Turkish Daily News
21 October 2004

If only Derrida hadn’t died

Gunduz Aktan

Debates concerning our membership in France have gone beyond the reasonable
with all the political parties and movements divided. Everyone is offering
an excuse depending upon their political convictions. A racist like Le Pen
and a Jewish socialist like Laurent Fabius find themselves defending the
same opinion.

In parliamentary debates on our membership held on Oct. 15 — brought
forward by the government — many criticisms were aired, but no vote —
which would have been unfavorable to us — was taken. This way, the
possibility of Turkey getting a date to start negotiations at the European
Union summit on Dec. 17 was kept alive.

Meanwhile, President Jacques Chirac is trying to insert an article in the
Constitution allowing a referendum on the accession treaty that will be
signed at the end of the negotiations. This will nullify France’s
international responsibilities that started with the Ankara Treaty signed in
1963, and ask the French people to have their say in violation of the
principle of “pacta sun servanda.”

On the other hand, the argument that “all negotiations are open-ended” is
also wrong. They are asking us to accept, right from the beginning, that
even if we fulfill all the clauses of the negotiations, which may last 10 to
15 years, we might not become members due to unrelated reasons.

There are those who oppose Turkey’s membership in every EU country. However,
none are carried away with their opposition like in France. If Turkey is too
large, populous, situated in a tough location, or is Muslim, this fact is
evident to all the other 24 members, not only to France. Moreover, Turkey
did not acquire these characteristics yesterday — so what’s wrong with
France?

Had Derrida been alive, he would have applied the method of deconstruction
to this bizarre phenomenon in his country. This method, in very general
terms, is based on the creation of a conceptual construction by the
exclusion of its opposite concept. In other words, it is necessary to
exclude the concept of fascism and racist anti-Semitism, as opposed to the
constituent concept of democracy and respect for human rights in order to
realize an integration which would prevent a war like World War II.

In this respect, countries like Turkey that are to become EU members have to
implement democracy and human rights. Turkey is expected to grant rights to
“minorities” like the Kurds and to face the “Armenian genocide” claims, just
like they faced the Jewish Holocaust.

Derrida, who was well acquainted with Freud, would have immediately realized
that Europe was not isolating abstract concepts as the opposite of
“democracy-human rights-minority rights,” but rather Turkey and the Turkish
people as representing these concepts.

The anti-Turkish groups in France and elsewhere believe that Turkey’s
anti-democratic system is based on its founding ideology of Kemalism, will
not change and believe that those who conducted the so-called “genocide” on
Armenians would not grant Kurds any rights. This “unchangeable” character
attributed to us constitutes the proof that we are subjected to exclusion.

According to Freud, the material repressed in the unconscious remains
unchanged there. On the day you return having changed, they do their outmost
not to believe you.

France has another problem with us: We are closer to France than any other
EU member. The Republic of Turkey was influenced by the French Revolution.
French enlightenment and positivism have become an integral element of our
souls. In order to believe that it is the one and only, France
narcissistically exaggerates the minor differences. By projecting the
anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime and the sins of French nationalism
committed in Algeria onto the excluded Turks, “purified” France becomes a
part of the unification of Europe. It believes that the excluded or
repressed material projected onto us would return to the EU through our
membership and that this would be the end of the EU. France fears that its
vision or illusion of the EU will end with our membership.

Derrida used to say that at the end of the deconstruction process a
synthesis would be produced by the amalgamation of the interiorized concept
with the excluded one and that this new concept, which would reflect the
realities, would bring about justice.

This will be the greatest contribution our membership will make to the EU.

NOTE: This article appears in daily Radikal and, after being translated by
the Turkish Daily News staff, in the Turkish Daily News on the same day.