"The Turkey of My Dreams"

The Rectorate of Yüzüncü Yıl University in Van is running an interesting conference programme under the title "The Turkey of My Dreams". The guests, who are usually invited from outside the city to give conferences, are called upon to dream about Turkey and, of course, to share these dreams with the audience.

On this occasion, you get to have an interesting experience, in the Turkish context, between dreaming and the practice of politics. In the extremely optimistic atmosphere created by the resolution process, dreaming is without doubt much easier and more realistic than before. When people see a hope and a possibility that their dreams may come true, they can cling to life with a little more passion. The opposite can lead to very different and tragic consequences. Dreaming dreams that will never come true makes disappointments habitual, and the typical complication of this habituality is an endless melancholy that has become a trait of character.

Of course, most melancholy stems from dreaming too much, from platonic constructions that miss the realities of life, from wanting the impossible. When encountered at the level of individual expectations, it is relatively easy both to diagnose and to treat, but at the ideological level it has far different consequences. Shared ideological disappointments lead to great social traumas, whose graver effect is a crisis in values and norms. That is why radical political tendencies that struggle to connect with life may inevitably, after a certain point, be hurled to the exact opposite pole, returning with astonishing submission to everything they had rejected.

That is why one must never neglect to establish the link between dream and politics, that is, between dream and life.

In fact, dreaming attainable dreams for Turkey also defines and activates the responsibilities we can take on politically. Unattainable dreams place no responsibility on a person, because the range dreamed of is in any case far from attainable. While this kind of imagining allows a person to be extremely radical in thought, thanks to the impossibility of these dreams it can make one extremely liberal at the opposite extreme in deed.

Still, the contradiction of being radical in thought and liberal in deed leaves a melancholic effect on a person. Truly, despite everything, the only way to overcome this is politics. Politics is the pursuit of the possible, and above all requires being aware of the level of reality one is at and starting from that point.

Of course, there are also times when politics cannot respond even to simple demands, when the political sphere has been closed off by the elements of tutelage. In that case it becomes equally inevitable that people become completely alienated from politics, continue their search on other grounds, and bring their political practices together with a kind of cynicism.

To the students of Yüzüncü Yıl University, to whom I was invited to describe the Turkey of my dreams, I explained that the country I dream of today has become more attainable than ever.

I described the Turkey of my dreams as a Turkey where the state is not the owner, boss, guardian and master of the citizen, but on the contrary the citizen is the owner and boss of the state. A Turkey with a state that, instead of seeing its own citizens as enemies, regards the diversity of its citizens as a blessing and adjusts itself accordingly. A country that has raised its own level of social and economic justice to high levels, where everyone lives a life worthy of human dignity, and where society lives in peace and brotherhood within itself. A Turkey that adopts justice as the highest value, practises it, and, in this respect, raises a loud voice of objection against the unjust order in the world as well.

Today we can say that this Turkey is no longer a dream, that it has been realised or is being realised. Of course, the fact remains that there is still a long way to go.