Europeanization and its enemies

Sunday, December 25, 2005

  “What s going on in Turkey?” numerous Westerners have been asking worriedly these past days. “Is the country moving away from the process of Europeanization?” “Where did all these court cases against voices of criticism come from all of a sudden?” “Is there an escalation in nationalist ideology?” they ask.

  There are two answers to these questions: One is quite long and the other much shorter. While reserving the long answer for another article, please allow me in this piece to offer the short answer, namely, “yes and no.” Turkey is as pro-European Union as ever, if not more so. And yet there is in Turkey, just like in many other countries today, a clash of opinions.

  As the country s bid to join the EU gathers pace, Turkey has become the scene of a silent clash between two deeply-rooted forces: Nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The clash is increasingly crystallized in a series of legal actions springing from the controversial Article 301 of the new penal code. Latest in this sequence is the charge against five leading columnists each accused of insulting the Turkish judiciary. They face between six months and 10 years imprisonment.

  Writing for different newspapers and coming from different ideological backgrounds, these five columnists are not of the same opinion in every respect. What unites them, however, is that they had all openly criticized an attempted court intervention to prevent the infamous Istanbul Conference on late Ottoman Armenians, which took place on Sept. 23, 24 and 25. The state prosecutor who filed charges against the columnists last week maintains that by criticizing the court s intervention they have tried to “influence” the judicial process and given offence to Turkey s judicial organs. In a vexing bureaucratic chain, every intellectual essay criticizing the Turkish judiciary s nationalist impulse ends up as another prosecution -- and so might this essay end up in one.

  Turkey s knee-jerk nationalistic forces seem to have launched a counterattack. The first signal of this backlash came during the Armenian Conference as a mixed mob of ultra-nationalists waited outside the building with tomatoes and eggs in their hands and slander on their tongues. In the weeks that followed, ultranationalist columnists took it upon themselves to pen belligerent columns directly attacking the participants; a crooked alliance of diplomats and academics organized “alternative” conferences to prove that the Armenian allegations regarding the genocide were nothing but a hoax. Recently, in a conference in the Anatolian town Muğla, a retired diplomat grabbed the microphone while someone else was speaking and decreed that the Turks had never hurt the Armenian minority, and that it was the other way round since Armenians had collaborated with the Russians to kill innocent Turks by attacking Muslim villages. The audience cheered and applauded. It is amidst this nationalist counterblast that the five prominent columnists are now being prosecuted.

  Though the conventional elite act as a stumbling block in front of the EU process they by no means form a homogenous group. They are rather a crooked alliance of strange bedfellows: some bureaucrats, diplomats, journalists, politicians and some state prosecutors… a miscellaneous cluster of people who have but one thing in common: they all want to preserve the status quo in one way or another and see themselves as the owners of the key of the regime. To assure their power they see every opponent who challenges their authority as a “threat.” Among the adherents of this old alliance are ultra-nationalist state prosecutors who in the last few months have been busier than usual filing cases against a number of writers, journalists and editors. As a result an increasing number of intellectuals are being brought to court under the now infamous Article 301 that purports to control the minds of Turkish citizens, not only in Turkey but also those abroad, in that it outlines “in cases where denigration of ‘Turkishness is committed by a Turkish citizen in another country the punishment shall be increased by one third.” Article 301 is an impediment to freedom of speech. It leaves the distinction between “criticism” and “disparagement of Turkishness” so vague that anyone who criticizes the state ideology can easily be accused of denigrating the nation. Such elusiveness makes it possible for arbitrary interpretation by judges.

  Turkey s EU bid needs to be supported now more than ever. Both Turkey and the EU are in need of each other s progressive forces, and they are in need of each other. It is important to show support for this process both domestically and internationally. Along with the EU process, there are imperative democratic changes underway in Turkey and it is generally accepted that there is no going back in this historic process. The problem is this: The bigger the transformation the deeper the panic becomes to those who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo, and hence the louder their voices. Some in my country seem intimidated by the forces of democratization and Europeanization, and are all similarly against cosmopolitanism. As the clash increases, it is quite plausible that more and more intellectuals will be punished for what one of Turkey s greatest poets, Nazım Hikmet, once defined as “not giving up hope in the world, in your country, your people…”