THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION ON THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY OF MODERN TURKEY: THE CONTEXT OF ÜÇ TARZ-I SİYASET (ISLAMISATION, MODERNIZATION AND NATIONALIZATION) BY YUSUF AKCURA

MEVLÜT UYANIK

ABSTRACT

This project examines the basic impacts the Late Ottoman and Modern Turkish
Experience to European Union, especially Cultural and Religious Identity. If we want to
foster and develop the spirit of democracy and pluralism in European Countries, we must
analyze Turkish experience from the point of theories of political sociology because it is
non members but want to join to EU as different cultural and religious traditions. It is
known that, people show great interest on to the social, ethnicity and political problems
so that will be discussed the formation of ethnic identities and ethnic groups in Modern
Turkey as a construction of nations and nationalism. This issue i.e dialectical integrity
between the human relations and religion relations is very important for European
Countries especially for Crash of Civilizations. For this reason, we have to study the
early forerunners of democracy in Modern Turkey, its influence of the early thinkers,
such as Yusuf Akçura, who lived at the last period of Ottoman State and early period of
Modern Turkey. The impact of this thinker on the history of Turkish modernization in
particular will be analyzed. Then, the place of Nationalist and secularist Turkish thought
in modern Islamic thought and its original contributions to EU, if there any, to the
development of democracy will be discussed. The impact of Western Political Thought
on this influential thinker also will be studies. So, I try to investigate the historical roots
and impact of Western Democratically Thought on our political and social identity. So
that, in this paper, it will be made by critical and rational reading of the political and
sociological accumulation of construction of national identity in Modern Turkey; i.e.
it will be discussed consciousness of Turkishness (Turkiyelilik) like a Europeans and
Americans