Continued ...

For the majority of our people, the idea of “change” means fundamental and meaningful political, cultural and economic transformation toward the realisation of civil society and the fulfilment of citizens’ individual and social freedoms and rights. In those years I could see that “change” was taking place somewhere deeper than the surface of politics, beneath the skin of society.

I was never a member of the reformist movement or its parties. The truth is that I did not even hold a positive view of most senior reformist politicians, and I still believe that many of them were opportunists without a heartfelt commitment either to the principles of civil-society development or even to the movement to which they belonged. Their attachment to power and to their restricted inner circle was so strong that when they left power there was no generation ready to continue their work, because within the sphere of social leadership and large-scale administration they had cultivated neither social leaders nor political phenomena from the generation on whose shoulders they themselves had risen to power. The fate of the young people who joined reformist parties in hope ultimately became imprisonment. Despite all this, many of those politicians were power-seeking but pragmatic bureaucrats who did not block development at levels beneath themselves, and I believe that this was where change was actually occurring: in a place hidden from public view, whose true story was never properly told.

I have not written all this to defend voting in elections. I still do not vote. Yet I also do not regard non-voting, as a universal rule and in every election, as necessarily the more effective strategy for civil resistance. I have even experienced how, in an “election that is not an election,” people drawing together around a shared objective can itself generate a current capable of moving civil society and its demands one step forward. Even so, when personal values are at stake, my own mode of thinking is fundamentally not pragmatic.

I wrote this piece especially for my younger readers so that I could share with you the lived experience that shaped my view of reformism. The easiest thing in relation to social phenomena is to see everything in binary terms, as zero or one, blessing or curse. This way of seeing the world is one of the principal reasons the boundaries between us arise. Only when, as a nation, we become capable of looking a little beyond and more deeply than our accepted boundaries can we approach the possibility of solidarity for change.

What our society needs today, in my view, is an institutionalised understanding of the concept of a “spectrum.” We do not know how to think in spectra. Our intellectual environment is continually Balkanising the social field and creating “insiders” and “outsiders,” “us” and “them”: islands of thought entrenched behind fault lines they themselves have made deeper and deeper. If anything can create an effective unity in our society, it is a discourse capable of crossing all these faults and walls. Yet creating such a discourse in so polarised an environment is impossible.

If we understood that we can occupy different positions along spectra that nevertheless connect us with people who appear to stand on the other side of these faults, solidarity for change would become possible. If each of us cannot replace our “island” beliefs with a heartfelt acceptance of the spectrum, we will have to wait for a generation capable, in light of the historical lessons of our time, of reaching the historical maturity required for this change of perspective.

This conversation continues ... (This piece was published in two posts. If you began with the second post and “Continued ...”, please read the first post as well.)

Aydin Areta