Happenings in Paris!
As I mentioned in my article on Saturday, the semantic content indicated by the words uttered by Alexandre Adler in response to my question was not unknown. Maybe, for the first time, the essence of our modernization adventure has been expressed so clearly as not to require any comment. It was all clear:
Concerning the EU process, it does not seem as if Europe will admit Turkey together with its Islamic identity. "The meeting of the civilizations" is also in vain; it is merely a nice rhetoric. Europe does not accept the existence of any other civilization apart from its own.
The Muslim world will be modernized with authoritarian policies, this is a basic issue related to the vital interests of the West. However, there will be no models other than the authoritarian modernization policies that have been implemented for 150 years. In other words, the "Non-Western modernities" Nilufer Gole has been working on for years do not have any equivalence in literature. The state imposing modernization serves as the West's filter, this is what Europe wants. And this makes democratization, the people's free self-expression, the processes of being effective in the decision mechanisms and the demands of the centrifugal forces, impossible; because the official political filter essentially includes authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian elements, by means of some tricky amendments. In short, the EU process does not promise democracy for Turkey.
"A big struggle is going on in Turkey." I take close interest in this as a Frenchman and a European. The establishment of the republic in Turkey is important for us. Therefore, the struggle in Turkey is also our struggle," Jean François Bayart, an influential French political scientist said.
Some intellectuals from Turkey were offended and astonished by these words. As someone who has reflected upon modernity and the Turkish modernization project for years, I am one of those who know quite well that there is no other way of modernization apart from the modernization concept the West itself has suggested. Besides, our struggle with a probelm of this or that depth is not on the agenda of Europeans. Especially the French, whatever you talk with them, they either bring the conversation down to their own problem or do not listen to you at all. They have such an egocentric viewpoint that they expect the world to turn around them. They enthusiastically applaud those who deliver their lectures in French: "That's it! Your very successful use of French made us happy!" They are rowing against the current, that is to say, against the fluidity of globalization, good or bad. Frankly, they cannot accept an Indian purchasing a French-originated iron-steel factory or a Chinese purchasing a perfume company. This is an insulting situation "damaging national identity," according to them.
As if France considers freedom only possible for itself and only deems itself worthy of it. Freedom is not a human state everyone can reach and experience, it belongs only to the West and France. The same is valid for democracy, too.
France scared of the EU's expansion, of the impacts of globalization towards the nation-state and national institutions, structures and especially of Turkey's probable membership, hides itself in its shell and returns to the oldest cultural sources of the republic and secularism, whose boundary with laicity is nothing but a very thin line. This is a classic modernization project that cannot surmount the frame of the Third Republic it also suggested to us and makes references to the last century, in a sense.
In general, its intellectuals are not aware of anything: The West has always explained Islam and the Muslim world so far. This is no longer useful as the crisis taking place in the heart of the modern world has made many intellectuals in the Muslim world turn towards their own authentic sources as a result of an interaction. The West in no way understands that it can no longer explain and define us and the world with the intellectual material it possesses, even if it comes close to understanding it, it cannot admit it.
Western intellectuals still approve of talking to intellectuals like Orhan Pamuk, who employ a style that insults the country's deficiencies at any given opportunity and show them as the right address or to "apologizing intellectuals acting like thought officials being inspected." If you say something different, especially, if you criticize them, if you say you are bored with their headmaster mission, even through allusion, they prefer running away from that platform immediately. Except Oliver Abel.
ZAMAN
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