In 2009 the Turkish government launched a novel initiative to tackle the Kurdish question. The initiative soon ran into deadlock, only to be untangled towards the end of 2012 when a new policy was announced. This comparative paper adopts Michael Barnett’s trinity of identity, narratives and frames to show how a cultural space within which a peaceful engagement with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) would be deemed legitimate and desirable was carved out. Comparisons between the two policies reveal that the framing of policy narratives can have a formative impact on their outcomes. The paper demonstrates how the governing quality of firmness fluctuated between different connotations and references, finally leading back to a deep-rooted tradition in Turkish governance
Since 1984 when the PKK commenced its armed struggle against the Turkish state, Turkish security policies have been framed around the Kurdish question with the PKK presented as the primary security threat to be tackled. Turkey’s Kurdish question has its roots in the founding of the republic in 1923, which saw Kurdish ethnicity assimilated with Turkishness. In accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), only three minorities were and continue to be officially recognized in Turkey: Armenians, Jews and Greeks. These three groups were granted minority status on the basis of their religion. Kurdish identity – whether national, racial or ethnic – was not recognized by the republic, resulting in decades of uprisings by the Kurds and oppressive and assimilative politics by the state. For a long time, the Turkish state denied the Kurdish question’s ethno-political nature by presenting it as a socio-economic problem. By the early 1990s, the state’s perception and methods regarding the Kurdish question began to change as a result of the growing discontent and increased level of armed clashes between the PKK and the military. The ethnic dimension of the question began to be slowly recognized and as the politics of oppression continued throughout the 1990s, the unrest was now viewed as ethnic separatism that required military measures. Therefore, during the 1990s the issue was thoroughly securitized.1

Since assuming office in 2003, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has hinted that his Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) might be willing to address Kurdish political demands for more rights and to hold peace negotiations with the PKK. In a 2005 rally in the Kurdish-populated city of Diyarbakır, Erdoğan made an audacious declaration that the answer to the Kurds’ long-running grievances is not more repression but more democracy.2 The declaration was met with anger and skepticism within the opposition and Kurdish circles, with the former accusing Erdoğan of giving in to terrorists’ demands, and the latter arguing that he is delivering mere rhetoric without action. There was more rhetoric three years later in October 2008 when Erdoğan stated that “democratization is considered as the antidote to terrorism, ethnic extremism and all types of discrimination. The main approach here is that no matter where a person lives and from which ethnic origin he/she comes from, they should all feel themselves as equal and liberal citizens of our country”.3

In a 2005 rally in the Kurdish-populated city of Diyarbakır, Erdoğan made an audacious declaration that the answer to the Kurds’ long-running grievances is not more repression but more democracy

But it was only in 2009 that the AKP government launched a concrete initiative to tackle the Kurdish question. The launch of the initiative took place exactly ten years after the EU granted candidate status to Turkey. The initiative, initially known as the Kurdish Opening, and later referred to variously as the Democratic Opening, the National Unity Project, and the Democratic Initiative among others, was set to profoundly transform “the basic institutional structure of the post-1980 regime through enlarging the understanding of citizenship, which would lead to re-defining the political community, strengthening association and grassroots participation, and engaging in a relative decentralization of the state with local levels of government carefully integrated into the national centre”.4 Its essential aim was to bring an end to the armed conflict by disarming and disbanding the PKK. .[1]
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