The end of the secret state

The state secret is, to a great extent, a concept belonging to the language of political theology. It requires believing that there is a supreme reason in everything the state does, that strange practices that seem incomprehensible on the surface arrive in the end at a wisdom. Just as God's will is not to be questioned, neither is the wisdom of government. Whatever the state does, it does well; even what ordinary subjects see as evil in what it does ultimately turns out to be a good.

Why does the state keep secrets from its citizens? Of course because the citizen does not see, cannot see, what an actor who knows everything and can look from a broader angle sees. In that case the citizen, faced with what he sees, may naturally not be able to give intelligent responses. With his feeble being he may not be able to bear the things he sees. Indeed, precisely for this reason, the state's need to hide some things stems from its compassion toward its citizen. This secondary assumption, typical of the language of theology, holds that if the citizen could have this vision of the state he would also receive it with understanding, but where is the citizen who has that vision, that insight, that common sense?

In this view, the assumption that the state's reason rests on a semi-divine will is not even concealed. Yet the state's reason is, much more often than is supposed, narrower than the reason of its own citizens, and can also be more cumbersome in its capacity to move. The state feels the need to hide this not because it possesses a higher reason or vision that the citizen could not bear, but rather because it takes the easy way out and strays onto paths that seem far less troublesome and shorter to it but are in essence also unlawful. And it is not a person called "the State" who does this, of course. In truth there is no person called "the State"; there are incompetent administrators acting in the name of the state, and the state departs from the routine in proportion to their incompetence. Since none of the out-of-routine ways can be taken on as a personal responsibility, all the guilt is loaded onto an imaginary perpetrator named the state. To the extent that the state here is a refuge of the lazy, the guilty, the incompetent, it turns into a vessel of secrets.

At one stage of the road taken in the democratization process, it is inevitable that the concept of the "state secret" will come intensively onto the agenda of debate. The most important quality of the state in a democratic structure is that it is open in every respect to oversight and accountability.

The state needs to leave the language of theology and speak in the language of mortals. That is what is happening now. It is no longer fitting for those who exercise authority in the name of the state to form a community of secrets that only those who have reached certain ranks can know. The change we are living through, the spirit of the age so to speak, cannot bear such openly constructed safe zones of secrecy. This forces the phenomenon of secrecy to retreat into a narrow area that can be resorted to only to the minimum degree, only in utterly unavoidable cases.

In fact, the state's language resting on such an esoteric lexicon is possible only when the state has become the private property of a very narrow circle, an illegal organizational structure or a community. In such cases, since the state is an oligarchic structure seized by a narrow circle, the threat it is most sensitive to is someone's "infiltrating" this hidden structure. We know that in Turkey the state's security discourse was for years based on the fears developed against this bogeyman of "infiltration." Yet a significant portion of those who fear the infiltration of the state are those who already hold the state in the hands of their oligarchic formations through an illegal closure or closing-off

In a democratic state there cannot be such a thing as someone's infiltrating the state, because all citizens are already at the very focus of the state to the extent that they are qualified. The state does not have more trustworthy or less trustworthy citizens. There may be citizens who have taken on certain duties, but these duties do not make them privileged over others because of the information they hold. In a democratic society, the state is in any case a mechanism over which one competes in order to capture it.

The Turkish Republic is not a tribal state, nor is it in any way the private property of one person; on the contrary, it belongs to the whole society with all the cultural diversity it contains. This country has recently pushed rapidly out of history the statist mentality that saw itself as the state, took the country as private property by saying "my homeland," the villager "my villager," the worker "my worker."

The state is opening up to its citizens, becoming public. The public sphere too must be moved away from being seen as the private, intimate sphere of certain circles. It is very natural for the heart ailments of some to recur as they roam the cosmic rooms. It is disturbing that even a judge of the state, representing the public, enters those places, because in their eyes the state is a sphere too private to be shared with the people, with a judge acting on the people's behalf.

That is why their raising an uproar about a "civil dictatorship" is not an incomprehensible reaction. Yet nobody is holding them under pressure, but the loss of a property that does not belong to them slipping away from their hands probably does not hurt a little. It is normal for them to feel this pain of loss as a dictatorship. It must be met with understanding. But let them not expect that, for the sake of relieving this pain, things will go on as before.