The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  In time-honoured fashion, the Turkish high command responded by stepping up repression, throwing more tanks and gendarmes into the south-east, and pressing for cross-border attacks into northern Iraq. Mobilization of state and para-state agencies to crush the guerrillas was accompanied by a hurricane of nationalist hysteria in civil society, fed by fears of the long-term example of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, resentments that for the first time in a century the country was having to give an account of itself to opinion in Europe, and the miseries of provincial life for unemployed youth, a prime recruiting-ground of the MHP. In this storm, Erdoğan and his colleagues took the same course as Demirel, accommodating the military—Turkish jets and troops were soon attacking across the frontier into Iraq—and upping chauvinist rhetoric. By the winter of 2007, Turkish cities were draped from one end to the other with national flags hanging out of windows or balconies; youngsters were replacing photographs of themselves with the crescent on a red field in Facebook; night after night, television news was reduced to solemn images of Erdoğan and Gül, at the head of a phalanx of army commanders, presiding at the funeral of soldiers killed in the south-east, mothers sobbing over their coffins, intercut with troops high-stepping through Diyarbakir to stentorian chants of ‘One Flag, One Nation, One Language, One State’. A comparable intensity of integral nationalism has not been seen in Europe since the thirties.

  The AKP’s embrace of this jingoism involves no renunciation of its own objectives. If nation continues to trump religion as the master discourse of society, without contradicting it, the party has much to gain and little to lose by doing so. Tactically, its adjustment has an obvious logic. The economic outlook for Turkey is worsening. The trade deficit is huge, the influx of foreign funds covering it is mostly hot money that could exit at the first sign of trouble, inflation is in double digits again. Should the boom evaporate, showing muscle on the security front is a well-tried electoral alternative. Strategically, so this calculation goes, giving the military all it wants in the battle against terrorism can enable the party to work towards its own goals on other terrain. These have been two-fold: to bend society into a more consistently observant mould, and to capture the branches of the state that have resisted this. The priority given to these underlying aims, at the expense of liberal reforms, can be seen from the AKP’s determination to control the presidency, by installing Gül in the post. The move raised military and bureaucratic hackles, put down with the easy electoral victory of 2007. Its political significance lay in the party’s refusal to nominate any independent personality with democratic credentials, which would have yielded it political gains of another kind, in which it was not interested. Its attempt to plant a pious incompetent as governor of the Central Bank failed, but indicates its general line of action—colonization of the state by trusted minions, which has been proceeding apace at lower levels. Operating in parallel, the movement led by the exile mystagogue Fethullah Gülen—preaching an Islam impeccably pro-business, pro-modern, pro-American—has created an Opus Dei–like empire, not just controlling newspapers, television stations and hundreds of schools, but now permeating all ranks of the police.68

  Bids to bend civil society to the will of the ruling party have followed a similar pattern. Rather than making any effort to rescind the mass of punitive articles in a penal code still modelled on that of Italian Fascism, Erdoğan tried to pass a law criminalizing adultery—three years in jail for straying from the marriage bed, desisting only when it became clear that this was too much for even his warmest admirers in Europe. The battle-front has now shifted to female head-gear. After failing to secure a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that the Turkish ban on headscarves in public buildings, including universities, was a violation of basic rights, the AKP–MHP bloc passed two constitutional amendments abolishing it last February. The Constitutional Court has since struck these down, and the ruling party now faces formal charges of attempting to subvert the secular basis of the state. If upheld, these would lead to its closure and the exclusion of Erdoğan, Gül and other leaders from all political activity for five years.

  The issue of scarves, trivial enough in itself, offers a perfect illustration of the warped dialectic between state and religion in the Turkey bequeathed by Kemal. Denial of the right of young women to wear on campus what they want is an obvious discrimination against the devout, excluding them from public higher education. Licensing the headscarf, as any secular girl from a provincial background will tell you, prompts fears of the reverse: brutal social pressure to wear it, on pain of ostracism or worse. The AKP is in no position to dispel such fears, since its record in office and the style of its leadership have been so persistently arrogant and bullying. Likewise, contemporary Kemalism is in no position to claim that the state must be kept inviolate from any expression of religion, since it maintains at public expense a vast directorate propagating just one faith, Islam, while curtailing the activity of all others. The successive waves of political pietism that have surged up since the fifties, of which the AKP is only the latest, are the logical revenge on its own duplicity. A genuine secularism would have cut the cord between state and religion cleanly and completely, creating a space for the everyday rejection of all supernatural beliefs. How far it has failed to do so can be judged from the verdict of one of the most sympathetic analysts of Turkish faith and society, not to speak of the statesmanship of Erdoğan himself: ‘There is not the slightest doubt that it is now dangerous for a man or woman to deny openly belief in God’.69 The army itself, supposed bastion of secularism, regularly describes those who have fallen in its counter-insurgency operations as ‘martyrs’. Nation and religion remain as structurally interdependent in latter-day Kemalism as they were when the Gazi first established the state.

  But because that interdependence could never be openly acknowledged, a tension was created within the Turkish political system, between an elite claiming to be secular and movements claiming to be faithful, each side accusing the other of want of tolerance, that has yet to abate. The AKP has not broken, but reproduced, this deadlock. Before taking office, Erdoğan famously told his followers that democracy was like a tram: we will take it to our destination, and then get off.70 The remark has sometimes been interpreted as a revelation of the hidden intentions of the AKP to use a parliamentary majority to install a fundamentalist tyranny. But its meaning can be taken as something more banal. Power, not principle, is what matters. Erdoğan is no doubt as devout an individual as Blair or Bush, with whom he got on well, but there is little reason to think that he would risk the fruits of office for the extremities of his faith, any more than would they. An instrumental attitude to democracy is not the same as either hostility or commitment to it. Elections have served the AKP well: why abandon them? Religious integrism would bar entry to Europe: why risk it?

  The temptations, and pitfalls, for the party lie elsewhere. On the one hand, the AKP is under pressure from its constituency—above all the dedicated core of its militants—to show results in the long-standing struggle of the believers for more public recognition of their faith and its outward symbols. Its credibility depends on being able to deliver these. On the other hand, the unprecedented weakness of any opposition to it within the political system has given its leaders a giddy sense that they enjoy a new freedom of action. The military and the bureaucracy, certainly, remain a potential threat: but would the army dare to stage a coup again, now that Turkey is on the threshold of the Union, and all Europe is watching? The outcome of the current crisis, pitting the Court against the Assembly, will show how well the AKP has judged the new balance of forces in Turkey. A triumphant appeal to the electors, sweeping away the Constitution of 1980, is one possibility. The hubris that took Menderes to his end is another. What is clear is that the latest cycle of Centre-Right rule in Turkey is approaching a critical moment, at which its precursors stumbled.

  10

  Whatever the immediate outcome of the conflict between them, the latest versions of Isla
mism and Kemalism derive from the same founding moment as their predecessors, even as each seeks sublimation into Europe. So too do the principal potential obstacles to Turkish entry into the EU. In Turkey, these are generally held to be European racism and Islamophobia, or the prospect of the country’s future weight in the European Council as its largest member. Perhaps equally relevant, if less often mentioned, is the calculation that if Turkey is admitted, it will be difficult to refuse entry to Ukraine—not quite as large, but more democratic, with a higher per capita income; a country which Romano Prodi once explained had as much chance of joining the EU as New Zealand. Such resistances are not to be minimized. But the more intractable difficulties lie within the country itself. Three of these command the rest. They have a common origin in the integral nationalism that issued, without rupture or remorse, from the last years of an Empire based on conquest.

  The first, and in theory most pointed, obstacle to entry is Turkey’s continued military occupation, and maintenance of a political dependency, in Cyprus. Refusal to recognize a member-state of the European Union, while demanding entry into it, requires a diplomatic sang-froid that only a former imperial power could allow itself. However eager Brussels is to welcome Ankara, the legal monstrum of Turkey’s position in Cyprus lies still unresolved between it and accession. The second obstacle to ready incorporation in Europe is the domestic situation of the country’s minorities. These are not small communities. Kurds number anywhere between nine and thirteen million, Alevis ten to twelve million, of whom perhaps two to three million are Kurds. In other words, up to a third of the population suffers systematic discrimination for its ethnicity or religion. The cruelties visited by the state on the Kurds are well advertised, but the position accorded by society to Alevis—often viewed as atheists by the Sunni majority—is even lower. Neither group forms a compact mass, subject to uniform ill-treatment. There are now more Kurds in the big cities than in the south-east, many of whom no longer speak Kurdish, and are intermarried with Turks,71 while Alevis, concentrated only in a single mountain enclave, are otherwise dispersed throughout the land. But that neither comes near the equality of rights and respect which the Copenhagen criteria of the EU nominally enjoin is all too obvious.

  Finally, there is the Armenian genocide, its authors honoured in streets and schools across the country, whose names celebrate the murderers. Talat: a boulevard in Ankara, four avenues in Istanbul, a highway in Edirne, three municipal districts, four primary schools. Enver: three avenues in Istanbul, two in Izmir, three in occupied Cyprus, primary schools in Izmir, Mugla, Elazig. Cemal Azmi, responsible for the deaths of thousands in Trabzon: a primary school in that city. Resit Bey, the butcher of Diyarbakir: a boulevard in Ankara. Mehmet Kemal, hanged for his atrocities: thoroughfares in Istanbul and Izmir, statues in Adana and Izmir, National Hero Memorial gravestone in Istanbul. As if in Germany squares, streets, and kindergarten were called after Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, without anyone raising an eyebrow. Books extolling Talat, Enver and Şakir roll off the presses, in greater numbers than ever.72 Nor is all this merely a legacy of a Kemalist past. The Islamists have continued the same tradition into the present. If Talat’s catafalque was borne by armoured train from the Third Reich for burial with full honours by Inönü in 1943, it was Demirel who brought Enver’s remains back from Tajikstan in 1996, and reburied them in person at a state ceremony in Istanbul. Beside him, as the cask was lowered into the ground, stood the West’s favourite Muslim moderate: Abdullah Gül, now AKP president of Turkey.

  An integral nationalism that never flinched in exterminating Armenians, expelling Greeks, deporting Kurds and torturing dissident Turks, and which still enjoys wide electoral support, is not a force to be taken lightly. The Turkish Left, consistently among its victims, has shown most courage in confronting it. Politically speaking, the ‘generation of ’78’ was cut down by the military coup of 1980—years of imprisonment, exile or death killing off any chance of a revival of popular attraction or activism on the same scale. But when the worst of the repression lifted, it was this levy that produced a critical culture without equal in any European country of the same period: monographs, novels, films, journals, publishing houses that have given Istanbul in many respects a livelier radical milieu than contemporary London, Paris or Berlin. This is the setting out of which Orhan Pamuk—not exempt from friendly criticism in it—along with other leading Turkish writers, comes.

  If there is a blind spot in the outlook of this intellectual Left, it is Cyprus, about which few know much and most say less, an attitude not unlike that of British counterparts towards Northern Ireland. But on the other two most explosive issues of the time, its record has been exemplary. Defence of the Kurds has for decades been at the centre of its imagination, producing one leading writer or director—often themselves Kurds—after another, from Yas¸ar Kemal, Mehmed Uzun or Yilmaz Güney (Yol), to such recent films as Handan Ipekçi’s banned Big Man, Little Love (2001) and Yesim Ustaoğlu’s Journey to the Sun (2001). As for the fate of the Armenians, it has been the object of a historical conference in Istanbul—cancelled under political pressure at two universities, held at another—a best-selling memoir (now in English: Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother), novel (Elif Shafak: The Bastard of Istanbul), iconoclastic reportage (Ece Temelkuran: Deep Mountain), and many a column in the press (Murat Belge, in Radikal).

  But above all, the outstanding work of the historian Taner Akçam has put the realities of the Armenian genocide, and their deep deposits in the Turkish state, irreversibly on the map of modern scholarship. His path- and taboo-breaking study of it was published in Turkey in 1999.73 A collection of key essays, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, appeared in English in 2004, and a translation of his first book as A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility in 2006. Himself a prisoner, then exile, of the military repression of 1980, Akçam has been repeatedly threatened and harrassed even abroad, where Canadian and American authorities have collaborated with their Turkish counterparts to make life difficult for him. Inside Turkey, the issue of the genocide remains a danger for anyone who speaks of it, as the charges against Pamuk and the killing of Dink—both under AKP rule—make plain.

  Outside Turkey, there has long been a school of historians, headed by the late Stanford Shaw, that reproduced the official mythology of the Turkish state, denying that any genocide ever occurred on Ottoman soil. Bald negationism of this kind has lost academic standing. Later versions prefer to minimize or relativize, in tune with the approach of the Turkish academic establishment, rather than repress altogether the fate of the Armenians. Intellectually speaking, these can now be regarded as discredited margins of the literature, but even such treatment as is to be found in the best historians of modern Turkey working in the West offers a painful contrast with the courage of Turkish critics themselves. In the most distinguished recent authorities, evasion and euphemism are still the rule. In the terse two paragraphs granted the subject in Caroline Finkel’s massive 550-page history of the Ottoman Empire, we read that ‘terrible massacres took place on both sides’. As for genocide, the very word is a misfortune, which not only ‘bedevil[s] any wider understanding of the history of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians’—not to speak of ‘Turkish foreign relations around the world’—but ‘consigns Armenia, which borders Turkey . . . to a wretched existence’ (sic).74

  If we turn to Sükrü Hanioğlu’s limpid Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, just out, a single paragraph tells us that ‘one of the most tragic events of the war was the deportation of much of the Armenian population of Anatolia’, in which ‘the finer details’ of the government’s decision that advancing Russian armies must be denied ‘crucial assistance’ from ‘Armenian rebels’ were unfortunately not observed in practice, leading to the unforeseen consequence of ‘massive loss of life’.75 Andrew Mango’s acclaimed biography Atatürk is even more tight-lipped. There we are told that ‘Eastern Anatolia is inhos
pitable at the best of times’, and if its Armenians were ‘deported’, it was because they were drawn to the Russians and had risen against Ottoman rule. No doubt ‘the Armenian clearances’ were ‘a brutal act of ethnic cleansing’, but the CUP leaders had a ‘simple justification: “It was them or us” ’.76 Any comment? Just a line. ‘The deportations strained Ottoman communications and deprived Anatolia of almost all its craftsmen’. German railroad traffic was going to be strained too.

  Even Eric-Jan Zürcher, the Dutch historian who has done more than any other scholar to bring to light the linkages between the CUP underground and Kemal after 1918, could only allow himself, in his classic Turkey: A Modern History, the cautious subjective avowal that while it ‘might be hard, if not impossible’ to prove beyond doubt, ‘this author at least is of the opinion that there was a centrally controlled policy of extermination, instigated by the CUP’. That was in 1993. A decade later, in his revised edition of 2004, the same passage reads: ‘it can no longer be denied that the CUP instigated a centrally controlled policy of extermination’.77 The alteration, though its wording has gone astray—denials continue to be heard, from chairs and columns alike—is testimony to the impact of Akçam’s work, to which Zürcher pays generous bibliographical tribute, and expresses a welcome shift in what a leading historian of Turkey feels can finally be said. But it would unwise to over-estimate the change. The reason for the pattern of evasions and contortions to be found in so much Western scholarship on Turkey that is otherwise of a high standard lies in the familiar fear of foreign—or expatriate—researchers, in any society where truth is at an official discount, that to breach national taboos will jeopardize access, contacts, friendships, at the limit bar them from the country altogether.