The Parcelled State: A Political and Historical Framework for the Current Intra-State Crisis in Turkey

Abstract

This article puts Turkey’s current state crisis into a historical perspective. During the transition to neo-liberalism after the hegemony crisis of the late 1970s, a critical objective for those in the high echelons of bureaucracy and ruling politicians was to ensure the security of state apparatuses. However, the policies implemented to achieve this led to fragmentation in both the state and the political spheres. Thus, during the second half of the 1990s and during the 2000s, the state became a field for open warfare between power networks that had established direct links between state apparatuses, political society, and civil society. These fragmentations – that is the parcellation of state apparatuses – triggered an intra-state crisis. Regarding the formation of the state and the political spheres in the neo-liberal era, this article shows that Turkey is a unique case in the debate on variegated forms of authoritarian statism.

Key Words:

• Authoritarianism
• authoritarian statism
• power networks
• state crisis
• Turkey

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a study comparing the cases of Turkey, Brazil, and Thailand regarding the rise and demise of neo-liberal populism, see Bekmen and Özden (2022).

2 For earlier analyses of Turkey with reference to Poulantzas’ theoretical framework, see Oğuz (2008, 2010) and Karahanoğulları and Türk (2018).

3 Özkazanç’s (1998) perspective on the parcellation of the state inspired this study.

4 In Turkish academia, the literature on the state is mainly written from a “political theology” perspective. According to this viewpoint, the Turkish Sonderweg dates back to the classical Ottoman era or even, in some cases, to the Byzantine era. Although Weberian, Marxist, and other approaches have developed different interpretations of this specific history, they share the view that the non-hegemonic character of the bourgeoisie and/or the non-democratic character of the modern state is related to the enormous historical continuity characterised by a strong state tradition (see Heper 1985; Keyder 1987; Mardin 1973). This approach, which continues to be a mainstream perspective, started to affect the political opposition after the 1980 coup. With the suppression of the political left after the 1980 military coup, a new democratisation discourse that positioned itself against the idea of “omnipotent Kemalism,” appeared. This particular political and intellectual stance, with its liberal, left-liberal, and Islamist versions, treated the military and the high judiciary, which were dominated by the Kemalist bureaucracy, as the current institutional actors of the “strong state.” Thus, the ideological dimension of power in modern Turkey was reduced to Kemalism while state power was identified with the Kemalist bureaucracy, especially the military.

5 These organisations were built according to a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) concept and were not unique to Turkey. It is well known that the history of counter-guerrilla forces such as Gladio in Turkey, which was supposed to organise unconventional war in response to any communist invasion of NATO countries during the Cold War, started in 1952 with the Tactical Mobilisation Group financed by the Joint US Military Mission for Aid to Turkey. These unofficial coercive apparatuses, previously used to counter the rise of the left in the 1970s, were reactivated in the 1990s, in the struggle against the Kurdish movement (see Ganser 2004; Işık 2021).

6 Nationalitarianism, here, is used as the translation of the Turkish term ulusalcılık, which refers to the secular and Kemalist section within the wider world of nationalism in Turkey. For a detailed analysis see Öztan (2013).

7 Poulantzas proposed authoritarian statism with regard to dominant countries without offering a general theory of capitalist states by extending it to dependent ones. However, he also suggested that “these changes affect every capitalist country insofar as they have their origin in the current phase of international reproduction of capitalism” (Poulantzas 1980, 204).