Paradoxes of Tolerance: Good Minorities, Bad Minorities and Constitution Making in Turkey

At the same time as the EU led legal reforms that emphasize the centrality of religious tolerance for secularism in Turkey, there has emerged a new discourse for religious coexistence. The Justice and Development Party's (AKP) government has targeted various oppositional groups through arbitrary arrests and detentions. However,  a new official discourse emerged as a critique of the Western Christian discourses of tolerance. This new discourse of tolerance signals a shift towards a (cunning of) recognition (Povinelli 2002) of religious identity as a legacy of Turkey's Ottoman past. This paper explores the contradictory nature of the seeming success of religious tolerance in the case of minorities in Turkey. I investigate the consolidation of this discourse of tolerance by the ongoing and much debated constitutional reform process in the country.

Specifically, I attend to the participation of the religious authorities, including the Armenian Patriarchate, in legal processes as alleged proof of tolerance claimed by the AKP government. This paper draws on  critiques of liberal notions of tolerance which argue that liberal conception of pluralism does not take religious belief seriously to address fundamental problems of secularism (Sullivan 2005). The historical importance of this new discourse on tolerance lies in its appeal to international initiatives to police other states' treatment of their populations (Braun 2006; Mahmood 2006). My paper aims to further this critique by examining the shift towards an international as well as a cultural and religious construction of tolerance.