Today is 23 April

The 102nd anniversary of the founding of the Grand National Assembly, on the road to establishing national sovereignty. On this occasion we will read and hear a great deal today. Many stock formulas will be repeated, and many simple truths will be hidden beneath those stock formulas.

The first thing to be remembered is that, among the many states established on the occupied lands of the Ottoman state, whose defeat was the most important outcome, Turkey is the only state that still keeps the institution of the assembly open.

All of the countries established on the occupied lands of the Ottomans were handed over to dictators or families whose rule was established through agreements with the occupying powers. Not only was no assembly established in any of them, but in many of those countries no trace was left of a still-functioning assembly or of the notion of national sovereignty. Because all of those lands and peoples saw themselves as belonging to one nation. National sovereignty is at the same time an expression of belonging to the Ottoman nation, and it has not been so easy to define a new nation through the new state established in its place and to establish the concept of the sovereignty of this putative nation.

Even the definitions that were tried to be developed over the past century through secular-Arab nationalism continued to cause problems because Islam could not be dealt with. That is why, since it was not possible to control these lands through institutions based on concepts such as "national sovereignty" or "the will of the people," the regimes deemed fit for them were dictatorships. It is no coincidence that the peoples who rose up during the Arab Spring put the slogan "the people want" at the center, and that this will of the people increasingly drew all these countries closer to one another also expressed a longing for "a lost notion of national sovereignty." The slogans echoing as "The people... want" reflected a yearning for a people that "wants, wills, and is master of its decision."

Meanwhile, that we are obliged today to remind that the TBMM, which acted on the principle of national sovereignty, was not Turkey's first experience of an assembly also shows what kind of ideological historiography Turkey has been subjected to. Yet the TBMM is an Assembly that came into being with the relocation of the Meclis-i Mebusan to Ankara. Therefore it is not the place where the notion of Hakimiyet-i milliye was first born, either.

It is also a fact that under the roof of this Assembly the National Struggle was conducted and the founding debates of the state in which we live today were held, and that it was later covered over in a way hardly compatible with the principle of national sovereignty. The open difference in hakimiyet-i milliye between the 1st Assembly and the 2nd Assembly, which came about with a single decision, also shows how discursive a construct the representation that would later be expressed as national sovereignty could be. In the 1st Assembly, established on the principle that "sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation or condition," the concept of the nation, the concept of the homeland and the concept of independence all acquired entirely different meanings in the new regime later built on the legitimacy obtained through this assembly.

For example, the removal in haste, with the convening of the 2nd Assembly, of the verse "Their affairs are by consultation among themselves," which hung on the wall right behind the chair in the 1st Assembly, was certainly not a decision of national sovereignty. In fact, even the formation of the 2nd Assembly was not a result of the functioning of National Sovereignty. Likewise, the manner and grounds on which an Assembly that had itself directed the National Struggle and had a very high capacity to represent the nation was dissolved by a fait accompli, and the election of the members of the 2nd Assembly established afterwards, show, from whichever side you look, what kind of wound the concept of National Sovereignty had received at the very outset.

The TBMM has a history in which, in the hands of a small group acting "in spite of the people, for the people," a stratum assuming sovereignty in the name of the nation, the Assembly's effectiveness was above all suspended for a long time. None of the members of the Assembly formed thereafter was determined by the people; all were chosen from Ankara and entirely according to the measure of loyalty to the founding will.

Undoubtedly we can say that from 1950 onward this will began to be reflected somewhat more, and over time more and more. Indeed, despite all the coups and military or oligarchic interventions, it is a fact that in Turkey the will of the people, compared with the other countries that experienced colonialism and are remnants of the Ottomans, has always been manifested through transparent and auditable elections. Today Turkish democracy has a very serious opportunity and advantage, at least in the formation process of the assembly, in the manifestation of the will of the people. In this context there is no need at all to cite the general problems of representative democracy so as to underestimate or belittle this advantage.

On this anniversary, the question of what happened to that assembly which was the continuation of the Meclis-i Mebusan, which conducted the struggle for liberation, which was passionately devoted to the spirit of independence and which wrote the Independence March, is of course a question that will determine an entire historiography. The long years of tutelary experiments by those quarters, after the transition to multi-party life, who looked with suspicion on the national will constantly manifested in that Assembly, saw it as an expression of the nation's unconsciousness, self-ignorance and lack of education, and tried to establish tutelage over it by various means, are likewise important events in this century-long history of the TBMM. Among those tutelary elements, who wanted to see the will manifested in the Assembly in Turkey, the democratic processes of representation, as a mere pageant, and to keep its effect at that level, a certain effectiveness has never been lacking.

The TBMM's effectiveness has also had to fight a battle of survival against these quarters. Without doubt, the deputies who gathered in the TBMM and showed a stance against the coup that was attempted on 15 July also witnessed the TBMM being subjected, for the first time in its history, to such an attack.

What was the state of the TBMM, which opened 102 years ago as the 1st Assembly, and what did it mean for the nation, for democracy, for the sovereignty of the nation? What is the role it undertakes today? To think more soundly about its role today, would the first assembly or the later assemblies constitute a reference or a precedent, or would they serve in determining a direction in the part of the road traveled that extends toward the future? In any case there is an indisputable benefit in remembering.