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Quote of the Week: Muslimism in Turkey and New Religious Orthodoxies

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on April 17, 2013 |

Excerpt from Neslihan Çevik & George M. Thomas (2012), Muslimism in Turkey and New Religious Orthodoxies, Ortadoğu Etütleri, Volume 3, No 2, pp.143-181.

The conservative Islamic regime in Saudi Arabia and the Islamist regimes and political forces in Iran and Afghanistan, in the aftermath of September 11, present a global image of Islam as a fundamentalist if not radically aggressive religion. This image fits nicely within International Relations (IR) theory that views deeply felt religious commitments within world politics as a serious problem and deeply felt Islam especially, given arguments that it is as an intrinsically “clashing civilization.” IR reinforces the popular question of why there has not developed a moderate Islam. This question takes on urgency in the face of democratic movements throughout Islam-majority countries in North Africa and the Middle East. What might be meant by moderate, however, is vague and alluded to primarily in the negative: moderate Islam (or moderate religion generally) is not violent, not repressive, not fundamentalist, and not theocratic.

Candidates for the label of moderate Islam are not uncommon and the most prominent one is the Islamic revival in Turkey. Yet, the ability to recognize a negatively defined case is difficult especially given normative concerns. If something is defined by the absence of an action, one can never categorize a case because it is always possible that the action will be committed sometime in the future. Islam in Turkey might sometime in the future become fundamentalist. This categorical blinder is reinforced by entrenched views that strongly held religions must be repressive: Islam in Turkey only seems moderate but it really is a front for a more aggressive Islamism. We argue that we need to rethink our understanding of religion, religion in modern democratic polities, and religion in the international.

We argue that the new Muslimist orthodoxy does not conform to conventional prescriptions. Neither liberal adaptation nor fundamentalist/Islamist rejection, it embraces many aspects of modern life while submitting that life to a sacred, moral order. Muslimism is a hybrid identity frame empowering engagements between Islam and secular modernity. More complex than cultural imports of fundamentalist religious movements and than what Roy has called ‘Sharia plus electricity’, Muslimists reinterpret theology (from sources such as hadith to symbols such as the veil) and restructure their everyday life by formulating new lifestyles, practices and institutions as they engage modernity. Within the frame of Muslimism, the main aim is not capturing the state to Islamize the society nor is it Islamizing the community to eventually bring on an Islamic state. The main concern is to contrive a lifestyle in which the ‘individual-believer’ can be incorporated into modernity without being marginalized and while preserving an Islam-proper living. Thus, Muslimism is neither state nor community-centered but individual-oriented.

We identify the roots of Muslimism in 1980s liberalizing policies. More than deregulating the market, liberalizing policies dramatically undermined statism (which promoted a total exclusion of religion from the public space) and opened up new political, cultural and economic spaces for religious mobilization. The retreat of statism also weakened Islamist establishments/expressions (developed as a reaction to statist policies) enabling religious actors to contest existing religious discourse and re-articulate religious identity. Moreover, liberalizing policies generated a new group of pragmatic Muslim entrepreneurs who wanted to take advantage of the new opportunities and be incorporated into modernity. Freed both from statist and Islamist prescriptions, these Muslim entrepreneurs became the prime agents of Muslimism.

Conditions undermining statism and traditional Islamic establishments existed prior to the neo-liberal transition in Turkey, yet in each case conditions for Muslimism were limited. Opportunity spaces were repressed by secularist backlashes and (or) mobilizing actors were confined to traditional religious sectors unable to articulate an alternative religious discourse. Moreover, the necessary conditions for the rise of Muslimism were hindered further by the external conditions enforcing both the statist and Islamist frames (e.g. the Cold War or 1979 Iranian revolution). In contrast, the necessary domestic conditions for Muslimism were coupled with a favoring IR context following the neo-liberal transition, giving Muslimism further support. The end of the Cold War, Turkey’s relations with the IMF, the US and NATO, lack of any serious external military threat, but in particular the increasing prospect of entering the EU further strengthened Muslimist positions undermining statist and Islamist ones.

New religious orthodoxies question the received binaries of IR theory: secular/religious, internal/external, culture/political, modern/traditional. They call for a more cultural and institutional approach to international relations and in particular to the place of religion.

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Quote of the Week: EU Member States’ Perceptions on Turkey’s Accession to the EU

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on March 9, 2013 | 1 Comment »

İçerik

 

A publication of the Center for European Studies, Middle East Technical University

Editors: Sait Akşit, Özgehan Şenyuva, Çiğdem Üstün

Contents

Sait Akşit, Çiğdem Üstün

Introduction: In Search of an EU-wide Debate on Turkey ………. 6

Nicolas Monceau

French Perceptions…………………………………………………………… 16

Katrin Böttger, Eva-Maria Maggi

German Perceptions …………………………………………………………. 32

Yvonne Nasshoven

Belgian Perceptions …………………………………………………………. 46

Emiliano Alessandri with Sebastiano Sali

Italian Perceptions……………………………………………………………. 58

Eduard Soler i Lecha & Irene García

Spanish Perceptions …………………………………………………………. 74

Athanasios C. Kotsiaros

Greek Perceptions ……………………………………………………………. 90

Gunilla Herolf

Swedish Perceptions ………………………………………………………. 104

Cengiz Günay

Austrian Perceptions ………………………………………………………. 118

Costas Melakopides

Greek Cypriot Perceptions………………………………………………. 132

Petr Kratochvíl, David Král, Dominika Dražilová

Czech Perceptions………………………………………………………….. 150

Adam Szymański

Polish Perceptions………………………………………………………….. 166

Iulia Serafimescu, Mihai Sebe

Romanian Perceptions ……………………………………………………. 186

Marin Lessenski

Bulgarian Perceptions …………………………………………………….. 204

Özgehan Şenyuva, Sait Akşit

Turkey Seen from the EU: Conclusions ……………………………. 218

 

Excerpt from the Introduction

 

We believe that there are serious, damaging myths and prejudices in Turkey about the EU, on the one hand, and in the EU member states about Turkey, on the other. One of the starting points of the project on Strengthening and Integrating Academic Networks (SInAN) was to question the myths and prejudices embedded in this ambiguous relationship. This edited volume is an attempt to outline how Turkey’s candidacy is perceived by different actors in a number of EU member states. While Turkish membership to the European Union, its opportunities and challenges for all parties are widely discussed, it is rather difficult to find comprehensive analysis that brings together the positions and arguments of different actors in different countries. In fact, at a very general level, it is argued that Turkey’s accession into the European Union is one of the most controversial and divisive topics deeply dividing both the EU governments and their citizens. Indeed, there is very limited literature on the European perceptions on Turkey’s membership into the EU, and almost none that tries to tackle all relevant stakeholders, such as the government, the opposition, the public and the elites, by exploring their views and examining the media coverage of those views within different countries…

Turkey Watch addresses one general question, which is the following: How has Turkey’s candidacy been perceived in EU member states between the years 2006 and 2009?

We asked different experts from the member states to take up the question, and to give qualitative insights by considering the perceptions of some of the main actors in their respective countries: the governments, the opposition parties, the civil society organisations and the media…

With the various country studies, we have tried to find answers to the following questions, through a consideration of the period between 2006 and 2009:

  • • How strong is the debate on Turkey?
  • • How informed is the debate on Turkey?
  • • What forms the basis of the perceptions of the different actors?
  • • Are there certain myths and prejudices that dominate the debate on Turkey in these countries?
  • • What are the reasons and motives in support for or opposition to Turkey’s membership?
  • • What are some of the perceived opportunities and challenges presented by Turkey’s membership?
  • • Is there convergence of arguments in favour of or against Turkey on a cross-country basis?
  • • Should perceptions on Turkey’s membership be considered within a broader context such as that of future of Europe?

 

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The quote of the week: ‘Referendum Campaigns in Polarized Societies: The Case of Turkey’ by Atikcan and Oge

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on January 8, 2013 |

Ece Özlem Atikcan and Kerem Öge (2012) ’Referendum Campaigns in Polarized Societies: The Case of Turkey’, Turkish Studies, 13:3, 449-470

“Can the referendum method be used in deeply polarized societies without invoking existing cleavages? If not, these cleavages could easily anchor referendum results, suggesting that different referendum proposals could repeatedly be treated as the same one, culminating in predictable results. This, in turn, raises doubts on the appropriateness of the referendum mechanism in such societies. This question is tackled by studying two recent Turkish constitutional referenda, which took place in 2007 and 2010. Research shows that the way political actors frame the referendum vote-in-referendumdebate determines the degree to which existing beliefs get reflected in the referendum vote. If political parties treat referenda as elections, voters’ predispositions are more likely to be reinforced, and the vote is likely to be more partisan. Further research is necessary to make a full and direct comparison of referendum and election voting behavior. The kind of data required for a comprehensive analysis is not available yet. A broader issue that deserves attention is whether some referendum questions lend themselves more easily to polarization than others. Apart from the previous discussion on the familiarity and complexity of the referendum proposals, certain issues might simply be less conducive for a partisan campaign, and thereby lead to different party strategies. That is, they might not carry the potential to be linked to existing societal cleavages. By drawing on the Turkish experience, we showed that when issues have similar mobilization potential, framing of political parties makes a difference. A cautious comparison of cases with similar contexts and actors but different types of proposals could shed further light on the significance of the referendum question.

Another related question is, given the likelihood of a partisan debate, is there any way to ensure a thorough discussion of the contents of a referendum proposal? One possibility is to ask the public to vote on the reform items individually or as sets of related reforms. Bundling unrelated reform items together can easily spark a onesided debate on the whole package, as was the case in the 2010 Turkish constitutional referendum. In fact, the Council of Europe’s “Code of Good Practice on Referendums” calls for “unity of content” and stipulates that electors must not be called to vote simultaneously on several questions without any intrinsic link, given that they may be in favor of one and against another. Therefore, splitting the referendum vote into a number of questions could enhance the debate and avoid placing too much or too little emphasis on different items in the package.

The polarization in Turkish politics and society is not a temporary phenomenon as its causes are deeply rooted in long-term factors such as modernization, industrialization and urbanization. However, the extent to which it shapes political choices depends on political actors. As the comparison of the 2007 and 2010 referenda demonstrate, societal cleavages are sharpened when political actors capitalize on them, and mitigated when they do not. As such, the future of Turkish democracy will largely be shaped by Turkey’s ability to have genuine debates on the upcoming reforms.”

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A Critique of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis by Amartya Sen

Posted in REVIEW, THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on December 11, 2012 |

Amartya Sen (2006) “What Clash of Civilizations? Why religious identity isn’t destiny”, adapted from Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny published by Norton.

The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an “algorithm” to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term “algebra” comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise “Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah”). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi’s Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence.

A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in Samuel Huntington’s influential 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with Huntington’s approach begins with his system of unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with “Islamic civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” “Buddhist civilization,” and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of hardened divisiveness.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other partitions, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to “the Islamic world,” “the Western world,” “the Hindu world,” “the Buddhist world,” the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between40166 members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question “Do civilizations clash?” is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations.

This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history that overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.

The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove just as treacherous for programs of “dialogue among civilizations” (much in vogue these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings to one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.

Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for “other people” is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called “Islamic terrorism” in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine—Islam…

Religious or civilizational classification can be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lt. Gen. William Boykin’s blaring—and by now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: “I knew that my God was bigger than his,” and that the Christian God “was a real God, and [the Muslim's] was an idol.” The idiocy of such bigotry is easy to diagnose, so there is comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual “guided missiles” that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a “true Muslim” must be a tolerant individual (“so come off it and be peaceful”). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must ask whether it is necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a “true Muslim” must be like.

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A critique of “Imagined Communities” by Prof. Roland Robertson

Posted in REVIEW, THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on October 17, 2012 |

Excerpt from Roland Robertson (2011) “Global Connectivity and Global Consciousness”, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol.55, no. 10, pp. 1336–1345.

Benedict Anderson’s highly influential Imagined Communities (1983/1996) was first published during a period of a veritable outpouring of books and articles on nationalism, although it undoubtedly further accelerated interest in the latter. Many, if not most, of these were written within the Marxist tradition or were, certainly, related to it. Regardless of the Marxian context of this turn in sociology, political science, and history, among the principal reasons for this development were the breakup of various empires, most notably that of the Soviet Union, which, of course, did not finally collapse until the early 1990s. It would be remiss, however, were one to overlook such near classics as Deutsch’s (1953) and subsequent work in the Deutschian vein. Indeed, it is important to note some similarities in the work of Deutsch and that of Anderson, for both emphasize the significance of “horizontal” communication as a basis on which national sentiments arise (Taylor, 1998).

The main difference between the two, however, was that the idea of community was central for Anderson and not for Deutsch. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of “community” in the work of Anderson has never been fully explored, in contrast to the idea of “imagined.” More specifically, thorough attention should have been paid to the issue of the comparative genealogy (Robertson, 1998) of the concept of community. In fact, this may well be the major flaw in Anderson’s work. This lacuna has become a hallmark of contemporary social and cultural theory in general—namely, the strong tendency to consider the present as an extrapolation of a Western, more accurately, a North Western, past (Chatterjee, 1986). In this regard, it is necessary to explore the ways in which “community” has mutated both synchronically and diachronically—to analyze comparatively and temporally the different meanings of this concept.

…

Here I am primarily concerned with placing Anderson’s Imagined Communities in a broader context consisting of prior developments in social science and subsequent developments in the sphere of globalization theory. In the first respect I will briefly show that Anderson was, perhaps unwittingly, working within a long tradition of work on “imagination,” invention, social construction, and the like. Second, and more significantly, I relate the thrust of Imagined Communities to the growing problematic of the relation between connectivity and consciousness within globalization theory (Robertson, 2009). In particular, I am concerned with global connectivity and reflexive global consciousness. By far the majority of people working on the global circumstance define globalization as being centered on rapidly increasing interconnectedness or connectivity. A growing minority of globalization theorists, of which the present author is one, has, on the other hand, strongly emphasized that global consciousness has been equally, probably more, important.

Anderson’s contributions to the theory of nationalism are centered on the theme of connectivity, with consciousness (for which, for the moment, read imagined communities) arising out of or from this. In other words, the issue of imagination, or imagining, is secondary to socioeconomic relationships. This parallels the present and increasingly widespread concern with networks (Holton, 2008), these often being regarded as the foundation of consciousness and objective culture. This is not to say that consciousness can or should be equated with culture but is obviously related closely to it when one considers consciousness in its collective, Durkheimian form. The dominant strand of Anderson’s argument with respect to nationalism is that it has been through extensive “networking,” often across long distances, that nationalist sentiments have been created (Anderson, 1998). This approach, however, lacks attention to forms of mediation between social relations on the one hand and, in a broader sense, culture on the other. This is an old, long-standing problem in most Marxist— indeed, many sociological—traditions. Such traditions frequently present an entirely implausible conception of ideas arising directly—indeed, automatically and unreflectively— from relationships. However, in the traditions of such classical thinkers as Durkheim and Simmel, great attention has been paid to the representation of relationships or what has been called, with respect to Simmel, the culture of interaction. The connection between connectivity and consciousness has come, almost dramatically, to the fore with respect to the present series of planetary crises concerning such issues as climate change, economic chaos, and worldwide catastrophes of various kinds. In a phrase, it is the contemporary “perfect storm” that has led to the awareness of this crucial connection (Hird, 2010; Junger, 1997; Urry, 2010).

Some of the problems with which I have been dealing arise from the strong tendency to “think from the “local” to the “global,” this, in fact, being phenomenologically implausible. Even though we tend to assume consciously that the local is, so to speak, close and the global is distant, the “real” circumstance is that one cannot “imagine” a locality or a place in the absence of imagining a context in which the locality or the place is situated. Indeed, this is an Andersonian problem, in the sense that he himself tends to think outwardly rather than from the whole to the part…

Appadurai (1996, p. 55) extends Anderson’s thinking with particular reference to ethnography, in arguing that what is now needed are new ways of representing “the links between the imagination and social life . . . is increasingly a global and deterritorialized one.” Leaving on one side my strong reservations about the popular association between globality and deterritoriality, which I have always found extremely puzzling, Appadurai has been an important advocate of the idea that locality is produced by globality (Appadurai, 1996, pp. 178-200).

Mason (2000, p. 175) states that the very idea of a global community faces an initial challenge “in the form of the thesis that a community, by its very nature, requires ‘outsiders,’ i.e., some who do not belong to it.” The issue of alterity and most certainly the issue of relativization are almost ignored in Imagined Communities. Under conditions of rapid globalization, nation-states are steadily “squeezed” together, thus enhancing the need—particularly as perceived by national elites—to declare their identities through the accentuation and calibration of national memories, commemorations, rituals, and histories. This is to be seen particularly in the almost constant revision of educational syllabi in many countries. Here we confront yet another irony—in the sense that although the concern with national identity is clearly due to accelerating globalization, national identity itself often constitutes an ostensible attempt to resist or oppose globalization. Herein lies much of the contemporary confusion concerning globalization and the nation-state.

 

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The Quote of the Week: “A Symptomatic Analysis of the Justice and Development Party’s Populism in Turkey, 2007–2010″ by Şakir Dinçşahin

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on September 6, 2012 |

 

Şakir Dinçşahin (2012) ‘A Symptomatic Analysis of the Justice and Development Party’s Populism in Turkey, 2007–2010’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 618–640.

In this article, the symptomatic approach is preferred as a methodological tool over the other approaches because it brings the greatest clarity to the case at hand. In the context of the JDP’s populism, the discourse of the JDP leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will be analysed during and after the presidential election crisis in 2007. Thereby, answers will be sought for the following queries that are necessary for understanding contemporary politics in Turkey: How and why did the parliament fail to elect the president? Which symptoms of populism can be found in the discourse of Erdoğan following the presidential election crisis? Who are the people that Erdoğan and his party claim to represent, and who are ‘the enemies of the people’ that the party strives to combat? How were the people impeded from ruling the country? Which institutions were held responsible from the institutional inability and unfulfilled demand of popular sovereignty? Answers to these questions are sought below through the symptomatic approach to the study of populism (p.625).

[...] In the final stage of the presidential election process, the RPP, along with other opposition parties, boycotted the elections and declined to attend the parliamentary sessions. Despite that, the JDP attempted to elect the president via a majority vote without a quorum. This election was annulled by the Constitutional Court upon the appeal of the RPP. The first round of elections was repeated, but the JDP again failed to bring 367 MPs into the session. Gül had to withdraw his candidacy. As a result, the state institutions were gridlocked and failed to elect a president (p. 631).

This institutional inability facilitated the adoption of populist rhetoric in which society was divided into ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. From Erdoğan’s point of view, the institutions of the political establishment, including the Constitutional Court, the army, the presidency, the Council of Higher Education, the RPP and the NGOs organizing the republican rallies formed an alliance to prevent people from achieving power, and thereby constituted ‘the elite’ in opposition to ‘the people’. At the same time, the candidate of the JDP, backed by the majority in parliament, represented ‘the people’. By preventing the majority in parliament from electing the president, these institutions blocked ‘the will of the people’ and thereby became ‘the enemies of the people’ (631-32).

[...] As a result, Erdoğan’s electoral strategy paid off. The party won an electoral victory on 22 July with 47 per cent of the vote and 341 seats in parliament (p.634). [...] From the JDP viewpoint, it was clear that this time the presidential election would be a smooth process. Again Abdullah Gül was nominated amid comments in the media that the presidency was ‘the last fortress’ of the Republic to be conquered by the Islamists.[1] Some journalists and politicians openly stated that they would not recognize the presidency of Gül if he were elected.[2] Although Gül preferred to ignore such statements, they were nerve-wracking for Erdoğan, who proclaimed, ‘those who do not recognize the president of the people should give up their citizenship.’[3] In the middle of this media storm, the JDP government managed to get its candidate elected to office on 28 August. On the very day he was elected, President Gül expressed messages of loyalty to the Republic and to the principles of democracy.[4] Since then, he has worked in harmony with the JDP government. Nevertheless, he also earned a reputation for his moderate, democratic and conciliatory attitude towards all segments of society (p.635).

However, President Gül’s liberal understanding of democracy was hardly found in other circles of the JDP leadership. After victory in the presidential elections, the JDP wanted to conquer not only the electorate but the state as well. In its new term in office, the party captured the authoritarian state structure as consolidated by the military regime between 1980 and 1983. It began to implement policies to turn the centralized institutional framework of the state against ‘the elite’, including the bureaucracy, the media, universities and the NGOs that had opposed the party during its first term in office. In academia and intellectual circles of present-day Turkey, this process is either perceived as the normalization and demilitarization of Turkish democracy or as a campaign to restructure these institutions to make them compatible with the JDP’s Islamist ideology (pp.635-36).

[...] As a result, Prime Minister Erdoğan managed to win the hearts and votes of the masses, and the 2010 referendum also revealed that popular support for the party is still on the rise. However, these consecutive electoral victories have given the JDP government an illusion of unlimited power. Although the JDP sustained economic stability and implemented several democratization reforms during its first term (2002–7), the degree of tolerance for the opposition seems to be declining in Turkey since 2007.[5] After the presidential election crisis, the institutions that are perceived to be potential threats to the government are either politically constrained or restructured in such ways as to operate in line with the government’s will rather than as a check and balance to it. As Fehmi Koru, a liberal Islamist journalist once stated, ‘Erdoğan came to power resembling Barack Obama but he began to look more like George W. Bush in office.’[6] As the country moved towards another general election in 2011, a ‘with-us-or-against-us’ mentality seemed to prevail in Turkey’s politics, justified by a populist discourse (p.639).

 

[1] Zaman, 26 August 2007.

[2] Hürriyet, 21 August 2007.

[3] Hürriyet, 22 August 2007.

[4] Radikal, 29 August 2007.

[5] Relying on World Values Survey data, Yeşilada and Noordijk claim that rising religiosity and intolerance in Turkey can be traced back to 1995 and that they have become more visible under the JDP. See Birol A. Yeşilada and Peter Noordijk, ‘Changing Values in Turkey: Religiosity and Tolerance in Comparative Perspective’, Turkish Studies, 11: 1 (2010), pp. 9–27.

[6] NTVMSNBC, 6 November 2008, http://arsiv.ntvmsnbc.com/news/464982.asp (accessed 30 October 2010).

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The Quote of the Week: ‘Turkey and Postnational Europe’ by Feyzi Baban and Fuat Keyman

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on June 24, 2012 |

Excerpt from Feyzi Baban and Fuat Keyman (2008) “Turkey and Postnational Europe: Challenges for the Cosmopolitan Political Community”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 11 (1), p. 107-124.

Drawing on the cosmopolitan and post-civilizational perspective proposed by Beck, Habermas, and Delanty, we analyze the question of Turkey’s membership according to the premise that cosmopolitanism is a two-way relationship in which encounters with the Other require a mutual acceptance of living with differences and of the possibility of being transformed as a result of this encounter. What this means is that Turkey’s membership requires Europe to rethink its borders and identity. It also requires Turkey to rethink its identity and its commitment to the basic ideals that lie at the foundation of the EU. In other words, the potential for a pluralistic cosmopolitan future for the EU depends on the possibility of a postnational, multicultural, and global Europe with the capacity to contribute to the creation of democratic global governance, which in turn will depend to a large extent on both Europe’s decision about Turkey’s full membership and the ability of Turkey to deepen and consolidate its democracy (Leonard, 2005).In the following two sections we discuss the impact of Turkey’s membership on the cosmopolitan visions of the EU within the contexts of: (a) Europe’s geopolitical place in the global world, and (b) postnational Europe and European identity. Finally, in the third section, we turn our attention to what a cosmopolitan Europe means in terms of Turkey’s ability to consolidate its democracy and develop a multicultural understanding of modernity.

 

Debates about Turkey’s membership force Europe to discuss what are often contradictory visions of cosmopolitan Europe in the global world. For instance, one of the arguments in favor of Turkey’s membership is that in order to balance US unilateralism, the EU has to develop capabilities in the areas of military, population, and economic productivity and that Turkey’s incorporation into the union would only strengthen the EU’s role in the world (Ostanhof, 2005; Sauron, 2004). Another argument that supports the view that Turkey’s inclusion would contribute to the geopolitical standing of Europe is that Turkey’s membership provides Europe with the opportunity to make a statement that the European project is not culturally sealed but allows Europe to bridge the gap between the West and Muslim countries (Touraine, 2004; Touraine et al., 2004). In fact, this point about bridging the gap between the West and Muslim countries is commonly used to argue that, contrary to the US’ so-called war on terror, which is based on security and conflict, incorporating a predominantly Muslim country into the EU would resolve tensions that have emerged between the West and Muslim countries (Benessia, 2004). Some suggest that – just as Monnet defined securing peace among European nations as the main objective of the EU– Turkey’s membership would serve the purpose of providing peace among cultures (e.g. Duisenberg, 2005). Similarly, it is also argued that including Turkey would prevent Europe from becoming increasingly isolated, culturally closed, and irrelevant in the global state of affairs (e.g. Kuntz, 2004).

However, others argue equally forcefully that although Turkey’s geopolitical condition is hard to ignore, the cultural differences between Turkey and Europe are just too great, and incorporating Turkey into the EU would pose insurmountable institutional challenges and further weaken the EU’s place in world politics. According to this line of argument, as emphasized by French President Nicholas Sarkozy (Aybet, 2006: 538), it is therefore more desirable to establish a privileged partnership with Turkey that would be effective in incorporating Turkey’s geopolitical advantages into the sphere of European influence without importing cultural incompatibilities into the EU’s domestic sphere (Pfaff, 2004). Notwithstanding cultural differences, Turkey, with its large and relatively poor population, could become a big drain on EU resources and a potentially large source of immigration, which would overwhelm the domestic configurations of European countries (Welfens, 2004).

 

This polarized debate about Turkey’s geopolitical place within the European project is about not only the geopolitical place of Europe in the global world but also the cosmopolitan nature of Europe. The arguments for Turkey’s geopolitical importance are that Turkey’s inclusion into the European project would benefit Europe through the creation of a highly dynamic economy and the possibility of bridging the gap between Europe and Muslim countries; furthermore Europe’s geopolitical significance in the global world mostly depends on its ability to go beyond a culturally sealed and essentialist European identity. However, arguments against the geopolitical importance of Turkey tend to downplay cultural pluralism and do not necessarily acknowledge multiculturalism as an integral part of Europe’s geopolitical strength. This ambiguity between geopolitics and cultural identity is further pronounced in debates about the EU’s Postnational character and European identity.

 

Debates over the postnational future of the EU are also indications of the current impasse over whether further integration will remain simply one of economic and political cooperation or evolve in a more radical direction. Whether this postnational future should be based solely on a procedural framework – as described by Habermas’s constitutional patriotism – or whether it requires a more elaborate construction of political community that is similar to national public spheres, is further complicated by the increasing cultural diversity of the EU. It is now clear that Habermas’s emotionally disengaged constitutional patriotism may provide the EU with contractual governance, but it certainly lacks the emotional attachment that would turn the EU into a real political community. A crucial question surrounding the postnational future of the EU is whether it is desirable to form a European public sphere that would provide citizens of member states with political attachment and shared political and social space. The more important question is whether this European public sphere is going to be any different from its national counterparts. National public spheres are integral parts of the national narratives that play a crucial role in consolidating national identities. The long history of the modern national public sphere is full of examples of national publics that are not hospitable to plurality, difference, and multiculturalism. In fact, in most cases, national publics have been sites of homogenization and marginalization of differences in national discourses (Eley, 1992). Imagining a postnational Europe that depends on a European public sphere appears to run the risk of ignoring the growing cultural plurality within European countries. Yet, emulating the model of national public spheres is just what the EU appears to be doing in order to counter the deep loyalties felt by Europeans to their national identities (Shore, 2004). Methods such as the European flag and anthem, song contests, and projects geared towards rewriting European history are all similar to those used by nation-states to create consolidated national identities. Yet, creating a postnational Europe as another form of national project goes counter to the growing cultural plurality of Europe.

 

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The Quote of the Week: ‘Contributions of the Ottoman Empire to the Construction of Modern Europe’ by Dr. Serdar Palabiyik

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on March 22, 2012 |

Excerpt from Serdar Palabiyik (2005) ‘Contributions of the Ottoman Empire to the Construction of Modern Europe’, Middle East Technical University unpublished dissertation.Full text is available online at http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12606224/index.pdf

 

What do we mean by ‘Europe’? Is it a mere geographical entity with some predefined borders such as the Ural Mountains and the Straits? Or does it imply a common religion, namely Christianity, unifying different nations under a spiritual umbrella? Or is it a name of a common culture, a product of modern ages without any precursors before the period we label as ‘modernity’? These questions are quite difficult to answer, and this thesis does not claim to answer them. However, it argues that the ‘idea of Europe’ had always been present throughout history, although having different connotations depending on different perceptions. But among those different connotations, it was the ‘idea of Europe’ in the early modern period that resembled much to that of the modern ages, thus it will not be wrong to argue that the modern European identity had its roots in this significant transitional period [the period between 1450 and 1650].

Within the framework of this remarkable age, the interaction between ‘Europe’ and its eastern neighbor, the Ottoman Empire, was very significant. Founded in the early fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire expanded quickly towards the Balkans and reached to the Danubian basin within a century and a half. Thus, until the early modern period, Constantinople had just been conquered as well as Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. This rapid expansion contributed to the emergence of the modern European identity as well as for the emergence of the modern European state system. The continent had witnessed many intruders before the Ottomans but generally they were merely raiders, pillaging and plundering the regions that they had conquered, offering no alternative political and economic system. Ottomans, however, were different from these previous invaders in the sense that they settled in the southeastern Europe for centuries. This continuous and persistent presence makes the Ottoman Empire a unique actor in the political, economic and social life of the continent.

Keeping all these factors in mind, the central argument of this thesis is that the Ottoman presence and expansion in Europe had tremendous implications to the construction of the European identity as well as to the emergence of modern European state system. In the literature, Ottoman impact on the ‘idea of Europe’ – which was termed in this thesis as the ‘negative/indirect contribution of the Ottoman Empire’ – was extensively analyzed. However, there was not much debate on the Ottoman impact on the emergence of the modern European state system – which was termed in this thesis as the ‘positive/direct contribution of the Ottoman Empire’. Thus the aim of the thesis is to show that impacts of the interaction between the Ottoman Empire and Europe should not be limited only to the construction of the European identity, which makes the Ottoman Empire an outsider to the European system and a passive actor in European politics. Rather, due to its contributions to the emergence of the modern European state system, the Ottoman Empire deserves to be treated as a part of this system and as an active actor in the European politics.

Ottoman-Habsburg clash, both politically and economically, has contributed much to the emergence of the modern European political and economic system. Considering the political contributions of the Ottoman Empire, it can be concluded that Ottoman direct and indirect support to two major western European states, namely, England and France, and its support towards the dissident factors within the Habsburg Empire resulted in the weakening of this medieval humble imperial formation vis-à-vis the central states. In other words, without realizing its expansionary aspirations over the whole continent, it was impossible for the Habsburg Empire to sustain its existence since it was quite dependent on these purposes.

Starting from the mid-1520s Ottoman troops began to advance through Hungary, a buffer state between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. In order to collect a significant amount of troops to cope with this problem, Charles had to get the alliance of the German Princes. To do so, he had to give some concessions to their new religious understanding. This enhanced Protestantism in Central Europe. The more Ottoman threat was felt intensely, the more concessions were given to the Protestants, and Ottomans’ continuous and persistent attacks in 1520s and 1530s forced the Habsburgs to form a tacit alliance with their religious adversaries. It was the Ottoman-Habsburg truce in 1545 that allowed Charles V to deal effectively with the Protestant problem and made him able to win over the League of Schmalkalden, a Protestant League formed by some German Princes in 1531, in the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547. However, Protestantism rooted well in the past two and a half decades, thanks to the external problems of the Habsburg Empire, thus this defeat did not produce a tangible result for the Habsburg Empire.

Another significant point regarding the Ottoman support towards the Protestant clause was that, Ottomans were well aware of the Lutheran ideas and they were sympathetic to them. Even some chronicles wrote that the Ottomans were focused on the similarities between Islam and Protestantism, thus found the Protestants a potential ally against the real heretics, namely the Catholics. Those ‘Luterân’ representatives, coming to the Ottoman capital on various occasions were welcomed. Even one of the factors that contributed much to the Ottoman support towards England and the Dutch Revolt was the Ottoman greeting of the Protestant understanding as a reaction to the Catholic faith.

Increasing Ottoman presence in the Mediterranean and Ottoman conquests in North Africa alarmed the Habsburgs, since they had always feared from an alliance between the North African communities and the Moriscos. Thus, they increased the pressure on the Moriscos, which made life unbearable for this community. Finally in 1568, there erupted a mass rebellion against the Habsburg rule, called the Alpujarras Revolution. There were some rumors that the Ottoman Empire inflicted, or at least encouraged, such a rebellion by declaration of material support towards the Morisco community. Even some letters from the Ottoman Sultan to the leaders of the Morisco community was found in the archives. Although, a material support did never sent to these people, still, Ottoman Empire had some sort of influence in encouraging them to revolt against the Habsburgs. Still, however, the rebellion was harshly suppressed and the Morisco community was expelled from Spain.

This was the political side of the story. Ottoman Empire’s influence in the emergence of the modern European state system could not be limited only to the political realm. Ottoman Empire also contributed to the emergence of a capitalist economic system by encouraging the Western European states to trade in the Mediterranean, thus helping them to accumulate capital, which would be used in the coming centuries to establish capitalist economies in the continent.

 

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Journal of Contemporary European Studies/Special Issue: New Perspectives on Turkey–EU Relations

Posted in ANNOUNCEMENTS, THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK on February 18, 2012 |

Excerpt from Chris Rumford (2011) ‘Editorial’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Volume 19, Issue 4, Special Issue: New Perspectives on Turkey–EU Relations

The articles here present a shift away from a narrow EU integration agenda. Turkey’s position vis-à-vis the EU cannot be adequately captured by simplistic notions of conditionality, harmonization and an uncritical interpretation of Europeanization. The argument here is that an EU integration studies agenda will only tell part of the Turkey-EU story. What is required in order to provide a fuller account is a more rounded view of Turkey-EU relations, one which places it in a broader context of European and global transformations. This special thematic issue advances a European studies interpretation of Turkey-EU relations and as such offers a much needed alternative to the dominant interpretations emanating from EU integration studies.

Original Articles

Constructing Turkey Inc.: The Discursive Anatomy of a Domestic and Foreign Policy Agenda

Nora Fisher Onar
pages 463-473

Ombudsmanship and Turkey’s Europeanization in ‘World Society’

Didem Buhari-Gulmez
pages 475-487

Resisting Anamnesis: A Nietzschean Analysis of Turkey’s National History Education

Edward Webb
pages 489-500

A Bakhtinian Approach to EU–Turkey Relations

Johanna Nykänen

pages 501-509

Turkey’s Path to EU Membership: An Historical Institutionalist Perspective

Gulay Icoz
pages 511-521

Kurdish Transnational Politics and Turkey’s Changing Kurdish Policy: The Journey of Kurdish Broadcasting from Europe to Turkey

Bilgin Ayata
pages 523-533

The Post-westernisation of EU–Turkey Relations

Hasan Turunç
pages 535-546

To visit the Journal’s website, please click on the picture below:

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The Quote of the Week: “Revisiting the Role of Credible EU Membership Conditionality for EU Compliance: The Turkish Case” by Beken SAATÇİOĞLU

Posted in THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK, tagged , , , , on January 31, 2012 |

Beken Saatçioğlu (2011) “Revisiting the Role of Credible EU Membership Conditionality for EU Compliance: The Turkish Case”, Uluslararası İlişkiler, (8)31, p. 23-44.

Since it was formally launched at the European Union (EU)’s June 1993 Copenhagen Summit, EU political conditionality has been central for the liberalization of post-Communist Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) aspiring to EU membership. The 2004 and 2007 enlargements have seen these countries adopt – with varying speed and success – the EU’s Copenhagen democracy criterion (i.e. “stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities”) which lies at the core of conditionality.

It is widely acknowledged that conditionality’s success in eliciting compliance from EU applicants largely owes to its credibility for the ruling parties in candidate states. Conditionality is a strategy of “intergovernmental reinforcement by reward”2 a credible EU membership perspective (one that credibly links membership to democratic compliance) is considered key to accession countries’ compliance, which may otherwise not occur.
The necessity of credible conditionality for democratic compliance has been insufficiently tested in the literature. Empirical studies of conditionality’s impacts have generally neglected the alternative hypothesis that EU adjustment can also happen in the absence of a credible membership perspective. Is it possible for candidate governments to comply with the political criteria even when they do not believe that this will guarantee membership? If so, what will motivate such compliance?
This paper addresses these questions by studying Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AKP) (2002-2009). Following an initial period marked by a credible membership prospect (2002-2004), AKP faced the EU’s reversal of credible political conditionality due to the Union’s increased emphasis on conditions other than the political criteria (i.e. the EU’s “capacity to absorb” Turkey) on the one hand and increasingly questionable commitment to Turkey’s full membership on the other. Indeed, it could be argued that in the post-2004 period, the credibility of Turkish accession linked to democratization hit record lows and membership became a distant target (even if it were to happen) in the context of the slow-moving, partially deadlocked accession negotiations. Two factors justify a focus on the AKP and more generally, the Turkish case. First, as stated above, the credibility of conditionality has varied under the AKP. This allows us to sufficiently test the importance of this variable for compliance by determining whether the variation before and after 2004 causes parallel changes in the dependent variable. Second, among all EU candidates competing for membership, Turkey is the strongest test case for the EU’s ability to influence domestic reforms when the credibility of the link between these and membership is questionable. In general, political conditionality is least credible in Turkey since the EU’s concerns about absorption capacity and member-state reservations about membership are most intense regarding Turkey. Thus, studying AKP’s fulfillment of the EU criteria allows us to reach generalizable claims about the possibility of compliance under weakly credible conditionality.
The paper seeks to explain AKP’s overall trend of compliance rather than the adoption of specific reforms under the various aspects of the political criteria. Despite the variations in EU credibility, the AKP complied – if not fully – with the EU’s democracy condition by legislating many of the reform measures mentioned in the European Commission’s progress reports. I first analyze the EU’s application of conditionality regarding Turkey to assess its credibility over time. I then introduce original compliance data for a precise quantitative measurement of the dependent variable, which so far lacks in the existing analyses of EU compliance. Last, I argue that the extent to which the AKP believed in conditionality was irrelevant to compliance. Rather, the party’s adoption of political reforms was motivated by political instrumentality. The EU reform agenda promised the AKP electoral benefits and political survival on the domestic political scene, which influenced compliance throughout the period of AKP rule.

 

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