Istanbul and Turkey One Year Later. Intriguing–Tense–Inspiring

A large number of people claim that Istanbul is the most exciting city in the world.^[1] Most of these are either artists or historians. The majority of the latter group would probably agree that no one can ever get to know a city like Istanbul completely, despite over a thousand books that have been written about it, and despite the fact that many of these books are their authors’ life works.

Events in Turkey over the last two years have led to significant unrest and tensions in this metropolis which spans two continents. To be sure, a contemporary visitor like myself can overlook most of the symptoms. Disquieted by what has been reported about Turkey in the news since the attempted coup, I did notice the military’s presence at the sites of former protests and bomb attacks, and, like many others, could not help being aware of security guards and plain-clothes police officers keeping a close eye on even the most minor expressions of protest. But apart from such signs, life in the city appears to an outsider to go on very much as it had done. The depersonalized unruliness of the multidimensional whole intertwines with the striking homeliness and openness of its individual parts. Istanbul, like all other metropolises, contains a near-infinite crowd of inhabitants. They are little different from the inhabitants of London or New York—indifferently superficial at times, kindly and considerate at others. The only real difference is that there are far fewer people from Western Europe or the Americas, though here they are all the more conspicuous. Everything else has seemingly remained unchanged, including the exceptionally long and rich history that makes Istanbul older than most metropolises and can, as such, only be studied in the longue durée.

So, if there is any central message that this commentary imparts, it is this: a country like Turkey and a megapolis like Istanbul cannot possibly be described in one essay—not even in a book or a series of books. I came to this realization on only the third day of my visit to Istanbul in the late summer of 2017, when I was starting my participation in a Marie Curie project which included a period of residency in one of the cities of the original project partners.^[2]

My decision to choose Istanbul goes back ten years, to the time when I caught the contagious enthusiasm of Alphonse de Lamartine, who famously maintained that ‘[i]f one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul’. Though Lamartine inhabited the same mental landscape as Ernest Renan and Silvestre de Sacy, a landscape from which (according to Edward Said) modern orientalism emerged, his romantic reflections on Istanbul, Lebanon, and other corners of the Middle East cannot be likened to theirs. He did not share Renan’s belief in the ‘backwardness of the Semitic language’ or de Sacy’s distinctive didactical wish to ‘discover’, ‘enlighten’, and finally ‘save’ the Orient.

Something similar holds for other comparisons of this kind. Nearly forty years after the first edition of Said’s Orientalism,^[3] observations on the difference in approach between Lamartine and Renan have evolved into in-depth sociological and anthropological analyses, and authority on understanding structural change has now—though Said and Foucault hold their places—been increasingly passed to Slavoj Žižek.^[4] Much more important for my argument here, however, are Turkish authors, in particular those, predominantly female, social scientists who started to publish in the 1990s.^[5] These authors have long alerted us to the pointlessness of principled polemics on whether Istanbul is a ‘miniature Turkey’ or a city completely separated from the rest of the country. They have also continually stressed that such debates are not only outdated but utterly superficial. They feel that, in Istanbul, as in any other environment, we need to analyse individual fragments of culture rather than the city as a whole. Of greater informative value would be discussion on the new middle class and its reproduction; also matters related to gender, to the cultural remapping of the country and its biggest city, to everyday life and the relationships between generations.

For a long time, from at least the seventeenth century, the visitors to this city, the capital of imperial and modern Turkey, have contemplated the ‘grand’ themes of centre and periphery. In recent times, the same questions have been largely the domain of Turkish sociologists. And this, according to Deniz Kandiyoti, the leading expert in Turkish Culture and Gender Studies—she is Emeritus Professor in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London—is what mainly distinguishes the writings of Turkish scholars and those of ‘western’ sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists.^[6] Fifteen years ago, Kandiyoti was the first to point out that, at a time when Turkish scholars were ‘utilizing the blunt tool of modernization theory, western scholars had embarked on analyses of the connections between the production of styles and tastes and the reproduction of class and status’.^[7] In the case of Turkey, the change only occurred with the adoption of the postcolonial narrative, which displayed a more imaginative language than had been used before and which, above all, prepared the ground for the dismantling of binaries such as East/West, traditional/modern, and indigenous/ foreign. According to Kandiyoti, one of the major contributions of postcolonial scholarship has been to draw attention to the formative influence of colonial encounters in the shaping of national cultures and nation states:

‘Even in countries such as Ottoman Turkey and Iran, which did not experience direct colonial rule, European hegemony and the perceived “backwardness” of their respective societies created a terrain for ideological contest in which notions of “catching up” imitation of the West, cultural corruption and authenticity continued to have a purchase on political discourse.’^[8]

Fortunately, this has not been the case with serious scholarly work that has looked into how the city and the countryside are at once similar and dissimilar. Like the countryside, the city (still) represents a mosaic of different languages and cultures, as well as of lifestyles and survival strategies. This diversity continues despite increasingly intensified efforts at Islamization. Like the countryside, the city goes through periods of change and, like Turkey as a whole, Istanbul represents a complex jigsaw puzzle.

The differences are reflected in everything from issues of mobility to attitudes toward foreigners. As in other parts of the world, the impatience of the overfrenetic urban professionals cannot compare with the hospitality of the inhabitants of Turkey along the shores of the Black Sea or in the province of Van in the easternmost part of the country. Three years ago, the public life of Istanbul still seemed to know no social boundaries, while central Anatolia continued, predominantly, to pursue a traditionally Muslim way of life.

The same may be said of the relationship toward the state. If, in Istanbul at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, ‘cynicism’ could be identified as a dominant emotional attitude towards the political in Turkey’s public life, this was certainly not the case in non-urban areas across the country. A similar difference is observable in the relationship between secularism and Islam. I concur with Yael Navaro-Yashin, who maintains that ‘secularism and Islamism [have] competed in a public arena, both wearing different faces of the state’.^[9]

There is also a variance in historical development, which led the historian Hans-Lukas Kieser to conduct a systematic probe into Turkey ‘beyond nationalism’—or rather ‘beyond Kemalism’.^[10] However, reading his book, I could not avoid the impression that Kieser, like several other authors, drew inferences from the conditions in Istanbul alone. Had these authors examined the country as a whole, they might not have reflected on what they saw as increasing ethnic, linguistic and political flexibilities with a lesser degree of certainty. Maybe, in the mid-2000s when this volume was in the making, they would have already been able to establish what Kieser concluded a scarce decade later in the paperback edition, that ‘the foundation of the Kemalist state had been severely undermined […] by 2002’. They would perhaps have seen that the subsequent political ‘roller coaster’ was not a result of the tension between a ‘comparatively liberal-minded AKP preparing for EU accession talks’ and the ‘neonationalist backlash’, but a consequence of ‘political manipulation and deep state interventions’.^[11] A year and a half after the failed coup of July 2016, it has become clear, even to notorious optimists, that, in the shadow of a clash between two political visions, the country had, for fifteen years, been held hostage to a nationalist policy openly coquetting with religion. Because of this, I agree with Kieser’s more recent observation that the last decade has not been so much about a changed understanding of Turkishness, but about its fundamental content:

‘Whereas Islam had been pushed to the margins of public life in the Kemalist tradition […] the Justice and Development Party government has propagated a notion of Turkishness that celebrates what is believed to be its deeply religious roots and the splendor of the Ottoman Empire.’^[12]

Exemplifying how Erdoğan uses religion, posters have been on display in which the president invites citizens to participate in joint prayer during the celebration of Kurban Bayrami, the most important Muslim festivity, falling at the beginning of September. The search for the roots and splendour of the Old Empire, however, is better represented by artefacts such as the oversized monument to the Battle of Manzikert erected on the site of the battlefield where an army of Seljuk Turks, led by King Alp Arslan, crushed the Byzantine Army a little less than one thousand years ago. The foundation stone for the monument was laid by president Cevdet Sunay in 1967. The statue depicting Alp Arslan on a ‘rearing stallion’ now stands at the western entrance to Manzinkert. Erdoğan rekindled the memory of the battle because this surprising victory enabled the Turks to seize Anatolia. It was this latter invasion that made it possible for the Seljuks’ successors, the Ottomans, to conquer Constantinople four centuries later. Judging from various commentaries in Western journals and newspapers, the president’s appearance at the site of a battle that took place 946 years ago has been one of the highlights in the resurrection of current Turkish nationalism. While criticizing his predecessors ‘for neglecting Manzikert’, Constantinople and Gallipoli, Erdoğan rearranged an event of medieval history by saying that his ‘victorious forebears […] entered Anatolia’ with the ‘Turkish flag in one hand and Islam’s green banner in the other’.^[13]

If at the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, Turkey seemed to have adopted a more flexible policy in ethnic terms, it has become clear over the last two years (at the least) that the current political elite has never given a thought to being ‘slightly more sympathetic towards language and cultural rights’.^[14]Moreover, Kieser, and other authors who contributed to the miscellany Turkey Beyond Nationalism were still convinced that the view ‘beyond Turkishness’ aroused no interest even among the Kemalists. It was, they maintained, increasingly focused on excluding (or at least restricting) the Kurds, all leftists, and the liberal academic elite, which included the sole Turkish recipient of the Nobel Prize, Orhan Pamuk. The ‘controversy’ surrounding Pamuk began as early as 2004, when he claimed that he was the only one who dared to talk about one million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds murdered in 1915. He was charged with ‘offending Turkishness’, a crime under Article 301 of the Turkish constitution. Exclusivist policies have been even more keenly approved by the real conservative core of Turkish society, which has never been willing to embrace all the principles of an open society. It has therefore been a matter of pure political calculation if the conservatives have shown any inclination to concede to the Kurdish and Christian minorities who, according to Kieser, ‘are now better off than they have been at any point in the history of the Republic’.^[15]

Nevertheless, in addition to the archaic hagiography which coloured the interpretation of the past before the Kemalist supremacy, people now have access to serious historiographical works on Turkey’s traumatic history after the First World War. According to Kieser and Öktem, some of these works expose the ‘dark side of nationalism’ and create ‘bridges that connect communities and bodies of knowledge previously obscured by Kemalist historiography’.^[16]The exploration of the common history of Turks and Armenians, for instance, has unveiled not only the role of the Turks in the destruction of the Armenian community but also Turkish relationships with minorities more generally.

The genocide itself is only the most tragic feature of an issue that has remained tragic in its subsequent (re)interpretations. Despite the evident responsibility of the caliph, government, army, and a number of official representatives, the line that has ultimately triumphed has been a dispersion of responsibility, in a manoeuvre sadly typical of the previous century. For example, in much the same way as Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian politicians have been doing since 1991 when referring to World War Two, Ali Fethi Bey, Ottoman Minister of the Interior from 1922 to 1923, insisted that casualties had occurred not only among Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs but also among the Turks. Arguing in this fashion, he laid the foundations for the classic defence of the Turkish position after the First World War. As the French historian Raymond H. Kevorkian puts it: ‘(a) we all suffered during the war, b) we will correct the abuses, c) we will punish the culprits, d) we will prevent similar things from happening again’.^[17]

Moreover, this created a narrative that was to be reproduced in all revisionist interpretations of war crimes to come. Postsocialist negationists and revisionists in Eastern Europe would be all too glad to see the slick argument ‘we were victims too’ and ‘never again’ successfully release the perpetrators of war crimes from responsibility. Some of the rhetoric Turkish apologists used after World War One are strikingly similar to these present-day reinterpretations of the role of perpetrators in the Second World War. In another parallel, ‘Turkish society, especially the young generation, knows almost nothing about these events’. This is why Kevorkian is probably right when he claims that the nationalism formed as a reaction to the Ottoman Empire’s incapacity to reform itself, was actually the worst possible ‘answer […] for a real problem’.^[18]

And the problem does not end there. Turkey’s recent constitutional reform has introduced penalties for citizens who ‘declare the Armenian genocide did indeed take place during the First World War’, thereby preventing academics from conducting research and informing the public. These academics are nevertheless the ones who know that, besides the Armenians whose genocide now ‘belongs to history’, there are other ethnic groups in Turkey, such as Pontic Greeks, Albanians, Arabs, Circassians, Bosnians, and most prominently the Kurds. Several of these groups have remained under threat from the Turkish state, which ‘continues to demonize them and reject them as “foreign bodies”’.^[19]

One of the main culprits in this regard was undoubtedly Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who reinvigorated the term ‘Turkish Nation’. Although he is often thought to have disregarded religion, he actually took it to be ‘essential for the formation of a Turkish nation’. For Mustafa Kemal, a nation could only be formed by persons who: (a) shared a rich historical legacy; (b) had a sincere desire to live together; and (c) had a common will to preserve their shared heritage. His definition did not exclude non-Muslim citizens, provided that they considered themselves part of the nation. The minimal conditions for becoming a Turk, however, were: a) adoption of the Turkish language as mother tongue; b) embracing Turkish culture; and c) subscribing to the ideal of Turkism.^[20]

The Kurdish rebellion in 1925 prompted Kemal to borrow the wording of prime minister Ismet Pasha, who claimed that the republic’s elite had an ‘immediate duty to make Turks [of] all those who live in the Turkish fatherland’. What is more, the government and the president were convinced that they had to ‘cut out and throw away the minorities who oppose Turks and Turkishness’.^[21] Kemal repeated this message in different forms in the years that followed. He was, in fact, the man who ‘invented’ Turkish nationalism. He started by decreeing

‘that each morning Turkish children across the country should chant: “I am a Turk. I am honest. I am hardworking. My code is to protect those younger than me, to respect my elders, and love my homeland and my nation more than myself. My quest is to rise higher and go further. [May] my whole life be a gift for Turkishness.”’^[22]

It was also Kemal who said that ‘nations which are unaware of their history are obliged to die’. This is one of the reasons why, during holidays, the decision made by some people, even today, to display a flag with an image of Atatürk rather than the official red-and-white flag should not be understood as a sign of the difference between those who endorse secular or religious ideologies.

Although Atatürk is symbolically still present at every celebration of a national or religious holiday, and although his statues can be found in all cities and towns across the country, his image as the liberal, well-educated and charming father of the nation has now been challenged because of his resentment of the Kurds. However, Turkish political analysts and intellectuals believe that this will not mar Atatürk’s legacy. Indeed, perhaps those commentators are right who think that a full rehabilitation, through recent writings that return to hagiography and imagine Turkey as the prolongation of the multilingual, multi-faith Ottoman Empire, is more likely. In their nostalgia for pre-First World War times and their desire to link with them, none of those who want to emulate the old nationalism seem to care that the imperial multilingualism and openness to different religions have been replaced by modern Islamization. Today, the non-Muslim population of Istanbul has almost disappeared. The city, whose population was composed of approximately forty percent Jews, Armenians, Greeks and other non-Muslims at the end of the nineteenth century, today has Muslim Turks accounting for ninety percent of those who live there.

What should also be borne in mind is that the new wave of nationalism had already been gathering momentum from the early 1990s onwards. As Ebru Bulut of the Marmara University in Istanbul stresses, the rise of popular nationalism interacted with the rise of political Islam and the Kurdish nationalist movement. Besides this, ‘popular nationalism also reverberated […] with [the] populist nationalism’ of the political, military, and bureaucratic elites. To understand this development, Bulut maintains, we need to take into account the impact of the economic crisis Turkey underwent in early 2001. This crisis not only influenced the economy, but led to the ‘reconfiguration of the political system where the ruling political parties of the 1990s were ousted’. Moreover, this ‘reconfiguration’ changed not only the political landscape but also essential power relationships—or, as the French philosopher Vincent Descombes puts it, the problem of power was now not merely a question of force or strategy; it had become a problem of opinion. From the beginning of the twenty-first century on, the power structures in Turkey (and not only there) have been able to ensure some sort of consent from the majority of citizens, showing that ‘national unity and territorial integrity and the idea of a strong Turkish state’ are ‘accepted as principles constitutive of politics and not only historically and politically determined categories’.^[23]

This is why extra caution should be applied when interpreting events such as the recent referendum. What appears to be a poor result for President Erdoğan should, in my opinion, be ascribed to the fact that his own supporters failed to vote: they remained at home, convinced that the referendum had already been won. This is underscored by the considerable insensitivity the public shows to the regime’s ‘zero tolerance’ towards anyone who dares criticize Erdoğan and his government. It is as though people have forgotten that, fifteen years ago, the same regime announced ‘zero tolerance’ for torture. It is now using the same strategy to persecute those it once claimed it would protect. According to some commentators, torture was re-established even before last years’ coup and has subsequently been used in the crackdown against Kurdish militants.^[24] This is why Human Rights Watch recently urged the government to investigate the kidnappings of people accused of being linked to the Gülen movement, a movement believed to have inspired the coup. According to The Economist, one of them ‘resurfaced in police custody after six weeks’ and accused the ‘security personnel of torturing him’. Turkish authorities usually deny such statements and tend not to comment on developments in the country’s southeastern region, ‘where at least 3,000 people have died in clashes between the army and Kurdish militants’ over the last two years, as The Economist maintains.

In fact, a greater danger than that coming from the police and from military violence is posed by violent paramilitary groups. Assassins from Syria were responsible for the murder of a Syrian journalist and her mother in Üsküdar in the Asian part of Istanbul at the end of September. Other examples of unlawful action are the arrests of the writer Dogan Akhanli and the journalist Hamza Yalcin in Spain. The latter event was described by fellow journalist Can Dündar as a ‘Kafkaesque absurdity’ (though it is much more than that), as the conduct of the Spanish police was highly questionable too: the police retained both reporters in custody even after the Swedish and German public had demanded their release.^[25] For years now, the two journalists have had Swedish and German citizenship, respectively. In fact, over 50 German citizens are being held in prison because of opposition to Erdoğan’s regime, which has prompted the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to ‘take a new direction in our policy towards Turkey’.^[26]

Naturally, for Turkish citizens the situation is far worse. Since the summer of 2016, 110,000 civil servants have lost their jobs, including the signatories of a petition urging president Erdoğan to stop the war against the Kurds. According to the Germany weekly Die Zeit, a significant number of professors and researchers from eighty-four universities who signed the petition against war and violence have ended up on the street or abroad or in custody.^[27]