Collective Memory and National Membership ― Identity and Citizenship Models in Turkey and Austria

This study explores the role played by collective perceptions of the past in constructing, maintaining, and challenging views of citizenship and national identity while taking divergent visions of the past seriously. It seeks to understand how much of the disparity in the way citizenship questions are approached can be explained by the differences in visions of the past. Drawing on comparative historical analysis of two post-imperial core countries, Turkey and Austria, this volume explores how differences in perspectives on the past inform citizenship debates. It looks at the ways in which different forms of historical narratives foster certain citizenship models and create resistance against others. By doing this, it develops a conceptual framework applicable beyond the two cases when analyzing the history-identity nexus at the collective level.

Meral Ugur Cinar received her PhD in Political Science from University of Pennsylvania in May 2012. She was a Mellon Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow at the New School for Social Research in 2012-13. Her articles are published inPS: Political Science and Politics, Political Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, andTurkish Studies as well as in book chapters. She also co-authored an article with Kursat Cinar that has won the 2013 Sabanci International Research Award. She is currently Assistant Professor at Bilkent University, Turkey.