Reflections on the Referendum in Turkey

It is tempting to say that the Turks lost twice yesterday: once at basketball and once at politics. The first loss was a straightforward case of not being able to get enough balls through hoops, but the second is more confusing. Even in Turkey, many voters didn't know exactly what it was they were voting on, and many of those who did had some odd ideas about what it meant. One Facebook commentator even rejoiced that the Yes vote meant Turkey would be safe from military coups, as though one could stop tanks by fiddling with the small print of the constitution. (If anything, the political polarisation that the reforms might engender would make a coup more likely.) The reform package passed with 58% of the vote, though turnout was only 77%, due to a boycott by various Kurdish groups (77% would be good in, say, an American election, but bear in mind that in Turkey voting is compulsory).

In fact, only a few of the proposed changes were at all controversial, and of these the most controversial was the one which had the most people scratching their heads. This concerned the appointment of judges to the Constitutional Court, allowing more of them to be appointed by the ruling party and dropping the requirement for them all to be qualified lawyers. In practice this means that the Court will be hampered in its ability to block laws it deems unconstitutional. According to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) this will prevent the judicial bureaucracy from stifling democratic reform; from the point of view of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), it will erode the separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary. There are also warnings that it could lead to the establishment of an Islamic regime, a breakaway Kurdish state or civil war (as one Turkish friend put it, "Either Iran or Yugoslavia"). Why then was such a proposal welcomed, not only by a narrow majority of Turks, but also by many in the EU and USA?

Everything depends on how you frame the clash between the AKP and the CHP. To oversimplify a little, supporters of the former see it as a struggle between democrats and bureaucrats; supporters of the latter see it as a war between Islamists and secularists. (Of course there are crossovers, such as the lunatic fringe of the AKP who really do see yesterday's victory as the first step on the road to an Iranian-style Islamic Republic.) Both sides are right to an extent, but what I suggest is that the referendum is really just the latest move in a game played between two groups that have dominated Turkish politics since WWII. Political scientists call them the "political elites" and the "state elites", but I'll use the more familiar terms "demagogues" and "oligarchs". The former gain power through appealing to the masses (especially the rural masses and rural-urban migrants), the latter, through control of the state apparatus, notably the army, the judiciary and the education system. The demagogue/oligarch split cuts across right-left lines, and business interests may support one side or the other (or even both, to be on the safe side), but in general, the conservative and religious AKP is the current party of the demagogues, while the centre-left and militantly secularist CHP has always been the party of the oligarchs. This may come as a surprise to Europeans, but it is not that far removed from American politics, where populist conservatives sneer at the "liberal elite".

The Turkish Republic came about through a popular struggle—the war that liberated the remnants of the Ottoman Empire from the occupying Allied forces—but its form was determined largely by a highly educated, "Westernized" elite. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the Republican People's Party that he formed, aimed at a European-style democracy but were hampered by the political culture left behind by the Ottomans and an uneducated and largely reactionary population. In particular, they were faced by the paradox of secular reform: there can be no genuine democracy without secularism, but secularism could not be implemented without authoritarian means. Early attempts at multi-party democracy failed, and for a while Turkey was a one-party state. It was in this period that the group I call the oligarchs came to power. I am actually stretching the meaning of the word slightly, since this period was also one of aristocracy, in the Aristotelean sense of "rule by the best in the interests of the whole." Many of the CHP, from government ministers down to local activists, were acting from entirely selfless motives, but the effect was to create an ossified bureaucracy, especially after the dynamic leadership of Atatürk was replaced by the monolithic government of his successor, İsmet İnönü.

It was dissatisfaction with this oligarchy that enabled the first of the great demagogues, Adnan Menderes, to come to power with the Democrat Party when the multi-party system was restored in 1950. Menderes was an accomplished populist politician, drawing on the votes of conservative rural Turks by providing large agricultural subsidies and pandering to religious feeling. He thus managed to form an alliance between upper-class conservatives and the masses they had often ignored. This set the model for populist politics ever since, including not only the openly religious parties such as the Welfare Party (which held power briefly in the '90s) but also for significant elements of mainstream parties that stayed nominally secularist while flirting with religious groups. Of course it didn't work out too well for Menderes: despite his democratic rhetoric, his government became increasingly authoritarian, and a military coup in 1960 led to his death by hanging. Whether Menderes was guilty of the crimes he was accused of (including inciting the Istanbul Pogrom, which left many Greeks, Armenians and Jews dead or injured) his death was the revenge of the oligarchs.

One would have thought that the fate of Menderes would have discouraged the demagogues, but the current Prime Minister, Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, is in many ways a new Menderes. He is a demagogue par excellence, not only in his popular rhetoric (which is corny but effective) but in the way his party apparatus can solicit major funding from big business while simultaneously reaching out to the poor—or buying votes, as his opponents would put it. It is perhaps with Menderes in mind that the AKP pushed through the changes to the constitution. While we shouldn't ignore the danger of the Turkish state moving in a theocratic direction, I think Erdoğan is currently more interested in guaranteeing his personal safety and that of his comrades. We shouldn't forget that the AKP is under continual threat of closure for violating the constitution and many of its members have pending court cases that they are only protected from by their parliamentary immunity. (In Turkey, being an MP gives you a "Get out of jail free" card.) This means they either have to stay in power for life, which is not really practical, or find an exit strategy that will save them from the angry oligarchs. Erdoğan is reputed to have said "Democracy is like a tramway—we can get off when we get to where we want," but it is precisely the getting off ((in a slightly different way) that will prove difficult for the demagogues.

I should emphasise that when I use the terms "demagogue" and "oligarch" I'm not saying that these people are necessarily evil or motivated purely by personal gain. Demagogy and oligarchy are means, not ends, and good people can use bad means, and even occasionally produce good results. As Saul Alinsky said back in the 1970s, it is not a question of whether the end can ever justify the means, but of whether this particular end justifies this particular means. It is also a question, as anarchists have pointed out throughout the sorry history of revolutionary movements, of whether means determine ends.

Coming back to Aristotle, his preferred society was what he called "politeia", usually Anglicised to "polity". He defines this in two different ways. The first time the concept was introduced, it is defined as the majority ruling in the interest of the whole society (as opposed to democracy, which he sees as the majority ruling in their narrow self-interest, in a kind of legitimized mob rule). This ties in with his view of a citizen as one who takes turns in ruling and being ruled, and corresponds roughly to the modern idea of participatory democracy. (Aristotle would count modern parliamentary democracy as a form of oligarchy.) Later, though, he admits that this system would only be workable in a society where everyone was sufficiently educated to play an active part in politics while at the same time putting their personal interests to one side. Despairing that such a society would ever exist, he redefined polity as a mixture of democracy and oligarchy such that each cancelled out the worst features of the other. When demagogues and oligarchs can't work together, however messily, the result is that republics fall and are replaced by empires. It happened in Rome with Caesar, just as it happened long ago in a galaxy far away.

Now polity #1 seems a worthy medium-term goal for mature democracies to aim at. However, most democracies are not mature, so for them it's almost as distant a goal as, say, anarcho-communism. Polity #2, though, is what keeps those young democracies on the rails. In Turkey, the often chaotic and occasionally bloody shifts of power between demagogues and oligarchs have, in the long term, enabled it to function as a secular republic. We have to hope that the current constitutional changes, coming after two election victories for the AKP and the trial of a number of army officers for alleged coup-plotting don't tip the balance of power too far towards the demagogues.