The referendum in Turkey that gave President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the executive presidency he desired after being the Head of State since 2002 in a parliamentary democracy, should resonate with Guyanese who are familiar with our own history, when Prime Minister Forbes Burnham assumed the executive presidency his newly imposed 1980 Constitution had created. Burnham, Prime Minister and Head of the Government in Guyana since 1964, explained the expansive powers he assumed were necessary to “mould” the destiny of Guyana, in its “transition from capitalism to socialism”.
Erdogan explained the need for an executive presidency in Turkey as necessary to bring together a divided nation that just came out of an attempted coup. The referendum, however, was secured with a razor-thin majority of 51 per cent, which many election observers claim was riddled with irregularities. Obviously, whatever divisions Erdogan was referring to are very much still present. Observers believe what is really playing out is a drift towards authoritarianism that was long in the making and, in fact, is part of a wider movement apparent both in Europe and the United States.
From this perspective, the authoritarian leaders who are now rising to the fore at the helm of mass movements based on nationalism is a direct reaction to the failure of the neo-liberal paradigm that only three decades ago was thought to have led to the “end of history”, with all the contradictions of politics resolved. To look for answers, analysts have excavated the works of the generation of scholars – such as Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm – who attempted to explain the rise of the totalitarian movements in the era between WWI and WWII.
In her “Origins of Totalitarianism”, Arendt focused on leaders taking advantage of the insecurities and fears of “atomised” individuals created by the liberal stress on individualism to create mass movements in which the individual can find “meaning”. The latter, according to Fromm, has a “fear of freedom” and want certainty. In the US and Europe, the white middle and lower classes find themselves adrift in the new globalised world that has undercut their initial advantage of being a “labour aristocracy”, in the face of outsourcing to China, India, etc. Leaders like Donald Trump are feeding off the resentment of these dislocated strata.
In Turkey, on the other hand, the initial revolution by Kemal Attaturk – who gave the English language the term “Young Turks” for a generation that demanded urgent change, after WWI to drag the rump of the Ottoman Empire that had shrunken to Turkey into modernity – had long faltered. The urban Westernised elites became disconnected to the people in the rural areas. But after decades of being rebuffed for admission to the European Union (EU), as not being quite European, even the children of the elite began to question the benefits of “modernisation”. The sea of headscarves in universities was only the tip of the iceberg exemplifying the change in how liberalism was seen.
In Guyana, as we know to our cost, at Independence we inherited a state, but not a nation. Burnham’s assumption of massive presidential powers in “moulding” Guyana’s destiny also incorporated the goal of creating “One Nation, One People, One Destiny”. The paramount PNC was supposed to be the “vanguard party” that would bring all the people under its banner. That the attempt foundered, crashed and burnt in its own contradictions simply left the door open to further attempts.
Today, there are disturbing signs of creeping authoritarian tendencies by the Executive here, even after many of the centralised powers of the 1980 presidency had been whittled away after constitutional reform in 2000-2001. Under the guise of creating “social cohesion”, an entire apparatus has been deployed ostensibly to create a “Guyanese nation”. But moving in tandem with the Executive disregard for the rule of law encompassed in the Constitution – and once again deploying its powers to run roughshod over those that oppose it – Guyanese have to be wary of history repeating itself.
