Now it’s official!
The strongest conservative/Islamist party of probably the
whole Turkish republican history, at the height of its power, lacked the means
to control the armed forces as well as the branches of the country’s
intelligent service, the office of telecommunications which functioned as a
surveillance and censorship mechanism and most strikingly 1/3 of the judges and
prosecutors of the country, whose appointment they brokered from 2010 onwards.
How shall we understand the weakness of the political party
which ruled the country and owned the state for quite some time,
uninterruptedly for the last 14 years? How should we come to terms with the
bizarre reality that there existed putschist cells in many state institutions
and security apparatuses, so professionally disguised for years but attempted
in the most amateurish coup attempt of the 21st century so far? Gülen, the head
of apparently the dominant fraction of the putschist alliance, denying any
responsibility, easily labelled the bloody attempt as more like a Hollywood
movie than a military coup.
For many, the new set of circumstances brought and the
alliances sought by the damaged but standing political circles of the Justice
and Development Party (JDP), prove the dawn of a new conjuncture, in which the
ruling party will rule, at least for a while, with the help of former
opposition parties, now allagedly the part of a ruling bloc.
The analysis was simple and seemed to be right for a few
weeks, but we have learnt soon that the consolidation of the ruling party within
the ruling bloc put an end to the seemingly conciliatory politics of the last
weeks of July. It should be underlined, however, this is far from the
construction of a new power bloc, in the original sense of the term. The
foundation of the JDP and its coming to power symbolized a new bloc, not the
post-15 July politics of pseudo consensus. The JDP became the state party (the
party which owned the state) starting from mid-2000s onwards. Despite the purge
of a former ally in recent months, we have not witnessed the rise of a new
bloc. Political Islam has been the defining cement of the Turkish state in the
last decade and it’s being used, with the help of nationalism, to cover the
cracks among the apparatuses of the state. But the capitalist state has never
been a monolithic structure, which
explains in Turkish case, partly the putschist cells and conflicting state
branches.
Ruling by consent? I
remember that
Without detailed explanation of the terms, let me be clear
that I benefit from the critical state theoretical discussions of the 20th
century, with modifications for clarity. The form of state, benefiting from this terminology, refers to the way
state / citizen relations and state / market relations are construed. The form of regime, on the other hand,
implies the relation among state powers (executive, legislative and judiciary)
as well as the institutional matrix in which particular state institutions are
donated with specific tasks in compliance with the form of the state. Using the
jargon, I would say the neoliberal authoritarian form of the Turkish state,
persisted for the last 36 years despite the transition to parliamentary and
limited democracy in 1983 and a semi-presidential system in 2007 oscillating
towards presidentialism (with the hot sauce of one-man rule discourse, Islamist
irredentism and local revanchist politics against the secular minded in the
country). For quite some time after coming to the power in late 2002, JDP was
successful in preserving the bloc crafted out of the dissolved centre-right
political parties of the 1990s. Ideological elements gained special weight in
neoliberal form of the state to drown alternative ways of thinking. In Turkey,
the prominence of ideology in the last decades was characterized by specific
roles of the religious institutions and cemaats,
which have not only attempted to make Islam the norm in everyday life relations
but also served to replace the state cadres with a new generation of people
with Islamic mindset. The specificity of Turkish transformismo, i.e. the transfer of political power to various
sects of political Islam without any popular rebellion, was the embrace of
neoliberal finance-led capitalism by most of the traditional Islamic cadres
without necessarily espousing democratic principles beyond regular elections.
The political party druing its reign benefited from the
favourable global political economic conditions and the capital inflows to the
emerging markets in many occasions. For several years under JPD rule, the US power
circles presented Turkey as the model for the Middle East and played into the
hands of the JDP. Turkish political landscape also provided a goldmine for the
provision of maneuvring capacity to the ruling party and consolidating support
through references to the glorious Ottoman past. The weakening international
support in early 2010s was compensated by the use of various opportunities to
gain consent of large sections of the society: Main discursive-sociological
element was appealing to Turco-Islamic mindset via employing the idea of the
“revival of Turkey” in Ottoman costumes, despite the persistent allegiance to
the Western bloc. Another one was of rather material nature, compensating the
losses of the urban working classes by increased access to credit and integration
into the formal financial system. The inability to increase the national
savings level limited the chance of industrial renewal and competition with
other countries of the global South, but capital inflows and credit expansion
enabled the postponement of economic problems for both households and the
corporations.
The hegemonic riddle, if not crisis, of the JDP started with
the glory of the Islamist circles in determining the trajectory of Turkish
foreign policy against the backdrop of Arab Spring. The narrow-minded and
ambitious Islamic intellectuals perceived a short-lived opportunity in both the
Syrian civil war and the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt. The foreign policy
failures and the increased isolation of the country were notable in the early 2010s.
The life styles of the urban population was already awashed with the culture of
consumptionism but they were also more integrated to the Weltanschauung of the “West” than ever imagined by the Islamist
policy makers. Increasingly shaping the everyday lives and minute details of
the urban/secular population did not help. The JDP was, therefore, successful
in alienating seculars, liberals, nationalists as well as Kurds through a
series of scandals, trials (of not only Kurdish politicians but also military
officers, mostly based on fake evidence) conspiracies and mass arrests throughout
its reign but particulary in the last decade. Many sections voiced their criticism
to be eventually silenced but the erosion of the capacity to govern and gain
consent was evident most notably in the 2013 June revolt spearheaded by the revolutianaries
and Alawi youth and the 2014 October revolt by Kurds to protest the Turkish
state’s blockade on Kobane.
To be clear, JDP did not ever rule by consent from these
groups whose electoral power was limited. But these revolts meant that “Alawi
opening”, “solution process” (in conservative terms “the project of national
unity”) and similar dubious and deliberately hollow political projects would
not serve for gaining consent in the near future, since the political project
of Turco-Islamization and conservative transformation of the society were too
obvious to hide after the outbreak of these revolts and the ways these were
managed.
Kiss of Life
In the absence of consent production, the power circles
relied more heavily on the Anatolian conservative heartland that came to be
defined after a decade of polical construction, with more reference to
Turco-Islamism (of Sunni kind) which radicalized the former identity of
centre-right voters. By June 2015, the party occupied the first position in the
election results but remained short of a majority to form the government, and
remained further away from the ambitious goal of the now President to change
the constitution into a Presidential system. Resorting to war against Kurdish
militants, inventing “cocktail terror” recipes with a conspiratorial view
became the new formula for holding onto power amidst increased turbulence in
the Middle East and depreciated capacity of the party within the country. Labelling
all dissidents as potential or actual terrorists was complementing the picture.
New elections in November 2015 gave the ruling majority. At
the same time, however JDP was running out of excuses: the country faced lower
rates of economic growth, more polarized political landscape and explicit
authoritarianism, dirty negotiations with the EU on refugee crisis and more
than 2,5 million Syrian refugees, hundreds of people getting killed in terror
attacks and the list goes on.
The irony of the coup attempt partly lies in the fact that
there has been no change, contrary to the first expectations, in the deriving
consent playbook of the ruling party: alienating segments of population with
limited electoral power to pursue an Islamist agenda. Mambo jambo of the
post-coup debate also revealed nothing with regards to the shifting
international alliances. The tensions between the NATO-EU bloc and the JDP go
back to the breach by the party of the assumed Turkish role in Syria in
particular and Middle East in general from 2011-2012 onwards, not to the July
15 Coup. The recent abortive coup simply gave the kiss of life that the JDP
desperately needed. To be clear, this was a bloody coup attempt led by the most
notorious Islamist sect of the country. Luckily, the army did not act in
cohesion. But it is undeniable with the purge of tens of thousands of public
servants in the aftermath, the ruling party seized an opportunity for sealing the
restructuring of the state and putting an official end to the transformismo, which was sealed
symbolically with the presidential elections of 2014.
What Next? Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell!
The coup attempt extended the life of Islamism. Again
contrary to the expectations of the main opposition party headquarters, the
sociological transformation within the country did not (and in the short run
will not) yield results favouring those in support of democratization, respect
to human rights and the rule of law. The urbanization and transformation of
class structure resulted in the creation of an unskilled but more flexible labour
force and an indebted urban population voting for conservatism rather than
showing tolerance for the other (or any hint of multiculturalism).
The future is made dim with the authoritarianism of the last
36 years and transformismo of the
last decades. It is now harder to talk about what’s next given the dizzying
political struggles. Nevertheless, the country is too complex and the economy is
too fragile to be ruled by a group of narrow-minded political figures. That is
the idea, I believe, in the heads of many silenced dissidents. It also shows
the level of desperation.
In short, the country has become for democrats and leftists
a waiting room, in which people expect worse to come and fear talking about the
future since any mumbling as a sign disapproving political authority may lead
to insurmountable suffering for themselves and beloved ones in the near future.
It’s better not to assume the role of Cassandra in Agamemnon, but what political
Islam is explicitly after can be summed up as a state that is strong by nature
and acts so, with institutions in unprecedented harmony, functioning in a
cohesive manner and are already in complete control by a figure leading the
community (defined rather as a gemeinschaft).
Apparently, they have never been closer to achieving the fantasy they had for
so long. That’s the “fundamental fantasy” safeguarding the desires of Islamism
and we’re facing the perils deepened by those who attempt to satisfy their
wicked desires no matter what the real conditions are.
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