Turkish riot police use gas to disperse demonstrators during the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul on July 8, 2013. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images) [/caption]
“The people who strive each for his own end
Today become all brethren wholeheartedly united.
Egoism fades away, collective feeling fills their hearts.”
Thus wrote Ziya Gökalp, sociologist and older contemporary of Mustafa Kamal Atatürk, whose writings on Turkish nationalism provided the foundations for the Turkish Republic’s idea of what society was and how it should be built.
He was a young man when he wrote this, recovering from a bout of serious depression and under the influence of a pious uncle of his, still a way from becoming the most respected intellectual of the new Turkey. But he actually never abandoned this vision—borrowed from the Sufi idea of deliverance from selfishness via full submission to God—of the need to annihilate the self in society. It permeated Republican thought, manifesting itself in the state’s decades-long insistence—to the detriment of the Kurds—on the indivisible nature of the Turkish people, popping up even in the oath that Turkish school children had to recite every week at school, until the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) binned it recently: “May my existence be a gift to the existence of the Turkish people.”
Small wonder that the liberal notion of free personality has had a tough time of it in Turkey over the years. Or that the dream of a liberal future has for some Turkish people taken on an almost millenarian intensity.
Back in the early years of the twenty-first century, after Turkey’s home-made banking crisis had knocked nearly a tenth off the country’s GDP and before the AKP came to power, a reader of the big secular-minded Istanbul dailies could have been forgiven for thinking that liberals were about to come to power. Leading commentators penned approving portraits of Kemal Derviş, former World Bank official and finance minister of the then coalition government whose austerity program laid the foundations for the country’s impressive growth since, and İsmail Cem İpekçi, then foreign minister and social democrat. At the general elections in 2002, the party in which they were leading lights got almost no votes.
The dream has not gone away, though. Writing in The Majalla recently, Soner Cağaptay again argues that the liberals’ day has finally come. Since the Gezi protests of June 2013, he says, they have claimed the mantle of change from the increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
His main argument is that the transformation of Turkey’s economy under the AKP has made Turkey middle-class, “on the cusp of becoming history’s first universally literate Muslim-majority society,” and that it is this new, educated, well-off class that will change the country socially and politically. It is easy to see what he is getting at. The Gezi crowds were fuelled by a very middle-class fury at the government’s meddling in the private lives of its citizens—diktats on how much alcohol they should drink and how many kids they should have. But there is no hard and fast rule to say that the literate middle classes are always liberal. It depends what they read. Think of Putin’s Russia. Or Germany in the 1930s for that matter. In any case, Cağaptay’s claim that these liberal middle classes “make up a majority of the country” is baffling, only justifiable if one assumes that everybody who didn’t vote for the AKP in the recent local elections is middle class and liberal, an assumption that is manifestly untrue.
An equally strong case could be made for portraying the Gezi protests and their aftermath not as the first glimmers of a liberal dawn but as its crepuscule. This is where Ziya Gökalp comes in. Liberalism had been an important political current in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, voiced by a wide variety of opponents to the autocratic and long-lived Sultan Abdul Hamid II. But it was eclipsed by the espousal of Gökalp’s collectivist nationalist ideas and by the clique that rose to power after Abdul Hamid’s overthrow (and later formed the backbone of the early Republican elite). Out of decades of chaos and intellectual ferment came a regime that was anything but liberal, and it wasn’t really until the 1950s, and the return of democratic elections, that liberalism in any form reappeared on the scene.
Since the military coup in 1980, Turkey has gone through a similar period of turmoil. The old Republican vessel was letting water in fast. A military attempt in 1997 at restoration got nowhere. As in the nineteenth century, liberals played an important part in the transformation. They were leading advocates in the 1980s of opening up the country to the global economy. In the 1990s, they became the spokesmen for a Second, liberal, Republic. In the 2000s, they sold AKP to the world—accurately as it happened—as a party capable of knocking down the military-backed status quo. Where they were wrong was in their assumption that Erdoğan and his lieutenants shared their vision of a free society.
After every previous election, Erdoğan has toned down the aggressive rhetoric he used while campaigning and portrayed himself as a leader for the whole country. Not this time. This time, he has his eye on presidential elections in August 2014, the final step to his total consolidation of power. Hence all the talk of the “will of the nation” and of “enemies of the people.” It’s all very Gökalpian, really. As the sociologist wrote in another youthful poem:
“In bodies there is multiplicity
In hearts there is unity
There are no individuals, there is [only] society.
There is no God but Allah.”
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
