Revisiting society vis-à-vis politics

Erkan Toğuşlu*

The political goals of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for society over the last two years have emerged to be steps that seek to destroy the distinction between the political and non-political (civil) spheres.

Its eagerness to respond to every move against its policies by referring to the ballot box, to indicate that the state reigns supreme in the sphere of politics and to note that it is the party that does politics is an illusion that Carl Schmitt -- a German jurist and political theorist -- also underlines. Schmitt notes that modern politics does not accept the distinction between the political and non-political in terms of the state. It is a theoretical misperception to take the state as a reference for this distinction. A theory suggesting that politics can be restricted to a certain area is far from acceptable, because the political wants to maintain control over the economic, cultural and religious and make a determinative decision on everything under its control. Schmitt argues that the political is associated with the state, so the state looks like a political object.

When those things belonging to the state are viewed as political, educational, cultural, religious and economic, these are referred to as areas of neutrality. However, in the modern state, these spheres are no longer neutral and are used as tools of decision-making and domination over civil structures. Modern politics goes beyond matters that are relevant to the government and the state to encompass all areas of life. It is a political strategy of the prime minister to view the ballot box as the source of legitimacy; it is the card in his hand to avoid corruption charges. However, the prime minister does not restrict politics to the ballot box. On the contrary, he takes politics beyond elections and the domain of the state; he brings politics into every field, making communities, businessmen, lawyers and even the media part of the notion of politics, and while doing this he relies on a discriminatory and alienating discourse.

In this way, politics penetrates all areas of life, and even philanthropic activities are seen as an extension of the political agenda. The distinction between friends and foes is blurred by the discourse the government uses, and fault lines are created by transforming the debate on corruption into bitter language in the social sphere. Daily life is converted into a sphere of struggle which is supposed to be designed by politics; however, daily life tends inherently to remain outside political issues. The prime minister, on the other hand, exposes this sphere to political messages and discourse every day. With this bitter language, everybody is accused of something, including serving as the tools of external forces or being assassins and traitors.

Recent developments, depicted as a power struggle or clash between the AK Party and the Hizmet movement, are a reflection of the civilian and critical forces fighting against the dominant discourse of politics in Turkey. Civilian mechanisms that are able to remain equally distant from various political orientations and are independent of politics have emerged out of many struggles; these mechanisms were generated by the intertwined nature of old-fashioned politics, the non-political sphere and their inability to position themselves as independent spheres. Society has created domains of fundamental rights and freedoms over the public identity offered by Jürgen Habermas. The political model that shapes society as depicted by Schmitt and promoted by the AK Party is moving towards an understanding that seeks to destroy non-political spheres. The sphere in which civilian entities and groups might reposition themselves and express their views and agendas has already been engulfed by politics.

Exam preparatory schools, which could be referred to as a sphere of civilian movement, are examples of this engulfment by politics. The Hizmet movement was trying to defend itself in the sphere of education, whereas the government attempted to drag the movement into the sphere of politics by politicizing an issue of private entrepreneurship, the prep schools, by relying on political language. Even though the discourse of the movement remains civilian, it is hard to preserve its civilian identity in a politicized sphere. For this reason, the debate over prep schools has become a sphere of politics that has invaded the privacy of daily life. Those who accuse the movement of acting as a political actor ignore the fact that those spheres that can be defined as civilian are being invaded by the government. In modern political philosophy, political-civil society relations are based on complementary and contradictory approaches.

When, as a determinative power, politics seeks to reconstruct the civilian sphere as well, it causes chaos and clashes in this domain. Any movement taking politics to account for corruption charges is invited into the political domain to question its legitimacy, because this move generates a rival with whom a political struggle is possible. It is not possible to struggle against a structure or entity that is not in the political domain; therefore, civil society is supposed to take action via political discourse if it wants to raise a demand.

As civilian structures and entities as well as religious communities are forced to move into the political domain, society will become an integrated part of the state under the leadership of the political sphere. When civilian entities avoiding this process of integration find themselves at the heart of the political domain, attributing the whole problem to these entities will turn into an attempt to exonerate politics. It is likely that the current corrupt politics will try to take everything that is relevant to daily life, including soccer, cinema, education and culture, into its sphere. What we are currently witnessing in Turkey right now is a lack of political restraint in every field of society. I am not sure if it is possible to remain untouched by the corruption through an apolitical stance, but the civil sphere is being threatened. I am not just saying that it is hard to remain apolitical, but I am also arguing that the political is destroying the apolitical.

Quite interestingly, Schmitt underlines that the apolitical cannot exist and that it is naïve to describe what is not relevant to the state as non-political. The destination of the civil sphere is what politics will determine. For this reason, raising demands without forming a party is perceived as a threat. Those who argue about the politicization of the Hizmet movement are in a state of misperception. It should be noted that they conclude that only what is irrelevant to the state can be regarded as civilian; however, the politics which defines itself as the state has left no civil sphere outside the state. What should be addressed first is reacquiring this civilian sphere; otherwise, we will keep complaining about entities that are allegedly trying to seize control from within the state. Arguing that all these problems can be resolved by a political approach and discourse will lead to the engulfment of all fields by the state. The greatest problem with the AK Party's politics is its efforts to convey its own political notions onto all fields and to imprison its audience in the binary of friends or foes.

*Erkan Toğuşlu is an instructor at the University of Leuven and works with the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre in Belgium.

Published on Sunday's Zaman, 09 March 2014, Sunday