Islamism, Populism, and Turkish Foreign Policy

Burak Bilgehan Özpek, Bill Park, Burak Bilgehan Özpek, Bill Park

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367184483
• eBook ISBN: 9780429589973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive volume analyses the phenomena of populism and Islamism in Turkey under Justice and Development Party (JDP) rule since 2002, and its impact on the country's foreign policy. The authors seek to identify the meanings of 'populism' and 'Islamism' in the Turkish context and their relationship to democracy there, exploring the extent to which they may explain the apparent rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism under the JDP and especially under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and address the tensions between Turkey's 'western' and 'Muslim' discourses and the politicization of history in the 'new Turkey'. They examine the implications of these developments for Turkey's EU accession prospects and its western alliances, explore the impact they have had on the country's approach to the Arab Spring, and consider their relationship to Turkey's status as an emerging economy in an economically globalizing context. The volume also debates whether Turkish populism is unique to that country or reflects a growing trend in world politics, including in the west.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science and international relations, especially those with a focus on Turkey. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Turkish Studies.

1 Introduction

Populism and Islamism in Turkey

Bill Park

 

 

 

 

Both inside Turkey and beyond, many greeted the election of the newly formed Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) single party government in November 2002 with optimism. It promised a welcome element of stability in the wake of the succession of fractious and fragile coalitions that it replaced, and seemed to offer a fresh alternative to the discredited parties and politicians which the electorate had so emphatically rejected. Labeling itself as a conservative or Muslim democratic party akin to Europe’s Christian Democrats, it promised to reform a political and economic system that had brought the country to its knees during the national economic crisis of 2000–2001. The new government moved quickly to assure its European partners that it would prioritize EU accession, encouraged a settlement of the Cyprus dispute, and appeared ready to address Turkey’s Kurdish issue as a political rather than a security problem that required an inclusive and conciliatory approach. The AKP’s electoral success also encouraged those who believed that, if Turkish democracy was ever to be consolidated, a way would have to be found to bring the country’s devout masses in the more peripheral provinces more fully into the political system. In and of itself, the AKP’s electoral success suggested a challenge to the hold of the Kemalist, secular, and largely urban elite over the country’s economy, its institutions, and its intellectual and cultural life.

A decade and a half later, the AKP’s political domination of Turkey’s political life seems complete. It has won a succession of national and local elections, referenda and, in 2014, its first direct presidential election, often managing to attract around 50% or more of the vote, compared with the 34% it achieved in 2002. The secular elite’s hold over the country’s bureaucracy, military, police, judiciary, universities and media has been severely weakened, so much so that it could be argued that the AKP has indeed succeeded in reconnecting the Turkish state with its hitherto largely alienated masses. The military appears to have been neutered as a domestic political actor – at least for the time being – and to have lost the capacity, legitimacy or even inclination to intervene in the country’s political processes or set its national security agenda.

Yet there has been no consolidation of Turkish democracy. In fact, recent years have witnessed an unambiguous reversal of the country’s political pluralism, intellectual and media diversity, attachment to the rule of law and the autonomy of institutions. Instead there has been centralization of power, growing authoritarianism, a coarsening of the government’s rhetoric, and a purge of all kinds of political opposition – including the elected leadership of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party and many of its locally elected officials, adherents of the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, liberal, leftist and Kemalist journalists and academics, including members of the ‘Academics for Peace’ group, and allegedly pro-Western military officers and other bureaucrats. Constitutional amendments have increased the power of the presidency at the expense of the National Assembly, and the war between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party has resumed and intensified. There has been a crackdown on social media and civil society groups. Abroad, Turkey’s relations with the European Union (EU) and some its leading member states are as bad as they have ever been, or worse, as is its relationship with the United States. Nor can it be said that Turkey’s regional relationships have improved. Its military incursions into neighboring Iraq and Syria have been condemned by the governments of those countries, and Ankara’s relationships with Israel, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and most other Gulf states, Iran, Greece, the Palestinian Authority and the Kurdistan Regional Government have been volatile and sometimes dire.

So, what went wrong? The articles in this special issue of Turkish Studies seek to address that question, albeit largely indirectly. They each explore the impact of populism and Islamism on both the AKP’s approach to governance and on its political fortunes. The contributions from Özpek and Tanrıverdi-Yasar, Sezal and Sezal, and Başkan highlight elements of continuity in the AKP’s approach from the outset. For Özpek and Yasar, the AKP exploited the tension between secularism and democracy in Turkey by deploying both populism and Islamism to reflect and intensify anti-elitist sentiment in the country that justified the government’s attacks on the secular establishment, notably the military. Populism has been the main driving force throughout the AKP’s period in office, however, which helps explain some of the fluctuations and turnabouts in government policies, such as the shift from support for to opposition against the EU and the West more generally. Eroding the power of the Kemalist establishment was presented as capturing the country and the state for the ‘real’ people of Turkey, the devout conservatives that formed the AKP’s electoral support base. The EU accession project was especially helpful to the campaign to marginalize the military’s role in Turkey’s domestic politics. However, the destruction of the Kemalist order has not been accompanied by the construction of a political system based on constitutional checks and balances, autonomous institutions, the rule of law, or a vibrant civil society and media. Thus, the AKP government can now act with few constraints.

Sezal and Sezal argue that Islamist ideology and objectives have constituted a central part of the AKP mindset from its inception, and that it has been applied in both domestic politics and foreign policy. Their coverage of the roots of the AKP’s Islamic thought argues that in essence, Islamism stresses the unitarian, communal and civilizational character of Islam, and enabled the AKP leadership to stress the alien and ‘foreign’ nature of the Kemalist elite, the individualistic and materialist civilization of the West and its corrupting impact on Turkey’s liberals and secularists, and the anti-populist leadership in the Middle East. They note, however, that the AKP period can be presented as a chronology, in which circumstances, opportunities and political victories offered the AKP ever more scope to stress its civilizational program, until it reached its current stage, in which liberals, Gülenists, Kemalists, Kurds and adherents of Shi’ism can all be represented as enemies of true Islam and of the ‘real’ people of Turkey.

Başkan’s piece centers on the thinking of former foreign minister and prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, and as such seeks to explain Turkey’s approach to foreign policy under the AKP. For him, the Middle East or perhaps the entire Muslim world constitutes a ‘civilization’ which had fallen from grace as a consequence of the legacy of imperialism, which left behind artificial borders, conflicted identities and culturally alienated leaderships – including Turkey’s of course – which left the region prey to foreign ideas and impurities. Hence the Arab Spring’s popular revolts against the existing order. As with AKP supporters in Turkey, the ‘people’ should overthrow the region’s unrepresentative regimes and restore their civilizational integrity. Such thinking provided the foundations for ‘neo-Ottomanism’ in Turkish foreign policy, in which the region should be encouraged to return to a condition that approximated those of Ottoman times, when, Davutoğlu argued, peoples could freely interact culturally, economically and politically, thereby reintegrating a region that had been artificially fragmented. Turkey’s Kemalist order had been part of a wider and alien regional order which the AKP and the Arab Spring movements promised to replace with a ‘normality’ in which the ‘people’ would be paramount.

Cinar’s piece perhaps takes the Sezals’ chronological observations a little further, in that it detects a shift on the part of the AKP from a moderate and democratic Islam towards a more populist vote maximization strategy and a progressive erosion of democracy. In other words, Cinar posits that there has been a degree of transformation over time in the AKP’s approach to government. According to this argument, the AKP was as yet ideologically unformed when it first came to power, and it may have initially and genuinely believed that it could reconcile Islam and democracy. It was encouraged in this by its Western friends in the wake of the 9/11 attack, who willed Turkey to play that role and serve as a ‘model’ for the Islamic world as a whole. However, the AKP leadership did not really understand or internalize Western democratic norms. Furthermore, as time passed, the AKP’s need to hold on to power, the lack of progress with EU accession, and the Arab Spring – which brought with it serious differences of perspective with its Western allies – led the AKP to place increased emphasis on its Islamic roots and those of its voters. Furthermore, EU inspired domestic reforms created resistance at home which could threaten the AKP’s hold on power, as too might any serious attempt to address the Cyprus or Kurdish problems. In line with the contributions discussed above, Cinar notes how the AKP adopted an attachment to what it saw as an Islamic ‘authenticity,’ defined in large measure as the binary opposite to Turkey’s Westernizing Kemalist elite. It applied this logic to the Middle East as well, of which he argues the AKP leadership had little more understanding than it did of Western democracy. Hence its support for what it saw as the authentic Islamic identity politics that fueled popular revolts throughout the region. In this evolution, the AKP moved towards a more overtly held conviction that democracy in the Western sense is a form of colonialism. ‘Real’ democracy was Islamic democracy, as represented by the AKP, in which the people held sway.

Cinar’s paper raises the important question of whether those who welcomed the AKP’s emergence were guilty of a poor understanding of what the party stood for, or whether it is the AKP that shifted from its initial stance towards the more anti-Western, Islamist and authoritarian flavor it exhibits today. Like Cinar’s contribution, Palabıyık’s paper on the politicization of Turkish history also detects a shift in around 2010. He argues that since that date government circles have embarked on an intensified attempt to replace Kemalism’s ‘official’ history with a more ‘nativist,’ neo-Ottoman and Islamist narrative. In this story, the pre-Republic Committee of Union and Progress, and its ideological descendent since the inception of the Republic, the Republican People’s Party, are deemed guilty for such ills as the overthrow of Abdulhamit II, the Armenian ‘relocation,’ the loss of Aegean and other territories in the Lausanne Treaty, imposed secularism, and alienating reforms such as the abolition of the Caliphate, the banning of the Arabic call to prayer, and the adoption of alphabet reform. The Republican elite’s Europhile Westernizing ‘obsession’ is also seen as part of this syndrome. In Palabıyık’s view, the AKP’s adoption of a variant of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis is intended to reverse or correct these mistakes, and has led to developments such as the reintroduction of Ottoman Turkish into the school curricula, a general re-Islamification of Turkish society, and a revisionist approach in foreign policy. Given Palabıyık’s observation that this process is not aimed at a pluralized historical debate but at the replacement of one official narrative with another, it might be worth asking whether the continuities here are greater than the discontinuities. The shoe is on the other foot for sure, but Turkey seems to remain as wedded today to the imposition of top-down official histories, and to the removal of constraints on power, as it was for so much of the pre-AKP Republican period.

Neither Cinar nor Palabıyık – nor the other contributions in this volume – draw attention to the change in the AKP itself after it assumed power. The AKP was formed by a number of younger exiles from Necemettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party, such as Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arinç. It also attracted more liberal conservatives and technocratic figures whose Islamism was worn more lightly and whose appreciation of democracy was deeper, such as Yaşar Yakis, the AKP government’s first foreign minister. These founding fathers, and the more liberal factions – including Davutoğlu – have long since been marginalized, have left the party, or have even been expelled. Today’s AKP has more and more come to reflect the personality, mindset and ambitions of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has surrounded himself with family members, business associates and acolytes. The adoption of a more presidential constitution, and the state of emergency that has been in force since the failed July 2016 coup, have further concentrated power into Erdoğan’s hands. It is worth asking whether the AKP in its initial formulation would have evolved in quite the way it has if Erdoğan had not been able to take over the reins of both the party and the government. This leads to a concomitant question – to what extent might any evolution of the AKP towards Islamism, populism and authoritarianism, be explained by Erdoğan’s rise as by any foundational character of the party as a whole?

A disturbing aspect of Turkey’s slide towards a more authoritarian, coarse, illiberal and, as this volume argues, Islamist and populist political formulation is that the party and its leader continue to attract enviable levels of electoral support. This is surely explained in large measure by the economic successes of the AKP era, at least from the perspective of its support base. Turkey’s economic growth figures and the modernization of its infrastructure have been remarkable. Ordinary Turks now enjoy access to material goods, health care, education, decent housing and leisure that would have been unimaginable to them just a couple of decades ago. The AKP government, largely correctly, gets credit for this transformation in the lives of the ordinary citizens of Turkey. However, as Kutlay and Karaoğuz point out, there have been deficiencies too in the country’s economic management. In their fine-grained piece, they scrutinize the AKP government’s endeavors to push through a neo-developmental state driven by improvement in the technological and value-added profile of the Turkish economy. They note that autonomous and meritocratic bureaucracy, governmental credibility, transparency and the free flow of information, are among the requirements and factors that enable the emergence of such a system. Research and development and resource allocation should be free of government interference and instead based on evidence and objective assessment.

The authors note that this has not been Turkey’s experience under the AKP. They trace the intense and often arbitrary political interference in the personnel and the work of TÜBITAK, Turkey’s scientific and research council, which has led to a number of high profile resignations from its board; the absence of objective performance evaluation; duplication of effort and lack of coordination; poor transparency and other weaknesses that inhibit Turkey’s shift from a medium-technology, low value-added economy to a technologically advanced and innovative model such as that provide by South Korea. Furthermore, the so-called ‘Anatolian Tiger’ companies, that form much of the business community’s AKP support base, are generally concentrated in the low value-added sectors such as construction, yet have been disproportionately favored with government contracts. For all its apparent successes, the AKP’s economic management might serve to confine Turkey to the ranks of middle technology economies that never quite manage to take off. Along with other aspects of poor economic management, this raises interesting questions about the future electoral fortunes of the AKP. Is its politicized approach to economic management sustainable over the longer term?

In retrospect, we can perhaps recognize that the populism that this collection of papers identifies and explains is an obvious tool for an anti-establishment party such as the AKP to have adopted. The unrepresentative, elitist, and top-down nature of Kemalism was systemic and inevitably alienating for many of Turkey’s marginalized and more ‘nativist’ citizens. Given Turkish society and culture, and the very roots of the AKP itself, it is also clear that Islamism would be married to populism in the challenge to the existing order. The relative absence in Turkey of a deeply rooted democratic culture, of autonomous institutions, the rule of law and of a vibrant civil society, have surely helped ease the AKP’s path, and certainly that of Erdoğan, and may also have served to leave Turkey hardly better placed, or perhaps worse off, than was the case in 2002.

Yet the triumph of Donald Trump in the United States, the successful Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and the emergence of anti-establishment parties on both the left and the right throughout the democratic world, demonstrate that mass popular alienation from and hostility towards ruling elites is hardly a purely Turkish phenomenon. In a complex, globalized and interconnected world, such populist movements might yet become more commonplace still. It is surely the case that the depth of American and Western European democratic culture and the strength of their political institutions will ensure a more robust defense of the existing order than what we have witnessed in the Turkish case. However, we are yet to see quite where this explosion of populism throughout the democratic world will lead, and what might be the consequences if it is resisted. What if, say, Trump is impeached or otherwise politically neutered by a rule-bound constitutional order characterized by intact checks and balances, or the Brexit vote remains unimplemented by a technocratic political and administrative elite who so universally opposed it in the first place?

Erdoğan, and the party that he leads, are undoubtedly very Turkish phenomena, and this volume helps us to better understand how Turkey has reached its present juncture. But populism, ‘nativism’ and the construction of alternative national narratives have a much wider currency. In that sense, this volume might also be useful for those readers who ponder the plight of democracy itself. Erdoğan might yet prove to be a forerunner of a populist wave that sweeps – and in some instances even sweeps away – the world’s more democratic political systems. Where it might lead, and whether he and others like him will be able to ride the wave, are vital questions that await us. This collection of papers might help us think through such questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bill Park served as a Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College, London. He is currently a visiting research fellow at King’s College, University of London, and visiting scholar at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara.

2 Turkey’s ‘Western’ or ‘Muslim’ identity and the AKP’s civilizational discourse

Menderes Çinar

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the evolution of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Populism and Islamism in Turkey
• 2 Turkey’s ‘Western’ or ‘Muslim’ identity and the AKP’s civilizational discourse
• 3 Populism and foreign policy in Turkey under the AKP rule
• 4 Dark taints on the looking glass: Whither ‘New Turkey’?
• 5 Politicization of recent Turkish history: (ab)use of history as a political discourse in Turkey
• 6 Islamism and Turkey’s foreign policy during the Arab Spring
• 7 Neo-developmentalist turn in the global political economy? The Turkish case
• Index