Turkish-Kurdish Relations and the European Union: An Unprecedented Shift in the Kemalist Paradigm?

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.

—Eric Hoffer

The struggle for recognition within a wider political arena has become an essential ingredient for a state, or a group of people within a state, if they are to survive and avoid social and economic extinction. It is widely accepted that the possibility of Turkey's accession to the European Union not only could bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West but would bolster the ailing Turkish economy and create an opening for the EU to Asia.¹ In order to attain these aspirations, the Turkish state will have to fulfill the conditions stated in the Copenhagen criteria.² This would mean that the Kemalist state will have to finally address the eighty-year-old "question" that relates to the recognition of a unique Kurdish ethnic identity within Turkey.

Before one examines the issues surrounding the plight of the Kurds in the southeast with respect to Turkey and the EU, it is imperative to understand the peculiar yet unique polemics that exist between the Turkish state and the Kurdish battle for recognition and representation. In this paper we attempt to trace the relationship between the state and Turkish Kurds from 1923 to the present day, highlighting the practical as well as theoretical changes this relationship will have to confront in light of Turkey's possible accession to the EU.

History of the Kurdish Movement: Overview

The world's 25 million Kurds are often described as the biggest ethnic group without a state, and are certainly one of the longest standing in that circumstance. Since the Allies dropped their pledge of a Kurdish state, made after the First World War, the Kurds have been divided mainly among four inhospitable countries: Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq.³

Kurdish nationalism constitutes the biggest single political problem Turkey faces today. The Republic of Turkey was founded as the Turkish national state and was assumed to be nationally homogeneous. However, the truth is more complicated.

The republic was and remains religiously homogeneous. More than 99 percent of its inhabitants profess the Muslim faith, and the founding fathers of the republic equated Muslim with Turk. Ataturk, as Turkey's founder, sought to unite all the Muslims who had come as refugees when the Ottoman Empire began to contract at the end of the seventeenth century or when Russia began to expand south, but more consistently after the Bolshevik Revolution. His motto, "Happy is he/she who calls himself/herself a Turk," stressed choice and personal commitment over origin. But the accompanying injunction "Citizen, speak Turkish!" had a coercive ring. Nevertheless, none of the constitutive ethnic components of the Turkish citizenry presents a political or societal problem, with the exception of the Kurds.⁴ The Republic of Turkey has failed to satisfy any legitimate demands of its citizens of Kurdish ethnic heritage, who constitute between 20 and 25 percent of the overall population.⁵

The Kemalist state aimed to transform Turkey into a country that was 100 percent Turkish and considered any war waged toward this end as almost a holy war. It was also a state that saw itself as the vehicle of a mission—the civilizing mission of the Turkish nation—and it used this to justify its provision of education and civilization to other nations, by force if necessary. Therefore, the Kurds presented obstacles to both the objective of homogenizing the national territory and to the Turkish nation's civilizing mission.⁶ The fear of the loss of national unity was and still is a common characteristic among most politicians and army officials.⁷ During 1960 and 1961 while the soldiers were the absolute masters of Turkey, the only bank that had been created by the internal dynamism of the Kurdish regions, the Dogu Bank...