Today every city and town in Turkey has at least one monument of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), the founding father of the Turkish Republic, located in one of its most important public spaces. All private and state primary, middle and high schools have at least one bust of him in front of which students have to line up every Monday morning and Friday evening to chant the national anthem. Apart from statues and busts, his portraits and pictures are hung in every office in state buildings and in most private offices. His name has been bestowed upon boulevards, parks, stadiums, concert halls, bridges, forests, and, more importantly, on educational institutions. Among these many public expressions, the monumental statues of Atatürk erected before he died exemplify one of the most effective instruments of the elite-driven modernization in early republican Turkey (1923-1938). These monuments reveal the ways in which Atatürk and his political elites attempted to establish a modern and secular sense of identity as well as a new official public culture and official history, mainly constructed through Atatürk’s Nutuk, the speech which he delivered in 1927. Nutuk was Atatürk’s public defense of his policies during the military and diplomatic struggle for independence in Anatolia between 1919 and 1923. It has not only become a remarkable and extremely influential text both in Turkish and foreign historiographies but also has been the source for visualizing the official interpretation of the struggle for independence in Turkey to the present day. Thus, all the monuments of the early Republic stand for such orthodox interpretations of history, emerging defensive Turkish nationalism and national identity while symbolizing the closure of the predating Ottoman Empire. Codified within this new national identity are the elements of secularization and racial homogenization of the society, a western cult of the “Orient” in the Orient, and an effort to control and limit the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam in the official public culture of early republican Turkey. / text

The transformation of the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey involved reforming the government, redefining the relationship between the population and the ruling elite, and navigating ethnic and religious identities and how those identities affected the national identity. Unfortunately, these processes were accompanied by the suppression of religious and ethnic minorities, deportations, violence, and murder.

The present thesis offers an innovative perspective analysing the perception of Turkish atrocities against the Ottoman Greek communities during the temporal period May 1919-December 1922 through the Athenian newspapers Estia and Empros, which were committed to the ubiquitous Greek irredentist vision of the Megali Idea. Delving into theories which emphasize on the political nature of nationalism, on national mobilisation and on the exploitation of mass communication by the elite, this thesis attempts to elaborate on the inclusion of the Ottoman Greeks into an expanded Greek nation-state, based on the principle of self-determination. Hence, from the Greek Press' perspective, the presented Turkish atrocities against a part of the Greek nation and potential subjects of a broadened Greek state had been contextualized on the basis of Greek nationalism. The study shows that, despite the widespread and divided Greek communities in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Estia and Empros were declaring that their common denominator had been their Greek self-determination and the fact that all these communities were viewing the Greek state and the Greek army as their guarantors for their safety. Adding to the agents of Hellenism also the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Estia and Empros were highlighting the crucial role of these agents towards the endangered Ottoman Greek communities. Thus, the presentation of the respective information in the newspapers was leaning on this theoretical schema.

Le Projet GAP ou «South-East Anatolia Development Project » en Turquie est l'un des vastes projets de développement au monde, consistant en la construction de 21 barrages et de 19 centres hydro-électriques sur les fleuves de l'Euphrate et du Tigre. Toutefois, ce projet pose de nombreuses controverses au cours de la dernière décennie tant au niveau national, avec la question kurde, qu'au niveau régional, en raison de l'enjeu du partage de l'eau avec les pays voisins, notamment la Syrie et l'Irak. Néanmoins, ce sujet fut évoqué dans la plupart des cas sous l'angle exclusif de la question conflictuelle kurde. Les objectifs de mon mémoire cherchent à comprendre l’utilisation du projet GAP par le gouvernement turc dans les constructions nationales et politiques de la Turquie de 1930 et 1980 dans un but de souveraineté et puissance nationale. Cette analyse s’effectue dans un cadre plus général de géopolitique et d’histoire politique. En s'appuyant sur des travaux en matière de géopolitique et de puissance, et surtout sur les théories de construction nationale, ce mémoire se penche sur l'évolution du projet GAP, ainsi que sur son instrumentalisation dans la construction nationale de 1930 et la reconstruction politique et nationale de 1980. / The GAP or “South-Eastern Anatolia Development Project” in Turkey is one of the vast development projects in the world, consisting of the construction of 21 dams and 19 hydroelectric centers on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. However, this project posed many controversies during the last decade both at the national level, with the Kurdish question, and at the regional level, because of the issue of sharing water with neighboring countries, notably Syria and Iraq. Nevertheless, this subject was debated in most cases exclusively from the perspective of the Kurdish conflict issue. The objectives of my dissertation are to understand the use of the GAP project by the Turkish government in the national and political constructions of Turkey in 1930 and 1980 with the aim of sovereignty and national power. This analysis is carried out in a more general framework of geopolitics and political history. Drawn on work of geopolitics and power, and especially on theories of national construction, this dissertation focuses mainly on the evolution of the GAP project, as well as its instrumentalization in the national construction of 1930 and the political and national reconstruction of 1980.