From
After Kemal
Perry Anderson
In a famous
essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of
the youthful revolts of the 1960s, Murat Belge – a writer unrivalled in his
intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation – told his
contemporaries on the Turkish left, as yet another military intervention came
thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had
misunderstood their own country in a quite fundamental way.[1]
They had thought it a
A quarter of a
century later, his diagnosis still holds. Since the end of the Kemalist order stricto
sensu in 1950,
During the
Second World War, Inönü had steered his country in much the way Franco had done
That in itself,
however, would not have been enough to bring democracy to
Thirty years
later, his regime had accomplished its historical task. Economic development
had transformed Spanish society, radical mass politics had been extinguished,
and democracy was no longer hazardous for capital. So completely had the
dictatorship done its work that a toothless Bourbon socialism was incapable
even of restoring the republic it had overthrown. In this Spanish laboratory
could be found a parabola of the future, which the Latin American dictators of
the 1970s – Pinochet is the exemplary case – would repeat, architects of a
political order in which electors, grateful for civic liberties finally
restored, could be trusted henceforward not to tamper with the social order.
Today the Spanish template has become the general formula of freedom: no longer
making the world safe for democracy, but democracy safe for this world.
But,
sociologically speaking, the basic parameters set by the first election of 1950
have remained in place to this day. Turkish democracy has been broken at
intervals, but never for long, because it is anchored in a centre-right
majority that has remained, in one form after another, unbroken. Across four
historical cycles, an underlying stability has distinguished Turkish political
life. From 1950 to 1960 the country was ruled by Adnan Menderes as premier, at
the head of a Democratic Party whose vote, 58 per cent of the electorate at its
height, was never less than 47 per cent, still giving it four-fifths of the
seats in the National Assembly and control of the presidency, at the end of its
lifespan.
The birth of the
party marked the moment at which the Turkish elite split, with the growth of a
bourgeoisie less dependent on the state than in the prewar period, no longer
willing to accept bureaucratic direction of the economy, and eager for the
spoils of political power. Its leaders were all former members of the Kemalist
establishment, typically with stakes in the private sector:
This alone would
have been enough to secure the popularity of the Democratic government. But
More gravely,
the integral nationalism of the interwar period was given a new impetus when
Menderes – solicited by
This time,
however, there was shock in the press and public opinion, and unease even in
establishment quarters at
The coup of 1960
was not the work of the Turkish high command, but of conspirators of lesser
rank, who had been planning to oust
With these
institutions in place, the second cycle of postwar Turkish politics was set in
motion. As soon as elections were held, it became clear that the voting bloc
put together by the Democrats, though at first distributed across a number of
successor formations, still commanded a comfortable majority of the country. By
1965, this was consolidated behind the Justice Party led by Sülyman Demirel,
which alone took 53 per cent of the vote. Thirty years later, Demirel would
still be in the presidential palace. A hydraulic engineer with American
connections – Eisenhower fellowship; consultant for Morrison-Knudsen – who had
been picked for bureaucratic office by
In power,
Demirel like
This in itself,
however, was not enough to secure a dominance of the political scene otherwise
comparable to that of
The danger to
Demirel lay elsewhere. The new constitution had allowed a Workers’ Party to run
candidates for the first time. It never got more than 5 per cent of the vote,
posing no threat to the stability of the system. But if the Turkish working
class was still too small and intimidated for any mass electoral politics, the
Turkish universities were rapidly becoming hotbeds of radicalism. Situated,
uniquely, at the intersection between First, Second and Third Worlds – Europe
to the west, the USSR to the north, the Mashreq to the south and east – Turkish
students were galvanised by ideas and influences from all three: campus
rebellions, Communist traditions, guerrilla imaginations, each with what
appeared to be their own relevance to the injustices and cruelties of the
society around them, in which the majority of the population was still rural
and nearly half was illiterate. Out of this heady mixture came the kaleidoscope
of revolutionary groups whose obituary Belge was to write a decade later. In
the late 1960s, as Demirel persecuted left opinion of any sort, it was not long
before some took to arms, in scattered acts of violence.
In themselves
these were little more than pinpricks, without significant impact on the
political control of the Justice Party. But they lent energy and opportunity to
movements of a much more threatening character on its other flank. In 1969, the
ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) was created by Alparslan
Türkes, a colonel who as a young officer during the Second World War had been
an ardent pro-Nazi, and was one of the key movers of the coup in 1960. Adopting
fascist methods, it swiftly built up paramilitary squads – the Grey Wolves – far
stronger than anything the left could muster, and boasted a constituency twice
its size. Nor was this all. As Demirel tacked towards the military, and the
elasticity of the political system expanded, a less accommodating Islamism
emerged to outflank him. In 1970 the National Order Party was launched by
Necmettin Erbakan, like Demirel an engineer, but at a higher level – he had
held a university chair – and with more genuine claims to piety, as a member of
the Sufi order of Nakshibendi. Running on a more radically Muslim ticket than
the Justice Party could afford to do, and attacking its subservience to
American capital, his organisation – redubbed the National Salvation Party –
took 12 per cent in its first test at the polls.
The turbulence
caused by these unruly outsiders was too much for the Kemalist establishment,
and in 1971 the army intervened again. This time – as invariably henceforward –
it was the high command that struck, with an ultimatum ousting Demirel for his
failure to maintain order, and imposing a technocratic government of the right.
Under martial law, trade unionists, intellectuals and deputies of the left were
rounded up and tortured, and the liberal provisions of the constitution
cancelled. Two years later, the political scene was judged sufficiently purged
of subversion for elections to be held again, and for the rest of the 1970s
Demirel and Ecevit seesawed in coalition governments in which either Türkes or
Erbakan, or both, held casting votes, and populated the ministries under their
control.
At the time, the
Grey Wolves looked the more formidable of the newcomers to the system, rapidly
capturing key positions in the police and intelligence apparatuses of the
state, from which terror could be orchestrated with paramilitary gangs outside
it. Few terms have been as much abused as ‘fascism’, but there is little
question that the MHP of these years met the bill. Therein, however, lay its
limitation. Classically, fascism – in
Much of the
traditional fabric of Turkish society was meanwhile coming apart, as migration
from the countryside threw up squatter settlements in the towns, still not far
removed in ways of life and outlook from the villages left behind –
ruralisation of the cities outrunning urbanisation of the newcomers, in the
famous formula of Serif Mardin, dean of Turkish sociologists – but without the same
communal bonds. Though from the turn of the 1970s the postwar boom was over,
industrialisation by import substitution was artificially prolonged by
remittances from Turkish workers abroad and a ballooning foreign debt. By the
end of the decade this model was exhausted: compared with
The tipping
point, however, came from another direction. In September 1980, an Islamist
rally in
Mass repression
was not the gateway to a dictatorship in
The new premier
was Turgut Özal, like Demirel (to whom he owed his rise) a provincial engineer
with a background in the
Squat and
unprepossessing in appearance, crude in manner, Özal always had a touch of a
Turkish Mr Toad about him. But he was a more considerable figure than Demirel
or
At the same
time, Özal more openly exploited religion to consolidate his position than any
of his predecessors. He could do this because the junta had itself abandoned
military traditions of secularism, in the interests of combating subversion.
‘Laicism does not mean atheism,’ Evren told the nation. In 1982 confessional
instruction was made obligatory in state schools, and from now on what had
always been tacit in official ideology, the identification of nation with
religion, became explicit with the diffusion of ‘the Turkish-Islamic synthesis’
as textbook doctrine. Özal, though an arch-pragmatist, was himself a member of
the mystical Nakshibendi order – he liked to compare them to the Mormons, as
examples of the affinity between piety and money – and used state control of
religion to promote it as never before. Under him, the budget of the
Directorate of Religious Affairs increased 16-fold: five million copies of the
Koran were printed at public expense, half a million pilgrims ushered to
In the spring of
1987, Özal capped his project to modernise the country by applying for Turkish
entry into the European Community, the candidature that is still pending twenty
years later. In the autumn he was re-elected premier, and in 1989 took over the
presidency when Evren retired. From this peak, it was downhill. Economically, a
trade deficit and overvalued currency combined with electorally driven public
spending to send inflation back to pre-coup levels, triggering a wave of
strikes and choppy business conditions. Corruption, rife during the boom, now
lapped the presidential family itself. Politically, having gambled that he
could keep the old guard of politicians out of play with a referendum banning
their re-entry into the arena, which he then lost, Özal was faced with the
rancour of a reanimated Demirel. Increasingly abrupt and autocratic in style,
he made
Each of the
three cycles of centre-right rule had seen a steady weakening of one of the
pillars of Kemalism as a historical structure: its compression of religion to a
default identity, restricting its expressions to the private sphere. Now it was
not just secularism, as officially defined, but also statism, as an economic
outlook, that was eroded. Özal had gone furthest in both directions,
confessional and liberal. Yet the deeper foundations of the Kemalist order lay
untouched. Integral nationalism has remained de rigueur for every government
since 1945, with its invariable toll of victims. After the Greeks in the 1950s
and the Alevis in the 1970s, now it was the turn, once again, of the Kurds. The
radicalisation of the late 1960s had not left them unaffected, but so long as
there was a legal Workers’ Party, or a lively set of illegal movements in the
universities, Kurdish aspirations flowed into a more general stream of
activism. Once the coup of 1980 had decapitated this left, however, the
political reawakening of a new generation of Kurds had to find its own ways to
emancipation.
On seizing
power, Evren’s junta had declared martial law in the south-east, and rapidly
made any use of the Kurdish language – even in private – a criminal offence.
Absolute denial of any cultural or political expressions of a collective
Kurdish identity covered the whole of
This time the
Turkish state, facing a much more disciplined and modern enemy, with external
bases, could not crush the movement in a few months, as it had done during the
risings of 1925 and 1937. A prolonged war ensued, in which the PKK responded to
military terror with pitiless ferocities of its own. It was 15 years before the
army and air force finally brought the Kurdish insurgency to an end, in 1999.
By then,
This was the
other face of Özal’s rule. In his last years, he started to speak of his own
half-Kurdish origins – he came from
In the last year
of the century a moribund Ecevit returned to office, boasting of his capture of
the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, a figure out of Dostoevsky: abducted by Mossad
and the CIA in Africa and delivered in a truss to Ankara, he was soon profusely
expressing his love for Turkey. By now public finances were in ruins, the price
of necessities out of control. The final economic crisis was triggered by an
undignified dispute between the president, now a former judge, and the premier,
livid to be taxed with the corruption of his ministers. Dudgeon at the helm of
the state led to panic on the stock market, and collapse of the currency.
Meltdown was avoided only by an emergency IMF loan, extended for the same
reason as to Yeltsin’s Russia: the country was too important an American
interest to risk a domestic upheaval, should it founder. The fall of the
government a few months later brought the aftermath of the Özal years to a
close.
Elections in the
autumn of 2002 saw a complete transformation of the political scene. A party
that had not even existed eighteen months before swept the board. The AKP (the
Justice and Development Party), running on a moderate Muslim platform, won
two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, forming a government with the
largest majority since the time of Menderes. Its victory was widely hailed, at
home and abroad, as the dawn of a new era for Turkey: not only would the
country now be assured stable government, after years of squabbling coalition
cabinets, but – still more vital – the prospect of a long overdue
reconciliation of religion and democracy. For the central plank of the AKP’s
electoral campaign was a pledge to bring Turkey into the European Union, as a
country made capable of meeting the EU’s long-standing criteria for membership,
above all the political sine qua non of the rule of law and respect for human
rights. Within a month of their victory, AKP leaders had secured a diplomatic
triumph at the Copenhagen summit of the EU, which gave Turkey a firm date, only
two years away, for starting negotiations for its accession to the Union, provided
that it enacted sufficient political reforms in the interim. At home the
general change of mood, from despair to euphoria, was dramatic. Not since 1950
had a fresh start, inspiring so much hope, been witnessed.
The novelty of
AKP rule, widely acclaimed in the West, is not an illusion. But between the
standard image, to be found in every bien-pensant editorial, opinion column and
piece of reportage in Europe, let alone America – not to speak of official
pronouncements from Brussels – and the reality of what is new about it, the
distance is considerable. The party is an heir, not a founder, of its fortune.
When the ban on pre-1980 politicians was lifted in 1987, the landscape of the
late 1970s re-emerged. Özal and Demirel disputed the mainstream centre-right
vote, traditionally hegemonic, but weakened in the 1970s by the rise of fascist
and Islamist parties on its far flank. These now duly reappeared, but with a
difference. Türkes had dropped much of his earlier ideological baggage, his
party now touting a synthesis of religion and nation in the style of a more
generic Turkish chauvinism, with somewhat greater – though still quite limited
– electoral success as time went on.
Erbakan, on the
other hand, became a major force. The popular constituency for Islamism was
much larger, and he proved a formidable shaper of it. By 1994 he had created
far the best grass-roots organisation of any party, based on local religious
networks, powered by modern communications and data systems. In that year, his
– renamed – Welfare Party showed its mettle by capturing Istanbul, Ankara and a
string of other cities in municipal elections. Town halls had never been of
much importance in the past, but the new Welfare mayors and their councillors,
by delivering services and charitable works to communities that had never known
such attention before, made them into strongholds of popular Islamism.
Behind this
success lay longer-term changes in society. Outside the state education system,
religious schools had been multiplying since the 1950s. In the market, the
media were moving steadily downscale, the tabloid press and commercial
television propagating a mass culture that was, as everywhere, sensationalist
and consumerist, but with a local twist. By dissolving the distinctions, on which
the Kemalist compression of Islam had depended, between private life (and
fantasy) and admissible public ideals or aspirations, it favoured the
penetration of religion into the political sphere. The post-Ottoman elites
could afford to look down on a popular culture saturated with folk religion so
long as the political system excluded the masses from any real say in the
government of the country. But as Turkish society became more democratised,
their sensibilities and beliefs were bound to find increasing expression in the
electoral arena. The Muslim vote had existed for nearly fifty years. By the
mid-1990s it was much less inhibited.
On the heels of
its municipal triumphs, the Welfare Party got a fifth of the national vote in
1995, making it the largest party in a fragmented assembly, and soon afterwards
Erbakan became premier in a precarious coalition government. Unable to pursue
the party’s agenda at home, he attempted to strike a more independent line
abroad, speaking of Muslim solidarity and visiting Iran and Libya, but was
rapidly called to order by the foreign policy establishment, and within a year
ousted under military pressure. Six months later the Constitutional Court
proscribed the Welfare Party for violating secularism. In advance of the ban,
Erbakan formed the Virtue Party as its reincarnation. In the summer of 2001,
that in turn was banned, whereupon – never short of inspiring names – he formed
the Felicity Party to replace it.
This time,
however, he could not carry his troops with him. A new generation of activists
had come to the conclusion that Erbakan’s erratic style of leadership – veering
wildly between firebrand radicalism and unseemly opportunism – was a liability
for their cause. More important, the repeated crackdowns on the kind of
Islamism he represented had convinced them that to come to power it was
essential to drop his anti-capitalist and anti-Western rhetoric, and present a
more moderate, less explicitly confessional face to the electorate, one that
would not affront the Kemalist establishment so openly. They had already
challenged Erbakan for control of the Virtue Party, and in 2001 were ready to
break away from him completely. Three weeks after the creation of the Felicity
Party, the AKP was launched under the leadership of Tayyip Erdogan. Mayor of
Istanbul from 1994 to 1998, he had been briefly jailed for an inflammatory
verse and was still ineligible to run for parliament, but few doubted the
practicality of his ambitions. His proven skills as orator and organiser
assured his domination of the new party.
The spectacular
scale of the AKP’s victory in 2002, catapulting it into power, was an effect of
the electoral system rather than of any overwhelming support at the polls. The
party got no more than 34 per cent of the vote, far below the scores achieved
by Menderes, Demirel or Özal at their height. This was transmuted into 67 per
cent of seats in the Assembly by the number of other parties that fell below
the 10 per cent bar – only the still extant Kemalist RPP cleared it, with 19
per cent. The result was more a verdict on the kind of democracy the
constitution of 1980 had installed in Turkey rather than a tidal vote of
confidence in the AKP: a combined total of half the electorate was
disenfranchised by the threshold for representation in parliament.
Yet the party’s
disproportionate control of the legislature also corresponded to a new reality.
Unlike any of its predecessors, it faced no credible opposition. All the
parties associated with the debacle of the later 1990s had been wiped out,
other than a hastily resuscitated RPP, without any positive programme or
identity, surviving on fears that a neo-Islamism was about to take over the
country. A new cycle of centre-right dominance had begun, not discontinuous
with the past, but modifying it in one crucial respect. From the start, though
it mustered less numerical support than its forerunners at a comparable stage
of the cycle, the AKP enjoyed an ideological hegemony over the whole political
scene that none of them had ever possessed. By a process of elimination, it was
left in all but sole command of the stage.
This structural
change was accompanied by an alteration in the character of the ruling party
itself. Since its roots in the Islamism that arose outside the establishment after
1980 were plain, and its turn towards a more moderate stance in coming to power
no less clear, the AKP has been widely described by admirers in the West as a
hopeful Muslim equivalent of Christian Democracy. High praise in Europe, the
compliment has not been well received by the AKP, which prefers the term
‘conservative democracy’, as less likely to provoke Kemalist reflexes. But the
comparison is mostly misleading in any case. There is no church for the AKP to
lean on, there are no welfare systems to preside over, no trade unions in its
tow. Nor does the party show any sign of the internal democracy or factional
energies that were always a feature of postwar German or Italian Christian
Democracy.
Still, there are
two respects in which the AKP could be said to correspond, mutatis mutandis, to
them. If its electoral base, like theirs, includes the peasantry, which still
comprises 30 per cent of the population in Turkey, it draws more heavily on a
teeming underclass of urban slum-dwellers which scarcely existed in postwar
Europe. But the dynamic core of the party comes from a stratum of newly
enriched Anatolian entrepreneurs, completely modern in their approach to
running a profitable business, and devoutly traditional in their attachment to
religious beliefs and customs. This layer, as distinct from the big
conglomerates in Istanbul as local notables in the Veneto or Mittelstand
in Swabia were from Fiat or the Deutsche Bank, is the new component of the
centre-right bloc commanded by the AKP. Its similarity to the provincial motors
of the German or Italian parties of old is unmistakeable.
So too is the
centrality of Europe – the Community then; the Union now – as ideological
cement for the party. In Turkey, however, this has been much more important,
politically speaking, for Erdogan and his colleagues than it was in Germany or
Italy for Adenauer or De Gasperi. Entry into the EU has, indeed, to date been
the magical formula of the AKP’s hegemony. For the mass of the population, many
with relatives among the two million Turks in Germany, a Europe within which
they can travel freely represents hope of better paid jobs than can be found,
if at all, at home. For big business, membership of the EU offers access to
deeper capital markets; for medium entrepreneurs, lower interest rates; for
both, a more stable macro-economic environment. For the professional classes,
commitment to Europe is the gauge that Islamist temptations will not prevail
within the AKP. For the liberal intelligentsia, the EU will be the safeguard against
any return to military rule. For the military, it will realise the
long-standing Kemalist dream of joining the West in full dress. In short,
Europe is a promised land towards which the most antithetical forces within
Turkey can gaze, for the most variegated reasons. In making its cause their
own, the AKP leaders have come to dominate the political chequerboard more
completely than any force since the Kemalism of the early republic.
To make good its
claim to be leading Turkey into Europe, the AKP took a series of steps in the
first two years of its rule to meet norms professed by the Union. A reduction
in the powers of the National Security Council, underway before it came to
office, and of the role of the military in it, was in its own interest, as well
as that of the population at large. Of more immediate significance for ordinary
citizens, the State Security Courts, a prime instrument of repression, have
been closed down. The state of emergency in the south-east, dating back to
1987, has been lifted, and the death penalty abolished. In 2004, Kurdish MPs
jailed for using their own language in parliament were finally released. Warmly
applauded in the media, this package of reforms secured the AKP its European
legitimacy.
The larger part
of the popularity of the new government came, however, from the rapid economic
recovery over which it presided. The AKP inherited an IMF stabilisation
programme as a condition of the large loan Turkey received from the fund in
late 2001, which set the parameters for its stewardship of the economy. The
ideology of the Welfare Party out of which it came had been not only
anti-Western, but often anti-capitalist in rhetoric. The European turn of the
AKP purged it of any taint of the first. Still more demonstratively, it put all
memories of the latter behind it, adopting a neoliberal regimen with the
fervour of a convert. Fiscal discipline became the watchword, privatisation the
grail. The Financial Times was soon hailing the AKP’s ‘passion for
selling state assets’. With a primary budget surplus of 6 per cent, and real
interest rates at 15 per cent, subduing inflation to single figures, business
confidence was restored, investment picked up and growth rebounded. From 2002
to 2007, the Turkish economy grew at an average rate of some 7 per cent a year.
Drawn by the boom, and fuelling it, foreign capital poured into the country,
snapping up 70 per cent of the Istanbul stock market.
As elsewhere,
the end of high inflation relieved the condition of the poor, as the price of
necessities stabilised. Jobs, too, were created by the boom, even if these do
not show up in official statistics, where the rate of unemployment – more than
10 per cent – appears unaffected. But jobless growth in the formal sector has
been accompanied by increased employment in the informal sector, above all
casual labour in the construction industry. Objectively, such material gains
remain rather modest: real wages have been flat, and – given demographic growth
– the number of paupers has actually increased. Ideologically, however, they
have been enough, so one acute observer argues, for the AKP to make
neo-liberalism for the first time something like the common sense of the poor.
But how deep
does popular belief that the market always knows best ultimately run? Fiscal
discipline has meant cutting social spending, on services or subsidies, making
it difficult for the AKP to repeat at national level the municipal philanthropy
on which its leaders thrived in the 1990s, when the Welfare Party could deliver
public benefits of one kind or another directly to its constituents. The
Turkish state collects only about 18 per cent of GDP in taxes – even by today’s
standards, a tribute to the egoism of the rich – so there is anyway little
government money to go around, after bond-holders have been paid off. To hold
the mass of its voters in the cities, the AKP needs to offer something more
than the bread – it is not yet quite a stone – of neoliberalism. Lack of social
redistribution requires cultural or political compensations. There were also
the party’s cadres to be considered: a mere diet of IMF prescriptions was bound
to leave them hungry.
The pitfalls of
too conformist an adherence to directives from abroad were illustrated early
on, when the AKP leadership attempted to force a vote through parliament
inviting American troops across Turkey to attack Iraq, in March 2003. A third
of its deputies rebelled, and the motion was defeated, to great popular
delight. At this stage, Erdogan was still outside parliament, having yet to get
round the previous ban on him. Possibly harbouring a residual sense of rivalry
with him, his second-in-command, Abdullah Gul, acting as premier, may not have
pulled out all the stops. Two months later, Erdogan had entered parliament and
taken charge. Once premier, he rammed through a vote to dispatch Turkish troops
to take part in the occupation of Iraq. By this time it was too late, and the
offer was rejected by the client authorities in Baghdad, nervous of Kurdish
reactions. But Erdogan’s ability to impose such a course was an indication of
the position he has come to occupy in the AKP’s firmament.
In his person,
in fact, lies a good deal of the symbolic compensation enjoyed by the mass of
the party’s electorate for any material hardships. Postmodern political
cultures, ever more tied to the spectacle, have spawned a series of leaders out
of the entertainment industry. Erdogan belongs in this respect with Reagan and
Berlusconi: after an actor and a crooner, who could be more popular than a
striker? The product of a working-class family and religious schools in
Istanbul, Erdogan started out life as a professional footballer, before moving
up through the ranks of the Welfare Party to become mayor of the city at the
age of 40. Along the way, he found time to burnish his private sector
credentials, amassing a tidy fortune as a local businessman. Neither humble
origins nor recent wealth are new for leaders of the centre right in Turkey.
What distinguishes Erdogan from his predecessors is that unlike Menderes, Demirel
or Özal, his route to power has not been through bureaucratic preferment from
above, but grass-roots organisation from below. For the first time, Turkey is
ruled by a professional politician, in the full sense of the term.
On the platform,
Erdogan is a figure of pregnant native charisma. Tall and powerfully built, his
hooded eyes and long upper lip accentuated by a brush moustache, he embodies
three of the most prized values of Turkish popular culture. Piety: legend has
it that he always prayed before bounding onto the pitch; machismo: famously
tough in word and deed, with subordinates and enemies alike; and the common
touch: manners and vocabulary of the street-stalls rather than the salon. If no
trace of democracy is left in the AKP, whose congresses now rival United Russia
in acclamations of its leader, that is not necessarily a black mark in a
tradition that respects authoritarianism as a sign of strength. The weaknesses
in Erdogan’s public image lie elsewhere. Choleric and umbrageous, he is
vulnerable to ridicule in the press, suing journalists by the dozen for
unfavourable coverage of himself or his family, which has done well out of the
AKP’s years in power. A son’s gala wedding adorned by Berlusconi, a daughter’s
nuptials glad-handed by Musharraf, have shut down half Istanbul for their
festivities. A son-in-law’s company has been handed control of the second
largest media concern in the country. At the outset, the AKP enjoyed a
reputation for probity. Now its leader risks acquiring some of the traits of a
tabloid celebrity, with all the attendant ambiguities. But Erdogan’s
personality cult remains one of the party’s trump cards, as that of Menderes,
no less vain and autocratic, was before him. Simply, the audience has moved
from the countryside to the cities.
When elections
came again in 2007, the ranks of the AKP had been purged of all those who had
rebelled against the war in Iraq, relics of a superseded past. Now a
homogeneous party of order, riding five years of growth, a magnetic leader in
charge, it took 47 per cent of the vote. This was a much more decisive victory
than in 2002, distributed more evenly across the country, and was treated in
the West as a consecration without precedent. In some ways, however, it was
less than might have been expected. The AKP’s score was six points lower than
that of Demirel in 1965, and 11 points below that of Menderes in 1954. On the
other hand, the ex-fascist MHP, flying crypto-confessional colours too, won 14
per cent of the vote, making for a combined vote for the right of 61 per cent,
arguably a high tide of another kind. Indeed, although – because of the
vagaries of the electoral threshold – the AKP’s share of seats actually fell,
despite the increase in its vote by more than a third, the MHP’s success handed
the two parties, taken together, three-quarters of the National Assembly: more
than enough to alter the constitution.
In its second
term of office, the AKP has altered course. By 2007 entry into the EU was still
a strategic goal, but no longer the same open sesame for the party. Once the
Anglo-American plan to wind up the Republic of Cyprus had failed in 2004, it
was faced with the awkward possibility of having to end Turkish military
presence on the island, if the country was itself to gain entry into the EU – a
price at which the whole political establishment in Ankara has traditionally
baulked. So, after its initial burst of liberal reforms, the party decelerated,
with few further measures of real significance to protect civil rights or
dismantle the apparatuses of repression, testing the patience even of Brussels,
where officialdom has long been determined to look on the bright side. By 2006
even the Commission’s annual report on Turkey, a treasury of bureaucratic
euphemisms, was here and there starting to strike a faintly regretful note.
Soon afterwards,
in early 2007, Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist repeatedly prosecuted
for the crime of ‘denigrating Turkishness’ (he spoke of the Armenian genocide),
was assassinated in Istanbul. Mass demonstrations protested his murder. A year
later, the extent of the AKP’s response was to modify the charge in the penal
code under which Dink had been prosecuted, with a grand alteration from
‘denigrating Turkishness’ to ‘denigrating the Turkish nation’. Twenty-four
hours after that change had been made, on May Day 2008, police launched an
all-out assault on workers attempting to commemorate the killing of trade
unionists in Taksim Square in 1977, after the AKP had banned the demonstration.
Clubs, tear-gas, water cannon and rubber bullets left 38 injured. More than
five hundred were arrested. As Erdogan explained, ‘When the feet try to govern
the head, it becomes doomsday.’
Shedding liberal
ballast, once Europe moved down the agenda, has meant at the same stroke pandering
to national phobias. In its first term, the AKP made a number of concessions to
Kurdish culture and feeling – allowing a few hours of regional broadcasting in
Kurdish, some teaching of Kurdish in private schools. These involved little
structural change in the situation of the Kurdish population, but combined with
selective use of state patronage in Kurdish municipalities, and a more
ecumenical rhetoric, were enough to treble the party’s vote in the south-east
in 2007, taking it to the national average. Since then, however, the government
has tacked heavily towards the traditional military approach to the region. For
soon after its failure to get the scheme it wanted in Cyprus, it was confronted
with a revival of PKK guerrilla actions. On a much smaller scale than in the
past, and more or less disavowed by Öcalan, these now had the advantage of a
more secure hinterland in the de facto autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan, after the
American march to Baghdad.
In time-honoured
fashion, the Turkish high command responded by stepping up repression, throwing
more tanks and gendarmes into the south-east, and pressing for cross-border
attacks into northern Iraq. Mobilisation of state and para-state agencies to
crush the guerrillas was accompanied by a hurricane of nationalist hysteria in
civil society, fed by fears of the long-term example of Kurdish autonomy in
Iraq, resentment that for the first time in a century the country was having to
give an account of itself to opinion in Europe, and the miseries of provincial life
for unemployed youth, a prime recruiting ground of the MHP. In this storm,
Erdogan and his colleagues took the same course as Demirel, accommodating the
military – Turkish jets and troops were soon attacking across the frontier into
Iraq – and upping chauvinist rhetoric. By the winter of 2007, Turkish cities
were draped from one end to the other with national flags hanging out of
windows or balconies; young people were replacing photographs of themselves
with the crescent on a red field in Facebook; night after night, television
news was reduced to solemn images of Erdogan and Gul, at the head of a phalanx
of army commanders, presiding at the funeral of soldiers killed in the
south-east, mothers sobbing over their coffins, intercut with troops high-stepping
through Diyarbekir to stentorian chants of ‘One Flag, One Nation, One Language,
One State’. A comparable intensity of integral nationalism has not been seen in
Europe since the 1930s.
The AKP’s
embrace of this jingoism involves no renunciation of its own objectives. If
nation continues to trump religion as the master discourse of society, without
contradicting it, the party has much to gain and little to lose by doing the
same. Tactically, its adjustment has an obvious logic. The economic outlook for
Turkey is worsening. The trade deficit is huge, the influx of foreign funds
covering it is mostly hot money that could exit at the first sign of trouble,
inflation is in double digits again. Should the boom evaporate, showing muscle
on the security front is a well-tried electoral alternative. Strategically, so
this calculation goes, giving the military all it wants in the battle against
terrorism can enable the party to work towards its own goals on other terrain.
These have been
two-fold: to bend society into a more consistently observant mould, and to
capture the branches of the state that have resisted this. The priority given
to these underlying aims, at the expense of liberal reforms, can be seen from
the AKP’s determination to control the presidency by installing Gul in the
post. The move raised military and bureaucratic hackles, put down by the easy
electoral victory of 2007. Its political significance lay in the party’s
refusal to nominate any independent personality with democratic credentials,
which would have yielded it political gains of another kind, in which it was
not interested. Its attempt to plant a pious incompetent as governor of the
Central Bank failed, but indicates its general line of action, a colonisation
of the state by trusted minions, which has been proceeding apace at lower
levels. Operating in parallel, the movement led by the exiled mystagogue
Fethullah Gülen – preaching an Islam impeccably pro-business, pro-modern,
pro-American – has created an Opus Dei-like empire, not just controlling
newspapers, television stations and hundreds of schools, but now permeating all
ranks of the police.
Bids to bend
civil society to the will of the ruling party have followed a similar pattern.
Rather than making any effort to rescind the mass of punitive articles in a
penal code still modelled on that of Italian Fascism, Erdogan tried to pass a
law criminalising adultery – three years in jail for straying from the marriage
bed – desisting only when it became clear that this was too much for even his warmest
admirers in Europe. The battle front has now shifted to female headgear. After
failing to secure a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that the
Turkish ban on headscarves in public buildings, including universities, was a
violation of basic rights, the AKP-MHP bloc passed two constitutional
amendments abolishing it last February, which the Constitutional Court has
since struck down.
The issue of
scarves offers a perfect illustration of the warped dialectic between state and
religion in the Turkey bequeathed by Kemal. Denial of the right of young women
to wear what they want on campus is an obvious discrimination against the
devout, excluding them from public higher education. Licensing the headscarf,
as any secular girl from a provincial background will tell you, prompts fears
of the reverse: brutal social pressure to wear it, on pain of ostracism or
worse. The AKP is in no position to dispel such fears, since its record in
office and the style of its leadership have been so persistently arrogant and
bullying. Likewise, contemporary Kemalism is in no position to claim that the
state must be kept inviolate from any expression of religion, since it
maintains at public expense a vast directorate propagating just one faith,
Islam, while curtailing the activity of all others. The successive waves of
political pietism that have surged up since the 1950s, of which the AKP is only
the latest, are the logical revenge on its own duplicity. A genuine secularism
would have cut the cord between state and religion cleanly and completely,
creating a space for the everyday rejection of all supernatural beliefs. How
far it has failed to do so can be judged from the verdict of David Shankland,
one of the most sympathetic analysts of Turkish faith and society, not to speak
of the statesmanship of Erdogan himself: ‘There is not the slightest doubt,’ he
writes in Islam and Society in Turkey, ‘that it is now dangerous for a
man or woman to deny openly belief in God.’ The army itself, supposed bastion
of secularism, regularly describes those who have fallen in counterinsurgency
operations as ‘martyrs’. Nation and religion remain as structurally
interdependent in latter-day Kemalism as they were when the Gazi first
established the state.
But because that
interdependence could never be openly acknowledged, a tension that has yet to
abate was created within the Turkish political system between an elite claiming
to be secular and movements claiming to be faithful, each side accusing the
other of want of tolerance. The AKP has not broken, but reproduced this
deadlock. Before taking office, Erdogan famously told his followers that
democracy was like a tram: we will take it to our destination, and then get
off. The remark has sometimes been interpreted as a revelation of the hidden
intention of the AKP to use a parliamentary majority to install a
fundamentalist tyranny. But its meaning can be taken as something more banal.
Power, not principle, is what matters. Erdogan is no doubt as devout an
individual as Blair or Bush, with whom he got on well, but there is little
reason to think that he would risk the fruits of office for the extremities of
his faith, any more than they would. An instrumental attitude to democracy is
not the same either as hostility or commitment to it. Elections have served the
AKP well: why abandon them? Religious integrism would bar entry to Europe: why
risk it?
The temptations,
and pitfalls, for the party lie elsewhere. On the one hand, the AKP is under
pressure from its constituency – above all the dedicated core of militants – to
show results in the long-standing struggle of the believers for more public
recognition of their faith and its outward symbols. Its credibility depends on
being able to deliver these. On the other hand, the unprecedented weakness of
any opposition to it within the political system has given its leaders a giddy
sense that they enjoy a new freedom of action. The military and the
bureaucracy, certainly, remain a potential threat: but would the army dare to
stage a coup again, now that Turkey is on the threshold of the Union, and all
Europe is watching? The outcome of the recent crisis, in which the
Constitutional Court failed by one vote to ban the AKP for breaching
secularism, suggests that latter-day Kemalism is willing to wound, but afraid
to strike.
Whether the AKP,
which has hit back with accusations of a plot against it – whose labyrinthine
details conspicuously avoid the killing of Dink or crimes in the south-east
under its watch – shows greater resolve remains to be seen. For the moment, it
has the upper hand, with big business solidly behind it. A triumphant appeal to
the electors, sweeping away the constitution of 1982, is one possibility. The
hubris that took Menderes to his end is another. What is clear is that the
latest cycle of centre-right rule in Turkey has entered a critical phase, at
which its precursors stumbled. If the AKP’s position is now stronger than that
of its forebears, it is not impregnable.
Whatever the
immediate outcome of the conflict between them, the latest versions of Islamism
and Kemalism derive from the same founding moment as their predecessors, even
as each seeks sublimation in Europe. So too do the principal potential
obstacles to Turkish entry into the EU. In Turkey, these are generally held to be
European racism and Islamophobia, or the prospect of the country’s future
weight in the European Council as its largest member. Perhaps equally relevant,
though less often mentioned, is the calculation that if Turkey is admitted, it
will be difficult to refuse entry to Ukraine: not quite as large, but more
democratic, with a higher per capita income, yet a country which Romano Prodi
once explained had as much chance of joining the EU as New Zealand. Such
resistances are not to be minimised. But the more intractable difficulties lie
within the country itself. Three of these command the rest. They have a common
origin in the integral nationalism that issued, without rupture or remorse,
from the last years of an empire based on conquest.
The first, and
in theory most pointed, obstacle to entry is Turkey’s continued military
occupation, and maintenance of a political dependency, in Cyprus. Refusal to
recognise a member-state of the European Union, while demanding entry into it,
requires a diplomatic sangfroid that only a former imperial power could allow
itself. However eager Brussels is to welcome Ankara, the legal monstrum
of Turkey’s position in Cyprus lies still unresolved between it and accession.
The second obstacle to ready incorporation in Europe is the domestic situation
of the country’s minorities. These are not small communities. Kurds number
anywhere between nine and 13 million, Alevis ten to 12 million, of whom perhaps
two to three million are Kurds. In other words, up to a third of the population
suffers systematic discrimination for its ethnicity or religion. The cruelties
visited by the state on the Kurds are well advertised, but the position
accorded by society to Alevis – often viewed as atheists by the Sunni majority
– is even lower. Neither group forms a compact mass subject to uniform
ill-treatment. There are now more Kurds in the big cities than in the
south-east, many of whom no longer speak Kurdish and are intermarried with
Turks, while Alevis, concentrated only in a single mountain enclave, are
otherwise dispersed throughout the land. But that neither comes near the
equality of rights and respect which the Copenhagen criteria of the EU
nominally enjoin is all too obvious.
Finally, there
is the Armenian genocide, its authors honoured in streets and schools across
the country, whose names celebrate the murderers. Talat: a boulevard in Ankara,
four avenues in Istanbul, a highway in Edirne, three municipal districts, four
primary schools. Enver: three avenues in Istanbul, two in Izmir, three in occupied
Cyprus, primary schools in Izmir, Mugla, Elazig. Cemal Azmi, responsible for
the deaths of thousands in Trabzon: a primary school in that city. Resit Bey,
the butcher of Diyarbekir: a boulevard in Ankara. Mehmet Kemal, hanged for his
atrocities: thoroughfares in Istanbul and Izmir, statues in Adana and Izmir,
National Hero Memorial gravestone in Istanbul. As if in Germany squares,
streets and kindergarten were called after Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, without
anyone raising an eyebrow. Books extolling Talat, Enver and Sakir roll off the
presses, in greater numbers than ever. Nor is all this merely a legacy of a
Kemalist past. The Islamists have continued the same tradition into the
present. If Talat’s catafalque was borne by armoured train from the Third Reich
for burial with full honours by Inönü in 1943, it was Demirel who brought
Enver’s remains back from Tajikistan in 1996, and reburied them in person at a
state ceremony in Istanbul. Beside him, as the cask was lowered into the
ground, stood the West’s favourite Muslim moderate: Abdullah Gul, now AKP
president of Turkey.
An integral
nationalism that never flinched in exterminating Armenians, expelling Greeks,
deporting Kurds and torturing dissident Turks, and which still enjoys wide
electoral support, is not a force to be taken lightly. The Turkish left,
consistently among its victims, has shown most courage in confronting it.
Politically speaking, the ‘generation of 78’ was cut down by the military coup
of 1980, years of imprisonment, exile or death killing off any chance of a
revival of popular attraction or activism on the same scale. But when the worst
of the repression lifted, it was this levy that produced a critical culture
without equal in any European country of the same period: monographs, novels,
films, journals, publishing houses that have given Istanbul in many respects a
livelier radical milieu than London, Paris or Berlin. This is the setting out
of which Orhan Pamuk – not exempt from friendly criticism in it – along with
other leading Turkish writers, comes.
If there is a
blind spot in the outlook of this intellectual left, it is Cyprus, about which
few know much and most say less. But on the other two most explosive issues of
the time, its record has been exemplary. Defence of the Kurds has for decades
been at the centre of its imagination, producing one leading writer or director
– often themselves Kurds – after another, from Yasar Kemal, Mehmet Uzun or
Yilmaz Güney (Yol), to such recent films as Handan Ipekçi’s banned Big
Man, Little Love (2001) and Yesim Ustaoglu’s Journey to the Sun
(1999). As for the fate of the Armenians, it has been the object of a
historical conference in Istanbul – cancelled under political pressure at two
universities, held at another – a bestselling memoir (now in English: Fethiye
Çetin, My Grandmother), a novel (Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of
Istanbul), iconoclastic reportage (Ece Temelkuran’s Deep Mountain),
and many columns in the press (Murat Belge, in Radikal).
But above all,
the outstanding work of the historian Taner Akçam has put the realities of the
Armenian genocide, and their deep deposits in the Turkish state, irreversibly
on the map of modern scholarship. His path and taboo-breaking study was
published in Turkey in 1999. A collection of key essays, From Empire to
Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, appeared in
English in 2004, and a translation of his first book as A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility in 2006.
Himself a prisoner, then exile of the military repression of 1980, Akçam has
been repeatedly threatened and harassed even abroad, where North American
authorities have collaborated with their Turkish counterparts to make life
difficult for him. Inside Turkey, the issue of the genocide remains a danger
for anyone who speaks of it, as the charges against Pamuk and the killing of
Dink – both under AKP rule – make plain.
Outside Turkey,
there has long been a school of historians, headed by the late Stanford Shaw,
that reproduced the official mythology of the Turkish state, denying that
anything remotely like genocide ever occurred on Ottoman soil. Bald negationism
of this kind has lost academic standing. Later versions of this school prefer
to minimise or relativise, in tune with the approach of the Turkish academic
establishment, rather than repress altogether the fate of the Armenians.
Intellectually speaking, these can now be regarded as discredited margins of
the literature, but even such treatment as is to be found in the best historians
of modern Turkey working in the West offers a painful contrast with the courage
of Turkish critics themselves. In the most distinguished recent authorities,
evasion or euphemism are still the rule. In the terse two paragraphs granted
the subject in Osman’s Dream, Caroline Finkel’s massive 550-page history
of the Ottoman Empire published in 2006, we read that ‘terrible massacres took
place on both sides.’ As for genocide, the very word is a misfortune, which not
only ‘bedevils any wider understanding of the history of the fate of Ottoman
Armenians’ – not to speak of ‘Turkish foreign relations around the world’ – but
‘consigns Armenia, which borders Turkey . . . to a wretched
existence’.
If we turn to
Sükrü Hanioglu’s limpid Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, a
single paragraph tells us that ‘one of the most tragic events of the war was
the deportation of much of the Armenian population of Anatolia’, in which ‘the
finer details’ of the government’s decision that advancing Russian armies must
be denied ‘crucial assistance’ from ‘Armenian rebels’ were unfortunately not
observed in practice, leading to the unforeseen consequence of ‘massive loss of
life’.[2]
Andrew Mango’s acclaimed biography Atatürk (1999) is even more
tight-lipped. There we are told that ‘Eastern Anatolia is inhospitable at the
best of times,’ and if its Armenians were ‘deported’, it was because they were
drawn to the Russians and had risen against Ottoman rule. No doubt ‘the
Armenian clearances’ were ‘a brutal act of ethnic cleansing’, but the CUP
leaders had ‘the simple justification: “It was them or us.”’ Any comment? Just
a line. ‘The deportations strained Ottoman communications and deprived Anatolia
of almost all its craftsmen.’ German railroad traffic was going to be strained
too.
Even Erik
Zürcher, the Dutch historian who has done more than any other scholar to bring
to light the linkages between the CUP underground and Kemal after 1918, could
only allow himself, in his classic Turkey: A Modern History, the
cautious subjective avowal that, while it might be ‘hard, if not impossible’ to
prove beyond doubt, ‘this author at least is of the opinion that there was a
centrally controlled policy of extermination, instigated by the CUP.’ That was
in 1993. A decade later, in his revised edition of 2004, the same passage
reads: ‘it can no longer be denied that the CUP instigated a centrally
controlled policy of extermination.’ The alteration, though its wording has
gone astray (denials continue to be heard, from chairs and columns alike), is
testimony to the impact of Akçam’s work, to which Zürcher pays generous
bibliographical tribute, and expresses a welcome shift in what a leading
historian of Turkey feels can finally be said. But it would be unwise to
overestimate the change. The reason for the pattern of evasions and contortions
to be found in so much Western scholarship on Turkey that is otherwise of a
high standard lies in the familiar fear of foreign – or expatriate –
researchers, in any society where truth is at an official discount, that to
breach national taboos will jeopardise access, contacts, friendships, at the
limit bar them from the country altogether.
Where awards or
consultations are concerned, there is yet greater cause for prudence. Zürcher’s
later edition marks an advance over his earlier version where Armenians are in
question. But where Kurds are at issue, it moves in the opposite direction,
forthright statements in 1993 – ‘Turkey will have to become a binational state,
with Kurdish as its second language in the media, in education and in
administration. The south-east will have to be granted some sort of
far-reaching autonomy with Kurds governing and policing Kurds’ – vanishing in
2004. Since then, Zürcher has been awarded a Medal of High Distinction by the
Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and become an adviser to the EU
Commission. Scholarship is unlikely to benefit from either honour. Nor are
political brokers often brave speakers. It would be wrong to condemn the
compromises of Western historians of Turkey, even of such an independent spirit
as Zürcher, out of hand. The constraints they confront are real. But the
pressures on Turks themselves are much stronger. Greater safety warrants less
escapism.
The one signal
exception in the field confirms the rule. Donald Bloxham’s Great Game of
Genocide, which came out in 2005, is the work not of an Ottomanist but of a
comparative historian of extermination, with no professional connections to
Turkey. Its ill-chosen title gives little sense of the clarity and power of
this work, a succinct masterpiece on the killing of the Armenians, illuminating
both its national context and its international aftermaths. The treatment of
the CUP’s genocide by accredited historians in the West forms part of Bloxham’s
story, but it is the attitude of states that moves centre stage in his account.
Of these, as he shows, the US has long been the most important, as the Entente
power that never declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1916-18, and whose high
commissioner to Turkey from 1919 to 1927, Admiral Bristol, advocated further
ethnic cleansing after it. Since America contained Greek and Armenian
communities that needed to be silenced, it was there that the casuistries of
later negationism were first developed in the interwar years, before they had
much currency in Europe. By the 1930s Hollywood was already cancelling a movie
of Franz Werfel’s novel on Armenian resistance to massacres in Cilicia, after
charges from the Turkish Embassy that it was a calumny.
Since 1945
Turkey has, of course, acquired far more importance for the US as a strategic
ally, first in the Cold War and now the War on Terror. In the last twenty
years, increasing pressure from the Armenian community, today much more salient
than in the 1920s, and the emergence of an Armenian scholarship that has
pioneered modern study of the exterminations of 1915-16 in the West, have made
repression of the question more difficult. After previously unsuccessful attempts
to get resolutions on it through Congress, in 2000 the House International
Relations Committee voted for a bipartisan resolution condemning the Armenian
genocide, while carefully exempting the Turkish Republic from any
responsibility for it. Ankara’s response was to threaten withdrawal of American
military facilities in Turkey, trade reprisals, and to talk of a risk of
violence against Americans in Turkey – the State Department even had to issue a
travel advisory – if the resolution were passed by Congress.
Characteristically, Clinton intervened in person to prevent the resolution
getting to the floor. In Ankara, Ecevit exulted that it was a demonstration of
Turkish power.
Last year, the
same scenario was repeated. This time, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi –
another Democratic champion of human rights – pronounced herself in favour of a
resolution with 191 sponsors. But as soon as a string of party notables headed
by Madeleine Albright intervened, she heeded the pleas of the State and Defense
Departments, and killed any vote on it. In the background, Turkish threats were
now combined with bribes in a drive to stop the resolution. Some $3.2 million
were spent by Ankara on a lobbying campaign orchestrated by Richard Gephardt,
the former Democratic Majority Leader in the House, who had supported the
resolution in 2000, when he was not yet on the Turkish payroll.[3]
Meanwhile, major Jewish organisations – AIPAC, ADL and others – far from
expressing any solidarity with the victims of another genocide, were closeted
with Gul in Washington, discussing how to deny it. Ideology plays its part in
this: the uniqueness of the Nazi destruction of the Jews as a moral patent not
to be infringed. But there is also the close military and diplomatic
relationship between Israel and Turkey – IDF jets train in Turkish airspace –
that has led Tel Aviv to undertake, in the words of a sympathetic observer, ‘a
concerted effort to educate American Jewry on the strategic significance of
Turkey’. Not all consciences have been stilled quite so easily. Other Jewish
voices have been raised against such collusion, but to little effect so far.
Pressure from
Ankara is not confined to Congress. Under Evren, an Institute of Turkish
Studies was set up in the US, funded by Turkey, to encourage the right sort of
research about the country in American universities. Though not all were
willing to accept money from such an obviously official source, quite a few
scholars did so in good faith. Among them was the leading Ottoman historian
Donald Quataert, whose writing could not by any stretch of the imagination be
described as other than sympathetic to his subject, and who became chairman of
the institute’s board of governors, a supposedly independent body. When,
however, he published in late 2006 a review of Bloxham’s work, acknowledging
its force and conceding that the fate of the Armenians ‘readily satisfies the
UN definition of genocide’, he was promptly forced to resign by the AKP’s
point-man in Washington, Ambassador Nabi Sensoy – a diplomat whose good
religious connections go back to Özal, under whom he served as chief of staff –
under threat of financial lock-down, if he did not.
In Brussels,
Turkey’s candidature to the EU puts a wider set of issues on the agenda than in
Washington. Here, the situation of Turks themselves, in principle of Kurds, by
extension of Cypriots, is the object of attention, not the fate of Armenians.
In practice, the Commission’s priority has been to get Turkey into the Union at
the least possible cost: that is, causing as little difficulty as it can for
the AKP government, represented as a torch-bearer of progress, held back from
fully realising EU norms only by a retrograde judicial and military
establishment. Annual reports on the country’s advance towards membership,
invariably dwelling much longer on economic than political requirements, chalk
up performances in privatisation and torture in the same imperturbable idiom:
‘proceeds were significant, but the agenda is not yet finished’; ‘the Turkish
legal framework includes a comprehensive set of safeguards against torture and
ill-treatment. However, cases still occur.’ Shortcomings are noted, but the
road always leads upwards.
Naturally, all
potential sticking-points are excluded from these bland memorials. Cyprus? The
rubric ‘Regional Issues and International Obligations’ does not even mention
Turkey’s refusal to recognise a member of the European Union it seeks to enter.
Commissioner Olli Rehn, a boyish Streber from Finland with sights on his
country’s presidency, has told Cypriots they should ‘stop complaining against
past injustice and rather work on future solutions with a pragmatic approach’ –
naturally, one that accepts occupation by Ankara in the wider interests of
Brussels. After all, as the Commission’s Turkey 2007 Progress Report
can relate with satisfaction, among other merits, ‘Turkey has offered to train
Iraqi security forces,’ and demonstrated ‘close alignment with EU Common
Foreign and Security Policy’.
Kurds? Wherever
possible, avoid mention of them. In the words of an authoritative study by two
leading jurists of the record of the AKP in power and the way the EU has
covered it, the Union tends to use ‘the term “situation in the south-east” as a
euphemism for the Kurdish issue’. EU leaders have not only ‘singularly failed
to issue any statement’ on the Kurdish question, or ‘promote any democratic
platform or meaningful discourse about it’, but ‘the glossy picture of an
overall dynamic towards democratisation, respect for human rights and pluralism
painted by the Commission belies the reality that Turkey’s attitude towards the
granting of minority rights and the Kurds shows little sign of genuine change’.[4]
Embarrassed by such criticisms, the Commission’s latest report makes a weak
attempt to meet them. Kurds and Alevis, well aware that its main concern is
that they not rock the boat of accession, remain unimpressed.
Armenians? Their
fate has no bearing on Turkish membership of the Union. The ‘tragedy of 1915’,
as Rehn puts it in a now standard euphemism, can form part of ‘a comprehensive
dialogue’ between Ankara and Erevan, but Brussels must keep clear of it. Widely
regarded inside Turkey as an honorary consul for the AKP, Rehn is perhaps
exceptional even in the ranks of the current Commission for vulgar
self-satisfaction and Tartufferie. His mission statement, Europe’s Next
Frontiers (2006), replete with epigraphs from pop songs, and apothegms like
‘defeatism never carries the day’ or ‘the vision thing is not rocket science,’
ends with a naff conceit of his prowess on the football field: ‘Don’t tell the
goalie, but I tend to shoot my penalty kicks to the lower left-hand corner.
After all, it is goals that count – even in European integration.’ Such are his
skills at ‘democratic functionalism’, we are told. Who could be surprised to
learn, from the same mind, that ‘the Commission’s role in the accession process
can be described as the friend who tells the truth’?
The Barroso
Commission is not, of course, either an independent, or an isolated, centre of
power. It reflects the outlook of the European political class as a whole. When
the Parliament in Strasbourg, theoretically less subject to diplomatic
constraints, was told by the Dutch MEP Camiel Eurlings, rapporteur on Turkey,
that recognition of the Armenian genocide should be a condition of its
accession to the Union, it was predictably the Green delegation, led by Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, that sprang into action to make sure the passage was deleted,
confirming the general rule that the more any political group talks about human
rights, the less it will respect them. The reality is an establishment
commitment to Turkish membership that brooks no cavils. Emblematic is the
Independent Commission on Turkey, hailed by the admiring head of the Open
Society Institute in Istanbul as a ‘self-appointed group of European
dignitaries’ (its members included one former president, two former prime
ministers, three former foreign ministers, not to speak of Lord Giddens) which
‘has been a beacon of how Europe can be very fair and diligent in the pursuit
of the truth, and as such has gained much praise both in Europe and in Turkey’.
Its findings can be imagined.
A fuller
handbook is offered by the Federal Trust’s volume The EU and Turkey: A
Glittering Prize or a Millstone? (2005). No rewards for guessing the
answer, but as one glowing prospectus follows another, with a decorous sprinkling
of ifs and buts, more candid language occasionally breaks through. Opening the
collection, its editor, Michael Lake, a former representative of Brussels in
Ankara, salutes the ‘noble, even heroic’ role of the Turkish Association of
Businessmen and Industrialists in propelling the historic process of reform of
Turkey. With its entry into the Union, he points out, Europe will acquire a
‘strategic asset of the first quality’. Closing the volume, Norman Stone deals
briskly with the Armenian question. The motives of those who raise it require
examination: ‘Is it that hostility to Israel leads them into an effort to
devalue Israel’s strongest argument?’ Not to put too fine a point on it: ‘Why
do we have to talk about such things nowadays?’
Respectable
opinion in Europe generally avoids such bluntness. Mainstream liberalism puts
it more tactfully. In Mark Mazower’s words in the Financial Times, but
variants can be found galore, ‘what happened to Armenians’ should be moved ‘out
of the realm of politics and back into history’. Let scholars dispute, and the
caravan of state pass on. The difficulty with such disinterested advice, of
course, is that the Turkish Republic has always treated the fate of the
Armenians as an affair of state, and continues to do so. As Bloxham writes,
‘Turkey has persistently lied about its past, bullied its minorities and other
states in furtherance of its falsehoods, written the Armenians out of its
history books’ – as well, of course, as spending large sums of public money to
ensure that their fate stays ‘out of politics’ in the West, as Mazower and
others would wish it.
Such
well-wishers are liable to be ginger in their use of terms. Joschka Fischer
would delicately allude to ‘the tragedy of the Armenians’, Timothy Garton Ash
speaks in the Guardian of their ‘suffering’, the circumlocutions most
acceptable to Ankara. It is true, of course, that ‘genocide’ is among the most
devalued terms in contemporary political language. But if it has been debased
beyond any originating imprecision, that is due principally to the very
apologists for Nato, claiming genocide in Kosovo – five thousand dead out of a
population of a million – who are now most vehement that the term not be
allowed to compromise fruitful relations with Turkey. Historically, however, as
has often been pointed out, the jurist responsible for defining the notion of
genocide for the postwar United Nations, Raphael Lemkin, a student at Lvov at
the time of the Istanbul trials of 1919, was first prompted towards it by the
killings of the Armenians by the CUP, just across the Black Sea.
Not
coincidentally, another who noted their extermination was Hitler, who had a
first-hand witness of it among his closest associates in Munich. The former
German consul in Erzerum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, reported to his superiors
in detail on the ways they were wiped out. A virulent racist, who became
manager of the early Nazi Kampfbund and the party’s key liaison with big
business, aristocracy and the church, he fell to a shot while holding hands with
Hitler in the Beerhall putsch of 1923. ‘Had the bullet which killed
Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the right, history would have taken a
different course,’ Ian Kershaw remarks. Hitler mourned him as ‘irreplaceable’.
Invading Poland 16 years later, he would famously ask his commanders, referring
to the Poles, but with obvious implications for the Jews: ‘Who now remembers
the Armenians?’ The Third Reich did not need the Turkish precedent for its own
genocides. But that Hitler was well aware of it, and cited its success to
encourage German operations, is beyond question. Whoever has doubted the
comparability of the two, it was not the Nazis themselves.
Comparison is
not identity. The similarities between the two genocides were striking, far
closer than in most historical parallels. But they were not complete, and the
differences between them are part of the reason for the enormous contrast in
contemporary reaction to them. Both campaigns of extermination were launched in
secrecy, under cover of war; their perpetrators were aware they were criminal,
and had to be hidden. Both required special organisations of killers,
controlled by political leaderships operating informally between apparatuses of
party and state. Both involved selective participation by military officers. At
elite level, both combined ideologies of secular nationalism with doctrines of
Social Darwinism. At popular level, both drew on ancient religious hatreds,
targeting groups already victim of confessional pogroms before the war. Both
involved a process of escalation from local killings to systematic
extermination. Both draped their actions under the guise of deportations.
The differences
between them lay essentially not in scale or intent, but in the greater
instrumental rationality, and civil participation, of the CUP compared with the
Nazi genocide. Jews in Germany numbered less than 1 per cent of the population,
no threat to any regime. Nor was there any state that attempted to use Jewish
communities in Europe for political or military ends. The Nazi destruction of
the Jews was ideologically, not strategically or economically, driven. Although
there was wholesale seizure of Jewish property, the proceeds were monopolised
by those in power, without any large-scale benefit to the mass of the population,
and the costs of extermination, when the struggle in the East was already being
lost, were a deadweight on the German war effort. The Turkish destruction of
the Armenians, although fuelled by ethno-religious hatred, had more traditional
economic and geopolitical objectives. More than ten times the relative size of
the Jewish community in Germany, the Armenian minority in the late Ottoman
Empire not only possessed lands and capital on another scale, but compatriots
across the border, in a Russian Empire that saw Armenians as potential recruits
in its own schemes of expansion. When war came, fear and greed in Istanbul
combined in more time-worn fashion to detonate annihilation. Both participants
and beneficiaries of the cleansing in Anatolia were more numerous, and its
structural consequences for society greater. One genocide was the dementia of
an order that has disappeared. The other was a founding moment of a state that
has endured.
But if these are
real distinctions between the two catastrophes, the contrast in the way each
figures in the European imaginary is so complete as all but to numb judgment.
One has become the object of official and popular remembrance, on a monumental
scale. The other is a whisper in the corner, that no diplomat in the Union
abides. There are some presentable reasons for the difference. One genocide
occurred within living memory in the centre of the continent, the other a
century ago in its marchlands. The survivors of one were far more literate than
of the other, and left more personal testimonies. But since the Armenian
genocide was denounced by the Western powers when it occurred, as the Judeocide
was not, and there were more third-party witnesses – official ones at that – of
the killings as they occurred, something more is needed to explain the vastness
of the discrepancy. What that might be is plain as day. Israel, a pivotal ally
in the Middle East, requires recognition of the Judeocide, and has secured
massive reparations for it. Turkey, a vital ally in the Near East, denies that
genocide of the Armenians ever occurred, and insists no mention ever be made of
it. The Union, and its cortege of belles âmes, follow suit.
This is not
remote history, best left to antiquarians. The implacable refusal of the
Turkish state to acknowledge the extermination of the Armenians on its
territory is not anachronistic or irrational, but a contemporary defence of its
own legitimacy. For the first great ethnic cleansing, which made Anatolia
homogeneously Muslim, if not yet Turkish, was followed by lesser purges of the
body politic, in the name of the same integral nationalism, that have continued
to this day: pogroms of Greeks, 1955/1964; annexation and expulsion of
Cypriots, 1974; killing of Alevis, 1978/1993; repression of Kurds, 1925-2008. A
truthful accounting has been made of none of these, and cannot be without
painful cost to the inherited identity and continuity of the Turkish Republic.
That is why leaders of the AKP relentlessly pursue the same negationism as
their predecessors, with the same threats and yet more dollars. For all the
tensions between them as traditions, Kemalism and Islamism have never been
chemically separate. Erdogan and Gul, too, are at home in the official
synthesis between them, the ‘Turkish nation’ which, in what passes for a reform
in Brussels, they have made it a crime to insult.
How, then, does
Turkish membership of the Union now stand? The conventional reasons for which
it is pressed within the EU are legion: militarily, a bulwark against
terrorism; economically, dynamic entrepreneurs and cheap labour; politically, a
model for regional neighbours; diplomatically, a bridge between civilisations;
ideologically, the coming of a true multiculturalism in Europe. In the past,
what might have been set against these considerations would have been fears
that such an elongation of the Union, into such remote terrain, must undermine
its institutional cohesion, compromising any chance of federal deepening. But
that horse has already bolted. To reject Turkish membership on such a basis
would be shutting the door well after there was any point in it. The Union is
becoming a vast free range for the factors of production, far from an agora of
any collective will, and the addition of one more grazing ground, however large
or still relatively untended, will not alter its nature.
In Turkey
itself, as in Europe, the major forces working for its entry into the Union are
the contemporary incarnations of the party of order: the bourse, the mosque,
the barracks and the media. The consensus that stretches across businessmen and
officers, preachers and politicians, lights of the press and of television, is
not quite a unanimity. Here and there, surly voices of reaction can be heard.
But the extent of concord is striking. What, if the term has any application,
of the party of movement? It offers the one good reason, among so many crass or
spurious ones, for welcoming Turkey into the Union. For the Turkish left,
politically marginal but culturally central, the EU represents hope of some release
from the twin cults and repressions of Kemal and the Koran; for the Turkish
poor, of chances of employment and elements of welfare; for Kurds and Alevis,
of some rights for minorities. How far these hopes are all realistic is another
matter. But they are not thereby to be denied. There is another side to the
matter too. For it is here, and perhaps here alone, that notions that Europe
would gain morally from the admission of Turkey to the EU cease to be
multicultural cant. The fabric of the Union would indeed be richer for the
arrival of so many vigorous, critical minds, and the manifest dignity and
civility, that must strike the most casual visitor, of so many of the ordinary
people of the country.
It would be
better if the EU lived up to some of the principles on which it congratulates
itself, and were to greet the entry of a Turkey that had evacuated Cyprus, and
made restitution for its occupation of it; that had granted rights to the Kurds
comparable to those of Welsh or Catalans; that had acknowledged the genocide of
the Armenians. Its record makes clear how remote is any such prospect. The
probability is something else: a Union stretching to Mount Ararat, in which
ministers, deputies and tourists – or ministers and deputies as tourists: the
Fischers, Kouchners, Cohn-Bendits enjoying their retirement – circulate
comfortably by TGV between Paris or Berlin and Istanbul, blue flags with golden
stars at every stop on the way, from the monument to the extermination of the
Jews by the Brandenburg Gate to the monument to the exterminators of the
Armenians on Liberty Hill. Former Commissioner Rehn could enjoy a game of
football in the adjoining park, a few metres from the marble memorials to Talat
and Enver, while bored young soldiers – fewer of them, naturally – lounge
peacefully in Kyrenia, and terrorists continue to meet their deserts in Dersim.
Turkish dreams of a better life in Europe are to be respected. But emancipation
rarely just arrives from abroad.
1 ‘The Tragedy of the Turkish Left’ in
New Left Review, March-April 1981.
2
3 ‘
4 The European Union and Turkish Accession, Human
Rights and the Kurds by Kerim Yildiz and Mark Muller.