Turkey’s Hidden Revolution
How Prime Minister Erdoğan accidentally fostered a generation of Turkish liberals.
Young Turks, like those protesting in Ankara on June 4, don't fit into the country's old ideological categories.
Photo by Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images
Photo by Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images
On Aug. 5 a court in western Turkey handed down life sentences to a
score of retired military officers, including the former chief of the
general staff, as well as politicians and media figures, for plotting
attacks that would have hurled the country into chaos in preparation for
a military coup. The trial was widely regarded as flawed, but the
verdicts did not provoke big protests in a nation that until a few years
ago held the Army in higher esteem than any other institution. A few
days later, at the end of Ramadan, the cities emptied as usual and the
resorts were packed. Amid the festivities, the decapitation of the
country’s former ruling establishment was largely forgotten.
To an outsider it might seem as though the Islamist prime minister,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has achieved what his former counterpart in Egypt,
Mohammed Morsi, failed to do: boot the generals into irrelevance and
impress on his opponents the fullness of their defeat. But that
impression is incomplete. Over the past decade, emboldened by impressive
mandates from the electorate, Erdoğan has indeed done much to
subordinate the Army to the civilian authorities, but he has had help
from an unlikely quarter: a generation of Turks who, although secular
and deeply opposed to political Islam, no longer want the generals to
fight their battles for them. These Turks are young (or youngish), and
what they know of modern countries tells them that it’s not a good idea
to have the Army running things behind the scenes. Nor has the military
always contented itself with remaining behind the scenes; since 1960 the
generals have staged three coups (four if you include the “soft” coup
of 1997), befriended gangsters and neofascists, and sabotaged efforts to
end a decades-old war against Kurdish insurgents. So, the silence of
these younger, secular Turks after Aug. 5 was meaningful. It was a
silence of disassociation.
Who are they, and what do they stand for? For the answer, look at the
protests that swept Turkey this June, starting around some threatened
sycamores in central Istanbul, spreading to no fewer than 60 of the
country’s 81 provinces, and ending with five dead and many thousands
injured. Amid the chaos and tear gas, new elements in society were
discernible; these elements will be prominent in the political and
cultural struggles of the future.
The old Turkey—the Turkey I came to know after moving to the country
in 1996—was dominated by big, obvious blocs: left, right, and Islamist,
each with its own culture, leaders, “look,” and foundation myths. Each
bloc was subject to an internal tyranny, with leaders-for-life and the
common foot soldier shielded from truths he wouldn’t understand. The
media, academe, and the huge public sector bought into this system. It
was hard to get on without being a client of one bloc or another.
Everyone knew where he stood.
This summer’s agitation was suggestive of a different Turkey,
variegated, harder to classify. The old blocs are gone. There is now a
concatenation of groups, interests, forums, and individuals—different
shades of identity and belief. Over the past decade, the country has
gained the most sophisticated green, feminist, and gay rights movements
in the Muslim world. A large, overwhelmingly secular minority, the
proto-Shia Alevis, have emerged from semi-hiding, while the Kurds, long
reviled and detested, enjoy greater prominence and freedom than at any
time since the Ottoman era.
All of these groups were represented on the streets in June—rallied
not by tub-thumping leaders or powerful editors, but by fellow
protesters using Twitter and Facebook. Not forgetting the housewives
banging pots at their windows, the students, private-sector workers, and
football fans who joined the protests, and the celebrities who were
photographed cleaning up the mess. Turkey has a new bloc, betrothed to
none of the established political parties, loyal readers of no single
newspaper: a liberal bloc.
The irony is that the person who did the most to bring liberal Turkey
into existence is now its adversary: Erdoğan himself. It seems
outlandish to recall, but he is the man who authored some of the most
comprehensive pro-democracy reforms the country has known. Erdoğan’s
measures were designed above all to benefit his own, Islamist supporters
who had been persecuted by the old secularist elite. But Alevis and
gays and the others also came up for air. A forgotten group, the
Armenians—a group that almost symbolises Turkey’s troubled historical
conscience—shot back into prominence. When the Armenian newspaper editor
Hrant Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist in 2007, hundreds of
thousands of Turks marched in protest. “We are all Hrant!”
All the while, Erdoğan presided over an unprecedented expansion in
material prosperity, lifting millions into the middle class, where they
enjoyed greater mobility, educational opportunities, and freedom of
choice. The result was a more diverse, complicated, and irreverent
culture than Turkey had seen for many decades.
Erdoğan does not seem to like this Turkey, or the liberals who
inhabit it. He has criticized their drinking habits and their abortions;
opponents in the media have been silenced through a combination of
behind-the-scenes pressure and the courts. The prime minister supports
radical changes to Istanbul’s already much-abused skyline—a mammoth
hilltop mosque, the world’s biggest airport, a new bridge across the
Bosporus, and endless shopping malls, all approved with little
oversight. The sycamores were the last straw.
Erdoğan’s reaction to the June protests was neither thoughtful nor
generous. He called the demonstrators “looters” and social media a
“plague” spread by “social delinquents.” He congratulated the police,
whose brutality had been deplored by human rights campaigners around the
world, on writing “an epic of heroism.” Now he is lashing out, suing
critics and complaining of an international conspiracy led by a sinister
“interest rate lobby.” False modesty is not among the prime minister’s
faults; he speaks of himself in the third person, when not using the
royal “we.” He hopes to end 2014 as the occupant of a much-empowered
Turkish presidency.
Erdoğan still has the numbers—pious, commercially minded Turks who
constitute the country’s new establishment, and who share his
conservative views. But his opponents are also a formidable force. There
should be a way for liberals and conservatives to coexist—it’s the norm
in many countries. Can Erdoğan be the leader of all Turks, even those
who disagree with him? The auguries are not hopeful.
Labels: Democracy, Islamism, Social-Cultural Deviations, Turkey
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