The Organization of Turkic States that excited Sezai Karakoç

It was written that the poet of revival, the late Sezai Karakoç, whom we saw off on his journey to the eternal realm last week, had been very excited about the Organization of Turkic States summit, which took place only a few days before his death. He had even told Zeynep Karaca, who visited him 3 days before his death, that when his health permitted, the first piece he would want to write would be on this subject.

The summit of the Turkic states held in Istanbul took place in a far different atmosphere of mood and excitement compared with past meetings. The most important factor creating this atmosphere was that this year's summit came after Azerbaijan, in solidarity with Turkey, ended the Armenian occupation of Karabakh. As a concrete example, two members of the Organization showed that when they display solidarity they can accomplish things and can become an effective force. There is no doubt that the victory won through this solidarity has given this union a distinct spirit, excitement and motivation.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Turkic Republics have become an important area in Turkey's politics and an important source of nourishment in its conception of national identity. But on the plane of facts, none of the unity, togetherness and solidarity attributed to this cultural geography ever materialized as hoped. For the generations of the Turkic Republics raised under 70 years of Soviet rule did not look at us the way we looked at them. Because under the Soviet-Russian culture whose influence they lived under so intensely, they had become unable to look at us in that way: their alphabets were the Russian alphabet, their cultures and histories were closer to a commonality with the history of the Russians, and most importantly, under 70 years of intense ideological education, generations had been raised who were extremely secularized, even atheized. Sevil Nuriyeva describes these processes with first-hand testimony.

"There is a Russian weight in all of them. But how strange that, as much as the Russian weight, there is also Western influence in all of them... Societies are not all single-layered. Turkishness and Islamic consciousness are not present in all of them.

But (even so) the main vein was always on national and religious identity... With a bit of the West, a bit of the administrations and a bit of Russia's influence, many tissues were turned upside down... Of course, the rulers of the countries themselves also experienced a change on the matter of national identity."

You will say, admittedly, has there ever been a more favorable opportunity in the past for these countries or peoples to come together? History bears witness that the harshest wars and massacres have taken place between peoples close to one another. In history, the Arab peoples with their tribal wars among themselves, and the Turkic peoples with their principality wars among themselves, had an effect that weakened one another rather than strengthening them. Another Turkic khan, Timur, was the one who halted for a long time an Ottoman state that had gone on the offensive toward the interior of Europe. It is also well known that the state that gave the Ottomans, who were acting with the same mission, the most trouble was the Turkic Safavid State, and that the war between them is still a reference for a serious historical consciousness. We are not even counting a host of other examples.

Still, modern times and the different conceptions and experiences of nationalism have produced different opportunities. Pan-Turanism, as an ideal that rose in a period when the winds of nationalism brought down the Ottomans, was nonetheless an option before the new Turkey. Moreover, from the standpoint of the Turkist nationalism that was adopted, it was an option that was doctrinally necessary but practically impossible. For the world order that had formed in those days and that also drew borders for the Republic of Turkey did not allow resort to this option, and therefore the formation of a new center of power that could arise from the union of the Turkic peoples. Just as it would not allow any initiative toward the re-establishment of the Islamic Union, whose dissolution had become inevitable with the World War.

In this respect the Republic of Turkey would be bounded, besides its geographical border, by two important political restrictions. It would pursue neither an Islamic Union nor a Turkic Union.

Mustafa Kemal's banning of Turanism, despite all his Turkist-nationalist emphases, was related not only to his realism but to these thick borders that were communicated or made felt to Turkey at every level under the conditions of the day.

Do the discourses on the failure of Ottomanism or the Islamic Union suppose on what claims and on what principles the Ottoman state stood for 600 years? Ottomanism had a thoroughly proven success, and what determined that it would no longer work afterward was not that it was a bad project but that it had been defeated in war. Of course, if we hold an understanding such as "if it was defeated in war, it is wrong," we are in no position to discuss this. Yet until the day it was defeated in war, it was able to keep together 72 nations spread over three continents and to govern them with justice and a model administration.

Today we are at a very different point. Any kind of togetherness among Islamic countries is, in the final analysis, a step that will make a serious contribution to the formation of a beneficial and alternative world.

The Organization of Turkic States too can be seen not as an alternative to the Islamic Union but as a step that complements it and perhaps will speed the journey toward it even more. The formation of such regional or language-based unions among Islamic countries on every occasion is far preferable to their standing scattered. Of course, for the functioning of these unions each country needs to grow stronger separately, and in order to grow stronger they need to be in solidarity with one another.

However, one should not think that the resistance displayed against these unions since the past has completely disappeared or will disappear today. This resistance will come from within each country or from other powers. Sevil Nuriyeva is not wrong to point already to the probable concerns of Russia and China. You may add the USA and the EU to these.

In the end, this is not a union that leaves wholly untouched the still-continuing allotments of a world order formed after the First World War. But it is also impossible to build a new and more just world without touching that allotment.