In our previous article, we claimed that the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) being the permanent reality and predominant political party of Turkey presents invaluable opportunities for the present government to re-handle many political, social, and economic issues of the country from foreign policy and public accord to urbanization.Indeed, the new government faces multiple opportunities in various realms.First and foremost, the Republican People's Party (CHP) and its social base have lost their 60-year-long reactive capability of resistance against democratic progress.Therefore, the new government can realize fundamental changes for the country by easily determining its real agenda covering education, health, culture, the economy, social justice and the judicial system.
In order to be respected and treated as independent, states should ensure their political, military, cultural and economic independence. Today there exist many states in the international arena with massive economic wealth that are politically and culturally dependent and servile. We are not, however, using the term independence in line with closed and totalitarian political regimes, such as that of North Korea and we, on the contrary, embrace the idea of mutual dependence among states as an inescapable and necessary reality of our present world.
As for culture, since the AK Party government had to concentrate its energy on the transformation of the strict and clumsy bureaucratic structure of the state, economic growth and demilitarization, they could not realize the same development and influence in the cultural realm as they did in others. Yet policies of culture should be strategically central for any government by their relevance for each and every individual in society. First of all, we still don't have historical and urban museums capable of rightfully and fully exposing the cultural values of our history and cities. In this respect, Istanbul still has no urban museum corresponding to its cultural wealth in terms of history and diversity. Yet artifacts originating from Istanbul have long been on exhibition in the principal museums of the world. As the ancient traditions, knowledge, craftsmanship and art of Anatolia are on the brink of extinction, those innumerous local sources of culture, such as regional songs, dialects, cuisines and clothing, have to be immediately recorded and protected.On the other hand, the percentage of readers within the general population is rapidly declining in our country. Thus, the issue of reading, per se, should be on the political agenda of the government. The ongoing testing system used in our educational system is well-known for being one of the principal roots of the existing reading problem. Besides, there exists no substantial incentives for writing and publishing books - yet, not only material, but also the mental production of a country should be highly encouraged by the state.
Regarding the seventh art - cinema - in order to prepare the ground for a prospective revolution in Turkish cinema, an educational formation should be specifically designed for raising new directors and actors.Local authorities have already begun to allocate resources for cultural productions.Indeed, lesser the problems of urbanization, more resources for cultural and social issues are needed. In this respect, the Ministry of Culture should develop cultural strategies concerning such a spontaneously developing sector. It is indispensable to get rid of the complex that "culture belongs to the left" and to adopt the mentality that "culture belongs to men and women of knowledge and to the people as a whole."
The aforementioned prejudice of "culture belongs to the left" not only prevents the emergence of new names, and thus new trends in the cultural arena, but also cloaks the fact that there is no cultural production worthy of note emanating from the present leftist groups in Turkey. Although there are many crucial details in this cultural context, let's finalize the article with the following assertion: culture ensures the resilience of a nation within the international arena by procuring solidarity and rapprochement among the internal segments of its social structure.
About the author
İhsan Aktaş is Chairman of the Board of GENAR Research Company. He is an academic at the Department of Communication at Istanbul Medipol University.
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