Turkey’s Mission Impossible. Cengiz Çandar
as well), which broke what had been a taboo since the 1920s, would the trajectory of the events between Turkey and Kurds have been? If I had not known Talabani in 1973 in Beirut and despite the irreconcilable differences in our upbringing and ideological backgrounds, besides the generational difference, if I had not taken the unexpected pro-Özal position in the overwhelmingly hostile Turkish mainstream media in 1990, would I have been able to play the role I played? Supposedly, the principle of causality in historiography and the element of chance or coincidence cannot survive.
I tried to surmount the paradox—not to solve the problems—by bringing my anecdotal experience into Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. As I argued earlier, these experiences are my primary sources. I thought this was compatible with what the founder of modern source-based history, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), would demand. Ranke, in E. H. Carr’s description, is a “talisman for empirical historians” and a titan of historiography who left a powerful mark on history writing in the nineteenth century. For Ranke, the task of the historian was to study, research and then to show “how it really was”5 or as he phrased it in German, “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” He did not believe in the philosophy of history as Hegel did, or in general theories that cut across time and space. In his historiography, he used quotations from primary sources.
For me, my anecdotal contributions in the book were somewhat like taking refuge in Ranke’s gargantuan authority. I knew that Ranke’s dictum “wie es eigentlich gewesen” had attracted extensive criticism from the great historians of the twentieth century whom I also admired, notably E. H. Carr and Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the great French historian and leader of the Annales School in historiography. They both challenged Ranke. Carr opposed Ranke’s ideas of empiricism as outmoded, and underlined that historians did not merely report facts, they chose which facts they used. Facts and documents are essential to the historian, but they do not by themselves constitute history, according to Carr. The historian’s selection of the facts makes what history is. He argued brilliantly that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of Rubicon by millions of other people before or after Caesar interests nobody at all, and wrote, “The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy.”6
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the renowned Italian historian, philosopher, and political activist, carried that understanding to new horizons. For Croce, “All history is contemporary history, because history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present. . . . The main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording.”7
The element of subjectivity, therefore, is not only unavoidable for writing history, but is an inherent condition of it. Carr’s friend but at the same time his fierce critic, Sir Isaiah Berlin, influenced by the experience of the Holocaust and the totalitarian practices of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, in his famous essay “Historical Inevitability” brings up the argument that “human beings are unique by their capacity of moral choice” and accords “moral responsibility to the historian” in history writing. Thus, Berlin carried the element of subjectivity to further horizons: “There is always a subjective element in historical writing, for historians are individuals, people of their time, with views and assumptions about the world that they cannot eliminate from their writing and research, even if they can hope to restrain it.”8 This observation was entirely valid in the writing process of Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
Delving into the passionate debate among the great historians presiding over more than a hundred years to dig out the methodology for Turkey’s Mission Impossible has not only been an amusing and thought-provoking exercise but also a constructive one. The research taught me that until recently, alongside many from my generation in Turkey, I have been guided by a primitive understanding of Hegelian determinism and Marxian materialism in looking at history, tropes that have injected a linear directionality into our view of history. History was seen through the lens of an inevitable progress toward our ideologically preferred objectives. Of course, to neither Hegel nor Marx can be attributed the responsibility for this, but in writing Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, I consciously refrained from adopting historical determinism as the sole tool of my analysis. Instead, I wanted to make use of all the available tools in the rich arsenal of historiography, in an eclectic manner. If “how it was” and “what really happened” had precedence in Ranke’s historiography, it was “why” for Carr. In my ambitious project, I wanted to reconcile Ranke’s empiricism that empowered my anecdotal notes as primary sources with the relativism of historians like Carr, who construct history with the foundation of their selectively arranged and organized “facts.”
Perhaps I should add that I do not embrace the doctrine which stipulates that there are invisible laws that govern the flow of history. There, indeed, are dynamics to explain specific historical developments and of overall history itself—that is to say, generalizations—but they cannot be put forward as laws that govern it.
The belief in laws of history has more to do with the historians of the nineteenth century who tried to consider the discipline of history as a science, during a period when it was widely believed that nature was guided by laws beyond the control of human beings. Karl Marx contributed to this understanding by presenting his propositions as scientific socialism which in its turn influenced generations of people all over the world. The underdogs in many lands took refuge in the belief that the injustices they faced and the plight they lived through would come to an end with the inevitable triumph they would ultimately enjoy as the laws of history took effect. For me, as even the Law of Gravity established by Newton (1642–1727) lost its significance as “law” upon the emergence of the Theory of Relativity proposed by Einstein (1879–1955), and since we are living in Liquid Times in the Age of Uncertainty as Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) describes, I do not believe in governing laws and inevitability of history.
VII
Another major question with which I also had to grapple was the role of the individual: how, for instance, in terms of the subject matter of the book, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Öcalan occupied the places that they did, in both quantitative and qualitative senses. Besides the political controversy regarding those names that erects a formidable challenge in front of the historian or writer, the issue itself, above all, is a philosophical one: the role of the individual in history.
For one of the greatest writers of all time, Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910), individuals play an insignificant role in history. In a draft of the epilogue to his immortal War and Peace, he had stated, “Historical personages are the products of their time, emerging from the connection between contemporary and preceding events.”9 One can find a strong Marxist connotation in this statement; whereas the Oxford historian, one-time member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and of the Labour Party from 1926 until his death, A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90) asserted in his 1950 book From Napoleon to Stalin that “the history of modern Europe can be written in terms of three titans: Napoleon, Bismarck and Lenin.”10
The research period for Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds coincided with momentous developments that have been effective in changing the course of history, such as the regime change in Turkey that placed the country, ostensibly, under the one-man rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. So, in terms of historiography, I have felt closer to Taylor than to the great Tolstoy. For me writing the history of the last 150 years of Turkey in terms of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1842–1918), M. Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, three autocrats who each in their own right can accurately be described as a titan, would help us better understand that period of Turkish history in all its richness and vicissitudes. Turkey’s drift from an illiberal democracy to the one-man rule of Erdoğan affected the frame and the content of Turkey’s Mission Impossible because of its impact on the destiny of the Kurdish conflict. Just as Turkey’s most protracted Kurdish insurgency, initiated by the PKK, cannot be analyzed and narrated without specific reference to its founding leader, Abdullah