EUROPE CAN LEARN FROM TURKEY’S PAST
By Mark Mazower
Financial Times (London, England)
October 3, 2005 Monday
Asia Edition 1
In the tormented run-up to the start of Turkey’s membership
negotiations with the European Union, the ghosts of the past are
haunting the government of Tayyip Erdogan.
Orhan Pamuk, a novelist, faces prosecution for “insulting the national
character” in a newspaper interview in which he referred to the death
of a million Armenians during the first world war. It was only after
a flurry of legal threats and patriotic violence that a path-breaking
academic conference into those same events went ahead recently in
Istanbul, bringing together leading Turkish and foreign scholars to
discuss the subject for the first time on Turkish soil.
Does all this portend change or demonstrate how deeply entrenched
the resistance to it is? EU officials have been reminding the Turks
of the virtues of free speech, while sceptics about the merits of
Turkish accession have seen these events as justifying their doubts.
The Turks are not unused to being criticised, of course, for western
pressure for reform long predates the formation of the EU. As far
back as the 1830s, European ambassadors routinely told the Ottoman
sultans how and why they should become more like them.
Now, as then, one wonders: which Europe are the Turks being asked
to emulate; the noble ideal in whose name rights and liberties are
demanded or the region as it actually is? Valery Giscard D’Estaing,
the former French president, commented recently that Turkey is “not a
European country”. Had he forgotten that women got the vote in France,
Italy, Switzerland and Belgium many years after they did in Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk’s Turkish republic? Or that France’s sense of national
identity is fragile enough to be threatened by schoolchildren wearing
heardscarves and by rightwing nutcases denying the Holocaust?
It is not only in Turkey that national anxieties prompt the curtailment
of individual self-expression and historical discussion.
The current government in Ankara has, in fact, presided over a
remarkably rapid legal and institutional overhaul: just last year
it pushed a new penal code through parliament at the prompting of
the EU. If anything, the transformation has been too rapid. Although
getting rid of the 1930 code, which was borrowed from fascist Italy,
was overdue, plenty of the old impulses remain enshrined in its
replacement. It is still illegal, for example, to insult or belittle
state institutions. We easily forget that in much of Europe this was
an offence until fairly recently. An expanded version of the medieval
crime of lese majeste protected the honour of many 19th century
national leaders and heads of state and culminated between the world
wars in penal codes that lent even the lowliest public functionary
immunity from public criticism. Such provisions faded from view only
under the glare of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (though
easily abused defamation laws still – in Austria for example – remain
on the books). As a result, Turkish law’s continued protection of the
symbols and the honour of the state has become an anachronism, like
the provisions that shore up the sacralised monarchies of south-east
Asia and the Gulf.
The penalisation of discussion of the Armenian genocide is a similar
kind of hangover from the past. After the great war, some of the
most liberal of the new European states criminalised any questioning
of the circumstances of their origin. In the 1920s, Czechoslovakia
and Estonia, for example, felt so unsure of themselves that they
outlawed what they termed opposition to the state “because of its
origins”. In western Europe, the contemporary criminalisation of
neo-Nazi sentiment and Holocaust denial is a phenomenon closely
related to this, reflecting postwar unease about the fragility of
democratic traditions and testifying to the well-founded suspicion that
without the intervention of the Big Three during the second world war,
rightwing authoritarian rule in the EU heartlands might have lasted
well after 1945.
Today, moreover, even as Turkey is being asked to liberalise its legal
system, Europe is moving in the other direction. Influenced by the
post-9/11 fight against terrorism, crimes of opinion are again under
discussion, though matters have not yet reached thelevel of the US
which, as we see in the recent under-reported convictionof New York
University graduate student Mohammed Yousry, now seems prepared to
criminalise even professional translation and academic research.
Yet it is one thing to say that others are in no position to throw
stones and another to condone the Turkish penal code’s assault on
historical argument. In this matter, the over-zealous prosecutors
are wrong and prime minister Erdogan is right: a confident nation
should allow free debate. Moving the discussion of what happened
to Armenians out of the realm of politics and back into history
will certainly demolish some hallowed nationalist myths. We will
learn how it came about that many hundreds of thousands of Armenian
civilians were killed and who planned and carried out the crime. We
will also learn more about the war during which those events took
place and in particular about the part played by the great powers,
especially Russia, and their plans to partition the empire. We may
learn, too, more about the long-forgotten backdrop – the decades of
Muslim dispossession from former Ottoman lands in Europe and the
millions of refugees this generated. The end result will be less
serviceable to the political concerns of this or that side, but far
more beneficial to both Armenian historical memory and the vitality
of Turkish intellectual life.
As important, it may offer a precedent for how to deal with the most
neuralgic aspects of one’s past that not a few European countries could
learn from. Democratisation and glasnost need not be a one-way street.
The writer, professor of history at Columbia University, is author
of Salonica, City of Ghosts (Harper-Collins/Knopf)