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Religious populist parties, nationalisms, and strategies of competition: the case of the AK Party in Turkey
Abstract
Religious populism features prominently in the global political landscape. This contribution focuses on this particular type of populism, and the political strategies employed by religious populist actors, with a focus on the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) under the leadership of Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. Although there is an established literature on religious populism, there are still dynamics that need to be studied further. How religious populists outflank their rivals, especially those with relatively conservative ideologies and understandings of nationalism, remains unanswered, for example. In this study, I investigate how the AKP, as a religious populist party, has competed with and distinguished itself from other mainstream and conservative Turkish political actors and movements, and their respective nationalist ideologies: (a) the secular political establishment, including the Kemalist Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party), (b) the tradition(s) the party was originally part of but is no longer viable, the Milli Görüş (National Outlook) movement, (c) other popular religious movements that have a claim to power (such as the Gülen, or Hizmet, movement), and finally (d) ultranationalist segments and parties such as the Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (Nationalist Action Party), each of which has their own interpretations of citizenship and nationalism.
... Although the AKP's ascent to power marked a turning point in the interplay between politics and religion, their long rule needs to be contextualized. In its first term (2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007), the AKP did not necessarily behave as a typical Islamist party bent on asserting religious fervour in the Turkish state and society (Kaya 2015;Sandal 2021a). This changed in 2008 when the AKP was sued for violating the principle of separation of religion and state, a foundational pillar of the Turkish Republic. ...
We draw on Turkey – a Muslim-majority country governed by the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) for the past two decades – to examine some underexplored implications of the supply-side theory of religion. The longevity and shifting nature of AKP rule provide a unique opportunity to observe the subtleties involved in the noticeable strengthening of Sunni Islam’s religious monopoly in a Muslim society. Results from a series of public opinion surveys conducted between 2010 and 2020 show that the AKP rule has caused the religious segment of Turkish society to consolidate around AKP and secular sections to consolidate around the opposition, leading to a significant polarization within the country. We argue this is because hegemonic religious policies may create crosscutting effects which both increase and decrease religiosity. The findings also have political implications that are undertheorized in the supply-side literature.
... Most of the recent political criticisms of the Hizmet movement are driven from pro-Erdogan circles due to the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey which, according to Erdogan, was plotted by the movement. Still, despite being exclusively two different Islamic movements (i.e., one is a politically motivated Islamist party, and the other is a spiritually motivated interfaith and education driven movement), Ergodan and Gülen developed a temporary "mutually beneficial relationship" in the 2000s (Sandal 2021). Yet, it quickly started to crack in 2010 with the Mavi Marmara flotilla crisis. ...
The resurgence of religion worldwide proved that secularization is not a de facto reality of modernity and the initial chaos that came along with the birth of postmodernity evolved into uniquely developing combinations that recognized cosmopolitan, multicultural, and hybrid (i.e., fluid and hyphenated) identities. Universal values became more instrumental than ever to connect members of hyper diverse societies while ethnocentric, nativist and exclusivist patriotism expired (and only recently starting to attract far right and white supremacist groups alone). Most Islamic revivalist movements emerging from this context have had minimal interactions with non-Muslims and influence on mainstream societies. Being in search of a solution to respond to the overwhelming effects of the West on Muslim societies, these revivalist movements could not change (and maybe contributed to) the binary positioning of Islam and the West. On the contrary, the Hizmet movement, inspired by Muhammed Fethullah Gülen and his predecessor Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, appeared in the global arena as an Islamic revivalist movement whose discourse resonated with the commonly shared universal values of every culture, ethnicity, and religion. The Hizmet movement did not position itself as an antithesis to Westernization, secularism, and modernity; the movement adopted a universalist and all-inclusive attitude, which re-introduced to the world that Islam is universal religion with the capacity to accommodate people of diversity and meet the needs of every age. This paper explores the Hizmet movement’s historical, theological, and social roots as a transnational Islamic revivalist movement. It analyzes the movement’s outreach across multicultural societies and its capability to adapt to a changing world through its educational and interfaith and intercultural activities across the globe. While unpacking thirty years of the Hizmet movement’s activities and the contribution to the literature, the paper also addresses some of the criticisms that have emerged regarding the movement and its activities, particularly in the wake of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey. It should be noted that much criticism toward the movement emerged in recent years, and the movement did not face much backlash in its early years of development. With this in mind, this paper explores the development of the Hizmet movement and how much of its initiatives rapidly left a positive mark on diverse societies around the world. The paper is thus structured chronologically, tracing the birth, growth, stagnation, and transition (or according to some collapse) of the movement. The paper, by extension, too, positions the Hizmet movement within the phenomenon of contemporary Islamic revivalism as this movement is born out of similar conditions as are other Islamic revivalist movements but taking a slightly different direction, which is that it challenges the prevailing binary ‘us and them’ discourses produced mostly in ethno-centric political discourses.
Most assume that when governments support a religion, they do so in the hope that they will increase their legitimacy. However, a growing literature implies that support for religion may decrease a government’s legitimacy for three reasons. First, political secularism, an ideology mandating separation of religion and state or state restrictions on religion, is increasingly popular. Second, state support for religion can undermine religious vitality. Third, support for religion entails an element of government control over religion which can undermine the perceived authenticity of a religion. We test this support-legitimacy relationship in Christian-majority countries from 1990-2014 using the Religion and State (RAS) and World Values Survey (WVS) data, comprising 54 countries and 126 country years. We find that state support for religion is associated with lower levels of individual confidence in government. We posit this has important implications for our understanding of the underpinnings of legitimacy.
How does government involvement in religion affect media freedom? One of the primary roles of independent news media is to hold government accountable, but will governments with official policies for or against religion accept this check on power? This study investigates the effect of government involvement in religion on media freedom. Previous empirical studies have shown that authoritarian regimes may tolerate free media in order to remain informed about lower level bureaucratic performance and potential rebellion, but we hypothesize that states with greater involvement in religion are more likely to control news media because freedom of the press may be seen as a political threat to their ideological authority. Using a multimethod approach, we test our hypothesis with a statistical analysis across countries from 1991 to 2014. We find that government involvement in religion does have a negative effect on media freedom. We then put these findings in context with a case illustration of the changes in media freedom in Greece, a democracy with a high level of government support for religion.
The aim of this paper is to examine comparatively the growth and political effectiveness of right-wing populism in Western Europe, Central Europe, and the USA since 9/11. The focus is on such politicians’ vilification of Islam as a faith and Muslims as a people. The paper examines the following research question: how and why do right-wing populists in the USA and Europe use an ideological form of “Christianity”, known variously as “Christianism” or “Christian civilizationism”, to vilify Muslims and Islam? The political purpose seems obvious: to influence public perceptions and to win votes by questioning the desirability of Muslims in both the USA and Europe, claiming that Muslims’ religious and cultural attributes make them unacceptable as neighbors. As Muslims are not capable, so the argument goes, of assimilating to European or American norms, values, and behavior, then they must be excluded or strongly controlled for the benefit of nativist communities. Right-wing populists in both the USA and Europe pursue this strategy because they see it as chiming well with public opinion at a time of great uncertainty, instability, and insecurity.
Inspired by the populists’ salient urge to recalibrate and locate contingent developments within a larger temporal order and establish historical continuity, this paper dwells on the chronopolitics of national populism and calls for a systematic treatment of time in these movements. Focusing on the neglected narrative dimension, such an inquiry will afford an alternative reading from which to engage with and critique the magnitude of populism. This study argues that despite ample variance and claims of uniqueness, national populisms employ a shared temporal template that accounts for a particular national subjectivity through a set of timing and sequencing of events complemented by affective stimuli. It focuses on the case of Turkey. More pronounced since 2013 Gezi Protests, the rising tide of national populism under President Tayyip Erdoğan’s rule encapsulates how these populisms conflate the past, present, and future into a single narrative about the people’s survival and prosperity.
Why do right-wing populist leaders routinely resort to religious appeals? How should the religious symbolism in populist politics be interpreted? To address these questions, this study shifts attention to symbolic, ritualistic and emotive mobilization by populism through insights from cultural sociology and ‘sacralization of politics’. Populists in power sacralize the political arena by attributing nominally secular entities such as the nation, the state and the leader ‘religious’ traits as objects of loyalty and faith. By creating a syncretic amalgamation of the secular and religious domains, they perpetuate the dichotomy between the people and the powerful enemy, despite changing boundaries of both categories. Using the case of Turkey as illustration, the study examines three features of sacralized politics: (1) mission led by a sacrosanct leader, (2) consecration of elect community/the nation, and (3) performance politics that substitutes democratic participation. The findings suggest that beyond the instrumental use of religious tropes for political gain, right-wing populists rally support by selectively evoking the ‘cultural toolkit’ available to them. They also construct a specific group identity by evoking collective memory. Researchers should pay more attention to populists’ embeddedness in cultural structures in which religion remains a powerful pillar and resonate well with their audiences.
Since at least 2011, Turkey has undergone a dual process of democratic backsliding amid the emergence of a new, authoritarian regime under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. An interesting component of this process of authoritarian turn has been the lack of serious opposition on the part of the opposition parties CHP and IYIP parties to the growing political repression, curtailment of civil liberties and growing consolidation of power in the hands of Erdoğan. In this article, we deal with a major puzzle that emerged in Turkey's politics: how did the AKP regime legitimize its authoritarian transformation of the political system in Turkey in the eyes of CHP and IYIP, despite these parties’ political opposition to the AKP regime and its Islamist agenda? In answering this question, we make use of a causal theory that predicted the intensified use of legitimation claims on the part of the incumbent regimes during authoritarian restructuring. Combining the works of several scholars, we utilize the concept of “missions,” along with ideational narratives, performance objectives and six claims of legitimation to explain how the AKP managed to legitimize its authoritarian grip and regime change even in the eyes of the main opposition parties.
The rise of populist parties around the world raises concerns about liberal democracy. Amid the discussions on democratic backslid-ing, this study scrutinises populism in Turkey by using quantitative content analysis. For this goal, this article uses parliamentary group speeches of political leaders between 2011 and 2019 (N = 569) as raw data. The results illustrate that Erdoğan is significantly more populist than other leaders. Kılıçdaroğlu, on the other hand, appears as the least populist political figure. While Bahçeli exploits a Manichean discourse, Peoples' Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP)) instrumentalises anti-elitism. The overall results indicate that Turkish politics is stuck in the spiral of populism, which damages democracy in Turkey.
This article contributes a new perspective to debates on religious political populism. It does so by considering the role of religious leaders and religious groups in political populism in South Africa. The article shows that conceptions of populist leaders and movements is a complex and nuanced task. In some instances, like during South African apartheid, religious leaders and religious communities played an important role in capturing, and expressing, the identity and will of “the people” over and against “the elite”. Some would argue that this contributed to the downfall of apartheid. However, some contemporary examples show that some of these same Churches have now aligned themselves with the new political, economic and religious elites in contemporary South Africa. Moreover, they are using religious and theological rhetoric to cast dissident persons and movements as “the enemy” of “the people”. A central question is, how can one differentiate between constructive forms of religious political populism, and destructive forms of religious political populism? The article proposes that the theology of the 1985 Kairos South Africa document offers some helpful theological insights for this task.
What kind of foreign policy do populists execute once in power? Based on the existing literature, we conceptualize populism as a set of ideas whose two core elements are anti-elitism and antipluralism. From this we develop a set of hypotheses regarding both substantive aspects of foreign policy as well as foreign policy–making processes of populist leaders in government. An analysis of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy record serves as a first plausibility probe of our hypotheses. We find that our concept of populism carries most explanatory value in the procedural aspects of foreign policy making as well as in its communication, less so in those aspects relating to the goals or substance of foreign policy. Whereas foreign policy under Modi's populist leadership is highly centralized and personalized, the traditional foreign policy establishment, including most notably the Ministry of External Affairs, has lost some of its previous authority. Engaging the Indian diaspora abroad emerged as another characteristic of populist foreign policy making. By contrast, the case of India does not confirm our hypothesis regarding a preference of bilateralism over multilateralism, nor does populism necessarily preclude investing in global public goods.
The central cleavage of Turkish politics has created a fertile ground for certain parties to adopt a populist strategy since the first free and fair elections in 1950. In contemporary Turkish politics, the leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) harbors the core characteristics of doing politics on a populist platform. We back up this claim by highlighting the political discourse of AKP’s long-time leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who extols populist principles, and by describing the institutional changes brought upon to concentrate power in the hands of the executive branch. We also examine the prevalence and correlates of populist attitudes in the Turkish population by drawing on an original, nationally representative survey. We find that populist attitudes are quite prevalent in the Turkish electorate, and support for populism is significantly and positively related to being a partisan of the incumbent AKP. Rather than discontent, the fact that the AKP, a party with a populist agenda, has long been in power seems to be the key driver of mass populist attitudes in Turkey where supporters of this party have internalized the core premises of populism to a significant extent.
This article examines the circumstances shaping the evolution of the Gülen movement. Once considered a relatively liberal and pluralistic Islamic movement based in Turkey, the movement later succumbed to authoritarianism and illiberalism following its political alliance with the AK Party and their subsequent falling out. The paper opens with a brief overview of the historical context of the relationship between state and society in the Ottoman Empire and then examines the politicization of Islam as a movement of resistance against the modernizing reforms of the Kemalist state. The complex interplay of these factors culminated in the construction of a secular communalism in Turkey. The remainder of the paper focuses on the triangulated relationship among state, society, and religion, targeting the alliance and political struggles between the AK Party and the Gülen movement. The paper concludes that once legal and political checks and balances are removed, Islamic movements bend towards authoritarian tendencies seeking to monopolize or, at least, influence nearly every sphere of social and political life. After a decade-long experiment with Islamic movements in power, Turkey—increasingly authoritarian in character and socially fragmented—is experiencing the most serious institutional crisis in its history as a modern republic.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, AKP, was for many years believed to be paramount in ushering in a new era of moderate Islamism. However, in recent years, AKP has troublingly reversed course. From violent repression of the Gezi protests of 2013 to the 2016 abortive coup and subsequent crackdown on opposition, the party has lost all semblance of moderate Islamism and radicalized. If AKP had truly moderated, how could the party have changed in such a short period of time? What explains the radicalization of AKP? First, we argue that the strategic benefits of moderation far outweighed its costs, rendering it analytically improbable to determine whether AKP’s actions were genuine or merely strategic. Second, we show that AKP has been in a process of radicalization characterized by the adoption of anti-system, anti-democratic, and violent tactics and rhetoric since 2011. The disappearance of domestic and international structural constraints created the requisite background conditions for the party’s radicalization. Radicalization was facilitated by what we call ‘Erdoganization’, an ongoing de-institutionalization process within which Tayyip Erdogan gained complete control over the party. Additionally, a series of four “external shocks” threatened the party’s primary goal of gaining hegemony and caused the party to radicalize.
How does Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs ( Diyanet ) act as an instrument of foreign policy (FP)? What are the factors that allow such an instrumentalization of Islam in Turkish FP? In addressing these questions, this paper uses semi-structured expert interviews from Bulgaria and the Netherlands. Although both countries host a sizeable Muslim minority, these populations differ in their characteristics and historical ties with Turkey. Comparing Diyanet ’s role in the Netherlands with its recent Turkish-Muslim diaspora, and in Bulgaria with its centuries-old Muslim minority allows us to reveal variation in the practical engagement strategies that Diyanet adopts in different country contexts. Thus, this paper advances two main claims; first, Diyanet serves as a primary FP tool of Turkey in countries with a significant Turkish-Muslim minority. Secondly, this instrumentalization destabilizes secularization projects both at home and abroad.
For decades, Turkish Islamists have failed to attract the votes of large sections of society and remained marginal. As a result of this failure to come to power, and due to domestic and international constraints and windows of opportunities, they have declared that they have jettisoned Islamism. Many Turkish Muslims whose religious disposition was shaped by the pluralistic urban Ottoman experience and small-town Anatolian traditionalism, and by the contesting currents of cosmopolitan pluralism and rural social conservatism, voted in favour of these former Islamists who have become “Muslim Democrats”. This paper elaborates on the genealogy of Turkish Islamists and their political trajectories and argues that when the forces and constraints of domestic and external social, political and economic conditions disappeared and the opportunities derived from being Muslim Democrats no longer existed, the former Islamists easily returned to their original ideology, showing that despite assertions to the contrary their respect for democracy and pluralism had not truly been internalised. This paper also aims to demonstrate that similar to other authoritarian populists, Erdoganists perceive the state and its leader as more important than anything else and as being above everything else, which has culminated in a personality cult and sanctification of the state. As long as Turkey’s economy continued to boom, almost everyone was happy that Turkey could readily market the “Muslim Democrats” story to the whole world for a long period as a major success story, or as an “exemplary Muslim country” or “model”. Yet, Middle Eastern elites and Western forces got carried away and learnt the hard way just how naive their view was in perhaps the first great transformation movement of the twenty-first century – the Arab Spring. Likewise, the Turkish Spring turned all too quickly towards autumn and then winter.
Although organized independently, both the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and the Gülen Movement (GM) have primarily addressed the same base and acted as mediums of upward mobility for Sunni Anatolian conservatives. Targeted by the old secular establishment, AKP and GM forged a mutually beneficial relationship in 2000s, with the former’s political office reinforcing the latter’s social and bureaucratic power and vice versa. Nevertheless, with the demise of their common enemy, this marriage of convenience gradually turned into a brutal fight, as epitomized in the abortive coup of 15 July. This profile provides a critical history of AKP and GM relations, illustrating how and why the image of Gülenists has changed in AKP’s projection from a faith-based community to a terrorist organization.
A strong sense of victimhood, a discourse of social suffering, and complementary bodily performances, which mobilize rancor, resentfulness, and revengefulness, are fundamental elements of Turkish-Islamist ideology. This article discusses the political dynamics and implications of such assertions of victimhood in the Turkish context. To underscore these dynamics, it analyses the role of the logic of pain in the subject formation of Turkish-Islamist identity and how this logic has been revitalized by constitutive and hegemonic social imagination, and circulated and intensified by a reactionary mood. Additionally, it aims to expose how this reactionary mood profoundly depends on contradictory subjectification processes, which simultaneously involve mobilization of feelings of impotency, non-responsibility, self-pitying, and sublimation of power. This subject formation opens the way for identification with authoritarian figures in the Turkish case.
Periodically, India has sought to act as a ‘normative power’ in international affairs,
advancing a normative agenda about how states and other actors ought to behave,
what norms and rules should regulate their interactions, and what institutions
should exist to make and enforce them. The rise to power of Narendra Modi,
who became India’s prime minister in May 2014, with a declared aspiration to once
more make India a vishwaguru (‘world guru’) and a ‘leading power’, has generated
debate about whether India will again become a normative power. This article
analyses the intellectual resources with which Modi might construct that new
normative agenda. These resources include the work of a number of key Hindu
nationalist thinkers with whom Modi is well acquainted, but also the thought
of Swami Vivekananda, for whom Modi claims a special devotion. The article
concludes that constructing a new normative agenda for a revived ‘normative
power India’ out of these resources will be difficult, given the limited usefulness
of these intellectual resources, and that Modi’s government will likely continue to
pursue an essentially pragmatic foreign policy designed above all to further India’s
domestic economic development.
The dominant theoretical paradigm originating in the work of Cas Mudde conceives of populism as a thin-centered ideology that focuses on the antagonism between people and elites against the backdrop of popular sovereignty. While this framework has contributed significantly to an improved scientific analysis of populism, it is argued in this article that its ideological connotations are ill-conceived both conceptually and methodologically, and that its normative implications and failure to acknowledge the graded nature of populist behavior hinder the further evolution of the field of populism studies. Combining insights from the work of Ernesto Laclau and the proponents of frame theory, the article suggests dropping the ideological clause and simply conceiving populism as a discursive frame. The article contends that frame analysis reveals a strong fit between discursive elements and cognitive features of populism, furnishing solid methodological foundations to conduct empirical research and encouraging cooperation with neighboring fields of social science.
Guillermo O’Donnell’s influential work ‘Delegative Democracy’ set the discourse on a peculiar type of democracy. Lying between representative democracy and authoritarianism, the uniqueness of delegative democracy lies in its features, including an absence of horizontal accountability, strong centralised rule, individual leadership with unchecked powers, a cult figure embodying the nation and clientelist practices. While delegative democracies seem to arise out of presidential systems, Turkey, though a parliamentary system, has also displayed the distinctive features of delegative democracies. This paper identifies three characteristics of delegative democracy, which are responsible for the lack of democratic consolidation, if not the erosion of democracy itself: anti-institutionalism, an anti-political agenda and clientelism. Arguing that delegative democracy is the best concept with which to examine contemporary Turkey, the paper lays out how, post-2011, Turkey has demonstrated the three elements of delegative democracy. The final section discusses the implications of the Turkish case for scrutinising the very possibility of delegative democracy in parliamentary regimes.
The Nationalist Action Party (MHP) has undergone a substantial evolution since it was formed in 1969, gradually moving away from the far Right toward a centrist position. It is this transformation that allowed the MHP to enter into a successful coalition partnership with the centrist Motherland Party and the center-Left Democratic Left Party in 1999. This contribution examines the MHP from a number of perspectives. The historical development of the party, the reasons for its electoral success, and the role Devlet Bahçeli, the new leader of the party, played in this outcome are explored in detail. The question whether the party represents the State, the nation or the nationalists is also raised.
In 2002 the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to power in Turkey. Since then it has shied away from a hard-line ideological stance in favour of a more conservative and democratic approach. In this book, M. Hakan Yavuz negotiates this ambivalence asking whether it is possible for a political party with a deeply religious ideology to liberalise and entertain democracy or whether, as he contends, radical religious groups moderate their practices and ideologies when forced to negotiate a competitive and rule-based political system. The author explores the thesis through an analysis of the rise and evolution of the AKP and its more recent 2007 election victory. The book, which tackles a number of important issues including political participation, economics and internal security, provides a masterful survey of modern Turkish and Islamic politics, which will be of interest to a broad range of readers from students to professionals and policymakers.
Alevis of Turkey and Alawites of Syria have different origins, traditions and political experience. After the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, Turkish government took a clear stand by supporting the Sunni rebels fighting the Syrian state forces. This enthusiastic support for the Sunni segments was accompanied with condemnations against Syrian Alawites and discrimination against the Alawite refugees. The civil war in Syria and the Turkish government’s response to it brought Alevis of Turkey and Alawites of Syria closer and created a solidarity based on close religious beliefs. Alevi community in Turkey provided assistance to the Alawite refugees from Syria and Alevi leaders started to create a narrative focusing on identity similarities between and common threats against the Alevis and Alawite communities. Using interviews and public statements, this article shows how the securitization of identities and discrimination can result in new units of advocacy and belonging.
This article aims to understand the ‘non-Western self’ and the different ways its ontological insecurity can manifest, through the example of Turkey, by contrasting Kemalism’s modernizing vision with Erdoğan’s current populism. We argue that the constructions of political narratives in Turkey (and by implication in other similar settings) derive from two interrelated aspects of the spatio-temporal hierarchies of (colonial) modernity: structural insecurity and temporal insecurity. Modern Turkey’s ontological insecurity was constructed spatially, on the one hand, as liminality and structural in-betweenness, and temporally, on the other, as lagging behind the modernization of the West. After discussing how Kemalism offered to deal with such insecurities in the twentieth century, we analyse the Justice and Development Party (AKP) period of the twenty-first century as an alternative attempted answer to these problems and explain why efforts to dismantle the Kemalist framework collapsed into its populist mirror image. The example of the Turkish case underlines the importance of focusing on the different ways in which the structural and temporal insecurities of ‘the non-Western self’ take shape at a given point and manner of entry into the modern international order.
Cambridge Core - Sociology of Religion - Secular States, Religious Politics - by Sumantra Bose
What explains authoritarian reversal and resilience in hybrid regimes? This article derives hypotheses from an in-depth case analysis of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule in Turkey. The Turkish case demonstrates that authoritarian reversal can happen as a result of strategies pursued by political elites to stay in power. Ruling elites in hybrid regimes endure by using the strategies of centralization, legitimation, and repression. During the 2002–13 period, Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) were able to entrench their power by eliminating veto players within the state, building a well-organized apparatus for targeted repression, and strategically making concessions to large segments of the electorate. Since 2013, they have changed their strategies for political survival in response to emerging economic and security problems and the ensuing defections of some supporters, which had rendered the original equilibrium unsustainable. AKP elites intensified repression, further centralized power, and relied heavily on an ideological and polarizing rhetoric to delegitimize and splinter the opposition. We argue that this new equilibrium of high centralization, ideological legitimation, and widespread repression allowed the elites to withstand serious challenges to their rule, while significantly weakening the competitive and democratic elements of the hybrid regime. Our in-depth analysis of elite strategies and their adaptability to changing exogenous economic and geostrategic conditions in the Turkish context contribute to the analysis of the resilience and vulnerability of hybrid regimes in general and of where on the regime spectrum they eventually move. © 2018, Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
A revisionist tone that has created several crisis has become more pronounced in Turkish foreign policy. This trend has been particularly evident after 2010 when the AKP consolidated its power base, the military's tutelage over politics subsequently disappeared and the Arab Spring opened a new window of opportunity for Turkey in the Middle East. This has been surprising because de-militarization of political space was envisioned to produce more cooperative stances in the globalized post-Cold War world. This trend has occurred alongside what many would argue has been the AKP's authoritarian and Islamist agenda. Such an argument suggests that earlier the AKP had pragmatically used democratic values and integrationist policies to weaken the military, and then adopted Islamism in foreign policy and authoritarianism in domestic politics. This study aims to explore the common characteristics of the AKP in domestic and international realms while the extant paradigm tends to divide the AKP period into two categories, which are democratic/pro-western and authoritarian/Islamist. In order to suggest a common characteristic to identify the AKP's domestic and foreign policy in a holistic manner, this article applies the term ‘populism’ to describe a number of AKP policies and positions.
In recent years, Turkey’s Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP, in English the
Justice and Development Party) has been looked on as a model by many of
the democratizing forces in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and
elsewhere in the Muslim world. This has been true especially since the Arab
uprisings that rocked MENA in 2010–11. The AKP also captured the imagi-
nation of Western democratic forces with its successes at the ballot box, as
the party continues to win the votes of conservative Muslims without being
a direct threat to the West. This essay argues that one reason for the AKP’s
success is its discursive strategy, which differs from those of the previous
incarnations of the party. The adoption of a broad strategy has led to voters’
support for an Islamist-led government that has only judiciously spoken in
public on implementing Islamic socioeconomic programs. However, following
the AKP’s third consecutive parliamentary election victory in 2011, the party
has become bolder in its Islamic agenda and rhetoric. In 2012, then prime
minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked, “Do you expect from us, as a political
party with a ‘conservative democrat’ identity, to cultivate an atheist genera-
tion?”1 Such statements are viewed by the opposition in Turkey as threaten-
ing the secular nature of the state.
In recent years, there has been an increasingly prevalent trend observed in emerging democracies in which popular parties rise to a position of dominance and engage in actions that seriously threaten democracy and democratic consolidation. I ask, why do some dominant parties veer into authoritarianism and undemocratic rule while others do not? I theorize that in societies where dominant parties veer into authoritarian practices (which we call hegemonic party system) rests on the fact that there are deep, long-standing, and seemingly irreconcilable social cleavages around race, religion, or the economy. Using the cases of ANC (African National Congress) in South Africa, Fidesz in Hungary, and AKP (Justice and Development Party) in Turkey, I find that only in countries in which a particular party or viewpoint has been institutionally marginalized will hegemonic party rule become more likely. This is in contrast to parties such as Japan’s LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) which did not become hegemonic, for it had no ideological rival to pit itself against. My analysis goes beyond the argument about a lack of experience with democratic contestation as the cause of the rise of hegemonic parties, offering a generalizable framework demonstrating the factors that facilitate the process of authoritarian slip.
This paper seeks to explain Turkey’s rapid de-democratization from the conceptual perspective of existential insecurity, which accounts for the unwillingness of incumbents to share or relinquish power. The Kemalist era, the multi-party period and the early AKP era have all shown elements of the radicalizing effects of political insecurity and the weak institutions which stem from them. The concurrence of a revisionist Islamist project and geopolitical and ideological crises in Turkey’s overlapping neighbourhoods, however, have driven existential angst and insecurity among the incumbents to novel proportions. Under the conditions of this aggravated insecurity, the consolidation of a stable authoritarian regime appears unlikely, reducing the possible scenarios for Turkey’s immediate future to a weak and contested authoritarian arrangement or further escalation of conflict and instability.
The transformation of the Turkish state is examined here in the context of globalized frames of neo-liberal capitalism and contemporary schemas of Islamic politics. It shows how the historical emergence of two distinct yet intertwined imaginaries of state structuring, laiklik and Islam, continues to influence Turkish politics today.
This article compares contemporary populism in Turkey, Venezuela and Ecuador from a cross-regional perspective. Through adopting a political definition of the concept based on the idea of domination, it provides an analysis of the three populist leaders Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa along three interrelated dimensions: an anti-establishment image, a plebiscitary understanding of democracy and a Manichean worldview. These case studies show that in each country, a strong leader positions himself against the traditional establishment, cultivates direct linkages between himself and his followers and polarizes the political environment into two opposing camps. In addition to the discussion on populism, the article provides comparative insights into Turkey’s constitution-making process, the presidential system debate, and the 2016 military coup attempt.
The Iranian Revolution has been one of the epic events of postwar history, involving remarkable levels of political mobilisation, international crisis, and political brutality. Contrary to the expectations of many, the apparently stable regime of the Shah was overthrown in 1978–9 and a new post-revolutionary system successfully established and maintained. Yet beyond its importance for the history of modern Iran and of the world as a whole, the revolution has posed analytic questions of considerable complexity, both for those who seek to relate it to the overall course of modern Iranian history, and for those who want to compare it to other modern revolutions. If the Iranian upheaval deserves the name ‘revolution’, defined in terms of levels of mass mobilisation, destruction of an existing political and social order, and the establishment of a distinctly new order, then it would seem to be an unusual variant of this type of social event, a development as atypical as it was unexpected.
This article analyzes the causes and consequences of the nationalist party politics in Turkey by focusing on the rise of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). The article identifies three interrelated processes to explain the MHP's rising status in 1999. First, neo-liberal economic policies of the early 1980s generated the formation of new opportunity spaces in media, education, politics, and market. Second, these opportunity spaces, in turn, empowered ethnic and religious groups to demand recognition and reconfiguration of the state ideology. Third, the failure of the ideologically rigid Turkish state to cope with these new identity claims prompted the military-dominated state elite to define the Kurdish and Islamic identity claims as existential threats to the core values of the state ideology. Being in a coalition, the MHP has given up its identity to become respectful in the eyes of the governing ossified military-bureaucratic elite.
The MHP won 13 percent of the vote in the June 2011 elections, which guaranteed it 52 seats in parliament. Ever since the 1960s, the MHP has operated with a vague party identity that amalgamated different, even contradictory, elements such as Islam, folk nationalism, secularism, militarism, Kemalism, statism, and even Ottomanism. However, the serious issues that are challenging Turkish politics today, such ascivilian-military relations, the Ergenekon trial, Islam in the public sphere, the Kurdish question, the crisis of the presidential election, or the 2010 referendum, have made a nebulous discourse operationally impossible. This paper argues that the recent political polarization between the AK Party and the CHPput an end to the MHP's strategy and discourse of traditional obscurantism, causing in these last elections this party's unimpressive electoral performance.
Turkey has leapt to international prominence as an economic and political powerhouse under its elected Muslim government, and is looked on by many as a model for other Muslim countries in the wake of the Arab Spring. In this book, Jenny White reveals how Turkish national identity and the meanings of Islam and secularism have undergone radical changes in today's Turkey, and asks whether the Turkish model should be viewed as a success story or a cautionary tale. This provocative book traces how Muslim nationalists blur the line between the secular and the Islamic, supporting globalization and political liberalism, yet remaining mired in authoritarianism, intolerance, and cultural norms hostile to minorities and women. In a new afterword, White analyzes the latest political developments, particularly the mass protests surrounding Gezi Park, their impact on Turkish political culture, and what they mean for the future.
Turkey has leapt to international prominence as an economic and political powerhouse under its elected Muslim government, and is looked on by many as a model for other Muslim countries in the wake of the Arab Spring. This book reveals how Turkish national identity and the meanings of Islam and secularism have undergone radical changes in today's Turkey, and asks whether the Turkish model should be viewed as a success story or cautionary tale. Jenny White shows how Turkey's Muslim elites have mounted a powerful political and economic challenge to the country's secularists, developing an alternative definition of the nation based on a nostalgic revival of Turkey's Ottoman past. These Muslim nationalists have pushed aside the Republican ideal of a nation defined by purity of blood, language, and culture. They see no contradiction in pious Muslims running a secular state, and increasingly express their Muslim identity through participation in economic networks and a lifestyle of Islamic fashion and leisure. For many younger Turks, religious and national identities, like commodities, have become objects of choice and forms of personal expression.
Ph.D., Consultant, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Ukraine Macroeconomic Reform Program. Kyiv, Ukraine. toritsin@prime.net.ua
3. See, for instance, Edward Azar and C. Moon, (Eds.), National Security in the Third World. Hants, England: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1988; Donald M. Snow. Distant Thunder: Third World Conflict and the New International Order. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1993; Mohammed Ayoob. The Security Problematic of the Third World // World Politics. No. 43. January 1991. Pp. 257–83.
4. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. Democratization and the Danger of War // International Security. Vol. 20. No. 1. Summer 1995. Pp. 5–38; Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder. Democratization and War // Foreign Affairs. Vol. 74. No. 3. May/June 1995. Pp.79–97; Jack Snyder and Karen Ballentine. Nation alism and the Marketplace of Ideas // International Security. Vol. 21. No. 2. Fall 1996. Pp. 5–40.
In the middle power literature, states are blackboxed and their behavior is analyzed independently of electoral or regional politics. This article fills a gap in this literature by tying the foreign policies of new middle powers to their political trajectories. Using the case studies of Brazil and Turkey, I argue that the assertive foreign policy behavior of these developing states is a legitimation strategy in response both to the international and domestic audience. I revise the definition of middle powers and enumerate the factors that contribute to their emergence in order to better clarify the dynamics of policymaking by the ‘second-generation middle powers’.
This article explores the transformation of the Turkish religious right in its view to the major goals and orientation of Turkish foreign policy from National View parties to the Justice and Development Party. The main argument of the paper is that foreign policy vision of Turkish religious right has shifted from a substantially cultural to a pragmatist and rational one. While the National View parties were opposed to develop relations with the West and were rather in favour of integration with the Muslim countries of the Middle East, the Justice and Development Party is motivated to integrate with the West and the East at the same time in search of achieving advanced political, economic and social institutions at home and in Turkey's neighbourhood. It is a major goal of the Justice and Development Party to ensure Turkey's membership to the EU which was formerly identified by the National View as a union of Christian states. The Justice and Development Party is also in cooperation with the USA in its goal to institute more democratic and peaceful regimes in the Middle East. While trying to promote contemporary political institutions in the Middle East, the Justice and Development Party is also in search of greater cooperation and partnership in economic, diplomatic and cultural terms. Behind this seemingly contradictory attitude lies the belief on the part of the Justice and Development Party deputies that democracy, human rights, rule of law, good governance are indisputable ideals of 21 st century politics and that they are not in conflict with different cultural values enjoyed by the world community. The Justice and Development Party endeavours to make Turkey a centre country, a regional and global power, an advanced democracy and a respectable member of the international community.
While the literature on populism is rich on specifying the characteristics of populist movements that distinguishes them from non-populists, much less attention has been paid on distinguishing between different types of populist movements. In this article we highlight and account for
divergent trajectories of populist practice in two major emerging economies—Argentina and Turkey. We stress that both the Kirchner governments of Argentina and the Erdoğan governments of Turkey closely fit to the populist pattern of rule, yet a close analysis of their policies
suggests a left-wing type of populism in Argentina and a right-wing type in Turkey. Beyond identifying divergent strands of populism in two national contexts, we also explain the mix of domestic and external factors that accounts for this contrasting pattern.
Human rights violations against religious or ethnic minorities cannot be treated independently of the state-society relations in respective countries. With a focus on the Christian citizens of the Turkish Republic, this article investigates the limits posed by theological underpinnings of citizenship to the rights and freedoms of religious minorities. This study approaches human rights issues and citizenship using the public theologies concept, which accounts for the temporal, spatial, substantive and spiritual aspects of the contemporary tension between rights and duties. The main argument is that unless the entire concept of citizenship is democratized in Turkey or in any other context, improvements in the rights of minority populations cannot last long.
Populism has traditionally been defined as a cumulative concept, characterized by the simultaneous presence of political, economic, social, and discursive attributes. Radial concepts of populism offer a looser way of spanning different domains. Criticism of modernization and dependency theory, which assumed tight connections between different domains, and the emergence of new types of personalistic leadership that lack some traditional attributes of populism have made cumulative and radial concepts of populism problematic. Populism can be reconceptualized as a classical concept located in a single domain, politics. Populism can be defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power through direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of followers.
To what extent do specific events influence democratic consolidation? Although institutionalist, structural, international and process-oriented explanations have advanced our knowledge of democratic consolidation, they have not sufficiently addressed the issue of timing. Drawing on the literature on temporality, this article develops an explanation to account for how specific events interact with social structures in producing democratic outcomes. This argument is demonstrated by an in-depth study of democratic consolidation in Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s. I use the method of “systematic process analysis” by testing alternative theories to explain the Turkish case and by employing process tracing to show how suggested variables produced the outcome of democratic consolidation in Turkey.