To His Excellency Abdullah Gül

President of the Republic of Turkey

T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Genel Sekreterliği

06689 Çankaya

Ankara, Turkey

July 1, 2013

Your Excellency,

We write to you to express our grave concern regarding the developments in Turkey in connection with the popular protests that began with the protection of trees in Gezi Park in Taksim. As a result of unexpectedly harsh police repression, these protests soon grew to encompass widespread grievances about government intrusion into different forms and values of life and to express the democratic demands of the masses. These demands include greater transparency and popular participation in processes of decision-making about urban restructuring plans and reforms, better accountability of political leaders and bureaucrats, the protection of fundamental rights, and the speedy and effective public prosecution of members of the security forces, whose use of excessive and targeted force on peaceful protestors has scandalized the global public.

As current faculty of the New School for Social Research, which was founded as a home for scholars who became refugees of Nazi rule in Europe and who were known to the world as the “University in Exile,” we are proud to maintain a sincere and ongoing commitment to fostering democracy around the world, the freedom of speech and protest, and the free exchange of ideas. We see this commitment as the constituent element of our history and identity as a research institution that cultivates the highest standards of scholarship as well as the ethos of public engagement and active citizenship.

In this light, we are deeply concerned about the news from Turkey regarding the violent suppression of protestors, the arbitrary detention of individuals on grounds such as participation in peaceful demonstrations, use of social media, provision of volunteer medical care to the wounded protestors, or exercise of legal representation or counsel, and the preemptive labeling of peaceful protestors as “terrorists” by members of the government. We consider the wave of arbitrary detentions, some of which remain incommunicado, as a serious violation of the constitutional right of citizens in a democratic country to express their grievances and opinions in a peaceful way. The real test of a democracy is not only how it builds consensus among a plurality of values, different opinions, and interests, but also, and more importantly, how it treats dissent.

As faculty of the New School, we condemn police brutality and ask that those responsible for giving the orders as well as those executing the orders for the use of excessive force be immediately brought to justice. We denounce in the strongest possible terms the making of threats and intimidations toward individuals who exercise or plan to exercise their right of civil disobedience and toward those who shelter protestors from pressured water, tear gas, and rubber bullets. We ask for an immediate end to the detention of individuals who have done nothing other than participate in peaceful demonstrations. We call upon the government to cease its polarizing and demonizing rhetoric and its resort to measures reminiscent of a “state of emergency” in which citizens are treated like enemies. We encourage the adoption of a conciliatory public discourse as well as the active promotion of measures that enhance democracy, both through the decrease of the 10 per cent national electoral threshold and the creation of new, local channels for direct participation.

We express our deepest condolences for the four citizens of Turkey who have lost their lives in the recent events and our sympathies for those who have lost their eyes, suffer broken limbs, and endure other serious injuries. We are saddened by the thousands of people who have reported human rights abuses and physical injuries, and we are worried about those who face legal persecution on the seriously dubitable charges of terrorism and organized crime. We trust that Turkey will emerge a better and more democratic country from this experience but see that such an outcome will be possible only if the current situation is considered to be an opportunity to affirm fundamental rights and liberties, the legitimacy of peaceful disagreement and organized dissent, and the illegitimacy of the deployment of arbitrary violence, detention, and intimidation tactics by the state upon its own people. We appeal to your office to support our call.

Best regards,

Faculty of the New School for Social Research

New York City, NY, USA

Signatures:

Elaine Abelson

Zed Adams

Andrew Arato

Cinzia Arruzza

Banu Bargu

Tarak Barkawi

Jay M. Bernstein

Richard J. Bernstein

Omri Boehm

Chiara Bottici

Christopher Christian

Alice Crary

Simon Critchley

Stefania deKenessey

Oz Frankel

Nancy Fraser

Jeffrey Goldfarb

Orit Halpern

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Bill Hirst

Andreas Kalyvas

Paul Kottman

Benjamin Lee

Arien Mack

Elzbieta Matynia

Inessa Medzhibovskaya

William Milberg

Joan Miller

Dmitri Nikulin

Julia Ott

Timothy Pachirat

Ross Poole

Christian R. Proaño

Hugh Raffles

Janet Roitman

Lisa Rubin

Willi Semmler

Anwar Shaikh

Ann-Louise Shapiro

Rachel Sherman

Ann L. Stoler

Jenifer Tally

Miriam Ticktin

Kumaraswamy Velupillai

Ken Wark

Eli Zaretsky

Next week I am off to the New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. The Institute opens today, but I will be arriving a few days late. As I review the events of this week at Deliberately Considered, I am anticipating my work at the Institute, which will be reflected in upcoming posts. The last two posts, on Iran and on American identity, in fact, were informed by Democracy and Diversity experience.

In the most mundane way, the Institute is like many other international summer schools. Students from many different countries, this year Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Italy, Poland, and the USA, among others, come together to study a set of problems from a number of different academic perspectives. As usual, in my judgment, the topics are particularly interesting, this year, each addressing the theme of the year The World in Crisis: “Gender in Crisis? Strengths and Weaknesses in the Strategy of Emergency” (Prof. Ann Snitow), “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” (Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb and Prof. Daniel Dayan), “Romancing Violence: Theories and Practices of Political Violence” (Prof. Elzbieta Matynia), and “‘We the People’: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Belonging” (Prof. Sharika Thiranagama).  Still there are many summer schools that offer interesting programs with talented students such as we have. Yet, there is something special about this Institute that makes it different than most summer programs, linked to its history.

In terms of my student’s observations and reflection on Iran this week, our institute is in a sense, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, a not so lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition. He observed how freedom was experienced in the days before and after the 2009 elections in his country, and noted how even in the face of extreme repression, the ability of independent people to speak and act in each other’s presence is still consequential, apparently preventing the execution of Habibollah Latifi. But the real significance of the free politics, before the elections of 2009 and through the Facebook mediated protest against Latifi’s execution, is not so much determined by the results, as important as those are, the failure of the elections, the small victory of the prevented execution.  The very act of people with common principles meeting each other, speaking freely to each other and developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. Arendt’s definition of free public action, is where the real significance is, and it has lasting results. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is a case in point.

The Institute has a heroic past, based in the resistance to Polish Totalitarianism and linked with the New School’s University in Exile, two instances of free creative public action. The University in Exile was established by Alvin Johnson, President of the New School and one of the co editors of the first Encyclopedia of Social Science. In 1933, he worked to establish a special institution of higher education, helping to rescue social science scholars at risk in Nazi Europe, leading to a distinctive academic program that joined European and American social science and philosophy in a creative dialogue.

In 1984, during a special ceremony marking the 50^th anniversary of the University in Exile (formally founded in 1934), the New School granted Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident and historian, an honorary doctorate, along with other human rights activists from around the world. He was in jail at the time of the ceremony. Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning poet, accepted the degree for Michnik, reading an excerpt from his famous letter to General Kiszczak, in which Michnik in no uncertain terms denounces the oppressive ruling order and the logic of its Minister of the Interior. A few months later Michnik was released from prison and I went with the President of the New School, Jonathan Fanton, to present Michnik his degree. I spent time with Michnik the week following the official ceremony. We discussed working together to establish a semi-clandestine international seminar on totalitarianism and democracy. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was the first work that was discussed together in Budapest, Warsaw and New York. Maintaining such an activity before the World Wide Web was extremely difficult, particularly given the nature of the regimes of the former Soviet bloc. There were plans to work also with colleagues in Czechoslovakia, but this couldn’t be fully developed. The history of the seminar has not been fully told. I have written some about it, as has Elzbieta Matynia. But what is truly significant is that the history informs our present activities.

Matynia moved the New School from the commitment to this unofficial underground activity to the full development of what is now our Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and our Democracy and Diversity Institute. What brought the German scholars to the New School and what led to the development of the Democracy Seminar animates the Democracy and Diversity Institute.

I am not being sentimental about this. It is a result of ongoing practices, ongoing meetings of people speaking and acting together freely, taking part in a conversation through time, as people do so on Facebook in Iran and in other repressive contexts. Thus, this year’s program includes Ann Snitow’s course on gender. She has been teaching in the Institute for most of its history, underscoring the important connection between gender justice and democratic constitution. Now this not something very controversial, but in the early years of the program it was not easily accepted by many of students from the region. She organized the important Network of East West Women, and in the Institute, she taught problems of gender, and she continues doing this in the transformed global context.  As problems of nationalism emerged in the region, we discussed it and we continue to do so, broadening our comparative focus. As violence, and not just dialogue, determines political fate, we critically examine it.  And as public life is more and more defined through new media forms, we critically examine them. The Democracy Seminar and the University in Exile live in our not narrowly academic activities.

The problematic future of the nation state, its link with exclusionary practices, violence, patriarchy and the like, is one of the topics that we have been discussing at the Democracy and Diversity Institute for years. Last year, Tim Rosenkrantz took part in those discussions in Wroclaw. I am pretty sure that those discussions informed his telling reflections on the recent public action of Jose Antonio Vargas in his post this week. Rosenkrantz is sympathetic with Vargas’s claim to citizenship, but points out the uncomfortable radical implications. I look forward to discussing this in my class in Wroclaw and analyzing the media form Vargas has used to make his public intervention. It’s a long way from the Democracy Seminar, but the media is not the message, the free public action is.