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Political Parties and the Production of an Islamist–Secularist Cleavage in Turkey

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Political Parties and the Production of an Islamist–Secularist Cleavage in Turkey TONI ALEKSI ALARANTA Political Parties and the Production of an Islamist–Secularist Cleavage in Turkey his study demonstrates how profoundly Turkey’s ency would hardly exist in its enduring form without main social cleavage – Islam versus Secularism – particular political articulations. This article argues Tis produced and reproduced by political parties that the cleavage is based on the logic of a legitim- in their attempts to form a coherent sociopolitical bloc ation of power through opposing attempts at polit- as a basis of mass support. ical mobilisation, and thus cannot be reduced to pre- sumed pre-political social and economic structures. Introduction The article aims to demonstrate how profoundly Tur- The production of social cleavages at the level key’s main social cleavage – Islam vs. secularism – is of official party programmes produced and reproduced by its political parties. I In political science, parties have often been seen to will analyse the role of political parties in producing be simply reflecting the preferences and social div- this cleavage at the level of the official programmes isions of a given society, while the cleavages them- of the Justice and Development Party (the Adalet ve selves have been understood as being more profound Kalkınma Partisi orAKP) and the Republican People’s and part of a large-scale explanatory category of the Party (the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP). The ‘social’. However, it can be argued that political par- main purpose is to challenge the paradigm which ties are central to the production of social cleavages understands social cleavages to be part of a ‘social as they establish institutions capable of naturalizing structure’ that exists prior to political articulations. class, ethnic, and religious formations as a basis of According to this standard perspective, social cleav- social division ‘by integrating disparate interests and ages create the demand for political parties. identities into coherent sociopolitical blocs’ (De Leon An often-repeated claim about Turkey’s politics et al. 2009: 194–5). is that the conservative centre-right parties, which In their well-known work on cleavages and party have won nearly all the elections since the establish- affiliations, Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan ment of a multi-party democracy in 1950, represent (1967) emphasise that political parties help to crys- the ‘natural’, religious-conservative preferences of the tallize and make explicit conflicting interests by majority. I believe there is something in this explana- developing a rhetoric for the translation of contrasts tory model that needs to be further scrutinized. in the social structure into demands and pressures Otherwise we end up with a simplistic conclusion for action or inaction. That existing social divisions according to which religious-conservative parties are do not necessarily become the basis for political destined to win elections in Turkey simply because struggle is to some degree recognised by preced- they represent an already-existing cultural conserva- ing scholarship. Octavio Amorin Neto and Gary W. tism of the majority. The traditional mode of explan- Cox (1997) have defined social cleavages as endur- ation presupposes that the other main constituency ing social differences that might become politicised, – the secular – is based on the natural preferences of or might not. On the other hand, Michael Gallagher a secular-minded minority. This is also problematic and others (1992) have defined cleavage as a social because the more or less coherent secularist constitu- division in which the groups involved are conscious Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 2 • December 2014 113 of their collective identity partly because it is an shapes the question of identity. It creates an organisation that gives expression to this identity. issue where there was none. (Lee 2010: 12–13) Even though Lipset and Rokkan can said to be fully aware of the role parties have in making conflict- This is why it can be justifiably argued that trad- ing interests explicitly expressed, their perspective, itional, collective identities were produced and defined as a research problem which asks ‘how does a experi enced through very different mechanisms and sociocultural conflict gets translated into an opposi- practices. They were reproduced in local settings, tion between parties?’ (Lipset and Rokkan 1967: 26) and they hardly had any unifying features beyond presumes that these sociocultural conflicts exist prior the small units composed of village communities, to political parties. tribes, clans, religious sects, and so forth. Even the This article suggests that divisions constituting the great religious traditions with universal pretensions basis for social cleavages are indeed produced within and a common discourse, such as Islam, were lived the social process, but that in modern societies this and experienced locally, as there was no reason to social process is political from the very beginning. narrate these collective identities within the national, Here I follow Colin Hay who asserts that centralised structure. The definition of a social cleav- age as it is understood in the present study can thus The political should be defined in such a way be presented in the following form: a social cleavage, as to encompass the entire sphere of the social. in a modern nation state, is a social division in which The implication of this is that events, processes the groups involved are conscious of their collec- and practices should not be labelled ‘non-polit- tive identity most of all because there are organisa- ical’ or ‘extra-political’ simply by virtue of the tions – political parties – that through an intertextual specific setting or context in which they occur. process produce and reproduce the core elements of (Hay 2002: 3) such a group identity. The research question can thus be expressed in Thus, the existence of a social cleavage is ultimately a simple formulation: how is the Islamist–secular- possible only through an intertextual process where ist cleavage intertextually produced and reproduced different political parties espouse different group in the official programmes of Turkey’s main political identities in an interdependent, relational process. Of parties? A political party programme can be seen as course, a counter argument would assert that there a way of integrating various interests into a general need to have been social divisions within the Otto- political project transformed into a programme, for man society existing at the time of the establishment which any given party campaigns to receive the sup- of the first modern parties after 1908. Indeed, there port of a majority. In this sense party programmes can definitely were different communities and thus also be seen as explicit textual expressions of integrating social divisions in the Ottoman realm before the birth different interests and identities into an aggregated of the modern parties, but one needs to ser iously form. The party programmes fulfil in particular two consider the possibility that these were qualitative ly main functions. On the one hand, they aim to articu- different from the ones that have been subsequently late the interests of the population, and on the other generated. According to Fred Halliday (2005: 7) the hand, they orientate and influence the opinions of the Young Turk revolution of 1908 was ‘arguably the citizens, forming the public will. This is to say that in greatest turning point in the modern history of the this study Turkey’s main social cleavage is analysed Middle East’. After 1908, all previous collective iden- at the level of key political texts, as an arena of an tities have been thoroughly transformed within the interplay between main parties’ official programmes. process of nation building. As Robert D. Lee puts it, Intertextuality refers to the idea that as texts, party programmes gain their meaning only in rela- The modern doctrine of social contract pro- tion to other party programmes. Intertextuality poses that states should be the creation of asserts that no text has a meaning – or even existence peoples who already have a common identity… – by itself, but only in relation to other texts. Further, the question, then, of what constitutes identity intertext uality denotes those explicit and implicit within the nation becomes a much more critical relations that any particular text has with past, pre- issue than it ever was in the age of empire… sent, and possible future texts (Allen 2006: 1–3). To politics has already reshaped religion in this develop this idea in terms of social cleavages, one can sense, because the triumph of the nation-state argue that no political group identity has significance 114 Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 2 • December 2014 by itself but only in relation to other group identi- These defining denominators – and, conversely, ties, reproduced by other major political parties. As politicised social divisions – written into the party Graham Allen (2006: 19) notes, ‘all utterances are programmes are best analysed by concentrating on dialogic, their meaning and logic dependent upon the implicit and explicit historical interpretations they what has previously been said and how they will be entail. This is based on the conviction that the build- received by others’. ing of a common, defining denominator can only take Political parties aiming to secure mass support place by accounting for the past of the national polit- operate within the political system of a nation state. ical community, that is, by demonstrating through an This is why their ideologies are embedded in the historical account where we come from, who we are, institutions and the ideology of the nation state. The and what is our ‘true nature’ (Hodgkin and Radstone intertextual production of major social cleavages thus 2003). This requires investigating the main narrative refers to a process where the national characteristics tropes of these contested pasts. offered by one political party as essential, defining factors are being formed against alternative versions offered by other parties.
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