These days, the key
concept in Turkey’s political lexicon is “New Turkey.” President-elect
Recep Tayyip Erdogan hails it in every speech, as do members of his
cabinet and political team. Pro-Erdogan writers reserve their columns
for the praises of New Turkey, reminding readers that the old one is
thankfully gone and that those who long for it have lost. But what
exactly does “New Turkey” mean?
It is hard to tell, because the narrative is often vague. We are told simply that New Turkey will be a place where “democracy” will be consolidated, and the era of military coups and interventions will be forever in the past. This is, of course, good news, but we are also told that that democracy is only about the ballots and hardly anything else. In fact, to assert that “democracy is not just about the ballots” has become taboo, sparking reactions from Erdogan and his ardent supporters. They apparently presume that those who say such a thing are justifying military coups against elected governments, as was the case in Egypt.
There is an understandable reason for this veneration of
the ballots by the pro-Erdogan conservatives: They are Turkey’s largest
voting block (40-50%), and thus they are likely to keep winning
elections in the foreseeable future. In fact, as Erdogan's election
posters noted, his Justice and Development Party
(AKP) has the goal of staying in power at least until 2071, the
millennial anniversary of Turks’ conquest of Anatolia. So, in a sense,
New Turkey simply implies a Turkey ruled by religious conservatives.
That
said, how will the religious conservatives rule? Will they create a
pluralist democracy in which all other segments of society feel
included, as Erdogan promises in his famous “balcony speeches” or will
they opt for conservative hegemony in a way that mirrors the secularist
(i.e., Kemalist) hegemony that had defined “Old Turkey”? Murat Belge,
a prominent secular liberal, thinks that the latter will be the case —
“a transfer to a majoritarian dictatorial regime from minority
hegemony.”
This hegemony has already been established to
a great extent in regard to the state bureaucracy. Key positions in
ministries are staffed by pro-Erdogan loyalists. It is hard to find,
even imagine, a prominent Alevi or secularist in such jobs. Arguably,
the police and judiciary still employ a significant number of Gulenist
movement members, Erdogan’s archenemy, but his determined rooting out of
this “parallel state” will probably go on until every state apparatus is cleansed of these alleged subversives.
It
can be argued that the AKP's filling state institutions with loyalists
is only normal. All the political parties in Turkey have done the same
thing, because they all share the same nepotistic culture. Since the
“single party” era of 1925-50, however, no party has been as dominant,
ambitious and long-lived in power as the AKP.
If the AKP continues at the same pace, it is likely to
become a state party, pleasing its cadres and cronies while making
discontented groups increasingly bitter. In other words, the very
criticism the AKP hurled at Nouri al-Maliki's government in Iraq — that
it destabilized Iraq by “excluding the Sunnis” — is in fact applicable
to the AKP itself, which appears to have sidelined Turkey's
non-conservative Sunnis. The June 2013 Gezi Park protests, which were
basically a secular and Alevi backlash against AKP dominance, could have
been a wake-up call, but Erdogan preferred instead to explain it away
with conspiracy theories.
The cult of the savior-leader is another aspect of New Turkey that resembles the old one. In Old Turkey, it was embodied in Ataturk.
In New Turkey, it amounts to Erdogan. The symbolism and language used
to venerate both of these leaders has become increasingly similar. Both
are hailed as triumphant leaders of “wars of liberation” and as the
redeemers the nation had been waiting for for centuries. A new book
about Erdogan is titled “The Sun of the Age,” as Ataturk was also called.
The
biggest problem with the cult of the savior-leader is that it demonizes
the leader's opponents as enemies within. As an Aug. 22 editorial in
the pro-Erdogan daily Yeni Safak
put it, “If the attack [on New Turkey] is coming from within, … this is
called betrayal.” The same editorial also declares, “New Turkey is not a
slogan. It's not a party expression or a political show. New Turkey is a
project. This is the redesigning and re-establishing of Turkey after a
century.”
This “redesigning and re-establishing of
Turkey” is probably still a vague project; it is unlikely that all
religious conservatives have thought this through. Some of them,
however, such as Yeni Safak columnist Yusuf Kaplan,
do have provocative ideas. In a controversial article headlined “20
suggestions for Erdogan,” Kaplan proposed a state-imposed “revolution”
in “education, culture and media,” involving the restructuring of the
entire education system “according to our civilization spirit and
dynamics.” More shockingly, he argued for the “demolition” of Bogazici,
Bilkent and Middle East Technical University (ODTU) — Turkey's best
universities — because they serve as “volunteer agencies of other [i.e.,
Western] cultures.”
Kaplan is not an official voice of the AKP, and most party
seniors would probably find his ideas too outlandish. He certainly
represents a tougher line within conservative circles, say the
Islamists, who see New Turkey as a project for reversing all the
Westernization Turkey has experienced in the past century.
What
these Islamists do not seem to realize is that such an effort would be a
form of “social engineering” — which they hated when it was done by
Ataturk — and that it was destined to fail. Turkish society is too
modern, diverse and averse to state-imposed cultural revolutions. If the
Islamists insist on pushing for an authoritarian, top-down
Islamization, what they will get is what they fear most: widespread
secularization, even an anti-religious trend, in Turkish society. For,
as the history of Turkey testifies, impositions by the state are always
countered by reactions from society.
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