This is a book about what it meant to be German, Soviet, Russian, and Turkish in the twentieth century, and how that definition radically changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Germany's ethnic citizenship law, the Soviet Union's inscription of ethnic origins in personal identification documents, and Turkey's prohibition on the public use of minority languages, all put in place in the early twentieth century, underpinned the definition of “nationhood” in these countries. Despite many challenges from political and societal actors, these policies did not change for many decades, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, when Russia removed ethnicity from the internal passport, Germany changed its citizenship law, and Turkish public television began to broadcast in minority languages. How did such tremendous changes occur? This book develops a new typology of “regimes of ethnicity,” whereby the ideal-types of monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes are defined and identified. This new conceptualization connects the study of nation building to studies of ethnic diversity and citizenship, while providing a coherent typology of state policies on ethnicity that accommodates the full range of variation across cases. Using this new typology and a close study of primary documents and numerous interviews, ?ener Aktürk argues that the coincidence of three key factors – counterelites, new discourses, and hegemonic majorities – explains successful change in state policies toward ethnicity.

?ener Aktürk is an Assistant Professor at Koç University in Istanbul. He holds degrees from the University of Chicago (BA, MA) and the University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD). He has spent extended periods in Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow for language study and doctoral research. Prior to his current appointment, he was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. He is a recipient of a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant from the European Commission. He has published more than thirty articles in international and national refereed academic journals includingWorld Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, European Journal of Sociology, Middle Eastern Studies, Nationalities Papers, Ab Imperio, Turkish Studies,Insight Turkey, and Theoria. He has authored chapters in various edited books published in Turkey, Russia, Hungary, and the United States.