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ABSTRACT
Prominent themes in Turkey’s political development are modernization and Westernization, notions that carry with them a particular teleology in terms of expected political outcomes. While Turkey has, over several decades, modernized in several respects, Westernization has arguably been much more limited, particularly in terms of embracing political liberalism. This paper scrutinizes its failure to take root in Turkey, noting how a congruence of factors at both the mass and elite levels tends to work against policies that would embrace individual rights and freedoms, pluralism, and a more limited role for the state. It focuses in particular on three periods in Turkish history when liberalism could have potentially been adopted, but ultimately failed to succeed.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kubicek, “Turkey’s Inclusion.”
2 Yanik, “The making,” and Altunışık, “The trajectory.”
3 Kalaycioglu, “A Hundred Years.” There is, of course, a rich literature on this schism in Turkey. A seminal source is Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations.”
4 Turan, “Never quite making it.”
5 Gürpinar, “The Trajectory,” 162. There is also a history of liberalism in the late Ottoman period that certainly informed Turkish liberalism after 1923. It is explored in Özavcı, “Liberalism.”
6 Özavcı, “Liberalism,” 141.
7 Numerous articles have explored “illiberal democracy” in various settings. See, for example, Zakaria, “The Rise.”
8 A useful review can be found in Freeman, “Liberalism.” Many debates among liberals revolve around economic concerns (e.g. how property rights rank among other rights, the role of government in alleviating economic inequalities). These issues, however, are not central to my analysis.
9 Locke, A Letter, 46.
10 There can, of course, be overlap between the two, and the state’s “need” to provide order and security can also be seen as a prerequisite for individuals to pursue their interests.
11 Berlin, Four Essays.
12 Beliefs about extensive suffrage should be have evolved over time. Locke (1632-1704), for example, favored a constitutional monarchy with a parliament chosen by privileged (white) male voters (which was essentially what the United Kingdom had until the early 20th century), and Mill (1806-1873), while supporting female suffrage, championed a system in which the votes of more educated people would weigh more than those of the less educated.
13 The last confers group or community rights and is more associated with contemporary as opposed to more classical liberalism, which was relatively unconcerned with minorities, particularly ethnic minorities. For more see Kymlicka, Liberalism.
14 Rustow, “Transitions,” 346.
15 Rustow, “Transitions,” 355. A more extensive analysis that focuses on the role and power of different social classes is Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens, Capitalist Development.
16 Hanioğlu, Atatürk.
17 Mango, Atatürk, 536.
18 Özavcı, “Liberalism.” In particular, he upholds Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869-1939) as the leading liberal of this period. Ağaoğlu, however, failed to prevail against those who sought to use state power and consequently limit individual rights in pursuit of the goals of the Kemalist Revolution,
19 Özbudun, “The nature,” and Ete, “Tutelary Regimes.” For a more negative assessment that suggests Turkey more closely resembled a fascist state, see Parla and Davison, Corporatist Ideology.
20 Sofos, Turkish Politics.
21 Mardin, “Center-Periphery.”
22 Sofos, Turkish Politics, 76.
23 Mardin, “The Ottoman Empire,” 121.
24 Turnaoğlu, The Formation, 241.
25 Quoted in Tomlin, Life in Modern Turkey, 9.
26 Zurcher (“Three turning points”) sees the short-lived experiment in 1930 with an alternative political party, the Free Republican Party, combined with pressures from the Great Depression, as decisive in Turkey’s political development.
27 Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness.
28 Karpat, “The Republican People’s Party,” 44, emphasis mine.
29 Berlin, Four Essays.
30 Globally, liberalism remains confined largely to European and European-settler states, and even in Europe – especially, but not only, in post-communist East-Central Europe—one sees many of contemporary liberalism’s tenets openly challenged and/or repudiated.
31 Sofos, Turkish Politics, 76.
32 Chichocka, “Understanding.”
33 Kalaycioglu, “A Hundred Years,” and Isiksel, “Between Text and Context.”
34 Constitution of the Turkish Republic (1961) (in English), translated by Sadık Balkan, Ahmet Uysal, and Kemal Karpat, available at https://www.anayasa.gen.tr/1961constitution-text.pdf.
35 It is worth mentioning that Rustow (“Transitions”), writing at the end of the 1960s, suggests that democracy could emerge out of conflicts in Turkey because he believed the new, younger leaders would come around to the idea of the benefits of democracy. While some clearly did embrace the idea of winning power at the ballot box, this did not mean that they endorsed the panoply of rights and protections consistent with a liberal view of democracy.
36 Jacoby, Social Power, 138.
37 Isiksel, “Between Text and Context,” 723.
38 Karaveli, Why Turkey is Authoritarian, 121-122.
39 An English-language version of the 1982 Constitution can be found at https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Turkey_2017.pdf?lang=en.
40 Arat and Pamuk, Turkey Between Democracy, 57, and Isiksel, “Between Text and Context.”
41 Quoted in Tezcur, Muslim Reformers, 157.
42 For example, see Dagi, “Post-Islamism.”
43 Öniş, “Turkey-EU Relations,” 38.
44 For comparison, the scores of the United States (.805), Germany (.863), Poland (which acceded to the EU in 2004) (.809), and Bulgaria (which was negotiating EU membership) (.629) were all much higher. In contrast, Russia’s score (.16) was much lower in 2004 and peaked at .301 in in 1992 and 1995.
45 See V-Dem Institute, “Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021,” p. 19, available at https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/files/dr/dr_2021.pdf.
46 Çalışkan, “Toward a new political regime.”
47 For a self-critical review of this issue, see Kubicek, “Faulty Assumptions.”
48 The most developed exposition of this argument is Hintz, Identity Politics.
49 Aydın-Düzgit, “The Islamist-Secularist.”
50 Bashirkov and Lancaster, “End of moderation.”
51 Sofos, Turkish Politics, 199-201.
52 Cagaptay, “Turkey’s.”
53 Akdoğan, AK Parti, 67.
54 Özavcı, “Liberalism.”
55 Yayla, Kemalizm.
56 Gürpinar, “The Trajectory,” 162.
57 Denli, Liberal Thought, 83.
58 One survey in 2016 found that only 5.4 percent of respondents identified most strongly as Liberal/Democrat, far less than Conservative/Religious (31.6 percent), Secularist/Ataturkist (13.5) Nationalist (27.8) and even Social Democratic/Communist (12.2). See Friedrich Naumann Foundation, “The Void.”
59 See “Biz Kimiz? Hayat Tarzaları Araştırması 2008,” available at https://konda.com.tr/rapor/165/biz-kimiz-hayat-tarzlari-arastirmasi-2008. This is a report of a survey of 6482 respondents conducted by KONDA. The report presents limited data, but suggests that those who are more “liberal” on issues such as gender roles or personal freedoms are less “liberal” or “democratic” on larger societal questions such as closing political parties, the latter of which was a very current issue in 2008.
60 Hazama, “Conservatives.”
61 Friedrich Naumann Foundation, “The Void.” The survey was conducted by the professional polling organization Metropoll in June 2016 (a month prior to the coup attempt) with a representative sample of 1285 respondents.
62 Notably, 7.2 percent of AKP supporters said nothing could justify such restrictions whereas 50.4 percent of HDP supporters stated this position.
63 The survey report, while presenting data broken down by gender, age, profession, income, and education, does not do so for religiosity, although it does report that 70.6 percent of AKP supporters say they are “pious” whereas 75.5 percent of CHP supporters say they are “believers” but not “pious”.
64 Data can be found and downloaded and limited on-line analysis can be conducted at www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
65 Analysis of these questions can be found in this Special Issue in Yeşilada, “The AKP.”
66 Welzel, Freedom Rising. Its code on the WVS is RESEMAVAL.
67 Ibid. One could also be directed to Welzel’s numerous publications with Ronald Inglehart.
68 Yeşilada, “The AKP,” develops this point in greater detail.
69 For example, in 2018, 40.8 percent those who described themselves as “religious” (two-thirds of all respondents) were “low” on the EMI compared to 25.7 percent who described themselves as “not religious” and only 13 percent of the small number of respondents (1 percent) who said they are atheists.
70 Sofos, Turkish Politics, 218.
71 See, for example, Hussain, “Turkey’s Next Elections,” as well as the special report on Turkey, “Erdogan’s Empire,” The Economist, January 21, 2023.
72 These conditions were in place in 2019, which might offer a blueprint for 2023. See Esen and Gumuscu, “Killing Competitive Authoritarianism.”
73 See for example, “Al-Monitor/Premise poll finds tight race for Erdogan in Turkey's elections,” Al-Monitor, December 7, 2022, available at tinyurl.com/tmb3xu9d.
74 The notion of “temptation of power” is a general one for ostensibly democratic parties that come to power in countries with weak democratic institutions. See Hamid, Temptations of Power.
75 Birgün, “Meral Akşener: HDP’nin olduğu masada biz olmayız,” September 6, 2022.
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Paul Kubicek
Paul Kubicek is Professor of Political Science at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan. He has published extensively on post-communist and Turkish politics in journals such as Comparative Politics, Democratization, Middle East Critique, Europe-Asia Studies, and Political Studies. He has taught at Koç, Boğaziçi, and Antalya Bilim University in Turkey. He is the editor of Turkish Studies.