Pan-Turkism §

Pan-Turkism is a political ideology that calls for the cultural and, in its more programmatic forms, political unification of the Turkic-speaking peoples of Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Volga-Ural region, and Central Asia. As a coherent doctrine it crystallised in the late 19th century in the work of Russian-Tatar intellectuals, most notably the Crimean Tatar publicist Ismail Gaspirali (Gasprinsky), whose newspaper Tercüman propagated a slogan of "unity in language, thought and work", and was systematised politically by the Azerbaijani émigré Ali bey Huseynzade (huseynzade) and the Tatar journalist Yusuf Akçura.

Within the late Ottoman Empire, Pan-Turkism (or Turkism, Türkçülük) supplied the Committee of Union and Progress with an ideological alternative to Ottomanism after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Ziya Gökalp's writings reframed the empire as the heartland of a wider Turkic nation, and War Minister Enver Pasha pursued the doctrine practically through the disastrous Sarıkamış campaign and the 1918 Army of Islam in Baku, commanded by his uncle Nuri Pasha. Most genocide scholarship, including Bloxham and Akçam, treats the Pan-Turkist demographic vision (a contiguous Turkic geography between Anatolia and Central Asia) as a structural condition of the Armenian Genocide, because Eastern Armenia and the Christian populations of eastern Anatolia stood in the corridor.

Officially repudiated by Kemalist Turkey, Pan-Turkism survived in fringe form (the Grey Wolves, MHP) and re-entered state discourse after the dissolution of the USSR. Since the 2010s the ruling AKP has institutionalised it through the Organization of Turkic States and through the deepening Turkey–Azerbaijan partnership captured in Ilham Aliyev's and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's "One Nation, Two States" formula (sourced opinion: de Waal reads the contemporary version as primarily geo-economic; editorial others see in the 2020 war and the Zangezur corridor demand a revival of the contiguous-corridor logic).