This is one of the most important chapters of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's classic “Sahnenin Dışındakiler” (Those Beyond the Stage). The book centers around the contradictions, political fortunes and personalities torn between a depressed İstanbul and the struggle to attain independence in Anatolia.
It is 1920 and the Entente powers are ruling the imperial capital while the independence struggle has begun in Anatolia. The “stage” is Anatolia and İstanbul finds itself “beyond the stage” -- in other words, removed from the center of gravity. Apart from Tanpınar's literary mastership, it is a very interesting read, portraying the center of dynamism and gravity of political fate moving away from İstanbul to Anatolia. What came after the war of independence is clear. The center of political gravity clearly shifted to the Anatolian heartland and political power was transferred to the steppe wilderness of Ankara. To be fair, the republic has succeeded in maintaining its political eminence for many decades.
The shift away from Ankara began in the 1980s, when Prime Minister Turgut Özal radically liberalized the Turkish economy and opened it to the outside world. He de facto applied shock therapy to an inward looking Third World satellite state of the Cold War era. The liberalization of the economy meant that the state-centered economy was about to weaken at the expense of big business in İstanbul. Ankara was unhappy. It resisted and its stubbornness to adjust to a changing world meant that Ankara was not ready to welcome the call for normality.
While Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorism, weak coalition governments and successive economic crises wasted the 1990s, the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) pretty much signifies the overtaking of the country by a team based in the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Interestingly, the rise of the AK Party not only meant an intervention by the periphery in Anatolia but also the desperate call for change by the Turkish bourgeoisie.
Decades of authoritarianism, ineptitude and resistance to change were finally ended by the taking over of Ankara. Ankara has no one to blame. It had been so hopelessly corrupted and become a ramshackle entity amidst a rapidly changing world. It pretty much deserved its inevitable demise.
In contrast, İstanbul is increasingly a thriving European capital with immense physical beauty, an ever-developing business culture and a dynamic media. İstanbul has become an international hub for air travel, a convention center and, thanks to a liberal visa regime, an unmistakable venue where people, goods and ideas flow freely.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spends almost every weekend in İstanbul. President Abdullah Gül prefers working out of Tarabya in the summer. İstanbul has retaken the center stage away from Ankara. In fact, Ankara is run by İstanbulites. Ankara was incapable of adjusting to a world very different from the one that made Ankara a necessity. In Tanpınarian terminology, “those beyond the stage” have returned to the center of the stage.
However, İstanbul's overtaking of Ankara is not without problems. Change and normalization is such an overwhelming urge in our society that even the monumental changes accomplished over the least nine years are not seen as enough. Turks want more. They want their country to complete the normalization process that started nine years ago. They want a new constitution. They want a historical compromise. They want a political environment that can tolerate “the Other.” As the German essayist Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1935, “a country is not just what it does -- it is also what it tolerates.”
