This thesis aims at understanding the citizenship formations in Turkey and Iran by a comparative study of ethnicity, state formation, and nation building in the two lands. The research question is what kind of socio-political and cultural elements caused the two nation states to follow different paths and end up with different citizenship and state formations in the end of the twentieth century. The foci of comparison are the homogenization process of the nation states in ethnic terms, the extent of mass movements, the degree of centrality of the state in shaping the sociopolitical life, and the resistance to the state imposed regulations. In this thesis it is argued that the state tradition inherited from the Ottomans, the ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim minorities, and the intention to assimilate the Kurdish population were the main determinants of Turkish citizenship. The mass movements emanating from the societal groups, the provincial autonomous movements, and the disruption of the state by external invasions were the main determinants of Iranian citizenship. The national identity in Turkey was more strongly based on the Turkish ethnicity / the Iranian national identity functioned as an umbrella identity over all ethnic identities in Iran. The Turkish citizenship, in comparison to Iranian, was closer to the ethnocentric and exclusionary German model / the Iranian citizenship, in comparison to the Turkish, was closer to the soil based and assimilationist French model.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612392/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 August 2010 |
| Creators | Erden, Mustafa Suphi |
| Contributors | Yegen, Mesut |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Ph.D. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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