Tale of Two Turkeys

Two hearts beat in Turkey’s breast. For outsiders, the most familiar divisions are those between Islam and secularism, Orient and Occident, state and society, Turk and Kurd. But perhaps the most fundamental divide remains that between city and village, between the modern and the pre-modern.

The overlapping contradictions have induced, in the words of Hugh Poulton, a “schizophrenia of Turkish nationalism,” both for Turkish reformers over the past three centuries-and for today’s Turkish elites who want to join the European Union. A glance at history explains why.

The Turkish pre-modern scene had a central area dominated by the imperial Ottoman state. The prevalent worldview, shared by men and women in peripheral areas as well as in the center, was the Islamicized version of the world and state tradition. Ottoman rule did not penetrate into local cultures, which perpetuated their own Greek Orthodox, Sufi, Gregorian Armenian, Nestorian, Syrian, Jewish, and other traditions. The Ottoman agrarian world formed a mosaic of “low cultures, rural peasant settlements, and nomadic tribes, but also towns, sustaining the urban and literate central zones of the high culture(s), with which the local and folk cultures had weak but vital ties,” according to the doyen of Ottoman historiography, Halil İnalcik. Whatever their diversity, all shared the axiom that the order, the nomos of human society, was not a human product but was fixed by God, like the cosmos, and was given to mankind.

The ruling Ottoman cadre was convinced that its “world order” was far superior to any other contemporary system on earth, including the European one. But this confidence collapsed at the end of the 17^th century as a delayed result of the Ottoman defeat at the Habsburg borders. The “helplessness” of the ‘Turks’ “prolonged process of defeat” led to an enduring perception in some sections of the Ottoman bureaucracy that their world order had serious relative insufficiencies-and that innovation in emulating some elements of the alien European world order was essential for the survival of the Ottoman polity. Thus, from 1718 onward, a long process of change began, first of all in the institutions, practices, and norms of the Ottoman military-administrative establishment. These then triggered further changes in economic, social, and cultural institutions, and in norms and values.

Adoption by edict of equality of Muslim and non-Muslim subjects before Ottoman law in 1839 was perhaps the first radical political innovation in Islamic history, conspicuously contradicting the Koran. Other innovations departing from the Koran and Islamic heritage followed, including adoption of European codes on property, commercial, criminal, and procedural law, a written constitution, elections, parliaments with large non-Muslim representation, and constitutional amendments that instructed the Caliph-Sultan to take an oath in parliament that he would be loyal to the constitution, the fatherland, and the nation.

The establishment of the 1923 republic and the subsequent reforms were thus not the source, but the consequence of the change in Turkey that was begun by enlightened despots. The whole process was led by a small cadre of military and civilian officials and not by political movements in the civilian society. A public realm as the collectivity of organized social decision-making and conflict resolution reflecting diverse sections of a civil society, as developed in some European countries from Middle Ages onward, did not exist in Ottoman Turkey, despite the 19^th-century constitutions, elections, and parliaments.

Moreover, the core dynamics of what we now refer to as political change in the Ottoman/Turkish scene from the early 18^th century on was perceived as a problem of the survival of the state. The main question for officials was how to save the state, which they saw as their state, from expansionist aggression by European states and nationalist secession movements of local Christian populations supported by Europeans. Whatever enlightenment or other

The Turkish Republic

In the single-party period of the Turkish Republic (1923-1946) the “state saviours” carried out a social engineering project. They wanted to create a new society where, first, the political and legal realm would make no reference to “religion” (i.e.,Islam). Second, “citizens”, both men and women, equally endowed with civil rights, would constitute and belongs to “the Turkish nation”. Third, this nation would evolve so that it could participate constructively in “contemporary [Western] civilization.”

The Kemalists, who brought the changes of the Ottoman reformers to their logical conclusion, dismantled the Islamic legal foundations of the public/social realm together with such key symbolic constituents of the Islamic worldview as the Arabic script, weekly holiday, calender, dress codes, and social status of women. No consensus-building process of representative democracy was involved. Indeed, a project that entailed such a radical dismantling of Islam in the public sphere would surely have been rejected by the Muslim populace if it had been tested in the ballot box. Its execution did face significant opposition and resistance, but it was implemented with the enthusiastic support of a clear majority of the urban population.

This “democratic deficit” of the late Ottoman and early republican project of saving the state, modernizing the existing society (or societies), and thus creating a nation, led to a fundamental tension between the bulk of the population and the self-assigned custodians of public interest, with their wish to move toward the Enlightenment ideal of a nation of self-governing individuals, sovereign persons who would create their own nomos without reference to revelation emanating from God as Creator. Mustafa Kemal and many republicans did have a genuine commitment to this ideal. In part they sincerly believed in the dictum that the “true spiritual guide in human life is science, philosophy, critical thinking.” However, as custodians of the state, they also sincerly believed that they were the ones who had a history-sanctioned and sovereign citizens” in the name of the public good and state interest. This schizophrenia of the Kemalist project explains why Turkey sometimes seems to be frozen between the two worlds of European democracy and Middle Eastern authoritarianism.

The republicans’ secularist reforms were somewhat more value-oriented. However they took place in the 1920s, at a time when religious plurality had disappeared from the Turkish scene. During the cataclysmic 1915-1922 period of wars and disturbances, Turks and other Muslims suffered large losses, while nearly all of the local Greek and Armenian communities disappeared through forced exile, killings, emigration, and population exchange between Turkey and Greece after the Lausanne Peace Treaty of 1923. By 1927 the total population within Turkey’s present boundaries had decreased by 17 percent–and the urban population by 35 percent–from their 1915 levels.

The Kemalists thus started with a de-populated and de-urbanized Turkey. A religiously homogeneous but ethnically heterogeneous population–90 percent of whom were illiterate and disease-stricken peasants and nomads living in segmented communities and producing primarily for subsistence needs, with ancient technologies–was the human resource to be mobilized for the republican project. It was this population that was to be transformed into a “secular nation” in the “image of Europe” and participate as an equal partner in “contemporary” civilization.

Turkey and the EU

The Western-oriented change of the past three centuries in Turkey is now at a critical stage. The outcome of Turkey’s application to join the European Union will measure the success of Ottoman and republican Turkish attempts to effect civilizational transformation.

To join the EU, Turkey must fulfill the EU’s “Copenhagen criteria” for membership. It must convince European politicians that it has met the three conditions–that is has a well-functioning market economy robust enough to cope with international competition; that it is commited not to use force or the threat of force in intra-European disputes, including disputes with Greece and Cyprus; and that it has a well-functioning democracy that subordinates the military to civilian authorities and respects the human rights of all citizens.

Economically, semi-socialist, etatist resource-allocation mechanisms long limited development of a market economy and restricted Turkey’s growth potential. The sliding of the “progressive” intelligentsia to Marxism in the 1960s led to an East European-like economic environment. State enterprices had large shares in banking, manufacturing, and mining, while many sectors were controlled by the state monopolicies. Import-substituting trade policy and the accompanying industrial policy of the post-1960 five-year-plan era were reminiscent of the priorities of Soviet planning. This brought forward an industrial structure increasingly in need of imports without generating a capacity to earn export incomes.

When Bülent Ecevit’s 1978/79 government toyed with the idea of leaving the Western alliance, the Turkish economy collapsed in the domestic armed struggle between left and right organizations. International trade and financial markets were liberalized after the 1980 coup-which was widely seen in and outside Turkey as legitimate intervention by the army to save Turkey from economic chaos and civil war, but Turkey has yet to dismantle its semi-socialist heritage of state banks and enterprises.

Further constraints on economic growth have been the pressures of population growth (until the last decade), nepotism and corruption, ambivalence between a market economy under legal supervision and a redistributive command economy not subject to law, and what has been called “a national economic culture of free riders”. Populist policies over the last forty years induced a widely-held assumption that the state can provide free public goods to citizens who do not pay taxes and can pay salaries and wages to public employees who do not add value to the national economy. The result is one of the most unequally distributed national incomes among countries of comparable scale and development.

Following conclusion of its customs union with the EU, Turkey has solved the problem of trade and industrial policy differences by trying itself to European norms in this field. Heroically, the present government also committed itself to a stabilization policy that is expected to bring the inflation rate to a single-digit figure by 2002. In this sense one can be optimistic about Turkey’s eventual fulfillment of Copenhagen economic criteria. Fulfilling the international and democratic criteria poses greater problems, however.

The Role of the Military

The Turkish constitution accords the armed forces an important role in issues of foreign policy and national security. These issues are primarily debated and decided not in the government, but in the National Security Council, where generals constitute a majority. The armed forces as an institution are intent on “protecting the Turkish state” on its Kemalist foundations. Unless the electoral process confirms over time that an open secular political system is stable in Turkey and can not be overturned through the popular ballot, the army as an institution is likely to hang onto its role of custodianship of the secular state, as legitimized not through the ballot box but through history. From their point of view, the soldiers still see their institution as the “creator, saviour, and protector” of the unitary state in Turkey.

The Kemalist project, which itself evolved during the eighty years of republican Turkey, faced internal challenges in three different, sometimes overlapping dimensions.

First, some Muslims saw secularization as blasphemy that their religion required them to resist, by force if necessary. Although this resistance was sporadically violent, it did not pose a political threat. However, in the 1980s and 1990s Islamic parties with nation-wide organizations aimed at dismantling the secular state through the ballot box and mass movements.

Second, some sections of the Kurdish-speaking communities also rejected the secular legal order. The Kurdish rebellions of 1925, 1930, and 1938 were religiously motivated. The more recent challenge by the Kurdistan People’s Party (PKK) was Kurdish nationalist in spite of its Marxist revolutionary ideology.

Third, in the 1960s and 1970s large sections of the progressive secular intelligentsia slid deeply into Marxism. Even the Republican People’s Party, which Atatürk had formed as the vanguard of his Westernization project, moved in the 1970s under Bülent Ecevit toward a Third-World, Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist agenda and ideology. Paradoxically, those militantly secular intellectuals and bureaucrats with Westernized lifestyles saw the West-oriented cultural and political reforms that had brought them into existence as policies of bourgeois and imperialistic class domination.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Marxist challenge has effectively disappeared, even if Marxism is still fashionable among non-conservative intellectuals and bureaucracy. However, the Kurdish nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist challenges still look like real threats from the point of view of the military custodians of the secular republic. Granting linguistic rights is probably a relatively less difficult innovation for the Kemalist establishment than dealing with the aspirations of some Muslims to Islamicize the public realm in a predominantly devout Muslim society. This task will require the kind of democratic ingenuity and vision that soldiers typically lack.

In terms of the Turkish electorate’s readiness to constitute a nation of citizens and civil society that need no military custodians to preserve their integrity, recent research gives rise to both optimism and anxiety.

The present population in Turkey is predominantly Sunni Muslim, with some 5 or 6 percent who define themselves as Alevite. In serious survey conducted in 1999, 85 percent classified themselves as devout Muslims. Some 50 percent said they pray five times a day; 63 percent of males go to the mosque every Friday; and 91 percent fast every day during Ramadan. On the critical issue of whether the legal structure of the public realm in Turkey should or should not have reference to religion, there were mixed signals: 77 percent think the republican reforms have moved Turkey forward; 61 percent think there should be no parties basing their politics on religion (with 25 percent wanting such parties); and 78 to 85 percent do not want to change the secular marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws according to Islam. However, while only about 7 percent favored a religious state based on Islamic law in surveys in the 1970s and 1980s, this figure increased to between 20 and 26 percent in surveys conducted between 1995 and 1999. And there was little tolerance for irreligiosity and religious diversity; 76 percent opposed marriage of their daughters–and 71 percent marriage of their sons–to a non-Muslim.

Kurds

Despite the efforts of predominantly pro-PKK Marxist Kurdish activists to convince Europeans that there is a “Kurdish nation” that is captive in Turkey, recent surveys indicate that the ethnically diverse population of Turkey is nationally integrated. The 1999 survey by Ali Çarkolu and Binnaz Toprak found that 20 percent of the adult population defined themselves as Turks, 34 percent as “citizens of the Turkish Republic,” 4 percent as “Muslim Turks,” 35 percent as Muslims, and only 1.4 percent as Kurds, even though 8.5 percent spoke Kurdish.

Other surveys conducted in the 1990s showed that between 4 to 10 percent defined their identity as Kurdish. A survey of the population of Istanbul, the melting pot of Turkey’s diversities, showed that in 1993, 69 percent defined themselves as Turks, 21 percent as Muslim Turks, 4 percent as Kurds and another 4 percent as Turks with Kurdish parents. Among those defining themselves as Kurds only 22 percent (less than 1 percent of the total population polled) favored an independent Kurdistan, while 78 percent wanted to live in Turkey together with Turks.

A secessionist or even a federalist Kurdish political movement is almost virtually impossible in Turkey because of the very large number of mixed marriages between Kurds and Turks and the majority of persons with Kurdish origin living in the metropolitan areas of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, Mersin, and Antalya, Eastern and Southeastern provinces where persons with Kurdish origin constitute a majority are, in terms of economic and extra-linguistic cultural relations, integral parts of Turkey.

Turkish Dualism

Research on values of citizens of Turkey conducted in the 1990s shows that there are two Turkeys, not a Turkey of Muslims and secularits or Turks or Kurds, but a Turkey of metropolises and towns on one side and rural areas on the other, or of high school and university graduates on one side and those with lesser or no formal education on the other. The urban educated citizens of Turkey have values similar to members of European societies.

The weight on one side of this dualism, rural and poorly-educated Turkey is shrinking, as the weight of urban educated Turkey is expanding. The declining population growth rate will accelerate this shift. In ten to twenty years life choices from cradle to grave may well be largely European. Demographics thus offers the hope that the future may judge that the Ottoman/Turkish attempt to transform a civilizational tradition was not in vain.

Yet the outcome of the Turkish quest for civilizational transformation still depends on the courage and ingenuity of those citizens of Turkey loyal to the values of “European political civilization” in their competition with the other citizens of Turkey who aim at another kind of society with other set of values. Present-day Turkey has yet to produce a new generation of politicians with such courage and ingenuity.