news.am, Armenia
Nov 21 2009
Europeans have two reasons to be concerned about Turkish democracy
10:07 / 11/21/2009`When Nicolas Sarkozy rejects accession for Turkey
on the grounds of Europe’s `natural borders,’ everybody know that he
is speaking of `cultural borders”, reads the article by Jean-Francois
Bayart, the director of National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
published in French Libération. The article is titled `An Islam
Compatible with the Republic’. NEWS.am posts the full text.
`And Turkey’s culture is Islam: It would be incompatible with Europe,
and even with the Republic [France].
Yet Turkey has been a republic since 1924. Islam has democratized in
Turkey. It has appropriated the idea of the nation, republican
institutions, the civil code (introduced in 1926 and modelled on Swiss
legislation), the market economy, education, the mass media and
scientific knowledge. It has adopted the political party as method of
political participation and, because it is as theologically and
ideologically varied as in the rest of the Muslim world, it has given
rise to a pluralist education, the one rivaling the other to a greater
or lesser degree. The believers have also themselves divided up their
votes across the political checkerboard, while non-believers have
voted for Muslim parties.
More than that, Islam has made a decisive contribution to the
democratization of the Kemalist republic. By virtue of the
parliamentary system, successive Muslim parties or conservative
parties with a religious sensibility, close to brotherhoods, have
incorporated within the republican institutions the religious masses
that do not identify with the aggressive secularism of Kemalism and
filled the space that could have fallen to the jidahist groups. They
supported the move of the peasant farmers to the cities during the
rural exodus. They lent a voice to those of the Kurds who sought to
express their defiance of a centralizing state but without joining the
armed struggle of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. They also
permitted the rise of the Anatolian elites that the Kemalist
establishment was confining to the periphery.
On the other hand, Kemalist nationalism is less secular than it
claims. It is ethno-confessional, like its counterparts in the Balkans
and Caucasus. In the Kemalist republic nationals of Turkish origin or
Sunnis of the Hanefite rite are implicitly more citizens than the
Kurdish, Alevi, and Christian and Jewish inhabitants. But the origin
of this implicit discrimination does not have much to do with Islam as
a religion. It is political and is part of the unleashing of a
cultural nationalism from the latter half of the 19th century as well
as of the crossed operations of ethnic cleansing that followed, the
genocide of the Armenians being its culmination. The same logic is
found at work for the benefit of Orthodox, Catholics or Jews, or
Shi’is or even Sunnis, depending on the Balkan, Caucasian, or Middle
Eastern country in question. After all, an Arab Israeli is a little
less Israeli than a Jewish Israeli and it is not so long ago that that
religion ceased to be indicated on the identity cards of the Greeks.
The paradox of Turkey is due to the fact that the secular nationalists
are the ones that hold this ethno-confessional conception of
citizenship and the ruling Islamic party, the AKP [Justice
andDevelopment Party], with the support of the conservatives, is
questioning it. Closing the door to Europe on Turkey by claiming it is
a Muslim country is clearly to play the game of this conception. There
is, moreover, a certain coherence in hearing Nicolas Sarkozy, a man so
concerned about &`national identity,’ inadvertently assume the slogan
of the Turkish far right: &`France, you must like it or leave it!’ On
the other hand, many Turks who are not necessarily believers but who
vote for the AKP to oppose nationalist authoritarianism, say to
Europe, along with the left-wing intellectual Murat Belge: &`Do not
allow us to become fascist!’
The Europeans have two reasons to be concerned about the future of
Turkish democracy. It is not in their interest to see the development
of an ultranationalist Moscow-Ankara axis. And they bear a direct
historical responsibility for the development of these
ethno-confessional nationalisms in the Eastern Mediterranean, which
they fuelled ideologically and supported politically, even militarily,
under cover of &`protection’ ‘ a self-interested one ‘ of Christian
minorities. We are still paying the price in Lebanon, in Palestine, in
Iraq, in the Balkans, of the disastrous way the &`Orient question’ was
handled.The failure of negotiations between Turkey and the European
Union would be a continuation of this disaster.’