Over the past few months I have been, step by-step, constructing an in-depth explanation of exactly why the U.S. intelligentsia have read the current political situation in Turkey so completely and disastrously wrong. In this and the next column connected to this particular issue, I want to explore an example that illuminates one aspect of this issue.
As should be clear from my previous articles for Serbestiyet (1), I consider the Saidian critique of academic and mainstream media orientalism to be an effective tool for understanding the current conception of Turkey in U.S. media, policy-making, and punditry circles. One of the most striking consequences of the latent orientalism present even in the progressive think-tanks and publications is their inability to comprehend that Turkey’s Kemalist political system and mentality were never actually democratic; instead, they were “progressive” only in the sense of a top-down, authoritarian imposition of radical, prescriptive social reforms. This means that the political program of the AKP, which draws on the masses for its political support (which was never true for the Kemalists), is fundamentally more democratic, and in the current political atmosphere also much more progressive, than any of the major political alternatives now available to Turkish voters. This, coupled with the fact that the AKP has proven itself able to bring about major improvements for the bulk of Turkish society, is why the AKP continues to win elections.
In the U.S., however, academics and journalists interested in Turkey have rather lost the thread concerning Turkey’s domestic (social and political) transformation. The more fundamental reasons are rooted in the dominant conception of Turkey in U.S. academia since the Cold War. But there are also some more short-term and conjunctural factors affecting the ability of U.S. academicians and pundits to grasp the nature of Turkey’s current political scene. One of them is that Turkish academics publishing in English on Turkish political and social issues come, by-and-large, from the Kemalist secular elites. This means that their anti-AKP and anti-Tayyip Erdoğan writings are sourced in class and ideological animosity, and have little or nothing to do with any sort of serious academic analysis.
Also in the past I have noted that US academics’ and political commentators’ lack of ability to understand Turkish politics has resulted in some strange phenomena. Publications and figures who would, under normal circumstances, be considered leftist or progressive, end up writing or saying things about Turkish politics that echo, imitate, or (worse) even inspire the rhetoric from traditional right-wing ideologues like Michael Rubin, former Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Pollock, Daniel Pipes, and David P. Goldman (2). Apparently, a disturbing lack of self-examination has enabled this situation to continue for many years in the midst of the general rush to lambast the AKP and President Erdoğan for whatever topic may have been the focus of the moment’s feverish and overwrought debate.
Since the AKP’s resounding electoral victory in November’s snap parliamentary ballot, the international press, with some exceptions, has been notably more subdued in its coverage of Turkey’s politics. The international think-tank and academic community, on the other hand, has been less quick to feel concern.
The most recent example that caught my attention was the prolix article contributed to the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) by Ümit Cizre, a professor at İstanbul’s Şehir University (İŞU). MERIP, as many readers probably know, was founded in the early 1970s specifically as a progressive alternative to the orientalist narrative that then dominated academic and press coverage of the Eastern Mediterranean. This, of course, makes the appearance of Cizre’s article in MERIP all the more disappointing, even painful.
Cizre’s article, titled “Leadership Gone Awry: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Two Turkish Elections” (3), is a late, lengthy installment in a narrative that is now on its last legs, the “creeping authoritarianism!” zombie analysis (4) of Turkish politics. On Cizre’s İŞU page, her research interests are described as “…democracy problems, civil-military relations, democratic governance of security sector, nationalist and right-wing politics in Turkey” (5). Since Cizre’s academic career covers more than thirty years, the reader would expect a thorough analysis of the topic promised by the title.
Unfortunately, even in the initial paragraphs of Cizre’s discussion, the reader quickly realizes that expectations will not be fulfilled. For example, Cizre refers to 2015 as Turkey’s annus horribilis, an entirely confounding analysis for a year in which 50 percent of the Turkish people saw the party of their political choice forming a government after the November elections. For those voters might 2015 have been, instead, an annus mirabilis? Has Cizre, born in 1946, totally forgotten what military coups, and especially the 1980 coup, were like? Has Cizre forgotten the political instability and violence that permeated Turkish society from the late 1960s to the 1990s?
In actuality, Cizre quickly reveals her intent. After several prefatory paragraphs, Cizre begins a subsection, titled “Erdoğan’s Penchant for Power,” with the following sentences:
In the parliamentary elections of June 7, 2015, traditional notions of representative democracy were affirmed and the “people’s voice” interrupted the inexorable 13-year rise of the AKP, seeming to bring its decade in power to an abrupt halt. In the 69 years since the beginning of the multi-party era in Turkey, “the people” have lived up to the representative democratic ideal more than once, thwarting several governments whose program had deviated from the original platform or become out of touch with reality.
What exactly does Cizre mean by the “people’s voice”? In the June 2015 elections, the AKP received 42 percent of the popular vote; only the intricacies of Turkey’s electoral laws determine that a party with 42 percent of the ballots cannot form the government when there are also three other parties in the National Assembly (TBMM). The “people’s voice” still said “AKP” by a wide margin since the nearest political competitor, the CHP, received 15 percentile points less of the vote.
And also, what does Cizre mean by “the original platform” from which various governments are said to have subsequently deviated? If by this she means the Kemalist, even Atatürkist “original platform” of the Republic, the key electoral results of the past 69 years were 1950, 1965, 1983, and 2002, in all of which the Turkish people emphatically rejected the political prescriptions of the military-bureaucratic elite, whatever political party happened to be carrying them. If she means that the DP in the 1950s (on the way to the 27th May 1960 military takeover), then the AP in the 1960s and again in the 70s (on the way to the 12th March 1971 and the 12th September 1980 military takeovers), “deviated from their original programs and became out of touch with reality,” and that now, it is the AKP that is similarly “deviating” from its original program and “becoming out of touch with reality,” this becomes nothing but playing with very inflammable material indeed, implying that a similar fate (like 1960, 1971 or 1980) might be in store for the AK Party.
However, there is a deeper, more problematic dimension to Cizre’s discussion, which I will dwell on in the next article. In the quote above, Cizre focuses on “the people” and the expression of the “the people’s voice” through the ballot box. For the past four years, at least, Turkish politics has been subjected to the machinations of an extra-political force that is neither transparent nor has gained its power from “the people” or their democratic voice. And despite spending more than 5000 words providing what is supposed to be an in-depth analysis on contemporary Turkish politics, not even once does Cizre mention that name essential to understanding Turkish domestic events of the past four years: Fethullah Gülen.
NOTES
(1) See, for example: “Covering Turkey,” 27 September 2015; “Interpreting the Turkish Republic,” 13 October 2015; “Knowledge, Power, and the Turkish Republic,” 18 October 2015; and “Fulfilling the Conditions for Cultural Interpretation,” 16 November 2015.
(2) See: “Reminiscences of Bush’s Middle East Democracy Project,” 16 July 2015.
(3) http://www.merip.org/mer/mer276/leadership-gone-awry.
(4) This usage of “zombie” is adapted from Paul Krugman; for a definition, see: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/obamacare-and-the-cockroaches/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body.
(5) http://www.sehir.edu.tr/en/Pages/Academic/AcademicList.aspx?akademid=74.