The Turks have no friends but The Turks: The Sevres trauma and the construction of an exclusionary national identity

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2578919_(Table of contents)

This study examines the enduring memory of the never-implemented Sevres Treaty and the belief in the existence of foreign forces-domestic collaborators trying to partition Turkey through cultural trauma theory. Instead of reducing Sevres to the political and bureaucratic elite’s interests and pursuit of power, or pathological fear, it analyzes the emergence of Sevres as a cultural structure with its narrative, binary codes, and categorization with a relative autonomy from and influence over social and political structures. Through Critical Discourse Analysis/the Discourse-Historical Approach, this study investigates how the founding elite constructed Sevres trauma narrative and the threat of partition as the constitutive other of the birth narrative of the Turkish Republic and its contribution to an exclusionary national identity. It also demonstrates how the political elite and military reproduced and transformed the Sevres narrative starting from the mid-1960s in the face of major domestic and international issues. The thesis also analyzes how pro- EU and pro-democracy groups contested the hegemonic Sevres narrative. With a specific focus on the AKP’s counter-narrative, the study investigates how political actors struggle to gain control over the cultural framework of Sevres. Analyzing how the AKP drew on and reappropriated Sevres trauma structure in its construction of the July 15 coup attempt as a trauma, the study concludes that the cultural structure of Sevres has a relative autonomy vis-à-vis political actors. Finally, this thesis aims to contribute to cultural trauma literature by demonstrating factors that can be influential in determining the exclusionary and antagonistic outcome of cultural traumas through the Turkish case.