Women in Turkey

Silent Consensus in the Age of Neoliberalism and Islamic Conservatism

Gamze Çavdar, Yavuz Yaşar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351009102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Winner of the 2021 Suraj Mal and Shyama Devi Agarwal Book Prize

This book provides a socio-economic examination of the status of women in contemporary Turkey, assessing how policies have combined elements of neoliberalism and Islamic conservatism.
Using rich qualitative and quantitative analyses, Women in Turkey analyses the policies concerning women in the areas of employment, education and health and the fundamental transformation of the construction of gender since the early 2000s. Comparing this with the situation pre-2000, the authors argue that the reconstruction of gender is part of the reshaping of the state–society relations, the state–business relationship, and the cultural changes that have taken place across the country over the last two decades. Thus, the book situates the Turkish case within the broader context of international development of neoliberalism while paying close attention to its idiosyncrasies.
Adopting a political economy perspective emphasizing the material sources of gender relations, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Middle Eastern politics, political Islam and Gender Studies.

1 Theoretical framework

On August 13, 2001, 74 politicians along with supporting independent parliamentarians met in the Conference Room of the Bilkent Hotel in Ankara to declare the establishment of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP) (“AKP Kuruldu” 2001). Before the watchful eyes of journalists, the founding members of the new party read the party program declaring their unequivocal commitment to a market economy, a Western-oriented foreign policy, and individual liberties, which the program characterized as “the foundation of a free society.” These commitments represented a declaration of an ideological reorientation within the Turkish Islamist movement, a process that began in the early 1980s. The Turkish Islamist movement had historically criticized Turkey’s pro-Western foreign policy, calling the European Union and NATO “Western clubs,” and had been opposed to capitalism, at least in rhetoric, and barely mentioned individual liberties (Teşhis n.d.).

The AKP founded on that day has won four consecutive elections (2002, 2007, 2011, and 2015), each of which led to the formation of majority governments and the fundamental restructuring of the political, economic, and social life, including gender, in Turkey. The AKP’s era encompassed both executive posts (President and Prime Minister) and the legislature, among other top bureaucratic units. The party’s power was consolidated when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the former prime minister and the party chairman, was elected as president in 2014 and a referendum of constitutional amendments instituted a presidential system in 2017.

Since the day it was founded, the AKP has received considerable attention from political analysts both inside and outside of Turkey. One of the major topics drawing scholarly attention has been the party’s Islamic identity: A political party that came out of the Islamist movement was forming a majority government in a secular, Western-oriented regime of Turkey, and at the same time openly challenging that regime. This new government was going to attempt to reshape many characteristics of the Turkish republic, and, without question, gender was at the forefront.

Indeed, as soon as the election results declared the AKP’s victory in 2002, the headscarf became the focus of attention for both academics and the media. “What will happen to the headscarf ban?” newspapers wondered, counting those MPs from the AKP whose wives wore headscarves. The headscarf had never been present at the official ceremony. Similarly, the headscarf had been absent from campuses since the late 1980s. While the media busily speculated about the role of the headscarf, Bülent Arınç, then spokesperson of the Grand National Assembly, brought his headscarf-wearing wife to the official ceremony—setting up a prelude to a headscarf crisis among the top brass (“Ve Türban Protokolde” 2002). This event began a period of prolonged tension at the top until the ban finally ended in 2013.¹

The centrality of the Islamic–secular identity conflict in any discussion related to gender in general, and women in particular, was also apparent in academic studies. Scholars paid close attention to the new headscarf crisis (Saktanber and Çorbacıoğlu 2008). Some were much more optimistic about the prospects of women’s empowerment under the AKP rule, arguing that thanks to the AKP, Turkey will feel much more comfortable in its Islamic skin. Others argued that the “triple issue of the headscarf, the public sphere, and secularism are the three obstacles to the [AKP’s] gender policies” (Sözen 2006, 277), and the AKP can be said to be the party that has “extensively dealt with women’s issues more than any other political party in the last fifty years” (Sözen 2006, 277). The common feature of these analyses is their exclusive attention to the issue of women’s identity. Some focused on the headscarf ban; others criticized the Kemalist elite for having created “the other,” while still others discussed the legal implications. In any case, identity, its formation and the clash of different identities have remained the focus of attention, concerning gender, for many academics and pundits.

However, a closer look at the recent history of Turkey over the last decade reveals that, with respect to gender, not one process but multiple processes have been present all at the same time. First, a curious and less-noted development has taken place over the last decade that cuts across the Islamic–secular dichotomy and questions the exclusive attention to identity politics the AKP governments have implemented in the most widespread and in-depth economic liberalization programs in the history of the country. These programs were announced during the 1990s but their implementation had been delayed owing to the volatile economy, unstable coalition governments, economic crises, and war with the Kurdish separatists.

Under the AKP’s majority governments, a relative stability in the economy and a reduced level of conflict with Kurdish separatists (1999–2015) enabled the process of economic liberalization to be expanded, consolidated, and institutionalized while the neoliberal principles, such as privatization, individual responsibility, merit-based promotion, flexible market conditions, privatization of care, and supremacy of private enterprises were extended to almost every government program, including those pertaining to women and family. For instance, to attain the goal of increasing women’s employment rates, the AKP governments focused on entrepreneurship as a major policy. Large numbers of projects have been funded by various state agencies to train women (as well as men), providing them with logistical, financial, and legal support for their start-up businesses. Between 2005 and 2012, the European Union sponsored 23 of these projects for women entrepreneurs alone (“Kadın İstihdamı Projeleri” 2012). The AKP, in other words, emerged from the ashes of the Turkish Islamist movement, which was long anti-Western and anti-capitalist, and became the cheerleader for neoliberal policies that extended to people’s daily lives, particularly those of women. Except for a small body of scholarship, much of the recent research on gender in Turkey has neglected this political economy aspect of gender. Here, one finds the AKP governments, which promote neoliberalism while at the same time legitimizing women’s traditional roles through references to Islam, tradition, and custom.

The focus on the headscarf fails to highlight the fact that the AKP period has seen the most comprehensive promotion of traditional gender roles through public policies. The party program introduced at the Bilkent Hotel meeting revealed the limits of the new party’s interpretation of individual liberties by emphasizing women’s traditional roles as mothers and characterizing the family as “the essence of the Turkish society” (“AKP Kuruldu” 2001). The steps taken by the government indeed followed the footsteps of this program.

As one of its first legislative initiatives concerning women, the AKP introduced a bill to criminalize adultery, only to withdraw the bill in the face of the EU’s strong opposition. Later, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the AKP’s leader, the prime minister (2003–2014), and the president (2014–present), openly, unequivocally, and regularly advised women to have three children (later revised to four)—advice that was subsequently turned into a law in 2015 (Law #6637). Accordingly, to promote the three- or four-child policy, couples would receive interest-free loans and women would get longer maternity leave and enjoy “flexible working conditions” that would allow them to stay home while working. While some of the changes seem progressive—for instance, because they allow longer maternity—they in fact reinforce the traditional gender division of labor and women’s predicament as men’s dependents as the home-based flexible work does not come with benefits. It is also striking that these policies are accompanied by increasing religious discourse. In fact, the size of the 2013 budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı—DİB) exceeded the budgets of 12 ministries, including the Ministry of the Interior, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Health. In addition, the DİB was designated by the Ministry of Family and Social Policy as the main institution to educate the family. Clearly, the AKP period attempts to synthesize two seemingly exclusive ideologies: global neoliberalism and Islamic conservatism.

This book addresses the following two questions: (1) What have been the AKP’s gender policies over the last decade? And (2) How has the AKP reconciled the two seemingly distinct and alternative ideologies of global neoliberalism and Islamic conservatism?

Answering these questions is significant for two reasons. First, the rise of Islamist and conservative politics in Turkey, especially since the 1980s, has been a subject of intense scholarly discussion. This discussion has mainly concentrated on issues such as the construction and reconstruction of Muslim women’s identity, the headscarf, the departure of the new Islamic identity from the Kemalist one, tension between the Muslim and secular identities, and resistance to and accommodation of different identities. Beyond the concerns with the identities, however, there remains a strong need to examine the socio-economic dimension of gender over the same period. Specifically, what has happened to the material conditions of men and women during the AKP rule? How have the gender roles in production and reproduction changed over the last decade?

Second, the existing studies that examine the AKP’s ideology have either under-theorized the relationship between neoliberalism and Islamic conservatism or identified these as mutually exclusive. This study is an attempt to better develop a theoretical framework between the two, especially with respect to gender.

Starting from the premise that an exclusive focus on identity is insufficient to understand the gender policies of the AKP over the last decade in Turkey, this book aims to bring a critical political economy perspective back into the study of gender, a dimension of gender long neglected owing to the almost exclusively scholarly focus on identity since the early 1990s. As explained in detail below, the strength of the critical political economy approach comes from two main premises. One premise is that this approach pays particular attention to the material while not neglecting the discursive, and the second premise is that it is concerned with the gender division of power not only in production that takes place in the market, but also in reproduction in the household. However, the critical political economy neither deems identity completely irrelevant nor completely neglects the socio-cultural factors in the analysis. For instance, the study uncovers the role identity plays in the way those in power justify public policies and the way those individuals are perceived by the constituency, thereby playing crucial roles in “marketing” and justifying the government policies. These points will be highlighted as they become relevant throughout the rest of the book.

By taking both dimensions of gender into account, this book specifically examines gender policies in the areas of employment, education, and health since the early 2000s. These areas constitute some of the fundamental pillars of the socio-economic conditions for both men and women. The Global Gender Index, designed by the World Economic Forum to measure gender equality, takes these overall areas (in addition to the political empowerment) as the main indicators of gender well-being. Each of these areas is meticulously examined to demonstrate the reshaping of the material conditions of men’s and women’s lives as well as the redistribution of power between men and women and how these changes are tied to the issues of identity.

This book argues that under AKP rule, gender politics has been meticulously and fundamentally reshaped as a unique blend of neoliberalism and Islamic conservatism. This new mode of patriarchy (Coşar and Yeğenoğlu 2011) was made possible because neoliberal globalization and Islamic conservatism, although different ideologies, are harmonious in both theory and practice with respect to the societal roles they assign to genders. This “silent consensus” between neoliberalism and conservatism to a large degree holds the same fundamental assumptions concerning gender: (1) men and women are fundamentally different; (2) women’s primary domain of activity should be confined to the home; and (3) a natural division of labor exists between men and women (and attempts to change it would be detrimental).

In addition to this theoretical congruence, the specific policies these ideologies advocate also largely overlap. For instance, “flexible market conditions” serve both neoliberalism and conservatism because they promote both efficiency—by employing women temporarily and with no social benefits—and gender segregation—by allowing them to work at home. Therefore, these seemingly alternative ideologies actually work in concert with each other, strengthening, reinforcing, and further institutionalizing traditional gender roles. These policies, although originating outside the country, are mitigated through a system that operates at multiple levels. Therefore, the AKP’s blend of neoliberalism and Islamic conservatism operates at three interrelated levels with respect to gender: (1) The neoliberal policies at the global level, often advocated by the IMF, World Bank, and the European Union; (2) conservative policies adopted at the national level; and (3) administrative units such as municipalities operating along with civil society organizations at the local level. The AKP governments ensure that the neoliberal policies are wrapped with a conservative discourse that often appeals to custom, religion, history, and authentic Islamic values while advocating and justifying these policies.

It is important to state at the outset that this study makes a normative commitment to gender equality, viewing the maldistribution of power between men and women on the global scale as unjust and unnecessary rather than taking it as “given,” a type of social phenomenon that is “natural” or “unavoidable.” Thus, this normative commitment uses gender as an analytical category and examines the socio-economic conditions of men and women as the necessary requirement for gender equality.

Limits of exclusive focus on identity politics

During the 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of identity politics in advanced capitalist societies, academic studies began moving away from economic-based explanations. Identity and culture gained prominence not only as topics of interest, but also as conceptual frameworks of examination. Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the preponderance of economic issues in academia has further declined, and instead, post-structuralist, non-economic, cultural, and at times micro and individual-based approaches have taken over. Although originating in Western scholarship, this trend has deeply influenced the analysis of non-Western countries, including Turkey.

A large body of literature on identity politics in Turkey has emerged since the 1990s (Kadıoğlu 1996, 1999; Ayata 1997; Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997; Göle 1997a, 1997b, 2000; Keyman 1995; Keskin-Kozat 2001; Gülalp 2003; Yavuz 2003, 2009; Saktanber 2002; Güneş-Ayata and Tütüncü 2008; Paker 2009; White 2014; Cinar 2014; Doğan and Kenar 2016). This perspective considers many of Turkey’s political, economic, and social problems to be instances of identity crisis, which are often argued to result directly from the modernization and Westernization processes that the Turkish republic initiated at the turn of the century. Accordingly, the new republic’s promises for modernity were false, misg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical framework
• 2 Competing visions of gender
• 3 Employment
• 4 Education
• 5 Health
• 6 Looking global, looking ahead
• Index