Input Paper #2: Turkey
By Kevin Duong
In the past few decades after the ratification of Turkey’s new constitution in 1982, their project of nation building has re-oriented itself due to external circumstances. Primarily, the possibility of Turkey’s EU ascension has shifted the terms of political transformation in Turkey’s domestic politics. There are several elements of nation building that are transforming, and in this particular input paper, I want to focus on the shifting politics of “framing” involving the Kurdish population in Turkey.
Ever since the clashes between the Kurdistan’s Worker’s Party and the domestic conflicts in Turkey in the late 1980’s and the early 1990s, the status of the Kurdish population in Turkey has been exceptionally volatile. The end of the 20th century saw the Kurdistan’s Worker’s Party calling for an independent Kurdish state. However, their demands how now shifted focus onto cultural rights. Although the Kurdish culture is also diverse, pluralistic, and contains its own inner tensions, the way that the dominant Turkish administration treats the Kurds is often aggressively monolithic, with the government vacillating between labeling the Kurds a terrorist group to a minority group claiming cultural rights. This vacillation manifests in several ways, including media control and the establishment national languages. In 2006, the Turkish government passed legislation allowing for one hour of television and radio broadcasting to be in the Kurdish language, recognizing and legitimizing a cultural claim. This new legislation has not been without resistance. In addition, there have been discussions about whether the Kurdish language should be added as an official national language. The politics behind the inclusion of Kurdish as a national language cannot escape the spectre of an independent Kurdish state, which the Turkish government fears.
Because the Kurds are not confined to just Turkey, but rather the surrounding nations of Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the Kurds are a discursively volatile group; they are at the boundary of Turkish society in that they are sometimes discussed as Turkish citizens (although still marginalized) at the same time that they are discussed as a foreign and invasive culture penetrating into Turkey’s borders and threatening their secularist policies. Because the Kurds live in multiple countries and cross boundaries, the government is able to discuss them simultaneously as citizens as well as foreigners, depending on the political question at hand.
Because Kurds are not strictly, or at least hegemonically considered part of the dominant (and exclusive) Turkish society, they are a type of cultural refugee. As Chen-Tiberghien suggests, their marginalization from Turkish political society also marginalizes the extent to which human rights, and especially women’s rights, can be enforced. This kind of marginalization is exacerbated due to the privileging of international forums and conventions as the sites of activism, where the major players are delegates from nation-states. Since Kurds are not politically powerful in Turkey, they are not given strong representation at international forums and conventions on human rights; rather, their Turkish counterparts are the agents of their representation. Where the UN and INGO’s are the privileged spaces of activism, Kurds lose many of their voices by being culturally marginalized in Turkey. Third-party organizations who have passed resolutions concerning the Kurdish question in Turkey have suggested that they “[regret] that Kurds are seen as a third party that is not consulted in EU-Turkey deliberations on Kurdish issues.”
Thus, because they are politically excluded in these international forums, people who are not Kurds get to frame their political existence. Although many of our readings focus on how certain established groups frame issues in their favor, and how framing is one of the most significant strategies for getting concrete gains in terms of policy, the strategy of framing also discursively constitutes and organizes populations that are culturally excluded—like the Kurds. Turkey’s process of nation-building at the international level requires framing the issue of the Kurds in a manner that helps their EU Candidacy status, and the shifting framework in which the Kurds are discussed and negotiated by the Turkish administration in international discourses is one of the important political strategies that affects whether the Kurds are considered “terrorists” or simply a cultural minority. That is, the Kurdish narrative is one that is subjected to the calculated and dominating Turkish framing strategies in the context of their imminent EU status.
What is at stake in this process of nation-building is not simply whose narrative – the Kurds or the Turkish—gets to inform domestic and foreign policy, although that is a large part. What Turkey’s nation building politics now reveals is how one cultural narrative gets to write another, and that the process of re-writing less predominant cultural narratives is an exercise of power that occurs in avenues like the U.N. and conventions. This process does not simply involve subjugating one narrative in favor of another. Rather, the grander narrative of EU ascension that Turkey has ascribed to, and which unfolds in international forums, involves the process of writing the Kurdish narrative and constituting them in whatever manner necessary to gain EU membership.
Bibliography:
Narayan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge.
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Resolution on the rights of the Kurdish population in Turkey. <http://www.eldr.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=646>
Müftüler-Baç, Meltem. The Impact of the European Union on Turkish Politics. East European Quarterly 34:159 Summer 2000.
Lennon, David. Turkey’s Drive for EU Membership. Europe No.420:18-21 October 2002.
Human Rights Watch World Report 2007. 425-429
