FORCIBLY RE-SECULARIZING TURKEY WILL ONLY BACKFIRE
By Alfred Stepan
The Daily Star
March 22 2008
Lebanon
The chief prosecutor of Turkey’s High Court of Appeals recently
recommended to the country’s Constitutional Court that the ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP) be permanently banned. Only last
July, the AKP was overwhelmingly re-elected in free and fair elections
to lead the government. The chief prosecutor also formally recommended
that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul, and
69 other leading politicians be banned from politics for five years.
Clearly, banning the AKP would trigger a political crisis that
would end Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union in the
foreseeable future and threaten its recent strong economic
growthTrillion-Dollar-Experiment . So the chief prosecutor’s
threat should not be taken lightly – all the more so given that the
Constitutional Court has banned 18 political parties since the current
constitution was introduced in 1982. Indeed, the recent call to ban the
AKP is directly related to its efforts to change Turkey’s constitution.
The underlying charge in the chief prosecutor’s indictment is that
the AKP has been eroding secularism. But the origins of the current
constitution, and its definition of secularism, are highly suspect.
Turkey’s existing constitution was adopted in 1982 as a direct product
of the Turkish military coup of 1980. The five senior generals who
led the coup appointed, directly or indirectly, all 160 members of
the Consultative Assembly that drafted the new constitution, and they
retained veto power over the final document.
In the national ratification referendum that followed, citizens were
allowed to vote against the military-sponsored draft, but not to
argue against it publicly.
As a result, the 1982 constitution has weaker democratic origins than
any in the EU. Its democratic content was also much weaker, assigning,
for example, enormous power (and a military majority) to the National
Security Council. While the AKP has moderated this authoritarian
feature, it is difficult to democratize such a constitution fully,
and official EU reports on Turkey’s prospects for accession repeatedly
call for a new constitution, not merely an amended one.
With public opinion polls indicating that the AKP’s draft constitution,
prepared by an academic committee, would be accepted through normal
democratic procedures, the chief prosecutor acted to uphold the type of
secularism enshrined in the 1982 constitution, which many commentators
liken to French secularism. Yet the comparison with what the French
call laicitŽ is misleading.
Certainly, both French laicitŽ and Turkish secularism (established
by modern Turkey’s founder, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk) began with a
similar hostility toward religion. But now they are quite different.
In Turkey, the only religious education that is tolerated is under
the strict control of the state, whereas in France a wide variety of
privately supported religious education establishments is allowed,
and since 1959 the state has paid for much of the Catholic Church’s
primary school costs. In Turkey, Friday prayers are written by civil
servants in the 70,000-member State Directorate of Religious Affairs,
and all Turkish imams also must be civil servants. No similar controls
exist in France.
Similarly, until the AKP came to power and began to loosen
restrictions, it was virtually impossible in Turkey to create a new
church or synagogue, or to create a Jewish or Christian foundation.
This may be why the Armenian patriarch urged ethnic Armenians in
Turkey to vote for the AKP in last July’s elections. Here, too,
no such restrictions exist in France.
The differences between French and Turkish secularism can be put in
even sharper comparative perspective. In the widely cited "Fox" index
measuring state control of majority and minority religions – in which
zero represents the least state control, and figures in the thirties
represent the greatest degree of control – all but two current EU
member states get scores that are in the zero to six range. France
is at the high end of the EU norm, with a score of six. Turkey,
however, scores 24, worse even than Tunisia’s authoritarian secular
regime. Is this the type of secularism that needs to be perpetuated
by the Turkish chief prosecutor’s not so-soft constitutional coup?
What really worries some democratic secularists in Turkey and
elsewhere is that the AKP’s efforts at constitutional reform might
be simply a first step toward introducing Islamic law, or sharia. If
the constitutional court will not stop a potential AKP-led imposition
of sharia, who will?
There are two responses to this question. First, the AKP insists that
it opposes creating a sharia state, and experts say that there is no
"smoking gun" in the chief prosecutor’s indictment showing that the
AKP has moved toward such a goal. Second, support for sharia, never
high in Turkey, has actually declined since the AKP came to power,
from 19 percent in 1996 to 8 percent in 2007.
Given that the AKP’s true power base is its support in democratic
elections, any attempt to impose sharia would risk alienating many of
its own voters. Given this constraint, there is no reason for anyone,
except for "secular fundamentalists," to support banning the AKP,
Erdogan, or Gul; and every reason for Turkey to continue on its
democratic path. Only that course will enable Turkey to construct a
better constitution than it has now.
Alfred Stepan is a professor of government and director of the Center
for Democracy, Toleration and Religion at Columbia University in
New York. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration
Project Syndicate (c) ().
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