Now that the Turkish government has performed its role in publicizing the Armenian Genocide far beyond anything Armenians could have done on their own, Pelosi is pretty much guaranteed to drop the issue. But given the country’s importance, one thing that American policymakers can’t just “leave to historians” is to understand why Turkey is so monomaniacal about denying the Armenian Genocide. It just seems so irrational. You can see why even our Arab “friends” to go berserk if we moved our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — they want to extirpate the Jewish State, and moving our embassy to the City of David would further signal the legitimacy of the Jewish presence in Israel. Likewise, the ChiComs have little left to rely on for their legitimacy except extreme nationalism, which is why we have to pretend that our embassy in Taipei, staffed with Foreign Service officers, is a “non-profit, private corporation” called the American Institute in Taiwan.

But why does Turkey care so much about something a now-defunct state did nearly a century ago? Because, despite the trends that Michael pointed to in his earlier post, mainstream opinion sees recognition of the genocide as striking at the very legitimacy of Turkish nationhood. At the turn of the last century the Turkish elite, after gradually losing control over the non-Muslim peoples their ancestors subjugated when they invaded from Asia, came to the conclusion that they needed to create their own national state rather than continue to be the ruling people of a multinational empire. To do this they needed to engineer a Christenfrei Anatolia by exterminating the Armenians, who shared much of the same territory (and by killing or expelling the remaining Greeks and Assyrians too). In other words, the Turks fear that the genocide, though carried out by the prior regime, was the “original sin” without which there could not have been a Turkish national state.

This is also why the issue of Kurdistan is so sensitive, and why even speaking Kurdish was a crime until relatively recently. When Turkey was created, the Kurds were still looked on “pre-Turks,” an ethnic group with its own peculiarities but one whose members, because they were Muslim, would turn into Turks as they became educated and urbanized. In other words, they were not thought to represent a challenge to a Turkish national state. This is what had always happened with the Kurds under Turkish rule, but the development of a modern Kurdish national consciousness now means that’s impossible, and that’s important since Kurds make up 20 percent of the population.

In other words, both the Kurdish rebellion and recognition of the Armenian Genocide are seen by mainstream Turkish opinion not as political matters where you can split the difference but as existential questions. As with the case of Red China, I think this touchy, chip-on-their-shoulder nationalism is evidence of how weak, even brittle, Turkey’s reigning ideology has become. This doesn’t change my own opinion on these matters, but we need to understand it when making policy.