The Turkish National Anthem and the Politics of Nation-Building and Legitimacy in the Early Republic

This article examines the Turkish National Anthem as a constitutive element of nation-building and political legitimacy in early Republican Türkiye. It conceptualizes the anthem as a symbolic and ritualized practice embedded in the institutional and everyday reproduction of national belonging, and argues that legitimacy in modern nation-states is sustained through the interaction of symbolic forms, ritual performance, and pedagogical infrastructures. The study adopts a multi-theoretical framework drawing on Anderson’s imagined communities, Hobsbawm’s invented traditions, Billig’s banal nationalism, Smith’s ethno-symbolism, and Kertzer’s theory of ritual and political power. These perspectives frame national anthems as embedded mechanisms of identity and authority reproduction. Empirically, it situates the anthem within early Republican transformations, focusing on its embedding in education, ceremonies, and cultural reform. It argues that the anthem contributed to routinized national identity, affective synchronization, and symbolic reinforcement of legitimacy, in a relational and context-dependent manner. By integrating international and Türkiye-specific literature, the article addresses a gap in comparative nationalism studies and extends debates on symbolic governance in non-Western contexts.