Author: Alex Doe

Turkey:  A Warning for Free Speech Critics

The JDP possesses a fundamentally hostile perspective towards freedom of speech, thought, and assembly, more so than any other European country.  Turkey does not easily compare to the cases Bleich examines in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries which value liberty as an axiom of society.  What certain countries regard as a provocation to violence, such as genocide denial in Germany, Turkey regards as the status quo in the case of the Armenian genocide.  For contrast, the French outlawed Armenian genocide denial in 2007, and the Swiss even tried and convicted a Turkish politician (Dogu Perincek) for his denial. In Turkey, acknowledgment of the genocide could fall under Article 301 of the Turkish constitution which criminalizes “insulting Turkishness.” Additionally, the reasons Bleich provides for preserving free speech in Europe and the US often constitute the same reasons Turkey chooses to eliminate free speech.

Much of the paranoia surrounding free speech limitation in Europe stems from the “slippery slope” argument.  The British Religious Hatred Act, pursued by the Labour Party in 2006, met exactly this challenge in Parliament (Bleich 2011, 25).  Tories feared the generality of an act which restricted hate speech as a blanket category. Answers to the question of who could define hate varied depending upon who gave the answer.  Thus, the UK added a clause which specified that the speech must be “likely” and “intended” to cause acts of racial hatred– a difficult standard to prove, and one which limited use of the act to a maximum of four times per year (Bleich 2011, 25).  The fear of government overreach in defining dangerous or hateful speech has reached its full potential in Turkey, where the government has taken sweeping actions to limit the speech of dissidents.

Since the Ergenekon investigation launched in 2007, Turkey has used flimsy and fabricated evidence of widespread coup conspiracies to crack down on speech (Eligur 2016, 158).  By 2010, 275 academics, politicians, and journalists had been arrested in the Ergenekon case, and the faux investigation only expanded from there (Jenkins 2009, 9). As a weapon against oppositional speech, the investigation targeted several parties from the PKK to the Marxist Revolutionary People’s Liberation party (Jenkins 2009, 9).  

In the Netherlands, the government used state power to dissolve a hateful party as recently as 1998, when it dissolved the Centre Party ‘86 for racism which was “incompatible with public order” (Blech 2011, 88).  Bleich speaks of this extreme as a rare but aggressive tactic, which often results in a “phoenix-like rise of the organization under a different name” (Bleich, 87). Turkey resolves the problem of a rebirth of state-dissolved organizations by cracking down on every aspect of society.  Consequently, the lack of free speech and organizational assembly protects the government’s ability to control opposition. Given the strength of its institutions, the idea of such an abuse of power occurring in the Netherlands seems preposterous. Regardless, Turkey provides a fair warning as to how the state can abuse the power to patrol speech and assembly.

Allies Domestically, Enemies in Foreign Affairs

The JDP’s rejection of liberal democracy and preference for authoritarianism already aligns with the goals of most Russian political intervention.  Turkey’s widening distance from the EU, in which President Erdogan has recently downplayed the importance membership, also reduces Russia’s need to interfere in the country’s politics. Despite their authoritarian similarities, Russia and Turkey have struggled to bridge the divide over the Syrian civil war.  Their support for opposing sides has prevented the countries from maintaining closer relations beyond trade.

In September of this year, Russia, Turkey, and Iran met in Tehran to discuss the imminent humanitarian disaster unfolding in Syria.  The Idlib province, home to approximately 3 million citizens and 1 million children, had become the final rebel stronghold in the country.  Turkey and the United States support the rebels, while Russia and Iran support the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The three states managed to craft a deal in which the Idlib province would contain a demilitarized zone for the citizens.  The rebels removed all heavy weaponry from the demilitarized zone. Their competing interests in Syria may continue to drive the countries apart, however, since the Syrian regime violated the agreement and shelled the demilitarized zone as recently as yesterday, killing a woman and a child.

The conflict in Syria stands in the way of an alliance otherwise well suited for both countries.  They share a democratic facade behind which their authoritarian leaders control the affairs of the country.  While Putin has held control in Russia since 1999, vacillating between Prime Minister and President, Erdogan only recently created competitive authoritarianism in Turkey.  The JDP’s referendum on April 16, 2017, encoded a number of constitutional changes into law which expanded the power of the executive. The changes abolished the Prime Minister position, granted the President the power to dissolve the entire Assembly at will, and contained several similarly authoritarian provisions (Sakurai 2018, 36).  With the rise of an illiberal European regime typically comes closer ties to Russia, as in Orban’s Hungary and Duda’s Poland. Whether the civil war continues to obstruct this development remains to be seen.

Works Cited:

Bleich, Erik. The Freedom to Be Racist?: How the United States and Europe Struggle to

Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Eligür, Banu. “Turkey’s Declining Democracy.” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 17 (2014):

151.

Jenkins, Gareth H. Between fact and fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon investigation. Central

Asia-Caucasus Institute, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, 2009.

Osseiran, Hashem. “Syrian Army Shells Demilitarised Zone in Idlib, Undermining

Russian-Turkish Deal .” The National. November 18, 2018. Accessed November 18,

2018. https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/syrian-army-shells-demilitarised-zone-in-idlib-undermining-russian-turkish-deal-1.792963.

Yukio Sakurai. 2018. “Turkey’s Possible Future Directions after the 2017 Referendum:

Autocracy or Democracy?” International Journal of Interdisciplinary Civic & Political

Studies 13 (1/2): 33–45. doi:10.18848/2327-0071/CGP/v13i01/33-45.

Due to its external position relative to the EU, the foreign policy of Turkey most closely follows that of the post-Brexit United Kingdom.  Since the decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, they have reached a negotiation standoff. The tension has manifested itself in the form of the political party UKIP, which led the campaign with a series of populist declarations and sentiments.  UKIP benefitted from the perception of an anti-UK bias within the EU, which persisted despite several concessions, such as the rebate on contributions to the EU budget (Zimmerman and Durs 2016, 251). Turkey and the UK both maintain close trade relationships with the EU, although both have struggled to rationalize and preserve it.

The UK and Turkey experienced slow withdrawals from their relations with the EU, culminating in singular acts of defiance which shook their respective relationships to the core.  The Turkish government slowly embraced authoritarianism beginning with the faux Ergenekon investigation in 2007 (Jenkins 2009, 9). Not long after, the ruling JDP party continued to slide away from democracy with state-influenced elections and voter intimidation, particularly in the snap elections of 2015.  Turkey’s smaller-scale acts of domestic rebellion preceded a decisive split in 2017, when President Erdogan eliminated hopes of joining the EU by destroying the parliamentary system in Turkey and replacing it with a presidential system without checks on his power.

The UK began with small-scale acts of rebellion as well, such as testing the EU’s tolerance for dissent with their opt-outs on banking unions and migration policy (Zimmerman and Durs, 251).  In 1992, they successfully rejected the replacement of the pound for the euro (Zimmerman and Durs, 251). These acts of rebellion culminated in the Brexit campaign of 2016, when rising anti-EU sentiment in rural areas handed a victory to the Leave campaign. Between Brexit and the referendum, the new challenge for the UK and Turkey is to negotiate for the survival of their economic relationships with the EU.

In both cases, the perception of unfair EU policies played a role in the decisions to separate from the EU.  According to The Brookings Institute, “anti-Western sentiment that has risen in Turkey” due to the “perception that the West is continually carrying out operations against Turkey” damaged popular opinion of the EU.  Similarly, the members of the Leave campaign accused the EU of attempting to impose a tax on all financial transactions (Sked, 261). Sked attributed the tax impropriety to the EU’s desire to “undermine the success of the city of London” (Sked, 261).  Turkey and the UK confronted the perception of bias with rebelliousness, which amplified over time into full-scale defiance of EU membership and values.

Institutional Perspective:

As the UK has attempted to negotiate with the European Council regarding the terms of its exit, it has encountered a number of internal and external problems.  The government of Theresa May, perhaps as a result of its diminished strength following the snap elections of 2017, has failed to reach a compromise. Segments of the far right and far left within the UK claim to desire a hard Brexit.  The prospect of no-deal by March 2019 has provoked the UK to begin stockpiling food and supplies. The possibility of no-deal warrants their concern, considering Ottaviano et al. discovered that Brexit would cause anywhere from a 1 to 3% drop in GDP as a minimum, reason enough for 84% of the business community to support UK membership in the EU (Zimmerman and Durs 2016, 257).

For comparison, Turkey regards the EU as an antagonistic but necessary partner for economic relations.  Both Ankara and Brussels have struggled to sustain the pretense of membership negotiations, but according to Al Jazeera, the EU foreign ministers have declared the negotiations “a standstill.”  The European Commission has met with Ankara in Brussels to discuss the terms of their trading relationship. However, the two sides failed to reach an accord with regards to the state of membership in Turkey’s future.  

Turkey stands to lose a large proportion of trade valuation if relations with the EU further plummet; the EU accounted for 36.4% of Turkey’s imports and 47% of its exports in 2017, according to The Independent.  Earlier this month, the European Parliament canceled an earmarked payment of 70 million euros in pre-accession funds to Turkey, due to a scathing report from the European Commission. With such strong economic ties, the slide towards authoritarianism has not deterred Turkey’s desire to remain economically close to the EU, despite charging it with acts against the JDP regime. The UK and Turkey have difficult EU relations in common, as both rely upon them economically, yet carry disdain for the perceived slights against their sovereignty. The question remains: Can the UK negotiate a decent trade relationship with the EU in spite of its internal animosities?  Similarly, can Turkey uphold its trade relationships in the face of increasing political divide between the ideological expectations of the EU and its ruling JDP party?