Can peoples be at peace?

It is both the right and the demand of every human being for the peoples of a country to reconcile and live together in peace and tranquility without conflict. However, as long as there are differences in states, religions, and languages on earth, the creation of an environment of peace and tranquility where everyone can live together does not seem very likely. This is because conflicts between states, friction between religions, and disputes between those who use different languages constantly trigger conflicts between peoples. The actual fabric that allows this simple model to work, and even lubricates its functioning, is the economic system. Since the capitalist system is based on individual interest and the exclusion of the opponent or the contrary, and leaves almost no room for compromise, different power centers keep conflict on the agenda by excluding their opponents. In order to prevent these conflicts and to create the possibility of living in as much tranquility as possible, some social and political conventions have been developed and institutions have been established. The principle of secularism, international pacts, non-conflict agreements, and organizations and policies such as the United Nations at the very top can be cited in this context. 

Despite the existence of all policies and institutions, the tribal conflicts of the past and the wars of today continue indefinitely. The first and second world wars, small and large regional wars, and the oppression and terror currently being applied by Israel against Palestine are taking place before our eyes, as if to destroy the idea that all civilization has progressed. Today's brutality, which is not far behind the painful Holocaust atrocity experienced in the past, has, as the poet described in his poignant expression, taken all of humanity into its clutches, like a monster with only one tooth left of civilization.

The philosophical question that needs to be asked here is whether conflicts between peoples are the result of the conflictual and uncompromising behavioral model inherent in human nature, or whether humans, who are not inherently evil, are pushed into conflict against their nature as a result of environmental influence and pressure! Since this question cannot be answered with a single reason and a 'controlled experiment' cannot be conducted in the social field as it can in the scientific field, it necessitates wandering in a very wide field for an answer. The growth of the population, against the shrinking of food and energy resources, brings humanity face to face with Malthusian-like problems. Beyond basic needs, the advancing technology of today and the know-how associated with it create insurmountable differences between people and states, and the necessity of accessing abundant resources to support technologies that use excessive investment, such as artificial intelligence, leads to the economic occupation of peripheral economies by central economies. Technology, the dominant source of dominance today, and 'artificial intelligence' by its known name in the field of technology, constitute an important focus of resource competition. As the two leading countries, the USA and China are in a position to strive to bring the entire globe into economic exploitation in order to win this race. As the most intense way of extracting resources today is financial transactions, on one side there is the country or countries that quickly obtain the resources they want, and on the other side, there are peripherally located economies that melt in favor of resource-absorbing countries. In the capitalist system, which is increasingly squeezed by its ordinary functioning, such fast resource-extracting centers squeeze peripheral economies with an acceleration above the global average. In this case, almost every economy is drifting towards state and political structures that are quite squeezed compared to liberalism, which is called a competitive authoritarian regime. This regime, of which the Viktor Orban administration in Hungary is a typical example, has a tendency to become widespread in almost all economies, more rapidly in peripheral economies. 

In the competitive authoritarian administration, while the authority center is shifted to the top and the management format is narrowed, the management style supported by widespread authority and judiciary in the state structure, which is designed as legislative-executive-judiciary in classical democracy, is also narrowed. In a system where there is an authoritarian election mechanism that can be called tokenistic and the central administration is weakly supervised, the liberal state resembles an 'organic state' structure in the context of political management, in Buchanan's expression. The model, which can be described as a semi-authoritarian state structure where the 'public sphere' mechanism, which serves to convey the people's views to the state level, is not operated, and where the will of the people is very weak compared to the liberal state structure, although not entirely, is becoming increasingly widespread and tends to spread to all areas. The presidential system, which was switched to in our country in 2008, resembles a competitive authoritarian regime with some minor differences. 

Dealing with the political structure that is developing and becoming increasingly widespread today solely with a structural model means keeping the main cause of the formation outside the objective. The infrastructure of the spreading political regime should be seen as a result of the increasingly squeezed world capitalism affecting countries with different economic powers to different degrees. Namely, as capital flows from central countries to peripheral economies—which happened in neoliberalism—it exploits the country it enters, while deindustrializing the country it leaves, leaving it alone with problems of employment and public revenue. The efforts to resolve the problems experienced in both the country of origin and the destination country by partially solving and partially suppressing the problems of the peoples who are dragged into deep problems in both countries make changes in political structures necessary. In order to understand the problem, it is understood that Turkey is in the position of a destination country in capital movement, that excessive resources need to be transferred to the outside world as interest and principal payments, and that a semi-authoritarian regime is functional to suppress the problems this creates in the domestic economy.