ABSTRACT
Probably one of the most dynamic and expanding ideological positions that surfaced during the last quarter of the twentieth century is tribalism reconstructed in the form of ethnic violence. Consequently, the communitarian politics of tribalism essentializes and calcifies cultural identity in order to bring forward change. The leading ideology of the new Republic, that of Kemalism, dealt very harshly with the earlier forms of pan-Turkism in order to establish the official ideology of a secular and Turkey-based civic nationalism. In an attempt to re-establish their legacy in Turkish politics, the Turkist/ultranationalist circles organized large-scale anti-Communist rallies in Istanbul and Ankara in 1944. If Turkist-tribalist political violence was the quintessential product of state-ultranationalist alliance, Turkist-Sunni fundamentalist terror appears to be the new offspring of the mythic-utopian orientation in Turkish politics that denies the ethno-religious heterogeneity of the national polity. More specifically, tribalist politics anchors communitarian self-righteousness in a mythical point of ancestry.
