Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ROBERT ((Inter-)nationalism and the new Turkey: the rise and fall of international education at Istanbul's Robert College, c. 1913-1933)
Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2021-07-31
This project analyses the paradoxical relation between “international education”, or even “peace education”, and the Turcocentric national ideology of Kemal Atatürk in the first half of the 20th century. Using the case of the Robert College, an American private institution in Istanbul which aimed to foster a future local elite of a multi-ethnic student body, and its social-studies instructor Dr. Edgar J. Fisher, the project sheds light on the negotiation between two conceptions of modernity, as represented by American internationalist ideals and the tenets of Kemalism, the Westernizing, yet deeply ethnocentric national ideology of post-1923 Turkey. Using archival documents, I address the educational intentions of the school’s staff, strategies for adjustment toward the Turkish authorities and the reasons for the eventual demise of international education, as well as students’ understanding of internationalism, religious, ethnic and national identity in the Ottoman past and in the new Turkish republic. This perspective has been missing in research on the Kemalist revolution from above, owing to the dominance of the regime’s discourse in the interwar period. The project thus brings new knowledge about this critical phase of Turkish history. By revisiting the early phase of nation formation, this project contributes a more nuanced understanding of the roots of the present nationalist backlash against “Western” globalization, highlighting among other things the continuity between today’s Islamist traditionalism and the perceived secularism of Kemalism, with regard to tolerance of ethnic and religious diversity.
The study's main conclusions are as follows. Despite the wartime ethnic cleansing from which the new Turkey emerged, the prospect of international conciliation and disarmament in the 1920s convinced American educators that they could forge an enlightened elite that would inoculate Turkish society against national hatred. The positive response from the student community seemed to vindicate this assumption. The nationalist regime prohibited foreign educators from teaching Turkish history, which hampered efforts to teach about the roots of present ills, meaning that the violent end of the Ottoman Empire from which the new Turkey had emerged could never be addressed in the open though the Armenian genocide found its way into students’ essays anyway. The overall belief in progress also precluded the interethnic understanding and conciliation that American educators hoped for, as that would have required a more profound engagement with the troublesome past than mere declarations of good faith. Still, international education not only offered students an opportunity to express themselves more freely than elsewhere in Turkey, but also invited them to examine certain problems from different viewpoints. Both American educators and Kemalists saw the development of nationalism as vital to the process of becoming modern, although the former viewed this as a mere stage in the process of forging a truly international sentiment. When the ruling party intensified its promotion of Turkish nationalism in the 1930s, taking control over the teaching of the social sciences at Robert College, the project for international education was abandoned by college authorities, in the hope of securing future American influence in Turkey.
The study's main conclusions are as follows. Despite the wartime ethnic cleansing from which the new Turkey emerged, the prospect of international conciliation and disarmament in the 1920s convinced American educators that they could forge an enlightened elite that would inoculate Turkish society against national hatred. The positive response from the student community seemed to vindicate this assumption. The nationalist regime prohibited foreign educators from teaching Turkish history, which hampered efforts to teach about the roots of present ills, meaning that the violent end of the Ottoman Empire from which the new Turkey had emerged could never be addressed in the open though the Armenian genocide found its way into students’ essays anyway. The overall belief in progress also precluded the interethnic understanding and conciliation that American educators hoped for, as that would have required a more profound engagement with the troublesome past than mere declarations of good faith. Still, international education not only offered students an opportunity to express themselves more freely than elsewhere in Turkey, but also invited them to examine certain problems from different viewpoints. Both American educators and Kemalists saw the development of nationalism as vital to the process of becoming modern, although the former viewed this as a mere stage in the process of forging a truly international sentiment. When the ruling party intensified its promotion of Turkish nationalism in the 1930s, taking control over the teaching of the social sciences at Robert College, the project for international education was abandoned by college authorities, in the hope of securing future American influence in Turkey.
The project consisted of four work packages. In the first work package (WP1), I had set out the goal to attend training courses at the University of Copenhagen as well as the organization of a workshop. In the second (WP2), I planned for two data collection trips to archives in the United States, while the third (WP3) consisted of the actual analysis of the collected data and the writing of two articles and a book chapter. The fourth package (WP4) related to the dissemination activities, where I set the goal of attending and presenting my project at two conferences as well as at a seminar at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS).
Regrettably, the coming of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown of the University of Copenhagen upended much of the planning and objectives of WP 1 and 4. The ban against international travel and the cancellation of many academic conferences in 2020 was a risk that nobody had anticipated at the beginning of the project. It forced me to reconsider large parts of the project. Fortunately, I had already collected most of the data needed during my first trip to the archives held at Columbia University in New York in the fall of 2019, and I was later able to access material from archives elsewhere in the US through the help of dedicated archivists once they were allowed back into their workplace. Since the international conferences I originally envisioned writing papers for that could be turned into journal articles were cancelled, and the data collected from the US archives yielded richer insights into the subject than previously expected, I changed the objectives for WP3, in close consultation with my scientific supervisor. Instead of two journal articles and a book chapter, I decided to write a monograph, intended for the book series at Palgrave Macmillan that my supervisor Catharina Raudvere edits. The manuscript is now completed and ready to be submitted on 7 January 2022, with a likely publication date toward the end of the year. In addition to that, I have presented my project at the seminar of the research group The Many Roads in Modernity at the University of Copenhagen on 7 April, 2021, with Professor Resat Kasaba of the University of Washington as an invited commentator via Zoom. After this very successful seminar, I submitted my book proposal to Palgrave Macmillan, which led to a contract after a similarily positive anonymous peer review. Shortly after, I received an invitation by email by Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dr. Khatchig Mouradian to contribute a chapter of an upcoming handbook on the legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War in the Middle East. Two workshops (on Zoom and, if possible, at Columbia University, New York) relating to this book project are scheduled for February and June, 2022. In addition to that, I have presented the project along with its preliminary results to fellow historians from Södertörn University, Sweden, and Åbo Akademi, Finland, at a digital workshop in May 2022. I also plan to disseminate the results of the project at the 30th Congress of Nordic Historians in Gothenburg in August 2022.
Regrettably, the coming of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown of the University of Copenhagen upended much of the planning and objectives of WP 1 and 4. The ban against international travel and the cancellation of many academic conferences in 2020 was a risk that nobody had anticipated at the beginning of the project. It forced me to reconsider large parts of the project. Fortunately, I had already collected most of the data needed during my first trip to the archives held at Columbia University in New York in the fall of 2019, and I was later able to access material from archives elsewhere in the US through the help of dedicated archivists once they were allowed back into their workplace. Since the international conferences I originally envisioned writing papers for that could be turned into journal articles were cancelled, and the data collected from the US archives yielded richer insights into the subject than previously expected, I changed the objectives for WP3, in close consultation with my scientific supervisor. Instead of two journal articles and a book chapter, I decided to write a monograph, intended for the book series at Palgrave Macmillan that my supervisor Catharina Raudvere edits. The manuscript is now completed and ready to be submitted on 7 January 2022, with a likely publication date toward the end of the year. In addition to that, I have presented my project at the seminar of the research group The Many Roads in Modernity at the University of Copenhagen on 7 April, 2021, with Professor Resat Kasaba of the University of Washington as an invited commentator via Zoom. After this very successful seminar, I submitted my book proposal to Palgrave Macmillan, which led to a contract after a similarily positive anonymous peer review. Shortly after, I received an invitation by email by Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dr. Khatchig Mouradian to contribute a chapter of an upcoming handbook on the legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War in the Middle East. Two workshops (on Zoom and, if possible, at Columbia University, New York) relating to this book project are scheduled for February and June, 2022. In addition to that, I have presented the project along with its preliminary results to fellow historians from Södertörn University, Sweden, and Åbo Akademi, Finland, at a digital workshop in May 2022. I also plan to disseminate the results of the project at the 30th Congress of Nordic Historians in Gothenburg in August 2022.
The project's wider impact still lies in the future, as the resulting monograph has yet to be published. I believe that the book will stimulate a scholarly debate about the origins of the American-Turkish partnership as well as a wider societal debate about the deeper historical background to Turkey's current predicament. The anonymous peer reviewer of the book proposal noted in his or her report that the project promises an "insightful and innovative study of high quality on early Kemalist Turkey", the findings of which "will be significant to understand Turkey's journey from then to its current authoritarian crises." The reviewer further notes that "This research will be of use and importance for the next ten years at least", and that apart from being of interest to scholars of Turkish and Middle East studies, it will "certainly interest a Turkish readership so that a Turkish translation will probably by realised in a later stage".