Celebrating Turkey's 'counter-revolution' (aka democracy)Saturday, February 9, 2008
These days it has become a mantra among secularists that the lifting of the headscarf ban amounts to a "regime change." Even fellow TDN columnist Mr. Yusuf Kanlı, a most reasonable and articulate voice in that camp, was quite strong about this in his piece the other day. "Turkey is facing," he argued, "the most important counter-revolutionary attempt in the republican era."
I think he is right. But I also think that this is great news. Because in this country, what is dubbed as "counter-revolution" is actually democracy.
Counter-evolution:
Actually my preferred term, and phenomenon, would be counter-evolution. I have never been a fan of revolutions, which violently disrupt the natural order and leave many scars and fault lines in societies. Societies should rather be allowed to evolve by their own dynamics, and social actors should try to influence, not dominate, peoples' destinies.
That is one reason which makes me critical toward the Turkish (i.e., Kemalist) Revolution. Another one is its content, which took its principles from the radical secularism of the French Enlightenment and assimilationist nationalism of the French Republic. The former idea led to the oppression of Turkey's conservative Muslims. The latter led to denial of the Kurds.
Of course all revolutionaries say that their radicalism was absolutely necessary, and they rationalize this by depicting the pre-revolutionary era as a dark age. The Kemalists have done the same thing for the Ottoman past. In primary school, like all Turkish students, I was taught that the later Sultans were either idiots, or traitors, or both. I was told that "darkness" reigned in our homeland until Atatürk "shone on us like a sun in 1919."
Today I know enough to see that this Manichean picture was far from the truth. The Ottoman Empire had been modernizing itself since at least a century before its fall. It was, in fact, a proto-democratic constitutional monarchy with its functioning parliament and competing political parties. Atatürk himself was, after all, not beamed from outer space, but educated in the modern schools opened by Sultan/Caliph Abdülhamid II. Pre-Kemalist Turkey included liberal currents, socialist trends, and feminist clubs.
In other words, Kemalism introduced neither democracy to Turkey nor modernization. It indeed suspended the former for a narrow interpretation of the latter. The multi-party system that Kemalists abolished in 1925, and replaced with their "single party regime" that would reign for a quarter of a century, could only be restored after World War II. The post-war tides of democracy led the ruling elite to unwillingly accept the emergence of non-Kemalist parties. Hence came the first step of "counter-revolution." In the first free and fair elections of the Republic, the one held in 1950, the Kemalist state-party, the CHP, was massively defeated by its aptly named opponent: The Democratic Party (DP). "Enough, the nation has the word!" was the DP's motto – a cry for "counter-revolution" that would soon provoke the old revolutionaries to stage a military coup, execute the DP's leaders, and put the CHP back into power.
Since then no Kemalist party has ever come to power via elections. (Alas, although Atatürk is widely respected, Kemalists have never won an election in Turkish history!) That's why the Kemalist establishment distrusts ballots and their winners. They rather watch over the elected politicians by using various mechanisms such as the manipulation of the system by the military or the usurpation of political power by the judiciary.
None of these is a secret in Turkey. Kemalists often openly say that democracy is dangerous and it might well be limited, or even suspended, by the supposedly "enlightened" elite. Yet this is a temporary situation, they add. Full democracy will come, the story goes, when everybody will become "enlightened." Well, that's what all autocrats say. According to Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat would continue only until the whole society internalized the wonderful principles of communism. Similarly, an Islamist despot will tell you that his regime needs to force people to be moral and observant until they become pious by themselves.
The new class:
Of course societies almost never fully embrace such collectivist designs, therefore the despotic effort to indoctrinate them becomes permanent. Moreover there emerges a "new class," as Milovan Djilas once called it in the Yugoslavian context, which has its own vested interest in the permanent postponing of democracy.
Turkey's own “new class” is in power for a long time, and thus is more appropriately named nowadays as the “old elite.” The things they label as “counter-revolution” are nothing but the expansion of rights and freedoms. They love to depict their political opponents as “traitors,” or, in the case of religious conservatives, as wild-eyed, Taliban-like fanatics. (This sometimes plays well to international audiences in the post-9/11 world.)
That caricature is of course not true. Truly there are still marginal Islamists in Turkey who dream of a “shariah state,” but the
majority of the Islamic circles, and their political representatives, ask for religious freedom, not religious tyranny. They don't speak about forcing women to wear headscarves, they only ask for equal rights for the women who wear them. These days, that is the top item in the agenda of our “counter-revolution.”
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=95941 
