Identity Fluctuations in the Turkish Cypriot Community YU ¨ CEL VURAL* & AHMET RUSTEMLI** *Assistant Professor of Political Science, Eastern Mediterranean University, **Professor of Social Psychology, Eastern Mediterranean University ABSTRACT This paper investigates identity fluctuations in the ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ community and argues that identity descriptions do not necessarily overlap with ethno-cultural boundaries. Age and education-related identity fluctuations emerge as responses to variations in the socialization process. Although the notion of ‘Turkish Cypriots’ implies a unitary entity, a marked cleavage mainly between two identity categories is apparent. Self-descriptions based on civic conceptualizations of identity compete with ethno-national identity and transcend community boundaries. Therefore, despite an official ‘ethno-national’ identity being imposed, ‘Cypriotness’ suggests a model comprising individuals from various ethno- national backgrounds. Data come from a probabilistic sample of 415 Turkish Cypriots who ranked components of collective identity (Cypriot, Turkish, Moslem, and European) from the ‘most important’ to the ‘least important’. The concept of ‘identity fluctuation’ has received almost minimal attention from social scientists. Among those who ascribe significance to the concept, the stress on an overall fluctuation in the entire community is apparent. Hutchinson successfully demonstrates that national identities fluctuate over time. Among the reasons of such fluctuations, he mentions ‘the role of national disaster, warfare, war shame, economic depression and failure of economic modernization’ (Hutchinson, 2000: 665 – 6). Melson and Wolpe (1970: 1124 – 5) suggest that modernization, through softening or dilating communal group boundaries, leads to internal differentiations within ‘communal categories’. Emphasizing the idea that ‘identity is not something that is fixed and static but that is continually evolving and changing’, Saeed and others (1999: 824) focus on the concepts of ‘reformation’ or ‘redefinition’ of collective identity and underline the process of an overall fluctuation in the collective identity. Our analysis shows that such changes in collective identity could be measured through employing data relating to individual perception of identity. 1362-9395 Print/1743-9418 Online/06/030329-20 q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13629390600913916 Correspondence Address: Yu ¨cel Vural, Department of Political Sciences, Faculty of Business and Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, via Mersin 10-Turkey. Email: yucel.vural@ emu.edu.tr Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 11, No. 3, 329–348, November 2006