Enlightening republic versus spoiling democracy, and entering the Turkey Century with TOGG

There is an interesting comparison between republic and democracy made by Régis Debray, one of France's famous leftists and an important adviser to Mitterrand. Debray says: "The republic seeks the human being in the child, and, at the cost of eliminating the child, addresses only that which must grow in him. Democracy, on the other hand, spoils the child in the human being. For it fears it would bore him if it treated him as an adult. The republican who wants the pupil to develop says that no child is admirable as a child. The democrat, on the other hand, thinks that since in the end they are grown-up children, all people are lovable. This can also be put more crudely: The republic does not like children. Democracy does not respect adults."

What has been said about the republic whose 99th year we reached and observed yesterday took me back to what was said on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the republic. The 75th anniversary of the republic, identified, to the accompaniment of tremendous iconographic displays, with a hotel, with athletic bodies, with the tractor in place of the plough, was being celebrated as though it had issued an invitation to the spirit of the single-party years and that invitation had been answered as the 28 February coup. I remembered what I had written in Tezkire magazine 24 years ago, on the 75th anniversary of the republic, about the meaning of the republic, its dimension of virtue and its practices in Türkiye. Quoting Debray's words, I had said:

"If we proceed from this comparison, it appears that in both republic and democracy there is a conceded body of knowledge about what the adult state and the child state of the human being are. If that is truly so, then in fact no problem should arise either in the republic's way of constructing the adult human being or in democracy's attitude of spoiling the child. Yet the problem arises precisely at this point. It can be said that all the legitimacy problems contained in the republic stem from the fact that the forces governing in the name of the republic, beginning with their own adulthood, have been unable to persuade their citizens sufficiently about the standard of adulthood they attribute to the society they govern. The self-assuredness about what the child state and adult state of the human being are, and the sense of certainty whose unearnedness comes more into daylight every day, yields, in return, a legitimacy crisis.

Of course, when the diversity among all of the roughly one hundred countries in the world said to be governed as republics is added to this picture, what the republic adds extra to a social structure, or to that structure's conception of governance, in the sense of representing the will of the people, also becomes a serious question. In the diversity in question there is a broad spectrum stretching from an unlimited one-man dictatorship to the domination of a party or a clique, from a pluralist social structure to a multi-party parliamentary regime. It is another fact that the Baath regimes of today are also a kind of republic and generally rest on a very small minority of their peoples, or that all the Eastern Bloc countries we left behind as we entered the 90s were each a republic, and that all representation of the people had been reduced to the will of a politburo which had happened to undertake the revolution. In this situation, it would have been unthinkable for there not to be a serious blur about what the republic adds extra to a government."

Today, with the confidence that the picture has become sufficiently clear, in the light of very different political practices, for instance the 20 years of AK Parti rule, we can comfortably say this. Unless it is crowned with a democracy, not in word but in practice, with its standards, its law and its human rights, the republic has no meaning or value at all. A republic against its own people has no meaning other than legitimizing certain dictatorships in order to save appearances before others. Today the Baath regime of Assad, who massacres his own people with chemical weapons, is a republic, Saddam's dictatorship was a republic, and so are the dictators in the Middle East who make their peoples live hell on earth. By contrast, monarchies prevail in countries such as Britain, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, which are regarded as representatives of "Contemporary Civilization" for the Republic of Türkiye. For that reason, the republic is valuable not on its own, but only if it can meet a real democracy, and only then can its claim to be the representative of the people be valid.

The Jacobin mentality, which in the name of republicanism lords it over its people and treats its people as children, was never seen to do anything but a clutter of words in the name of celebrating the republic. Yet from 1950 onward, from the moment the people came into play through its meeting with democracy, the republic began to move toward its real meaning.

The fact that AK Parti, under the leadership of Erdoğan, earlier as prime minister and for 8 years as President, comes before the people on every anniversary of the founding of the republic with huge development or democratization projects has a special meaning, of course. The republic is not observed with applause and words. The meaning the republic deserves can be shown only by rulers' respect for the republic, for the people, by service and development projects, by visionary but realistic claims.

That, although in power alone for 20 years, the President presents his vision with the excitement of the first day, with newness and freshness, showing no sign of fatigue, is in my view a great event, far beyond its content.

In our day, when the important countries of the world, when Europe, flounder in the vise of serious economic recession and political crises, to be able to address one's people with hope and excitement, free of the fatigue or weariness expected to settle in after 20 years of governing experience, is a great merit, of course. But for a country to have such a leadership in the midst of such a crisis in the world is a separate opportunity and advantage.

It is a sociological fact that strong leadership is the greatest source of social capital. What is far more important than countries' strong material capital assets is that they possess such social capital, motivation, hope and excitement.

Today, of course, despite certain economic difficulties that are being experienced and much discussed, Türkiye has a leadership that makes a strong claim that these difficulties can be overcome, and that inspires confidence that it can carry this claim beyond words.

The entry that this leader made at the wheel of TOGG, Türkiye's first domestic automobile, which at the same time represents the most advanced technology of the world of the future, represents symbolically precisely this story, with the high confidence and hope it inspires.