Be wary of those who speak of Motherlands!

Alkan CHAGLAR
Cypriots repeatedly speak of their ‘motherlands’ –to refer to our neighbours Greece and Turkey. Like an adult who has never grown up there is a paradigm in our thinking where we believe everything our ‘motherland’ tells us and even get impassioned to defend the ‘motherlands’ against any criticism. Acting more Turkish than the Turks or more Greek than the Greeks, Cypriots often disregard the fact that EU Cyprus is a sovereign state in the international community and a partner of both Greece and Turkey at international organisations. So why do we continue to speak of ‘motherlands?’

COUNTRY OF BIRTH
One connotation of the term ‘Motherland’ is one’s country of birth. One definition I located on the internet described the ‘Motherland’ as the place where one grows up, with the country being respectfully viewed by its citizens as a “benign mother nurturing its citizens as her children.” Since most Cypriots with the exception of the diaspora were born and raised in Cyprus this I assume disqualifies Greece or Turkey as a motherland. But if such talk is aimed at uniting Cypriots, the stumbling block of this definition is that many diaspora Cypriots cannot call Cyprus their motherland since they were born and raised abroad. This is most notably the case of the British Turkish Cypriot community who now far outnumber their fellow Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus.

ANCESTRY
However, some go further arguing that ‘motherland’ can also refer to a land where our ancestors came from centuries ago. In Spanish-speaking countries one often hears the term “Madre Patria” (Motherland), which is generally used to refer to Spain since most White Latin Americans came from Spain. But can the term with the same definition be applied to in Cyprus? I think not, Ottoman Anatolia was not known as Turkey back in 1572; Turkey is a new term in modern history. And although there was limited Ottoman settlement, there was also large scale proselytism to Islam and other emigration to Cyprus. In the same way that not all Greek Cypriots derive from the two thousand year old Ancient Greeks, not all Turkish Cypriots derive from those that settled in 1572. In fact I doubt many Cypriots would be able to find a straight uninterrupted line of Greek or Turkish ancestors without finding instead an Arab grand father, Armenian grand mother, Sudanese great uncle, or some Circassian or Bosnian great aunts!
In response to this insanity of worshipping a land we may or may not have come from hundreds of years ago, Petros Katsouloudes, a Maronite Cypriot friend once asked me: “Aren' t there, any Cypriot Cypriots?” He said: “My community, the Maronite Cypriots, do not consider Lebanon, our country of origin, of nearly 15 Centuries ago a fatherland or a motherland, even though we maintain ties with Lebanon, mainly religious ones. “We do not adore it, worship it, we have only one home, and this home is Cyprus. This is our land, the land of our ancestors, and we love it as such!”

LA TURQUIE METROPOLE?
In France the term ‘Motherland’ can be used to refer to La France Metropole or the main geographical part of France, since there are French overseas territories that are part of the French Republic throughout the World. From French Polynesia to La Reunion and from French Guyana to the small Islands of Saint Pierre et Miquelon you can find the bust of Marianne beneath French tricolour. But in Turkey now, there are a growing number of people who believe that Northern Cyprus is their Overseas Territory. I have heard Turks talk among themselves of the “Yavruvatan” (Baby homeland); a term which rather amusingly is equally patronising for both those Turkish Cypriots who seek reunification and even those who struggle for the recognition of the TRNC. Even so, it certainly gives us an idea of where terms like ‘Motherland’ can lead to. Thinking of those who use such terminology, it makes one speculate how a sovereign people can reduce themselves to a position of an unofficial overseas territory? La Turquie Metropole, ah non Monsieur, nous sommes Chypriotes!

CULTURAL FATHERLAND & POLITICAL MOTHERLAND
Yet still people cannot abandon the notion of motherland. Some even argue that both Greece and Turkey are the cultural fatherlands but the political motherland is Cyprus. But I do not accept the notion that the two main Cypriot communities are extensions of Greece and Turkey. Greek and Turkish Cypriots have not ended up on the ‘wrong side of the border.’ This may be the case in other parts of the globe but Cypriots whatever their language after half a millennia of coexistence have much more in common than they do with neighbouring Greece or Turkey. In fact, culturally there is very little that divides the communities of Cyprus.

CONTROL
Suspicious of terms like ‘motherland,’ in his article “Death to the Motherland,” Vled Melamed the President of the organization New Tradition writes that powerful patriotism often employs terms like “Love of ones country, devotion to the nation, the great Motherland and so on” to connect with human emotion and instincts in order to make citizens “more controllable.” Melamed argues that the notion of country is not at all as “natural” since every “country is per se a political association, and, when they say: I love my country, this, using the strictest standards, is just as strange as to say I love the United Nations or I adore the lower house of parliament” Believers of this propaganda are according to Melamed the “the primary bearers of national propaganda, mistakenly equating patriotism with political association with the country.” So engrained are these ideas into our subconscious that “loss is equivalent to the destruction of the family” claims Melamed.

COMMON HOME
By this stage you would expect me to say that Cyprus is our ‘motherland.’ But I’m not going to say that. There is no ‘motherland,’ Cypriots have no motherland; a myth created as nationalist propaganda, this myth is merely used as a tool to gain your endless and blind folded loyalty to an ideology that benefits the interests of a larger neighbouring country. As much as Greece or Turkey are not motherlands, Cyprus is also not a motherland. Cyprus is a Common Home, but as a state it does not nurture its citizens like a mother or father. States do not function to nurture their citizens, as Franz Oppenheimer argues the state is a “vehicle of capitalism” and in Cyprus as in most of the world “if you want to eat you have to work.” And Cypriots must wake up to the reality too that in the world of states there is no concept of “family” either, such loving terms do not exist and even friendships between states and peoples are subject to change over time. States form their relationship only due to their political and economic constraints that make up their individual strategic interests. But as long as they are wretchedly distracted by foreign nationalist propaganda Cypriots can never fully expect to exert theirs.