In the previous two articles I explained how Turkish nationalism came to figure prominently in Turkish leftist rhetoric, and then I provided examples of the leftist content on TGB’s website –though it is not presented as such by the group (1).
It is now time to look at the TGB’s own stated ideals. The TGB are what in Turkey is known as ulusalcı, sometimes translated into English as “left-nationalists” or “patriotic leftists” (2). Their ideological explanations, the visual images and the entire symbolism pervading their website make all this abundantly clear, though it is in their Temel İlkeler Bildirgesi (Declaration of Fundamental Principles) that it becomes most explicit (3).
The TGB’s Declaration is a list of eight items that read more like leftist manifestoes, though by a confused leftist. The first states that the TGB does not recognize any sort of left-right political division in pursuit of “National Defense” (their caps). The second then claims that the Turkish Republic is under threat from those “cooperating with imperialists,” and that the Atatürkist Reforms, which should be “defended without question,” provide “answers for all of the country’s problems.” The third item in the list then reads:
The Turkish Youth Union is anti-imperialist. The TGB defends the youth’s continual struggle in Turkey and in the entire world against Western expansionism and colonialism. Specifically with regard to Turkey, opposing Turkish membership in the EU, and overthrowing the USA’s military, economic, cultural, and political hegemony over Turkey, should constitute the main axis of the struggle against imperialism (4).
Apparently they’ve been spending a lot of time at Trotsky’s Büyükada residence? (5) The rest of the Declaration goes on to explicate in more detail how the imperialists of the USA and the EU are trying to use “reactionary chauvinism” and “ethnic nationalism” to divide Turkish territory, and how the TGB defends a “populist” and “secular” Turkey against the forces of religious reaction, but also against “individualism” and “privatization.” Finally, the single longest item elaborates the TGB’s demand for free higher education, and warns against universities providing education in foreign languages as well as against the danger posed to “national culture” by “alcoholism and drug addiction.”
One might be forgiven for having Cold War flashbacks while reading the TGB’s “principles,” but the reality is that the vast majority of Turkish leftists (who by-and-large come from the Turkish social and political elites and upper-middle classes) embrace similar ideas. In fact, this sort of rhetoric can even be heard from the MPs of Turkey’s oldest political party, the CHP. Here’s a former CHP representative from Uşak, Dilek Akagün Yılmaz, speaking at an official CHP press conference on 14 November 2014 in reference to an apology for the Dersim (Tunceli) massacres of Kurdish villagers perpetrated by the Turkish state in 1938:
Those who need to apologize for these Dersim incidents are not the Republican People’s Party, but rather those who cooperated with the imperialists, those who were incited by the imperialists, the imperialists themselves and all those who collaborated with them. (6)
About six months after Ms Yılmaz made those comments, most of the CHP’s hard-line ulusalcı MPs, like Emine Ülker Tarhan, were purged as the party leadership moved its identity closer to the center in appreciation of Turkey’s political realities. Still, the CHP’s “leftist” identity has lasted for more than fifty years after it adopted the ortanın solu (center-left) concept in the mid-1960s.
Outside the West, where Marxism originated in a specific set of historical conditions, there have long circulated peculiar strains of leftism that have baffled, and continue to baffle, even academics used to the norms of universalist Marxist ideology. But just labeling them as “nationalist” obscures their ideological roots. Groups like the TGB take inspiration from a variety of figures, from Marx through Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to a more recent generation including both Che Guevara and Turkey’s own home-grown (and home-executed) romantic revolutionaries like Deniz Gezmiş. They would also protest vehemently if you were to suggest that they were milliyetçi (nationalist).
It is time to highlight an overall characteristic of Turkish politics. In terms of political stages of identities that Europeans or Americans are used to, there is not a single Turkish political party that can be understood as “leftist” in the Western sense. The reason is that all Turkish political parties embrace some sort of nationalism — and the embrace is a tight one. Only the terminology and the degree of fervor change from party to party.
Former Turkish Foreign Minister İsmail Cem identified this problem nearly twenty-five years ago. In an article he authored, titled SHP’de ‘Yeni Sol’un Türkiye Programı (The Program for Turkey of the ‘New Left’ within the SHP), Cem noted that genuinely leftist parties (of Marxist origins or associations?) did not have anything to do with nationalism:
Are we really pretending to believe that social democracy may be able to grow and spread by adhering to “statism,” a concept that no leftist, social democratic — or its equivalent, democratic socialist — party holds among its guiding principles? Or by adhering to “nationalism,” which is a customary and universal element and hallmark of not leftist but rightist parties? Our party is at a crossroads. We have to see properly, to think well, and make solid decisions. (7)
The way in which Cem posed his question is interesting, since he seemed to be suggesting that, though it would be an extremely difficult step to take, nationalism needed to be eliminated from the SHP’s (Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti: Social-Democratic Populist Party) program (8). Since then, however, not a single Turkish leftist party has attempted to overtly and definitively reject nationalism — no matter what the terminology or jargon — as an aspect of their party ideology. Atatürkism’s “Six Arrows” still maintain their hold on even the Turkish left and, consequently, Turkey continues to lack or to wait for a political party that can truly be labeled leftist. Meanwhile, groups like the TGB, which subscribe to an ideology composed of a mind-boggling assortment of unrelated concepts, somehow continue to exist.
NOTES
(1) https://serbestiyet.com/yazarlar/adam-mcconnel/how-to-define-the-turkish-youth-union-1-685490; https://serbestiyet.com/yazarlar/adam-mcconnel/how-to-define-the-turkish-youth-union-2-687224
(2) I think it is useful to note here that the same type of leftism exists also in Greece. Greek leftists, too, argue that a huge difference exists between their own type of nationalism and the nationalism of the Greek right-wing, often resorting to rhetoric about “culture” to provide it with substance. It is, nevertheless, an entirely superficial, indeed artificial, distinction.
(3) http://tgb.gen.tr/genel/temel-ilkeler-bildirgesi-17175
(4) Türkiye Gençlik Birliği, anti-emperyalisttir. TGB, Türkiye’de ve tüm dünyada Batı yayılmacılığına ve sömürgeciliğine karşı gençliğin sürekli mücadelesini savunur. Türkiye özelinde AB üyeliğine karşı çıkmak, ABD’nin Türkiye üstündeki askeri, ekonomik, kültürel ve siyasi hegemonyasını yıkmak, anti-emperyalist mücadele çizgisinin ana eksenini oluşturmalıdır.
(5) Trotsky spent some years in Istanbul in the early 1930s, living in a house that still stands on Büyükada, after he was exiled from the USSR, and before he went to Mexico. Büyükada (named after its original Greek name, Prinkipo) is the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul.
(6) Bu Dersim olayları nedeniyle özür dilemesi gereken Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi değil; emperyalizmle işbirliği yapan, emperyalizmin kışkırttığı, hem emperyalistler hem de onların işbirlikçileri….: http://beyazgazete.com/video/webtv/siyaset-3/chp-li-dilek-akagun-yilmaz-dan-sezgin-tanrikulu-ya-tepki-431861.html
(7) Deniz Baykal and İsmail Cem, Yeni Sol [The New Left], Cem Yayınevi, 1992, pp. 79-80: Hiçbir sol, sosyal demokrat ve eş anlamıyla demokratik sosyalist partinin ilkeleri arasında yer almayan “devletçilik” (étatism) ile; sol partilerin değil, sağcı partilerin geleneksel ve evrensel tanımı, ilkesi olan “milliyetçilik” (nationalism) ile, sosyal demokrasinin yetinebileceğini, serpileceğini mi sanmaktayız? Partimiz bir yol ağzında. Doğru görmek, iyi düşünmek, sağlam karar vermek zorundayız.
(8) The SHP (Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti) resulted from the merger of two earlier parties (Halkçı Parti, HP, and Sosyal Demokrasi Partisi, SODEP) founded after the 1980 military coup. It was intended to take the place of the CHP, and even featured the “Six Arrows” in its party emblem. After the CHP was re-founded in the early 1990s, the SHP merged with it in 1995.