After the earthquake that struck Turkey in February, social media was flooded with images capturing the devastation and heartbreak. One photo in particular stood out. It shows the half-standing wall of a house and through a gap the viewer can make out a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The steady gaze of the former leader could be interpreted – if you were so inclined – as a damning judgement on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “new Turkey” by the republic’s founding father. Leaving upwards of 50,000 dead, the catastrophic impact of the earthquake is indicative of the current state of the country. The image has the feel of a disappointed father surveying the wreckage created by the policies of his wayward son.
The thought of Atatürk’s disapproval would not concern Erdoğan. A scion of Turkey’s Islamist movement, the current president’s long political career has been defined by the repudiation of Mustafa Kemal’s legacy. Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been at the country’s helm for two decades and thanks to his recent electoral triumph he will be ensconced in Ankara when Turkey turns 100 in October.
There is much debate about the incumbent president’s ideology. Is he an Islamist, a nationalist, an opportunist? In order to fully grasp the nature of Erdoğan’s political project, it is useful to survey the republic’s history from its founding in 1923 through to today.
In 1918, while Mustafa Kemal was convalescing in the Habsburg town of Karlsbad, he wrestled with how he might modernise the Ottoman Empire were he to be in power. Writing in his diary, later to be published as the Karlsbad Memoirs, the hero of Gallipoli boldly stated: “If I ever acquire great authority and power, I think that I would introduce at a single stroke the transformation needed in our social life.” In just a few years, Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”), as Mustafa Kemal would come to be known, would acquire the authority and power he desired and would transform the empire’s Anatolian core.
Overwriting the past
Mustafa Kemal was not the first Ottoman reformer. There had been multiple attempts over the previous century to reform the empire’s institutions and instil in its disparate subjects a sense of Ottoman patriotism. But by the end of the First World War, the Balkan territories had won their independence and the Arabs too had grown restless under the Turkish yoke. Anatolia’s Christian communities had also been devastated by war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Everyone now dreamt of national self-determination, including
Anatolian Muslims. Faced with occupation by the Allied powers, invasion by Greece, and the prospect of losing what was left of their imperial homeland, Turks, Kurds and others launched what is today known as the Turkish War of Independence. Mustafa Kemal joined in May 1919 and under his leadership independence was won. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923.
After the establishment of a united Italy, the liberal politician Massimo d’Azeglio famously declared, “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” Atatürk was in a similar position. He could now bring about the social transformation he had dreamed of in Karlsbad, which consisted in overwriting the Islamic Ottoman inheritance with a modern European Turkish republic.
Based in the new capital of Ankara, Mustafa Kemal abolished the Sultanate and the Caliphate – two relics of the Ottoman past and potential threats to his search for absolute power – and set about reforming the state along western lines. He introduced the European calendar and Mussolini’s penal code, and replaced Sharia law with the Swiss Civil Code, which allowed for a more equal relationship between men and women in the eyes of the law. Atatürk also abolished the religious school system and changed to Turkish the Arabic call to prayer. Intricately linked to his programme of westernisation was the idea of secularism (laiklik), which was to be a central component of the new state’s identity. Atatürk wished, as he put it in 1925, to prevent modern Turkey from being a “land of sheikhs and dervishes” and to this end he set up the Ministry of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) to “enlighten the public about their religion, and administer the sacred worshipping places”. Under Atatürk’s idiosyncratic version of laiklik, Islam was to be controlled by the state, and cleansed of any aspect deemed irrational or reminiscent of the Ottoman past.
As well as these modernising reforms, Atatürk was determined to introduce a new collective identity that would bind Turkey’s citizenry tightly together and to the new state. The experience of Ottoman collapse had left Mustafa Kemal and his coterie wary of heterogeneous polities with cleavages that could be exploited by external powers. A new identity would be needed, one that could fuse the people into an indivisible whole. Ottomanism and Islamism were out of the question; the former was anachronistic and there was no place for the latter in a secular republic. Turkism, an idea that first emerged in the late 19th century and which had gained some ground with the Ottoman Empire’s Young Turk leaders, was the logical choice.
The birth of Turkish nationalism
The Kemalist version of Turkism – or Turkish nationalism – had a civic, territorial dimension where “Turk” was understood as a legal category. As the 1924 constitution stated: “The people of Turkey without any regard for religion or race are called Turks through citizenship.” But in practice there was also a salient ethno-religious dimension. Ankara selectively revived aspects of the pre-Ottoman ethnic Turkish past to weave together a narrative about the unique greatness of the Turks, an ideological development that alienated other ethnicities. A common Muslim identity, which had united Turks, Kurds, Laz and others during the War of Independence, had also carried over into the new nation state. The core Sunni Muslim population that was left in Anatolia after the Ottoman demise formed the silent partner of Kemalist nationalism, a historically contingent substratum of Turkish identity that made it harder for religious minorities to be fully accepted as “Turks”.
This secular nationalist identity, with its ethnocentric dimension and muted Islamic undertones, was propagated by Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) through various arms of the authoritarian state. There was resistance – from Islamists and Kurds, for example – but this was violently quashed in the name of modernisation and national unity by a loyal military. By the time of his death in 1938, Atatürk had succeeded in making modern Turkey.
The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has dedicated his life to remaking the nation. Over the last 20 years he has carried out a social transformation comparable in scale to that undertaken by Atatürk. This began even before the AKP’s first electoral triumph in 2002. The blend of Islam and Turkish nationalism that animates the party and its supporters is the culmination of a slow-burning cultural revolution that began decades ago and which prepared the ground for Erdoğan’s ascension.
The cultural revolution – or counter-revolution – began in 1950. The Turkish Republic’s move to a multi-party democracy that year opened the way for those tired of the CHP’s hegemony to voice their frustration. And they did so vociferously. Over the next three decades, the conservative prime ministers Adnan Menderes and Süleyman Demirel mobilised small-town Turkey against the Kemalist dispensation. Consummate populists, they decried the power of the “Kemalist elite” – an amorphous term meant to denote the secular middle and upper classes in big cities – and took a more relaxed approach to laiklik. Under Menderes, the call to prayer could again be heard in Arabic.
Both leaders ran afoul of the military defenders of Kemalism, however. In 1960, the generals carried out a coup and executed the by-now demagogic Menderes, turning him into a martyr for the Turkish right. A decade later, in 1971, Demirel was also toppled for – in the words of a military memorandum – not carrying out reforms “in a Kemalist spirit”. He would return to frontline politics shortly after, but the message from the barracks was clear: the Kemalist revolution would be defended at all costs.
The Cold War struggle
The struggle between civilian politicians and the military is often taken as the starting point for understanding modern Turkish history. It signifies, for many, an eternal clash between the religious masses and a secular elite. But this is a misleading framing. As historian Halil Karaveli and sociologist Cihan Tugal among others have convincingly argued, this simplistic narrative downplays the importance of the Cold War struggle between left and right.
During the 60s and 70s, the Turkish left was on the march. The CHP, under the charismatic poet-politician Bülent Ecevit who served as prime minister in 1974, 1977 and 1978–1979 (and again from 1999 to 2002), had adopted a social democratic platform, and teahouses and student dormitories were awash with Marxist talk of revolution. Out on the street, some radical leftists even turned to violence.
Alarmed by the forward march of labour, the right mobilised. Demirel (prime minister for five terms in total between 1965 and 1993) appealed to the conservative sensibilities of his provincial base with talk of Islam and the Turkish nation and warned that the centre-left represented “the road to Moscow.” The cadres of the newly formed fascist Nationalist
Action Party (MHP) – known as the Grey Wolves – also took to the streets to intimidate and murder progressives and minorities in the name of the ethnic Turkish nation, often with the blessing of the state. Meanwhile, the Islamist National Salvation Party (MSP), founded by Erdoğan’s mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, denounced the “snake oil” of western ideologies such as Marxism and Kemalism and urged their compatriots to embrace their Islamo-Turkish Ottoman roots.
The conservative Demirel, the fascist MHP, the Islamist MSP – these groups were different in many respects. But they were united in their hatred of the left and their championing of a heady mix of ethnic Turkism, piety and Ottoman nostalgia. Against the background of a struggling economy and street violence, these groups helped foster a new religious nationalism. In essence, they mobilised the pre-existing ethno-religious dimension of Turkish nationalism and put it to work in a new context, preparing the ground for the eventual rise of the AKP.
A brutal intervention
As the tumultuous 70s came to a close, religious nationalism received a boost from an unexpected source. In September 1980, amid violent clashes between the state-backed right and an insurgent left, the military once again took power. This time the generals’ intervention was brutal. Hundreds of thousands of people, particularly leftists, were arrested. Some were executed or disappeared. Having secured their grip on the country, the putschists proceeded to propagate a conservative ideology called the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, which they hoped would unite the divided polity and diffuse the appeal of radical ideologies.
The ploy backfired. The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis only served to legitimise religious politics. Mosques and religious schools sprouted up across the country.
Islamist activists, such as the followers of the scholar and preacher Fethullah Gülen, colonised the state bureaucracy. Thanks to the erstwhile defenders of the Kemalist revolution, who had managed to weaken any opposition, the Islamists now found it much easier to carry out what the left used to call “the long march through the
institutions”.
The Welfare Party (RP), Erbakan’s new Islamist group, was the main beneficiary. The increasingly religious public square created fertile terrain for his message. Thanks to the generals’ destruction of the left, the RP could also now court the urban working classes without any serious competition. It also benefited from the increasing economic clout of conservative religious entrepreneurs – or “Anatolian Tigers” – from Turkey’s smaller towns. The RP, a party that Erbakan claimed had “believers” rather than “members”, went from strength to strength during the 80s. By the mid-90s its rising star, one Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was mayor of Istanbul and Erbakan was prime minister.
Determined to turn back the forward march of Islamism, in 1997 the generals threatened a coup. Erbakan’s government collapsed. In protest, Erdoğan read an incendiary poem to a crowd of supporters: “Our minarets are our bayonets, / Our domes are our helmets, / Our mosques are our barracks.” He was subsequently arrested for “inciting hatred”. While he had acquired an international profile as mayor of Istanbul, it was his imprisonment that really made the future president. Erdoğan was now a martyr, a victim of the “Kemalist elite”, an innocent politician thwarted by an unaccountable military.
Promised change
By the turn of the century, Turkey was struggling. Economic collapse, unstable coalition governments, a catastrophic earthquake that left over 17,000 dead – the country was ready for a change. After the threatened coup, the Islamist movement regrouped and formed the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and a change is just what they promised.
For a time, it appeared as if they could deliver. Elected in 2002, the AKP played down its more radical inheritance and presented itself as a moderate conservative party. It promised and – thanks in large part to the reforms of the preceding government – could deliver a certain level of economic development. It courted the European Union and talked of liberalisation and peace with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which had been fighting a separatist insurgency since the 80s. In particular, Erdoğan and his coterie dedicated themselves to constraining the power of the military: no more would the generals intervene in democratic politics.
The AKP were successful on this last point. But the result was not democracy. Between 2008 and 2011, Erdoğan curtailed the political power of the military through a series of show trials, with the help of his Gülenist allies.
He has since consolidated his power, following a path taken by many authoritarians in the 2010s. This process only intensified after his former Gülenist allies attempted to oust him in 2016. The president once compared democracy to a tram: “You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” With many opponents in prison, and a cowed media and judiciary, it is clear that Erdoğan long ago stepped off the tram.
Before the recent election, many speculated that the struggling state of Turkey’s economy and the shockingly inadequate response from Ankara to February’s devastating earthquake would bring down the incumbent government, just as similar conditions did in 2002. History, however, was not to repeat itself.
Erdoğan runs Turkey today as his own personal fiefdom. While this might in some ways mirror the one-party state built by Atatürk during the republic’s early years, ideologically it is very different. The modern state established by Kemal was legitimised by a secular Turkish nationalism woven together out of the ruins of a collapsed empire and a struggle for independence. Erdoğan’s rule is legitimised by the mix of Islamism and ethnic nationalism that first came to the fore during the right’s Cold War struggle against the left. There may be a family resemblance between father and son; but there are also radical differences.
This article is from New Humanist's autumn 2023 issue. Subscribe now.
