Gezi

After 18 days of pitched battles between the police and youthful protestors, the Turkish authorities managed to clear Gezi Park in downtown Istanbul over the weekend. That might not be the end of this perplexing movement, however, as Turkey’s trade unions called for a general strike this week.

The protests began, rather innocuously, on May 31. Young professionals began picketing at Gezi Park, protesting government’s arbitrary decision to close down the last green space in sprawling Istanbul. In its place, government decided to build a mall resembling a famed Ottoman barracks. This would have, as we shall see, great political repercussions.

Gezi Park is adjacent Istanbul’s historic Taksim Square, site of some of the most important events in the emergence of the Turkish nation. It is comparable to that square in central Cairo where the Arab Spring was born.

At the onset, the protests were described as being of an environmental nature. Residents of Istanbul love Gezi Park and resent that its redevelopment was undertaken without public consultation.

Soon enough, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip became impatient with the demonstrators who camped out at Gezi Park. He called them “thugs” and “terrorists,” and ordered the police to clear them out. The police tried to do so with characteristic brutality.

The brutal attempt to evict the demonstrators scandalized the people of Istanbul. The day after the first police attempt to clear the park saw tens of thousands of mostly youthful demonstrators filling up Taksim Square, protecting the main protest encampment at Gezi.

Barricades were erected. Protestors settled in for a long siege, installing a first aid station as well as a public library at Gezi. Every evening, young Turkish professionals streamed into Taksim to resist the police. Tear gas canisters and water cannons, firecrackers and fire bombs became a nightly event for over two weeks that the resistance held their ground.

The entire event grew beyond the matter of defending Gezi Park. The protests assumed a more political character, culminating in a demand for Erdogan to resign. Similar protests began breaking out at the capital, Ankara. For a while, it seemed the protests might cascade into a nationwide rising against the Islamist government Erdogan represented.

About a decade ago, a popular movement for greater democracy in Turkey put pressure on the military-controlled government to call for elections. Ironically, elections called produced a victory for the Islamist party instead of the liberals ­— a foreboding of what happened in Egypt after Mubarak was ousted. The first free Egyptian elections installed the Islamic Brotherhood and its leader Muhamad Morsi in power.

Since the military shattered Ottoman power and installed a secular government led by Ataturk in the twenties, Turkey has been consciously shaped as a modern polity. That made the country the least rigid Islamic society in the world. Generations of Turks, since revolution and nationhood, learned to be wary of Islamist influence. The separation between religious and secular authority was keenly observed. As a consequence, Turkish society is almost European in many respects. Women enjoy the same civil liberties as men and were not required to wear veils.

The election of Erdogan, however, made many Turks — especially the urban dwellers, women and the young — wary. They feared a restoration of Islamist power could stunt democratization or even push social norms back to the Ottoman period. The Erdogan government was closely observed, from the day it was installed, for any hint of authoritarianism or restrictiveness against liberal social practices.

To his credit, the Erdogan government managed Turkey in a fairly modern way. It nursed the development of a dynamic market economy, making Turkey today one of the most important nodes of growth.

Gezi Park was the first real reason for the cosmopolitan Turks to suspect creeping authoritarianism. The arbitrary decision to tear up public green space and build the semblance of Ottoman barracks in the place was a provocation for Turks most wary of the decline of democratic space. It is because of that deep-seated wariness of an Islamist political leadership that the population of Istanbul, almost spontaneously, spilled into Taksim Square to join the protests.

This was not just a demonstration conducted to defend a public park. It was the main arena where the struggle between alternative futures for Turkey would be fought. That is the source of the dynamic that drives the street protests.

Erdogan recognizes this. He knows that if he allows the protests to escalate, his political future will be in jeopardy. This can be the only reason for the surprisingly tough position he took against the Gezi Park activists.

Fortunately for Erdogan, the liberal activists in the city square possessed an ethos not entirely shared by the more conservative rural population. Understandably, Erdogan’s political base depends on the support of the more rural, more elderly and more traditionalist sections of Turkish society. He is now trying to fire up his own political base by bringing in forces from the countryside and holding his own political demonstrations.

Because the undercurrents are so deeply-rooted in variant cultural dispositions, the friction we saw in the streets of Istanbul will likely continue to play out. The forces of liberalization and modernity are not about to yield too easily to the social conservatism Erdogan represent. Sooner or later the contending forces, the variant views of the Turkish future, will have to be settled in a vital electoral exercise.

Many other societies share the same powerful clash of civilizational preferences, the same strong undercurrents of cultural differentiation that underpin Turkish politics. This is why so any other societies observe the unfolding of events in Istanbul with keen interest.