Abstract
Bilge Yesil’s timely Media in New Turkey analyzes Turkey’s neoliberal and authoritarian regime through the lens of the country’s media system. As Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) increasingly strengthened its grip on power and over media, Yesil’s political economic analysis will help the Western reader make sense of the developments not only in the country but also among similar global trends. The country is a telling example of a neoliberal state: A conservative and nationalist government initiated rapid privatizations and an assault on organized labor (and increasingly on all dissent) while relying on the clientelist relationship between the state and private industry, including media companies. As already-concentrated media markets are increasingly dominated by non-media conglomerates around the globe, Turkey also provides a fine case study for how the trend progresses. The media is owned by major conglomerates whose main business interests include banking, energy, and construction – businesses that are highly dependent on privatization and government contracts. Media companies not only operate under the clientelist relationship between the bureaucratic and financial elites, but they also play a crucial role in legitimizing the AKP’s regime. The AKP years that led up to what Murat Somer (2016) describes as ‘democratic breakdown’ were also marked by the party’s relentless efforts to control and instrumentalize the media in its entirety despite having a consistent electoral support.
The AKP and its media propagated this ‘breakdown’ as the establishment of a stronger, ‘new Turkey’; Yesil describes the regime as ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, with an emphasis on the role of neoliberal ideology and practices. The book is centered on the neoliberalization era that followed the 1980 coup, during which political Islam was actively promoted and clientelist relations between the bureaucracy and media conglomerates became increasingly dominant. Yesil describes the country’s media environment as both statist and commercialized; it is ‘shaped by authoritarian neoliberal impulses’ and should be understood as ‘the byproduct of dialectic tensions between the paternalistic inclinations of the Turkish state and a constellation of externally derived developments’, including ‘foreign capital flows and EU-imposed reforms’ (pp. 12, 13). The interpenetration of the state and market and the tensions between the decentralization and centralization of power are the underlining themes of Yesil’s analysis. These tensions and currents, inherited from Ottoman class relations, are also at the root of the clientelist relationship between bureaucracy and private capital – a relationship that the AKP has redefined and on which it has thrived.
According to Yesil, the ‘statist, nationalist, and secularist’ characteristics of the official state ideology set the tone of the top-down political and cultural reforms of the 1920s–1930s and regulated state–capital and state–media relations. She points out how the state facilitated the process of the accumulation of private capital through government contracts and how the founding elites (Ottoman military and administrative officials) instrumentalized the press and radio as tools of regime building – ‘to create and preserve a national identity’ (p. 21) that was based on Sunni Islam and ethnic Turkish nationalism.
Yesil emphasizes the role of the 1980 military coup in paving the way for ‘the neoliberal restructuring of the economy’ and the rise of political Islam, both of which continued after the transition to civilian governance in 1983 and then throughout the 1990s. She describes how the commercialization and conglomeration of media and the extralegal relationships between the government and the media companies were already established alongside the prominence of the Islamist networks, including the Gulenists, within the state and social life before the AKP era. When the tumultuous 1990s came to end with an economic crisis in 2001 that crushed the markets, the AKP ‘successfully tapped into voter anxiety … while giving political voice to the pious Muslims’ and ‘presented itself as a reform movement’ (pp. 72, 73).
The second half of the book focuses on the AKP era, which is marked by rapid privatizations and massive construction projects, assaults on all dissent and institutional checks on power, and the regime’s involvement in the proxy war against Syria. The AKP, which relies on different configurations of an increasingly narrow elite coalition between bureaucracy and private capital, tried to capture the media not only to censor and propagate but also to offload censorship on media companies and legitimize its regime. Yesil analyzes how the AKP took advantage of the 2001 economic crisis to reshuffle media ownership structures and discipline the mainstream media via political, legal, and economic means (pp. 89–94); working class, socialist, and Kurdish outlets, meanwhile, continued to pay the biggest price both before and during the AKP administration. As the party created a network of its partisan media and disciplined the mainstream outlets, professional solidarity weakened and self-censorship increased under insecure and deunionized working conditions. The country’s media system, ‘beset by clientelism and conglomeration … deteriorated further during the AKP regime’ (p. 138).
Although the book does not delve deeper into the relationship between digital media companies and the AKP, it does not fall into fetishism of technology; it explores how digital platforms were crucial not only for dissidents but also for the ruling elites, including competing factions. Protesters during Gezi protests used networking sites to express themselves and coordinate when the mainstream media ignored and/or took a pro-AKP stance; after their alliance with the AKP broke, Gulenists leaked tapped phone conversations and police investigations about corruption within AKP leadership and about the government’s involvement in the Syrian proxy war; and the AKP used the same technologies to surveil, suppress, and propagate.
Yesil’s well-researched work represents a case study of the neoliberal state’s tendency to favor anti-democratic governance, to appeal to nationalism/neoconservatism to rally citizens behind the neoliberal project, and to produce oligopolies/monopolies. As she presents the Turkish experience from the perspective of media industries, which are the intersecting sites of ideology and profit making, Yesil’s analysis of the Turkish case gains another layer of global relevance: A free market does not necessarily produce media that serve democratic ends.