Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Understanding the Uprising in Turkey

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Aug 12, 2013 Turkey
[Banner reading: “Shut your mouth, Tayyip, the bums [çapulcular] are talking,” Gezi Park, 5 June. Photo by Christiane Gruber.] [Banner reading: “Shut your mouth, Tayyip, the bums [çapulcular] are talking,” Gezi Park, 5 June. Photo by Christiane Gruber.]

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Understanding the Uprising in Turkey

By : Erdem Yörük

For most people around the world, the recent uprising against Turkey’s ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) is still a puzzle. Why did a protest over a park lead to country-wide unrest so quickly? The Turkish government has explained what happened by resorting to a conspiracy theory, referring to an international “interest-rate lobby” that planned to overthrow the government. Yet, according to a KONDA research institute poll, forty-nine percent of protestors decided to join the protests after receiving news about excessive police violence, indicating this as the main trigger of the uprising.

To provide a snapshot of this phenomenon, take the example of a young female student of mine: she comes from a politically conservative family, and she had never taken part in any protests before Gezi. But on 1 June, she could not stay at home after seeing reports on social media that the police had harshly attacked peaceful protestors at Gezi Park. The Konda survey results suggest that her experience was shared by many others like her.

To understand how a small protest evolved so quickly into large-scale unrest, I suggest referring to the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy. The American sociologist Robert K. Merton defined self-fulfilling prophecy as “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come `true.`”[1] Since late May, the Turkish government has acted on a set of worst-case-scenarios and false premises, most likely based on misleading or misevaluated intelligence, which escalated, united, and transformed existing and emerging protests into an uprising.

The year leading up to the Gezi protests had already been marked by a series of protests by Kurds, women, workers, LGBT individuals, students, and Alevis, all on top of AKP’s impressive and continuing record of anti-democratic policies: Turkey alone accounts for one third of all terror convictions in the world after 9/11 and has more journalists in jail than any other country, followed by Iran and China. Before the Gezi uprising started, Kurdish protesters had already helped to push the AKP into peace negotiations by exercising a combination of armed and civil disobedience (including a sixty-eight-day hunger-strike of thousands of Kurdish prisoners from September to November). Women displayed powerful resistance against the government’s plan to restrict abortion; the workers’ movement in the formal and informal sector escalated (examples include the ongoing Turkish Airlines strike and the Koç University resistance in April); LGBT protesters organized a strong public response against the killings of transgendered individuals; the student movement displayed a rapid expansion, especially after the riots at the Middle East Technical University campus in Ankara in December 2012; and Alevis protested the naming of the new Bosporus bridge after Sultan Yavuz Süleyman, an Ottoman sultan held responsible for the deaths of many Alevis in the early sixteenth century. It was perhaps only the Kemalist middle classes who did not take to streets before the Gezi protests, and their subsequent participation in the protest movement has provided the massive numbers that had previously been missing.

Given these broad-ranging forms of resistance, it is relatively easy to explain the unfolding of the Gezi uprising in June by looking at the recent past retrospectively. However, it was very difficult to predict what would happen, even by the end of May. The rapidity of the transition from these ongoing series of protests to a country-wide uprising occurred largely because the political choices of the AKP have been shaped by what I am calling self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here is the four-step pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy that the Turkish government has been trapped in: 1) an initial small wave of public protest starts; 2) the ruling party makes the observation that this is a conspiracy to stir up a larger uprising; 3) to prevent the conspiracy, the government exercises extreme police violence against protestors; 4) the extreme violence turns the protest into the very uprising that the ruling party was initially trying to prevent. This pattern has recurred a number of times since late May, when the government harshly repressed an initially small number of environmental activists in Gezi Park, based upon most likely inaccurate intelligence about a plot for a coup. This pattern is likely to recur in the upcoming months as well, since the AKP has still failed to grasp the logic of causality.

For example, following the same self-fulfilling pattern, the government has recently announced that it will pass a new law that will replace the existing private security forces on university campuses and in football stadiums with state police forces. The declared reason, again, is to prevent an uprising. Vice-Prime Minister Bülent Arınç said on 30 July that the government has received strong intelligence about a new large-scale wave of protest. It is said that these new protests will begin in September and will originate from campuses and stadiums.

On the same day, the public heard news about new government plans to disqualify any university students who took part in the resistance from benefitting from government scholarships. On 31 July, the Interior Minister announced a new plan to prohibit political slogans in football stadiums. According to these new proposals for football stadiums, political and ideological slogans will be prohibited; police forces will be deployed in place of the private security companies that are currently responsible for security during the games; plain-clothes police forces will be placed among the fans; football supporter groups’ actions in stadiums during the games, and their organizing activities through the social media, will be closely monitored; and alcohol consumption in stadiums will be severely restricted.

University students and football team supporter groups, most importantly Beşiktaş’ Çarşı, have been among the driving forces during the Gezi protests; it is very likely that the plan to insert police forces on campuses and in stadiums, along with other measures to repress political activism, will actually cause protests in September, when universities open and the football league begins. This has become an even stronger possibility after Prime Minister Erdoğan declared on 8 August that security forces would respond in the necessary manner to those who attempt to continue the riots in September. Most recently, on 10 August, Sports Minister Suat Kılıç explicitly threatened football supporters by saying “those who politicize the stadiums will pay the price.” He went on to say:

If some groups try to infiltrate in to supporter groups, they should know that Turkey is not a banana republic. We have been fighting terrorism for thirty years. We can handle that, as well. I don’t want to sound threatening, but know that it is not worth risking yourself and your team. Everyone must know that the law will be enforced. I hope that no one will be hurt, but this can happen. I want to warn, there will be electronic monitoring in stadiums. Sports prosecutors will watch the games in stadiums, and we are introducing electronic tickets to monitor the seat of every supporter.

Mr. Kılıç also warned university students: “They can try Gezi protests in universities. People should not ruin their lives, should not have criminal records.”

There is already a growing reaction in universities against these plans. Excessive police forces are already being sent to the training matches of prominent football teams, triggering the supporters of these teams to continue shouting anti-government slogans during the games. On 10 August, reacting against the government plan to ban political slogans at games, Gençlerbirliği supporters were chanting a quite creative slogan: “Political Slogan!”

Many Gezi protestors now think that the events have calmed down only because of the coming of the summer and Ramadan. Recently, a strong belief—indeed, a desire—has emerged among the public about a new wave of uprising to come in September. Thus, the government’s pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy recurs: a repressive measure against an expected uprising, based on what is most likely a false prediction, is likely to cause this very uprising itself to occur in September.

But why does the Turkish government keep following this pattern? One possible explanation is that Prime Minister Erdoğan has increasingly recruited AKP cadres with a penchant for conspiracy theories. For example, the recently appointed chief advisor to Erdoğan, Yiğit Bulut, is famous for his argument that “there is work going on to kill Erdoğan from afar through methods like telekinesis.” Bulut has been aptly called by the Financial Times “Erdoğan’s right-hand conspiracy theorist.”

But more important, the decade-long hegemony of the AKP has created an over-confidence among the party cadres regarding their capacity to mobilize and control Turkish society. As I noted in a previous Jadaliyya article, the AKP leadership has tried to conserve its popular base by resorting to a polarizing and non-accommodating stance towards the Gezi protestors. This strategy has seemed to work. If you talk to an ordinary AKP supporter—for example, a taxi driver in Üsküdar, a conservative neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul—you are likely to hear conspiracy theories about the Gezi protests: for example, Germany is against the new airport that would replace Frankfurt International, or England is against the new channel that the AKP is planning to build in the European part of Istanbul. Hence, the uprising comes to be seen as nothing but a western plot to undermine the successful projects of the AKP.

It is worth noting that there is no single unifying strategy within the AKP. Many people have started to talk about an emerging demarcation between Erdoğan’s supporters and those who have closer relations with the Gülen Movement, including President Abdullah Gül and Vice-PM Bülent Arınç. For example, Gül and Arınç have occasionally adopted a more tolerant approach towards the protestors. While the popular base of the AKP still seems to be convinced by the over-confident approach developed by Erdoğan and his close allies in the party, this other faction of the AKP has begun to question the long-term sustainability of this strategy, given the mushrooming of grievances in the western world about Erdoğan’s authoritarian policies and his odd targeting of international finance capital. But despite growing objections, Erdoğan is still able to rule the party and thus determine the course of events.

The blindness among Erdoğan’s close cadres has led them to disregard accumulated grievances within the society, driving them to see conspiracy theories as the most plausible explanations for the uprising against an otherwise unchallenged ruling party. Therefore, it is apt to say, referring back to Merton, that the false definition of the situation by the governing AKP (as an international plot aiming to provoke an uprising) evokes a new behavior (the use of state repression) that continues to make the original false prediction come “true” (the uprising occurs). This is what has happened since late May, and seems likely to happen in September as well.

NOTES

[1] Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 477.
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]