Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Dec 6 2009

Turkey’s civil war

by MÃ`CAHÄ°T BÄ°LÄ°CÄ°*
Turkey today is undergoing cultural and political changes that leave
Western observers at a loss for words.

On one side is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an’s unprecedented
opening of meaningful dialogue with Kurds, Armenians, Alevis and other
religious and ethnic minorities. On the other is the seemingly endless
Ergenekon prosecution, an eye-popping investigation into decades of
corruption, coups and conniving that is exposing the seamy side of
Turkey’s military elite. Faced with these developments, the
conventional juxtaposition of the `secular state’ and `political
Islamism’ is increasingly inadequate. A new Turkey is emerging, and
the contending forces are not what we imagine them to be.

European modernity filtered into the Ottoman Empire through the
Balkans before finally seeping into the bedrock of Anatolia, the
Turkish heartland. As carriers and transmitters of modernity, the
Balkan elite of the early Turkish Republic turned their geographic and
political advantage into aristocratic domination. The modernization of
Anatolia — Atatürk’s prized project — was turned into a prolonged
process that yielded addictive privileges for the ruling classes. But
the granting of full equality to the `Middle Eastern’ masses could not
be put off indefinitely. Anatolia woke up to the power game being
played at its expense in the era of Turgut Ã-zal, the prime minister
who in the 1980s opened Turkey to the first waves of liberalism and
globalization. It comes as no surprise that today the traditional
modernizers of Turkey (the Atatürkist elites, best represented by the
military and the Republican People’s Party [CHP]) are against Turkey’s
EU accession, while the recipients of their modernizing zeal
(Anatolian Turks and Kurds represented by the Justice and Development
Party [AK Party] and Democratic Society Party [DTP]) have become its
most enthusiastic supporters. The Turkish experience shows how
modernization can turn against modernity, how an inauthentic
secularism can work to undermine the democratic cornerstones of
pluralism and competition.

Throughout the 20th century, democracy was only one element in the
larger toolbox of Turkish modernization. It was often seen as a luxury
to be dispensed with, especially when the perceived safety of
secularism was at stake. Turkish democracy therefore remained stunted
under the shadow of the Balkan elites, who gave priority to their
particular understandings of secularism and nationalism. Turkey’s weak
democracy found a new ally and breathed some much-needed fresh air
with the dawn of globalization. In the 1990s the combined forces of
democracy and globalization brought former peasants from Anatolia into
the game as new political actors and an emergent economic power. Since
2002, the balance of political power in Turkey has also shifted toward
these new players. With the rise to power of the `mildly Islamist’ AK
Party (an epithet seemingly permanently affixed in the Western media)
the conventional instrument used by the elite to stifle domestic
competition and secure Western support — the pitting of the secular
state against political Islamism — has lost its plausibility. The
time has come to speak with a new vocabulary and hear a different
story.

A close look at Turkish politics today reveals that Turkey is in the
midst of a civil war between its European side and its Middle Eastern
side. It is a struggle between the secularist elite, composed largely
of immigrants from the Balkans and the Caucasus, and the religiously
conservative but politically liberal masses of Anatolia (Turks, Kurds
and others). Both sides use discourses made available to them by their
Western orientations: The Ataturkist elites have long used
`modernization’ as a justification for their domination. The newly
rising Anatolian bourgeoisie has taken up `globalization’ and
`democracy’ as the instruments of its awakening and its entry into
power. So far, the Eurocentric nature of things has tended to
privilege and empower the culturally and (strangely enough) ethnically
European citizens of Turkey — people originally from the Balkans and
the Caucasus. Today, however, globalization (led not primarily by
Europe, but by America and other relative upstarts) favors Turkey’s
previously repressed Middle Easterners. So a conflict that is often
hastily characterized as `Islam vs. secularism’ or `Islamists vs.
modernists’ proves rather to be between European Turks and Middle
Eastern Turks, between the state Islam of Muslim nationalism and the
civil Islam of Muslim liberalism. The first group may look modern, but
is authoritarian in practice; the second group is conservative in
demeanor, but much more liberal in practice. When this civil war
reaches its conclusion, Turkey will emerge as a different country: its
ruling elite will look less European, more Middle Eastern — while its
democracy becomes more European, less Middle Eastern.

*Mücahit Bilici is a professor of sociology at John Jay College,

City University of New York.