ROBERT · (Inter-)nationalism and the new Turkey: the rise and fall of international education at Istanbul's Robert College, c. 1913-1933

(Inter-)nationalism and the new Turkey: the rise and fall of international education at Istanbul's Robert College, c. 1913-1933

This project analyses the paradoxical relation between “international education”, or even “peace education”, and the Turcocentric national ideology of Kemal Atatürk in the first half of the 20th century. Using the case of the Robert College, an American private institution in Istanbul which aimed to foster a future local elite of a multi-ethnic student body, and its social-studies instructor Dr. Edgar J. Fisher, the project sheds light on the negotiation between two conceptions of modernity, as represented by American internationalist ideals and the tenets of Kemalism, the Westernizing, yet deeply ethnocentric national ideology of post-1923 Turkey. Using archival documents, I address the educational intentions of the school’s staff, strategies for adjustment toward the Turkish authorities and the reasons for the eventual demise of international education, as well as students’ understanding of internationalism, religious, ethnic and national identity in the Ottoman past and in the new Turkish republic. This perspective has been missing in research on the Kemalist revolution from above, owing to the dominance of the regime’s discourse in the interwar period. The project thus brings new knowledge about this critical phase of Turkish history. By revisiting the early phase of nation formation, this project contributes a more nuanced understanding of the roots of the present nationalist backlash against “Western” globalization, highlighting among other things the continuity between today’s Islamist traditionalism and the perceived secularism of Kemalism, with regard to tolerance of ethnic and religious diversity. The study's main conclusions are as follows. Despite the wartime ethnic cleansing from which the new Turkey emerged, the prospect of international conciliation and disarmament in the 1920s convinced American educators that they could forge an enlightened elite that would inoculate Turkish society against national hatred. The positive response from the student community seemed to vindicate this assumption. The nationalist regime prohibited foreign educators from teaching Turkish history, which hampered efforts to teach about the roots of present ills, meaning that the violent end of the Ottoman Empire from which the new Turkey had emerged could never be addressed in the open though the Armenian genocide found its way into students’ essays anyway. The overall belief in progress also precluded the interethnic understanding and conciliation that American educators hoped for, as that would have required a more profound engagement with the troublesome past than mere declarations of good faith. Still, international education not only offered students an opportunity to express themselves more freely than elsewhere in Turkey, but also invited them to examine certain problems from different viewpoints. Both American educators and Kemalists saw the development of nationalism as vital to the process of becoming modern, although the former viewed this as a mere stage in the process of forging a truly international sentiment. When the ruling party intensified its promotion of Turkish nationalism in the 1930s, taking control over the teaching of the social sciences at Robert College, the project for international education was abandoned by college authorities, in the hope of securing future American influence in Turkey.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union