Head Scarves and Socio-Economic Mobility in Turkey

Few individuals in Turkey or beyond lack an opinion about the AKP's proposal to give young women attending university the legal right to wear head scarves in university facilities. The mere political progress made by this reform convinces many of the country's secular citizens that their country is five years away from resembling Iran - a type of doomsday "back to the future" scenario considering the last great Islamic revolution was in 1979. Western voices, which laud the democratic or Western aspects of these impending reforms, are chastised by the secular elites for not understanding the critical threat of "politicizing" religion in such an important public sphere of Turkey's legally secular society. These elites furthermore derive a feeling of abandonment and perhaps betrayal from the West’s tendency to cite Turkey as an example of the potential for democracy to cohabit with Islam.

In addition to the rhetoric of politicians, Turkey’s secular community has made most of the headlines with flag-waving political demonstrations. There nevertheless exists a less publicly assertive portion of Turkish society, which is a less-widely reported, but is nonetheless growing in importance for the Turkish social landscape. This segment is composed of individuals who are less concerned with issues such as secularism or political symbolism. They desire equal opportunities for religiously observant woman, who want to remain faithful to the commandments of their religion while in the act of receiving a Western-style education in Turkey's universities.

Arguments concerning the validity of religious symbols have enveloped the domestic and international discussion of head scarf reform in Turkey, obscuring other extremely important and equally symbolic aspects of the political initiative. Not simply an issue of religious political symbolism clashing with the original secular values of the Turkish Republic, the crisis over the head scarf is perhaps more importantly symbolic of frictions related to the socio-economic evolution that defines modern Turkey.

As is the case in many fledgling nations, accumulating wealth, increasing one's standing in society or simply creating a sense of security have all been a function of a citizen's proximity to the state. For the first five or six decades of the Turkish Republic's economic history, the state was almost the exclusive orchestrator of economic development in Turkey. Foreign investment was non-existent, entering the economy only by way of various aid packages from the United States and other allies in the West.

The development of many of the substantial conglomerates, which currently rule Turkey's modern economy, accordingly followed this rule of proximity to the state. Vehbi Koç, the founder of Koç Holding, was a mere grocery owner in Ankara during the 1920s. Tapped by Atatürk to become one of Turkey's early captains of industry, his descendants now control an empire of 98 companies that ranks 358th in the Fortune Global 500 of 2006. While the Koç story is extraordinary, it is nonetheless indicative of an economy strongly influenced by the state. Successful participants in Turkey's private sector, in addition to generations of Turkey's armed forces and other state organizations, traditionally acquired great wealth or more moderate financial security due to their affiliation with the Turkish state. Such affiliation naturally included their adoption of state-sponsored social mores - unabashed secularism chief among them.

Free market reforms during the 1980s, which were implemented under the leadership of then Prime Minister Turgut Özal, would prove to have a dramatic, and perhaps unintended, influence on the socio-economic dynamics of Turkey. Privatization of state assets allowed the Turkish economy to develop in new ways and slowly increase its interaction with global markets. This in turn paved the way for a customs union with the European Union in the mid-1990s, greater foreign investment, and ultimately the economic conditions in which a non-state affiliated lower-middle and middle classes could emerge.

This phenomenon was marked by free market economic growth that was not restricted to the traditional Turkish industrial centers such as Istanbul, Bursa or Ankara. During the 1990s and most prominently since 2001, unprecedented levels of prosperity, which were still extremely low by European standards, were also felt in traditionally underdeveloped places like Gaziantep, Kayseri and Konya. Business Week-type clichés such as "Anatolian Tiger" were accordingly coined to describe a phenomenon that would not have been possible two decades earlier. Turkey's president and AKP leader, Abdullah Gül, started his political career in Kayseri. Much of the AKP's current domestic political punch is thanks to the influence of wealthy businessmen from Kayseri and other regions in Anatolia that had been neglected by economic development prior to the free market reforms.

From the perspective of social values, these traditionally poor areas of Anatolia had understandably not bought into the mores of Ataturk's republic quite as enthusiastically as the more economically developed centers. Moreover, the social values and political concerns that had always held sway in these areas did not necessarily evolve due to the greater levels of economic development. Rather, they gained a more prominent political voice since they no longer represented a strictly poor cross-section of society as had traditionally been the case. With the gradual economic development of a non-state affiliated middle class in interior Anatolia starting in the 1990s, values common to interior Anatolia would come to develop a stronger political voice at the national level.

The development of the poorer regions in Anatolia has been a priority of the Turkish Republic since Atatürk's time. While it is true that the state did invest in these regions, it was ultimately capitalist free market actors that would appear to have generated the greatest momentum for socio-economic mobility. While Atatürk no doubt hoped that such an "Anatolian Tiger" renaissance would some day occur in Anatolia, it is doubtful that he would have appreciated the interior Anatolian social values that it has assisted in bringing into the national political arena.

It is ultimately within this framework that one can further consider the great paranoia of the secular Turkish elites concerning the current head scarf crisis. In particular, the emergence of the head scarf issue serves as a reminder to Turkey's secular elites that conservative social-values no longer exclusively belong to the domain of the poor in interior Anatolia. Rather, these values are espoused by Turks, who are steadily growing into sizable middle classes, and who consequently have a much greater will and ability to realize their social interests through politics. While still solid, the secularist economic power base established by Atatürk maintains a weakening grip on the direction of the country.

Poor Analysis of Turkish Election in Western Media

Turkey has executed yet another successful test of its democracy apparatus. The elections were clean of scandal and violence. The Turkish military remained on the sidelines and it should be commended accordingly.

For this observer, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this July political experiment did not actually take place within the borders of Turkey. Rather, the very inadequate manner in which the election was covered in much of the Western press deserves great criticism. In particular, it seems more than fair to point a finger at the American media, which continued to use a litany of recycled analysis for its election coverage.

The journalist intelligentsia at publications ranging from the New York Times to Salon.com appear to have a one-track mind when it comes to analyzing Turkish affairs. They repeatedly choose to explain their analysis of Turkey in the following light: An election as complex as the country in which it is taking place or the clash of two Turkey's - one secular and one religious or Turkey is increasingly turning its attention away from Europe and the West. While some of these statements or observations might indeed hold some truth, they are nonetheless woefully superficial in terms of their level of helpful analysis.

In short, these journalists would appear to be interviewing my English students (upper-middle class, educated, secular) as opposed to my taxi driver from the Istanbul airport (lower-middle class, uneducated, religiously observant but not necessarily conservative), who predicted on June 25th that the AKP would win the July 22nd election without any trouble. His thesis was straight to the point: Turkish people were pleased with the country's strong economic performance under the AKP. As it turned out, the taxi driver was a very accurate observer of his fellow countrymen; the majority of Turkish people don't particularly care about the dialog concerning Turkey's place in Europe or whether they were drifting away from democracy or toward the east. What does concern them is whether they have a job in order to feed their family.

In the aftermath of this decisive victory for the AKP, Turkey's secular upper class elite continues to howl about the prospect of their country evolving into an Iranian style society by November. The irony of this clamoring is that they are essentially complaining about a possible outcome delivered by the very system that they so strongly associate with their secular society -- democracy!

Erdoğan and the AKP did not come to power through a 1979-style Islamic revolution. Nevertheless, these compassionate supports of secularism will neither accept the democratic will of their fellow countrymen, nor do they even have genuine faith in the prospect of a future democratic election turning the country in a direction, which is more favorable to their interests. Instead, they accuse Prime Minister Erdoğan of wanting to dismantle the democratic system and/or impose Islamic Sharia law on the country.

The claim that Erdoğan might represent a threat to democracy and to secular law probably has some validity over the long term. But more importantly, this reaction of the secular elements of society illustrates that Turkey might have a democratic political system, but it is certainly *not* a pluralistic society that practices democracy. Democracy was forced onto Turkey by the founder of the modern Turkish state, Ataturk. Ataturk never encouraged his new Turkish nation to accept other types of people or political ideas (see further: Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Alevis etc.) since that would have undermined the emergence of the new secular, western oriented Turkish state for ethnic-Turkish people. Thanks to the lack of military intervention over the last seven years possibly due to pressures by the EU, Turkish democracy has finally matured to the point that there is more than one democratically legitimate political approach for the nation.

Unfortunately, Turkish society is not yet ready to accept the idea that democracy can serve as a vehicle for *co-existing* social views or political opinions in a single society. Whether one is a religious conservative or an ardent secularist, the Turkish people still tend to maintain the "all or nothing" mentality, which was originally instilled in them by Ataturk. I very much doubt that Turkey will organically evolve into a society that maintains a certain level of self-awareness regarding the values of pluralism. Perhaps the only hope for this, if it is in fact pluralism is important or relevant for Turkey, is through the continuation of the stick and carrot strategy utilized by the EU.