‘Optimism of the Intellect’? How to Stay Hopeful in the Wake of Turkey’s Referendum Results

[\"NO\" supporters. Image via Wikimedia Commons.] [\"NO\" supporters. Image via Wikimedia Commons.]

‘Optimism of the Intellect’? How to Stay Hopeful in the Wake of Turkey’s Referendum Results

By : Gülay Türkmen-Dervişoğlu

Following the constitutional referendum in Turkey, which resulted in a narrow victory for the “Yes” camp (with fifty-one percent of the voters approving the constitutional changes that grant President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unprecedented powers), pundits rushed to portray a grim picture, mourning “the death of Turkish democracy.” In an op-ed for Foreign Policy, titled “RIP Turkey, 1921-2017,” Steven Cook claimed that with this victory, Erdoğan not only “permanently closed a chapter of his country’s modern history” but also closed off the prospect that Turkey could become a democracy. Similarly, Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker argued, “after fifteen years of riding the train of democracy, Erdoğan and Turkey are finally stepping off.” Writing for CNN, Frida Ghitis joined this chorus by declaring that, “Turkey’s democracy has died.”

Although I understand the underlying logic that gives rise to these gloomy analyses and I share their concerns about the future, I also beg to differ and to put forward a more cautious reading of the Turkish referendum. I believe that there are three important caveats one should take into consideration before jumping to depressing conclusions about “the end of Turkish democracy.” 

First, as most analysts agree, Turkish democracy has long been in a sickbed. In fact, save for the ballot box, Turkey has historically lacked the crucial elements needed to be considered a “democratic” country; human rights abuses, military involvement in politics, and discrimination towards ethnic and religious minorities have all, unfortunately, been regular occurrences throughout the Turkish Republic’s existence. More importantly, Turkey has been under de-facto authoritarian rule since July 2016, when the government, in response to the failed coup attempt, declared a state of emergency. Since that time, the country has been governed mostly through statutory decrees. In the last nine months, around 134,000 public employees—including state officials, bureaucrats, academics, teachers, judiciary, and military personnel—have been dismissed from their professions (around 80,000 had their passports revoked); 560 foundations, 1125 associations, and nineteen trade unions have been shut down; 157 journalists have been jailed; 178 news outlets and publishing houses have been closed. As such, the referendum results have only made de jure what has already been in practice since July 2016.

Second, as detailed in reports by opposition parties, as well as by national non-partisan organizations such as Oy ve Otesi and Hayir ve Otesi and international monitors such as the OSCE, the “victory” of the Yes camp is overshadowed by serious allegations of electoral fraud. On late Sunday afternoon, shortly before polling booths closed, Turkey’s Supreme Board of Elections (YSK), acting upon a complaint letter by Recep Ozel, the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) representative on the board, issued an instruction to count as valid unstamped ballots, which, by law, should be considered invalid. According to the OSCE, these instructions, which changed the ballot validity criteria on election day, seriously “undermined an important safeguard and contradicted the law.” Although it is not possible to tell precisely how many unstamped ballots were accepted (because no records were kept), Alev Korun, an Austrian member of the Council of Europe observer mission, has claimed that “up to 2.5 million votes could have been manipulated.” If one bears in mind that the Yes votes were only about 1.3 million more than the No votes, it becomes quite clear why the decision of the YSK shattered any legitimacy this referendum might have had in the eyes of a considerable number of voters, as well as of the majority of the international community.

Third, even if any claim of fraud is unfounded, the solid reality is this: In a country which is currently under a state of emergency and which has been so since July 2016; in a country where thousands of people have been detained, arrested, or forced into exile; in a country where journalists, prominent intellectuals, and academics are being jailed, repressed, and censored; in a country where the two co-presidents and eleven MPs of the third largest political party in the parliament (the pro-Kurdish, leftist HDP) are imprisoned; in a country where “No” campaigners were constantly stigmatized, labeled as “traitors” and “terror supporters,” physically abused, and even detained; in a country where the referendum campaign took place on a distorted playing field, where the opposition had very little television time or mainstream media coverage while the ruling party had the benefit of constant live broadcasts and television appearances to promote their position; in a country where Erdoğan has slowly but surely managed to get ahold of almost all the institutions (from the judiciary to the Higher Election Board to the Directorate of Religious Affairs—the imams of which allegedly advocated for “Yes” in Friday sermons); in a country where Erdoğan pulled every single string available to win this referendum, the amount of Yes votes turned out to be only fifty-one percent.

So rather than mourning “Turkish democracy” and wondering “How and why did the Turkish people vote for authoritarianism?” the right question to ask is: How is it possible that under these circumstances, against all the odds, so many people were courageous enough to say “No”? Putting the situation in these terms forces us to reframe the way we look at the referendum results and invites more caution in reaching pitch-black conclusions about Turkish democracy. It also forces one to respect and acknowledge the resilience and willingness of (at least half of) the Turkish people to fight against the further entrenching of authoritarian rule in their country.

At the end of the day, if democracy is ever to flourish in Turkey, it will only be thanks to those people who, despite the ongoing atmosphere of fear and repression, not only voted “No” against the presidential system, but also are using all democratic means at their disposal—from filing complaints about fraud allegations to taking to the streets—to defend their votes with the slogan “No, this is not over.” As scholars and analysts who are too often taken by “pessimism of the intellect,” we could, once in a while, benefit from using “optimism of the intellect” in order to be more sensitive to historical contingency as well as to the capabilities of collective human agency: In Turkey, the referendum might be over, but the fight for democracy is not.  

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.]