Why is Turkey unable to overcome certain hardships?

The culture of reconciliation for example. Why aren’t its benefits grasped in these lands and it remains quite distant from becoming a principal idea?

This is an age where the understanding prevails that strength is not derived from the past, where the present should not be sacrificed for the sake of the future, and one where the future should be created in the present…

In this regard, the curtains have not been fully drawn open in order for us to see the light. The prevailing winds hint at an atmosphere of opening up to others but some elements of the current structure remain introverted…

We frequently repeat and continue to constantly live with the trauma of the past century… The same unchanging mechanism has been in place since the early 19th century regardless of the direction of the trajectory and changes both within and outside the country. It is the same mechanism implemented under the umbrella of conflict even if the problems are new, the situations are new, and the players involved are new…

The trauma is increased two-fold when modernity is implemented in a manner where out of its two basic elements, centralization is adopted but diversity is disregarded. That is to say, individualization, which is the catalyst of centralization, is impeded, and by proceeding on this basis, the creation of autonomous spheres other than the state are disregarded…

This trauma has become part of the history of Turkish politics, the Turkish right and the Turkish left. It forms the essence of the policies and very existence of these political parties that decide Turkey’s fate.

It is because of this trauma that the right has placed the blame for all societal inequality and the breakdown of morality on Western modernization. Its belief that all these problems faced by Turkey are due to its cultural and political contacts and affinity with the West, has pushed it toward viewing the “mythology of origins” as the miraculous solution to all the country’s problems. It has pushed it toward introverted nationalism, or some sort of radicalism.

The left, on the other hand, has preferred to lay all the blame here, on this country’s culture and local values. It has based its fundamentals on a discourse that from a political viewpoint draws from eastern habits as much as it can, but from a cultural viewpoint, is anti-eastern to the utmost based on an anti-change, statist, opportunist and divisive discourse.

As a result Kemalism, Islamism, nationalism and leftism haven’t been able to mature past the stage of political reactionism based on some cultural or ideological root. They have used the West and the West’s institutions of modernity as tools of reference in a selective and arbitrary manner during their clashes against each other.

This has been publically reflected in the same manner. The victims have always rallied about individual rights, whereas the rest have rallied behind the state. One has glorified the discourse of “public order with no regard for individuals based on a movement for individual rights,” and the other has glorified the discourse of “modernity without people by its rejection of diversity.”

Politics has been conducted by swapping positions among these discourses depending on the persons and institutions involved. In fact, as part of this order and with this mindset, local values have become neighborhood values; and universal values have become local values…

The clash has taken place in the minds and the clash has been between the palpable authority of the East and the imaginary individual of the West. The country has become introverted as it has become more distant from the imaginary. It became acquainted with chaos the closer it got to what is palpable. The narrative has been the same for years and is still the same. But serious breaks from this narrative are also experienced.

The attempts by the current political leadership to break away from this tradition in many areas, and its struggle against this tradition are an example of this. However, even when it comes to the political leadership, there are adherents of this tradition that resist and recurrences of such actions can be seen.

An inverse example would be the leaving to political sovereignty any decision on autonomous spaces that would absorb some of the values of dominance of the state. At any rate, the political leadership is not the only criterion. It is not easy to proceed as long as the country doesn’t witness changes in the political and societal opposition groups, media and civil institutions as well.