The political language of Turkey

Western policy makers or analysts, and especially American ones, need to keep something in mind about Turkey which they often fail to see: The political language of this country is different from theirs. Here, emotions play a bigger role and political leaders hardly do the deliberation on “wording” that is a crucial matter in their own political culture. �

You can see this emotional and inflammatory rhetoric not just in the politics of Turkey, but also in the daily life of ordinary Turks. In Turkish films and soap operas, lovers very often yell at each other saying things like, “I hate you,” “You are disgusting,” or even “I want to kill you.” Next day, or even the next hour, the same couple shows up again in a Romeo and Juliet mode. The TV’s might be exaggerating things, you might think, but they are not. Marriages or premarital relationships in this country are often full of nasty words followed by love fests, and then nasty words again. I am sure it must be like that to a degree in most cultures, but here, it is pretty much over the top.

Oh, you hit me!
Even physical expressions of anger are more tolerated in Turkey more than in other, especially Western, cultures. When I was a kid, I would be surprised by a theme I repeatedly saw in American movies: In the midst of a heated discussion, a father would put a slap on the face of his disobedient teenage child. The child would be shocked, look at the angry father with a stunned face, and say, “oh, you hit me.” Then the kid would angrily run to his or her room, slam the door, and leave behind a regretting dad. But in Turkey, if you get a slap from your parents, you are not supposed to be surprised that much. “Oh, you made your father angry and he gave you some tough love,” your mother will tell you. The fact that his emotions led him to take excessive action is not criticized. The distance between feeling the anger, and putting it into words and acts, is not that big here.

Generalizations might be very misleading, I am aware, but my sense is that the same distance is a bit more emphasized in the Western culture, or at least in the one I know best, the American one.

Now let’s move on from this societal level to the political one. Here, we will see that it is much easy and conventional for Turkish political figures not mince words against some irritating person, group or country. Later he will easily be able to say, “Oh, I didn’t mean that, I was just angry.” Or, his audience will make the same interpretation readily and thus not think that he really means what he says. In fact, there is even a delicate term which we Turks have coined up to define that type of heated rhetoric: “The word which has surpassed its aim.”

There probably is also a big difference between Turkey and America in the level of institutionalization. When the U.S. president or secretary of state make remarks, there is almost always a team of people behind them who took great pains to make the right arguments and choose the right terms. The Turkish prime minister, on the other hand, can simply wake up, read something in the paper, feel annoyed about it, and then comment on it directly to the media without much calculation.

The recent remarks of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan in the face of the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza should be understood in this context. In fact, Mr. Erdoğan tried to balance some of seemingly pro-Hamas remarks by refusing the opposition’s calls to abandon relations with Israel and denouncing anti-Semitism. But it was not enough. Hence, President Abdullah Gül and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan also spoke on the same topic in order to create a balance and diffuse misunderstandings.

The emotion factor
Those who see a “fundamental shift” in Turkish foreign policy by looking at Mr. Erdoğan’s rhetoric are, thus, wrong. In fact the pre-Erdoğan period was not too different. When Israel killed nearly 60 Palestinians in Jenin in April 2002, the Turkish prime minister of the time, the secular and center-of-left Bülent Ecevit, had accused the Jewish state of “committing genocide.” The exaggerated rhetoric was not because that he had a personal bias against Israel, but such magnified words are used very freely in Turkey. Almost all camps label each other as “fascists,” and blame them for “high treason.” It is just not a very meticulous country in terms of its political language.

So, my advice to those foreign policy experts who sit down in Washington or other Western capitals and try to assess why the Turkish prime minister said something on this or that is to consider this whole context. And, as a reading material, let me suggest a very good piece that former American Consul General to Istanbul, David Arnett, wrote for the Turkish Policy Quarterly three years ago: “The Importance of Emotion in Turkish-American Relations.” If one does not get that emotion factor, one does not get Turkey at all.