Two visions of politics in Turkey: authoritarian and revolutionary

The leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, speaks to his party supporters during an anti-coup rally in Istanbul,July 23,2016. Petros Giannakouris/Press Association. All rights reserved.Late
last December, upon returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia, Turkish President
Erdogan was asked by Turkish reporters whether an
executive presidential system was possible while maintaining “the unitary
structure of the state”. He responded, “There are already examples in the
world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.” Following a
failed coup d’etat attempt this July, as Erdogan started excluding and
imprisoning political rivals, laying the groundwork for authoritarian control, some critics have begun
taking the comparison more seriously.

In fact, Erdogan draws on the same conception of
politics, drawing on the thinking of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and
political theorist who was a passionate defender of Hitler’s regime. According
to Schmitt, politics is based on nothing more than the distinction between
“friend” and “enemy”. This concept of politics is not determined by economics
and ethical categories. Rather, the state needs to create enemies to constitute
itself and to ensure its own survival.  Erdogan's politics have much
in common with this central premise, as he explained here:

“Democracy, freedom and the rule of law…For us,
these words have absolutely no value any longer. Those who stand on our side in
the fight against terrorism are our friends. Those on the opposite side are our
enemy,” July 16, 2016

Any opinions or policies outside the boundaries
of the ruling ideology of the Turkish state are deemed to be a threat to the unity
and security of the state. The friend and enemy binary is not a rigid concept. A friend can become an enemy and an enemy can become a best friend
out of the blue. For this politics is not structured around ethical principles.
The enemy, for Erdogan, is whoever stands against him on his way to building an
authoritarian state, as he
deploys the declaration of a state of emergency, imprisonments, war and
massacres against his political rivals.

Erdogan has called the failed coup attempt “a gift
from God”, since it would help to quash his rivals within the state. It
"proved" the existence of an enemy he has been rhetorically
constructing over recent years. Consequently, it will pave the way for him to
consolidate his power throughout the state, allowing him to install a new authoritarian hyper-presidentialist system. Now everyone
in Turkey – the army, academics, journalists, judges and political opponents – can
be the enemy in the eyes of Erdogan. God’s gift plays its role whenever necessary
to enable all the state’s “enemies” or political rivals to be arbitrarily
packed off to jail.

God’s gift is the moment of the “state of exception”
that Carl Schmidt outlined in his book, Political
Theology, which begins by defining as “sovereign… he who decides the
exception”. The sovereign is a charismatic leader who saves his people from
“peril” by acting outside the law if necessary. He is sovereign in an absolute
sense; in other words, a dictator.

What Erdogan is trying to achieve through this kind
of politics is to build an authoritarian state by fighting diversity and
plurality within the body of the state, firstly by excluding the different
parties that are not compatible with the ruling party’s ideology, such as the Peoples’
Democratic Party (HDP) – whose elected representatives were recently stripped
of their immunity for allegedly “abetting terrorism.” The
democratic aspirations of the HDP were an obstacle to Erdoğan’s dream to
establish a hyper-presidentialist
system.
The other threat to Erdogan was Fethullah Gulen – the prominent Muslim cleric currently
living in exile in the US accused by the Turkish government of plotting the
coup – and the Gulenist cells within the state apparatus. After this, by
penetration of the social realm with his politics, Erdogan aims to reduce the Turkish
masses to passivity.

Revolutionary politics as an alternative

The friend-enemy political binary does indeed limit
the scope of diversity and plurality in administering the social realm. This
crude dualism cannot encompass the complexity and richness of life, and neither
can it ultimately divest the rich meaning of politics from its original Greek meaning
as the self-management of the community. This self-management is rooted in the
people and based on their empowerment in participatory democratic institutions.
For politics is not a mere choice between white and black, but rather a
creative way of people running their daily lives in all their colourful
richness. Theodor W. Adorno, German philosopher and sociologist, in his book Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged
Life countered this central concept of Carl Schmitt’s politics with an
emphasis on freedom, writing:

“Carl Schmitt defined the very essence of
politics by the categories of friend and enemy… Freedom would be not to
choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices”.

In Turkey today, we see both these visions in
contestation. On the one hand, Erdogan is pursing Carl Schmitt’s political
trajectory: on the other hand, many are drawn to a radical politics which is
totally at odds with Erdogan’s politics. Despite the harsh conditions of being
in solitary confinement on Imrali prison island in Turkey since 1999, Ocalan,
thinker and ideological father of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), developed
his concept of revolutionary politics after drawing on the thought of philosophers
such as Hanna Arendt and Murray Bookchin. This kind of politics is practiced by
the Kurdish Freedom Movement in North Kurdistan(southeastern
Turkey) and Rojava. Their revolutionary politics aims at
creating a dual power to challenge the nation-state: a non-state public sphere empowered
by grassroots assemblies, combined with a confederation of democratized
municipalities, elected by the people through direct face-to-face democracy.

One of the main
characteristics of this revolutionary politics is its strong melding with
rational ethics in society. While ethics tries to determine morally good
actions, politics tries to create the best action. Any action or politics is
pushed by ethical needs, and this politics is the manifestation of an ethics
that seeks to achieve creative self-realization through participation in a
non-hierarchical and free society. In his fifth volume, Ocalan analyzes
the way in which this ethics plays the same role as politics in managing
society. He argues, “while politics performs a routine creative, protective and
feeding role, ethics does the same service in the society, via the
institutionalized and rule-based force of tradition. One can judge ethics as
the political memory of society.”

Erdogan’s politics and Ocalan’s politics collided
head on when the HDP, embracing a revolutionary and democratic politics, scored
a great victory in the June election, surpassing the Turkish parliament's 10%
threshold. This impressive performance temporarily stalled Erdogan’s ambitions,
hence the subsequent escalation of conflict and the brutal crackdown on the
Kurdish movement ever since. Erdogan terminated the peace process and launched
a war against the popular base of the HDP. In reaction to this war people
organized local assemblies and declared self-rule all over North Kurdistan.
Ever
since, the Turkish government has chosen coercion and social engineering
policies enacted through war as its approach to uprooting the seeds of
revolutionary politics in North Kurdistan. The war in North Kurdistan is a war
against the will of the Kurdish people to pursue a revolutionary politics dedicated
to freedom, democracy, diversity and plurality.

It follows that the first step to
solving the Kurdish question in North Kurdistan is an end to militarism on both
sides, since militarism too can only suffocate the real role of politics, that
is more active participation in building a peace process between the Turkish
state and the Kurds.

When Erdogan, aided by the CHP and MHP – two
parties which have a similar mentality to that of the AKP – stripped parliamentary
immunity away from the  HPD, Selahattin
Demirtas, co-leader of the HDP, eloquently expressed his vision of a
revolutionary politics rooted in people. He said:

 “People form
parliaments, not parties, and the people can form multiple parliaments if they
wish to do so… The people, the public would be able to do whatever they wish
to do and we would not stand in the way of our people.”

Turkey
is heading to a gloomy future under the shadow of an AKP politics  based on exclusion and the denial of all forms
of democracy and diversity in Turkey. To avoid the abyss, people need a new revolutionary politics
aimed at absorbing the power of the state and giving it back to people to run their
own lives in a free, democratic and ethical way.