Author: İsmet Şahin

Rethinking the Turkish Hearths, Rethinking Turkism
A Study of Customary Being, National Identity, and the Geopolitical Unity of the Turkic World
Abstract

This study conceptualizes Turkism not as ethnic closure in a narrow sense, biological essentialism, or romantic cultural nostalgia, but as an ontological, customary, and political principle of being directed toward the preservation of the historical subject. Its central proposition is this: the contemporary global order generates a regime of indeterminization that erodes not only the borders of states, but also nations’ capacity to name themselves, their historical memory, and their status as constitutive subjects. In the case of the Turkish nation, this process appears as the amorphization of the constitutive historical subject under such discourses as “multiculturalism,” “superordinate identity,” and “plurality.” Within this framework, the Turkish Hearths are approached not merely as a historical society, but as a site for the reorganization of customary memory, constitutive reason, and national continuity. The study further argues that while European integration is legitimized as a progressive historical form, the horizon of unity in the Turkic world is often stigmatized as reactionary, and treats this as an ideological double standard. It also examines the effects of contemporary imperial aggression on Eurasia within the context of the hegemonic phases of historical capitalism. In conclusion, it argues that the geopolitical unity of the Turkic peoples is not a romantic ideal, but directly a matter of historical being. The official institutional history of the Turkish Hearths clearly states that the organization was formally founded on 25 March 1912 and that preparations had begun in 1911.