Pan-Turanianism

Pan-Turanianism, late 19th- and early 20th-century movement to unite politically and culturally all the Turkic, Tatar, and Uralic peoples living in Turkey and across Eurasia from Hungary to the Pacific. Its name is derived from Tūrān, the Persian word for Turkistan (i.e., the land to the north of Iran). It was popular mainly among intellectuals and developed from a now largely discarded theory of the common origin of Turkish, Mongol, Tungus, Finnish, Hungarian, and other languages (the Ural-Altaic languages). 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 movement was never more than a sidelight, however, to the more important Pan-Turkism.