State elites, political change, and patterns of nationhood from the late ottoman empire to contemporary turkey

Under what conditions and why do the state elites change their policies toward nationhood? In this research, I intend to develop a nuanced analytical framework with an aspiration toward a theoretical proposition on the institutional change of state policies toward nationhood. The dissertation takes the cases of imperial citizenship reform in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, the shift from Ottoman identity to Turkish identity in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and the state promotion of minority languages in Turkey after the 2000s. Methodologically, I carry out a comparative historical research through the analysis of official documents such as constitutions, parliamentary proceedings, and speeches by political leaders. I explore the patterns of change within my proposition of the four ideal-type nationhood structures that states can adopt: hierarchical, asymmetrical, hyphenated, and monolithic. While the dissertation emphasizes the notion of ontological security in terms of the logic of the state elites in revisiting state policies toward nationhood, it explains the conditions under which the policy changes occur by looking at the contingencies of the international context, domestic elite competition, and domestic nonstate actors.