the_dunk_tank

The final decades of the Ottoman Empire have a lot to do with it, but it's more of a feature of the turkish republic's own history. The Balkan Wars meant that the Ottomans went from a multi-confessional empire to an empire with multiple nationalities but one majority faith in one fell swoop. This put the Ottoman elites into a nationalist hyperdrive where they believed that anything less than total unity across their country meant that european powers with many times their population would just continue to do what they had done for a century: slowly partition the empire by encouraging ethnic sectarianism and rebellion. The ethnic cleansing of the balkans and the circassian genocide would eventually fuel the armenian genocide and Turkey's ongoing issue with the kurds.

That paranoia did not end after the Turkish War of Independence. On the contrary, the kemalist state sought to take this country of refugees and mold it into a single nation, to varying results. Turkey is a multi-racial country and the turkish identity is not really ethnocentric. On the other hand, that same state reacted very strongly against the groups which it perceived as a threat. Namely the religious conservative peasantry and the kurds.

The Turkish Republic was a francophile project and a project of top down secularization which was enforced by a series of juntas. The elites behind this project however proved rather brittle. Their wealth and power did not come from industry or land but the state apparatus itself. The kemalist middle classes of half a century ago were the literati elites of a state which, all things considered, is poor in most ever resource. Anatolia is not even good for fishing, not that great for agriculture, and poorer in mineral resources compared to pretty much everyone in the region. In what way Turkey is an industrial middle power today, it is because of state policy and the ability to be a middle man in the world supply chain. And soon enough, that industrial success lead onto the rising middle classes of a religious conservative majority, which entirely displaced the only francophile elites.

This is the fundamental conflict in Turkey today. A fractured opposition, each with their own idea of what kemalism is, and a strong government capable of bridging gaps created by the old juntas - both for good and for ill. That is why you have this demographic of turks who insist they are european for all the wrong reasons: 'no, we aren't like the arabs, no we aren't like the kurds, we like classical music and we believe in laicité!'. It's the same as iranian diasporas who are diehard Pahlavists.