On the tenth anniversary of 15 July: remembering not the coup but the birth of the nation

Ten years have passed since July 15. Ten years is a very important span for such founding and rupture-creating events, a turning point in itself. For some, these ten years are the anniversary of a failed coup attempt. For others, they are the history of the struggle against FETÖ. Yet the time that has passed has shown that reading July 15 merely as a coup attempt is not enough to understand what happened. Because July 15 was, in its intentions, a coup, but in its consequences a moment of social rupture and re-founding.

Looking back today, the real question to be asked is this: what was saved on July 15? A government? A political party? A leader? Or, much deeper, Türkiye's will to be a nation?

In my view, in the tenth year of July 15, it is now necessary to address the matter beyond daily political debates. Because the historical importance of July 15 lies less in what happened that night than in the sociological truth that night brought to light.

For many years in Türkiye a complete identity between state and nation could not be established. The state often worked like a mechanism that functioned despite the nation, tried to discipline it, tried to force it into the molds it had designed. Even after the transition to multi-party life, the people were allowed to choose, but not to change. They could capture the government up to a point, but never the state. On April 27, Erdoğan Teziç had said precisely this. The people sometimes cannot know what they want, and when they want what they should not want, or do what they should not do, a higher will was needed to correct them.

Coups were the usual correction tools of this system. All the interventions, from May 27 to March 12, from September 12 to February 28 and April 27, rested on the same logic: when the nation's choices were found wrong by the owners of the state, military or bureaucratic tutelage stepped in.

That is why in Türkiye coups did not merely overthrow governments. They also constantly gave the people this message: "This state does not belong to you."

In fact, the will that had been expressed on April 27 was expressed more strongly on July 15, and this time in practice. For the first time a coup attempt was actually stopped by the nation. For the first time the people defended their own will beyond the government they had elected. For the first time people took to the streets not merely for a government but to protect the meaning of their votes.

That is why the most important result of July 15 is not that the coup failed, but that the nation discovered itself as a political subject. Of course this event, this resistance, this stand did not fall from the sky. The social ground that made July 15 possible was formed over many years. Looking at Türkiye's last seventy years, we see that urbanization, rising levels of education, the strengthening of the middle classes and increased democratic participation raised society's self-confidence vis-à-vis the state.

While in the 1950s a quarter of the population lived in cities, today Türkiye has largely become an urban society. Thanks to the spread of universities, means of communication and economic mobility, people have become actors who are no longer merely governed but want to take part in governing.

This was exactly what the coup plotters could not calculate. They were still acting with the sociology of the old Türkiye. They thought tanks would produce absolute fear over society. Yet what stood before them was now a different society. A society that believed it had a political will of its own, that thought it had rights over the state, that knew that elections consisted of more than the ballot box.

It is therefore an incomplete reading to see the people who stood before the tanks on the night of July 15 merely as people who moved at the call of a single political leader. What emerged there was the democratic consciousness accumulated over long years. This consciousness had also unleashed another anger that the nation had accumulated against the non-national nature of coups. Of course, this consciousness manifested in different ways in different political tendencies. But the common denominator that night was opposition to changing power by means other than elections, and especially to the external intervention behind it.

In this respect, July 15 formed a striking example not only for Türkiye but for the history of democracy worldwide. Because in the sociology of modern politics, social movements generally develop against the government. On July 15, however, millions of people mobilized not against the government but to protect the democratic order.

This produced a picture that even classical theories of social movements struggle to explain. After these ten years we see more clearly today that the failure of the coup attempt did not only affect domestic politics. It also changed Türkiye's foreign policy horizon.

After July 15, with the liquidation of the parallel structures that had infiltrated the army, Türkiye reached a very different point in the fight against terrorism, in the defense industry and in areas of regional influence. It is not possible to think of the new picture that has emerged in Syria, Libya, Karabakh and the Eastern Mediterranean independently of the new state capacity formed after July 15.

That is why July 15 should be seen not merely as an event belonging to the past but as the starting point of a transformation process that is still continuing today.

However, none of this means that the danger of July 15 has passed entirely. Because coups are not carried out only with tanks. Tutelage sometimes wears a uniform, sometimes speaks in the language of the media, sometimes circulates through academic concepts, and sometimes proposes suspending democracy in the name of democracy.

Today in many parts of the world new forms of tutelage that limit the will of the people are emerging. Elitist conceptions of politics, technocratic models of governance and political engineering projects steered by global power centers continue to live on in different forms. That is why commemorating July 15 is not merely remembering a coup in the past. The real matter is to remember that the national will is a trust that must be continually defended.

Looking back after ten years, this is the most important lesson July 15 has left us: democracy is protected by institutions, but what keeps it alive is the nation. The state becomes truly a state only when it rests on the will of the nation. And the nation becomes a nation only when it shows the courage to defend that will when necessary. What we need to remember in the tenth year of July 15 is not what the coup plotters did, but what the nation did, and of course the preservation of the nation's capacity, will and spirituality to do so. Because the real event that goes down in history is not the coup attempt but the story of the nation that rose to its feet against that coup.

And perhaps the truest summary of July 15 is this: that night Türkiye did not merely stop a coup; it also showed the whole world that it is a nation capable of taking ownership of the state, that in Türkiye state and nation are of one body, and that the distances that had come between them decades ago have been closed.