"Revolutionary" conservatism and "foreign" nationalism

President Abdullah Gül's heartening and horizon-opening speech in the TBMM had hardly finished being debated when Prime Minister Erdoğan's magnificent two-hour speech at the AK Parti ordinary congress followed. Of course, neither speech diminished the importance of the other. On the contrary, they were complementary speeches that can be evaluated together.

Where the President made a speech of the utmost progressiveness, one would have expected the opposition to point to something still more progressive, but it fell to the Prime Minister himself to point further ahead. That the President and the Prime Minister are competing with each other for the good of the country is undoubtedly one of the country's greatest strokes of luck. A greater stroke of luck, though, would have been for the opposition to join the race toward this horizon. Unfortunately, instead of joining this race, the opposition prefers to cling to a conservatism that lags far behind even the government and even the state.

The Prime Minister, unable to find an opposition to compete with in doing good for the country, is forced to compete either with the President or with his own discourse. Each of his speeches and initiatives sets the bar at a higher level than the previous one. In return, the opposition, as if it had no responsibility to wish the country well, prefers to compete with itself in exactly the opposite direction, and to surpass itself in this race.

That is why the opposition, left and right alike, on the country's most important problem, can propose no way other than steering a little further along the very roads that have been tried for years and have mired the country in this swamp.

The social democratic part of the opposition wants the giving of martyrs to continue regularly; the nationalist part regards expressing the integrity of society as a sign of "alienation" from the nation. Everyone is advancing along the path he has set, on the way to surpassing himself. Bahçeli strains his voice even harder at the rostrum and looks for ways to surpass his own style or line of opposition. He offers not a single proposal on the truly national and rational ways of keeping the nation together.

Bahçeli most probably does not see that this rage of his works to the detriment of the nation's integrity and has already shattered the nation's emotional unity, because, as Etyen Mahçupyan has also aptly noted, the nationalism he represents is very "foreign" to this land. Indeed, it is not only Bahçeli's or Baykal's Turkish nationalism, but also the DTP's Kurdish nationalism, that are ideologies very foreign and alienating to this land.

On the other hand, these are signs that in Turkey, in fact, no party is consistent and in harmony, in its existence and its actions, with the identity it is named for. Not even the AK Parti's conservative identity is exempt from this. Moreover, although it does not seem at all bothered by this and even adopts it as an official identity, the AK Parti's conservatism is also highly debatable in the face of this revolutionary performance.

That the AK Parti, with an approach that leaves no taboo area on matters such as the state, the citizen, the official ideology and identity, and which has no conservative side at all, so insistently claims a conservative identity, which in fact has no positive connotations in the literature of political science, should itself be counted as a kind of novelty. Especially since conservatism within the Enlightenment-modernizing tradition is perceived as a kind of "stagnation" and even "reaction," it can be said even more that, rather than drawing legitimacy from conservatism, the AK Parti has added strong legitimacy to the concept through its own revolutionary experience and performance.

Erdoğan's speech, which claimed one by one all the symbolic names outside the state's official discourse, giving each of them extremely warm messages, was a revolutionary speech that touched all the borders and walls the state has tried to preserve. What it hopes to preserve is, I think, the line of social freedom, peace and integrity whose outline was drawn in this speech but which has not yet been reached.

If this discourse and the openings it points to are insisted upon, we may hope that this conservatism too will become meaningful.