What is the matter with citizenship? A Turkish debate

Fundamental to the establishment of the Turkish Republic was the development of a new concept of citizenship in the national polity that would go hand in hand with the nation-building process. Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Republic, perceived citizenship as the very core of the legitimacy of the Republic.' Accordingly, he himself actively participated in designing a compulsory course of civic education that was to be taught in the schools of Turkey. In those early days of the Republic, civic education in the country began with the course entitled Malumat-z Vataniyye (Information about the Motherland) which was included in school curricula in 1924. In 1927, it was replaced by Yurt Bilgisi (again the same meaning, Information about the Motherland), and finally from 1985 on, it was offered with the title of Vatandalhk Bilgileri (Information about Citizenship).2 In other words, from the very start in Turkey, citizenship was officially taken to be one of the key elements of successful nation-building. Despite the fact that from the very beginning, citizenship had a deep underlying significance for the construction of the new Turkish society and state, social science literature seldom explicitly discussed the concept of citizenship in Turkey beyond its ideological implications regarding nationalist heritage. In addition to these implications, Turks often thought of their citizenship as serving goals and practices of a universal kind reflected in Western political and philosophical tradition: defining the rights, obligations and identity of individuals in the country, citizenship concerns the relations that individual members of the state have among each other and with the governing body. Now, however, this comfortable scenario is challenged on two fronts. At the present time, Turkey finds itself reacting to the naturalization policies and practices of migrant-receiving states, in which thousands of its emigrant citizens are in search of access to citizenship and citizenship rights in those states, and consequently 'dual