Globalism as the Product of Nationalism: Founding Ideology and the Erasure of the Local in Turkey

This study is based on the argument that globalism is a product of nationalism. I argue that globalism, understood as the imagination of the world as a single place, was made possible by and accompanies the emergence of nationalism, defined as the formation of an imagined community in a given (local) discursive space. Focusing on the specific ways in which globalism is understood and experienced locally in Turkey, this study examines how the world-at-large is seen from Turkey as part and product of the founding national ideology during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as expressed in cartoons, and how these visions and images of the globe are produced, mobilized and disseminated locally as part of ongoing nation-building efforts. I argue that during these years the global was invariably imagined as the West, referring mainly to Western Europe, and this imagining was mobilized toward the creation and projection of Turkey as a modern, Western, secular country. I argue that the founding national ideology projected an image of the West as the global-other to be taken as a model and imitated, setting norms for the creation of a new national identity and new norms of citizenship around the principles of secularism, modernity and civilization, which could only be attained by the erasure of the local.