We are at a meeting in Ankara which started yesterday and will continue at the weekend. The Arab-Turkish Conference of Social Sciences is held by the Institute of Strategic Thinking, Cairo University, and Osmangazi University with 230 participants from 26 countries.

Today it is easily seen that the social sciences both in Arab and Turkish world have developed significantly. However, it seems that both worlds do not know much about the developments of each other in social sciences. For instance, our social scientists have to look for western resources in English and French when they want to be informed about a social issue on Turkey’s neighbor Syria. Because in Turkey, no one is enough informed about Syria in order to follow the social scientists there. Therefore, we have a great language gap with a country which is very close to us and where we were living together under one flag eighty years ago. Having a language gap means having a gap with the place where this language is spoken. Probably this is also true for the social scientists in Syria and Jordan who are interested in issues on Turkey.

All the science disciplines within social sciences are first of all knowledge disciplines and as a discipline each of them needs to determine their fields of interest. Each discipline also needs to determine which problems it will struggle with, with which concepts it will think, which matters it will deal with, and which criteria it will have to determine which knowledge is true or false. Looking from this perspective, a great majority of those are disciplines that try to understand and make sense of new social relations created by the experience of industrialization-urbanization or modernization-urbanization that came out within the last two or three hundred years in Europe from a Western perspective.

However, after the Westernization’s expansion over the rest of the world, the idea of taking the west as the center started to be internalized by other countries in a way. It means that the problems of the western countries are started to be considered as the problems of the whole world. The knowledge systems and disciplines cannot merely function to depict things. At the same time they build the world. Therefore, considering all sociological theories which came out from the western perspective, there is a tendency to build the world from a Western perspective. Indeed, this aspect of disciplines is not easy to deal with. This aspect is well handled by Michel Foucault.

While these disciplines perceive the problems emerged in the West as the problems of the whole world, they place the whole humanity in the center of their problematic surrounding. When we adopt these academic frames as they are without thinking on them, we lose our capacity to identify our own problems. However, it is quite important to adopt disciplines after critical thinking and a consideration of their ethnocentric approach effect. Otherwise, it becomes real rather than possibility to look ourselves from an orientalist point of view within these disciplines that approach the east with orientalist views. Unfortunately today we cannot go beyond the problem of orientalism that is internalized, adopted, and absorbed unless we accept a critical approach to the disciplines in social sciences. Therefore, we look both ourselves and each other from the perspective of a western discipline.

Of course these are the deep epistemological and philosophical answers of “Why ATCOSS?” ATCOSS, can be a serious basis to overcome these epistemological problems through an academic atmosphere between the Arab and Turkish worlds.

There are more practical answers of “Why ATCOSS?” Today it is inevitable for the Turkish-Arabic commercial or cultural relations which have been getting strong in Turkey’s foreign policy vision to correspond with academic and scientific atmosphere. It is already seen that upon lifting visa regulations, the integrity of the people in the region who were separated for nearly a century has such an encouraging effect for both sides. For centuries, the boundaries causing regional division formed not only physical boundaries but also formed thick boundaries on people’s minds. On one side of these boundaries there were Turkish prejudices about Arabs, and on the other side there were Arabic prejudices about Turks.

It is fact that with the increase in regional trade, human interaction made the people in the region richer in all respects. When four states in the region are about to sign a free circulation agreement, today it is calculated that this free circulation has a serious effect on the region’s total economical growth. It is essential to continue this economical and social exchange among academicians by spreading it to a broader field.

On the first day of ATCOSS, the Minister of Internal Affairs Prof. Dr. Beşir Atalay made an impressive speech as a social scientist. And the sessions of ATCOSS will continue today and tomorrow at five different halls of TOBB University from 09.00 to 19.00. We will continue to inform you about the congress.

(Published on Yeni Şafak [newspaper] on 11.12.2010)