The irreversible horizon of the opening has appeared

By overcoming the fear of division and beginning to see the differences within itself, Turkey is brought not weakness but strength.

For perhaps a hundred years, while putting on an air of self-admiration with a grandiloquent nationalist discourse, we were kept worrying that two-million-strong Armenia could take a chunk out of Turkey, and that a Kurdistan formation in northern Iraq could divide Turkey. Yet there is a very simple truth about being a great country: a country that fears division is not a great country, and with that fear it has no prospect of becoming one.

So not fearing division is the inevitable consequence or condition of being a great country. The democratic opening path embarked upon today is the name not of a process of division but of a process of growth.

Of course, the meaning of this growth is not adding land to the country's land, not adding land to others' land with an imperial appetite. In itself, Turkey's growth does not have to mean the shrinking or weakening of other countries.

However, a culture of citizenship in which differences are accepted with a great sense of breadth is a typical imperial culture. We must not forget that today the most powerful countries in the world are also those that can tolerate the differences within themselves the most.

The democratic opening, within which the Kurdish question too will be set on the way to resolution but which will not remain limited to that, is, because of the international vision and mission Turkey has attained of late, no longer merely possible but an inevitable process. Moreover, Turkey has long since seen the horizon of that irreversible world.

According to the simple reading of some, these openings are not a task imposed on Turkey from outside. On the contrary, this opening stems from Turkey's need to free itself from a shackle binding its own feet, a need required both by its own maturation and by the new role it has assumed in world politics.

As Turkey grows it matures, and as it matures it notices its own raw structure that turns the Kurdish, Alevi, Islamic and other issues into problems. Thus the opening means Turkey's opening to itself, its discovering itself, its becoming aware of itself.

Those who think that this opening is being imposed on Turkey from outside must now begin to accustom themselves to the idea that Turkey is a country able to produce its own politics, a playmaker.

Frankly, the democratic opening, from beginning to end, can be explained by the dynamics within the country so fully that it does not require recourse to the role of any other country. There is no need at all to appeal to another country (the US, the EU) for this. And the domestic dynamic is the fact that Turkey has by now grasped the vision of being a great country.

This vision shows that the existence of this problem, which so wastefully consumes the country's material and spiritual resources and whose solution lies within this country's means, can no longer be tolerated; that is all.

However, even if the vision is this, it does not change the fact that the AK Parti, which has shown the courage to attempt to do justice to this vision, is taking a great risk. For those who want to sabotage this visionary initiative, which can have no result other than making Turkey grow, in order not to let go of the cheap gains of everyday politics, are not idle at all.

Just as taking this risk within this vision is a valuable politics, so attempting to sabotage these initiatives will be an effort judged to be worthless.

From the moment the AK Parti began to use this discourse of opening, it has also opened onto a new horizon in its manner of doing politics.

Prime Minister Erdoğan, by sending members of parliament to their own regions to take the pulse and views of the public on this opening, has displayed perhaps the first example in Turkey of involving the public so actively in the decision-making process. I attended as an observer one such meeting held in Konya by the members of parliament with civil society organizations. It was seen that the civil society organizations, who expressed their concerns and views on the process from every angle, were already willing and ready for this opening.

Perhaps this is a politics required by the size and complexity of the task. But the idea of involving the greater part of the people in consultation and the decision process should be read as a sign of another very healthy development in politics: a sign that an understanding of politics that sees people not as subjects of the state but as partners, participants and equal citizens is developing.