From Millet to Nation-State: Competing National Projects and Identity Transformation in Turkey and Lebanon

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The transition from ottoman empire to modern nation state reshaped patterns of communal belonging across the Middle East. This paper examines the transformation that unfolded in Turkey and Lebanon. These two post-Ottoman states with shared imperial legacy but diverged along contrasting paths of nation-building. Rather than treating the Ottoman millet system as a direct ancestor of modern national identity, the paper examines how inherited communal identities were reshaped through different state-building strategies. In Turkey, the Kemalist project sought to build a centralised and secular national identity; later, especially under the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the relationship between Turkish nationalism, religion, and the Ottoman was reconfigured. Lebanon, by contrast, took a different path: it built communal diversity into the state through a confessional power-sharing structure allowing sectarian identities to be central to political representation and citizenship. This paper uses a comparative-historical approach and a constructivist lens on nationalism and identity. It looks at the role of state institutions, political discourse and the competing role of nationhood in determining these divergent paths. It contends that post-Ottoman identity change was not a simple, uniform transition from communal belonging to national citizenship. Instead, it was shaped by competing national projects and institutional choices through which states managed diversity.