When national interests and objectives are in question, a general reconciliation and solidarity will be provided in the foreign policy. National objectives, and in the strict sense, foreign policies have an important effect on the formation of rooted nations’ identities. Sadly, it’s not right that these objectives are always including rightfulness, justice and truth. Actualizing different politics through these types of national feelings and mobilizing the society is one of the most frequently used methods used by governments.

The national pride, which mobilizes the masses, the pledge of the wave of excitement, can be completely different from the concrete reality.

In case of such possibilities, masses are being motivated around threat perceptions like ‘foreign enemies’, common fears and concerns. We need to be prepared for the ‘social cost’ of the politics that are structured on the excitement or fear.

In Turkey, during the recent years, a discourse, whose excitement side is preponderant in the foreign policy, had been developed based upon the building of self-confidence and identity. More than the success or the failure of this politics, where the fear perception is used partly, the unforeseen social cost of it wasn’t pondered.

It is better to be prepared for uncalculated results in a region like the Middle East, where, the regional and global factors and different dynamics are extremely active…

The Syria issue had become an experience field, where all of these factors are interlaced together and their solutions are extremely painful and the price is paid with human lives. As much as the people who support the Syria policy, the social cost has been disregarded by analyses, which are adjusted to the result, and the ones, who criticize this policy. Of course, this omission was not only limited to the social myopia of analysts.

From now on, there is only the Syrian refugee reality, which is not limited with the provinces that has refugee camps but also became a part of the daily life especially in big cities. There couldn’t be anything more natural than Turkey opening its arms to Syrian refugees and harbor them. Playing the host for the people, who are exposed to the tragedy of humanity happening just over our border, is the necessity of brotherhood. However, the evolving of the Syria crisis, at a time least expected by the government, had ended up with millions of people pounding on Anatolia. This communal flow is still happening…

We should accept that, up until now, Anatolian people had played the host for these guests in a vast scale.

Other than hundreds of thousands of people, whom had been hosted by the government at the constructed tent cities, tens of thousands of other Syrians, who had spread to cities, had become part of our lives. Scenes of humans, who are looking for work, a roof for shelter, and who had been sleeping at parks or abandoned and thus trying to hold on to a life in a new country…

Until now, other than small provocations, there hasn’t been a frightening event.

However, we will need to face the social aspect of the Syria crisis, which as it seems will not end in the near future and is extending increasingly. Despite the culture and tradition harbored by these lands, our side, which has the tendency of degenerating, had presented itself during the Syria exam. On one hand, there is the Muslim conscience which is trying to look after the people, who had lost everything, in every province with their own means, and the inclusive consciousness, which is trying to look after the people whom they had encountered on the gateways’ pavements.

On the other hand, the attitudes, which are bleeding hearts after the nationalism, selfishness and the arrogance, had started to increase. We are encountering the results of how the Turkish- Kurdish conflicts, which had been going on for years, had hurt the chemistry of these lands and its structure and destroyed the structure of these lands. It means that we could see the social explosions, which will embarrass us when the selfish, individualist, human type is provoked with the fire of ethno-nationalism. Our country is being transformed into a field suitable for marginalizing, racist reactions of the sectarian-based clashes and the Arab hatred, which is the distinguishing feature of Turkish orientalism. This threat being closer than assumed is not only a problem against Syrians, but also a signal, which states that the alarm bells are ringing in the sense of essential values. We had just started facing all the problems like; Syrians, who are spreading over Turkey, being prepared for the new situation, precautions being taken against elements that will exploit their socio-economic situations, preventing the exploitation of support; which appear in upside-down situations…. It not so hard to guess what the people, who had become refugees after leaving their country where civil war conditions are being experienced, will be encountering. All these are valid for Syrians. Leaving the ones, who are misusing the happenings, aside, after the organized crime networks had come into action, social costs, which might include clashing from human marketing to labor exploitation, and from ethic issues to local issues, will appear. While we are regulating the Middle East, because we didn’t ponder the social cost of the issues we had to face off between ourselves, we are confronted with a frame, which reminds us that the infrastructure of this was not prepared.

The problems that the Syrian refugees are facing with and how we reply to them is functioning as a laboratory, which indicates where the society is swaying from where to where. At the same time, we are being passing through a common test, where the government will be tested on how much they are prepared against crises and the establishment of foreign policy.

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