The Making of Neoliberal Turkey

Cenk Ozbay, Maral Erol, Z. Umut Turem, Aysecan Terzioglu, Cenk Ozbay, Maral Erol, Z. Umut Turem, Aysecan Terzioglu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472473837
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134807963
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring the divergent aspects of the rule of neoliberalism in Turkey since 1980s, each chapter in this book highlights a specific dimension of this socio-economic process and together, these essays construct a thorough examination of the whirlwind of changes recently experienced by Turkish society. With particular focus on the new ways in which social power operates, expert contributors explore new discourses and subjectivities around environmentalism, health, popular culture, economic policies, feminism and motherhood, urban space and minorities, class and masculinities. By questioning the primary influence of the state in these micro-political matters, they engage with concepts of neoliberalism and governmentality to provide a fresh, grounded and analytical perspective on the routes through which social power navigates the society. This sustained examination of the new axes of power and subjectivity, with a particular eye on the formation of new political spaces of governance and resistance, deepens the analysis of Turkey's experiment with neoliberal globalization.

Chapter 1
The Making of Neoliberal Turkey: An Introduction

Maral Erol, Cenk Ozbay, Z. Umut Turem, and Aysecan Terzioglu

In the early summer of 2013, a momentous public protest took place in Istanbul, offering an invaluable source of information and perspectives on Turkish society in the neoliberal era. The event, which today is called the Gezi Park Protests, started as a small occupation in order to defend Gezi Park in the Istanbul's city center from destruction by the government. The protests quickly snowballed into the biggest social protest that Turkey has seen since the 1970s, unleashing a massive social energy and producing one of the biggest laboratories for social dynamics in recent times. The Gezi Park Protests included massive demonstrations against the government's recent policies and on and off occupation of the park space for several weeks, as well as brutal police violence against the protesters, occupiers and supporters. What was striking in the Gezi protests was the inability to define the protests through the existing academic frames. Protests were carried out by thousands of people with diverse political ideologies and socio-economic backgrounds. Even to this day, a satisfactory analysis of the protests is hard to find.

The protests initially appeared to pit the masses against a heavy-handed government. This certainly has a kernel of truth: indeed, while the protests were initially about the protection of the park space, they quickly evolved into a massive protest against the heavy-handed, top-down approach of the government. The reality, however, is a much more nuanced and complex picture in which we saw the struggle between different regimes of governmentalities. The Gezi protests, in other words, did not lend themselves to an easy reading that pits the society and the state against one another. Rather, these protests displayed the different regimes and mentalities of governing while such mentalities are striving for dominance against one another. A particularly salient form of such struggles took place during the protests against the governing ideology of the ruling party, which seemed determined to impose an Islamic, conservative, family-oriented, pro-natalist life style to the citizens. Such outright pressures included, for example, a ban on the sales of alcoholic beverages after 10 p.m., access limits to birth control and abortion, and leaving major urban venues of arts and culture dysfunctional and empty, to eventually crumble or be demolished. Against the type of neo-conservative Islamism that defined the government's stance, a more generous and hands off liberality was championed by the protesting youth, putting the two competing programs of governing in present day Turkey on clear display.

In addition to such contours, however, there were also different currents of political experimentation that showed potential new forms of subject formation and governance. Within the physical borders of Gezi Park, a political space was quickly established in the immediate aftermath of the protesters' takeover of the urban park. What started out as an environmental protest to protect an urban park, in other words, was quickly turned into a sphere of political experimentation in which a long yearned for democratic, inclusive, and deliberative style of politics was put on display. Such political experimentation positioned itself against the meticulous and intrusive governing style typical of the JDP government, but the other side of this same experimentation can also be found in the more traditional political party system of Turkey. This performative and discursive political arena indicated the existence of certain axes of resistance and subjectivity not only against the JDP rule, but also against the system of political representation altogether. Political groups which are quite different in terms of their political views and aspirations came together in a common act of resistance. Such common acts formed the grounds for the recognition of the other, as well as opening avenues for dialogue between previously distant communities. Social media channels and public meetings in neighborhood parks and open spaces played a crucial role in generating a rethinking of the governmentalized nation and the need to revise what citizens understand from power and demand from politics. The protests have also confirmed our insight that new perspectives in analyzing Turkish society and politics are needed. The more traditional frameworks on power and protest in Turkey fail to understand and explain the social phenomena today. That issues such as environment, urban space, and individual freedom became so important as to incite massive demonstrations proves, at least in part, that a new landscape of power is out there. The Making of Neoliberal Turkey is an attempt to chart that landscape and offer ways to make it legible.

Turkey has been neoliberalizing at least since the economic reforms that were declared on January 24, 1980. This book is about the process of neoliberalization of Turkey in the recent decades. Each chapter highlights a specific dimension of this process, and the chapters collectively offer a thorough examination of the whirlwind of changes Turkish society has undergone since the 1980s. Governmentality provides a distinct analytical lens through which to explicate neoliberal globalization in Turkey. The particular focus of the volume is on the novel ways that social power operates and the new identities and social forces that emerge alongside channels of resistance and reinterpretation. Hence, our claim is that such a sustained examination of the new axes of power and subjectivity with a particular eye on the formation of new political spaces of governance and resistance would deepen our analysis of Turkey's experiment with neoliberal globalization. The opening up of new venues and the building of new discourses, such as environmentalism and feminism, the rise of identity politics and its discontents, and the reproduction of spaces for politics through, for example, the urban rights movements, are some of the key elements in this transformation.

Another key motivation in bringing together the interdisciplinary chapters in this volume is to question the primary role ascribed to the state in the critical accounts on politics and society in Turkey. All of the authors in The Making of Neoliberal Turkey resist the urge to explain social dynamics by constant references to the Turkish state, as frequently done in Turkish social science, especially in critiques of modernization (Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997; Heper and Sayari 2012). Governmentality, a concept developed by Michel Foucault (Burchell et al. 1991), is a useful departure point for an analysis that aims to have a healthy suspicion about the role and capacities of the state in Turkish society. Although not all the authors subscribe to an explicitly Foucauldian framework, they all agree that, not only have politics shifted over time (notably through neoliberalization), but our conceptual tools to understand and explain the domains of politics and society have also transmogrified. In this sense, through the incorporation of the dual concepts and process of neoliberalism—neoliberalization and governmentality—governmentalization provide us with a fresh analytical perspective as we facilitate a move away from state-centered analyses of Turkish society.

In this introductory chapter, we lay out the basic threads that connect the chapters in the coming pages. Initially, in the next section, we draw a bird's eye view of the transformations in Turkish society and politics in recent decades. Next, we briefly discuss the established ways of thinking and understanding that characterize many, if not all, works on the Turkish sociopolitical scene, in an effort to explain what it is that we are offering with this book. This section leads to a theoretical excursus where we offer our take on governmentality and governmentalization as theoretical concepts and tools that could be mobilized for research in the context of neoliberalization in Turkey. Finally we offer an overview of the book, specifying what the chapters are about and how they connect to one another within the broader skeleton of the book.

A History of the Turkish Present

Turkey has been gradually opening up to the multiform flows of globalization and neoliberalism since the early 1980s. This opening has become more accentuated since the end of the Cold War, during which Turkey had been located as one of the frontier countries. As Fikret Senses explains in greater detail in his chapter, in the post-1980 years, the national economy was liberalized and articulated with world markets, while the import-substitution basis of the industry was mostly terminated amidst broad waves of privatization and deregulation. The political landscape that had been structured around the meta-narratives of the left and right in the pre-1980 period got fragmented to include identity issues, culture and lifestyle choices as the new bases for politics. As military intervention heavily bulldozed over the pre-1980 axes of politics, unions and other labor associations were silenced and tamed by the military rule of the early 1980s and kept under control by the ensuing governments. Much like any other country experiencing neoliberal transformations, politics took on a bad name as if it were, by nature, equated with corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence. Under the neoliberal reforms, politics would be a technocratic endeavor: rational, sterile, and free from the messiness of ideology and ideological struggles. Accompanying this eradication of the "old" politics was the emergence of a "new" one focused on identity, locality, consumerism, and a celebratory rhetoric of free choice. Civil society was hailed as the ideal terrain of politics, while labor movements or political parties that aimed at capturing governmental power were discredited as outdated. At this juncture, a depoliticized understanding of social movements and non-governmental organizations became hegemonic, in accordance with technocratic understandings of how the state and society should be organized. While the pre-1980 forms of politics were still operative in the 1980s to a certain extent, as could be seen in the massive labor demonstrations of 1989 and the miner strikes in following years, such forms were eventually diminished by the fall of the Soviet Bloc, leaving the labor movement and politics severely damaged. The anti-politics machine that seemed more like a liberal and military fantasy at the beginning of the decade appeared to have become a reality by the end of it. If global factors and forces such as the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc were one part of the reason Turkey grew into this liberal fantasy, the mixing of culture and consumerism in order to produce consent for the emerging neoliberal doxa was another. Turkish culture adopted transnational tastes, brands, and values; and then blended them with various localisms that autonomously existed together in the cultural domain. While a number of monographs and edited volumes give an account for this transformation in the post-1980 term using different and significant theoretical approaches (Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997; Finkel and Sirman 1990; Heper and Sayari 2012; Oktem and Kerslake 2010; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Oktem 2011; Onis and Senses 2009; Ozyurek 2006), the lack of a focus on "culture" and the relatively rigid conceptualizations of hegemony with a strong emphasis on the economic dynamics leave further room for studies that examine the cultural domain and emphasize politics not only at the macro level but also at the very micro, capillary sites in of the everyday with a bottom up view of how power actually operates and circulates.

Just as this liberal fantasy started producing consent by the beginning of the 1990s, it was also dealt a serious blow. The fantasy itself was not lived by the majority of the population, but it commanded the power to mobilize desire and longing among the masses for a depoliticized form of politics. This false utopia was shattered by the increasingly violent and (by the early 1990s) chronic armed conflict between the Turkish army and the separatist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). A deep wave of confrontation, which the army defined as a "low intensity war," not only left tens of thousands of people dead, but also led to the forced mass migration of Kurdish citizens from the country side to urban regions (Saracoglu 2010). At this juncture, the essential axis of the political landscape moved swiftly toward nationalism. Both Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms grew alongside each other, producing ethnic-based identities as significant movers of politics. Parallel to the move towards a politics of ethnicity was the rise of political Islam, partly due to the deliberate encouragement of Turkish-Islamic view in the post-coup 1980s (Tugal 2009). A line of post-1980 Islamic parties increasingly claimed an important segment of the popular vote. By 2002, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) was elected to government, and has stayed in power since.

In fact, these broad changes in the political landscape followed a global pattern that is displayed in the "West" as well. As Lenz and Dallman put it (2007, 5), in the 1980s "a paradigm change [was experienced] from redistribution, a politics of structural difference, to recognition, a politics of cultural difference that focused on multiculturalist and feminist claims and notions of cultural group identities." In Turkey, the broad remaking of the political landscape bore its fruit in the 1990s, with the shift from a politics of redistribution articulated with a left versus right scale toward a politics of recognition that emphasized identities, Islamist, Kurdish, secularist/Kemalist, and, of course, Turkish nationalist.

Such emergence of new or renewed identities and their recognition changed the entire political spectrum. The previous normal of Turkish politics, defined by an adherence to the ideals and practices of the Kemalist Republican model, a military to guard this adherence, and a strict avoidance of ethnicity and religion as the bases for political mobilization, have been shattered, leaving a wide open terrain for new forms of politics to flourish. In this renewed landscape, identity based social movements (such as feminist groups, LGBTQ activists, Kurdish associations, environmentalist organizations, and religious currents) have been politicized. It is also in this context that the currently ruling JDP has formed a discursive coalition with a number of secular/liberal groups using its democratic rhetoric, reaction against outdated state mechanisms, and promises to take steps towards European Union membership, which would signal an ultimately happy ending to the belated Turkish modernization.

We identify three essential dynamics that have facilitated the process of neoliberal governmentalization: First, the heavy military rule in the years following the coup of 1980 hammered out any type of political organization that had existed in the pre-1980 years. Second, financial liberalization and integration with global neoliberalism under the guardianship of the military have rendered Turkey vulnerable to the establishment of the rule of the market in almost all facets of life. In the absence of political webs that could provide organizational capabilities to the people for resistance, such intrusion of the market has been much more profound. Finally, these twin dynamics have been accompanied by a societal change that had already been well under way in Turkey. The consistent rise of the urban population from 1955 onwards and its surpassing of the rural population by the early 1980s have been key to understanding Turkish neoliberalism. Partly as a result of urbanization, middle class formation and consumerism have been in the making for quite some time, even before the coup of 1980. Combined with the tabula rasa that the military provided in the years immediately post-1980, these already existing dynamics merged with the new ones to shift the Turkish political landscape. We argue that these three dynamics opened up new spaces and sites both for creative politics and governance of the masses in the post-1980 period. The proliferation of new identities and political positions on the one hand enabled new forms and repertoires for progressive politics. But these emerging forms and processes also are indicative of, and sometimes engender, new forms of regulation and governance.

If the transformations of the 1980s can be seen as the building blocks of the neoliberalization of a country, they were also accompanied by what Michel Foucault (1991) calls, "'governmentalization of the state and the nation." By governmentalization, he means the sidelining of the traditional axes of politics and the emergence of new spaces and sites for both governance and resistance. Governmentalization is used by Foucault to further explain his concept of governmentality. He uses governmentality in order to designate the myriad ways in which power operates in society. This is part of his attempt to understand power not as a property to be owned or energy to be stored. Rather, Foucault conceives of power as a relation, as produced as a form of relationality. He tries to understand, not who has power and who executes it from top to bottom, but rather how power operates and is produced at the very micro instances that we can observe. Accordingly, power in modern society is not owned by and does not emanate from a sovereign state that stands above the society but is produced and applied in a variety of ways that go beyond and above the state. In this sense, the state is a condensation, a point of concentration as it were, of multiple axes of power in society. The following line from his lectures in College de France best captures this line of thinking: "The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities" (cited in Bröckling, Krasmann, and Lemke 2010, 77).

New subjectivities have been constructed as neoliberal ideas are fostered and proliferated through intensifying power relations and the increased social investment to govern them. The production and administration of knowledge, the creation of supposedly free subjects who are able to compete and succeed in neoliberalism, and the rigid governance of actions are fused in this context. Governmentalization, as incomplete and open-ended concept as it is, is useful in a first stab at the enrichment of academic vocabulary for broadly analyzing the shifted Turkish political landscape.

Taking off from such a starting point, the process of government in Turkey became more diffused yet tangible; almost all domains of conduct among people, groups, and institutions have been redefined and reordered, and a great number of new laws have passed in a ceaseless procession of legal reforms. Life itself has been reconfigured by legal, political, cultural, and symbolic interventions. In due course, cities and urban spaces have been restructured, identities and sociabilities have been intermixed, ideological affiliations and political belongings have been reformatted, bodily capacities and somatic experiences have been rearranged, work and leisure have been transposed, and nature has become a site of unceasing conflict and contestation. In revealing these new axes of power and subjectivity, The Making of Neoliberal Turkey does not intend to swing to the other end of the pendulum by fully ignoring the state in the Turkish landscape of power, for this would significantly impair the accuracy and explanatory strength of our analysis. In fact, power in post-1980 Turkey has been multiplied and decentralized through capillaries of everyday life and the body ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Making of Neoliberal Turkey: An Introduction
• 2 Turkey’s Experience with Neoliberal Policies Since 1980 in Retrospect and Prospect
• 3 Engineering Competition and Competitive Subjectivities: “Self” and Political Economy in Neoliberal Turkey
• 4 Governing without Control: Turkey’s “Struggle” with International Migration
• 5 The Violence Law and the Governmentalization of Football in Turkey
• 6 Inarticulate, Self-Vigilant, and Egotistical: Masculinity in Turkish Drawn Stories
• 7 Urban Anxieties and Kurdish Migrants: Urbanity, Belonging, and Resistance in Istanbul
• 8 The Mourning Mother: Rhetorical Figure or a Political Actor?
• 9 Health Care for All? Rethinking Globalization and Health Inequalities in the Turkish Context
• 10 Anticipation, Choice, and Personal Responsibility: Medicalization of Menopause as Gendered Governmentality
• 11 Remaking the Tobacco Market: The Emergence of Contract Farming and New Subjectivities
• 12 The Politics of Biotechnology and the Governance of Genetically Modified Organisms in Turkey
• 13 Governmentality and Environmentalism in Turkey: Power, Politics, and Environmental Movements
• Index