Episode 33: What’s in a Name? Renaming places as a Strategic Gambit

Hello, and welcome to People Places Power, with me, Nick Cull, and me, Simon Unhold. In this podcast, we talk about issues of international reputation, foreign policy, and a few other things along the way. And today, we're talking about one of those phenomena that comes round in place and reputation from time to time, and that is renaming. Simon, right now, there's been a lot of reporting about the decision of Turkey to adjust the use of its name or the spelling of its name in international media. What do you think is going on there? What's happening with this story? I think that the story has been told carelessly, as is often the case, and it's been referred to in international media as an attempt by the Turkish government to rename their country. I don't think the country is being renamed. I suspect that two things are happening. On the one hand, the tourist board and possibly some other state agencies have basically designed themselves a new logo, and probably on instruction from the president, in that logo or that logo features the name of the country, spelled in Turkish, which is Turkiyye. So T-U with two dots on it. We don't call it an umlaut because the umlaut is German. It's a separate letter in Turkish pronounced Ü, Turkiyye, I-Y-E, and the international media is saying Erdogan is trying to change the name of the country from Turkey to Turkiyye. Now that's not really what's happening at all. What's really happening is that the Turks themselves in their promotional activities are choosing to use their own spelling of their own country's name rather than presumably in the English-speaking world continue to use the English name of Turkey, which is Turkiyye. That's one of the things that's happening. I think at the same time, there's a bit of a domestic political agenda going on here, which is President Erdogan basically saying, as nationalist leaders often will to his population, look, the rest of the world doesn't take us seriously. They don't treat us, our culture, our history with sufficient respect. Possibly he even says to them, I don't know, I haven't been looking at his speeches recently. The Americans name us after an ugly bald bird that they eat at Christmas time. That's how little respect we've shown. Of course, it's the other way around. The bird is called a turkey because it's a fowl that was presumed to come from Turkey. In fact, it came from North America. But anyway, that's the classic nationalist stance, isn't it? Look, they don't take us seriously. Only I can protect our precious culture and our history against this lack of respect. Therefore I'm going to command the world to learn what to call us. Now that, of course, is doomed to failure because the one thing that no leader can do, no matter how powerful, is to force the world to start calling a country by a new name. But it's also a very unfriendly thing to do because in this age of global trade and global connections and global challenges, countries surely ought to be making it easier for people around the world to do business with them, not making it harder. I mean, only about 4% of the world's population actually has anything like that letter U with the two dots on it on their keyboard, wouldn't know where to find it. And the 95 or so more percent wouldn't know where to find it. So this is exactly the opposite of what countries ought to be doing in our modern globalized age. It's basically a great big get lost to everybody else. We're going to spend it our way. And if you don't like it, you can stuff it, which is not very friendly behavior. And if it's imposed on the tourist board, it's particularly ironic, because the whole point about the tourist board is that they're trying to be welcoming. And they're trying to make it to the rest of the world as if this is a country that gives you what you want, not this is a country that forces you to do what it wants. Well, I think there are a couple of things going on here. Historically, it's very interesting that it's Turkey that's making this move as there's a long history of Turkey being concerned about what foreigners think about it. Even back to the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s, the Sultan Abdulhamid II would write these letters to foreign capitals where he felt the image of his country was disrespected. He got very steamed up with the Dutch for allowing a nightclub to have a comedy sketch set in a harem. And he felt that was denigrating Turkish culture. He also didn't like whirling dervishes performing in New York City and wrote to the president at the time to complain and said, "How would you like it if there were shakers doing their religious dances up and down the streets in Istanbul, giving a bad reputation to the United States?" So I find that fascinating that it's another page in the attempt of Turkey to get a certain kind of international respect. But I agree with you that I suspect it's misplaced and part of an image of the government taking care of the international reputation. I think more recently, Turkey tried this. I seem to remember Turkish ads like 30 years ago on TV using the national spelling as a way of sort of being themselves or exoticizing or something like that. What other examples have we got of this in recent years of name changes? There are plenty. People pop up all the time and they always make the media because people are fascinated by this idea. Just before we leave Turkey, it is very interesting, isn't it? Because the description that you gave of this protection of Turkey's original identity against the onslaught of Western culture is, of course, the diametric opposite of what Ataturk tried to do. And it's very interesting how, almost from half century to half century, Turkey tends to swing backwards and forwards from westernization, deliberate, wanting to look like the West and be part of the West and perform like the West, and then swinging back again. So it's a remark that's often made somewhat lightly of Erdogan, but it does sometimes look as if we're now back in the Ottoman days. And the pendulum has swung back again from the other side of where Ataturk... And he certainly references the Ottoman history and is looking in other ways to restore respect, paying to restore buildings from the Ottoman Empire around the Western Balkans and other places in the region. So it's obviously an important history to him. Which I think is great, by the way. I think it's a fine thing when countries realise and acknowledge the value of their cultural distinctiveness and try to maintain it. But what matters a lot is the tone in which that's done. When it's done angrily rather than in a welcoming way, then it begins to cause all kinds of problems and takes you down quite a dark sort of route. But in principle, give me the choice for what I as a foreigner would rather see in Turkey. I think I'd probably be more interested in... Less interested in the Ataturk approach of extreme westernisation. But then again, in the end, it's a question of what the country wants. So you ask about others. Well, there are so many examples. Well, recently we had, I think it was 2018, Swaziland, who changed his name. It said it was going to be Eswatini, which is closer to, which is their own name for themselves. Yes. And it means more or less exactly the same thing as Swaziland. And I think, instinctively, one has the land of the people, the Swati, if I'm not mistaken. Instinctively, one has more sympathy for that kind of change. For the simple reason that what they're doing is they are lifting from their shoulders the burden of a name that was imposed on them by a colonial power. And so, you know, the same applies to, for example, Sri Lanka. Ceylon was not the name of the island. That was the name imposed on them by the English, Taiwan, Formosa, another one, Burma, Myanmar. There are quite a lot of these. And as I say, one's instinct is to sympathise because, you know, why should you carry for centuries a name which was placed on you by a foreign power, especially because, in very many cases, these foreign names are actually just misspellings or mispronunciations. I mean Bombay, for example, is a sort of Portuguese mispronunciation or misspelling of something which is closer to Mumbai. And of course, India has gone through quite a long process of renaming dozens if not scores of its cities. Some of them quite dramatically. We were talking just before we came on air about Chennai Madras. Others are just going a little bit closer to the authentic name. Pondicherry, for example, is a typical example of an anglicised name that has been re-Indianised and so it goes on. But those are an entirely different category. I suppose there are at least two other categories that one might dream up if one was doing a matrix of this behaviour. One is that nobody's ever heard of us and we're sick of it and it's partly because they confuse us with another country with a similar name. So we're going to give us a brand new name and start again. This is not so very common, but Slovenia tried to do this 20 years ago or so because they were fed up with being constantly confused with Slovakia, particularly because Slovenska is the Slovakian name for Slovakia and it sounds an awful lot like Slovenia. So one has some sympathy with that. There was one faction who were campaigning to have Slovenia renamed as Alpadria, the Adriatic and the Alps, the suggestion of Padria, the fatherland in the middle of it, Alpadria. They asked me about this at the time they were doing it and I said to them rather rudely, I said, look, the reason why people confuse Slovenia and Slovakia is not mainly because they sound the same, it's because nobody knows anything about either of them. You know, Bhutan and Britain sound quite similar, but nobody goes muddling them up because they're both famous for different reasons. So don't worry about the tag, worry about the content and about how little or how much you give people to know about yourselves. What are you teaching people? When I look at this, I think a lot, maybe it makes sense politically to create a name to remake your name, to indicate a clear break with a past, but countries and places that choose to do this are sacrificing an immense amount of, an immense resource. People talk about it in terms of the equity in a name and I think it can even make a difference, it can make a tremendous difference. I'm thinking the other day about what went wrong for Czechoslovakia, why nobody in the West was really prepared to get behind the borders, defending the borders of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and it wasn't really on people's radar as an important place. If they'd have called themselves by the name people knew from their dominant province, Bohemia, if they'd have been able to do that at the end of the First World War, I think they would have had better name recognition and it could have led to different political consequences because Bohemia is part of the language, part of the sense of Europe and you talk about Hitler threatening Bohemia and people have an idea of this beautiful place that's relevant, artistically relevant, that's about to get stamped on, whereas Czechoslovakia didn't push any buttons at all and we even have that radio broadcast where Neville Chamberlain saying that how terrible it is to think of war over a far country of whose people we know nothing. I think if they'd have been called Bohemians it would have been much harder to say they're people of whom we know nothing because you know something about them. Where else do you see equity lost in this renaming? Well Madras, which we mentioned a moment ago, a great number of associations bound up with that name perhaps principally or entirely for British curry lovers, nonetheless. Food, yes, there's a chicken Madras, isn't there? Yes, I don't suppose that's a good name. I don't think it'd be really weird to call it chicken Chennai, I don't think it is. I think the dish is named for, the dish is a thing in its own right. Yes, absolutely, well it's possible to preserve these things as a sort of dual track, I mean Ceylon tea is still called Ceylon tea even though the country is called Sri Lanka. And the dog breed is still a Pekingese, not a Beijinger. Well, yes, again we're talking about the English language here and of course one can only get a proper sense of what's going on here if you look beyond the English language. What's equally interesting, we could spend an hour on that, is how in some languages names get regularly updated but in others they don't. So for example in Italian, Beijing is still called Pekino, Peking. So that particular upgrade wasn't considered necessary by Italians but is by the Brits. And we find these differences all over the world, everywhere we go. We find that updates and respellings and changes take place at different points in time. And this partly underlines the absurdity of a government thinking that it can impose something on the entire world. And I suppose that's my next category, which is the power freak leader who simply insists on having his, because it's always a he, name enshrined in the name of the country or at least the city. And of course the most prominent and recent example of that is Norsultan, the renamed Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The economist was wondering last week how soon it would be before its renamed Astana again, which is an interesting thought, it may indeed go backwards. But that's nothing but a cult of the self. And one does see these from time to time but they're relatively unusual. Every time they do happen, the thing that I always feel like reminding these leaders is, do you realise what a gigantic burden you are putting on the international system by changing the name of your country, the billions and billions of dollars that it's going to cost for the entire international system to revise and update your country name just because you've decided that that's what they've got to do. And you're a sovereign state and they have no choice. But the postal service, the internet addresses, the telephone, dialing codes, absolutely everything. It takes decades and it costs billions. And as I said before in the case of Turkey, we're living in an age where countries ought to be doing their best to try and make life easier for each other and to live together harmoniously in the international community. And yet periodically you get somebody who comes along and says, I don't care how long it takes or how much it costs, you're all going to call me something different because our pride is damaged. By the way, there's another category which is brand new countries. And in some cases when you start a brand new country, you come up with a brand new name like Liberia, which is full of meaning. Sometimes you adopt a foreign name like Sierra Leone, which is an Italian name, it's adopted by the Sierra Leoneese because they like the sound of it, the Sierra of the lion. And sometimes you deliberately take an old fashioned name because you want people to know where you've come from, like Israel. With symbolic, with very, very strong symbolism and an inherent legitimization included in the name choice. So there's a lot of it going on and I think, you know, as I say, there are one or two cases there where one has some sympathy and where one senses that the international community probably ought to do what it can within reason to facilitate that. But the majority of cases I think are idle and they are time-wasted and it suggests that the governments are not focusing on the things they really ought to be focusing on. I think we had a moment in the 1950s when there were many new names and with the decolonization happening and while I was thinking of the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh and so forth as those names and I think, well, Vietnam was new to international audiences. And so maybe it's a little less, it's less usual now to have these changes to the map. Pakistan, by the way, another interesting example of the made-up name, I mean you'll know this but not all of our listeners will. It's made up of the first letters of the original provinces of Pakistan. I doubt very much whether I can remember them all or in the right order but it's Punjab, the K is Kashmir, Sindh and it ends with an N because Balochistan. So it was quite a clever sort of crossword puzzle name and it's fascinating how through conflict and much else besides and growth and struggle, it's become such a resonant and important sounding and apparently ancient name but in fact it was just a word game made up almost within our lifetimes. By the way, another country which has been playing at this recently in a very similar manner to Turkey is the Netherlands and the Dutch government on two or three occasions in the last 10 years or so has announced that it's not going to call itself Holland, it's going to call itself the Netherlands or that it's not going to call itself the Netherlands, it's going to call itself Holland and just as in the case we started with Turkey, it's never quite clear whether this is just we're going to use Holland as our logo when we're promoting tourism or whether it's we the Dutch government and the people have fed up with you calling us by the name of one of our provinces and henceforth you're going to call us the Netherlands because that's our name and that seems a little unfriendly and not very internationally minded for such an internationally minded country but there you go, I mean national identity as we've said over and over again in this series is a topic that touches almost everybody and touches people to the quick, doesn't it? Well British people are irritated by being referred to, for the whole thing being referred to as England and it's amazing how many well-informed people do that, it was President Carter would make that mistake all the time, call the whole thing England and his assistants would sort of, England is the American name for the United Kingdom, there's no question about it and the overwhelming majority of Americans do refer to it as England because that's what they call it in their language, the Italians call the United Kingdom London and I've often found myself in absurd situations in Italy where I'm over there and somebody says to me when you're going back to London and I say I don't live in London and they say well I thought you were English and I say yes I am and so they say well when you're going back to London and I say I'm not going back to London, we go round and round in circles. It's a sign of admiration I think in a sense it's the sincerest form of flattery because the Italians are devoted to London and at almost any given moment you hear more Italian voices than English voices in London. Well are there any countries that you think should change their name? Interesting question, I think South Africa should change its name, I think it's a very confusing name, to have the name of your country the same as half of the continent that you sit on is either monstrously big-headed or else just very confusing and very wrong, I mean they've called themselves that for long enough that people have kind of got used to it but it still causes confusion especially with people who are not so familiar with the country. Well I think it's at the root of some American politicians referring to Africa as a country, the country of Africa, getting very indignant when you point out Africa is a continent. But the United States makes this claim itself, you're calling itself using America as a way of referring just to themselves, so you have that alternative usage going on. What do you think about Iran, Simon, do you think Iran is disadvantaged by being linguistically separated from its history or the history of that part of the world, the Persian language, the Persian, you know it occurs to me that nobody ever loves their Iranian cat or enjoys their Iranian carpet, those wonderful things that have historically come out of that part of the world are separated linguistically from the nation state that currently dominates that region. But there's always a temptation in these cases to muddle cause and effect and if the Islamic Republic of Iran had a government that cared more about its international image than the one at the moment, you could easily imagine them making a similar argument and saying let's rename ourselves Persia because that has good associations. Well the reality of the matter is that the reason why Iran has negative associations in many parts of the world is because of the role that it's played in the international community recently and so even if it did change its name to Persia unless it started behaving in a very different way, it would very quickly trash that name as well. So there's only a certain number of opportunities that you have, I think the name change doesn't change the perceptions, it perhaps opens a door for new behaviors, raises a flag, I don't know what quite the right metaphor is, but it signals something changing but if it isn't then swiftly followed by dramatic sustained long-term different behavior, then all that's going to happen is that the new name will end up with as negative associations as the old one and that's exactly what's happened with Myanmar. Absolutely, absolutely but I think this is a theme that we've come back to before as well that what's important is reality and if you want a good image, engineer a good reality and if you want your name to have positive associations, do positive things and you can sully an old name as easily as sully a new name and where it seems counterproductive is where an old name had positive associations and that seems to be letting down your population to shut yourself off from positive associations that can actually help in a very competitive environment, why wouldn't you want to be known as the successor place to the point of origin for successful and admired qualities? Yes, well as you say, throwing away an old name, again the sorts of leaders who do things like that tend to be the sorts of leaders who are not really au fait with that kind of thinking. They don't particularly understand or care for those arguments that the old name perhaps has a resonance for the rest of the world that means something that's worth something to them. It would be difficult to imagine a man like Nazar Bayef in Kazakhstan for example thinking in those terms. So these are these are these are mindsets and another it's a slight side issue but it's also quite interesting to look at the countries that have more than one name because there are countries that are known by several different names depending on circumstances and it's very interesting that there are not very many countries that can sustain that because that's a difficult thing to a difficult act to sustain really to be known in several different ways. The champion probably is England, Britain, United Kingdom, British Isles. Which has endless names and people choose from them as they see fit or as their culture or habit dictates but the UK seems to be able to sustain this. Nobody gets confused between them. Sometimes people stop and ask what they what they mean and that's interesting and that's as far as it goes. United States of America as you say although as you also rightly say that annoys the hell out of Latin Americans who think of America as being their continent and I suppose the parallel is that there is some highly successful commercial brand that is so successful they can manage with two names like Coke and Coca-Cola it's got two brands very rare indeed in the commercial environment somewhat rare in the international in the environment. It's even rare linguistically that there aren't so many objects that are known as as as two things in the same way as a bucket and a pale but you know usually one will be the old name one will be the new name it's it's surprisingly rare to have two names for the same for exactly the same object. Well it depends on you on your etymology doesn't it I mean in the English language we very often have two words for every object because we have almost balanced Germanic and and romance roots and so for almost every object in the English language we have a basically a romance name French Latin Italian Spanish name but they tend to be differentiated so you like as with beef and and and cow you know where the the the the sir the French name and the raw version is the satan who has to actually look after the thing and lamb and mutton but what a wonderful thing. And without a without a difference one name would will dominate and force the force the other out that we're maybe we don't see it because we're living at a it takes a long time for these these changes to to to happen and there and there are evolutionary arguments there as to as to why certain variants succeed and certain others fail generally speaking it seems that the one that causes least trouble is the one that survives and and that's the reality with Netherlands the Netherlands versus Holland. A country name with with with with a with a direct article in front of it is a nuisance it's two words it's got a space in the middle and of course again it varies from language to language I'm talking about English here but Holland is a single word and that makes things an awful lot easier but you know there are a number of countries out there which in various languages have an article attached to them I mean we talk about Lebanon in English but in French they talk about Le Liban it's always the Lebanon which we used to call it in English but we dropped that the Argentine we used to call it but it's now Argentina so there's a tendency for place names to become simpler over time and that's always the people spoke about the Sudan didn't they yes absolutely absolutely I was just thinking about because we were mentioning Czechoslovakia and the interesting point you made about Bohemia of course everything everything changed again didn't it after the after the fall of the Berlin war and and one half of it walked off with the front of the name the other half walked off with the back like a pantomime horse and the Czechs got the better end of the deal because they got the name was the beginning of the of the of the known country the Slovaks got the end of the name which of course meant very little to anybody because people are only generally aware of the first syllables of words and so the Czechs very clearly got the better end of the deal there because because they were the front end of a well-known by that stage well-known country so the moral there is if you're if your country is Fisiperas and you're going to split into two make sure you get the front end of the word and not the back end and there are dangerous north with with with splitting North Korea and South Korea you could or indeed East Germany West Germany you can end up sharing a name with the rogue state and what that does to your image is bad news research this over and over again South Korea is perpetually diminished by the fact that it has the same name as a country that everybody knows as a baddie and most people on the planet are not quite sure of their geography their international relations their modern history and very often end up mistrusting both careers because they can't remember which one is the bad one. Oh dear well on that bombshell well that's all we have time for this week thank you so much for listening I'm still Nick Cull I'm still Simon Unhold.