BY GUNDUZ AKTAN
RADIKAL- Many newspaper columnists believe that the wide range of freedoms enjoyed by the West acted as a catalyst for its advanced development, which is why they also argue that the chief obstacle to Turkey’s further development is its habit of restricting freedom. This is an assumption which takes for granted that such freedoms led to high social welfare in the European Union countries.
However, one can’t say definitively whether democracy and freedoms led to development or vice versa. In the Western world, economic and democratic development went hand-in-hand with long, bloody struggles. Freedoms which spurred economic development were adopted before political freedoms and then widened the political rights and freedoms of the bourgeoisie.
The French Revolution created modern Western society. The concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ were accepted after this radical transformation. Economic development was sustained on the basis of the nation-state, which created a national market protected by walls of customs. Rights and freedoms developed within the territories of the nation-state. For this reason, Jospin Lionel, France’s socialist former prime minister, says that democracy only exists in nation-states. In other words, without nationalism, democracy cannot survive.
Countries which began developing later than the Western world are instructive in this context. Japan completed its modernization reforms as a nation-state prior to its transition to democracy. China and other far Eastern countries are still developing on the basis of the nation-state, albeit without full-fledged democracies. However, in Turkey our governments have failed to develop policies similar to these countries’, electing instead to pursue populist ones in order to protect their status quo. Unlike the far Eastern countries, there is no way for us to adopt a non-democratic mode of development. Ankara must find a democratic formula to develop our country. The key factor is, I believe, rationalist nationalism.
Freedoms are good unless they go too far. Unfortunately some have split our country into ethnic and regional factions, and some have spread a damaging consumerist hedonism upon our citizenry and mentality. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be victims of the phobia of nationalism, forever shackled by past traumas. We must make way for progress, not degeneration.