The legacy of the spearhead of Italian unification ( Risorgimento), Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), could be said to have received similar treatment by later political movements in Italy. Such “eclectic,” if not unstable, instrumentalization of former intellectual figures is certainly not unique to the case of Gökalp in Turkey. The political-Islamists call attention to the assertion that the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was imprisoned and banned from all political activities after reading one of Gökalp’s poems in 1999 (Bardakçı Reference Bardakçı2002). The far-rightists cite his famous poem – “Its ground is an idea / Its sky is an image / One day it will arrive / But right now it is only a fairy tale” – while conjuring up their pan-Turkist “Red Apple” ideal (Bahçeli Reference Bahçeli2018). Secularists, for instance, refer to him as “the father of Mustafa Kemal’s (Atatürk) ideas” (Parla Reference Parla1985, 93). Even in today’s Turkey, it is not unusual to see Gökalp’s name or hear his poems and slogans in political messages of every stripe and color. The irreconcilable differences in these lines, however, did not alienate his readers but, on the contrary, earned him a strange popularity and sometimes unrestrained appropriation within a variety of ideological groups both during and after his lifetime. Tracing his subject’s ideological progression over a little more than a decade from the early 1910s, Bora identifies four different lines of thought that could be associated with the famous Turkish thinker Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924): Romanticist pan-Turkism, political sociologism, middle way populism, and a synthesis between conservatism and modernism (Bora Reference Bora2017, 202-209).

In that sense, our analysis finds four fundamental similarities between Mazzini and Gökalp with regard to their national ideals: loyalty to the principles of the Enlightenment, national self-determination, civic-legal equality among citizens, and normative equality among all nations. They both rejected essentialist (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) rationales for the backwardness of their respective countries and maintained the necessity of constructing nations that would initially provide civic equality among citizens and then aim at normative equality among nations at the civilizational level.

It is proposed that both Mazzini and Gökalp went through ideological transformations that made them firm opponents of German Romanticism and ardent believers of the Enlightenment, as shown in their non-exclusionary approaches to nationalism. In contrast with the distorted and romanticized images reproduced by far-right narratives, we argue in this study that the constructive ideals of “nation” held by Italy’s Giuseppe Mazzini and Turkey’s Ziya Gökalp, from two later examples of European nationalism, could fit into what might be called a “proto-modernism” within nationalism theories.

Türkçülüğün Esasları by Ziya Gökalp