TY  - JOUR
T1  - Uneven and Combined Development and the Kemalist Synthesis of Nationalism and Laicism
AU  - Söyler, Mert
Y2  - 2025
DO  - 10.47478/lectio.1768097
JF  - Lectio Socialis
JO  - Lectio
PB  - Emrah Konuralp
WT  - DergiPark
SN  - 2602-2443
SP  - 51
EP  - 70
VL  - 9
IS  - 1
LA  - en
AB  - This article examines the conjunction of nationalism and laicism in the making of the Turkish Republic through Leon Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), as reformulated by Kamran Matin. The analysis situates Kemalist Turkish nationalism within the broader pressures of global capitalism, arguing that the formation of the modern Turkish nation-state was not a linear process of modernization but a combined outcome of international geopolitical competition and domestic transformation. Drawing on historical sociological analysis, the study demonstrates how the “whip of external necessity” and the “privilege of historic backwardness” compelled Turkish elites to merge nationalism and laicism to construct a secular, capitalist-oriented state. This synthesis was not a derivative of European secularism but a coercive amalgam shaped by late Ottoman backwardness, ethnic purification, and the dissolution of religious authority. The findings reveal that, in Turkey, nationalism and laicism preceded capitalist development and acted as ideological and institutional mechanisms to produce the conditions for it. Thus, the Kemalist experience inverts modernist theories of nationalism by showing how ideological transformation can function as a precondition rather than a byproduct of capitalist modernization within an uneven international order.
KW  - nationalism
KW  - secularism
KW  - laicism
KW  - nation-building
KW  - uneven and combined development
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UR  - https://doi.org/10.47478/lectio.1768097
L1  - https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/5167410
ER  -