I am serving an 18-year sentence and writing this column by hand from a maximum security prison. I am one of seven people recently imprisoned for allegedly organising anti-government protests in 2013 that started after plans to demolish Istanbul’s Gezi Park emerged. Regular readers of The Economist are probably familiar with accounts of deteriorating democratic standards in Turkey. My co-defendants include an architect, a city planner, several academics and civil-society personalities, a film producer and a lawyer. Amnesty International has chosen to classify us as prisoners of conscience. The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that our judicial process has violated several rights enshrined in the European Charter for Human Rights, and that all results of the trial had to be vitiated. We nevertheless remain incarcerated.
Perhaps you feel you know enough about Turkey by being familiar with its human-rights record and democratic backsliding? My story seems to fit into dire assessments of both. But if you assume that is the whole story, then I fear you miss out on a complex and contradictory reality. There are developments not easily subsumed into a narrative about authoritarian Turkey: the Istanbul Art Biennial, which opened in September and may draw more than half a million visitors; a proliferation of independent and resilient web-based news providers; environmental struggles across the country to preserve forests, olive groves and rivers; multiple civic efforts, such as Teachers Network and Teachers Academy Foundation, to aid public-sector teachers; and thousands of pro-bono lawyers determined to ensure that no one faces prosecution alone and unassisted.
The Bosphorus offers an apt analogy: a narrow but busy seaway with 90-degree turns that captains have to navigate between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The visible top current flows from north to south, but there is also a lower current with heavier, saltier Mediterranean water flowing from south to north. Unless the captains are aware of both, the Bosphorus cannot be successfully navigated. The same goes for relations between Europe and Turkey. We need a good deal of attention and curiosity to discern dynamics which seem contradictory at times and build rapport.
Turkey and the rest of Europe are deeply entangled with each other. If our friends in Europe and beyond wish to show some camaraderie with Turkey, genuine curiosity and a willingness to engage in a wholesome conversation would not be a bad start. Rather than transactional relationships between leaders, we need more interactions between peers: parents with parents in platforms that reckon with the challenges and joys of raising children, teachers with teachers in forums that shape the future of education and artists with artists in cultural programmes that reimagine our common questions. The beauty and magic of good conversation is its ability to render each side more permeable to the other.
I will admit that the recent past has not been encouraging. On July 15th 2016, Turks watched our own aircraft bomb the country’s parliament, while Turkish tanks crushed people in cars. Commanders were taken hostage by their own aides de camp. For any society, this would have been a source of profound insecurity, where they would have appreciated their friends to be by their side. Sadly, that did not happen for Turks. Fethullah Gulen, whom the vast majority of Turks hold responsible for the coup attempt, has even had space in the op-ed pages of leading Western newspapers in years past and has been called a “Turkish dissident”. Meanwhile senior officials in Turkey have resorted to using combative language towards Europe for more than a decade. Will we be able to break this vicious cycle?
There is reason to fear that Western apprehension has deep roots. Take the Louvre in Paris, the greatest of all art institutions. Although visitors today may flock to the Mona Lisa, the central placement in the grandest room is reserved for Eugène Delacroix’s Massacre in Chios. It depicts soldiers of the Ottoman Empire killing Greeks on the island during the Greek War of Independence in 1822. Delacroix never witnessed the events he depicted. Yet he was certain enough of Turks’ beastly conduct to paint an outsized canvas. To this day nobody bothers to ask why Delacroix—and the curators at the Louvre—were so easily convinced. In the age of “Rhodes Must Fall” and Woodrow Wilson being dethroned in his own university, there is no “Unhang Delacroix” movement. And there has still been no worthwhile reckoning with the past and present of orientalism. Might this also explain why the narrative of “authoritarian Turkey” finds such fertile ground in the European conscience and provides an excuse to abandon meaningful engagement with the country’s vibrant society?
We cannot give up on the promise of a better conversation between Europe and Turkey. We can and should do better. Why not offer hassle-free visas for Turkish university students so that they can engage their peers in Europe, for a start? It is not hard to find very good reasons to give up on each other. But recall that the late Mikhail Gorbachev, to whom we all owe a great deal, asked that his tombstone read “We tried”. Turkey and Europe should try, too.
Hakan Altinay is a scholar and held positions at the Carnegie Council, Yale University and the Brookings Institution. He was the director of the European School of Politics in Istanbul until his arrest and conviction in April 2022.