World War I: A Synthesis Essay

The repercussions and consequences that occurred at the end of both World Wars contributed to the dramatic shifts in nationalism and desire for independence during the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Many countries emerged out the fallen empires, empires such as the Weimar Republic and the Ottoman Empire. The desire for independence and the growth of individual and communal nationalism heavily impacted the worldview of ethnic and religious communities all over the world. Suddenly, collections of people were all asking the same question: how did their existence create a path for their “voices” to be legitimized? The contradiction of the development of nationalism and the development of ethnicity have been present since the emergence
Thus, the lackluster transition from the Ottoman Empire to development of the Turkish state in the 1920s, the development of ethno-nationalism in the Turkish state, and the inappropriate ethnic assimilation based on the transition of religious identity to modernity, have all contributed and have led to the politicization of Kurds in Turkey. The Ottoman Empire fell in 1920, at the end of World War I. The instability created by the First World War began to creep into the economic and political infrastructure of the Empire. Power was no longer centralized, with the Allied nations controlling several different separate regions of the former Empire. Nationalism began to be emphasized by the leaders who emerged after the fall, most especially Kemal Ataurk, who believed that “the Ottoman Empire was
The first “rebellion against the modern state [of Turkey] took place in February 1925” (Robins 1993). The leader of the rebellion was a man named “Sheikh Said of Prian, a Kurdish religious leader” (Robins 1993). His platform, unlike Kemal, was “far from being exclusively nationalist” and by doing so, he gained support “on the basis of tribal and religious allegiance” (Robins 1993). This threat to the state was more than enough for the state to “ruthlessly suppress” the rebellion (Robins 1993). By doing so, the Turkish state “underlined the centrality of the use of coercion in Turkish policy on the Kurdish issues” (Robins 1993). The state also used tactics “which have been used against the current insurgency” which resulted in the use of ideology based on “ethno-nationalism, drawing from [the] European experience” (Robins 1993). Thus, just as in the beginning of the Turkish state, ethnic separation was being used to establish the legitimacy of the state, and undermine all those who were not a part of this group. This tactic was used to grow and legitimize nationalism within the state by allowing the majority to rally, despite differences, and isolate a minority, and in the specific case of Turkey, this minority is the Kurds, “simultaneously denying and coopting” their existence (Robins