Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

Modern Turkish Culture and The European Community

"Civilization is progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity towards a definite, coherent heterogeneity."
Herbert Spencer

Turkey has been and is in Europe. That is sure. We are a member of all European organizations. We have an Associate Agreement with the EC which, being basically different from similar agreements with other countries, envisages full membership. But is Turkey of Europe? One may say that this question should have been answered before concluding the Association Agreement. Indeed, it was answered positively at that time. But since some circles wish to reopen this question, Turkey should not take refuge behind legalistic arguments.

Although westernizing reforms to a great extent transformed Turkey into a European country, primarily politically and economically, the question remains whether Turkey is culturally European as well.l34

The contemporary culture in the West has been greatly influenced by the structures of the modern economy. The production organization and consumption patterns determine a certain life-style and world view. Countries and peoples resemble each other to the extent that they are industrialized and economically developed. Modern communication and transportation technologies enhance the unifying forces of the industrial civilization over the globe.

The political regime based on democracy and respect for human rights, and social structure based on secularized urban culture on the one hand, and the industrial (now increasingly post-industrial service) economy on the other, are closely inter linked and interacting with a view to creating the modern society whose common characteristics have largely outgrown its differences. In this respect Japan, an Asiatic society, is much closer to the West than Christian Ethiopia.

In order to reinforce self-identity against this engulfing uniformity, the cultural differences of a traditional and religious nature are deliberately and defensively emphasized, inter alia, by Western countries even among themselves. This is especially what the EC is trying to do. In this context it is interesting to note that the famous historian Jean-Baptists Duroselle, who was commissioned by the EC to write a European History, allegedly omitted in his book the contribution of Ancient Greece and Byzantium to European civilization. This attitude seems to assert the exclusiveness of western Europe, for the sake of creating and strengthening a European identity.

The problem lies in the fact that, in order to be strong enough, the so-called self-identity of Europe needs to be exclusive and different, to the extent of severing itself from some of its main sources: What a paradox!

Each nation-state in Europe has had culturally much broader vision than when they are put together into the EC. Apparently the solidity of the identity in the nation-state enabled it to do away with cultural purity, whereas the diffused nature of the European identity still necessitates narrower cultural boundaries.

Turkey has suffered from a similar attitude to culture. But, if the impact on culture of westernizing reforms and the founding of the nation-state by reduction were taken into account, it would be much easier to understand the Turkish case. Nevertheless, in this book I have severely criticized such a reductionism approach to culture and defended the continuity of civilizations in Anatolia as well as the unity of human civilization in world history. I am very much afraid that an exclusive approach to the construction of Europe could eventually bring about racial, national, and religious tensions and intolerance, along with cultural impoverishment, for the simple reason that this approach is based on differences rather than similarities, and once a differentiating action is set off no one can say where and when it will end.

It is therefore vitally important that the unified Europe should conceive of its identity in a broadest possible form by incorporating all geographic and historic dimensions as well as the attributes of modern society, in full knowledge of the fact that identity-building is a very slow and mostly unconscious process which requires no hasty and artificial efforts.

Having already dwelt on the historic aspect of Turkey's Westernness in the previous chapters, I now turn to modern Turkish culture to see to what extent it is Western.

Contemporary Turkish culture is a product of major historical developments which occurred in the last one hundred and fifty years. These are the advent of secularism, nationalism, social mobilization and democracy in the post-1945 period. Under the influence of the above mentioned phenomena the culture of the inhabitants of Eastern Thrace and Anatolia started to experience drastic and radical changes from the 1840s on.

The Advent of Turkish Nationalism

When Halit Efendi went to Paris as Ottoman Ambassador, he was shocked to find himself called the `Turkish ambassador'. . . It was obvious to Halit Efendi that `Turk' was a derogatory term. As late as 1897 it was impossible to find traces of Turkish nationalism in Anatolia. Furthermore, the very concepts of national homeland (vatan) were still literary concepts in the second half of the nineteenth century. The efforts to `invent' a concept of nationhood (millet) were not without problems. The term millet was used to refer to non-Muslim religious communities in the Ottoman Empire. Besides, in the sociological or historical sense of the term there was no Ottoman nation either. The Turks of the Ottoman Empire had fully submerged their identity in the Umma, the international community of Islam. Consequently, nationalism started out as the intellectual or éven scholarly endeavour of a group of Young Turks. Turkish nationalism emerged thus not as a mass political movement, but as a `strong, and eventually dominant, current of opinion, adding a completely new dimension to the older order'. Consequently, Turkish nationalism was initially developed as a world view by the help of which new political action and governmental policies could be devised to protect the Ottoman fatherland (vatan) from imminent foreign threats.

A major influence on the development of Turkish nationalism into a dominant political current was the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, leaving in Turkey a culturally homogeneous population of 97.3 per cent Turkish Muslims.

The first endeavour of the Turkish nationalists, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was to redefine the legitimate political authority on the basis of national will and national sovereignty. The `Turkish Nation' was declared to be the sole sovereign power in the Turkish homeland. This declaration rejected any allegiance to the international community of Muslims on the one hand, and negated the right of the Ottoman dynasty to rule the Turkish nation on the other. The successful War of Independence paved the way for the Turkish nationalists not only to establish a new political regime, but to do away with Ottoman rule as well. Thus the tie between the religious Umma and the citizens of the Turkish Republic was severed by the abolition of the Caliphate.

Secularism in Turkish Culture

Secularism or the laciest policies of the Turkish Republic did not emerge through a sudden need to convert Turkish citizens to nationalism. Throughout the nineteenth century one witnesses various signs of secularization in the Ottoman Empire. The Tanzimat period of post-1839 is a consequence of the above-mentioned multifarious influences on Ottoman social and political structures. It is also apparent that, under the influence of the French Revolution, the Ottomans also felt that all Empires were going through change to survive. Consequently, with the reign of Mahmut II, Ottoman governments started to change their organization, especially in the field of law. Secular laws and courts were designed and introduced into the system.

In the meantime during the nineteenth-century major changes started to occur spontaneously in the Ottoman territories as well. Ahmed Hamdi Tanpynar, a famous student of Turkish literature, contends that the nineteenth century poets and, later on, novelists gradually began to discover the m-individual, with his passions, needs, drives, and problems in Ottoman society. What is called the `birth of the individual' in the Ottoman literature of the nineteenth century is a major indication of the secularization of Ottoman culture. He further notes that the style of writing started to evolve into a more simple and even mundane form in the cities, and into more complicated forms among the works of popular literature (folk-song and poetry), thus bridging the gap between the two traditions, that of the city and that of the rural areas. The visibility of different life styles and tolerance towards each other and even borrowing from the `great' culture (urban) by the 'little' culture (rural) or vice versa seem to have started by the nineteenth century as well. One major consequence of this development appears to be a fundamental change in the perceptions of their socio-political system by the individual members of the Ottoman community. We observe that individual demands from the Government for the solution of specifically personal problems of the individual started to emerge and rapidly increase by the 1850s. We may safely argue that we witness the advent of rational thinking in the realm of politics in the nineteenth-century Ottoman society.

The major steps toward secularization of the Turkish culture were taken by the Republican regime. Since I dwell on these reforms in other chapters, I will not repeat them here. But I should like to draw your attention to the fact that new art forms were either introduced or, if previously introduced, encouraged. For example, classical ballet was implanted in Turkish culture during the Republican era. Ballet in Turkey is barely sixty years old. It would, however, not be erroneous to claim that its influence on contemporary Turkish thought has been important; through the advent of classical ballet, a wholly westernized outlook upon music and dance has developed. Turkish composers, choreographers, and dancers have kept this `élite' window to the West entirely open, causing international artistic cross-currents to influence and modernize the Turkish public's view of the performing arts in general. Although only twenty years old, `Modern dance is not a "stranger in a strange land" any more. The Turkish people have accepted it as a vital form of art to the extent that in less than a decade the list of Turkish choreographers who use the stage as a laboratory for avant-garde forms of dance would probably form a thick volume.' 135 Other performing arts, plastic arts, classical and polyphonic music all received State support from the new Republican Governments.

Culture statistics indicate that Turkey ranks well with the Western countries. In terms of the number of museums and museum attendance, Turkey ranks higher than Austria, Israel, Australia, and Luxembourg; she has greater public library capacity than Austria, Portugal, Ireland, and Iceland; from the standpoint of theater and performing-arts buildings Turkey comes before Norway, Denmark, and Luxembourg; as for professional and amateur performances of dance and drama, the United Kingdom follows Turkey.

Finally, women's rights were guaranteed by a law promulgated in 1934. Hence almost all aspects of Turkish culture have been molded by the comprehensive secularizing cultural reforms of the 1920s and 1930s. Interestingly, they have received a considerable amount of support among Turkish citizens, especially among the educated and urban segments of the population.

In Turkey, when the self-identity of the Turkish citizen is analyzed, nationalism and secularization cannot really be considered separately. After such a large-scale modification of cultural symbols and values under the combined or complementary influences of nationalism and secularization, the self-identification of the Turks has become associated with the nation state.

Democratization and Political Culture

The Turkish experience with democracy is already half a century old, although parliamentary experience is much older. Turkish citizens have participated in eleven national legislative elections and a similar number of local electoral contests. They developed strong identifications with the political parties of the 1946-1990 era. They have formed the habit of following campaigns, they focus on issues, and even shift their allegiances across political parties. They seem to have reacted to the economic performance, political activities, and personal styles of the party leaders and the deputies of the Turkish Grand National Assembly. It is also obvious that the Turkish electorate does not prefer single party rule. In a surveyy research project carried out in twelve Turkish villages as long ago as the summer of 1978, about eight out of every ten respondents, and almost all of the older generation of peasants, asserted that any party system is preferable to a partyless or a single party regime in Turkey. Earlier studies had also documented that there exists widespread support for the multi-party system.

At the same time there is a marked inclination among the Turkish élite's and masses alike against élitist rule. More specifically, the `tendency of a small, privileged sector to dominate society, and consciously or unconsciously to regard its domination as legitimate and desirable because of the cultural or intellectual inadequacy it attributes to non-élite elements' seems to be contradicting a distinctly egalitarian attitude of the Turkish élite and the masses observed in the mid-seventies.

In a study, the Turkish masses and élite's were found to possess as much tolerance toward political opposition as their Indian, markedly more than their South Korean, and somewhat less than their US counterparts. Similarly, `a majority feels that opinions which are contrary to those of the majority should also be expressed, but the mass public is somewhat less tolerant of criticism, particularly if it is carried out after the majority choice has become known'. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be any well entrenched set of mass feelings, attitudes, and expectations that undermine the stable performance of democracy in Turkey. I would like to assert, at this point, that democracy has been well received by the Turkish masses.

However, Turkey has experienced a considerable amount of polarization across the cultural divide between the secularist and conservative groups. Consequently, the perennial cultural conflicts have emerged at every attempt at instituting multi-party pluralism in Turkey.

Social Mobilization and Culture.

The migration of the rural masses to the cities and metropolitan centres of Turkey has converted a country inhabited by peasants (90 per cent in 1923) into a country of urban dwellers (60 per cent in 1990), and this trend is continuing at one of the highest rates in the world. Meanwhile, global exposure to mass media (especially through the extensive use of TV receivers)13s has also introduced new values, expectations, and life-styles into Turkish culture. Increased interaction with peoples of foreign cultures through the four to five million tourists coming annually, or with Turkish guest workers in Europe, has also added new components to Turkish culture. Finally, thanks to the growth of Turkish industry, refrigerators, washing machines, other electrical and electronic home equipment, and family cars have become prominent features of Turkish households.

One major consequence of this global transformation of Turkish culture has been the bridging of the gap between the life styles of the rural and urban populations. The national economy has absorbed even the most remote towns of the country and they have started to use and demand or expect similar good things of life. The rural population of Turkey has become increasingly exposed to the modernizing influences incorporated into the cities and the metropolitan areas, in various forms ranging from music to language. The squatter settlements of the cities seem to have provided this bridge between the little and the great cultures.

However, there are still serious differences between the cities and the villages in terms of education, health, job opportunities, and income. These differences vary across regions as well. The chances of obtaining an educational background and occupational credentials that would enable a person to adopt and sustain a high-income life-style are greater in the metropolitan areas and in the western parts of the country.

The rural migrants interact with city culture. They find employment in the modern sectors of the city. Few are content with the status of laborer and most yearn for a small business of their own. The older generation of rural settlers seem to prefer their children to get some 'positive science' education.

A sense of personal efficiency seems to have been instilled in the minds of the rural migrants and they have developed a need to raise their living standards; most seem to strive to do this by their own means and efforts. A recent study indicates that in the realms of acquisition, accommodation, getting a new job, procuring new resources to enlarge one's business and so on, expectations from Government are minimal.

Self identity of Turks

The impact on Turkish culture of the socio-political transformation of Turkish society has precipitated the emergence and persistence of new values, expectations, and attitudes. The founders of the Republican regime seem to have reached one of the goals, namely the severance of the new society's cultural ties with its recent Ottoman past in the sense that the Ottoman language and script are out of use.

The 'subject culture' of the Ottoman masses has rapidly eroded. The increase in the scope and variety of acts of political participation is a lucid indication of this fact.

Parochialism in Turkish culture is also waning under the influence of TV watching and the increasing span of the road network. Transportation and communication facilities have enabled messages from the centre of the Turkish society, and also international news, to travel into every settlement in Turkey. Formal secular education has also functioned as a major agent of culture change.

Studies conducted to determine the self-identity of Turks seem to indicate that the above-mentioned influences and efforts have been quite successful. In a study conducted in twelve villages in 1978, the villagers seemed well informed and aware of the role that Ankara, the seat of the Turkish Government, played in their lives. Members of the village community were thoroughly informed about their political representatives in Ankara. About ten per cent of the men seemed to have regular and frequent contact with their MPs in Ankara. Over half of the male sample also indicated that they had travailed to Ankara and/or Istanbul, Izmir, and Adana, the metropolitan areas of Turkey. All that modern agronomy could provide, at affordable prices, from pesticides to tractors, were in regular use in all twelve villages.

Studies of students too seem to indicate that national orientation among them is very noticeable. The Turkish university students are highly nationalistic in their orientations, certainly no less than their Western peers.

Finally, I would like to point out that modern criteria are accepted for upward social mobility in the polity and society. A nationally representative sample of interviewers overwhelmingly tended to assert that the feature of Turkish society depended upon human performance and control of the environment, rather than on any metaphysical force. The 1978 village study and the follow-up study in 1980 also clearly demonstrated that the crop yields in every one of the twelve villages in the sample closely correlated with the market prices of the crops, and also with the availability and the cost of the modern agricultural inputs. The villagers who participated in the study tended to argue that losses in crop yields can only be remedied by their own personal efforts and/or by governmental aid. They very clearly indicated that physical, chemical, and human causes are responsible for their current and future prosperity.

Scattered as they may be, the above-mentioned studies show that a secular Turkish culture has been both created and widely diffused in the Republican era. It is also clear from various studies that formal education is the major determinant of this development.

However, the religious-conservative creed is also fully alive; its vitality seems to have increased in the recent past. The processes of democratization and social mobilization seem to have cast favorable influences upon the Islamists in Turkey. There has never been a total conversion to secularism, nor a complete erosion of Islamic traditions, the Dervish Orders, and the sects in Turkey.

What seems to have happened in Turkey is a cultural revolution which has not totally replaced the ancient culture, but has led to an engulfing of the cultural system of the country to incorporate utterly new values, beliefs, and expectations which have partly replaced or blurred the previous values, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes which in turn have also shown some signs of change or adaptation. This became most clear in the 1980s. The perception of the religious conservatives as an anti-system political movement has been changing, whereas the old anti-science approach of at least some Islamists has also been modified.

Inferences, Conjectures, and Conclusions

The life-style of the citizens of Turkey has completely changed in the course of the six decades since the promulgation of the Republic. Modern practices, directed by human rationality, technological necessity, and the adoption of international standards, mould the practices of work, leisure, and recreation in Turkey, the more so in the urban centres. The countryside has also been under the profound influences of the novel agricultural inputs on the one hand and advances in communication and transportation facilities on the other.

Turks have shown a great ability to adapt to a new way of life. When compared with other efforts at manipulating cultural change, such as those that occurred in Russia and China, the Turkish experience looks more successful, not less. A similar comparison with other countries containing large Muslim communities makes the Turkish case look like a spectacular Cultural Revolution.

It is true, as in every complex human society, that the peasants are more conservative than the urban middle classes, and the petty bourgeoisie is more religious than the upper classes in Turkey. Most journalistic accounts abroad of the `Turk' are no more than a sketchy and partial image of one social group of Turks, the nationally representative value of which is at best dubious. I am afraid some able European politicians are guilty of the same logical fallacy when they make allusions to a fictitious `typical Turk' and to his values vis-à-vis Europeans.

As a matter of fact Turkey is a secular nation-state with a Muslim population. Therefore the notion of a Christian EC versus a Muslim Turkey is a basic fallacy. The cultural ties between the two are based on secularism, but not religion. In the words of a world-renowned British Turcologist, `if the implication is that the ordinary people of the member-countries of the European Community might not approve the accession of Turkey because she is not a Christian country, I should find that hard to accept. I doubt if the prospect would worry the de-Gospelized millions who constitute the bulk of the population of Western Europe. I think that Christianity is no longer a political force.' Geoffrey Lewis further ponders about what cultural differences separate Turkey from EC member countries. `The cultured Turk', he writes, `can hold his head up in any gathering of cultured Europeans. He can talk about Shakespeare or Goethe or Baudelaire with the best of them. In addition he can talk about Nedim or Yahya Kemal or Orhan Veli, which they can't. But how many Portuguese, how many Greeks have heard of Schiller? I am not asking how many have read him; I am simply asking how many have heard of him. How many Frenchmen have ever heard of T. S. Eliot?' Lewis ends with a saying attributed to the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun: `Class unites its members; a noble Arab has more in common with a noble Persian than with an Arab commoner. It may be that a cultured German EC official will one day find that he has more in common with a cultured Turkish EC official than with an uncultured German.' 140 But before that day can dawn, one will have to abstain from stereotypes and develop a slightly more sophisticated understanding of the social stratification of one's own and of other societies.

When Turkish full membership in the EC occurs, it is hard to envisage any revolutionary change in Turkish culture that might take place. Adaptation to the legal system of the EC may pose problems in daily juridical practices and also to the Turkish Government, yet they will not constitute an insurmountable challenge, especially if and when the younger generation of lawyers are properly trained and politicians show a willingness to adapt themselves to the new conditions. Some Turkish universities have currently started to educate lawyers with an eye to full EC membership. Furthermore, it is a fact that Turkey has historically practiced major and wholesale changes in her legal system and demonstrated a remarkable capability to adapt to such changes. Her current secular legal system still carries the impact of the continental European legal system of earlier decades. A drive for more modernity and rationalization will hardly create any intractable difficulties.

The Turkish educational system may need to be overhauled to adapt to EC norms. Language education is the most likely area to require some special attention. Currently, Turkish secondary school education does not provide its graduates with a sufficient comprehension of European languages. The civic orientation of the Turkish education system is also somewhat fragile. The basic practice of memorizing texts and regurgitating them upon request needs also to be replaced by self-inquiry on the part of students about the subject matter of the course materials.

The Turkish political system has also been going through a period of democratic consolidation. The last four decades of experience with multiparty democracy has created a responsible electorate, widespread adoption of the values of pluralism to an extent unparalleled in any previous period of Turkish history, a concomitant feeling of tolerance of political opposition, and a distinct mass dislike of oligarchic rule by an `enlightened' élite group. The masses assign a positive value to multiparty pluralism. They seem to correlate the latter with their personal welfare.

However, the Turkish political system is not without problems. The national vote is fragmented into blocks of various sizes. There still exists a tendency for polarization of the party system between the Government and opposition parties. The cultural divisions in the country that influence the self-identity of Turks also cast an influence on the political system. The political parties, obviously, tend to take the various self-images of Turks into consideration. Thus political parties propagate somewhat different educational and cultural policies, which further expands the gap between them. Consequently, much depends upon the ability of the Turkish political élite to engineer an overall compromise on the essential rules of political interaction. The process of integration with the EC will further motivate the Turkish political élite to negotiate and compromise over the rules of the game of Turkish democracy.

Democratic consolidation has been a learning process in Turkey. Much has been learned and thoroughly assimilated by the masses and élites alike. Political integration with Europe will further ease the institutionalization of democracy in the Turkish political system. A secular and pluralist culture has been gradually taking root in Turkey. Integration with the EC will only enhance its ability to persist into the twenty-first century.

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