A feature of many nationalisms is resistance to comparison in the name of national singularity. The very effort to establish or invent distinctive characteristics, whether historical or contemporary, obscures similarities with other cultures and encourages intellectual isolation. This remains true even of those nationalisms which draw on republican and civic traditions of identity with an international thrust, rather than on ethnic ones more concerned with primordial roots.
In practice it is difficult to separate the two approaches, as is illustrated by a comparison of Turkey and Ireland.
This has been a century of nationalisms. They show no signs of diminishing, as has been apparent in Europe over the last 10 years. Two developments, however, one political/economic, the other intellectual, put European nationalisms in a different light.
European integration is an attempt to tame, redirect and transcend the imperial nationalisms which gave us two world wars and to create a space within this new power system for the smaller state nationalisms that have usually arisen as a democratic defence against the large powers. It becomes possible to reconcile previous adversaries in a wider complementary scheme.
Over the last 25 years or so, there has been an explosive growth in the comparative study of nationalism from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines. Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith, Tom Nairn, Liah Greenfield, Eric Hobsbawm, John Breuilly, Jurgen Habermas, Rogers Brubacker, Linda Colley, Adrian Hastings, Michael Ignatieff and Miroslav Hroch are some of the better known names in this endeavour.
Their work is reviewed illuminatingly in The Sociology of Na- tionalism by David McCrone (who is inspired by the recent growth of national sentiment in Scotland). It has been ably augmented by writers such as Tom Garvin, Norman Porter, Joe Lee and Hugh Kearney in Ireland.
Much remains contested in this literature. Despite its sophistication it is still touchingly divided between those who like or dislike nationalism, or between those who believe it is an historically contingent phenomenon dependent on other forces such as capitalist modernisation and those who argue it is based on much more long-standing primordial identifications.
Such divisions aside, however, this literature does draw crucial distinctions between civic and ethnic nationalisms, citizenship and nationality, state and nation. These make it much more easy to draw comparisons and can release people from the peculiar tunnel vision imposed by nationalist rhetoric.
In practical terms they underlie much of the thinking behind the Belfast Agreement, which is replete with references to parity of esteem, recognition of diversity and dual identities. These are the contemporary forms of political civility. Ireland has, wittingly or unwittingly, become a pioneer in their practical political application.
Turkey provides a very interesting example of a modern nationalism in need of self-examination and critical renewal along these lines. At a conference last week in Ankara on Ataturk and Modern Turkey, this could be seen plainly. The bustling city of four million people was founded by Mustapha Kemal, the military leader who led his country out of semi-colonial servitude after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (he took the name Ataturk later). This year is the republic's 75th anniversary.
Kemal was determined to wrench Turkey out of its Ottoman identity by founding it on a French model of the territorial nation state based in Anatolia, rather than on far-flung imperial possessions that broke up into separate nationalisms, encouraged by competing imperial powers.
The republic sought to mould Turks into one people by a nation-building exercise based on strict separation of Islam and a secular state and a wholesale adoption of modern western, specifically European, civilisation.
It was a centralised assimilationist system, preoccupied with territorial sovereignty and integrity arising from the circumstances of its foundation.
These were described by one of the conference participants, Prof Carter Findley of the University of Ohio, who said that practically all Turkey's ethnicities disappeared and/or became externalised by these events, including the Armenians massacred in 1915, the Greeks transferred under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and the Kurds, who revolted in 1925 against the abolition of the caliphate - encouraged, Kemal and his colleagues firmly believed, by British scheming over regional oilfields at the time.
Their rebellion was crushed and Islam and the Kurdish population has ever since been regarded with suspicion by the Kemalist establishment, as is all too clear from recent events.
Prof Carter made a plea for comparative treatment of Ataturk and Turkish nationalism. He spoke too of Turkey's distinctive approach to the 1930s depression, based on planning, state-owned industry and import-substitution. Mexico, he reminded us, adopted a similar model. I reminded him that Ireland did too at that time.
De Valera's Ireland and Ataturk's Turkey had much in common, including their conduct of neutrality during the second World War. Irish nationalism has gone through a sea-change of redefinition and renewal since then, driven in recent years by the growth of a vibrant civil society and a broadening European identity.
Turkey also has a fantastically vibrant civil society and economy but, as the former European Commission representative there, Michael Lake, pointed out in his departing report earlier this year: "Turkey is in process of transition from Kemalism, with its undergrowth of state authority, of contradictory constitutional laws, of state security courts, of excessive secularism, of reverence for a long dead leader and continuing reliance on the military as the last resort of stability, to a more modern, flexible and privately-oriented consumer society. The problem is what to put in place of Kemalism".
Turkish representatives quite correctly point out that for the European Union to reject their country on the grounds that Europe is a Christian club is to adopt a very restrictive definition of European identity. However, this Turkish rejoinder to a narrowly civilisational definition of Europe is the less convincing to the degree that Turkey has itself been unable to adapt the Kemalist model, to take account of its own multiple cultural and historical inheritances, including its Islamic and Kurdish ones.
Such a redefinition would make its case for accession to the EU much stronger and based more securely on contemporary realities. But it is very difficult to find the political will to do so in its fragmented political system. The genuine efforts to make these changes nevertheless deserve a sympathetic hearing from their fellow-Europeans.
