Changing Turkey in a Changing World

Dr. Roy Karadag is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. His doctoral project on “Political Capitalisms: Power, Elites and the Economy in Turkey and the Philippines” has been completed in November 2009. His research interests include Comparative Politics, Historical Sociology, Theories of the State and State Formation, Middle East Studies, and Political Islam. His publications include two book chapters in German (2006) mit Oliver Schlumberger: Demokratisierung und Transitionsforschung. In: Barrios, Harald/Christoph Stefes (Hrsg.): Einführung in die Comparative Politics. München: Oldenbourg, 227-250. (Lehr- und Handbücher der Politikwissenschaft); and (2007): Jenseits von Kultur und Ökonomie: Rivalisierende Erklärungsansätze zum Klientelismus und ihre Relevanz für die arabische Welt. In: Albrecht, Holger (Hrsg.): Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Vorderen Orient. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 243-262.

CHANGINGTURKEY: Could you tell us a bit about your recent research on Turkey, “Neoliberal Restructuring in Turkey: From State to Oligarchic Capitalism” which appeared as a discussion paper in the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies?

DR. ROY KARADAG: I wrote this paper after finishing my dissertation “Political Capitalisms: Power, Elites and the Economy in Turkey and the Philippines” to highlight the implications of post-1980 capitalist transformations in the Turkish case. The aim was to counter those scholars arguing in the neoliberal manner that, basically, Turkey’s woes with its non-democratic traditions would go away as long as elites stick to the global prescriptions of deregulation and privatization. In order to really understand where this wave of neoliberalization has led, we have to analyze the historical foundations of capitalist order in Turkey as well as the internal change dynamics that became manifest in the course of the twentieth century. Turkey’s state capitalism eroded due to the dynamism introduced by electoral institutions.

However, the adoption of neoliberal policies to re-structure state and capitalism lead to the emergence not of liberal, but of oligarchic capitalism, which is based on low degrees of infrastructural power and competitive politics. Family-business groups organized within TÜSIAD represent the core of oligarchs maintaining beneficial access to state resources and capturing the re-organized state apparatus. In this sense, the Turkish transformation is similar to other neoliberal projects around the world. What makes the Turkish case so interesting is the culmination of two developments: the erosion of political authority in the 1990s during which the fragmentation of the political sphere further undermined the capacities of the state apparatus and the coming to power of the moderate Islamists who now have at their disposal substantial capacities to financially strengthen their own business constituencies and who similarly transgress formal modes of conduct.

As a result, the days of a closed oligarchy seem to be over. Yet, the days of oligarchic capitalism are not, as it is not ended by the propagated new, Islamic Calvinist ethos, but by credible steps to decouple the spheres of elite politics and business, particularly through restructuring issues of political finance and strengthening supervisory agencies irrespective of political power interests. However, this seems to be neither viable nor to be in the interest of any party as powerful as the JDP.

CHANGINGTURKEY: What are the potential limitations of the existing analyses on Turkish politics and society, in your opinion? Could you suggest any gaps in the literature or any potential pitfalls?

DR. ROY KARADAG: As many other scholars on Turkey have noted, what we currently experience is a deep polarization of society that is easiest to explain by dichotomous characterizations of ‘Kemalist’ and ‘Islamist’ blocs who unyieldingly struggle for supremacy in politics and the public sphere. Although there are obvious material reasons for this bifurcation, we should not give in to a possible politicization of scholarship. Pro-AKP scholars (like Hakan Yavuz) would then struggle with their anti-AKP rivals (e.g. Soner Cagaptay) over the ‘real’ democratic ambitions of the ruling party and frame their theoretical and empirical insights accordingly. It may be impossible to hide one’s own political identity during the most recent contentious episodes, and I myself must admit that at times I tend to fail this test as well, but we should nevertheless try to refrain from politicizing our findings so as not to render them illegitimate within the academic field.

There is indeed one substantive gap in social science works in Turkey, which concerns the delicate issues of corruption and clientelism. While there have been major studies on the role of corruption, patron-client relations and party patronage on Turkey of the 1970s and 1980s – in line with the global application of these concepts -, and several articles on cronyism in the context of financial liberalization and the “corrupt 1990s”, this literature is, in terms of quality and quantity, not comparable to similar studies on Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the post-Communist and even the western world. When we talk about clientelism and corruption in Turkey, we still refer to the works of Özbudun, Heper and Bugra, which are empirically de-coupled from contemporary political structures and developments. This reflects a major gap that should be filled, otherwise we might believe those scholars telling us, according to the old ‘doux commerce’ assumption, that economic liberalization per se eradicates all forms of political illiberalism, which of course does not reflect socio-political realities.

CHANGINGTURKEY: Could you suggest any Turkey-focused research you’ve found valuable to our readers?

DR. ROY KARADAG: I am always struck by scholarship that through new access to historical or contemporary sources or new theoretical formulations helps me to further understand the complexities and discontinuities of Turkish history. Contrary to the developmental models of Marxists and modernization theorists that introduced me to the Ottoman roots of modern Turkey, such works tend to uncover the contradictions of ‘Kemalist’, ‘Islamist’ or other modernist forms of representing the past. For those parts of my dissertation dealing with the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, I stumbled over a variety of new as well as old books.

First, and foremost, is Karen Barkey’s “Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective” (2008) that nicely highlights the temporal differences in terms of identity boundaries and the social organization of dissent. Also, Ryan Gineras’ “Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912-1923” (2009) traces the multiplicity of regionally-based orders of violence and tells a different story of state consolidation between the Balkan Wars and the founding of the Republic that defies the official ethno-nationalist rhetoric according to Atatürk’s Nutuk. Finally, I would suggest interested scholars to read again Erik Jan Zürcher’s “The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905-1926” (1984) through which we get an encompassing overview of the rivalries within the national movement after World War I in order to understand how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk managed to gain his unchallenged position by disempowering potential rivals. In a similar vein, Holly Shissler’s “Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey” (2003) traces the worlds of Turkishness each of which could have been realized had there been slightly different outcomes of those highly contingent periods.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author/s who retain the copyright.