The Donnybrook at the End of History

Those crazy parliamentarians are at it again -- this time in Turkey.  Turkey, usually considered a stable bridge between East and West, has become something of an internal mess over the past years.  It's hard to tell precisely what it's about.  The AK party -- with Erdogan as its absolutely domineering figure (though he was actually banned from participating in Turkish politics at the time his party took power) -- has swung a fair portion of social policy to the right, though economic policy has become more laissez faire.  It's been a tough and controversial -- though in some ways popular -- blow in a country which had traditionally maintained an essentially laicistic principle; keeping state and religion separate in revolutionary democracy's grand tradition.  That separation, however, sometimes came at a gunpoint -- at which point, one wonders what is, or was, being separated from what (the army, traditionally, was the guarantor of the secular republic).

Erdogan is in the midst of a massive corruption scandal, and in a style that would make Silvio Berlusconi proud, he's pulling out all the stops to avoid having the light turned too closely on his own actions and those of his close associates.  There's been serious shifts in the cabinet and the bureaucracy and a purge of the police.  An Imam named Fethullah Gülen, who now lives in Pennsylvania, is being used as a kind of straw man in the middle of this; he wields significant religious and cultural influence in Turkey and was a former ally of Erdogan's.  Erdogan says he wants his (Erdogan's) power.  Erdogan might be right.

The fight came in relation to a bill that would place much of the governance of the country's judiciary in the government's hands.  This would blur a distinction that Turkey has by hook or by crook managed to maintain for the better part of its nearly century-long moden history (Atatürk made initial declarations of a new Turkey in 1920; by 1922 the last legal vestiges of the Ottomans were gone and by 1923 the Republic of Turkey had full international recognition).  An opposition MP called Erdogan a dictator.  Someone didn't like that.  There was yelling.  There was hitting.  The bill passed, 210-28.  Not even close.  Could be that the courts will strike it down in an effort to save their own autonomy.

It seems somehow comical when members of parliament come to fisticuffs.  Indian Business News has published a list of twenty great parliamentary brouhahas:  from Bolivia to Korea, lawmakers like to get into it.  Passions flare; manhood gets challenged -- though a couple of legislators from the fairer sex have also managed to land a couple of good haymakers here and there.  You'd love to say it was just non-democratic backwaters that descend into this kind of behavior.  It's not, though -- Turkey is an example of how that's definitely not the case -- and you can't even write the thing off to macho Mediterranean tempers; the Taiwanese legislature has decided more than once that it's Indian leg wrestling time. Taiwan isn't exactly the outer edges of the Third World.  Its GNP per capita is higher than Belgium's, Denmark's, Japan's or France's.

So what gives?  In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published his widely-read analysis of the end of the Cold War, The End of History and the Last Man.  Academics hammered it as simplistic -- and for those of us on the left (as in the "we-still-like-socialism-red" left), its argument that Marxism's time as a valid politics was up grated (it still does).  Fukuyama was right, though:  it was liberal democracy's time.  It was the time of thymos -- thymos being a word from Greek philosophy indicating "spiritedness."  It was time for all manners of self-expression, rational or not.  Fukuyama thought rationality would win out; like wagons circling around a campfire after a long journey, as he characterized it.  Whether we agreed or not, the era of open voice was upon us.

There was a lot of open voice, or free speech, prior to 1989 or 1991 or 1992, or whenever one wants to call the Cold War done.  There was even a lot of funky free speech one might not like; the revolt against the Shah in Iran in 1979 would be a good example for secularists, anyway.  As the international studies scholar Samuel Huntington presciently pointed out in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, that's the kind of free speech that scares the bejeebers out of the West -- the claim to fundamentalistic, religious (and non-Christian) sovereignty.  However, there's an evolving process today of a massive range of identities and ideologies having to negotiate new spaces with one another and finding sustenance in new trends; many more political entities since the end of the Cold War have been trading in religious ideas than any time during that bipolar conflict.  It's hardly to say that the end of the Cold War leads to parliamentary fights in Turkey.  It is to say that the whats and wherefores of national politics in many places in the contemporary world are experiencing massive torsion -- torsion related to the idea that it's not only around economics and wealth management that ideology might organize itself, but religious identity and theology too.  Turkey's AK (the abbreviation for "justice" and "development") claims no Islamicism; just "social conservatism."  However, in a country whose religious minorities (Orthodox, Catholics -- a surprising number of Jews) are in the end extremely small, "social conservatism" can only mean one thing.  There is a serious battle brewing between various stripes of Islamicism and multiple approaches to secularism and republicanism.  Those faultlines have always been present.  They're relatively out in the open at the moment, though.

So free speech manifests itself.  A society goes through the internally violent process of negotiating who is "us" and what the terms are going to be for policing participation in that group.  Someone will loose that battle.  The question is whether we want the side that wins to be a side that might not allow the same free speech for others it has been enjoying in its assertion "who" and "what" it is.  We'll have to keep our eyes open to find out the results.

(The Circumstance; sends its thanks to Ada Burçak for insightful comments on recent Turkish history that made this post possible.)