An end to Turkey’s experiment in turkeyishness?
Over the last 15 years, as right-wing, nativist parties have gained strength across Europe with promises to expel immigrants and to ethnically purify their countries, Turkey has been fitfully engaged in an initiative that runs in the opposite direction. This effort, which has sought to broaden the prevailing definition of the national community in recognition of the country’s social diversity, marks an attempted return to older traditions of tolerance. It has faced no lack of opposition, however, and the arrest late last week of prominent Kurdish politicians provides the latest indication that this faltering venture to recast Turkey’s national identity may have run its course.
Language has been central to the identity reform effort, which has insisted on linguistic diversity while also promoting new terms to support Turkey’s acceptance of a more heterogeneous sense of itself. Key to the latter push has been the replacement of the semi-ethnic identity of Turk with the civic identity of Turkeyish (Türkiyeli, meaning from the geographic entity of Turkey). By substituting place of birth for bloodline descent as the primary criterion for inclusion in the national community, this reframing has sought to present minority groups who do not identify as ethnic Turks — particularly but not exclusively citizens of Kurdish extraction — with expanded opportunities for self-expression and the assertion of compound identities. With Turkeyishness serving as a unifying umbrella identity, the idea went, people would be free to openly associate themselves with other ethnic and religious subgroupings to which they felt attached. Such a shift in thinking would normalize actions heretofore highly controversial or illegal, allowing citizens of Turkey to engage in the equivalent of labeling themselves Irish- or Italian-Americans without risking charges of sedition.
Political conditions since the attempted military coup against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan this past summer have not been propitious for revitalization of the already weakened Turkeyish initiative. The November 4 arrest of the leaders of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) — the largely Kurdish political party that has come to most strongly represent the new, pluralistic vision of Turkey — deals a further blow to this effort to promote a more flexible and inclusive sense of national belonging.
An identity geared toward territorial defense
At the center of the traditional national identity of Turkey is a defensiveness that reflects the country’s origins. Formed in 1923 from what remained of the collapsed Ottoman Empire after World War I and a subsequent war of independence, the Turkish Republic inherited an ethnically diverse population descended from the successive civilizations and empires that had taken root in Asia Minor over the centuries. Beginning in the late Ottoman period, the tolerant incorporation of varied ethnic and religious groups into Ottoman society gave way to a belated effort to forge a common Turkish identity in order to bind the empire together and halt its loss of territory through conquest and revolt. The empire suffered further dismemberment as a result of independence movements and defeat in World War I, and the Turkish Republic’s founders emerged from the latter convinced that internal divisions left the country vulnerable to betrayal and external manipulation.
The Republican period saw an intensification of the Ottoman effort to create a unifying identity based on the denial of differences and encouragement of a fervent nationalism. This push included more thorough standardization of the Turkish language and an insistence on its exclusive use. Instruction, publication, and broadcasting in non-Turkish languages native to Anatolia, especially Kurdish, were forbidden. The mere existence of certain groups — particularly Kurds, who were believed to pose the greatest secessionist threat — was all but officially denied for certain periods.
This effort at forced conformity worked to a point, but the imposition of Turkishness undermined its appeal.* In addition, conflation of the official national identity with the majority characteristics of Turkish society — notably, descent from the Turkic conquerors of Anatolia and at least nominal adherence to the Sunni branch of Islam — left a number of populations seemingly outside the main Turkish body politic. Alongside the Kurds, who constitute nearly 20% percent of the population, these marginalized groups included Turkey’s small Jewish, Greek, and Armenian communities, and a sizeable Alevi population whose religious practices diverge from those of Sunni Islam. Within the Kurdish community, resentment at forced integration gave rise to an armed insurrection led by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has resulted in an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 deaths since 1984.
The rise and fall of Turkeyishness
Two factors created an opening for a reconsideration of Turkish national identity and minority rights in the first decade of the 21st century. The first was the launch of Turkey’s accession negotiations with the European Union, which encouraged the Turkish government to lift prohibitions on the use of Kurdish and other minority languages. The second factor was the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a pragmatic descendant of more radical Islamist parties consistently blocked from power by the traditional Turkish elite. The AKP scored a massive electoral victory in 2002 and took office with a mandate to pursue wide-ranging reforms. With strong public backing, the party successfully undercut the significant political power of the Turkish military — the constitutionally appointed “guardian” of certain core features of the Turkish Republic, including both strict secularism and insistence on a unitary national identity.
Carving out more space for the public exercise of religion may have been the AKP’s primary aim in pushing the military from the scene, but the party also showed early willingness to revisit Turkey’s officially recognized national character as part of its transformation of society. In the reformist zeitgeist of the aughts, the AKP encouraged discussion of a wholesale revision of the constitution that would include an overhaul of that document’s codification of Turkish identity. It was in this context that “Turkeyish” made its public debut, to acclaim in many minority circles but to mixed reviews more generally. Work on the new constitution never advanced very far, however, and Turkeyishness did not gain broad popular acceptance. Erdoğan and the AKP government nevertheless adhered, at least selectively, to the spirit of pluralism, taking significant steps to expand Kurdish cultural rights and making efforts to negotiate an end to the secessionist insurgency of the PKK. By 2009, Turkish state television had established a dedicated Kurdish-language channel.
This was perhaps the high-water mark of the diversity drive. The AKP’s electoral strength steadily grew, and its success in neutralizing the political force of the military left no effective checks on its power by the turn of the decade. The pace of accession talks with the EU slowed to a crawl, reducing external pressure for progressive change. Freed from political constraints and moderating influences, Erdoğan — the one-time poster boy of reform-minded democracy in the Muslim world — increasingly abandoned his broad-minded agenda to pursue projects of narrow or personal interest, flirted with traditional Turkish nationalism to continue building the AKP’s vote-share, and drifted into a creeping authoritarianism. The Turkish government’s harsh response to protests, in 2013, inspired by Erdoğan’s plan to bulldoze a historic Istanbul park to make way for a shopping center crystalized the extent of this drift for much of the outside world. The peace process with the PKK also meandered and frayed. In late 2015, the PKK declared an end to its ceasefire and resumed hostilities against the Turkish state.
The vulnerability of the HDP
The idea of Turkeyishness has clung to life among ethnic/religious minorities and certain urban, liberal segments of the population. Many members of the latter gave strong support to the AKP during its reform phase but have more recently transferred their allegiance to the HDP, the latest in a long line of parties established to represent Kurdish interests — and now the de facto standard bearer for what is left of the Turkeyish cause. In the past few years, under party leader Selahattin Demirtaş, the HDP has evolved from its Kurdish roots into a catch-all reform movement championing expanded rights for all minorities (whether defined by ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation), consistent respect for civil liberties, and environmentalism. An influx of hipsters, leftist intellectuals, ethnic Armenians, and others swelled the mainly Kurdish ranks of the party in the June 2015 general election, pushing the HDP to the largest ever representation in parliament for a Kurdish party and briefly raising hopes in progressive and minority circles of a change in Turkey’s political trajectory.
A year and a half later, prospects for a revival of the Turkeyish project appear dim given a dramatic reduction in the space available for political debate. On July 15, 2016, high-ranking military officers allegedly affiliated with Fethullah Gülen — a charismatic religious leader living in rural Pennsylvania — launched a failed coup against Erdoğan. The action appeared to justify the latter’s concerns about internal enemies and the threat that they posed to his political monopoly. In the weeks and months that followed the coup, the government embarked on a purge of staggering proportions, decimating the ranks of judges, university professors, teachers, and military officers to root out alleged Gülen followers. A wave of arrests has accompanied the mass dismissals. Liberal intellectuals, journalists, and politicians with no likely ties to the attempted putsch have been swept up by security forces. Other would-be reformers have gone into exile or are keeping a low profile. A broad range of media outlets has been shut down.
The political crackdown, along with a recent surge in fighting between the PKK and Turkish state security forces, leaves the HDP in a position of high vulnerability. This was underscored by the arrest last Friday of HDP leader Demirtaş, his co-party leader Figen Yüksekdağ, and seven other HDP members of parliament. The nine face charges related to alleged membership in, and support of, the PKK — familiar charges for political advocates of Kurdish interests. In protest, the HDP officially withdrew its delegation from parliament on Sunday. A PKK-attributed car bomb blast that killed 8 and injured more than 100 occurred shortly after the HDP detentions, underscoring the likelihood that foreclosing options for inclusive politics can lead only to further divisive violence.
The long list of previous Kurdish parties banned based on alleged PKK ties suggests that the very existence of the HDP is now at risk — and with it, perhaps, any continuation of the Turkeyish experiment in the foreseeable future. The potential demise of this project comes at an awkward time given the recent flood into Turkey of 2.5 million Syrian refugees, at least some of whom could end up staying in permanence and would benefit — along with other minority groups — from a more expansive notion of what it is to be a Turk.
*A parallel and similarly heavy-handed effort to push religious identity to the margins of public life also encountered increasing headwinds as the 20th century advanced.
