I first read Tanpınar in 2003 when I was doing my master’s. I was taking a course on Turkish Political Thought from Tanıl Bora, and I ended up preparing a paper on Tanpınar for that class. I cannot remember if that was my choice or by lot, but it was one of the pieces I most enjoyed writing ever. Almost 20 years later, when I reread my musings, post-post-Kemalism was all the rage in Turkish Studies. I realized Tanpınar had been the cultural hero of post-Kemalism and liberal Islamism, which seemed poised to carry the day when I wrote that paper. However, that was not meant to be. Liberal Islamism’s champions evolved into textbook populist-nationalist authoritarians, and post-Kemalism’s intellectual hegemony soon declined as Aytürk called for a post-post-Kemalism. So, did Tanpınar’s legacy collapse along with the movements that once claimed him? Curious, I started exploring newer scholarship on him and quickly saw that his oeuvre still has life in it and finally published my observations in Turkish Studies.
Indeed, it is not surprising for an author of Tanpınar’s complexity to be interpreted through new lenses by every generation. Even during his lifetime, it was not clear to his contemporaries whether he belonged to the left or the right. In contrast, his diaries suggest that he saw himself above such petty squabbles. In the 1970s, both Marxists and conservatives sought to claim him.
However, his work became emblematic with the rise of post-Kemalism in the 1980s. His novels offered an excellent starting point for criticizing the failures and excesses of Kemalist modernization. The comical superficiality of modernization in Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü and the longing to reconnect with the past in Beş Şehir and Huzur aligned well with the post-Kemalist critique of Kemalism as an elitist, distorted project of modernization that violently rejected the past and traumatized the nation’s cultural life. Later on, liberal Islamists found in Tanpınar the blueprints for a new cultural policy: a way to connect capitalist modernity with the Ottoman past and Islamic identity.
As the Tanpınarian East–West synthesis gave way to Kısakürek’s totalitarian utopia in İdeolocya Örgüsü in the 2010s as the main inspiration for right-wing cultural policy, one might expect Tanpınar’s figure to fade into relative irrelevance. Yet the 21st century had other plans for him. At the literary level, with Orhan Pamuk’s encouragement, Tanpınar’s work entered the world stage, gaining global visibility as his writings were translated into English and other languages. This coincided with the rise of “World Literature” as a scholarly project, part of a trend across the humanities that aims to challenge Eurocentric views by developing new perspectives that focus on global interactions in a world of inequalities. At first glance, Tanpınar may not appear to be a natural candidate for a global perspective. He often espouses an Orientalist conception of a rational, dynamic West versus a spiritual, static East, and can at times be read as either an uncritical admirer of the West or a nationalist obsessed with lost grandeur. Neither of these roles fits comfortably within the intellectual aims of World Literature, which seeks to build a cultural sphere where different traditions can encounter one another on equal footing while addressing the dynamics that produce global inequalities.
However, scholars dug deeper. Once we try to see beyond what Tanpınar says about Turkey’s struggles, we see a critic of modernity itself. Some scholars found his work useful in discussing contemporary problems such as masculinity, neoliberal urbanization and institutional decay. Others pointed out that, beneath his unapologetic use of the Orientalist East-West distinction, lies a critique of this dichotomy, as Tanpınar emphasizes that they are useless as frozen, reified concepts, evidenced by their comfortable coexistence in İstanbul. Most importantly, they discovered that his central intellectual problems, namely the problem of modernity’s temporal and spatial organization, are in line with the modernist discontent that shaped the European literary field in the first half of the 20th century. In short, for contemporary scholarship, Tanpınar is a modernist and a critic of essentialism, rather than a critic of Kemalism.
As such, his commentary on social issues extends well beyond Turkey’s immediate woes. In Tanpınar, we see a critique of the modern world rooted in Turkey’s own unique experience. This is, indeed, in line with the current generation’s concerns about Turkey’s political landscape. The previous generation’s willingness to lay Turkish democracy’s problems at the door of the Kemalist State and the military, as well as Turkey’s unique historical experience, has lost credibility after the 2010s. Turkey’s contemporary problems with democracy are better understood within the context of the Global crisis of democracy and the wave of populist nationalism that affects everywhere. For this reason, the current generation is unsatisfied with endlessly reinterpreting the past, cycling from post-Kemalism to post-post-Kemalism. To emerge from our self-incurred immaturity, as Kant would put it, we need to grow out of our complex relationship with our “father.” Instead, we need to expand our horizons by examining the universal crisis of modernity through the lens of geographical inequalities. Tanpınar is an ally.
Getting a project I have been working on for 10 years in print is so exciting. It is available here.
The part that covers the AKP’s misadventures until 2013 is based on my dissertation, conceived in 2012 and submitted in 2016. I added the part concerning post-2013 AKP recently.
One can read it as a history of Turkish Democracy under the AKP. Graduate students looking for interesting cases to include in their own research can read it as a history of Turkey by going over both background chapters. However, people familiar with Turkish politics will probably skip the first background chapter unless they think this statement needs to be substantiated: the Turkish Army always kept a close eye on Western reactions when meddling with political life. The second background chapter on the history of Islamism in Turkey is more interesting to the specialists because it underlines that the rise of Islamism was not the inevitable “return of the repressed” but a product of changes in the international context, accurate strategic choices and not a small amount of luck.
Beyond that, I offer insights to answer six questions regarding Turkey, Western Democracy and Political Science itself.
How the AKP managed to tear apart the Army’s Ancien Regime?
The decisive factor was the international environment.
The AKP’s success in defanging the Army was dependent upon its legitimacy in the West. It built its reputation as a democratic force in the West and among the pro-West elite carefully and kept the dialogue channels open. The West, by the 1990s, had abandoned the Cold War-era belief that it needed the good guys in uniforms in the Third World to keep communists in check and provide stability when corrupt politicians could not. Instead, they adopted the triumphant liberal idea that only more democracy can create more stable and secure environments and that military regimes were illegitimate and ineffective. This was particularly important to counter the rise of Radical Islam. The AKP provided the much-needed Muslim Democratic synthesis, whereas the Army’s room for maneuver was reduced. The AKP managed to triumph against its foes only thanks to this international environment.
Why it abandoned its democratic agenda in the 2000s?
It did not. Its definition of democracy always allowed the tyranny of the pious majority.
The Muslim Democratic synthesis was, from the start, different from the Western conception and the seeds of the so-called authoritarianization were already visible in the AKP’s cherished democratic identity. The AKP had inherited the center-right’s understanding of democracy. This meant that democracy was first and foremost about the “National Will,” the will of the elected officials representing the pious majority. Democratization meant the elimination of elitist institutions capable of hamstringing the elected governments. Rights and liberties were a secondary concern, whose boundaries should be drawn by the elected officials who should prioritize the sensitivities of the pious majority and state security concerns. The roots of this reinterpretation of democracy lie in Western democratic thinking, but it is also different from the hegemonic Western practices and ideas. Still, the AKP’s actions were more or less compatible with Western actors’ ideas when it struggled with the Kemalist bureaucracy. These visions became increasingly distinct as the AKP sought to implement its agenda more aggressively. After 2013, as its economic and foreign policies failed to deliver the intended results, the AKP resuscitated the Islamist/Nationalist narrative of “Turkey under siege.” All opposition to its rule was linked to a Global/Western conspiracy to keep Turkey down. Turkey needed to deal with this enormous security threat using extraordinary measures. However, the AKP kept trying desperately to persuade its Western and domestic audiences that those were legitimate security concerns and not excuses to build a dictatorship. Of course, no one bought these “legitimate security concerns” outside its nationalist-conservative base.
Why political scientists failed to see early warning signs?
They noticed them. They relegated them to footnotes because of the dominant conceptual strategies. Their significance only becomes apparent when we read democracy as a novel.
Studies focusing on Turkey’s regime in the 2000s were inspired by the democratization literature. The AKP’s ideological discrepancies were noticed but never articulated to the broader theoretical constructs. This cannot be explained away by the post-Kemalist zeal as it went far beyond scholars who were working with the assumption that the defining conflict of Turkish politics was between the Kemalist state (or center) and pious civil society (or periphery.) Studies using institutionalist assumptions also predicted that the effect of the EU accession process and Kemalist institutions had created an environment where the Islamists had to learn to be democrats without necessarily implying that Kemalism is evil. The majoritarian statements were simply a residue of the past which will melt into the air in the face of impeccable forces of modernization. The shortcomings were merely a problem of quantity. The Turkish regime’s authoritarian fever was still high, but it would recede. In the 2010s, it started to rise again. People first began to talk about “majoritarian democracy” and then “competitive authoritarianism” as the thermometer of repression started to show higher numbers. However, if we abandon the positivist quest to measure and operationalize democracy and instead take into account its multivocal nature, ideational dynamics that shape AKP’s tyranny of the majority are revealed. We need to read democracy as Bakhtin reads Dostoievsky, as a dialogical novel, a multivocal narrative with multiple authors and possible interpretations. The Turkish right’s narrative of democracy, with its obsession with the National Will and state security, had always considered rights and liberties as an auxiliary part of democracy. In fact, the need to balance majority rule with minority rights and security needs with civic rights has always been part of Western democratic thinking. After all, the AKP did not create an alternative modernity based on the Islamic civilization’s revival as the Islamists promised. It did not even create a Muslim Democratic synthesis. It simply served the worst parts of liberal democratic modernity with an Islamic sauce.
Is this part of a broader populist assault on democracy?
Imagining an epic fight between good and evil accomplishes nothing. Populist nationalism is one of the symptoms of democracy’s crisis, not its mortal enemy.
Nationalists imagine a nation under siege. The decadent values of Netflix, unbound immigration, and cosmopolitan world order are putting the Nation at peril; but still, the Nation is strong and pure at its heart. Strangely, liberal cosmopolitans are also doing the same thing. They imagine a liberal world order under siege. Trolls funded by authoritarian kleptocrats and opportunist leaders exploiting the fears of the uneducated masses are putting the West in danger, even though the West is still the beacon of freedom and the center of a well-intentioned civilization. Populism is the code word for this peril. With its historical references to the Latin American left, agrarian movements of the 19th century and critics of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, it imagines a civilization attacked both from the left and the right. This is a misleading image. Just as the epic fight that the Nationalists imagine being between the Nation and foreigners is a cover for various domestic struggles, the epic battle that liberals imagine is a cover for the crisis of democracy. Firstly, the leftist critique of the liberal order coming from the likes of Sanders and Podemos has little in common with the nationalist critique. Second, the idea that there is a “silent majority” whose values and interests should rule supreme, that this silent majority is not a random collection of individuals, but a nation brought together by common values and history, and the idea that the state can and must act violently when there is a security threat are not alien to Western democratic thinking. The West invented these ideas, and all of them can be traced back to the debates of the American and French Revolutions. The clash between this “populist” vision and the idea of autonomous individuals equipped with civil rights within civic-inclusionary public is as old as modern democracy. It is more fruitful to think of the rise of anti-establishment nationalism as the crisis of democracy rather than an epic fight between liberal democracy and populist authoritarianism.
Is there hope for Turkey’s democracy?
Yes, there is no reason to assume it’s hopeless. There is no reason to expect a cathartic, emancipatory moment any time soon either, though.
Over the years, it has often been argued that Turkey is doomed to be a quasi-dictatorship because its authoritarian culture and statist economy do not support full democracy. We do not hear the economic version of this any longer because the peripheral bourgeoisie came to power but did not prove to be more democratic than the Kemalist “strong state”. People who argue that this is somehow Kemalism’s fault come across as old-timers unwilling to abandon their intellectual habits. We hear the idea that Turkey’s culture is conducive to authoritarianism more, but this begs the question: Why Turkey’s opposition is still vivid and creative? Why do the Islamic nationalists keep complaining about their total failure on the cultural front? Turkey is boosting with potential.
However, to expect that it could overcome its crisis in a single electoral cycle is naive. No election can offer the cathartic moment the opposition craves. The winds are not favorable for democracy. The main lesson that the AKP has learned in the last seven years is that polarization is a winning strategy. Even if they lose control of the presidency, the parliament or both, it will still function as a call for arms to protect tribal interests and win the next election. It is worth remembering that Netanyahu managed to avoid jail time and managed to grab hold of power again after two rocky years. The opposition may have learned how to deal with the new situation and how to develop creative solutions, but it is awfully divided and is unlikely to keep a pro-democracy united front once its components feel less threatened. The domestic actor that the AKP needs to keep content, the MHP, is not interested in a balanced approach the way the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie can be. Au contraire, it wants more repressive and exclusionary politics. The EU and the West are unlikely to play a positive role as they deal with their ideological and economic crises. Even if they were not, the AKP’s legitimacy production is less dependent on their approval than the Army’s. Overall, the only reason to be optimistic about Turkey’s future is the possibility that the energy we once saw in Gezi could be channeled to more institutionalized avenues, as we have seen in the 2019 İstanbul elections.
What should the West do?
Put its own house in order.
I do not have advice for foreign policy experts scratching their heads in Western capitals. They find themselves in a bizarre position with Turkey. On the one hand, the West is pictured as a center of conspiracy intent on destroying Turkey by supporting its various enemies. On the other hand, Turkish authorities try hard to persuade Western capitals that what appears to be dictatorial actions are indeed legitimate security measures and are eager to seek quid pro quos with Western capitals. It is difficult for the West to support the opposition without validating the government’s narrative, but the AKP’s unpredictability is a problem. The good news is that their decisions are not crucial. Neither the government’s nor the opposition’s strategies depend on Western recognition and support. Still, even if they don’t have a lot of leverage, linkages between the West and Turkey are as strong as ever. According to Levitsky and Way, this is supposed to be a good influence. However, nowadays, a lot of anti-enlightenment narratives make their way from the West to Turkey through these linkages: anti-wokism, nativism, a variety of conspiracy theories and, on a different level, neoliberal managerialism. It looks like Western liberals are not in a position to help solve Turkey’s democratic crisis. It might be helpful, though, if the West managed to develop an answer to its own crisis.
Writings & Readings 