Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural monuments and beautiful beaches. ‘A model partner’, Obama affirmed in 2009, as he congratulated the leader of the Justice and Development Party (akp).footnote1 Today, with perhaps 50,000 oppositionists in jail, including scores of journalists, politicians, lawyers and civil servants, Turkey is exporting radical Islamist mercenaries from its Syrian enclaves to Libya and Azerbaijan, clashing with France, Greece, Israel and Cyprus over gas-drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean and imposing a brutal occupation regime on swathes of what was once the autonomous Kurdish zone of Rojava. Predictably, the cry of ‘Who lost Turkey?’ has gone up within the American foreign-policy establishment, where the main concern is Ankara’s purchase of Russian missiles.footnote2
Strategically situated at the nexus of Europe, the ex-Soviet borderlands, Iran, Iraq and Syria, a nato power with a us-equipped air force, a 350,000-strong land army and a large if resource-poor economy: few would dispute the significance of Turkey for the existing geopolitical order. But little is to be gained by swapping left-liberal illusions in an earlier democratic-era Erdoğanism for moralistic denunciations of Islamo-fascism, or imperial threats that Turkey needs to be taught a lesson—or, as Biden has put it, ‘to pay a price’.footnote3 To understand the shifts the regime has undergone requires also grasping the limits of the ‘Turkish model’. These in turn need to be seen in the context of a changing world-economic situation and a regional order fractured by the nato powers themselves.
A caution is in order here. The role of the security forces, combined with a modernizing political leadership, was foundational for the new Turkish state that emerged from the 1920s from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire; a state constituted—after the extermination of Armenians, the expulsion of the Greeks and the linguistic assimilation of the Kurds—on the basis of one religion, one language, one flag. But the importance of the military, both domestically and in Turkish foreign relations, was reinforced under us hegemony during the Cold War, when Washington built Turkey into a frontline nato bulwark on the ussr’s southwestern border. For such a vital ally, with such impeccably ‘secular’ military and political elites, the us was prepared to turn a blind eye to operations that trampled on every democratic norm: Ankara’s 1974 military annexation of Northern Cyprus and expulsion of the Greek–Cypriot inhabitants; the 1980–83 military junta, which broke the militant trade-union movement and the powerful, if fragmented, far left through a policy of mass imprisonment, torture and executions, paving the way in Chilean fashion for neoliberalization under the Özal government; the 1990s counter-insurgency against the Kurds, in which us weaponry was used to bomb and strafe the starving villagers of the southeast, killing an estimated 30,000. Only the first of these received (short-lived) us sanctions, and throughout the 1990s Turkey’s crisis-ridden economy received privileged treatment from the imf.
Needless to say, this history bears upon continuing us and eu strategies to set the Turkish state to work on the West’s behalf, whether as overseer of refugees, policer of jihadis or usaf base for further wars. At the same time, the akp view of Turkey as maltreated by arrogant Western powers is grossly self-serving, given its own murderous record and neo-imperial vainglory. Against both viewpoints, this essay will argue that there is a complex but legible state logic behind Ankara’s twists and turns since 2012, even if these do not—cannot—amount to a coherent new course. Turkey’s latest adventures in the Eastern Mediterranean and Nagorno-Karabakh, its partisanship in Libya and its bunkering in Idlib, are outcomes of the multiple impasses—economic, national, geopolitical—that have confronted the liberal-Islamic ‘Turkish model’ since the early 2010s. They also demonstrate the limits of Erdoğanism’s attempt to construct a new ‘national’ route beyond them, given the constraints of the domestic situation and the crowded regional landscape within which it operates. What follows will briefly sketch the lineaments of the akp’s first hegemonic formula and register the shocks that rocked it, before examining the novel regime structure that has emerged.
In earlier contributions I have argued that the objective effect of the Erdoğan regime’s hegemony was a double absorption—in the sense proposed by Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution—of the radical energies of Islamist revolt against the old ruling order. Through the mediation of the akp, those energies would be absorbed, first, into domestic consumerism, glossed by patriarchal piety; and second, into the political-economic and military structures of the West, legitimated on the one hand by Islamic solidarity—Turkish occupation forces protecting Afghans from the depredations of the non-Muslim nato troops —and, on the other, by old-fashioned nationalism: Erdoğan’s backing for the us invasion of Iraq was read in the coffee-shops as a deep game to strengthen ‘our’ position. This was the formula of the ‘Turkish model’ that the Obama Administration aimed to see extended across the Middle East in the early days of the Arab Spring.footnote4
The initial appeal of the akp—as a voice for ordinary patriotic Muslims, long denied recognition by Turkey’s ‘secular elites’—was primarily to provincial business owners in the Anatolian heartlands and the conservative petty bourgeoisie. But around this social core the Erdoğanists constructed a much broader hegemonic bloc. Its cadre included the shadowy network of believers run by the cleric Fethullah Gülen, with extensive influence among the police. It also spoke to the millions driven off the land by cuts to agricultural subsidies, or the forced clearances of the Kurdish southeast, and hurled pell-mell into precarious proletarianization on the outskirts of the big cities, where the mosque and its school offered a chance of order and advancement amid the chaos of urban life; something like this was Erdoğan’s own story. Positioning itself as a new-model Muslim party, an eastern equivalent of Christian Democracy—pro-market, pro-nato, pro-eu—the akp also won the support of many Turkish Kurds and most of the left-liberal intelligentsia, who saw it as an expression of civil society against the authoritarian state and the best hope for eu entry.
Every successful hegemonic appeal is also a polarization. After winning its first landslide in 2002, the akp positioned itself with growing confidence against Turkey’s ‘secular elites’—the big bourgeoisie, the upper ranks of the military and intelligence services—which likewise had little but contempt for the ill-educated provincial Islamists. Its struggle against the military leadership was waged by juridical means. In 1997, the Army High Command had intervened to remove an earlier Islamist government and purge the security forces of its supporters (Gülen himself fled to the us to escape arrest in 1997 and has been there ever since, running his network long-distance). After 2008, the Erdoğanists turned the tables. In a series of long-running trials—the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer investigations—that dragged in scores of officers, they shored up their domestic position through a purge of the upper ranks, re-staffed by the rapid promotion of pro-akp or Gülenist officers. Quite what else was happening here, and how the trials related to the ongoing nato modernization of the Army, remains shrouded in mystery. But it was clear that the Erdoğanists and Gülenists aimed not to dismantle the authoritarian-militarist structures of the Turkish state, but to infiltrate and re-populate them. This, nevertheless, was the liberal-Islamic model propounded to the Muslim world.