H. Akın Ünver http://www.akinunver.com/scholar op-eds, articles and other written works Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:33:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Inside Story – Will the 1980 coup trial heal Turkey’s wounds? http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=421 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=421#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:33:35 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=421

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=421 0 U.S. Foreign Policy and The Arab Spring http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=387 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=387#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 05:42:13 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=387

This article, appeared on the Political Reflections Magazine, vol.3, n.2, is the second part of my review of FPA’s Great Decisions episode on the Arab Spring: The first part, providing a general overview of the debate can be found here.

**********************************

As the uncertainty of the Arab Spring continues, the debate on the future of the movement and the U.S. role in it grows into a colorful debate. As a part of this policy debate I was recently asked to review Foreign Policy Association’s Great Decisions episode on the Arab Spring, featuring columnist Mona Eltahawy and Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and also featuring comments from key foreign policy heavyweights like Madeleine Albright, General Michael Hayden, Robert Malley and Carl Gershman.(1)

The debate in the episode is in many ways a small- scale projection of the overall U.S. policy debate on the current and prospective U.S. role in the Arab Spring. It focused on the issues of U.S. military help, danger of militancy, and the Arab Spring view to- wards Israel and the United States. This article will focus on three of the most under-studies aspects of the U.S. role in the Arab Spring: American policy and the academic debate, the paradigm of ‘doing’ in U.S. foreign policy and the question of overlap between American domestic and foreign policies.

Figures taken from: Trevor Hall ‘Foreign Policy on Hold?’ The National Interest. December 6, 2011

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/foreign-policy-hold-6222

Predicting the Arab Spring: U.S. policy and the academic debate

The widespread policy and media narrative of the Arab Spring is that the movement has been a surprise; emerging completely out of the blue, catching every political player flatfooted. ‘Even the regimes and administrations that were targeted by the Arab Spring movements couldn’t see it coming’ (2) – or so it is argued.

While this shock is somewhat understandable among the regimes of the Middle East whose administrations never really established rigorous ‘academia- watch’ departments that follow the academic literature and debate, I can’t really contextualize the surprise in the American executive branch circles as almost every branch have one or more academia- watch programs staffed by quite capable analysts. My curiosity grows even further as it was Gary Fuller, a former CIA political analyst who wrote about the danger of the Middle East ‘youth bulge’ back in 1989 and its possible dangers to regime stability, as well as U.S. Middle East policy (3). The youth bulge literature grew in the 1990s, highlighting statistical correlations between nations with youth bulge demographics and the likelihood of socio-economic discontent. Further studies by political scientists like Jack Goldstone, (4) Gunnar Heinsohn (5) and more recently Richard Cincotta – Christian Mesquida (6) reinforced Fuller’s observations. But the most critical warning was given by perhaps one of the most read books of its genre, Roger Owen and Şevket Pamuk’s work on Middle East economics, whose concluding chapter argued that based on the MENA region population growth statistics in the 1990s, the region had to maintain a minimum of %7 economic growth. Other- wise, authors warned, the region would fall to youth bulge demonstrations by 2010. (7)

Furthermore, the assumption that the Middle East youth bulge would create such a domino effect was one of the hypotheses behind the 2003 War in Iraq. Bernard Lewis for example (8), was aware of the repeated warnings by Middle Eastern demographics experts and argued that it was the duty of the United States to knock the first domino by invading Iraq. In a romanticist Wilsonian spirit, it was argued that the presence of a large U.S. force intended to overthrow perhaps the most hated dictator in the region would inspire the Arabs to rise and overthrow their dictators as well and create a region-wide movement like the Third Wave democracy movements in Eastern Europe. However, due to the way in which the U.S. entered the war in Iraq and handled the conflict ended up delaying this domino effect, effectively causing people to rally around their dictators against a possible American invasion, strengthening the position of the very dictators the United States sought to remove.(9)

However, despite the existence of a substantial literature that warned American policy-makers about the Arab Spring as much as two decades ago (including forecasts commissioned by the intelligence service) Washington appeared unable to make sense of what was happening in the region or what to do about it. This raises serious questions over the executive branch’s handling of academic information and forecasts.

I recall from the International Studies Association (ISA) annual conference of 2010, that a group of senior analysts from various government agencies were boasting how closely foreign policy and intelligence programs were following ‘all that’s going on in the literature’, in response to an inquiry from the audience questioning the government’s rationale of ig- noring the academia’s warnings before the war in Iraq. Just about a month after the conference Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation started the Arab Spring. Ever since the American administration has been scrambling – with mixed results – to situate itself with regard to the movement, still not convinc- ing those who think the government organs are following the academic literature – at best – preferentially.

U.S. foreign policy and the ‘paradigm of doing’

Go to Google and search for the query: ‘What should the United States do?’ – you will end up with thou- sands of issues and agenda topics on which some expert is ‘urging’ the United States to do something about. Carry on with the search adding a random country each time; you’d probably be surprised to see that American decision-makers are called on to act in some way on almost every country in the world and every global issue.

Although many American foreign policy professionals don’t like ‘the E-word’, feeling an urge to act in a large volume of area, including literally the other side of the world, is one of the main characteristics of an imperial consciousness. (10) I don’t necessarily say this in a pejorative way: projecting an imperial consciousness is not the same as being an empire. Yet cost- benefit calculations don’t travel far with ‘normal’ states; their security concerns are geographically close. (11) The ability to make these calculations globally is the mark of imperial ambition and capabilities.

Therefore as long as the ‘what should we do?’ paradigm remains integral to American foreign policy-making and ‘not doing’ is often associated with disin- terest or isolation, we can’t not talk about U.S. foreign policy form a non-imperial perspective. A hegemon can be benign or malignant and therefore an imperial foreign policy consciousness should not readily be understood in terms of global domination, but the hegemon’s perception of itself (and the following policy discourse about its intentions) will usually reflect benignity. (12) Furthermore, the hegemon’s foreign policy behavior and how this behavior is perceived by the international system often change over an extended period of time. Therefore, while talking about ‘what the U.S. should do’ about an international event (in our case, the Arab Spring) it would perhaps be a better idea to direct our inquiry not towards what the U.S. should do, but rather towards which U.S. we are talking about.

Think about two cases; the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the Iraq War of 2003-11. Both have been important cases of American military action and both instances take place literally on the other side of the world.

Although the target of two military interventions is the same, there are in fact two very different kinds of American presence in each instance. The Gulf War coincided with the end of the Cold War whose victor was the West, led by the United States. Having prevailed in this protracted conflict, the United States had managed to force the USSR into bankruptcy, without coming into direct military confrontation and such American leadership – coupled with the fact that the ever-imminent threat of a nuclear war was now over – rendered the benign hegemon image of the United States credible. The size of the U.S. economy, its living standards, democratic credentials, multi-ethnic, religious, linguistic character and its level of social freedoms dwarfed the considerable majority of the world. On top of all this, the United States still refrained from a multilateral intervention to attack Iraq and scrambled to build a global coalition, even including its Cold War nemesis: Russia. Furthermore, the move against Iraq was decided institutionally, through consensus reached within NATO and UN. Let’s then consider 2003. In 2003 we have an administration that is still coping with the post-traumatic stress of 9/11. Instead of following a uniting discourse, the administration did not refrain from polarizing the global public opinion by introducing the “with us, or against us” doctrine. Furthermore, in a very clumsy political move, the Bush administration had defined Iran within the ‘axis of evil’ even though U.S.-Iranian relations were going through a delicate process of détente under the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and Mohammad Khatami and the streets of Tehran were filled with mourners who showed support for the U.S. after 9/11. The bullying rhetoric of the Bush administration, not only towards the ‘axis of evil’, but also towards U.S. allies who were unconvinced about the American justifications for a war in Iraq further isolated the administration. Then by using deliberately inaccurate intelligence to make the case for a war and then, deciding to bypass NATO and the UN to launch an attack on Saddam with a poorly assembled coalition that fell apart very soon all added to the process that took the United States from a considerably powerful and prestigious position and dragged it into a mud of international isolation and opposition, reversing its image as a benign hegemon. Additionally, as the war went on, growing number of torture cases, frequency of illegal combat methods and mounting civilian deaths, ended up rendering the U.S. flag to represent the exact opposite of what it represented in 1991 in the Middle East. More importantly, 9/11 succeeded perhaps, in the sense that it forced the United States to drift off from its declared core values and what it came to represent. Using the war on terrorism as a pretext for reducing civil liberties, such as media censorship relat- ed to Iraq and Afghanistan war, the NSA electronic surveillance program, DARPA’s ‘Total Information Awareness’, lack of judicial oversight concern over the National Security Letters, Section 505 of the USA Patriot Act which enabled FBI to demand records without prior court approval, as well as the Protect America Act of 2007 – all added up to this drift from core values.

Perhaps the American public isn’t really aware how closely foreign countries, institutions and organizations follow U.S. politics. This is also true in the Middle East. Even so-called anti-American groups and organizations follow American media; after all anti- Americanism paradoxically takes its power from its narrative of the United States. Yet, American policy- makers must take note of this shift: foundations of American foreign policy and its global influence rests not in what the United States does; it rests in what the United States is. If the United States distances itself from the fundamentals of its social and political identity, a great divergence emerges between its domestic and foreign policies. For a successful foreign policy, all countries – but especially the hegemon – must maintain considerable overlap between its domestic and foreign policy ideals and practice.

Domestic-foreign policy overlap

Therefore, when we return back to the question “what should the U.S. do” with regard to the Arab Spring, the only level-headed answer becomes: it should demonstrate the same domestic political standards that it advocates in its foreign policy. This is even more relevant and important with regard to the Arab Spring, which is essentially a call for democracy, liberties and better economic distribution. There is absolutely nothing the United States can ‘do’ – as in policy – to expedite, ease or form this movement. The best it can do, would be to become the inspiration it used to be for these kinds of movements – and if I were pressed to point to one issue on which the U.S. can become such an inspiration, I would highlight the question of financial recovery. As long as the United States deals with a serious financial crisis, with visible side effects of unemployment and increasing homelessness, its inspiration to the Arab Spring will be limited. While the Obama administration has taken steps towards tackling these issues, we can’t really talk about an American inspiration until the U.S. fully recovers from this recession.

On the same note, no amount of policy ‘doing’ will improve the credibility of the United States as a role model as long as movements like Occupy Wall Street attract so much popular support and there is so much anger in the United States towards income inequality and poor redistribution of wealth. After all, this is also what the Arab Spring is about. If anything, it will increase the solidarity between the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, but that doesn’t imply anything for U.S. foreign policy. More worrisome, U.S. foreign policy discourse against the violent suppression of the Arab Spring demonstrations simply become invalid when the Arab youth watches the NYPD’s heavy handed tactics of suppression of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators or read the blogs describing in detail, how the UC Davis campus police pepper sprayed the passive demonstrators on campus or go on YouTube and watch videos of police brutality directed towards Occupy Oakland protes- tors. As Arab feminists and gender equality activists see the Capitol Hill hearing on contraception featuring an all-male panel of experts in which women are deliberately prevented from testifying, as the Arab youth, attracted to the opportunities of the United States read about the austere Arizona law on immigration or the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program or as the Arab politicians examining the U.S. electoral system read about the Supreme Court rule rejecting a ban on corporate political spending, effectively increasing the penetration of the big oil companies, Wall Street banks and health insurance companies into the electoral system, the question of why the United States has lost so much influence in foreign affairs in the last few years and why it currently is not an inspiration to the Arab Spring become quote obvious.

Yes, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube became a part of the Middle Eastern revolutions. Some over-excited Western analysts even dubbed the Arab Spring a ‘Twitter Revolution’ perhaps unaware of the fact that the mobilization of these revolutions took place primarily in the traditional public spaces of the Middle East: the mosque and the coffee house. However, as much as the West reaches out into the Middle East through online media, so can the Middle East reach into the United States and follow its daily workings through these media outlets. Just like the ‘information revolution’ nullified state control on information and propaganda in the Middle East, it also opened up a parallel window for the Middle East, into the everyday life in the United States, independent of the American foreign policy discourse of what the United States is. And as a result, the United States domestic politics have become a function of its foreign policy image perhaps more than ever. Globalization and online media is a double-edged sword – and we all have heard the overused truism ‘U.S. foreign policy begins at home, in domestic politics’. But what is it that we call ‘home’? Is this home the launching pad of a malignant empire, domestically reflecting the same mistrust, greed and fleeting calculations that the same empire pursues in its foreign policy, or, is this home a working example of a human ideal – a new way of life and interacting with the social, political and economic environment?

The United States will most probably emerge from its current crisis by re-creating itself along an updated version of its ideals. But how it does so and what this new identity will imply will be the only honest answer one can ever give to any questions arising from the post-Arab Spring U.S. foreign policy.

—————–

Notes:
* Dr. Ünver is the Ertegün Lecturer of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

  1. To watch this episode, please refer to the author’s review of the episode on the FPA Blogs: <http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/2012/02/28/ review-fpa-great-decisions-arab-spring/>
  2. On this, see ‘The Arab Spring and Why Nobody Saw it Coming?’ Reinsurance Magazine. June 24, 2011. <http:// www.reinsurancemagazine.com/articles/arab- spring-and-why-nobody-saw-it-coming>
  3. A more accessible 1995 version is: Gary Fuller. “The Demographic Backdrop to Ethnic Conflict: A Geographic Overwiew,” in: CIA (Ed.): The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990s (Washington 1995), p. 151-154
  4. Goldstone, Jack A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  5. Gunnar Heinsohn. ‘Vielleicht unser ganzes Leben lang: Youth bulges und die Zukunft des Terrorkrieges’, in Die Zeit Online. February 7, 2002
  6. Richard P. Cincotta and Christian G. Mesquida. ‘Authoritarianism as a Form of Sustained Low- Intensity Civil Conflict: Does Age Structure Pro- vide Insights into the Democratic Transition?’. Paper submitted at the Population Association of America 2007 Annual Meeting, Princeton.
  7. Roger Owen and Sevket Pamuk (1999) A History of Middle East Eocnomic in the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press. pp. 229-35
  8. O’Reilly is quoted in Matt Corley. ‘Rove: a win after more years in Iraq will rally the Muslim world to us’. Think Progress. March 21, 2008 <http://thinkprogress.org/ politics/2008/03/21/20720/rove-iraq-oreilly/>

     

    9. On this, see: Marvin Baker Schaffer. ‘The Iraq Experience and Domino Theory Revisited’ Joint Force Quarterly, issue 57, 2nd quarter 2010. National Defense University. <http:// www.ndu.edu/press/lib/images/jfq-57/ schaffer.pdf>

    10. On this topic, see: G. John Ikenberry. ‘America’s Imperial Ambition’ Foreign Affairs. September/ October 2002. Council on Foreign Relations. <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/58245/g-john-ikenberry/americas- imperial-ambition>

    11. This is the main hypothesis of the regional se- curity complex theory (RSCT); on this, see: Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge University Press 2003.

    12. For a discussion of benign and malignant he- gemony in international relations, see: Benjamin Miller. States, Nations and Great Powers: The sources of regional war and peace. Cam- bridge University Press.

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=387 0 The Agenda with Steve Paikin – Turkey’s Power Surge http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=378 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=378#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:34:38 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=378

You can access the full video of the program at:

http://ww3.tvo.org/video/169524/turkeys-power-surge

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=378 0 Voice of America (VOA) Röportajı – Kürt meselesi, İran ve ABD http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=369 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=369#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:32:17 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=369

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=369 0 A – Haber Röportajı: Suriye, Rusya ve Çin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=360 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=360#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:23:45 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=360

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=360 0 CNN-Turk Tarafsız Bölge (2 Mayıs 2011) http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=351 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=351#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:49:31 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=351

 

 

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=351 0 Malmcom H. Kerr Award in the News http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=338 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=338#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:09:47 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=338


AmerikaTürk

Hurriyet

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Sabah

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InternetHaber

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HaberTurk

 

 

 

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=338 0 Atlas Tarih Röportajı – Kürt meselesinin tarihi (Ağustos-Eylül 2011) http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=303 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=303#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:15:48 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=303

 


Röportajın Google PDF dosyasına buradan

ulaşabilirsiniz

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=303 0 What to Expect from Turkey’s New Secular Leadership? http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=291 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=291#comments Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:14:00 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=291

 

Political Reflection Quarterly. Volume 2, Issue 1. (Spring, 2011)

H. Akın Ünver, PhD

—

 

Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has been undergoing an important and profound transformation since May 2010, which began with the resignation of Deniz Baykal, the party’s chairman for more than 15 years, as a result of sex scandal allegations. Following Baykal’s resignation, Kemal Kilicdaroglu was elected as the new chairman of the CHP. A former deputy chairman, he rose to fame after a series of public debates in 2008 in which he successfully challenged two senior members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on corruption allegations. In fact, Kilicdaroglu was such a popular figure within the party, that during the CHP rally on May 22, 2010, he was elected to chairmanship by winning 1189 votes out of a possible 1197. About 6 months later on November 3, Kemal Kilicdaroglu made his first major overhaul of the party’s leadership by re-assembling the Central Executive Committee (CEC) with younger and lesser known members; a move, which was interpreted as the ‘revolution of the RPP progressives’. On December 18, following the intensification of the disputes between the CHP’s ‘old guard’ and the ‘progressives’, the party undertook an extraordinary general meeting, which took a further step towards the complete rectification of the party assembly along progressive lines, furthered with yet another change in the party’s CEC on December 25.

 

  • What caused the change?

 

While the CHP was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 as the political flagship of Kemalist ideology, it has undergone several periods of transformation through its history. Most notable of these changes was Ataturk’s successor Ismet Inonu’s attempts in reformulating CHP as a center-left party and Inonu’s successor Bulent Ecevit’s further expansion of this definition into the discourse of ‘Kemalist social-democratic party of the disaffected’ from 1973 until the military coup in 1980. After the closure of all political parties following the 1980 military junta, CHP leadership that had sympathized with Ecevit’s idea of a center-left social-democracy had established two separate parties that had later merged into the Social-Democratic People’s Party (SDPP) in 1985; perhaps not surprisingly, led by Ismet Inonu’s son, Erdal Inonu. However, CHP had re-emerged in 1992 under the leadership of Deniz Baykal and had merged with the SDPP; yet, Baykal’s reformulation of the CHP had less to do with Bulent Ecevit’s social-democracy and more to do with the CHP’s transformative-secularist wartime identity of the 1920s. Under Deniz Baykal, CHP’s main agenda changed into actively polarizing the electorate along ‘secular vs. Islamist’ lines and thereby monopolizing the ‘secularist’ votes. Especially after the election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its skill in attracting the disaffected-underprivileged electorate led the CHP to be widely perceived as an elitist party; especially through the first half of the AKP’s tenure, voting behavior became a class issue in Turkey.

It was this polarizing and elitist discourse of the CHP that had alienated the electorate in general, which caused Baykal and his old comrades-in-arms to grow increasingly unpopular vis-à-vis the AKP. Gradually the mocking term ‘CHP-style opposition’ became the dominant and predictable characteristic of Baykal-era opposition politics, which basically implied arguing the exact opposite of what the AKP proposed, regardless of what the policy offered. This in turn, rendered Baykal’s CHP to be a ‘non-functionally ideological’ party, aiming to highlight its ideology as a tool of electoral polarization, damaging its credibility as a policy-formulating party in the long run. As a result, the CHP failed to win any elections since its re-emergence in 1995, adding to the alienation and frustration of the party supporters. Since former chairman Deniz Baykal and his comrades-in-arms took over the leadership in 1992, CHP consistently lost general and local elections and remained in the opposition (in the 1999 elections it couldn’t even get into the parliament). While the CHP could barely pass the 10% threshold through the 1990s crowded political scene, single-party government of the AKP forced the old leadership to re-construct their agenda around the discourse of a resistance against political Islam, thereby adopting the policy of active polarization of the electorate along ‘secular versus Islamist’ lines and increasing its votes considerably as a result. In 2002 and 2007 general elections, CHP had received 19.39% and 20.88% of the votes respectively, while in the local elections of 2004 and 2009, it got 18.38% and 23.11% respectively; latter being the highest percentage of vote Baykal leadership ever received. Nonetheless, such increase in votes was hardly due to CHP’s increasing electoral campaign performance, but rather a result of a much less crowded political scene with three main parties. Although CHP’s votes had increased, it did not cover the fact that it had been consistently losing elections. The old CHP leadership was becoming increasingly unpopular among the electorate because of this performance, and when it was in the opposition, it seemed unable to pose a serious check and balance against the ruling AKP. Furthermore, the ‘old guard’ was perceived to be stifling the party of young blood, thus turning away younger secularists who turned either to apathy or even voted for AKP. Therefore, both the voters and the party membership demanded a structural change and fresh blood to take over the party leadership.

 

What do the ‘new secularists’ offer?

 

Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s election can be regarded as the yearning of the CHP supporters for the 1970s’ Ecevit social-democracy, during which the party had sealed its only two election victories since 1950. To that end, Kilicdaroglu’s first move was to eliminate the ‘old guard’ from the Central Executive Committee and Party Assembly, as well as to change the party program and bylaws – albeit with great controversy and difficulty. Second, Kilicdaroglu adopted a new makeover, making some recent public appearances with the distinguishable hat and blue shirt, characteristically worn by Ecevit in the 1970s, as a clear signal of the future direction the party is headed towards.

Ideologically, the most striking feature of the new party assembly is the absence of ‘old Kemalists’ – those that define Kemalism as it was formulated during the early republican wartime period, which emphasized rigidly secularist-nationalist modernization over democratization and representation. More specifically, this implied the construction of the ‘citizen’ along an early-20th century Franco-German model in which social and political influence of religion was minimized and an overarching ethno-linguistic identity would constitutionally and legally override other ethno-linguistic and religious identities.

 

Kemal Kilicdaroglu’s election can be regarded as the yearning of the CHP supporters for the 1970s’ Ecevit social-democracy, during which the party had sealed its only two election victories since 1950. To that end, Kilicdaroglu’s first move was to eliminate the ‘old guard’ from the Central Executive Commit-tee and Party Assembly, as well as to change the party program and bylaws – albeit with great controversy and difficulty. Second, Kilicda-roglu adopted a new makeover, making some recent public appearances with the distinguishable hat and blue shirt, characteristically worn by Ecevit in the 1970s, as a clear signal of the future direction the party is hea-ded towards.

Ideologically, the most striking feature of the new party assembly is the absence of ‘old Kemalists’ – those that define Kemalism as it was formulated during the early republican wartime period, which emphasized rigidly secularist-nationalist modernization over democratization and representation. More specifically, this implied the construction of the ‘citizen’ along an early-20th century Franco-German model in which social and political influence of religion was minimized and an overarching ethno-linguistic identity would constitutionally and legally override other ethno-linguistic and religious identities.

 

34 members of the old party assembly were not included in the election list and another 12 of the old members included in the list were not elected, meaning that 46 out of 80 members (more than half) of the old assembly, that were associated with old Kemalism were taken out. These include very influential and symbolic figures that became almost synonymous with the old CHP, such as Onder Sav, Sahin Mengu and Oya Arasli – Onder Sav for ex-ample, was a protégée of Ismet Inonu himself. Alt-hough many of them can be regarded as ‘Kemalists’, 34 members retained from the old party assembly can be seen closer to the 1970s CHP led by Bulent Ecevit, who had attempted to reconstruct the party’s image as a ‘social-democrat alternative for the disaffected’. Therefore, much of the 34 retained members (at least in terms of image) were intra-party opposition to the ‘old Kemalists’ and had sympathized more with the 1970s’ ‘center-left’ im-age of the party. 10 of the 46 new members of the party assembly come from social-democratic activism, either by playing an active role at the political level, or as leaders of labor unions and associations. On the other hand, inclusion of more social-democrats into the party assembly seems to be balanced by 11 pro-business figures that come from a background of international trade, industry and private enterprise. Another important aspect of the new CHP party assembly is a distinct lack of nationalist hard-liners; only 3 party members (Suheyl Batum, Nuran Yildiz and Mehmet Farac) are known to be such. While Suheyl Batum was in the CEC as the vice-chairman after the first party revision, he was later demoted to the position of ‘director of electoral and legal affairs’ and was re-placed by a social-democrat Gursel Tekin after the revision of December 25, 2010.

 

Individually, some of the higher-profile members of the new party assembly (that are also in the party’s Central Executive Committee) give a clearer per-spective on CHP’s main agenda. Binnaz Toprak for example, a professor of sociology, was the director of a high-profile 2006 TESEV public opinion study, which had demonstrated that Islamist reactionism was not a real threat in Turkey (only 8% of the respondents had demanded a Sharia law in Turkey and the study had marked a 9% decrease in wom-en using headscarf) but she had nonetheless ob-served a pattern of ‘neighborhood pressure’ (a term coined earlier by another Turkish sociologist, Prof. Serif Mardin) that explained increasing grassroots conservatization of the Turkish society. While Prof. Toprak had previously declared her support for the AKP’s social policy, she had also explicitly conveyed that she was ‘worried’ not because that the ‘AKP would render Turkey more Islamist’, but be-cause under the AKP, opposition and dissent was becoming increasingly marginalized and ‘otherized’, causing problems for the level of democracy in Turkey. Prof. Toprak’s involvement in the CHP can be interpreted as the party’s attempt in re-defining its secularist opposition, away from a polarizing/fear-based discourse into a more rational interpretation emphasizing the quality and practice of democratization. Another symbolic figure in the new party assembly is Sezgin Tanrikulu, a Kurdish rights advocate and a lawyer, who had sued the Turkish state at the European Court of Human Rights for the malpractice of the security forces during an in-tervention to the 1996 Diyarbakir prison revolt, which resulted with the death of 10 Kurdish inmates and had managed to win a compensation for the relatives of the deceased. Tanrikulu’s involvement in the party assembly can be interpreted as CHP’s departure from its statist position with regard to the Kurdish question and adopt a more human rights based perspective on the matter. Furthermore, Tanrikulu is known for his support for the ‘Ergenekon’ legal case; in an interview to Turkish daily Taraf, he had defined the case as a “struggle for democracy” – a 180-degree opposite view to the general consensus within the old CHP. Another notable figure in the new party assembly is Dr. Faruk Logoglu, (not in the party CEC) a prominent diplomat served as the Ambassador of Turkey in Washington DC from 2001 to 2005.

 

Having been re-arranged in December 2010, the new composition of the Central Executive Commit-tee on the other hand, can be interpreted as a further purge of the old guard and their replacement by younger, comparatively more social-democrat leaning and libertarian figures. Indeed, some influential members of the new CEC, such as Gursel Tekin (considered by many as the ‘second man’ of the new CHP – replacing Onder Sav; the party’s longest serving vice-chairman), Sezgin Tanrikulu (human rights advocate) and Izzet Cetin (workers’ unions and syndicates leader) come from a back-ground of active involvement in social-democratic politics and associations. Inclusion of such former social-democrat activists into the highest echelons of the party decision-making at the expense of the older members, (generally accused of being ‘political elitists’) the new leadership seems to be prioritizing on connecting the party with the disaffected segments of the population; rural electorate and the blue-collar workforce that have been throwing their lot in with the ruling AKP since 2002. The new CEC consists of 17 members, of which only 4 are parliament members. In the new CEC, economic planning was transferred to a former Undersecretary of Treasury, Faik Oztrak, whereas Osman Koruturk, a retired senior diplomat and formerly the special envoy to Iraq, was appointed in charge of foreign policy planning. Only one member of the old CEC, Erdogan Toprak was retained as the press and public relations director of the party.

 

While this change is interpreted by some as the social-democratization of the CHP leadership by coming down off its ‘high horse’, critics argue that the new leadership has become more ‘technocratic’; especially in the party assembly. Such critics point to the overwhelming majority of experts, academics and specialists within the new party leadership, which makes the party look more like a European Commission experts’ panel, rather than a representative political party; a configuration that may render RPP unable to connect with the society at large.

New CHP’s aims and support

 

Concrete manifestations of the new CHP’s policy outlook came in a series of public initiatives. The first of these initiatives is a welfare program called the ‘family insurance’, which, according to Kemal Kilicdaroglu is “one of the most important projects” of the new CHP. According to the plan, which was introduced on March 8, party volunteers will prepare a ‘national poverty inventory’ through a door-by-door survey, making a list of the households that are in real need. Those house-holds with an income of less than minimum wage will be assigned a monthly aid on par with the mini-mum wage – and this monthly payment will be transferred to the bank ac-count of what CHP defines as the “family member who knows the needs of the family best”; which will be a female member of the household. This way, the new CHP aims to give poor households a chance to spend based on their real needs; a criticism of the AKP’s policies of distributing certain freebies before the elections. All aid will be transferred through the state-agency ‘family insurance fund’.

A further extension of this initiative is a specific pro-gram directed towards the economic amelioration of the predominantly Kurdish areas of the south-east, in a program called the ‘regional development and democracy’ project. Within the general framework of CHP’s civil society initiatives, some of its main priorities are listed as:

 

¨ Ending the civil-society’s dependence on government funds

¨ Introducing a law that will facilitate the participation of civil-society leaders in democratic decision-making processes

¨ Eliminating bureaucratic hurdles against the freedom to establish associations, also introducing tax exemption to civil-society organizations

¨ Introducing courses in schools, teaching and promoting civil-society and organizations

¨ Encouraging female participation and promoting affirmative action in civil-society participation

 

Also, the new CHP leadership wasted no time to prepare a draft new Constitution, whose 26 articles were amended as a result of the public referendum that had taken place in September 2010. Rather than directly challenging the AKP’s plans for a new Constitution, CHP’s then vice-chairman Suheyl Batum had indicated that CHP would only “offer guidance” to the AKP, emphasizing that the preparation of a new Constitution should be a non-partisan is-sue, necessitating the cooperation of all political parties.

 

High initial support, recently wavering

 

Although the new leader-ship had met with support initially, this support seems to be wavering more recent-ly, as the electorate is be-ginning to expect more concrete policy positions from the party. Public opinion surveys conducted right after the election of Kemal Kilicdaroglu to chairman-ship initially showed that this leadership change was well-received. In a poll conducted by the Istanbul-based polling organization SONAR, in May 30, 2010, CHP emerged as the most popular political party by 32.48%, followed by the ruling AKP, which got 31.09% of the respondents’ vote. This poll was particularly important, because right after the leadership change, CHP had emerged as the most popular party in any poll for the first time since 2002. In another poll, conducted by MetroPoll in May 2010, 52.3% of the respondents claimed that the leader-ship change benefited the CHP, while in another question, 63.6% of the respondents declared their support for the change in CHP leadership and their replacement with new figures. Among those that had claimed they have never voted for the CHP, 22.5% stated that they would vote for the CHP for the first time, after the election of Kemal Kilicdaroglu as the chairman.

 

However, due to an increasing politicization of newly emerging polling organizations and polls them-selves, such figures need to be analyzed in comparison to other polls in different polling periods. For example, another survey in July 2010, this time con-ducted by Andy-Ar, yielded less flattering results for CHP (26.8%), which trailed the AKP at 41.9%. Furthermore, support for the new CHP leadership seems to be wavering as time goes by and the party elite seems to be lacking consensus on two of the most pressing policy issues facing Turkey 6 months prior to the general elections: the Kurdish question and the headscarf debate. This electoral perception gained more ground as Kilicdaroglu keeps avoiding making statements on the party’s position with regard to these two questions in his party rally speeches and press releases. In a more recent MetroPoll December 2010 survey, the ruling AKP emerged as the most popular party by 37.3%, while the CHP followed by 30.1%. Furthermore, while 41.3% of the respondents defined Kilicdaroglu as a ‘more successful leader than Deniz Baykal’, respondents of the same survey expressed their lack of trust towards CHP’s ability to solve the Kurdish problem and the headscarf controversy; 71.9% of the respondents stated that ‘Kilicdaroglu cannot resolve the Kurdish question’ – 62.8% had conveyed their belief that he will not be able to resolve the headscarf issue in a survey conducted by the same group in May 2010.

 

What can the new leadership do?

 

The changes CHP has been going through since May 2010, may be interpreted by some as an ‘intra-party revolution’ by the pragmatist-progressives against the more ideological old guard. However, although CHP’s long presence in the opposition has been characterized as a leadership problem, according to the critics, CHP’s main problem is its inability to go through a structural identity shift and to locate itself on a democratic political continuum. Debates on the ‘secularist change’ must understand that the party was not established as an ‘ordinary political party’, but rather as a political tool of a socially tran-formative-reformist mentality, which traces its intellectual roots deep into the late-18th century Otto-man Empire. Therefore, the CHP never saw itself as a standard political party functioning in a democratic political system, but rather as an extension of a ‘sacred social mission’. CHP’s new leadership change can be seen as the manifestation of the party’s understanding that discourses of social engineering end up creating resentment in a democratic political system. To that end, Kilicdaroglu in person appears to understand why exactly CHP has to change away from a ‘party of coercive modernization’; at least so far his actions and speeches point towards this direction. However, some segments of the party’s membership and the electorate still see CHP as a transcendental political presence and the continuity of a long reformist tradition. Furthermore, Kilicdaroglu seems to be purposefully avoiding making references to two of Turkey’s deepest identity problems in his speeches; the Kurdish question and the headscarf problem. Therefore, it remains to be seen whether the CHP can re-define itself ideologically within a democratic political system, its outlook towards the Kurdish and the headscarf questions and how successfully Kilicdaroglu can rally party members and the electorate around this new identity.

 

 

 

 

 

]]> http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?feed=rss2&p=291 0 Islam and democracy: American questions, Ottoman answers http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=285 http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=285#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:15:02 +0000 admin http://www.akinunver.com/scholar/?p=285

 

 

 

 

http://fairobserver.com/article/islam-and-democracy-american-questions-ottoman-answers

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March 21, 2011

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“Is Islam a ‘democratic’ religion?”

“Is Islam compatible with democracy?”

“What is the relationship between religion and governance in a Muslim country?”

For the past decade, Americans have increasingly questioned whether Islam and democracy are compatible. What many participants to the debate do not realize is that a similar debate took place more than a century-and-a-half ago amongst Ottoman intellectuals. American scholars were triggered to focus on this huge topic after a traumatic incident: the September 11 attacks and the necessity to re-define the global role of the United States. Ottoman scholars also wrote extensively on the same question after suffering another traumatic incident: successive Ottoman military defeats in the hands of Christian-European powers (most notably the Russian Empire) through the 19th century. Back then, Ottoman scholars asked this question in reference to progress: “Is Islam an inherently backward religion?” They also questioned its compatibility with more liberal and progressive governance models, such as constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Ottoman scholars believed that Islam was no more or no less advanced than either Christianity or Judaism, pointing to the scientific, literary and administrative advances made by the Muslim scholars which surpassed those made in the Christian realm throughout the medieval and post-medieval era.  These scholars had then asserted that the culprit was not Islam, but the way in which the religious clergy and its institutions interacted with the decision-making apparatus of the empire.

What then, was the role of Islam in a democratically conceived society? The question was posited in reverse by the famous Ottoman thinker Namik Kemal: “What is the role of democracy in an Islamically conceived society?” One must keep in mind that the main defining element here was the ‘Islamic society’ (ummah = community) since the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was also the Caliph (the leader of the Islamic community – a title assumed by the Ottoman sultans since 1517) and the dual title of the sultan-caliph meant that the religious-dynastic identity was the raison d’être of the Ottoman state. The sultan, apart from being the head of state, was the protector and enforcer of the Islamic law through legal bureaucracy; equal and just enforcement of this law (at least in discourse) was key for the empire to keep its sovereignty over a vast area of Muslim land. Due to this critical role that the sultan had to play, Ottoman thinkers had to demote democracy and make it secondary to the primary identity of religion: Islam was the ultimate identity and therefore, would not be subservient to any other authority or ideology. The closest political answer to these questions was constitutional monarchy. At that time, most Ottoman statesmen and thinkers had considered Islam and democracy to be compatible, but not equal.  The primary state identity had to be Islam and constitutionalism could be practiced as long as it did not breach the jurisdiction of Islam. What an Islamically conceived Ottoman state could do was to accept the freedom of religion, not because religion should be implemented as the basis of the state, but because it was the duty of the state to safeguard freedom. Freeing the conscience completely could only be effected, however, when the theocratic concept was eliminated from the body of the religious outlook.

The question then boiled down to: “Is Islam conceivable in a democratically constituted state?” Would a democratic state, as a polity incompatible with theocracy, recognize the demand to subordinate itself to religion as a right to be exercised on the principle of democratic freedom?

The assumption of the sovereignty of the people thus implied a religious view that was not merely residual to the political principle but rather an inherent part of it. The manner in which religion had become institutionalized in Turkey made it appear as though the question had implications for the whole of social existence. However, the constitutional monarchy as practiced under the well-known sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) was not good enough for the more progressive voices within the empire. The revolution of the Ottoman progressives (the Young Turks; later institutionalized under the umbrella organization Committee of Union and Progress – CUP) in 1908 was launched specifically to further limit the role of the sultan and the clerical institutions in the decision-making system and to check the power of the sultan via a politically organized parliament. The more radical wing of the CUP to which the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal belonged, were highly educated in Western standards with expertise in the social sciences, Islamic law and its practice. They saw very little utility in trying to retain the Islamic character of the state and asserted that the decision-making process had to be devoid of clerical interests. The idea of a secular republic as the primary identity of a modern state and the strict privatization of religious practice was, therefore, the final answer to the debate on the compatibility of Islam with democracy that was ongoing within Ottoman intellectual circles for almost two centuries.

However, once the Turkish War of Independence was won and the Kemalist revolutionaries became the ruling elite of modern Turkey, the same question – what is the role of Islam in a democratically constituted state –now had to be answered in a practical way. Just like the dilemma faced by Sultan Abdulhamid II, the new state would have to accept religious freedom, not because religion should be implemented as the basis of the state, but because it was the duty of the state to safeguard freedom. So that raised another question: “Would democracy, as a polity incompatible with theocracy, recognize the demand to subordinate it to religion as a right to be exercised on the principle of democratic freedom?” On the one hand, under the regime of popular sovereignty, this dilemma gave hope to religious enlightenment. On the other, it became the surrogate of a national existence, one of moral re-integration. Mustafa Kemal’s construction of secularism and the answer given by the Turkish history to the question ‘Is Islam compatible with democracy?’ took its final shape within the interaction of these two approaches.

The first (rationalist) approach was based upon a view shared by the Westernists and Islamists – the belief that Islam was a natural and rational religion. The idea of Islamic rationality for example was a deistic conviction for Mustafa Kemal. For him, the abolition of the Caliphate meant liberating Islam from the unreasonable traditional associates and interests of its clerical institution, preparing the ground for its emergence as a rational religion. Mustafa Kemal had understood the role of religion in the life of the people during the struggle for national liberation and had seen how dangerous religious fanaticism could be in moments of national disaster. He had, at the same time, felt the role of religion as a spontaneous expression of popular unity in consolidating national efforts. On the other hand, he had witnessed how the deep ignorance of the interpreters of religion was influencing the character of an entire umma and pushing Muslims further away from what he called ‘a genuine spiritual enlightenment’. The crux of all Mustafa Kemal’s experiments, according to him, was not to ‘Turkify’ Islam for the sake of Turkish nationalism, but to ‘Turkify’ Islam for the sake of religious enlightenment. His persistent objective – the one revoking the most severe denunciations from the clergy, the Islamists and the repositories of the secrets of the Arabic of the Qur’an – was to cut the ground out from under those vested interests claiming an exclusive monopoly over the understanding and interpretation of what they too claimed to be a natural and rational religion.

Therefore, Ataturk’s answer to the ‘Islam vs. democracy’ question was essentially: eradication of all religious ‘middlemen’, their brotherhoods and sects, thereby in his own way opening the individual’s way to personal enlightenment both spiritually and socially. This, however, was a practice that would be defined in today’s terms as ‘undemocratic’ and even ‘despotic’ by some; both of which were justifiable through the Kemalist period – republicanism is not the same thing as democracy. The latter point became a point of massive dispute between Mustafa Kemal and his wartime comrade-in-arms. While Mustafa Kemal wanted the new state to be a republican one, so that the influence of the clergy in the decision-making would be minimal, some of his associates criticized him, arguing that a republic is not necessarily more democratic than a constitutional monarchy.

With regard to Islam as practiced in the Arab-Middle East, Ottoman progressives took a stance that was surprisingly closer to today’s American neo-conservatism. As mentioned earlier, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the political organization Mustafa Kemal belonged to in his earlier career, was an alliance of devout Muslims as well as agnostics, who saw a need to minimize the political and social influence of Islam, without eliminating individual the religious liberties and practice of religion. Yet, especially the CUP went through a process of mentality shift, as a result of which it had attempted to bypass religious (Islamic) identity with an ethno-linguistic one. This in turn, had resulted in their Turkification attempts on Sunni-Arabs in the Middle East during World War I; a policy that emerged as  one of the primary reasons for the Arab Revolt of 1916. The ‘impossibility of saving the Arabs’ had also been pointed out by Mustafa Kemal himself, who had led several Arab divisions before and during World War I. His experiences with the Arab divisions of the Ottoman Empire caused him to grow increasingly more frustrated with the role of Islamic misinterpretation and the dominance of the Islamic clergy, which ended up pursuing its own political agenda, tainting the primary goal of spiritual guidance with political tutelage.

This is why the American question: ‘can Islam co-exist with democracy?’ was answered both as ‘yes’ and ‘no’ by Ottoman-Turkish history, whose final decision on the matter was Kemalist secularism in which transformative republicanism (not necessarily democratic) was upheld over Islam and also over democracy. In other words, while the Kemalist intention was to save democracy from the tutelage of the Islamic state, it ended up replacing democratic tutelage with republican-secularism. This caused democracy to be gradually picked up by the disaffected Islamist segments of the society marginalized by the Kemalist practice of secularism, which then tried to reformulate a new answer to the Islam-democracy debate on constructing Islamic expression from the viewpoint of the individual and of social liberty. Kemalist secularism however, should not be confused with being anti-Islamic, atheist or even agnostic; one of the key aspects of Kemalism was to eradicate religious institutionalism, not as an anti-Islamic move, but rather as a move that aimed to ‘purify’ Islam of the hold of clerical institutions, and instead allowing the individual to study and practice religion in an introverted and private matter.

Therefore, today’s Islam-democracy debate in the United States, especially the policy debate in Washington, is largely elementary and redundant. Many of the questions posited by American scholars were answered by 19th century Ottoman political literature and early Turkish republican reform efforts; re-inventing this wheel can be prevented by focusing instead on another question: “Is democracy possible in a country ruled by a rentierstate?” A scholar can discover a more satisfying pattern by looking at the role of capital mobility in state-society relations in non or under-democratic countries in the Middle East.

 

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