Ayse Kadioglu wrote:...
The theme that a patriotic Turk should try to achieve a balance between the benefits of the West and the East by opting for adopting the science and technology of the former and the spirituality of the latter is repeated quite often in the schooling system designed by the educational establishment in Turkey. This difficult endeavour is almost like a mission for every patriotic Turk. Hence, it is possible to argue that since the days of the early Westernization efforts. the Turkish psyche has been burdened with the difficult task of achieving a balance between the Western civilization and the Turkish culture.
...
A preoccupation with this balance between modernity and tradition, Western materialism and Eastern spirituality as well as Civilization -- based on the premises of Enlightenment -- and Culture -- based on the premises of Romanticism -- is a recurring theme accompanying Turkish modernization. The desire to achieve such a balance is nowhere better expressed than in Ziya Gokalp's (1876-1924) works. Ziya Gokalp's ideas were wavering between the three trends of Islamism, Turkism, and Westernism, hence, reflecting the political climate of the context in which he was located. As Niyazi Berkes puts it: `He was fighting within himself the battle that intellectuals and politicians were raging on other levels'.(20)
...While on the one hand, there were those intellectuals and politicians who opted for a social reconstruction by way of reversion to Sriat (Islamic law), there were those who staunchly supported the idea of Westernization, on the other. In addition to these two groups, there were others who longed for the romantic ideal of the pre-Islamic Turkic unity.
Ziya Gokalp was influenced by all of these trends. Yet, he
envisaged a middle road in the tradition of Namik Kemal: `that only the material civilization of Europe should be taken and not its non-material aspects'.(21) Yet, contrary to Namik Kemal's thought, Ziya Gokalp did not think that the individual and his reason could be a criteria for social reconstruction. Ziya Gokalp rather signified a shift from Tanzimat rationalism inspired by the eighteenth century thinkers of the European Enlightenment to the nineteenth century Romantic thought in the tradition of the German philosophers by accepting the transcendental reality of society identified with the nation instead of individual reason. Berkes sums up Ziya Gokalp's convictions in the following manner: `As the ultimate reality of contemporary society is the nation, and as national ideals are ultimate forces orienting the behavior of the individuals, so the most urgent task for the Turks consisted of awakening as a nation in order to adapt themselves to the conditions of contemporary civilization'.(22)
Ziya Gokalp believed that it was the primary task of sociology to determine `what the Turkish people already possessed or lacked to be a modern nation'.(23) He diagnosed the major ailment of the existing cultural climate in Turkey within the dichotomous representations of the East and the West. Accordingly, he believed in the necessity of an adjustment between the two aspects of social life, namely civilization and culture. Ziya Gokalp believed that civilization simply became a matter of mechanical imitation without a cultural basis. The source of cultural values was located in the social unit that he called `nation' Hence, he tried to give momentum to the rise of the concept of a modern Turkish nation as an independent cultural unit within the confines of contemporary civilization. He placed a lot of emphasis on the concept of `nation in coming to terms with the adjustment of culture and civilization. Ziya Gokalp's analyses contained the premises of both Enlightenment and Romanticism symbolized in the concepts of civilization and culture, respectively. By the same token, the nationalism that he described contained elements of individual liberty, rational cosmopolitanism, and universalism while at the same time tended for its own self-preservation. In short, it contained elements of both a cosmopolitan French nationalism and an organic, anti-Western and anti-enlightenment German nationalism. This paradoxical synthesis, first of all, posed the national question in the Turkish context as an insoluble problem; secondly it assigned a particular role to the refined intellect in transforming the popular consciousness by an elitist project from above. The latter had paved the way to the evolution of an official Turkish identity within the confines of a peculiar Turkish nationalism that was adopted in the course of the formative years of the Turkish Republic.
(21.) Niyazi Berkes (ed.), Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gokalp (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1959),
Source:
Ayse Kadioglu,
"The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity." Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, no. 2 (April 1996)
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ayse.htm 
