The Turkish Paradox
June 28, 2012 § Leave a comment
Anyone who follows Turkey knows that there has been a perpetual debate during the past few years over whether Turkey is becoming more democratic or less democratic. The answer you get depends on whom you ask, and Turkey experts point to different factors to bolster their respective cases. To my thinking though there is no absolutely right or absolutely wrong answer to the question, because the truth is that Turkey is becoming both simultaneously; it just depends on where you look. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Steven Cook and I tried to capture this dynamic and explain the proper way of viewing what is going on in Turkey by harkening back to Robert Dahl’s definition of democracy that divides it into two elements, participation and contestation. Our article can be found here, and I have excerpted part of it below. I look forward to people’s feedback and comments.
The Turkish Paradox
How the AKP Simultaneously Embraces and Abuses Democracy
Michael J. Koplow and Steven A. Cook
MICHAEL KOPLOW is a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Georgetown University and has a blog called Ottomans and Zionists. STEVEN A. COOK is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Prime Minister Erdogan sitting in a fighter jet on June 27, 2012. (Umit Bektas / Courtesy Reuters)
The Halki seminary, founded in 1844 as a center of learning for the Orthodox Eastern Church, was for decades a symbol of religious toleration and minority rights in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. But in 1971, Ankara closed the seminary when the constitutional court, dominated by adherents of Kemalism, the secular ideology of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, ruled that only the army was allowed to run nonstate-supervised private colleges. So in March, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the Halki seminary would be restored and reopened, it seemed that the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the country’s ruling faction since 2002, was furthering its reformist agenda of making Turkey a more open society by expanding personal, religious, and economic freedoms.
But while Ankara encourages openness with one hand, it clamps down on it with the other. In May, Erdogan announced that the government would end state subsidies for the arts, closing the spigot on $63 million in annual funding and, in effect, endangering the country’s more than 50 state theaters and artistic venues across the country. The AKP claimed that it did so in the name of private enterprise and was instituting a modern approach to government patronage of the arts; opponents argued that it was a deliberate attempt to silence artists, some of whom had become highly critical of AKP rule. Since the AKP era began, the world has watched closely to see if Turkey would embrace, or abuse, democracy. What is becoming clear is that Erdogan’s strategy is to do both, simultaneously.
The key to understanding democracy under the AKP lies with the meaning of democracy itself. The Yale political scientist Robert Dahl wrote that democracy is defined by the extent to which citizens can participate in civic life and whether they can contest the government’s power. Looking at each factor separately illustrates why Turkey is such a paradox.
To continue reading, please click over to the article at foreignaffairs.com
Turkey’s Journalists
March 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
Mustafa Akyol, who is one of the more insightful Turkish columnists and has been very harsh on the press crackdown under Erdoğan, thinks that the worst might be over for Turkish journalists now that Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener have been released from prison. This column comes on the heels of a long Dexter Filkins piece examining the growing quashing of opposition under Erdoğan, which is certainly not a new phenomenon to anyone who has followed Turkish politics over the last decade. I think that Akyol might be jumping the gun just a bit in the glow of Şık and Şener’s reprieves – the bottom line is that the dynamics that have led Erdoğan to become more heavy-handed in his attempts to ensure that the AKP becomes Turkey’s permanent ruling party have not changed. Turkey’s burgeoning economic growth and building conviction that it doesn’t need to join the EU are still in play, as is Erdoğan’s personal popularity and dominant position atop the Turkish political firmament. It also still remains true that Erdoğan’s instincts tend toward the authoritarian side and that he does not react well to challenges.
There is a great word in Turkish – kabadayı – that is used to describe Erdoğan and that captures well the divide between his supporters and opponents. A kabadayı was historically the neighborhood tough or small time gangster, and it carries a negative connotation of being a bully but also a positive connotation as someone who stands up for his own people and those under his protection. To Erdoğan’s fans, he is a kabadayı in the sense of unapologetically fighting for Turkey on the world stage and restoring Turkish honor and prestige. To his detractors, he is simply a bully who pushes people around and brings the power of the state down on his political opponents.
While it is a positive sign that four journalists out of the over one hundred in jail have been released, Şık and Şener were prominent high profile cases, and lots of domestic and international pressure had been brought to bear on the government to release them. I hope that Akyol is right and that this indeed heralds the end to a sorry era for press freedoms in Turkey, but I fear that this is just a momentary blip that is ultimately not going to mean very much in the larger scheme of things.
