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TRANSCRIPT
The Sèvres Syndrome and the Roots of Middle Eastern Paranoia
Dr. Fran Hassencahl Department of Communica6on and Theatre Arts , Old Dominion University, USA 23529
Turkey-‐ Note bridge loca6on between Asia and Europe
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Paranoia about the West • Pamuk’s characters savor the çörek and the milk puddings of their childhoods and are curious and fearful about what the new Turkey under the influence of the West might become.
• Osman in The New Life encounters a peddler who tells him that Turkey has suffered a great defeat. “The West has swallowed us up, trampled upon us in passing. They have invaded us down to our soup, our candy, our underpants; they have finished us off. But someday, someday perhaps a thousand years from now, we will avenge ourselves; we will bring an end to this conspiracy by taking them out of our soup, our chewing gum, our souls.” [Pamuk 1997, 290].
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Paranoia
• Hofstadter argues in The Paranoid Style in American Poli=cs, that an enBre society or culture can feel powerless or that they are at the mercy of forces such as postwar technological and social changes that they cannot comprehend or understand [1996].
• Turkey fears the manipula6on of the west • Suspects like the peddler that the mo6ves of Europe and the United States are to divide and weaken Turkey
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Roots of Paranoia
• Stems from a loss of locus of control and power.
• Control is no longer internal, but external. • Fear that that the external power is out to get us and cannot be trusted.
• Becomes a contest between “Us” and “Them”/ “Other”.
• Gives rise to conspiracy theories.
Rise of Paranoia
• Paranoia is not without its links to reality, but it oaen serves either to freeze individuals individually or collec6vely as a na6on state into the perceived glories of the past or to flail wildly without direc6on toward the future.
• Forgecng is not usually an op6on. • Blame is assigned. • Social Construc6on of Reality.
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Paranoid behavior
• Fear of loss of territorial integrity. Borders. • Are we East or West? We straddle con6nents. • Embrace of modernity, without commitment to human rights and democracy.
• Modernity is more than replacing the fez with the European bowler.
A Case of Paranoia
Turkey and the EU
• Wai6ng to be chosen. • Has been knocking at the door since 1987. • Turkey, as a member of NATO and with a more advanced economy than the recent entrants of Bulgaria and Rumania now feels snubbed by the EU.
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Turkey’s Dreams of Acceptance by the West by Gürel
Now that we have lost our empire, will we also lose our souls?
• Emerging at the end of the thirteenth century, the Ohomans seemed unstoppable. Under the leadership of Sultan Süleyman I, Turkish forces beat back the Europeans on the plains of Mohacs near Budapest in August of 1526 and “sealed the posi6on of Turkey as a predominant power in the heart of Europe for the next two centuries”.
• By 1914 the Turks joined forces with the Germans and Austrians, and the Ohoman Empire was in a state of advanced collapse.
• By 1918 the Allies called for dismemberment: the Sick Man of Europe was finally upon his deathbed.
A Never Ra6fied Treaty
• The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on August 10, 1920 was “a death sentence served on the Ohoman Empire”.
• The treaty planned for an independent Armenian republic in the east, an autonomous Kurdish region in the Southeast. Italy, France, and Greece would divide and rule the rest of the country.
• The treaty demilitarized and placed the Straits of Bosporus and Constan6nople under interna6onal control. Britain would control the European side and France the Asian side. The Greeks received Western Thrace.
The ghost of Sѐrves
The Power of the Word
• “Why is it that this piece of paper, which lost its validity the moment it was signed and has never been ra6fied or enforced but has only gathered dust on shelves, is always being talked about in Turkey and never comes off the agenda?” Türkman 2001
Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 • Supersedes Serves. • The Western powers planned to take a state that had spanned three con6nents and limit it to the rural central Anatolia.
• While Atatϋrk is crea6ng the present day Turkey in a war for independence, England and France argue over influence and money.
• England wants control over the Straits of Bosporus and Istanbul.
• France wants repara6ons and repayment of bond money that had financed the Ohoman Public Debt.
Iden6ty –Sense of Loss of the Past
• “ ‘Iden6ty’ is a simultaneous struggle against dissolu6on and fragmenta6on; an inten6on to devour and at the same 6me a stout refusal to be eaten…” Zygmunt Bauman in Iden=ty 2004.
• Pamuk 2004 upon seeing the death of culture and architecture in Istanbul. “Nothing western, or local came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted to mostly the erasure of the past.”
Sense of Loss or Hüzun
• The Hoja and the Vene6an prisoner in Pamuk’s novel, The White Castle, discover that there are no grand narra6ves, no hidden secrets or supernatural voices speaking.
• We live in the modern world as Lyotard posits and experience the bankruptcy of the narra6ve.
Fine in The New Life says, they have “gone crazy on Coca-‐Cola.” Omar Al Abdallat The Media
Iden6ty wrapped up in Atatϋrk’s denial of existence of minori6es. Menekse
Cam -‐ Integra=on/Assimila=on
Who is a Turk? Halit Kurtulmus Aytoslu -‐Turkish Rhapsody
Iden6ty Issues • EU concerns about minority rights. • The Kurdish ques6on is divided within the general popula6on and within the Kurds themselves as to whether they want a separate state or whether they want equal ci6zenship rights and jus6fied iden6ty claims (bilingualism, etc.).
• Complicated by an armed rebellion against the state by the PKK ( Kurdistan Workers’ Party), internal struggles among the Kurds, the war in Iraq and Syrian meddling.
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Mike Flugennock-‐Map of Kurdistan Revised
Na6onalism rears its ugly head
• Turkey and the EU have differing concepts of na6onalism.
• Turkey views na6onalism as having saved Turkey from the dismemberment of the Treaty of Serves.
• Europeans see na6onalism as a cause of WW I and II.
• EU values human rights, democracy and protec6on of minority rights.
• Turkey has not resolved minority rights issue.
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Turkey’s Future? by Gürel