Abstract
On 15 July 2016, a coup attempt took place in Turkey. In the aftermath of the coup, a wide-ranging wave of repression has unfolded, fingers have been pointed at the Gülen movement, many media outlets shut down, and journalists imprisoned. As the full extent of the coup’s repercussions continue to emerge for both the media and Turkish society more generally, Bilge Yesil’s Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State becomes absolutely essential reading for those seeking to understand the origins of authoritarianism in a state long lauded as a model of democracy and development in the region. Taking on Western narratives about ‘the Turkish model’, the book provides a critical account of political economic developments in a post-1980s era of economic liberalization and their implications for Turkish media industries. Yesil contends that Turkish media constitute a hybrid system blending commercial and state interests through conglomeration and clientelism that have long been indicative of authoritarian threads in Turkey’s political culture. The ascent of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (also known as the AKP, or the Justice and Development Party) to power in 2002 resulted in the repackaging of these tendencies to suit Islamist interests and shift power away from the secular Kemalist military establishment, a move that the AKP leveraged through international economic and political alliances. Approaching Turkish media from the standpoint of critical political economy, Yesil relies on analysis of policy documents and interviews with media personnel, unions, and free speech activists to shed light on Turkey’s media system as just one example of ‘the global phenomenon of state-market interpenetration’ (p. 13). The account that emerges is one in which the state adopts an ambivalent relationship with the forces of global capital and attempts to instrumentalize those forces in accordance with its interests, specifically by taking advantage of opportunities to extend its authority in the economic realm. As a result, the link between media and democracy becomes ever more tenuous as companies and personnel are sandwiched between the imperatives of the state and those of the market, which Yesil shows to be alternately complementary and contradictory.
This book should be of interest to scholars of media and globalization, as well as those interested more broadly in tracing the interweaving of economics and politics at the nexus of the local and the global. Although written primarily for academic audiences seeking a systematic account of Turkish media as a by-product of both domestic and international political economic developments of the last 30 years, the book has the potential to appeal to a more general audience with interest in Turkey and recent events in the country. The first half of the book focuses primarily on trends of economic liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s, while also establishing historical linkages between politics, economics, and culture over the course of the broader Turkish nation-building project. The second half of the book turns to transformations in Turkey’s media landscape between 2000 and 2015 that accompanied the rise of political Islam, the AKP, and discourse about a ‘new Turkey’ based on the ‘remoralization’ of society and a return to Turkey’s previous geopolitical prominence. In addition to critical political economy, the book is grounded in critical globalization scholarship and draws on work by Ayse Bugra and Osman Savaskan that attempts to move beyond ‘reductionist conceptions of the state as an object of globalization’ to consideration of the ways in which the state acts as a ‘active promoter’ of the global capitalist projects (p. 14). Following this theoretical framework, Yesil examines policy documents and consults with journalists in order to trace shifts in ownership and regulatory regimes that show how the role of the state has been reconfigured as a result of local and global dynamics.
One example of the major transformations in the 21st century has been the simultaneous rise of pro-AKP media and the silencing of opposition in mainstream media. This resulted from a variety of factors across multiple scales: a reshuffling of ownership interests in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis; government policy and corporate pressure against unions; lobbying for and loosening of ownership restrictions; media ownership by conglomerates relying on government contracts in other sectors; channeling of state advertising to sympathetic outlets; and the appointment of AKP political insiders and allies to leadership positions in media enterprises. Dogan, a major conglomerate owning four news outlets, three TV stations, and a news agency, as well as businesses in the energy, tourism, retail, finance, and real estate industries, managed to reinforce its broadcasting dominance coming out of the crisis, only to be handed multimillion and even billion dollar tax fines that threatened the company’s financial solvency. While the government claimed that the fines were due to ‘tax evasion and accounting irregularities’, analysts alleged they were a response to past critical coverage of corrupt financing practices by the AKP (p. 91). Regardless of the reason, the result was a chilling effect on journalistic coverage and the spread of self-censorship among media outlets and personnel. While Turkish media have long been instrumentalized for political gains, this differed from previous political pressures in that it was much more extensive and went so far as to put the careers of journalists and the existence of media companies at risk, involved a breakdown of past patron–client relationships, led to a loss of privileged positions by traditional players in the Turkish media oligopoly, and ultimately represented an AKP challenge to the hegemony of a military-bureaucratic elite.
This example and many others in the book paint compelling pictures of the complex interweaving of stakeholders and interests that characterizes Turkey’s contemporary communicative environment. Media in New Turkey moves across a vast array of documentation from policymakers, media, and civil society, in addition to interview data, in explaining these transformations in political influence as they relate to the media. The project provides a strong model for scholars working to understand the intersection of media industries, regulatory regimes, and transnational capital flows in a particular historical moment. Many of these dynamics are by no means unique to Turkey, but are instead relevant to many nations of the Global South that underwent World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-coordinated economic restructuring in the 1980s, opening them up to flows of capital and culture from elsewhere, or other nations whose media combine strong state influence with neoliberal tendencies. In some ways, Turkey’s opening to global capital offered new opportunities for the government to subvert traditional authority structures associated with Kemalist nationalism, secular intellectuals and the military, while expanding the economic influence of the Islamist establishment in many sectors of society. However, Yesil contends that democratic discourse from the AKP has not been accompanied by far- or deep-reaching democratic reforms, but rather contradictory policies, prosecution of dissent, and a polarizing Islamic revivalism, so that the centralized authoritarian state continues in a new relationship to capital. Ultimately, attempts by Erdogan and the AKP to institutionalize a new socio-cultural order under the guise of a ‘New Turkey’ play out in extended executive power that serves to maintain Turkey’s tradition of authoritarian neoliberalism while increasingly encroaching on critical voices across the media landscape.