For the gatekeepers of established wisdom in the West, the rise of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (akp) was one of the great success stories of our age. Obama ranked its leader Erdoğan among his five most trusted friends on the world stage; David Cameron promised to be Ankara’s ‘strongest possible advocate’ for eu membership. The Financial Times gushed over the akp’s ‘constitutional revolution’ and its record of ‘good governance and strong growth’, while the nyt hailed the emergence of a ‘vibrant, competitive democracy’ which was ‘setting a constructive example for the entire Muslim Middle East’.footnote1 The European Union gave its seal of approval by formally opening accession talks with Ankara, despite the presence of 30,000 Turkish soldiers on the territory of one of its own member-states, Cyprus. The ‘Turkish model’, supposedly melding Islamic piety with adherence to democratic norms, reached its apotheosis after the Arab rebellions of 2011, when Islamist parties in Egypt and Tunisia pledged to follow the akp’s example, and Erdoğan claimed the right to determine the fate of Turkey’s neighbours.
The stench of tyranny emanating from Turkish soil is now so overpowering that even the most sycophantic commentators have been forced to murmur their disapproval and deplore the akp’s supposed regression from its formerly exalted standards. In reality, there was never any golden age of liberalization under Erdoğan. The praise he attracted from Western elites as a ‘moderate’ and a ‘reformer’ was motivated above all by the akp’s staunchly pro-American foreign policy and readiness to maintain good relations with Israel (the same criteria that earn the Saudi regime its ludicrous plaudits as a moderating force in the region). It also helped that nato’s favourite Islamists had taken up the neoliberal agenda with gusto, privatizing state assets into the hands of akp cronies—including Erdoğan’s close relatives. The akp’s attitude to democracy was purely instrumental: inside the party, Erdoğan ruled without challenge, and the only flutter of independent thought by its mps, a vote against collusion with the us invasion of Iraq in 2003, was briskly stamped out by party enforcers. On the key taboos of past and present for Turkish nationalism—the Armenian genocide and the oppression of the Kurds—the akp had no intention of loosening the shackles. Turkish liberals hoped that Erdoğan’s government would clip the army’s wings, but the purges of the officer corps were intended to secure its grip on power, not to establish civilian supremacy. Critical journalists quickly discovered the limits of the akp’s much-vaunted ‘Islamic liberalism’.