The Root of the Kurdish Issue: The Indelible Mark in the State’s Memory
Türkiye’s endless political problems, with the Kurdish issue at the forefront, have been explained and analyzed through many legitimate reasons. Nationalism, racism, and class struggle were mentioned; a “fascistic vein” was spoken of; imperialist games were cited; it was also stated that it stemmed from the reaction to the centralization policies that began in the late Ottoman period. Chauvinist, social Darwinist ideologies leading to uniformist policy choices were also counted among the reasons. Most of these are probably true; at least I believe most of them have made substantial contributions to this process.
The opposing arguments are also clear: separatism, terrorism, treason, and the like. Everyone is focused on how right their own position is and how wrong the other’s is; they have set defeating the “other” in judgment as their goal, demanding at the very least that the scales of justice be balanced, which is quite understandable…
But when you actually prove how wrong the other side is and ensure their condemnation, do you solve fundamental problems of this country like the Kurdish issue? I am not so sure about that.
Furthermore, can a consensus centered only on a conjuncture-dependent convergence of interests/gains, where guns fall silent but structural and epistemic violence and distrust persist, eliminate the root of the problem? My belief is much stronger that this mere state of non-conflict, termed ‘Negative Peace’ in the literature, will not work and cannot produce a genuine and lasting peace.
My experiences and research in politics, academia, civil society, and international institutions and organizations show me that there is also a psychological factor at the root of the problem.
In other words, deep within the political elite of this country and the institutional and social memory it relies on, there is an influential “state of mind.” Unfortunately, the core components of this state of mind are not optimism, trust, or rationality. On the contrary, it is the fear of destruction and annihilation, and the constitutional order choices shaped by it. The savior missions attributed to constitutions. The expectation that constitutions will change the unfortunate destiny. On the other hand, as an inevitable consequence of fear and deep anxiety: homogenous society design, strict centralization, denial, and assimilation, equating the sharing of central authority with the other with destruction and annihilation; therefore, neither the formation of a rational will shaped from the bottom up in state administration, nor the principle of democracy in the internal functioning of political structures and organizations is permitted. Politics is therefore conducive to the rise of charismatic savior figures; state administration is like that, and the society, similarly expecting a savior to slam his fist on the table, has a political understanding that rewards this and quickly aligns itself accordingly.
The constitutional order choices of the whole country are built on this deep fear; it is organized almost as a republic of fear.
Is such a heavy and deep problem merely a political choice? I am not sure about that. It seems to me like the expression of helplessness, of a pathology fallen into, constantly reproducing itself. And it reminds us that we must prioritize the effort to understand rather than to blame and judge.
Moreover, this is not a situation unique to Türkiye. Researchers working on large-group psychology—primarily psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan—show that states and societies, like individuals, can be severely wounded, and these wounds can be carried for generations (transgenerational trauma) and profoundly shape collective behavior. Volkan calls this “chosen traumas”: societies placing the great destructions they could not resolve at the center of their identity memory and transmitting them from generation to generation. Türkiye’s political state of mind presents a highly familiar picture in this context.
We are facing a colossal, unhealed psychological rupture: The Founding Trauma, that is, the founding experience shaped by the massacre, exile, and mass slaughter of the Turkish political elite in the Balkans.
The roots of the famous “survival” (beka) rhetoric, which stands before us like a steel wall in every political debate today, stretch back to that immense physical and spiritual destruction experienced in the Balkans, once the heart of the empire. The Balkan War was not a simple loss of land or military power for the state elites. It was an existential collapse, an uprooting, and an ontological trauma where the horror of ‘if we make the slightest mistake, we will be completely wiped off the stage of history’ penetrated to the bone.
So, what does psychoanalysis tell us about a destruction of this magnitude? To express it with the striking concept of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich; the state mind here experienced, and still experiences, a profound ‘inability to mourn’ (Unfähigkeit zu trauern). The subject that was exposed to such severe trauma and could not cope with this unmourned destruction—the subject here being the state mind and the founding social strata of the political dynamic—experiences dissociation to escape the unbearable weight of reality. Because the state could not process that immense fear of annihilation experienced outside in a healthy way, it withdrew into itself in a state of deep distrust and, in order to survive, shaped its constitutional order accordingly and implemented a social engineering project based on it.
The Spiral of Projection, Paranoia, and Megalomania
There is an infallible rule in psychology: The trauma you cannot mourn, face, and process does not disappear; on the contrary, it poisons you and is eventually projected onto someone weaker than you (projection).
Feeling profound helplessness in the face of Western imperialism and the destruction in the Balkans, the ruling elite, composed almost entirely of Balkan Turks, directed its anger and fear towards internal differences because it could not heal this severe inferiority complex. Anatolia was the last remaining fortress, and the same trauma could not be allowed to happen there. Cleansing was the fundamental political prescription shaped and motivated by this trauma. Moreover, this prescription was in line with social Darwinism, the prevailing mindset of the 19th century. The events of 1915 are the heaviest and most tragic manifestation of this projection mechanism. Here, a parenthesis is mandatory: A psychological context can make an event understandable, but it never absolves it.
Understanding the wound is not legitimizing the wound. The political elite, crushed on the outside, tried to survive by crushing on the inside. Differences—ethnic, cultural, religious—were perceived not as a richness, but as potential dangers that could cause that great catastrophe to repeat at any moment and collapse the state from within. Thus, the “Founding Other” on the inside replaced the enemy on the outside. Initially, this was the non-Muslims; once Anatolia was (almost) cleansed of them, this other was quickly updated as the “Kurd.”
This situation dragged society and the state into chronic paranoia. The fear of being betrayed, stabbed in the back, and divided at any moment became the state’s everyday policy. And this distrust created a highly dangerous, schizophrenic split in the state’s mind: Rationality and irrationality intertwined; a state of mind that is pro-Western on the one hand, but deathly afraid of the West on the other; Eastern on the one hand, but striving to abandon Easternness and despising it internally on the other; claiming to be a democratic and rule-of-law state on the one hand, but clinging to death to chauvinistic and exclusionary choices incompatible with them on the other. In short, a painful fluctuation between the severe feeling of worthlessness caused by deep fear and the megalomania embraced as the sole way out of it. Tiring and consuming at the same time…
Turkish politics has been suffocating in this vise for a century. When one looks closely at the body trapped under this dual pressure, no matter how hard the outer shell appears, an extremely fragile and wounded subject is found inside.
Looking at the Other Side’s Wound
But here we must stop and also look at the other side’s wound. Because if this picture is to be completed, we must see not only the state’s pathology but also the experience of the society that is the target of this pathology.
The Kurdish society, which has been subjected to denial, assimilation, and at times direct massacres for over a century; which has rebelled and been defeated multiple times, and spent its last forty years in the midst of a heavy armed conflict, also carries an indescribable psychological weight. People exposed to indescribably heavy destructions in Dersim and Zilan, whose language was banned, names changed, villages evacuated, and who could not even hold public mourning for their losses, have deep wounds in their memory. These wounds have also not been processed; this mourning has also not been held. Therefore, the picture before us is not just the pathology of one side, but the accumulation of a two-sided pain that deepens each other’s wound and constantly reproduces each other. And any “peace” built without facing this reality is doomed to experience the inevitable fate of a foundationless building: collapse.
This accumulated weight has inevitably shaped not only the relationship of societies with each other but also the relationship the state establishes with society and the nature of the political contract.
Unprocessed Mourning and the “Negative Social Contract”
Could a democratic social contract based on free will be established in a structure where the state sees itself as a perpetual “sober guardian” and society as a “potential threat” capable of making a mistake at any moment?
In classical democracy theories, a social contract is the consensus of free individuals and differences coming together to build a common future. However, the contract woven into Türkiye’s genetics is not a text of consensus or freedom, but a “survival” mechanism. This is a “Negative Social Contract.”
There is no positive pact signed by the parties with their free will. The picture before us is the “silent consent” shown by a society, feeling the fear of statelessness and annihilation in its bones, to the heavy tutelage of the state out of anxiety about chaos. The society has accepted surrendering its freedoms and blunting its differences as the lesser evil with the fear that ‘if the state ceases to exist, we will perish’. As such, the constitution has ceased to be a positive ground where structural justice and trust are established, and has turned into a permanent “ceasefire” text where everyone looks at each other with suspicion and distrust is institutionalized. Because a ‘Negative Social Contract’ based on the absence of free will, that is, on a reluctant partnership, can by its nature only produce a frozen and always-ready-to-collapse ‘Negative Peace’.
The 1921 Parenthesis and Repeating History: The Uncleansed Lesion
If we want to see what can happen if the trauma and that deep paranoia are not healed, we should look not only at the spirit of the 1921 Constitution but also at its fate.
1921 was also a historic “Kurdish-Turkish alliance” document dictated by logic and shared destiny in the face of an existential threat, recognizing local dynamics and differences. Its normative ground was strong: it was based on the principles of shared destiny, local autonomy, and the recognition of differences. But there was no solid institutional skeleton under this normative ground, and exactly for this reason, when the conditions changed, that spirit could not be preserved.
Towards the end of 1922, why was that partnership quickly shelved? Why was brotherhood forgotten and a strict denial of differences initiated?
The answer is again hidden in that unprocessed trauma. Right after victory was achieved and the acute danger passed, the deep fear in the subconscious of the state mind shaped the institutional and political preferences of the authority that consolidated in Ankara and secured its legitimacy on the international plane. Distrust towards the other, deep fear and anxiety made gathering all power and resources in Ankara and controlling them from Ankara the only valid option. In parallel, the unhealed wound instantly coded old allies as “new potential threats.” The rule of psychology also worked in politics: If the lesion is not cleansed, no matter how much a scab forms on the wound, the disease relapses at the slightest tremor. Because the trauma was not processed, as conditions changed, the ally was antagonized, and the constitutional order was redesigned accordingly. The path to 1924 is the path of trauma taking the future hostage and the “Negative Social Contract” becoming permanent.
This is precisely why it is of vital importance to view the solution or peace efforts pronounced these days through this psychological lens. It must be explicitly stated that; any step taken without healing the deep and shaking wounds of the founding trauma and eliminating the existential fears of the state mind on a constitutional ground of trust will unfortunately fail to reach the capillaries of society and will not go beyond an “elite pact” made behind closed doors. Even if such processes survive for a while with the cold rationality dictated by international dynamics, when those external dynamics change, the trauma and distrust swept under the rug are doomed to explode again with full force. Let’s not forget, when traumas are not processed, they are also passed down from generation to generation…
Conclusion: Healing the Republic
This clinical experience history shows us actually offers a brand new perspective to those seeking peace and democratization today: We are not merely facing a smooth “evil” or strict ideology; there is a political preference shaped by two centuries of defeat and a century of anxiety over annihilation, along with its political and social carriers. There is a situation poisoned by severe trauma; in short, behind the outer wall described as a “fascistic vein,” there is a serious fragility.
Applying more pressure to a body acting with fear and experiencing division paranoia only triggers its security reflexes. The solution is not to feed this fear, but to democratize the state by purifying it from its “founding traumas” and its deep fear with constitutional assurance. The new language of politics should be not to defeat the state, but to liberate it from its fears and heal it—not to defeat the Kurd, either.
The homogenization policies carried out in these lands for a century have trapped the Republic in a “single-pillar” structure. A state architecture built on only a single ethnic, cultural, or ideological pillar inevitably produced its own antithesis and the resistance that would justify its own traumatic reactions. The results of this are obvious.
Viewed this way, there is no victory, no defeat, no right or wrong. Because everyone is right in their own way and clings to their own righteousness as if it were sacred, the other appears equally wrong; thus, there is a political reality where one becomes a monster and the other is also monsterized, and the heavy toll of this. And if you can look behind the mask of that angry monster, you will see the same face on both sides: a fragile, severely wounded child who has not completed growing up.
And rest assured, when you focus on the wrongness of the other, this toll will be nothing but a total exhaustion.
But the Anatolian geography is not suitable for building a healthy togetherness through victory-defeat. The Ottoman Empire could not do it in its last century, the Republic could not do it either, and it cannot.
Political problems have very complex foundations and require intense, rather cold and distant analysis. We won’t solve everything, but I think understanding and noticing, focusing on the wound of the other and being able to touch it very carefully is very important.
Let’s accept that the inhabitants of these lands are severely ill, severely wounded. We are in a reality where accusations and defenses will have no healing benefit, at least until significant progress is made in the healing phase, the ability to mourn collectively is developed, and the strength to confront is gained.
It is time to face our founding trauma, to hold our century-delayed mourning together, and to cleanse that infected lesion. If we are to step out of a ‘negative peace’ spiral doomed to collapse at any moment and build a lasting social peace; I think we must first purify ourselves from the founding trauma with a ‘founding mourning’, and then move to the ‘Positive Social Contract’ phase that will carry us to a genuine ‘Positive Peace’.
And this requires a multi-layered and highly delicate constitutional engineering that transcends mere jurisprudence.
Let’s proceed this way for once, what do you say?
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