Erdal Kaynar is a historian of the 19th century and a specialist of Ottoman transformation. He is associate professor in history at the University of Strasbourg.
He studied history and sociology in Berlin and Paris and holds a PhD in history from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, 2012).
Before joining the History Department at the University of Strasbourg, he held fellowships at different research institutes including Institut français d’études anatoliennes (IFEA, Istanbul), Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK, Vienna), Orient Institut Istanbul, as well as the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is an associate member of the Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques (Cetobac, Paris).
His research defines Ottoman transformation as a dynamic process mediated between the general and abstract project of societal reform and the often-neglected human component, marked by the construction of the modern self in a world of radical transformation. During his doctoral research on the Young Turk and Parisian positivist Ahmed Rıza (1858-1930) he concentrated primarily on the political interpretation of Ottoman reform, inquiring into the epistemological foundations of modernist political philosophy. He has worked on a wide array of subjects, including the emergence of democratic notions, the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the development of modern authoritarian principles, the question of nationalism, and the way of relating to the West in a world marked by European geopolitical and economic dominance. More lately, he has started exploring the development of political economy as a means of inscribing the Ottoman Empire in the modern world. The overall aim of his research is to define the emergence of modernity in the 19th century as a shared global experience and inquire into its legacies today.
Address: Institut d'histoire contemporaine
Faculté des Sciences Historiques
Université de Strasbourg
Palais Universitaire
67084 Strasbourg Cedex
He studied history and sociology in Berlin and Paris and holds a PhD in history from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, 2012).
Before joining the History Department at the University of Strasbourg, he held fellowships at different research institutes including Institut français d’études anatoliennes (IFEA, Istanbul), Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK, Vienna), Orient Institut Istanbul, as well as the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is an associate member of the Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques (Cetobac, Paris).
His research defines Ottoman transformation as a dynamic process mediated between the general and abstract project of societal reform and the often-neglected human component, marked by the construction of the modern self in a world of radical transformation. During his doctoral research on the Young Turk and Parisian positivist Ahmed Rıza (1858-1930) he concentrated primarily on the political interpretation of Ottoman reform, inquiring into the epistemological foundations of modernist political philosophy. He has worked on a wide array of subjects, including the emergence of democratic notions, the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the development of modern authoritarian principles, the question of nationalism, and the way of relating to the West in a world marked by European geopolitical and economic dominance. More lately, he has started exploring the development of political economy as a means of inscribing the Ottoman Empire in the modern world. The overall aim of his research is to define the emergence of modernity in the 19th century as a shared global experience and inquire into its legacies today.
Address: Institut d'histoire contemporaine
Faculté des Sciences Historiques
Université de Strasbourg
Palais Universitaire
67084 Strasbourg Cedex
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Books by Erdal Kaynar
Un personnage clé de la fin de l’Empire ottoman, originaire d’une grande famille d’Istanbul, exilé pendant vingt ans à Paris, Ahmed Riza a été le principal idéologue et représentant du mouvement jeune-turc. Adepte du positivisme sous la IIIe République, membre fondateur du Comité Union et Progrès, président de la Chambre et du Sénat ottomans, il s’est trouvé au centre des événements historiques et des débats intellectuels et politiques entre Istanbul et Paris.
Ce livre propose de suivre pas à pas sa vie et sa pensée pour mieux saisir les développements majeurs qui ont marqué son temps: le processus d’occidentalisation, le sens de l’universalisme et de l’internationalisme, les défis de l’impérialisme et des nationalismes, les débats sur la réorganisation de l’État et de la société, la transition de l’ordre impérial à l’ordre national. Au-delà d’une simple biographie intellectuelle et politique, il met en lumière, à travers une expérience vécue, une «vie moderne», révélatrice du sens, des tensions et des limites de la modernité bourgeoise.
Special issues by Erdal Kaynar
Erdal Kaynar: De la philologie à la sémantique historique en études ottomanes
Marc Aymes: How Language Change Actually Took Place. ‘Altering’ in Late Ottoman Legal and Bureaucratic Practice
Özgür Türesay: The Political Language of Takvîm-i vekayi: the Discourse and Temporality of Ottoman ‘Reform’ (1831-1834)
Darina Martykánová: Science and Technology in the Ottoman Language of Power (1790s-1910s). Rethinking the State, the Economy, and the Elites
Ömer Köksal: Progrès dans l’impasse : critiques de Celal Nuri et Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi vis-à-vis des puissances européennes (1910-1914)
Erdal Kaynar: Défis, limites et promesses d’une sémantique historique en études ottomanes
Papers by Erdal Kaynar
Summary:
The intellectual and political history of the Middle East has been marked by constitutionalism since the nineteenth century. It was the principal movement contributing to the spread of modern political values associated with democracy, but also led to the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism which developed in a political order no longer regulated by the principles of monarchic and divine legitimacy. The Iranian and Ottoman Revolutions (1906 and 1908 respectively) transformed constitutionalism into a reality for most of the Middle East, bequeathing a legacy of major significance to the twentieth century.
Le constitutionnalisme a marqué l’histoire intellectuelle et politique du Moyen-Orient depuis le milieu du XIXᵉ siècle. Principal mouvement ayant contribué au déploiement des valeurs politiques modernes liées à la démocratie, il a également mené à l’émergence de nouvelles formes d’autoritarisme, développées dans un ordre politique qui n’est plus régi par des principes de légitimités monarchiques et divins. Les révolutions iranienne (1906) et ottomane (1908) ont transformé le constitutionnalisme en une réalité pour la majorité du Moyen-Orient, laissant un héritage important pour le XXᵉ siècle.
"L’opposition ottomane, le Comité Union et Progrès et la révolution de 1908", Conseil scientifique international pour l’étude du génocide des Arméniens, Le génocide des Arméniens. Cent ans de recherche (1915-2015). Paris : Armand Colin, 2015
Review Articles by Erdal Kaynar
Un personnage clé de la fin de l’Empire ottoman, originaire d’une grande famille d’Istanbul, exilé pendant vingt ans à Paris, Ahmed Riza a été le principal idéologue et représentant du mouvement jeune-turc. Adepte du positivisme sous la IIIe République, membre fondateur du Comité Union et Progrès, président de la Chambre et du Sénat ottomans, il s’est trouvé au centre des événements historiques et des débats intellectuels et politiques entre Istanbul et Paris.
Ce livre propose de suivre pas à pas sa vie et sa pensée pour mieux saisir les développements majeurs qui ont marqué son temps: le processus d’occidentalisation, le sens de l’universalisme et de l’internationalisme, les défis de l’impérialisme et des nationalismes, les débats sur la réorganisation de l’État et de la société, la transition de l’ordre impérial à l’ordre national. Au-delà d’une simple biographie intellectuelle et politique, il met en lumière, à travers une expérience vécue, une «vie moderne», révélatrice du sens, des tensions et des limites de la modernité bourgeoise.
Erdal Kaynar: De la philologie à la sémantique historique en études ottomanes
Marc Aymes: How Language Change Actually Took Place. ‘Altering’ in Late Ottoman Legal and Bureaucratic Practice
Özgür Türesay: The Political Language of Takvîm-i vekayi: the Discourse and Temporality of Ottoman ‘Reform’ (1831-1834)
Darina Martykánová: Science and Technology in the Ottoman Language of Power (1790s-1910s). Rethinking the State, the Economy, and the Elites
Ömer Köksal: Progrès dans l’impasse : critiques de Celal Nuri et Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi vis-à-vis des puissances européennes (1910-1914)
Erdal Kaynar: Défis, limites et promesses d’une sémantique historique en études ottomanes
Summary:
The intellectual and political history of the Middle East has been marked by constitutionalism since the nineteenth century. It was the principal movement contributing to the spread of modern political values associated with democracy, but also led to the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism which developed in a political order no longer regulated by the principles of monarchic and divine legitimacy. The Iranian and Ottoman Revolutions (1906 and 1908 respectively) transformed constitutionalism into a reality for most of the Middle East, bequeathing a legacy of major significance to the twentieth century.
Le constitutionnalisme a marqué l’histoire intellectuelle et politique du Moyen-Orient depuis le milieu du XIXᵉ siècle. Principal mouvement ayant contribué au déploiement des valeurs politiques modernes liées à la démocratie, il a également mené à l’émergence de nouvelles formes d’autoritarisme, développées dans un ordre politique qui n’est plus régi par des principes de légitimités monarchiques et divins. Les révolutions iranienne (1906) et ottomane (1908) ont transformé le constitutionnalisme en une réalité pour la majorité du Moyen-Orient, laissant un héritage important pour le XXᵉ siècle.
"L’opposition ottomane, le Comité Union et Progrès et la révolution de 1908", Conseil scientifique international pour l’étude du génocide des Arméniens, Le génocide des Arméniens. Cent ans de recherche (1915-2015). Paris : Armand Colin, 2015
In his new book Ahmet Demirel chronologically extends his preceding work on the two Ankara parliaments during the War of Independence. He studies the six parliaments of the Republic of Turkey from 1923 to 1946, roughly the time known as the single-party period, when political power was monopolized by the Republican People’s Party (CHP – Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası/Partisi). In his former research Demirel had devoted his attention strongly to political disputes in the Turkish parliament by highlighting the actions of the so-called Second Group, opposed to the faction led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). In his latest work, the scope of his research has changed, since the parliaments he deals with were composed nearly exclusively of deputies of the single party, a system that Mete Tunçay has called a “unanimous democracy” (24). Nevertheless, the book is part of a historiographical current that challenges the discourse the Kemalist regime had maintained on the official history of Turkish parliamentarism and underlines political contradictions in the formative processes of the early Republic.
In his analysis, the author draws mostly upon the official parliamentary publication, with some references to the press and to memoirs by leading politicians. He meticulously scrutinizes the composition of the six parliaments from 1923 to 1946 and concentrates particularly on the deputies’ age, geographical origin, education, profession, and seniority in parliament. Demirel processes the empirical data by analyzing the transition between two parliaments and by highlighting the changes in the profile of the deputies in the long run. Hence, the author is able to present valuable quantitative information on the political history of the young Republic. He does not pretend to cover completely new grounds in scholarship; but he presents a thoroughly documented study on different political evolutions, which hitherto lacked empirical study.
Demirel demonstrates clearly how the CHP could establish an authoritarian regime through parliamentary control, and how the power structures in Ankara corresponded to a scheme of political representation in which the Kemalist political and intellectual elite appeared as the natural representation of the entire nation. His study offers for the first time numbers on these developments. In the first parliaments the deputies’ place of birth still corresponded relatively well to the geography of the Turkish Republic. But after 1935, the regional representation gave way to a far more homogenous geographical composition, with more than half of the deputies born in the Istanbul/Marmara region or the former Ottoman provinces in the Balkans (321-323). Average age increased from 43.4 in 1923 to 53.7 in 1943 (325). Rates of reelection reached 78.7 percent in the 1930s (318). Education levels rose, signifying principally the rise of bureaucrats and military officers. On the other hand, the percentages of farmers and merchants dropped to 12.4 and of ulema to 1 in 1943 (327).
While Demirel brilliantly illustrates the bureaucratization and militarization that accompanied the rise of the single party, he also succeeds in demonstrating that this process was more controversial and uneven than one might suggest. Thus, he detects in the collected quantitative data proof for internal conflicts in the CHP. Demirel shows how deputies of the “Second Group” were successively excluded from parliament in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, several continued to be politically active and could even reenter the parliament in the course of the political changes succeeding Atatürk’s death in 1938 (219-220). Demirel’s study further presents valuable information on the controversies surrounding İsmet İnönü in the 1930 and in particular on the transition from Atatürk to İnönü. İnönü’s politics to liquidate deputies and high functionaries of the CHP opposing his power directly affected the parliament’s composition without, however, reversing its general trend towards bureaucratization (230, 276). Demirel concludes convincingly that the closed system of the single-party rule reached its limits at the end of the Second World War and eventually gave way to a multi-party system. He demonstrates how in 1946 the CHP had to resort to fraud in elections, which – to the great surprise of the party leadership—proved unfavorable to the former single party (311-312).
Demirel presents an excellent study on the Turkish political elite during the first decades of the Republic. His book has its limits, mostly due to the nearly exclusive use of the official documentation. In that regard, its title is misleading since the author does not really study elections, but analyzes their outcome and the political structures they brought about in the capital. Little is said on the importance of elections as republican ceremonies, or on the importance of women’s suffrage. Also, one is left to wonder how the parliamentary power structures were effectively implemented in the provinces. But in sum, Demirel offers an extremely useful book. He systematically grounds his analyses on empirical facts in every chapter and summarizes the main outcomes in nine tables in the appendix. The quantitative data he has collected is extremely valuable and can easily be used for further research, even if the lack of an index makes the book at times hard to navigate. However, the strength of the book is also that the author does not drown the reader with dry information. Indeed, from the beginning to the end of the book, Demirel succeeds in establishing a coherent narrative on the political evolutions in the early Republic. Given these qualities, it is regrettable that in the conclusion Demirel prefers to repeat collected information rather than restating his arguments on the nature of the Republic of Turkey in the first 25 years of its existence. Thereby, he also misses an opportunity to contribute to the general debates in political theory on representative systems and democracy beyond the Turkish case.