Pan-Turkism

Pan-Turkism is a movement that emerged in the 1880s among the Turkic intellectuals of Azerbaijan (part of the Russian Empire at that time) and Ottoman Empire (modern day Turkey), with the aim of cultural and political unification of all Turkic peoples.

Name

In the research literature, the term "pan-Turkism" is used to describe the idea of political, cultural and ethnic unity of all Turkic-speaking people. Turanism is a closely related movement but a more general term than Turkism, since Turkism applies only to the Turkic peoples. However, researchers and politicians engaged in the field of Turkic ideology have used these terms interchangeably in a multitude of sources and literature. The term "Turkism" started to be used with a prefix "pan-" (from Greek πᾶν, pan = all), for a "Panturkism".

While the various Turkic peoples often share historical, cultural and linguistic roots, the rise of a pan-Turkic political movement is a phenomenon only of the 19th and 20th centuries and can be seen in parallel with European developments like Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism or with Pan-Iranism. Proponents use the latter most often as a point of comparison as the concept of "Turkic" is not a true racial or ethnic description but more of a linguistic and cultural distinction. This is to differentiate it from the term "Turkish" which is more of an ethnic/racial term for the citizens and denizens primarily residing in Turkey. Pan-Turkic ideas and "re-unification" movements have been popular since the collapse of the Soviet Union in Central Asian and other Turkic countries.