The trees in Gezi Park: environmental policy as the focus of democratic protests

ABSTRACT

The protests that took place across Turkey in the summer of 2013 started as a bottom-up response to the plans of the government and Istanbul municipality to build a shopping mall on a small yet symbolic park in the cultural heart of the city. Taking the name of this point of origin, Gezi Park protests have quickly turned into a countrywide resistance movement against the hyper-developmentalist environmental and urban policies of the government, and the authoritarian tendencies of PM (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan. The movement unified opposition from all sides of the political spectrum, and transformed not only environmental discourses and policy-making but also the language in Turkish politics. Using Laclauian discourse theory and 25 semi-structured interviews with protesters and opinion leaders, this article documents how environmental policy has become the focus of popular dissent and analyses the signifiers around which the resistance has emerged. The hegemonic struggles between the government and the protestors and the lasting effects of the protests are critically discussed, to scrutinise the increasingly focal place of environmental discourses in the global conjuncture.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse theory
• Gezi protests
• empty signifier
• Turkish environmental politics
• hyper-developmentalism

My leaves are a hundred thousand hands

I touch you, I touch Istanbul, with all hundred thousand

My leaves are my eyes, amazed

I watch you, I watch Istanbul, with a hundred thousand eyes

My leaves beat like a hundred thousand hearts

I’m a walnut tree in Gülhane Park

Neither are you aware of this, nor are the police.

Walnut Tree.¹ (Nazım Hikmet Ran, 1957/2014, p. 1618)

Nazım Hikmet, the infamous romantic revolutionary of Turkish literature, wrote this poem while hiding from the police for his political opinions, on the branches of a walnut tree. The poem has been made into a popular revolutionary song later on, which was banned after the 1980 coup, and became one of the anthems of the Gezi Park protests of 2013. A tree in a park represents not only the fragility of human existence and its relationship with nature in the midst of a soaring metropolis, but also a hiding place from state oppression. Thus, ‘trees’ are a symbol of unity, and of resistance. The spark that led to massive protests lasting over three months throughout Turkey was in fact the bulldozers entering Gezi Park to uproot the trees on 28 May 2013 and the police burning the tents of about 50 protesters camping in the park to prevent its demolition the next day. In the following months, around 4 million people took part in over 5000 protests across the country (Türkiye İnsan Hakları Kurumu [TİHK], 2014). Over 8000 protestors were injured and 11 died due to the excessive use of force (Amnesty International, 2013). Tayyip Erdoğan, who was Prime Minister at the time, condoned the use of force, by claiming he personally gave the order, was proud of the police force (Radikal, 2013). His uncompromising tone fuelled the tensions and has made the Gezi protests by far the most transformative development in Turkish politics since the 1980 coup d’état.

The origin of the conflict between the protestors and the governing Justice and Development Party (JDP) was the handful of trees in a small park to be replaced by a shopping mall. Yet, this origin is often dismissed as the cause of the subsequent upheaval. Instead, it is argued, the increasingly authoritarian policies of the government caused the uproar (e.g. Atay, 2013; Benhabib, 2013; Bilgiç & Kafkaslı, 2013). While the increasing state oppression has played a significant role in the proliferation of the protests, this article scrutinises their original cause, asking: What was it about the environmental policies of the JDP government that upset millions of citizens? What were the discourses that merged under the banner of Gezi protests, demanding change in (especially urban and environmental) policy-making? Why were the park and its trees so central to the imagery of the resistance? Finally, as a central organising question to this inquiry, I ask: How and why did protests responding to urban environmental policies resulted in the emergence of ‘nature’ as a political subject?

The discourse analytical method employed to answer these questions and the related theoretical concepts are the focus of the next section. Section 2 provides the background on environmental policies of JDP governments, and begins to answer the first research question. I argue that there is a complex but critical relationship between environmental policies and anti-democratic practices of JDP, which underlies the logic of the protests. Section 3 answers the second research question by analysing the formation of a populist Gezi camp, their demands, and discursive strategies. I argue that the trees were central to the imagery of resistance because JDP’s urban and environmental policies provided certain conditions under which ‘nature’ gained political subjectivity. Section 4 summarises the aftermath of the protests and the transformation of the public sphere by the ‘Gezi spirit’.

1. Discourse analytical concepts and methods

Since the discursive turn in social sciences, many conceptual tools were developed to explore policy-making practices, leaving a conceptual lacuna in scrutinising environmental politics. Feindt and Oels (2005) recognised this when they suggested that the socially constructed nature of ‘environment’ is at the centre of discourse analytical work, but power should also be its focus: meaning-making and interpretation are essential for policy-making, and environmental discourses not only reflect material practices and power relations but also affect them. Hajer and Versteeg (2005) also warned that the changing nature of policy-making required discourse analysts to identify new sites of politics and understand the political dynamics therein. Some of the questions this issue aims to answer point in this direction, too: What dynamics are evolving between dominant and marginalised discourses? How is power constituted and how does resistance unfold within discourses? By studying the political dynamics of the Gezi Movement, this paper contributes to this endeavour.

Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) work on populism, democracy and pluralism provides a set of useful concepts in understanding polarisation and institutionalisation of discourses, which have also been applied to environmental policy (Griggs & Howarth, 2008; Howarth & Griggs, 2013; Mert, 2009, 2015). In a similar vein, this article focuses on politics of environment and hegemonic struggles over policy-making practices. Thus, a set of discourse theoretical concepts are used to explain how environmental policy has emerged as the focus of Turkey’s largest populist resistance to date.

The main tenet of discourse theory is that all structures, discourses and institutions are contingent. Some are relatively durable, whereas others are regularly contested, politicised and transformed. The dynamics that bring about political change are explained by political logics, which are related to the institution of meaning as well as its de-institution, contestation and defence (Glynos & Howarth, 2007; Laclau, 2005a). When the existing system of meaning is unable to explain, represent, or otherwise domesticate new developments and challenges, the hegemonic discourse becomes dislocated until it finds a way to represent these demands (Torfing, 2005). This institutionalising force of the hegemonic discourse is the logic of difference, and the contesting force of populist discourses is the logic of equivalence. Simply put, the logic of equivalence is the strategy that aims to establish a discursive unity between separate elements, linking several social demands against a common enemy (in most cases against the hegemonic discourse of the establishment). It is an attempt to polarise and politicise the social space (‘us’ against ‘them’), typically used by resistance movements. In contrast, the logic of difference is typically the strategy of the establishment, which tries to defy such polarisation by trying to override antagonisms through assimilation, co-optation or concession.

Laclau argues that when a group of people feel frustrated about a certain desire they have, their articulation of this frustration turns into a demand from the existing power structure. For instance, if a group has been frustrated in their request for better transportation, and

[they] find that their neighbours are equally unsatisfied in their claims [for] security, water supply, housing, schooling, etc., some kind of solidarity will arise between them all: all will share the fact that their demands remain unsatisfied. That is, the demands share a negative dimension beyond their positive differential nature. (Laclau, 2005b, p. 37)

If all these groups start articulating their demands in a way associating with, for instance, the idea that the existing government does not fulfil its role, an equivalential chain is formed among them, and a dichotomic frontier is formed between these groups and the government.

If the equivalential chain expands, one of these demands might take on the role to represent the whole chain. When a signifier ‘steps in’ like this, it reduces its own content to a minimum, and can articulate the shared negation among all these demands, representing what is equivalent among them (Laclau, 2005b, p. 40). Such a signifier empties itself (of its initial particularity) and acts like a mirror: whichever group articulates the empty signifier sees the reflection of its own demand, with its own identity formed around that demand. Critically, the formation of the dichotomic frontier requires an antagonistic relationship, not just another difference, as various differences can be subsumed under the empty signifier. Across the frontier lies the ‘Other’ (or antagonistic other), ‘which prevents me from being totally myself’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 122).

While these concepts help analyse populist protests of environmental policy, the Gezi case is also interesting from a discourse theoretical perspective: JDP has emerged as a populist movement against the earlier hegemonic discourse of the Republican establishment. After 10 years of rule as the majority government, it faced a new populist opposition during Gezi protests. Therefore, the following analysis is also an inquiry into hegemonic contestation between two populist camps, one governing and the other polarising. Although my focus is the populist resistance of the protestors, new problematiques arise as the older populism responds to a novel one, which are sketched in the conclusions.

Rather than establishing a new equivalential chain inclusive of protestors’ demands (the logic of difference), the government responded to the protests by force, which could have made data gathering for discourse analysis challenging. However, this was not the case: all the respondents I approached have accepted being interviewed, and suggested (and at times even spontaneously invited) others for interviews, which resulted in the expansion of the original sample by snowball sampling. This shows how normal it was for most Istanbullers to participate in and talk about the protests. To further ensure that they felt safe and comfortable, the respondents were asked to choose the place of the interview. Most of them opted for public spaces in various parts of Istanbul, and a few were interviewed in their homes. As a result, 25 semi-structured interviews were held in Istanbul with protestors and opinion leaders between September 2013 and May 2014. The language of the interviews was Turkish. The sample included respondents from both main and fringe groups, early Gezi camp organisers and later participants, representatives from political parties, NGOs, networks and labour unions. The duration of the interviews ranged from one to four hours. I used open-ended questions and only partially followed the questionnaire, especially when the respondents were telling highly emotional narrations of their experience. This decision, although unconventional, turned out to be informative; the structure in which respondents told their stories added a narrative dimension to the analysis.

2. JDP and hyper-developmentalism in Turkey

Our sensitivity about environment, nature, is no less than anyone else, but much more sincere, realistic. Any malfunction or deficiency would be tackled but we have to know this for sure: Turkey will not return from the road to development, growth. Tayyip Erdoğan. (Milliyet, 2015)

With the end of the Cold War, developing economies merged with global capital markets, and governments were expected to transform their economies by practising competitive statehood, trying to make their markets competitive in the global scale, even though their decisions are increasingly restricted by the disciplining mechanisms of the global finance institutions (Cameron & Palan, 2004). I propose the concept of hyper-developmentalism to describe the response of developing countries to such dilemmas: it subsumes a latent developmentalist rush embodied in massive development projects with no concern for ecological and social side effects. The structural transfer of wealth via impoverishment of the masses is coupled with political repression of democratic demands regarding the human and ecological costs of economic policies. Paradoxically, the deepening impoverishment of large sections of the society does not necessarily mean that the national economy is unsuccessful when judged by the criteria of globalised finance. As a result, despite their socio-ecological side effects, massive development projects are often legitimised on the basis that they are good for the national economy. In this section, I argue that JDP’s economic policies have followed a hyper-developmentalist pattern, and the protests were a response to these policies.

JDP came to power in 2002 following a deep economic recession, with the promise of economic stability by rapid industrial development and continued economic liberalisation. Under Tayyip Erdoğan’s populist leadership, JDP won the 2007 and the 2011 elections and formed four cabinets until the Gezi protests. The Turkish economy saw steady and high growth rates, relatively low inflation, and high current trade deficits in this period. GDP per capita increased rapidly from 2002 to 2012 (World Bank, 2015) but Turkey has also become one of the countries with highest income inequality in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2015). Corruption throughout the state system worsened, and petty corruption was replaced by systematic cronyism and nepotism as the government regularly changed the laws to impede prosecution (İnsel, 2009).

The main source of revenue in the first years of the JDP rule has been privatisation of previously state-owned industries. Turkey’s industrial growth since 2002 is largely based on low-tech, polluting, energy-inefficient, and natural resource-dependent industries such as construction, steel, cement, coal and hydropower, shipyards, and mining (cf. Pamuk, 2008). The economic policies of the third and fourth JDP cabinets were characterised by dispossession of the commons and gigantic infrastructure projects such as large dams, highways, and pipelines in cooperation with foreign partners.

Main social problems related to ill-planned development projects have been displacement of local people, loss of subsistence economies, and reduction in quality of life for rural communities. JDP’s ‘developmentalist obsession’ augmented pollution-related health problems and water scarcity, while many ecosystems were classified as critically endangered (Şekercioğlu et al., 2011). JDP projects throughout Turkey were questioned for being ill planned, irreversible, ecologically and socially harmful and, in most cases, corrupt. Protests ensued against the damming of Tigris River and hundreds of streams in Northern Anatolia, construction of nuclear power plants, and mining with cyanide in Pergamum among others. These protests had global/glocal ties and merged their demands with those of other global and regional movements. They demanded the government to include stakeholders in decision-making, respect court decisions, provide environmental assessment reports, ensure transparency, and not to censure the reports by the media and the academia. All of their demands were also articulated during Gezi protests (see below), but these pre-Gezi protests were diffused and fragmented, and they were dismissed, oppressed, or targeted by the government.

Environmental movements have been ineffective in opposing JDP’s hyper-developmentalist policies. One reason for their failure was the lack of participatory democratic practices and narratives. The Turkish Republic has been founded on the principle of a unified, centralised state, wherein a powerful bureaucracy occupied a dominant place in relation to civil society (Heper, 1990). Typically, contesting ‘the public good’ determined by the state agencies and the government would be regarded as anti-patriotic. JDP also insinuated that opposition to development policies is either organised by foreign imperialist powers, or as an elitist bourgeois reflex against pro-poor development (Karakatsanis, 2013). Thus, demands for participatory decision-making, respecting the rule of law, transparency and accountability have been systematically frustrated.

Istanbul was central to JDP’s projects: the construction of a third airport (to be the world’s biggest airport) and a third bridge between the Asian and European sides of Istanbul have started; Kanal Istanbul, a canal to divide the city’s European peninsula is also on the agenda, expected to cost about 50 billion dollars. These mega-projects aiming to achieve ‘the biggest’, ‘the greatest’, ‘the most expensive’, or ‘the most unthinkable’ have been called ‘crazy projects’ (C̨avuşoğlu & Strutz, 2014). Taksim’s transformation has already begun when Erdoğan was the mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (1994–1998), creating lucrative real estates and shopping centres while drawing the locals to the city’s periphery. After JDP consolidated its power, urban renewal projects focused on symbolic spaces and buildings of cultural significance, such as the oldest theatre of Republican times (Emek Sineması) which was demolished in 2009 to build a shopping mall, and Atatürk Culture Centre which was closed down in 2008.

These policies in combination with its increasing authoritarian responses to challenges point to JDP’s hyper-developmentalism. The narratives, practices, and institutions of ecological modernisation, which used to be the dominant discourse in policy-making, were dislocated. Ecological modernisation assumes a functioning liberal democracy; its institutions became obsolete when the basic tenets of liberal democracy were no longer present in the Turkish political system. As JDP curbed the power of vocational and professional associations, experts, and trade unions, these actors started to voice their opposition to projects with ecological and social side effects. However, the pressure on the media and academia has also made this subject position difficult for them. Subsequently, the environmental movements and initiatives have become the platform on which these arguments could be articulated. Under these conditions, semantic constellations of ecological conservation, cultural pluralism, and democratisation merged in opposition to the hegemonic hyper-developmentalist discourse. In what follows, the narratives of Gezi protestors are juxtaposed to this background.

3. Discourse analysis

The following analysis focuses on the second research question: what the demands of Gezi protestors were and how these demands merged under the banner of Gezi, forming an equivalential chain. Using interview data and secondary research, this section explores four themes in detail: the reasons for participating in protests, how their experience transformed respondents’ identities, how they narrated the political dynamics between the people and the government, and what the Gezi protests changed in the Turkish society and politics.

3.1. Veterans and rookies: political affiliation of the protestors

In their exploratory survey, Bilgiç and Kafkaslı (2013) found that the Gezi protestors were young, inexperienced in political protests, with no affinity to political parties. This last point was disputed by Ete and Taştan (2013) as other polls reported that a majority of the protestors voted for the Republican People’s Party in the previous elections; however, they have also found that most protestors were not officially affiliated with any party and many voted for the Republicans only to block JDP (pp. 35–39).

To illuminate this discrepancy, I asked respondents how they heard about the protests and why they decided to participate. Two groups emerged based on their degree of political affiliation. The first group has been previously involved in social movements and regarded themselves as politicised individuals; therefore, I call them ‘veterans’. Many lived, studied, and/or worked around Taksim, which is central to the politics in Istanbul and at times in Turkey. They were aware of the plans to build a mall in Gezi Park, and sympathised with the initial sit-in/camp-in. The veterans were instrumental in the initial proliferation of the protests, because (1) they decided to support the activists in the park as soon as they heard the trees were uprooted and the police was involved, providing the first images of the events; (2) they regarded the protests as the continuation of other resistance movements and were instrumental in articulating an equivalential chain between the demands of Gezi protests with other social movements.

I followed the activities in the park since the project was proposed, as it lacked all transparency. Not many people paid attention by then; they considered it another ‘hippy’ action. I didn’t think so, but I also didn’t take the trouble of going there for support before I saw the police accompanying the bulldozers. Then, I knew we had to go there and quickly, too.

I’ve kept an eye on the Park from my balcony. When I saw the gas clouds, and received the email of the Association of Architects and Engineers, I went to buy the list of things urgently needed for the activists in the park and headed to a meeting aiming to formulate a response. After all, this was the most important development in Turkish politics in decades.

Willy nilly I was on the first rows, I truly enjoyed it until they started hunting the foreigners. Then, I could no longer be active but I was busy all the time, putting into use everything I learned during the protests of my youth.

I first heard the protests from the students camping in the park and signed the petition. I went there to protest police violence but my initial support was because of JDP’s the urban policies, the park, the trees and the absurdity of building yet another shopping mall on the last remaining little plot of public space in Taksim.

It was all about the trees and the park for me. We were discussing the project daily. Taksim is a special place. It stands for something. They wanted to demolish that [identity]. I participated because I didn’t want the park demolished, and took action when I saw the first banners and the graffiti: There was a lack of analysis, a lack of historicity and a proper language to articulate the problem better, in a more connected fashion.

I vaguely heard of the problem beforehand, but I felt something was not normal in Taksim that night. I asked a group of students what was up, and immediately went home to get my camera: I knew this needed to be documented. It was about my neighbourhood’s local politics for sure, but it was also very much about the bigger picture.

The second group of protestors identified themselves as largely apolitical or non-activist and at times as ‘uninterested in socio-political matters’. Most of them decided to participate in the protests as a response to police violence, and Erdoğan’s reactionary attitude. Their narratives focused on the dynamics of the movement, its expansion, and the government’s response. The protests transformed their political identity and social networks. I call them ‘rookies’.

I was politicized in less than ten minutes, when I saw how the police treated the activists. I couldn’t have stayed home if I wanted to feel human for the rest of my life. I don’t take anyone who was not bewildered by those scenes seriously anymore. […] Since then, I have spent most of my time catching up on my readings on political issues.

There was a great deal of provocation by the police; how else could they have politicized a people that was systematically de-politicised since [the 1980s]?

I was so ignorant of politics. I used to pride myself for not having a political opinion, now I am ashamed of it. We all turned into militant activists during those months. I gathered hundreds of strategies against police violence and governmental disinformation.

At first I thought nothing would come out of it. On the third day of the protests, impressed by the collectivism, I participated. Everyone in my family told the others not to go and get hurt, so in the end, everyone went there, for their own set of reasons. For me it was not the trees but the attitude of Erdoğan, that he said nobody can question him. I remember thinking that my life is changing, this struggle is going to be its focus, I will defend this place and things will change.

Erdoğan does not surprise us often; we grew up under his increasing oppression after all. But his response to the protests gave us a whole new identity. He couldn’t have done anything better for our generation of students. There is now a separation between us and those who did not protest. When we meet someone new, our Gezi experiences are the first subject to share. Until Gezi, I was apolitical and only followed [mainstream media]; I triangulate every news item now. I changed my consumption habits; I no longer go to those restaurants that shut their doors when we were under attack by the police and certainly not to the [global franchises].

I decided to go when I saw the messages on Twitter. I wasn’t beaten up but got my share of teargas. […] I learned a lot from Gezi; I changed the sources from which I follow politics.

While both groups regarded excessive use of force as an important reason for their participation, the rookies were more surprised. All but two respondents who physically participated in the demonstrations had traumatic experiences from the teargas, pressurised water often mixed with unknown chemicals, and/or physical abuse by the police. Six respondents claimed that they were hospitalised for minor injuries, and 12 claimed to experience continued effects. Many of them used the same sentence while describing police violence: ‘I remember thinking I will die here’ often followed by ‘then, some stranger(s) saved me’. Several protestors reflected on this communitarian spirit.

There was an explosion of kindness.

While running from the police everyone was apologizing for stepping on others’ feet. We were running for our lives, and trying to slow down so that nobody would get hurt.

It was spontaneous and altruistic, therefore fundamentally unifying.

Who could imagine that the supporters of Istanbul’s three football clubs would stand together?! It is unheard of, extremely symbolic, and very dangerous from the viewpoint of the establishment.

The big cement block separating the highway lanes was carried by fifty-something people, to build barricades. If one of us let go, we’d all end up with broken legs. Not a single one of us let go before finding a replacement.

You stop acting on your own behalf. Hotels opened their rooms to us –for if you are hit by that orange-gas you must quickly shower. Everyone was miserable but all acted politely.

The support they received from random strangers, the collectivism and the communitarian spirit has been impressive for both groups, but they were transformed by their experience in different ways: rookies were particularly proud of their transformation, and often used the metaphor of a cocoon (the protests) and a butterfly (their post-Gezi identity). Veterans, by contrast, reflected on how their political practices and opinions of the younger generations changed.

We wrongly assumed this generation was fundamentally apolitical.

When we entered the Park, we loved what the youngsters did with the place!

The Y-generation gave us back the hope we lost since the 1980 coup.

The altruism and communitarian spirit were important for the formation of an equivalential chain, allowing for various identities to meet, talk, and act together against a common enemy that quite literally threatened their existence. The next section focuses on the political dynamics of the protests.

3.2. Carved from the same tree: logic of equivalence and the empty signifier

To live! Like a tree, sole and free

Like a forest in solidarity

-this is our yearning …

The Invite. (Nazım Hikmet Ran, 1953/2014, p. 1522)

According to Bilgiç and Kafkaslı (2013), the protestors most strongly identified with the words özgürlükçü (libertarian) and çevreci (environmentalist). When asked about their reasons for participating, the protestors indicated (agreed or strongly agreed with various statements on) the oppressive policies of the government (between 94% and 97%), ‘public spaces being taken away’ (94%), and ‘uprooting of the trees’ (86%). In other words, JDP’s environmental and urban policies were among the important reasons for the protests. However, political parties highlighting these issues traditionally enjoyed little popular support; therefore, how environmental policy and democratic freedoms have become discursively linked requires further investigation.

In the first week of the protests, the demands of the protestors in the park and other democratic demands in the society began to be articulated in an equivalential chain. For instance, the first press release of Taksim Solidarity, the organising group in the park, ‘saluted’ many resistance movements such as the struggles against several ‘crazy projects’, the workers on strike, the Kurdish emancipation movements (Taksim Solidarity Joint Declaration, 2013). One of the organisers of Taksim Solidarity, Burak Atlar, noted that the first groups highlighting this equivalence were the environmental NGOs working against development projects (cited in Şahin, 2013, p. 62). These NGOs were already in touch with trade unions, civic initiatives, professional associations, and several opposition parties and were instrumental in forming a unified front. Atlar suggested that the crowd in the park multiplied right after the press release, ‘[also because] Taksim Square is a symbolic space for the city due to its identity and history, about which various groups are sensitive’ (p. 64).

As represented by the slogan ‘Everywhere is Taksim, resistance is everywhere’, this symbolic dimension was critical in Taksim Square/Gezi Park becoming the empty signifier of the protests. Gezi was the first park built in Istanbul after the Republic was established, symbolising the urban transformation brought about by the Kemalist Revolution (Polat, 2013). This makes it important for the middle-class Republican elite that lost its hegemony to JDP in the recent years. The same space was at some point an Armenian graveyard confiscated during the Ottoman modernisation process; the military barracks built here in early eighteenth century represented the Armenian influence in Ottoman architecture. It represented the cultural pluralism of the Ottoman capital not only to minorities but also to progressive groups in Istanbul. In 1909, a battle took place at the barracks between conservative counter-revolutionaries and the Young Turks, the main modernising force of the Empire and an important part of the Turkish Independence War. This made the same space historically important for the modernists and patriots. In 1921, the inner courtyard of the remaining buildings was transformed into the first football stadium in Turkey, used by all Istanbul football clubs. Only in the 1940s has it become a public park, with the Taksim Square Project, and shortly afterwards, the Square has become the main locus of political demonstrations, and many painful memories for the Turkish left, such as the 1969 Bloody Sunday and 1977 Taksim Square massacre. The demands of unions and left-wing parties are frustrated almost every year, when their application to gather on Taksim Square on 1 May is turned down by public authorities, at times resulting in clashes between the police and the workers.

Şahin (2013) noted that:

the urban and ecological movements expanded the campaign and articulated all kinds of other events such as the [strikes]. The origin of the resistance, Topçu Barracks and Gezi Park were symbols, but it was the attacks on the city and ecology as a whole that was contested. (p. 64)

Once the equivalential chain was formed among these demands, other excluded identities started to articulate their anti-hegemonic demands on the same platform. One respondent reflected, ‘everyone started to speak of what they thought was missing and problematic; everyone was able to express themselves’.

The veterans highlighted that the decision to stop using political party banners was a conscious choice to expand the appeal of the protests. In discourse theoretical terms, this is a moment of emptying out of the signifier ‘Gezi Park’. Indeed, a number of rookies mentioned this to be important for them. As a result, the protests were overtly inclusive of traditionally marginalised parts of the society, particularly the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer (LGBTQ) movement, sex workers, Alevis, Kurds, the displaced (the urban poor and the Romani), non-Muslims, and feminists. Despite rejecting both the new conservatism of the JDP and the old conservatism of Kemalism, the protests even mobilised the Republican elite, the progressive liberals recently ejected from JDP ranks, and anti-capitalist Muslims. This pluralism was not only restricted to the protests in Istanbul:

In Gezi Park, [but also in] Ankara’s Kuğulu Park, one could see antimilitarist groups, LGBTQ and environmental activists, conscientious objectors, affiliates of the BDP—the Kurdish political party— and [other] leftist parties, all of them occupying the same streets of protest, the same streets in claiming life, together with the more traditional Kemalist opposition […]. Until a month ago, the discourses of these various groups were mutually exclusive. This was the first time [they] were exposed to the symbols of the ‘other’, were speaking to each other, were beginning first to tolerate, but also gradually to understand the resentment and discontent of the ‘other’. (Karakatsanis, 2013)

Of all these groups, the Kurds were the biggest group that have been marginalised the longest. Revealing their frustration with mainstream media that did not report the protests, a popular tweet in the first weeks of the protests arguably reflected an ‘awakening’ on the side of various non-Kurdish protestors: ‘My Kurdish friends, we have only read about your cause from THIS media all along. Apologies’. Many more slogans, banners and activities openly negated the otherness of the ‘other’ that Erdoğan promoted through the years. For instance, one of the most picturesque moments took place when praying anti-capitalist Muslims were joined by those practising yoga. Another example was the popular Gezi slogan ‘Assume we’re fags, so what?’ in support of LGBTQ activists.

Another dimension of the equivalential chain was the relationship between the local and the global: climate activist and radio producer Madra (2013) wrote that the local demands of Gezi were linked to the global demands of climate activism. Similarly, Chomsky (2013) noted that symbolism of Gezi protests was about protecting the commons in the local, to resist ‘the neoliberal assault on the global population’. Seeing the messages from various international intellectuals, one respondent reflected, ‘meeting international activists made me realize we’re not alone in this fight’.

Both veterans and rookies mentioned various groups with whom they never interacted previously, and started empathising with:

Despite years of political activism, we’ve never sat and talked to the LGBTQ movement, we stood together for the first time. They were lovely, and very funny.

I never thought mothers to be a political group, but when the mayor requested them to call their children back from the park, hundreds of them formed a chain around the park which brought me to tears. Then, I remembered Saturday Mothers, how I never paid attention to them while I passed them by … What a shame.²

Even the teenage girls that I only thought to be petty-bourgeois shopping-addicts were participating en masse! People stopped being scared; I guess they thought ‘eight kids were killed in peaceful, democratic protests in this country, what is the point of being afraid, how much worse can it get?’

We started talking for the first time! We thought differently, but this did not make it difficult to act together, quite the contrary, it was good to talk.

As a feminist that cares about language, I refrain from participating in protests where sexist swear-words are all over the place. This time, we went and selectively painted over those words we thought were sexist and in many cases we even tried to leave the message intact.

This is about the park, the trees, about being one with nature, and with those other people who have been marginalized. We were all dying so we shouted ‘living is resisting’.

Inversely, a new equivalential chain formed between nature and people. The overarching symbols and themes of the Gezi protests were the trees, nature, bodies, lives and so forth, which have been oppressed by the government. One respondent described how two lovers were running from the police, checking each other out for injuries, reapplying their home-made anti-teargas lotions, kissing for ten seconds before rushing back to Taksim Square. He said: ‘I remember thinking, something this natural and beautiful cannot be stopped’. Another respondent identified a widespread metaphor describing the JDP rule:

They have been draining the life out of us for such a long time … Now they would drain the last breath of life out of our city –and, you know, Istanbul is an organism with its own mind, so we took to the streets to say what it can’t articulate.

There are two relevant points about these reflections. First, there was a clear divide between a non-descript ‘us’ and a well-defined ‘them’. An equivalential chain was formed around the empty signifier of Gezi Park, consisting of various groups that did not stand together before but were all antagonised by the establishment. The antagonistic relationship was critical in the formation of the dichotomic frontier and the emergence of the Other, which prevented the protestors ‘from being totally themselves’. The antagonistic Other against which Gezi protestors united was Erdoğan, whose response to the protests is the focus of the next section.

Secondly, the metaphor of draining the life out of things and people point to the way hyper-developmentalism created an affinity between people and nature. While Laclauian discourse theory explains the politico-linguistic dimension of the equivalential chain, another interpretation can be made about this affinity if we ask how it extended beyond demands and identities and subsumed nature not as fantasy or object but as a political subject. In a Hobbesian universe, violence of the sovereign is legitimate since nature is even more violent and hostile. JDP’s hyper-developmentalism made ‘nature’ vulnerable and threatened, thereby cancelling out such legitimation. Furthermore, these policies generated losses and tragedies, both natural and human, and described them as economic externalities. In this context, the rights of nature, of things, and of people are simultaneously negated. As a modernist hegemonic project, hyper-developmentalism relegates nature to a realm of transcendence; it is there to be discovered and acted upon and has no agency. As Latour (1993) reminds us, modernity has systematically refused to consider the rights of the object. To give nature back its position as an actant required the symbolic move of merging with it as did the Gezi protestors. This sometimes took a physical form such as tree-hugging, and but mostly was a symbolic merger, such as Nazım Hikmet’s verse, ‘I am a walnut tree in Gülhane Park’, or the hundreds of memes of anthropomorphised trees that the protestors created. At this point, nature no longer refers only to ‘environment’ but also subsumes physical bodies, things, and non-mediated relations with the surroundings. This is important in the context of Erdoğan’s neo-conservative policies ranging from restrictive abortion laws to criminalisation of private homes shared by male and female students, to his call to women to give birth to at least three babies. The equivalential chain was therefore more inclusive than just social groups; as some of the banners used at Gezi aptly listed: ‘Hands off my tree/ street/ square/ drink/ uterus/ sexual identity/ hair/ meal/ sea/ dress/ river/ number of kids/ bread/ home …’ (Akkuş, 2013, p. i). The influence of this expansion in the equivalential chain is further scrutinised in Section 4.

3.3. Erdoğan’s response: ‘this has nothing to do with trees’

These developments are in actual fact not about Gezi Park or the trees. They are the attempts of those who weren’t successful at the ballot box to achieve their goals through different means. Compared to five days ago it has died down. […] I expect it to be resolved by the time I am back. Tayyip Erdoğan. (Hürriyet, 2013)

The pluralism of the Gezi protests further increased its appeal for the protestors. One respondent suggested that this represented an Arendtian moment of political action, wherein the public domain enlarges to include plural identities: ‘I have been teaching [Hannah] Arendt for years; since Gezi, for the first time I have a spot on example that the whole class immediately recognises, when I explain her concept of public space’. Other respondents agreed that they were forced to think about political culture and theory:

I saw an older Republican woman and radical Kurdish leftists dancing together and thought ‘only Erdoğan could bring together these people who wouldn’t in a million years meet each other, let alone share a political platform’. Everyone was acting in their own way, but together. People saw these differences but kept talking to each other. I wondered whether this unity could only be organized thanks to an enemy figure such as Erdoğan, or could the Gezi spirit be maintained without him?

Gezi brought together all those people ‘othered’ by the administration. Turkish people are not very good at collective action. But this government has created an ‘other’ out of so many groups, that I could no longer accept what was around me and ignore politics.

These accounts suggest that the Gezi Movement was successful in mobilising masses around its empty signifier, and challenging Erdoğan and his government. Many expected Erdoğan to respond by integrating some of these demands to JDP’s own paradigm (the logic of difference), as a former JDP voter I interviewed suggested:

I am not a political person and neither got involved in the protests –instead I looked after the kids when others went. Most women went anyway when Erdoğan offended them. I was scared. It was as if the country was divided into two. All these deaths and the scary things that took place during May and June had two reasons: the trees and Erdoğan’s obstinacy. He didn’t know how to share his power. He couldn’t apologize and change the plans for the park or start a conversation with the people. His dictatorial attitude caused much pain and sadness. I used to vote for JDP but I can’t forgive him the deaths of those kids. He kept his offensive, never hearing what others wanted to say. A person who says ‘my will be done at all times’ cannot be prime minister.

What Erdoğan did instead was to further polarise the social space, initially by refusing to talk to the protestors and leaving for a visit to North Africa. Before he left, he sent a clear message to his followers, by saying ‘I can hardly contain the fifty per cent [that voted for me]’ (Hürriyet, 2013). As the opening quote of this section shows, he implied that the protests were anti-democratic, and called the police force to action. His responses became increasingly intolerant as protests continued. Unlike the veterans who unanimously emphasised that the government lost control of the political agenda, the rookies insisted that Erdoğan’s reactions structured the protests.

What affected the process most was Erdoğan’s fascistic attitude.

Even Bülent Arınç [Deputy PM] and Kadir Topbaş [Mayor of Istanbul] admitted that the process was not transparent and inclusive enough. Quickly Erdoğan silenced such moderate voices and started threatening us. Then a few idiots attacked us on the streets with machetes.

It wasn’t only the police that beat us up, thanks to Erdoğan’s calls… They would find us (but also passers-by, I should say), corner us, and hit so as to ensure maximum damage: on the face.

Perhaps I would passively support the protests if it weren’t for Erdoğan’s no one-can-tell-me-what-to-do attitude. But he went to Erzurum and said it was the protestors who attack and loot; another time he threatened to shut down twitter; he called us anything from looters to terrorists, to socialists, to atheists –often all at once. So we decided to take this name [looter] and called ourselves after it.

I was shocked when Erdoğan invited this so-called Gezi delegation, made up of people that had nothing to do with the protests. He intentionally tensed things up right after calling for reconciliation.

Erdoğan lost all legitimacy when he said he had personally given the order for the police to attack, when we called for the prosecution of the policeman that shot and killed [a protestor].

A few days into the protests, Erdoğan said he had nothing to learn from us regarding being an environmentalist. He says that about many things, he even once said to a sociology professor that he had nothing to learn from him regarding sociology. It was so comical that we came up with the slogan, ‘I have nothing to learn from you regarding being a fag.’ It was an immediate hit!

Erdoğan constructed the image of a vicious ‘enemy’ with a twofold face: ‘On the one side it was the local “sacrilegious”, “looters”, “terrorists”, “anarchists”, “leftists”, and on the other side an enemy unknown, alien, non-Turkish, that aims at dissolving the country’ (Karakatsanis, 2013). This has significantly contributed to the consolidation of the equivalential chain. The day after his speech, the protestors appropriated his words already, calling themselves ‘looters’ and redefining the word at the protests and on the media (Göle, 2013). One banner read ‘I am a looter, a wino, a whore, a faggot, a crypto-jew … What happiness!’

So why did Erdoğan further polarise the public space instead of reducing the tensions at least by paying lip service to the demands of the protestors? Özbank (2013) understands the tension between Gezi protestors and Erdoğan/the JDP government as two divergent conceptions of political legitimacy: the protestors depended on a populist idea of legitimacy, whereas the government claimed that these protests were illegitimate based on a Weberian conception. While this argument has its merits, it does not sufficiently explain Erdoğan’s refusal to make any concessions or find means of representing these demands within the hegemonic JDP discourse, as some other JDP officials suggested. A partial explanation for Erdoğan’s strategy lies in his political past: he was banned from office and sentenced to jail in 1998, for citing a poem to incite religious hatred. He turned this into an advantage and created a populist political movement by arguing that JDP is a revolutionary force against the establishment (the Republican reformation, its elite and institutions, particularly the military). When he became the Prime Minister, he opened the public sphere to some of the Muslim groups that were previously excluded. As his rise to power was as a ‘populist reactionary’, he was unable to transform his position to the ‘instituting leader’ in the face of a new populist opposition.

Erdoğan’s populism included some sections of the society, but systematically excluded other groups from the public sphere, which previously had at least some representation or access to it. This resulted in various groups with resources and political consciousness to be left out of the public debate, and subsequently uniting at the Gezi protests. During and after Gezi, Erdoğan failed to ensure support for JDP policies, and governability problems arose:

Erdoğan consciously contributed to the polarisation of the country, [which] may ultimately work against him. Polarization has left over half of Turkey’s population angry, insecure and anxious about their future and that of their country. [Gezi protests] proved that their number is not [small, and they are] likely to increase their involvement in politics. (Paul & Seyrek, 2014, p. 1)

While being a powerful force in polarising the public sphere, JDP has failed to institutionalise and legitimise its discourse. One respondent aptly described this process as follows: ‘One can divide-and-rule only for so long. Then, a leader must create unity around his policies; otherwise people unite against him’.

To summarise: the logic of equivalence established in Gezi protests gathered the demands of various groups whose identities were marginalised and threatened by the hegemonic JDP discourse. The equivalential chain also included various global demands and the needs of nature. The empty signifier Gezi Park represented a future wherein all identities could not only coexist but also could be articulated in a pluralist fashion. Against this equivalential chain, there was the antagonistic Other, which made all these demands impossible: Erdoğan in particular and his governments’ neo-conservative policies on the bodies, the environments, the livelihoods and the lives of people, in general. By resorting to violence and dismissing the protests as ‘anti-democratic’, Erdoğan further polarised the society. His actions resulted in governability problems for JDP and indicated that various forms of pressure (or even violence) will be applied to the opposing views of the people, the intelligentsia, the media, and so on. In an online discussion forum, political scientist Yılmaz (2015) notes, following Gramsci, that such inclinations towards politico-military responses to popular dissent often result in a vortex of violence wherein the establishment loses control over the oppression process it starts. This brings about a new puzzle: What happens when the populist equivalential chain is met not with the logic of difference but with further polarisation by the establishment? It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully answer this question, but the next section presents the changes that took place in Turkish politics in the immediate aftermath of the protests, suggesting potential starting points for such an inquiry.

4. Post-Gezi transformation of Turkish politics

We will find a language that reaches out to every thing. We will not walk this earth without a language, in hostility, scattered into pieces … (Kemal, 2010, p. 106)

Successful discourses sediment into institutions (Hajer, 1995); accordingly, the practices of Gezi Movement were habitualised and institutionalised after the protests. First, JDP’s continued commitment to hyper-developmentalism faced resistance in every part of Turkey. Urban centres throughout Turkey experienced full-fledged uprisings against gentrification (Kuymulu, 2013). The communal orchards of Kuzguncuk and Yedikule in Istanbul were protected by citizens around the clock when the municipality proposed to build a recreational area (Milliyet, 2013; Zaman, 2014). In the focus of the post-Gezi imagery, there also were the trees: the protests revived every time trees were cut or burnt. Student demonstrations took days to subside when trees were bulldozed despite a court order in the Middle East Technical University (METU) campus in Ankara (Bianet, 2013). When the tree-huggers blocked the uprooting of a hundred trees surrounding Turkish State Theatres, the bulldozers were sent at night, to finish the job (CNN Türk, 2014). Rural communities also started to take action, protesting the cutting of some 225,000 trees to make space for one power plant in İnceburun (Northern Anatolia), a prominent conservation area (Yeşil Gazete, 2014), and keeping watch against the bulldozing of olive groves for another in the Aegean village of Yırca (Hürriyet, 2014).

Secondly, the involvement in and the practice of politics changed at all levels. Neighbourhood councils organised around city parks have become increasingly influential after the protests. Various parks were used for bottom-up decision-making practices during the protests, and ‘Occupy-style’ hand symbols were appropriated for a quick and inclusive process. After the protests, these gatherings continued and the councils started to shape neighbourhood policies. This is in line with the observation that, politics have started to occupy the centre of many respondents’ life. One interviewee reflected, ‘we have all become volunteers and organisers of smaller scale initiatives in our neighbourhoods’. Furthermore, the continued involvement of the protestors in politics proliferated political action throughout Turkey, and a diverse set of groups gathered each time. For instance, in a response to the increase in the rape and murder cases that went unpunished under JDP rule, feminists cooperated with various left-wing groups and the LGBTQ (Erdoğan & Köten, 2014, p. 101). When 301 miners died due to a lack of labour safety measures, Erdoğan’s speech on how it was in the nature of mining to have such catastrophes received a strong response from the families of the miners, but also environmentalists, and the labour unions of other sectors (e.g. Greenpeace, 2016).

Thirdly, the humorous, subversive, and inclusive language of Gezi challenged the tone of traditional Turkish politics, which is stern, provocative, and patriarchal (Akkuş, 2013; Varol, 2014). Several respondents reflected on how important it has become for them to influence the way events were defined and narrated, particularly in the media. They no longer regarded politics as ‘dirty’, and were untypically eager to be interviewed; many told me that I could even use their name. Furthermore, possibly due to the systematic disinformation and misinformation of the government and mainstream media, the respondents used a language both emotional and full of facts and references.

Finally, the governability problems that arose after the protests influenced JDP internally. Various groups in JDP’s initial coalition have broken off in the following year. The globalist/Islamic Gülen movement, one of the biggest groups supporting JDP, turned against it and shared tapes revealing corruption of the Erdoğan family and three ministers (Paul & Seyrek, 2014). Many liberals left the party, and high-ranking JDP officials publicly entered into political fights. The populist chain of equivalence that brought Erdoğan to power has been shattered, either directly by the new equivalential chain formed by the Gezi Movement, or in response to Erdoğan’s further polarisation and authoritarianism. The political consciousness that emerged with Gezi evolved into various post-Gezi protests, political movements, and actions, which focused on corroding JDP’s two remaining claims to legitimacy: economic development through hyper-developmentalism, and increasing the inclusive and democratic qualities of the public sphere.

5. Conclusion

Many emerging economies are responding to the pressures of globalisation by investing in massive, socially, and ecologically questionable projects, and oppressing democratic opposition to such policies. It is critical for environmental policy studies focusing on these societies to understand this increasingly prevalent new discourse, which I call hyper-developmentalism. The Gezi case illustrates how the lives, bodies, public spaces, and natural environment of people are threatened by the hyper-developmentalist urban and environmental policies of JDP governments. Contestations over these policies were already present in the background when the bulldozers entered Gezi Park to uproot the trees in a symbolic urban space in Istanbul and started a wave of protests that lasted several months across Turkey. The excessive use of force by the police and Erdoğan’s polarising response resulted in the proliferation of the protests, constituting an antagonistic Other against which social groups marginalised or alienated by JDP unified. These groups found their way of life and existence jeopardised and articulated their demands around the empty signifier, Gezi Park. A chain of equivalence emerged between the demands for ecologically sound policies and democratisation, which included ‘nature’ as a political subject. As a result, trees became central to the imagery of resistance and were extensively used in visual and textual references. More importantly, they have become the foci of post-Gezi protests and the symbol of the progressive, pluralist political movement that emerged out of the equivalential chain. Peoples’ Democratic Party further expanded the chain of equivalence by including the demands for Kurdish liberation and peace. In the June 2015 elections, it secured 80 seats in the Parliament as JDP lost its majority. The question that arises now is whether JDP will respond by reducing the tensions or by further polarising the political space using politico-military and military options as Yılmaz foresees.

To conclude, I return to Hajer and Versteeg’s (2005) suggestion that discourse analysts should identify the new sites of politics. Gezi Park was such a new site and the protests transformed the space of representation, opening up new participatory domains, and creating a pluralist language. The developments that followed indicate new problematiques for discourse theoretical research, regarding the ability of populist parliamentary movements in dealing with extra-parliamentary populist resistance, and the transformation of the populist equivalential chain itself, when the establishment further polarises the political space.

Notes on contributor

Ayşem Mert is Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Governance at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), VU Amsterdam and a research fellow at Earth System Governance Research Programme. She holds a PhD in global environmental governance (2012, VU Amsterdam), an MSc in Environmental Studies (2005, Bogazici University) and an MA in International Relations (2002, International University of Japan). Her research interests include public–private cooperation on sustainability governance, discourse theory, democratic theory, and accountability and transparency for global governance institutions. She is the co-editor of Earth System Governance Working Papers, and Uc Ekoloji (Three Ecologies), and a founding member of Green-Left in Turkey.

ORCiD

Ayşem Mert http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5105-1540

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This and all subsequent translations from Turkish are made by me.

2 Saturday Mothers refer to a group that gathers every Saturday since 1995, approximately half a kilometre from Taksim. They demand the political murders of their children during and after the 1980 coup to be investigated.