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Introduction
Joost Jongerden
Few people interested in current affairs could have failed to notice some of the most striking events in Turkey during recent times. In the last few years alone, Turkey has experienced a failed coup attempt; a prolonged state of emergency, only to be lifted after the implementation of a presidential system based on the supreme power of the head of state and the absence of proper checks and balances; a crackdown on traditional and new media, universities and civil society organisations; the detention of journalists, mayors and members of parliament; the establishment of political tutelage over the judiciary; and a staggering economic crisis. It has also terminated talks with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK); intervened in and occupied mountainous border areas in northern Iraq to fight that organisation; occupied Afrin and strips of territory in northern Syria to combat its US partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); and intervened in Libya to reverse the advance of the forces of Khalifa Haftar. It has staked new claims to drilling rights in the Mediterranean Sea, pushing relations with Greece to a new low; articulated an assertive transnational politics towards ‘kin’ across the world; and strained its relations with the European Union (EU) and the US, while developing relations with Russia; flirted with China’s intercontinental Belt and Road Initiative; and carved out a presence in Africa, to name just a few of the most recent developments.
It is an understatement to say that the challenges Turkey faces, both domestically and abroad, are many. So much has happened that Turkey’s future today looks very different from that of two decades ago. With the lifting of the state of emergency in the south-eastern part of the country in 2002, for the first time in the history of the Republic, the Kurdish population in this region was not ruled under martial law or emergency regulation. For many, this had signalled the start of a new and more hopeful era. In a similar vein, Turkey’s first gay pride event was held in 2003, which grew in size to ten thousands of participants in the years that followed. In 2005, the EU officially initiated accession negotiations with Ankara, which signalled a significant rapprochement between the Turkey and EU, including, in the background, Greece, with whom relations had been long strained. The economy was booming. Along with China, India, Brazil and others, Turkey was on its way to classification as a Newly Industrialised Country.
The landslide electoral victory of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey in 2002, just one year after its establishment as a political party, was met with guarded optimism by many inside and outside Turkey. Turkey would throw off the shackles of the hardened Kemalist elite and the main political programme for which it had become known: the monomaniacal obsession with regulating the identity of its inhabitants. Yet the founders of the AKP, among them Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arinç, were veterans who had been active in the Islamist Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi) and its predecessor, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), while others had a background in nationalist and conservative political parties. Yet to many, they seemed to be a relief compared to the old cast of inveterate politicians. However, it was only a few years after the AKP assumed power that it became clear that the initial reform agenda had not stemmed from a political will towards a fundamental reorientation of the state towards its citizenry but was rather to be used as a tool with which to marginalise the Kemalist elite (Bahcheli and Noel 2011, Cinar 2011, Müftüler-Baç 2016, Jongerden 2019). In fact, the state that the party started to build had many of the features of the old, built around maintaining the authority of the centre, the primacy of state power and articulated around a narrative of nationalism, but harnessed now to an Islamist populism.
Earlier assessments that ‘Turkey has made significant progress toward the consolidation of its democracy’ and turned out to be ‘resilient to the global economic downturn’ (Sayarı 2012: 1) have been shattered. References to a new Turkey (Yavuz 2006) started to look like an anachronism. The establishment of a one-party rule, the exaltation of its leader, the self-confident and forceful positioning as a regional power referred to as neo-Ottomanism (Taspinar 2008), the depiction of Turkey’s rowdy president as the new sultan (Cagaptay 2020) give the impression of Turkey as the ‘Angel of History’ caught in full flight (Benjamin 1940, Bauman 2017). Yet different from the famous painting by Paul Klee, in which the angel pushes forward, away from the atrocities of the past, the AKP angel is flying backward. Virulent nationalism and political paranoia fuel its flight.
The optimism about progress in Turkey has been a performative effect of the widespread belief that Turkey’s state elites, both old and new, have been the carriers of modernity and democracy. In both Turkish and Western academia, Turkey was long viewed as the exceptional case in the so-called Muslim world, where a secular elite had led the country into the modern age (Lerner 1958, Lewis 1994, Shah 2011). Military tutelage and an occasional coup were either considered compatible with an ‘authoritarian modernisation’ paradigm (Örnek 2012: 953) or evaluated as short-term interruptions to save democracy from itself (Heper 2005) and keep development on track (Varol 2013). Albeit not always with democratic means, the bureaucratic elite and the military, in short, were thought to facilitate the overall development of democracy (Lewis 1994, Heper 2005, Varol 2013). The military as the shepherds of the masses prevented ‘instability and anti-systemic turbulence’ (Örnek 2012: 953). This representational practice, making authoritarianism the fellow traveller of modernisation theory, served the cementing of Turkey into the Western bloc during the Cold War, but also a persistent anti-democratic rule.
When the AKP came to power in 2002, the political upheaval it represented was again framed in terms the idea of a Turkish exceptionalism, now adjusted to a ‘Turkish Islamic exceptionalism’ defined as ‘a complex, many-tiered encounter between “traditional” forces and modernity that have interpenetrated and been transformed over time’ (Mardin 2005: 160). Thus, it was determined that ‘Turkish Islam has come to have an increasingly secular face’ (Heper and Toktas 2003: 157), which contributed to the democratisation process (Heper and Toktas 2003, Mardin 2005, Karaosmanoglu 2012), even though ‘the reformist zeal exhibited by AKP leaders during the party’s first two years in office slowed perceptibly in 2005 and noticeably in 2006’. (Patton 2007: 340). Though there had been concerns over the AKP adherence to ‘universal notions of modernity’ from its first days in power, many thought that the AKP, because of its popular ties, could form the platform which could bring the periphery closer to the centre (Kasaba 2008: 7–8). Its approach had been hailed as a model for the Middle East (Taspinar 2014).
The idea of a fundamental tension between an institutional and popular component in Turkey’s progress to modernity has been persistent in Turkish studies (Mardin 1973, Kasaba 2008). This ‘representational practice’ – the way in which a dualism was created around a progressive institutional centre and a conservative popular component – has been seductive and deceiving at the same time. Seductive, since it provided a robust framing of political, cultural and economic contradictions, while it was deceiving since it imposed a generalising theoretical straitjacket on social and political sciences. The latter helped create an ideological barrier against doing meticulous research into the layered, conflicting and contradicting ways in which social realities and practices are constituted in Turkey.
Over the last decades, we have not only seen a growth of Turkish studies (Sayarı 2012) but also witnessed the field becoming more diverse and comparative (Zurcher 2014: 589), critically interrogating hegemonic epistemologies (Eissenstat 2014, Zurcher 2014: 597) and questioning taboos, such as the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish issue. In Turkey, too, the space for critical encounters increased, until the beginning of 2016, when a petition of academics against the state’s renewal of a military approach to its Kurdish issue was squashed and the failed coup attempt became the pretext for an unprecedented purge of academics in which more than 6,000 lost their jobs (Kaya 2018), which set the scene for university closures and a restructuring of the academic landscape in Turkey (Bohannon 2016).
Notwithstanding this oppression of intellectual freedoms, however, Turkish studies has now moved beyond a promotion of ‘modernisation’ – or ‘Ottomanisation’ or whatever-isation. Turkish studies has moved beyond the close-distance promotion of nation and state, and area studies, of which Turkish studies has been a part, has changed from ‘long-distance knowing’ (Schendel 2002: 660), and a site of ‘exoticism’ and ‘eurocentrist representations’ into a field of situated academic discourses (Gibson-Graham 2004: 408, 409, 412). The contributions in this book are an expression of this qualitative change in Turkish studies.
The first chapters of this handbook cover the period marked by the conversion of an empire into a nation state, the period in which rulers came to consider themselves not as separate from the people but as a part of and representing the people. This was also a time in which political parties, populism, borders and demographic engineering came to prominence. In ‘Politics and ideology: party and opposition in the late Ottoman and early Republican period’, James Ryan (Chapter 2) examines the conflicts and contradictions that drove politics in the late Ottoman period and the formative decades of the Republic. This chapter focuses on the contest between authoritarian regimes and their opponents against the background of, on the one hand, internal political ambitions and challenges and, on the other hand, international interactions with ideological trends as varied as liberalism, fascism, communism and conservatism. Uğur Ümit Üngör and Ayhan Işık (Chapter 3) examine the role of violence in the transformation from empire to republic and how violence continued to play a role in the sustenance of the nation-state form. While some populations in the Ottoman Empire suffered from genocide, the authors argue, the Kurds became subject to a protracted process of exclusion. Three distinct episodes are examined, showing that much of the logic of the violence was systemic.
Zeynep Kezer (Chapter 4) looks into the reshaping of Turkey’s demographic and cultural landscapes in the course of the violent transition from a pluralistic empire to a unitary nation state. The phenomenon of population movements culminating in purges and mass violence against non-Muslims at the end of the Ottoman Empire continued in the Republican period. Kezer argues that the zeal for the constitution of a homogeneous citizenry, a ‘homogenization by faith’, became an endless and all-consuming pursuit within the Republic. Ottoman inhabitants of Orthodox faith were one of the population groups purged, supported by a League of Nations-mediated formal agreement. Eleni Kyramargiou (Chapter 5) follows the fate of the more than one million Christians from the Ottoman Empire who were forcibly moved to Greece after the formal agreement on a ‘population exchange’ between the states in 1923. Kyramargiou shows how the departure of Muslims from Greece created ample space for a process of ‘Hellenization’.
With the violent transition from empire to nation state and the cultural and demographic change that came with it having been considered in generic terms, the sixth chapter looks at how this worked out at the local level. Ali Sipahi (Chapter 6) discusses the transformation of a rural hamlet into an imperial town and then a national city. The transformation of Ağavat Mezrası to Mamuretülaziz and subsequently Elazığ, he argues, can only be understood in the context of a long-term interplay and collaboration between local and extra-local forces, whose relations were at certain times marked by disinterest, while at other, critical moments, they converged. These local and extra-local interactions are examined around the creation of a landlord settlement, establishment of an imperial garrison, Armenian genocide and contemporary developmentalism.
The next chapters of this book broach the rearrangements of political and social relations in modern Turkey, the centrality of appeals to ‘the people’, the emergence of clientelism and the false contradiction between secularism ...
