Uneven and Combined Development and the Kemalist Synthesis of Nationalism and Laicism

Year 2025, Volume: 9 Issue: 1, 51 - 70

Mert Söyler

https://doi.org/10.47478/lectio.1768097

Abstract

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.

Keywords

nationalism , secularism , laicism , nation-building , uneven and combined development

Thanks

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Jan Yasin Sunca for his helpful comments and guidance in developing this paper from a research placement on nationalism beyond Europe at Bielefeld University.

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