Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
RECENT PERIOD TURKISH STUDIES-YAKIN DONEM TURKIYE ARASTIRMALARI, cilt.2023, sa.44, ss.213-239, 2023 (ESCI)
The founding nationalism of the Republic of Turkiye, while establishing the national identity imagination of the newly formed nation-state, centered on the idea of an ethnic continuity extending from Central Asia to Anatolia as embodied in the Turkish History Thesis. In this context, the idea of basing the origins of civilizations such as the Hittites and Sumerians on Central Asia has strengthened the argument that Turkish identity is a contemporary form of belonging. These principles, on which the founding philosophy of the Republic is based, have been criticized by many circles and have led to the expression of alternative initiatives, especially by Anatolianist circles. Carrying the Western form of expression of the official discourse further, the Blue Anatolianists have been influential in the world of Turkish thought since the 1940s. The aim of this study is to reveal that the Blue Anatolianism movement, which is generally shown in the literature as a pure literary-aesthetic movement, a cultural stance or a school of Westernization, should actually be considered as a theory of nationalism based on the land (territorial nationalism) and that also has political outcomes. As a matter of fact, when looked at with the concept sets of nationalism theories, it is obvious that the Blue Anatolianist movement replaced the idea of "ethnic continuity" at the center of the Turkish History Thesis with the principle of "loyalty to the land" and based the center of gravity of the identity on the cosmopolitan tradition of Anatolia from Central Asia, thus envisaging an alternative form of belonging. In this context, by also taking into account the intellectual foundations of the Blue Anatolianism movement in the early republican period, the study focused on the reflections of the movement in the early period and examined the principles put forward by the movement, which was shaped around three main names (The Fisherman of Halicarnassus, Azra Erhat, Sabahattin Eyuboglu), as a theory of territorial nationalism.