Turkey’s Big Business Opts for Consolidation of Democracy
ASIA--PACIFIC, 4 Apr 2011
Sahin Alpay – TRANSCEND Media Service
No restrictions incompatible with democracy on freedoms of expression, association and religion.
Unrestricted use of headscarves for university students and teachers, Parliament members and public employees other than those (like judges, prosecutors, police officers and soldiers) who perform duties where impartiality carries importance. The right to conscientious objection to be recognized. State administration to be decentralized. The Religious Affairs Directorate to be restructured.
No compulsory religion courses in schools, and the right to education in the mother tongue to be recognized. A full parliamentary governmental system with no powers for the president that conflict with that system. The National Security Council (MGK) to lose its constitutional status, and its area of jurisdiction to be strictly limited to military issues. The General Staff to be placed under the authority of the Ministry of Defense, and defense expenditures to be audited by both Parliament and the Court of Accounts. The Higher Educational Board (YÖK) to be abolished and replaced by a commission that would only plan and coordinate higher education.
The above are only the main points raised in a report prepared by a group of specialists and opinion leaders concerning the principles on which Turkey’s new and democratic constitution to be adopted should rest on. The report was assigned and published by the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSİAD) on the 40th anniversary of its founding. These principles now open to public deliberation, have been advanced, discussed and broadly agreed upon by liberals and democrats in Turkey in a debate that started in the early 1990s. What the TÜSİAD report suggests is, briefly, that the Constitution based on Kemalism (secular nationalism) drawn by the military in 1982 be replaced by one that is based on the principles of liberal democracy.
What is the significance of this report for Turkish politics? In order to answer this question one has to consider the fact that Turkey since the turn of the 21st century has been engaged in transition from a kind of tutelary democracy under the supervision of the military and civilian state elites committed to an authoritarian reading of Kemalism to one based on European Union norms as defined by the Copenhagen political criteria. Current political struggles in Turkey are based mainly on the cleavage between those who favor the preservation of the tutelage regime, established with the introduction of multi-party politics in the early 1950s, and those who call for its replacement by a liberal democratic regime. This cleavage has divided not only the civilian, military, bureaucratic, political, economic, cultural, media and other elites, but also the people at large into two main camps. The former camp argues that Turkey may become a religious state like Iran or lose its territorial integrity if the tutelage regime is allowed to be disestablished. The latter camp, on the other hand, argues that Turkey can consolidate secularism and its territorial integrity only by adopting a liberal democratic regime.
What the recent report by TÜSİAD signifies is that Turkey’s İstanbul-based big business puts its weight behind the calls for consolidation of democracy instead of continuation of the tutelage regime. İstanbul-based big business began to accumulate its capital thanks to state protection and subsidies during the period that lasted from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s when the country pursued an industrialization strategy based on import substitution, and grew to prominence by adapting to the liberalizing and globalizing economic policies pursued from 1980s onward.
Initial signals that Turkey’s big business may opt for the consolidation of democracy were observed in the late 1990s when TÜSİAD published in January 1997 a report titled “Perspectives for democratization in Turkey,” which met with considerable opposition from within and was soon shelved, losing all relevance with the military’s (“postmodern”) intervention to force the elected government to resign and bolster the tutelary regime later that year. The recent report, however, seems to have gained general approval of the members, while being denounced foremost by Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, who declared that all the demands of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were now put forward by TÜSİAD.
The real meaning of the report, however, is that big business in Turkey, whether based in İstanbul or Anatolia is now putting its weight behind consolidation of a normal democracy. It needs to be emphasized that if military conspiracies to topple the elected government and attempts to ban the government party have failed in 21st century Turkey, this can only be explained by the fact that even among the military and judiciary, those in favor of consolidating democracy prevail. Turkey is, therefore, likely to consolidate a democracy on European norms since majorities of both Turkey’s elites and people are opting for it.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 4 Apr 2011.
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