"An astonishing irony" in Turkey!

May 21, 2007
TPMCafe, NY
By Yasemin Congar | bio

As much as I appreciate Steven Cook's four points that summarize the basic messages of RBNG, I find the book's analysis especially valuable in the passages that deal with the EU reforms in Turkey. The desire to become a full member of the EU not only has resulted in a major --albeit incomplete-- uprooting of authoritarian laws and structures in the country, but also serves as a catalyst for the world to see who/what is modern in Turkey now. As Cook told me in a recent interview, "This is not your grandfather's Turkey." In an irony of history, the forces that are in the forefront of Westernization in today's Turkey come from among the religious masses of Anatolia, while many among the Western-looking secularist elite of the big cities are nostalgic for the modernism of 1920s and not ready to accept what it means to be modern and Western today.

I am just back from a trip to Istanbul where I had the chance to chat with politicians, candidates for parliament and journalists, with different takes on the Ak Party government. Some of them blamed AK for the crisis over the election of the new president: "The Prime Minister," they said, "overplayed his hand. He should have sought consensus, nominated a benign figure and avoided confrontation with the military." Others pointed out that the thousands of people demonstrating against AK had genuine fears that a headscarved First Lady would be a major step in what they perceived as the gradual Islamization of Turkey: "Whether these fears are unfounded or not is beside the point. It is up to AK to erase these fears." Others, still, believed the developments to be the inevitable stages of the power struggle in the country: "Turkey is a sick man that is slowly getting better," said an astute democrat, "Every now and then there is a relapse, but the overall prognosis remains good."

Yet, it was striking how very few people were overtly supportive of what the military had done on April 27, namely the issuing of an e-memorandum that included a thinly-veiled coup threat. Within Turkey's political classes, more and more people seemed to realize what Cook calls "the astonishing irony" -- that the Turkish military no more seemed to be the vanguard of modernization and Westernization in Turkey.

Ak Party has been the locomotive of the EU reforms for over four years. Under EU's guidance, the leaders of AK did more to limit the military's role in the political system than any other elected government in the country's history. The military, on the other hand, has been alternatingly acquiescent and resistant to the reforms. Lately, Turkey's top generals have become more vocal in their criticism of the EU's positions vis a vis the civil-military relations and the Kurdish question in Turkey. Also, they never accepted to remain fully outside the political discourse and decision-making process. The generals continued to speak on a wide range of issues including Northern Iraq, Cyprus, Armenia, genocide resolutions, secularism, Orhan Pamuk, etc.

When the military issued its e-memorandum on April 27, the leaders of AK became the first-ever Turkish politicians to reject such a move and publicly remind the military that the Chief of Staff worked for and was accountable to the Prime Minister. The EU, for its part, was quick to criticize the military.

Even among the secularists who protested against AK in several mass rallies recently, voices were heard against a military intervention. The overwhelming message, however, was not a democratic one, as the official speakers of those rallies, for the most part, supported the military's role in politics. They also criticized the ties with the EU, the US, and globalization in general. Although many in the eclectic crowd might have disagreed, the message from the microphone was one of an inward-looking, nationalistic, and even militaristic mindset.

As the cameras captured a sea of red--of Turkish flags and red t-shirts--thousands of secular Turkish women expressed their fear that some day the Islamists might tell them to cover their heads. The fact that, at that very moment, there were millions of Turkish women whose right to higher education was denied because they donned headscarves did not seem to matter. The demonstrators believed themselves to be, in the words of one speaker who took the microphone at several rallies, "the modern, civilized face of Turkey." The implicit dehumanization of the other--the pious, the headscarved--did not bother the crowd. Neither the democratic and pluralistic nature of modern politics nor the freedoms that are the base of today's Western society and the rule of law that protects those freedoms seemed to register with the speakers at the rallies. For them being modern and Western seemed to be merely a lifestyle and a dresscode. An authoritarian regime could be modern and Western as long as it remained untainted by Islam.

But the subscribers of this ideology are diminishing in number in Turkey. In the Anatolian cities and among the newly-urbanized segments of society, more and more people welcome and participate in the economic boost resulting from globalization and the EU process. Pious Turkish women are no longer low-profile, stay-at home types, but have become politically and socially active under the AK government. While their visibility is perceived as a threat by narrow-minded secularists, that visibility is the result of a modern --and Western-- demand to participate. The headscarf, while it remains a symbol of "backwardness" for those secularists who do not think beyond the official definitions of 1920s, is in fact an item of modernity for it enables the woman to go out of her house and socialize.

In RBNG, in the chapter entitled "Turkish Paradox," Cook provides an astute analysis of the political superstructure that has been slowly but surely transforming against a background of social change in Turkey.

"For the Islamists," Cook writes, "to supplant the officers as the perceived agents of Westernization would not only represent an astonishing irony but also risk a breach with the majority of Turks who overwhelmingly support the political reforms Europe demands. The result would be a significant diminution of the prestige of the officer corps, which would simultaneously enhance that of the civilian leadership, rendering it more difficult for the officers to act autonomously, influence the political arena, or defend the political order."

I could not agree more.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.