Turkey Transformed: the Origins and Evolution of Authoritarianism and Islamization Under the AKP
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Turkey Transformed: The Origins and Evolution of Authoritarianism and Islamization Under the AKP October 2015 Principal Investigators Ambassador Eric Edelman Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey; Co-chair, Bipartisan Policy Center Turkey Initiative Svante Cornell Director, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Aaron Lobel Founder and President, America Abroad Media Halil Karaveli Senior Fellow, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program National Security Program Staff Blaise Misztal Director Ayhan Üçok Policy Analyst Jessica Michek Project Assistant ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The conclusions and insights contained in this report were shaped, in part, by a range of conversations that Principal Investigators and staff members had with government officials, politicians, journalists, and activists in urkT ey. We are indebted to them for their time and thoughtful commentary. DISCLAIMER The findings and recommendations expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the Bipartisan olicyP Center’s founders or its board of directors. 1 Table of Contents 3 Executive Summary 9 Introduction 11 The Real AKP: Ideological and Political Origins 11 Introduction 12 Ideological Origins and Development of Turkish Islamism 16 Turkish Islamism Goes Political: The Rise of Erbakan and Milli Görüş 23 Erbakan’s Career: Success and Failure 29 From Milli Görüş to AKP: Rebranding Political Islamism 35 Conclusion: “The Liberal Hope” 40 The “New Turkey” Project: Authoritarianism and Islamization 41 The AKP’s Authoritarian Drift 58 Better Late Than Never: The Islamization of Turkey 75 Conclusion 2 Executive Summary On June 7, 2015, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party Turkey has already been transformed, though perhaps not in (AKP) lost its majority in Parliament, which it had maintained for the way that Western observers expected. 12 years. But, as is increasingly clear, losing an election did not When the AKP was created in 2000, it cast itself as a “post- mean losing power. From the presidential palace, the AKP’s de Islamist” party leaving behind the ideological baggage of facto leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has ensured that no other previous, failed attempts at governance arising out of Turkey’s political force is given a chance to govern. Instead, Erdoğan Islamist tradition and representing a democratic movement bent has called early elections and relaunched the war against on weakening the hold of entrenched elites on the Turkish state. the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in a rather With this mission, it quickly captured the goodwill of the West transparent attempt to rally the Turkish nationalist vote. as well as Turkish liberals. Should Erdoğan and the AKP prove successful in this gambit, Fifteen years later, the behavior of the AKP has forced a they will likely seek to transform Turkey. “Today is the day that reconsideration of this assumption. Erdoğan’s “new Turkey” Turkey rises from its ashes,” Erdoğan said upon ascending the has come to mean something other than the consolidated presidency in August 2014. “It’s the day the process to build the democracy the AKP promised. Instead, in the domestic realm, new Turkey gains strength.”1 However, during the AKP’s tenure, 3 Turkish government policies have grown strongly authoritarian and imperialist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western worldview. And, while repressive, while increasingly tinged with Islamic rhetoric. In the the AKP rose to power by declaring a break from that tradition, area of foreign affairs, Turkish policies are less and less aligned its leaders transformed the movement’s political tactics while with those of Turkey’s Western allies and increasingly anti-Western preserving its ideological objectives and ambitions. and sectarian in nature. The “new Turkey” espoused by the AKP The AKP’s Ideological Origins appears to have more in common with the Milli Görüş movement it sprung from than with the reformist, democratizing party it For the first eight decades of the Turkish Republic’s existence, claimed to be. political Islam struggled to gain a foothold in the country’s public life. It was systematically excluded in the Kemalist period, but Determining which of these is the real AKP—the post-Islamist slowly allowed back from the cold when the Cold War made party of liberal hope or the autocrats of a New Turkey—is crucial Islam a bulwark against the chief enemy: communism. It was not to understanding both the Turkey of today and its plausible future until Erbakan succeeded in mobilizing the Anatolian bourgeoisie trajectory. What went wrong? Did the AKP project get derailed by and later made inroads into the working classes under a single Western alienation or, as some would argue, the excesses of its ideological banner—that of the Milli Görüş movement—that increasingly narcissistic leader? Or is the problem, rather, that political Islam emerged as an independent political force. Western and Turkish observers alike misread the AKP from the start and saw only what they wanted to see? Was the AKP’s early liberal A closer study of Milli Görüş suggests that the movement is democratic platform a façade and a tactical ploy, its real objectives far more radical than is commonly assumed. Led by Erbakan, all along the autocratic and Islamist ones it espouses today? this movement had its origins in the Naqshbandi order’s Khalidi branch, which has gradually become a dominant social force in These questions cannot be answered without knowing the Turkish Islamic circles. This order is distinct from most Sufi orders AKP’s relationship and attitudes toward the ideological tradition by its strong commitment to Shari’a and its political nature; in the from which it emerged and the reasons for its apparent split 19th century, it brought orthodox Islamic ideas from the Middle with its political forbearers. This calls for the investigation of East into a Turkey that had remained attached to more moderate two particular questions, which have so far received only limited practices. In addition, the Turkish Islamist movement drew scholarly attention. The first is the ideological origins of the Milli inspiration from abroad: in the early 20th century, from European Görüş movement, the ideological forefather of Turkey’s modern fascism; and following World War II, from the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists. The second issue is the split that occurred in the Islamist movement and its affiliates. It is, therefore, no wonder that Milli movement between 1998 and 2000, when the AKP began to rise Görüş was strongly committed to the Islamization of the state, from the ashes after the Virtue Party had been closed down and heavily infused with anti-Western concepts, and inundated with Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan removed from power by the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Turkish military. Knowing this will allow a more informed analysis of the AKP’s 12 years in power and its current political agenda, Erbakan’s dominance over Turkish political Islam lasted for 30 illuminating the ideological ambitions driving its pursuit of a years. His successes, including becoming the prime minister of a “New Turkey.” coalition government in 1996, came from being able to continually find, reach out to, and recruit new constituencies under the Islamist What emerges is a picture of remarkable continuity: The leading ideological banner of his party. Erbakan’s tenure as prime minister, figures of Turkish political Islam have all been steeped in an anti- 4 however, came to an abrupt end as the military intervened to quash and analysts to take this transformation at face value. his blatantly Islamist agenda. With the benefit of hindsight, the speed of the transformation This historic moment—working three decades to ascend to the and its self-serving nature generates doubts about its sincerity. pinnacle of power only to have it come crashing down in a year— It appears that a considerable portion of the rationale for the made a significant impact on the younger generation of Turkish Islamist movement’s transformation was tactical. Leading figures Islamists. The AKP’s rebranding of political Islam learned from even admitted as much—noting that their ideals had been these mistakes and developed new tactics for not repeating them. defeated, and it was time to move on, barring which they would never be able to reach power. The shock of Erbakan’s ouster led Islamist intellectuals to reexamine their ideological approach to politics and prompted a The “New Turkey” Project: seeming evolution in their thought. Up until the late 1990s, the Authoritarianism and Islamization dominant Islamist worldview included a rejection of the West, The AKP’s ideological roots only tell part of the story. It must democracy, and modernity. Following the 1997 coup, these ideas also be evaluated on the basis of its record of governance. This went through rapid change. Islamist thinkers concluded that, record is increasingly consistent with the picture painted above following the events of 1997, an embrace of democracy and of a staunch Islamist movement that embraced the technical support for the EU had become a necessity in order to promote mechanics of electoral democracy, but not its underlying values, Islam, as it was the only way to gain the upper hand over the state and underwent a rebranding process to make itself more palatable establishment that had removed Erbakan from power. At the same to domestic as well as international constituencies. time, the 1997 coup tilted the balance in Western circles toward viewing the Turkish state and its secular authoritarianism, rather The “New Turkey” project can, analytically speaking, be separated than the Islamists, as the main problem facing Turkey’s democracy into three areas—the political, the cultural, and the economic—in and European integration, providing a strategic opportunity for which the country that is being built differs considerably from the Turkey’s Islamists to gain the goodwill of the West.