2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli
described as a “torn” country, which has been unable to reconcile its internal,
cultural differences, and settle for a stable democracy unhampered by the
temptations of authoritarianism. In that perspective, Turkey would appear to
be a vindication of the pessimistic assumption that the application of
Western conceptions in a Muslim context is fraught with the nearprobability
of failure.
The confrontation of 2007-2008 can certainly be placed within a broader
historical framework of an ongoing – internal – “clash of civilizations” about
the proper place of religion in society. Its origins can be traced to the
beginning of the nineteenth century, when the first, westernizing steps were
taken by the reformers of the Ottoman Empire, paving the way for Atatürk’s
subsequent westernizing revolution in the 1920s. Religion was then banished
from the public sphere, as law and education were thoroughly secularized.
It is a foregone conclusion that Turkey stands out as a unique country in its
part of the world; Muslim but – although intermittently – aspiring to be a
part of the liberal civilization of the West. Indeed, Atatürk was a rare kind of
a leader in his contemporary European context: stating, at a time when
democracy was besieged, that “today (in 1930), the ideal of democracy
resembles a rising sea”, and reminding that “the 20 th century has seen many a
tyrannical regime drown in that sea”. 5
Even though stability continues to elude it, Turkey has been the only durable
democracy in the Muslim world. That is no coincidence. The founder of the
republic significantly believed that the replacement of the religious
worldview with one guided by rationalism and science would pave the way
for democracy. With the freedom of the mind from religious constraint and
indoctrination firmly established, “the citizens will be able to obtain and
exercise their political freedom in the best way”, Atatürk put it. 6 The full
realization of that ideal, inherited from Enlightenment thought, and typical
of the enthusiastic and optimistic liberalism of the nineteenth century, has
obviously eluded the Turkish experiment in democracy.
5 Can Dündar, Yükselen bir deniz, Imge 2006, p. 7
6 Baskın Oran, Atatürk milliyetçiliği, Bilgi, 1990, p. 214