Humanism in Ruins by Aslı Iğsız is an ambitious account of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange that highlights its connections to liberal humanist and multiculturalist population management policies in Turkey and beyond. Rather than producing another narrative of this much-studied historical event, Iğsız traces its reverberations in both domestic and international political spheres by focusing on the shared categories of thought, repertoires of action, and forms of cultural production that underlie seemingly diverse (even opposing) policies with regard to the regulation of alterity. One of the main goals of the book is to show “how local discourses draw as much from transnational policies and discourses as they do from local past cultural policies and discourses” (177–78). Towards that end, Iğsız combs through the transnational political field as well as the Turkish one to unearth the interconnected formative moments that inform the current landscape.
The book begins with the assertion about the transnational significance of the Greek-Turkish population exchange as “the first internationally ratified and executed forced exchange of populations” (173) that “has set an international legal precedent whereby forced migration was legitimized as a solution for a ‘greater good’: peace” (4). Iğsız states that the population exchange epitomizes the policy of unmixing that is informed by segregative biopolitics, which had shaped the international order following World War I. She compares this to the latter instances of world ordering in the post-World War II and post-Cold War eras, and concludes that although they seem to refute it, “racialized thinking” (6) is in fact an integral part of the intellectual history of historicist and liberal humanist ideologies.
Iğsız surveys several historical-political events and cultural products that display the salience of racialized thinking in the post-1945 era. These include: the 1954 meeting of the European Association for the Study of Refugee Problems (AER) in Istanbul; the 1955 UNESCO Photo Exhibit “The Family of Man” at MOMA; the 1983 National Cultural Policy Report issued by the military government after the 1980 coup d’état in Turkey; the 2001 UNESCO Declaration of Cultural Diversity and the 2005 convention that followed it; the 2006 Cultural Policy Report issued by the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the establishment of the History Foundation in Turkey the same year; the UN Alliance of Civilizations in 2008; and the opening of the Population Exchange Museum in Istanbul in 2010. She traces the links between these sites also through a number of crosscutting historical characters such as Corrado Gini, a well-known Italian statistician, eugenicist, and author of “The Scientific Basic of Fascism” (1927), who was invited to found the Institute of Statistics in Istanbul University in 1950; Hilmi Ziya Ülken, the renowned Turkish sociologist who hosted Gini in Istanbul; and Fahrettin Kerim Gökay, a Turkish eugenicist, former governor, and mayor of Istanbul—all active figures in the AER, as well as various platforms facilitated by UNESCO in the 1950s. Following a careful analysis of the connections between those events and characters, Iğsız states: “These palimpsests of scholarly activities and institutionalized knowledge production demonstrate multiple crossings of scholars over institutions and networks, and underscore the terms of engagement with biopolitical logics at multiple levels. Inasmuch as the content of the production of knowledge on notions like race, the social, integration, or being human is important, so are the institutions and people involved in producing them, unraveling the politics of expertise of the time” (63).
“Palimpsest” is indeed one of the key terms of Humanism in Ruins. Although the book centers around the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, Iğsız's interest in this episode goes beyond its immediate history. Instead, she takes the event as an artifact of a particular frame of thinking, whose meaning and significance were overwritten in different periods in ways that reflect the dominant ideology of the time. It is these layers of meaning that lurk beneath the surface that the book really seeks to engage with. Just like deciphering an ancient parchment to trace the evolution of a text, Iğsız peels off the layers of erasure that enabled institutions like UNESCO to move from endorsing the homogenization of nation states to establish peace and economic stability after World War I, to advocating for the recognition of alterity for purposes of democratization and liberalization after the Cold War. In a similar vein, she traces the roots of AKP's neo-Ottomanist multiculturalism to the Turkish-Islamic synthesis that was institutionalized by the military government to consolidate “national consciousness” after the coup. These erasures are necessary to claim the heritage of a coherent past–national and transnational–while at the same time refuting the meanings that were once ascribed to some of its formative concepts. For instance, culture, a concept that once was used to maintain national homogeneity, gets re-appropriated by UNESCO later on to advocate for demographic diversity. In the national realm, Islam—once adopted by the military junta as the unifying essence of a cohesive and timeless Turkish identity—gets re-inscribed by the AKP government as the source of historical tolerance to multiplicity. The entanglements of these seemingly contradictory past and present meanings that account for the continuing legacy of racialized thinking and segregative biopolitics leads Iğsız to question the integrity and effectiveness of liberal humanist recognition policies.
The transnational and transdisciplinary character of Iğsız's scholarship makes the book appealing to a wide range of audiences. Her research rests on a truly diverse methodology that traverses disciplinary boundaries by employing archival research, interviews, and cultural analysis at once. Although the book centers around a phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the post-World War I Balkans, the way Iğsız tracks down its legacy in shaping our current transnational institutions also makes the book relevant beyond its immediate geographic boundaries. Humanism in Ruins speaks to the ongoing discussions in politics, anthropology, history, sociology, legal studies, and critical social thought with regard to liberal humanism, humanitarianism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and transnationalism. In addition to its more obvious interlocutors, such as: Alexis Aleksandris’ The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974 ([1983], 1992); Renée Hirschon's Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (1989) and Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (2003); James Faubion's Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (1993); Anastasia Karakasidou's Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990 (1997); Onur Yıldırım's Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1923–1934 (2007); Umut Özsu's Formalizing Displacement: Interanational Law and Population Transfers (2015); as well as the work of scholars such as Ayhan Aktar, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, Nergis Canefe, and Giorgos Tsimouris, the book is also in conversation with works such as: Charles Taylor's The Politics of Recognition (1992); Elizabeth Povinelli's The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002); Didier Fassin's Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011); Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin's In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (2010); and Eyal Weizman's The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2011).
While Iğsız's detailed documentation of institutional and personal relationships, entanglements, and legacies may feel overwhelming to a reader who is unfamiliar with the topic, her diligence and attention to detail allows her to powerfully take on one of the most critical questions that haunts the studies of its kind: “Given the global turn toward a preoccupation with national security and attacks on multiculturalism in recent years” (232), how justified is it in this day and age to expose the limits of liberal multiculturalist recognition policies? To this sobering question, Iğsız offers two thoughtful responses: first of all, she urges the readers to distinguish cultural recognition that merely induces domesticated expressions of alterity from politics that aim to restructure social, economic, and political order to rectify the impacts of prolonged exclusion and marginalization. While the latter is an admirable cause, Iğsız contends that in most cases diversity policies stop short of tackling the root causes of the problem. Furthermore, Iğsız's powerful display of the swift swing of the pendulum between segregative biopolitics to liberal multiculturalism and from cultural recognition to securitarianism in both domestic and international fields cautions the readers to not trust the permanence and effectiveness of liberal multiculturalism. In a period when the public worldwide seems to be “forced to choose between discipline-and-punish campaigns or policies that aim at pacification via limited recognition” (234), Humanism in Ruins shows a not-so-easy way out by pointing towards the extensive work that remains to be done in order to establish true, substantive, and enduring diversity.
