Many names are being spun to capture the essential nature of
the dissent being expressed in Turkey, and to try to link this movement to a
broader, Islam-wide cultural context. It is important that everyone know that
this movement is most certainly not part of the “Arab Spring,” is not part of
the “Occupy” economic movement, and is about a great deal more than just the
imaginary boogeyman of (quote-unquote) “Islam.”
This is not, I repeat NOT, the
Turkish Spring.
On that score at least, though on little else, Tayyip
Erdoğan is right.
Though intertwined with the history of most of the nations
undergoing the Arab Spring, Turkey’s history is separate and unique. So is its
current situation. The issues concerning Turkey are not those concerning the
nations addressed under the Spring moniker. The Spring is a fight for liberation
from entrenched, corrupt dictators, and a fight for self-governance, whatever
form that takes, democratic or otherwise.
Turkey already has democracy, and has had it for a long
time. Tayyip Erdoğan is a democratically elected leader, and even if the
allegations of election rigging are true, he is nonetheless a popular leader
with a wide base of support and a glowing track record in many respects. In
fact, many of those protesting would have a hard time claiming Erdogan has been
all bad.
In Turkey, democracy was brought to the country by Mustafa
Kemal -- named Atatürk, Father of the Türks -- in the 1920’s following a war of
independence from foreign control. Turkey’s war of independence at that time has
more in common with the Arab Spring than the current situation does, but even
then that would be a stretched comparison – Mustafa Kemal lead the Turkish
people against the foreign occupier and liberated his people from foreign
control imposed in the wake of a decadent, defunct, and crippled local
government.
After liberating his people, he brought them secularism and
democracy. One historical criticism of this choice might be that the people
themselves did not rise up in favour of democracy specifically, and the result
has been nearly a century of fluctuations between democratically elected leaders
with a tendency toward despotism as their term goes on, and military coups that
emerge when those leaders become too despotic and threaten to steer the country
too far away from Ataturk’s original ideals.
The history of Turkish democracy has thus been fraught
growing pains, similar in many respects to those growing pains experienced in French
and American democracy, with tensions between the old way and the new, and
inherent problems that persist from that history up to today. When things
threaten to go awry, the military steps in and the test of Turkish democracy
begins again.
Leaders in Turkey have been characterized, between coups, as
tending to err toward authoritarian rule as their term lengthens, increasingly
representing their own beliefs ahead of those they govern. Words like “Sultan”
appear more and more as leaders serve, their style of leadership hearkening back
to the old days, the days before democracy was an ideal to be upheld, and
before secularism was the rule.
Yet we must think more globally on this matter. This is not
some character attribute unique to rulers from any one particular geography,
religion, or creed. This tendency toward autocratic, authoritarian, and even
despotic rule is all too common a story in democratic nations anywhere. It is
the reason why many democracies have maximum Presidential terms. In Canada, it underlies
the reason why the Liberals under Chretien eventually had to fall, and why for
years the Liberal party has been in decline. In the United States, it’s the spectre
of the George W Bush years, where authoritarian, despotic rule was given freely
in the wake of horrific attacks, and then all but impossible to return from.
Hubris is far too common a story in democracies the world
over. Hubris is difficult to recover from.
Mr. Erdoğan is just such a leader. His early successes,
largely economic, made him very popular. Ideals which under other lights would
seem progressive and even enlightened are instead tainted by the spectre of history
and Islam. Erdoğan has changed Turkey’s strict laws regarding the wearing of
headscarves, for example. In his own terms, he is giving women the choice to
cover themselves, granting them a right. The fear, however, is that he is
steering the nation further backwards, becoming ever more the Islamic Sultan in
the Caliphate of Turkey.
Even the recent law regarding the sale and depiction of
alcohol is relatively tame compared to laws in other nations, like Canada where
the sale of alcohol is, in most provinces, restricted to daylight hours and it
is illegal to consume alcohol in public. Until recently, in Canada it was legal to show a
glass of beer on TV but illegal to actually depict a person drinking it. In
Erdoğan’s terms, the law for Turkey is sensible, and respects the general
safety of the people of Turkey. And as far as that goes, he’s not all wrong.
The problem is that he pushed the law forward without so
much as a few hours of debate and implemented it virtually that day. The
problem is that he has been doing so increasingly in the past few years, with
dubious intent. It demands questions about the nature of democracy and the
consultative process. It raises, again, that question of the aspiring despot,
the all-powerful Sultan. It suggests a leader who may need to be deposed. Where is
the next coup going to come from?
The current movement in Turkey represents a pent up
dissatisfaction with this cycle between despots and coups, and Tayyip Erdoğan
is its cause in a deeper way than it might first appear. Though a powerful
force of improvement for Turkey, he has in many minds gone too far, sacrificing
the existing culture in favour of the economy, and in favour of his more ideal
culture that is somewhat more religious and conservative. And, perhaps most importantly, valuing only
those who believe as he believes, disregarding (and even jailing) those who do
not.
The nature of the injustice perceived by the Türks in Turkey is of a
vastly different and entirely unique character to other movements going on in
the Islamic world. This is not simply an Islamic issue – it is a Turkish issue.
Mr. Erdoğan has done great things for this country, and began his Ministerial
career with excellent intentions, and has had excellent results. He has fallen afoul
of those original intentions and successes, and his own success has become his
worst enemy. He now seems to believe he is entitled to success and does not have to earn it.
But perhaps more importantly, the uprising in Turkey has
become possible due to another importantly hot topic of Erdoğan’s
administration. Over the course of the past three years, Mr. Erdoğan has
arrested and detained a collection of military personnel who are accused of
having planned another coup. Ostensibly, this is to preserve the integrity of democracy. Arguably, it is evidence of a leader removing obstacles to become a dictator.
The evidence is reportedly specious at best that these
generals and admirals had any such plan, but given the history of the nation it
would not be far-fetched to assume that someone, somewhere in some part of the military did have some sort of
standing order regarding the taking back of power if the Prime Minister was
leading the country down the wrong path. It would only be sensible, and the
E-Memorandum of 2007 would suggest at the least that the idea existed.
Regardless of the truth of these accusations, the Turkish
military has been brought under civilian control, and for the first time in the
modern Turkish Republic’s history, it does not have a systemic safeguard
against corruption of Ataturk’s ideals. The military is essentially headless,
unable to fulfill its “stabilizing” role in Turkish democracy. The people do
not have a force to rely on to protect their freedoms and rights….
Except that this past week’s uprising proves that, in fact,
it does – the people themselves have at last risen to speak for themselves.
In his paranoid pursuit of power, Mr. Erdoğan has unwittingly
unleashed the full force of democracy – representation of the people, by the
people, for the people.
It is conceivable that by now, as little as five years ago,
the military might have intervened and staged another coup. Mr. Erdoğan has, it
turns out, created a situation which has empowered his people to speak for
themselves – even dared them to speak for themselves – and the result is that
they have spoken up loudly and clearly.
The military right now cannot speak up on their behalf. But perhaps it shouldn't.
The people have risen against hubris, and divisive majoritarian
rule.
The fact that Mr. Erdoğan is incensed that his people have a
voice is thus deeply ironic. In his efforts to secure power, he opened the door
for democracy's greatest force. People expect to be governed fairly, and
without a military intervention, the responsibility for maintaining democracy
starts and ends with its people, each and every day.
The Turkish People have risen to demonstrate that the power
of democracy lies with its people – all of its people, not just those who agree
with its Prime Minister, and not only at election times. They have risen to
show that a Prime Minister of this nation is responsible for, and accountable
to, ALL of its citizens ALL of the time.
In all, the end goal of this protest has nothing in common
with The Spring. This is a nation wrestling to come to grips with functional
democracy, figuring out how to include and accommodate the voice of dissent in
decision and policy making. This voice has been largely ignored throughout the
history of the Republic, and when it would get too loud the military would
speak up in its place – rather like an overshadowing parent finishing a nervous
child’s sentence.
The goal, it turns out, is the act of protest itself. It is
a protest for the right to be heard during the process, not only before it or
after it. It is a course correction of Turkey’s endogenous democracy by an
electorate than has grown up in the sudden absence of an overprotective parent.
So, let’s dispense with the Arab Spring associations. Let’s
drop the “Occupy” prefix and stop trying to make this a world economic issue. The
Economist
has coined the term “Tree Revolution,” but even this is woefully
inaccurate – this is not the tearing down of one system in favour of another.
Let’s do away with these notions of Revolution, and
understand that we are witnessing an Evolution.
The chant has become “Tayyip Istifa!” (Tayyip, resign!) but
perhaps this is wrong. This is not about another coup, whether from a military
or from a popular uprising. If this is to be an evolution, perhaps the chant
should be “Tayyip, bizi dinle!” (Tayyip,
listen to us!)
The trigger for these events was the destruction of Gezi
Park, and the Gezi Park Protests is as good a name as any. It’s Turkish. It’s
right. It’s a unifying symbol of the uprising against a leader become too sure
of himself. The full complexity of the situation will be years in coming to
light, and the Turkish people will have to continue to speak up from now until
the next election and until the next.
Let’s not do the Turks a disservice by lumping them into
some box we feel comfortable with. Gezi Park is the name. Tayyip, bizi
dinle.
(Posted as inoculation against the active mythologizing
tendencies of the modern press.)
Turkish Prime Minister 
