Rethinking Kemalism with Hüseyin Nail Kubalı: solidarism beyond corporatist teleology

This article revisits debates on the ideological character of Kemalism by examining the classificatory dispute between solidarism and corporatism in Turkish political thought. It argues that Taha Parla’s influential reading constructs a teleological line from solidarism to fascism through successive operations of definition, classification, and conflation. The article tests this framework through the case of Hüseyin Nail Kubalı, a Kemalist jurist shaped by the Durkheimian-Gökalpian tradition. Although Kubalı should not be taken as representative of Kemalism as a whole, his writings and political interventions show how solidarist premises could sustain liberal-democratic and pluralist interpretations of Kemalism.