Right to public space: social movements and active citizenship in Turkey

Abstract

Gezi movement was initiated by a group of young people originating from different political and ideological backgrounds, who were in conflict with established élites. These active citizens most often approach problems from the grassroots level. They may belong to a political party, social movement, or some other active association involved in promoting an ideology of change. They are not necessarily left or right, but tend to be in the opposition and the more radical of each political persuasion. They are often social reformers of an established party, grassroots organisers of any political position, or radical revolutionaries with an activist orientation. They believe that many things can be done altruistically for ‘the people’ or for ‘the country’. The Gezi Park Protests announced the formation of new collective movements denouncing the precariousness of individual life and the fragmentation of social life. It also brought about new avenues for the reconstruction of a social life free from the control of neoliberal and financial speculation, affirming the human dignity of individuals aiming at their subjective assertion in the context of a new democracy. Based on such premises, the Introduction will introduce the basic assumptions of this issue as well as the content of each article.

Keywords:

• social movement
• active citizenship
• ideology of change
• right to the city
• Gezi protests

1. New global social movements and active citizenship

In their article, Yörük and Yüksel (2014) divide the revolts emerging since the 2008 financial crisis into three categories. The first one is anti-austerity and anti-neoliberal protests in the capitalist world such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the indignados in Spain, and the Greek protests against EU–Troika rule. The second type is the anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy protests, which erupted across the neo-capitalist World such as the ones in the Arab states, Russia, Hong Kong and Ukraine. And the third one is the mass protests in the other BRIC countries, notably Brazil and India, characterized by inflationary, credit-fuelled expansion, construction booms and new levels of corruption. According to their categorization, the Gezi protests seem to fit the third category due to the anger at government-backed commercial construction encroaching on a rare fragment of public green space. It also fits into the second category of anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy protests as it was formed by the alliance of “new proletarians”, i.e. the graduates working in telemarketing, with inflation-hit traditional middle classes, both of whom have to go through a set of political turmoils under the AKP (Justice and Development Party) rule characterized with Islamisation, Euroscepticism, parochialism, nationalism, polarization, majoritarian democracy and electoral authoritarianism.¹

Occupy Gezi is a new global social movement, which has similar characteristics to its predecessors such as Tahrir Square, Occoupy Wallstreet, and European Indignado movement. Alain Badiou (2012) argued that Tahrir Square and all the activities which took place there such as fighting, barricading, camping, debating, cooking, bartering, caring for the wounded, constituted the “communism of movement” in a way that posited an alternative to the neoliberal democratic and authoritarian state. Similarly, Slavoj Zizek (2013) claimed that only these totally new political and social movements without hegemonic organizations and charismatic leaderships could create what he called the “magic of Tahrir”. And, Hardt and Negri (2012) also joined them in arguing that the Arab Spring, Europe’s indignado protests and Occupy Wall Street expressed the longing of the maltitude for a “real democracy” against corporate capitalism. Occupy Gezi movement also bears all these characteristics.

Similar to what Marina Sitrin (2012) put it in the Occupy Wallstreet Protests context, the purpose of the Gezi movement was “not to determine the path the country should take, but to create the space for a conversation in which all can participate and determine together what the future should loke like.” Rejecting all kinds of hierarchies and embracing prefigurative politics, citizens of all kinds, youngsters, socialists, Muslims, nationalists, Kemalists, Kurds, Alevis, gays/lesbians, ecologists, football fans, hackers, artitsts, activists, academics, anarchists, anti-war activists, women, and several others gathered in Gezi Park located in Taksim, which is loaded with left-wing working-class demonstrations in the past as well as with various symbols of modernization such as the Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM), to create a multiplicity of spaces such as social centres, graffiti walls, libraries, collective kitchens, music venues, conference venues, day care corners, bookfairs, barter tables, utopic streets and squares, and democratic forums, which provide room for experimentation, creativity, innovation and dissent.² Hrant Dink Street, Ceylan Özkol Street, Pınar Selek Square, Mustafa Sarı Street are some of those names used by the protestors to demonstrate their solidarity with those who had been exposed to the discrimination of the state machinery either in the past or during the demonstrations.³ Naming the fictional streets of squares after those persons, the protestors aimed to restore the justice, which was not secured by the state. These civil utopias brought about a form of solidarity, which is cross-culture, cross-religion, cross-ethnicity, cross-class, and cross-gender.

Almost all the participants of the Gezi Park protests including youngsters of all kinds, football fans, artists, hackers, gays and lesbians, strangers, outsiders, and others performed various acts of citizenship in a diological process vis-á-vis the hegemonic state.⁴ As Isin (2008) rightfully stated, these acts of citizenship are being defined as ‘those acts that transform forms (orientations, strategies and technologies) and modes (citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens) of being political by bringing into new actors as activist citizens (claimants of rights and responsibilities) through creating new sites and scales of struggle along with a new form of prefigurative politics (Isin 2008, 39). The idea of prefigurative politics is used in this paper as a kind of qualifier for distinguishing current acts of citizenship in new global social movements from the earlier left models of organisation (Franks 2003; and Maeckelbergh 2009). The term and its key ideas have been increasingly deployed for making sense of a variety of protest activities, and for a spectrum of political movements including environmental activism, the alter-globalisation movement, and recent occupations of public space such as the Spanish Indignados and Occupy movement (Juris 2012; Razsa and Kurnik 2012. I argue that it is this kind of prefigurative politics, which incarnates the ideology of these new global social movements experienced in different parts of the world, i.e., the ideology of change. The common motto of the social protests in Egypt, Turkey and Brazil was “Another World is Possible”. The idea of transforming this neoliberal world into a world which is more humane, benevolent, compattionate and cohesive is the main source of inspiration of this ideology of change.

Respecting differences was also embeded in these civil utopias where practicing muslims respected atheists, atheists respected practicing muslims, all respected homosexuals, Kemalists respected the Kurdish activists, Kurds respected the Kemalists, Besiktas football fans respected Fenerbahce fans, and the elderly respected the youngsters. In the spaces of communication created by the demonstrators, citizens coming from different ideological backgrounds had the chance to experience a form of deliberative democracy. At Gezi Park, the protesters also displayed a good practice of responsibility and civility by cleaning up the mass they did during the demonstrations. In one of her works on the current social movements, Donatella Della Porta (2012) draws our attention to the critical trust generated by the demonstrators in such deliberative settings:

By relating with each other, recognizing the others and being by them recognized, citizens would have the chance to understand the reasons of the others, assessing them against emerging standarts of fairness. Communication not only allows for the development of better solutions, by allowing for carriers of different knowledge and expertise to interact, but it also changes the perception of one’s own preferences, making participant less concerns with individual, material interests and more with collect goods. Critical trust would develop from encounter with the other in deliberative settings (Della Porta 2012, 40).

Gezi movement also provided its participants with an experience of direct democracy by which the holders of different points of view interact and reciprocally transform each other views (Della Porta 2012, 41).

As in Tahrir Square and Zucotti Park (Calhoun 2013), the demonstrators of Gezi Park also made a point of cleaning up after collective action to demonstrate the capacity of “the people” to govern themselves. Occupy Gezi movement was also meant to be an attempt to reassemble the social, which had been polarized in different spheres of life between the so-called secularists and islamists.⁵ It was revealed that most of the demonstrators were not involved in any organized demnstration before (Konda Public Survey 2013). Gezi Park provided those youngsters who usually only communicate online with a meeting ground where they experienced communicating face to face. Against the segregation and isolation of everyday life Occupy Gezi movement offered participatory structures and open communication. It invited the passive citizens to experience an active sense of what James Holston (2008) calls “insurgent citizenship” by which they could see what an inclusive and egalitarian society might look like. Gezi movement was about creating alternative pathways for political organization and communication to prefigure the real democracy and active citizenery to come. The Movement introduced millions of citizens all around the country to the experience of direct democracy. It radicalized an entire generation of previously discouraged and apathetic youth, and it built test zones for imagining and living out a post-capitalist utopia organized outside profit, competition and corporate world. The occupiers experimented with and showcased a form of democracy deemed suitable for the quality of the spaces they claimed. Consensus not only gave expression to the prefigurative and utopian politics that provided the dynamic for the occupations it also supported the libraries, learning spaces, barter economy and leaderless agreements that flourished amid the tents (Turan 2014). The movement, or the moment, created a totaly new marker of identity, which became more and more visible in the aftermath of the Occupy Gezi movement. The new marker depicts resilience for those individuals who were actively involved in the movement to express their resistant civic identity – an identity which is scrutinized further in this entire issue.

As Engin F. Isin (2002, 306) put it very well, we witnessed different practices in the aftermath of the World War II that were originally deemed to be outside the political, and which assembled themselves as relatively routinized, durable and effective strategies and technologies, making, enacting, and instituting political demands and translating them into claims for citizenship rights. These practices were, at first, interpreted as social movements, then as cultural politics. Now, these practices are increasingly being perceived as insurgent citizenship practices by agents themselves as well as scholars. Thomas Janoski and Brian Gran (2002) define the active citizens as those citizens who participate in the political activities and have concern for the people in their group. The active citizens are often engaged in conflict with established élites and most often approach problems from the grassroots level. They may belong to a political party, social movement, or some other active association involved in promoting an ideology of change. They are not necessarily left or right, but tend to be in the opposition and the more radical of each political persuasion. They are often social reformers of an established party, grassroots organizers of any political position, or radical revolutionaries with an activist orientation. They believe that many things can be done altruistically for “the people” or for “the country”. However, in dealing with the opposition, they can be somewhat ruthless (Janoski and Gran 2002, 39–40). What is narrated here very well defines the type of citizenery experienced in Gezi movement. As John Stuart Mill ([1861] 1975, 196–7) stated in the second half of the 19th century already, active citizenship widens individuals’ horizons and deepens their sense of how their lives are involved with others’, including the lives of people who are unknown to them. In this way participation works to overcome individualism. This is indeed what happenned in the Occupy Gezi movement. The Gezi Park Protets announced the formation of new collective movements denouncing the precariousness of individual life and the fragmentation of social life. It also brought about new avenues for the reconstruction of a social life free from the control of neoliberal and financial speculation, affirming the human dignity of individuals aiming at their subjective assertion in the context of a new democracy (Farro and Demirhisar 2014).

2. Revolt of the Masses

Under the charismatic leadership of Erdoğan, the AKP government has brought about political, social and economic transfromation in Turkey. After taking over the executive power in 2002 and presidential power in 2007, the AKP started to transform the bureaucracy by lowering the retirement age to bring its adherents to the key positions in the judiciary, security, higher education, and other key institutions such as the Turkish Radio Television Corporation (TRT), the Board of Higher Education (YÖK), High Audio Visual Board (RTÜK), Turkish Court of Accounts (Sayistay), Higher Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), Board of Information and Communication Technologies (TIK), Public Procurement Authority (KIK), Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK), Capital Markets Board (SPK), and Housing Development Administration (TOKI), Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA), and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), and Turkish Airlines (THY) (Kaya 2015).

Similarly, the AKP also transformed the social policies in Turkey through various neo-liberal forms of governmentality reinforcing the family, communities, charities, as well as through generating some public discussions as the adultery law. Social policies in modern Turkey have always been family-oriented and conservative. The main premise of the social policies is that the beneficiaries of welfare schemes are those who cannot be taken care of by their families (Buğra and Keyder 2006). This is a corporatist model of social policies, which organizes social benefits such as health services, pension payments, holiday camps and social clubs, on the basis of sectors disproportionately privileging formal employees in the public and private sectors in comparison to informal workers and unemployed.

The AKP’s social reforms have mainly focused on unsuccessful attempts to criminalize adultery, and more successful attempts to lift the headscarf ban, to reinforce familial values, to revitalize conservative values, and to Islamize the public space by means of reciting the debates on building mosques, trying to convert churches to mosques (Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and in Trabzon)⁶, separating male and female student dormitories and private student houses, and helping the poor through Islamic references, but not through a rights-based approach. The attempt of the AKP criminalize adultery encontered fierce reaction from the secular domestic forces, the military and the European Union in 2004 (Somer 2012, 16). The AKP still insists that outlawing adultery would empower women, however Tayyip Erdoĝan has already shelved his plans to make adultery a criminal offense after meeting fierce resistance from different groups in Turkey. However, the AKP has been very successful in recruiting the family as a key instrument of its populist neoliberalism.

The AKP has also redefined the economic sphere. Before and after the Gezi protests, Erdoğan and the AKP generated a pattern of what one could call structural racism, which denotes that apparently only Islamists are now being advantaged in econonomic transactions and cliantalist relationship with the state. Secondly, the subtle Islamization of Turkey under the AKP rule created a pattern of deinclusiveness for the Turkish state with regard to its relationship with certain segments of the civil society such as secularists, Kurds, Alevis, and left-wing groups. Thirdly, Turkey has practiced an urban transformation, which has trigerred a growth based on construction sector. Fourthly, Turkey has lately experienced an emerging distinction between the already existing global-universal-secular middle class and the newly existing pro-Islamist local middle class. Finally, similar to the other authoritarian forms of emerging economies, Erdogan and the AKP leadership have tried to explain almost every social and political movement by means of some conspiracy theories as if all these movements have been set up by competing international powers such as the EU and the USA.

Accordingly, Gezi movement in 2013, massive protests after the Soma mine disaster in 2014 (a district in the Aegean region), and protests against the destruction of olive trees in the Aegean Region in 2014 were all fabricated by international powers who allegedly did not appreciate the economic growth of Turkey. The Occupygezi movement symbolized the rejection of Erdogan’s acts of authoritarianism, vanguardism and engineering of the life-worlds of Turkish citizens, practiced through neoliberal social policies essentializing the community and family, raising “religious and conservative youth”, his call to mothers to have at least three children, his direct intervention in the content of Turkish soap operas, his direct order banning alcohol on university campuses, his intention to build mosques in Taksim Square and Camlica Hill, his condescending say over the lives of individuals and his increasing authoritarian discourse based on Islamic references. In other words, the Occupygezi movement was partly a social upheaval against the subtle Islamization of Turkish society and politics (Kaya 2015). However, the authoritarian tentencies of the state seem to have surpassed the resistance of the insurgent citizens of Turkey as the citizens have gradually become more and more suppressed by the executive and judiciary bodies of the state.

3. Right to the city

This special issue drives from the Lefebvrian idea of “the right to the city”, and is extended to various kinds of rights ranging from the right to water to the right to nation branding. The authors assume that there is a growing stream of consciousness within the Turkish civil society to become resilient, insurgent and active citizens trying to make thinks happen rather than waiting for the things to happen. All the contributors in this issue worked with the Lefebvrian idea of “the right to the city” and discussed their subjects through the its optic.

Lefebvre (1996, 158) defines the city as “an oeuvre, a work in which all citizens participate”. Lefebvre does not accept the monopoly of the state in constructing the urban space. The city is a public space of interaction and exchange, and the right to the city enfranchises dwellers to participate in the use and reproduction of the urban space. The right to the city is the right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of … moments and places” (Lefebvre 1996, 158). Similarly, David Harvey (2012) defines the right to the city being “far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights” (Harvey 2012, 4).

What happened in Gezi Park was a revolt of the masses against the ever-lasting authority of the state in shaping the public space as well as the city. The revolt was spontaneously organized by the youngsters of every kind, who were mobilized through the new social media such as Twitter and Facebook. The selection of the Gezi Park, which is located at the very centre of the city was also symbolically important as it was meant to be the space restored from the hands of the corporate world collaborating with the neo-liberal state. Lefebvre finds the use of the city centre by the dwellers of that city to be very important with regard to the materialization of the right to the city:

The right to the city, complemented by the right to difference and the right to information, should modify, concretize and make more practical the rights of the citizen as an urban dweller (citadin) and user of multiple services. It would affirm, on the one hand, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos for workers, immigrants, the “marginal” and even for the “privileged” (Lefebvre 1996, 36).

Hence, Occupy Gezi movement has become a civil-political venue in which the youngsters of every kind communicated with each other in a deliberative form, and became active citizens in a way that has proved the merits of the ongoing Europeanization processes.

In his article entitled “Terricide: Poisoning the Lungs of Istanbul,” Efe Baysal concentrates on the ways in which the Northern Forests Defense, a grassroots organization founded in the period of Gezi uprisings, has created an awareness of the urban dwellers regarding the importance of northern forests against the urban growth and the so-called mega projects such as the notorious third international airport in Istanbul. Sıla Selin Oğuz takes the reader from the north-western shores of Turkey to its north-eastern shores where the peasants generate a kind of active rural citizenship against the neoliberal logic of the Justice and Development Party rule, which has prevented the locals in the rural spaces of Rize, Trabzon and Artvin from the “right to water” due to the erection of hydroelectric power plants on the rivers of the Blacksea forests. In his article called “Right to Privacy in Turkey”, Şervan Adar elaborates on the ways in which the neoliberal forms of governmentality of the AKP rule have so far created a surveilance system in the form of an electronic panopticon, MERNIS (The Central Civil Registration System). He suggests that the way out of this panopticon goes through the “right to failure” which may allow individuals to challenge the surveillance assemblage.

Cristiano Bee and Stavroula Chrona seek to understand the role of social media in the enhancement of public participation during the Gezi protests. They claim that the social media has become a tool for bringing upfront a form of active citizenship that is in support of greater democracy and civil rights underlining the citizens’ “right to the city”. Erkan Saka’s article is a follow-up of the work of Bee and Chrona in the sense that he traces the legacy of the Gezi movement on the citizen journalism through social media referring to various examples such as 140Journos, DokuzSekiz Haber, and Oy ve Ötesi. Saka’s intervention revolves around the citizens’ right to the web as a place of freedom of expression and opposition. Ayşe Tecmen’s piece on the “right to brand Turkey” questions the fact that the process of nation branding in Turkey is mainly undertaken by the AKP government with minimal civil society and private persons’ involvement. Concentrating on the creative, aesthetic and artistic repertoire of actions of civil society actors during the Gezi movement that Tecmen investigates the civil society’s right to nation branding in Turkey. In her article entitled “Right to Culture”, Ülkü Zümray Kutlu focuses on the practice of developing participatory local cultural policy in Çanakkale, a city in the Marmara region. Her study ties up to the work of Tecmen as she investigates the participation of insurgent citizens in the decision-making process at the local level with regard to the city branding and cultural policies of the city. Her work addresses at the emerging civic activism in Turkey as the precursor of the insurgent citizenship claims prior to the Gezi protests.

In her article, “From “right to be equal” to “right to be””, Burcu Taşın claims that the societal and political deprivation of Greek-Orthodox minority in Istanbul does not ony results from their unequal treatment by the republican Turkish state but also from the principle of reciprocity inserted in the Treaty of Lausanne signed by Greece and Turkey in 1923. For the Roum minority who used to hold on to the common discourse “we were always here and we will always be here”, the essential claim of the “right to be” has become the primary concern underlining their quest for protecting their language, culture and visibility in Turkey. In the ast article of this issue, Melanie Weißenberg questions exclusive holisms and nationalist strategies of the state in everyday lives of German-Turkish returnees residing in transnational space between/beyon the territorial boundaries of Germany and Turkey. Based on Lefebvre’s understanding of space, which is not presumably tied to a territory, she talks to her transnational interlocutors who were also involved in the Gezi protests to understand the logic of tactics that they generate to cope with the nationalist and Islamist strategies of the state.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ayhan Kaya is Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University. He is specialised on European identities, Euro-Turks in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Circassian diaspora in Turkey, the construction and articulation of modern transnational identities, refugee studies in Turkey, conventional and nonconventional forms of political participation in Turkey, and the rise of populist movements in the EU. Kaya is recently working on his manuscript on the populist political style in Europe. Some of his latest books are Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey (London: Palgrave, 2013); Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization (London: Palgrave, 2009).

Notes

1. For further debate on such parochial, authoritarian and Islamist tendencies see Özel (2014), Özbudun (2014), and Kaya (2013).

2. For an detailed review of the creativity and humour in Gezi Park Protests see Yalçıntaş (2015). For another detailed analysis of the potlach economy experienced at the Gezi Park see the anthropological review of Turan (2014).

3. I would like to introduce the trialectics of Edward Soja (1996) here in order for us to understand the significance of Taksim as a historically and politically loaded space leading to the emergence of massive social movement impacting the rest of the country as well as the diaspora. Trialectics is a critic of the conventional form of dialectical thought, which simply assumes that historicality is created by sociality, or in other words, societies construct history. Trialectics, on the other hand, proposes that historicality is crated by societies in a particular space. Hence, historicality, sociality and spatiality are the three axis which we need to consider in understanding social, economic, political, cultural and legal phenomena.

4. For a detailed account of the pluralism of the Gezi Park Protests see Örs and Turan (2015).

5. The term “reassembling the social” is being used in the text in a similar way to the one depicted by Bruno Latour (2005).

6. For more information on this issue see “Turkish Deputy PM expresses “hope” to see Hagia Sophia as mosque”, Hürriyet Daily News (16 November 2013), http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-deputy-pm-expresses-hope-to-see-hagia-sophia-as-mosque.aspx?PageID=238&NID=57998&NewsCatID=338 accessed on 2 March 2016.