Re: Sick Man of Europe: Next Generation (was Michael's question)

["Andrew Hagen" <xah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was just in Turkey, albeit only as a tourist. While the people of
Turkey do face political repression in several forms, as in the cases
of some journalists who are arrested, Turkey is not a totalitarian
state. The people of Turkey have a will of their own. They can think
for themselves.

Earlier this year the Turkish supreme court ruled that a popular
political party was unconstitutional. As a result, the party was made
illegal. This has been taken out of context as evidence for massive
problems in Turkey. Turkey does face a great dilemma today. It is both
a state that usually looks to the West, and it is a Muslim country.
Most Turkish citizens are not of Arabic descent, and relations with
Arab countries vary from warm to cool. Domestically, most Turks embrace
Western values and Western modes of dress. Religion is a part of their
daily life, but they are not fundamentalist. A growing minority of
Turks have embraced fundamentalist religion, however. The reigning view
amongst commentators in Turkey is that this development is a reaction
to Westernization and in particular the currently difficult economic
times. The party that was ruled illegal was a fundamentalist party that
had as its stated objective the remolding of Turkey into an Islamist
state. Additionally, one of the leaders hinted that violence was a
legitimate option to attain this goal. Such statements violate the
Turkish constitutional provisions that political parties may not
threaten the secular nature of the republic, and may not resort to
violence to attain their political goals. The party appealed their case
to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), but ECHR ruled in a 3-2
decision that this did not violate the broad European human rights
treaty that Turkey signed some time ago. Two party officials were
jailed, but due to legal maneuvering, they were granted amnesty after
only short sentences were served.

Turkey is a country neglected of our attention here in the West. As
Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk intended it, it is a grand
experiment on whether a secular, primarily Muslim republic that draws
upon Western political traditions will stand. Its birth as a republic
was a minor miracle when one considers how the Ottoman Empire
collapsed.

The Armenian genocide was of course atrocious and unjustified. The
existence of the genocide is not taught to Turkish school children. The
series of conflicts and wars fought by the Turkish people in the years
1912-1922 resulted in many Turkish casualties, yet provided for Turkish
independence. As the Armenian genocide occurred during that time, my
guess is that the loss of life in largely unrelated military matters
has acted as a blinder on the consciousness of Turks today as to the
Armenian genocide. The early history of the modern Turkish state is an
interesting and important subject.

Since charting a course away from the imperial past of its predecessor
state, Turkey has made great strides in reaching for the higher ideals
of the "open society." Admittedly, this has not taken place overnight,
as some think it should.

The large issue before Turkey today is whether a true national security
council should be created to firmly put the military under civilian
control during this time of great economic stress. Part of the question
in Turkey, a nation where the military enjoys the highest prestige
amongst social institutions, is whether an application for EU
membership should be filed with Brussels. Every EU country has a
civilian national security council. Ideally, an EU defensive force will
created. In my view, the EU should eventually be extended to Eastern
Europe, Russia, and other countries like Turkey. It may be that the
left-leaning Prime Minister Ecevit will not have the opportunity to
decide this question, as the public is extremely unhappy with the
government's economic policies. Turkish GDP recessed 11% (?!) in 2Q
2001. If an early election is called, Ecevit will lose. The likely
winner would be the right-leaning Erdogan, the former mayor of
Istanbul. His stance toward the EU is not clear.

Turkey is moving closer to that day when the contradictions inherent in
it must be faced. I'm confident that the many diverse and warmhearted
people of Turkey will find some way to continue living in peace, and
find ways to significantly boost their mutual prosperity.

Finally, an unrelated note. If you want to travel to a country with
lots of fascinating history, unending ancient structures in various
stages of ruination and preservation, incredible food and friendly
people, a country where modernity constantly interacts with forces
rooted firmly in the past, Turkey is a great choice.

Andrew Hagen
xah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001 16:36:21 EDT, SOncu@xxxxxxx wrote:

>Friends,
>
>Let me tell you that it is impossible for mortals like me to keep pace with
>the discussions on PEN-L. I was thinking about responding to Michael's
>original question but when I looked at the archives, I saw that you had
>already produced a ton of e-mails on the subject. I apologize for responding
>so late but here you go.
>
>Let me start with what Andrew said:
>
>" The United States, India, Israel, Turkey, and Mexico were able to
>remain both open societies and independent. Each of these successful
>nations embraced capitalism, albeit to different extents."
>
>Independent maybe, at least for some time, but Turkey, that is, the Turkish
>Republic (TR), has never been an open society and this remains true even
>today. From 1923 until the beginning of the Cold War, TR had been under a one
>party rule. The founding leader of the party, Mustafa Kemal, a former Ottoman
>General, was also the national chief and the concept of a national chief
>still plays an important role in the current day Turkish politics.
>
>Mustafa Kemal went to such extremes as accepting as his last name Ataturk
>(the father of Turks), given to them by the National Assembly a few years of
>the founding of TR.  One of the recent debates I had witnessed a while ago
>among some Turkish socialists was on whether Kemal was the Lenin or Stalin of
>Turkey. While Marxist-Leninist were arguing that he was more like a Stalin ,
>Kemalist-socialists, which is a contradiction in terms in my view, were
>arguing that he was the Lenin of Turkey. Coincidentally, these
>Kemalists-socialist happen to be Maoists as well and I don't think they have
>any objection to the concept of a "national chief".  Some others consider
>Kemal a benevolent dictator, and maybe he was, but benevolent or not,
>dictators repress people and kill some whether they like it or not. In
>another e-mail Michael said: "... I am sure that if I were committed to the
>success of the revolution, I would have had to do nasty deeds that would have
>made me shudder." Mustafa Kemal was comitted to the succes of "his"
>revolution and did nasty deeds that probably made him shudder later.
>
>The Turkish "revolution" of 1919-1922 had broken out in a poor economy, in
>the Sick Man of Europe, which had not had the ability to confront the
>imperialism powers head on. Clandestine operations had been doing great
>damage to the society.  Less committed citizens had been bribed already.
>Misinformation had confused people, creating factional divisions.  Further,
>the society had been divided among different ethnic groups and these
>ethnic-national-religous differences had been under manipulation by the Great
>Powers of the time. At the time the Hundred Years Peace, as Polanyi calls it,
>had already been over and the imperialists of the time had no reason to see
>the Ottoman Empire intact and decided that it was time to dismember her.
>
>The Turkish "revolution" of 1919-1922 was an anti-imperialist independence
>struggle against the Great Powers of the time. And the Kemalists (although
>Kemalism remained undefined until the Great Depression of 1929-32 and there
>still is much confusion about it) won this struggle. From there followed the
>Turkish Republic, which was founded in 1923. Kemalists were off-springs of
>theYoung Turks and hence Kemalists' original intention was same as that of
>the Young Turks, with whom they had coexisted for a while until the
>anihilation of their ancestors (guess by whom): To save the Ottoman Empire
>and install capitalism there from above. Their original intention was by no
>means to bring the Empire to an end and build a republic. But as an old
>fellow once said, "the many individual wills active in history for the most
>part produce results quite other than those inteded - often quite the
>opposite."
>
>One thing remained the same though: the urge to install capitalism into the
>pre-capitalist Turkey from above, in some sense, in a manner similar to
>upgrading your operating system from Windows NT to Windows 2000. Upgrading
>from Windows NT to Windows 2000 was such a night-mare for me that I can
>imagine the difficulties the Kemalists had to go through to some extent. By
>the way, I strongly recommed that you let an IT specialist do the Windows
>upgrade for you, if you are not an IT expert yourself.
>
>This installation of capitalism into the pre-capitalist Turkey is what is
>known as the Kemalist revolution. Some argue that the Kemalist "revolution"
>was a bourgeois (unbelievable, I spelled it right this time) democratic
>revolution. I disagree. There was nothing democratic about it. It was a "
>revolution" from above and its main objective was to create a national
>capitalist class by any means appropriate, including totalitarianism, so that
>Turkey can find herself a place under the sun, that is, among the first class
>capitalist nations of the world.  Although Turkey failed to achieve this
>objective, and in these days she is back to being the Sick Man of Europe once
>again, the regime in Turkey remains totalitarian to this day.
>
>Please keep in mind my friends that the above is an attempt of a
>mathematician who wanted to provide you with a brief historical account of
>the development of a non-communist (indeed, anti-communist) totalitarian
>regime based on his limited knowledge of history. Hence, there may be some
>historical errors in it. "An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
>Empire" edited by Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert is a good source to look
>at for a more reliable historical account of the era. Several books of Feroz
>Ahmad, particularly "From Young Turks to Kemalism" (this is my translation
>from turkish so the actual english name may be different) may also be useful.
>
>Going back to Andrew's assertion, we see that Turkey is not one of those
>nations who were able to remain both open societies and independent. Turkey
>is hardly an open society. Whether Turkey is succesful or not depends on what
>Andrew means by that, though by any economic standard the Turkish economy is
>beyond redemption and even in the National Security Council of Turkey
>(Turkish Military), that is, at the commanding hights of my country, the
>possibility of a "social explosion" has been the main topic for the past few
>months.
>
>As for independence, I am not sure whether we can call ourselves independent
>either: Turkey has been a toy of the US imperialism since the beginning of
>the Cold War. With the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan, we had embraced
>USA as our saviour and since then have been a satelite of the US in the
>region. The US and British planes that bomb Iraq almost daily in these days
>are stationed in Turkey and as recently as a few days ago, following the foot
>steps of her master, Turkey sent only a mid-level delegation to the UN
>Racisim Conference in Durban.
>
>Anyway! I don't think there is any proof of that communism (with a small c)
>is not inherently totalitarian in what I wrote in the above but hey!
>
>Let me finish by saying that capitalism is like a restaurant that operates on
>a "First Come - First Served" basis. A further complication is that the first
>comers have no intention to leave their tables.
>
>Best,
>Sabri Oncu
>
>