Turkeys and Christmas

Before the virtual ink had dried on my last post, the campaign for the UK to leave the EU produced their biggest and, so far, most pernicious, lie with the launch of a poster stating: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”. The idea – signalled in the population figure – is to whip up fears of Turkish – meaning Muslim – immigration to the UK.

The lie is that Turkey is not joining the EU. They applied to do so in 1987 but negotiations did not start until 2005. Joining requires the opening and closing of 35 ‘chapters’ or areas of agreement, of which so far only 15 have been opened and just one closed. Turkey is nowhere near to joining the EU and in any case its joining could be vetoed by any member state and almost certainly would be. In some ways it is further than ever from joining because of its deteriorating human rights and democracy record. And, for that matter, Turkey itself is far less interested in EU membership than in the past: its longstanding failure to join has led it to reposition itself strategically away from Europe and towards being a middle-eastern regional power.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Turkey or its EU negotiations, but the expert opinion is clear, as in this recent summary:

“To infer that Turkey may one day soon join the EU is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the political and procedural realities of the EU and of its enlargement process. Turkish membership of the EU is at best a distant prospect.”

Reading – as, sadly, I do – many internet discussion forums about the EU Referendum it was interesting and depressing to see how the lie that ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ was defended. One line was to say – mendaciously – that the recent deal by ‘Germany’ to give Turks visa-free access to the Schengen zone meant that they had ‘free movement rights’. It doesn’t (three month visa-free travel is not the same as free movement) and, anyway, the deal may not go ahead because it is not ‘Germany’ that decides but the democratically elected EU Parliament which is blocking or at least modifying the deal which, for that matter, Turkey may not accept. And even if this were to happen then, of course, it would not mean that Turkish membership of the EU was any closer.

Another line of defence was downright peculiar. It was that ‘joining’ is the present continuous tense and therefore the poster was true since Turkey was ‘in the process’ of joining. This kind of sophistry gives sophistry a bad name. If I say that ‘I am joining the campaign to leave the EU’ any reasonable person would think that means that it is going to happen, not that I am in a process that might or might not end in the future in me becoming a member of the campaign.

The wider context for this anti-immigrant sentiment associated with a supposedly anti-elitist movement is the well-worn theme of how the consequences of economic crisis play out. It never has a happy ending, not least for the ‘ordinary, salt of the earth folk’ that the anti-elite elitists play for fools in the way that the Brexit advocates are currently trying to do. For their goal is not to help, sustain and support ‘ordinary people’ in the face of global capitalism, but to expose them to the most extreme form of unregulated global capitalism. Those who fall for it are voting, like the proverbial Turkeys, for Christmas.

Talking Turkey

Almost all news stories in the UK at the moment seem to have some relationship to, or are filtered through, the EU Referendum debate. I don’t want to use this blog simply to talk about that debate but for those who may be interested I will start this post with some links to various things I have written on other sites on the topic (some are syndicated re-issues of the same pieces).

So on the New Europeans site there are four articles (and do look at the rest of this excellent site); two pieces on The Conversation (again, there’s loads on this site worth looking at) both of which are listed on the House of Commons Library Referendum Research Briefing; another on the Wake Up Europe site; another on the EU Movement site; and another on the Reasons2Remain site. Finally, there is also the transcript and audio of a radio broadcast I took part in on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Rear Vision programme. Oh, and a short letter in the Financial Times (pay walled link but free access to up to a monthly limit). I’m also giving numerous talks in town and village halls on the kinds of issues covered in these posts but of course I can’t give links for these.

Anyway, on to today’s related topic, the news this week that the EU Commission has conditionally agreed to Turkey having visa-free access to the Schengen area. The anti-EU press and campaign to leave the EU spun this in predictably, but depressingly, dishonest ways, speaking of the EU ‘opening the door to 79 million Turks’. What such formulations imply (and get taken to mean) is a mix of downright lies, confusions and paranoia: that Turks will now have the same free movement rights as EU citizens (they won’t; the deal will apply to short term visits); that this will apply to the UK (it won’t; the UK isn’t in the Schengen area); that the entire population would move wholesale to the EU and the UK if it could (a nonsense, both obviously and as was shown when exactly the same claims were made about Bulgaria and Rumania when those countries gained free movement rights).

The wider issue is that this is part of a deal under which Turkey will control the flow of refugees into the EU, and more particularly Greece by taking back all such refugees with an equivalent number then being taken directly from the Turkey by the EU. That deal is controversial, not for the ludicrous reasons given above but because the UN has pointed out that it may be illegal and other bodies that it may be immoral. Yet one has to recognize that, shabby as it may be, it is primarily a response to the claims (not least from anti-EU groups in Britain) that the EU has failed to deal with the so-called migration crisis (more correctly, the refugee crisis).

One of the reasons this deal is, indeed, shabby is because Turkey has recently become markedly more authoritarian and repressive, as I have written about elsewhere on this blog and as events just this week underscore, events which may yet scupper the EU deal. In fact, if the EU is to be criticised, the real criticism is that in the years that Turkey was reforming and improving its human rights record its desire to join the EU was discouraged, contributing to the downward path it has since followed. Especially in the light of what has since happened in Syria, this now looks like a major strategic blunder by the EU. Even so, the relentless hostility to Turkey’s membership by Eurosceptics and worse in many EU countries since it applied to join (as long ago as 1987!) bears much of the blame for this.

Why does any of this matter for organization studies? One reason is the general point that I always make about the inseparability of politics and organizations. The EU is the biggest single economic entity in the world, after all. Another, narrower, reason is that Turkey has an organization studies community of some significance and within that a fragile critical management studies community. This is discussed by Beyza Oba and Mehmet Gençer in their chapter (‘The Ghost in the System: Critical Management Studies in Turkey’) in the recent book I co-edited (Critical Management Studies. Global Voices, Local Accents). It may be too grandiose, or alternatively too Eurocentric, but one reading of CMS is as the promulgation of the critical strand of European Enlightenment thought within the imperialist, or anyway dominant, strand of that thought.

I think that is a defensible reading. It’s well-established that there is a direct line of thought from Kant to Weber from whom there is an indirect line to Foucault; and a less direct line, via Hegel, to Marx from whom there is a direct line to the Frankfurt School. And although it is less well-established there is, I increasingly think, a direct line from the Descartes-Spinoza bifurcation of Enlightenment thought to the bifurcation between modernist and postmodernist thought; dogmatic and sceptical rationality; positivism and constructivism.

Whatever the truth of that, it is an obvious political reality that Turkey now stands at the pivot between the EU and not just Syria but the wider Middle-East tragedy; and perhaps between Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. What happens there matters enormously. It therefore becomes important to approach Turkey not, to finish where I began, through the narrow prism of the EU Referendum but as a conflicted boundary across which we – we Europeans, and more narrowly we students of organizations – must reach to support progressive, liberal and critical movements and people in Turkey.

The fourth estate

There are many things I would like to write about today, from the latest Islamist atrocities in Brussels to the latest twists in the EU Referendum debate. But one dimension of these and, by definition, any news story is the reporting of news in general and the importance of journalistic freedom in particular.

I’m prompted to say this by the trial which began today, in secret, in Turkey of journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül. The case, which involves charges of espionage since the journalists reported on alleged Turkish state support for weapons shipments to Syria, has attracted widespread condemnation. It comes at a time of wider concerns about press freedom in Turkey, in part following the State takeover of Zaman, the country’s biggest newspaper, earlier this month.

Journalistic freedom is always a target for attack by authoritarian regimes, and there are numerous cases throughout history – Egypt’s action against three al-Jazeera journalists being a recent notorious example. That this is so reflects, precisely, why journalism is so important to a free society and why it is so important to defend it. The universally acclaimed recent film Spotlight, about the journalistic investigation of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, dramatizes this, as did now classic films like All the President’s Men or The Killing Fields.

The need for robust reporting and investigative journalism seems to me to be all the more important given the massive increase in information available because of the internet and social media – what Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks calls ‘the networked fourth estate’. In one way this seems to offer a powerful counter in its own right to political authoritarianism. In another way, it obscures because it enables anyone and everyone to put their message out – in blogs like this one, indeed – with no necessary regard for truth, verification or accuracy. Twitter storms both shape the news agenda and become news in their own right.

In this world, according to the Pew Research Center:

"Instead of gatekeepers, journalists now become referees. Acknowledging that our potential audience is flooded with unlimited information and no way of discerning what is of value, what is true, what is propaganda, we must construct our work to offer them the referee’s advice: this information has been checked and verified; this information has been found to be untrue; this is self-interested propaganda; this is being reported but we have yet to be able to verify the information."

Academics are also important in this process. I think it was C. Wright Mills who described sociology as ‘slow journalism’ but whoever it was I agree – as regards sociology and social science in general, including organization studies. Indeed this is why (returning to the general point) authoritarian regimes also persecute academics as they do journalists, but my point is more particularly that in the internet-enabled cacophony academics can also be ‘referees’. Indeed they are often used by the media in just that way, and it seems to me a more important social utility than the rather mechanical notion of ‘research impact’ currently in vogue. What I find striking and impressive is the way that every time a new news story breaks, there is an academic on hand with expertise in what just hours before might have been dismissed as esoteric self-indulgence or 'academic' in the pejorative sense.

Of course there are plenty of academics and journalists who use their positions in ways that neither live up to the heroic traditions of investigative crusade nor to the mundane traditions of careful facticity. And the notions of disinterested truth that underpin both are clearly somewhat threadbare; one hardly needs to read the laboured prose of postmodern philosophers to realise this. Even so many journalists and academics do, I think, seek to uphold their best traditions whilst being sensitive to their limitations.

On the other hand, just at the moment that good journalism is most needed it is being undermined by the economics of new technology and the voracious demands of 24-hour rolling news. It is very cheap to use what is at best citizen journalism and at worst twitter-fuelled populism to fill cavernous news space, and much journalism is now no more than a recycling of the PR material of firms and governments. By contrast, it is expensive to maintain a journalistic staff unless there is lot of cultural capital and state subsidy (e.g. the BBC) or a lot of cultural capital and a brand that can be ‘monetized’ (e.g. the Financial Times). Academics, too, face pressures, especially where universities are heavily dependent on private funding or just when they become so overwhelmed by other demands that their public information role gets marginalized.

Even so, our main concern should surely be the very direct, coercive ways in which authoritarian states seek to silence comment, and here I return to Turkey – a country, let’s not forget, that is a member of NATO and an aspirant member of the EU. Here, it is not just journalists who are being arrested and, in fact, killed. Just ten days ago, three mathematics academics were arrested for calling for an end to security operations against the Kurds (and a fourth, British computer scientist Chris Stephenson was arrested and then deported for protesting in their support) and stand accused of terrorism.