Nationalism as a job

An important part of the resistance displayed against the resolution process is the worry of being left unemployed in the new environment that will emerge through the resolution. This is not a remark made idly, merely to belittle the opposition some display on this matter. It is in fact a reality that anyone with a little reading and writing on the sociology of the matter can see.

Resolving the terror problem is not a simple job, and it is not a job consisting merely of the few thousand people who hold arms laying down these arms today. In fact, the laying down of arms is both a need forced by a social change that can no longer be resisted by any of the parties, and, once this step is taken, a move that will in turn lead to an even greater social change.

Today we have an increasingly urbanising, middle-classifying society, and although the Kurdish segment has fallen quite far behind the rest of the country in this regard because of terror, it too is getting its share of the same urbanisation and middle-classification. As it gets this share, it is inevitable that it will come to demand more of social welfare. This situation makes the pressure on the PKK and Kurdish politics to end terror as a form of action increasingly felt. What do you suppose? How long can Kurdish parents remain unconditionally attached to a political leadership that recklessly consumes their own children's lives for a cause that also has alternative peaceful paths?

On the other hand, Turkey in general has acquired a vision broad enough to see that it can no longer wrestle with such a problem. It is not an easily explained situation, neither to ourselves nor to the world, for a country with such an assertive tendency to grow to live within a reality built on the fear of division. That someone is feeding or supporting this problem as a shackle on Turkey precisely against this tendency to grow is a separate reality, but one must not be incapable of developing a politics that will resolve this problem at its root and stop it from being a trump card in the hands of others.

With the resolution process, Turkey today proves that it is not in this incapacity. This situation, whether from this direction or from the other, corresponds to a great social change, and the biggest problem of every social change of this kind and this scale is the segments it leaves idle. Those segments cannot immediately adapt to the requirements of social change, and especially if they cannot show success in finding other jobs to adapt to the next social structure, they show the greatest opposition to the course of events.

In fact, from a truly nationalist point of view, the resolution process is a process that will strengthen Turkey much more as a country, even "as a nation", and that can even turn being a nation from a state of "self-deception" into a conscious, voluntary participation. Indeed, our definition of the nation until now was made relying on creating a system of common delusion.

Of course there would be no problem if everyone believed the theses that everyone living in Turkey is a Turk and that a Turkish nation was formed from them, that this nation has founded a state and that this state represents the indivisible integrity of the Turkish nation. But it does not work. This remained a story that, in a country left over from the Ottomans where 72 nations lived together, could be endured without objection only because of repression. There is an urgent need to be a nation, but this need cannot be met with this story.

Turkey is only today rapidly making its way to being a nation, but not by ignoring differences; by recognising them, respecting them and observing their rights. That is why we say Turkey has never before been this close to the possibility of being a nation in the true sense.

That this course is disturbing to some who claim nationalism is in fact truly strange, but the truth of the matter relates to the worry of being left unemployed I described above.

MHP nationalism does not proceed from an approach that truly embraces the whole of the country and sees the whole of the people as part of the nation. On the contrary, it is a job needed and produced by the Ergenekonist-securitist mindset that sees most of the nation as its enemy and produces enemies for itself from among the people. Nationalism as such a job would, God forbid, tear the country to pieces; with this mindset you cannot hold together a people, not even two people.

The political atmosphere that will emerge when the resolution process is completed will introduce some to a new world for which they have made no preparation at all, in which the language or programmes of politics will be rebuilt. In this environment the old effortless but profitable-comfortable attitudes will have no relevance left. In order to compete in the new world, it will be necessary to produce new politics and new programmes. A very laborious job, as you understand. That is why Kılıçdaroğlu meets with a tearful complaint a process whose course he could immediately understand if he were to leaf through a newspaper or two, saying "the AK Parti does not inform us, we cannot follow what is going on". Devlet Bahçeli, for his part, orders those shouting "strike and we'll strike, die and we'll die" to be ready for the appropriate time.

As the leader of a party that has put the idea of the "indivisible integrity of the country" at its centre, let us set aside his objection to this process for a moment: does Bahçeli have a formula that would truly hold this country together? This process would in fact also open the way for him to go to Diyarbakır, Van and Batman and talk there, and therefore to feel the integrity of the country to his very marrow.

That is probably the panic. Bahçeli does not want to go that far; he is comfortable where he is. He has already divided the country in his own head, according to his comfort and his business, as much as he is going to divide it.