TIME AS AN INSTRUMENT OF BUILDING CITIZENSHIP IN TURKEY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN AND THE EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA
Mehmet Kendirci, Gaziosmanpaşa University, Tokat
Abstract: The modernization process and its relation with citizenship in the Ottoman Empire was connected to the project of modern state-building. Throughout the late Ottoman era, modern practices of time organization were concerned with regulating the Ottoman bureaucratic institutions. In the early Republican era however, modernization process underwent a drastic transformation taking a new form which aimed to reshape the whole social fabric and landscape of the country. In this paper I try to provide a reading of the relationships between the changing meaning of time and the understanding of both state and citizenship in Turkey by analyzing the political discourse generated by the legislation and the governing elites’ ideas of the time. By doing so I delineate how the concept of time was seen as an instrument and vigorously employed to construct a new citizen that was also seen fit for the expectations and needs of the new republic.
Keywords: Concept of Time, Modernization, Citizenship, The Late Ottoman Era, The Early Republican Era of Turkey