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An interview with Ersin Kalaycıoğlu on

Conservatism, Democracy, The Gezi Park Protests, and Civil Society Elif Gülez / Editör Fotoğraflar: Doğa Önen

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sabancı university / SUdergi

An Interview with Ersin Kalaycıoğlu On Conservatism, Democracy, The Gezi Park Protests, and Civil Society Ersin Kalaycıoğlu and his colleague Ali Çarkoğlu have been conducting public opinion polls since 2008 as the Turkish representatives of the international academic network International Social Survey Program. Last November, they published the results of the “Family, Work and Gender in Turkey” survey. The other surveys completed by the team were “Religiosity in Turkey: An International Comparison” in 2008; Social Inequality in 2009; Environment in 2010; and Health in 2011. Their area of focus for 2013 was national identity, and they plan field surveys for the general elections in 2014. Kalaycıoğlu is the author of Turkish Dynamics: Bridge Across Troubled Lands printed in 2005, and him and Çarkoğlu have coauthored Turkish Democracy Today in 2007 and The Rising Tide of Conservatism in Turkey in 2009. Kalaycıoğlu also has a number of articles and book chapters on voter behavior, political participation and political culture in Turkey.

Ersin Kalaycıoğlu is a common figure on news and debate shows on TV, and is interviewed by daily papers on a regular basis. I wanted an article to appear in SUdergi to touch different subjects or uncover new aspects of discussed issues. I gave considerable thought to how the interview would proceed before meeting Kalaycıoğlu, but I found that I couldn’t avoid some well-worn questions. Thankfully, Ersin Kalaycıoğlu is extremely knowledgeable and is thoroughly analytical in his thinking. His response to my first question almost shaped the entire interview. Kalaycıoğlu’s responses remind us once again that we need to know the society we live in and make sense of social facts and phenomena before attempting to have an opinion about things. This interview was nothing short of a lecture for myself, and I hope it is enlightening for you too.

Question: The results of your studies confirm the conservative nature of the Turkish society, if one may arrive at this conclusion.

We have a government which reaffirms its conservatism at every opportunity. The more recent discourse and actions of the government have taken nearly a totalitarian 16

stance. Do you think these policies and actions are the result of a wider social agreement?

Answer: This is a complex issue but let’s try to navigate through it. The predominant attribute of the Turkish society is that it is going through tremendous change. Conservatism is a result of that. Starting in the late 19th century and culminating in 1923, the Turkish society undergoes restructuring. In 1923, about 90% of the society was living in rural areas. A considerable part of the population in some provinces was nomands in nature; up to 40 to 50% in some provinces. In 1950, an election as free as possible under the circumstances brought the Democrat Party to power. At the time, 25%

was down to 25%. In short, we transitioned from a rural population to an urban population within two generations. The most rapid transformation began in the 1970s and ended in the 1990s. While the role of the agricultural industry in the economy declined quickly from the 1950s onwards, that of industry and the service sector in particular increased. We ceased to be an agricultural economy and began industrialization. Employment conditions began to improve in cities. This changed not only the mode of settlement, but the way of life as well.

This transformation took two to three centuries in economically-developed democracies to our west, while we had to undergo the same process

of the population was living in urban areas, and the remaining 75% in rural areas. Nomand living had decreased, but was still considerable in Eastern Anatolia. Urban population was low. By 2010; however, 75% of the population was living in urban areas, and rural population

in only two generations. The majority of our population today is being born and raised in cities. Some surveys conducted by sociologists in the 1980s, for example, the Istanbul survey

by Sema Erder and Nihal Ä°ncioÄ&#x;lu immediately prior to the 1989 local elections, revealed that

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sabancı university / SUdergi 66.6% of the denizens of Istanbul had been born in villages. In the 2010s, we have a generation that was born in the city, has no connections to the village, and only nurtures romantic thoughts about it. The weight of this generation on our social and political life will increase in the years to come.

Kalaycıoğlu summarizes the transformation in Turkey and the rise of conservatism: In Karl Polanyi’s terms, we are going through a “great transformation”. This has great implications on the social psychologies of both individuals and social groups. The place where an individual is born and raised shape their strategies for survival that they will pursue throughout life. Depending on whether you are born a nomand, a villager or the member of a small town family, you learn strategies that will help you survive in later life. This is what we call socialization: the transformation of a born individual into a social entity. Individuals learn the rules of coexisting in that society from their families and the lessons they derive from everyday experiences. This is how we all build our identities. When people are torn away from the setting in which we were born and raised and thrown into a different environment – say when they move from Adıyaman or Kütahya or Burdur to Ankara, Istanbul or Izmir, the survival strategies they had learned become inadequate.

Regardless of the age at which they arrive to the new setting, socialization is interrupted and they have to develop a new survival strategy. This is a terrific challenge. Learning is difficult. It is difficult enough in schools, yet there is no school for learning a survival strategy. People learn this by trial and error in daily life, which has a great cost. Trial and error is a very effective method for learning, but comes at a high cost. In order

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to learn that you may fall if you run, you have to run and fall; but you might break your leg when you do. The learning process is not the same for everyone; some learn more readily, some with more difficulty. Everyone has a learning curve.

We all must learn one way or the other.

Those who survive are those who have emerged from this process of re-socialization. It is here that a severe problem surfaces: they do not know the environment in which they arrive. They experience alienation at an insurmountable level.

The language, the accent, even the body language used in large cities is different, to begin with.

The survival strategy here requires education – education in a specific set of schools; it requires knowledge of a foreign language. Appearance is different, so are social manners. Even mealtimes are different: you don’t eat with your hands; you sit on a chair at a table, and you go through three or four sets of forks and knives, using a different set for each course. People who find themselves in such situations must calculate how long their old values will last. But they also have to make sense of the situation, because you can only create your survival strategy by making sense of whatever is happening around you. Take an example: in a rural setting, you might call a woman “lady” to express your reverence of her; yet in the urban setting, women are more used to being called “ma’am” and take offense when you say “lady.” Conduct and communication changes, and you find yourself in uncertainty.

This is something social psychologists pay a great deal of attention to, because uncertainty and the ambiguity it brings terrorizes people.

Reactions in the face of uncertainty include flight, hiding or attacking. One must come to

terms with uncertainty. If you aren’t trained for this, how will you manage? The typical

reaction here is to find yourself “anchors” that are constant values of which you are sure on an essential basis. Reinforcing and sublimating these anchors is a method. You look for facts that will resist change or will not succumb to any change – facts that are always right, allowing you to associate yourself with. Your first resort within the repertoire of your previous socialization is your traditional relations, which are kinship, your fellow townsfolk, and, as a source of compatible behavior and social manners, religion. Grasping onto these, you find the anchors that will keep your ship afloat in turbulent weather. This is the phenomenon that we view as conservatism.

This is a reactionary ideology that individuals who find themselves utterly terrified in the face of uncertainty resort to; it is a way of finding security. I would recommend Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin to anyone who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this issue.

Another thing is the attempt to go back to the old ways, trying to make the values and culture of the social environment the individual was born and raised in predominant in the new setting. Keep in mind that the past, meaning the actual experiences lived, contain no uncertainty whatsoever. You have lived through it, know it all, and can make perfect sense of it.

Recreating the life you have left in the provinces in the urban environment, and tying this to constants such as kinship, townsmanship and religious orders which will never change in time allow you to protect yourself. These social connections and relationship networks gained

unprecedented power in Turkey. All kinds of organization today have ethnicity, tribes, clans, orders and townsmanship behind them. If you were to check the number of citizen’s associations, the most populous are associations established to build and operate mosques. These are followed by townsmen’s associations. Most members of these are related to one another in some way. These lead to intriguing dilemmas. Let me give you an example from the latest ISSP survey: women should be at home, cook, clean the house, raise the kids; however, since this is the age of the nuclear family, a single income is not enough to sustain a family in the city.

What is to be done? The woman has to be an excellent housewife while also contributing to the household income. This is an unrealistic demand from women. That means you have to change your life, share housework. It appears that we are yet to complete this transformation, at least in terms of mentality. This results in bizarre conglomerations of ideas and contradictory expectations.

As we have seen in the data of the conservatism study in 2009, the current environment is one of unruliness created by such contradictions. There is a widespread conviction that all rules can be bent. This is where Emile Durkheim’s concept of “anomie” in sociology occurs. We are an anomic society. We do not abide by the rules.

Bending the rules has become a fundamental habit, or even a norm. This tendency to bend applies to legislative rules as well as the rules of nature. If you break a public law you might be confronted by the authorities, but if you stretch the laws of physics, you can cause a

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sabancı university / SUdergi disaster, perhaps roll your car over in traffic. The demands of constituents from the Parliament contain a considerable dose of favoritism. The voter wants a job from the elected member of parliament, but he can’t get a job based on merit because he has no specialization. An unqualified employee has no place in the workforce of the service economy. This leads the voter to say: “We have voted you into office. In return, give us the so-and-so directorate.” Saying “But you barely have a primary school degree” means nothing to the person. This makes the implementation of any rule a negotiable subject.

As a result, where there is a return to tradition, there is also embracement of predominantly

its requirements are, and how the world view of someone who receives university education might be shaped. There is another fear on top of this: in the rural setting, the only form of social security is what may be provided by the children. When you have many children, you plan on living through your senior days with the care that those children will provide. This is part of the survival strategy. But this doesn’t work in the city. This causes the upbringing and expectations of the child to conflict with the qualifications of the parents. The parents have primary school diplomas at best, while the child has become a doctor or an engineer. They fear that the child will be estranged and scorn

religious mentalities, coexisting unruliness, and a demand for favoritism that feeds on these.

his parents, which will eliminate their social security. So the child is expected to cherish the rural values of his parents, revere them, respect their age; he doesn’t have to have so much respect for knowledge, but he should be a doctor at the same time. Again, contradicting expectations and dilemmas caused by these.

Meanwhile, as the child goes to school, his expectations from life and his view of his parents change. Family issues arise.

In summary, what we have here is people who are confronted with tremendous change resorting to and embracing values that they hold to be constant as they try to develop new survival strategies, and attempting to steer the society based on reactions that emerge from these values. There is a great number of people in this situation; in fact, our surveys confirm that the majority is in this situation. This leads to the predominant conservative social structure.

Question: How is the relationship between generations in this conservative environment? Çocuğun iyi eğitim alması ihtiyacı var ama bu There is the idea that the children should receive a good education, but many a parent lacks a complete idea about what this education looks like, because many people don’t know what type of a place the high school or university should be. They only have an extrinsic view of the university, and even of the high school. They are not aware of what university education is, what

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Some of these contradictions will resolve as the older generation ceases to exist. New generations live in the nuclear family, and the level of education rises, albeit slowly. This requires solutions that are compatible with the urban society. You need daycare centers like those in Europe or America, flexible work schedules for moms, professional senior living institutions and the like. Turkey is confronted with such demands. There is no electoral basis for these demands yet, but I assume that these will be voiced more strongly in the future.

Question: Could the discomfort associated with this transformation be getting more severe?

Lately, boys and girls socializing together or sitting at the same desk in university is becoming a debate topic.

I don’t think this happened overnight. For one, a greater number of students can now go to university. According to the Council for Higher Education report in 2006, the number of university students that belong to the lowest 20% income bracket in Turkey is very low; by ratio, this is 0%. When this reaches 10%, we will have even greater issues. These people are living in rural areas. They send their children to the university, which is an environment of

hatip” schools. There were schools that gave education more harmonious with their idea of morality. Educators, social psychologists and even politicians who have realized this have been calling for separate girls’ schools for training nurses or medical personnel, these professions being more oriented towards girls. Many people say such schools will constitute an alternative to parochial schools. I don’t think having girlsonly secondary schools is a wrong thing. Some high schools may be reopened as girls’ schools, and the rest continue co-education. This is not a huge problem. However, if you attempt to mold all schools into a single, conservative shape, you will be treading totalitarian waters with a single

science, arts, literature and philosophy, but it is a mysterious place about which they know nothing. This can be a threat for them too. There is also the propensity to keep them out of school, particularly effective on girls. Meanwhile, as the numbers increase, political interests become stronger. Political parties bring these issues on the agenda to collect votes. First, it was the issue of wearing headscarves in schools. This issue was escalated as far as it could go in Turkey, and now people are looking for an alternative. They tried their hand at abortion but that didn’t go too far, because there is not much difference between the current legal provisions in Turkey and the rules in Islamic law. Abortion in the first 120 days of pregnancy is permissible in Islam. Thus, the subject came off the agenda as well. A new issue was needed, and that was co-education. In the old days, there was a greater number of schools to which conservative families wanted to send their children; now there are fewer. In our generation, Kabataş and Pertevniyal were boys-only public schools; Saint Joseph was a boys’ school, and Robert College had a boys-only section. Now these are all co-ed. This caused many families to send their children to the parochial “imam-

type of education, single mentality, and a single political authority that controls everything from the top. This is the key challenge and critical choice. I would believe that a large segment of the society will resist against this.

What are suggested as reforms fall through as you very well know, because of narrowmindedness and lack of proper governance. For example, abolishing school uniforms was labeled as “liberating children.” This was not a matter of liberty. We are a consumer society. This became the nightmare of mothers everywhere. When put to the vote, 80% voted for going back to the uniform. They were not authoritarian or fascist mothers. The issue was not about liberty, but about the household budget. The divide between the rich and the poor became painfully apparent.

More affluent families bought more clothes for their children; they went shopping on Saturdays and had a whole wardrobe ready for the week.

Children of families who could not afford this lived through a severe feeling of deprivation.

This devastated the parents. People objected to this, of course.

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sabancı university / SUdergi The incumbent party declares every now and then that they intend to make Turkey more conservative. This may be expected, provided that it does not go too far. It is natural for a conservative government to implement more conservative values, but what matters here is to preserve liberty; as in the case of the school uniform, empower people to decide the way they want to go themselves. The government may suggest this. Once you start forcing things onto people, your volition has no longer to do with democracy and liberty, and has more to do with authoritarianism. This is the crossroads at which we are now.

Question: Was the Gezi uprising a reaction against authoritarianism?

The Gezi Park issue was a reaction against excessive police violence against a protest that was not a significant threat in its own right. One must comprehend this. There were many factors in play at the time. One was the members of parliament involved in the issue. Sırrı Süreyya Önder in particular reached great popularity.

There were other MPs too; the police were able to use violence against them, but not against Önder due to the peace process. This meant that Önder was singlehandedly and physically able to prevent the workers of the contractor from felling trees to expand an area.

There is a construction industry that is determined to pour concrete over anything.

There seems to be very close among this industry, municipalities and the central government. This merry-go-round is extorting considerable profits through the urban environment. Reactions spark against these.

Another development was the emergence of anti-capitalist Muslims who are critical of the

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Prime Minister’s “arrogance”. When discussing the issue of covering, they said “you don’t have to cover your person; it will suffice to cover your arrogance.” This was aimed directly at the PM. The people who had these reactions were raised within conservative values; they weren’t in opposition to them.

Above all, there was a very complex social situation at Gezi: the population that called for the authorities to leave Gezi Park alone was not confined to environmentalists, those opposing the profit economy, and the supporters of Sırrı Süreyya Önder. Some of the people there were those whom AKP believed to be in their support.

More importantly, the government, which had been pursuing an often-used “divide and conquer” strategy until then to create a critical mass that would benefit itself, realized that a huge problem arose at Gezi: the masses that they had divided and conquered began to talk, and worse still, to understand each other. When the strategy began to go sour, they attempted a coverup. If people realized that these separate groups were not actual adversaries, the divideand-conquer strategy would have failed. Some of their allegations fell through. There was the outrageous case of a covered mother and her six-month-old baby being assaulted by a crowd

of people, the stroller being taken away, the assailants even urinating on her! Not one piece of evidence was found. Not one eyewitness came up. A group of a hundred people attacks a woman right in the middle of Kabataş, and no one sees it! So we knew that the news was fabricated. It was also understood that “they are attacking covered people” accusations were also false. If you had been to the Gezi Park or taken part in protests in Ankara, Izmir or Antalya, you would have seen that people of all segments of the society were there. The vast majority of the demonstrators engaged in no violence.

A release issued by the Ministry of the Interior itself, I think on June 16th, said that two and a half million people (I don’t know how they counted) took part in protests in 79 provinces, the only exceptions being Bayburt and Bingöl, and that 4900 people were brought under investigation. In other words, two out of every thousand demonstrators were subject to criminal investigation. Since then, the government, aided by the spin doctors in the media, are trying to present this as an act of violence. Either the Ministry of the Interior is wrong, or the others are wrong. So the case is that of a peaceful protest, excessive police brutality, an arrogant government, an approach that depends on its constituency to disregard the sensitivities of others, and the idea that they can do what they want resulting from that arrogance. Then they started denying their own words – i.e. “We never said it was going to be a shopping center!” and all that. Finally, Mayor Kadir Topbaş went on TV and said that the PM himself insisted on building the artillery barracks there. The great imposition of one man led to a whole new landscape. The protests were suppressed on June 15 by force, but meetings continued throughout the summer in

various parks. Not a single incident of violence was reported in these meetings. People resorted to no verbal or physical abuse. They listened to each other and found a civil way of discussion.

Things like these gave the impression that the old sense of community, which had been destroyed with the mass migration from the provinces, can emerge again. This is also an important development.

The protests also showed that, where there is no intervention by the government, the processes in which individuals voluntarily take part lead to the civil society. Democracy thrives in civil society. Developing this is critical for Turkey.

We have no reason to claim that the civil society in Turkey is strong for now, but we have the potential. If we manage to activate and continue this, Turkey will become a country with a strong civil society and high-quality democracy.

Question: How will we achieve this?

First, by not attacking these people. Public prosecutors play a large part in this. The judiciary invented a new crime: “Attempt at overthrowing the government.” It is the opposition’s duty to attempt at overthrowing the government. The word “overthrow” might sound aggressive, but if the incumbent party fails to gather

sabancı university / SUdergi enough votes in the elections, they will have been overthrown. Overthrowing the government is not a crime. Attempting to overthrow by force – that is criminal.

So is attempting a military coup. But going from door to door, calling to people to overthrow the government and elect a new one is the fundamental function of democracy. Prosecutors come up with new crimes that make exercising democracy a criminal act. If prosecutors and judges support democracy, then civil society may thrive. Not all attempts of the government will be executed, which will give civil society some room to breathe.

In an environment where everything is an attack against the government and any two people who come together to talk are conspirators, democracy will never thrive. Democratic opposition is labeled as subversion. The objective of the government is to depict any opposition against it as an illegitimate attack against the state itself. The opposition too is voted into the Parliament. That is the problem we have. The electoral opposition is every bit as legitimate as the electoral government. They receive their votes from the same group of people – the citizens of this country. There is no difference between them. When you claim yourself to be the only democrat and everyone else to be non-democrats, you effectively stifle democracy. Democracy will not work in an environment where the government is always in power and the opposition is always in opposition. That is when a very severe issue arises: your power becomes absolute, and inasmuch as it is absolute, it becomes corrupt.

Democracy and corruption cannot coexist.

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This is why the government should change from time to time. Different parties should ascend to power at different times, like in the UK, Switzerland or Germany. When the same administration is elected time and again, and when you are branded as illegitimate if you oppose that administration, the approach itself is anti-democratic. This is a serious conundrum.

Question: What do you think about the restrictions on social media, thus freedom of expression? How is the balance between personal privacy, protection of rights, public interest and freedom of expression maintained in the West, which is our point of reference for democracy?

Censorship on social media was executed when wiretap recordings of allegedly corrupt relationships were leaked in the context of political sparring. As the March 30th elections drew closer, many voice recordings that suggested corruption, bribery, grafts and embezzlement among the Cabinet of the incumbent party were uploaded to YouTube and shared on Twitter. Upon this, the orders of the Telecommunications Authority to block access to some specific URLs were unlawfully extrapolated to the entire Twitter and YouTube

websites after statements by the Prime Minister.

Court appeals were made against this executive order, while some government officials, including the President himself, continued to use Twitter despite the ban. Finally, the Constitutional Court decided on the appeal made by the Bar Association and resolved that the Twitter ban was a violation of freedom of expression. This led to the government speaking against, and even threatening, the Constitutional Court. Censorhip policies, mostly enforced by pressure on media companies to oppress and fire journalists, continued to expand.

It was observed that the government was drawing further away from transparency and

fast at responding to complaints. It is common knowledge that the Prime Minister himself had seen no invasion of privacy in disseminating video recordings of the former CHP Chairman Deniz Baykal leading up to the general elections in 2011, and had stated that the case in question was “public� rather than private. The fact that social media censorship was implemented when the image of the AKP government came under question shows that the issue has less to do with ethics and more with political struggle.

accountability – aspects that are essential to demoracy and proper governance. The expansion of censorship policies is in stark contrast to democracy. Turkey already had a weak score in democracy, and the recent issues tarnished the democractic outlook even more.

court order and only when security becomes paramount. Anyone can be subject to this; from the French President Sarkozy to a decorated general, a minister or deputy, and the average citizen on the street. The critical authority here is the judges, who will interpret what law enforcement sees as a threat to security in accordance with the freedom of democracy and the rule of law.

The fact that AKP won 43.3% of the votes in the local elections indicated that the sensitivities of Turkish voters about censorship took a back seat to their sensitivities about economic interests and alingment with the mentality in the government.

There is little evidence that censorship in Turkey is enforced to protect the privacy of individuals. Censorship appears to have more to do with the dissemination of wiretap recordings involving the Prime Minister, some Ministers and their sons, and huge amounts of money.

Libel, defamation and invasion of privacy had been going on for years in social media, but the government had not made an issue out of this, and the courts were not particularly diligent or

Privacy and security are exclusive. Therefore, democratic governments listen in on people who pose a risk of committing a crime only with a

Freedom in a country depends on the extent to which its judges know, accept and implement the norms and standards of democracy and rule of law. In countries like Britain, France, Germany, United States and Switzerland, the implementation is clearly in favor of and sensitive to personal freedoms and the protection of rights. In other countries like Turkey, Pakistan, Ukraine, Iraq and others, implementation tends to favor the priorities of the government rather than the rights and freedoms of the individual. The issue lies in transforming Turkey from a country that is yet to achieve democracy to a country that has an established democracy.

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sabanc覺 university / SUdergi Question: The results of the last local election, despite all allegations of corruption, was effectively a vote of confidence for the government. What should we make of this situation?

In the elections of March 30th, constituencies voted, as they had before, for the parties and candidates who appeal the most to their mentalities (ideology), and who they believed would protect their economic interest the most. Most votes (almost 70%) were cast for conservative parties and candidates, particularly AKP and MHP. A quarter of votes were given to CHP, 6% to BDP, and the rest to political parties and independent candidates who have

politicians and their parties must have played a part.

few supporters. Mentalities are closely related to lifestyles. There is no reason to think that the voters cast their votes in order to protect their conservative, liberal, secular or other lifestyle.

In many places from Izmir to Erzurum, the constituency preferred political parties that they view to be the most appropriate to maintaining their lifestyles.

advance towards a political environment that will try to meet the needs that this will bring. I also assume that the demand for democracy will increase, as long as Turkey remains a part of the world and does not turn inwards. The effects of growing conservatism will weaken gradually.

What reinforces these trends is ideas about whether the economy is managed well or poorly.

In the 2014 elections, the majority voted with the belief that the economy is being managed well, and in support of policies regarding credit card debts, real estate values, agriculture, education and energy, which they believed to be concerning their economic interests. There are findings that voters who believed the economy to be mismanaged voted for MHP and CHP. The economy is slightly worse compared to 2011, and AKP lost about 6.5% of votes compared to 2011.

It is possible that these motives were augmented by votes cast specifically for mayoral candidates and their parties. Since this was a local election after all, the perception of specific local 26

Question: While these happen in Turkey, the world moves on as well. Developments in communication technology transform the world. Social media emerges as a new medium of communication. Despite the hindering effects of censorship, Turkey too is being influenced by these changes and is part of the transformation. What does the future hold in store for Turkey?

The future population of Turkey will be more urban, further industrialized and postindustrialized, and slightly older. We will

We must understand that in a few generations, as the urban middle-class continues to grow, our society will begin to resemble European societies. This will not happen overnight. We arrived at this situation in two generations, and it will take us sixty years minimum to get out of this situation.

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