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Turanism, also known as Turanianism, pan-Turanism or pan-Turanianism, is a Pan-nationalism political movement built around Pseudoscience claims of mongoloid and Altaic connections between various ethnic groups of Eurasia. It revolves around the abandoned proposal of a Ural-Altaic language family, which hypothesizes that the Turkic peoples, Mongolic peoples, Tungusic peoples, and Uralic languages peoples share Inner Asia and origins and therefore close cultural, ethnic, and linguistic bonds. Supporters of Turanism propose political unity among these groups, chiefly to oppose the cultural and political influences of the of Europe, West Asia, and South Asia, as well as the of East Asia. The movement emerged in the 19th century to counter Pan-nationalism ideologies such as pan-Germanism, and built upon the ideas of pan-Slavism (e.g. the idea of a "Turanian brotherhood and collaboration" was borrowed from the pan-Slavic concept of "Slavic brotherhood and collaboration").
The term "Turan" is of Iranian origin and is believed to have referred to a prehistorical human society in Central Asia. The term was widely used in scientific literature from the 18th century onwards to denote Central Asia. European scholars borrowed the term from the historical works of Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur; the annotated English translation of his Shajare-i Türk was published in 1729 and quickly became an oft-used source for European scholars. Friedrich Max Müller, the German Orientalist and philologist, published and proposed a new grouping of the non-Aryan and non-Semitic Asian languages in 1855. In his work The Languages of the Seat of War in the East, he called these languages "Turanian". Müller divided this group into two subgroups, the Southern Division and the Northern Division. MÜLLER, Friedrich Max. The languages of the seat of war in the East. With a survey of the three families of language, Semitic, Arian and Turanian. Williams and Norgate, London, 1855. https://archive.org/details/languagesseatwa00mlgoog In the long run, his evolutionist theory about languages' structural development, tying growing grammatical refinement to socio-economic development, and grouping languages into 'antediluvian', 'familial', 'nomadic', and 'political' developmental stages, proved unsound. Nonetheless, his terminology stuck, and the terms 'Turanian peoples' and 'Turanian languages' became parts of common parlance. Another proposed group, the Ural-Altaic languages, was later derived from Müller's Northern Division subgroup.
Like the term Aryan is used for Indo-European, Turanian is used chiefly as a linguistic term, synonymous with Ural-Altaic.M. Antoinette Czaplicka, The Turks of Central Asia in History and at the Present Day, Elibron, 2010, p. 19. However, the Ural-Altaic theory has been scientifically disproven. Concepts of areal linguistics and typology even if in a genetic sense of these terms might be considered as obsolete.BROWN, Keith and OGILVIE, Sarah eds.:Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. 2009. p. 722.
Turanism originated in the work of the Finnish nationalist and linguist Matthias Alexander Castrén, who championed the ideology. He concluded that the Finns originated in Central Asia (more specifically in the Altai Mountains) and far from being a small isolated people, they were part of a larger polity that included such peoples as the Hungarians, Turks, and Mongols.EB on Matthias Alexander Castrén. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/98799/Matthias-Alexander-Castren It implies not only the unity of all Turkic peoples (as in pan-Turkism), but also the alliance of a wider Ural-Altaic family believed to include all speakers of the "Turanian languages".
Although Turanism is a political movement for the union of all Ural-Altaic peoples, there are different opinions about the movement's inclusivity. The early Turanist Ziya Gökalp opined that Turanism is for Turkic peoples only, as other Turanian peoples (Finns, Hungarians, Mongolians and so on) are too different culturally.Türkçülüğün Esasları pg.25 (Gökalp, Ziya) In contrast, his contemporary Lothrop Stoddard gave the following description during World War I:
Right across northern Europe and Asia, from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean, there stretches a vast band of peoples to whom ethnologists have assigned the name of "Uralo-Altaic race", but who are more generally termed "Turanians". This group embraces the most widely scattered folk—the Ottoman Turks of Istanbul and Anatolia, the Turkmen people of Central Asia and Persia, the Tatars of South Russia and Transcaucasia, the Hungarians of Hungary, the Finns of Finland and the Baltic region, the aboriginal tribes of Siberia and even the distant Mongols and Manchu people. Diverse though they are in culture, tradition, and even physical appearance, these peoples nevertheless possess certain well-marked traits in common. Their languages are all similar, and, what is of even more import, their physical and mental make-up displays undoubted affinities.
Castrén was of the opinion that Russia was seeking systematically to prevent all development towards freer conditions in Finland, and concluded from this that the Finns must begin to prepare a revolt against Russia. According to him, it was to be linked with a favourable international crisis and would be realised as a general revolt against Russian rule, in which the non-Russian peoples from the Turks and Tatars to the Finns would take part. This political vision of his was shared by some other intellectuals.PAASVIRTA, Juhani: Finland and Europe: The Period of Autonomy and the International Crises, 1808–1914 1981. p. 68. Fennomans like Elias Lönnrot and Zachris Topelius shared this or an even bolder vision of coming greatness. As Topelius put it:
The idea of a Hungarian Oriental Institute originated with Jenő Zichy.VINCZE Zoltán: Létay Balázs, a magyar asszirológia legszebb reménye http://www.muvelodes.ro/index.php/Cikk?id=155 This idea did not come true. Instead, a kind of lyceum was formed in 1910, called Turáni Társaság (Hungarian Turan Society, also called Hungarian Asiatic Society). The Turan society concentrated on Turan as geographic location where the ancestors of Hungarians might have lived.
The movement received impetus after Hungary's defeat in World War I. Under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon (1920), the new Hungarian state constituted only 32.7% of the territory of historic, pre-treaty Hungary, and it lost 58.4% of its total population. More than 3.2 million ethnic Hungarians (one-third of all Hungarians) resided outside the new boundaries of Hungary in the successor states under oppressive conditions.PORTIK Erzsébet-Edit: Erdélyi magyar kisebbségi sorskérdések a két világháború között. In: Iskolakultúra 2012/9. p. 60-66. http://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00011/00168/pdf/EPA00011_Iskolakultura_2012-9_060-066.pdf Old Hungarian cities of great cultural importance like Pozsony (a former capital of the country), Kassa, and Kolozsvár (present-day Bratislava, Košice, and Cluj-Napoca respectively) were lost. Under these circumstances, no Hungarian government could survive without seeking justice for both the Magyars and Hungary. Reuniting the Magyars became a crucial point in public life and on the political agenda. Outrage led many to reject Europe and turn towards the East in search of new friends and allies in a bid to revise the unjust terms of the treaty and restore the integrity of Hungary.
On 1 June 1924, the Magyar-Nippon Társaság (Hungarian-Japanese Society) was founded by private persons in order to strengthen Hungarian-Japanese cultural relations and exchanges.FARKAS Ildikó: A Magyar-Nippon Társaság. In: Japanológiai körkép. 2007. http://real.mtak.hu/34745/1/Farkas_Magyar_Nippon_Tarsasag_u.pdf
Turanism was never embraced officially because it was not in accord with the Christian conservative ideological background of the regime, but it was used by the government as an informal tool to break the country's international isolation, and build alliances. Hungary signed treaties of friendship and collaboration with the Turkey in 1923,1924. évi XVI. törvénycikk a Török Köztársasággal Konstantinápolyban 1923. évi december hó 18. napján kötött barátsági szerződés becikkelyezéséről. http://www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=7599 with the Estonia in 1937,1938. évi XXIII. törvénycikk a szellemi együttműködés tárgyában Budapesten, 1937. évi október hó 13. napján kelt magyar-észt egyezmény becikkelyezéséről. http://www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=8078 with the Finland in 1937,1938. évi XXIX. törvénycikk a szellemi együttműködés tárgyában Budapesten, 1937. évi október hó 22. napján kelt magyar-finn egyezmény becikkelyezéséről. http://www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=8084 with Japan in 1938,1940. évi I. törvénycikk a Budapesten, 1938. évi november hó 15. napján kelt magyar-japán barátsági és szellemi együttműködési egyezmény becikkelyezéséről. http://www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=8115 and with Bulgaria in 1941.1941. évi XVI. törvénycikk a szellemi együttműködés tárgyában Szófiában az 1941. évi február hó 18. napján kelt magyar-bolgár egyezmény becikkelyezéséről. http://www.1000ev.hu/index.php?a=3¶m=8169
After World War II, the Soviet Red Army occupied Hungary. The Hungarian government was placed under the direct control of the administration of the occupying forces. All Turanist organisations were disbanded by the government, and the majority of Turanist publications was banned and confiscated. In 1948, Hungary was converted into a communist one-party state. Turanism was portrayed and vilified as an exclusively fascist ideology although Turanism's role in the interwar development of far-right ideologies was negligible."While Turanism was and remained little more than a fringe ideology of the Right, the second orientation of the national socialists, pan-Europaism, had a number of adherents, and was adopted as the platform of several national socialist groups." JANOS, Andrew C.: The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945. 1982. p.275.
The political party of the Young Turks, the Committee of Union and Progress, embraced Turanism, and a glorification of Turkish people ethnic identity, and was devoted to protecting the Turkic peoples living under foreign rule (most of them under Russian rule as a result of Russia's enormous territorial expansion during the 16th and 19th centuries), and to restoring the Ottoman Empire's shattered national pride.Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (Hardcover) by G. S. Graber
The Turkish version of Turanism was summed up by American politicians at the time of First World War as follows: "It has been shown above that the Turkish version of Turanism contains two general ideas: (a) To purify and strengthen the Turkish nationality within the Ottoman Empire, and (b) to link up the Ottoman Turks with the other Turks in the world. These objects were first pursued in the cultural sphere by a private group of 'Intellectuals', and promoted by peaceful propaganda. After 1913, they took on a political form and were incorporated in the programme of the C.U.P.", but Ottoman defeat in World War I briefly undermined the notion of Turanism.
After World War I, Turkish nationalists and Turanists joined the Basmachi movement in Central Asia, to help their struggle against the Soviets. The most prominent amongst them was Enver Pasha, the former Ottoman war minister.
Turanism forms an important aspect of the ideology of the modern Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), whose youth movement is informally known as the Grey Wolves. Grey Wolf (the mother wolf Asena) was the main symbol of the ancient Turkic peoples.
In the wake of the Turkish-assisted victory by Azerbaijan in its war with Armenia in 2020, "a certain 'Turan' (greater Turkic world) euphoria took hold on social media," Tanchum, a senior fellow at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy and a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said.
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