Turanism, or Pan-Turanism, is a political movement for the union of all Turanian peoples. It implies not merely the unity of all Turkic peoples (as in Pan-Turkism), but also the unification of a wider Turanid "race", also known as the controversial Uralo-Altaic "race," believed to include all peoples speaking "Turanian languages".
Turkish proponents of scientific racism purported that this racial group embraced
the Ottoman Turks of Istanbul and Anatolia, the Turcomans of Central Asia and Persia, the Tartars of South Russia and Transcaucasia, the Magyars of Hungary, the Finns of Finland and the Baltic provinces, the aboriginal tribes of Siberia and even the distant Mongols, Manchus, Koreans and Japanese.—[1]
The Ural–Altaic linguistic hypothesis, now discredited, inspired the emergence of Turkish Hungarian Japanese Korean branches of the Turanian Society in the 1920s and 1930s.[2]
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The idea of Turanic language family and turanic people were invented by the German linguist Max Müller. Max Muller, in his “Science of Language” (1861), took the name Turan in opposition to Aryan races and considered it "as the nomadic Asian element as opposed to the agricultural communities".[3] Traditional history cites its early origins amongst Ottoman officers and intelligentsia studying and residing in 1870s Imperial Germany. The fact that many Ottoman Turkish officials were becoming aware of their sense of "Turkishness" is beyond doubt of course, and the role of subsequent nationalists, such as Ziya Gökalp is fully established historically.
…they (the Turks) could form a political entity stretching from the Altai Mountains in Eastern Asia to the Bosphorus.—[4]
Hungarian Turanism (Hungarian: Turanizmus) is a Hungarian nationalist ideology which stresses the alleged origins of the Hungarian people in the steppes of Central Asia ("Turan") and the affinity of the Hungarians with Asian peoples such as the Turkic people. It gained wide currency on the Hungarian political right in the years between the two world wars. In the half-century before World War I, some Hungarians sought to encourage Pan-Turanianism as a means of uniting Turks and Hungarians against the Slavs and Pan-Slavism. The idea of the necessity of "Turanian brotherhood/collaboration" was borrowed from the "Slavic brotherhood/collaboration" idea of Panslavism.[5]
The political party of the Young Turks, Ittihad ve Teraki (the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress), espoused the notion of Turanism, a mythic glorification of Turkish ethnic identity, and was devoted to restoring the Ottoman Empire's shattered national pride.[6]
Turanism forms an important aspect of the ideology of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), whose members are informally known as Grey Wolves. Grey Wolf (the mother wolf Asena) was the main symbol of the ancient Turks.
According to Kaveh Farrokh,
Pan-Turanianism, like Nazi “racial sciences”, or Stalinist “History”, has failed to convince the majority of western scholarship to support its cause, and has been as equally unsuccessful in Eastern Europe, with the exception of the Republic of Azerbaijan.—[7]