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ANKARA: Sailing through turbulence

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  • ANKARA: Sailing through turbulence

    Sailing through turbulence

    TDN
    Monday, June 20, 2005


    OPINIONS

    Opinion by Doğu ERGİL


    Doğu ERGİL

    There was lot of talk about Turkey's slackening of preparations for
    the start of EU membership talks. There were times when the political
    actors seemed to turn to internal politics under the spell of a common
    disillusionment with European demands that were found to be unfair and
    unwarranted. Hardships to be experienced during the accession
    negotiations, a difficulty in adapting to the degree of recognition
    and the disheartening resistance of many European peoples and elites
    to Turkey's membership all added up to the making of this sour feeling
    and attitude. The passive but continuous resistance of Turkish
    nationalists and state worshippers acting out of fear of losing their
    privileges and relative unaccountability in a system that is neither
    responsive to popular demands nor fully transparent must also be
    mentioned.

    All of a sudden the dominant actors on the Turkish political scene,
    such as the civilian bureaucracy and the military together with a
    section of the mainstream media, which has backed up the government's
    European vocation in the recent past, have began to escalate their
    criticism of the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP)
    government. The president of the republic lent weight and clout to
    this bunch with his latest demarches.

    President Sezer recently issued a public declaration in which he
    announced the number of government proposals to assign officials to
    various official posts in the bureaucracy and with reasons he blocked
    them when they were submitted for his approval. Mr. Sezer has turned
    down 251 formal government appeals. This is a substantial number,
    indicating a major schism between the AKP government, or the main
    political actor, and the presidency, which represents the state, the
    body of the unelected, the power of which is no less than the
    popularly elected branch of government. This is a form of castration,
    or trimming down, of the powers of the government, and here is the
    president's justification: 58 of the officials proposed for
    bureaucratic posts did not have the necessary experience. Thirteen of
    them had legal obstructions. Seventeen did not possess the legal
    qualifications to hold the proposed position. What about the remaining
    163 who were vetoed by the president? There is no mention of their
    presidential rejection. The obvious reason, then, is ideological
    resistance to the spawning of the AKP government, which is still
    suspected by the `state' of a `hidden agenda' to undermine the present
    structure of the secular nation-state. You may read this as a
    top-heavy bureaucratic system where the state has primacy over the
    nation and the bureaucracy controls social change, the judicial
    process, security issues and internal and international affairs to a
    great extent.

    Such friction between the state and government is indicative of a
    serious gap between the political process shaped by rule of law and a
    bureaucratic centralism that borders on arbitrariness guided by
    ideology (a blend of nationalism, centralism and statism). That
    ideological framework emanates from the supremacy of the state and its
    privileged position in shaping the nation (considered as an
    undifferentiated, solidaristic, monolithic body) and its
    deeds. Politics that emanate from popular demands and popular
    preferences are secondary to this kind of statecraft and the political
    cultural it is based on. This relationship, or reality, becomes more
    obvious as the government, the elected part of the executive, loses
    its grip in and over the system.

    Viewing it from this perspective, the eruption of a barrage of
    criticism and pseudo internal frictions based on the headscarf issue,
    government initiatives to assign personnel to official posts, Abdullah
    Ocalan's retrial as recommended by the European Court of Human Rights
    and a forced debate by some European circles on Turkey as to what
    happened to the Armenians at the time of the demise of the Ottoman
    Empire (early 20th century) must have been no coincidence. If it is no
    coincidence, what is the rationale behind such a tactical move?

    One strong or determining reason must be the upcoming presidential
    elections in 2007. With its two-thirds domination in the parliamentary
    arithmetic, the AKP will be able to select a president from among its
    ranks. (Presidents are elected within Parliament in the Turkish
    political system. Initially, candidates for parliamentary seats were
    hand picked by the ruling party to guarantee a monolithic political
    process that was disrupted after the inception of multi-party politics
    in 1950). The obvious candidate for the next Turkish president is
    Mr. R.T. Erdogan, the incumbent prime minister. His religious
    background, which surfaced during his insistence on penalizing
    extramarital relationships at a very critical juncture of EU-Turkish
    relations that could have been as make or break for the process of
    granting Turkey a starting date for accession talks, his unpredictable
    initiatives in international relations, his cocky mannerisms in
    internal politics and his parochialism, reflected in the attire of his
    family's women, fall short of the republican elite's worldly and
    predictable leadership style, which does not lose elbow contact with
    the state, are sufficient reasons to keep him away from the seat of
    Ataturk, who still sets the standards of statesmanship in Turkey. The
    STATE does not want Mr. Erdoğan or another AKP member to be the
    next president of Turkey.

    The abundance of controversy on this issue these days emanates from
    this fact, and it is very likely that there will be no end to it any
    time in the near future.

    What will happen then? Mr. Erdogan's realization that he is losing the
    support of the United States, without which he cannot keep the economy
    in shape and be effective on either the European front or in the
    Middle East, forced his hand to repair damaged relations with the
    United States. He saw this as necessary because he has increasingly
    realized that the way to Europe is long and arduous. At the same time
    he has realized that slackening relations with Europe were detrimental
    to the only sound political platform that his party/government shared
    with other, mostly adverse, groups in the country. That is why the
    delayed appointment of the chief negotiator with the EU has lately
    been realized in a jiffy. Now he is faced with the challenge of early
    elections, which the adversaries of an AKP government will push him
    into. These adversaries are aware that the next AKP group in
    Parliament will be smaller than of today, although the party will
    emerge victorious from the elections in the absence of any other
    viable alternative. A smaller AKP parliamentary group will run into
    difficulties in naming the next Turkish president, especially if it
    faces problems of legitimacy and representation. (Even today the AKP
    dominance in Parliament is based on one-third of the electorate's
    support due to the vagaries of an electoral system that favors the
    winner.)

    There are rough times ahead in Turkish politics, not all of which will
    be that rational or savory. Let us wait and see.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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