labor exports, because it created domestic unemployment by focusing on technology as opposed to labor, while producing goods only for an internal market, not for external trade, and therefore did not create sources of foreign revenue. At the same time, domestic industrialization created a “geographical and social unevenness” in society, as centers of urban industrialization grew at the expense of impoverished peripheral areas, which were relegated to merely providing pools of labor in the face of declining agricultural production.
While Turkey’s economy was growing at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent between 1960 and 1978, per capita income, even by 1980, was still only $850, well below that of other Mediterranean states, such as Spain, Greece, or Portugal. The combination of a high rate of population growth (from 20.9 million in 1950 to 45.2 million in 1980) and a rapid mechanization of agriculture created a tremendous burden on the Turkish labor market. From 1950 to 1975, between 7 to 9 million people migrated within Turkey from rural to urban areas (
Sayari 1986, 90). Given that most Turkish citizens involved in the first wave of migration from Turkey were skilled artisans and members of the petite bourgeoisie in rural and urban areas who were seeking to escape proletarization, migration policies were viewed as a safety valve for easing discontent (
Akgündüz 1993, 171). Through migration, Turkey would be able to export workers, and ease domestic unemployment and the infrastructural demands on rapidly expanding urban centers. Turkey therefore strategically signed migration agreements not only with Germany, but also with Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, and Switzerland, although the vast majority of migrant labor flows were to be directed to Germany.
Bahadir (1979, 105) argues that Turkey deliberately entered into as many labor agreements as possible in order to fall “back on other countries if one showed signs of saturation and diminished absorption ability.”
The desire to attract foreign remittances in order to cope with a foreign exchange crisis was an additional component of Turkey’s migration policies. By the early 1970s, remittances represented 70 percent of Turkey’s foreign currency earnings, 84 percent of export earnings, and 5 percent of the gross national product (
Sayari 1986, 92–93). Workers’ remittances continued to be a primary source of foreign exchange up through the 1980s, at which time Turkey switched to an export-led growth strategy. Turkey’s Second Five Year Development Plan, 1968–1972, explicitly noted the importance of workers’ remittances to the Turkish economy and included measures to increase them. Official figures for annual workers’ remittances ranged from between $1 billion and $2 billion annually between 1973 and 1986. The amount of unofficial transfers is likely to have been substantially higher. Between 1973 and 1975, official labor remittances equaled between 93.7 and 99.8 percent of exports in Turkey (
Richards and Waterbury 1990, 390–91).
As part of state policy, Turkey attempted to channel the flow of remittances through official channels, such as state banks. However, the official figures only represent a tiny fraction of the actual financial transfers that occur between migration-receiving and migration-sending countries. Most transfers occur through informal and unofficial channels (
Choucri 1986;
Richards and Waterbury 1990, 389). Worker remittances in the form of foreign currency or consumer goods were important in driving much of the underground economy of Turkey and other countries. In the late 1970s, unofficial worker remittances helped to pay for about $1.5 billion worth of smuggled imports. “Much of these consisted of badly needed equipment and primary inputs, without which Turkish industry would have probably collapsed” (
Hale 1981, 232). In addition to the desire to ease unemployment and urban migration, and attract remittances, Turkish migration policy was also motivated by the hope that rural migrant workers would return home with useful skills and training and that returning migrants would make investments in their local communities upon their reentry into the country. As migrants began to return to Turkey with consumer goods from Europe, migration became a desirable alternative to many segments of the population. The Turkish government faced domestic pressures to expand its migration policies, and in the process, “the demand for getting on the official lists for worker recruitment emerged as a new and important source of patronage” (
Sayari 1986, 92–93).
Following the oil crisis and a rise in unemployment in Germany, official recruitment of non-EEC foreign workers was put to a halt by Germany in November 1973. However, contrary to German expectations, the Turkish migrant community did not decrease in number after the change in recruitment policies. While there was an initial drop in the number of workers, the total number of Turkish immigrants increased. The years following 1973 brought a change in the type of migration to Germany. No longer recruiting workers, migration now took the forms of family reunification, politically motivated migration, such as asylum seekers — particularly in the years following the military coup in Turkey in September 1980 — illegal migration, and a small amount of legal migration of specialized persons (including Turkish state employees such as government teachers or religious personnel) (
Akgündüz 1993). Indeed, the early 1980s were defined by the institutionalization of state engagement policies with its diaspora in Europe, which included the establishment of the Turkish Islamic Union of the State Office of Religious Affairs (DITIB) in Cologne Germany, which was organized under Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and which sent imams and other religious figures to Germany.
10 This supplemented the Turkish consular functions, which had been the main source of Turkish engagement in Turkey by providing legal and administrative services to its citizens, such as registering births, marriages, and deaths and providing advice on pensions (
Aydin 2014). Turkey also for the first time passed a law allowing dual citizenship in Turkey in 1981 and included Turkish citizens abroad within the constitution in 1982, as well as establishing the Higher Coordination Council for Workers, which included the Social Affairs and Economic Affairs Committees, which were designed to foster the attachments of citizens abroad to Turkey (
Aksel 2014, 203–204).
11
1980s and 1990s State Repression, Political Exile, and Kurdish Separatism
A new wave of “diaspora formation” occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, in which labor migration was driven by Turkish economic policies of ISI, it was the political dynamics in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s which created new forms of politically motivated migration. This interacted with earlier waves of economic migration, which had created existing networks in Europe, as well as with changes in Europe’s migration policy which increasingly restricted economic migration, making the option of seeking political asylum one of the few channels open for new migrants.
In Turkey, the country experienced increasing political instability and state repression in the late 1970s, which culminated in a military coup in 1980. During that period, there were a number of leftist movements and organizations that faced severe repression, one of which was the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which was founded by Abdullah Öcalan in 1978. The PKK began to agitate among Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey in the late 1970s. Bruinessen argues that the emergence of a radical Kurdish movement in southeastern Anatolia grew in part out of the process of rural to urban migration within Turkey, in which, as part of the general trend of urbanization and modernization of the agricultural sector during the period, Kurdish migration to urban areas in Turkey made populations in southeastern Anatolia more politically aware of the economic and infrastructural disparities which existed between the southeast and the rest of the country (
Bruinessen 1984, 8–9). During the late 1970s, as Turkey descended into a state of internal anarchy characterized by violent clashes between the extreme left and right, the PKK began to attack targets and established a presence in Kurdish areas of Turkey.
When the Turkish military stepped in to restore domestic order to Turkey in September 1980, the PKK, along with all other left-wing organizations and trade unions in Turkey at the time, was severely repressed. In the wake of the 1980 military coup, the government banned a number of political parties, and over 20,000 leftists were arrested around the country, including approximately 3,000 Kurdish activists accused of promoting separatism. During the period, a group of Kurdish intellectuals, activists, and militants had arrived in Western Europe as part of the tens of thousands of political exiles who fled Turkey for political reasons following the 1980 military coup. It was members of this group who began to organize a Kurdish nationalist movement in Western Europe and establish a European branch of the PKK’s political wing, the ERNK, in a number of European states. In addition, Kurdish activists set out to mobilize and politicize segments of the “Turkish” immigrant communities in Europe, which had been established as a result of the migration patterns that had emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of Turkish citizens seeking political asylum in Germany ranged from almost 58,000 in 1980 (the year of the military coup) to between 20,000 and 24,000 per year in the late 1980s and early 1990s (corresponding with the most intense period of the Kurdish conflict) (
Faist 2000b, 83). Across all of Western Europe, almost 350,000 Turkish citizens applied for political asylum in various European countries between 1983 and 1994 (
Faist 2000a,
b, 93). Throughout the period, the number of foreigners seeking admittance to Germany under its asylum policies rose by almost 8,000 percent. In 1992 alone, almost 450,000 people sought political asylum status — this included refugees from the Balkans as well as Turkey (
Gibney 1993). Thus, economic push and pull factors were transformed, to some extent, into a new set of political push and pull factors. These built upon earlier migration patterns and flows, as refugees and political asylum seekers from Turkey drew upon the networks which had been forged by previous economic migrants, and made their way to Germany, continuing an established pattern of chain migration.
During this period a distinctively Kurdish diaspora identity and nationalist movement emerged in Europe. Kurdish political exiles from Turkey set up a “diaspora engagement policy” that was managed largely via the PKK and linked to the ongoing military conflict in southeastern Turkey. In 1982, the new constitution of Turkey strictly prohibited the use of the Kurdish language, Kurdish publications, the establishment of Kurdish political parties, or other expressions of Kurdish identity. Expressions of Kurdish ethnicity were criminalized. Europe provided a space in which Kurdish intellectuals and activists could escape the repression of the Turkish state and work to codify and standardize a Kurdish language and culture by drawing on the opportunity structures that were available within Western European states, particularly Germany and Sweden. The 1990s thus saw a period of intense Kurdish activism in response to the shutting down of the political space in Turkey, which continued until the arrest of the PKK leader Öcalan in 1999 and the admittance of Turkey as an official EU candidate in the same year, which stimulated a period of political liberalization related to the EU acquis process.
At the same time, Turkey was also further institutionalizing its interaction with Turkish emigrants, moving beyond the provision of social, religious, and educational services to a more comprehensive approach that began to focus on fostering transnational ties with Turkish citizens abroad who were increasingly integrating into European states and societies (
Østergaard-Nielsen 2003c;
Kaya 2011). Elsewhere, the end of the Cold War had reopened the question of Turkic and Muslim identity, with Turkey emphasizing a shared kinship with Muslim and Turkic groups in the Balkans, Caucasus, Central Asia, China, and the Middle East.
12
2001–2015: Turkey’s Diaspora(s) and the Emergence of the “New Diaspora Policy”
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a convergence of events that were to lead to shifts in both Turkish domestic politics and Turkey’s diaspora(s). In addition to the arrest of Öcalan and the beginning of EU accession negotiations and a series of internal domestic reforms, the period saw a change in the geopolitical environment with the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent Global War on Terror and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the emergence of Islam and religion as issues front and center on the world stage, and the rise of the religiously oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) within Turkish domestic politics. This was accompanied by a growth in religiosity in parts of Turkey’s diaspora in Europe. The transformation in identity is reflected in the academic literature on Europe’s Turkish population: whereas in 1996 the sociologist Claus Leggewie published a piece titled “How Germany’s Turks became Kurds,” by
2009 the sociologist Gökce Yurdakul had produced the book
From Guest Workers into Muslims.
Religious politics came to the fore during this period, and the top-down state-driven policies of the AKP combined with the emergence of a more vibrant civil society in which religious expression and religious organizations became more prominent. Thus, groups such as the Fethullah Gülen Hizmet movement, which had been active in Turkey and elsewhere in the 1990s; more fundamentalist groups such as Milli Goruş in Germany; and minority religious movements, such as the more progressive Alevis, all had an opening to increase their prominence in both Turkey and the diaspora, after having built up their capacity in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Turkish state moves to engage its diaspora(s) during this period went hand in hand with a number of other political developments in Turkey, including the emergence of a more expansive Turkish foreign policy, a reconstruction and re-imagination of Turkish national identity to include its Ottoman heritage (so-called neo-Ottomanism), and a political liberalization in Turkey related in part to the EU accession process, as well as a simultaneous process of pluralization and Islamicization. Like other states, Turkey increasingly turned to “its” diaspora as potential source of soft power and influence. Previously viewed as “guest workers,” “Turks abroad,” “Euroturks,” or
almancilar (Turkish word for Germans) (
Kaya and Kentel 2005;
Abadan-Unat 2011), the population in Europe, which was a legacy of previous Turkish state domestic policies of post-imperial nation-building, economic development, and domestic political repression and marginalization, was now being courted as a desirable constituency to enhance Turkish state power.
Turkey’s “diaspora management policy” reached a new stage with the setting up of a formal Office for the Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) in April of 2010. The name itself reflects the ambiguities of defining the diaspora and was meant to include Turkish citizens, students, and through the term “related communities” those who could be associated with Turkey via ethnicity or through historical ties. The aim is to define the diaspora as broadly as possible, with Foreign Minister Davutoglu arguing in 2011:
Every individual who originated from Anatolia belongs to the Turkish diaspora… “regardless of religion and ethnicity. This also included Armenians and Greeks, who the Turkish government would approach in order to ‘win their hearts’. We will talk to every Armenian and member of the Orthodox church who has emigrated from Turkey. We will talk about our glorious shared past. (
Aydin 2014, 14)
In many respects, the office brought together streams of previous policies that were aimed at both Turkish citizens abroad (largely in Europe) and Turkish “ethnic kin” living in the Balkans or Former Soviet Union. As of 2014, the office employed approximately 120 people and had three sections that reflected its different target constituencies: a department for Turkish citizens living abroad, a department for cultural and social relations geared to “co-ethnics” and related communities, and a department for scholarships awarded to students from developing countries to fund an education in Turkey. An analysis of its publications has shown that the focus of the office has been largely on Western Europe, followed by the Balkans, the United States, and Canada — although there are also stories and programs on Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
13 In the Office's journal, there was a predominance of articles about discrimination in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and stories of integration and adoption of Turkish children (
Öktem 2014, 13–16).
At the same time that the state was drawing on its imperial past as a way of projecting a more expansive national identity both at home and abroad, it also drew on its identity as a majority Muslim country as a source of soft power. This was reflected as well in its diaspora policy, in which the state at times positioned itself as the protector of Turks in Europe, standing up for their interests in the face of discrimination or anti-Muslim sentiment in European states. This echoed the way in which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu positioned Israel vis-à-vis Europe’s Jewish population following the Paris attacks in January 2015.
14 These policies were accompanied by a harnessing of Turkey’s
Diyanet or Ministry of Religious Affairs as a more prominent tool for projecting Turkish soft power internationally, including the building of a $100 million mosque in Maryland, United States, as a place of worship for both diaspora Turks and other US-based Muslims.
15 This use of Islamic identity as a form of soft power has been married with an explicit attempt to leverage the diaspora as a tool of state economic and lobbying power — to make (in the words of a member of the TYB Advisory Committee) “the Turkish diaspora among the most influential diasporas in the world.”
16
Turkey’s “New Diaspora Policy” was closely linked to its new assertive foreign policy and attempts to exercise increased geopolitical influence in the world (
Içduygu and Aksel 2013, 183). However, as with the challenges the government came up against in its “zero problems with neighbors” foreign policy, Turkey’s diaspora policy suffered from similar contradictions. Although it had an expansive rhetoric of inclusion in the neo-Ottoman language it uses, this was accompanied by a more narrow nationalist interpretation in much of the language used in the materials it published and the practices it encouraged (
Öktem 2014). For example, while there have been overtures toward Armenians abroad which resulted in an increased level of return tourism and a re-discovery of Armenian identity in Turkey, this has also been accompanied by Turkey’s resistance to recognizing a genocide, which has extended to attempts to engage “its diaspora” in activities such as demonstrations and lobbying against Armenian Genocide resolutions abroad (
Ünver 2013, 182).
An expansive approach to “diaspora engagement” accompanied by a tight state control of content may in and of itself feed into ongoing “intra-diasporic politics” by fostering continuing political conflicts about the nature of national identity. It may even contribute to contemporary “diaspora-generating” processes via exclusionary political practices. An example of this is the targeting and repression by the ruling AK party of the Hizmet movement associated with exiled Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, which began in 2014 and accelerated after the failed 2016 coup, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan publicly blamed on Gülen and his followers. Ongoing internal repression of the movement within Turkey accompanied by a significant transnational presence around the world create conditions which might be ripe for members of the Hizmet movement to form an alternative counter-hegemonic “diasporic identity” which could resemble Turkey’s other marginalized “diasporas” — for example, the Alevis, Kurds, Assyrians, and others.
Finally, attempts to project an expansionist form of nationalism abroad also have the potential to ruffle the feathers of some of the states in which the “Turkish diaspora” reside. This has already been the case in Germany where Turkish state activities are viewed in some quarters as contradicting Germany’s efforts at promoting integration — a view that has not been helped by incidents such as Erdoğan’s 2008 speech in Cologne in which he argued that Turkey was against migrant “assimilation” and that it supported tying (former) nationals and their descendants to Turkey (
Mügge 2013, 20). Indeed, the 2017 Constitutional Referendum was marked by a diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Europe over the issue of holding rallies in Germany and the Netherlands.
17 Turkey has also been vocal about religious discrimination and anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe to the extent that it has periodically promoted itself as the protector of Turkish and/or Muslim communities in Europe — an approach that could be viewed as interventionist and undermining European states’ interests in institutionalizing Islam in Europe (
Laurence 2012).