IDENTITY FORMATION AND THE POLITICAL POWER IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND EARLY TURKISH REPUBLIC

This article examines the reasons, consequences and penetration ways of the nationalist movement in the lands that made up the Ottoman Empire. But if many academics have studied this issue and offered an agreed vision of the disruptive effect that nationalism had in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, an evaluation of the impact and consequences that this process had in the population and the political configuration of the new states that appeared after the end of the Turkish domination has not been made. This complicated process, distinguished by the ethnical conflicts in the Balkans and Anatolia in the late Ottoman Empire, led to the elimination of certain ethnical groups from the central territory of the Turkish State, Anatolia, and to its foundation as principal consequence. This paper will focuse on the nature of political power in the Ottoman empire with the purpose of, first, exposing how transformation of the political power generate radically different resolution to ethnic conflict and its management and, secondly, demonstrating the impacts of imperial practices in dealing with multi- cultural society on inheritor nation-state practices in the Turkish case.