Abstract

Turkey’s republic is approaching its centenary, built on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire as a nation-state that, rather than accommodating the ethnic plurality it inherited, was constructed through forced assimilation, erasure, and coerced absorption of non-Turkish groups. The Armenian genocide and the forced population exchange with Greece in 1923 were the violent preconditions that made the new republic’s ethnic homogenization possible. What survived that project were two minorities: Arabs, small and, from the state’s perspective, unthreatening; and Kurds, large, territorially concentrated, and therefore a perceived danger. This essay draws on world-systems theory (Wallerstein) combined with class analysis to argue that Turkey’s Kurdish question cannot be understood merely as an identity crisis or a security problem. It reflects Turkey’s semi-peripheral position in the world capitalist system and the uneven development that has split the country’s east from its west — a split that runs, through a specific causal chain, from semi-peripheral capitalism to the securitization of Kurdish-majority regions. The question of whether Erdoğan can set aside Atatürk’s century-old legacy is therefore misframed as a matter of one leader’s political will. It should instead be posed at the level of the structural logic that has driven both Atatürk and Erdoğan, despite their evident ideological break, to reproduce the same fracture.

State-Building Through Homogenization: The Republic’s Founding Legacy

Contrary to its official narrative of secular modernization, the Turkish republic was built from the outset on the systematic suppression of ethnic plurality — though not through physical elimination alone. Forced integration, cultural Turkification, population displacement, and security repression operated together. The Armenian genocide in the empire’s final years and the forced population exchange with Greece in 1923 were the demographic precondition for the new nation-state. What Kemal Atatürk called “Turkishness” was an imposed, homogenizing identity that either erased the “other” or dissolved it into itself. Kurds, given their large population and territorial contiguity in southeastern Anatolia, occupied a different place in this homogenizing project: they could be neither expelled nor ignored, so they had to become Turkish. For nearly eighty years, the Turkish state denied Kurdish identity through schools, media, and the military; the Kurdish language was banned, and even the word “Kurd” was replaced in official discourse with the demeaning label “mountain Turk.” This was not an exception to the nation-state’s founding logic — it was that logic.

After the First World War, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres had envisioned an independent Kurdish state, a prospect abandoned entirely with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the consolidation of the new republic’s borders. This reversal should not be attributed to a unified, premeditated Western intent — the reality was more complicated. Sèvres reflected the immediate post-war balance of power, but the Turkish nationalist movement’s military victory over Greek occupying forces and the Allies overturned that balance entirely. Facing a central government that now commanded real military power, Britain and France abandoned their earlier declared support for Kurdish autonomy and judged it more expedient to come to terms with a victorious Ankara. This was not a preconceived conspiracy but a pragmatic recalculation in response to a shifting military and political landscape — one that nonetheless illustrates how far the great powers’ declared commitment to “national self-determination” in the Middle East has historically bent to the geopolitical convenience of the moment, a pattern noted in an earlier analysis of Turkey’s place in the world system.

From Denial to Armed Struggle: The Formation of the PKK

Rather than resolving the Kurdish question, this suppression of identity produced a deep social rift between Turkey’s Kurdish population and the central state. Repeated civil-society efforts in the mid-twentieth century to secure recognition of Kurdish cultural rights were met largely with repression. Against this backdrop, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was formed in 1978, initially presenting itself not merely as a Kurdish representative but as a project for class and ethnic justice for all of Turkey’s oppressed. The banning of Kurdish civil and party activity paved the way for the movement’s radicalization; from 1984, the PKK’s armed struggle against the central government began — a war that lasted decades and, by various estimates, cost tens of thousands of lives, mostly civilians and Kurdish fighters, along with a smaller number of state soldiers.

What matters here is the dialectic of repression and pretext: every PKK armed operation supplied a fresh justification for intensifying cultural and political repression against the entire Kurdish community, including its unarmed, civilian segments. This pattern locked Turkey into a cycle in which the securitization of the Kurdish question kept deferring any lasting political solution.

Semi-Peripheral Turkey: From Uneven Development to Securitization

To understand why the Kurdish-Turkish rift is not merely “cultural,” it must be placed within the framework of Turkey’s political economy in the world capitalist system — and, more importantly, the intermediate links connecting that position to Kurdish repression must be traced explicitly. Turkey’s NATO membership since 1952 and its gradual integration into Western capital markets made it a textbook case of semi-peripheral power in Wallerstein’s sense: a state neither fully at the center of the world system nor entirely on its periphery, but a mediating position that is simultaneously exploited by the center and itself exploits the periphery.

The causal chain can be stated plainly. Turkey’s unequal integration into global capitalism imposed a pattern of uneven development in which industrial and infrastructural investment concentrated in the west — Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, and the central-western Anatolian industrial corridor. This concentration of capital drove a corresponding concentration of political and military power in the central state, since sustaining and extending this pattern of accumulation required a unified state facing no internal challenge. The east, where the Kurdish majority lives and whose territorial contiguity with Iraq, Iran, and Syria made it strategically sensitive, was for the central state not merely an economic periphery but an arena of potential contest over territory and resources. This combination of economic marginality and geopolitical-security centrality pushed the Turkish state toward the systematic securitization of Kurdish-majority regions: militarization, restricted investment, and demographic control all functioned as instruments of containment for a region held both economically underdeveloped and, from the security standpoint, “problematic.”

On this basis, being Kurdish has, statistically and structurally, correlated with a higher likelihood of living in a less-developed region with fewer economic opportunities — not because all Kurds are poor or because ethnicity alone explains eastern Turkey’s poverty, but because ethnic and class-regional cleavages in Turkey have systematically overlapped. This overlap gives the Kurdish question a dimension that exceeds cultural or linguistic recognition: the issue is simultaneously the real redistribution of capital and political recognition.

Erdoğan: Ideological Break, Structural Continuity

The AKP’s rise to power in 2002 initially raised hopes of a break with the Kemalist legacy, and that hope was not baseless. Erdoğan is not a Kemalist; he and his party emerged from a conservative Islamist tradition that had itself been a target of Kemalist state repression. In his first decade in power, Erdoğan launched what became known as the “Kurdish Opening” or peace process (2009–2015), which included direct talks with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and cultural reforms — including permitting Kurdish-language broadcasting and easing some linguistic restrictions — that none of the preceding Kemalist governments had been willing to undertake. In this sense, a simple thesis that “Erdoğan merely reproduces Atatürk” would be inaccurate.

Yet the process collapsed in 2015, coinciding with a shift in Erdoğan’s electoral calculations: after the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) cleared the parliamentary threshold for the first time in the June 2015 election and threatened the AKP’s parliamentary majority, Erdoğan’s government swiftly returned to securitization and an alliance with the nationalist right, the MHP. The central point is this: Erdoğan’s ideological break from Kemalism did not dissolve the structural continuity of centralized statehood and territorial nationalism. He could distance himself discursively, and even in some cultural policies, from the Kemalist legacy — but when his political survival, through alliance with the nationalist right, or his party’s economic project, the export of Turkish productive capital via construction and defense firms into the more peripheral Middle East, was at stake, he reverted to the same instruments of centralized nation-statehood and border-territory control.

Turkey’s military intervention in northern Syria, justified by reference to the “security threat” of the Syrian Kurdish YPG, is a clear instance of this continuity: the expansion of Turkey’s economic and military sphere of influence in Syria has come bundled with the suppression of Kurdish autonomy across the border, precisely because any legitimation of Kurdish autonomy in Syria reverberates directly into Kurdish demands inside Turkey. The article’s thesis is therefore not that “Erdoğan is simply Atatürk,” but that the ideological break from Kemalism has not removed the structural imperatives of a semi-peripheral state — the need for domestic nationalist legitimation and territorial control to sustain capital export.

A Counter-Argument: Is This Time Really Different?

Advocates of the current process — including figures close to the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), who have taken part in recent talks with the government — argue that a combination of factors distinguishes the present moment from earlier attempts: shifting regional geopolitics, developments on the ground in Syria, and Erdoğan’s need to stabilize the southern border to realize his economic reconstruction projects. On this view, PKK disarmament could offer a genuine opportunity to move from armed conflict to political bargaining, and Kurdish civil society should seize this window rather than dismiss it.

This argument deserves serious consideration and should not be dismissed as naive. But it faces two significant limits. First, even if the ceasefire holds, there is no clear indication that the Turkish state is prepared to address the structural economic gap between east and west through genuine capital redistribution; without that redistribution, political reconciliation alone leaves untouched the material inequality that keeps reproducing distrust. Second, the 2009–2015 peace process demonstrated that such processes, so long as they remain tied to shifts in Erdoğan’s electoral or security calculations, can reverse as quickly as they began. The current opening therefore warrants cautious optimism, not confidence.

Has the Role of Kurdish Civil Society and Parties Ended?

The short answer is no — but its nature needs redefining. If the disarmament and negotiation process advances mainly at the level of political elites — among Erdoğan, Öcalan, and DEM’s leadership — the real risk is that it collapses into a narrow settlement between the central state and Kurdish party leadership, without incorporating the structural demands of Kurdish society: regional economic justice, mother-tongue education, and the restoration of local self-governance. In that scenario, the role of Kurdish civil society and the Turkish left is not diminished but becomes precisely one of scrutiny and pressure from below to prevent that reduction.

At the same time, Kurdish parties and movements need to move beyond purely ethnic isolation and rebuild class ties with labor and democratic movements in western Turkey, which have themselves suffered under the AKP’s neoliberal policies — the very project the PKK claimed at its founding, even if, in practice, repression and the militarization of the struggle largely confined it to an ethnic frame.

Conclusion

Turkey’s Kurdish question is the product of three converging layers: the founding legacy of a homogenizing nation-state; a specific causal chain linking semi-peripheral capitalist uneven development to state power concentration and, from there, to the securitization of peripheral regions; and the geopolitical imperatives of a moment in which Turkey is simultaneously a NATO member, a regional actor, and a claimant to influence in postwar Syria. Within this framework, asking whether Erdoğan can and will set aside Atatürk’s legacy is the wrong question — Erdoğan, unlike Atatürk, has genuinely broken ideologically with Kemalism and, for a period, placed the Kurdish question seriously on the political agenda. The better question is whether Turkey’s political-economic structure — its dependence on reproducing state nationalism for domestic legitimacy and on capital export into the region — allows for a structural break that goes beyond discursive and episodic gestures. Historical experience suggests that such structural dependency is not easily set aside, even under the cover of cultural reform or peace negotiations.

The future of Turkey’s Kurdish question should not, then, be tied to elite negotiations or the state’s declared goodwill. A durable solution lies not in regime change, nor in replacing one ruling coalition with another, but in rebuilding transnational, class-based solidarity among social forces from below — Turkey’s labor movement, Kurdish civil society, and international solidarity networks — capable of insisting simultaneously on economic redistribution and cultural-political recognition, without being captured by the short-term geopolitical calculations of a semi-peripheral power.

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