Modernization alla Turca

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Opinion by Elif Şafak

  Every analysis on Turkey needs to pay a special attention to the trajectory of modernization in Turkish cultural and political history.

  For quite some time in university circles, the notion of “modernization” was employed as a universal and fundamental stage, which all societies had to undergo at one time or another along their particular history. Only recently has this sweeping approach been replaced by a more diversified understanding, which gives room to cultural and historical variation, and acknowledges the existence of perhaps several modernizations rather than “modernization” as one single formula.

  According to this perspective, which has been crafted by, for instance, Marshall Berman in his book “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air”, although modernization is a universal phenomenon, which no culture can avoid, still, in their specific paths to modernity not all societies did proceed in the same way. There is no all-encompassing procession of modernization that is equally applicable to all contexts. Rather than that, there have been, and still are, distinct experiences of modernity.

  There are, for example what Gregory Jusdanis calls “belated modernities,” countries that have been “late” in building a modern nation-state, countries where the major driving force of modernization is not the society but the State. In that sense Greece, Bulgaria, many Balkan countries, countries in various parts of the Middle East and Turkey are all cases of belated modernity in respect to particular aspects of their development.

  There are general assumptions concerning modernization. If something is modern it is automatically supposed to be “better developed”. The dominant usage of the term entails a firm belief in it as progress on the whole and at every single level. Modernization is associated with the emergence of civil society, with the end of traditions, with innovation and change. In the Turkish case, in addition to these expectations, modernization means three other things.

  Firstly, it meant Westernization. Every endeavor to modernize the society at large in a non-Western context entails a process of Westernization and the adoption or negotiation of Western ways, values and thinking patterns.

  Secondly, in Turkey, the wave of modernization -- which goes back to late Ottoman times and cannot simply be taken from 1923 -- at one point converged with the tide of secularism and the establishment of a modern secular Republican regime. 

  Thirdly, one other characteristic of modernization in the Turkish case was that it was a process carried out from above. In the Western world, modernization was generally initiated and crafted by the forces of production, and the parallel forces of industrialization, urbanization and class conflict. In Turkey, modernization followed a different trajectory; it was more often than not an outcome of the efforts of the reformist state elite. Thereby the command the elite had on the society and culture at large was going to be the guiding force. In other words, rather than originating within the civil society, modernization in Turkey was forced by the state; rather than evolving from below, it spread from above. Many of the problems we face are directly related with this particular aspect of Turkish modernization.

  As a novelist, it is especially this last feature of modernization alla turca that interests me most: the role of the cultural elite in Turkey.

  The French sociologist and philosopher, Bourdieu distinguishes two distinct systems of building a social hierarchy that operate in modern societies. The first stratum is economic, in which position and power are determined by money and property. Herein, society revolves capital. The second stratum, however, is cultural or symbolic. Herein one s status is determined by how much cultural or "symbolic capital" one possesses. I will argue that it is this symbolic capital that served as the leading force in the construction and consolidation of Turkish modernization.

  In other words, any analysis on Turkish modernization needs to pay a special attention to the cultural elite -- seemingly the most progressive and open-minded, yet underneath, the least ready and most resilient to change and transformation.