Onur Alp Yılmaz wrote | The government's new horizon for Türkiye: The mothball-scented "Ottoman Peace"

T.H. Marshall argues that modern citizenship is a story of progress: first, civil rights come, making the individual autonomous from the state. Then come political rights, making the individual a subject of government.

Finally, social rights render citizens not only free but also secure and equal. This triple expansion, despite the inequalities produced by capitalism, constitutes the common denominator of modern societies: rights-based equality.

Today, Turkey is moving backwards, not forward, on this path. Our social rights have already been stripped away amidst neoliberal class resentment. In this process, the welfare state has been replaced by marketized education and, again, marketized health and social services. At the same time, retirement, job security, and union rights have also been slashed.

With the government's authoritarianism, our civil rights have been violated. Our civil rights—freedom of expression, the right to association, the right to a fair trial, and personal security—have been systematically and gradually stripped from us.

All that remains are our political rights, that is, a limited representation through the ballot box. And now, the government wants to deplete this last area by instrumentalizing the Kurdish issue again, transforming the ballot box from a right for citizens into a showcase of legitimacy for the government and a market activity for citizens.

Having previously eliminated this opportunity for representation by appointing trustees to HDP-run municipalities, it is now doing so by appointing Öcalan to the DEM Party as the trustee of the collective, making him the sole person authorized to speak about and on behalf of the Kurds, and replacing the concept of citizenship with singular representation.

It's at this point that the project imposed on both Turks and Kurds by the process marketed as peace becomes crystal clear: to reduce a society whose rights have been truncated, whose ties to the social state have been severed, and which has been trapped in a spiral of fear and loyalty, to a passive mass at the ballot box. In other words, to transform elections from a moment of democratic will into a mere bargaining chip between the governed and the governed.

This represents a regression from all the areas of expansion of rights described by Marshall; a return from modern citizenship to imperial subjecthood. Furthermore, the government has found a remarkably useful legitimacy platform for this, one that its opponents, unfortunately, also take for granted: the positioning of "state reason" against foreign policy developments.

The issue of " reason of state" is a crucial topic of discussion in its own right, but I'll leave it for another article to avoid straying from the topic. However, I can't help but point out this: Even the country's corrupt elders, who hand out leftist certificates to all of us, ignore the dialectical relationship between domestic and foreign policy.

In other words, the fact that the ruling class, in line with its own interests, has entered into economic and political relations with the US as a reflection of its domestic policy strategy and is seeking financing such as foreign aid and loans to finance the regime in which it has liquidated the opposition is being ignored.

Anyway, let's get back to the topic...

What do I mean by " returning to imperial subjecthood" ? That the government is actually marketing an imperialist-backed "Ottoman Peace" to Turkey.

As a matter of fact, the US Ambassador's statements in this direction are covered in newspapers every day.

This subject imagination is nothing more than a political vision that centers on belonging rather than rights, addresses communities rather than individuals, and rewards loyalty rather than equality.

So what this peace offers ordinary people is a state of "silence " that bears no claim to equality. This means we are in the exact opposite direction of Maine's famous statement that "the movement of progressive societies has been from status to contract."

In other words, the quest to take Türkiye from contract to status, and from being free individuals equal in status to a point where our status in the social hierarchy is determined by our affiliation, where class mobility is almost non-existent.

However, true peace, in the sense conceptualized by Marshall, is possible through citizenship based on full membership. By restricting rights and reducing citizenship to mere subjects, peace can be established by force, or even through hardship; but even if established, it cannot be sustained.

Therefore, Türkiye today has two paths: Either to be trapped in the loyalty relations of the subject order, or to deepen the horizons of republican equal citizenship.

This is where Nancy Fraser's theory of justice offers a powerful framework for understanding how we can achieve this. Fraser defines social injustice along two axes: redistribution and recognition.

According to Fraser, policies based solely on recognition—for example, symbolically celebrating female identity—may yield some short-term gains but fail to change the economic roots of patriarchy. Conversely, redistributive policies focused solely on reducing economic inequalities reproduce cultural stereotypes of gender. This is why Fraser speaks of “transformative solutions” —strategies that simultaneously transform both the economic structure and the cultural order. Thus, inequality is not only managed but also fundamentally redefined.

Looking at the Kurdish issue from this perspective makes the issue much clearer. One-dimensional approaches to date have fallen into the trap of superficial solutions, which Fraser calls "confirmatory."

Development projects like the GAP (Global Project) improved the economic infrastructure but affirmed Kurdish citizens not as rights-bearing subjects but as masses dependent on the state's favor. The process of opening up, while providing visibility through cultural gestures, was fragile because it left economic inequalities untouched and relied on individual will rather than institutional guarantees. Ultimately, neither solution eliminated the structural obstacles to achieving true justice, and often reproduced them.

What Fraser calls "transformative justice" proposes a policy that will break this vicious cycle. In the Kurdish case, this means not just investments to improve income distribution, but a genuine reconstruction of the welfare state; not just cultural rights in the mother tongue, but ensuring that language has equal status in public life; and not just opening symbolic spaces for local governments, but strengthening their democratic capacity.

Such an approach positions Kurdish citizens not as "recipients of favors" or "approved" but as subjects with rights, and moves the issue from an identity crisis to a democratization process based on equal citizenship.

Today's "Ottoman Peace" discourse, however, operates in the opposite direction. It constructs peace not through rights-based equality, but through relations of loyalty. It transforms Kurdish citizens from subjects back into subjects, transforming the ballot box from an instrument of democratic will to a showcase of the government's legitimacy. This approach is an updated version of the "affirmative" but superficial solutions described by Fraser. In other words, it is a policy that fails to transform the structure; in fact, it regresses it even further, producing silence and perpetuating inequality.

This is why, when Marshall's rights-based narrative of progress and Fraser's transformative justice framework come together, a very clear picture emerges. When rights are diminished, equality disappears; when equality is lost, peace cannot be sustained. What is needed today is not a mothballed "Ottoman peace," but a rights-based, transformative horizon of equal citizenship. This horizon is not only relevant to the Kurdish issue. Indeed, an atomized Kurdish issue, isolated from Turkey's other problems, is unthinkable. On the contrary, there is a Kurdish issue that exists alongside all of these, in a dialectical relationship with them all.