Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three ... - Insight Turkey

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MÜCAHİT BİLİCİ view of “integration” is rather too simplistic. Such an analysis fails to question the centrality of the center: it gives the impression that the incumbents of the center have arrived there through some achievement and effort, and that the periphery is under some teleological obligation to try to join with them under normative conditions that Shils calls the “central value system.” Even in Western democracies, where such “central value systems” are relatively broad, there has been a tendency towards multiculturalism as a way of acknowledging the multiplicity of values. In countries like Turkey, what has become the “central value system” of the society is still far from representative or inclusive. Authoritarian efforts to engineer a new society from above led to a center that has remained in constant opposition to the periphery, creating two Turkeys at odds with one another. Once we begin to see the relationship between the center and the periphery in these terms, we can no longer think of its vernacular reflection, the White Turks/ Black Turks distinction, in terms of income level, economic power or, most misleadingly, the “degree of modernization.” The relationship between the two Turkeys has been one of power relations. It can best be grasped as a long-running competition, often obscured by the domestic discourse of national homogeneity and by such imported templates as “political Islam versus the secular state.” This competition occasionally flares up into political crises, the most recent example of which is the ongoing standoff between the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) and the Kemalist bureaucratic elite. What follows is a discussion of the historical and cultural conditions that contributed to the bifurcated Turkey we see today. Being a Minority in Turkey As part of the European Union candidacy requirements, in the last couple of years the Turkish government has engaged in a series of constitutional and legislative reforms, and has lessened the restrictions on minority languages and on the property rights of non-Muslim foundations. This trend towards change and democratization was so promising that in October 2004, the prime minister’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights sponsored a “Report on Minority Rights and Cultural Rights.” It was prepared by a committee and co-authored by Baskin Oran and Haluk Kaboglu. The report criticized traditional state policies towards minority identities, demonstrated how the term “Turk” was simultaneously a racial/ ethnic and a constitutional category, and recommended greater accommodation of Kurdish and Alevi identities as well as protection of the rights of non-Muslim minorities. 24
Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three Requirements of Turkish Citizenship The requirements of citizenship reflect the experience, cultural taste and conception of modernity particular to a small segment of Turkish society It soon became clear that the term minority was one of the most explosive in Turkish state culture. The report was attacked from all sides. It was disowned by the government and the prime minister who sponsored it. The Turkish military condemned it and Turkish courts decided to prosecute the authors. What was even more interesting was that the unofficial minorities themselves—Bosnians, for instance—rejected the label of minority. One might ask: What is wrong with being a minority? To answer this question in the Turkish context we need to explore the minorities external and internal to the Turkish nation. They can be categorized in terms of their visibility and recognition. It is important to note that their locations within (or outside) the nation interact with larger processes such as globalization and EU accession. My larger task is to make a statement about Turkish national identity as understood by the official discourse, which I argue has three conditions. Only a small percentage of Turkish society meets the requirements of ideal citizenship. Turkish national identity and the sense of what constitutes rightful citizenship, as I hope to show, are not products of a Habermasian deliberative process nor are they “objective” goals set by society at large. Rather, the requirements of citizenship reflect the experience, cultural taste and conception of modernity particular to a small segment of Turkish society. Turkish National Identity: Muslim, Turkish, Secular Turkish national identity came into being in dialogue with Europe and today it is being re-negotiated in dialogue with Europe. The story of Turkish national identity can be re-told as a tale that stretches between two European cities: Lausanne and Copenhagen, the cities that played host, respectively, to the making and potential remaking of Turkish national identity. The boundaries of Turkish national identity were drawn by the Lausanne Treaty in 1923, the same year Turkey declared itself a republic. Some eighty years later, those boundaries are being called into question as a result of the Copenhagen accord with the EU—but not all minorities are benefiting equally from these externally instigated openings. Identifying some of the minorities whose exclusion remains invisible will allow us to understand who, exactly, is a Turk. Before the Republic, a Turk was merely an ethnicity among many, and not necessarily a prestigious one. Only later was it elevated to the level of national standard. Most people in Turkey would say 25
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Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three ... - Insight Turkey

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