Ece Temelkuran
If Cihan Tuğal’s book was filmed as a political
thriller, the pre-credit sequence would go something like this: George
Bush, against the backdrop of the Bosphorus Bridge, delivers a speech
announcing the discovery of a cure for radical Islamism to the 2004 nato summit in Istanbul.
[1]
As Commander-in-Chief of the ‘war on terror’, Bush has a
flattering message for his Turkish hosts: ‘Your country stands as a
model to others, and as Europe’s bridge to the wider world. Your success
is vital to a future of progress and peace in Europe and in the broader
Middle East.’ The ‘Turkish model’, showing the perfect match of
moderate Islam with American-style democracy, would prevent a dangerous
fundamentalism from taking hold. The camera would pan back to show the
audience of Western leaders eagerly applauding Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdoğan, whose government epitomized the nato-friendly
Islamic liberalism which they hoped would take root in the Middle East.
At this point, the screen would darken and the words, ‘Twelve Years
Later . . .’ would appear. In the next scene, the same world leaders
would be seen sneaking into a monstrously flamboyant palace to beg an
autocratic President Erdoğan to block the wave of Syrian refugees
fleeing the war that the ‘democratic face of Islam’ had been stoking,
with Western collusion, for the past five years. The screen darkens
again and the movie’s title is emblazoned across it: ‘Falling Bridge,
Rising Wall’.
The Fall of the Turkish Model offers a forensic analysis of the akp-Erdoğan
phenomenon. For over ten years, Western mainstream intellectuals, media
and politicians were so dazzled by this image of the perfect blend of
East and West that objective thinking and critical stances were set
aside. The Justice and Development Party (akp) and its leader were praised for creating a bon pour l’orient democracy—that
is, good enough for the Middle East; clearly not up to Western
standards, but acceptable. Abroad, critics of Erdoğan were labelled as
self-hating Muslims, unable to cope with their identity. At home, they
were at first stigmatized as alienated intellectuals, or cheerleaders
for the Turkish Army’s role in politics; later they were simply branded
‘infidels’ or agents of foreign influence. The claim that a majority
vote was the same thing as democracy created an atmosphere in which
critics of the akp would automatically be defined as enemies of the people, to be subjected to constant online defamation by the akp’s trolls.
As
the Turkish model has grown visibly more tarnished, a few more critics
are to be found today, even in the mainstream American media. However,
as Cihan Tuğal emphasizes, the complaints are still limited to Erdoğan’s
authoritarian inclinations and do not question ‘Islamic liberalism’
itself. He traces the origins of Turkey’s Islamist project, its record
in power, and its influence on movements elsewhere in the Middle
East—especially Egypt and Tunisia, where attempts to emulate the akp
ran into the ground after 2011. From an apparent high point in the
first phase of the Arab uprisings, when Erdoğan’s disciples looked set
to inherit the region, the Turkish brand of Islamism has now been driven
back onto its home territory, where it has become ever more reliant on
coercion to maintain its grip. Tuğal is critical of fashionable
scholarly approaches which ‘eulogize civil society’ as a habitat for
liberal Islamist mobilization against the ‘secular’ Middle Eastern
state. He proposes instead a broadly Gramscian framework with a focus on
‘political society’, defined as ‘a field of actors and organizations
that have comprehensive social visions’. In advanced economies with
settled liberal democracies, he argues, parties usually predominate in
this field; but in more dynamic situations, it will be ‘populated by
sociopolitical organizations and groups that are difficult to classify’.
The interaction of these actors with state and civic structures will
determine whether a country faced with a strategic impasse will follow
one of three paths: revolution, counter-revolution or passive
revolution, in the Gramscian sense of ‘restoration–revolution’. For
Tuğal, a nation’s socio-economic, political and cultural path is
sustainable ‘only when it rests on a well-organized power bloc’ capable
of welding together the ‘interests, dispositions and outlooks of various
dominant strata’, and of mobilizing wider social layers behind its
project.
This analytical framework is then used
to examine the outcomes in four countries where modernizing, nationalist
projects took shape under the direction of secular elites: Turkey,
Iran, Egypt and Tunisia. By the closing decades of the twentieth
century, all four had reached an impasse. The Egyptian and Tunisian
regimes had largely discarded their nationalist trappings and become
Western client states, in thrall to the Washington Consensus—especially
Tunisia, which was, in Tuğal’s words, ‘the most orthodox neoliberal
regime in the Arab world’ and something of a poster-child for the imf.
On the other hand, the fall of Pahlavi’s dictatorship in Iran and its
replacement by an Islamic Republic supplied a model, both positive and
negative, for religious forces throughout the region. Turkish Islamists
went through several organizational mutations before consolidating as
the Welfare Party in the 1980s; they managed to increase their vote
steadily, from 8 per cent in 1987 to 16 per cent in 1991 and 21 per cent
in 1995, when they emerged as the largest party. The movement also
trained a generation of cadres through the İmam Hatip religious schools:
‘In a country where intellectuals had previously been equated with the
left, the emergence of this new, avowedly Muslim intelligentsia would be
a significant element in the construction of Islamism as a hegemonic
alternative.’
The first Welfare Party government
under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan clashed with Turkey’s
Kemalist establishment and was deposed in a military coup in 1997. This
experience helped crystallize the ideas of a younger generation of
Islamist politicians grouped around the Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdoğan,
who first tried to take over Erbakan’s reconstituted party, then broke
away to form the akp in 2001. As Tuğal
explains, the new party set out to convince established power-holders at
home and abroad that they had nothing to fear:
The akp would not challenge the headscarf ban, they reassured the old elite. They emphasized their allegiance to the free market (in line with the interests of their own increasingly bourgeois support base) and parliamentary democracy. The leaders were also vociferously pro-European and committed to the process of eu accession. They made frequent trips to the United States.
For Tuğal, the akp
leadership was trying to forge ‘an updated version of that alliance of
export-oriented businessmen, religious intellectuals and the state elite
at which the subordinate fraction of the power bloc had traditionally
aimed’. Above all, it was the newly rich provincial businessmen of the
central Anatolian region that would provide the akp’s
social foundation in the 1990s. Their offices were all decorated in the
same fashion: a replica of the Bosphorus Bridge, bookshelves adorned
with a set of Ana Britannica encyclopedias, and a cheap nylon seccade, or prayer rug. When asked why they had the seccade
on display, the answer was always the same: ‘Nobody would want to do
business with us otherwise.’ The modest prayer rug was a sign of
humility and religious faith, while the Ana Britannica—a free promotional gift offered by newspapers and magazines in those days—symbolized respect for enlightenment. This nouveau-riche layer paved the way for Erdoğan and his party’s ascent by enlisting millions of their employees in the movement. The akp’s
narrative of modern Turkish history presented these people as the real
backbone of Turkey, a class formerly oppressed by the secular Kemalist
elite. At the same time, the akp was highly successful in mobilizing support from liberals with its pro-eu orientation and talk of cutting the Army’s political role down to size.
Erdoğan’s
formula delivered electoral success in 2002, with 34 per cent of the
vote and a comfortable majority of seats. Subsequent elections saw the akp’s
vote rise dramatically: over 46 per cent in 2007 and just shy of 50 per
cent in 2011. This was also a period of high economic growth: gdp
per capita rose from $4,000 in 2000 to $10,000 in 2010, leaving Egypt,
Iran and Tunisia far behind. The Turkish variety of ‘Islamic liberalism’
was hailed by Western and Arab observers alike as a template for the
region to follow. As Tuğal argues, however, the akp’s
commitment to democratic practice was never deeply rooted: Erdoğan had
governed Istanbul in the 1990s with an iron fist, and the party’s
internal structures were quite literally based on ‘one man, one
vote’—Erdoğan was the man, and he had the vote. In 2005, at a time when
the akp was still being praised by
Turkish liberals who would later deplore its authoritarian tendencies,
the party’s interior minister denounced a conference on the Armenian
genocide, accusing its organizers of ‘stabbing the nation in the back’.
The headline figures for economic growth concealed a starkly unequal
society, where the wealth share of the richest 1 per cent rose from 38
per cent in 2000 to 54 per cent in 2014. Unemployment remained above 10
per cent—in line with Egypt’s performance, though slightly better than
Tunisia’s—and the rate of workplace deaths was shockingly high: 1,710 in
2011 alone. Growth rates were heavily dependent on flows of hot money
from abroad, leaving Turkey vulnerable to any global downturn.
On the international stage, the dream of reviving Ottoman imperialism provided the akp’s energized provincialism with a greater goal. Recognition by world powers as a ‘model’ legitimized the akp’s
delusional hunger for regional influence—especially over the
territories which had once been under Ottoman rule. A carefully
calibrated campaign, combining occasional rebukes to Israel—as at Davos
in 2009, when he intervened to remind Peres of ‘the children killed on
the beach’ in Gaza—while continuing Turkish military exercises with the idf,
saw Erdoğan become the most acclaimed leader on the Arab street: in
2009, billboards in a Hezbollah neighbourhood in southern Beirut were
adorned with his image under the reproachful slogan, ‘Where are the Arab
men?’ On visits to Arab countries, he was showered with praise by
intellectuals and politicians, and often mobbed by ordinary citizens. It
was little wonder if the one-time municipal boss from Istanbul, finding
himself the focus of such admiration, began to lose the plot; his ego
was so puffed up that he came to believe he was the chosen one, while
anyone who dared to criticize him was guilty of rank impiety.
Turkey
has always been a sharply divided society, both politically and
sociologically—to the extent that there are two kinds of toilet, à la Turca and à la Franca, that define whether you are a conservative or a secular modernist. The akp
gradually pushed this fragile society towards a dangerous level of
polarization. This was already apparent when Bush and the other nato
leaders were promoting the image of Turkey’s economic success and
democratic transformation. Erdoğan’s victory speech after the 2007
election was superficially magnanimous—‘to all those who didn’t vote for
us, don’t worry, we will respect your votes’—but its underlying message
for the akp’s opponents was clear: they
would be tolerated, but would not be considered equal citizens. The
Prime Minister’s circle of liberal and ex-Marxist intellectual
sympathizers were desperate to find a benign democratic message in his
words; but in the aftermath, the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as Tuğal
stresses, was drawn ever more clearly. In 2008, Erdoğan warned bluntly:
‘We want one nation, one flag and one state. Those who don’t approve of
this are welcome to leave.’ Ultra-nationalists were brought into the
ruling coalition; mediocre mafia bosses celebrated Erdoğan as the
‘Sultan’.
Erdoğan’s cult reached its apogée in 2011, as the anciens regimes
of the Arab world began to tumble. To the Obama Administration, Egypt
and Tunisia appeared to be the most promising candidates for imitation
of the akp’s example: in both countries,
long-established Islamist movements stepped into the field after Mubarak
and Ben Ali were ousted and carried the day in the first competitive
elections. The Muslim Brotherhood had the longest history of any
fundamentalist movement in the region, while Tunisia’s al-Nahda could
draw on the profile and leadership skills of Rachid el-Ghannouchi, who
combined the roles of Islamic scholar and politician. Tuğal credits
al-Nahda’s victory in the 2011 elections, with 37 per cent of the
popular vote—four times the score achieved by its nearest rival—to the
‘mirage’ of the Turkish model, ‘which had kept the region under its
spell for the previous decade’. A substantial part of the Tunisian
electorate craved ‘a Turkish-style combination of religiosity, economic
success and global acceptability’, while the head of Libya’s National
Transitional Council declared in 2012 that his country would ‘take
Turkey as a model for its own political and democratic structure’.
But none of the akp’s
epigones were able to match its record of consolidating power. Tuğal
attributes this failure to the different structures of political society
in Egypt and Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood, finding itself challenged
by Salafi currents, had never managed to dominate the Islamist space in
the same manner as the akp; after 2011,
the Nour Party kept the Brotherhood under pressure and limited its
ability to manoeuvre. When Erdoğan visited Cairo in September 2011 and
put forward the akp’s gradualist message,
arguing that a secular state offered the best political framework for
pious Muslims, the Egyptian Islamists reacted with hostility. This
partly reflected their own anti-secularism, but as Tuğal notes, ‘the
cold response was also a reflex shaped by the existing balance of
religious power, which would have led to the further empowerment of the
Salafis and the Jamaa had the Brotherhood let Erdoğan’s comments pass in
silence.’ This was not the only departure from the Turkish pattern.
While the akp had been keen to bring the army under its control, the Brotherhood preferred to reach a modus vivendi with the Egyptian military, denouncing protests against its political role as fitna,
‘disorder’. This would not save them in 2013, when Mohammed Morsi’s
clumsy and autocratic presidency provided the generals with an
opportunity to mobilize and seize power for themselves. The coup was
followed by large-scale repression of the Brotherhood’s supporters.
Meanwhile
in Tunisia, the al-Nahda administration was forced to grapple with a
complex political terrain, which included one of the strongest labour
organizations in the Arab world. The assassination of two prominent
left-wing politicians led to bitter anti-government protests. At the
same time, Ghannouchi’s party had to respond to pressure from Salafi
radicals who had taken over hundreds of mosques and were demanding the
transformation of state television and Tunisia’s universities. The akp
never had to face a mobilization of that kind during its early years in
office—or the secularist counter-mobilization which it provoked. A
broad anti-Islamist front, which included old-regime elements,
secularists and a part of Tunisia’s left, defeated al-Nahda in the 2014
elections. This act of political closure was not as decisive as the one
in Egypt the previous year, but it now seems unlikely that Tunisia will
follow the Turkish road.
The regional shift that had appeared so promising for the akp
in 2011 thus proved to be a bitter disappointment to it. The real
winner, as Tuğal explains, was Saudi Arabia, representing the most
illiberal face of Islam. Erdoğan could only watch helplessly as Morsi’s
government was overthrown by the Egyptian military with enthusiastic
Saudi backing. Delusions of imperial grandeur quickly melted away. After
some initial hesitation, Erdoğan swung behind the us–Saudi
position on Syria, demanding Assad’s removal from power, and provided
support and sanctuary for rebel groups fighting to overthrow his regime.
Five years later, Assad has not been ousted, and the most significant
outcome of the Syrian conflict from Ankara’s perspective has been most
unwelcome: the emergence of a Kurdish autonomous zone close to the
Turkish-Syrian border, governed by the sister party of the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (pkk), whose guerillas have been fighting its army for decades.
Turkey’s
toxic ‘Kurdish question’ is now part of a complex regional equation.
The struggle for Kurdish autonomy has long been a determining factor in
Turkish politics: the 1980 military coup mowed down an entire generation
of Turkish and Kurdish leftists; Diyarbakır Prison became a notorious
torture centre. The pkk emerged from this
crucible as a powerful armed resistance capable of challenging the
Turkish state, which has responded with a policy of intermittent
military repression towards the Kurds, very rarely acknowledging the
issue to be one of democratic rights. Left-wing forces in Turkey have
maintained an on-off alliance with Kurdish activists over the decades,
while keeping their distance from the guerrilla movement. Erdoğan and
the akp appeared to take a promising line
on the Kurdish issue in earlier years, increasing the party’s
attraction to liberals and leftists. In 2013, as the situation in Syria
deteriorated and Washington stepped up the search for effective regional
allies, negotiations began between the pkk’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan and the akp
government, though the outcomes were kept hidden from the public eye.
However, Erdoğan has now regressed to presenting the ‘Kurdish problem’
as one caused exclusively by the pkk’s existence.
The
Turkish leader received an honorary doctorate in political science from
Marmara University in 2013, just weeks after he had dismissed the
concept of the division of powers as a barrier that would prevent him
from serving the people. This theoretical vision had already been put
into practice by his administration, as the courts were brought into
line with the executive through constitutional changes and hundreds of
people were bundled into jail on political charges. Because of the
highly undemocratic 10 per cent threshold required to enter Parliament,
legislative power was monopolized by the akp.
Media companies were taken over by businessmen loyal to the government;
journalists who differed from Erdoğan’s line were threatened with
prosecution. With all the formal channels of political expression
seemingly shut down, opposition to the akp
manifested itself on the streets, in the form of the Gezi uprising.
Tuğal concludes his study with an analysis of the Gezi movement, which
he rightly views as a watershed in Turkish politics.
While
some Turkish intellectuals tried to explain Gezi to the international
media through a clichéd analysis of the ‘clash of secular and religious
mindsets’, the spectrum of the protestors, coming from a wide range of
political backgrounds, showed that it stemmed from resistance to the
conformity demanded by Erdoğan and his party. The accumulated anger that
had been brewing beneath the surface reached boiling point, and the
concept of mass civil disobedience was revived for the first time since
the 1980 military coup. There was an immediate and dramatic change in
the political climate: once again, resistance was sanctified as
something good, beautiful and right. The word ‘resistance’ itself (direniş in Turkish) re-entered the popular vocabulary, having been expunged from the public sphere after 1980. The akp’s
propaganda machine was challenged by an eruption of political humour.
Tuğal argues that the style of the protests was as important as its
multi-class and multi-issue character: ‘Social movements in Turkey had
been becoming more colourful and festive ever since the mid-1990s. But
this was the first time that a mass uprising was marked by fully
carnivalesque tendencies.’
While it was certainly
full of novelty, the Gezi uprising was not short of historical
reference-points either. During the protests, the facade of the Atatürk
Cultural Centre in Taksim Square was covered with the picture of a young
man alongside a banner that read, ‘stand tall!’ The young man was Deniz
Gezmiş, a student militant who was executed by the Turkish military in
1972 and has become a symbol of the revolutionary left. There was a
notable absence, however: since the Kurdish movement did not want to
squander the historic opportunity of talks between government
representatives and the pkk, its
supporters largely held back from joining the protests. Tuğal argues
that Erdoğan’s government was able to defuse the protest movement by
presenting it in the same secular vs. religious terms as the Western
media: ‘In the popular imaginary, Gezi was anti-akp
and therefore anti-Islamist. This perception simply played into the
hands of the regime.’ Concluding his analysis in the early months of
2015, he takes a rather pessimistic view of Gezi’s broader impact:
‘Eventually, the revolt subsided and the various attempts to turn it
into a sustained movement could not reach the broader masses’;
thereafter, the Turkish left ‘retracted to its pre-2013 base.’
Subsequent
events have qualified that verdict somewhat. While none of the leftist
organizations or political parties could fully capitalize on the
mobilization around Gezi, a new civil network, Oy ve Ötesi, was launched in the wake of the protests, and would prove a major irritant for the akp
during the elections of June 2015. Its observers fanned out all over
the country to obstruct vote-rigging by the incumbent party. The result
of the poll was a setback for the akp, which lost its majority in parliament, while 13 per cent of the vote went to the new People’s Democratic Party (hdp),
left-wing and pro-Kurdish. One of its main slogans, addressed to
Erdoğan—‘we won’t allow you to be President’—had a wide popular
resonance. The hdp’s leader Selahattin
Demirtaş established a strong public profile, helping the party to scale
the 10 per cent threshold for representation in parliament.
Erdoğan’s
presidential ambitions could not be satisfied in the framework of a
coalition government and he called a second election five months later.
The November 2015 poll took place in a climate of intensified
nationalism after the revival of hostilities between the pkk and the Turkish army. The thinking behind the pkk’s renewed offensive has not been set out publicly, but it appeared that the guerrilla leadership was not as pleased with the hdp’s
performance as its voters. Opponents of the new war rallied in Ankara
the week before the election, and became victims of the deadliest
terrorist attack in Turkish history, as suicide bombers suspected of
links to isis killed 102 people. Riot
police assaulted the survivors, while Erdoğan’s ministers claimed that
the protesters had bombed themselves. The akp took advantage of a national-security panic to gain a majority of seats, largely at the expense of the far-right mhp; the hdp’s
vote was also depressed, though it still managed to clear the 10 per
cent hurdle. Erdoğan’s message of ‘stability’ may have delivered his
party victory at the polls, but there has been no end to the fighting in
the south-east since the 2015 election—nor to the bombings in cities
like Istanbul. The perception of life has changed dramatically. Human
rights organizations have documented hundreds of civilian casualties in
the Kurdish-majority regions since the summer of 2015, including more
than fifty children. The army’s siege is predictably invisible in the
mainstream Turkish media: recently, a teacher was fired from her job and
threatened by akp loyalists after
ringing a live phone-in show to draw attention to the issue. There is
great reluctance to speak about the Kurdish question in intellectual
circles. Turkey appears to be regressing back to the bloody days of the
1990s. The political discourse on both Turkish and Kurdish sides has
been militarized, to the benefit of the akp’s nationalism: once again, it is a question of Turks versus Kurds. The murder rate of women has risen tenfold under the akp.
Meanwhile, there are now almost three million Syrian refugees
sheltering in Turkey. For Erdoğan, the refugee crisis is just another
chip on the bargaining table with the West, while the refugees
themselves, who increasingly form a nation within a nation on the
streets of Istanbul, are rendered politically invisible.
The
‘fall of the Turkish model’ announced by Tuğal in his book’s title
could have multiple, overlapping meanings. Has the model failed because
it could not be exported to the rest of the Middle East—Egypt and
Tunisia in particular? Was that because of its inherent flaws, or
because social and political conditions were very different in those
countries, as Tuğal demonstrates? However tarnished it may now be, we
should not assume that the akp’s
political model has ‘fallen’, in the sense of being incapable of
retaining power or mass support. Its followers have been encouraged to
believe that social rights are a form of political charity that should
only be available to those who vote akp.
They are mobilized by a gigantic propaganda machine which promotes a
visceral hatred of the party’s adversaries; Erdoğan can break his
promises whenever he sees fit, and anyone who dares to raise the matter
will find themselves branded as the enemy. It is considered perfectly
acceptable for akp leaders to incite
crowds to boo the family of a fifteen-year-old, Berkin Elvan, who was
killed by a police bullet during the Gezi uprising. Turkey’s
Constitutional Court was also anathematized when it ordered the release
of journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül. Between August 2015 and
February 2016, sixty people were charged with insulting Erdoğan and
prosecuted, with each ‘criminal’ facing a year or two in prison.
Recently, a woman in the process of divorcing her husband accused him of
insulting the President, hoping to get the upper hand in the divorce
proceedings. Business owners of all kinds are kept in line, with the akp’s sword hanging over their heads.
The climate of sycophancy towards Erdoğan can give rise to moments of black comedy. When the akp chief declared in a speech that Turkey had no need for 4g mobile networks because it would jump straight from 3g to 5g, one of the phone companies made sure to plaster billboards with advertisements for ‘4.5g’—a technology that doesn’t exist—rather than contradict the President. Ironically, since the akp
has cultivated an image of itself as the liberator of Turkey from
military hegemony, this vision of politics bears a close resemblance to
the one promoted by the generals who seized power in 1980. They, too,
sought to nurture a generation of Turks who would be ‘without
ideology’—in other words, conservative, nationalist, devout and
obedient, and ready to embrace the free-market economy under nato command. The leadership cult promoted by Erdoğan and his disciples today has its roots in this social and political soil.
[1] Cihan Tuğal, The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, Verso: London and New York 2016, £19.99, paperback 296 pp, 978 1 7847 8332 7
