These people range from those who want me to put in a word with the authorities concerned on behalf of their scions who have taken an exam for employment in a government institution, to those who want to warn me about the grave dangers our republic is threatened by. The latter are those who are generally identified as “Western, educated, urbane and secular.” They call themselves “republican” are not. They believe people other than their kind are fundamentalists of some sort and agents of foreign powers ranging from Saudi Arabia to the US and to the EU plotting the demise of the regime and the country. An engineer from İstanbul demonstrated an unrealistic degree of fear of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the “dark forces” behind it, waiting for the opportune moment to seize the state and change things once and for all. Our conversation heated up after I pointed out that this party with its Islamic roots is more internationally oriented than many other secular governments before and has moved Turkey towards the West more than those governments that we knew as “Western.” He retorted by claiming that this was a tactical move -- instead, the incumbent government wanted an Islamic state and to bring back the Caliphate. I could not change his mind or better his belief. So I had to shut up.
The other one was high-ranking retired military officer known as a strategist. He pulled me aside after a TV talk show and said, “Don’t you realize that the republic is going down the drain?” He said this in such a manner that among all others I should side with him because we represent the same social values. Indeed, we did except one thing, I was a democrat and he, as are many millions that are scared, is ready to sacrifice the regime to a military or authoritarian rule because the incumbent government was not drawn from their lot and represented a different culture.
This is also the tragedy of the “modern” and “Western” founding elite as they believe themselves to be. They never were democrats. That is why they did not try to rally the masses to participate in politics. The people were backward and ignorant. The founding elite of the republic had two false premises that they seriously believed in. One was adopting Western science and technology and leaving its culture and social values out. This dictum was the standard line by which minds and public administration were shaped. Even the concept of freedom was quite different from the West. In Turkey freedom means the independence of the nation rather than individual rights and liberties. The latter have always been sacrificed to the collective good that stifled individualism both in the political and economic realms. The collectivity was represented by the state, and all individuals drew their rights from being an obedient component of the state. That is why society never became free and grew independent of the state and the state never came under the reign of the society/nation. The second mistake was to believe that education alone could change the face and fate of the country. Education is indeed a very important variable in social change and development, but only if it is coupled with economic and technological change.
Today Turkey cannot be considered an advanced industrial country, although it is economically building up. There was no democracy among the constitutive principles of the republic, which are made up of nationalism, statism, reformism, secularism, populism and republicanism. These principles do not add up to produce the rule of law and a democratic regime.
Given this backdrop, it can be said that today the old bureaucratic elite who controlled society by controlling the state apparatus is rapidly losing its power and privilege. Their republic is on the decline. The bureaucratic republic is giving way to a more democratic republic. Because the West represents them and demands them for membership, our “modern and Western” elite have given up on the West. They want their old republic back. That is why Republic Day (Oct. 29) is celebrated in two different places, one at the presidential palace and the other at the chief of General Staff’s office.
But then the republic is no more that of the bureaucracy; civilian people are claiming it after 86 years. What we see is the crumbling of the ancien régime and the birth of a new one. Natural births are painful and take longer.
