Only if he had spent New Year’s Eve watching TV shows a couple of years ago, we may not have witnessed so-called republican rallies, the presidential election crisis, the military e-memorandum on April 27, unconstitutional decisions by the Constitutional Court, the closure case against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), etc.Wisdom has suddenly visited this old man of the Kemalists making him realize that there was no danger of Islamism in Turkey. This is, I would argue, the greatest discovery of the Kemalists ever! I am sure many other Kemalists would disagree with Selçuk, knowing that without a discourse of “danger to secularism” there could hardly be any better instrument to control, exclude and even suppress conservative democratic masses.
Historically speaking the Kemalist hegemony owes a lot to the cry for “secularism in danger.” Authoritarian one-party rule, direct military coups and a regime of military tutelage were all justified by this so-called Islamist threat.
Even in recent years this was ground on which the Kemalists resisted democratization, globalization and Europeanization, arguing that these processes were weakening mechanisms of bureaucratic control over social, economic and political realms and thus enabling the Islamists to assert their presence in this new liberal atmosphere.
Reasoning that their hold on power had weakened, the Kemalists resorted to anti-democratic, unconstitutional and unethical attempts to finish off the political agent of democratization, globalization and Europeanization, that is the ruling AK Party.
So it was the Kemalists who brought the country to the edge of a military coup. Among those who are being tried in the Ergenekon case for plotting a coup is Cumhuriyet’s Ankara representative and columnist Mustafa Balbay. The coups pondered and planned, numbering at least four since 2003, were all to be justified on the bases that secularism had been threatened by the Islamists. The role the media was supposed to play in this process was to help spread the fear that the Islamists were coming.
But now the big brother of the Kemalists, Selçuk, has discovered that there is no such danger. Of course, those Kemalists, among them Selçuk, are well aware of the fact that the Islamist threat was not real but fabricated. They know this because they are the ones who made up this threat. Why? The answer has two layers. First, the “Islamist threat” was perfect ground to justify a Kemalist military coup in the eyes of secular social segments in Turkey and of the Westerners who were concerned about the spread of Islamist fundamentalism. Second, the “Islamist threat” was instrumental in defending the Kemalists’ vested interest in the status quo.
So what has happened now that Selçuk made such a U-turn?
This is, I think, the enlightening impact of the Ergenekon case. The top two men of the Kemalist Cumhuriyet daily are suspects in the Ergenekon case and are accused of being part of a plot to topple the government using violence, i.e., a military coup. Moreover, many of their allies face similar accusations and are being tried. Thus, Selçuk and his friends have come to the conclusion that there is no possibility of a successful military coup at the moment on the secularism argument. They have therefore withdrawn their thesis on the “Islamist threat.”
Meanwhile, Selçuk seems to attribute the end of the Islamist danger to the Islamists’ accumulation of capital. Good morning!
Market economy, open society and democratic politics are the greatest remedy for any ideological dogmatism, including both Islamism and Kemalism. Such dogmatic ideologies cannot survive in such a polity.
Anyhow, for the time being secularism is “out” and nationalism is “in” for the Kemalist circles. They will work on this new fault line in Turkish politics to defend their shaken power and provoke militarist forces.
