The Speculative Identity of Modern Turkey

This past Sunday, Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development party took 47 percent of the vote in the Turkish parliamentary elections.¹ The Times characterized the results of the vote as a “slap at the secular state establishment” and a “referendum on the future of Turkish democracy.” Assuming this is correct, how should we conceive this anti-secular (and possibly anti-Democratic) backlash?

The radical antinomy found in Turkish politics—the split between secular, Western, democratic values and irrational fundamentalism—requires some deconstructing. Is the split really so clear? As is often mentioned in regard to Turkish politics, the secular Turkish military has a history of “stepping in” to the political sphere when Turkey’s own democracy threatens to destabilize the foundation of Kemalism. Thus, in a way, Western secularism’s function in Turkish politics is the opposite of democracy: it proposes instead to prevent the “excess” of democracy from unravelling democracy and secularization itself. We find this same problem in none other than Iraq, where the very similar threat to democracy through democratic means is prevented by the spectral presence of U.S. soldiers acting as anti-democratic “safeguards.”

If one chooses to argue that protecting democracy through undemocratic means is justified, then we should acknowledge the suppositions of such a paradox. What kind of democracy are we trying to protect? Is it democracy we’re protecting, or something that we can get only through repression vis-a-vis democracy? Are we not, in fact, just trying to justify the suppression of a type of revolution we (or anyone else) find(s) to be not in compliance with Western Enlightenment ideology?

In a similar way, the very origins of Kemalism are not uniquely Turkish, either. Modern Turkey rose out of the smoldering ashes of the collapsed Ottoman Empire after its capitulation in World War I (and its territorialization on behalf of the Allies). However, the Turkish nationalist movement only solidified as a reaction to Western occupation of Istanbul and İzmir, eventually resulting in the Treaty of Lausanne.

We also shouldn’t fall into the trap of associating fundamentalism with absolute Evil, nor reason with some higher good, as is the doxa of today’s ideological constellation. Take for instance the fact that during the Crusades, the only countries (including pre-modern Turkey) that would openly accept religious sects considered heretical to the Catholic Church were undemocratic Islamic governments. This is true in regard to the Spanish Inquisition as well, in which case many Spanish Jews were forced to emigrate and were accepted by Islamic Turkey (there is in fact, to this day, still a small community of Spanish-speaking Jews in Turkey). Is it not also true (and without coincidence) that one of the most horrendous massacres of the 20th century, the Armenian genocide, was committed by the Young Turks, who were responsible for restoring Turkey’s constitutional monarchy?

With regard to Turkey’s historical and teleological epochs, we should assert the properly Marxist analysis of what seems to be the source of Turkey’s political antinomy. Was not the very source of the Ottoman Empire’s decline (ending in 1908 with the Young Turk Revolution) that of pre-capitalist relations and the failure to industrialize in relation to Western Europe?² Thus, perhaps the disavowed Real of Turkish politics is precisely not an epic struggle between reason and fundamentalism, but capitalism itself. Maybe this is what links America with Turkey: do we not both have fundamentalist-populist groups upset at the implacable, transformative power of global Capital, which threatens the very core of one’s cultural traditions?

The critical maxim, then, that can be discerned through the varied and insufficient interpretations of Sunday’s vote, is the embodiment of an objective, positive refutation of the popular “clash of civilizations” thesis as proposed by Huntington, Fukuyama, et al: perhaps, rather than being a “clash of civilizations,” the recent Turkish election demonstrates that the most defining aspect of our current era of late capitalism is actually a “clash within civilizations.”³

1. Ruling Party in Turkey Wins Broad Victory, New York Times, July 22, 2007. ↩
2. Point owed to Tariq Ali. ↩
3. Point owed to Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso. ↩