National Rhetorics in the Syrian Immigration Crisis: Victims, Frauds, and Floods
354
National Rhetorics in the Syrian Immigration Crisis: Victims, Frauds, and Floods
354Paperback(1)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611863284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Series: | Rhetoric & Public Affairs |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 354 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Immigration Rhetoric of Political Leaders in Turkey
FROM GUEST METAPHOR TO EMPHASIS ON NATIONAL INTEREST
Inan Özdemir Tastan and Hatice Çoban Kenes
The antigovernment protests that, after the Arab Spring, began in Syria turned into a civil war and caused a massive refugee crisis. One of the countries that has been affected most by the crisis is Turkey. Turkey has welcomed asylum seekers from Syria, its largest neighbor geographically, by adopting "an open-door policy," that is to say, without imposing any conditions on their entrance. It was initially predicted that one hundred thousand asylum seekers would be accepted and that they would be harbored for a while and return after the civil war ended. By 2016, however, three million Syrian refugees were living in Turkey for their fifth year under a "temporary protection regime" that recognized their status as refugees. As a result, millions of Syrians, initially labeled as "our guests" by the government, struggle to live in Turkey. While some of them are at provisional sheltering centers spread out over ten provinces, most of them are scattered in precarious conditions in cities close to the Syrian border.
The current refugee crisis is shaped by Turkey's history of immigration, the origin of the asylum seekers, their ethnic background, and the sheer numbers involved. This crisis has incited a major public debate, in fact, one of the most fundamental issues in political and public debates in Western democracies since the 1970s. Immigration generally, and the Syrian immigration crisis specifically, have become topics on which the political parties have had to take a stand in general elections for the first time in the history of Turkey. Immigration has occupied a central position in the campaign pledges of political parties, in policies related to the subject in election manifestos, and in the campaign rhetoric of political leaders.
As noted, early in the crisis, Syrian refugees were defined as "guests" by the government and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan upon their entry into the country. The definition also was substantially accepted by the public. However, President Erdogan opened a new dimension to the debate on July 3, 2016, by announcing his plan to confer citizenship on the refugees. The citizenship of Syrian refugees became the first item on the public agenda, from national and local media to social media users, arts communities, the business world and politicians. Thus, immigration and the granting of Turkish citizenship became a contested — and unavoidable — topic for Turkish political parties and their leaders.
After Erdogan's promise of citizenship, racist, discriminatory, and hateful rhetoric against Syrian refugees was circulated intensively. Several clashes occurred between Syrians and local people in various parts of the country. Actual attacks against Syrians became a pressing issue. While social media featured these attacks, discriminatory discourse also was circulated in the national media. For example, Turkey's third best-selling newspaper, Sözcü, criticized the promise of citizenship to Syrians with a headline, "Will You Confer Citizenship on Those?" The newspaper described Syrians in racist and discriminatory terms as "a bad lot, murderers, fanatics" and claimed that while the Turks pay taxes, join the army, and get killed, the Syrians live as "freeloaders." Social media users also criticized Erdogan and the promise of citizenship with tweets, using the hashtag #ÜlkemdeSuriyeliIstemiyorum(#IdontWantSyriansInMyCountry). This was the popular climate in which the rhetorical struggle of the political leaders over this issue took place.
Shaped by a humanitarian perspective and the guest-host metaphor, the immigration rhetoric of Erdogan and the AK Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi), which has been in power for fourteen years, caused a public uproar. This chapter focuses on the immigration rhetoric of Erdogan and the leaders of the AK Party. We also will discuss the immigration rhetoric of leaders of other political parties in Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi). In order to analyze the criticisms voiced against the ruling party led by Erdogan, we also focus on the speeches and statements of Erdogan and Ahmet Davutoglu, as well as Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, leader of the main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP); Devlet Bahçeli, leader of Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP); and People's Democratic Party (Halklarin Demokratik Partisi, HDP) cochairs Figen Yüksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas. The material consists of speeches of leaders at the parliament and in media.
Our theoretical focus is on understanding the key metaphors in recent Turkish political rhetoric related to the refugee crisis. As, for example, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have stressed, metaphors not only are stylistic ornaments but structure our most basic understandings of our experiences and shape our perceptions and actions even without our noticing it. Metaphor, "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another," is conceptual in the sense that human thought itself is metaphorical. For example, time, space, morality, emotions, and even life itself are grasped in terms of metaphors: time is money, life is empty, love is burning. Metaphors are crucial to political language. By hiding some aspects while highlighting others, they construct a certain kind of world and imply actions proper to it. For instance, there is a huge difference between immigrants as "threat" or as "workforce."
We will focus on the milestones of the refugee crisis that began in 2011 in Turkey. They include the very beginning of the crisis, that is, the speeches and statements made by leaders when Syrians started to come to Turkey in masses, the 2015 general election campaign, the process of signing a readmission agreement with the European Union (EU), and finally the period after the promise of citizenship was declared publicly. Before analyzing the leaders' immigration rhetoric, we will describe the basic structure of Turkey's government, then examine briefly Turkey's history in relation to immigration and immigration policy in order to understand the background of the issue, with a focus on the rupture caused by the admission of Syrian asylum-seekers to Turkey.
The Turkish Republic
Turkey is a republic that was founded on October 29, 1923, on the territory of the dispersed Ottoman Empire. On April 16, 2017, with a referendum on a constitutional amendment, Turkey's government system switched from parliamentary democracy to an executive presidency, a kind of "one man" regime, where the president retains ties to his or her political party, becomes the head of state and executive, and has sweeping powers from appointing ministers and choosing senior judges and bureaucrats to preparing the budget.
In the period covered by this study (2011–2016), Turkey was ruled by a parliamentary democracy based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Legislative power was held by the Grand National Assembly. The government consisted of a Council of Ministers formed by the prime minister, who was appointed by the president and is usually the leader of the party that received the most votes. There were 550 elected deputies in the parliament, with a 10 percent threshold for political parties to be in the parliament.
The 1982 constitution is still in force, though with many amendments. It was drafted by the National Security Council, which seized power after a military coup in 1980. With this coup, military forces took power and the National Security Council (NSC) governed the country for three years. In 1982, the new constitution, which had an oppressive perspective on democratic rights, was accepted by means of a referendum. The transition to the parliamentary system occurred with the 1983 general elections, won by Turgut Ozal's Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party). Ozal and his party ruled the country till 1991, a period in which neoliberal transformation of the economy was initiated under the conditions of a full-fledged suppression of leftist politics and labor organizations. The 1990s saw coalition governments and socioeconomic turmoil. After economic crises in 1994 and 1999, the Turkish economy was hit very hard by crisis in 2000–2001, which led to a fundamental change in the political landscape in the 2002 elections. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's newly established AK Party came to power in the 2002 general elections, in a political atmosphere fierce contest over all current political parties and economic policies. Erdogan and his party, as we mentioned, remain in power.
During 2003–2014, Erdogan ruled the country as the prime minister. With the constitutional amendment adopted in 2007, the president was directly elected by the people instead of being elected by the parliament. Following this critical reform, Erdogan became president by taking 51.79 percent of the votes in the August 10, 2014, election. Erdogan announced that his status was different from that of his predecessors because he had been elected directly by the people. He continued his engagement with his party informally, appointing a puppet government and prime minister in his administration. He reiterated his claim that Turkey should be governed by a presidential system and held a large number of rallies prior to the general elections of June 7, 2015, demanding a two-thirds majority of parliament (367 seats), which would be able to change the constitution. However, his efforts did not pan out, and for the first time in its history, the AK Party lost its majority in the parliament. As president, Erdogan gave the task of forming the government to AK Party leader Ahmet Davutoglu. When Davutoglu was unable to do so, Erdogan scheduled so-called reelections, held on November 1, 2015. The AK Party triumphed, receiving 49.5 percent of the votes. The social democratic CHP received 25.3 percent, the nationalist-conservative MHP 11.9 percent, and the HDP 10.8 percent.
The resulting distribution of the 550 seats in the Grand National Assembly was as follows: the AK Party with 317, the CHP with 132, the HDP with 59, and the MHP with 42. After these elections, Erdogan forced Davutoglu to resign both from the prime ministry and the AK Party leadership. He appointed the "low profile" Binali Yildirim, who was more closely aligned with Erdogan, as prime minister.
Immigration in Turkey: A Brief History
The immigration policy of Turkey can be divided into three historical periods. The first period, from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire until the 1990s, is characterized by the homogenization of the empire's multiethnic and multireligious structure — in other words, the "nationalization" of the population. The second is the "global" period shaped by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and globalization with its attendant economic and political problems. The third period, involving the recent crisis, is a "postnationalist and neo-Ottoman" period, with the Syrian immigrants at the center. This period constitutes a significant break in Turkey's immigration regime influenced by Ottomanism and Muslim conservatism.
As mentioned previously, the phenomenon that marked the first period is the nationalization of the population. From the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s up to the 1990s, immigration functioned as one of the main tools for nationalization and the purification of the population. Nationalization was carried out in two basic ways: first, the emigration of the non-Muslim population and, second, ensuring the immigration of Turk and Muslim populations who had been left out of modern Turkey's borders and were living in countries that were previously part of the Ottoman Empire.
Deportation, commutation, and forced migration were used against the non-Muslim population to push them out of the country. These practices include the 1915 Armenian deportation and the 1923 Lausanne Treaty between Greece and Turkey, which aimed at exchanging Muslims in Greece for the Christian Greek population in Turkey. The result of these practices was a decrease in the non- Muslim population of Turkey from 19 percent in 1914 to 3 percent in 1927 and, eventually, to 0.2 percent by the 1980s.
During this period the Turkish and Muslim population outside the country was allowed to enter Turkey as another means to increase and nationalize the population. Adopted on June 13, 1934, Resettlement Law No. 2510 was an important measure in the operation. It opened the way for persons "of the Turkish race or ones bound to the Turkish culture" to enter Turkey as immigrants or refugees; it also aimed to prevent the arrival of persons who did not fit this description. The law revealed how assimilation practices would be enforced against those citizens who, as stated in the law, were "of non-Turkish origin or ... not bound to the Turkish culture" (for example, a person whose mother tongue was not Turkish) by forcing them to live in specific regions. The remainder of the Armenians were removed from Central Anatolia and subjected to forced migration to Istanbul. This law remained in effect until 2006.
This resettlement law was an example of the immigrant policies of the newly established Republic of Turkey: international migration was accepted by the state only as a means to incorporate people of Turkish origin. Between 1923 and 1950 about 850,000 Muslims and Turks from countries including Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia were allowed to immigrate to Turkey. Turkey held on to the policy while acknowledging the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951. Turkey accepted the Convention with a proviso recognizing that the Convention related to "the events before 1951 and that occurred in Europe." A protocol added to the Convention in 1967 that was approved by Turkey in 1968 removed the earlier time limit but retained the geographical limitation to Europe. Thus, Turkey still recognizes as refugees only those who come from European countries. Turkey evaluates the applications made by people coming outside Europe together with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and channels to the UNHCR the applications of those to whom refugee status in a third country has been granted.
Turkey accepted around 400,000 Bulgarian Turk immigrants fleeing the oppressive and assimilationist policies of the Bulgarian government, in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 1989. These immigrants were later naturalized by an amendment to the Citizenship Law. As well as the admission of "cognates" (that is, those related by blood) left in the Balkans, various kinship groups in the Middle East and Asia have been accepted to the country by tailor-made laws in line with their demands — despite the geographical limitation discussed earlier. For example, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Turkish-Afghan immigrants were allowed to enter Turkey and settle in the various provinces of the country by Law No. 2641, enacted in 1982.
Altogether, from 1923 until 1997 more than 1.6 million immigrants were allowed to settle in Turkey. The vast majority of this population were cognates who were quickly naturalized. The breakup of Yugoslavia led to waves of migrations to Turkey: 20,000 people fled Bosnia between 1992 and 1998; 17,000 came from Kosovo in 1999, and 10,000 people from Macedonia in 2001.
The policy stressing ethnic, religious, and cultural bonds, recognizing cognates coming from both Europe and Central Asia as immigrants, and naturalizing them swiftly changed during the 1990s. The second period in Turkey's immigration history includes globalization as a major determining factor. Now the migration of non-Turkish and non-Muslim people to Turkey took place for the first time. In short, the migration of those considered "foreigners" may be mentioned for the first time. The main reasons for this are globalization and political and economic problems in Turkey's neighborhood in the Middle East, especially in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
While Turkey was trying to limit international immigration in this period to only "Turks," new arrangements had to be made due to immigration for reasons including work, transit, and suitcase trading (whereby goods for trade are carried in suitcases rather than shipped). Consequently, on November 30, 1994, Turkey issued the Refuge and Asylum Regulation regulating the procedures pertaining to asylum seekers and refugees. According to the regulation, individuals with refugee status coming from European countries are defined as "refugees," whereas individuals from countries outside Europe are labeled "asylum seekers." In accordance with these regulations, those coming from outside Europe are allowed to stay in Turkey until they have obtained refugee status from a third country, and they are expected to be granted permission to remain until they have resettled in a third country.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "National Rhetorics In The Syrian Immigration Crisis"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Michigan State University.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Immigration Rhetoric of Political Leaders in Turkey: From Guest Metaphor to Emphasis on National Interest Inan Özdemir Tastan Hatice Çoban Kenes 1
Serbian Migration Rhetoric: They Are Only Passing Through Ivana Cvetkovic Miller 43
Political Rhetoric in the Refugee Crisis in Greece Yiannis Karayiannis Anthoula Malkopoulou 69
Viktor Orbán's Anti-Brussels Rhetoric in Hungary: Barely Able to Keep Europe Christian? Heino Nyyssönen 97
Why Do Poles Oppose Immigrants? The Polish Political Elite's (Anti-)Immigration Rhetoric Jaroslaw Janczak 125
Flüchtlingsrepublik Deutschland: Divided Again Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager Elisa I. Hörhager 153
The United Kingdom's Rhetoric of Immigration Management: The Syrian Immigration Crisis and Brexit Clarke Rountree Kathleen Kirkland Ashlyn Edde 189
Finnish Discourses on Immigration, 2015-2016: Descendants of Ishmael, Welfare Surfers, and Economic Assets Jouni Tilli 217
Japan's Prime Minister Abe on the Syrian Refugee Crisis: A Discourse of Sending but Not Accepting Kaori Miyawaki 247
The United States' Immigration Rhetoric amid the Syrian Refugee Crisis: Presidents, Precedents, and Portents Ellen Gorsevski Clarke Rountree Andrée E. Reeves 269
Conclusion 305
Contributors 317
Index 323