Daily News
Sunday, April 4, 2010
The Anatolian landscape is dotted by a tall slender tree in the aspen family, known to the Turks as kavak, a fragile-looking but sturdy tree. When the harsh Anatolian wind blows across the steppe, kavak can bend at incredible angles, adjusting to the power of the wind, and somehow not break. Turkey is like the Anatolian kavak. The country has come to bend with the powerful political, social and foreign policy choices that its elites have ushered in over the ages, bowing to the power of such winds. Ever since the sultans started to Westernize the Ottoman Empire in the 1770's, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk continued these reforms making Turkey a secular republic in the 1920's, and the various political parties of the Turkish democracy in the 20th century cast their dice with the West, the Turks have adopted a pro-Western stance in foreign policy, embraced secular democracy at home, and marched towards the European Union (EU).
This is changing. The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a party rooted in Turkey's Islamist opposition, to government in 2002 introduced new social, political, and foreign policy winds across the Turkish society. These forces include solidarity with Islamist and anti-Western countries in foreign policy and orthopraxy in the public space, promoting outward displays of homogenous religious practice and social conservatism, though not necessarily directed by faith. After seven years of AKP rule, the Anatolian Turks are bending over to the power of the AKP, orthopraxy and the Islamist mindset in foreign policy are taking hold. According to a recent poll by TESEV, an Istanbul-based NGO, the number of people identifying themselves as Muslim increased by 10 percent between 2002 and 2007; in addition, almost half of those surveyed describe themselves as Islamist. Moreover, orthopraxy seems to have become internalized: bureaucrats in Ankara now feel compelled to attend prayers lest they be bypassed for promotions. Public display of religious observance, often devoid of faith, has become a necessity for those seeking government appointments or lucrative state contracts. Where is Turkey heading under the AKP, and what are the lessons that can be drawn from the AKP experience?
The AKP has roots in Turkey's Islamist movement, including the Welfare Party, or RP, the mothership of Turkish Islamism. The AKP's founders, including party leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, cut their teeth in the RP, an explicitly Islamist party, which featured strong anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and anti-secular elements. The RP joined a coalition government in 1997 before alienating the secular Turkish military, the courts, and the West, leading to being banned in 1998. Yet the party never truly disappeared. Erdoğan and his comrades drew a lesson from this experience; the Turkish Islamists would be better served to reinvent themselves in order to be successful. In due course, Erdoğan re-created the party with a pro-American, pro-EU, capitalist and reformist image.
When the AKP came to power in 2002, after taking advantage of the implosion of the country's centrist parties in the 2001 economic crisis, it tried to reassure the moderates' concerns it might chip away at the country's secular, democratic and pro-Western values. The AKP renounced its Islamist heritage and began working instead to secure EU membership and to turn Turkey into an even more liberal and pro-Western place. At the time, few thought that the party could transform Turkey for the worse. After all, Turkey had been a multi-party democracy since 1946; it had a vigorous free media, secular courts, a large business class, and a strong army, all deemed to be guardians of Western values. What is more, the United States support for the secular, Western Turkey and the EU process were viewed as the fail-safes of the Turkish liberalization process that would entice the AKP to maintain its pro-West stance and reform path.
The AKP indeed promoted reforms, pro-business and pro-EU policies after coming to power. However, soon the party's transformation appeared to be a cynical one. The AKP began to undermine the liberal values it supposedly stood for. For instance, it began to hire top bureaucrats from an exclusive pool of practicing, religious conservatives. Concurrently, the percentage of women in executive positions in government dropped. In years past, Turkish women served as chief justice, prime minister, and ministers of the Interior and Foreign Affairs. Some 30 percent of Turkey's doctors and 33 percent of its lawyers are women. Yet under the AKP, women are largely excluded from decision-making positions in government: there is not a single woman among the 19 ministerial undersecretaries appointed by the AKP. Moreover, whereas in 1994, the percentage of women in executive positions in government was 15.1 percent, according to IRIS, an Ankara-based women's rights group, today this statistic is at 11.8 percent.
The AKP's lack of commitment to liberal values is a testimony to the party's tactical view of EU membership: the AKP pushes for EU membership when it brings the party’s public approval, but not to make Turkey truly European. The nail in the coffin for the AKP's EU tactical drive came in 2005, when the European Court of Human Rights upheld Turkey's old ban on Islamic headscarves on college campuses. The AKP had hoped Europe might help recalibrate Turkish secularism into a more tolerant form. But this wasn't in the cards. Thus, as soon as actual talks of EU membership began in 2005, the AKP became reluctant to take on tough, potentially unpopular reforms mandated by the EU, making accession seem less and less a likely. Statements such as Erdoğan's calling the West "immoral" in 2008 only eroded popular support for EU membership: by last year, about one-third of the population wanted their country to join the EU, down sharply from more than 80 percent in 2002, when the AKP first came to power.
Efforts by secular Turkish institutions to curb the AKP have backfired. In 2007, the secular opposition and the military, which issued a declaration against the AKP on its Web site in spring that year, attempted to block the AKP from electing its own presidential candidate, Abdullah Gül. The AKP successfully challenged the claim, suggesting that the secular opposition and the military did not want Gül to run because of his personal religious views. The AKP thereby created a secular-vs.-Muslim divide, in lieu of Turkey's traditional Islamist-vs.-secular political divide along whose fault line it had always lost in the past. The party successfully positioned itself on the winning Muslim side of the new fault line. Additionally, when the Turkish Constitutional Court tried to prevent the AKP from appointing Gül as president, the AKP cast itself as the underdog representative of Turkey's poor Muslim masses. The two strategies worked: the AKP won 47 percent of the vote in the July 2007 parliamentary elections, defeating the opposition in a monumental victory and exposing the fact that hell does not freeze over when the Turkish military is ignored.
* This piece originally appeared on Majalla on Nov. 26, 2009.
PART II
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The effective elimination of military and court pressure against the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has hastened the party's return to its core values. The AKP has begun abandoning its displays of pluralism, dismissing dissent, ignoring checks and balances and condemning the media for daring to criticize them.
In due course, Turkey's media has been transformed for the worse. The government used legal loopholes to confiscate the ownership of independent media and subsequently sell them to AKP supporters. In 2002, pro-AKP businesses owned less than 20 percent of the Turkish media; today, pro-government people own around 50 percent.
In the meantime, the relationship between the AKP and Turkey's secular business lobby, organized through the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association, TÜSİAD, also changed. TÜSİAD support for the AKP had been a crucial source of support for the AKP.
The pro-business, pro-EU group provided the party with domestic and international legitimacy, and armed it with the means to fight off accusations that it was an Islamist party. But in 2007, the relationship between TÜSİAD and the AKP, always an uneasy one, faltered when ErDoğan targeted TÜSİAD, a key node of secular power in Turkey. The AKP attacked Aydın Doğan – whose family holds the presidency of TÜSİAD and owns roughly half the Turkish media in a group of companies known as Doğan Yayın – characterizing Doğan as a rich and corrupt businessman. In two waves in 2009, the AKP slapped Doğan Yayın, a conglomerate whose media outlets have published corruption allegations against the AKP, with a record 3.2 billion tax fine, forcing the media mogul to come to terms with him and stop criticism of the AKP in Doğan media outlets.
Together with the punitive use of taxes and audits, the party's use of wiretaps, especially as part of the Ergenekon case in an alleged coup plot against the government, has been its other vehicle for cracking down on the opposition. When the case opened in 2007, AKP watchers saw it as an opportunity for Turkey to clean up corruption, such as security officials' involvement in the criminal underworld. But the case is much more than that. It is a tool for the AKP to curb freedoms. Hundreds have been detained in over a dozen waves of arrests. Legally, the case is unfitting of a country in accession talks with the EU: some people arrested in relation to Ergenekon have waited 18 months in jail before being taken to a court or seeing an indictment.
These arrests, alongside fears of illegal wiretaps to build evidence for Ergenekon, have left Turkish liberals paralyzed, and the country has dangerously shut off frank political conversations. As a sage once said, "Countries become police states not when the police listens to all its citizens, but when all citizens fear that the police listens to them."
That the AKP has effectively outsmarted the internal checks, which had hitherto imposed moderation on its policies, has not been without consequences: the AKP has become Turkey's new elite in charge politically, economically, and socially. The party is supported by a growing business community, which it nurtures through government contracts that are awarded by using orthopraxy as a yard stick.
The AKP has sway over the media, and exerts power over the Turkish military through the Ergenekon case and proven ability to force the political opposition into submission through its control of domestic intelligence. Last but not least, the AKP controls the executive and legislative branches. Former AKP member Abdullah Gül is now the Turkish president with the power to appoint judges to the high courts.
As the new elite, the proverbial "wind over the Anatolian landscape," the AKP is shaping Turkish society in its own image, promoting orthopraxy through administrative acts.
Accordingly, it is not religiosity that is on the rise in Turkey – i.e., the number of people attending mosque services or praying – but rather government-infused social conservatism. Indications of social conservatism, such as wives wearing turbans, are used as benchmarks to obtain government appointments, promotions and contracts.
Social conservatism, however, is not in itself the problem, and a conservative Turkey can certainly be European. The problem is that a government-led project of this type is incompatible with the idea of a liberal democracy. And given Turkey's nature as an elite project, AKP-led social conservatism is reshaping Turkish society.
Turkish Muslims Pray In The Blue Mosque ...ISTANBUL, TURKEY - NOVEMBER 27: A muslim prays alone before he begins the midday prayers in the Blue Mosque on November 27, 2006 in Istanbul, Turkey. Pope Benedict XVI arrives November 28 in Turkey for his first papal visit to a Muslim country and will visit Blue Mosque on the third day of his trip. Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty Images Nov 27, 2006
Last year in Istanbul, I came across a young Muslim-Greek Orthodox Turkish woman who had applied for a job with an AKP-controlled Istanbul city government branch. In her job interview, she was told the government would hire her if she agreed to wear a headscarf. When she responded that she was Greek Orthodox, the woman was told "you don't need to convert; all you have to do is cover your head."
* This four part series originally appeared in Majalla on Nov. 26, 2009.
In due course, Turkey's media has been transformed for the worse. The government used legal loopholes to confiscate the ownership of independent media and subsequently sell them to AKP supporters. In 2002, pro-AKP businesses owned less than 20 percent of the Turkish media; today, pro-government people own around 50 percent.
In the meantime, the relationship between the AKP and Turkey's secular business lobby, organized through the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association, TÜSİAD, also changed. TÜSİAD support for the AKP had been a crucial source of support for the AKP.
The pro-business, pro-EU group provided the party with domestic and international legitimacy, and armed it with the means to fight off accusations that it was an Islamist party. But in 2007, the relationship between TÜSİAD and the AKP, always an uneasy one, faltered when ErDoğan targeted TÜSİAD, a key node of secular power in Turkey. The AKP attacked Aydın Doğan – whose family holds the presidency of TÜSİAD and owns roughly half the Turkish media in a group of companies known as Doğan Yayın – characterizing Doğan as a rich and corrupt businessman. In two waves in 2009, the AKP slapped Doğan Yayın, a conglomerate whose media outlets have published corruption allegations against the AKP, with a record 3.2 billion tax fine, forcing the media mogul to come to terms with him and stop criticism of the AKP in Doğan media outlets.
Together with the punitive use of taxes and audits, the party's use of wiretaps, especially as part of the Ergenekon case in an alleged coup plot against the government, has been its other vehicle for cracking down on the opposition. When the case opened in 2007, AKP watchers saw it as an opportunity for Turkey to clean up corruption, such as security officials' involvement in the criminal underworld. But the case is much more than that. It is a tool for the AKP to curb freedoms. Hundreds have been detained in over a dozen waves of arrests. Legally, the case is unfitting of a country in accession talks with the EU: some people arrested in relation to Ergenekon have waited 18 months in jail before being taken to a court or seeing an indictment.
These arrests, alongside fears of illegal wiretaps to build evidence for Ergenekon, have left Turkish liberals paralyzed, and the country has dangerously shut off frank political conversations. As a sage once said, "Countries become police states not when the police listens to all its citizens, but when all citizens fear that the police listens to them."
That the AKP has effectively outsmarted the internal checks, which had hitherto imposed moderation on its policies, has not been without consequences: the AKP has become Turkey's new elite in charge politically, economically, and socially. The party is supported by a growing business community, which it nurtures through government contracts that are awarded by using orthopraxy as a yard stick.
The AKP has sway over the media, and exerts power over the Turkish military through the Ergenekon case and proven ability to force the political opposition into submission through its control of domestic intelligence. Last but not least, the AKP controls the executive and legislative branches. Former AKP member Abdullah Gül is now the Turkish president with the power to appoint judges to the high courts.
As the new elite, the proverbial "wind over the Anatolian landscape," the AKP is shaping Turkish society in its own image, promoting orthopraxy through administrative acts.
Accordingly, it is not religiosity that is on the rise in Turkey – i.e., the number of people attending mosque services or praying – but rather government-infused social conservatism. Indications of social conservatism, such as wives wearing turbans, are used as benchmarks to obtain government appointments, promotions and contracts.
Social conservatism, however, is not in itself the problem, and a conservative Turkey can certainly be European. The problem is that a government-led project of this type is incompatible with the idea of a liberal democracy. And given Turkey's nature as an elite project, AKP-led social conservatism is reshaping Turkish society.
Last year in Istanbul, I came across a young Muslim-Greek Orthodox Turkish woman who had applied for a job with an AKP-controlled Istanbul city government branch. In her job interview, she was told the government would hire her if she agreed to wear a headscarf. When she responded that she was Greek Orthodox, the woman was told "you don't need to convert; all you have to do is cover your head."
* This four part series originally appeared in Majalla on Nov. 26, 2009.
