View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy PERFORMATIVE SOCIALIZATION IN WORLD POLITICS: ISLAMISM, SECULARISM, AND DEMOCRACY IN TURKEY AND EGYPT A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Ismail Yaylaci IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Raymond D. Duvall August 2014 © Ismail Yaylaci, 2014 Acknowledgements This project came into being thanks to the generous support I received from many individuals and institutions. First and foremost, I am indebted to Bud Duvall, my adviser, for his endless support and encouragement. Bud is truly an intellectual role model. The deep respect with which he engages with his students and colleagues and with their work is exceptional. Bud has come to represent excellence in scholarship and teaching for me. Despite his time-demanding administrative duties over the last seven years, he always made me feel his support and always fostered my ideas and questions. I’m so glad and fortunate to have worked with him. I also thank other members of my dissertation committee—Kathleen Collins, Ron Krebs, and Shaden Tageldin. Kathleen contributed to the development of my project from the very beginning. I am also very grateful for her hospitality. The conversations we had over brunch in her house in the freezing Minnesota winter were truly heart-warming. Ron joined my committee in the very last year, but he carefully read every single chapter and gave substantive feedback. His attentive and thoughtful comments always pushed me to make my arguments more clear and compelling. I thank him for joining my committee and for his serious engagement with my work. Shaden’s comments and suggestions were really helpful, and our conversations with her about postcolonial translation and Egyptian politics were invaluable. I am truly grateful for her endorsement and for her signature kindness, respect and generosity. Michael Barnett served in my committee when he was in Minnesota, and I thank him for his initial contribution. I also thank Nancy Luxon, Ajay Skaria, Kathryn Sikkink, and Margaret L. Werry, whose graduate seminars helped me refine my questions and ideas. My friends in the department also commented on different sections of this project in different occasions. I am particularly grateful to the members of our dissertation group and to the participants of the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium (MIRC), including Robert Assadi, Sema Binay, Charmaine Chua, Chase Hobbs-Morgan, Mark Hoffman, Eli Mayerhoff, Haeri Kim, Garnet Kindervater, Quynh N. Pham, David Temin, and Sergio Valverde (a.k.a. Hafez Greenvalley). I am also grateful to Himadeep Muppidi for sharing his insightful comments and suggestions. I also wish to extend my thanks to the participants of the Religion and International Affairs Dissertation Workshop organized by the Social Science Research Council in California in 2011, particularly to Ebrahim Moosa, R. Scott Appleby, Cecelia Lynch, Danilyn Rutherford and Qamar-ul Huda, for their feedback on an earlier iteration of the project. I was convinced to include AK Party into my discussion after Sidney Tarrow’s suggestion at a workshop in Syracuse. I want to thank him for that. I would not be able to conduct fieldwork research or write my dissertation without the financial support I received from multiple institutions. In that vein, I thank the Department of Political Science for providing me with numerous research and teaching i assistantships, Graduate Research Partnership Fellowship, and Andrew Dickinson Summer Research Fellowship. The Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) not only funded my fieldwork research with a pre-dissertation fieldwork research grant and then a year-long MacArthur Fellowship, but it also became a second home at the university. I also thank the University of Minnesota Graduate School for the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and Meridyen Derneği and İlim Yayma Cemiyeti for travel support they provided at different stages of my doctoral studies. I also want to express my gratitude to Bilim ve Sanat Vakfı (Foundation for Sciences and Arts) in Istanbul for being my scholarly home since my college years. My fieldwork research in Egypt would not have been as productive and enjoyable if it wasn’t for the support and friendship of many truly remarkable people. There is no way I can name all of them here, but I particularly want to express my gratitude to Abdalla Erfan, Tarık Abdulcelil, Abdelrahman Ayyash, Abdelrahman Hosam and many other Egyptian friends for their support and friendship. Hamdi Yıldız was a wonderful neighbor and an experienced guide in Cairo. I will never forget our long conversations with him in the sha‘bi coffeeshop nearby our residence. I also thank Dr. Heba Raouf of the American University in Cairo and Cairo University for letting me participate in her class and for our conversations. Dr. Nadia Moustafa and Dr. Sayf AbdalFattah and the staff of the Center for Civilization Studies and Dialogue of Cultures were all very welcoming and supportive. I thank them all. And I also want to thank Mesut Özcan for his help during my stay in Ankara. Finally, I thank my wife Fatıma Tuba for making this journey meaningful and beautiful. To her and to our little angel Ayşe Hilal I owe the most and to them I dedicate my dissertation. ii Dedication For my wife Fatıma Tuba and our daughter Ayşe Hilal iii Abstract How do norms and discourses travel across cultural difference? How do actors negotiate the constitutive norms of liberal global governance at the juncture of the domestic and the international? This project provides an answer to these questions by developing a performative account of norm socialization and uses this theoretical framework to analyze Islamist negotiations of secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt. I suggest that the International Relations scholarship often takes socialization as a pedagogic process in which the non-West is made to transition into the norms of liberal modernity in a hierarchical relationship of authority. In this perspective, actors either socialize into liberal norms or resist them. After identifying the shortcomings of these narratives, I develop a reading that takes socialization as a performative process of cultural translation and norm appropriation. By so doing, I analyze the ways in which norms can be adopted non-normatively—at once inhabited and resisted. I argue that a performative reading enables a more complex understanding of the dynamics of normalization and resistance in socialization. Then I employ this framework to analyze Turkish AK Party’s and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s negotiation of secularism and democracy by drawing mainly on the data I collected in my fieldwork research in Turkey and Egypt. More specifically, I examine the performative politics of translation and appropriation in the AK Party’s notions of ‘democratic secularism’ and ‘conservative democracy’ and the Muslim Brotherhood’s notions of ‘civil state within an Islamic framework’ and ‘Islamic democracy.’ iv Table of Contents List of Tables ...…………………………………………………………………………..vi Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………....1 Chapter 2: Pedagogic Socialization in International Relations…………………………..23 Chapter 3: Performative Socialization: Cultural Translation and Appropriation of Norms in Liberal Global Governance………………………………………………..82 Chapter 4: AK Party’s ‘Democratic Secularism’ and ‘Conservative Democracy’……..149 Chapter 5: Muslim Brotherhood and ‘Islamic Democracy’: Negotiating Democracy, Secularism and Shari‘a through the Civil State…………………………….236 Chapter 6: Conclusion………………………………………………………………….316 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....325 v List of Tables Table 1.1. Islamism and Post-Islamism, derived from Asef Bayat (2007)………………13 Table 1.2. Islamic Democracy and Muslim Democracy, derived from Vali Nasr (2005)……………………………………………………………………....................13-14 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In his first visit to post-Mubarak Egypt in the September of 2011, the Turkish Prime Minister R. Tayyip Erdoğan, the founder and chairman of the Islamically-oriented Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AK Party, [Justice and Development Party]) which has been in power since 2002, was welcomed with enormous enthusiasm by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members at the Cairo International Airport in the middle of the night. During his much-publicized visit Erdoğan made a surprising move. When he was asked about his opinions on Egypt after Mubarak, he stated that secularism should not be seen as atheism or irreligiousness, but as guarantor of religious freedoms, and thus should be enshrined in the constitution. These remarks came at the distaste of the Muslim Brotherhood as the latter has long been calling for an Islamic state that implements the principles of shari‘a (Islamic norms and law) as the law of the land. The spokesperson of the Brotherhood, Mahmoud Ghazlan, immediately responded to Erdoğan by accusing him of interfering in Egypt’s internal affairs and by arguing that Turkey’s and Egypt’s conditions and experiences were very different.1 This was indeed an intriguing moment. Here you had Erdoğan, whose party was convicted by the Turkish Constitutional Court in 2008 for ‘becoming a hub for anti- secular activities’ and who himself served a four-months prison sentence in 1999 and was forced to quit his position as the Mayor of Istanbul for an ‘anti-secularist’ public