Democracies Divided

The Global Challenge of Political Polarization

Thomas Carothers, Andrew O'Donohue

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780815737223
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"A must-read for anyone concerned about the fate of contemporary democracies." —Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die

Why divisions have deepened and what can be done to heal them

As one part of the global democratic recession, severe political polarization is increasingly afflicting old and new democracies alike, producing the erosion of democratic norms and rising societal anger. This volume is the first book-length comparative analysis of this troubling global phenomenon, offering in-depth case studies of countries as wide-ranging and important as Brazil, India, Kenya, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. The case study authors are a diverse group of country and regional experts, each with deep local knowledge and experience.

Democracies Divided identifies and examines the fissures that are dividing societies and the factors bringing polarization to a boil. In nearly every case under study, political entrepreneurs have exploited and exacerbated long-simmering divisions for their own purposes—in the process undermining the prospects for democratic consensus and productive governance.

But this book is not simply a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Each case study discusses actions that concerned citizens and organizations are taking to counter polarizing forces, whether through reforms to political parties, institutions, or the media. The book's editors distill from the case studies a range of possible ways for restoring consensus and defeating polarization in the world's democracies.

Timely, rigorous, and accessible, this book is of compelling interest to civic activists, political actors, scholars, and ordinary citizens in societies beset by increasingly rancorous partisanship.

Part I

SEVERE POLARIZATION AND DEMOCRATIC BREAKDOWN

ONE

The Islamist-Secularist Divide and Turkey’s Descent into Severe Polarization

SENEM AYDIN-DÜZGİT

On multiple different measures of polarization, Turkey today is one of the most polarized nations in the world.1 Deep ideological and policy-based disagreements divide its political leaders and parties; Turkish society, too, is starkly polarized on the grounds of both ideology and social distance.2 This chapter focuses on the bases and manifestations of polarization in Turkey, the main reasons behind its increase, and its ramifications for the future of democracy and governance in the country.

The current dominant cleavage between secularists and Islamists has its roots in a series of reforms intended to secularize and modernize the country after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. These reforms created a deep division within Turkish society, but until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the secularist elite dominated key state institutions such as the military, allowing it to repress conservative groups and thus keep conflict over the soul of Turkey from coming into the open. Since 2002, however, the remarkable electoral success of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) has brought the Islamist-secularist divide to the fore.

Despite the AKP’s initial moderation, several developments, including the collapse of the European Union (EU) accession process, the success of polarization as an electoral strategy, and undemocratic threats from the secularist state establishment, pushed the AKP toward increasingly populist, divisive rhetoric and politics, beginning with the 2007 general elections. As the AKP’s dominance has grown since the late 2000s, its own authoritarian behavior has largely driven further polarization. The problem of constant electioneering, the rise of majoritarianism, an erosion of democratic institutions, and a polarized and unfree media landscape have further deepened Turkey’s divisions. Although the Islamist-secularist cleavage remains the most salient divide in Turkish politics today, the AKP has inflamed other divisions, particularly between Turkish and Kurdish nationalists, to play the opposition parties against one another.

The consequences of these developments are as clear as they are worrisome. Polarization has eroded fact-based public debate, facilitated a dramatic retrenchment of democracy, undermined the legitimacy of public institutions, divided civil society, and hurt social cohesion. Given that Turkey’s political elites cannot even agree that such polarization exists, this problem is unlikely to abate, and no substantial efforts have been made to address it.

Roots

The origins of Turkey’s current polarization lie in the foundational reforms of the 1920s that sought to remove religion from public life and thus fomented a political and cultural divide between secularist and Islamist camps. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, enacted a series of sweeping top-down reforms to transform the nation along Western, secularist lines: he abolished the caliphate, replaced sharia courts with a secular civil code, and placed all religious institutions under state control to monitor and strictly limit the role that religion would play in public life.

These radical reforms deeply polarized Turkish society and fomented a values-based kulturkampf (cultural struggle). As Şerif Mardin’s “center-periphery thesis” argues, since the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923, the modernizing and westernizing reforms undertaken by the Republican elite (“the center”) in both the political and cultural domains have been resisted by a significant segment of Turkish society (“the periphery”).3 On one side are those close to the center, “whose lifestyles are shaped on the basis of an image of the good society with science and human rationality at its core, which we may loosely refer to as a ‘Secular Image of Good Society.’ ”4 On the other side are those close to the periphery, “whose lifestyles are based on the core values of tradition and religion (mainly Sunni Islam), which may best be referred to as a ‘Conservative Image of Good Society.’ ”5

Across the rest of the 20th century, the secularist elite used its control of key state institutions such as the military and judiciary to repress its conservative opponents and thus suppress the symptoms of this divide. On the whole, the center dominated, and those who subscribed to the conservative image of good society were kept on the sidelines. Although the strict secularism of the Kemalist elite managed to exclude Islam from political life, religion remained a powerful force in the formation of individual and communal identities in the country. Turkey’s top-down modernization thus succeeded in restructuring the country’s political institutions but failed to ensure that Turkish society accepted the process of secularization. Instead, Islam remained a powerful symbolic force in the everyday life of Turkish people and in the way in which they define themselves as Muslims.6 In the first two decades of the 21st century, this divide sharpened and deepened, becoming the basis of the harsh polarization that afflicts Turkey today. The following section examines the process by which polarization intensified and the key drivers of this process.

Three other notable divides also have existed in modern Turkey, but they have either faded over time or been exploited to exacerbate the dominant divide between secularists and Islamists. First, between 1960 and 1980, Turkey witnessed the rise of a left-wing labor movement and a nationalist right that defined itself as anticommunist. Societal and political polarization between the nationalist right and the far left increased in the 1970s, resulting in widespread civil violence that culminated in the military coup of September 12, 1980. The 1980 coup radically changed the Turkish social and political landscape. The military regime abandoned the strict secularism of the early republic to increase its popular support and opened up the liberalizing economy and the domestic market to Islamic capital. These changes helped strengthen Islamic movements within the state and civil society and contributed to the rise of Islamic identity as a strong political force in the 1990s. The nationalist-religious (Turkish-Islamic) ideology of the military regime led it to conduct a massive crackdown on the Turkish left, exceeding by far its suppression of the nationalist right. The military’s neoliberal agenda also further marginalized the Turkish labor movement as a political force.

In the second half of the 20th century, two additional fault lines in Turkish politics and society—namely, an ethnic cleavage between Turkish and Kurdish identity and a sectarian divide between Sunnis and Alevis—intensified. To win the Kurds’ support during Turkey’s war of independence and in the early years of the republic, Atatürk originally appealed to a common Ottoman or pan-Islamic identity to create a multicultural sense of solidarity. Yet the vacuum left by the removal of Islamic elements in state ideology soon started to be filled with an emphasis on ethnic Turkishness, signifying a policy shift from Ottomanism to Turkification. This shift soon helped alienate the Kurds but did not immediately lead to the emergence of an ethnic or national Kurdish identity, mainly because of the regional, feudal, and religious divides among the Kurds themselves.

Such an identity, however, began to emerge in the 1950s and developed in the following decades, as modernization and urbanization led to high rates of Kurdish migration to industrialized cities. The traditional establishment perceived Kurdish demands for recognition of this identity as threats to the territorial integrity of the state and met them with hostility, especially after the 1980 coup. Similar to its role in the rise of political Islam, the 1980 coup also played an important role in the rise of nationalism, deepening the ethnic cleavage between Turkish and Kurdish identity. This divide erupted into conflict in 1984, when the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiye Karkeren Kurdistan; PKK), a terrorist-guerrilla organization, launched a violent secessionist campaign in the southeast. The late 1980s and 1990s were marked by the escalation of the PKK’s conflict with the Turkish military and the ensuing rise in the number of casualties, alongside gross human rights abuses and the forced displacement of a large number of Kurds from the southeast to western cities.

The third and final fault line is the one between Sunnis and Alevis. The Alevi faith is a distinct sect of Islam, which differs from the Sunni sect in terms of both theology and religious practice. It is estimated that Alevis constitute roughly 10 to 20 percent of the Turkish population.7 The roots of the Sunni-Alevi divide also go back to the early years of the Turkish Republic, when the Republican project sought to construct a national identity that was not only Turkish but also Sunni Muslim, and had no room for minority sects of the dominant religion. Alevis almost uniformly attach themselves to the secularist camp in the prevailing cultural divide of the country, translating into support for center-left political parties and currently the main opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi; CHP). Although historical animosities between these two sects have been largely contained in the Republican era, the divide has grown stronger following key traumatic events, the most notable of which were the 1978 Maraş and 1993 Sivas massacres of Alevi citizens, which are still vivid in Alevis’s collective memory.

Trajectory

The rise of the intense polarization of Turkish politics and society between secularists and Islamists started in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those years saw the political rise of the AKP under the skillful and charismatic leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The party emerged as a splinter of the Islamist Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi; FP), which the Turkish Constitutional Court had banned in 2001 on the grounds that it had engaged in antisecular activities. The AKP’s core constituency was conservative segments of society, though it also attracted some liberals and Kurds as it mounted a fundamental challenge to the dominant position of the secularist elite. The party first came to power in the November 2002 elections, following a major economic crisis in 2001 that wiped out almost all of the established parties of the center from the political scene.

Between 2002 and 2006, the AKP pushed for EU accession, a policy goal that united many Islamists, liberals, Kurds, Alevis, and secularists. The party’s coming to power coincided with the growing prospect of EU accession for Turkey (which was officially declared an EU candidate country in 1999) as well as a strong economic recovery program led by the International Monetary Fund. Immediately upon coming to power, the party successfully promoted EU accession and its democratic reform agenda to widen its support base toward the center, to preserve its core voter base by promising expanded religious freedoms, and to guarantee its survival in the face of the secularist state establishment in the judiciary and the military. Democratic reforms went hand in hand with the growth of the Turkish economy and the country’s rising profile in foreign policy. The rise of the AKP was generally viewed favorably in the West, where its record of democratic reforms was considered as a possible model for other Middle Eastern countries to emulate. Turkish official rhetoric matched this discourse by frequently pointing at the significance of the Turkish “model” in underlining the need for democracy in the wider region.

From the mid-2000s onward, however, the AKP adopted increasingly polarizing rhetoric and policies that led first to the stagnation and later to the regression of Turkish democracy. Several distinct causes prompted it to foster political and societal polarization through the populist rhetoric of then-Prime Minister Erdoğan, starting with the 2007 general elections. First, the partial freeze of EU accession negotiations in December 2006 significantly dampened hopes of Turkish membership and thus eliminated a significant factor that had induced the AKP’s moderation. Second, this polarizing rhetoric was highly effective, particularly given the AKP’s dominant status in the political party system and a weak and divided opposition. The party capitalized tremendously on feelings of “victimhood” among the peripheral masses, which felt alienated and discriminated against by the former secularist state establishment in the center as embodied in the military, judiciary, and state bureaucracy. The success of this discourse in the 2007 elections encouraged it to use similar rhetoric in the following general, local, and presidential elections, as well as in two constitutional referenda.8 A key element of this populist polarizing rhetoric has been an “us” versus “them” divide, referring respectively to the “people,” constituting the public will and represented at the political level by Erdoğan through his leadership of the AKP, mainly as opposed to the corrupt “Republican elite,” which represents the “establishment” embodied in the main opposition party, the CHP. This populist view of the “people” vs. the “elite,” where the party and its leader are represented as “the voice” of the genuine “will of the people” as opposed to that of the “elite” identi...