Is this a chain reaction or mass epidemic? Either way, the fact remains - the political upheavals in the Muslim world that began in Tunisia swept across North Africa and Syria, and now a wave of instability has reached Turkey. A member of the Presidium of the Academy of Geopolitical Issues Araik Stepanyan analyzed this complex, ambiguous situation in the country.
"We will identify the external and internal factors that have caused, for the lack of a better word, social unrest in Turkey.
Internal factors have deep roots. The main reason is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the Turkish Republic established by the "father of the Turks" Kemal Ataturk. He decided to raise the status of the ethnic Turks that was low in the Ottoman Empire, turning them into an overriding ethnic group and create a political nation - the Turks.
In 1926, a law was passed stating that all residents of Turkey were ethnic Turks, and different names - the Kurds, Armenians, Laz, Circassian, and so on - were insulting to the Turkish national identity and must not be used. Everybody was recorded as Turks. And, although many years have passed, the first problem in Turkey is a problem of national identity.
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There is a huge mass of people, more than half of today's Turkish population, who do not consider themselves Turks. They see themselves as citizens of Turkey, but ethnically they do not identify themselves with the Turks, and do not want to. But because they live in the country where they have to be Turks to have a chance for a career, they are considered Turks. In 2000-2002, Western funds conducted a secret survey of the Turkish population and obtained evidence that only 37 percent of all Turkey residents saw themselves as ethnic Turks. The national issue has aggravated, and rallies and slogans are convincing evidence.
The second internal factor that undermines today's Turkey is a debate about the type of the government - secular or theocratic. The elite of modern Turkey have serious disagreements about this. The heirs of the Ottoman Empire believe that the highest level of prosperity in Turkey was in the days of the Ottoman Empire, where all citizens were equal, except for Christians, and ethnicity was not emphasized. That means, people were Osman regardless of the ethnicity - the Turks, Circassian, or Kurds.
The secular government afraid of Islamic influence is holding to the legacy of Kemal Ataturk. This is the army general staff who until recently served as the guarantor of the Constitution by the secular power. But Erdogan came to power and abolished that item of the Constitution. Incidentally, this is a revolutionary step, and can be compared with the constitution of the Soviet Union whose sixth article stated that the Communist Party was the governing body of the Soviet state. Once it was removed, the state has collapsed. Eliminating his "sixth paragraph," Erdogan dealt a crushing blow to the General Staff and the army. Naturally, the army is very unhappy and wants to overthrow Erdogan, although it is not directly involved in the rallies.
Third internal factor is the Kurdish issue. The Kurds are seeking autonomy in Eastern Anatolia (the largest region of Turkey), their number is approximately 20 million. Despite the talks started by Erdogan (negotiations with Barzani, president of the Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, and Ocalan, the PKK leader) armed clashes between Kurdish rebels and the official Turkish army continue, with daily casualties on both sides. Thus, this is the third most important factor.
The fourth factor is the Armenian issue. Armenians living in the south-eastern and eastern Anatolia, the original Armenian territories of Western Armenia, have, so to speak, their hidden aspirations. They are hidden because they have bitter experience of being eliminated and thrown out. The Turkish elite, the intelligentsia, too, in turn, realizes that it is impossible not to recognize the Armenian Genocide. About three thousand Turkish intellectuals on Turkish websites apologized to the Armenians for the Genocide and eviction. Then there was football diplomacy with signing the agreement on opening the border between Turkey and Armenia. The Armenians are now fighting with diplomatic methods.
Turkish demographic policy denies all other nationalities. Turkey strongly advocates that 82 percent of the population is Turks. But for obvious reasons this is not the case. There is a vast array of Greek Muslims who do not even speak the Turkish language and as many Bulgarian Muslims.
There are Armenians who speak Kurdish, Armenians who speak Turkish and Armenians who speak the Armenian dialect. But the state considers them all Turks. This is not the case, but a reason to oppose the government in one form or another.
The fifth factor is internal - it's Alawites, a religious movement with millions of people who adhere to the same religious beliefs as Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian Alawi. When I see banners proclaiming "Erdogan, you are a thief!" I understand that these are Alawites. In the course of combat activities in Syria, Aleppo in particular, gunmen took out everything - from machines to museum exhibits, and exported them to Turkey, with the connivance of the authorities, and sold or appropriated them.
But Gezi Park or Taksim Square where rallies are held now is a special topic that overlaps, incidentally, with the Armenian issue.
First, in 1500 sultan Suleiman presented this territory to his Armenian assistant who uncovered a conspiracy. In 1560, an Armenian cemetery was laid there. The cemetery existed until late 19th century and was eliminated after a well-known cholera epidemic, but the ownership was left to the Armenian community. After the genocide in 1915, when the Armenians were expelled, the owner clearly changed. Barracks were built there, then a park. When the authorities planned to build a shopping center, the community exploded. All ethnic minorities, anti-globalization activists, gays, lesbians, football fans, the "green" joined against the destruction of the park. Clearly, everyone had different views and goals, but the only reason was rejection of the current government that none of these social groups liked. Yes, individually they are in the minority, but this is the case where the sum of minorities produces the majority, incidentally, in contrast to Russia.
There is also an external factor. The U.S. lost interest in Turkey after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Turks tried to start building a new Turkic empire, the so-called Great Turan based on pan-Turkism, but the Turkic-speaking states, newly formed in the Soviet Union, gave the initiative a cold shoulder despite the extent of the economic expansion of Turkey in these regions is impressive.
The U.S. does not really support these imperial ideas. Especially when Turkey did not provide its territory for ground operations during the recent war in Iraq, did not let the American ships into the Black Sea during the Russian-Georgian conflict in 2008, incidentally, rightly so, in accordance with the international status of the Black Sea and the Bosporus and the Dardanelles.
The White House is beginning to move away from its ally. Moreover, according to the plan of a military expert Ralph Peters of the National Military Academy of the United States, in accordance with the concept of the Greater Middle East, Turkey is disintegrated. A large Kurdistan is created, and Mount Ararat goes to Armenia. Most important task, of course, is to take control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, close access for Russia to the Mediterranean Sea, and so on. The U.S. has a clear plan and is implementing it. The European Union, of course, agrees with this plan.
America will not save Erdogan despite the fact that he supported the Muslim extremists against Assad. Only Assad is winning, and Turkey has lost its authority with the nearby neighbors. It is likely to face open hostility, because no one has forgotten the Ottoman Empire or the imperial motives of the Turkish foreign policy. Turkish leaders have painted themselves into a geopolitical trap. There are still chances of getting out of it, but, judging by Erdogan's recent statements, they are becoming slimmer every day.
All of these factors combined lead Turkey to a collapse. It will not happen overnight, but the trend is moving in this direction. All mass movements just show the causes, both external and internal. Therefore, even if the military who wants to overthrow Erdogan comes to power, and the constitution and the role of the General Staff is restored, it will be impossible to stop the process of globalization and crush the rebellion of ethnic groups.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — FOR the past few years, there has been a general optimism about Turkish democracy in Western capitals, especially in Washington, thanks to the economic strides made by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P.
How should the United States respond to the Turkish government's reaction to dissent?
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These optimists, and even those who admit that Turkish democracy has its shortcomings, tend to subscribe to the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset’s famous modernization theory — the idea that greater democratization follows automatically as a country becomes more prosperous. Turkey has been growing rapidly and steadily over the last 11 years, the theory goes, so perhaps all we need is patience. By this logic, Mr. Erdogan’s own economic success will inexorably bring an end to his authoritarian style of government.
But modernization theory has had little success in explaining the rise of democracy around the world. My research with Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson and Pierre Yared has shown, for example, that countries that have grown faster don’t show any greater tendency to become democratic or to consolidate democratic institutions that already exist. A few cases where democracy has followed rapid growth, as in South Korea and Taiwan, did not occur automatically but as a result of a combative political process — and a far more violent set of confrontations between the military and protesters, trade unionists and students.
And it has little relevance to this week’s protests in Turkey.
Even before the brutal suppression of the demonstrations, the belief that Turkey was on its way to becoming a mature democracy — a role model for the rest of the Middle East — had already become untenable.
As the A.K.P. consolidated its power, dissent was tolerated less and less. Judicial institutions lost the little independence they’d had, and an array of critics of the government, ranging from former high-ranking military officers to journalists, are now in jail, in most cases without having had a fair trial (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey has now surpassed China for the number of jailed journalists.)
The bulwarks of democracy have not exactly distinguished themselves during the past week’s events. There has been hardly any criticism of the prime minister from within his own party (except a mild rebuke from President Abdullah Gul).
The main opposition party, which was established by the Turkish republic’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, still seems trapped in a time warp — focused solely on defending the nationalist, secularist ideology of the Turkish state.
And the Turkish news media still seems cowed into submission, so much so that it did not report much on how the small protests against a new shopping center on one of the few remaining parks in Istanbul turned into a spontaneous mass movement challenging Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarianism. Indeed, while CNN International was reporting live from Taksim Square, the local channel, CNN Turk, which is partly owned by Turner Broadcasting, was airing a program on penguins.
Even so, what began as peaceful protests by a few hundred demonstrators in Taksim Square could define Turkish democracy for years to come — for two reasons.
First, democracy doesn’t just take place at the polls, especially when the choices on the ballot are as unappealing as they have been in Turkey. British democracy came of age in the 19th century partly as a result of protests in the streets, which not only led to the enfranchisement of the previously disenfranchised but also to the formation of the Labour Party, offering new options to voters. Large numbers of people pouring into the street in several Turkish cities, even in the face of heavy-handed police action, may be Turkish democracy’s coming-of-age moment.
Second, there is a real chance that these protests, and the political movements that they might spawn, will transcend the deep-rooted but stale political divisions of the last two decades, divisions captured pithily by Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he said in 1998: “In this country there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks. Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.”
In Turkey, these terms have nothing to do with skin color. “White Turks” are the well-educated, wealthy secular elites who see themselves as the defenders of Ataturk’s legacy. They are often associated with government bureaucracy, the military and big businesses in major Turkish cities. “Black Turks” are those that the White Turks look down upon as poorly educated, lower class and trapped by their piety. Elites tend to view them as peasants or being unable to shake off their peasant heritage.
Although the Turkish military periodically used religion as a weapon in its struggle against the political left, particularly after the 1980 military coup, by the 1990s the most important challenge to the secular elite’s rule came from religious conservative parties, who unabashedly represented the Black Turks.
In 1997, the military toppled a government led by the A.K.P.’s predecessor, the Welfare Party, which was subsequently shut down by the constitutional court. It similarly threatened the A.K.P. in 2007, with the Constitutional Court again following at its coattails and threatening to ban the party because its religious outlook violated the Turkish Constitution.
Particularly troubling for the secular elite was the fact that the wife of the new president, Mr. Gul, wore a head scarf, something banned in public spaces by the Constitution.
Since 1997, these divisions have defined Turkish politics. The military failed and the A.K.P. withstood the challenge. Turkey has become more democratic in the sense that the previously disenfranchised have become empowered. But it has not taken many steps toward liberal democracy. On the contrary, Turkish society has become more polarized between supporters of secular orthodoxy and the A.K.P., which, under Mr. Erdogan’s leadership, has used its newly acquired power to exact revenge on the military, secular elites and its other critics with increasingly authoritarian certitude.
This week’s protests are unlikely to topple the government or even force an about-face by the prime minister. Their import lies in their symbolism.
Suddenly, there is a diverse group of people pouring into the streets to demand not handouts or policy concessions but a voice in Turkish politics. The protesters are not hard-core opposition supporters wishing to turn the clock back to the secular orthodoxy of yore but young urbanites frustrated by the A.K.P.’s increasingly unresponsive monopoly on power.
As in 19th-century Britain, if the ballot box doesn’t offer the right choices, democracy advances by direct action.
The danger in Turkey is that hard-liners in the A.K.P. will use these events to further divide society. They are already painting a picture in which the protests are an attempt to claw back the newly acquired powers of the previously disenfranchised, labeling the young men and women in the streets as alcoholics, looters and leftists.
These hard-liners have been aided by the Turkish news media, which, with a few exceptions, still obediently toes the party line. In the short run, they may well succeed, further polarizing Turkish politics and cementing the A.K.P.’s control over state institutions.
What makes these events a turning point, however, is that the discontent of a large segment of the Turkish public is now out in the open, and even if the Turkish media continues to ignore it, the knowledge of this discontent will spread.
The genie is out of the bottle. Neither it nor Turkish democracy can be put back.
Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at M.I.T., is the co-author, with James A. Robinson, of “Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy” and “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty.”