New Statesman
November 22, 2004
A nation in search of an identity; Turkey appears to be moving
eastwards and westwards at the same time. But is it really possible
to invent a pro-market Islamism? Report by Maureen Freely
by Maureen Freely
On its travel posters, Turkey is the land ‘where east meets west’. An
alluring sales pitch, but what does it mean? As they contemplate
Turkey’s bid to join the EU, nervous westerners are very keen to
know. Journalists have worked to furnish nutshell histories and
thumbnail sketches of ‘Turkey today’, but the more people read about
this strange country, the less they understand it.
The central paradox is the prime minister, who is Islamist but
fervently pro-Europe. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has introduced radical
legal, economic and political changes to bring the country into line
with European standards, but has also tried to slip in a new law that
would have criminalised adultery. Can he be trusted? In this volatile
age, how can a nation move both eastwards and westwards without
splitting in two?
More confusing still, at least to concerned Europeans, is the
consensus inside Turkey. It would be wrong to say that everyone wants
to join the EU: there are Eurosceptics there who think Turkey should
turn its back on Europe to build (and head) its own regional power
base. But, paradoxically, this is not at present an eastern dream:
the most fervent nationalists of the moment belong to the Republican
People’s Party, traditionally the voice of westward-looking
secularism.
Meanwhile, three-quarters of the Turkish electorate are in favour of
joining. No one is saying there aren’t Herculean feats to be
performed beforehand, or that there wouldn’t be large adjustment
problems afterwards. Even if it met every challenge before the
deadline, Turkey would be not just the poorest and most populous
nation in the EU, but the most unevenly developed, with the country’s
cities and western provinces far outstripping its eastern regions,
long impoverished and only just recovering from the 15-year conflict
between the army and the Kurdish paramilitary PKK. But when the
European parliament’s president, Joseph Borrell, last month met Leyla
Zana (the former parliamentarian, recently released after ten years’
imprisonment on charges of advocating Kurdish separatism) she pressed
for membership as strenuously as Erdogan had done in the same office
two weeks earlier. Certainly, her priorities were different. But the
bid to join Europe has strong support not just in Ankara and the
business sector, but also among human rights campaigners; not just in
the country’s industrialised western regions, but also in its largely
Kurdish provinces in the east.
Erdogan explained in a recent speech that joining the EU bid would
not (as nationalists have argued) be a departure from the republican
ideals set out by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk 80 years ago; rather, he
said, it would be its ‘natural outcome’. This neat rhetorical
flourish indicates the distance between our view of Turkey’s EU bid
and theirs. For us it’s an east-west conundrum. For them it’s about
sovereignty, national identity, citizenship and those republican
ideals.
What exactly did Ataturk have in mind all those years ago, when he
conjured up a modern state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire? When
he spoke of all Turkey’s peoples working together as one, did he mean
its non-Muslims as well as its Muslims? Its Alevis as well as its
Sunnis? To become true Turks, were non-Muslims expected to shed their
religions, and were Muslims compelled to give up also thinking of
themselves as Kurdish, Laz, Turkmen, Azeri, Bosnian, Circassian?
Today many would say he had no such thing in mind – that it is (or
ought to be) possible to be a fully-fledged Turkish citizen without
suppressing one’s religion or ethnic origins. But in the Turkey I
knew as a child, this was literally unsayable. The Turkey I knew in
the Sixties was a beautiful, sleepy backwater, valued by its Nato
allies mostly (some would say only) for providing a ‘bulwark against
Communism’. The news on the radio was the news as the state wished us
to view it. The state was defined less by the prime minister and the
National Assembly than by the generals in the National Security
Council. The military presented itself (and was largely accepted as)
the guarantor of the Kemalist project.
At the same time, it was forever mindful of its prime backer, the US.
The economy was closed, to protect fledgling industries; the practice
of religion permitted but kept under strict surveillance. The state
kept an almost perfect control over what children learned in school,
and what they learned in their history books was very much in keeping
with the narrow, purist nationalist project as refined by Ataturk’s
successors. To express difference was unpatriotic: to be different
could be life-threatening, as tens of thousands of Greeks and
Armenians discovered on 6 September 1955 when bands of thugs (now
acknowledged to have been government-sponsored) went on a rampage
throughout Istanbul, setting fire to Christian-owned businesses,
raping and maiming and killing as they went. When my family first
came to Istanbul five years later, it was still the multicultural
city it had been throughout the Ottoman Empire. The turning point was
1964, when the Cyprus crisis prompted the state to chase most of the
remaining Greeks away.
The state flexed its muscle frequently over the next three decades,
meeting all challenges to its authority. There was a coup in 1971 and
another in 1980; although they had various aims there was in both a
serious effort to suppress the intelligentsia, and with it the basic
freedoms we in the west take for granted. In 1974, there was the
invasion of Cyprus. Beginning in the mid-1980s, there was the
conflict with the PKK in the south-east. Running through all these
stories is the long catalogue of human rights abuses.
The EU has long made it clear that these issues had to be resolved
before Turkey could become a member. For almost just as long, its
warnings had little effect. But over the past two and a half years,
there’s been a dramatic shift. The first ‘EU laws’ were passed
several months before Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development
Party came into power – in a single session, the National Assembly
removed the death penalty, paved the way for teaching and
broadcasting in Kurdish, and lifted restrictions on freedom of
assembly. Since Erdogan took over, control of the National Security
Council has been switched from generals to civilians. The penal code
has been reformed and a ‘zero tolerance’ stance adopted on human
rights abuses.
The EU is dismantling the state as we used to know it and, in so
doing, challenging the way the state defines ‘the Turk’. This is ex-
plosive stuff. (Just imagine if Brussels were to march in tomorrow to
tell us how we were to define Englishness.) If three out of four
Turks are still prepared to support these radical changes, it is
because they have gone through radical changes, too. Not only has
there been mass migration to the cities: millions have gone on to
northern Europe as guest workers. Visit any village in Anatolia and
you’ll find its networks extending not just to Istanbul and Ankara
but to cities in Germany, France and the Netherlands.
In the Sixties there was only a handful of universities, which, with
few exceptions, were open only to the elite. Now there are more than
80. The expansion of higher education and the opening up of the
economy in the late 1980s have spawned a new and formidable
generation of entrepreneurs. Many have spent time studying in Europe
and the US; as comfortable in these cultures as they are at home,
they bring Turkey closer to Europe every time they pick up the phone.
Forty years ago, most Turks had no knowledge of the outside world and
their only source of information was a highly censored press. Now
millions have lived and worked and studied in Europe, and what they
want is, well, a lot more European. The borders have opened – even
the one with the old arch enemy, Greece. The rapprochement that began
with the 1999 earthquake continues still, with hundreds of small
groups (from the business world, the professions, the universities
and the arts) quietly forging ties with their colleagues across the
border. The cultural renaissance is multicultural, but at its core is
a desire to define what it is to be Turkish in a 21st-century world.
If it’s possible to be Turkish and European, is it possible to be
Turkish, European and Kurdish? If non-Muslim minorities are to enjoy
full cultural and political rights, shouldn’t Muslim minorities
receive the same consideration? In a secular state, what is the
proper place of religion? Is it possible to modernise without losing
one’s traditional values? How to prosper in a globalised economy
without becoming its slave?
These are urgent questions: no politician will get far unless he
addresses them. Erdogan’s answer, so puzzling when viewed from
abroad, makes perfect sense to the people who voted him in. Many are
(as is his family) recent urban migrants, social conservatives who
wish to prosper. So what better than pro-market Islamism? Turkey’s
established secularist bourgeoisie remains suspicious, but Erdogan
has won friends even in these quarters. ‘For the first time ever,’
one non-Muslim businessman told me recently, ‘we have a government
that actually understands business and wants to help us.’ In place of
the delaying and bribe-taking bureaucrats who once directed the
economy is a new breed of Islamist MBAs who are there to expedite and
enable and whose hands (so far) remain clean.
Where it will all lead is another matter. If George Bush invades
Iran, if Saudi Arabia slides into civil war and takes the rest of the
region with it, if the EU refuses Turkey’s bid and American GIs
continue to machine gun wounded men in mosques, we could see a Turkey
torn between east and west. But right now it’s a republic struggling
to better itself along European lines. At the same time, it wants to
remember where it comes from and what it means to bridge east and
west. Therein lies its promise – not just to itself, but to us all.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress