Happy New Year, Hakan

Mist was thickening over the Bosphorus, and one of the most beautiful and cosmopolitan cities in the world was slowly disappearing into the February fog. “It has never been as hopeless as it is today,” said Hakan. “You never know when they will come and take you away.” There was no anger or fear in his voice, only sadness and disappointment.

One of my first trips in the year that has just ended was to Istanbul, for the graduation ceremony of the Council of Europe’s Turkish School of Political Studies. The school is a partnership between a Turkish university, civil society and the Council of Europe, devoted to non-formal education in the knowledge and skills we need in a democracy. Hakan, the school’s director, and I handed out the diplomas in the rectorate of Boğaziçi University, in a wonderful setting reminiscent of American universities, which is not surprising, since it was founded by Americans after the Crimean War. A century and a half later, Boğaziçi is no longer a private university, but it remains true to its founders’ commitment to accept students of all faiths and nationalities and not to interfere in politics. Years ago, when the Council of Europe founded the school together with the university and the Anadolu Kültür association, the condition of staying out of party politics was no obstacle at all. At that time, liberal democracy—that is, democracy based on human rights and the democratic rule of law—was still, at least on the surface, a project of national consensus, in Turkey as elsewhere in Europe. Hakan, the school’s director, is an intellectual, a humanist and a cosmopolitan who loves his Turkey boundlessly. Hakan is my friend.

The first school in the Council of Europe’s network of schools of political studies, which today has twenty-one members, was founded a quarter of a century ago in Moscow, in the kitchen of human rights activist Lena Nemirovskaya and her husband, the philosopher Yuri Senokosov. It grew out of the realization that a society only recently freed from an authoritarian ideological straitjacket needs politicians, journalists, civil servants, civil society activists and others who know and understand what democracy is and how it works. Over the Moscow School’s many years, countless people attended its courses in democratic political culture. Many of them are in influential positions today but are reluctant to talk about their ties to the school, because a few years ago it was put on the list of foreign agents, that is, organizations that receive money from abroad for their work. That most of this money came from the budget of an international organization of which Russia is also a member did not soften the Kremlin; Lena’s cookery school of democracy simply got on the Russian authorities’ nerves too much. It is not that Lena and Yuri changed their recipes; it is just that their surroundings changed their taste for liberal democracy and lost their appetite.

Today the school still operates, but it organizes its seminars elsewhere in Europe, from universities in Spain to Oxford and trade union centers in Sweden. When I can, I go and visit them. Despite its foreign-agent status, which is not currently the most recommended reference on a CV in Russia, hundreds of people attend the seminars, from all corners of the Russian Federation, not just urban and liberal Moscow. What also draws me to Lena and her travelling band of hunters of lost illusions are the long hours of conversation after the official program, in hotel rooms, in cigarette smoke and with vodka as the only interpreter to and from Russian. In these conversations there is neither hatred nor conspiracy, only sadness at lost hopes for a better and more beautiful future.

Ilgar Mammadov, director of the Council of Europe school in Baku, looks to the future with a little more hope. Ilgar was released a few months ago from prison, where he spent more than five years, even though the European Court of Human Rights ruled just months after his conviction that it had been a political trial. When we talk on the phone, he sounds incredibly relaxed for someone who says he doesn’t know whether he will be locked up again tomorrow.

Ilgar is no exception in the brave new Europe. Before my lecture at Boğaziçi University, I met the wife of Osman Kavala, chairman of the board of Anadolu Kültür, co-founder of the Council of Europe’s Turkish school. Osman, a wealthy Paris-born businessman and philanthropist, was arrested in October 2017. To this day, the prosecution has not filed an indictment. After more than a year, Osman still does not know what he is accused of. “It is a message to liberal Turkey,” one of the people I spoke to in Istanbul told me. “If we can lock up Osman Kavala for no reason, the authorities are saying, then we can lock up any of you.” Being liberal means something different in today’s Turkey than in Europe and Slovenia. It is not about party affiliation but about the civilizational outlook of people who believe in an open and progressive society based on humanism, social justice, human rights and real, liberal democracy. In Europe, this is slowly becoming a term of abuse, both for increasingly self-confident right-wing populists and for armchair revolutionaries who hate Hillary and Macron even more than Trump or Orbán. In Turkey, Russia and many other places, people can less afford to gloat over the troubles of liberal democracy. It is not that they are great fans of those who talked endlessly about liberal values while, through their inconsistency and lack of integrity, creating the conditions that paved the populists’ way to power. It is that for them the end of democracy, the end of human rights, the end of the democratic rule of law is not a theoretical concept you can simply dismiss while bashing Hillary, but a reality in which you never know when they will come for you and take you away.

In conversations with friends from Istanbul, Moscow and Baku, I sense a bitterness born of the conviction that the European democracies left them in the lurch. That the hopes and expectations born of the fall of the Berlin Wall ultimately mattered less than the West’s geostrategic and economic interests. But I sense no envy in our conversations. If anything, in relation to us they feel like canaries in a coal mine. Europe today is less and less a model and more and more a cause for cynical pity. This year we face European elections. Although everyone is asking what the balance of votes between democrats and populists will be, the real question is how low those who until yesterday lectured about democracy and human rights will sink this time, now that, in panic at the populists, they are capable of nothing but aping their discourse. Populism is winning in Europe’s elections regardless of the final result. In the coming European elections, we will be defended against it by political forces that do not understand, cannot shoulder or do not want their historical responsibility. By politics that, through its lack of principle and competence, first created fertile ground for populism to flourish and now competes with it in the political manipulation of hatred and fear. By politics that normalized intolerance with its attitude to refugees and is now confronted with the fact that hatred cannot be channeled and controlled. Old demons are awakening in Europe. Nationalism, which reminds us that Europeans have always been most threatened by other Europeans. Antisemitism, which is rising steeply, even though some try to disguise it by shouting “damn Soros” instead of “damn Jews.” Fascism, which behaves as if it had never heard of Slavko Bobovnik. No wonder we are no longer a model for anyone.

Hakan was arrested on Friday, November 16. He was released after a few days but is still subject to criminal proceedings. Among other things, he is accused of having lobbied against the import of tear gas into Turkey. I wish Hakan the very best of luck in the coming year, but we will all need it.