Following excerpts adapted from Turkey Under Erdoğan written by Dimitar Bechev published by Yale University Press
That day in October 2016 Istanbul felt like the fulcrum of worldwide authoritarianism. An A-list of strongmen lined the front row at the cavernous Congress Center in the downtown district of Harbiye. One after the other, Vladimir Putin, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro took the stage to share their thoughts about volatile oil prices, global investment and economic development with the audience at the 23rd World Energy Congress. But that was not the real purpose of their gathering. Rather, the cast of international dignitaries had made their way to Turkey to put on display their unbending support to the host, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Having defeated a coup attempt – “a heinous terrorist act” – three months prior, the Turkish leader spared no word of gratitude. “On this occasion, you support our nation, our country and our democracy. Personally, I would like to thank you on behalf of my nation.”
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| President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan |
His nation indeed. Like no other statesman since the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Erdoğan had grabbed vast powers in his hands. By 2016, the governing Justice and Development (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), the bureaucracy, the courts, the media, the business establishment, the army and the police (the last two having recently gone through a sweeping purge) were all beholden to him alone. The Turkish state itself had morphed into a family fief. Those disagreeing with the direction taken by Erdoğan’s proclaimed “New Turkey” faced denunciation as terrorists and fifth columnists – if they were lucky. Indeed, many were in for long jail sentences, had lost their jobs or had been forced to flee abroad, whether they had anything to do with the attempted military takeover or not. Selahattin Demirtaş, contender in the most recent elections on behalf of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), was about to be detained. Having condemned the coup was no excuse for his lack of deference to the chief (or reis, as Erdoğan’s aficionados liked to call him).
Then there were Turkey’s friends such as Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin’s master took credit for standing by Erdoğan in the aftermath of the putsch, putting aside quarrels over Syria and the Su-24 ground-attack aircraft downed by the Turkish air force back in November 2015. Putin knew a thing or two about Western-concocted plots to engineer regime change, the Turkish president’s partisans murmured. The United States, a presumed ally, meanwhile stood accused of having masterminded the conspiracy to overthrow or even physically eliminate Erdoğan, backstabbing Turkey. Vladimir Putin, naturally, had no objections to this narrative. So long as Ankara ordered top-of-the-range Russian missiles, to the dismay of the rest of NATO, and cooperated with Moscow in Syria, “dear friend” Putin was content. Coming to Istanbul, he oversaw the signature of a multi-billion deal for TurkStream, a gas pipeline under the Black Sea, too. But Erdoğan was happily playing the Russia card himself. The Kremlin green-lighted a Turkish military operation in Syria clipping the wings of US-backed Kurdish militants. Why stick with the West then? The Russians were paying heed to Turkish national interests and delivering on commitments. Who was better: Putin or the unreliable Obama,2 not to mention the duplicitous Europeans keeping Turkey at arm’s length?
What change a decade makes! As I was marveling at Erdoğan and Putin’s show from the audience in Istanbul, I could not help but go back to the first time I had a chance to see the Turkish leader speak live. On 28 May 2004, the then Turkish prime minister delivered a speech titled “Why the European Union Needs Turkey” at St John’s College, Oxford. Flanked by Kalypso Nicolaidis, a French-Greek professor of European politics, and the late Geoffrey Lewis, the doyen of Turkish studies at Oxford, the swaggering Erdoğan pledged “to make European values Ankara’s values.” Europe, he argued, was a normative union where Turkey deserved a place, not “a narrowly defined geography.” Erdoğan furthermore went over a list of issues bedeviling relations between Brussels and Ankara, from the rights of the Kurdish community to the division of Cyprus.3 His was a hopeful message: Turkey was doing its best to carry out democratic reforms, confront the ghosts of the country’s troubled past, improve human rights and deliver economic growth.
The recipe seemed to work fine. In little more than a year, on 3 October 2005, the European Union (EU) decided to start membership negotiations with Turkey, a belated reward for the achievements scored by the AKP as well as, it shouldn’t be forgotten, its predecessors in office. Nobody believed accession would be an easy ride, given the tough obstacles ahead. Membership in the EU could not be taken for granted either. But it was Turkey’s own transformation which counted, when all was said and done. To borrow from Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaka,” it was all about “the marvelous journey,” not the destination.
What Went Wrong?
This book grapples with the question of what changed so drastically and so quickly. Why did Turkey succumb to authoritarianism, take to nationalism and turn away from the West?
For many people, there is of course one simple answer: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A shrewd operator, he took advantage of electoral democracy to seize ever more authority and eventually install a one-man regime. The mission was completed with the change of the Turkish constitution in 2017 replacing parliamentary with presidential rule. Erdoğan’s commitment to democracy and human rights, once lauded in the West, proved skin-deep. This, in turn, points at another, related explanation: Turkey’s Western allies were complicit. Put bluntly, Erdoğan duped the EU and the US. A tactical alliance with Brussels legitimated his power grab. Europe’s democratic conditionality allowed a demagogue to defeat opponents, notably the military and the diehard secularists in the bureaucracy and the judiciary. Washington accepted at face value the whole spiel about Muslim democracy, blinded by the missionary zeal driving its policy in the Middle East. Once the partnership outlived its usefulness, not least because the EU gave Turkey the cold shoulder, Erdoğan cut the West loose. His detractors, crying foul at the sight of an Islamist lionized in Western capitals, had a point all along.
What the above account overlooks is the long-term structural and institutional forces shaping Turkey’s domestic politics and, by extension, foreign policy. As cunning and ruthless an operator as Erdoğan is – and he does have a stellar record in that department – what were the other reasons he was able to climb the greasy pole and retain power for nearly two decades? The AKP’s rise would have been unthinkable without taking into account the cleavages rooted in Turkey’s top-down modernization in the twentieth century driven by secularist state elites. Starting from the 1970s, political Islam gained ground among pious Anatolian masses as they gained prominence in public life. The rise of a conservative entrepreneurial class coupled with the rapid pace of urbanization in the 1980s and 1990s not only blurred the social and geographic distinction between the center and periphery but also fomented strife. Culture became an arena of ideological struggle waged over the issue of the place of faith in the public sphere. Turkey’s brand of Islamist populism pitted the privileged minority usurping the state vs “the people,” the ordinary folk – Turks, Kurds or others – discriminated against because of their adherence to religious values and lifestyles. It was the people, not Erdoğan, who vanquished the so-called tutelage system (vesayet) whereby generals and unelected mandarins had the final word over the affairs of the state. It was the people who were building a democracy worthy of its name. It was the Ahmets and the Mehmets who stood up to tanks on that fateful night in July 2016 and paid with their lives. This is what the Erdoğan brand is all about.
Populism, to be sure, is hardly Erdoğan’s invention. It had long been the oxygen of Turkish party politics, with the ilk of Süleyman Demirel and Bülent Ecevit, on the right and on the left respectively, excelling in its dark arts. Erdoğan perfected the trade, turning his emotive connection to the masses and his personal story – a poor boy from an underprivileged area of Istanbul rising to the top – into a formidable political instrument. His rule, he would argue, has been the triumph of the “national will” as expressed through the ballot box. Then common men (women, needless to say, figure in supportive roles) rose against the oppressive and self-serving elites and reclaimed what was theirs by right. “It is not that we had Oxford in Şanlıurfa,” he chuckled while quoting the Arabesk star İbrahim “İbo” Tatlıses at a youth gathering in 2018, “but I preferred not to study there!” On that occasion, Erdoğan was taking credit for a rise in the number of universities, from 75 to 206, on his watch, expanding access to higher education and upward mobility to the previously disenfranchised. This was the New Turkey, with its world-class hospitals, highways, glitzy shopping malls, gargantuan airports and towering housing estates, all for the people. In the first decade under the AKP alone, GDP per capita had more than tripled, from $3,600 to $12,600 (plunging back to $8,000 by 2020, however). At the same time, Erdoğan’s populism differs from that of his predecessors. No other Turkish leader has been willing and able to take on the establishment, to change the country to such an extent and remake it in his image. He is in a league of his own.
So far so good. The problem with Erdoğan’s version, however, is that “the national will” he claims to represent does not match electoral reality. Not until the first direct presidential elections in 2014 was the AKP able to clear the 50 per cent threshold. Pious voters defected in large enough numbers to deliver opposition victories in Istanbul and Ankara, along with the bulk of the remaining big urban centers in the 2019 municipal elections too. The previous year, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and now governs in tandem with the Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP). In addition, Erdoğan has been the beneficiary of rules and institutions, amplifying his performance at the polls and consequently his power. Formal rules matter, even in an arena as informality-ridden as Turkey’s. Back in 2002, the exceptionally high electoral threshold of 10 per cent kept the AKP’s rivals on the right out of parliament, and propelled the party to power with roughly a third of the vote. As a result, it monopolized the right-wing and conservative space which had traditionally been where the bulk of the electorate gravitated. Subsequently, the AKP took advantage of constitutional provisions allowing for amending the basic law through referendums. Plebiscites tilted the political system towards majoritarianism, polarizing society and, in effect, delivering to Erdoğan a winner-takes-all bonus. Now, of course, the playing field is skewed in the president’s favor because critical institutions, such as the Supreme Electoral Council, are doing his bidding.
Turkey’s transformation from an electoral democracy to a competitive authoritarian regime has a lot to do with the high costs of the AKP losing power. Karabekir Akkoyunlu and Kerem Öktem have written about the condition of “existential insecurity.” Through the 2000s, the party faced a robust challenge by secularists, the courts and the military, responsible for the closure of its predecessors. It survived a bona fide coup attempt in 2016, likely orchestrated by its former allies from the Gülen movement. Its long tenure has been marred by a sequence of corruption scandals which have set off damaging court cases in the West. From Erdoğan’s position, there is arguably no alternative to holding on to power as long as possible through a variety of means, including constitutional engineering and outright repression. This is a predicament shared by all authoritarian and semi-authoritarian systems. Think about the counterfactual: in a country where the rule of law is upheld by independent institutions, moving from government to opposition and back is a less risky affair.
One should not lose sight of the enduring appeal of nationalism either. It is the common thread connecting Erdoğan’s New Turkey and the Turkey of old with all its authoritarian baggage. The collapse of the peace talks between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2015, the renewed conflict in the Kurdish-populated southeast, the AKP’s alignment not only with the far-right MHP from 2016 onwards but also with Kemalist factions hostile to the West and to minority rights, and the clash with Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean are all chapters in this story. The rollback of the public use of the Kurdish language, for example, the removal of bilingual signs in the city of Diyarbakır in 2018 and the removal of elected officials carry a distinctive back-to-the-future flavor, too. The image of Turkey as a beleaguered fortress threatened by enemies abroad and their internal abettors has become central to Erdoğan’s messaging.
Erdoğan’s evolution, from an EU-friendly “Muslim democrat” to a strongman, speaks to the weight of illiberal legacies. In essence, he and his partisans appropriated the cult of the strong, sovereign and indivisible state, adding to it a (Sunni) Islamic tinge.13 Individual rights and freedoms are secondary to raison d’état, as interpreted by the president and his entourage. Thanks to the AKP’s fusion with the state, Erdoğan has become, to quote Soner Çağaptay, “the anti-Atatürk Atatürk.” Though even the parallel between the two remains an anathema to secularists and the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), it is reflected strongly in official memory politics. Indeed, breaking with tradition, New Turkey’s historical narrative shifted the focus from Mustafa Kemal’s Westernizing reforms to his role as savior of the state in the face of mortal danger during the War of Independence. Witness, too, the campaign around the centennial of the republic to be marked in 2023, set to be a celebration of Erdoğan’s sultan-like ascendancy. Paradoxically, Ataturk has found himself in the AKP’s pantheon cheek by jowl with Sultan Abdülhamid II idolized by conservatives for his pan-Islamist worldview but very much the “Other” from the Kemalist perspective. Both statesmen thus feature as Erdoğan’s forerunners, along with leaders in the center-right tradition such as Adnan Menderes or Turgut Özal.
At the end of the day, Turkey’s illiberal trajectory could be best understood by Turkey’s own illiberal features: its polarized society, undemocratic institutional arrangements and exclusionary nationalism. The corollary is that the country’s fate is in its own hands. It is to Turkey’s voters that Erdoğan owes his career. They will ultimately decide how the story ends too, and whether Erdoğanism as a system of governance outlives its founding father. Do Western leaders share some of the blame about how Turkey has turned out? Probably they do. The EU was essential for triggering democratic reforms in the late 1990s, and early 2000s, but it then left Turkey high and dry, particularly when French President Nicolas Sarkozy made it clear that membership was not on the cards in 2007. With internal checks and balances gradually dismantled, the EU could only restrain Erdoğan and help depolarize domestic politics if membership were actually a credible prospect. Yet here a bit of counterfactual analysis might again come in handy. What would a Turkey inside the EU have looked like? Would it have remained committed to liberal democracy or, on the contrary, backslid like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary? We will never know the answer, but that does not invalidate the question.
The regime’s deep sociological and historical roots do not imply in the least that Turkey is doomed to authoritarian rule. The country has a history of competitive politics stretching back more than seven decades, advanced level of socio-economic development and links to the West that, other things being equal, favor a return to electoral democracy in the future. Citizens believe their vote counts and still turn up in high numbers at the polls. There is a real opposition which has proven its ability to cooperate, setting aside ideological and identity differences. That contrasts with other authoritarian polities, say Azerbaijan, Russia or Abdelfatah Al-Sisi’s Egypt, where multi-party politics and elections are a mere façade. We cannot be certain whether, when and how Turkey will transition back to democracy but equally there is no reason to rule out such an outcome ex ante.
The Long Goodbye
Turkey’s democratic decline has opened a chasm between it and Europe and the US. For a long time, the West provided the normative horizon the country aspired to attain. Whether it was Ataturk’s reference to “contemporary civilization” in the 1920s and 1930s, the post-war vision of Turkey as “little America” or the EU’s accession criteria, Turkish society measured its achievements and failures against Western benchmarks. Of course, the relationship was ridden with ambivalence. After all, was it not the European powers who conspired with non-Muslim minorities to bring down the once mighty Ottoman Empire? The Kemalists, but also the Tanzimat-era reformers, emulated the West partly in order not to fall prey to it. During the Cold War, too, anti-Americanism was rife not only among the Turkish left but also within the Millî Görüş (National Vision) movement, the Islamist strand AKP sprang from. The political and military establishment resented US policy in Cyprus and Western Europeans’ reluctance to welcome Turks into their exclusive club. These days, it is common for some analysts on both sides of the Atlantic to wax nostalgic about the halcyon days when Ankara was fully and unreservedly on the Western team. Such a golden era never truly existed, except for the 1950s. Still, all things considered, the love–hate relationship would lean on the side of attraction, with membership in NATO and the bid to join the European Economic Community (EEC) and subsequently the EU as cornerstones of Turkish foreign policy.
This is obviously not the case nowadays. In the words of Galip Dalay, (the current) decision makers in Ankara have given up on “the idea of the indispensability and uniqueness of the West.” The Atlantic Alliance and belonging to Europe, Dalay observes, are no longer central to Turkey’s geopolitical identity through which it “filters relations with non-Western powers” nor are they the points of reference in domestic affairs. The alliance with America, eroding since the Cold War ended, hangs by a thread. An overwhelming percentage in Turkey looks at the US as the foremost threat to national security. Turkish–EU relations are in bad shape too, even if 60 per cent continue to support membership. Erdoğan pledges that his country’s future is in Europe, but both sides know this is a charade. Accession talks have ground to a halt but neither Ankara nor Brussels (or rather, a majority of member states) have an interest in walking out first. In consequence, Turkey turns to the EU and US selectively when there are gains to be made. Witness the Syrian refugee deal struck with Brussels in March 2016 or Erdoğan’s being able to talk Donald Trump into letting Turkish troops enter northeast Syria in October 2019.
To be fair, the West itself is not blameless. First, many of its leaders likewise approach Turkey with a transactionalist mindset and are happy to wheel and deal with Erdoğan. Second and more fundamentally, however, the West’s own ills manifest in the rise of illiberal populism have dented its claim to a moral higher ground. “Instead of us becoming little America, you became a big Turkey,” quips political scientist Ersin Kalaycıoğlu.21 Joking aside, the West is much less coherent and, as a result, influential compared to the heyday of its power in the 1990s and 2000s. It is not accidental that Donald Trump’s lone-wolf idea of foreign policy, not to mention his cavalier attitude to constitutional norms and penchant for mixing personal interest and the affairs of the state, struck a chord with Erdoğan and his courtiers. The “liberal international order,” which conditioned the AKP’s early reforms, seems like something from a bygone era. Turkey feels at home in the brave new world of today.
Rather than a Western periphery, Erdoğan’s Turkey imagines itself as the center of its own universe spanning the Middle East, the Balkans and the Southern Caucasus, all the way to sub-Saharan Africa. The shift has also reversed what Malik Mufti calls the “Republican Paradigm.” Rooted in the trauma of the Ottoman collapse, it was underpinned by “[a] strong bias in favor of the geopolitical status quo; and a powerful aversion to foreign entanglements” as well as a “conviction that the external world is essentially hostile and threatening; an anxiety about the ability of external enemies to infiltrate the body politic by exploiting internal divisions.” Erdoğan’s rise and the demise of the Kemalist elites made Turkey outward-looking and self-confident. From a liability, imperial legacy turned into a geopolitical asset. “The New Turkey” of today claims leadership over global Islam and professes a moral obligation to Muslims – the ummah – wherever they may be.
Some analysts have labeled this new role conception “Neo-Ottomanism,” courtesy of the obsession with the distant past. Reality is, of course, messier. Russia and Iran, two of the empire’s fiercest rivals, have been at the forefront of the outreach to neighbors. Ottoman nostalgia cohabits with Realpolitik and the pursuit of economic interest. In addition, Erdoğan is not the first to espouse “the Imperial Paradigm,” which Mufti defines as the belief in the benefits of trying to reshape the external environment. Indeed, many of Ankara’s policies and initiatives date back to the 1980s and 1990s, when Turgut Özal pushed for engagement with the Middle East, the Balkans and post-Soviet Central Asia. With the end of the Cold War, he revived the notion of Turkey as a model, originating from the early republican period, but also as a conduit of Western influence. The same theme reappeared again under Erdoğan, first in the wake of 9/11, when the Bush administration enthused about it, and then before and during the Arab Spring, with Ahmet Davutoğlu in charge of the foreign ministry in Ankara.
Has Turkey lived up to its hegemonic ambitions? Not quite, this book argues. The brutal and devastating war in Syria turned everything upside down. The conflict precipitated a regional contest where other players, notably Russia and Iran, frustrated Ankara’s aspirations to mold the Middle East in its own image. The Syrian tragedy, furthermore, deepened Turkey’s rift with the West, exacerbated the democratic backslide at home and ultimately caused the militarization of the country’s foreign policy. With Erdoğan facing no internal checks on his authority and always eager to whip up nationalist fervor, the appetite for taking risks has grown. Force projection far beyond national borders, as in Libya and the Horn of Africa, has become the norm. The current Turkish elite believes the only way to prosper in an increasingly competitive world is to be able to act decisively and punch hard, leveraging capabilities developed by one’s own defense industries. Soft power, though not entirely irrelevant, is the main focus. The lesson Erdoğan learned from Putin’s intervention in Syria – military power works – has sunk in.
Where does Turkey fit in the global order? The future, Erdoğan and his entourage believe, belongs not to America and its Western allies but to “the rest.” Turkey feels comfortable in G20, enjoys its newly discovered influence in Africa, poses as a leader of Muslims across the globe and has deepened ties with the likes of Russia and China. On 15 January 2021, Erdoğan took a shot of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by the Chinese firm Sinovac Life Sciences. Back in June 2020, the Turkish central bank had activated a swap agreement with the People’s Bank of China, allowing local companies to pay for Chinese imports in yuan. It was Beijing coming to Turkey’s rescue amidst the pandemic, in the same way Moscow had shown solidarity after the 2016 coup attempt. Remarkably, Erdoğan – who is not known for mincing his words – has not called out China for the repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim groups in Xinjiang (or East Turkestan). But is Turkey likely to team up with the revisionist powers in mounting a frontal challenge to Western dominance in international affairs? Despite Erdoğan’s combative tone, the answer is no. Instead, Turkey will juggle between various centers in search of advantage: a power in the middle or perhaps an entrepreneurial vendor in an increasingly crowded geopolitical bazaar. “Turkey does its own thing,” Nigar Göksel and Hugh Pope have argued.
Going forward, Turkey will stay in NATO and keep the connection with Europe. Good news for those in the West who have not given up on Turkey as well as for those in Turkey who persist in their belief in liberal democracy. But there is bad news, too, for both of those constituencies. A post-Erdoğan Turkey might not rush back to the West but instead stick to the script set by the current regime. Whether the script itself works or not is another matter.
. As Turkey prepares to mark the centennial of the republic in 2023, it is confronted with turbulence at home as well as in the world.
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Copyright © 2022 Dimitar Bechev
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