Orienting a Nation: The Turkish National Anthem Controversies

Abstract

As Turkey’s ruling elite founded a nation from the collapsed Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s, competitions for the Turkish national anthem’s lyrics and musical setting did not immediately yield clear winners. The original winning composition by Ali Rıfat Çağatay draws on Ottoman-era musical and literary conventions; however, the anthem was redacted six years after selection and replaced in 1930 by the current national anthem by Osman Zeki Üngör, a work iconic of European anthems yet infamous for its “broken” prosody. The anthem’s prosodic errors and enigmatic selection process have fueled national debates since its adoption. I argue that the Turkish ruling elite’s selection of a national anthem reflects the challenges of a broader nation-building project premised on rejecting a presumed Ottoman past and oriented towards the modernity associated with the imagined West. More broadly, I assert that understanding the anthem genre requires interrogating the Eurocentrism of non-European anthems that would seem to seek to emulate European exemplars. Exploring nearly a century of anthem controversies in Turkish media and film illuminates how prosodic errors have served as an innocuous proxy for politically sensitive topics, including tensions over religion in public life and governance as well as the Turkey-US relationship since the Cold War. On the other hand, the many-layered meanings within the anthem as well as its iconicity of the nation have enabled those acting in the name of the state to deploy the anthem as a tool of violent state coercion to discipline nonconforming subjects.