Turkey’s civil war
by
MÜCAHİT BİLİCİ*

On one side is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’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 Özal, 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.