The old and new conditions of social body politics

To produce a body integrity out of communities that cannot agree even on some very basic issues, that gnash their teeth at one another, that express their feelings toward one another through grudge and hatred. Under a despotic order, all these wolf-like conditions may perhaps be kept under control by a strong Leviathan practice; in that case, since no one gnashes teeth at anyone and does not express feelings of grudge and hatred, a thoroughly harmonious picture of society forms anyway.

For example, how much the order secured in Yugoslavia during the Cold War years rested on force and fear came to light with the civil war that began right after the dissolution of the union. The explosion of the suppressed hostility that the Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks nurtured inwardly while living together led to a civil war that lasted 5 years and caused the deaths of at least 300 thousand people. It is quite meaningful that what exploded here was religion, which had been the most suppressed under the socialist ideology, and a nationalism based on religion.

In a democratic situation, or one where despotism has lessened, suppressed hostilities may find an opportunity to emerge, but this is not inevitable. Keeping differences together within a harmonious social body integrity by a wise and just administration is not at all impossible. Throughout history there have been many civilizations that have achieved this, of which the Ottomans are one of the best examples.

Producing a social and political body integrity out of people's differences is possible with a solid story or law, with a covenant agreed upon, that will bring them all together and make them willing, even happy, to be together. A story that ignores, belittles or disparages one of the elements, although it may please the majority, becomes a source of serious discomfort within the political body.

Although it was possible to make the German society a nation through the supremacy and virtues of the German race, the problem of discontent toward the political body in German society could not have been resolved without developing an approach that recognizes both Protestantism and Catholicism and honors them equally. Indeed, in Germany the nation-state not only recognizes both denominations equally, but works in strong cooperation with both to contribute to the strength and happiness of the German nation.

In Britain, on the other hand, the country's Irish problem has remained a problem that could never be resolved because of the central position of Anglicanism in its own definition of the nation. The Irish cannot see themselves as an organ or part of the political body based on Anglicanism, but imagine themselves as a separate yet unfree body.

In Turkey too there are many factors and components in the imagining of the political body, but how unifying an element religion could be, starting from the particular definition of secularism, has always been a question worth examining. The only possible way to be able to call Turkey, in which there are Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Laz, Circassians and so on, by the single name Turkish nation, ignoring the ethnic characteristics of all these elements, could perhaps have been to give religion a central role as the common characteristic of them all and to keep the concept of Turk insistently away from an ethnic definition.

On this subject, while different politics and different understandings in different periods played a functional role in softening possible conflicts, they also continued to feed the tension at the fault lines of these differences. For instance, when the concept of Turk could not be presented as a mere citizenship category beyond expressing a race… Or when religion, as the most unifying element possible between them, was thoroughly diluted within the framework of the adopted secularism, so that the possibility of society holding the mortar a nation needs was greatly diminished…

Indeed, the secularism policies adopted in the first years of the Republic were far from using religion even as a functional instrument for social integrity. Since religion was looked upon almost as an innovation and superstition, in a positivist ideological atmosphere it was reduced to an object of struggle to be discredited and ultimately destroyed. From this viewpoint, not at peace with religion in essence, it could not be expected to restore its dignity by assigning religion a unifying mission. The reflection of this viewpoint among the people was to be unable to identify themselves in any way with the social body, indeed to see themselves as the imagined organ of another, exiled body that is no longer here.

Frankly, from that point on, the social integrity of the country could only be possible through the coercive methods of a central administration, which roughly pointed to no way other than techniques of suppression. Even so, up to a certain time, through the features that these techniques suppressed in Turkey, that they made forgotten or repressed by the working of widespread education and ideological apparatuses, they brought into being, for better or worse, a nation-society. There are those who call this making forgotten or repressing a success, but nothing comes out of this other than a culture of heedlessness and abasement.

In the limited working fields of democracy and politics there was also no place for a political discourse referring to these features, and this was to some extent taken for granted. Yet this understanding, which reproduced itself in Turkey through coups, each time worked by demanding more of a consensus that had settled, for better or worse, in society, while also scratching old wounds. Each time, in the name of the integrity they were trying to create, they tried to crush the differences that came to the fore. The more they tried to crush and level the differences, the more they awakened an identity consciousness in those segments.

In the end, differences in the country turned, rather than into a wealth and a dimension of social capital, into deep and fragile fault lines in which energy continually accumulates within the country.

Today politics is largely the management of these faults that have returned, been remembered and awakened, and it is at the same time a politics of the body. It is the art of being able to govern without ignoring any social demand, feature or desire, without pushing any problem under the carpet.