A Myth Under Question: Military-Nation

“The contradictions and silences in both seemingly intact discourse of militarized nationhood and individuals’ experiences promise new openings in overcoming the dissimulating state discourse”, Ayse Gül Altinay, observes in the closing paragraph of her invaluable research“The Myth of The Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey”.

Her book comprises one of these “new openings” which, in her own words, provide a new approach in analyzing “the mechanisms that have created and sustained the myth of the military-nation, as well as of interrogating the many contradictions that lie beneath and within the masks of ‘the military’ and ‘the state’”.

Altinay’s book appears at a time when the powers and domination of the Turkish army is under public discussion as the country marks time for a date to start negotiations with the European Union (EU) for full membership. Yet for most Turks, albeit the country had to face 4 military coups (1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997) since its adoption of a multi-party democracy in 1950, the credibility and the popularity of the army seems to remain unstained. According to a recent public opinion poll the military appears as the most respected institution with 80 percent while the parliament and the media remain as the least respected.

Altinay’s research probes into the intricate mechanisms of the building up of the Turkish nation-state in which the Turkish military has played a very significant part, thus bringing from heavens to the earth one of the major myhths of Turkish statehood what will be standing to the test of major debates as the country expects to get along with the so called “European values” of multi-ethnicity, civil society, accountability, affirmative action, etc…

Published by Palgrave Macmillan this month, Altinay’s 207 page book is welcomed by Cynthia Cockburn of City University London, as “ a stunning insight into the intimate and enduring bond between education and military service in Turkey.”

“The Myth of the Military-Nation is a precious gift to those many of us who want to understand the cultural processes through which manhood and national belonging come to be inseparable from soldiering - and the courage and cost involved in reaching for an unmilitarized way of being," says Cockburn, in appreciation of the universal value of Altinay’s work which transcends the Turkish experience as such and provides insight to male-dominated state building mechanisms of modernity in general.

"With all the news about Turkish politics due to the Cyprus, Iraq and EU debates, now is exactly the time for all of us to read this smart feminist investigation of the Turkish political interplay between masculinity, men, statist nationalism and soldiering, " observes feminist author Cynthia Enloe who also values Altinay as “one of the most insightful political anthropologists,” she knows.

Betty A. Reardon of Peace Education Center, Teachers College too converges that "Gul Altinay has dared to demonstrate a crucial truth that applies not only to Turkey but to virtually all states, as well as, to human groups aspiring to statehood; the conflation of national identity and military capacity is the greatest of the many obstacles to human security.”

And she advises that “it should be read by every educator concerned by the disservice to critical learning done by the militarization of education." For “this is a work which contributes essential substance to modern history, peace and security studies, gender studies and to the theory and practice of education.”

The author, Ayse Gül Altinay is Assistant Professor of anthropology and cultural studies at İstanbul’s Sabanci University . With a Ph. D. from USA’a Duke University where she has thaught anthropology and gender studies she is also distinguished with a wide range of articles in Turkish and English, she is the editor of “Vatan-Millet Kadinlar” (Homeland-Nation-Women) from İletisim Yayinlari, Istanbul. (EK/YE)