Clashing Turkish Nationalisms through Gezi Movement: Reflections on Everyday Nationalism

Gezi protests, emerged as a reaction against the AKP government’s authoritarian intervention into the urban space, turned into a country-wide social movement. Interestingly enough, the movement brought various components of the society together with the aim of more democratic and pluralistic governance even though they have different political/ ideological backgrounds. The nationalist discourse with its eclectic, flexible and nonhomogeneous structure articulated in different forms in the Gezi movement.

Unlike the primordialist approaches to nationalism which considers nations as preexisting structures, modernist perspective embraces it as an invented and imagined product of social engineering. Modernist approach, which focuses on political institutions, overlooks the role of everyday life and individuals, as the real carriers of nationalism and national identity. However, the conceptualization of everyday nationalism focuses on how nationalist discourses and symbols are internalized and reproduced by ordinary people in daily experiences with a micro sociological perspective. Hence, this study, benefiting from the concepts of “everyday nationalism”, aims to investigate how people, participated in the Gezi protests, subjectively constructed or reconstructed their national identity in their own discourses and narratives about their experiences in the Gezi Park. Is the perception of nationalism of these Gezi supporters compatible with the “Turkish” nationalist rhetoric?

The study will be based on qualitative data obtained from deep interviews with approximately 10 respondents who participated in the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013. The research findings will be analyzed by using discourse and narrative analysis. Participants’ perception of nationalism and their discursive construction of national identity in their daily life will be traced through their experiences of Gezi movement.