Eurasia Calling: Political context of scientific Turanism in the writings of Max Müller and Yrjö Koskinen, and its development into the 20th century Pan-Turanism

Abstract

Turanism was a 19th century ethnolinguistic theory and a pan-nationalist idea which argued that there was an ancient relation between Finnish, Hungarian and North-Asian languages and peoples. The theory assumed a linguistic relatedness between nations included in it, as well as a shared ancient land from which these nations spread out. Its earliest formulation can be found in the writings of the Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén, but it was later popularized by the German philologist Max Müller. Often mistakenly understood as merely pan-Turkism or pan-Magyarism, it had greater international reach than often perceived. In this paper I ask to what extent was Müller’s theory of Turanism politically conceived and how was the theory interpreted by its later followers, such as Yrjö-Koskinen? To what degree were these subsequent interpretations politically tinted? While I agree with much of the existing literature that describe the nature of 20th century pan-Turanism, here I argue that the scholarly work in the 19th century was also politically motivated and had political utility in its process of establishing a new philological field. I explore and trace the concept in the 19th century intellectual works, mostly by comparing and contextualizing Müller’s Languages of the Seat of War and Finnish historian Yrjö-Koskinen’s historical work on the roots of the Finnish nation. My main argument is that Turanism was established as linguistic and ethnographic field in the mid 1800s, became a historical and history political discipline in latter half of the 19th century, but ultimately in the early 20th century it had transformed into a greater political idea.