Cyprus-Forum.com

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Is it State coalition or union of citizens?


16.01.2009

Niyazi Kizilyurek


“We are not creating a coalition of states, we are uniting people.”
Jean Monnet

It is certainly more difficult to unite people than to unite states. States are bureaucratic entities and can unite through mutual agreements. Rational benefits such as security, economy, etc. could bring states together temporarily. There has to be more to bring divided people back to unite as a political entity, much more. As a matter of fact the European Union begins to form a political unity rather than an economic one as the states come closer, they started to look for ways to get their citizens closer. Other than common symbols and ceremonies such as a flag, a national anthem, and having an EU-day, they began history workshops, cultural exchange and youth projects, and so on and got into an interactive process; an effort to create a sense of ‘Europeanness’ to make them fit together and feel being a part of the initiated system. The notion of ‘Europeanness’ was surely not to be demoted to a single identity. This could only be formed around common values to be turned into a political identity.
When we take a look at the political unity search in Cyprus, there seems to be very little or almost no activity organised in a bicommunal way, other than the meetings held by the leaders that would open the way of a political unity. There seems to be no common cultural projects, history workshops, political debates or youth projects at all. On the contrary the day to day life seems to have been left to the mercy of dividing speeches, symbolic productions that work just in the opposite way. Our daily life seems to be dominated by those who believe that painting the mountains white and red, placing gigantic flags every where and anywhere in the 21st century Cyprus and talking about ‘Orthodox-Helen’ or ‘Turkishness’ continuously is an achievement. We know very well that those who do such things have no intention of uniting the people at all.
It is not easy to achieve a solution through settlement and negotiation in an environment where certain symbols, ceremonies, speeches and other elements conducted in order to divide people are going on. Although a solution is achieved through ‘give and take’ it is not all that is required. It is not possible to establish political unity and a common state through a mentality that acts as if victorious when ‘taking’ but ‘give’ with hands shaking; this situation will also disable the establishment of a common country on the same geography.
We know that there was no notion of ‘us’ in Cyprus through the historical process between the two communities. However, if there is to be settlement there has to be a common ‘concern of us’. If what we want to achieve is to bring people together and get them to live together and establish common offices – what else could solution be – bringing people closer, strengthening the ‘concern of us’ and adding importance to symbolic productions.
Surely this is not the first country to be geographically divided in the history of humanity or divided inhabited geography. After centuries of fighting in wars Europe managed to take a step towards union. Many countries managed to maintain their political unity despite the different mosaics within. The element that helps maintain unity is the created ‘notion of us’ or ‘concern of us’.
If we want to achieve unity with citizens rather than a coalition of states, then we need to find ways to rid ourselves of symbolic production from discriminative technologies and elements. Otherwise we will fail in creating the ‘concern of us’ and in cases where this is not achieved then there cannot be settlement. Even if achieved this would be more like the settlement of states rather than citizens!