Plus Ça Change … Re-Articulating Authoritarianism in the New Turkey

Introduction

Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason devotes a separate section, titled ‘Atatürk’s Six Arrows’, to how the modern-republican Turkish identity discourse was constructed. His basic argument is that the so-called Kemalist re-articulation of Turkish society during the single-party regime of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), ¹ which is organically connected to the western, secularist-nationalist political ideals of President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, cannot be portrayed as an example of populism ‘because its homogenization of the “nation” proceeded not through the construction of equivalential chains between actual democratic demands, but through authoritarian imposition’ (Laclau, 2005: 212). Deconstructing the key pillars of Kemalist ideology, Laclau asserts that the CHP’s ‘programme of forced modernization’ (2005: 213) in the 1920s and 1930s failed to construct a people and instead led to an exclusionary etatism that was operated by the military and intervened in all aspects of life. For Laclau, Kemalism changed the course of social identifications by constructing an imperative relationship between a dominant statist-national identity and a collection of antagonized (sub-national) identities, which are expected to yield to and be subsumed by the former. This discursive bias determined the character of modern Turkish political life, leaving very little space for political and civil society to prosper on their own, as ‘whenever there was an opening in the political system … [there] was a tortuous process, in which periods of democratic opening were interrupted by successive military intervention’ (Laclau, 2005: 214).

The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey after the 2002 general elections was hailed by many national and international observers, at least until 2011, as a correction to the inherent authoritarianism of Kemalism, i.e. a break from the reign of divisive frontiers erected among social identities/discourses. The possibility of such a correction, being the AKP’s major political premise, seemed to represent a nodal point that would provide the much needed ‘chains of equivalences’ ² between the particularistic demands of various groups that were traditionally excluded from political decision-making processes in Turkey, including liberals, religious conservatives, Kurds, the Anatolian bourgeoisie, and even leftists. This process would entail a socio-political transformation in the hierarchy of identities within Turkish society, from its constituent verticality to a more horizontal reconfiguration. The dominant political discourse was then appropriately adjusted to constitute a contrast between the anti-democratic and exclusionary functions of the Kemalist program and the democratic and inclusionary nature of the AKP’s ‘populism’ (see Dinçşahin, 2012).

In contrast to the ever-increasing number of liberal or nationalist analyses that focus on whether this transformation has succeeded or changed its path at some point during the AKP’s consolidation of power, this study argues that adapting Laclau’s concept of antagonistic politics to the analysis of contemporary Turkey produces a critical counter-narrative that reveals not extreme contrasts but similarities, in effect a continuation of an authoritarian tradition, between the socio-political discourses of the 1930s CHP and the present AKP. It demonstrates that although the ideological dynamic between the two parties is unmistakably distinct, as the former is located under bourgeois nationalism and the latter under right-wing religious conservatism, their discourses are fundamentally inspired by the same logic of difference, one that reduces the role of the construction of equivalential chains among different pre-existing political demands to a transient and pragmatist game of hegemony. The two discourses’ understandings of political representation also share a striking commonality, the aim of constituting a supposedly homogeneous and organic unity between the parties and the people.

Given this fundamental resemblance, this study proposes that what distinguishes these discourses essentially lies in ‘the symbolic frameworks’ (Laclau, 2005: 167; see also Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 159–171) that sustain each regime. Specifically, the authoritarianisms of the two differ from one another in the early CHP’s French-inspired, Jacobin-like, military-led nationalist approach to democracy and the AKP’s US-paralleling blend of neoliberal and neo-conservative, that is, neo-rightist governmentality, ³ the latter of which was made public in the party’s New Turkey Manifesto in 2014. To explain this change in the nature of the democratic discourses that frame modern Turkey, I suggest, first, seeking the overlap between the Laclau’s reading of 1930s Turkish politics and the current Turkish political vision, and, second, expanding his antagonistic political theory to include Alain Badiou’s concept of restoration, by which Badiou explains the reactive and non-revolutionary character of the current political-economic structure that insists on liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy as the only acceptable means of achieving the wellbeing of humanity (Cox and Whalen, 2001). For the latter, I offer an account of the transformation of Turkey’s governmentality from the nationalism-statism of the 1930s to the current neo-rightism. Reflecting on the evidence that the authoritarian tradition persists in the Turkish state, albeit by different ideological mind-sets and with different means and ends, this article concludes with avenues for future research engaging critical philosophical approaches to the discussion of the so-called social reforms and democratizing practices in times of neoliberal governance.

The National Re-Articulation of Republican Turkey

Turkey’s secular nationalization at the beginning of the 20th century is frequently presented as a paradigmatic example of the ethno-symbolic construction of national identity. Accordingly, under the leadership and vision of military officers and French-inspired intellectuals, a new Turk was said to have been created in accordance with the symbols and myths deriving from linguistic and ethnic bonds among citizens, a process of identification that differed dramatically from the religious acculturation fostered in the former Ottoman vassals and, instead, resembled the corresponding process in the civilized West (see Çınar, 2005). Anthony D. Smith, for instance, argues that ‘Turks in Anatolia before 1900 were largely unaware of a separate Turkish identity – separate, that is, from the dominant Ottoman or the overarching Islamic identities – and besides, local identities of kin, village and religion were often more important’ (1991: 20). To some extent, the construction of the nation-state managed to simultaneously dominate other identity types and create continuity between this separate identity and the past. However, the new national identity’s prematurely consolidated power to articulate pre-existing demands, which allowed it only limited access to the largely underdeveloped regions of Anatolia, as well as a troublesome international context, prevented it from being disseminated throughout society.

These non-essentialist accounts of nationalism that address the state as the sole arbiter/source of identification for a given society are problematic, however, in that they establish an a priori assumption that the process of nationalism begins after the nation-state is constructed. Adapting Laclau’s people-construction to this case not only reverses the state comes first formula but also generates processes of contingent encounters (and possible articulations) among pre-state and/or pre-national identities in the political field. Unlike what ethno-symbolist accounts of nationalism suggest, the state or its policy-makers do not automatically identify the people. In fact, even before nationalism or any other process of identification can take place, the hegemonic subject has to be at least partially exterior to this articulation. ⁴ ‘In that case, both the hegemonic force and the ensemble of hegemonized elements would constitute themselves on the same plane – the general field of discursivity – while the exteriority would be that corresponding to different discursive formations’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 135; see also Laclau, 2007: 47–65). This theoretical extension works in two ways. First, it offers a valid explanation for the limits of national identification, or why ‘a maximal point of national homogenization’ (Hall, 2003) exists, no matter how successful or widespread a state’s channels of nationalization. Second, it rules out the priority essentially granted to the nationalist identifiers by making any type of antagonism/differentiation a relevant source of political-hegemonic tension. This is, in brief, what has occurred in post-republican Turkish politics.

Coming from the tradition of the Committee of Union and Progress, a group of young soldiers and students with a reformist agenda of modernizing the Empire in line with western politico-bureaucratic techniques without relinquishing the Ottoman identity, the Kemalist cadre in Ankara gained their articulatory power during the War of Independence against the Sultan’s government in Istanbul, gathering different groups and identities together during major political and social crises and relying chiefly on the discourse of war. That the war ended in favor of the Ankara government meant the end of the logic of equivalence and the beginning of the state-led nationalist identification that Laclau dubbed ‘authoritarian’.

Exploiting bureaucratic, educational, administrative, cultural, and military channels, the statist national identity lured the newly emerging bourgeoisie and the growing middle classes in urban areas, who were later known as the white Turks, into the symbolic framework of western-oriented, ethnic, secular, and Latin vernacular mobilization. Conversely, the national identity inevitably excluded anyone who did not meet the strict criteria of ideal Turkishness, including Turkish ethnicity and language, the mainstream Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, anti-communism, and an appraisal of new Turkish history that explicitly dismissed its Ottoman past (Karpat, 2004: 1–29). These contrasting identifications and the political failure to fulfill their varying (ethnic, religious, political, social, gender-related, etc.) demands not only prevented the nation-wide construction of the people of Turkey but also hindered the process of the country’s modernization. Antagonized groups that did not fit into this process, such as Kurds and their separate ethnicity and dialects (Yeğen, 2007), Alevis and their incompatible sects (Köse, 2013), and leftists and their communist ideals (Karpat, 2004: 337–352) were exposed to systematic assimilation into the statist national form of Turkishness; in turn, their antagonistic identities were not accepted and thus were constantly re-constructed during nearly every conflict that would arise.

An additional political demand that was excluded from the Kemalist articulation was that of conservative-religious people who lived mostly in the small cities of central and eastern Anatolia. Their physical and ideational distance from the nationalizing channels of bureaucracy, education, and urban culture made it necessary for them to self-identify with a conservative identity located within the safe boundaries of elements borrowed from the identities rooted in the recent past and found in Islam, Ottoman history, kinship, underground religious orders, and local/regional cultures (Göle, 2002). However, unlike other excluded identities of modern Turkey, this conservative branch was differentiated by its ability to integrate into the ongoing political articulations in the country and its eventual transformation into the hegemonic subject in the early 2000s (see Hintz, 2015). Crystallized in the political form of the AKP, the conservative movement was counterintuitively successful in becoming a discourse that is ideologically situated at the extreme opposite of Kemalism – borrowing heavily from Islamic and Ottoman heritage, maintaining a distance from the idea and the practice of the West, and relying on a conservative ideology. The irony here is that the socio-political reality in which the AKP is grounded is represented not as a novel agenda with entirely new discourse for the future but as a correction to the past that was constructed by Kemalism. It therefore reproduces the discourse of the 1930s-era CHP, but uses the exact opposite images: the AKP replaces an emphasis on the West with an emphasis on the (Middle) East, secularism with Islam, modernization with conservatism, the military with the police, millet with ümmet, ⁵ etc. However, understanding this crystallization under the AKP requires examining the past failures of the conservative group that constitutes the party’s membership to rise to power since the 1950s.

Ruptures, Openings, and Strange Bedfellows: The 1950s to the 2000s

Between 1950 and 1980, two key transformations occurred in Turkish politics. First, the rise of Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party (DP) in the 1950s, which promised the re-inclusion of Islam into political and daily practices, was halted by a coup on 27 May 1960. The coup achieved its goal of suppressing an allegedly political Islam, thus reinforcing Islam’s passivity and consequently marginalizing its public role. In contrast, as the post-1960 governments and the military allied more consistently with the West, leftism, rather than political Islam, became the perceived threat to the well-being of the Turkish state. Associated with mainstream Soviet communism, the increasing fears of a right-left cleavage produced an unexpected reconciliation between old enemies: the statist-nationalist elite and the conservative Islamists. The hegemonic center, embodied in the military and bureaucratic elite, likely assumed that as long as the periphery – represented in this case by the Anatolian conservatives – remained under state supervision, a rapprochement between the two was possible and even necessary. Thus, by weaving certain religious (Sunni) motifs into the dominant political discourse (the so-called Turkish-Islam synthesis), the hitherto seeming alliance between the statist and conservative identities would provide the country with much-needed social stability (see Eligür, 2010: 59–75).

However, apart from closing the gap between these two identities, this political strategy’s aim of producing stability apparently failed. The economic crises of the 1970s, the failed foreign policy in Cyprus, and, particularly the ever-increasing street clashes between the right and the left eventually led once again to military intervention, this time on 12 September 1980. It was obvious that a new path in Turkish politics was about to appear, and a new political figure emerged in Turgut Özal and his Motherland Party (ANAP). Özal was most likely the first political actor in Turkish history to have achieved and even personally exuded a substantial compromise in his image and political agenda between the statist nationalism and the political Islam at the hegemonic center. Importantly, a functioning dialogue was established that was based primarily on the ‘reassertion of state-controlled Islam’ (Ahmad, 1988) between the traditional identities of the center and the periphery, at least superficially. The political-economic identity of the Özal era (capitalist and populist) succeeded in both ensuring the indelibility of the state’s secularist character and incorporating the Anatolian bourgeoisie – along with this group’s Islamic, family-centric, and regional priorities – into these dynamics (Yavuz, 2003: 75–77). Embodied in Özal’s economically liberal and socially conservative character, a new ruling social class, along with an arguably more ‘conflictual’ (Birtek and Toprak, 1993) but simultaneously more broadly inclusive national identity, emerged in Turkey.

Özal’s unexpected death in 1993 confounded this process of re-articulation and eventually re-animated the military’s institutional fear of rising Islamic tendencies. They viewed the triumph of the pro-Islamist Welfare Party (RP) in two consecutive elections (1994 and 1995) as a warning that the pre-existing hegemony in Turkey was changing hands. Özal served as a guarantor who would not allow political Islam to overhaul the Kemalist state structure; indeed, the near simultaneity of his disappearance from power and the RP’s electoral success raised questions about the possibility of losing control of Islam’s role in the public sphere. To prevent such an outcome, in 1997 the now infamous 28 February Process was implemented, which included a National Security Council memorandum that first compelled the government to make several decisions guaranteeing the secular structure of the socio-political system – particularly concerning the two symbolically difficult issues of imam hatip schools and the ban on the headscarf – and then required the closure of the RP and its successor, the Virtue Party (FP). The 28 February Process showed that even in the era of Özal, the chain-making between the hegemonic identity of the state and the antagonized identity of the Anatolian conservatives was not equivalential; rather it was constructed in favor of the former. Once this balance had been upset, it became clear that a power/identity void had emerged.

‘An appropriate political initiative’, as Antonio Gramsci (1992: 168) once wrote, was necessary to transform this ‘political direction of certain forces which [had] to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, [was] to be successfully formed’. The 28 February Process re-taught Turkey’s citizens that radical political Islam was not an appropriate candidate to lead such initiative; and the intellectual roots and discourse of the AKP movement were planted at this moment of instability.

From a Discourse of Articulation to Elimination: The AKP Era

To articulate the non-Islamist tendencies of their new program, the AKP leaders initially included a wide range of known political actors with mostly center-rightist and liberal backgrounds to the party’s decision-making mechanism, and the phrase ‘a simply center-right, conservative party’ (Mecham, 2004: 357) was frequently repeated to explain the party’s political discourse that shifted from Islam to conservatism and followed the example of Özal’s ANAP. The party’s economic mission was also carefully crafted to avoid harming its discourse and specifically attempted to subsume the incorporation of Anatolian capital into the national economy and comprehensive social policies, which targeted the historically neglected central and eastern regions, the urban poor, and the suburbs (Patton, 2006). The military was already regarding the AKP’s actions and its discourse with suspicion due to the former’s previous experience with the RP; however, the party’s policy-makers seemed to be able to avoid repeating the mistakes of its openly Islamist predecessors. They articulated a global identity discourse (democratic, pluralist, and moderately religiously oriented rather than Islamist), one that was also shared by the military at the time, due in large part to the negotiations for membership in the European Union (Diez, 2005), rather than struggling desperately to thrust themselves on (or be accepted by) the statist national identity that had previously never fully accepted the party’s predecessors. Specifically, the main difference between the AKP movement and its previous political iterations was the former’s ability to avoid dichotomizing the traditional nationalist and Islamist identity discourses by employing a new symbolic framework, one promising to embrace all identifications available in Turkish society and thus to appeal to a larger social base beyond religious conservatives or the Anatolian petit bourgeoisie.

This new symbolic framework of the AKP was distinctly different from Kemalism’s French-inspired nationalist-republican discourse of the 19th century and was perfectly consistent with the post-1980s neoliberal imaginary in western societies (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 165–166) that envisioned a mutual relationship between the free market and democracy under the referents of globalization, regional integration, consumerism, and governance. It would successfully play the role of what Laclau calls an empty signifier in the re-articulation of Turkish society. Political collaboration with the neo-conservative US government’s Greater Middle East Project, which promised social and political democratization and moderation of Islam in the Middle East, along with closer partnership with the European Union (EU) were two fundamental premises of this framework, by which the AKP movement managed to establish equivalential chains between different interest groups and their conflicting identities. Such groups included conservatives, liberals, ethnic/religious minorities, women, and leftists. Between 2002 and 2007, therefore, it might be argued that the AKP employed a Laclauian populist discourse.

The 2007 presidential elections, however, signaled the first rupture in this successful articulation. When the then Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül was rumored to be the party’s candidate, it was not his political Islamic past but mainly his wife’s headscarf that raised serious doubts about the professed secular character of the AKP movement (see Çınar, 2014). Displays of dissent came both from the Kemalists within the civil society (e.g. Republic Protests) and the traditional elites in military-bureaucracy (e.g. the e-memorandum published by the Turkish Armed Forces and the closure case opened by the Constitutional Court). However, unlike its predecessors, this time the AKP was not alone, or without a strong social base, to face these reactions and to recover from this rupture. At that hegemonic moment, a chain of equivalence emerged between people with religious-conservative demands who found taking political actions including denying a woman the right to wear her headscarf to be borderline offensive to their culture and religion and the people who located themselves within the global identity discourse and addressed this issue as a human rights concern and democracy platform, as part of the founding empty signifier. Both groups provided their support not necessarily for the AKP’s political decisions but for elevating the level of freedom in the country. Similar alliances continued between these two sides in 2007–2011. For instance, both supported the trials known as Balyoz and Ergenekon, which involved the incarceration of retired and active-duty generals and soldiers, university professors, students, and journalists, on the allegation of staging a coup against the AKP, and they heralded it as the overthrow of the traditional state structure. In the Yetmez Ama Evet! [Not Enough, But Yes!] Movement before Turkey’s 2010 referendum, which resulted in the passage of constitutional amendments approved by 58 per cent of voters, these two sides only shared an expectation that Kemalism’s limitations would be revealed to Turkish civil society and democratic consolidation would be established. Consequently, the traditional secularist, military, and bureaucratic elite experienced an incremental loss of power during the 2007–2011 period. In other words, within the new Turkish political articulation, the former hegemonic subject lost its primacy and was relegated to a new location as part of the oppositional discourse. A new hybrid of the antagonist identities thus appeared to consolidate the civil-political hegemony for the first time in the history of the republic.

This hegemonic narrative of the AKP’s consolidation of power, however, has been critically evaluated since 2011. This classification stems mainly from four related issues. First, the 17 December and 25 December (2013) processes not only reflected the severe rupture between the Gülen Movement – an influential religious community in the AKP’s initial social articulation due to its support for the party using its networks in education, media, and state institutions including the police and the judiciary (see Hendrick, 2009) – and the party’s leadership but also exposed recordings that revealed numerous instances of alleged economic and political corruption, nepotism, and illegal financial dealings with international sources. These revelations served to damage the conservative, Muslim, and morally righteous image of the entire ‘AK’P ⁶ movement. Second, the so-called Arab Spring and Turkey’s inconclusive foreign policy activism during and after these events resulted in the flight of Arab financing from the Turkish economy and left the economy overly dependent on the construction and service industries. Third, in the area of foreign relations, associated with the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoğlu, the Özal-esque neo-Ottoman arguments superseded those of Turkish-EU relations and were directed mostly at a specter of bringing peace to the former lands of the Ottoman Empire. Finally, in domestic affairs, a process of restoration of the new hegemonic bloc occurred that, to the AKP and its supporters, represented a shift in power from the atanmışlar [the designated ⁷ ], i.e. the military and bureaucracy elite, to the seçilmişler [the elected], i.e. the democratically elected government of the AKP and its supporters. For the military and the opposition, however, this shift in power represented a right-wing/religious populist takeover of the republican state structure by the AKP government that had abused democratic means. Both the constantly growing opposition, which after 2010 had added liberals, leftists, environmentalists, feminists, pan-Turkists, and even some religious groups to the Kemalist camp, and the international institutions that had almost unanimously supported the rise of the AKP (in opposition to the militaristic state structure that existed between 2002 and 2007), questioned the continued existence of the symbolic framework. The main issues under scrutiny included the framework’s discourses on democracy, human rights, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression (i.e. the elements of the global identity discourse that the AKP had previously promoted) that initially led to populist politics in the country.

It is no longer only the fears of Kemalists or the emasculated military that raise doubts about the increasing authoritarianism in AKP politics; a new chain of equivalence has also emerged to connect various other groups and currently exhibits indications of being a hegemonic anti-AKP referent. The general strike of TEKEL ⁸ workers between December 2009 and February 2010; anti-government demonstrations, such as the Republic Day marches in 2012; the Labor Day protests in 2013; the Gezi Park Protests and the 17–25 December Processes in 2013; and, more importantly, the means that the AKP used to quell them (i.e. limiting the power of the judiciary, replacing powerful bureaucrats, politicizing the National Intelligence Agency, inappropriate use of the police force, emphasizing the instrumentalism of democracy, drafting of a new internal security plan, etc.) have extended the anti-AKP circle. This opposition camp considers the party’s touted philanthropic and center-rightist qualities, and thus its initially articulatory agenda, to be fraudulent. Each of these events warrants a scholarly investigation of its own; collectively, however, they represent the enlarging social base of the hegemonic anti-AKP referent. They are manifested at the administrative-political level in examples such as the joint candidate (former Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu) of the CHP and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in the 2014 presidential election against the natural AKP candidate, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the rising electoral support for the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the 2015 national elections.

The Restoration of the New Turkey and Its New Identity: From Permanent Institutions to Temporary Contracts

An ethno-symbolist perspective might read these recent developments as the disintegration of a collaborative identity that was constructed among sub-national groups in the first decade of the AKP era in favor of an authoritarian national identity that is closer to what had previously been represented as a conservative-Islamic identity, one that the AKP had inherited from its own past. However, this view fails to recognize that the unfulfilled demands of different groups in the post-articulatory phase of the AKP movement were not fundamentally national, such as the displacement of these groups’ identities from the national imagination. As detailed in the previous section, they were represented on a larger terrain that involved a contingent combination of social, political, feminist, environmental, and other types of demands. The actual change in the AKP’s previously articulatory discourse was therefore not about a matter of transformation in a/the national identity but in the very process of identification, particularly in the symbolic framework that circumscribed it.

The evidence presented below suggests that apart from the transitory period between 2002 and 2007, the AKP’s ongoing discourse demonstrates remarkable parallels with the US neo-rightist hegemonic project. This project ‘seeks a profound transformation of the terms of political discourse and the creation of a new “definition of reality”, which under the cover of the defense of “individual liberty” would legitimize inequalities and restore the hierarchical relations that the struggles of previous decades had destroyed’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 176). The key word here is restoration, which I use with reference to Alain Badiou to describe the transformation in the symbolic framework of Turkey’s political articulations from Kemalism’s Jacobin-like republicanism, representing ‘the struggles of previous decades’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 176), to the AKP’s US-paralleling neo-rightism.

Ergin Yıldızoğlu observed that the amalgamation of Turkey into the worldwide capitalist restoration, which began in 1851, occurred at the beginning of the 1980s, following the politically and economically transformative power of the military coup in 1980 and the Özal era, which helped establish the rules of the free market, including the rise of neoliberal institutions, the destruction of left-wing politics, and a post-modern turn both culturally and ideologically (2008: 18–19). Restoration, as understood by Badiou, means ‘a moment in history that declares revolutions to be both abominable and impossible, and the superiority of the rich both natural and excellent … Every restoration is horrified by thought and loves only opinions, especially the dominant opinion’ (Badiou, 2007: 26). ‘Reactionary [and] liberal’ (Bensaïd, 2004: 100) in its character, the global ‘authoritarian opinion’ since the 1980s has ‘entailed much “creative destruction”, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sovereignty) but also of divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart’ (Badiou, 2005: 78). This current period of restoration emphasizes ‘the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace [and initiates] Lyotard’s famous description of the postmodern condition as one where “the temporary contract” supplants “permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family and international domains, as well as in political affairs”’ (Harvey, 2007: 3–4).

This leads to the rise of a conservatism that relocates the individual in the private sphere, instead of widening the public sphere, and that ‘[redefines] the notion of democracy itself in such a way as to restrict its field of application and limit political participation to an ever narrower era’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 173). Adapting the Lyotardian temporary contract to Badiou’s restoration, the meaning is to be found within the realm of private sphere, particularly through consumer culture, political imagination around cultures (multiculturalism), and religion.

The fundamental difference between Kemalism’s solidarist/nationalist articulation under the institutional guarantee of the military and the bureaucracy and the AKP’s neo-rightism is thus represented in the dimension of temporality entailed by the current form of restoration. The former conducted its social engineering through the Jacobin institutional carriers of nationalization of identities, economic nationalizations, and state-led economic development, a social-historical narrative that deliberately broke from the Ottoman past, and a party that was identified with the people. The latter has now established non-institutional temporary contracts in the economy through privatizations and undocumented foreign investments (Öniş, 2012); in domestic politics via establishing close ties with religious communities (Hale and Özbudun, 2010: 33–43), pro-government media branches (Kaya and Çakmur, 2010) and selected minority groups (the socially unrested Kurds, in particular; Yörük, 2012); and in a re-oriented foreign policy. For the already established repressive institutions, such as the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), the Turkish Radio and Television Association (TRT), the Supreme Board of Radio and Television (RTÜK), and the Directorate of Religious Affairs, current practice is to keep them open and functioning while essentially re-arranging their decision-making mechanisms to align with the AKP’s neo-rightist ideology. The participation of antagonistic actors in the public sphere is thus still restricted, if not absent. Individual political liberties are essentially limited to voting in elections, and they are occluded by considerable obscurantism and a denouncement of the political sphere that degrades democracy into free-market choices. The very authoritarianism that despises democratic demands inconsistent with those of the hegemonic subject – the party itself – is still present, if not growing, in contemporary Turkey, which suggests a continuation of the authoritarian tradition. Therefore, the period of restoration from Kemalist Jacobinism to the AKP’s neo-rightism cannot be understood as an update of democracy because it did not eliminate the defining element of authoritarianism in Turkish politics. Rather, the AKP’s restoration only changed the dimension of temporality in the ongoing authoritarianism from permanent institutionalism to temporary contracts in every aspect of life.

In addition to this transformation in the temporality dimension, three further discourses serve as universal signifiers of the AKP’s neo-rightism: an ambitious foreign policy with the role of the military diminished to that of a subsidiary actor, ⁹ a de-secularized confinement of the public sphere, and a conservative/Islamic re-imagination of social morality. A discourse analysis of the AKP’s New Turkey Manifesto serves to illuminate the function of these discourses as universal signifiers. The manifesto was introduced on 27 August 2014 by Ahmet Davutoğlu after he was handed the leadership of the party and the prime ministry by his predecessor, three-term prime minister Erdoğan. The document included a section that was titled the ‘Nine Areas of Restoration’. These involved remarks on the country’s self-reliance, resolution with the Kurds, a new moral formation, the struggle with the ‘parallel state’ (the pseudo-name given by the AKP to the Gülen Movement following the latter’s role in promulgating the allegations of 17–25 December 2013), the decontamination of the judiciary, an Ankara-centered foreign policy, and restoration of culture and civilization, the economy, and morality (Davutoğlu, 2014).

Restoration, as a term that perfectly captures the AKP movement’s political, economic, and sociocultural strategies, signals an epistemological break not only from the country’s founding principles but also from the AKP’s pre-2007 discourse. The connotation of the word is also important to note here because, in Davutoğlu’s view, restoration is loaded with the meaning of progress, i.e. something that erases the past’s mistakes and establishes a new path for the future. Thus, restoration is at the opposite extreme of how Badiou conceptualizes the term: a pejorative to describe something that implies reactionism and repressiveness in terms of past acquisitions. As a consequence of this fundamental difference, Davutoğlu’s version of restoration heralds a future that Badiou describes with apprehension. The ability to highlight such an essential difference in the meaning of restoration between theory and practice testifies to the value of the approach adopted in this study.

The connection between Turkey’s new, ambitious foreign policy and its emerging neo-rightist identity is the core element that constitutes the restorationist narrative of the manifesto. As an International Relations scholar himself, Davutoğlu understands foreign policy through a wider lens, making it an issue that is less about relations among nations and more about cultures and civilizations, and the appearance of a ‘self-confident’ Turkey, ‘assuming [its] global responsibilities’ (Davutoğlu, 2013c). He praises Erdoğan’s outburst against Israeli President Shimon Peres (a former ally of the Kemalist military and state) at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos as the turning point in Turkey’s restoration of confidence. Davutoğlu (2014) adds, ‘it was only after [Davos] that we would no longer think of our actions based on how other nations would react to them, but what those nations should think of what the Turkish Republic would think of theirs’ in turn. From this perspective, he regards the Gezi Park protests, the 17–25 December Process, and the ‘parallel state’ of the Gülen Movement, which all lay the foundation for an ‘interregnum’ with the combined support of ‘ulusalcılar’ [secular nationalists] and the ‘international powers and media behind them’, as an attempt to undermine the rise of the New Turkey (Davutoğlu, 2014).

For Davutoğlu, the refugees to Turkey fleeing tumultuous conflicts in Syria and Iraq are returning to ‘their family home’ (2014) for protection in these troubled times; he interprets demonstrating hospitality, ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ (Davutoğlu, 2013b), and support for the needy as a cultural mission and a symbol of the power of the New Turkey, represented as the true heir to the Ottoman State. The traditional problems of Turkish republican foreign policy – the Cyprus issue and claims regarding the Armenian genocide – are to him only defensive matters, limited to within the national borders. Conversely, the New Turkey that is accepting refugees and is actively involved in the former Ottoman territories ‘from Afghanistan to Bosnia’, as well as the Turkic countries in Central Asia, is now playing offense (Davutoğlu, 2014). Spreading Turkey’s power beyond its national territory also requires the restoration of a missionary diplomatic culture and the morality of a ‘civilization’. ¹⁰

Consistent with this foreign policy narrative, but striking given the ideological distance between the AKP movement and Kemalism, Davutoğlu (2014) echoes Atatürk’s famous statement that ‘There is no linear defense; there is a surface defense, and the surface is the entire territory of the nation’ and applies it to diplomacy, stating that ‘There is no linear diplomacy; there is a surface diplomacy, and the surface is the whole world’. He further perceives his goals as ‘keeping the Turkish flag flying all around the world’, ‘nominal and efficient foreign policy in all near regions’, ‘conscientious diplomacy’, ‘God-given power to terrify the tyrant and to show affection to the oppressed’, ‘Turkey as panacea’, and ‘being an heir to a glorious historical past’ (Davutoğlu, 2014). Addressing these matters, Davutoğlu (2014) embarks on the formation of the AKP ‘not only as a re-establishment of a state, of a policy, of an authority, but as a rejuvenation of a civilization’. A lengthy quote from his speech on inauguration as Prime Minister is worth reproducing here:

If human history is divided into periods such as antiquity, modernity and globalization, we might clearly say that this country, this glorious land – not just geo-strategically but also geo-culturally important land – incorporates all the colors of antiquity. It incorporates the Islamic civilization, the preceding Mesopotamian culture, and the former Hittite and Roman cultures. There is no basin of civilization that has not interacted with Anatolia. Again, when it comes to modernity, no other country with this ancient culture confronted modernity like we did, and ultimately, there is no other country that experiences globalization as profoundly closely as we do. We are now on the eve of a new cultural awakening. This new cultural awakening is the one that will call for a universal civilization just as humanity is now confronting the existential and epistemological problems of the fundamental values of being human. (Davutoğlu, 2014)

Davutoğlu claims that the reign of globalization, understood as the excessive opening of the private sphere and egalitarianism, is currently nearing its end. Further, he asserts that the long history of the land of Anatolia is full of privilege and opportunity to lead the forthcoming era that can overcome the ‘mostly moral’ (see also Dönmez, 2011) problems that modernity and globalization have caused. Thus, in calling for a new ‘national branding’ (Varga, 2013) characterized by a conservative and civilizational political agenda, he also provides an explanation for why the initial political articulations that the AKP presented to Turkish society in the party’s early days must no longer apply. Accordingly, both national and global identities and their discourses had stripped humanity of its morals and placed them in conflict; ethnic, linguistic, national, and ideological conflicts are all presented here as the offspring of modernity. Turkish republican nationalization (Kemalism) is reproduced here as exclusionary, as an alienating social engineering process that features an overly narrow focus by denying the troublesome difference ‘between the political culture of a society that was accumulated after being a historically and geo-culturally central country of a civilization and the political system that evolved around a political elite who tried to adhere to a different [western] civilization’ (Davutoğlu, 2002: 83). Consequently, Turkey was saddled with an unproductive and dependent foreign policy when it might otherwise have enjoyed its heritage of multiple (but religiously defined) identities and cultures and, thus, might have forged an integrated and multidimensional foreign policy.

In addition, the process of globalization meant transforming this ‘barren nationalism’ (Davutoğlu, 2014) in foreign policy and made its expansion inevitable. However, for Davutoğlu, globalization itself represented another challenge to essential identities. After ‘the three major earthquakes’ (Davutoğlu, 2013a) that the world experienced – i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the events of 9/11, and the global economic crisis along with the Arab Spring – it became clear that globalization can no longer be regarded as a safe harbor in terms of individual identification and that it falls short of answering existential questions (for which it is partly responsible). Therefore, as a natural priority of ‘regional political restructuring’ (Davutoğlu, 2012), a new Turkish identity also naturally must effectively eliminate nationalizing or globalizing discourses. This identity must ‘revive religiously’, as Amin (2011) puts it, and prepare for the new cultural awakening with the help of its own glorious past and identifications, i.e. the elements of the country’s conservative religious discourse that have managed to protect the roots of the AKP movement from the morally detrimental effects of modernity and globalization. Hereby, the New Turkey’s identity must be restored around conservatism, populism, family values, Sunni religious motifs, and Ottoman history, but it must now also be equipped with a restoring civilization-based mission and a coherent and powerful state agency.

Conclusion

In synthesizing the arguments presented here, despite their ideological and institutional distinctions, three parallels might be drawn between Kemalism’s founding principles and the AKP’s areas of restoration to reveal the ongoing authoritarianism in modern Turkish politics. First, they both represent strands of a top-down social engineering that regards antagonisms and emerging public spheres as threats to their own centrality and well-being. Second, they both utilize the discourse of Laclauian populism, which establishes temporary chains of equivalence between varying democratic demands during their periods of incubation that, however, rapidly dissolve in favor of the hegemonic subject once a sense of power consolidation is anticipated. Finally, they both employ an idea of democracy and freedom – Kemalism from the French experience referring to a permanent nation/institution and the AKP from the US experience referring to temporal contracts ¹¹ – and use it as an empty signifier in their hegemonic practices, but they also similarly fail to institutionalize it in the wider fields of democratic struggles. Therefore, their hegemonic subjectification has remained limited to what Laclau and Mouffe call ‘popular subject positions [that are] constituted on the basis of dividing the political space into two antagonistic camps’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 131) – one being with us and the other against us – that would eventually turn both movements into authoritarian regimes.

As previously noted, the core difference between the Kemalist hegemonic subjectification and that of the AKP is related to the chosen symbolic framework for democratic revolution. Within their respective frameworks, each elite group understands and represents the type of democracy, and thus the implications of freedom and equality, through which it seeks to re-articulate the components of Turkish society. Kemalism performed this action within its inherited Jacobin imaginary that ‘hated the very notion of separation and division of power’ (Arendt, 1990: 245) by postulating a national identity and constituting the political strictly within its own national institutions. Conversely, the AKP suggests demolishing such national frontiers to restore national institutions through temporary contracts and adapting a new form of governmentality around a form of neo-rightism that aims at a proactive foreign policy, a desecularized public sphere, and an Islamic morality. As opposed to the initial promises made by the AKP movement and its supporters, the recent developments in Turkey have demonstrated that, first, the restoration that occurred in the symbolic framework did not result in favor of antagonisms, second, democratic openings are still treated as threats to the existence of political power, and, third, Turkish society is still far from the construction of a democratic public sphere that is receptive to particularistic differences. At present, instead of the expectations engendered by the AKP’s rhetoric of advanced democracy, Turkey is experiencing a steady increase in the level of authoritarianism directed toward all aspects of life. The nationalist-statist identity and its institutional base, particularly as represented by the military and the bureaucracy, have waned, but the neo-rightist governmentality of the AKP extends the authoritarian tradition in the Turkish state in pursuit of different means and ends, maintaining the support of the conservative-Islamist discourse, developing its own law-enforcement agencies, such as the police, specially authorized prosecutors and the intelligence services, instead of relying on the military, and leaving even less room for dissent to raise its voice in the public sphere.

This study’s comparative analysis of these two narratives of governmentality, and its application of the concepts of re-articulation and restoration, thus reveals, counterintuitively, that the maxim plus ça change best encapsulates the relationship between these otherwise diametrically opposite symbolic frameworks. Future scholarship could build on this article’s study of authoritarianism in Turkey as a continuous historical pattern, ‘the reconstitution of a new kind of authoritarianism’ in the country, as Dani Rodrik puts it (Parry, 2015), generating opportunities for research on the sometimes-obscured themes of authoritarian governance in purportedly new, democratic discourses.