“Cannibal Democracies,”
at the symposium organized by
Yeshive University Cardozo School of Law
Participants:
- David Golove, Cardozo Law School (Moderator)
- Thomas Christiano, University of Arizona
- Gregory Fox, Yale Law School
- Paul Magnarella, University of Florida
- William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune
- Edip Yuksel, 19.org
Thomas Christiano
Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona
We are quite a diverse group today and I’d like to focus my remarks on a philosophical question that arises in Mr.Yuksel’s paper and presentation. I have found this question to be a fascinating one and important to deal with in my own thinking on the nature of democracy and its justification. My remarks will be focused on a philosophical / theoretical question and that’s the following: Mr.Yuksel says there is something paradoxical or contradictory about the idea of banning political parties for the sake of democracy. He says banning a party which is playing according to the rules of democracy contradicts the core of the system. I want to explore what that means, if there is something compelling about this idea.
It seems completely undemocratic to ban certain parties. But I want to explore first what this claim means and explore some possible ways of thinking about it. The idea that banning a party violates the rules of democracy, I think, is pretty clearly right in a sense, that is, one clearly has to abridge the rules of democratic participation to exclude some people from having a say in the political process. There is clearly something non-democratic about that exclusion to the extent that democracy involves a kind of equal participation of all the citizens in the democratic process. Mr. Yuksel wants to say that there’s more than an abridgement of the democratic procedure – what’s being said here is that it’s impossible to justify based on any democratic principles any limitation on the people’s right to participate. That’s a different kind of claim and I want to pursue that.
As a philosopher, this is something I do as a matter of profession, but a quick distinction between different kinds of contradictions or incoherence. I mean there is an incoherence or contradiction on the idea that one might say that one is abridging the rules of democracy in a way that is still entirely consistent with democracy. There still is a kind of contradiction in that you’re still excluding someone from the process – that’s a conceptual incoherence, but it looks like there’s a more important issue to us, which is, do the principles that underlie democratic government, to the extent there are moral principles which we can defend, the principles of democratic government, do these principles rule out the possibility of excluding individuals from participating in politics under certain circumstances? If the idea is that the principles themselves rule out this possibility, then there’s a normative incoherence or moral incoherence in the idea of excluding people from participation.
Let me give you an example, one which Mr. Yuksel uses in his own paper, that is, in a slightly different context and that is the idea of freedom or liberty. John Stuart Mill, for instance, argued that it was a contradiction to say that a person could have the freedom to give up their own freedom, that is to sell themselves into slavery, there is some sort of contradiction. And that sounds like the conceptual type of contradiction that I was talking about before. Now in this case, it seems as if there is no contradiction. I mean, if I have an opportunity to sell myself into slavery, then there is no sense in which there’s any contradiction when I lose my freedom as a result of my own free choice. Mill, I think, has the following type of idea, in fact he says that, to give up one’s freedom, to sell oneself into slavery, defeats the very purpose, which is the justification of freedom. It defeats the point of having freedom. To enable somebody to sell oneself into slavery defeats the point of having freedom in the first place. So there’s this idea, freedom itself, there’s some moral reason for giving freedom, of not interfering with them, and that’s the idea of, to allow them to sell themselves into slavery defeats the point of freedom. I won’t go into his particular argument there but you can see the kind of distinction. Mill could say, you don’t want to allow people to sell themselves into freedom, not because it contradicts the idea of freedom, but because it undermines the principles which give moral justifications to freedom.
In many ways, this same distinction applies in a different way to democracy, that is, it’s undemocratic to exclude people from participating in the vote. I mean, there’s no question about that. But at the same time, it’s a different question to ask whether it would be justified, morally speaking, on the basis of democratic principles, to exclude people from democratic participation. Of course, whether it will be or not depends on the justification, the reasons for whether we think democracy is desirable or not. That’s the crucial question, so let me say a few words about that, just to prepare my own answer to this kind of question. I mean, democracy, as I think of it, is a kind of method for making decisions, it’s a kind of process for making decisions, that involves one person, one vote usually, involves a substantial proportion of the population being permitted to participate in some roughly equal way in the process of making central types of decisions. It may involve campaign finance restrictions and things and the idea is in some sense to make sure this process by which decisions are made gives people, depending on one’s view of equality, some roughly equal say over the outcome.
There are two ways you can think about the methods of making decisions. One if them is what’s the outcome of the decision, what kind of decisions are made when they use this method, what happens as a consequence of using this method, and you might evaluate democracy and say democracy is a good political method for making decisions, on the grounds that usually democratic decisions are good decisions. That is, they are at least better than decisions made by monarchs or dictators or aristocracies or something of that sort. You may say it’s an instrumentalist justification. You might say democracy is a good thing, not inherently, not intrinsically, but that it tends to protect liberty or that it tends to bring about justice, or it tends to being about a certain kind of result. This kind of approach is to be contrasted against another kind of way we could think about a method of decision-making. That is, instead of asking whether the decisions are good, one could ask, how was the decision made, was it made in a fair or just way? Did it treat all the participants of the process in a fair or just way? So you can ask the question either whether the decisions made are good or you can ask whether the way in which the decision was made is fair or just.
Let me just relate this very quickly to the question of whether there’s some sort of normative coherence to the idea of excluding anti-democratic elements from the democratic process. If you think the justification, or the thing that makes democracy a reasonably good thing to have, is that it tends to produce good decisions, in the normal case, than it doesn’t seem as if there is any kind of paradox or incoherence in excluding some anti-democratic elements, because it might be the case that democracy is going to produce those kinds of good decisions only in the context where you’ve excluded those kinds of elements, and since your justification is entirely in terms of the result, you say, it’s OK to have these various kinds of modifications, there’s no problem with the various modifications, if this tends to enhance the result of democratic decision-making. It seems to me the question of the normative type of coherence or whether there’s a paradox in banning anti-democratic elements from the democratic participation arises more seriously where we talk about this intrinsic justification – that is, if the method of decision-making itself is somehow intrinsically fair, it looks like there is something intrinsically unfair about excluding people from that process. That’s the puzzle and that’s what leads to the sense that one might often have, that excluding anti-democratic elements is somehow paradoxical from the point of view of democracy.
But I want to say there’s something mistaken about this and I want to say something about what I think is the underlying set of values behind democracy, in such a way that there’s in fact, no incoherence in, as it were, banning, in some cases, anti-democratic elements. The idea is the following: Democracy is a just or fair method of making decisions when there as, as it were, substantial disagreement among the people in society, about how that society ought to be organized, because people have different judgements about what justice requires under various circumstances, there are disagreements and we have lots of disagreements in the US, and most societies that are even reasonably complex, there are lots and lots of disagreements about how to organize a society. Democracy, as it were, is a fair way of making decisions, in that it treats them in some sense as equals, gives them an equal say in this process. The idea is that democracy has this elements of equality in that you have one person, one vote, so it looks like a clearly equal way of making these decisions. What’s important about democracy, particularly, is not just that it’s this equal way, but that it is a publicly clear, equal way of making decisions. That is, when people disagree, particularly if you think that equality is a fundamental value in a political society, when people disagree about justice, what they often are going to be disagreeing about is what constitutes an equal treatment of members of the society.
In the US, there’s this question of whether affirmative action treats people as equal. Some people say affirmative action is necessary to treat people as equals in order to compensate for past harms or in order to alleviate or change current disadvantages for people. Others, on the other hand, say affirmative action treats people as unequal on the grounds that it gives some people a better chance of getting a job under certain circumstances then others. So there’s a disagreement about what equality and what the moral equality of persons implies in this particular circumstance. And lots of disagreements in society about taxes, justice, the roles of various individuals, about religion and so forth, have to do with how do we treat the members of our society as equals, and how do we express this moral equality amongst persons in legislation. To the extent that people disagree a lot about these things, it’s inevitable that individuals are going to think that the legislation actually passed treats them, or some people are going to think that it treats them, as unequals. It’s inevitable that that happens because people disagree about what equality involves and only some people get their way in each case. Now what I want to say is that democracy, in some sense, involves a way in which you can give some people or treat some people as moral equals in a publicly clear way, one in which straight formally expresses and publicly embodies the moral equality of persons, when they disagree about substantive legislation. So there’s something fundamental about justice here in particular, is that it’s not only important that justice be done, but that justice be seen to be done. So it’s important that there be some public embodiment of this idea of justice.
Why does disagreement matter? Well, the idea is that disagreement matters because, in a society where people disagree about equality, we think that people’s judgements about what justice is, what fairness requires, and so forth, in some sense reflect their interests in various ways because people are naturally cognitively biased towards their own interests, so if you can exclude for example, a group of people, like if we exclude women, or people without property or ethnic minorities, the danger is going to be a public affirmation of the fact that their interests are less worthwhile than those of others. So the idea is that, the way to accommodate disagreement in a way which reflects equality, is to have it democratically resolved because it publicly expresses an idea of having equality amongst all members. So how does this relate to the exclusion of anti-democratic elements? Well here the idea is the following: it’s like, look, the process or method of democratic decision-making in my view, cannot publicly express the equality of citizens when it is explicitly used for the purpose of depriving individuals of their equal right. So, in other words, when the explicit purpose is to say, not merely that we have a different view of equality, but rather that we don’t think equality should be there at all, we think that certain people should be treated as inferior or have less of a say and so forth. And the idea is going to be that, once the democratic process is explicitly used for that purpose, that whole sense that democracy is a public expression of equality disappears. And to the extent that the idea of democracy is a public expression of equality, to the extent that that is the basis for saying that it’s intrinsically fair, when democracy is used to explicitly advance inequality, in an explicit way, then it ceases to have its intrinsic justice or fairness, and as a consequence, I want to say, there is not something or some contradiction in rejecting the banning of anti-democratic elements when they constitute a serious threat, explicitly speaking, to equality.
To the extent that we think democracy itself embodies some kind of equality, there is no real contradiction to the justification of democracy in banning those elements that want to exclude various, large portions of the population form the democratic process, on the grounds that they are not equal. The idea is that, given that the principles which underlie the defense of democracy, the moral justification of democracy, also provide for the circumstances for where, when there is a serious and explicit threat of the process being used for the purpose of eliminating equality, then the elements which embody those threats can be, as it were, excluded from the process.
Gregory Fox
Senior Fellow at the Orville H. Schnell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, Yale Law School
I am very glad to follow Professor Christiano because I would really like to be speaking precisely in international legal terms about what it was that he was addressing in philosophical terms, that is, to what extent can a system that purports to call itself democratic, to what extent can a democracy protect itself against erosion or destruction from within. And this is obviously the core of the debate that is going on in Turkey, because it has to do with the extent to which the Turkish national political process is open to discussion of the Kurdish issue. If there is any hope to which the question surrounding the Kurds will be resolved through political compromise rather than the use of arms, then the Turkish political process obviously needs to take account of this debate and have institutions that are ready and able to reach some sort of resolution. Now, obviously, there are many other human rights issues in Turkey that we’ve heard about. If people are interested in a rather extensive discussion of those human rights issues, I would commend to you the recently issued report by the U.S. State Department on human rights practices. This report was issued on February 26th, so it’s brand new. And I don’t only say that because a former colleague of mine at Yale is now the Assistant Secretary of State who produced this.
What I would like to focus on is the question of whether the Turkish political process is now sufficiently open to accommodate this debate in the terms dictated by public international law and, more specifically, the law of human rights. What I’d like to do first is to give a little bit of general background on the international law that bears on this question and specifically European human rights law. I’d like to discuss two recent cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights and talk a little bit about how these issues might play out in the future. Starting out at a very general level of how human rights law views the issue of political participation and the potential exclusion of political actors, 10 years ago, or maybe even 15 to be safe, to say that it was a goal of international law to protect democracy would have been an extraordinarily controversial statement.
If one looked at instruments, resolutions, produced by the United Nations (UN) or other international organizations, the word democracy almost never appeared. But, events of the late 80’s and early 90’s have worked a revolution in that area and now you can’t, it seems, look at any instrument of international law without reference being made to democratic participation, openness, transparency, accountability, all of these values that we associate with democratic systems. So, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that it has become a goal of the system of public international law to promote a system of political democracy and I will be making reference to two cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights, one of them a case involving the Communist Party of Turkey.
The European court says that democracy is without a doubt a fundamental feature of European public order. This claim that democracy is a general goal of the international community may be debatable in other regions of Europe. But, I think it fairly clearly established in Europe at this point. And there are reasons why the international legal system has moved so strongly behind the goal of promoting democracy. Among other things, the democratic system is seen as being self policing in its respect for human rights, i.e., there would be an independent judiciary, that there would be a civil society sector that would expose human rights abuses, so that the necessity of international intervention would be minimized.
And then there are more systemic reasons. There are international relations theories now, a very hotly debated proposition which people refer to as the democratic peace thesis which holds that democratic states in general do not go to war with each other. They quite often go to war with non-democratic states, but these theories say that if you look at a list of all the democratic states over the last 100-150 years and put it next to a list of all the major wars, you’ll never find on both sides of those wars two states that are in the category of being democratic. And so one of the fundamental goals of at least the UN charter era that is maintaining peace and security is advanced by encouraging transitions to democracy because you are less likely to get international conflict if there are more democracies. It’s obviously very much more complex than that, but that’s the justification.
So, now, if we have this very broad international goal of promoting democracy, what is the international community to do when it is faced with democratic states in which there are anti-democratic actors? As we just heard from Professor Christiano, the essence of a democratic system, the way we normally think of it, is a process in which all voices are heard and in some systems those voices may include parties or individuals who are simply using democracy as a vehicle to attain power, but they themselves share very few values of the democratic system. There’s an electoral system and they see an opportunity to achieve political power through elections, but their platform, explicit or implicit, is at odds with many respects of what we would understand as democracy. Maybe they explicitly say that this election will be the last one. After this we will have hereditary monarchy or a theocracy. Perhaps they promise to exclude certain groups from political process. Perhaps they promise to impose religious laws in place of secular laws. The difficulty obviously, as we just heard, is how a process committed to openness confronts parties and individuals who take the absolute opposite view. This is an issue that was very much on the minds of those in the post war era who drafted the major human rights instruments that we know today; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant of Civil And Political Rights, and more relevant for our purposes, the European Convention on Human Rights.
What was on their minds was primarily the experience of Nazi Germany in which the Nazi party first achieved political power by using the elections to the Reichsheid. If one looked around Europe in the 1930’s, one also saw many democratic systems in which mostly Fascist, but sometimes Communist parties were winning majorities of pluralities and attaining a degree of power that they would not have achieved if they were not permitted to participate. And in the minds of the drafters of human rights instruments, permitting these profoundly anti-democratic forces to take advantage of the openness of a democratic system was a major mistake that led to all the horrors of the second world war, against which human rights instruments were reacting.
The drafters of these instruments decided that it was important to build into the treaties that they were drafting mechanisms that would allow democratic states to protect themselves from anti-democratic actors. These are in different articles, in different treaties: Article 5 of the civil and political convention, Article 17 of the European convention. What these articles say is that no right enumerated in any of the treaties can be used as a justification for the suppression of any other right. Meaning, in our scenario, what this translates to is that enumeration of a right to political participation which is in all these human rights treaties, a right to open, free and fair elections, cannot be used as justification for anti-democratic actors who attain power to suppress rights of others. Political parties can’t say simply that because I won 51% of the election, I therefore have the right to exclude women from education or to discriminate against racial or religious minorities or to shut down newspapers, all of which are actions that would be violative of other articles in human rights instruments.
These clauses create a textual basis for excluding those who could make exactly that sort of argument, that because the majority of plurality of voters have given us power through an election, we can take these anti-democratic steps. And these textual provisions have formed the basis for a number of decisions of international human rights bodies. Quite early on, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban, the first of the German Neo-Nazi party and then of the Nazi Communist party in the late 1950’s. The UN human rights committee has upheld an Italian ban in Canada which was in this case applied to white supremacist parties. It’s fairly well established in human rights jurisprudence that anti-democratic actors are not legitimate players in the democratic process.
If you think of this as some bizarre abnormality, you should keep in mind that there’s another aspect of human rights law that is very much in sync with this and that is the very clear commitment of human right instruments to the suppression of hate speech. Now this is something that in the U.S. we take quite the opposite view of. But, if you take a look at the convention on race discrimination or Article 20 of the political covenant, there is not only permission to suppress hate speech, there is an obligation to suppress hate speech. And in the race convention, that obligation extends not only to individuals, but to racist organizations that espouse hatred toward groups must be restricted. And again for the U.S. this is quite difficult for us to understand given our First Amendment history and, indeed, when the U.S. ratified the political convention, we took explicit reservation to Article 20 because it would have been in direct contradiction to our First Amendment jurisprudence.
So, this principle is fairly well established in human rights law. To state this principle, though, is really not to answer this hard question that it is permissible to exclude anti-democratic actors. The hard question is who are the anti-democratic actors to be excluded? What are the evidentiary standards that must be met? What aspect of a program or platform of a party individual should an international body look to in order to decide that this actor represents a demonstrable threat to a democratic system? And here, the debate has ranged between those who say there must be a demonstrable, immediate threat. The group or individual must have a widespread following. It must engage in acts of violence and we must know exactly what its political program portends. It’s similar to the criminal law doctrine of self defense where there must be an immediate threat and the law within the permitted response to that. The problem with that argument of course, is that if a democratic society waits until an anti-democratic party has a widespread following is well organized enough to engage in violence, that to suppress that party is going to produce an enormous backlash and may even lead to civil unrest. That at that point, it would be simply too late. So, what’s the alternative? Well, it would be to go after those parties when they’re quite small, when there isn’t opportunity for backlash. And, if we’re thinking about the German Nazi party, it would have been better for Germany to take action before the elections of 1932 when the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichsheid. The problem there is obviously that there is much less evidence available that there is in fact a demonstrable anti-democratic actor. If you’re taking action against small parties that don’t have much of a track record, there’s the opportunity to drown out voices that are simply not democratic at all and it really gives a lot of weight to the subjective judgment of those who institute the ban.
Let me talk about the cases before the European Court of Human Rights. Let me just mention that Turkey is by far the state which has been the subject of more claiming than any other before the European Court of Human Rights. As of 1998, there were 1825 matters pending against Turkey in the European court. Italy was in second place with 1191 and then you go to the Netherlands with 131 and the disparity is quite large. These two cases involved action taken first against the United Communist Party of Turkey and secondly against the Socialist Party of Turkey, both if which were banned by orders of the Constitutional Court in 1991 and 1992. Let me briefly say that the argument of the Turkish government before the court was that these two parties, by encouraging dialogue with the PKK, had violated the idea of a unified Turkish citizenship/nationality and was advocating a political process in which a separate national identity within Turkey would be recognized. The European Court of International Rights rejected the ban in both cases. The court said that the essence of democracy is dialogue and these parties were not promoting secession. They were not promoting anything that would disrupt the territorial integrity of the Turkish state. They were simply proposing a political dialogue with the PKK that might be an alternative to the arms struggle and that the essence of democratic dialogue would contribute to the problem.
How can it be that more discussion could lead to more terrorism? The court seems to believe that quite the opposite is the case. Now, I wanted to make one other point that I was making in this case. Turkey wasn’t really attempting to bring itself within a tradition of portraying itself as being the target of an anti-democratic party. Turkey wasn’t saying that its democracy was being threatened as such. It was saying that its national identity was being threatened and its territorial integrity was being threatened. The PKK and those that the Turkish government views as its allies are referred to as secessionists. What I wanted to talk about was whether advocacy of secession and advocacy of disruption of national territory could be a basis for excluding a political party and is the maintenance of national territory a dearly held enough value in international law that it should permit this drastic restriction of democratic process. The U.S. fought a civil war to protect its own territorial integrity. Many states do the same thing. So, it’s the question of whether international law should take account of this claim in addition to the claim of anti-democratic actors. But, to the extent that the Turkish government is trying to fit its action in regard to the Kurdish problem under the umbrella of protecting democracy, that is a claim that has been squarely rejected by the European Court.
Paul Magnarella
Professor of Law and Anthropology, University of Florida
Turkey is a very special country. It’s the only country with a Muslim population that aspires to be a democratic one as well. It’s a democratic state in many respects. Its political leaning is pro-Western leaning republic. It has a democratically elected parliament and a completely independent judiciary. It is a member of NATO. It has an associate membership in the European Union. And it’s a major recipient of American foreign aid. Even with all these achievements Turkey is currently the target of international criticism because of its human rights policies and violations. Specifically: (1) torture and suspension of prisoners, while in detention, (2) the disappearance of and extra judicial killings of human rights activists, (3) government infringment upon the right to free speech and association, (4) denial of due process rights, (5) military rule in Kurdish villages, (6) suppression of the Kurdish self-expression.
Many human rights organizations have urged Turkey to improve these problems, and there have been many people working in Turkey in this direction. Private NGO groups have people putting their lives on the line every day, not necessarily of Turkish, Kurdish, or of other ethnic descent.
What are the elements indigenous to the Turks which I think are responsible for the state of affairs? I feel they are the following. The first is statism and authoritarianism — the state initiates controls on all economic and social institutions. Ever since the first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, often referred to as the father of the Turks, the elite have not tolerated easily criticisms of their leadership.
The police have over the years harassed, detained, arrested and beaten, and in a couple of cases, even killed, people because of their writings. Some have been tried and convicted, usually under a very broad anti-terror law, that prohibits threatening or insulting the president, public officials, military, or printing any anti-military propaganda. I attended a trial of a peace activist in 1949, and basically he was convicted of alienating the public from the military.
The second principle would be military involvement in the economy and society. The military see themselves as elites and inheritors of the Otto-Turk society, who are seen frequently through military advice or coups.
The third principle would be the Otto-Turk principle of populism which stands against class based politics and for a unified state based on one people and one language. The main idea of populism is Turkification. Every Turkish government from Otto-Turk to the present has tried to convert ethnic peoples into homogeneous population of Turks. The process has had the effect throughout history of suppressing the culture of non-Turkish peoples.
Fourth is legalism. The practice by Turkish governments to legalize all of the above so as to legitimize all of the state’s involvement in the economy, society, and culture, the legal consequences of military involvement in the economy, society and culture and the process of Turkification have all impacted Turkish culture. They also have consequences for human rights. With respect to the Kurds in particular, certain things have been part of the problem.
One is that Turkey became a state out of an empire which was a multi-ethnic political entity. There were over 40 different ethnic populations in Turkey proper when it was created. And there was an attempt by the elite to homogenize the population. The government accepted residents of Turkey as Turks. There was no separatory system imposed. Everyone was encouraged to be a Turk. This was a very strong assimilation policy and at the time it was very liberal. Rather than creating the Turks as some kind of superior people and other people being lesser, all were accepted and Turkey has promoted this policy from then up until the present.
However, times have changed. At first there was a time that the United Nations promoted assimilation. The World Labor Organization in its convention on minoritites, and tribal peoples called upon states to open all of these particular avenues to be part of the greater society. It didn’t say that states should promote policies to preserve their cultures. It said don’t discriminate against them. Open all doors so that we can assimilate everyone.
But, as I said, times have changed. The Covenant on Political Rights and philosophical changes have now put great stress on preserving minority cultures. These are things of great value, great human creations and they should be preserved. They should not be blotted out with an assimilationist policy. And Turkey is still living with their leaders in a time warp. They see minority cultures as a threat to the ability of the state and the nation.
A point I want to talk about briefly is the state security courts. The court of Human Rights has criticized them. There are 8 of them in 8 different Turkish cities with jurisdiction over certain alleged crimes, such as crimes against the invisibility of the state, crimes which involve insults to the military, to the memory of the president of the parliament, and threats to the principle of Turkishism. They consist of three judge panels. 2 of the judges are civilians and 1 judge is a military leader. The European Court of Human Rights has said that the military officer on these panels defeats the purpose of an independent review of these cases. Coincidentally, Abdul ju-Omajor, the Kurdish leader, is scheduled to be tried before such a court.
The state security courts also have jurisdiction over relations in the southeast, the area populated by Kurds. The government of the state security region, which consists now of 6 provinces, can issue decrees with the force of law which, the Constitution declares, a court cannot examine. For example, one of the decrees issued has enabled security forces in those regions to search Kurds without a warrant. These parties cannot appeal to the Constitutional Court and protest these warrants, because the governor has declared them okay.
There are a lot of positive things which can be said for Turkey. It has accepted the highest human rights standards by the Human Rights Convention, the compulsory jurisdiction of the Human Rights Court by allowing its citizens to petition before the Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Court.
Not many countries have ever done this. And as Greg Fox just told us, there are literally hundreds of petitions. So Turkish citizens have, once they have exhausted their legal rights in Turkey, and still believe their rights are being violated, a way to petition international courts.
And this is pretty good because Turkey usually respects the judgments of those courts. They are still lagging behind on some issues, like the presence of the military personnel on independent review boards, and other stuff I don’t want to get into.
We can say there are people, the government and the parliament have passed for example laws that are very positive. What I’m concerned about is the implementation of these.
William Pfaff
International Affairs Columnist, International Herald Tribune
The problem with being the final speaker is often that you find yourself with not a great deal left to say. This is not really the case for me, but it is true that Professor Magnarella covered some of the ground that I wanted to talk about myself. I’m interested in this overall problem, not as someone who is a specialist in Turkish affairs, or certainly not a scholar, but who is interested in the general political problems posed by nationalism and the aftermath of the European empires. Stalin once said to the Finns at the time of the Russian invasion of Finland, in the so called winter war, which immediately preceded the second World War, he said, I am not responsible for geography. Something like that could be said to the Kurds, whose misfortune is to exist where the Arab the Persian and the Turkish worlds come together. Where three civilizations meet, as well as separate political entities. And the Kurds themselves are not sufficiently numerous or powerful to have been able to impose themselves, although they have certainly repeatedly tried to establish a separate political identity. But, given the intrinsic difficulty of their position, speaking in historical generalizations, they really have little choice except to accommodate, and of course the problem is that many of them are stubbornly unwilling to do so.
What alternative do they have to accommodation? They have been testing that in recent years once again with the result of considerable grief for both themselves and for the Turkish population in general. The realistic question before them, I would say, is accommodate on what terms? And the answer to that has to be negotiated. The negotiation can be verbal and legal but it can also be a matter of action and violence and that is what occurs now. The problem to be negotiated is the Kurds’ determination to become a political nation. In that they have much support, particularly since post-WWI liberal civilization has been committed to the notion of national self determination. This is something in which we Americans of course were deeply implicated because it was Wilson who went to the Versailles treaty negotiations and the other negotiations which followed the Versailles treaty with the simple principle of national self determination for the peoples of the Near East and of Eastern Europe, a rather simplistic notion since he suffered from the illusion that men of good will can always find solutions to these problems. In fact, he and Walter Lippman and a handful of people sat down with maps and volumes of studies of the region trying to draft the terms on which these new nations would come about.
Implicated in that problem, however, is the question of what is a nation? A much disputed problem to which the best answer I believe, inadequate as it is, is one proposed by an eminent scholar of the region, a scholar of the post WWI era, Hugh Ceton Watson, when he said there is no scientific definition of a nation, and that the only realistic definition he could offer was a nation exists when a significant number of people consider themselves to form a nation or behave as if they formed one. Now one can also say a la Stalin, could say to the Kurds that they are also not responsible. Those who will stand against their national aims are not responsible for history. Because the idea of the nation and of national self fulfillment in political terms is frequently thought to be ancient or to reach back into antiquity, nations struggling over the centuries to achieve their fulfillment. But in fact, the idea of the nation, the modern nation, is fairly recent, which is to say that the modern nation, I suppose that France and England can be considered the two first modern nations, but the modern nation emerged in the middle ages or formed itself in the middle ages and could be characterized as a modern nation in 17th or 18th century. The notion of nationalism as such was connected to the 19th century phenomenon of romanticism and it was connected as well to the crises of modernization in Eastern Europe and the Near East.
You had in the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires a great many people of diverse origins who were the products of successive movements of peoples from Asia towards the Atlantic. They were able to rule them with considerable success because these peoples were not ordinarily self conscious. It was a preliterate period, and the institutions of the Ottoman Empire in particular were extremely well adopted to this problem and extremely flexible. The Ottoman Empire as late as the 19th century demanded obedience from the peoples they ruled. They demanded tribute from the communities in which they existed, they demanded taxes, but did not demand ideological conformity or religious conversion or social conformity to the model of the governing power so that there were large Christian populations living under Islamic rule. There was a large Jewish population. So long as they respected the imperial rules, all were left largely undisturbed to conduct their own lives under their own leaders, and careers in the imperial service were open so talented persons of whatever origin could go very high in the Ottoman system. I think that the one exception was in the army, where it was necessary to be Islamic, but otherwise it was a system that could work. It was close to the empires of antiquity, but it was not a system that could cope with the modernization of the 19th century. Primarily with the rise of literacy, the rise of literacy then produced a class of who were at the time a petit intelligentsia of teachers and they in turn took it upon themselves to turn their language into a written language to prepare dictionaries, and also then to attempt to discover or in many cases to invent histories of their people. The conventional pattern was that, in ancient times we were a great people ourselves but the oppressors have denied this and now in the 19th century we must recover our old identification. Serbia is the most important example of this. But the empire collapsed also because it did not have the technological and the administrative resources of the western nations or even Russia which had begun to pick the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires apart.
Out of the Hapsburg Empire collapse then came a score of more or less realistic nations, as I say sometimes, with somewhat embellished stories of their origin but nonetheless, in Seton Watson’s term, thinking of themselves as nations. Paradoxically, the most dynamic nation that emerged from the collapse of such the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was Turkey, shorn of its empire, but out of the collapse came no nation for the Kurds. In the treaty of Sev, which was the Treaty that dealt with the Ottoman’s collapse, the succession, there was a Kurdistan but three years later, the Western powers had chosen the course of realpolitik and also Turkey had established itself as a not unformidable nation and so Kurdistan disappeared from the Treaty that ended, that ended the First World War so far as Turkey was concerned. The new Turkey had no room for the tolerance of the old empire. Quite to the contrary, it wanted to be a modern European nation because it wanted to resist the modern European nations which had caused the old empire so much grief. It created a state, I supposes the closest model that it had was Germany, which had been the closest to the Ottoman Empire . The Turks were the allies of Germany in the First World War, but they did not adopt the German notion of a “racial state,” which is still a problem in German society to the present date, the notion that there is a German race. You either belong to it or you don’t belong to it. Instead, Turks, as has just been said, wanted everyone to be a Turk. To be a Turk was a universal norm, the model of society was much closer to the French, which was to say it was a assimilationist, wherever you came from you could become a Turk and you should be honored, it was assumed, to be a Turk. Now the state that was created, was a quite remarkable accomplishment, as a French author in the journal Politic has just written.
It is a non-negligible accomplishment that indeed a democratic space was created and exists today, that there has been something like 100 years of experience of a democratic politics in Turkey. If you take account of the later Ottoman period when the forms of a constitutional monarchy were adopted, but there have been regular elections since 1946. There is an independent court. A civil society exists. But this state sees the separatist problem as an ill of how the Ottoman Empire was destroyed. In this case there is something that can be described as the servant syndrome. Turkey becomes very defensive when the minority question is raised from outside Turkey. It says, “This is a way of destroying Turkey. This is meant to destroy Turkey. Our enemies our responsible,” and indeed, Turkey has enemies. It has Greece, Iran, Armenia, Syria, all of whom play ,or at one or another time, have played the Turkey card against Turkish unity. Even today it sees the United States sponsoring an autonomous Kurdish zone in Iraq at the sane time that Turkey is acting as America’s ally by permitting the United States to bomb Iraq from Turkish soil. The Turks also feel defensive with respect to the European Union, which lead the Turks into an expectation that they could become part of the European Union, and are now backing away from this for expedient reasons but essentially because of the sense that the civilization is too different, that the mixture of the Islamic civilization with a Christian or post Christian Europe will not take. But that is something that has been a development of recent years. There is also the Islamic movement, which is perhaps something we can discuss in the question , ah the question period.
I will end with the argument that the problem of assimilation or non assimilation is a serious problem and you must make a choice. The Turks have made one choice. But every country faces this question with respect to minorities or immigrants. It is easy for an ideological nation such as the United States or France, for countries that see themselves as a norm for society, can then say to all who come, come from anywhere and you can easily become us if you want to be. Now that is challenged with a multi-culturalist argument. But in the United States, until very recently, certainly through the periods of the great immigrations, the immigrant child was taken from his parents’ home where they were speaking the language of the old country, put down in the public school, was told he was an American and to salute the flag, give the Pledge of Allegiance, speak English, and he came out of the end of the school system, parochial schools just as well, he came out as a good little American, slightly embarrassed about his parents. This is the same thing in France, you are put into a the French public school system, and you begin to learn about your ancestors, of the Gauls. But again, it works. It turns people out who are citizens of the society. Now, theoretically, the United States is not doing this, but I think in fact the assimilation is just as powerful. The assimilative powers are just as powerful, but they are MTV and Hollywood. I personally would prefer assimilation by way of the schools. In any case, the notion of the multi-cultural nation is today untested in the long term. Be that as it may, the Turks say, you are Turks and if you are a Turk everything is open to you, careers, social positions, full participation in the society. If you do not wish to be a Turk, you threaten national disintegration. So, that is the refusal that many Kurds are making, but I end with the question of which I began: what is the reasonable alternative?