WHAT IS HAPPENING IN TURKEY: WHY TURKEY MATTERS

I would like to ask the following question to provide a broader context to the readers who are new to politics in Turkey: Why all these should or would matter to non-Turkish citizens of the world? Well! The answer is very sophisticated and depends on where you live. For Americans, although Turkey is considered a strategic and important ally by the American government, for general public there has always been ‘news’ on America and ‘news’ on the rest of the world for which what is going on in individual countries doesn’t really matter. Life in other parts of the world is limited to what appears on CNN or Fox News for the most part or unless America sends troops to a foreign land. For Europeans, news on Turkey revolves around whether Turkey should be admitted to the European Union or not as a democratic and developing Muslim country.

For Middle Eastern and North African countries, where all except Israel, are considered mostly Muslim countries, Turkey is considered to play a critical role in the region and to be a role model for other Muslim nations, majority of which are still run by kings or dictators, to show that democracy and secularism can be successfully implemented in a mostly Muslim country. I believe what is happening in Turkey today will have short and long-term effects on the future of the region and will one day be defined as history-defining moments.

That being said, one should not also forget that we all live in a global, knowledge-based society where boundaries are getting vague and information and communication technologies are transforming the global society in which we live in and contributing to globalization where knowledge and ideas are accessible to all and movements proliferate around the world with an unprecedented speed like it did during the Arab Spring, The Occupy Wall Street Movement, The Gezi Resistance and the Anti-government protests, which took place in Brazil only a few weeks after Gezi… We now live in a world in which people come to consider themselves as global citizens and develop transnational identities and see the world and world politics from a different perspective.

As I was concluding my paragraph, I had a chance to check twitter and found out that a new potential ‘Occupy’ movement erupted in Germany and Turkish twitter users, who represent one of the highest percentage of Twitter usage on the Net with over 4 million users, have already launched hashtags labeled #StopGermanPoliceVoilence, #DirenHamburg (means resist Hamburg), and #OccupyHamburg.

With the advent of new technologies the role of social media gains importance at a fast pace and influences how people make decisions and interact with each other. In the past, we used to talk about news media as being the 4^th power and discuss its impact on world affairs. With the spread of social media in our lives today, we now consider social media as the 5^th power. ‘Twitter wars’ is now a newly coined term and is already shaping debates around the globe. The influence of social media did not bypass the Middle East in general and Turkey in particular, of course, and has already become an inherent force for democracy all around the world. I will touch on social media and Turkish political affairs later on.

Next: Understanding the Past to Understand the Present