The workshop as a style of politics

It appears that the government, in seeking an opening on the Kurdish question, has decided to begin with a series of workshops. The first workshop has already been held at the Police Academy, chaired by Prof. Zühtü Arslan, under the supervision of State Minister Beşir Atalay. We may hope that progress has begun on the opening process announced by Mr. Atalay during the past week.

Workshop organizations as a method of approaching the country's chronic problems, which no one has touched, are a method this government has discovered recently. Regarding the Alevi opening as well, the third of the series of workshops, coordinated by Dr. Necdet Subaşı under the patronage of State Minister Faruk Çelik and still continuing, will be held on 19 August.

Frankly, these workshops have not yet shown any concrete result beyond the participants' expressions of high satisfaction and productive exchanges of ideas. Perhaps, since it is not completed, comparison will not be possible either, but even at the stage reached, as a way for the state or the government to open a path on problems that no one dared to touch, it deserves interest and appreciation in any case.

On such tense subjects, the voices of those who have settled judgments and approaches come out louder, and somehow, according to them, if their own views are followed the solution of the problems is very simple. The authorities or politicians are needlessly dragging the matter out, whereas the prescription is perfectly simple, and when this prescription is followed the problem will be solved very easily.

But right at this point there emerges a clearer truth of the political world, which shouts at people at the top of its voice "welcome to the desert of the real." There are so many who say they hold the solution to everything in their hands, and the prescriptions each presents as the definitive solution are so different from one another, so contradictory, that in this desert even what some liberals cry out "I've found it, this is it!" over may be nothing but a mirage.

Those liberals, for whom discussing many things before society or before institutions is meaningless and unnecessary, and what is to be done is already clear. You bring in EU laws or standards and you solve everything. Society, politics, the state, history, they will all be useless anyway. None of them has Alexander's power and horizon, but in all of them the fantasy of cutting the knot like Alexander has developed badly. It is forgotten that where that sword comes into play there is neither politics nor free society left.

Perhaps one more practical truth of politics is also being forgotten:

In politics, debates are generally not held in order to arrive at a more perfect, flawless, consistent text. Very few people seek such a text in the field of politics, and such people are not in determining positions anyway. Where the real debating arena turns is the seizure of certain positions of power, or the persuading, one way or another, of those who hold these powers, authorities and privileges to withdraw from these positions. For this process of persuasion the politician's only instrument is of course not legal texts or universal values; it has never been so, and it should not be expected to be so. This is in a sense the most natural state of politics. Politics made by ignoring this state recorded by political science remains either anachronistic (outside history) or out of context (lacking in relevance).

Regarding it as legitimate to impose "universal standards" on people "for their own benefit," without waiting for them to be persuaded of the perfect ideas we hold, is no different from a kind of Kemalism, but it is very clearly different from democracy...

That an opening on the Kurdish question can be spoken of today has been possible because the parties of politics have gone through a process of persuasion and approach relating not logically but to positions of power. More plainly, those who today earn their bread from the continuation of the Kurdish question, feeling that they can no longer eat this bread so cheaply, are unable to support their positions sufficiently against the increasing pressure or efforts toward resolving the matter.

Having made the bread produced from the Kurdish question costly has to some extent been a success of politics as well. As politics has claimed what belongs to it in this field kept closed to everyone, it has also strengthened its position in the debate.

In this respect the probable role of the workshops should not be underestimated. In this way it broadens the ground for politics, that is, for more discussion of the subject. Since there is no turning back from this path, let us hope that the process turns out well.