Associate Professor of Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of University of Tabriz
Abstract
The roots of modern states in the West can be traced back to the 1648 Westphalia Peace Treaty and emergence of European nation-states. This phenomenon entered the East as well as Iran and Ottoman Empire with two centuries of delay. In order to offer a new definition of the concept of national state, thinkers and politician of the two countries held fast to such constructive elements of nationalism as history and language; some of which were the connecting point of Iranians and Turks and were interconnected: the interconnectedness of Iranians and Turks within the framework of Iranian and Turanian myths, participation in the establishment of Islamic states and empires in the image of writers and warriors, lingual exchanges as well as mystical and gnostical interactions were all the elements that were later used for the construction and establishment of nation building and modern states of Iran and Turkey. The main objective of the present paper is to study some of the common historical-civilizational elements of Iranian and Turanians, the elements that played a great role in nation-state building and emergence of modern state in Iran and Turkey. Based on Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities theory, the concept of historical-civilizational memory has been chosen for the common heritage of Iranians and Turks. The main question of this research is: How and through which images the common memory of Iranians and Turks have been used in the construction of modern states of the two countries? The hypothesis of this research is: the historical-civilizational commonalities of Iran and Turkey in contemporary era, despite their historical interconnectedness, under the influence of European nation-state building model, went their separate, and time times contradictory, ways. Descriptive-analytical method was employed and the necessary data were collected from documents, books and journals.
Dehghani, R. (2017). Common Historical-Civilizational Memory of Iran and Turkey and Its Role in Establishment of the Two Modern States. Journal of Cultural Relation, 2(4), 35-56.
MLA
Reza Dehghani. "Common Historical-Civilizational Memory of Iran and Turkey and Its Role in Establishment of the Two Modern States". Journal of Cultural Relation, 2, 4, 2017, 35-56.
HARVARD
Dehghani, R. (2017). 'Common Historical-Civilizational Memory of Iran and Turkey and Its Role in Establishment of the Two Modern States', Journal of Cultural Relation, 2(4), pp. 35-56.
VANCOUVER
Dehghani, R. Common Historical-Civilizational Memory of Iran and Turkey and Its Role in Establishment of the Two Modern States. Journal of Cultural Relation, 2017; 2(4): 35-56.
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