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ABSTRACT
This article explores the dynamics of state-formation in Turkey during the AKP regime by questioning its claim of an almost two decades long continuity heading towards the centennial of the Republic of Turkey in 2023. Eclectically drawing on four different, yet related, theories of conflict, power and (visual) narrative; i.e. Gramscian ‘war of position,’ Contentious Politics perspective of (de)democratization, dialogical principle and visuality, the article presents a comparison of the claim-making of the two official publications; now defunct the Silent Revolution, and Towering Power Turkey, published in 2013 and 2018, respectively, to demonstrate the contrast between the pre-hegemonic and hegemonic self-presentation claims of the AKP regime, and indicates that its regime change is the re-entrenchment of many of the postulates of the Kemalist regime it originally aspired to challenge. The tenets of this analysis is located within the intersection of political sociology and cultural studies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on contributor
Kumru F. Toktamis is Associate Professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies of the Pratt Institute, where she is also the Coordinator of the Cultural Studies Minor. She is the co-editor of the book Everywhere Taksim: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2015. She has also co-edited a special issue of Turkish Studies entitled ‘Repression and Resistance: Fragments of Kurdish Politics under the AKP Regime in Turkey,’ and a 2018 special issue of Mediterranean Quarterly entitled ‘Critical Crossroads – Erdogan and Transformation of Turkey.’ Her research focuses on social movements, state formation, ethnicity, nationalism, and gender politics in Turkey and in the Middle East.
Notes
1 From the movie ‘Il Gattopardo’ [‘The Leopard’] by Luchino Visconti, 1963.
2 Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy, Liberalism, AKP; Yavuz and Ozturk, Making and Remaking, 219; and Yesilada and Rubin, Islamization under the AKP. The literature on the AKP regime mostly focuses on the changing role of religion in politics and society in volumes.
3 Ceran, “Maintenance of the AKP,” 1; Akkoyunlu and Oktem, “Illiberal Governance in Turkey,” 469–80; Akkoyunlu and Oktem, “Existential Insecurity in Turkey”; and Esen and Gumuscu, “Rising Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey.” Ceran provides some notable exceptions that have explained the policy shift, rise of authoritarianism and nationalism as a by-product of political survival efforts, rather than regime re-alignments, thereby emphasizing a strategic continuity. On the other hand, Oktem and Akkoyunlu, as well as Esen and Gumuscu, focus on institutional, political and economic dimensions of this transformation.
4 Taspinar, “Erdogan's Alliance.” Journalistic observations and interpretations occasionally claim that Erdogan has been in a new power coalition since purging his former allies in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt.
5 Towering Power Turkey (TPT), 1, 2, 3.
6 Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry, Silent Revolution (SR). This publication used to be available on the website of the Undersecretariat of Public Order and Security [KDGM]. This website has been closed since late 2018 and the booklet is not displayed on any other governmental website. The author could previously download only the third edition of the English version and the fifth edition of the Turkish version. This article uses the third edition in English and the author was not able to compare different editions. Commercial websites such as amazon.com also state that the book is unavailable: https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Revolution-Democratic-Transformation-Inventory/dp/9751959950. The KDGM was a civilian- led department for coordinating and sharing information among the security agencies in Turkey, especially, if not specifically about the conflict with the Kurdish insurgency. Together with the Counter-Terrorism Coordination Board, which was also under the same secretariat, the distinguishing purpose of its foundation was ‘to oversee the fight against terrorism.’ The KDGM was closed with a governmental decree (#703) in 2018 soon after the Turkish Republic adopted a presidential regime. For further information about KDGM and a detailed description and analyses of The Silent Revolution see Toktamis, “Now There is.”
7 TPT, 2.
8 For a discussion of the ‘hidden agenda’ argument, see Cinar, “The Justice and Development Party.”
9 Sipahioglu, “Europeanization, De-Europeanization in Turkey”; Gourlay, “Kurdish relationship to Islam and AKP”; Cinar, “Democratic Backsliding”; Ozpek, Peace Process; and Cicek, Kurds in Turkey. Claims of the AKP instrumentalizing various convictions and policies have been widely studied.
10 Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention. In political philosophy, the conceptualization of ‘contingency’ as opposed to pre-determined, teleological or foundational historical narratives and political analyses, emphasizes the relationality and fragility of political and social reality and how it created and constructed via intentional or non-intentional actions of human agency. While Rorty's philosophical stipulations are at times (mistakenly) reduced to relativism and post-modernism, the Contentious Politics perspective, as developed by Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam, sociologically specifies that contingency in political clashes, historical conflicts and continuities can be explained via discernable, identifiable and detectable (causal) mechanism and processes.
11 For a versatile discussion on the rise of competitive authoritarianism see Esen and Gumuscu, “Rising Competitive Authoritarianism.”
12 SR, 2.
13 TPT, 2.
14 Mango, “Turkey Under Military Tutelage,” 429–35. This expression was first used by Mango in 1983 with respect to the political regime in Turkey to explain the institutionalization of the constitutive and foundational role of the military as the guardian of the Republic and democracy following 1980 military coup.
15 Kirisci and Sloat, “Rise and Fall,” and Bertelsmann Stiftung, “2020 Country Report: Turkey.”
16 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
17 Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics and McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention. Contentious Politics delineates environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms as a delimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical and closely similar ways over a variety of situations and focuses on concatenation of mechanisms into broader process to explain political change.
18 Bakthin, The Dialogical Imagination. This perspective, exploring the construction of meaning, fundamentally differs from, for example, the Habermasian understanding of communicative action (or dialogical rationality) which often explains the emergence of reason and consensus through conversation or ‘framing studies’ that assume discourse as a meaning conveyer that is carried around by individuals or groups as a self-evident and fixed category. While the common focus of theories of discourse and discursive interaction is based on idealized conditions of dialog and communication and often appears as a consensus seeking process, especially in Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action, 9), the dialogical principle indicates that meanings emerge relationally as a product of ongoing social interactions during which actors may act strategically in achieving their goals and interests, yet consequences are unintended.
19 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look.
20 Akkoyunlu and Oktem, “Illiberal Governance in Turkey.”
21 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 80.
22 It needs to be noted that Gramsci's formulation of ‘war of position’ as opposed to the frontal confrontation of ‘war of maneuvering’ is not only a revolutionary strategy to overthrow the capitalist class, but an analysis of formation of alliances and institutions of power in modern state. It needs to be noted that in his later writings Gramsci replaced the term with the concept of ‘hegemonic strategy.’
23 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 80.
24 Ibid., 243–3. As Gramsci notes: ‘Massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position.’
25 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, and Tilly, Collective Violence, Contentious Politics.
26 Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 214. Mechanisms are defined as ‘events that produce same immediate effects over a wide range of circumstances.’ See also Tilly, “Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization.”
27 McAdam et al., Dynamics of Contention, 27.
28 Ibid., 50.
29 The uncertainty and relationality of (de) democratization is best described by Charles Tilly's statement asserting “[b]ureaucratic containment of previously autonomous military forces … appears to come close to a necessary condition for democratization, but it also has significant effect on the capacity of government, the likelihood of civil war, the level of domestic violence, and even the prospect that a given state will engage in international war.” See Tilly, “Mechanisms in Political Processes,” 21–41.
30 Steinberg, Fighting Words: Working Class Formation.
31 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 146.
32 Steinberg, “Understanding Social Movement Culture,” 211.
33 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 293.
34 For a discussion on Kemalist modernization, its historical emergence, political goals, cultural ideals and everyday practices, see among others, Ciddi, Kemalism in Turkish Politics; Ahmed, Making of Modern Turkey; Zücher Ottoman Legacy; Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern; and Alaranta, Contemporary Kemalism.
35 SR, 12.
36 Ibid., 14.
37 Ibid., 18.
38 Ibid., 25.
39 Ibid., 14.
40 Ibid., 22.
41 Ibid., 13
42 Ibid., 44.
43 Ibid., 34.
44 Ibid., 44.
45 Ibid., 180.
46 Toktamis, “Now There is.”
47 Ibid., 749.
48 TPT, 2.
49 Ibid, 8–42. Note that the actual page numbers of the chapters do not correspond to the page numbers on the contents page.
50 Ibid., 43–71.
51 Ibid., 72–186.
52 Ibid., 187–237.
53 Ibid., 238–78.
54 Ibid., 279–341.
55 Ibid., 342–405.
56 Ibid., 406–30.
57 Ibid., 431–467.
58 Ibid., 6–41.
59 Ibid., 42–153.
60 Ibid., 154–97.
61 Ibid., 198–227.
62 Ibid., 228–33.
63 Ibid., 234–55.
64 Ibid., 256–303.
65 Ibid., 304–77.
66 Ibid., 378–407.
67 Ibid., 6–44.
68 Ibid., 45–169.
69 Ibid., 170–257.
70 Ibid., 258–335.
71 Ibid., 336–87.
72 Ibid., 388–417.
73 Ibid., 418–37.
74 Ibid., 438–97.
75 Ibid., 498–502.
76 Some photos are used more than once.
77 TPT Volumes 1, 2, 3. Introduction with no page numbers.
78 Toktamis, “Evoking and Invoking Nationhood,” discusses the distinction between evoking nationhood that calls upon sentiments, memories, and images of the past and invoking nationhood that calls upon a new collectivity and new sense of community.
79 See above reference 34.
80 The main contentions AKP had to engage for the survival of its regime include the Kurdish conflict, the Syrian conflict (which has a Kurdish dimension), the Gezi Protests of 2013, conflict with its former ally the Gulen Movement, and the coup attempt in July 2016.
81 TPT Volume 3, 472.
82 Toktamis, “Evoking and Invoking Nationhood.”
83 TPT, 14–16.
84 Ibid., 18–19.
85 Ibid., 54.
86 Bugra and Aday, “Social Policy Change”; Bugra and Candas, “The Case of Turkey”; and Eder “Welfare Regime Change.”
87 Bozkurt, “AKP Rule,” 77–9.
88 The speech was on 10 October 2019, in the wake of the Turkish military incursion into Syria to destroy the Kurdish presence across the border, when he threatened to flood the European Union with 3.6 million refugees if it called “the Turkish military operation in Syria an invasion.” See https://sendika.org/2019/10/erdogandan-savas-gunu-daveti-milletimizin-her-bir-ferdini-partimiz-safina-katilmaya-564544/