By Mustafa Gurbuz
Mobilizing Ideas
June 11, 2013
After two weeks of contentious politics, streets have started to return
to normal in Turkey. Although the activists did not leave Gezi Park yet,
current political atmosphere has already changed: massive
confrontational rallies now harbor traditional battle-grounds instead of
the sentiments that gave rise to the Occupy Gezi. The Occupy Gezi was
an expression of a mass frustration by a wide-range coalition against aggressive neo-liberal regime that has been symbolized in urban renewal projects and
PM Erdogan’s iron fist. The current organized rallies in the last two
days, however, push people to be polarized as pro-AKP or anti-AKP. This
is the new phase in contentious episodes, and arguably, a detrimental
blow to the spirit of the Occupy Gezi.
Western media was too hasty in describing the protests as a “secular awakening” and a crisis of democracy
in Turkey. Although late episodes of contention makes the traditional
battlegrounds solidified, the initial spirit of the Occupy Gezi was
unprecedented. Perhaps for the first time in modern Turkey, we have
witnessed a type of New Social movement protests, typically occurring in
post-industrial societies. No, it’s not Marx that grasps the spirit of
the Occupy Gezi, it’s Melucci. Key words to understand these protests
are dignity, self-realization, respect, resistance, and identity
politics. All these demands find their symbolism in youth culture,
according to Melucci. In fact, Occupy Gezi was largely organized by
college students, who were considered to be apolitical (and who remember
only Erdogan as their leader). The spokesperson of CARSI, a famous
soccer-fan group that leads the mass protests, expressed the
aforementioned feelings of youth resistance: “Life means resisting to
power-holders!” (“Yasamak Muktedire Karsi Direnmektir!”) (See a recent scholarly article on Carsi)
As social movement scholars well know, “relative deprivation” is a key
process not only for mass uprisings after economic downturns but also
mobilization of educated middle-class youngsters in post-industrial
cities (For a shrewd analysis, see Cagaptay’s OP-ED in NY Times).
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