Iron fist or nimble fingers?: An anatomy of Erdogan's strongman politics

ABSTRACT

Populist strongman rulers of our times have two contradictory portraits. They appear messianic saviours committed to rooting out corrupt politicians and kindling a moral rejuvenation. They also appear pragmatists unafraid to get their hands dirty in the rough and tumble of politics and commerce. How do strongmen carry these two faces without having to resolve their glaring contradictions? I locate the roots of Janus-faced strongmen in their partnership with overlapping networks of religion and business. Focusing on the case of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, I argue that his two faces are embedded in two different Muslim networks, the morally stringent Islamists and the realist Gülenists. The idioms generated by these networks, ‘Homo Islamicus’ and ‘Golden Generation,’ have profoundly shaped the content and style of Erdogan's politics. I use these idioms to delineate these networks’ social makeup and show how (1) they hold the strongman accountable beyond the law and the ballot in the national sphere and (2) externally serve as informal diplomats calibrating his image abroad. I further argue that the strongman-network partnership is a fragile and high-stakes arrangement as their falling-out can leave the strongman hallowed out and the network fragmented. This research allows us to reimagine the strongmen of our times as socially accountable figures whose political prospects hinge less on an iron fist than nimble fingers knitting a delicate web of clients and informal diplomats.

KEYWORDS:

• Strongman
• populism
• sovereignty
• Turkey
• Anatolian Tigers
• network society
• Erdogan
• informal diplomacy

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were presented at two events organized by the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. I thank the participants of the 2018 Conference ‘Strongmen and Networks: The Rise of Informal Diplomats’ and the 2019 Workshop ‘Rethinking Asian Diplomacy: New Methodological and Thematic Interventions’ for their contributions to this paper and the special issue at large. Special thanks to Nisha Mathew, Ameem Lutfi, Hyeju Janice Jeong, Thomas Blom Hansen, Engseng Ho, Naoko Shimazu, and Sara Loo for their incisive feedback at various stages of this article. I extend my gratitude to the editor David Henig and the reviewer of History and Anthropology for their thoughtful and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 ‘Golden generation’ dates back to 1976, when Fethullah Gulen went on a conference tour in Anatolia to expand on this notion which has since become a central feature of his writings and speeches. Drawing on the idea of Islam's golden age, golden generation points to the possibility of reliving it with a new, faithful and methodic generation. Gulen has expounded on his conception in different issues of the movement's primary journal Sızıntı. See, for example, issues 59 (December 1983) and 218 (March 1997).

2 The author calculated the figures based on the Turkish Statistical Institute's import/export data. Retrieved from http://www.turkstat.gov.tr on August 30, 2017.