BY ALI BAYRAMOGLU
YENI SAFAK- Columnist Ali Bayramoglu writes about the need for a mentality change in Turkey. A summary of his column is as follows:
Democratization reforms, the shift of the periphery towards the center and the emerging interaction between the two are all developments long needed in Turkey. Despite certain setbacks, our country is effectively making progress on certain political and social issues. However, change is a multidimensional phenomenon. Modernity dictates institutional improvement, bridging the gap between the center and the periphery, and political and economic standardization. But just securing these won’t suffice to solve all our problems. There is yet another very crucial point, one which constitutes the hard nut of the issue: The need for a change in mentality.
The grave contradiction between ‘ideas’ and ‘sheer interests’ is difficult to overcome in a social setting dominated by a patriarchal mentality and an overwhelmingly centralist political structure. In this order, interests turn ideas into mere tools. Thus, the power alliances are inevitably built not on an ideological basis but on shallow interests. Since Ottoman times, the Turkish political system has been plagued by this very contradiction. The problem is in fact related to our definition of power and expectations from it. It has to with the dominant imagery through which we perceive power not as a transforming force but rather as an instrument to distribute the vast resources of the state. The problem is closely related to the state’s perception of society, and, in turn, to society’s expectations from the state. The most important consequence of this contradiction is perhaps the failure of politics and politicians to effect the transition from a ‘community understanding’ to a ‘societal understanding.’ In other words, no matter what anyone says, this country’s politicians have no sense of what a society is. They lack a perspective which would embrace society in all its various and sundry elements. Instead, the state substitutes this understanding of society with an over-arching, obscure definition of ‘nation’ and ‘national will,’ thus papering over our differences. The agents of community politics – be they Kurds, Islamists, secularists, or urban or rural groups – then begin to seek to expand their own living space by worshipping power at the expense of others.
This mentality must change before our country’s system can be reformed and a broad consensus achieved. But first the state should alter its understanding of society. Seeing society as an undifferentiated totality cannot secure a lasting rehabilitation of the system.