Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

96 Philosophical Frames


I. Diyarbakir: An agonistic public space


The nonrecognition of Kurdish identity is a complex problem that has
persisted in a more or less subterfuge manner since the foundation of the
Turkish Republic in 1923. It turned into an acute crisis in 1984 when the
extralegal Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) raided two army outposts in
southeastern Turkey. The crisis immediately turned into a bloody war that
realigned most of Turkey’s social and political groups into two strictly
antagonistic camps. By the early 1990s, it was barely impossible to speak
from a “middle ground.” Those who defied the language of division were
persecuted on both sides. The civil war was constitutive of antagonistic
publics that positioned themselves with respect to an issue that took dif-
ferent names according to where one stood: terrorism/separatism or the
Kurdish problem/Eastern problem.
lthough this alignment ruled out deliberation or communica-A
tion between the camps, it nevertheless imposed a single event—that of
war—on what thereby became a nationwide public of spectators. Besides,
it made it impossible to ignore the fact that there was a problem, whatever
the name given to it. It was clear to everyone, even to the mainstream
media, that the PKK had wide grassroots support in the provinces popu-
lated by Kurds and that qualifying the situation as isolated acts of ter-
rorism or as the folie des grandeurs of a small number of radical Kurdish
leftists would simply not suffice. Although genuine discussion and
debate were totally lacking within the Turkish public, the reality of con-
flict simultaneously separated and connected the two publics. Not only
were Kurds and Turks both claiming rights to the same territory, but they
were also now part of the same space of existence. The situation corre-
sponded much to a paradox, elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe, according
to which hegemonic struggles construct a single space in the very process
of partitioning available discursive elements into two opposing fields.^16
Irrespective of what one may have to say about the desirability of nation-
wide political spaces, the case in hand demonstrates the degree to which
the constitution of single spaces hinges upon antagonistic division rather
than consensus and harmony.
n the Kurdish case, this paradox was accompanied by another: not-I
withstanding the intensification of the ideological content of discourses

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