The Current State of Democracy in Turkey

Academic (?) Event Reflection

29 January 2021, Zoom, 3:30pm-5pm

This event was incredibly informational since I do not really know anything about Turkey, let alone their democracy and the history of it. The biggest thing that the speaker, Professor Asli Bali, focused on in this informative session was the uses and abuses of constitutionalism in Turkey’s government. Since I did not really have any background knowledge about this topic and there was so much information presented, a lot of the presentation, unfortunately, went over my head. One point that she seemed to be making was that Turkey’s democracy is currently making more progress, but there is still a long way to go. She also talked about Turkey’s multiple constitutions and that they wanted to join the European Union at one point and made many changes and amendments to how their government was run because of that. One interesting part of this presentation was the Q and A session when someone asked if governments always need to demonize a group (for example, Jewish people by Hitler and the Kurds in Turkey by the Turkish government) to keep power. Her answer was that this is almost always the case and can even be seen in the USA when government officials run based on fighting against some “threat” to the “real” people of our nation. She also mentioned that to keep a majority, it seems like you need to say that the “other” is going to rise up against everyone and that you are the only one who can keep them from taking over. That part of the presentation really opened up my eyes to how that just keeps occurring no matter how much we progress.

This event directly related to the topic of International Affairs since it was about the government in another country and partially how it compares to the government in the USA. I have learned a little bit about the Kurds in the past, so it related to that knowledge that I had. Other than that, this was all new information. This event could have been easier for me to digest if there were visuals along with all of the auditory information (like a powerpoint) because it is often difficult for me to process information by just hearing it anyway, even when it isn’t information that is outside of my understanding of the topic. I was still able to take away some information from the presentation, so it wasn’t all too much for me to take in. I can use this information to just have a better understanding of the world as a whole and how other governments and people’s lives are.