The "Soul" of Turkish Politics

Nationalism in Turkey is certainly a harsh downside of Ataturkism. Their great reformer and "Father of the Turks"--Ataturk--was a patriot before anything else. But in the process of forging a modern Turkey, he and his successors have lost the easygoing Ottoman tolerance of a multicultural empire. In fact, one of the five pillars of Ataturk's reform was Turkish "nationalism". This is not just a problem for Kurds and Armenians. The Alevis, an Islamic sect, also feel persecuted. It is dismayingly hard to open a Christian church anywhere, despite Anatolia’s long Christian heritage. And the beleaguered Greek community of Istanbul, the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch and of the (closed) Halki Greek Orthodox seminary, are under pressure as never before. The third pillar of Ataturk's reform is "secularism"--and it means something entirely different from the English usage. Instead of the state being completely separate from its religions, Turk's rely on statism (the fifth pillar of Ataturk) to fund equally, and give equal protection to, its various religious entities. So in fact the state is heavily involved in religion. Yet there is no religion of the state. This is familiar to a long-standing practice of the Seljuks and Ottomans since they ousted the Byzantines in the 11th century, when "enlightened despots" (as the Scottish philosophers used to say) like Suleiman the Magnificent and Sultan Ahmed reigned.

While protests and demonstrations over the soul of Turkish heads of state are not as wild in Istanbul as they were in April or May, the potential for a Turkish uprising, or even a military coup, is highly likely. The Turkish military announced that it would intervene, implying a coup, if the Abdullah Gul was elected president and successor to Ataturk. The military has a strange and eerie constitutional right to be the vanguard of Turkish politics, and to step in whenever the government cannot keep Ataturk's principles before them. This happened several times in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But since the major parties of that era dissolved into the AKP party, this party has been largely entrusted to kept politics under their orderly rule. The banks, for example, are now independent of the government, which brought inflation down to 9% after being hyper-inflated 153% a few years back. After the currency crises, the New Turkish Lira was introduced.

My task is to uncover the inner-workings and perhaps seediness of Turkish politics, especially the banking sector. To understand the mechanics and informalities of modern Anatolia. As an immense cultural experience, I cannot simply see Turkey from a distance, or through four glasses of raki, like my American colleagues probably will. My goal is to experience Turkey as at once a pilgrim and a scholar. To infiltrate the political and Turkish culture to see how Turks see themselves in its fluctuating political atmosphere. This trip I'm about to embark on will enlighten me about this rich land and its legacy, and gather new ideas and perspectives from which to view the Occident. Since I will have limited internet access in Istanbul, Ankara and Antalya, I will post further blog entries when I return to Freiburg. My flight leaves from Zurich in a few hours. Ciao.

The Fractious State of the Ummah in Iraq

The position of the prime minister, al-Malaki, is extremely vulnerable. Two Shia parties have withdrawn from the government in recent months, and, although the largest Sunni political grouping in parliament--the Iraqi Accord Front--has for the time being abandoned its threat to pull out, avoiding other ruptures will soon become impossible. The forthcoming referendum in oil-rich Kirkuk should presage an increase in violence in the city, and possibly the eventual establishment of a de facto Kurdish zone, or state. Some Kurdish separatists are attacking Turkey, of course. States' rights should be respected without having to resort to violence. But the majority of Kurds still appear to think about their independence in a democratic and non-militant way. The Kurdish Democratic Party of Turkey says this on their website,

The KDP supports the struggle of Kurdish people in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Russia for their just national rights and reiterates its support for the way in which they determine their own future within the state they live in and agreements they reached within their central governments.

Similar statements of separatist solidarity are emerging elsewhere. The Coalition Forces don't acknowledge separatism as a legitimate political desire. Washington, as we know, has always insisted on a single-state solution. Maliki's benefactor, the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, has recently withdrawn his followers in parliament in the wake of the Samarra bombing. The leader of Sadr's legislative bloc said that "the Maliki government will surely collapse if the situation continues as it is right now."

These political withdrawals and boycotts have a specific purpose, although the media simply mentions it (like in the 2005 elections) without providing any analysis. The boycott, obviously, is rejecting the legitimacy of this Iraqi state--and the disproportionalities, like the representation of Shia and Kurd, built into the system. All for the sake of unity in Iraq. The government of Iraq is a failed project, decidedly, and will most likely collapse within a year or two. Unless nations are granted rights. A new formation or federation of states will emerge in place of the Maliki government. This possibility should have been considered long before it came to this. Four years into occupation, and it still hasn't happened.

Earlier this year the Fadhila Party staged the first direct challenge to Shiite unity when it withdrew its 15 members from the United Iraqi Alliance, the ruling Shiite coalition in the 275-seat parliament. As Iraqis withdraw their support from opposing sectarians, they draw closer to the ideologies that hold the individual groups together. Some observers see the Shiite leadership in Najaf as one of the last bonds holding together an increasingly fractious political grouping and uncomfortable coalition-making. Republican candidate Mitt Romney says the Shiites will dissolve into Iran. But it's no surprise the neo-conservatives are saying such things about a true Iraqi independence movement. Our leaders plan on occupying Iraq for, as General Patraeus said, "Nine or ten years".

Sadr and Hakim are now powerful rivals who command large militias, and Sadr might be attempting to expand his disparate following at a time of transition for the Islamic Council, the largest (Shia) party in the Iraqi Council of Representatives. Sadr is a fierce nationalist and militant, while Hakim has already pushed to create a semi-autonomous region of largely Shiite provinces in southern Iraq. This should be made an easy process. But the neo-cons call this "Balkanizing" Iraq to quell enthusiasm for it. Historically greater autonomy and self-government has been the natural and most productive answer to national or ethnic separatism. When Balkanization begins to happen, there is nothing the paternalists can do to stop it. Tito and Milosevic wanted to hold the Yugoslavian People's Republic together. And after prolonged war with every one of its seven separatist nations except Montenegro, it still has no sense of the national unity it hoped to maintain. With the right to self-determination, as it is called, there can finally be peace.

The only thing holding Iraqis together now is the Ummah, the global community of Muslim brotherhood. They will eventually separate themselves politically, join factions, rival tribes, and eventually form their own nations. That has always been the history of the Arab peninsula, from Bedouins and Gokturks to Sadrists and Kurds. We in the West shouldn't view their "unity" as necessarily under federal government rule from Baghdad. This is a Western perspective, and it is biased towards state unity. We will still see them as "Mesopotamian" peoples. But they deserve this special right to, as Woodrow Wilson said to the leaders at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, "national self-determination". All over the world the wounds and frustrations of bottled nations are swelling. "State unity" carries with it a mystical impression of national unity. Yet the two are radically incompatible when the state is so violently fractious as in Iraq. Peoples have rights. Individuals and groups of them. All classical liberal thinkers have said this. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights agrees with this; the UN Charter also says this. Since 2003 the neo-conservatives have struggled with the question of "nation-building". It's simple. Autonomous nation-building in Iraq should be determined freely by public referendum.

At any rate, change in the Gulf peninsula is imminent, and the path toward stability and self-governmental satisfaction is always an open door.

Politics and Google Informatics

I'm surprised at this point how few candidates in the 2008 race have used the Google AdWord service, which allows SEOs to purchase keywords to direct potential supporters to the correct site. The Republicans, who would like to buy their support, seem to like the SEO strategy more than the Democrats, who prefer social networking abilities like Facebook, Eventful, Meetup, and Myspace. 2008 is going to be remembered as the YouTube election--and Google's YouVote is preparing for participatory campaign debates where users can send vlog-style video questions to candidates. And candidates will respond in real time. Social networking capabilities seem to be the best strategy since AdWord doesn't work with tools like Digg and various 2.0 platforms, but neither parties have a grasp on both concepts. Unlike the other Republican candidates, Ron Paul has "gone viral" as net phenomena. He is the most consistently libertarian candidate in either race. His ideas seem to upset every other Republican except for a small circle of unorganized liberalismes. His ideas hearken back to classical liberals like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and yet the Republicans shun him for being opposed to the very un-liberal United States foreign policy. He's the only candidate who proposes abolishing the IRS, yet he's not invited to a Republican debate on tax reform. His presence all over the net is in fact a threat to the Republican establishment, and they feign disinterest while he has presented himself as a serious, competent candidate full of ideas. The media will follow the other Republicans, not Paul, and if he disappears they will assume no guilt. The net has taken up the responsibility of reporting news of high interest, like Ron Paul, to the millions of users who have become increasingly unsatisfied with mainstream media.

Capitalism Now!

"I want to give you an argument," Saskia Sassen told a large audience of German intellectuals at the Grosses Haus in Freiburg. She leaned forward complacently and made some kind of gesture that reminded me of Hugo Chavez's speech to the UN last September. She looked up and said, "The WTO and the IMF have done their jobs!" The global power structures have de-nationalized zones around the world which adhere to their own kind of "private law". This de-nationalization of what was once the nation-state is important to her argument. But we lack the kind of vocabulary to describe this privatization of the rule of law, yet it exists and those for whom it exists are the organizations who seek to destroy lesser-developed economies and dominate global politics from a distance. Although the imperative of her diatribe was never made explicit terms, it is something like multinational corporations must be punished for their crimes, and that the nation-state is the most important structure yet the corporations are using them to gain illegitimate power.

But what is illegitimate power? I agree with Sassen on the urgency of her thesis, that there is something illegitimate about the power making its way to the corporate sphere. But I would like to give you an argument too. And I'm going to call this a teleological reply to Sassen's noticeably anti-capitalist argument. "The corporation" is certainly a failed enterprise. But it is not the corporation which is to blame for the emergence of this illegitimate power. Corporate power is simply an effect: it is rather the concept of the nation-state itself which is to blame for all of this. Sassen applauds the "important lawsuits" in the last three years against the 200 largest multi-national corporations. This is really important work, she says. We should not be convinced. This is misguided work. Real work would decentralize state-power, the crux of the problem. Strong states, that is, states with a tremendous amount of executive and distributive power, have not only a huge burden and responsibility, but also have an incredible incentive towards corruption. All the post-communist countries with lingering statists in power have exorbitant levels of corruption deep within the state apparatus. And this is the source of socialist inequality. I mean that: socialist inequality--that is, inequality under the law which is promulgated by a powerful, lopsided state.

The situation of capitalism is perilous. A professor of sociology with academic posts at Princeton, London and Chicago flies to Freiburg to warn the audience of how dangerous corporate extensions of state power are in the United States. But offers no compelling argument as to why the state apparatus deserves its own special status, as if it were an 'enlightened' institution. The IMF and the World Bank are an extension of the US executive branch legally. The organizations she blames for the disintegration of Latin American states wouldn't have existed without the state-sponsorship of Washington. And if Latin American states weren't so strong or so statist they wouldn't have been able to bargain with the IMF and the World Bank. This nasty power can be traced all the way back to the state every situation, invariably.

Sassen commented that people tell her she thinks "like a European", much to her flattery. In fact she spent part of her youth in Italy. Her cosmopolitanism can be attributed to the fact she was born at The Hague where her father, Willem Sassen, wrote articles as a Dutch-collaborator and Nazi journalist. While not a Nazi, she is indeed a super-statist. However, isn't it more apparent that she thinks like a Latin American? After all, she spent the other half of her youth in Beunos Aires, and she remembers the collapse caused by the IMF and the World Bank first hand. Hugo Chavez helped Argentina pay down its debt, she recalls, but the IMF encouraged Argentina not to accept it "because then they'd be out of work." The audience snickers. Oh capitalism.

Another one of her ideas: "Global capitalism needs the nation state to survive." I paused for a moment--she is so close to the idea and yet so removed from it! Of course, heavy state power becomes increasingly powerful when its corporations benefit it, bribe it, corrupt it, manipulate it. What if there was nothing to be manipulated in the first place? A minimal state and a vigil polis can achieve this. But as the ultimate arbiter of these matters, the nation-state is incredibly irresponsible. There are many problems with the contemporary conception of "the corporation", and these all come from the states which assign them a special status. The state has the power to enact, the power to penalize, the power to subsidize, is the object of immense lobbying, has the power to distribute wealth from the citizen to the corporation, the authority to govern belligerently, the power to puff-up its military defense, power to create spaces, power to engage in warfare, power to annex territory, power to manipulate trade, finance, media, courts, etc., the power to imprison, and the willingness to act unjustly and without good governance. This is late capitalism--state-sponsored capitalism.

In Robert Nozick's article Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism he outlines Sassen's academically anti-capitalist disposition to a point. The opposition of what he calls "wordsmith intellectuals" to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information. I don't doubt Prof. Sassen is an intelligent person. The intellectual stance against capitalism, however, seems to be highly misguided. If statism is the problem, as I believe, the anti-capitalism of intellectuals like Sassen is a serious threat to global civil society and its development. Academic intellectuals, who have spent their entire lives in formal institutions, come to believe that these state tools and easily-manipulable offices are the answer to all civil problems when if they had studied the problems of capitalism more closely, more teleologically, they might have found a more tenable conclusion: the intellectual arguments about the ills of corporate power have invariably taken for granted the strength of the state.

Why I Am Opposed to "Tourism"

This sounds like a simple statement but too many tourists do not understand it: mass tourism defeats the purpose of seeing places as they have been created by people and nature. I prefer to see things the way they really are: deathly, destructive, and ugly. Traveling to lesser developed places and observing how people live in poverty appeals to me. So does thanatourism, which is related to historical places of death and grief, like Dachau. But Dachau itself is a rather attractive place for tourists. The tourist industry, which is largely sponsored by strong interventionist states, tries too hard to accommodate Westerners by giving them the same luxuries they expect in their white suburban homes. Five-star hotel infrastructures must be erected to serve the rich and seasonable men and women in skirts and flip-flops. All this infrastructure is boring and pointless. The tourist critical mass would travel anywhere as long as there is a golf resort. So why go someplace far away when they're all over the Everglades?

Now A Three-State Solution to Palestine

This year a Jewish study found that 46% of Palestinians prefer a two-state solution, and only 26% prefer a bi-national solution to the Palestinian Question. But the two-state solution, which has been integrated into Bush's Road Map for Peace in Palestine, never envisioned a completely divided Palestinian Authority.

Hamas, the militant Sunni Islamist party elected to the PA last January, replaced the old majority, Fatah. PA salaries, which depend on foreign aid, have dropped since Hamas was elected. Hamas admirably began a 10-year truce with Israel after they were elected, as well. But from the start, Fatah tried to prevent Hamas from getting full control of the PA military--called the PA security services--which are a cornerstone of political power and a job scheme for unemployed militants, and which had become bloated with Fatah loyalists during the secular party's long and corrupt rule. Hamas responded to this by making an extremely disciplined “Executive Force” of its own loyalists to the PA roster in Gaza, where its stronghold is.

Fatah won the favor of the US, which has turned its presidential guard into an elite force to counter Hamas, whose weapons and troops are superior. The US State Department says Hamas's funding comes from Iran. Under the guise of strengthening Mr Abbas as a moderate (unlike Hamas, which still refuses to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state), Bush has provided $59m for training and supplying the presidential guard with non-lethal equipment, which Israel has let enter Gaza. Israel (Olmert) would also like to strengthen Fatah. Israel and Hamas's truce was ended when Israeli forces attacked Hamas for shipping weapons into Gaza, which it technically does not "own" anymore, so it should be out of Israel's jurisdiction.

The Western support for Mr Abbas's troops, along with the now 15-month-old Western boycott of the PA, is part of a conspiracy to force Hamas out of power. Although it's hardly a secret conspiracy. All levels of defense are beefing up Fatah, when it is clear that Hamas has won a clear democratic majority regardless of their being on the terrorist list in many Western countries. The debate over the security services was aggravated by Western pressure to keep it in the hands of Fatah, the minority party. This is why democracies can fail, and why other democracies wish to explore coercive means of getting the parties they'd like in power.

Fatah's propagandizes that Hamas staged a coup against them, which is impossible if you're already the head of government. And so Fatah has officially outlawed Hamas's "paramilitary" organization, which was to be the security services, and has sworn in emergency cabinets to reclaim power. Hamas then fires from Lebanon to attack Israel, reminiscent of last August. It's a war on all fronts now.

The Palestinian democracy has failed for sure, and that's why massive fighting has taken place this week in Gaza. Fatah now has been ousted from Gaza, where Hamas has total control. Israel invaded Gaza today, to crush Hamas and to move people to the West Bank. So Perhaps the answer to the Palestinian Question is tripartite. Mahmoud Abbas's West Bank will become a flourishing democracy, and Ismael Haniyeh's Gaza will become a militant "Hamastan". Western "history" will hail Fatah as the rightful democratic leader, despite faulty Western intervention, and Hamastan will be demonized as the failed militant state, listed as an "axis of evil" and would its credibility crushed so much that it could not attract one dollar of Western FDI. Western propaganda has and is determined to spoil the fruits of any Hamas-led government.