Table Of Content‘Cogently argued and rich in illustrative detail, this important book eloquently R REGIME
describes the mimetic nature of Turkey’s renewed descent into authoritarianism E
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under the AKP. Essential reading about a country once touted as a democratic
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model for others to follow.’ M CHANGE IN
Gareth Jenkins, Senior Fellow, Silk Road Studies Program E
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Explores the transformation of Turkey’s political regime from 2002
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CONTEMPORARY
A
Turkey has faced a series of upheavals in its political regime from the mid-
N
nineteenth century. This book details the most recent change, placing it in its
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broader historical setting. Beginning with the Justice and Development Party’s
E
rule from late 2002, supported by a broad informal coalition that included TURKEY
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liberals, the book shows how the former Islamists gradually acquired full power N
between 2007 and 2011. It then describes the subsequent phase, looking at
C
politics and rights under the amorphous new order. O
Politics, Rights, Mimesis
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This is the first scholarly yet accessible assessment of this historic change,
T
placing it in the larger context of political modernisation in the country over
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the past 150 or so years. M
P
Key Features
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• Covers the main issues in contemporary Turkish politics: the effective
R Necati Polat
concentration of powers in the government; rule by policy rather than law;
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the religious and secular divide; the state of the media; basic freedoms; R
Y
minority rights; the marginalised in society; economic growth at the cost of
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dire public dispossession
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• Places Turkey in the broader milieu of the Arab Spring, especially in terms of
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Islamist politics and Muslim piety in the public sphere, with some emphasis
K
on ‘Islamo-nationalism’ as a local Islamist variety E
• Uses the concept of mimesis to show that continuity is a key element in Y
Turkish politics, despite the series of radical breaks that have occurred
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• Effortlessly blends history, politics, law, social theory and philosophy in
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making sense of the change c
a
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Necati Polat is Professor of International Relations at the Middle East i
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Technical University, Ankara. He is the author of International Relations, Meaning
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and Mimesis (2012). l
a
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Cover image: 7 June 2013, PM Erdogan met by supporters at airport in Istanbul on his return from North Africa during
the Gezi protests © Thanassis Stavrakis/AP/Press Association Images
Cover design: Barrie Tullett
ISBN 978-1-4744-1696-2
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REGIME CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY
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REGIME CHANGE IN
CONTEMPORARY
TURKEY
Politics, Rights, Mimesis
Necati Polat
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Necati Polat, 2016
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 1696 2 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1697 9 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1698 6 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 1699 3 (epub)
The right of Necati Polat to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives
Fund.
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
PART I CHANGE
1. What Changed? 41
2. Run- up to Change 75
3. Trials 92
4. Resistance to Change 115
PART II AFTER CHANGE
5. Context 141
6. Gezi Protests 186
7. Media Engineering 206
8. Anything Goes? 227
9. Peace at Home 253
10. Everyday Atrocities 290
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vi | regime change in contemporary turkey
Conclusion 319
Notes 341
Bibliography 408
Index 419
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PREFACE
A
historic regime change took place in Turkey between 2007 and 2011.
This book provides an account of the change and the use of power in its
immediate aftermath, offering a prismatic survey of virtually all of the major
issue areas in the domestic politics, with some emphasis on rights. As such, the
book is very much about the political rule under the Justice and Development
Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), a s elf- defined ‘conservative’ force that
emerged out of the local Islamist politics to be in charge from late 2002. The
book charts the phenomenal rise of this political party, notably supported
by a group of secular intellectuals intent to use it as a vehicle for reform, the
turnaround it led by wresting power from the grip of the bureaucracy long
at the helm, and the n o- nonsense majoritarianism the change would subse-
quently initiate. The discussion attempts to make sense of the shift in the
political order by placing it in the larger context of political modernisation in
the country from the second half of the nineteenth century, articulating and
rehearsing answers in so doing to one apparent conundrum that pervaded
the assessments of some of the salient aspects of authority in the wake of the
recasting of power. The drive behind the readjustment had looked, for most
of the way, a bona fide quest for political normalisation, with the masses to be
fully enfranchised via unqualified observance of basic rights for the first time,
and through in-depth integration with the wider world, principally Europe.
The unhindered mandate of the elected government, achieved by 2011, was
vii
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viii | regime change in contemporary turkey
only the initial goal towards that much- promoted end, dubbed ‘advanced
democracy’. How did this pursuit of normalisation along the model of more
evolved democracies develop, shortly after an a ll- embracing sway had been
secured for the political rule, into what seemed to be simply a new form of
authoritarianism?
The transformation drew on a broad base, convincing along the way key
international policy circles, which would extend considerable support to the
repositioning in process, in turn inhibiting much that would otherwise have
been in the way domestically. For all the toils and resourcefulness, including
some serious guile and chicanery on the part of the government, the reorder-
ing would be accomplished first and foremost because the established scheme
could no longer be sustained, for a myriad of reasons to do with a diversify-
ing, maturing society and the way the organised polity interacted, or had to
interact, with the greater political, economic and social milieu. The modu-
lation into an unrestricted licence for the elected government would thus
appear before long to be firmly in place, rather than radically questioned in
opposition circles for having ‘enabled’ the subsequent episode that had been
little bargained for. The overall recalibration in the system certainly stood out
to be comprehensively shaped and consolidated through appropriate power
dispensation arrangements, ideally to be reflected in a rewritten constitution,
which remained pending, as the ruling party would begin faltering on the
possible contours of the switchover.
The book is in two parts. The first part describes the change, which
effectively ended the l ong- standing dichotomy between the ‘state’ and the
‘government’, reclaiming for elected politicians vast areas of policy formerly
controlled by the bureaucracy, both military and civilian. This is basically
what the book understands by ‘change’. The second and larger part in the
book seeks to capture the mood in the following period and the government
practice, detailing the main patterns in the exercise of authority after the
change: virtual concentration of powers in the government, including the
judiciary; a rule by policy rather than law; the euphoric and increasingly
daring discourse of some of the Islamist ideologues associated with the gov-
ernment; the attendant panic among the secular urbanites; the allegations
of massive corruption and bribery; the state of the media, basic freedoms,
minority rights; and the plights of some of the exceptionally marginalised
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preface | ix
sectors in society, primarily women and workers. The book at once links
the change in Turkey to the m uch- highlighted public confrontations in the
Middle East and in North Africa with a host of settled regimes at about the
same time, registering some of the dynamics at work, such as the barely antic-
ipated strength of the local authoritarianisms and the evident encumbrances
on Islamist politics in the region in likely democratic contestation.
The argument advanced on change in the book is also one of ostensi-
ble ‘continuity’ over a somewhat lasting stretch, despite a series of ‘radical’
breaks from the mid- nineteenth century. In the 1993 film Groundhog Day,
an obnoxious man gets caught in a time loop, going through one horrid
day again and again. Close observers might notice a roughly similar ‘loop’
in Turkish politics throughout the history of political modernisation in the
country, notwithstanding various splits and reshuffles spectacularly dramatic
on the surface, particularly tangible with the latest regime change, yet ulti-
mately submitting to a more profound level of recurrence and replication of
‘desire’ in a common pool of amazingly resilient local political culture. In
putting forward this contention, I draw on René Girard’s work on mimesis,
which allows me to rethink and branch out my own earlier notions in the
book International Relations, Meaning, and Mimesis (2012) on the function
of ‘iteration’ as pivotal to meaning, which I suggested relying principally on
the work of the later Wittgenstein and Derrida. Let me add that the minimal
theory ‘talk’ that there is in the book is in a simple language that is careful
to avoid jargon, often against a backdrop of colourful political sketches. As
the book at once purports to communicate a plain register of major events,
bordering on a t ask- conscious study of history in the actual period, the hope-
fully unobtrusive ‘thematic’ assumptions in the background should not imply
diminished use for the work for those with little or no interest in such theo-
retical flourishes.
Of the ten chapters in the book, in addition to an Introduction and a
Conclusion, Chapters 1–4 include, in places, material previously published,
though substantially reworked. The rest is seeing the light of day for the first
time, albeit that I did comment between October 2013 and June 2014 on
some of the current issues on the short- lived blog Human Rights Practice
in Turkey, taken off the web briefly afterwards, and the book treats some
of the day- to-day events roughly along the lines of those former notes. The
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