InternationalTurkish intellectuals and state denial
The enemies of my enemy may not be my friends
Published: Thursday May 28, 2009
Althen-le-Paluds, France - This authorized English version of Laurent Leylekian's keynote address to the May 9, 2009, conference "Althen Meets Armenia," Althen-le-Paluds, France, has been translated from the French by Lou Ann Matossian for the Armenian Reporter and is published with the author's permission. Mr. Leylekian is executive director of the European Armenian Federation (Armenian National Committee of Europe). A response, in Turkish, from Baskin Oran, appears on the website of the daily Radikal.
Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will stretch out their hands throughout the country delicately giving form to all manner of opinion. Everyone will belong to my party without knowing it. Those who believe they are speaking the language of their party will be acting for mine. Those who think they are marching under their own banner will be marching under mine.
—Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu
Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. . . . But the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.
—Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?
The fact that in the early 2000s, a significant number of Turks began to speak broadly of Armenians, genocide, or the various abuses of the Ottoman Empire or Turkey today was experienced as a gift from heaven by most Armenians, the descendants of Genocide survivors. Socially speaking, these Turkish people are mostly very westernized and pro-European intellectuals, and their rhetoric fits in perfectly with the political criticism of Kemalism, of ultranationalism and, in general, of the authoritarian tendencies of Turkish society and the Turkish state.
It is therefore quite natural that these people were so enthusiastically received by the European intelligentsia in general, and by what I will call the liberal-socialist consensus, i.e., by this important group of policymakers in the European Union that identifies nationalism with ultranationalism and sees in the free-market system – possibly with social safeguards – the resolution of all political, cultural, and identity issues.
It is thus also quite natural that Armenians have lumped together these people, whose discourse is generally progressive, with the older, more radical, and therefore systemically less promoted dissidents, including those who genuinely and sincerely want a recognition by Turkey of the Armenian Genocide, with all that that implies.
Therefore, naïve imagery depicts the Turkish political field as ultranationalist and denialist Kemalists versus a progressive, pro-European civil society that advocates cosmopolitanism and favors the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. However, the actual situation is infinitely more subtle because in truth, we cannot understand this new Turkish intelligentsia with such a blanket generalization.
The common thread: critiquing Kemalism
The thinking as well as the political intentions of its various members covers a very wide spectrum, ranging from radical critique of the Turkish state, Turkish society, and even the Turkish people, to a very limited critique of the management of certain issues by Turkey. There are those who oppose the Turkish state system and those who simply want to improve its image by giving its most questionable practices a more cosmetic appearance.
To name names, the thinking of a Ragip Zarakolu is no doubt quite different from that of an Ayse Hur, whose thinking is itself scarcely comparable to that of Erol Özköray, all of which are probably unrelated to the thinking of Ahmet Insel or Baskin Oran.
What links most – but not all – of the new Turkish intellectuals is the more-or-less open critique of Kemalism. Often the reasoning behind this critique pays less attention to the moral failings of this state ideology than to its inability to adequately manage the factors that threaten to disrupt Turkish society.
It is therefore quite natural that many of them – not necessarily proponents of political Islam – developed at the dawn of the 2000s a certain sympathy for the AKP [Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or Justice and Development Party] because that political force was, sociologically speaking, the only one able to move the Turkish state. These intellectuals, who supported the political priorities of the AKP government in the first half of the 2000s, were naturally promoted by the Turkish media and by the European political forces who believe in the European vocation of Turkey. What were these policy priorities?
• Support for Turkey's European Union candidacy
• Support for appropriate institutional reforms ("democracy and rule of law")
• Respect for human rights and minorities
For example, one might mention the famous report on minority rights in Turkey, for which Ibrahim Kaboglu and Baskin Oran were persecuted by Turkish ultranationalist groups. Indeed, this report and the reforms it proposed struck squarely at the monolithic conception of Turkey advocated by Kemalists.
Kemalists, Islamists, and Turkish nationalism
However, as opposed as they may be on the form of the state they offer and on the societal choices they promote, the Kemalists and the Islamists agree on a number of points that are in truth a national consensus, simply because these are prerequisites to the existence and the affirmation of their nation, especially as this nation is newly created and, like all nations, artificial.
