Analyzing the Justice and Development Party’s changing discourse on the headscarf issue as the constitutive part of its drift toward authoritarian politics in Turkey

Abstract

Despite its long history since the late Ottoman period in Turkey, this article focuses on the headscarf issue within a particular period; since 2002, when the Justice and Development Party has been in power. Women’s issues have always occupied a large space in the Justice and Development Party’s project(s), which articulate diverse narrative lines ranging from conservatism to liberalism. The article aims to unravel this diverse insight into the Justice and Development Party’s politics within the context of its recent political drift toward authoritarianism while particularly focusing on its headscarf discourses. It argues that the Justice and Development Party’s political drift toward authoritarianism resulted in the replacement of the earlier politics of consensus/‘non-defiance’, which refers to a conservatism that denies radicalism and avoids emphasizing controversial issues like the headscarf, with the politics of dissensus/defiance that reveal social tensions and political conflicts such as those between Islamic and secular sectors, through revitalizing the old debate on the headscarf issue. In this sense, the lifting of the headscarf bans in public institutions in 2008 can be read as a symptom, not of the Justice and Development Party’s earlier liberal stand, but of the beginning of its shift toward authoritarianism based on its religious-nationalist project, which made use of this liberal right of pious women in enhancing the gaps between oppositional groups and in consolidating its social basis. This earlier attempt has been followed by continuous use of the headscarf as a symbol drawing a border between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and signifying outrages and moral crisis for which the Justice and Development Party blamed the oppositional groups. Within this context, the article questions the ways in which the headscarf as a political symbol along with other conservative policies targeting female bodies and sexualities took a part in the constitution and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party’s radical right alliance and its authoritarian regime.

Keywords

AKP/Justice and Development Party anti-genderism authoritarianism feminism Islam neoconservatism neoliberalism Turkey

Introduction

The Islamic headscarf has always been a controversial issue, polarizing Turkey between modern secularists and conservative Islamists. This article examines this controversial phenomenon in the context of the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) gender policies and headscarf discourses from 2002, when it came to power, to the late 2000s, when it drifted toward authoritarianism in Turkey. Studying a largely Muslim country from the challenging perspective of the headscarf, the article contributes to the growing literature on recently rising authoritarian regimes and their anti-gender equality politics and provides an exemplary case that is largely transferable to other countries despite their religious differences. The article also suggests studying the JDP’s recent drift toward authoritarianism from a gender-sensitive perspective with a unique focus on the headscarf issue. Unlike many other works dealing with similar problems, the article argues that the recent changes in the JDP’s policies are not only a matter of an increase in the JDP’s authoritarian and patriarchal politics but also about qualitative changes in its gendered national project that has strong implications on the headscarf issue.

The article starts with brief references to framing theoretical and methodological concepts that allow readers to make inferences about extrapolating the findings to other countries, where similar political trends along with unique historical and local dynamics exist. Within this context, I explore the Foucauldian theory of power and governmentality, which was elaborated further by other authors in their analysis of emerging subjectivities under the impacts of such rationalities as neoliberalism and neoconservatism. For instance, while Brown stresses the combined impacts of such governing rationalities over both policy practices and subjectivities, Butler underlines how this process of subjectification is fluent and interactive. This discussion on governing rationalities and subjectivities from a Foucauldian perspective is combined with the Gramscian theory of hegemony, as the latter helps us see the connections between such rationalities as neoliberalism and neoconservatism with local national projects and ongoing struggles around them at the national level. I use Nira Yuval-Davis’ theory on gender and nation, Jawor’s analysis of discursive construction of social upheavals as moments of moral crisis, and Belford’s works on the family crisis to see how gender relations affect and are affected by national projects and how political discourses on crises are moralized and gendered.

Within this framework, concerning the historical analysis of changing the socio-political meaning of the headscarf from the late Ottoman period up until the period of the JDP rule, the second part pays attention to oppositional political discourses and struggles, such as among state elites and Islamist women’s groups. Following Butler (1989, 1990, 2009) argument that dominant rationalities are not simply inscribed over individual bodies (i.e. bodies with a headscarf), but make these bodies, and subjectivities possible, this section discusses the symbolic role that the headscarf plays for power groups and also for Islamist and/or pious women in, for example, destabilizing the nation-state project and its didactic-secularism imposed on them by the secular establishment (Alimen, 2018; Göle, 1991, 2000; Turan, 2013). In the 1980s and 1990s, the Islamist women’s movement played a crucial political role in constituting a new discursive position in between modernism, conservatism, and feminism in the vein of their demonstrations protesting the headscarf ban by the state (in Arat, 2016; Köse, 2014; Yılmaz, 2015).

Against this historical backdrop, the third part involves an analysis of the JDP’s gender politics and its strategic approach to the headscarf issue, which were framed by its liberal Islam project entitled ‘Conservative Democracy’ by its ideologues and intellectuals during the earlier period (2002–2008) of its rule. This period underlined the party’s strategic retreat from the strong oppositional stand on the headscarf issue in favor of strengthening the image of a liberal party seeking social consensus. During this period, the JDP established women’s politics by appropriating feminist concepts and principles, with the help of developmentalist agendas from the European Union, for instance. Articulating liberal and conservative principles, mainly through neoliberal rationality, this project also included a package of reforms based on the principle of gender equality. Instead of its radical political defense, the use of the headscarf, along with other forms of Islamic lifestyle, was expanded through its integration with the market forces. I argue that its integration into the market economy has not only provided some liberty to pious women in using a headscarf in public but also increased disappointment and resentment among religious conservative groups who reacted to the transformation of the headscarf into a fashion item and a commodity.

The final section of this article focuses on the second period of JDP rule when the aforementioned eclectic project of the JDP lost its ability to coordinate conflicting socio-political dynamics, leading to the breakup of the JDP’s earlier liberal coalition in the late 2000s. Hence, the JDP established a new alliance with radical nationalist and conservative groups on the basis of a new religious-nationalist project framed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s famous motto: ‘one nation, one flag, one country, one state’.¹ I argue that, along with authoritarian measures and governing techniques, the conservative-moral body politics on femininity and female body-sexuality, as well as the headscarf issue, played effective roles in this process of de-democratization and in the constitution of the new illiberal social and political alliances by the JDP. As Armstrong (2012) states, the current Turkish government’s rhetoric manages to appeal to impulses of both nationalism and religion, which have been ‘the two primary energizing forces in Turkish society for almost a hundred years, even if one has always dictated to the other’ (p. 38). In this respect, the AKP’s anti-gender equality politics, including its headscarf policies, function as symbolic glue cementing the constitutive parts of the new religious-nationalist power block and its religious-nationalist project, as opposed to imagined external and internal others that force Turkey into moral and economic crises.

Theoretical background and methodology

This article analyzes the JDP’s policies and discourses that are employed not only in orchestrating diverse socio-political and economic forces but also in governing the moral issues concerning cultural symbols and practices like the headscarf based on the Foucauldian theory of power and governmentality (Burchell et al., 1991; Foucault, 1997; Lemke, 2001) and the Gramscian theory of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971; Hall, 2011; Jessop, 2007; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). From the former perspective, the government’s discourses and governing strategies are studied at the conjuncture of dominant neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities (Brown, 2005, 2006, 2018). With respect to the Turkish context in the period of the JDP rule, authors such as Ertuğrul (2012) define the JPD’s politics that are framed by the concept of ‘Conservative Democracy’ by its ideologues, as neoconservative. For Ertuğrul, while classical continental conservatism rejects the new and resists progress to preserve the old, neoconservatism defends a shift to the free-market economy and liberal democracy, recognizing individual freedoms. For neoconservatives, religion does not conflict with progress; on the contrary, it is the main catalyst for a change. Some other authors have described the JDP’s politics through the concept of neoliberalism, which they have defined as an economic strategy (Coşar, 2014; Coşar and Özkan-Kerestecioğlu, 2016). Unlike those authors, I argue that neither neoconservatism nor neoliberalism alone has framed the JDP’s politics; rather it is the combined effect of the two rationalities that needs to be tackled. However, in addressing their relations and interactions, Brown (2005, 2006, 2018)² stated that neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities are not always coherent and complementary. They may present some paradoxes and inconsistencies that lead to ambiguities and diverse modes of articulation of these two rationalities. According to Brown, to be able to understand recent de-democratization processes, we need to explore them in a symbiotic relationship through which these two governing rationalities produce not only negative oppressive but also positive constitutive effects over institutions and subjects. In line with Brown’s arguments, I suggest that, in the first period of the JDP, in resonance with its liberal consensual approach and liberal Islam project, neoliberalism³ was the main articulating rationality for its governing practices, while in the later period, neoconservatism has become the main articulating logic.

In her theory of performance (Butler, 1989, 1990, 2009), Butler (1989) attempts to go beyond Foucault’s notion of the body as ‘a site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, a nodal point or nexus for relations of juridical and productive power’ (p. 601) and as ‘the body as surface and resistance’ (p. 607). For Butler, subjects have the capacity to perform given structural elements in ways that might challenge and destabilize existing dominant regulations and norms. Furthermore, from a Gramscian perspective, a particular emphasis can be given to the ongoing socio-political struggles in the state (as the main ‘organizer of the hegemony’) and in society regarding national projects. The Gramscian theory allows us also to review the articulation of the above-mentioned rationalities with national projects, while Nira Yuval-Davis’ (1993) groundbreaking analysis can be used to explicate how gender relations affect and are affected by national projects. For Yuval-Davis (1993), in all the national projects, ‘gender relations play crucial roles, constructing notions of femininity and masculinity, naturalize power relations and reproduce biologically, culturally and symbolically national collectivities’ (p. 9). Yuval-Davis addressed how women play the roles of cultural transmitters as well as cultural signifiers of the national collectivity/identity. Through multi-layered connections between gender and nation, the abstract notion of the nation turns into a feminized and erotic entity to which people feel belonging and invest their subjective sense of commitment. Combining Jawor’s analysis of the discursive construction of social upheavals as moments of moral crisis⁴ with Yuval-Davis’ (1993) theory on engendered nationalisms, one can argue that, particularly in the context of the second period of its rule, the religious-nationalist project of the JDP has not only been engendered but also moralized through discursive works conducted by Erdoğan and his followers to reveal moral panic among conservative sections of society against the oppositional forces.

In line with the above-explained theoretical framework, in this article, the JDP’s headscarf policies and discourses are scrutinized based on data involving 105 various documentary materials. Including articles, commentaries, columns and press interviews published in diverse newspapers and magazine journals like Hürriyet, Akşam, Yeni Şafak and Artizan between 2002 and 2020, the data were collected through a Google search. Here, concepts such as ‘headscarf’, ‘veil’ and ‘tesettür’ were used in combination with other terms like Erdoğan and JDP. Hence, a large number of documents have been identified. Later, these documents were reduced to 105 with the use of theoretical sampling, which helped me in exploring various hibernating research questions that are eventually evident in the data collection as a theory. Furthermore, in analyzing these selected documents, I paid particular attention to documents concerning the moments of tension and heated public debates between the government and the oppositional groups, such as the presidential election, constitutional changes, 8 March demonstrations after 2010, the Gezi riots in 2013 and the abolishment of the Istanbul Convention. I also analyzed books and documents published by the JPD or its intellectuals. I reviewed these data in chronological order using the discourse analysis method (Hamann et al., 2019; Jäger, 2001).

A brief historical analysis of the changing meaning of the headscarf

Public debates and criticism of the headscarf (başörtüsü) as a practice related to Islamic tesettür tradition (the practice whereby some Muslim women cover their hair and sometimes also their faces, wear long, all-enveloping garments and avoid contact with men who are not core family members) are not new (Turan, 2013). The Turkish government has confronted these issues since the late period of the Ottoman Empire (Alimen, 2018; Çınar, 2008; Göle, 1991, 2000; Turan, 2013). Throughout the history of Turkish modernization, there has been tension between Turkish nationalism and Islam, as the former emerged in response to the collapse of Ottoman religiously legitimated imperial power. Turkish nationalists from the earlier years of the Turkish Republic have consistently attempted to nationalize and domesticate local and radical forms of Islam, primarily through such state apparatuses as the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Armstrong (2012) stated, ‘The newly independent Turkish republic was not just neutral to religion; it actively subordinated it to the state, establishing a rigid and doctrinaire form of laicite’ (p. 135). The strategy of nationalization and domestication of Islam has resulted in the utilization of Islamic imagery as part of the nationalist symbolism by the power groups (Eissenstat, 2018). However, Islam, with its appeals to multinational, multiracial unity, inevitably stood in the way of the ‘pure’ homogeneous nation-state, which has been represented and constituted also through gendered policies and symbols. For instance, during the nation-building process, the establishment of the public sphere in unity with a modern-secular state was the key goal of the Kemalist⁵ state bureaucrats (Ozcetin, 2009; Suman, 2000). In constructing a ‘secular’ public sphere, the founding state ideology promoted the image of a ‘modern-looking woman with an uncovered head’, as opposed to the ‘veiled woman’ who was seen to be traditional, backward and in conflict with the new modern image of Turkey that had been aimed to be drawn and to be presented to the world by modernist political and cultural elites as late as the 1980s (Sakin et al., 2008).

In the 1980s, with the expansion and development of a new Islamist movement in Turkey and in places ranging from the Middle East to Europe (Ali, 2008), the headscarf became a subject of growing political debate vis-à-vis the rise of radical Islam and Islamist movements. The first widespread prohibition of wearing the headscarf was introduced through the regulation concerning the Dress of Personnel Employed in Public Institutions of 1982 following the military coup d’état in Turkey on 12 September 1980 (Buğdaycı, 2008; Çınar, 2008; Report 2010). The military rule aimed not only to secure the state authority but also to constitute proper and stable political conditions to fulfill the neoliberal austerity package imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the Turkish economy. In line with this two-sided position, although the aim was to control Islamism, the state authorities saw ‘the indoctrination with a mixture of fierce nationalism and a version of Islam friendly to the state’ as an effective antidote to the problem of expanding socialism and communism in Turkey (Zurcher, 2004: 288). The ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’, with its emphasis on authoritarian politics and social control using cultural and religious motifs, was the product of the Heart of Intellectuals, a think tank established by right-wing intellectuals in the 1970s (Akin and Karasapan, 1988). Their doctrine (Kurt, 2010), with its emphasis on state authority, was exactly what the generals who carried out the 1980 coup were looking for. Adapting this instrumental understanding of Islam developed by the Hearth (Kurt, 2010: 4), the military regime sought not only to seize the state power over the radical left but also Islamist groups. Under these circumstances, the ban on the headscarf, which ascribed a new political and symbolic value in representing radical Islamism in the eyes of the political elite, came as a strong political step to show the military’s red borders with respect to the evolving Islamist movement in Turkey and in the region. Modernist-secularist and nationalist sections of society supported the attempts to ban the headscarf with the same motivation.⁶ Hence, the political tension has intensified and turned the bodies and headscarves of the pious into a battlefield of various political groups.

The newly developing Islamic women’s movement grew in response to this ban in the 1990s (Aktaş, 2017; Çakır, 1990). As Ozcetin (2009) stated, ‘in the 1980s, the “woman question” was introduced into the Islamist movements’ discourse with the headscarf issue’ (p. 109). In their search to reform Islam, increasing numbers of Islamic female activists and intellectuals have contributed to the development of literature on this question, not only in Turkey but also in the Middle East. Although they developed some important critiques against the second-wave feminists in Turkey, they also agreed with them on some issues concerning women’s rights.⁷ However, contrary to what feminists would claim, the headscarf is, for them, an indicator of their obedience not to men but to God, and it is not a decision forced by their patriarchal superiors or their male comrades, but an outcome of their own choice.⁸ This hybrid position emerged at the intersection of Islamism and feminism and sometimes allowed them to criticize religious interpretations and Islamic perceptions of conservative men.⁹ Here, tesettür (including the headscarf or veiling), as a hybrid invention, played a key role for religious women entering into a public space dominated and defined by modernist-secularist establishments (Göle, 2012).

In the late 1990s, the religiously rooted Welfare Party (WP) attempted to take both the Islamic women’s organizations and demonstrations against the ban under its control (Çakır, 2000, 2013). Resulting in their politicization beyond the need for veiled women, this ongoing expansion of the Islamist movement through the headscarf issue has not been welcomed by modernist secularists and nationalists and resulted in the 1997 military memorandum and the intensification of existing headscarf prohibitions.¹⁰

JDP’s politics of non-defiance and commodification of the headscarf

The JDP was founded in 2001 by members of existing liberal and conservative parties (but mainly the WP) and came to power in 2002. The JDP’s liberal Islam project, which promoted a developmentalist perspective along with the critique of the long-lasting dominance of the state-centered nationalist modernism of the secular establishments, was framed by the notion of ‘Conservative Democracy’,¹¹ favoring the idea of combining Islamic cultural values with market forces in the name of the national development and social democracy defined in terms of identity politics; this project included elements of neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities. Due to its liberal nature, the JDP’s project appealed to the masses – including (despite some reservations) pro-Kurdish movement circles as well as some feminists – and expanded their hopes for the European Union (EU) membership, the protection of women’s human rights and a successful peace process. Hence, it managed to combine the diverse interests of the conservative right and liberal left sectors of society. Turam (2008) defines this approach of the JDP as the politics of ‘non-defiance’. This concept refers to a religious conservatism that denies radicalism (which has been once identified with the WP, the earlier classical religious conservative party) in defending Islam. One of the main strategies of non-defiance politics was to place less emphasis on controversial issues like the headscarf. In line with this, the JDP initially showed no interest in the continuing defiance and street protests of veiled women against the headscarf ban. In fact, in the early 2000s, the harsh military intervention and continuing social clashes between secularist and religious conservative groups and sections led many pious women to retreat to a more liberal position.¹² For instance, Turam (2008) concluded that Islamic women in power positions under JDP rule prefer individualized forms of ‘politics of non-defiance’ that avoid conflict and aim for a non-confrontational mode of communication. Stating that the concept of resistance is overrated by Western secular feminists, Turam’s informants from the pro-JDP circles suggested a non-confrontational understanding of politics, which allows them to escape the ideological baggage ascribed to their identities under the tense political climate of secular-Islamist confrontations before the JDP. This liberal and consensual approach of the JDP’s members¹³ had been particularly effective in the period between 2002 and 2008 and allowed it to present itself as a liberal party seeking consensual politics and dissociate itself from the WP as its predecessor. As can also be seen in practice, the JDP made no move to make a change in the legislation or become involved in no quarrels with the secular establishments about the ban on the headscarf until the JDP had a resounding victory, winning 46.6 percent of the votes and managing to get its candidate to be elected as president in 2007. My analysis of Erdoğan’s statements between 2002 and 2007 proves his moderate approach to the issue, as hardly any of his comments addressed the issue in policy terms or suggested a specific solution to it.¹⁴

The JDP’s project also involved gender politics appropriating Islamic and secular feminists’ views. The JDP has conducted many gender-sensitive legal and institutional reforms in different fields to cope with the problem of ‘gender inequality’ (Ayata and Doğangün, 2017). Under the impact of the EU-led democratization reform process, the JDP attempted to further integrate gender equality into the legislative structure and amended not only the Domestic Violence Legislation (1998) to prevent violence against women, but also the Labour Law (2003) to expand the participation of women into public life and to promote a legal framework that favored women’s paid employment. The constitutional changes of 2004 and 2010 confirmed the state’s commitment to women’s problems and extended constitutional guarantees for women to have equal rights with men.¹⁵ These neoliberal and neoconservative pro-gender equality politics consolidated the JDP’s image as a liberal party capable of reconciling divergent demands of secular and conservative sections of society. The Conservative Democracy project of the JDP targeted a new understanding of modernism and nationalism that are in harmony with traditional Islamic values and neoliberal austerity rules (Dağı, 2006). The project involved a complex patchwork of regulatory narrative lines on women (Cindogulu and Unal, 2017).

The party’s neoconservative stand was in tune with its neoliberalism promoting not only the idea of weakening the welfare state, as opposed to feminists’ call for the state to take over some domestic responsibilities from the shoulders of women (Coşar and Özkan-Kerestecioğlu, 2016), but also the strategy of expanding the neoconservative bourgeoisie and its class habitus based on new subjective morality or ethics of self (Yankaya, 2013) through the private market forces rather than the state. Reflecting the emergence of a new fraction (secularist vs Islamist) in the national bourgeoisie, Tanyilmaz (2015) called this process the embourgeoisement of the Islamists and Islamization of the bourgeoisie, promoting a new Islam-flavored bourgeoisie lifestyle and consumption patterns. In the context of this neoliberalization of Islam, the tesettür and headscarf functioned not only as symbols of the expanding modern Islamic lifestyle, but also became the name of a sector and fashion industry called ‘tesettür fashion’ (Çakır, 1990; Durur and Şimşek, 2017; Meşe, 2015). Hence, as part of the fashion industry, the headscarf began to signify class differences among conservatives (Gökarıksel and Secor, 2012). In this period, neoconservative entrepreneurs established numerous private universities, schools, hotels, journals, TV channels, and other leisure and workplaces that brought their services in line with Islamic norms.

Engendering the social crisis and the JDP’s new nationalism: radicalization of the body politics and the politics of the headscarf

Since the mid 2000s, the JDP’s liberal alliance has gradually lost its hegemonic power in orchestrating contradictory socio-political forces that emerged at the conjuncture of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The Gezi uprises of various sectors uncomfortable with the JDP’s governing style,¹⁶ the escalating ethnic tension with the sudden prevention of the peace process with the Kurdish Movement in 2015, and the disintegration of the political alliance with the Gülen religious movement¹⁷ were symptoms of the dissolution of the earlier social consensus and power block, and gradually expanding political crisis. Against the deteriorating impacts of neoliberalism, such as increasing poverty, shrinking of the social state and increasing war conjuncture, the JDP’s politicians returned to the old rhetoric of a strong authoritarian state and culturally/morally strong society. It began to arouse popular fears/anxieties about national unity and combine them with reactions/resentments of some nationalist and conservative groups against earlier reforms expanding Kurdish and women’s rights. Along with these national problems, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/2008 further strengthened this shift as it led all the capitalist states to display authoritarian reflexes and withdraw themselves. In Turkey, Erdoğan’s JDP took the ideological leadership again and tended to keep the social field under control by employing authoritarian populist policies and retreating from its earlier reformist pro-EU position (Bruff, 2014, 2016; Bruff and Tansel, 2019; Tansel, 2018). It constituted a new political alliance with radical nationalist and conservative groups and parties (for instance, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (NMP) in the parliament). This process has certainly been conducted with the use of the security state strategy, which was raised on the foundation of a Turkish type of the presidential system (Kaygusuz, 2018).

The JDP’s attempt to shift the political ground toward authoritarianism also had a direct impact on its gender and sexual politics. This led women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex (LGBTI) persons increasingly to be exposed to disciplinary body politics at multiple levels as policy instruments and discursive tools (Acar and Altunok, 2013; Ayata and Doğangün, 2017; Cindogulu and Unal, 2017). Gender politics again functioned as the glue,¹⁸ this time, of the JDP’s illiberal alliance. The new power block has also been articulated and consolidated through their shared patriarchal and religious values concerning gender and sexuality. Veiled women have again turned into solid symbols of the new nationalism based on religion as the cement of dispatching society, and their headscarves played an important role as the symbol of national unity and purity.

An important sign of this process was the revival of the previously vivid debate on the headscarf issue in parliament under the initiative of the JDP and RPP (the Republican People’s Party, the main party representing Kemalist tradition). The rise of tension over the issue of the headscarf of the new president Abdullah Gül’s wife at the parliament can be reminded as an important moment. Immediately before and after the presidential election, which led Abdullah Gül to become the president of Turkey, a series of mass rallies called the ‘Republic Protests’ (Cumhuriyet Mitingleri) took place in support of a strict principle of state secularism in 2007.¹⁹ Since then, the JDP has gradually quit its earlier politics of defiance and radicalized its conservative stand through Islamist discourses targeting gendered bodies and sexualities including the headscarf with no fear of revealing the old socio-political tensions. For instance, the JDP re-conformed to its conservative outlook more strongly after 6 years of its rule by passing an amendment that lifted the ban on the use of the headscarf on public university campuses. The JDP’s countermove against the ban was expanded by changing the rules regulating student dress in secondary schools and colleges in 2013. All these revived the clashes between conservative and secular sectors and led the latter to renew their charges that the party posed a threat to the Turkish secular order.²⁰

Since then, the JDP politicians have referred to this political symbol whenever they needed to construct social opposition and transform social problems into moral crises and outrage. Unal (2022) described this change as the elevation of the ‘victimhood narrative’, which is resentful subject formation of Turkish Islamist identity that casts pious Muslims as victims of ultra-secular policies, ‘to a new level where populist antagonisms transgress the “secular versus pious” dichotomy and operationalize an “us versus them” mentality to vilify the opponents of the political regime’ (p. 2). The way it has been employed by the JDP can be exemplified by an incident that occurred during the Gezi protests, which started in Istanbul in 2013. The Gezi Park incident also involved the occupation of a park in Istanbul and the establishment of a camp managed as an autonomous commune by various groups. Being highly inclusive, the Gezi Park commune consisted of various groups ranging from environmentalists, feminists and LGBTIQ+ groups to ‘anti-capitalist Muslims’ and ‘Atatürkists’. Most important of all, the symbols of the Gezi protests were mainly (unveiled) female figures, like the ‘woman in red’.²¹ Erdoğan repeatedly discredited and accused the protestors of such actions as burning a Turkish flag or drinking beer in a mosque (Akkoyunlu, 2014). Erdoğan claimed that the Gezi protests were new attempts to defeat him by those who had failed to do so previously. In this context, addressing Istanbul’s Gezi Park protesters, Erdoğan said,

I want youth, especially, to understand this. We . . . as individuals, and as political generations, have passed through some difficult periods . . . Many of our people’s lives have been darkened because of their beliefs. Why? In a country whose population is 99 percent Muslim, our girls could not go to universities with their headscarves . . . These protesters don’t care about freedom as they’re stepping on the freedoms of others.

Erdoğan’s comments were followed by an accusation²² against protestors for harassing a pious veiled woman.²³ Through some unproven claims by politicians and pro-government journals about the harassment of a pious woman by protestors, a new debate was provoked and the woman’s body with and without a headscarf was turned into symbols dividing ‘us’ and ‘them’. This was different from the discourse of Islamist women’s movements that defined the headscarf as a right in the 1990s.

In line with the same strategy, it is important to address the government’s continuous attacks against secular feminists and LGBTIQ+ individuals.²⁴ Particularly in the last few years, women in growing numbers have been meeting in the Metropol cities of Turkey to march on International Women’s Day. In 2019, several thousand women gathered in central Istanbul for a march, and the main issue that year was the authoritarian regime. Police fired tear gas to disperse them and Erdoğan accused the crowd of disrespecting Islam by booing the Islamic call to prayer.²⁵ Women who took part in the march stated that the chanting and whistling that was part of the demonstration was not aimed at the call to prayer, which began during their protest. Throughout this continuing tension and struggle, which reached a peak when Erdoğan abandoned the Istanbul Convention,²⁶ the headscarf functioned as a symbol to construct exclusive borderlines dividing the national ‘us’ and ‘them’ as national others. In this way, a legitimate place for the political opposition in this imagined domain of the national self, which never fully includes the existing cultural/social diversities, is denied.

In this period, the JDP also emphasized a new perspective on development, which attributed great importance to the female body as the producer of a new pious generation for the nation. In this period, it was argued that only ‘good and strong families’ can overcome the increasing threats from the global power groups that have great plans regarding Turkey.²⁷ According to the JDP politicians, such plans were revealed when the European Union and Western countries passed decisions regarding headscarves or Burka bans.²⁸ These decisions and the JPD’s criticisms against them raised public resentment among conservative sections of the society against the Western Countries and strengthened their religious-nationalist and anti-European political stand. Against these global forces and their internal alliances, the JDP has continuously called for the masses to tighten their national and religious social values, expanding its policy agendas of familism,²⁹ particularly in the second period of its rule (Toksöz, 2016). Erdoğan has publicly argued that strong families would be saved by conservative women who would pass Islamic values onto new generations and confront the challenges imposed on Turkish society by global forces. In line with this discourse, Erdoğan has repeatedly said that women need to give birth to at least three children to ensure the nation’s future. In 2012, from a highly family-oriented and pro-life perspective blended with developmentalist-nationalist discourses, he said that abortion was an insidious plan to eliminate Turkey from the world stage.³⁰ As Kocamaner (2018) stated, the JDP’s ‘family crisis’ discourse demonstrates a logic of governance in which ‘the family is both the cause of an individual’s disorderly conduct and the site of its containment and correction’. This discourse veils structural factors producing societal problems such as income inequality, unemployment and a lack of affordable housing, and directs the anger and resentment of the popular classes to ‘imaginary others’. All these insights show

how perceptions of a crisis in the family, in sexuality and in gender relations more broadly can serve to crystallize anxieties about social change, demonstrating that threats to the nation-state may be filtered through gendered and sexualized anxieties about national virility, sovereignty, and integrity. (Bedford, 2008: 60)

This point goes also with the JDP’s politics that not only describe social problems in gendered terms but also promote gendered solutions against them and evoke gendered and sexualised anxieties central to experiences of crisis.

The drift of the JDP toward authoritarianism led to a change in the mode of articulating neoliberalism and neoconservatism as distinct governing rationalities, but also in the technologies of conducting them. The JDP has mainly drawn on state apparatuses rather than market forces to spread its neoconservative policies. The legislative power of the state, along with the apparatuses like the Directorate of Religious Affairs, was the main mechanisms to spread its familialistic policies and promote Islamic values in the name of pursuing women to act in accordance with Islamic values and to grow a new conservative generation.³¹

Conclusion

The hegemony of the JDP’s project of liberal Islam in the early period of its rule shows how neoliberalism has been further expanded throughout the social body and led the capitalist market dynamics to appropriate Islamic symbols, values and practices, and the constitution of a new conservative bourgeois class (Yankaya, 2013). Mobilizing various liberal principles like individual choice, free entrepreneurship and individual rights, along with conservative values promoting Islamic values, the JDP’s earlier attempts to reconcile contradictory demands and feelings through its ‘Conservative Democracy’ project prompted a neoliberal perspective, emphasizing the development by harmonizing Islam and the market economy. In this way, the symbiosis of neoliberalism and neoconservatism assumed not just oppressive/negative effects, but also enabling/positive effects, as they led to the constitution of various new conservative feminine (and masculine) subjectivities (Brown, 2018). For instance, the JPD’s gender politics had constitutive effects on the articulation of its liberal power block promoting the neoliberalization of Islam. In the same period, the headscarf gained new cultural and material value, as it has been part of the fashion industry and class performances of newly rising conservative bourgeois women. In this sense, what we see here is that earlier subjective and political performances of pious women (ranging from their street protests to their ordinary appearances in the public) with their headscarves, which are considered as being disruptive (in the Butlerian sense of the term) against the smooth operation of signification practices and reproduction of the earlier secular establishment, has now been appropriated by neoliberal discourses of the government and integrated into market dynamics. However, this is only one side of the picture. The JDP’s earlier project of liberal Islam, which appropriated some liberal as well as feminist elements, also allowed radical Islamist forces to enter the legitimate field of politics through their domestication. Parallel to its ‘Conservative Democracy’ project, the JDP has adopted a reconciliatory moderate approach to contentious issues like the headscarf in the earlier period of its rule and indulged in some legal reformations promoting gender equality (2002–2007/2008). Hence, under the impact of its political strategy, also called politics of non-defiance (Turam, 2008), earlier existing power conflicts between conservative and secularist sectors have been relatively balanced by the JDP until the date when the political ground began to shift toward the radical right, at both the national and global levels.

In the second period, in parallel to the fall of its earlier political alliance, the JDP tended to adopt authoritarian populist practices and hold on to radical right socio-political forces. Eventually, the JDP established a new political alliance with a radical nationalist party (the NMP) in the parliament. The first sign of the JDP abandoning consensual politics was the party’s strategic attempt to lift the ban on the use of the headscarf in the public institutions, which had been introduced by the military rule after the coup d’état of 1980. While this change was welcomed by many pious women, it also revived old suspicions and fears among secularists and led to the arousal of old socio-political tensions in Turkey.

With the gradual dissemination of the old liberal coalition, Turkey has witnessed further progress in the rise and consolidation of this religious-nationalist coalition and its continuous illiberal practices. The JDP’s project already had some radical conservative and authoritarian nationalist aspects in its party program, along with some liberal views and principles defending the rights of individuals from the very beginning of its rule. However, toward the end of the 2000s, it began to embark upon the construction of religious-nationalist alliance/project and led these more recessive aspects of its rationalities to get stronger. The articulating principle of this religious-nationalist alliance was no longer shallow liberalism, but illiberalism. In line with this, the discourse framed by Erdoğan’s motto of ‘one nation, one flag, one country, one state’ signified the second period of the JDP rule, which aimed to channel popular anxieties against liberal-modernizing forces that were condemned for being in alliance with the forces against national unity and development.

In this context, the symbolic value of the headscarf transformed, and it began to stand for the JDP’s religious-nationalist project, which aimed to defend traditional national values such as Islam against so-called alienated sections of society such as liberal democrats, socialist leftists, feminists and LGBTIQ+ people, who were accused of leading Turkey in the direction set by Western colonial powers. In this struggle, such gendered symbols like the headscarf contribute not only to the consolidation of the JDP’s new project and power block, but also to mobilizing and directing popular fears and desires under the banner of religious nationalism. This shows how this symbol has symptomatically reemerged in this new context to construct public outrage, moralize socio-political issues and problems, and consolidate the masses around feelings of hate and resentment. Using antifeminist, anti-gender equality and homophobic discourses through the prism of its engendered religious-nationalist project, the JDP transformed public protests into a moral crisis functioning for creating social ground for its authoritarian regime. This is the case not only in Turkey but also in Eastern European and Latin American countries (for analysis of these country-based cases, see Grzebalska and Petö (2017), Laczó (2018), Kováts and Põim (2015) and Muis and Immerzeel (2017)). Conservative body politics (pro-life and pro-natal reproduction policy, conservative family life based on the notion of gender justice, higher value of motherhood, etc.) have become important phenomena in present authoritarian times, since they are not only constitutive of new social control mechanisms, but also have an important function in cementing the new radical conservative-nationalist alliances as opposed to the ‘disrespectful Others’.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Betül Yarar

Other Sources

The Coalition for the Partial Preliminary Evaluation Report by 71 Non-Governmental Organizations of Turkey. Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women 46th CEDAW Session Turkey’s Sixth Report on its Compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, June 2010.

Notes

Biographical note

Betül Yarar is a sociology of cultural communication professor. She is presently affiliated with Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg. Before, she has done various national and international research projects focusing on different aspects of cultural studies, and gender studies mainly. The most recent one is the study that she has done while she was a Philipp Schwartz Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Bremen between 2017-2019: “Neoliberal-Neoconservative Bio-body politics of AKP and Counter-Strategies of Women’s Movement(s) in Turkey.” Based on this study, she has published various articles and edited a book. With respect to her experience as an exiled scholar, she is presently working also on the topic of exile and academic humanitarianism.

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