Next week today, the entire world will witness how Türkiye, once again, held its head high. I know it is almost impossible to evaluate electoral behavior even if you wish electors to behave a certain way. You mix your wishes with your reasoning and you confuse not only yourself but also your readers.
Years ago, Metin Toker, a Turkish journalist and writer who was married to the daughter of Ismet Inönü, the second president of Türkiye (in office 1938–1950) and the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), had said in a conference that when you are the son or son-in-law of a politician, you should not pass your whims as accurate predictions about the forthcoming elections. Therefore, even though neither my father nor my father-in-law was the leader of a political party, I’ll shun you from doing “whim collocation” here.
First, I hope, wish, and pray that the “New Türkiye Revolution” that started two decades ago continues forever. Second, it is not a whim, personal or otherwise. It is a national dream that began 100 years ago. But then, global imperialism projected the “Soviet Threat” so that Türkiye could no longer remain independently neutral in the international arena.
The republic’s founders, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his cadre had charted an almost-autarkic route to eliminate the remnants of the “ancient regime” of the Ottomans and self-reliantly develop a modern nation. But according to the intelligence received by the British, the Soviet dictator Stalin was about to invade Türkiye and claim six provinces that allegedly belonged to Soviet Armenia! What would the poor Turks do? Join NATO, of course, and start licking the American, British and French hands, begging for the crumbs on their table! Instead of a self-governing polity and a self-sufficient economy, now Türkiye had to get under the protection of its Western masters.
It had to cease its policies to develop a defense industry. Who needed expensive aircraft factories? Turks should manufacture stoves instead of aircraft. (It happened and aircraft builder Nuri Demirağ stopped producing fuselage, wings and flaps. He went into the stove manufacturing business. At home, my parents had one of the first aircraft-turned-stoves for years!)
Modernity had come to our lives with post-modernist interpretations: The more you owed to your Western allies, the stronger your ties to the alliance, and the safer you felt as a nation. NATO would soon mean the country’s accumulating foreign debt to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Who needs industrialization when one has industrialized friends? You sell them potatoes and onions; they sell you trucks and harvesting machines. Your army would depend on the armaments and ammunition the United States manufactured; your air force would be accountable to the U.S. for the warplanes they graciously accepted to sell to you. But – this Is a big but, by the way – you could only use them where and when the U.S. Congress approves.
That kind of symbiotic relationship between two different polities creates its support system: a tutelary political system and its elite with veto power over popular politics. In no time, that elite emerged in military and civilian politics. It made everybody agree that national defense, education and energy policies and the country’s international relations were off limits for the civilian politicians.
But they could oversee the daily affairs of other minor things as they do not contradict the overall guidance of the secularizing, centralizing, and modernizing elite bestowed on the people. The result of everything, from literature to music, from apparel to lifestyles, from neighborhoods to vacationing habits, was a dangerous social, political (and even religious) bifurcation between “The Center” and “The Periphery.” (I wish we remembered Samuel P. Huntington with his center-periphery analysis of developing societies rather than his unfortunate – and misunderstood – Conflict of Civilization theory.)
That bleak picture of a society halved in the middle continued benefitting both sides politically: The Center intervened in popular politics with their juntas and killing of the elected prime minister and his ministers, or jailing whole parliaments or sending its members to exile for years.
Starting with Turgut Özal, bureaucrat, engineer and state leader who served as the Prime Minister of Türkiye from 1983 to 1989 and the 8th President of the country from 1989 to 1993, and culminating with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the 12th and current president of Türkiye since 2014 who previously served as prime minister of Türkiye from 2003 to 2014, Turkish people got a grip of its destiny.
To make the long story short, Türkiye’s homegrown jets and rockets, armed and non-armed drones, have been exported to 24 countries since only last year, declaring a Blue Homeland (denoting the Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mediterranean Sea that had been established when the Government of National Accord of Libya and Türkiye signed a maritime boundary treaty to claim rights to ocean bed resources), and opening 44 new embassies throughout Africa where it had measly 12 representations.
It should not be difficult to read between the examples I mentioned here: it is not only economic development that makes the writer of these words proud. It is a national pride that was restored and erased when the founders of the Republic were forced to forge new alliances to keep the new country surviving.
Yes, after losing three-quarters of the country at the end of World War I, the founders of the Republic had not permitted to create irredentism in the country. Still, the ensuing “modernization” left the so-called Periphery angry. You could see it when the polls brought those politicians exiled by the military coups back to power by a large majority. One can see that reaction also in Erdoğan’s election victories one after another for two decades after The Central Elite jailed him when he was a popular mayor of Istanbul.
Erdoğan never carped or gloated during that time; he was not a malicious person. He rejected the bifurcation and created a solid and prosperous middle class. Should he live in a classic European country, he would be labeled a “conservative democrat.” He never discussed being more conservative than Democrat, or vice versa.
In a recent state visit to Turkmenistan, he confided to a group of journalists that since the 1986 by-elections, he was a candidate for parliament seat from Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) and lost; he never entered an election with a certainty of winning. It is a Democrat’s attitude. He never shunned reciting holy scripture or praying in or with the public. It is a conservative behavior. He has evolved the parliamentary system to the presidential one, yet he has created 17 ministries and nine presidential policy boards. Members confess he is a vivid discussant and an avid listener.
Perhaps that secret made the shrewd state leader with such humble beginnings. Erdoğan has overcome the founders’ fear (which had been carried on by the summary executions until the day Erdoğan’s AK Party came to power) that the Kurdish minority would be an instrument of imperialism by restoring the old Kurdish names of towns and villages, allowed Kurds to name their kids with their ancestral names, and made Kurdish an electable language taught in schools.
His conservative politics saved millions of innocent Syrians from being obliterated by their leader. Likewise, his traditional approach to the tribal and sectarian tensions in Iraq saved that country from dismemberment.
Everybody in the New Türkiye stands tall today: Turk, Kurd, Armenian, Greek, Laz, Cherkess and Arab, every person who proudly calls it their home, will not allow history to repeat itself. This is a wish, and I hope it will be a fact one week from today.
