Exit from democracy: illiberal governance in Turkey and beyond

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Notes

1. We would like to thank the members of the Consortium of European Symposia on Turkey (CEST), the director of the Centre of South-east European Studies at the University of Graz, Florian Bieber, and the keynote speaker Ayşe Kadıoğlu of Sabancı University, for their indispensable contributions to the Symposium and this issue. We are grateful to the participants of the Symposium, whose papers could not be published as part of the special issue for one reason or other. Finally, we owe unlimited gratitude to the external reviewers of this special issue, who ensured the academic excellence of the papers and made possible its timely publication.

2. Government-imposed curfews and heavy shelling by the state security forces and armed PKK forces have created human suffering on a scale that most probably exceeds that of the brutal Kurdish War of the 1990s. The Diyarbakır neighbourhood of Sur, a showcase for multicultural governance in Kurdish cities and home to a famous Armenian church was almost completely destroyed (Lepeska 2016). Smaller cities close to the Syrian border like Cizre were also severely destroyed since June 2015 (Albayrak 2016). These destructive campaigns led to several hundred thousand of local residents fleeing for the safety of larger cities. We cannot establish the effects of dispossession and psychological trauma. According to informal conversations, which Kerem Öktem conducted with state officials serving in Cizre in October 2016, the effects are severe, with thousands of families living in tents at the time of writing and much of the public service infrastructure being destroyed. As one of those interviewed put it: ‘This is now a war zone and people act accordingly. They know what to expect and they keep their heads down’.

3. The discourse of Islamic martyrdom was present in the Kemalist republic, even though its religious aspect was not overly emphasized. Narratives of ‘blood and nation’ also predate the AKP government. Since 15 July, however, we witness a concerted re-appropriation of all of these images and phrases in the name of a belligerent understanding of Muslim-Turkish identity and Islamist-nationalist politics. Terms like ‘nation’ (millet), ‘homeland’ (vatan) are being re-Islamicized in slogans like ‘The homeland is a piece of earth that is watered with blood’ (Kanla sulanan toprak vatandır) (seen on a placard at the entrance to Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul on 17 October 2016). Variants of this new narrative have been imposed almost the day after 15 July, with the Bosporus Bridge renamed to the ‘15 July Martyrs’ Bridge’, Istanbul Ataturk Airport’s Turkish Airlines Business Lounge rechristened as the ‘15 July Martyrs’ Lounge’ and so on. The speed and also the venues of these narratives of martyrdom show the shallowness of the whole endeavour, but also illustrate the search for a legitimizing narrative for the AKP government and the country’s recent history, which is infused with references to a certain form of Islam (cf. Arango 2016).

4. While the Hizmet network turned out to be the most powerful and hierarchically organized of the religious group in the state, they were certainly not the only one. A whole range of other Islamic brotherhoods are present within the AKP and therefore within the state apparatus, building on a long tradition of state capture that begins with Turkey’s turn to multi-party politics. It involves traditional brotherhoods like the followers of Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan (Süleymancılar), the Nur cemaat as well as smaller groups, whose members have leading positions in different service ministries. Followers of the extreme right-wing Nationalist Action Party and the anti-Western but staunchly secular nationalist Homeland Party (Vatan Partisi) were still present in the intelligence services and now seem to being brought back into power (Gürcan 2016b).

5. This modicum of meritocracy was possible, thanks to centralized entrance exams for universities and, particularly important, public sector jobs (Entrance Exam for Public Employees, Kamu Personeli Seçme Sınavı). These exams enabled a significant number of socialist and pro-Kurdish leaning entrants to be selected for executive positions in universities and state institutions, from which they are now being purged. However, as it has been recently alleged, the Gülen network seems to have infiltrated all of these central state exams and used them to have its followers placed into top positions.

6. Turkish authorities notified the Secretary General of the Council of Europe that Turkey will derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights under the Convention’s Article 15 on 21 July 2016 (cf. Withnall 2016). The meaning of this derogation is being discussed in Brussels and Ankara, but it is most likely that Turkey will not be able to make a convincing case for an all-encompassing suspension of the Convention.

7. There are many more aspects of the post-coup policies in universities, which we can only mention briefly. The forced resignation of all department deans in all universities after the coup attempt was one such policy. While the more established universities were able to reinstate their elected deans, in many newer state universities, the resignations were used to install pro-Erdoğan cadres in all levels of university governance. Another decree had immediate effect on Turkish academics on sabbaticals and research visits abroad. They were ordered back to their home universities in Turkey. Thousands of research projects and academic career paths have thereby been broken.

8. According to Murat Somer in this issue, the fixation on the European Union and the preoccupation with identity-based critiques of Turkey’s Kemalist republic accounts for the fact the revolutionary nature of the AKP’s political project was overlooked.

9. Turkey first withdrew from Eurovision in 2013, citing disagreements over administrative and financial matters. It is much more likely, however, that in the eyes of many AKP cadres, the Eurovision entries have become too concerned with bending gender roles, allowing too much nudity and giving too much space to LGBTI identities, and should therefore not be transmitted to the Turkish public.

10. In October 2016, Turkey declared its withdrawal from the European Union programme for the arts ‘Creative Europe’, which provided particularly independent art institutions in Turkey with funds. The withdrawal was explained with a concert commemorating the Armenian Genocide funded by the institution (Artforum 2016).

11. The construction of time and its ‘colonization by the west’ has been a major issue for Turkey’s Islamists, who continue to see the abolition of ‘Islamic time’ structured around prayer times as a humiliation of their heritage. In the run-up to the November elections, the government already once meddled with its international commitments by delaying the introduction of winter-time and causing havoc, as electronic clocks did not adjust to the government decree (BBC 2015). The current abolition of winter-time may or may not be primarily inspired by the goal to increase the symbolic distance to Europe, but in effect, this is what happened and how it has been understood by many secular commentators.

12. Cf. Yabancı in this issue for the strategies of creating consent among a relatively large following in the work sphere and the sphere of women's politics.

13. This perspective also questions the international agreements, on which the Turkish Republic is established, including the Lausanne Treaty, leading Erdoğan erroneously to claim that the Aegean islands were lost due to Lausanne (BBC 2016).

14. The ‘revolution from above’ is of course an important topos in military bureaucracies, which Trimberger discussed with regard to Japan, Turkey and Peru (1978), and Hinnebusch with regard to Baathist Syria (2001).