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.

Keywords: Turkish Hearths, Turkism, nation, töre, historical subject, ontology, hegemony, historical capitalism, geopolitical unity, Turkistan, imperialism

1. Introduction

The present historical moment cannot be understood merely as an international crisis marked by the disruption of inter-state equilibrium. At a deeper level, what is at work is the erosion of the capacity of communities to exist under their own names, with their own memory, and with their own historical consciousness. For this reason, the crisis of our time is not merely political, but ontological. By “ontological crisis” is meant not only the weakening of a community’s capacity for governance, but also the uncertainty surrounding what it understands itself to be in history, under what name it will continue, and within what framework of values it will reproduce itself.

Ontological dissolution is not merely the loss of identity; it is the erosion of a community’s capacity to exist as a historical subject. For socio-historical being is not a self-contained presence like a natural object; rather, it is a mode of existence that becomes visible within the horizon of recognition, naming, and differentiation constituted by other communities. The historical subject, therefore, is not merely a consciousness that regards itself as a subject; it is a community that is also named, recognized, and historically discerned by others as the constitutive and determining side of an event.

At this point, a critical conceptual distinction must be made: external recognition may occur at three distinct levels:

• The level of simple record: a community’s name appears in a chronicle or source.
• The level of effective element: a community plays a certain role in a war or event.
• The level of constitutive subject: in the world-historical record and collective memory, the main axis of meaning and naming is constituted between specific parties.

In this study, the concept of the historical subject is defined at the third level, that of the constitutive subject. In other words, the fact that a community is mentioned in sources or plays a role in an event does not automatically make it the constitutive historical party to that event. The historical subject is the community through which the historical naming of the event and its principal axis of conflict are constituted.

This distinction may be illustrated through a concrete example. In world historiography, in general historical encyclopedias, and in the chronicles of the period—Byzantine, Arab, Syriac, and Armenian alike—the Battle of Manzikert (1071) has been recorded as a war between the Turks (the Seljuks) and the Eastern Roman Empire. The name of the battle, its meaning, and its principal axis of conflict are all constituted in terms of these two constitutive parties.

It is a historical fact that Turkic tribes such as the Pechenegs, Oghuz, and Cumans were present in the Eastern Roman army and changed sides at the decisive moment. These groups are indeed mentioned in the sources (the first level), and they even affected the outcome of the battle (the second level). Yet this does not make them constitutive parties within the world-historical narrative of the war. They appear, rather, as elements incorporated into the military field of attraction of the Eastern Roman imperial order. Their change of allegiance at the decisive moment does not mean that they were themselves constitutive parties; rather, it indicates that when they encountered a force belonging to their own customary world, they abandoned the political line to which they had been attached and turned toward a ground of historical affinity. What is visible here, therefore, is not the subject-formation of secondary elements, but the renewed recognition of the ontological and customary weight of the constitutive subject.

Accordingly, the claim that “there were also Turks in the Eastern Roman army, therefore the war was between Turks and Turks” reduces historical analysis to the level of simple record and abolishes the hierarchical distinction between constitutive subject and auxiliary or secondary element. Historical-subject analysis is not conducted through a sociological inventory of the components present on the battlefield, but through the question of between which sides the conflict acquires its historical meaning.

Indeed, President Erdoğan’s statements that “Geography and history have bound Turks, Kurds, and Arabs together in an indissoluble and inseparable way” and that “Manzikert is the common victory of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs” exemplify a contemporary mode of discourse that seeks to redefine the constitutive historical subject within a multiple and horizontal language of political equivalence. Such formulations reorder communities occupying historically different positions upon the same constitutive plane in an arbitrary manner, thereby obscuring rather than clarifying the name of the bearer historical subject. The claim to historical subjecthood does not rest on abstract declarations of belonging advanced retrospectively, but on historical continuity, recognition by others as a constitutive party, and discernible constitutive effect. In the absence of these criteria, the rhetoric of “we too were there in history” remains not historical analysis, but retrospective political rhetoric aimed at occupying symbolic space.

This is the historical march of the Turks. Both geography and history have recorded this march in the name of the constitutive subject that bore it. Other elements that participated in this process did not appear as independent historical subjects under their own names, but as components articulated to this march and functioning within its political horizon.

For the Turkish nation, the ontological crisis is twofold. On the one hand, there is external encirclement: the fragmentation of geopolitical depth, the severing of historical bonds, and the normalization of strategic encirclement. On the other hand, there is internal indeterminization: the constitutive historical subject is rendered ambiguous within aggregates of equivalent and horizontally flattened identities. Thus the national subject finds itself vulnerable not only at the military or political level, but also at the conceptual and spiritual level. The tendency visible in the discourse of various political actors in recent years—most notably in President Erdoğan’s formulations of “Turk, Kurd, and Arab”—clearly demonstrates that, for the Turks, the issue is not merely one of current political controversy, but directly one of being and historical continuity.

For this reason, it is insufficient to read Turkism merely as a declaration of identity, an ethnic sentiment, or a temporary political reaction peculiar to the modern era. At a deeper level, Turkism is the principle by which the historical subject preserves and reconstitutes itself against dissolution. The central argument of this text is that Turkism is not a biological-ethnic doctrine, but an ontological-political form that defends the customary, spiritual, and geopolitical continuity of the historical subject.

2. Aim, Method, and Scope

The aim of this study is to reconceptualize Turkism, against reductionist interpretations that regard it merely as the ethnic nationalism of the modern era, in its customary, ontological, and geopolitical dimensions.

To this end, three questions are posed. First, what is the nation, and within what theoretical framework should the Turkish nation be defined? Second, what have the Turkish Hearths and Turkism historically represented, and for what reason should they be reconsidered today? Third, while projects of unity among European peoples are presented as “progress,” why is the horizon of unity in the Turkic world so often stigmatized as “reactionary” or “dangerous”?

Methodologically, the study adopts a threefold approach. First, it undertakes conceptual analysis, clarifying the concepts of nation, töre, ontology, historical subject, and hegemony. Second, it employs historical comparison to examine the intellectual differences among Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism, and European integration. Third, it introduces geopolitical interpretation in order to establish a connection between the hegemonic phases of historical capitalism and contemporary imperial aggression.

The distinctive contribution of this study lies in its refusal to view Turkism either as mere cultural romanticism or as a merely modern ideological invention. Here, Turkism is treated as a theory of being that defends the customary and geopolitical continuity of the historical subject. Put differently, the text seeks to move Turkism from the plane of “identity” to the plane of “being.”

3. Literature and Theoretical Discussion

The concept of the nation remains one of the most contested fields in modern political theory. Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, marks a classical threshold insofar as it grounds the nation not merely in common origin, but in shared sacrifice and the will to live together. Benedict Anderson, by contrast, defines the nation as an “imagined political community,” arguing that it is constituted in the modern era through communication, print culture, and political imagination. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy likewise emphasizes that nationalism should be understood simultaneously as a political movement, a psychological attachment, and a system of belief.

The strength of this literature lies in the fact that it frees the nation from crude biological determinism. Its weakness, however, is that some interpretations reduce the nation excessively to the level of discursive construction. The fact that nations acquire political form in the modern era does not mean that they are ahistorical or arbitrary. To be historically constituted is not a mark of unreality; on the contrary, it is the mark of social reality itself. The state is historical; law is historical; the market is historical. None of these is therefore regarded as imaginary. The same applies to the nation.

Within Turkish intellectual history, Yusuf Akçura and Ziya Gökalp represent two decisive moments. Akçura’s Three Policies undertakes a historical-political comparison among Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism, showing how, in the context of imperial disintegration, Turkism emerged as the final and viable option. Academic assessments published in DergiPark likewise make clear that this text was an effort to determine a direction in the face of the Ottoman political impasse.

4. Redefining the Concept of the Nation

To understand the nation, one must surrender it neither to biological essentialism nor to a purely constructivist theory of discourse. The nation is not a natural datum grounded solely in common descent; yet neither is it an arbitrary fiction constituted solely by discourse. This study proposes the following definition: the nation is the historically formed expression, at the level of language, memory, töre, and political will, of the common psychological-spiritual structure that emerges in the process of a community’s historical, vital, and species-level reproduction.

The first implication of this definition is that the nation is not the crude sum of lineage. The second is that the nation is not merely a conceptual consensus. Rather, the nation is the political form assumed by the spiritual-moral structure that emerges through shared production, shared defense, shared injury, and a shared sense of the future. It is therefore not merely a matter of living together, but of suffering together, sacrificing together, and moving together toward the future.

The decisive expression here is “common psychological-spiritual structure.” Communities are bound not only by similar language or similar traditions, but by a shared sense of fate. When a community perceives the disaster of another community in a distant geography as though it were its own, one encounters one of the deepest grounds of unity at both the national and civilizational scales. The nation is thus neither a metaphysics of descent nor merely a product of discourse; it is a historical-existential unity that has acquired reality precisely because it has taken shape in history.

5. Töre: Ontological Principle, Ethical Measure, Political Norm

One of the original conceptual centers of this text is the notion of töre. It is often understood merely as tradition, custom, or an archaic legal order. Here, however, töre is conceived as the normative-ontological core that allows a community to cease being a dispersed crowd and become a historical whole.

The ontological dimension of töre lies in its determination of the principle of order under which a community understands itself. Its ethical-political dimension lies in limiting government not to the technique of domination, but to obligations of justice, protection, and elevation. Its historical-spiritual dimension lies in establishing continuity across generations and thereby preventing the dissolution of the common psychological-spiritual structure.

For this reason, when Turkism is thought together with töre, it ceases to be an ethnic slogan of belonging and becomes the normative theory of being of the historical subject. Turkism without töre is easily reduced to narrow identity politics; töre without Turkism becomes a museumized fragment of tradition. Their conjunction establishes both memory and political will.

6. Historical Subject and Ontological Dissolution

The “historical subject” is a community that is not the passive object of history, but possesses the capacity to constitute its own memory, fate, and future. To lose the quality of historical subjecthood is not merely to lose a state. It is to lose the power of naming, the spirit of sacrifice, the reflex of defense, and the idea of a shared future. Ontological dissolution is therefore not a simple loss of identity, but the attenuation of the capacity to exist as a historical subject.

This is precisely what the contemporary global regime of indeterminization targets. Communities are regarded either as aggregates of consumer individuals or as assemblages of equivalent and horizontally distributed differences. In both cases, the constitutive subject disappears. In the case of the Turkish nation, this dissolution operates in two forms: the narrowing of historical depth and the dissolution of the constitutive subject within amorphous plurality.

7. Engaging the Counter-Theses

7.1. “Turkism is not an ontological principle but merely a modern political ideology”

One of the most common objections raised by modernist theories of nationalism is that Turkism consists merely of ideological productions of the modern era and that, for this reason, attributing ontological depth to it is anachronistic. The limited truth in this objection lies in its reminder that the nation acquired a specific political form within capitalist modernity. Its fundamental error, however, lies in conflating the historical subject with its modern political form. Any approach that confuses the modern political form with the historical subject may appear to explain the emergence of the nation, while in fact rendering its historical bearer invisible.

The nation is not a fiction created out of nothing, but the political form assumed within capitalist socio-economic formation by an ethno-cultural community possessing historical continuity. More precisely, the nation is the socio-political form acquired in the modern moment by the biogenetic, ethno-cultural, and historical core of a community through its reorganization by commodity, money, the market, the centralized state, law, and relations of sovereignty. This form may encompass not only the core ethno-cultural community itself, but also other communities governed within the territory over which it is dominant and subjected to its political-legal order, commodity-money relations, and hegemonic form. Yet such expansion does not abolish the name of the constitutive historical subject. On the contrary, the nation is named precisely after that historically continuous dominant ethno-cultural community.

Within this framework, to represent Turkism merely as an ideological invention of the modern era is to establish a false equivalence between the acquisition of modern form and historical rootlessness. Historical-subject communities appear not only within the concepts of modern political theory, but also in ancient and medieval sources, in the naming practices of neighboring societies, and in the memories of allies and enemies under their own names. In this respect, “Turk” is not an exception, but a classical example. Across a vast historical field extending from Chinese annals to Islamic geographers, from Byzantine texts to Russian and European sources, the Turks appear under their own name and are recorded as a historical subject recognized as such by others. For this reason, attempts by communities that never appeared independently in history as constitutive subjects under their own names to claim a share in this historical depth after the fact, to fragment this continuity, or to present the name “Turk” as merely one among equivalent elements cannot be regarded as an innocent demand for plurality. At bottom, this is an attempt to blur both Turkish nation-formation and Turkish historical depth. A community that is truly the subject of history exists in history under its own name, and others know it by that name. If a community is historically a constitutive subject, that status is not conferred upon it from outside after the fact; it is already visible in historical records, political continuity, and the naming practices of other societies. Accordingly, the name of the Turkish nation is the name of the ethno-cultural community that is dominant and constitutive within historical continuity; obscuring that name is not merely a conceptual error, but directly a political operation.

At this point, Yusuf Akçura’s Three Policies is of particular importance. Akçura approached Turkism not as an ahistorical fiction or an arbitrary intellectual fashion, but as a historical-political necessity arising from the objective conditions of Ottoman disintegration. Ottomanism and Islamism may have had a certain function at particular historical moments, but it became increasingly clear that no formula that failed to name the political subject explicitly could halt the disintegration. Turkism is therefore not an ahistorical ideological invention, but the reappearance of the historical subject’s own name within the modern political moment. In other words, the modern national form did not provide the Turks with a new name; it gave political visibility, under new social relations, to an old and historical subject.

7.2. “The nation is entirely the product of modern discourse”

The fact that the nation acquired political form in the modern era does not mean that it lacked a historical-spiritual ground. On the contrary, modern political form may be understood as the organization of an older historical and cultural continuity within new relations of production and new political institutions. The issue is not whether modernity should be acknowledged, but whether one should submit to an ahistoricizing interpretation of modernity.

7.3. “To object to the aggregate of Turk, Kurd, and Arab is to oppose pluralism”

What is rejected here is not plurality as such, but the instrumentalization of plurality for the purpose of rendering the constitutive subject indeterminate. Every historical nation contains multiple layers; yet this plurality does not require the obscuring of the name of its bearer subject. The dissolution of the constitutive subject into a language of equivalent aggregation is, on the surface, inclusive; in reality, it is a politically functional form of indeterminization.

7.4. “The unity of the Turkic world is romantic and impractical”

This objection presents itself as realism. Yet realism does not consist in accepting existing fragmentation as fate. It consists in analyzing what geography, historical memory, energy routes, linguistic proximity, and strategic necessity actually mean. If the search for unity among European peoples can be recognized as a legitimate historical-political form, then the search by Turkic peoples for unity along even closer historical and cultural lines cannot be dismissed in advance as irrational.

8. The Limits of Ottomanism and Ummahism: The Historical Necessity of Turkism

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made it impossible to postpone the question of who constituted the bearer subject of the Ottoman political form. Ottomanism sought to preserve the empire under an abstract civic unity; Ummahism sought to halt disintegration through religious unity. Yet the historical process demonstrated that these two overarching frameworks were incapable of sustaining the actual orientations of concrete communities. The official history of the Turkish Hearths likewise states clearly that, in the face of rising separatist movements after the Tanzimat, doctrines such as Ottomanism and Islamism were soon understood to be insufficient to preserve national unity and integrity.

For this reason, Turkism emerged not as an arbitrary ideological preference, but as the necessity of naming the bearer subject of the state explicitly. Akçura’s Three Policies, in comparing Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism, stands as one of the foundational texts demonstrating that no formula failing to name the political subject could arrest the process of disintegration.

9. The Turkish Hearths: Not a Cultural Society, but a Hearth of Constitutive Reason

That the Turkish Hearths were formally founded on 25 March 1912 is important for chronological placement. More important, however, is the historical need from which they emerged. Their founding histories indicate that preparations began in 1911 and that the institution aimed to elevate the national education of the Turks and their scientific, social, and economic level. This shows that the organization was not merely a literary circle, but a constitutive formation intended to produce social consciousness and national mobilization.

Academic studies on the early Republican period likewise show that during the National Struggle and the early Republic, the Turkish Hearths functioned not merely as a cultural association, but as an intellectual center closely connected with policies of nationhood, reform, and culture. Hamdullah Suphi’s characterization of the Turkish Hearths as the “guardian of the spiritual homeland” likewise points to this function.

For this reason, the call today to rethink the Turkish Hearths is not a demand simply to revive an old institution in identical form. The real issue is to reproduce its historical function: to serve, in moments of disintegration, as a site of constitutive reason that endows the community with the capacity to rethink, rename, and reorganize itself.

10. Enver, Talat, Cemal: Individuals or a Severed Line?

Britannica records that Enver Pasha died in Turkistan on 4 August 1922, Talat Pasha in Berlin on 15 March 1921, and Cemal Pasha in Tiflis on 21 July 1922. This geographical distribution is not merely a biographical datum; it also indicates the extent to which the historical-strategic line between Anatolia and Turkistan became the object of a broad political reckoning. The issue here is not the idolization of individuals, but the recognition that the Turkish political horizon possesses a historical depth too broad to be confined to Anatolia. Anatolia is the center; Turkistan is the depth. When the center is severed from the depth, the result is not merely geographical contraction, but mental and historical contraction as well.

11. Gallipoli, Shared Sacrifice, and Spiritual Integrity

To explain national unity solely in terms of common language, descent, or culture is insufficient. The deeper force that genuinely binds communities is the capacity for shared sacrifice and shared injury. A community recognizes itself not only in the same language, but in the same wound. For this reason, the nation signifies not merely institutional citizenship, but a common psychological-spiritual structure.

Within this framework, Gallipoli may be read not merely as the defense of Anatolia, but as a threshold at which broader historical affiliations became visible. The perception, in distant geographies, of the war in Anatolia as part of their own field of destiny represents one of the deepest manifestations of commonality on both the national and civilizational levels. National unity thus appears not merely as a political contract, but as the psychology of shared sacrifice.

12. European Integration and the Ideological Double Standard

The official historical narrative of the European Union states that the European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951 as the first step toward lasting peace, and that the Treaty of Rome in 1957 established the European Economic Community, thereby inaugurating a period of closer cooperation.

What is striking here is this: while the integration of European peoples—who fought one another for centuries and possessed different languages, denominations, and political traditions—is legitimized through the language of peace, civilization, and progress, the horizon of unity among Turkic peoples—who share common linguistic zones, kindred cultures, intertwined historical memories, and proximate geopolitical interests—is often stigmatized as Turanism, reaction, or danger. This is not a theoretical but an ideological double standard.

This becomes especially visible among self-styled progressive liberal-left circles. If unity on a European scale is called “integration,” while unity on the scale of the Turkic world is called “danger,” what is at work is not universality but hegemonic selectivity.

13. Hegemony, Historical Capitalism, and the Language of Legitimacy

Hegemony is not merely the superiority of coercive apparatuses. It is the power to produce the meanings through which certain forms of unity are deemed natural and progressive, while others are declared dangerous and illegitimate. Hegemonic centers produce not only economic and military power, but also the language of legitimacy.

Historical capitalism is not a linear narrative of progress, but a world-system operating through successive hegemonic forms. The line extending from Mediterranean-centered mercantile predominance to Dutch maritime-commercial hegemony, British industrial-colonial superiority, and finally the financial, military, cultural, and technological dominance of the United States demonstrates that the world-system has been organized through different centers in different historical moments. To understand today’s imperial language, therefore, one must see that centers of power seek to control not only markets, but also the very criteria by which “the progressive” is defined.

14. U.S. Imperial Aggression: Not a Choice, but a Historical Necessity

To explain the current aggression of the United States through neutralizing notions such as “tension” is analytically weak. A more adequate understanding is that a hegemonic center whose relative superiority is eroding is compelled to reproduce itself through war, sanctions, and regional pressure. In this context, war is not an exception, but a technique through which a historical impasse attempts to resolve itself.

As of March 2026, Reuters reported that Israel was carrying out strikes in Tehran, that the United States was actively involved in operational planning against Iran, and that the war had spread into the Iraq-Gulf corridor. During the same period, concerns over energy security also came to the fore. These developments suggest that the issue is not merely a bilateral confrontation between two states, but a broader project of regional redesign.

For this reason, U.S.-Israeli aggression cannot be understood simply as a military confrontation directed against Iran. The deeper issue is that the peoples possessing the historical depth of Eurasia are being kept fragmented, vulnerable, and disconnected from one another.

15. The Unity of the Turkic World: Not Romanticism, but Multilayered Convergence

The unity of the Turkic peoples is often presented either as a romantic dream or as a single-state project. Yet the academically more adequate approach is to conceptualize such unity as a project of multilayered historical convergence. Cultural unity is one thing; historical unity another; linguistic proximity another; geopolitical coordination another; institutional cooperation yet another. Any discussion that fails to distinguish these layers becomes either excessively romantic or excessively reductionist.

For this reason, the unity of the Turkic world cannot be reduced to a single form. Common historical consciousness, shared memory, educational and cultural cooperation, the coordination of energy and transportation routes, shared security sensibility, and reciprocal strategic responsiveness all represent different planes of this unity. Unity does not necessarily mean a single state; it means multilayered historical convergence.

16. Conclusion

The central conclusion of this study is this: Turkism is neither a biological doctrine of race nor a nostalgic sentiment directed toward the past. It is the ontological, customary, and political defense of the historical subject. Discourses that render the nation indeterminate within amorphous pluralities erase the constitutive subject in the name of pluralism; approaches that code European integration as progress while representing the horizon of unity in the Turkic world as danger produce hegemonic ideology.

The theoretical contribution of this text lies in its conceptualization of the nation neither as the crude sum of lineage nor as a merely discursive fiction, but as the historical-political form of the common psychological-spiritual structure that emerges in the course of a community’s historical, vital, and species-level reproduction. In the same way, töre is reconsidered not as folkloric tradition, but as an ontological principle, an ethical measure, and a political norm.

In the current phase of historical capitalism, imperial aggression is the means by which a disintegrating hegemonic power reproduces itself through war. In such an age, the geopolitical unity of the Turkic peoples is not merely a historical ideal, but directly a matter of being. This, precisely, is what it means to rethink the Turkish Hearths: the re-institutionalization by the Turkish nation of its own memory, its own töre, its own constitutive reason, and its own historical depth.

Given that the Turkish Hearths were founded on 25 March 1912, the year 2026 marks the 114th anniversary of their foundation. The hearth of the Turk: Turk Ocaklari 114 Years Old. May the 114th anniversary of the Turkish Hearth be commemorated with due honor. Let this commemoration not be merely the remembrance of an anniversary, but an occasion for bringing once again into consciousness a suppressed memory, a weakened subject, and a horizon that has been sought to be dispersed.