Turkey's Crisis: A Brief Background

Middle East dictators came to power after monarchs or colonial administrations. The social-political landscape was devoid of any mechanism to stop them. To the contrary, it provided a welcoming atmosphere for one man rule. Whereas in Turkey, Erdogan took charge of a functioning democracy -despite all its flaws- when he was elected in 2002. Turkey was already an EU candidate; with a diverse media, dynamic society and thriving business sector. How in the earth was that possible?

The Ottoman legacy

Turkish people have lost an empire and the trauma runs very deep. The humiliating feeling of defeat dominates the average Turkish mindset. Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman, revivalist discourse aims exactly at this sense of loss and the longing for regaining the glory of the imperial Golden Age. In the cases of Germany and Japan, the shock of the defeat in a World war and losing imperial domain was rehabilitated through a shared effort by the winners abroad and a moderate leadership at home. This included persecuting war criminals (de-Nazification), eradicating militarism by rebuilding the state, enshrining liberal democratic values in the constitution, and focusing on economic advance through industrialization and technology. None of these positive transformations took place in Turkey: The mentality and structures that brought the tragic end of the empire remained in the core of the state. Armenian Genocide went unpunished, a culture of militarism and statism prevailed, and the economic progress was slow at best.

Modern Turkey

After World War I., Turkey’s founding fathers struck a smart deal with the winners. They agreed to abolish the Caliphate, convert Hagia Sophia into a museum and strictly refrain from any imperialist claim. In return, Turkey’s undisputed sovereignty as a free nation was accepted. The Kemalist mantra of “Peace at home, peace in the world” powerfully summarizes the deal. This foundational agreement was a strategic success. It became the cornerstone of Turkey’s alliance with the West which protected the country from war throughout the 20th century. But the domestic record of the young republic is not as impressive.

Turkish political culture does not welcome concepts such as power sharing or compromise. Compromise is considered to be an inferior act of weakness rather than a problem solving instrument. This legacy continues to be a key factor in its poor democracy track record. The system is a painful mixture of parliamentary democracy with monarchical mentality.

Many argue that the Turkish revolution should have been followed by evolution. Yet Ataturk was overconfident in his policies to reshape the society. His top-down, uncompromising modernization and secularization agenda appealed to a small urban group but was resisted by the conservative periphery.  Moreover, his legacy was abused through the following decades by a military-bureaucratic-judicial elite that resisted to share power with popularly elected governments. 

Turkey’s military and the bureaucratic elites were the guardians of the pact with the West. As a result Turkish army was disproportionally influential in politics. It interrupted democratic process by military coups, while constantly oppressing the religious in the name of secularism and Kurds in the name of Turkish nationalism. Instead of negotiating differences, Kemalist urban secular elites chose to deny, oppress and humiliate the other segments. They resisted legitimate democratic demands claiming that any compromise would threaten the territorial integrity and the secular foundations of the republic.

The socially conservative, religiously sensitive voter block forms 60% of the constituency. Their sense of victimization and ambitious political mobilization resulted in the rise of conservative parties, eventually Erdogan’s AKP. Even to this day, Erdoğan’s biggest political arsenal is the memory of decades of oppression under the Kemalist – military tutelage. He keeps reminding his constituency of those years at every opportunity.

The rise of Islamists

Islamist parties peacefully challenged the secular old guard and finally won municipal elections in 1994 and general elections in 1995. Their provocative remarks, coupled with anti-Western policies while in office, alerted the Kemalist establishment. A coalition of military, judiciary, academy, business and media elements forced the Islamist Welfare Party party out of office in 1997’s “post-modern coup”. Being Istanbul's mayor then, Erdogan was jailed in 1999 for reading a poem that the court ruled to be inciting hatred among society. He was released after four months and founded the AKP in 2001. The party's young, pragmatic leaders claimed to have distanced themselves from their Islamist past and described the new party as “conservative democrat”.

AKP and Erdogan

Erdogan’s AKP successfully mobilized Turkey’s marginalized conservative periphery and won the general elections in 2002. With the 2010 referendum on constitutional amendments, the supremacy of the elected over the appointed was totally ensured in Turkey’s political system. The extraordinary powers of the army was curbed. Just like its democratic Western allies, Turkey became a country where the PM could fire the generals, not the other way around.

This meant that Turkey was at a historical crossroads by 2010. Would the political leadership consolidate democracy by codifying an EU inspired civilian constitution with checks and balances, or would they monopolize power? Unfortunately Erdogan opted for the latter. AKP came to power by championing anti-authoritarian values but ended up becoming a counter-authoritarian actor. Erdogan not only centralized power in government but also changed the internal decision making structures of his party by deinstitutionalizing it into a one-man show. After 2010, he gradually assumed a patronizing tone against other constitutencies and began returning to his Islamist ideological roots.

The Gezi Park protests

The Gezi Park protests that took place in June 2013 in reaction to a shopping mall project in Istanbul is a landmark event in modern Turkish history. Erdogan’s quest for ultimate power did not go unchallenged. Thanks to political stability, economic growth and liberalization through 2002-2013; a layer of independent, urban, educated and active citizens emerged in Turkey’s civil sphere.  This was the first time in the history of the republic that citizens took to streets for peaceful protest without being mobilized by political leaders. It was the largest civil protest ever as crowds gathered in more than 60 cities. While ignited by an imposed urban development project,  the main source of discontent was Erdogan’s aggressive and humiliating remarks on issues that pertain to lifestyle and personal choice; such as alcohol, abortion or mixed gender student houses.

Erdogan called the protesters hooligans, looters, thugs and ordered the police to violently suppress them. He resorted to conspiracy theories instead of responding to  demands for pluralism and citizen participation in decision making. 10 protesters and a police officer died during the weeks long unrest. Gezi is a turning point. Gezi Park is the moment when Erdogan realized the mature democratic awareness within certain segments of the population and shifted his authoritarian orientation from latent to manifest to eliminate it.

Economy

Economic growth was not built on sustainable, productive schemes that operate on added value, innovation and R&D. Turkey’s growth under AKP has been an unfounded boom of short-termism based on aggressive construction projects that favor pro-Erdogan businessmen. It is telling that the law on public procurements has been amended 163 times under AKP rule.

Government controls economic activity with large revenues distributed among a small circle of party businessmen and a small portion gets distributed to masses as in kind or in cash aid. Corruption is not only massive but also religiously approved thanks to an embedded group of Islamic jurists with lavish salaries. A party-controlled welfare system is used to buy in popular consent through a clientalist model with free goods and services. Voter loyalty is secured through provision of public welfare, redistribution of public resources, access to public jobs, public housing and free health care. The policy is an outright violation of welfare provision as resources are distributed based on party loyalty rather than in a rights-based fashion. An estimated number of 20 million receive in kind or in cash government aid. Their free will is hijacked.

Religion

Turkey took certain democratic steps during the first decade of AKP. However a close look reveals that Erdogan has pursued a politics of redress that selectively enlarges the freedoms for his party constituency but shrinks the liberties of others. A comparison between the removal of headscarf ban and narrowing of Kurdish, Alawi, minority rights during AKP years powerfully reveals the injustice.

Erdogan proudly announced his intention to raise a pious generation. To this end, education and civil society have been harnessed to serve his agenda of engineering a religious society through state power. The number of students attending religious public schools grew from 70K to over 1 M between 2002-2016. These schools receive preferential treatment as Erdogan is a graduate and chief patron of them.

Until AKP, Islamic groups in Turkey used to operate with large financial and doctrinal autonomy. However these groups are showered with money by the Erdogan regime in return for votes and undisputed loyalty. Those who maintain an independent line are contained, stigmatized and persecuted, Hizmet Movement being the most visible but not only example. The government keeps skilfully circulating the fear propaganda that AKP’s loss of power will be fatal for Islamic groups because the secular elite will come back vengefully to punish them. To that end, once the speaker of the government warned representatives of Islamic groups, “If we exist, you will exist”. As a result, most of Turkey’s religion based groups have become hostages of AKP in an all-or-nothing paradigm.

Politicization of religion has led to a divorce between faith and morality. Religion is abused in every compartment of life under government consent. Statistics show that Turkish people are losing their religion. For the first time in Turkey’s history, the average Muslims are distancing themselves from the mosque. The mosque is hijacked by politics as the Directorate of Religious Affairs has lost its neutral character and functions like a party organ. Friday sermons are used to disseminate government propaganda wrapped in religious lexicon and this is causing great discomfort. 

AKP has a policy of building gigantic mosques in order to content the secular design of the public space. Many of these mosques are built on symbolic locations that communicate a message of political dominance with little concern about local needs or community consent. Ironically though, there might be no worshippers to attend these new mosques by the time they are completed.

Sadly, Turkey’s pendulum has moved from one extreme to the other. Once it was the Kemalist elites oppressing the religious on grounds of defending secularism. Now it is the Islamists oppressing the rest under a religious-nationalist regime. The regime blatantly instrumentalizes Islam to justify authoritarianism.

Foreign policy, European Union

Turkey received candidate status from the EU in 1999 and made great progress during the first two years of AKP government, 2002-2004. This resulted in opening of direct talks in 2005. Turkey’s EU aspiration was the main source of a huge wave of democratization and liberalization in every segment of government. This positive trend slowed down in 2008 and began reversing after 2011.

Support for EU membership was very high when AKP came to power. Unsurprisingly, AKP pursued the EU agenda in order to have allies at home and abroad in its struggle against the military establishment. In order to protect itself from a possible coup, AKP sided with the EU. In order not to lose EU, they ostensibly followed EU guidelines on human rights, minority rights, Kurdish issue, Alawi issue, freedom of speech. Until beginning to reverse to his Islamist origins in 2010, Erdogan felt compelled to nominate EU friendly left, center-left candidates. Though he never gave them critical positions. These appointments were just a publicity act to float an image of moderacy and progressiveness.

In other words, Erdogan’s EU agenda was based on strategic incentives rather than genuine belief in EU values. Once its political costs began outweighing the benefits, Erdogan ceased pursuing membership reforms. Turkey’s current orientation leaves no doubt that Erdogan distanced himself from Islamism only temporarily and only for tactical purposes. In the meanwhile, he made strategic use of EU related reforms to weaken rivals  and consolidate power.

Part of the responsibility in the derailment of Turkey’s EU membership process belongs to European leaders. After the economic crisis in 2008, European public sentiment began turning against the concept of multiculturalism, immigration and enlargement of the union. Instead of taking political risk and challenging this trend, Europe’s key center right leaders adopted a populist discourse and started making  negative and even humiliating statements against Turkey’s membership. Their remarks mostly emphasized a vogue concept of “cultural differences”. Turkish public was offended with these remarks. Support for membership began decreasing from 70% in 2007 to 30% in 2013. Erdogan did not miss the opportunity to abandon the EU agenda, something he was reluctantly pursuing only for pragmatic reasons.

Foreign policy, Middle East

Prior to the Arab Spring, Turkey had amassed a huge level of popularity and political credibility in the Middle East. This successful outreach was mainly the result of economic engagement, export of popular culture and highly valuable diplomatic mediation inputs between Israel-Syria, Hamas-Fatah in Palestine and Sunni-Shia in Iraq. In other words, although it was not an EU member, Turkey behaved as if it already was one and became a peace and stability generator in its neighborhood.

This promising trend changed with the Arab Spring. Erdogan and his close circle, all of whom came from the same political Islamist background, were tempted to revert to their Islamist outlook after the beginning of the Arab Spring. They proclaimed a vague and overconfident concept of “Strategic Depth”, a geopolitical expression of neo-Ottomanism, and dragged Turkey into a futile effort to install Islamist regimes in Egypt, Syria and all over the region. Erdogan abandoned EU inspired cooperative behavior and engaged a neo-Ottoman adventure to become the kingmaker of the Middle East and eventually declare himself the Caliph. In the final analysis, Turkey is full-headedly oriented to be one of the main antagonists in a colossial war in the region.