The tension between secularism and democracy in Turkey: Early origins,current legacy

Introduction

The experience of Turkish secularism and the rise of conservative political parties in the Turkish democratic process has revealed peculiar paradoxes that challenge conventional understandings of the notions ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ and the relationship between democracy, secularism and religion. In the last two decades, the secular tone in the discourse of conservative political groups has gradually become more intense, such that they have even become ardent advocates of Turkey's entrance into the European Union and of the adoption of an American model of secularism. While conservative and religious circles promote Western and democratic values, paradoxically the secularist political groups have more and more become critical of Western, especially European, democratic ideas and institutions.

In recent years, as the government of the conservative Justice and Development Party (JDP) aimed at bolstering Turkey's relations with the European Union, the secularist elite that had for 80 years emphasised the need to westernise and modernise the country began, ironically, to take on a reactionary position highlighting national independence and anti-Europeanism. This is in fact a result of the encounter between pro-Islamic and secular Kemalist politics in Turkey in the 1990s. During this period, the quest of the Islamists for political recognition and their references to Anglo-Saxon models of religious freedom and secularism caused the secularist elite to redefine their idea of modernism on the basis of early revolutionary notions shaped by the Jacobin idea of laicism and the authoritarian understanding of republic that were current in the 1930s. On this understanding, democracy and modernity could only flourish in a secular system. That is, unless a society converts to secular or revolutionary morality, democracy is not possible. This idea underscored a kind of radical secularism that postulated secular ethics as the prerequisite of a modern and democratic way of life. Why does the Turkish State insist on the essential danger of religiously oriented political practices to the integrity of the political regime, even though Islamists did not advocate any militancy? Why do Turkey's so-called sharia-oriented religious groups make more references to the example of European democracies or American religious and cultural pluralism than to any sharia pattern, but are still seen as a significant threat by the secular establishment? Although Turkish secularism has had a significant democratic tradition, why did Turkey's pro-western secular intellectuals and elites overwhelmingly support the undemocratic interventions of the military into civilian life? What does this paradox teach us about the relationship between Islam and modern politics in what is relatively the most secular nation of the Muslim world?

Turkish secularism or secularisation

Drawing on a theory of secularisation, David Martin holds that there is not one single particular pattern of secularisation. Each state has its own pattern of secularisation, depending on the historical events that it has experienced. In simple terms, secularisation is not a uniform process, but has different consequences in different societies. Moreover, each state, with its particular religious and historical background, also undergoes a different pattern of secularisation. For instance, the degree of pluralism in a country determines the range of its pattern of secularisation. In a country like France, with widely shared religious beliefs based on a Catholic monopoly and a lesser degree of pluralism, secularisation has resulted in polarisation and a radicalisation of both the religious and secular forces. On the other hand, in a pluralistic country like the United States, religion has never caused such polarisation and cleavages [11, p. 9].

From the standpoint of this general theory of secularisation, it can be argued that Turkey also has its peculiar path of secularisation, with certain idiosyncratic characteristics. Actually, in the Turkish context it is more accurate to talk about secularism rather than secularisation. It is a common notion that secularisation is not the same as secularism. Secularisation relates essentially to a process of decline in religious activities, beliefs, ways of thinking and institutions that occurs primarily in association with, or as an unconscious or unintended consequence of, other processes of structural change within a society. On the other hand, secularism is an ideology that “aims to denounce all forms of supernaturalism and agencies devoted to it, advocate nonreligious, antireligious, or anti-clerical principles as the basis for personal morality and social organization” [20, p. 159]. Secularism, in short, aims to establish a secular society. Therefore, on a secularist presumption, the ultimate structure of society will be secular. Whereas secularisation implies a continuing and open-ended process in which values and world views are continually revised in accordance with evolutionary change in history; Secularism like religion, projects a closed world view and an absolute set of values in line with an ultimate historical purpose having a final significance for human beings. In view of this, the Turkish case can, to a considerable extent, be categorised under the banner of secularism. However, the term ‘secularism’ also does not correspond to the complex structure of the Turkish laiklik. In fact, the Turkish laiklik has a rather exceptional meaning that is almost non-transferable to any word in English. Its meaning can only be grasped by understanding the historical specificity of Turkey.

Along these lines of argumentation, it can be argued that Turkish secularisation has followed its own peculiar pattern. However, it is based mainly on the appropriation of the French legacy and the modification of the French secular tradition for the Turkish context. The French revolution created a political legacy in which the object of worship was shifted from God to nation. As George Mosse aptly notes, it was a new politics that sought to express and enhance national unity or general will “through the creation of a political style which became, in reality, a secularised religion” [12, p. 2]. In fact this new style embraced the utilisation of national myths and symbols and the creation of a liturgy that enabled people to participate directly in national worship. For Mosse, the mass movements and revolutions of the twentieth century adopted and appropriated this style with minor modifications and thus became the heirs of a French revolutionary tradition that had long presented itself as an alternative to parliamentary democracy. So the Turkish Revolution was also one of its heirs and displayed this style most prominently in the 1930s. Like the French Revolutionary elite, the Turkish Revolutionary elite imagined their own ancien régime, monarchy, feudality, scholasticism and the like. That is, they began to read their history more or less in the same way as the French revolutionaries had. Furthermore, the undertaking of laicité as a central pillar of state; anticlericalism; the creation of morale laique (secular morality); and laici-sation of education and church-state relations in France became the chief models for the Turkish revolutionary leaders in their nation-building process.

The history of secularism in Turkey

Durkheim considered the French revolution of 1789 as having comparable features with the most primitive and simple religions. To him, in the Revolution, “things purely laical by nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things” [2, p. 245]. In this sense, the very principles of the Revolution themselves became a religion: “In a word, they have been a religion which had its martyrs and apostles, which has profoundly moved the masses, and which, after all, has given birth to great things” [3, p. 35]. The revolutionary elite were concerned mainly with “the problem of symbolic legitimation”. Likewise, Albert Mathiez argued that the Revolution formed a new symbolic system that constituted a revolutionary religion. In this sense, “the festivals and federations that were convoked to celebrate important revolutionary events were the rituals of the new religion” [cited in 5, p. 28]. Alexis de Tocqueville also made similar observations about the religious character of the Revolution: “The French revolution, though ostensibly political in origin, functioned on the lines, and assumed many of the aspects, of a religious revolution” [19, p. 11].

Furthermore, the French Revolution aimed at accomplishing “a transference of sacrality onto political and social values” [13, p. 282] and a redefinition of legitimacy through which the new regime constituted and consecrated itself. This transference, spread throughout Europe by the French Revolution, put the relationships between politics and religion onto a new plane. It can be argued that this attempt “made politics religious and gave an educational mission to the state” [4, p. 2]. Furthermore, “it thus initiated a new era of rivalry and conflict between ‘civic’ and ‘traditional’ religion” [4]. This utopian Rousseauist understanding of politics also became a guiding principle in shaping the revolutionary cultural policy. Moreover, the replacement of the Gregorian calendar with the Republican one, the conversion of parish churches to the temples of reason, the discrediting of any religion other than that of truth and reason, the closing of the churches of all other sects by the Paris Commune and Robespierre's non-deistic creed paved the way for ideas and cults based on an anti-clerical, laic, rational and scientific faith for later generations. This revolutionary legacy, which stressed the creation of an egalitarian, laic and civic society, continued to inspire revolutionary movements all over the world, including the one in Turkey.

The secular revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

When Turkish revolutionaries headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk assumed the leadership of Turkey in the early 1920s, they immediately inaugurated a broad programme of reform that attempted to diminish the influence of traditional and religious institutions in almost all spheres of social and political life, including religion, education, dress, calendar, voting and so on. These laic reforms were considered to be measures of the revolutionary system against tradition, which was identified with the anti-Republican forces. As in the French case, these attempts to reform had not only political purposes. That is, the Turkish revolutionary leaders did not merely aim at neutralising and even devastating the power of anti-Republican groups in politics; more importantly, their goal was to alter Turkish culture and morality itself. The Turkish Republic developed a new value system different from the value universe of the periphery [10]. Furthermore, religion was excluded from the core of the system [9, p. 202].

In a few short decades, the country was transformed from an imperial state into a republican regime and from a millet system based on religious alignments to vigorous nationalism and westernisation. Laiklik was accepted as one of the fundamental principles of the new regime. Accordingly, there were attempts to eliminate certain religious, social, cultural and legal institutions of Islam; the official language of Turkey was changed, history rewritten and social customs, such as dress, were reformed. The purpose of all these reforms was nothing less than a wide-ranging transformation of Turkish values and ideals. The entire system of education was unified and brought under the control of the Ministry of Education. Religious schools were closed, and religious instruction was dropped from the curriculum. Moreover, the study of Arabic and Persian, which was associated with the Islamic tradition, was discontinued. Elites made education a primary field of interest, because they believed that only the medicine of enlightenment could cure the spiritual malady the Turkish nation had inherited from the traditional Ottoman way of life. The creation of a national system of adult education alongside the other methods of schooling was said to be a means for creating not merely an enlightened and civilised electorate, but also an electorate imbued with Republican faith, which would guarantee the perpetuation of the Republic at least in the sense of procedural democracy. The people had to be persuaded of the intrinsic merits of the revolutionary ideology.

Particularly in the 1930s, the control of religion was accompanied by more intensive concentration on developing an alternative moral foundation quite apart from any religious and traditional morality. One of the main questions in the mind of the Turkish revolutionaries was whether “religion should be given a place in the inculcation of moral principles or ideals, or will all morality and ideals be based on secular foundations?” [8, p. 139]. They responded to this question mainly by defining morality completely outside religious and traditional realms. This signified a turning point with respect to the secularist policies of the revolution. The Turkish revolutionary elite considered “the emancipation of morality from religion” as the chief factor in the laicisation of state and society.

It is argued that the Western states became secular through ideas as well as institutions. That is, it was the secularisation of intellectual life, science and institutions that brought about the secularisation of their states. However, “in countries like Turkey in which the influence of old, archaic and religious teachings still persist, the laic state became necessary for the laicisation of other institutions and intellectual life” [16, p. 374]. In this sense, the laic state became “the propagator, the apostle and guardian of social progress and evolution” [16]. The old morality, incompatible with modern conditions, was to be discarded by the laic state and replaced with modern culture: “That morality has now no relation to religion is a matter not even worth discussing … That means that the basis of morality is not religion anymore, but culture” [16, p. 373].

Mehmet Saffet, one of the prominent intellectuals of the Turkish Revolution, argued that divinity should be handed down from God to society through the teachings from laic sources: “True religion is to believe that divinity is expressed in society” [17, p. 414]. The Turkish revolutionaries saw inseparable links between their political-social revolution and the religious transformation of Turkish society. However, they faced the difficult task of explaining their imagined community to the masses, who had hitherto only identified themselves according to faith or place of origin. So they aimed at creating a secular Turkish identity and removing the influence and presence of Islam from the public sphere. As Recep Peker, the Secretary General of the Republican People's Party (RPP) in the 1930s stated, “The boundary of religious considerations in Turkey should not extend beyond the skin of the body of a citizen. In this sense, religion should have no place in society, administration, and politics” [14, iii].

The Turkish revolutionary elite believed that a strong nation needed a foundation in a common secular-religious practice based on shared political symbols, rituals and language. Several ideological views, examples and models–-French laicism, positivism and éta-tism–-were sometimes cited, and adapted for domestic purposes. Fascism and communism were also added to the roster of international models suitable for citation and emulation in the anti-liberal climate of opinion of the 1930s [see especially 1,15,18]. All these efforts were made to enlighten and purify–-from a secular point of view–-the people in that critical historical period.

Furthermore, the revolutionary elite had recourse to an onslaught of anticlericalism as a tactic both to tame religion and its political adherents and to divert the people's attention from the relative crisis of Republican politics to the ‘artificial’ enemies of society. That is, they used anticlerical discourse as a device to consolidate their hold upon power. In fact, it is quite hard to find evidence for clerical power or institutionalised religion in Turkey, particularly in the inter-war period. Turkish ‘clericalism’ was a fabricated threat, through which the radical revolutionary elite could generate a suitable motive for their anticleri-calism. In that sense, Turkish revolutionary anticlericalism had nothing to do with a direct political response to clericalism, as in France, but rather was used as an instrument to constitute a faith, a system of thought in its own right. It can be argued that the revolutionary elite considered any moral threat to the ideals, values and social order established by the Revolution as anticlerical as well as reactionary. There was above all a myth of anticlericalism, postulating a polarity between the anticlerical and clerical; progressive and reactionary; modern and traditional; civilised and ignorant and so on, that essentially favoured the revolutionary world view that always possessed the progressive of each pair of values. This sort of revolutionary political demonising created a politics of dualism, irremediably divided between those for and those against its principles.

The Turkish radical revolutionary elite in the 1930s was the new radical generation, which was searching for a new religion in the face of what they perceived as the moral and religious vacuum of their time. They thought laiklik was able to offer a firm belief system and a new morality. With a proselytising mission, they aimed at converting people from their traditional religious ties to the new revolutionary faith. They even considered themselves as the apostles of the new faith, striving to rehabilitate people [21, p. 152].

The Turkish revolutionaries believed that democracy could flourish only in a laic and republican system coupled with an enlightened society. However, they were disappointed when they realised that the goals of secularising and democratising the people are in a relationship of tension. This tension, of course, did not fit well with the teachings of the Enlightenment translated mainly from French thinkers. The revolutionary elite preferred to tackle this problem by postponing democracy, claiming that in a society that had not internalised secular morality, democracy was not possible. To this end, they imposed a system of revolutionary Jacobin education as a means of overcoming the tension between secularism and democracy in Turkey in the 1930s. “Democracy”, for them, “is not the product, but the goal of the revolution.” The revolution was to clear away those barriers blocking the democratic goal, and to lift the collective consciousness to a level at which this goal would be understandable to all. For a revolutionary figure, “Revolutionaries should be like prophets, even of the most liberalist religions, and will necessarily be dictators at the beginning” [7].

This kind of understanding of democracy led the radical revolutionaries to consider politics in messianic terms. Of course, this postponed representation of society, or this sense of ‘belated democracy’ refracted the elites’ ‘march’ to democracy to such a degree that it turned out to be a serious obstacle to democracy. Still, Turkish politics experienced such a tension between democracy and secularism that Turkish democratic consolidation was radically endangered.

The birth of democracy in Turkey: The multi-party system and its effect on secularism

Turkey decided to adopt the multi-party system in 1946, the inevitable choice determined by the post-war international environment. That made it difficult to maintain the authoritarian, single-party regime. The 1950 general elections in particular showed that the early Kemalist reforms had failed to successfully socialise and transform most of the population and put them on the path to a secular and revolutionary culture. Democratisation led in fact to the questioning of the official notions of culture and secularism, which were the names for participating in politics, to a certain extent especially for the forces on the periphery. The result was cultural clashes between the progressive, secular ideals of the modernising elite and the religious, heterogeneous orientation of the parochial elite and the masses. In the multi-party context in the 1950s, political and economic liberalisation and urbanisation provided suitable ground for the rise of ‘alternative’ cultural forms as new political projects. This process was accelerated by the policies of the Democrat Party (DP) governments (1950-1960) that tried to justify Islamic practices as well as traditional and local values. The DP's effort to justify some popular notions and symbols of Islam and stress historical continuities (the significance of the Ottoman Empire in Turkish history) represented an open challenge to the cultural discourse of the early Republican project. Nevertheless, while putting a strong emphasis on the legitimisation of Islam as well as traditional and local values, DP leaders did not reject the basic premises of the Kemalist secularism.

The military coup of 1960 stymied the Turkish democratic process. This was justified because in the eyes of the military officers the politicians had deviated for the most part from the Kemalist vision of democracy and secularism. Thus, their goal was to restructure the life of the Turkish population culturally as well as politically. These were also the basic goals motivating the military interventions in 1971 and 1980. The leaders and supporters of the coup sought ways to regulate and reorganise politics on the basis of the “preferences of modernity, positivism and secularism in their earlier official definitions of the early Republican cultural revolution” [6, p. 109]. The state elite aimed at restoring the Republican ideology, which would guarantee the perpetuation of the secular establishment. The result was military coups in 1971 and 1980.

After the 1980 coup, the Motherland Party governments under Prime Minister Turgut özal offered a successful synthesis between Kemalism and the religiosity of the masses. At that optimistic point, the democratic aspects of Turkish secularism were on the rise as well. But thanks to democratisation and globalisation, Islamic groups began to gain roots in the civil society and political sphere. These groups, together with ethnic (Kurdish) and sectarian (Alevi) movements, were able to question the Kemalist certainties and made claims to new rights and entitlements.

Turkish social and political life was mired in a war of cultures in the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of identity politics and the negative official attitude towards new socio-cultural movements began to affect the fate of the Turkish democratisation process. In the 1990s, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, WP), founded as heir to the national salvation party (NSP; one of the major political movements in the 1970s) in 1983, came to the fore as the political voice of Islamic critiques of the Kemalist legacy. Having favoured a new community based on a shared religious identity, the WP became, no doubt, the rival voice to the state-sponsored ideology. The rejection of Kemalist symbolism was at the centre of their discourse that preached pride in being Muslim and a member of an idealised religious community. Thus it can be argued that this was a period of the rise of a counter-cultural movement, or the development of symbols to counter those of the Kemalists. This sort of open challenge to the ‘legitimate use’ of cultural codes by the state elite could hardly be welcomed.

Since the early 1990s, partly because of the vacuum in the centre and partly due to the rising tide of globalisation, the religious segments of Turkish society began to side more and more with the WP. As a relatively soft Islamist political movement rather than a militant one aiming at the total transformation of the existing regime, the WP focused on defining and sustaining the cultural-moral parameters of Muslim Turks and freeing them from Western contamination. Like the Kemalists, its leaders made an attempt to establish hegemony over the symbolic structure of Turkish society.

Shortly after coming to power, WP leaders frequently revealed their different view of secularism by provoking intense discussions over the decisions of the military council (Askeri şura) to dismiss military officers and over the headscarf (turban) issue. The WP rule paved the way for the formation of a counter-group made up of many social segments with secular sensibilities. The situation provided the Kemalist wing with an opportunity to push the Army, the judiciary and academia into confrontation with the WP. The political crisis came to a head during the meetings of the National Security Council (NSC), of which both WP ministers and Army leaders were members, especially after the last quarter of 1996. Turkey once more experienced in a profound way the involvement of the military in politics. Actually, through utilising the NSC, the military became the primary actor in politics. The military has taken a firm stand against Islamic politics via several NSC decisions recommending the government certain measures to be taken against the rise of ‘anti-secular’ activities.

To prove that their culture belonged not only to the ‘state’ but also to ‘society’, the state elite mobilised a secular front (including state agencies, the media, the private sector, labour unions and civil organisations). In general, the countermeasures by the Kemalist front resulted mainly in symbolic measures: large numbers of secularists began to wear badges with the image of Atatüurk and made public visits to the mausoleum of Atatürk. This in fact was a simple reflection of their struggle over the ‘essential’ symbols of the nation. In sum, state agencies, the media, the private sector, labour unions and civil organisations participated in celebrations of the Republic to such an unusual extent because their foremost agenda was to preserve and perpetuate the values and norms of the Republic, or to recanonise the Kemalist tradition of culture on the basis of the early Republican notions.

The cultural ‘war’ between secularism and Islam

The result is a cultural war between secular and Islamic groups. The culmination of this war manifested itself in the 28 February 1997 military intervention, which paved the way for the revitalisation and further normalisation of the tension between secularism and democracy in Turkey. The forces of 28 February that were working to ‘democratise’ the country sought to inspire new forms of discipline and new ways of organising the masses. As a result of this process, secularism was mainly reduced to the radical revolutionary formulation developed during the inter-war period and Islam was reduced to a political party, the WP. Thus, as a result of the polarisation of symbols, democracy has been relinquished and subordinated to certain interpretations of Kemalist secularism and political Islam.

Furthermore, ‘alternative’ political and social movements with different identity claims have been regarded by the secular elite as divisive and reactionary and thus to be excluded and marginalised in order to consolidate and optimise the democratic ideal. In the 1990s, the Islamic quest for recognition came to the fore mainly as a reaction to Kemalist laiklik, and so Islamic political opposition developed alternative cultural forms and symbols, which became for them a means of politics. The radical Kemalist elite felt themselves obliged to restrict the public visibility of Islam for the sake of democracy. That movement caused the Kemalist elite to redefine their idea of modernism on the basis of early Republican notions shaped during the period of single-party Jacobin secularism.

Henceforth, the only way open for the Islamic groups to do politics was to highlight liberal democratic concepts and values against the Kemalist notion of democracy and secularism. This new political style of the conservatives was accused of being trickery. Although religiously oriented groups failed to promote a political attitude towards cultural pluralism in the 1990s, they now seem to have learned more about co-existence strategies in a liberal democratic system. The political consequences and legacy of the early Republic and radical secularist practices shaped the historical development of state-Islam interaction, and led, paradoxically, to secular democrats in Turkey supporting military intervention, and Islamists advocating an Anglo-Saxon model of liberal secularism.

Still, this radical interpretation of secularism has set limits on the scope of Turkish politics. The secularist elite consider the policies of the conservative democratic JDP government as the main challenge to Republican ideas of democracy and secularism. They are becoming increasingly hostile to the EU reform programme in that they are utilising the argument that Turkey's membership in the EU would harm national unity by resurrecting religious and ethnic identities. For their part, the JDP elite promote the country's entry into the EU not only has a chance to ensure the economic development of Turkey but also as a means of liberation that would consolidate Turkish democracy within which the conservative groups could find a secure environment to bolster their identities.

Although JDP leaders openly declared that their party had no association with the previous Islamic political tradition represented by National Outlook (Milli Görüş), the secularist elite has always showed their distrust of this new political party with the accusation that it had not proved its commitment to the principles of the secular regime. Once again, Turkish politics experienced tension between democracy and secularism, which does not accept a democratic process without the authorisation of secularism. This tension between the Kemalist elite and the JDP leaders reached its peak during the presidential elections on 27 April 2007. The Turkish Military published a manifesto showing its determination to preserve the country's secular identity as against the ‘reactionism’ of the existing government. This time, the government reacted immediate to the army by strongly emphasising democratic rules and principles. Subsequently, the general elections of 22 July turned out to be a referendum on democracy, in which the overall political discourse of the JDP was substantiated. The result is a clear mandate for the conservative JDP that restores of legitimacy to its policies. However, unless the conventional understanding of secularism inherited from the inter-war period is revised and revisited, the tension between democracy and secularism in Turkey seems likely to persevere.

In the post-11 September period, when Turkey began to be held up as a model for the rest of the Muslim world, it became obvious that the ‘Turkish model’ has great potential to set limits on authoritarian regimes and movements in the Muslim world. However, the Turkish model appears to fail to completely embrace human rights, democratic-civilian governance and the rule of law, elements that are the basic principles of a modern, democratic society. In other words, it is the failure of Turkish modernisation to provide a successful combination and synthesis between democracy, secularism and Islamic values. Here it might be argued that the relationship between cultural diversity and the practice of democracy in Turkey has not been settled and consolidated on the basis of civilian rule. Thus, the Turkish model presents itself as too fragile to be an ‘ideal model’ for the rest of the Muslim world.