Abstract
Contributors to this issue initially were invited to the İstanbul Seminars at Bilgi University to explore ‘the Promises of Democracy in Troubled Times’. Initiated by Reset-Dialogues on Civilization, İstanbul seminars tackle contemporary issues of democracy within a broader perspective of intercultural dialogue. On a yearly basis, the seminars host academicians, public figures and politicians from different horizons to cultivate an East–West debate across the established frontiers of knowledge and culture. Each year an intellectual agenda is set for discussion.
The task of agenda-setting is crucial. First, it requires a critical awareness of the contemporary issues that need to be raised. Second, to ensure the intercultural vivacity of the seminars the selected topic needs to appeal to concerns of participants coming from different parts and horizons of the world. It is paramount therefore to approach the contemporary issues of democracy not exclusively from the western perspective. İstanbul, by its very location, is a global city that defies the East-West divide and facilitates the ability to think across the European and the Asian continents. Turkish democracy provides a privileged site for thinking in new ways the religious and the secular divide. Characterized by a strong secular legacy, Turkey witnesses the ascension of AKP [the Party of Justice and Development] to political power. Furthermore Turkey as a candidate for joining the European Union and with a migrant minority in Europe has developed intense ties, both economic and legal, with European countries. Turkey offers an anchor-experience for İstanbul seminars to the extent that she is at the crossroads of a series of dynamics that are common both to the European and the Middle Eastern countries.
‘The Promises of Democracy in Troubled Times’, the topic selected for the fifth year of the İstanbul Seminars, conveys the importance of the two major events that marked the 2010s, namely the economic crisis in Europe and the political transformation in the Middle East, referred to as the Arab Spring. Two seemingly independent events are thought to be of major importance for revisiting democracy from different perspectives. Both events are occurring in an unstable and troublesome historical setting marked with uncertainties, crisis and transition problems. They raise new questions regarding democracy. Economic crisis illustrates the failures of self-regulatory liberal economy and encourages not only the rule of technocratic elites but also the flourishing of mass protest movements. The Arab revolts dissolve the image of the ‘Middle East’ as a bloc of authoritarian regimes and awaken hope for democracy. The religious component becomes part of the democratic game. The question of how to ensure pluralism of views, beliefs, life-worlds and avoid the ‘one-actor pathology’ that is one authoritarian regime replacing the other, becomes paramount. Democracy in this context refers to the capacity of societies, both from East and West, to overcome the holistic tendencies of ‘only true’ Islam and the ‘one best way’ of management ideologies.
Intellectual agenda is ‘reset’ by these two waves of change that bring religion, economic institutions and legal system to the forefront in our assessment of democracy. In the first section of this issue, authors engage in capturing democratic imaginaries beyond a religious–secular divide. In the second section, the economic institutions and the realm of rights, especially women’s rights, occupy a central place in tracking failures or transitions to democracy. The last section focuses on the changing legal frames, and the importance of state, religion and international institutions in democratic transitions.
For many authors, Turkey provides an anchor-experience for discussing issues related to the democracy-building process. The integration of political Islam in a political pluralism, the importance of economic growth, the consensual constitution-making process, the influence of European and global legal institutions, are aspects that will determine the success of the Turkish path; a potential to be a ‘model’ for other countries in the Middle East.
However, Turkey represents also a counter-example. In spite of its geographical proximity and the intensity of its relations both with Europe and with the Arabic countries of the region, Turkey has been immune to the economic crisis and trends of impoverishment and the waves of popular revolt. Alongside its economic dynamism and high growth rate, the AK Party, in power since 2003, has kept its popularity and furthermore increased its votes during the last legislative elections in June 2011. In spite of this political stability and welfare, Turkey continues to face major problems in consolidating its democracy. Side by side with the outcome of the peace-building process with the Kurdish nationalist movement, the achievement of consensus for the making of a new constitution, as Andrew Arato and Ertuğ Tombuş argue in this issue, will be a major test for Turkish democracy.
Although Turkey might remain immune to Arab revolts, the political transformations in the Middle Eastern countries have placed her in focus. Turkey gains a privileged position in democracy-mapping. She used to be singled out by European observers as not being representative of the Arab world. For the latter, Turkey has cut her ties with the Middle East since the advent of the republic. More recently, Turkish will for the ascension to European membership has been looked upon with suspicion from both sides. European publics questioned whether it was legitimate for a Muslim-majority country to be part of the European legacy and rejected Turkish membership as undesirable. With the advent of Arab political transformation, however, Turkey has achieved a new visibility and ‘desirability’ and entered into the debates as a model of reconciliation between Islam, democracy and economic growth.
Turkey during the last decades emerged as a major player in the region, becoming more and more present in the Middle East. The political scientist Kemal Kirişçi explains what is behind the Turkish ‘model’. According to him, the model has a demonstrative effect, a learning effect, on three major levels: a ‘just’ foreign policy; a ‘commercial’ state; and democracy as a ‘work in progress’. 1 On these three levels, Turkey has brought about more interaction with its neighbors, exploring the potential for a new vision of democracy. This is not limited to politics between states but also concerns scientific, industrial, commercial and cultural exchanges between citizens. The movement takes place in both directions: Turkey is moving towards its neighbors, and the Middle East is discovering Turkey. The proliferation of private universities and art and music festivals is creating new opportunities, attracting intellectuals and artists. İstanbul is discovering a new form of cosmopolitanism, distinct from that of Ottoman times with non-Muslim minorities. In the present time, there is a flow of migrants mostly from the East, those searching for a place of refuge, those who have fled despotic regimes, civil wars, ethnic cleansings, or the ravages of economic crises. Turkish, Iranian, Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese intellectuals and artists, whose regard was always turned towards Europe, are turning towards each other, exploring and drawing on their differences within common frames of reference, producing new artistic and political languages.
Thus, the Turkish model is appreciated in the Arab world as a ‘model of proximity’. It represents a certain success in bringing together democratic freedoms and secularism alongside Islam. As Sadik Al Azam has written, unlike Arab nationalism and Islamic radicalism, the Turkish version of the representation of Islam tells as a whole a success story. 2 According to him, the fact that this story comes from a non-Arab country undermines the widespread conviction among Arab peoples that they are at the heartland of Islamic civilization. 3
Turkey taken as a reference, as a model, indicates two things at once: it has a historically ‘singular’ experience, and it can be a ‘prototype’ for other nations. In contrast to a thesis describing Turkey more or less as a ‘torn-between country’, pulled between two paradoxical civilizations, as Samuel Huntington has written, 4 this notion embodies the possibility of mediation between one culture and another, carrying a resonance that goes beyond national boundaries. A model implies an unprecedented experience and provides a horizon of the possible for other nations. It is possible to speak both of a singular experience and of the mimetic effect that it can inspire in others. For centuries, European history was established as a model; European countries succeeded in realizing economic progress and individual freedoms, and this historical particularity had a resonance effect, inspired others and became a stimulus in non-western contexts. The notion of a ‘model’ therefore refers to the singularity of the historical experience, to its strength as an example for other nations and, accordingly, to its influence beyond its own borders. This is not to think of the model as flawless or as a prototype that can be reproduced to the letter, in an identical manner; on the contrary, each inspiration signifies a different historical trajectory with its own cultural matrix and framework.
What are the constituent traits of Turkey that can have exemplary effect on other groups, nations and regions? It is certainly the coming to power of an Islamic movement by free elections in a country proud of its laïcité that constitutes the most important singularity. For some, this implies the transformation from radical to a ‘moderate Islam’. For many secular intellectuals, including those of the Muslim world, the commitment of the army to the republic constitutes an advantage. The existence of an educated and wealthy middle class is considered as a pillar of democracy that is lacking in many Middle Eastern countries.
For each of these perspectives, we can nevertheless offer counter-arguments. The notion of moderate Islam is problematic, even if it has a sedative effect on western publics anxious about the rise of Islam. It is problematic because, in the first place, it reduces the Turkish experience to its religious characteristic and dismisses its pluralistic dimensions. Second, the notion of ‘moderate’ generates resentment and suspicion as part of a larger political program for the ‘Greater Middle East’ implemented by the United States. It is also rejected by pious Muslims, for whom the very definition of Islam is ‘the middle way’. For them the label ‘moderate’ suggests the existence of a ‘violent’ Islam, as if violence were intrinsic to the essence of the religion. In other words, qualifying the experience of the AK Party in Turkey as moderate Islam is subject to criticism on several levels. The AK Party is an outcome of an Islamist movement of the 1980s and has roots in the liberal conservative heritage of Turkey. What is at stake is threefold: the transformation of an anti-systemic Islamic movement into a legitimate political party in the parliament; the consolidation of democracy in the absence of European membership; and the advent of Turkey as a global player, a mediator in the region. Hence the AK Party, while transforming political Islam, undertakes as well the political transformation of Turkey. The democratization process under the leadership of an Islam-oriented party raises not only anxieties, but also new questions.
What distinguishes therefore the current Turkish experience is not its army as a safeguard of democracy, but on the contrary the marginalization of the military in the political life of the country without falling under an Islamic regime. From there, the democratic question is posed in terms of pluralism: how to show both signs of liberalism and religious beliefs in public life and ensure the compliance of both Muslims and non-believers or those who simply do not want to live according to religious norms?
In regard to the presence of a middle class, it is possible to say that it is not a pre-condition for democracy, but rather the other way around. Democracy provides open avenues for social mobility, equal opportunities in market economy, access to education, and political representation. The formation of middle classes is not independent from distribution of wealth, sharing of political power and acquisition of cultural capital.
These different readings of Turkish experience are well illustrated by the debate on the Arab Spring between two intellectuals. Tariq Ramadan and Abdelwahab Meddeb, the former originally from Egypt and an Islamic intellectual, and the latter from Tunisia and a supporter of secularism, converge in spite of their differences regarding the ability of the Turkish model to bring us away from the misfortune of equating ‘dictatorship’ to ‘Islamism’. According to Ramadan, younger generations, even among Islamists, refer much less to Iran than to Turkey. He says that the strength of Turkey comes from the fact that without negating her Islamic reference, she manages to be an endogenous democracy. According to Meddeb, Turkey and Tunisia were structured by the notion of the republic to the detriment of that of democracy, following the example of France. Today, they are trying to reverse the republican order and put democracy in the first row. 5 As historian Jocelyne Dakhlia says, democratization in the present day demands the overcoming of ‘the false divide between the secular and the religious’. 6 Commenting on the new era in Tunisia, she writes: ‘[I]n the political moment in which we live, we see that there are many ways to be democratic, as there are many ways to reclaim the politics of Islam that blur dichotomies.’ 7 According to Dakhlia, the French slogan ‘Dégage!’ that was adopted by the Tunisian protesters and made its way around the Arab world illustrates well the relation with the French language without a nationalist reaction. It conveys a novel, banal relationship to the West, without the disruptive effects of colonialism. Indeed the protest movements were more involved with democratization than anti-western politics.
The Arab revolts expressed a new political imaginary, based on a corporeal and linguistic performativity, as revealed in the Tunisian case with the slogan ‘Dégage!’ or the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo. In the Iranian protest movement that preceded the Arab uprisings, the ‘men in hijab’ campaign illustrates cross-dressing performances as a mode of protest. As Katajun Amirpur shows in this issue, this campaign of pictures of ‘men in hijabs’ was launched to express solidarity with an opponent who fled the police in disguise, but has also opened a new awareness of women’s rights.
These movements are not fueled by anger against the West, but they do inspire one another, circulating slogans, graffiti and symbols, establishing an intertwined public space, a new vision for democracy whose epicenter is no longer located exclusively in the West. It is possible to observe a reversal of the mimetic desire between Europe and the East; the Arab Spring provided new social imaginaries for the European youth in Madrid, Lisbon and Athens, inspired by the repertory of the Arab Spring to express their discontent and revolt. New democratic imaginaries imply overcoming the simplistic oppositions between the despotic East and the liberal West.
Jeffrey Alexander takes into account such interconnections and presents in the same ‘narrative arc’ conjointly the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. He argues for unprecedented connections between the eastern and western impulses for democracy against authoritarian governments and the growing power of neo-liberal economics. He focuses on the ways the promises of democracy emerge from below, from civil society movements occupying and transforming the spaces of democracy in Cairo and in New York.
On the other hand, Asaf Savaş Akat notes the lack of emergence of economic alternative models in spite of the protest movements throughout the world and the radical loss of credibility of the market economy. Although everyone easily agrees upon the importance of the economic factors, the production and the distribution of wealth in ensuring social cohesion and stability, the realm of the economy is often absent from debates on politics and democracy. Akat says that the respective attitudes towards the market are at the heart of this estrangement. While the economists build idealized models of the market exempt from social realities, the social scientists dismiss the market as part of neo-liberalism. Market economy transcends religion, race, culture, and yet it is a very divisive and polarizing social construct. The market is one of the most crucial institutions of modern times. The dialogue between social scientists and economists is a difficult yet a necessary one. Reaching a common understanding on the significance of the market, its strengths as well as weaknesses, may be an important step towards exploring the connections between the economic realm and the political one, between production of wealth, innovation and diffusion of power.
The economic institutions are inseparable from the emergence of a vibrant civil society in western democracies. In limiting the powers of central governments, the economic institutions become agents of democratization in the West. For Timur Kuran the Middle East countries remained largely undemocratic because of their traditional economic institutions, all part of Islamic law, that have kept civil society weak. Unlike corporations in the West, the waqf system did not lead to decentralization of the power, the original tax system, zakat, failed to protect property rights, and the small-scale, short-lived enterprises were atomic in nature and not capable of bargaining effectively with the state. Turan believes that these specific Islamic features of economic institutions have contributed historically to civil society’s weakness and delayed the democratization of the Middle East.
With a quite different tone, Mehmet Paçacı locates in the early stage of Islamic history the potential against the monolithic and authoritarian trends of modern societies. Contrary to the simplistic depictions of Islamic societies as despotic and intolerant by essence, he argues that Islamic institutions in the early age contributed to the emergence of an autonomous public arena; under the leadership of ulama, religious communities existed, the application of Islamic law was not arbitrary, the qadis had a legitimate authority, the waqfs – the charitable foundations – played a significant role in providing services, and the rights of women and dhimmis, non-Muslims, were protected by the court.
Massimo Campanini turns his gaze to potentials in Islam for contemporary Muslim countries and argues that an Islamic concept of democracy will differ in some aspects from a consolidated western idea of democracy. He believes that an intrinsic factor of Arab revolts is Islam that raises new questions regarding democracy. This political transformation bears as well a promise to renew and update principles of Islamic political thought.
Asma Barlas stresses as well the need for Muslims to introduce the religious perspective in debating democracy. The bridge metaphor used by the İstanbul seminar enables her to travel in opposite directions and not impose one possibility on the others, namely secular democracy. She criticizes the presentation of false choices between ‘Islam versus rights’ and on the contrary explores the liberatory potential of the Quran conducive to speaking about egalitarian rights, including women’s rights.
However, in practice, Islamic jurisprudence established in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979 abridged women’s rights as Katajun Amirpur reminds us. The male-dominated discourse long assigned all gender issues exclusively to the field of jurisprudence, f iqh; even for reformist intellectuals gender was a secondary issue. But women’s mass participation to the protest movement of 2009 brought women’s rights to the fore of the agenda of democratization. There is an increasing awareness that women’s rights are not a secondary type of rights, as a women-only problem.
Micheline Ishay pursues the signalling of the conditions for a sustainable democratic transition in Tunisia and in Egypt. Moderate Islamic parties in power need to succeed in building a consensus, without alienating minorities and secular citizens, to reverse the economic setbacks and diminish the social tensions associated with neo-liberal economics, and to secure society from chaos. Furthermore the democratization of Arab states will be beneficial to European stability and peace.
In the last section, contributors focus on the importance of legal structures for democracy-building. Constitution-making is a decisive stage for consolidation of democracy both for reformist Turkey and revolutionary Egypt as Andrew Arato and Ertuğ Tombuş argue. The new principles of legitimate constitution-making, pioneered in Spain, Central Europe and South Africa, are now becoming an international possession. A new paradigm in the constitution-making process privileges the principles of plurality, consensus and compromise. According to the authors, the chances of successful implantation are reduced, however, in cases where populist majoritarian rule, tied to populist revolutionary ideas, prevails, as is the case in Egypt. In the case of Turkey the weakness of the design for consensual solutions can be an obstacle to success.
Jean Cohen contributes to the debates on the changing legal frames of religion from the perspective of US constitutional history. She critically observes that the advent of religion risks transforming the relations between the state power and religion in a non-democratic way. She warns that the discourse of ‘freedom of religion’ often serves the politicized religious organizations that seek public privileges in democratic states, undermining other freedoms. Based upon her survey on the innovative nature of the US model of constitutional dualism, she defends political secularism and equal liberty for all as an ideal model-of-rights regime.
Seyla Benhabib stresses the changing frames and scales of legal systems. She argues that an international human rights regime, such as the European Court of Human Rights, has important effects on democracy-building measures within states. The clear demarcations between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ weaken, leading to a conversation that is a transnational as well as a translegal one. The courts become the primary authoritative sites of norm iteration. But interpretations of norms not only take place in courts but also involve other organizations. In that respect, a new democratic space is open for the elaboration of cosmopolitan norms.
The societies in which we are living are more and more porous and under mutual influence. The scales of interaction are multiple and transnational. Worldwide dissemination of models of democracy-making, the vibrant civil-societal forces, economic exchanges, all provide opportunities for limiting authoritarian powers. Populist identity politics, coupled with majoritarian rules, whether it is religion-referred or ethnic-based, stand against the potentials for an open society. Volker Kaul in his article points to the perverse effects of identity politics that hinder freedoms. The idealistic conceptions of identity lead to fundamentalist and totalitarian praxis. Only if the self is located in real life experiences and understood in psychological terms, can freedom prevail for individuals as well as for societies.