BANKRUPTCY OF THE PARADIGM
Today’s Zaman
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Aug 3 2008
Turkey
Fikret BaÅ~_kaya is a disturbed man, and he disturbs. This is his
definition of the intellectual in a nutshell. He may not agree
with this sort of rewording, but this is a second definition of the
intellectual for him: "The mission of the intellectual is to bring into
light the deceitfulness of the pseudo-intellectuals," he wrote in his
magnum opus, "The Bankruptcy of the Paradigm" (Paradigmanın İflası).
The main message of this phenomenal study can be summarized as — once
again in a way that most probably won’t satisfy BaÅ~_kaya — that the
"modernization" and "Westernization" rhetoric of the Republican era
is a continuation of the self-colonization that had started already
in Ottoman times; that the Republican revolution didn’t bring a
real breakthrough as compared to the past shaped by the Unity and
Development Party of the late Ottoman era; that the official ideology
created by the pseudo-intellectuals of the Republican era is both
incapacitating them and blocking any future possibility of turning
the nation into a subject of history.
"The Bankruptcy of the Paradigm" was first published in 1991, and
it cost BaÅ~_kaya more time in prison than it took him to write the
book. The story of "The Bankruptcy of the Paradigm" and its author
is evidence for BaÅ~_kaya’s claim that the statist paradigm went
bankrupt. Though he claims that the paradigm is bankrupt, BaÅ~_kaya
admits that it has not yet been replaced by another one. According to
him, whether Turkey will manage to create this new paradigm or not will
be decided according to the result of the Ergenekon investigation,
as the Ergenekon organization is one of the latest representations
of the old paradigm. Sunday’s Zaman spoke to BaÅ~_kaya and tried to
carry his neologisms created in 1991 into 2008.
You are claiming in your book that the "modernization"
and "Westernization" rhetorics were part of the process of
self-colonization. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is
following a similar path and saying that for the first time it is
not using the rhetoric, but actually doing so. Does this mean that
the self-colonization has ended?
In order to understand today, we need a discussion of the
background. Both the Unity and Development Party, which imposed the
constitutional monarchy, and those who changed the name of the regime
in 1923 to republic through a coup showed modernization, coming to the
level of developed nations as a target. They spoke about superpowers
and their desire to become one: powerful like them, wealthy like them,
militarily advanced like them. It should be underlined that as long
as the system of slavery continues to exist, it is impossible for
the expectation of a slave to be like his owner to come true. There
is an asymmetric relation here, the relation between the center of
hegemony and others shaped by this hegemony. There is no chance the
peripheral elements will be like the center.
Today the AK Party is saying that it has changed the picture and what
the previous ones spoke about, they realized. This is theoretically
impossible. It is true the AK Party looks like it is doing better
than others, but this is relative. Its alternatives are so backward
that it presents a progressive image. Otherwise there is no difference
between the sides on the issue; both are speaking about the impossible.
So self-colonization, to use your term, is continuing?
With an increasing pace! This globalization thing is rhetoric to
deceive the people. Imperialism is continuing as it is. But in this era
the imperialist attacks are done through the European Union. Nobody
regards the EU as imperialist. What did change in Europe? We came to
regard the EU as an island of wealth. This is not true, and this will
not continue forever.
You claim that in World War I the Ottoman state was on the side of the
imperialists. Was this a kind of struggle to move from the periphery
to the center?
Each and every imperialist war is a war of redistribution of
wealth. The members of the Unity and Development Party then thought
that they would be able to take a share from this redistribution. This
was once again dreaming the impossible. This mistake collapsed
the empire. It was going to collapse anyway, but the fact that
those people chose the losing side to join in the war quickened the
collapse. Then they started to claim that not Turkey, but the Germans
lost the war. This is a lie that children would laugh at.
Turkey has been busying itself with dreams of becoming a regional
superpower. Is this also a modern reflection of the dreams of the
Unity and Development Party leaders?
It is true that Turkey is still trying to take a place in the
imperialist camp. That is a shame. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization [NATO] is an imperialist pact with an American
commander. This was founded against the Soviet expansionism, and Turkey
was a wing country to secure the boundaries of NATO countries. Today it
has been given similar roles within the Greater Middle East Plan. For
instance, Turkey has soldiers occupied by imperialist powers. The
existing hegemonic classes in Turkey have their own interests in
keeping the country in line with the American policies and regard
this as a great success.
You are claiming that these hegemonic classes have never changed in
the last century. The AK Party claims that it is a new actor in the
old game.
Look, in order to understand the root causes of all the problems
in Turkey, you have to know that Turkey never had a modernity
revolution. Turkey never settled its accounts with the old regime. Take
the Unity and Development Party leaders. They opposed the monarchy,
but when they came to power their prime target became to guarantee
the survival of the state as it is. They didn’t change the system,
they just changed the garments. Nothing changed with the republican
coup; and nothing changed in the following years.
Take the 1980 military junta. Five generals came and dismissed
the Parliament and changed the whole country into an open
torture-house. Then they prepared a constitution and put a clause of
immunity in there. After the junta’s leaving power, Parliament was
changed seven times, but not a single man was brave enough to ask for
a change in that clause and indictment of the generals. Why? Because,
the parties in Parliament are subcontractor parties. It is the
subcontractor of the ‘real state party.’ Subcontractor parties have
limits to their authority.
It is just because of the fact that AK Party tried, to a small extent,
to force those limits, that they started this entire row. If the
AK Party managed to adopt a style like that of Suleyman Demirel’s
party or that of [the Motherland Party] ANAVATAN, it wouldn’t have
these problems. As it forces its limit, the real state party steps
in and says, ‘Wait a minute, you cannot do this.’ This is why they
don’t want us to discuss Ergenekon. And I say that we have to start
discussing the regime. If we can discuss the regime itself, instead
of our perceptions of the fact, we will see that the real faces
of things were different. But nobody is yet ready to come to this
point. Unfortunately, the political consciousness of this country is
still underdeveloped. As long as we have a regime like that, that
does not permit a bit of public sovereignty, there is no chance of
strengthening the political culture.
In your book you use the terms Kemalism and Bonapartism together. You
are speaking about a Kemalist version of Bonapartism. What is this?
Bonapartism was extant with Bonaparte. Our Bonapartism was not
like the French experience, nor like the one in Algeria. What I
say is this: The dictatorship of Mustafa Kemal was a Bonapartist
dictatorship. The classical definition of Bonapartism is a crisis
regime. The crisis emerges when the balance between the working
class and their oppressors reaches a critical position, or the fight
for power among different elements of the sovereign class reaches
a point of uncontrollability. There comes Bonaparte and defines the
limits of all parties to the struggle. But in Turkey the situation is
different. Different elements of the sovereign class are not clashing
at all. They are all created by the state, and they are continuously
strengthening each other.
Now this Bonapartism lost its importance after the 1950s and 1960s, but
one thing from that culture continued to exist. Since the republic was
founded by a military coup and since the country’s Parliament was never
a real parliament where real political parties sat, this tradition of
coups, conspiracies and gangs is still alive. This is what I call the
‘state party,’ and what we call Ergenekon is a representation of that
state party.
When you are discussing the real intentions of the Societies of
Preservation of Rights established during and after the National
Struggle [BaÅ~_kaya does not use the term War of Independence], you
claim that there was no ideology, no higher value there; they were
just after keeping the properties and privileges they had. Do you
see similar things among the Ergenekonists?
This is an ongoing reality. In those years, the groups that
expropriated the wealth of the Armenians and the Greeks had
an alliance with the elite that had class-based interests in
the survival of the state as it was. Actually, these are not
necessarily distinct groups. This alliance has continued until
now. The political parties that were founded from 1946 onwards are all
‘commissioned parties.’ They have to give guarantees to the real state
party. Otherwise it won’t be allow to survive. Even if they come to
government, they are not allowed to govern. So there is a similar
alliance between the capital and the political parties trying to
secure survival of the state.
Will this continue in that manner forever?
Hopefully not. This state party and its extension, Ergenekon, and the
paradigm that breathed them into life are being deciphered nowadays. I
detect three reasons for this disclosure of the state party: the
neo-liberal, the Islamist and the Kurdish movements. This gang,
which determined the fate of this country from 1908 [proclamation of
the constitutional monarchy] now on has already realized that it is
losing ground. This was a justifiable alarm, and this alarm explains
the attempted coups, the republican rallies and the coup diaries.
We had seen similar groups in the 1960s, the movement called "National
Struggle Once Again," for example. It existed then, and it was recently
revived. Did they have a similar fear back in the 1960s?
This statist paradigm has an intrinsic logic of keeping the
public out of ruling circles. They want to rule with minimum public
interference. This was the real reason for the 1960 coup. They believed
that after 1946 a "vulgar mob" started to mingle with serious issues
too much. They thought they had to create mechanisms of keeping
the public out of this ruling circle. Some people called the 1960
Constitution a democratic one. Suleyman Demirel went so far as to say
that this Constitution was one size too large for Turkey. These are
all lies. The purpose of that constitution was to keep the public
out. They created the National Security Council [MGK] and occupied
the center of the state. Then they established the senate and some
of the senators were left to the president to be appointed. Even this
was not sufficient for them, and they established the Constitutional
Court. People think this institution checks the congruity of the laws
to the Constitution.
That is another lie. This institution is there to work as a filter
against the manifestation of national sovereignty. Take the State
Planning Organization [DPT]. This was the mechanism to lay the state’s
hand on the distribution of wealth.
Why is so much fear from the public?
Because when the public steps in, these people lose their
immunities. They will become accountable. But they want the right
to question others to keep their monopoly. They want the people to
remain an object of history, not a subject.
Is there any chance that the people will one day become the subject
of history once again? What needs to be done for that to happen?
The average human life is about 80 years, but the lifespan of society
is much longer. The solution to this bankruptcy of the paradigm
will come through increased consciousness of the working class. I
believe that the people are ready to ask the questions that need to
be asked. This paradigm is bankrupt. This is not like the bankruptcy
of capitalism. This is about the system, and it is not sustainable
in its current form. Who will bring us out of this? The public masses
will be more consciously intervening on these issues, I believe.
Don’t we need intellectuals for such a public intervention? Can the
society act itself?
No social movement can be successful without intellectuals. Only true
intellectuals can create a new paradigm. I am not speaking about
the ‘graduated crew’ that serves the current corruption. There is
a wide range of pseudo-intellectuals in the higher echelons of the
universities, politics and the judiciary. Some of them have proven
connections with Ergenekon. These people create the official ideology
over and over again in the same format. They don’t allow any change
of perspective. But new horizons are opened only if you change your
perspective, and only a true intellectual can do this.
I don’t see such a strong intellectual tradition in Turkey, especially
in the left. Am I wrong?
Not at all! Though the paradigm is bankrupt, it is still there, and
since it is there and since the left cannot sever its ties with the
official ideology, it cannot present a consistent position. There are
exceptions, but exceptions exist in order to confirm the rule. The
left would not really be left without breaking away with Kemalism —
and it could not.
–Boundary_(ID_ElOVFlrNQ4MXswESwFzTqg)–
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