What is revolution?

The question of whether the social movements that began in Tunisia and continued in Egypt are a revolution has become everyone's concern these days. Perhaps nobody considers a capital-R "Revolution," with all its metaphysical connotations, fitting for Muslim or Arab societies. The famous Orientalist cliché that in Muslim societies there are not revolutions but changes of rulers in their palaces is being recalled and voiced again. Yet perhaps one should start from the question Michel Foucault asked even about the revolutions that took place in the West: "What is a Revolution?" What is the expectation from a revolution, and what, and how much, have the revolutions in the West really changed?

Whatever the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Soviet Revolution changed in Europe, the waves of Revolution in the Middle East seem bound to change just as much. What it will change will not be human nature. It will not be the nature of woman and man. Nor will it realize, from one day to the next, anyone's utopian expectations. Everyone may attribute a different meaning and expectation to the revolution. This is inevitable. A revolution is, after all, a process subject to a great current that can draw very different expectations all to a single point. In this sense, the fact that the Revolution taking place in Egypt strangely has no planner at all, and that it manifests itself as a social natural event that cannot be attributed to any party, group or specific actor, is actually something that all political actors or social engineers should dwell on in reflection.

Whatever anyone says, in Egypt one must see that neither the US, nor Israel, nor the Egyptian deep state, nor even any of the actors now taking part in the revolutionary process (above all the Brotherhood, ElBaradei or the Kefaya movements) can control the process alone. Nevertheless, the Revolution is proceeding in its capital-R quality, and from now on it will continue to play its role with all its influence on the peoples of the Middle East.

Undoubtedly, this subjectless quality of the Revolution does not mean that the political stances of political actors have no meaning or effect. On the contrary, this Revolution has been the result of an accumulation formed by the attitudes and feelings that all these movements have nurtured until now being joined onto one another. One must note that from the beginning of the Revolution the US has had to change its stance repeatedly. This shows how unforeseeable and unpredictable the waves of Revolution are. This Revolution will go down in history, above all, as an instructive lesson against the arrogance human beings feel about being able to control everything. We will continue to learn its other lessons day by day.

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THE POWER STRUGGLE AND DEMOCRACY, OR THE WRITER AND HIS STYLE

A phone call I received on Thursday from a friend I know reads my columns constantly was telling me that he could not reconcile the column published that day with my style and line. Although I told him he was mistaken and that my column days were Saturday and Monday, when the friend insisted I felt the need to look at the newspaper.

As I suspected, in the place of dear Yasin Doğan's column was my cliché. This mix-up, which I often encounter from readers, was this time made by our own newspaper; never mind, it will be corrected, there is no situation requiring us to distinguish ourselves from each other with very thick lines. Indeed, it was corrected yesterday with a note in Doğan's column, and the situation was corrected on the website too. No problem. But I should not fail to mention that on this occasion, from those who relayed their impressions of this column, I felt a small measure of happiness at seeing what kind of familiarity a writer's style or line has created between him and the reader. The reader expects certain things from whomever he reads. When he encounters an unexpected attitude, he pushes, steers or abandons. Every writer somehow attracts, perhaps forms, his own reader, and the reader's expectations also create serious pressure on the writer. This pressure is by no means an unhealthy pressure. It is of course not the writer's only yardstick, but it is one of the important areas of attention.

Yasin Doğan is one of the writers whose pieces I too always read carefully, both because of the post he holds and because of his own distinctive style. Like everyone, I have had many pieces of his that I agreed and disagreed with. But until now I have never entered a debate with him. Since his piece had been published, albeit by mistake, under my signature and my cliché, I read it with greater attention and I could not pass by at least one point he made. The sentence I stumbled on is this: "The CHP is not fighting a struggle for democratization; it is fighting a power struggle. The CHP's call is based not on the logic of 'let us democratize Türkiye' but on the logic of 'you get up, I'll sit.'"

Truly, like everyone else, I do not recall the CHP having so far persistently and as a weighty discourse clung to a claim such as democratizing Türkiye. So the performance the CHP has recently displayed on the country's democratization is quite consistent with itself. However, despite this performance, I find nothing to be surprised about in the CHP's being more focused on a power struggle on the democratic ground that has opened. Not everyone has to do politics in order to democratize more. Some do it only to advance their own ethnic, class or religious interests or power, and some do it only for democratization. Whoever does it for whatever, receives his own reward somehow from where he expects it.

Moreover, democracy is a regime that leaves no room for faulting a power struggle. On the ground of democracy the essence of the whole struggle is more power. Nobody can be expected to carry on the struggle for democracy only for charity. On the one hand the demand for power enters the struggle for democracy, and on the other hand the power struggle strengthens the ground of democratization. As long as the power struggle does not include resorting to every immoral method at the cost of destroying the democratic ground.