A what? Lebanonization of Turkey?

Calls to beware 'Lebanonization' echo through Turkish political discourse today, conjuring old ghosts of division and collapse. But these anxieties rest on a misreading of Ottoman history.

The fear of fragmentation and the impulse to negate difference are legacies of Turkey’s founding moment, shaped in the aftermath of World War I and hardened during the War of Independence.

These anxieties became embedded in the early Republic’s state-building project. Since then, the national psyche has wavered between an aspiration to “be Western” and a dread of turning into something else—once Iran, sometimes Malaysia, nowadays Lebanon. Beneath this tension lies a rigid understanding of modernity, one that claims Turkey’s destiny is Westward-looking while overlooking a deeper historical reality. That the Ottoman Empire was as much a Balkan and European polity as it was an Islamic one. This selective view of the Ottoman past as ‘backward’ has left behind a residue of misconceptions and inherited fears. Of pluralism, of recognition, and of anything that might blur the illusion of unity. Or in the words of Erdogan ‘one flag, one state, one nation.’

Anxieties about becoming Iran or Malay…