Regime Change in Turkey

Neoliberal Authoritarianism, Islamism and Hegemony

Errol Babacan, Melehat Kutun, Ezgi Pinar, Zafer Yilmaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367744892
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000367256
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Turkey's new presidential regime, promoted and shaped by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), has become a global template for rising authoritarianism. Its violence intensifi es the exigency for critical analysis. By focusing on neoliberal authoritarian, hegemonic and Islamist aspects, this book sheds light on long- term dynamics that resulted in the regime transformation. It presents a comprehensive study at a time when rising authoritarianism challenges liberal democracies on a global scale.

Reaching from critical political economy and state theory to media, gender and cultural studies, this volume covers a range of studies that transcend disciplinary boundaries. These essays challenge the narrative of an "authoritarian turn" that splits the AKP era into democratic and authoritarian periods. Hence, recent transformation is analyzed in a broad historical framework which is sensitive to both continuities and shifts. Studies that explore moments of resistance and relate the political development in Turkey to rising authoritarianism and the crisis- driven trajectory of neoliberalism on a global scale are included in this effort.

Since the advancement of neoliberal policies in conjunction with the religious project that is pushed forward by the AKP suggests that the ongoing transformation may well advance into a more totalitarian regime, this book strives to inform struggles that are trying to resist and reverse this development. By reviewing the dynamics and impacts of recent authoritarian developments, it calls on critical scholars to further seek out potentials and dynamics of opposition in the current authoritarian era.

Part I

Political economy of regime change

Chapter 1

Crisis in or of neoliberalism?

A brief encounter with the debate on the authoritarian turn

Galip L. Yalman

The last decade since the 2008 global financial crisis has witnessed a series of traumatic changes in the ways in which capitalist societies have been governed as they have struggled to cope with the repercussions of economic, social and humanitarian crises that have engulfed them. This has, in turn, stirred a series of theoretical responses to come to terms with the political outcomes which ensued in the context of the protracted period of crises. From “authoritarian neoliberalism” to “post-fascism”, these responses aimed to provide an understanding of the transformations in the state–class relations, as the era concerned is tended to be portrayed as the de-coupling of liberal democracy and neoliberalism. At the same time, there were debates ensuing about the nature of the crises and their implications for the global economic order on the one hand, and historically specific contexts on the other. In these endeavours, there is also a quest to develop the most apposite concepts so as to establish analogies and differences across different geographical locations and historical time periods. Put differently, as these conceptual categories tend to function as tools of periodization, there arises the need to problematize them so as to assess their saliency to account for their characterization in terms of both continuity and difference.

Crisis of what?

As Nicos Poulantzas (1976: 295) reminds us, “the generic elements of crisis (due to class struggle) are always at work in the reproduction of capitalism”. But this should not lead us to think that capitalism is always in crisis, because to do so “dissolves the specificity of the concept of crisis” (ibid.: 296). While he also underlined that “economic crises of capitalism” are “the very conditions of its extended reproduction and perpetuation” (1975: 172), it is noteworthy that, at the same time, he portrayed capitalist states with a declining ability to manage the crises confronting capitalist economies in general, and crises of hegemony of the bourgeoisies in particular (1975: 173; 1976: 320–1; 1978: 169).¹ This would, in turn, lead to the characterization of such episodes as “recourse to the more direct or more concealed forms of authoritarianism and coercion” so as to alleviate the potential consequences of the “developing crisis of hegemony” (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 58). As Buci-Glucksmann (ibid.: 72) reminded us in reference to Gramsci, “an economic crisis only develops into a historic and organic crisis if it affects the state and the apparatuses of hegemony, i.e. the state as a whole”. Put differently, a crisis would be characterized as “organic” when the “very foundations of bourgeois hegemony” were put in doubt (Thomas, 2009: 145).

Poulantzas had thus been laying the ground for the analysis of the ways in which this particular crisis of hegemony would lead to a change in the form of state without necessarily being accompanied by a regime change, at least for the European capitalist economies. Thus, he would in due course dub this “new form” “for want of a better term” as “authoritarian statism”, to be characterized by “intensified state control over every sphere of socio-economic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘liberties’” (1978: 203; see also Jessop, 2008: 131). In this regard, this crisis of hegemony would also be characterized as a crisis of the state, not only because the state is being considered an integral part of the power bloc (Poulantzas, 1976: 307) but, more pertinently, it is conceived as experiencing a “crisis of the crisis management” (ibid.: 320).

This focus on the relationship between different kinds of crises that ensued in the context of the crisis the capitalist West had experienced during the 1970s at both global and nation-state levels has had resonance since the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. An “authoritarian turn” is said to characterize the experience of several countries of the global South in particular, with or without a “regime change”. In fact, there seemed to be an apparent convergence of opinion that this particular economic crisis, though it gained systemic proportions and became protracted, did not produce a crisis of hegemony since it was not threatened by a systemic alternative – that is to say, there did not emerge a working-class challenge to the hegemony of the dominant classes and/or power blocs. Despite the crisis, it has been held that the political forces in no part of the world have been able to break out of the neoliberal logjam (Albo et al., 2010). Hence, its characterization, generally speaking, as a crisis in neoliberalism rather than a crisis of neoliberalism (cf. Radice, 2010: 37; Saad-Filho, 2010: 249; Sum & Jessop, 2014: 435). What is pertinent in this regard is Gramsci’s conceptualization of the crisis as a process rather than an event (Filippini, 2017: 88), as the process of neoliberal transformation is driven forward by a series of crises as exemplified by the post-1980 experience in Turkey (Bedirhanoğlu & Yalman, 2010; Yalman, 2016) as well as those of several countries of the Global South and of the Eurozone. Indeed, this particular conceptualization of the crisis has been reiterated as a “developmental feature of neoliberalism” in reference to the US economy in the wake of the 2008 subprime crisis, too (Gindin et al., 2011: 35).

Yet, it has been a characteristic feature of the current period to ponder about the perceived divergence between liberal democracy and neoliberalism to the extent that the latter came to signify the current form of capitalism (cf. Ayers & Saad-Filho, 2014).² A “de-democratization” tendency as a central feature of state practices has been observed over the neoliberal period, with more overtly “authoritarian” measures since 2008 (Albo & Fanelli, 2014). This tendency is attempted to be accounted for by two different, but somehow affiliated, arguments. On the one hand, what had much earlier been depicted as “the orthodox paradox” of market-oriented reforms (cf. Kahler, 1990; Nelson, 1989),³ is being reformulated as “the political paradox of neoliberalism” to the extent that the latter came to signify an ideal depiction of a market-based order with the proviso that “hegemony of neoliberalism is predicated on the discourse of the reduction of the economic role of the state” (Boffo et al., 2018).

Indeed, while there are still many on the left who tend to characterize neoliberalism as a form of capitalism in which non-market institutions such as the state play a limited role (cf. Kotz, 2015), even some of the IMF economists would acknowledge the need to reconsider whether a smaller role for the state should still be underlined as one of the main planks of “the neoliberal agenda” (cf. Ostry et al., 2016).⁴ This is all the more noteworthy since it has long been established that neoliberalism is characterized by the systematic use of state power to put into effect a hegemonic project of recomposition of the rule of capital in most areas of social life (cf. Saad-Filho & Yalman, 2010; Gindin et al., 2011: 28).⁵ Put in terms of the vocabulary of the regulation school, states would thus be ascribed the key role for the protection and reproduction of the neoliberal “regime of capital accumulation” (Tansel, 2017). Given the conceptualization of financialization as an integral feature of neoliberal capitalism and the characterization of the state as a major agent of finance dependent “system of accumulation” (Fine, 2010), this has given rise, however, to the characterization of the power relations in terms of “state–finance nexus” with special reference to the Central Banks as part of the state apparatus (Harvey, 2006: 321; 2011a: 76). In fact, a specific role has been attributed to the Central Banks for limiting the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt as reflected by their depiction as “independent” agencies. What has been at stake from a neoliberal perspective was “the transformation of the debt state” (Streeck, 2014), that is to say, an increasing awareness to the pitfalls of debt-led strategies of growth (cf. Bahçe et al., 2016; Yalman, 2019). While this could be perceived as providing the criteria to judge the extent to which a historically specific experience of neoliberal transformation and financial liberalization in particular has achieved these objectives, it has another salient aspect which deserves attention. The specific role attributed to the Central Banks implies their constitution as a hegemonic apparatus. It thus becomes clear that the hegemonic apparatus should be conceived as a constitutive part of the relations of production, thus not reducible simply to the super-structural level (cf. Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 89).

On the other hand, there is a widespread tendency to refer to the rise to power of right-wing parties with idiosyncratic leaders in several capitalist countries in terms of an implosion or collapse of neoliberal hegemony (Fraser, 2017).⁶ These developments would, in turn, revive an interest in another age-old concept, namely populism, as there has been a series of analyses that tended to characterize the period as a “populist moment” which signalled a “crisis of neoliberal hegemony” (Mouffe, 2018). Indeed, it has been argued that “in the absence of a hegemonic aura … neoliberal practices are less able to garner the consent [of the people]”, hence “the emergence of more coercive neoliberalization processes” (Bruff, 2014). While there seems to be a concurrence of opinion that “the world is going through a mounting tide of authoritarian neoliberalism” (Saad-Filho, 2018), curiously there is a rather different role attributed to the notion of hegemony, or lack of it, as an explanan of the political economy of neoliberal rule. On the one hand, it has been purported that while the hegemony of neoliberalism has been consolidated, simultaneously, its political legitimacy has been eroding as a result of successive crises (Ayers & Saad-Filho, 2014). Moreover, it has been contended that since the 2008 financial crisis, the world capitalist system has been experiencing a generalized political crisis, a process enhanced with the coming to power of the Trump Administration in the US (Panitch & Gindin, 2018: 1 and 11).

Interestingly enough, “the populist moment” has already been identified, at the same time, as “the expression of a crisis of liberal-democratic politics” (Mouffe, 2016). With the prevalence of TINA among the political organizations comprising the political system notwithstanding differences of regime between them, the policy consensus implies the hegemony of neoliberalism. As the people were constrained, if not totally deprived, to influence crucial policy decisions that have been increasingly placed outside the realm of democratic politics (Madariaga, 2017), it was held that “the hegemony of neoliberalism … has structurally destabilized neoliberal democracy” (Boffo et al., 2018: 260). However, while this kind of political crisis might pave the road for more authoritarian forms of rule, it has been purported that one could also entertain the idea that this could rekindle an opportunity for reclaiming and deepening the democratic institutions that have been weakened by the long rule of neoliberalism (cf. Boffo et al., 2018: 266; Mouffe, 2018). This is, in fact, in line with the conception of crises as “moments of indeterminacy” (Jessop, 2015) which, in turn, underlines the saliency of the crisis management strategies in coping with the actual and/or potential challenges to the existing social order. Yet, in the absence of such a challenge to neoliberal hegemonic rule, however protracted the economic and financial crises might be, they would remain as crises in neoliberalism rather than of neoliberalism (Radice, 2010; Saad-Filho, 2010), thereby diminishing the prospects for the re-emergence of a more democratic form of state and/or regime. It seems, therefore, it may not be apposite to characterize them as organic crises in Gramscian terms.

This would, in turn, lead to a refraction from the characterization of the authoritarian turn in reference to the concept of populism on the grounds that the latter is not only “unable to account for the phenomenon in question” but also tends to create confusion (Traverso, 2019a; Löwy, 2019). At the same time, however, it is held that “the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality” (Traverso, 2019a).⁷ Hence, the proliferation of the studies to come to terms with the contemporary forms of authoritarianism, which is said “to destroy democracy from the inside” by invoking notions such as new/late- and/or post- fascism (cf. Toscano, 2017; Traverso, 2019b). While historically, fascism has been conceived as “a ruling-class solution to the organic crisis of a regime of accumulation confronted by the threat of organized class struggle” (Toscano, 2017),⁸ a fundamental premise for the rise of post-fascism is said to lie in the lack of a left-wing alternative to neoliberalism (Traverso, 2019b). Moreover, it has been asserted that “the classical Marxist analysis of fascism is not relevant in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Debating regime transformation in Turkey: Myths, critiques and challenges
• Part I Political economy of regime change
• Part II Cultural political economy of regime change
• Part III Moments of resistance against regime change
• Index