The Reinvention of Kemalism: Between Elitism, Anti-Elitism and Anti-Intellectualism

This article probes the transformation of Kemalism to a xenophobic nation-statism with a strong anti-western animus diluting its self-styled westernism and elitism in response to the rise of the reformist-Islamist ruling JDP and its patchy liberal rhetoric and pro-EU stance. The article points to the novel qualities of the Kemalism of the 2000s but also attests to its inherent anti-elitist, anti-liberal and anti-intellectual nature that reigned in the 1930s given that the Kemalist project in the inter-war period involved the denunciation of the Ottoman establishment with its elite and intelligentsia and its replacement with an intelligentsia of its own that is acquainted with anti-liberalism, anti-cosmopolitism and also anti-intellectualism.