National Honour: The Poverty of Nationalism in Türkiye

What is a nation?
For centuries, nations have been described through blood, territory, language, religion, and collective myths. Yet these definitions leave a deeper question unanswered: What makes a nation morally legitimate?
In National Honour: The Poverty of Nationalism in Türkiye, Levent Caglar offers a powerful philosophical examination of nationalism, memory, identity, citizenship, and political ethics. Moving beyond conventional debates, he argues that the true measure of a nation is neither military strength nor ethnic unity, but its ability to confront its own history honestly.
The book develops a distinction between two models of nationhood: the Negative Nation and the Positive Nation. The Negative Nation is built upon denial, exclusion, historical amnesia, and the constant creation of internal enemies. The Positive Nation is grounded in recognition, plurality, moral responsibility, and democratic citizenship.
Drawing on examples from Türkiye, Germany, South Africa, and Canada, Caglar explores how societies remember, forget, suppress, and reconstruct their collective pasts. He examines the psychological foundations of nationalism, the politics of memory, the moral meaning of honour, the relationship between truth and citizenship, and the possibility of a new democratic future.
At the centre of the book stands a simple but challenging proposition: a nation becomes honourable when it can carry the tension between its official self-image and its suppressed history without resorting to denial, violence, or myth.
Combining political philosophy, history, ethics, and social criticism, National Honour speaks to readers interested in democracy, nationalism, collective memory, human rights, reconciliation, and the future of plural societies.
This is not merely a book about Türkiye. It is a reflection on every society struggling with historical wounds, unresolved injustices, and the search for a more truthful political community.
For readers of political theory, philosophy, history, nationalism studies, democracy, and human rights, National Honour offers a compelling vision of how nations may move from denial toward dignity, from myth toward truth, and from domination toward an Ethical Republic.