The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism

By Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta

An ethnographic exploration of the meaning of national citizenship in the context of globalization

The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced in a setting where everyday life is marked by numerous uncertainties and unequal opportunities. When a Turkish mother wants to protect her daughter's modern, secular upbringing through U.S. citizenship, U.S. citizenship, for her, is a form of insurance for her daughter given Turkey's unknown political future. When a Turkish-American citizen describes how he can make a credible claim of national belonging because he returned to Turkey yet can also claim a cosmopolitan Western identity because of his U.S. citizenship, he represents the popular identification of the West with the United States. And when a natural-born U.S. citizen describes with enthusiasm the upward mobility she has experienced since moving to Turkey, she reveals how the status of U.S. citizenship and "Americanness" become valuable assets outside of the States.

Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not intend to live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297065

Book preview

The American Passport in Turkey

DEMOCRACY, CITIZENSHIP, AND CONSTITUTIONALISM

Rogers M. Smith and Mary L. Dudziak, Series Editors

The American Passport in Turkey

National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism

Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Altan-Olcay, Özlem, author. | Balta, Evren, author.

Title: The American passport in Turkey : national citizenship in the age of transnationalism / Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta.

Other titles: Democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034847 | ISBN 978–0-8122–5215–6 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship—United States. | Americans—Turkey. | Dual nationality—Turkey. | Dual nationality—United States. | Turks—United States. | Transnationalism—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC JK1759 .A42 2020 | DDC 323.6089/130561—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034847

For Defne Paker

and

Efe Yağmur Olcay

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction. Meanings and Values of American Citizenship in a Transnational World

Chapter 1. Imagining America in Turkey:

A Historical Overview

Chapter 2. Imagining U.S. Citizenship:

Risk Societies and Calculating Mothers

Chapter 3. Transnationalized Americans:

Stories of Moving Up in the World

Chapter 4. Returning from an American Dream:

Turkish Americans in Turkey

Conclusion. A Nation of Transnational Citizens

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Meanings and Values of American Citizenship in a Transnational World

On 24 August 2013, Turkish Bloomberg published a story online about the trend among Turkish women of giving birth in the United States. The manager of a health tourism and international education company, part of whose business catered to this group, estimated that around 450 women went to the United States for this purpose every year, spending around $13 million. He also added that this trend was growing as much in China, Russia, and several Middle Eastern countries. When probed about the motivation, before giving a variety of misconstrued expectations, he said: [In this way] the child will become a U.S. citizen upon birth and will have the right to remain a U.S. citizen their entire life (Bloomberg HT 24 August 2013). Apparently, these mothers-to-be, who are permanently settled in Turkey, imagine U.S. citizenship as offering their children something beyond their own citizenship status, regardless of whether the children end up living in the United States in the future. What does this story tell us? What does it mean to be a U.S. citizen in Turkey? What does it signify to be a U.S. citizen outside of the United States? What do the allure and privileges of U.S. citizenship in Turkey tell us about U.S. global power and its connections with local politics? What do the transnational meanings and values attached to U.S. citizenship signal about the transformation of the institution of citizenship?

People can give diverse answers to these questions. When a mother tells us that she wants to protect her daughter’s modern, secular upbringing through U.S. citizenship, this aspiration lies atop an iceberg of Turkish national history, whose early republican legacy half of the country’s population considers to be under threat. For her, U.S. citizenship is a form of insurance for her daughter given Turkey’s unknown future. When a Turkish American citizen describes how he can make more credible claims of national belonging (because he returned to Turkey) and a cosmopolitan Western identity (because he lived in the United States and can always go back because he has U.S. citizenship), this says something about the popular identification of the West with the United States, a remnant of the political and cultural history between the two countries. When a natural-born U.S. citizen describes with enthusiasm the upward mobility that he has experienced since moving to Turkey, it signals a need to investigate what it is about the status of U.S. citizenship and Americanness that makes it a valuable asset outside of the United States. These stories and others show the many ways in which imaginaries about and the practices and experiences of U.S. citizenship outside of the United States are inherently connected to everyday experiences of economic opportunity and political unpredictability in Turkey and beyond. They reflect a history of conflicted relations between the non-West and the West, its echoes in cultural battles around questions of identity, and life in transnational spaces. More important, they elicit questions about the unequal meanings, practices, and values attached to national citizenship in transnational spaces.

This book explores the diverse meanings and values that various actors attribute to U.S. citizenship, actors who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. It is based on interviews with families who obtain U.S. citizenship for their children by giving birth in the United States, Turkish citizens who receive green cards and U.S. citizenship for themselves through naturalization but choose to return to and reside in Turkey, and natural-born U.S. citizens who have settled in Turkey during their adulthood. We propose that these meanings provide a unique vantage point to study locally situated political and economic tensions, inequalities, and struggles as well as the everyday workings of U.S. hegemony in the world. Through their narratives, we shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced in a setting where everyday life is marked by unequal opportunities, brought about by the consolidation of economic liberalism on the one hand and more recently impacted by the convergence of national, regional, and transnational political unpredictability on the other. We argue that there are highly relevant questions to be explored in these diverse accounts of living in Turkey and the United States, experiences of U.S. and Turkish citizenship, in connection with individual subjectivities.

This book suggests that the transnational meanings and values of U.S. citizenship are ultimately connected to U.S. global power. Having U.S. citizenship outside the United States brings with it a set of symbolic meanings that are articulated in negotiations of identity. U.S. citizenship is also recognized outside the United States because of its strategic advantages compared to most citizenships. People who live in a region where most inhabitants have only limited options to escape political crisis and life-threatening situations may see their U.S. citizenship as insurance, a guarantee for safe passage to what they perceive to be a stable, liberal democracy. This is a transnational value that needs to be recognized. Or, in times of economic downturn and crisis in the United States, U.S. citizens can seamlessly pass across national borders, looking for work elsewhere while being able to reasonably expect that they will not experience much downward mobility. These diverse meanings and values of U.S. citizenship, which signify unequal transnational opportunities and symbolic recognition, give clues about the everyday workings of U.S. global power.

We also believe that the hierarchical meanings and values emerging from diverse experiences with, practices of, and imaginaries about U.S. citizenship reveal the need to rethink our conceptualizations of citizenship in the contemporary world. The values and meanings associated with national citizenship regimes transgress state borders, overlap with one another, and create new frontiers. These meanings and values are distinct and do not always necessarily mirror the experiences of those situated within the official borders of a single citizenship regime. In other words, we need to think about citizenship as an institution, an experience, and a set of practices unfolding in transnational spaces. In this book, we recognize the persistent relations of inequality between states and emphasize the need to locate the diverse meanings and values of citizenship in people’s experiences, both inside and outside of countries of origin.

Broadly, this book makes three arguments. First, we propose that the privileges that people associate with U.S. citizenship in countries like Turkey provide a unique vantage point from which to explore the everyday workings of locally specific political polarization, social hierarchies, and cultural contestations. These privileges also give important clues about the long-term power of the United States in the region where Turkey is located, beyond its foreign policy interventions. The American empire persists at the intersection of the history of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. geopolitical prowess, and people’s experiences of privilege with and desires for U.S. citizenship outside of the United States. These citizens, current and aspiring, spread across the world, create the American third world (Altan 2006a): a new kind of empire of transnational Americans living outside the United States. This is an empire that extends beyond the official borders of the United States and is configured in the seemingly apolitical, everyday practices of American subjects as they fashion their agencies in social realms and cultural contestations ostensibly unrelated to U.S. geopolitical power.

Second, U.S. citizenship, whether the holder is born or naturalized into it, combines a unique set of values and meanings. It plays a powerful role in individuals’ identity negotiations between national belonging and transnational aspirations. It enables people to forge creative combinations of subject positions, precisely because they are situated outside of the United States. The allure of U.S. citizenship is also strategic, located in the exit options that it generates in case of crises, the geographical mobility its passport facilitates, and the upward mobility it enables. The status of U.S. citizenship enables individuals to make sense of and reconfigure positions in political and economic conundrums in transnational spaces.

Finally, these U.S. citizens beyond the borders of the United States reveal the need to rethink the transformation of the institution of citizenship. We argue that we need to take into account the ways in which diverse individual claims and aspirations, in tandem with unequal proliferation of state powers, unfold in transnational spaces. The book argues that national citizenship continues to matter, but now does so in ways that cannot be captured by a sole focus on domestic state-citizen relations. We need to consider how people imagine, experience, and strategize around their citizenship status against a background of macropolitical circumstances beyond their choosing and not necessarily confined to the official state borders of their citizenship regimes. An increasingly transnationalized world does not necessarily mean a decrease in the significance of national citizenship. National citizenship still matters greatly for ordering inequalities, but now in transnational spaces.

Current and Aspiring Citizens of the United States: A Word on Method and Context

We study U.S. citizenship in Turkey through a total of 110 semi-structured interviews with three groups of people who have different relations to U.S. citizenship. Together they allow us to map the diverse meanings and values attached to U.S. citizenship outside of the United States—ranging from those who imagine what U.S. citizenship means, through those who experience the advantages of this status alongside and in comparison with Turkish citizenship, to those whose U.S. citizenship coincides more unequivocally with being American. These subjects are parents who do not have U.S. citizenship themselves but traveled to give birth to their children in the United States so that the latter had U.S. citizenship from birth; Turkish citizens by birth who have lived in the United States long enough to obtain a green card or U.S. citizenship; and U.S. citizens who are permanently settled in Turkey. Exploring their personal journeys—which extend to but also go beyond Turkey and the United States—we seek to understand the variety of ways in which actual people imagine, practice and experience U.S. citizenship in Turkey.

The stories we tell in this book are also stories of an increasingly polarized country: a country where scores of urbanites have been socialized into thinking of Turkey as a Western country whereas the current political authorities frequently deploy a rhetoric portraying connections to the West as a betrayal of the Turkish nation. Studies focusing on Turkey and its relations with the West in general and with the United States, in particular, do so from a macro-political perspective. In contrast, we emphasize the importance of highlighting everyday experiences and narratives that make sense of them, and connecting these to the macro-political context. Individuals strategize at the intersection of institutions that regulate citizenship, political contexts that affect their lives, and individual resources, which are always unequal. By turning our gaze to actual people and their everyday experiences in contemporary Turkey, we uncover how certain citizenships can become an important tool in managing diverse insecurities.

This research has a very personal starting point for us. We are both middle-class Turkish mothers who previously resided in the United States for close to a decade during our doctoral studies before returning to Turkey after graduation. Evren moved from the United States to Turkey while she was pregnant whereas Özlem gave birth several years after moving to Turkey. When Evren made the decision to return to Turkey while four months pregnant, many around her questioned her judgment. Friends and acquaintances asked her repeatedly why she did not stay in the United States a bit longer to give birth to her daughter Defne there instead. When Özlem was pregnant, she frequently encountered a different variation of this question. Was she going to go back the United States to give birth since she had so many ties there and knew the place inside out? The answer was negative: Her son Efe Yağmur was also born in Turkey. On the one hand, these questions evoked guilt about not having made the right choice for our children. On the other hand, as social scientists deeply interested in questions of micro politics of belonging and everyday strategizing, we began to think about what these insistent questions mean. Why do people think that it is a good idea to travel thousands of miles in the later stages of pregnancy, spending tens of thousands of dollars in the process, taking on health risks for ourselves and the unborn child, especially during a period when the support of one’s family and social network is of paramount importance? What do these questions say about experiences with the Turkish context as well aspirations regarding U.S. citizenship?

It was with these in mind that we initially began the research with interviews with forty parents who had given birth in the United States to acquire U.S. citizenship for their children. We contacted our interviewees, mostly mothers, through different points of entry into the field: There were individuals who had experienced this among our own acquaintances; others we reached through the schools where our children were enrolled; we found online blogs that some women write about their experiences; and our initial contacts led us to more people to interview. Three categories emerged at the intersection of familiarity with the United States and economic power. The first group comprised couples with at least one that had previously lived in the United States and was a high-level professional or business owner. This group not only had significant economic resources but also in-depth familiarity with the workings of everyday life in the United States. The second group was also made up of high-level professionals with substantial income and wealth. However, unlike the first group, their familiarity with the United States was limited to short-term visits for pleasure or business. Nevertheless, they could claim knowledge of and affinity with what they often referred to as the American way of life. The third group was the smallest of the three: Even though they too had visited the United States briefly and claimed cultural affinity, their financial means were more limited. All interviews, which on average lasted between one and two hours, covered the parents’ motivations for and interpretations of their children’s citizenship status, the intricacies of the journey itself and the ways in which parents were raising their children in Turkey.

We conducted these interviews in 2012 and at the beginning of 2013, a time in Turkish political history when the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) had begun alienating the liberal and secular middle classes, accusing them of being elitist. Its grip on political power was rising as it had successfully neutralized the military, a move desired by many, although the party then moved on to intimidate and repress opposition groups as well as to encroach on the independence of the judiciary. This was a time when the overwhelming sentiment among Turkey’s secular urban middle and upper classes was a fear that the early republican values of secularism and Western modernity were being damaged, along with a sense of a loss of stable life trajectories and sociocultural privileges.

This first group of interviewees belonged to those sections of Turkish society who were increasingly anxious about the possibility that the quality of their lives and their domestic status could decline. This anxiety had pushed them to strategize for their children’s future in case their predictions about Turkey’s worsening ties with the West, rising authoritarianism and desecularization would come true. They told us stories of their own upbringings and the insecurities that they felt in the contemporary context. Many described the longing they had for the freedom they had experienced when they lived in the United States or had observed about everyday life during their visits there. When people talked about their desires for individual freedom and a predictable political setting, these comments were intricately connected to apprehensions about the Turkish context. They also signified a sense of loss: These groups, regardless of their income and wealth, were brought up with an inherent sense of high social status because they had shared in the hegemonic narrative of Turkey as a nation that is part of the West (Altan-Olcay and Balta 2016). At this juncture, however, they felt that this narrative was losing credibility, along with their historically assumed social and cultural identities and privileges associated with them. In the end, because they did not feel capable of doing much to change the political affairs of the country, they used their individual resources to take precautions for their children’s future. Hence, for them, U.S. citizenship was a gift to their children (Balta and Altan-Olcay 2016) that represented expanded future possibilities and acted as a signifier of how the parents wanted to raise them. More important, people perceived it as a crucial precaution for the children if the parents’ premonitions about becoming the new minority in Turkey reached a point where they felt threatened.

As our interviews accumulated, patterns began to emerge: among others, anxieties about future risks, the motivation to protect children from such risks, and U.S. citizenship as possible insurance. The narratives we heard revealed imaginaries about and expectations of U.S. citizenship by people who themselves do not have the status (or plan to acquire it). However, it also became clear that these conversations were largely about the unknown future experiences of the children. At the time we conducted this first group of interviews, all the children whose parents we talked to were under the age of sixteen. We had little insight into what the children’s experiences and perceptions were concerning U.S. citizenship. With this in mind, we expanded our scope to ask a more inclusive question about how U.S. citizenship is experienced outside the United States, particularly in Turkey. Over the course of 2014 and 2015, we conducted interviews with two additional groups of actors: U.S. citizens by birth who had come to settle in Turkey during their adulthood and Turkish citizens who had become naturalized in the United States but returned to Turkey.

Our second group of interviewees included thirty-six U.S. citizens who were permanently settled in Turkey. This group had rich experiences with transnational mobility, career choices, and more intimate reasons, such as marriage, that took them outside the United States. In contacting this group, we also used various networks, such as acquaintances, institutional affiliations, personal blogs, and expatriate lists, in order to achieve diversity across gender, profession, age, and duration of stay. This group was also the most diverse in terms of socioeconomic origins. The stories of their familial backgrounds, upbringings, the schools they attended, and the options they had after graduating from college clearly revealed a wide range of socioeconomic opportunities in the United States. We asked them to describe their upbringing in the United States, the choices that led them eventually to Turkey, their experiences of the transition to and living in Turkey, and their personal interpretations of privileges and ambivalences of being American. Often we saw that, for this group, Turkey was not the only place outside of the United States in which they had lived, as many had also stayed in other countries in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, allowing us to tap into rich accounts of being transnationalized Americans with experiences of privilege in comparison with the citizens of various countries, including but not limited to Turkey.

These were actors who were natural-born U.S. citizens, socialized thoroughly in their country of origin, but now continuing their lives in Turkey. Thus, the meanings and values they associated with U.S. citizenship were informed deeply by their identification with Americanness. Their narratives revealed complicated issues of national belonging, however: Having lived in Turkey—and, for several, other countries in the developing world—they had seen firsthand the historical impact of U.S. foreign policy around the world. They could also compare the more consumerist everyday life in the United States with the significantly narrower range of choices outside. These experiences invariably produced discomfort about what it meant to be American. Yet at the same time, being recognized as an American almost always turned into various personal experiences of privilege. When individuals talked about the latter, some found themselves expressing patriotic pride. These experiences of privilege encompassed more lucrative jobs, interesting career paths, and elevated social status. They signaled the symbolic recognition that being an American elicited and how it could translate into upward mobility that was not available to the same degree if they had stayed in the United States. Once again, however, these were complicated processes, with people’s ethnic and racial backgrounds as well as gender and sexuality playing significant roles in the outcome. Ultimately, this group’s narratives documented the conditions under which U.S. citizenship and nationality come to be associated with one another and produce upward social mobility outside the United States.

Finally, we interviewed thirty-four individuals of Turkish birth who held a green card or U.S. citizenship. They had obtained their status mainly through long-term stay in the United States (as students and later for work-related reasons), the diversity lottery, or spousal/familial connections. At the time of the interviews, most of this group had returned to and decided to permanently settle in Turkey. We also conducted interviews with a small number of individuals who were still living in the United States but were entertaining, to different degrees, the option of returning to Turkey in the near future. These individuals were thus hyphenated American citizens: They had grown up in Turkey, some up to college age, some up to the point where they began graduate studies, and almost all into their twenties. Many had lived in the United States for at least a decade. Now back in Turkey permanently or visiting frequently, they had a distinct comparative perspective on Turkish and U.S. citizenship. We asked them about their life trajectories, their move to the United States and back to Turkey, their motivations for and experiences with obtaining the green card and/or U.S. citizenship, and how they currently lived with their dual citizenship in and outside the United States and Turkey, including the benefits that they gained and the ambivalences they experienced.

On the one hand, this group, more than any other, provided us with colorful stories about the strategic advantages of U.S. citizenship for crossing nation-state borders compared to Turkish citizenship. Furthermore, their dual citizenship status worked for them in a unique way: When they decided to go back to Turkey, they could utilize their Turkish upbringing and familiarity with Turkey to find jobs, while using their green card or U.S. citizenship to push for more lucrative, higher-status positions. Furthermore, the status of U.S. citizenship meant that the move to Turkey did not have to be permanent; they could circulate between Turkey and the United States if necessary. On the other hand, their stories were never only about the strategic advantages of having dual citizenship. Rather, U.S. citizenship also signified for them a cosmopolitan cultural disposition and confirmed their aspirations to belong to a transnational network of mobile actors. In other words, these