The Routledge Handbook of Turkish Politics 2018049246, 2018051152, 9781138500556, 9781315143842

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TURKISH POLITICS

The Routledge Handbook of Turkish Politics pulls together contributions from many of the world’s leading scholars on different aspects of Turkey. Turkey today is going through possibly the most turbulent period in its history, with major consequences both nationally and internationally. The country looks dramatically different from the Republic founded by Atatürk in 1923. The pace of change has been rapid and fundamental, with core interlinked changes in ruling institutions, political culture, political economy, and society. Divided into six main parts, this Handbook provides a single-source overview of Turkish politics:      

Part Part Part Part Part Part

I: History and the Making of Contemporary Turkey II: Politics and Institutions III: The Economy, Environment and Development IV: The Kurdish Insurgency and Security V: State, Society and Rights VI: External Relations

This comprehensive Handbook is an essential resource for students of Politics, International Relations, International/Security Studies with an interest in contemporary Turkey. Alpaslan Özerdem is Professor of Peacebuilding and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research at Coventry University, UK. He is co-editor of Human Security in Turkey (2013); Local Ownership in International Peacebuilding (2015); co-author of Peacebuilding: An Introduction (2015), co-editor of Conflict Transformation and the Palestinians (2017) and co-editor of Comparing Peace Processes (2019). Matthew Whiting is a Lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Birmingham. His research examines the moderation and radicalisation of non-state armed groups, with a particular interest in Turkey and Northern Ireland. His recent work has appeared in Government and Opposition, Middle East Policy and Ethnopolitics, as well as a book entitled Sinn Féin and the IRA. From Revolution to Moderation (2018).

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TURKISH POLITICS

Edited by Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ozerdem, Alpaslan, editor. | Whiting, Matthew. editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Turkish politics / edited by Alpaslan Ozerdem and Matthew Whiting. Other titles: Handbook of Turkish politics Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Non-Latin script record | Identifiers: LCCN 2018049246 (print) | LCCN 2018051152 (ebook) | Subjects: LCSH: Turkey--Politics and government--20th century. | Turkey--Politics and government--21st century. | Turkey--Economic conditions. | Turkey--Economic policy. | Turkey--Foreign relations. | Kurds--Turkey--Politics and government--20th century. | Kurds--Turkey--Politics and government--21st century. Classification: LCC DR576 (ebook) | LCC DR576 .R68 2019 (print) | DDC 320.9561--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049246 ISBN: 978-1-138-50055-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14384-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements

ix x xiv

Introduction Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting

1

PART I

History and the making of contemporary Turkey

11

1 Turkish politics: structures and dynamics Samim Akgönül and Baskın Oran

13

2 Turkey’s never-ending search for democracy . Ilter Turan

27

3 Turkish secularism: looking forward and beyond the West Murat Somer

37

4 Political Islam Kristin Fabbe and Efe Murat Balıkçıog˘lu

55

5 The politics of Turkish nationalism: continuity and change Durukan Kuzu

69

PART II

Politics and institutions

81

6 Elections, parties, and the party system Ersin Kalaycıog˘lu

v

83

Contents

7 The presidency in Turkish politics: from independence to the AKP Menderes Çınar and Nalan Soyarık S¸entürk

103

8 Civil–military relations Metin Heper

115

9 NGOs and civil society Markus Ketola

126

10 The media and media policy Eylem Yanardag˘og˘lu

138

PART III

The economy, environment, and development

149

11 Political economy Ali Burak Güven

151

12 Energy security and policy: between bandwagoning and hedging H. Akın Ünver

163

13 The politics of environment and climate change Ümit S¸ahin

177

14 The economic role of cities Stephen Karam

190

15 Governing Turkey’s diaspora(s) and the limits of diaspora diplomacy Bahar Bas¸er

202

16 Disaster management policy and governance Helena Hermansson and Naim Kapucu

214

PART IV

The Kurdish insurgency and security

229

17 The Kurdish question Zeynep N. Kaya and Matthew Whiting

231

18 The Kurdish insurgency David Romano

242

vi

Contents

19 The perennial Kurdish question and failed peace processes Cengiz Çandar

253

20 Terrorism, counter-insurgency, and societal relations Gareth Jenkins

266

21 The village guard system: counter-insurgency and local collaboration Evren Balta

275

22 The 15 July 2016 failed coup and the security sector Yaprak Gürsoy

284

PART V

State, society, and rights

297

23 Human rights Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat

299

24 Gender politics and the women’s movement Sevgi Adak

315

25 Religious minorities Samim Akgönül

328

26 Religious education Bekir S. Gür

339

27 The transformation of health and healthcare: transitioning from consuming healthcare to producing and maintaining health Enis Barıs¸

349

PART VI

External relations

365

28 Foreign policy, 1923–2018 Mustafa Aydın

367

29 Resetting Turkish foreign policy in a time of global turmoil E. Fuat Keyman

378

30 Turkey and its neighbours in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, and Syria Behlül Özkan

391

vii

Contents

31 US–Turkish relations in turmoil Kemal Kiris¸ci

401

32 Turkey and Russia Pavel K. Baev

413

33 ‘Will you marry me? Who proposes?’ Forgotten promises and the possibilities for reviving relations between Turkey and the EU Füsun Özerdem 34 Turkey’s Cyprus policy in transition Birol A. Yes¸ilada

425

435

35 Turkey–NATO relations: strategic imperatives, identity-building, and predicaments Müge Kınacıog˘lu

446

36 Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions Haluk Karadag˘

459

37 Turkey as an emerging global humanitarian and peacebuilding actor Alpaslan Özerdem

470

38 Conclusion Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting

481

Index

491

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1 Proportion of urban population to the total population (percentage) 14.1 Turkey urban population (right-hand axis) and GDP in constant USD (lefthand axis), 1960–2017 24.1 Percentage of female MPs in the Turkish Grand National Assembly 27.1 Evolution of health spending in Turkey, 1999–2015 29.1 Three crises confronting Turkey 34.1 Turkish Cypriot enclaves following intercommunal clashes: 1963–1974 34.2 Territorial division after the 1974 war 34.3 Cyprus gas and regional politics 36.1 The number of Turkish personnel supporting UN peacekeeping missions (1990–2017)

21 191 321 355 380 436 437 443 461

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 11.1 15.1 26.1 26.2 27.1 29.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 36.1 36.2

The political spectrum in Turkey Political parties banned because of the Kurdish question Political parties banned because of Islamic activities National election results, majoritarian elections, 1946–1957 National election results, majoritarian elections, 1983–2018 National election results, PR elections, 1961–1977 Voter volatility and fragmentation in Turkish politics (1961–2015) Turkish election laws and type of government Political parties with coalition or blackmail potential (1908–2017) Turkey: selected economic indicators (2002–2016) Gamlen’s typology . of diaspora engagement mechanisms (Gamlen 2008) The number of Imam-Hatip middle schools and of their students, as well as . the percentage of. Imam-Hatip students in all high schools (1995–2016) The number of Imam-Hatip middle schools and of their students, as well as . the percentage of Imam-Hatip students in all middle schools (2012–2016) Transformation of health and healthcare in Turkey, 2000–2015a Points of comparison illustrating unique, individual aspects of the twin crises Turkish foreign policy challenges and proactivism, 2002–2010/15 Continuities and ruptures in Turkish foreign policy in the post-2015 era Turkish foreign policy in the Davutog˘ lu and post-Davutog˘ lu eras International peace operations of Turkey Observer missions of Turkey ix

14 23 24 86 87 89 90 91 92 156 204 343 344 353 381 385 387 387 465 467

CONTRIBUTORS

Sevgi Adak is an Assistant Professor at Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London, specialising in gender studies and history of modern Turkey. Her book, Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: Gender, Power and Resistance under the Kemalist Regime, will be published by IB Tauris. Samim Akgönül is a historian and political scientist, Professor at the University of Strasbourg, head of undergraduate and graduate programs of Turkish Studies and Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Head of the Research Team “Religions and Pluralism” of DRES centre. Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on theoretical and empirical questions related to human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights. Her publications include numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as authored, co-authored and edited books, including: Deconstructing Images of ‘‘The Turkish Woman,’’ (1998); Human Rights in Turkey (2007); and, The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights (2014). Mustafa Aydin is a Professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University and the President of International Relations Council of Turkey. His latest book is The Levant; Search for Regional Order (ed., 2018). His areas of interest are international politics, foreign policy analysis, security in Eurasia and the Middle East, and Turkish foreign and security policies. Pavel Baev is a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Associate Researcher at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales. His research on Russian policy in the Middle East is supported by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Efe Murat Balıkçıog˘lu is a doctoral student in the History Department at Harvard University. Evren Balta is an Associate Professor of politics at Ozyegin University. She holds a BA from Ankara University; MA degrees from Middle East Technical University and Columbia x

List of contributors

University; a Ph.D. degree from City University of New York. Her areas of interests include security, political regimes, and citizenship. Enis Barıs¸ is a physician with graduate degrees in Public Health (M.Sc.) and Epidemiology (Ph.D) and over 30 years of experience in global health and health systems. He currently is Practice Manager for Health, Nutrition and Population of the East Asia and Pacific Region of the World Bank. Bahar Bas¸er is an Associate Professor at Coventry University and an Associate Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Cengiz Çandaris a leading Middle East and Kurdish affairs expert in Turkey. He was the special advisor to President Turgut Özal. A veteran journalist and scholar who taught at various Istanbul universities, he is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUITS and Senior Associate Fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs. Menderes Çınar is Professor of political science at Bas¸kent University. He is a former Giorgio La Pira research fellow at the European University Institute and a visiting scholar at Boston and Harvard Universities. His most recent publications have appeared in Turkish Studies and include “From Moderation to De-moderation: Democratic Backsliding of the AKP in Turkey,” in The Politics of Islamism: Diverging Visions and Trajectories (Palgrave, 2018). Kristin E. Fabbe is an Assistant Professor and Hellman Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit. Her book, Disciples of the State? Religion and Statebuilding in the Former Ottoman World, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. Bekir S. Gür holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from Utah State University. He is an Associate Professor at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. His primary research interests include educational policy studies. Yaprak Gürsoy is a Lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham. She is the author of Between Military Rule and Democracy: Regime Consolidation in Greece, Turkey and Beyond (University of Michigan Press) and The Transformation of Civil-Military Relations in Turkey (Bilgi University Press, in Turkish). Ali Burak Güven is a Lecturer in International Relations and International Political Economy at Birkbeck, University of London. His work focuses on development policy and practice with particular reference to international organisations and emerging economies. Metin Heper is Professor of Political Science at Bilkent University. He had been research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Manchester University and Harvard University, and Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut, Brandeis University and Princeton University. Helena Hermansson is an Assistant Professor with the Swedish Defence University and associated with the Centre for Natural Disaster Science, Uppsala University, Sweden.

xi

List of contributors

Gareth H. Jenkins is a political analyst based in Istanbul, where he has been resident since 1989. His fields of interest are security issues, political Islam and civil-military relations. He is currently writing a book on the PKK, to be published by Routledge in 2020. Ersin Kalaycıog˘ lu is a student of comparative politics who specializes in political participation and representation, employed at Sabancı University. He formerly served as the rector of Is¸ık University. He is a member of the Academy of Science, Turkey, the Turkish Political Science Association, and of the International Political Science Association. Naim Kapucu is a Pegasus Professor and Director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida. His research interests are emergency and crisis management, network leadership and governance, social inquiry and public policy. He teaches network governance, leadership, and network analysis in public policy and management courses. Haluk Karadag˘ is a faculty member at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Baskent University. He previously worked for the UN and NATO. His publications include Public Diplomacy: A New Dimension in International Relations and several journal articles. Stephen Karam is an Urban Economist working as a World Bank consultant in South Asia and the Middle East. He was previously Sustainable Development Program Leader of the World Bank stationed in Ankara from 2012-16. Zeynep, N. Kaya is a Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre at the LSE. Her book, Maps into Nations – Self-Determination, Territoriality and the Quest for Kurdish Statehood is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Markus Ketola is a Lecturer and Research Director at the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Ulster University, UK. E. Fuat Keyman is Director of Istanbul Policy Center and Professor of International Relations at Sabancı University. He works on globalization, democratization, international relations, Turkish Foreign Policy, Turkish democracy, and conflict resolution. He is the author and editor of twenty-five books and numerous articles published in prestigious international journals. Müge Kınacıog˘ lu is a Professor in the Department of International Relations at Hacettepe University, Turkey. . Kemal Kiris¸ci is the TÜSIAD Senior Fellow and Director of the Center of the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project at Brookings, with an expertise in Turkish foreign policy and migration studies. His publications include Turkey and the West: Fault Lines in Troubled Alliance (Brookings Institution Press, 2017). Durukan Kuzu is the author of Multiculturalism in Turkey: The Kurds and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He is currently an Assistant Professor in Politics at Coventry University. Baskın Oran is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Ankara University, fired for eight years during two military coups. Now columnist at the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, he also publishes at artigercek.com, and ahvalnews.com/tr. xii

List of contributors

Alpaslan Özerdem is Professor of Peacebuilding and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research at Coventry University. Füsun Özerdem is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Mug˘ la Sıtkı Koçman University. With the primary areas of research in EU-Turkey Relations, Cross Border Cooperation, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding, she has published extensively internationally. Behlül Özkan received his PhD from Tufts University in 2009. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Marmara University. He is the author of From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: Making of a National Homeland in Turkey (Yale University Press, 2012). David Romano holds the Thomas G. Strong Chair in Middle East Politics at Missouri State University. . Ümit S¸ahin is a senior scholar and the coordinator of Climate Change Studies at Istanbul Policy Center in Sabancı University. He also teaches courses on climate change, global environmental challenges and politics in the SU Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Nalan Soyarık S¸entürk is an instructor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bas¸kent University, Ankara. Her studies and publications concentrate on the fields of citizenship and migration with special focus on Turkey. Murat Somer is a Professor of Political Sciences and International Relations at Koç University, and a Visiting Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University. He specializes in comparative politics and democratization. His writings have appeared in books, book volumes, and journals such as Comparative Political Studies, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and Democratization. . Ilter Turan is Emeritus Professor of Political Science in the Department of International Relations of Istanbul Bilgi University and the past president of the International Political Science Association H. Akın Ünver is an Associate Professor of International Relations and a member of Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at Kadir Has University. He serves as a non-resident research fellow at Oxford University's Department of Politics-International Relations and the Alan Turing Institute, London. Matthew Whiting is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK. Eylem Yanardag˘ og˘ lu is an Associate Professor in New Media department at Kadir Has University. She received her PhD at City, University of London. She has published extensively on the state of Turkish media and journalism. Birol Yes¸ilada is a Professor of Political Science and International Studies and the Contemporary Turkish Studies Endowed Chair at Portland State University, USA.

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are very grateful to Yunus Emre Çakmak, Deniz Eks¸i, and Damla Yıldız for their outstanding support and assistance in compiling this manuscript.

xiv

INTRODUCTION Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting

On 24 June 2018, Recep Tayip Erdog˘ an, leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP – Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), was elected the first ever executive-power holding president of Turkey. He won in the first round . of voting following a reluctant concession from the second-placed candidate, Muharrem Ince of the People’s Republican Party (CHP – Cumhurriyet Halk Partisi) – the party that claims its heritage from the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic. The third-placed candidate, Selahattin Demirtas¸ of the Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP – Halkların Demokratik Partisi) conducted his campaign from a jail cell. Some 18 months previously, Demirtas¸, along with many of his parliamentary colleagues, had been stripped of his parliamentary immunity by the AKP and charged with terrorism-related offences. For many observers, this election result was the culmination of a concerted campaign by Erdog˘ an to seize autocratic control of Turkey and concentrate all meaningful political power in his personal hands, largely free of checks and balances. During the previous 16 years of AKP rule, the party had introduced a series of laws that heavily regulated the media, as well as detaining dissenting journalists, closing down critical media outlets and using business connections to threaten others. Alongside this, civil society groups were harassed and squeezed, while Sunni Islamist civil society groups were allowed to proliferate. Liberal rights, which were never well embedded at any stage in Turkey’s history, were also restricted. The party also undertook a series of constitutional and policy amendments that compromised the independence of the judiciary and reined-in the veto power of the military. Most significantly, Erdog˘ an, through a deal with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP – Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi) and endorsed through a popular referendum, implemented a long-sought-for constitutional amendment to fundamentally transform the Turkish republic from a parliamentary system with a (mostly) ceremonial president as head of state, to a system that abolished the prime minister and replaced it with a directly elected president who serves as head of government and head of state. A steady process of increasing the concentration of personal power in the hands of Erdog˘ an free of any meaningful checks was now completed. This was a seemingly dramatic shift from the early years of the party in power where hopes were high amongst many that it would deliver a change in the social, economic, and political life of Turkey for the better. When the AKP first came to power after a resounding electoral victory, it sought to reassure concerned observers who fretted over its mildly Islamist background. The 1

Introduction

party declared its commitment to Atatürk’s founding vision of a secular and modern Republic and reassured the watching public they had no desire to Islamise Turkish public life. They threw their weight behind Turkey’s EU candidacy process and committed to undertake necessary reforms to advance this. As part of this process, the AKP brought the military under civilian control, it abolished the death penalty, and loosened restrictions on the expression of religion in public life – of course all these reforms also advanced the AKP’s strategic interests and shored-up its electoral support with its core voters of pious and conservative Muslims, but they also seemed to represent advances in Turkey’s democracy. The AKP also pursued previously unthinkable policies including extending some language and broadcasting rights to the Kurds, attempting to re-establish formal relations with Armenia, and pursuing a peace initiative in Cyprus. The economy was thriving and there was a strong sense of optimism. All this led to Turkey being hailed as a model of how Islam and democracy could comfortably co-exist, and its regional importance and status grew. This makes it all the more puzzling how Turkey has come to the position it is in today. It has been viewed as a test case of whether a country needs to choose between its Muslim heritage and liberal democracy or if these can co-exist. Elements of Turkey’s rising authoritarianism can be traced back to soon after the AKP first came to power, but more recent key events have consolidated this. Notably, the government’s response to the Gezi Park protests in 2013 was a watershed moment. This began as an environmental protest against a proposal to build luxury . apartments and shops in a central square in Istanbul, but soon became a broad church for disgruntled groups to protest against the government and protest spread to almost 90 other locations across Turkey. The government responded in a confrontational manner, shutting down dissent, and using the police to forcibly break up the protests. Interestingly, a heavy-handed response seemed to divide the AKP and a strong response was a signal of Erdog˘ an consolidating his power in the party over any other potential leadership rivals. Three years later, Erdog˘ an faced the strongest outright challenge to his authority when a coup was attempted on 15 July 2016. Interestingly, this coup was different from previous coups in Turkey – it did not come from a secular military but it came from a rival Islamist group within the military. It was also more violent and had less senior officer support and popular support than previous coups. Again, in his response to the threat, Erdog˘ an saw an opportunity to consolidate his power. He declared a state of emergency which allowed him to rule almost entirely free of any checks on his power (the state of emergency was renewed seven times until his recent presidential election victory formalised this power anyway) and undertake a purge of the military, bureaucracy, universities, and almost all public institutions to remove internal threats to Turkey’s security. The focus on Erdog˘ an and the AKP by many observers can often lead to neglecting other important political developments in Turkey that are, of course, shaped by the party in power but which are often neglected by an exclusive focus on rising authoritarianism. Given Turkey’s rapid transformation and growth since the 1950s, but especially since the 1990s, any complete analysis of Turkey’s politics needs to have a broad scope. Processes like urbanisation have fundamentally changed Turkey. Its economy was seen as a success story by many (albeit the solidity of its foundations is often questioned), but this brought new pressures on Turkish society. Rising wealth and development have increased the expectations of the population, putting pressures on welfare provision, including healthcare and education. Non-traditional security issues have come to the fore as society has transformed, including disaster management, climate change, and energy security. Yet these issues are typically not examined alongside broader trends in Turkish domestic politics – a neglect that this book hopes, in part, to redress. 2

Introduction

What happens in Turkey has significant implications far beyond its borders. Due to its geopolitics, Turkey is often analysed as being at a crossroads between the West and the East. Its foreign policy swings from non-interference to proactive intervention. Turkey’s membership of international alliances and groups is vital, both as a signal for the interests of its domestic politics and in terms of whether a leading Muslim country will form alliances with Western institutions or look more to the East or Russia. Atatürk originally envisioned a Turkey that was Western oriented and open to the world but almost a century later, amidst rising nationalism and populism both in Turkey and around the world, Turkey has retreated from some key international institutions. Its relationship with the EU is currently at a low ebb with responsibility lying on both sides, while its relationship with NATO looks decidedly weak and has, in turn, weakened NATO. Bilateral relations with key countries including the US and Russia, while never completely smooth, have also come under strain. Yet at the same time, Turkey’s engagement with UN peacekeeping and international aid has steadily increased in scope and quality. In short, Turkey is going through possibly the most turbulent period in its history, with major consequences both nationally and internationally. The country today looks dramatically different from the Republic founded by Atatürk in 1923 on values including republicanism and laicism. The pace of change has been rapid and fundamental, with core interlinked changes in ruling institutions, political culture, political economy, and society. This Handbook, we hope, helps to make sense of these changes by offering a comprehensive and accessible, yet sophisticated, overview of the field.

The structure of the Handbook In this Handbook we have pulled together contributions from many of the world’s leading scholars on different aspects of Turkey. Our scope is widely comprehensive, covering all aspects of both formal and informal politics, highlighting how it is necessary to grasp the interlinkages between the different themes in order to understand Turkey fully today. Whilst we left the content of the chapters in the more than capable hands of our contributors, we did ask them to approach each topic with a loose structure and focus in mind to give some coherence across all chapters. Each chapter begins by tracing the historical origins of the issue at hand, often going back to the Ottoman or early Republican period before tracing the debate to today in order to put the different aspects of Turkish politics analysed here in their rightful perspective. Next, we asked our contributors to consider how their topics are playing out today, and to engage with the main scholarly debates and literature facing these topics. This ensures that each chapter is very topical, discussing the AKP’s influence on Turkish politics to date as well as the influence of wider domestic and international trends on key issues facing Turkey today. Each chapter not only provides the contributors’ own expert analysis and insight, but also engages with other scholarly and policy literature on their debates. In this way, each chapter provides an excellent entry point and overview to key debates around Turkey’s politics at this crucial time. Finally, we asked each contributor to conclude with some thoughts on future possible trajectories around their topic of concern. Of course, futurology and speculation are the downfall of many a great academic, but rather than speculation our contributors offer careful insights into what we should expect if current trends continue and analysis around some of the challenges Turkey faces going forward. Additionally, many chapters also have a strong policy focus, and they tease out the implications of the topics discussed both for policy-makers within Turkey and for policy-makers hoping to engage with Turkey. 3

Introduction

In order to cover the wide range of themes facing Turkey today and to do them full justice, this book is divided into six parts. Part I of the book covers the theme of ‘History and the Making of Contemporary Turkey’. This part examines the origins and evolution of the main political ideas that frame Turkey today, with a focus on how these have changed over time and how they shape the politics of Turkey today. Turkey today, in many respects, is a successful model of economic growth, a link between ‘East and West’, and a rising regional and world power. Yet it is also beset by internal tensions and contradictions, especially around its model of a secular state ruled by moderately Islamist democrats and its embrace of liberal capitalism within a traditional conservative society. Many of the challenges and sources of conflict facing Turkey have their origins in the foundation of the state. These include: the powerful role of secularism in guiding powerful elites like the military and the judiciary; a dominant ethnic and exclusionary understanding of Turkishness enshrined within the state’s institutions; an interrupted history of electoral democracy that is weak when it comes to liberal rights; and a long-term and ongoing conflict between a secular state and political Islam. These issues represent fundamental fault lines in Turkey today and going forward. In Chapter 1, Samim Akgönül and Baskın Oran discuss ‘Turkish Politics: Structures and Dynamics’. This foundational chapter sets out the main themes of Turkish politics since the founding of the Republic, tracing the origins of the fault lines of recurring political . conflicts as well as analysing why we see the outcomes we do today. In Chapter 2, Ilter Turan looks at ‘Turkey’s Never-Ending Search for Democracy’. He traces the chequered history of democracy in Turkey, highlighting the uneven nature of democratisation characterised by swings and variations. Turkey’s failure to ever fully consolidate its democracy is explained as the product of particular incentives within the political system combined with a particular institutional culture. This history is used to frame the rising authoritarianism under the AKP today. In Chapter 3, Murat Somer discusses ‘Turkish Secularism: Looking Forward and Beyond the West’. He traces the social, political, and cultural battles over secularism in Turkey, how the AKP has been seen to challenge this founding concept of the Turkish Republic and, crucially, what lessons the Turkish case has for wider understandings and debates around secularism. Chapter 4, by Kristin Fabbe and Efe Balıkçıog˘ lu, looks at the related but distinct theme of ‘Political Islam’. They highlight the changing and at times harmonious but more often somewhat conflictual relationship between political Islam and the state. In other words, the conflict that many see as characterising that between the state and the early years of the AKP in power is nothing new and, in fact, this conflict ploughs a well-worn furrow. Finally in this part comes Chapter 5, by Durukan Kuzu, ‘The Politics of Turkish Nationalism: Continuity and Change’, which looks at another major founding principle of the Republic and how this has evolved. He demonstrates how Turkish nationalism has multiple and varied reference sources that have altered according to changing political and social landscapes. He shows how the roles of ethnicity and secularism in shaping Turkish nationalism have changed since the founding of the Republic, while religion continues to be to be an influential referent. Part II covers ‘Politics and Institutions’. This analyses those fundamental formal institutions which set the rules of the political game in Turkey. What is fascinating is that these institutions are currently in flux. Recent developments have seen the emergence of a ‘dominant party system’, and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an has used his party’s dominance to create an executive-led presidency to further increase the AKP’s control over the whole political system. Institutions both incentivise and constrain the choices made by political elites, so any reduction in the independence of institutions, or in their ability to check elected governments, is problematic for democracy. Yet many political institutions in Turkey have a history 4

Introduction

of intervening against elected governments and have not always been bastions of liberal democracy themselves. For the AKP and its supporters, it has been necessary to constrain existing political institutions before these institutions attempt to limit the AKP’s electoral mandate or even remove it from power. In this way, historically powerful institutions have become major sights of contestation, especially in the public bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the military. Meanwhile, civil society has been rolled back and the space for citizens to engage in public politics is increasingly monitored and restricted. Similarly, the media has come under a profound assault. These developments raise questions about the origins of the main political institutions, the drivers underpinning institutional change, and the likely consequences of the institutional changes we are witnessing. This part begins with Chapter 6, by Ersin Kalaycıog˘ lu, looking at ‘Elections, Parties, and the Party System’. Kalaycıog˘ lu traces the development of the party system from its Ottoman legacy, examining the cultural fault lines that shaped voting patterns and the party system, and how voter realignment in the 1990s produced a religious and nationalist hegemony, which led to the erosion of democratisation and the emergence of a one-party system today. Chapter 7, by Menderes Çınar and Nalan S¸entürk, ‘The Presidency in Turkish Politics: From Independence to the AKP’, shows how the institution of the presidency has changed over time. They demonstrate how the idea of shifting to a presidential system first emerged in the instability of the 1990s and how this eventually became a reality under the AKP today. Chapter 8, by Metin Heper, examines ‘Civil–Military Relations’, a particularly important topic. He examines the role of the military as supporters of Atatürk’s Republic and how this led to significant interventions by the military against elected governments in the name of protecting the national interest, until today where the AKP has largely brought the military under civilian control in a way not hitherto seen in the history of the Republic. Chapter 9, by Markus Ketola, looks at ‘NGOs and Civil Society’, looking at their role in modernising and democratising Turkish society by providing a counterpoint to the state. This chapter considers how the rise of populism, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism are impacting civil society today. Finally, Chapter 10, by Eylem Yanardag˘ og˘ lu, looks at ‘The Media and Media Policy’. Yanardag˘ og˘ lu traces how media pluralism grew in Turkey throughout the 1980s and 1990s before encountering a hostile atmosphere today under the AKP. She shows how, as pressure on mainstream media increases, online journalism and social media platforms have become an alternative outlet for journalism. Part III covers ‘The Economy, Environment, and Development’. Turkey’s modernisation has been truly remarkable and has brought notable change to Turkish society. As it embraced globalisation and a liberal capital model, the country thrived economically. Urbanisation and extensive development were visible. Previously overlooked sectors of society prospered, notably the rise of ‘Muslim capital’ – a new socially and religiously conservative bourgeoisie. Inevitably, such rapid change also put strains on internal infrastructure, introducing new challenges and exposing ways in which the state had failed to modernise. More recently, Turkey has seen its first economic downturn under the AKP’s modernisation agenda and critics have claimed that the Turkish model of liberal capitalism and conservative Islam is collapsing. This raises questions about future economic security and sustainable development. Chapter 11, by Ali Güven, looks at ‘Political Economy’. He shows how Turkey as a middle-income country has occasional bouts of high performance but has been unable to find a sustainable way of overcoming its deep-seated developmental challenges. Chapter 12, by Akın Ünver, entitled ‘Energy Security and Policy: Between Bandwagoning and Hedging’, examines Turkey’s diversification strategy in light of energy security concerns and ever-growing demand. In so doing, he identifies a range of factors that are likely to affect the 5

Introduction

success of Turkey’s ability to meet this growing demand going forward. Chapter 13 by Ümit S¸ahin discusses ‘The Politics of Environment and Climate Change’. He traces the origins of environmental activism in Turkey, showing how it has evolved as awareness of environmental threats grows. He argues that, as democracy has declined in Turkey, so has the space for effective environmental protection and activism. Chapter 14, by Stephen Karam, tackles ‘The Economic Role of Cities’. In the chapter he traces the links between economic development and urbanisation, highlighting how the emergence of large cities has transformed Turkey. He also examines the challenges facing Turkish cities going forward, including issues such as financing large cities today, ensuring successful urban planning, building strong transportation systems, disaster management, and the environment. Bahar Bas¸er discusses ‘Governing the Diaspora(s) and the Limits of Diaspora Diplomacy’ in Chapter 15. Given that Turkey has one of the largest diasporas in Europe, Bas¸er shows how the government’s policy towards its diaspora has become more proactive, seeking to manage diasporas and tapping their resources. Chapter 16, by Helena Hermansson and Naim Kapucu, examines ‘Disaster Management Policy and Governance’. Turkey’s disaster-prone geography means that management policies are particularly vital. However, this chapter argues that these policies have been reactive rather than proactive and, in many respects, ineffective, especially in terms of coordination and cooperation. Part IV is entitled ‘The Kurdish Insurgency and Security’. Turkey today faces very real and significant security threats, most notably in the form of the 30-year long Kurdish insurgency but also from Salafi jihadists (and historically from left-wing radicalism). Resolving the Kurdish insurgency, in particular, has proved exceptionally challenging, despite seemingly promising initiatives starting in 2009. Indeed, with the announcement of a ceasefire by FARC in Colombia, it is now the longest ongoing, uninterrupted armed conflict between a state and an insurgent group in the world. In spite of the high human and economic costs and general acceptance that neither side can outright defeat the other, neither side appears any closer to compromise today. The war in Syria and other regional developments have only exacerbated tensions with Kurdish insurgents. The war in Syria has also increased the threat facing Turkey from Al Qaeda and ISIS. To further add to this complicated picture, following the failed coup on 15 July 2016, the AKP government declared that its former ally, Fethullah Gülen, is now the major terrorist concern facing Turkey. Turkish responses to internal security threats typically prioritise robust military responses over engaging in political reform. In addition, successive Turkish governments have labelled dissidents and critics as terrorists in order to marginalise them from political life, even though such critics may not be using or promoting violence. Recent developments have only served to reinforce this policy response. This has placed significant strains on Turkish society and the security forces’ relationship with the population. Chapter 17, by Zeynep Kaya and Matthew Whiting, discusses ‘The Kurdish Question’, highlighting how its origins lay in the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Republic and the policies of successive governments to manage this threat, which grew in violence over time. In Chapter 18, David Romano looks specifically at ‘The Kurdish Insurgency’, with a specific focus on the PKK and the consequences of their armed campaign. In Chapter 19, Cengiz Çandar discusses ‘The Perennial Kurdish Question and Failed Peace Processes’. He introduces new data to show why two recent peace initiatives from 2005 to 2015 failed and what their legacy has been both for the conflict and for future prospects of reviving a peace initiative. In Chapter 20, Gareth Jenkins also covers the Kurdish insurgency but expands more broadly to cover ‘Terrorism, Counter-Insurgency, and Societal Relations’. He examines the range of internal threats that Tukey has faced from militant 6

Introduction

leftists, militant Islamists, and Kurdish radicals and how the state has responded to these threats. In Chapter 21, Evren Balta looks at ‘The Village Guard System: Counter-Insurgency and Local Collaboration’. She examines how the village guard system has expanded beyond its stipulations in law as successive governments saw it could be used effectively in the counterinsurgency against the PKK by drawing on an element of local collaboration. Finally in this part, Chapter 22, by Yaprak Gürsoy, looks at ‘The 15 July 2016 Failed Coup and the Security Sector’. She locates the response to the failed coup within the AKP’s wider reform policies when it comes to civil–military relations, showing how the AKP created forces loyal to the regime which ultimately prevented a successful coup from taking place. Part V covers ‘State, Society, and Rights’. One of the most common criticisms of Turkey is that the state fails to uphold and protect its citizens’ rights. These criticisms have been a source of conflict between Turkey and the EU, as well as leading to negative and backward stereotypes of Turkey abroad, often to the chagrin of Turks and successive governments (recall Turkish reactions to the film Midnight Express and the apology from its lead actor several years later). Most often these criticisms focus on human rights, but the importance of other basic rights, such as the right to education and the right to healthcare, should not be overlooked. This part assesses the state’s record when it comes to rights, looking in particular at key social groups like women and religious minorities. It investigates not only the record of the state in the provision and protection of rights, but also whether such rights are extended to all groups equally. Chapter 23, by Zehra Arat, on ‘Human Rights’, discusses Turkey’s inconsistent human rights record. She discusses obstacles to the advancement of human rights including authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, patriarchalism, and a tendency to uphold state security above human rights. Chapter 24 by Sevgi Adak examines ‘Gender Politics and the Women’s Movement’. Whilst noting the ability of the women’s movement to work together effectively on specific issues, overall it remains divided on religious, ethnic, and class lines, hindering its overall effectiveness. Samim Akgönül discusses ‘Religious Minorities’ in Chapter 25. He discusses which minorities are recognised by the state and which are not, and how this has shaped, and been shaped by, state policies. In Chapter 26, Bekir Gür looks at . ‘Religious Education’, specifically at the establishment and development of Imam-Hatip schools. After tracing their historical origins, he shows how the revival of these religious schools occurred from 2002 onwards within a broader reform of education policy by the AKP. Finally in this part, Chapter 27, by Enis Barıs¸, looks at ‘The Transformation of Health and Healthcare’. He traces the transformation of the healthcare system from underachieving to a model for other middle-income countries, explaining its drivers and some of the areas where it could still achieve further. The final part, Part VI, deals with ‘External Relations’. Turkey is a vital regional actor in the Middle East, an aspiring candidate to join the EU (at least officially, albeit enthusiasm has waned in the last decade), the second biggest contributor to NATO, and it has a history of UN peacekeeping. It also has a somewhat poisonous historical legacy with neighbours like Armenia and Greek Cyprus. As such, its external relations are multiple and overlapping. The state has also gone through phases of being insular and turning away from the outside world (such as under Erbakan in the 1990s) to trying to establish itself as an influential player on the world stage. Under the AKP, the Turkish government shifted away from an initial policy of ‘zero problems with neighbours’ to active intervention following the Arab Spring, the collapse of Syria and threats to the stability of Iraq. Meanwhile, Turkey has the potential to become a pawn in a game between a resurgent Russia under Putin and the liberalism of the

7

Introduction

EU and US. This part assesses these dynamics to examine Turkey’s place on the world stage and what the future holds. In Chapter 28, Mustafa Aydın looks at ‘Foreign Policy, 1923–2018’, providing an overview of key developments, trends, successes, and contradictions in Turkish foreign policy and carefully rooting these in the country’s geopolitics, history, economy, and military capabilities. In Chapter 29, ‘Resetting Turkish Foreign Policy in a Time of Global Turmoil’, Fuat Keyman discusses how Turkish foreign policy evolved from the early 2000s, from being proactive through regional and global engagements to facing an impasse with the onset of the Arab Spring, to today where Turkey is a sceptic of globalisation. In Chapter 30, Behlül Özkan examines ‘Turkey and its Neighbours in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, and Syria’. He traces how the AKP sought to make Turkey a leader of the Muslim world and rebuild its organic links with the Middle East. However, he argues that this became a policy of adventurism that has led to the greatest foreign policy crisis in the history of modern Turkey. Chapter 31, by Kemal Kiris¸ci, looks at ‘US–Turkish Relations in Turmoil’. He notes that although US–Turkish relations have never been without problems, today there are serious doubts about their viability as growing nationalism and Islamism under the AKP, have over time, pushed Turkey away from Western alliances. The arrival of Donald Trump and ‘America First’ has worsened the relationship further. In Chapter 32, Pavel Baev discusses ‘Turkey and Russia’. He notes how international developments, including Russia’s conflict with the West and the Syrian war, are straining this relationship and that similarities between Erdog˘ an and Putin do not actually bring the countries closer together. Against this backdrop, he traces the economic and strategic drivers of this relationship to explain its zig-zagging nature. In Chapter 33, Füsun Özerdem examines ‘Forgotten Promises and the Possibilities for Reviving Relations between Turkey and the EU’. She looks at the long-term relationship between Turkey and the EU, with a particular focus on Turkey’s EU accession efforts, why they failed to progress and the prospects for their future relationship. She argues that this relationship can only be revived if both parties see a rational and instrumental benefit in it. ‘Turkey’s Cyprus Policy in Transition’ is examined by Birol Yes¸ilada in Chapter 34. After providing the background to the Cyprus conflict and its partitioning, Yes¸ilada discusses recent efforts to resolve the crisis and why they have failed to date, albeit there is much optimism at the moment that a resolution is increasingly possible. In Chapter 35, Müge Kınacıog˘ lu examines ‘Turkey– NATO Relations: Strategic Imperatives, Identity-Building, and Predicaments’. She surveys Turkey–NATO relations and pinpoints moments of contention that adversely affect mutual relations. She argues that these relations are not solely determined by pre-given strategic concerns and rational calculations but rather they are constructed through their interactions, which in turn define their respective security identities. In Chapter 36, Haluk Karadag˘ looks at ‘Turkey and UN Peacekeeping Missions’. He discusses the different forms and shape that Turkey’s role has taken in this area, the strategic reasoning behind Turkey’s increasing engagement, and the consequence this has for Turkey domestically and abroad. In the final contribution, Chapter 37, Alpaslan Özerdem discusses ‘Turkey as an Emerging Global Humanitarian and Peacebuilding Actor’. He discusses how Turkey has become increasingly involved in this sphere since the end of the Cold War. He argues that the way in which Turkey delivers aid and undertakes peacebuilding missions in contexts like Somalia may be a more effective means of assisting war-torn countries by working with populations directly to deliver programmes more effectively. 8

Introduction

Needless to say, all views expressed in the chapters are those of the authors only. When compiling a book that covers such a broad range of topics, we as editors decided that it was essential to do justice to the plurality of different perspectives and analyses of Turkey’s complex politics. As such, we have brought together a diverse array of contributors, with each expressing their own perspective, rather than imposing any single editorial line. Instead, what links our all chapters is careful, rigorous, and high-quality analysis from leading experts in their field. That is down to the quality of our contributors, to whom we owe our deep thanks.

9

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PART I

History and the making of contemporary Turkey

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1 TURKISH POLITICS Structures and dynamics Samim Akgönül and Baskın Oran

Introduction Turkish politics can be seen as part of the general political tendencies observable around the world, following universal ideologies such as nationalism or capitalism. But it is also the fruit of a specific social and historical context. On the one hand, it has some solid structures due to its Ottoman and Byzantine roots, while, on the other hand, it copies Western templates in its institutions. Nevertheless, the political habitus of this country includes original political behaviours that are difficult to name using the usual political science jargon. For example, ‘right’ and ‘left’ as political categories in the Turkish context cover very different realities compared to their European (French) roots. There are in Turkey five major political currents that the external qualification by a non-Turkish observer does not fit with the internal qualification and with the perception in the eye of the Turkish population (Table 1.1). In the universal understanding of the political spectrum, Turkish politics, in the sense of the management and governance of the public affairs of the country, is clearly situated on the right wing. In the case of a ‘common enemy’, these right-wing movements cooperate and interact, creating de facto and sometimes de jure ‘National Fronts’. During the second half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century these common enemies have been communism, political Islam and the Kurdish movement. Thus, the main characteristics of Turkish politics are nationalism (Islamic and secularist), Jacobinism, and statism. This chapter aims to analyse the trends in Turkish politics chronologically since its foundation, but in a thematic perspective.

First Republic, 1920s–1960s Turkey, as a Republic, has passed through three steps in its foundation: (1) On 23 April 1920, during the national war (called ‘the war of independence’ in Turkish historiography), the Grand National Assembly opened in Ankara as an opponent of the Sultan’s Parliament of Istanbul; (2) On 24 July 1923 the Lausanne Peace Treaty was signed, setting up the State and recognising the legitimacy of the Ankara Government; (3) On 29 October 1923 Mustafa Kemal set up the Regime by declaring the foundation of the Republic and, by consequence,

13

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics Table 1.1 The political spectrum in Turkey

Place in the spectrum

Sees itself as

Main political parties

Active years

Extreme right

Nationalist – statist

1969– 1993–

Islamist right

Nationalist – conservative

Liberal right

Economically liberal, nationalist, conservative

Secularist right

Centre-left, Kemalist, nationalist

Kurdish movement

Left – Kurdish nationalist

Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (Party of the Nationalist Movement, MHP) Büyük Birlik Partisi (Party of the Great Union, BBP) Millî Görüs movement (National vision) and its parties Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Party of Justice and Development, AKP) Demokrat Parti (Democrat Party, DP) Anavatan Partisi (Party of the Motherland, ANAP) Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party, CHP) Demokratik Sol Parti (Democratic Left Party, DSP) Partiya Karakerên Kurdistanê (Party of Workers of Kurdistan, PKK), tradition parties Halklarin Demokasi Partisi (Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP)

1969– 2001–

1946–1960 1983–2009

1923– 1985–

1978– 2012–

Source: Authors.

the end of the Ottoman Monarchy. Starting from this date, and during the 1920s and especially 1930s, a new political system was established. The main characteristic of this ‘new’ system found its roots in the Ottoman Empire: the sacralisation of the State. Indeed, since the establishment of the very strong State apparatus, much more centralised than the Ottoman system, the State, as the incarnation of the nation, has been placed above everything, especially above liberal values such as democracy, human rights or the rule of law. The sacralisation of the State1 justified an authoritarian regime, rarely contested, and in particular, four military interventions in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. The foundation of the Turkish political system between the 1930s and 1960s followed two main interconnected guidelines: the installation of structural fears, and constant identity engineering. The Turkish political system after 1923 was an authoritarian presidential unicameral administration, in a single-party regime controlling the government, the State apparatus, the military, and the local and regional administrations. During this period, the Republican 1

Symptomatically, in the Turkish political vocabulary the State is associated with the father, Devlet Baba, and the Homeland is associated with the mother, Anavatan (Delaney 1995).

14

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

People’s Party (CHP) founded in 1923 was the master, at the same time, of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary, but also of the media and civil society. This period can be divided into two with regard to two different personalities: Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) (1923–1938), a national hero who became over decades the main political . . reference of the Turkish Politics alongside Islam; and Ismet Pasha (Inönü) (1938–1960), who followed, in the very precarious atmosphere of the interwar years, a pragmatic, balanced, multilateral, and very cautious foreign policy, at least until the 1950s. Atatürk’s period is characterised by very radical Westernising ‘reforms’ in order to construct a homogeneous nation, with two attempts at a multi-party system, in 1924 because of internal scissions in the CHP, and in 1930 by the will of the President Atatürk to build a ‘His Majesty’s most . loyal opposition’. Both attempts failed and the opposition parties were shut down. Inönü’s period was more fragmented. Between 1938 and 1946 the authoritarian system worsened. Between 1946 and 1950, however, Turkey adopted a multi-party system under pressure from the UN. And between 1950 and 1960, Democrat Party (DP), more liberal in economic matters but more permissive concerning Islam, governed the country until the military coup d’état of 27 May 1960. During this period, which can be qualified as the ‘first Republic’ (that the internal political jargon rejects2), the political system was based on two main ‘structural fears’ that are constant until today. Division Turkey has been founded on a fear: a fear of disappearance due to the Peace Treaty of Sèvres fragmenting the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Treaty signed in 1920 between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, not only completed the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the Middle East, but also divided Asia Minor for the benefit of the victors. The Peace Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, guaranteeing Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and a small section of Thrace, has certainly avoided the measures imposed by Sèvres, but the fear has remained as a perfect ‘chosen trauma’ to this day. Every time that some section of the Turkish population has claimed rights, or every time that Western allies of Turkey have asked for liberal reforms, the ‘Sèvres Syndrome’ has been reactivated (Schmid 2014) to the point of becoming a ‘Sèvres Paranoia’ in the hands of nationalists and conservatives. As the core ideology of any nation-state3 consists of building the ‘national’ homogeneity, the Turkish specimen, using that ‘sacrosanct fear’, tried, as in many other nations built after the establishment of a State, to accomplish this aim in three different steps. First, it tried to extinguish the non-Muslim minorities which were impossible to assimilate due to their different religion. Impossible because, in the Middle East and the Balkans where

2

3

Since the 1980s there has been an on-going debate about a ‘second Republic’ in order to outreach Kemalist principles of the Turkish Republic (centralisation, sacred State, coercive secularism, excessive nationalism, etc.) Thus, the term ‘second Republic’ became synonymous with the burial of the Kemalist State. Therefore, even if there are substantial changes in the Turkish State system as in 1983 or in 2016, it’s quite impossible to call it ‘second’ or ‘third Republic’ in the Turkish political jargon. See Sever and Dizdar (1993). Nation-state should not be confused with national state. The latter (which dates from 1789) refers to a type of state based on the concept of ‘nation’ in contradistinction to God or King. The former (which dates from the last quarter of the 19th century) is a type of state claiming that the nation it seeks to build has a unique identity (supra-identity), that of the dominant ethno-religious group, and refuses to recognise, and suppresses, other ethno-religious identities (infra-identities). This of course amounts to a sheer refusal of democracy.

15

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

the historical conditioning of the Millet System is almighty, the main determinant of national identity is not language or ethnicity, but religion and even denomination. Therefore, during the first decades of the Republic, an extermination policy, which had already begun at the very beginning of the 20th century with Armenians, and very repressive policies were directed at the religious and ethnic minorities that remained in the newly established Turkey as the silts of the Ottoman tide. Especially between the 1930s and 1960s, the main target of these repressive policies was the Rums (Constantinopolitan Greek orthodox), but also smaller non-Muslim groups such as Armenians, Syriacs, and Jews. The milestones in this process were 1915 (the extermination of Anatolian Armenians), 1923 (the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey), 1941–1942 (abusive measures towards Jews, Armenians, and Greeks), 1955 (the 6–7 September pogroms), and 1964 (the expulsion of Rums and Levantines bearing Greek citizenship). Secondly, the Turkish Nation-State tried, not to exterminate, but to assimilate the Kurds, who were considered assimilable due to their being Muslims like the Turks. It should also be noted, however, that the Turkish State, exasperated by a strong Kurdish resistance against assimilation, especially after the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) took up arms, lost hope of assimilating these people considered thus far as ‘Prospective Turks’ (Yeg˘ en 2006, 74–78). After the Nawruz festivities of March 2005 the Turkish General Staff in an official declaration used a term amounting to a ‘spiritual deportation’: ‘The so-called Citizens’ (Vatan 2005). Concomitantly, a second wave of assimilation was started immediately after the advent of the Republic and has been very successful: assimilation of non-Turkish Muslim groups, mainly originating from the Balkans (such as Albanians, Bosniacs, or Pomaks) and also the Caucasus (such as Circassians, Laz, or Georgians). Successful because these immigrants had not only escaped massacres in their host-states, but were also very fit for assimilation due to their being allochthonous Muslims. A third and important step should be added to these two: the on-going process of folklorisation of the regional, ethnic and cultural differences, applied to regional identities and also (but only after 1990s) to the small remaining non-Muslim minorities. Since the beginning of the Republic, the major systemic ‘problem’ of Turkish politics has been the way to deal with Kurds. The Kurds also were targeted at the beginning of the nation-building process but the triangle of extermination/assimilation/folklorisation didn’t (couldn’t) work for them. In contradiction to the allochthonous non-Turkish Muslims referred to above, the Kurds enjoyed a specific clan-based social organisation, they were (are) too many – forming 15–20% of the population of Turkey – and they were autochthonous. Autochthonous people are incomparably very jealous about their identity. Therefore the Kurds have been only partially assimilated and have not been fit to be folklorised and become a ‘cute’ local culture. Thus, the first violent reaction (actually, action) of the freshly established Turkish State was against the Kurds in 1925, namely only two years after the proclamation of the Republic. The so-called Sheik Said revolt of 1925 was the pretext to legitimise a coordinated violent attack against Kurdish tribes, considered as dangerous in three ways: (1) Kurdish identity was not welcome anymore in the Turkish nationalistic discourse of 1920s; (2) the Islamic character of the ‘revolt’ was considered incompatible with the secularist agenda; and (3) the tribal organisation of Kurds was considered as a rival that competed with the sovereignty of the newly centralised Turkish Nation-State. Starting with the Nestorian uprising in 1924, until 1937 no less than 20 regional uprisings to the central authority, led by Kurdish sheikhs or landlords, were violently quelled by the 16

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

Turkish Army (Olson 1989, 111–117), although many of them were simple incidents of perturbation and protestation. In addition, in the official discourse, these uprisings are always linked to some external meddling to weaken Turkey’s internal stability or its claims over the non-Turkish Middle Eastern territories such as Mosul. The concept of Dıs¸ Mihraklar (foreign evil forces) is a constant of the Turkish political discourse to explain every single problem (Aydın 2003, 345–355). During the first decades of the Republic many central ‘reports’ were written to underline the necessity of assimilating the Kurds to Turkishness and annihilating their traditional social organisation.4 The last and the best-known manifestation of this repressive policy, which became structural violence, took place in Dersim in 1937–1938. There was no revolt or anything like it in Dersim; this operation was simply the liquidation of the last region of differentness, resulting in 13,160 Kurds of Dersim killed and 11,808 people exiled. Starting with this pitiless repression, the Kurdish question was frozen, at least until the 1960s. Islam The second structural fear, motivating the establishment of a specific Turkish political system, is ‘Islam’, considered as dangerous in two ways. On the one hand, the founders of the Republic were almost all secularised, Westernised positivist soldiers and bureaucrats (Akgönül 2010, 113–130). In their vision, Islam was the main reason for the ‘backwardness’ of the Turkish nation and may be one of the main causes of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the nation that would be built, in an endless and coercive process of identity engineering, ought to be without the visibility of this Islam, associated in their minds with the backward Orient. But there was also a second reason for the anti-Islamic measures of the first decades. After having removed from power the Ottoman dynasty and after having quelled the regional ambitions of the Greeks, Armenians or Kurds, the Kemalists saw in religious brotherhoods possible rivals to their complete domination of society. Thus, in 1924 the caliphate was . abolished, along with the creation of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet I¸sleri Bas¸kanlıg˘ı) for three purposes:   

To eliminate the Ottoman dynasty as a possible rival. To eliminate popular Islam in order to construct a normative and ‘national’ Islam. To control religious discourse, the latter becoming more nationalist than spiritual.

Therefore, it is not possible to qualify Turkish politics between the 1920s and 1960s as ‘laik’, if this term means, as in post-1905 France, the separation between religion and the State. Quite the contrary, the Turkish laiklik of the period is an apprivoisement, a domestication of the Islamic religion for serving the Nation-State. The Diyanet, a minor institution 4

Reports by the President of Assembly Abdülhalik Renda (1925), the Minister of Interior Cemil Uybadın (1925), the Inspector of Public Administration Hamdi Bey (1926), the Governor Ali Cemal . Bardakçı (1926), the General inspector Ibrahim Tali Öngören (1930), the General Fevzi Çakmak (1931), the General Ömer Halis Bıyıktay (1931), the Minister of .Interior . S¸ükrü Kaya (1931), the General inspector Abdullah Alpdog˘ an, (1936), the Prime Minister Ismet Inönü (1935), the General inspector Abidin Özmen (1935), the deputy Celal Bayar (1936), the People’s Republican Party on minorities 1940, the General inspector Avni Dog˘ an (1943), the Inspector of Finances Burhan Ulutan (1947).

17

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

between 1924 and 1960, became step-by-step the major, if not the biggest State apparatus since the military coup d’état of 1980 (Gözaydın 2008, 159–176). One may detect four steps in the evolution of this institution, creating a specific political system:    

1924–1960: Creation of Diyanet and the control of popular Islam; 1960–1980: A more liberal political system, the institutionalisation of Political Islam against Diyanet considered as the tool of secularisation; 1980–1990s: Diyanet becomes the tool of the military junta and then of the bureaucracy and the political elite for an ultranationalist discourse (‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’) mainly against leftist and Kurdish movements; 1990s–2019: Diyanet becomes the largest State institution with huge financial and human resources, meant to de-secularise society. Its budget 2.34 times that of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, surpasses that of 12 ministries put together, including the Health Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Energy & Natural Resources Ministry.

Another measure against popular Islam as a major policy of the Turkish State was implemented in 1925, with the reunification of national education, in order to diminish the power of the religious education by brotherhoods and to complete the identity engineering mentioned above through the main ideological State apparatus. The same law in 1925 banned sacred places of brotherhoods such as the Tekkes. Thus these tarikats, one of the main social organisations of Anatolian society, had to go underground, at least until the 1960s where, step-by-step, they have been legitimised, until becoming an important part of political and social power after the 1990s. Thus, if the ‘fear of division’ as a structural constant of Turkish politics motivated repressive policies that succeeded until now, the ‘fear of Islam’ had the opposite effect. It created a reaction and brought Political Islam to power, and it now uses, though the one-man regime since 2014, the same oppressive policies to suppress non-Islamic behaviours, especially since the 2010s.

‘Second Republic’, 1960s-1990s Between the 1960s and the 1990s, what characterises Turkish politics is violence. This violence should be understood in two meanings of the term: a physical one and a symbolic one that Hamit Bozarslan sees in the entire region called the ‘Middle East’. According to Bozarslan (2015, 8) this violence is defined in two registers, material and emotional. In the same manner, Etienne Balibar considers this ‘state of violence’ as ‘ultra-objective’ because it is institutional in the sense of State violence or non-State political movements’ violence, but also ‘ultra-subjective’ because the violence is sacralised, passionate, and sometimes the only source of legitimation of an institution or movement (Balibar 2010, 34). In the Turkish context, both registers are present, both targeting the same social and identity categories: non-Muslim minorities, Alevis, Kurds, and left-wing political movements; in short, those who are in one way or another different from the ‘ideal citizen’, namely laik, Hanefi, Sunni, Muslim, and Turk.5 5

Concerning the citizen, the official ideology of the Turkish Nation-State has, from top to bottom, a four-level hierarchical stratification that can be described as: (1) Laik Hanefi Sunni Muslim Turks (LAHASÜMÜT); (2) Non-Turkish Muslims (Bosniacs, Pomaks, etc.); (3) the Kurds; (4) the nonMuslims. It’s important to note that, after the AKP came to power, the first word of the first/dominant level was dropped to read HASÜMÜT without Laik (Oran 2018, 444).

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Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

Physical violence Physical violence has been one of the constants of Turkish politics since the Committee of Union and Progress (1908–1912/1913–1918), so before the foundation of the Republic, and still is nowadays. However, this violence is often concentrated in some areas and relatively short slots in the country, except during the second half of the 20th century where a generalised violent context dominated all of Turkey. The primary actor responsible for this context is unquestionably the Army. If the Turkish State was founded by the military, during the first decades of the Republic these former militaries who became . . civilian politicians (such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Ismet Inönü, or Kazım Karabekir) continued to dominate the Army, and thus, the military considered itself the ‘founding father’ and the ‘owner’ of the country. Dynamics changed in 1950s when civilian leaders who did not take part in Turkey’s liberation war as military officers such as Adnan Menderes or Celal Bayar took power, step by step, pushing the Army in a defensive position. Therefore, between 1960 and 2000, four military interventions (two direct in 1960 and 1980 and two indirect in 1971 and 1997) placed Turkish politics solidly under military tutelage. The 27 May 1960 coup was relatively lenient compared to its ‘successors’. After ten years of DP rule, which took the government of the country from its military founders united in the RPP, the Army intervened for several reasons, especially because of the dissatisfaction of officers about their politically and economically weakened position,6 but also because of what they considered pro-Soviet foreign policy choices. After the coup, DP politicians were jailed and three of them, Prime Minister Menderes, Foreign Minister F.R. Zorlu and Finance Minister H. Polatkan were hanged, subsequently becoming martyrs for right-wing politicians. The 12 March 1971 memorandum of the General Staff was an ‘indirect’ coup, installing not the military in power but a technical civilian government under the direct tutelage of the military. Following the coup, left-wing political movements and student movements were . harshly repressed. The Worker’s Party of Turkey (TI P) and the Confederation of Progressive . Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK) were shut down, and more than 10,000 people, especially leftists, intellectuals, and Kurds, were jailed. The following years were particularly violent. After 1975, the military violence turned the whole country into a permanent tension arena. During the decade leading to the 1980 coup, a polarisation occurred between ‘left’ and ‘right’ engraved in the political vocabulary categories such as ‘nationalist’, ‘Islamist’ or ‘revolutionary’.7 Especially between 1977 and 1980, the streets of Turkey became permanent crime scenes where the ideological divisions led to a physical segregation, through specific cities and ‘liberated area’ neighbourhoods. During these three years, each day brought several deaths from one ‘side’ or the other. The ‘state of violence’ increased to such a point that a popular newspaper summarised the situation in its front page with a sharp sentence: ‘to survive has become difficult!’(Tercüman 1978).

6 7

At the end of the 1950s, hyperinflation dominated the country and impoverished the fixed-income public servants, including officers. In Turkish: ‘devrimci’. This has a double, therefore ambiguous meaning: it means reformist (referring to Westernising Kemalist reforms of the 1920s), as well as revolutionary. This ambiguity helped the leftist youth to escape the wrath of the military for some time. The same was true for the term ‘socialist’ used instead of communist, the bête noire of the military.

19

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

Paradoxically, the 12 September 1980 coup terminated this three-year street violence in a span of one single night. Much later, Turks learned that the ‘Anarchy’ (as Turkish newspapers and politicians were calling ‘political violence’) was encouraged by the military to justify and legitimise their direct intervention.8 Between 1980 and 1983, Turkey lived under a ludicrous junta that installed a civilian regime after 1983 but under solid military control: 1,683,000 citizens were blacklisted and taken into custody, of which 230,000 were taken to military courts; 14 died during hunger strikes, 171 during interrogation and torture in military prisons, and 49 were hanged. The number of deaths in military prisons reached 229 in total, and court rulings established that only 73 of them could be classified as ‘natural deaths’; 43 inmates committed suicide, 16 were killed while ‘trying to escape’, 74 in ‘clashes’. Under custody and in military prisons, 146 deaths were found ‘questionable’,. with innumerable physically and mentally crippled individuals. If, as Ilter Turan (2014, 43–66) says, the Turkish democratisation process advances with two steps forward and one step back like the Janissary band walk, the 1980–1990 period is, doubtless, a ‘many steps back’ period. Symbolic violence The physical violence of these 30 years was a part of general political, social, cultural, and economic violence that characterizes Turkish politics. Indeed, these three decades were under constant direct or indirect military tutelage and, thus, adopted the codes and behaviours of a military structure: hierarchy, chain of command, strict respect without questioning instructions coming from the top, sacralisation of the State and its chief, and legitimation of generalised violence in everyday life. Another reason for this generalised atmosphere was the confirmation of Jacobinism and the reinforcement of bureaucratism. During these decades, Turkish politics was firmly against decentralisation processes (and claims) because the centre (the Nation-State) did not, and does not, trust the periphery at all, and even less so the Kurds. For example, the seven ‘regions’ of Turkey, invented by military junta, have never had any administrative reality. Correspondingly, the political and bureaucratic class were decidedly against the development of a ‘civil society’ and/or a ‘participatory democracy’ simply because the State does not trust its citizens (Dönmez 2011, 9). Paradoxically, the same years coincided with an increase in the number of ‘citizens’ dwelling in cities. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Turkey witnessed an unprecedented rural exodus, resulting in more ‘citizens’ living in urban areas rather than rural areas where the socialisation respects different rules (Figure 1.1). This trend that begun in 1960s then became structural, preparing an electoral basis for populist, conservative, and eventually Islamist movements. The 1970s and 1980s especially were the age of gecekondus 9 and arabesk.10 It is obvious that until the 1990s former Kemalist, secularist, and statist political elites did not or could not 8

After his retirement, four-star general Bedrettin Demirel gave an interview to Yener Süsoy of the daily Milliyet on 5 July 1987: ‘I believe 12 September [coup] arrived very late. I’d have preferred to do it right away but the majority of my [General Staff] friends said: “Let the conjuncture get ripe enough so that [our coup] gets the full approval of the nation.” Thus we waited for one more year, during which too much blood was shed’. 9 Gecekondu means a house put up quickly without proper permission (slum). The zones of gecekondus constructed in the 1970s became the electoral basis of populist and Islamist movements in 1990s promising them a regularisation (Erman and Eken 2004). 10 Arabesk is an urban underclass music produced and consumed by former rural fringes born in the city, particularly considered as the symbol of degeneration by elite urban population (Yarar 2007).

20

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Figure 1.1 Proportion of urban population to the total population (percentage). . Source: Data compiled from the figures of the Turkish Statistic Institute (TÜIK 2017).

produce a comprehensive policy for this specific social category, who over the years became the majority and took the power at the end of 1990s. As this section of the population suffered from constant domination and symbolic social violence in its everyday life, and was devoid of social, cultural, and financial capital to participate in the city’s public life (namely, politics) despite their growing numbers, that period left resentment, frustration, and vindictiveness. That is maybe why when the plebus finally obtained economic and political power at the beginning of the 2000s, its oppression became more violent than in previous periods, but this time directed towards the former secular bourgeoisie.11 All the more so, the very same period is the beginning and the acceleration of an economic liberalisation, under strict State control [a Turkish paradox (Szyliowicz 1991, 71–74)] that widened the already existing gap between rich and poor classes. Unsurprisingly, the children of the former rural populations in the big cities gradually formed a new bourgeoisie, conservative but capitalist, economically liberal but ultranationalist, creating one of the several contradictory bourgeoisies in the Middle East, much as in Egypt or in Tunisia (Tarek 2016). Therefore, the new dominant population of Turkey was ready to take the power in every meaning of the term, but a resistance from the old bureaucratic, military, and business establishment confronted it, at least until the end of 1990s.

‘Third Republic’, 1990s–present day Despite its specificities, Turkey has a relatively open political system and society. Therefore, the global upheaval that occurred at the beginning of the 1990s strongly affected Turkish politics too. In the ‘second new deal’ of the century, Turkish politics was adapted, while keeping some structural characteristics such as nationalism, centrism or statism. This adaptation had two directions: in domestic politics, Turkish politics mutated towards populism and Islamism step by step. In the field of foreign policy, Ankara began to search for a new role in the new world. 11 The best work drawing a long-term overview of this transformation is not an academic but a literary one, Orhan Pamuk’s (2015) A Strangeness in My Mind. It tells the story of Istanbul from the 1960s to the 2000s from the eyes of a street yogurt vendor.

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Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

This period can be divided into two sub-periods. From the second half of the 1990s until the end of the 2000s a quick transfer of political capital occurred from the ancient dominant class to a new conservative but pro-European regime. The 1990s were characterised by a low-intensity conflict between Kurdish militants on one side and the Turkish Army and the establishment, on the other. In the same period the main problem facing Turkish politics once again became the place of Islam in the public and political sphere. The second period that corresponds to the last decade witnesses a very strong authoritarian, Islam, and capitalbased regime that is changing the tenets of politics. Kurdish and Islam issues are back Turkish politics is a matter of fears, and the resurrection of ‘old demons’ is lumpy but cyclical. After the 1920s period, the Kurdish question came back into Turkish politics in 1960 within the general Turkish leftist movement. Its third resurrection was in the 1990s, making this period one of most bloody eras of all time, with not only a military repression of the PKK,12 founded in 1978 and engaged in violence since 1984, but also through extra-judicial executions and assassinations of Kurdish businessmen, kidnappings and murders of intellectuals, torture in prisons, and so on. In the meantime, all political parties defending Kurdish rights have been, one by one, shut down (Table 1.2). It is true that with the 2000s and with the relative detente in Turkish politics, the Kurdish question lost, for a short moment, its intensity. After 2002 especially, when the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), defending at the time liberal values, came to power, the approach to the Kurdish question changed radically, as is the case for many other structural fears of Turkey, especially on the Islamic and Kurdish issues. When the traditional establishment was sceptical about the Europeanisation process, thinking that it was a trap, the AKP and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, accelerated Europeanisation reforms. This included not only economic liberalisation but also societal matters such as the compatibility of Islam with democracy and, also, the Kurdish question. Indeed, after the second election of the AKP in 2007, consolidating firmly its power over the State, an unprecedented policy of ‘opening’ was applied towards the Kurds, attracting Kurdish votes especially from those Kurds who were committed to Islam. The first period of the AKP, with structural EU reforms, can be seen as the second flow of Westernisation reforms after those implemented coercively in the 1920s. This second flow fixed and completed 1920s Westernisation reforms that were undoubtedly undemocratic. Actually, radical reforms were started in 2001 by Bülent Ecevit, who was an heir to the Kemalist tradition, but these reforms were strongly deepened by the AKP, especially between 2002 and 2004. Surprisingly, resistance to these reforms came not from the people but from the elite created by the first flow of reforms in 1920s, namely the bureaucracy, army and judiciary of the ‘Nation-State’, simply because the very same elite was thinking that these Europeanisation reforms would bring more rights to Kurds, Islamists, and non-Muslims, leading eventually to the dislocation of Turkey. As a result, especially with the new law of ‘struggle with terrorism’ passed in 2006, the AKP came back step by step towards the traditional structural fears that characterised Turkish politics. However, this policy did not last for long. The AKP saw that it was easier to go back to the former nationalist and warmonger discourse to attract the nationalist vote than resolving the century-old Kurdish problem. Thus, since 2010, especially since the 12 September 2010 12 For a general view of the cruelty of the 1990s see Bozarslan (2001).

22

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics Table 1.2 Political parties banned because of the Kurdish question

Name of the party . Türkiye I¸sçi Partisi (Turkish Workers’ Party) Türkiye Emekçi Partisi (Turkish Labour Party) Türkiye Birles¸ik Komünist Partisi (Unified Communist Party of Turkey) Sosyalist Parti (Socialist Party) Halkın Emek Partisi (Party of People’s Labour) Özgürlük ve Demokrasi Partisi (Party of Freedom and Democracy) Sosyalist Türkiye Partisi (Socialist Party of Turkey) Demokrasi Partisi (Party of Democracy) Demokrasi ve Deg˘is¸im Partisi (Party of Democracy and Change) Emek Partisi (Party of Labour) Demokratik Kitle Partisi (Party of Democratic Mass) Halkın Demokrasi Partisi (Party of Democracy of People) Demokratik Toplum Partisi (Party of Democratic Society)

Date of closure 1971 1980 1991

Political affiliation Socialist Socialist Communist

1992 1993 1993

Socialist Pro-Kurdish Pro-Kurdish

1993 1994 1996

Socialist Pro-Kurdish Pro-Kurdish

1997 1999 2003

Socialist Pro-Kurdish Pro-Kurdish

2009

Pro-Kurdish

Source: Sancar and Akgönül (2013, 747).

referendum,13 Turkish policy became traditional again, using societal cleavages to keep and strengthen the party’s power. Among these cleavages, the long-term rivalry between conservative Muslims and secularists, Sunnis and Alevis, and, as expected, between Turks and Kurds, have been instrumentalised successfully. The AKP came to power to heal cleavages; it discovered that the opposite was more beneficial and easier. Another structural divide within the Turkish society was the opposition between traditional Sunnis on the one side, and secular Sunnis and Alevis on the other. It is true that Islam has always been one of the main political parameters of Turkish politics. But the outbreak of political Islam in 1970s radically changed the Turkish political deal. Nevertheless, this political Islam – organised under the Millî Görüs¸ (National Vision) movement and embodied by Necmettin Erbakan – was tightly controlled by the military and bureaucratic elite between the 1970s and the 1990s. As is the case for the Kurdish movement, for political Islam too the main tool of repression was party bans (Table 1.3). In the 1990s, the Millî Görüs¸ movement became very successful, especially in local elections. Thus, the local elections of 1994 asserted this success where the movement won the municipalities of Ankara and Istanbul. In Istanbul, a young 40-year old Islamist, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, became the mayor. Between the general elections of 1995 and the indirect military coup d’état of 28 February 1997, the Welfare Party settled as the foremost political movement of the country and its leader Necmettin Erbakan became Prime Minister. During this period, Islamic activities and the desecularisation of Turkish society caused and accelerated the secularist reaction of a coup d’état. Paradoxically, in turn this ‘28 February’ intervention caused and accelerated a 13 A constitutional referendum on a number of changes was held in Turkey on 12 September 2010. The results showed the majority supported the constitutional amendments, with 58% in favour and 42% against. Even if this referendum allowed a more ‘civil’ regime, the large victory of ‘yes’ gave the AKP confidence and complete domination on the State apparatus.

23

Turkish politics: structures and dynamics Table 1.3 Political parties banned because of Islamic activities

Name of the party

Foundation

Closure

By

Reason

Millî Nizam Partisi (Party of National Order, MNP) Millî Selamet Partisi (Party of National Salvation, MSP) Refah Partisi (Party of Prosperity, RP)

1970

1971

Constitutional court

‘Activities against secularism’

1972

1981

Military court

Banned with all political parties

1983

1998

Constitutional court

Fazilet Partisi (Party of Virtue, FP)

1997

2001

Constitutional court

‘Activities against the principles of Secular Republic’ ‘Continuation of an already banned party’

Source: Authors.

democratic reaction in the country, resulting in the foundation of the AKP in 2001, which took the power in 2002 and has retained it until this very day under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an. Therefore, the Islamisation of politics and society that started in 1990s has continued steadily since, becoming one of the three mainstream political currents of Turkey, alongside the secularist and Kurdish movements. More authority, less ethics Since its foundation in 2001, the AKP has won:    

Five general elections: 2002 (34%); 2007 (46.5%); 2011 (49%); June 2015 (40%); and November 2015 (48%). Three local elections: 2004 (46%); 2009 (42%); 2014 (45.5%). Three constitutional referendums: 2007 (69%); 2010 (58%); 2017 (51%). One presidential election: 2014 (51%).

It is clear that, except for the elections of June 2015,14 election-by-election, the AKP has consolidated its power, not only at the level of votes but also at the level of domination of the entire State apparatus, gradually annihilating the very fragile Aristotelian separation of powers, conceptualised by Montesquieu, between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Particularly between 2008 and 2012, where through the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials military power was curtailed and subordinated, but especially since the 2010 referendum, the AKP has tackled a tremendous task in order to transform the traditional politics of Turkey. But if the purpose of this mutation was at the beginning within the framework of more democracy to liberate Islamic behaviours, it became after 2010 the instrument to impose the general domination of Islam on the country, restraining non-Islamic behaviours. Islam passed from the status of an object of politics to the status of the subject of politics.

14 This is the only election where AKP lost 8% compared to the previous elections, especially thanks to/ because of the Kurdish movement that set up a coalition with liberals, ecologists, and human rights defenders. This loss caused a radical change in the AKP’s policies towards Kurds, from open negotiation to pitiless repression, and also started a very repressive era against any opposition.

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Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

It is true that one of the main characteristics of Turkish politics, since its foundation, was and still is, the ideology of ‘shaping generations’ in the sense of social engineering. It was applied excessively by the pioneer Kemalists in the 1920s and by the military junta of 1980. But this objective has never been applied as openly since the 1920s as it is now by the AKP. Changing political behaviour and public appearance, altering the educational system from top . to bottom to address the Islamist agenda notably by opening a multitude of preacher schools (Imam-Hatip), building the unprecedented growth of the political and social role of the Diyanet, bringing the judiciary under the strict control of the party, and finally legitimising all superficial Islamic discourses, even those against the legal rules of Turkey, are some of the patterns of this ‘shaping generations’ project. Children born in 2001 are today 18 years old and have seen only Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an as a leader, and are educated under Islamist and nationalist programmes. Moreover, this exasperating cocktail of Islamism and Nationalism over the last decade is liable to profoundly reconstruct Turkish politics. That being said, if at the level of identity politics Turkey is moving away by giant steps from Western political values, at another level, it is completely within this framework. As a matter of fact, one of the main political masters of the ‘post truth’ era with ‘alternative facts’ becoming realities that hide the real realities (!), is Recep Tayyip Erdogan along with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Turkish politics is worshipping capitalism, but a dirigiste one of which nepotism, endemic corruption within and outside of the State apparatus, and a lack of coherence in the internal and external policy are, today, mainstream characteristics. Therefore, there is a huge ethical crisis brought about by Political Islam, which ironically dominated society precisely by constantly preaching on moral and ethics.

Conclusion Foucault’s pendulum is an illusion explaining reality. In its rotation, the pendulum comes always back to its initial position but turning around a circle. In Turkish politics, cycles are present but the pendulum turns around the same pivotal problem: identity. As Turkey is the last nation born from the remains of the Ottoman Empire, it keeps repeating over and over again debates on its own identity related to the imperial past, to religion, to language and to ethnicity. Thus, if politics changed over time, not only did they come back to their initial positions but also they still turn around this identity centre. Turkish politics therefore is in a constant legitimation process of the Muslim Turk15 in Turkey. In this country political positions are mainly related to nationalism and Islamism with a distorted perspective on history. Is Republican Turkey the heir of the Ottoman Empire or was it founded against the Ottoman Empire? Is Turkey a Muslim country or, on the contrary, is its specificity coercive secularism? Are Turks an ethno-religious group or citizens of Turkey? These questions, and many others touching the permanent identity crisis, constitute the heart of Turkish politics. Politics throughout the Republic consisted of the management of identity divisions. In the third period, but especially during the last decade, the Islamo-nationalists of the AKP understood that the management of these divisions was ineffective, or at least not as effective as the instrumentalisation of these divisions. Thus, with the referendum of 2017 changing the parliamentarian regime into a presidential one, without any balance of power but with a ‘convergence’ of the executive, legislative and judicial powers under the incontestable leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, Turkish politics is deepening the very existing interpenetrated 15 A Turk is by necessity a Muslim, HASÜMÜT being the alla turca WASP; non-Muslims are called ‘citizen’ (vatandas¸), the nickname for a non-Muslim citizen as portrayed in the nationalist motto of the 1920s and 30s in particular: ‘Vatandas¸ Türkçe Konus¸!’ (Citizen, speak Turkish!). .

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Turkish politics: structures and dynamics

identity divides, to defend, each time, the majority’s side: the AKP is Islamist in the divide between Islamists and secularists, it is Sunni in the divide between Sunnis and Alevis, and it is Turkish in the divide between Turks and Kurds, and so on. The new generation of Turkish politics seems to come back to its centre, identity, but in an opposite way.

References Akgönül, Samim. 2010. ‘“Young Turks” and Kemalist Reforms: Continuities or Ruptures.’ In Modernity and its Agencies: Young Movements in the History of the South, edited by Touraj Atabaki, 113–130. New Delhi: Manohar Publishing. Aydın, Mustafa. 2003. ‘Security Conceptualization in Turkey.’ In Security and Environment in the Mediterranean; Conceptualising Security and Environmental Conflict, edited by Hans Günter Brauch, P.H. Liotta, Antonio Marquina, Paul Rogers and Mohammad El-Sayed Selim. 1: 345–355. Berlin: Springer. Balibar, Etienne. 2010. Violence et civilité. Paris: Galilée. Bozarslan, Hamit. 2001. ‘Human Rights and the Kurdish Issue in Turkey: 1984–1999’, Human Rights Review 3(1): 45–54. Netherlands: Springer. Bozarslan, Hamit. 2015. Révolution et état de violence. Moyen-Orient 2011–2015. Paris: CNRS Editions. Delaney, Carol. 1995. ‘Father State, Mother Land and the Birth of Modern Turkey.’ In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, 177–200. New York: Routledge. Dönmez, R. Ö. 2011. ‘Beyond State-Led Nationalism: Ideal Citizenship for Turkey.’ In Societal Peace and Ideal Citizenship for Turkey, edited by Rasim Ö. Dönmez and Pınar Enneli, 1–26. New York: Lexington. Erman, Tahire, and Aslihan Eken. 2004. ‘The “Other of the Other” and “Unregulated Territories” in the Urban Periphery: Gecekondu Violence in the 2000s with a Focus on the Esenler Case, Istanbul.’ Cities 21(1): 57–68. Gözaydın, Istar. 2008. ‘Religion, Politics, and the Politics of Religion in Turkey.’ In Religion, Politics, and Turkey’s EU Accession, edited by Dietrich Jung and Catharina Raudvere, 159–176. New York: Palgrave. Olson, Robert. 1989. The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880–1925. Austin: University of Texas Press. Oran, Baskın. 2018. Etnik ve Dinsel . Azınlıklar; Tarih, Teori, Hukuk, Türkiye [Ethnic and Religious Minorities; History, Theory, Law, Turkey]. Istanbul: Literatür. Pamuk, Orhan. 2015. A Strangeness in My Mind. . New York: Penguin. Sancar, Mithat and Samim Akgönül. 2013. ‘Insan hakları [Human rights].’ In Türk Dıs¸ Politikası (Turkish . Foreign Policy) 2001–2012, edited by Baskın Oran. Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Schmid, Dorothée. 2014. ‘Turquie: le syndrome de Sèvres, ou la guerre qui n’en finit pas.’ Politique étrangère 1: 199–213. . . Sever, Metin and Cem Dizdar. 1993. Ikinci Cumhuriyet Tartıs¸malar. Istanbul: Bas¸ak. Tercüman.1978. ‘Sag˘ Kalmak Zorlas¸tı [To Survive Has Become Difficult].’ http://uzumbaba.com/belgeseller/tarihi_gazeteler/1978-1980/tarihi_gazeteler_1978-1980.htm (accessed 9 July 2018). Szyliowicz, Joseph. 1991. Politics, Technology and Development: Decision Making in the Turkish Iron and Steel Industry. London: MacMillan. Tarek, Osman. 2016. Islamism: What It Means for the Middle East and the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. . TÜIK. .2017. Turkish Statistic Institute. https://biruni.tuik.gov.tr/medas/?kn=95&locale=tr Turan, Ilter. 2014. ‘Two Steps Forward One Step Back, Turkey’s Democratic Transformation.’ In Turkey’s Democratization Process, edited by Carmen Rodrigez, Antonio Avalos, Hakan Yılmaz, and Ana Planet, 341–346. London: Routledge. Vatan. 2005.‘Sözde Vatandas¸ [So-Called Citizen].’ http://www.gazetevatan.com/-sozde-vatandas–49748-gundem/ (accessed 22 March 2015). Yarar, Betül. 2007. ‘Politics of/and Popular Music: an Analysis of the History of Arabesk Music from the 1960s to the 1990s in Turkey.’ Cultural Studies 22(1): 35–79. Yeg˘ en, Mesut. 2006. Müstakbel Türk’ten Sözde. Vatandas¸’a; Cumhuriyet ve Kürtler [From Prospective Turk to the So-Called Citizen; Republic and the Kurds]. Istanbul: Iletis¸im Yayınları.

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2 TURKEY’S NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR DEMOCRACY . Ilter Turan

Introduction Turkey’s democracy has had a chequered history. After a couple of failed experiments during the 1923–1945 interim, marked at one end by the founding of the republic and at the other by the end of the Second World War, Turkey entered a transition to political competition in 1945 with the opening of rival parties and their limited participation in the elections of 1946. A number of changes in the laws during the 1946–1950 period that rendered political competition more free and fair brought about a change in government in 1950 with the victory of the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) over the People’s Republican Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), the founding party of the republic. That a developing society had made a successful transition to political competition was a welcome development at the time for the ‘Free World’ led by the United States. The proponents of the view that democracy need not be confined to a few advanced Western societies but could operate universally under varying social and economic conditions felt vindicated. Turkey was not only praised but also rewarded by joining the institutional arrangements of the Free World stretching from the Council of Europe to NATO. Yet, the experiment with democracy proved short-lived. In May 1960, a junta of lower-ranking officers took over the government. After a country makes a transition to competitive politics, there is no assurance that its democracy will continuously deepen or become consolidated. When Turkey’s adventure with democracy of nearly seventy years is examined, it becomes immediately apparent that its democracy has experienced breakdowns and gone through periods of expansion and contraction. This chapter, after identifying the characteristics of Turkey’s checkered democratic history, will attempt to analyse the impediments that have rendered the consolidation of Turkey’s democracy difficult.1

Turkey’s pendular, variable geometry democracy Turkey’s democracy is pendular and has variable geometry. Pendular, pointing to the direction of change, means that it goes through periods of expansion and contraction. Variable 1

For a summary of Turkey’s democratic history, see Turan (2014).

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geometry, on the other hand, refers to a democracy’s content, irrespective of whether it is going through a period of expansion or contraction. Let me elaborate this terminology. Turkey has gone through periods when it has become more or less democratic. That observation simply describes whether there is an increase or a decline among the features that render a political system a democracy. The content of democracy at a later stage of democratic decline, however, may well be broader than that of an earlier period when democracy might have been expanding. To clarify by way of example, the 1961 Constitution brought a constitutional court to Turkey. During the 1960s, a period of democratic expansion, it was possible for a variety of actors to bring cases before the court. With the indirect military intervention of 1971 came a period of democratic contraction. The commanders, judging the 1961 Constitution too liberal, wanted the individual liberties to be trimmed, a choice with which the government and the parliament obliged, reducing the number of actors that could take cases to the Court. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Court remained to serve as a check on governmental powers which was not possible in the pre-1960 period. In this way, the content of democracy had changed, but the less democratic Turkey of the post-1971 period still had an institution that rendered the system more democratic than the pre-1960 Turkey. I have chosen to call this change in content (inspired by fighter aircraft with movable wings) variable geometry. What are the notable features of Turkey’s pendular and variable geometry democracy? The first feature has already been mentioned. Turkey has experienced several direct and indirect military interventions during the course of its democratic life. The first intervention in 1960, lasting more than a year, was in the form of a takeover by a junta of lowerranking officers. The second, in 1971, was of an indirect nature where the top military command forced the government to resign and then pressured the formation of a national unity government that narrowed down the civil liberties enshrined in the 1961 constitution. Amid growing violence, the military, keeping within the boundaries of its command hierarchy, took over the government again in 1980, lasting three years. Calling itself the Council on National Security, the junta fully revamped the party system, placed major limitations on civil society and individual liberties, and tried to depoliticise society. A final indirect intervention came in 1997 when the coalition government led by Necmettin Erbakan, heading the religiously oriented Welfare Party, was forced to resign; a new government excluding his party was formed. Apart from such clear-cut cases of intervention, in the past, using the National Security Council that brings together the military leadership, the prime minister and several other ministers, the Turkish military has vetoed government proposals and pressured governments to adopt measures which they did not favour. It is only recently that the military’s political role has declined significantly, though marred on 15 July 2016 by an attempted military takeover outside the command structure.2 A second feature of Turkey’s democracy is the narrow scope of democratic liberties in comparison to more established democracies. Ever since Turkey made the transition to competitive politics, one feature that has been most heavily contested domestically and criticised internationally, has been the limited nature of individual freedoms Turkish citizens enjoy. It seems that both the bureaucracy and elected officers share a basic fear, for example, that unrestricted and unmonitored freedom of association would enable enemies of the Turkish state to organise and challenge the independent, secular republic. In the past, the authorities expressed fears that groups wanting to construct a religious political order or 2

For a review of the role of the military, see Turan (2015, 86–140). For the coup attempt see Haberler (2017).

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communists aiming to deliver Turkey to Soviet hands would succeed if left unchecked. Though such concerns may have become irrelevant nowadays, the proclivity of the government to exercise excessive oversight over associations continues to be an engrained feature of associational life. The inclination of the authorities to keep ‘undesirable’ ideas and groups under control persists, covering such diverse entities as ethnic solidarity and LGBT associations, as well as the local extensions of international organisations such as Amnesty International (Turan 2015). Freedom of expression and the freedom of the press have also been problematical areas in the practice of democracy in Turkey. Part of the reasoning for a narrow interpretation of these liberties is no different than that which is employed to justify the freedom of association. But there are additional reasons. For example, the bureaucracy has almost a mystical commitment to preserving the sanctity of the state. Outright criticisms of the institutions of the state or exposing their weaknesses, failures, and mismanagement is viewed as undermining the state. Such a posture, inadvertently, produces a not fully accountable and arbitrary bureaucracy. The public itself often finds expressions of ideas and opinions that are out of the ordinary disturbing, helping create an environment that is prone to limiting freedom of expression. Finally, politicians have often displayed insufficient tolerance toward expressions of criticism. Particularly at times when their electoral fortunes may be declining, they have displayed a willingness to limit freedom of the press. Governments, to arrest criticism, have tried to apply both economic (for example, tax investigations, withholding credit from public banks, etc.) and legal sanctions (imprisoning of journalists and newscasters) to critical media. A third feature of Turkey’s democracy is the tendency to limit the scope of politics. A study of the history of Turkish political parties, for example, will show that several of them are descendants of earlier parties that had been closed for a variety of reasons, most typically for using religion for political ends and sometimes for advocating the establishment of the domination of one social class over others. During military interventions, the juntas closed down political parties for multifarious reasons but the reasoning of the 1980–1983 junta offers a window on how the scope of politics became limited. The commanders thought that in a modern democracy there is a party of the moderate right and another of the moderate left. They closed down existing parties and then tried to construct a party system to fit their visions. Not surprisingly, they failed from the beginning. These days, parties are less likely to be closed down, but the desire to keep the scope of politics narrow continues. In earlier times, a number of activities including some appointments to public offices and promotions of the top brass of the military were seen to be matters of ‘state’ and protected against the intervention of elected politicians through legal-institutional arrangements and tradition.3 Very recently, a reverse trend has appeared that views everything as being open to political intervention, including even the judiciary. It is too early to judge whether limiting the scope of politics will be replaced by an understanding that renders everything a target of politics. Such a change, I would fear, would constitute even more of a challenge for democratic governance than allowing for a narrow scope. A fourth feature of Turkey’s democracy is limited tolerance of pluralism. Research has also substantiated what any casual observer is able to see, that members of minority ethnic and religious groups, though legally equal, are often deprived of enjoying the same social and political opportunities as members of the Sunni Muslim Turkish-speaking majority.4 The lack of tolerance also manifests itself in other domains such as conscientious objectors and 3 4

The proclivity to keep the scope of politics narrow originates from a security maximisation orientation. See Turan (2015, 29–32, 95, 139, 194–195). The role of religion in defining political culture is addressed in Turan (2015). For empirical indicators of low levels of social tolerance, see Esmer (2002, 35–68) and Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2009).

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homosexuals. The most significant problem where lack of tolerance of pluralism has been seen during the recent years has been the so-called Kurdish problem where demands for ethnic recognition have also produced a terrorist movement, which in turn has led the government to rule parts of the country by emergency rule, suspending ordinary democratic governance. A final feature of Turkey’s democracy is the limited role the courts have played in the preservation of individual liberties. During the initial stages of the country’s democratic development, the courts were still wedded to a general orientation that when the interests of the state and the citizen collided, the state should be protected. As the country has moved along the democratic path, the court system gradually made an adjustment and assumed an expanding role in ensuring that the citizens’ liberties were observed. This trend has been reversed in recent years such that the courts nowadays appear to render decisions that do not constitute challenges to the preferences of the government rather than giving priority to the prevalence of individual freedoms.

Impediments to the well-functioning and consolidation of Turkey’s democracy During the 1950s and 1960s, students of democracy were optimistic that as less developed societies began to experience socio-economic development, they would move toward more democratic systems and eventually become consolidated democracies.5 By the end of the 1960s, it had become increasingly evident that even societies that were registering noticeable economic advancement were not necessarily becoming more democratic. Authoritarian systems, particularly those in which the military occupied a major role, were becoming increasingly commonplace (Welch 1976). Why had the democratic dream not come true? It appears that the predictions of modernisation theory, by projecting the experience of old-time democracies to the newly developing countries, had failed to recognise that the beginning points of modernising societies were different than those that had come to be identified as modern. This, in turn, had influenced why change came about, who were the leading forces of change, in what areas change took place, who became the beneficiaries of change, and what kind of unintended consequences change produced. The Turkish case may offer a partial insight to the challenges modernising societies have encountered in their efforts to build democratic systems. Let me introduce a word of caution, however, that the following analysis applies mainly to Turkey and does not pretend to offer a general case study of democratisation. Turkey may have had some unique conditions that have made its experiment with democracy longer lasting than many others.

The legacy: state-led modernisation In contrast to Western and Central Europe, where the transformation of societies was driven by technological and economic change emanating from society, leading to the emergence of new social classes that wanted to share political power, Turkish modernisation had its roots in the defeats the Ottoman Empire began to experience in the battlefield beginning with the 18th century. As defeat became routine, the Sultan’s governments decided that the way to arrest it was to imitate the ways of the adversary. Efforts to change began with modest 5

Modernisation theories are aptly summarised and analysed in Leftwhich (1996).

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undertakings such as the opening of a school of geometry in 1734, where some of the instructors came from France, to help improve the Ottoman artillery. They grew more comprehensive over time, extending into almost all areas of public life, as can be seen in the examples of medicine, public administration and education, among others.6 This process of incremental change led eventually to the emergence of a state elite who concluded what was needed was nothing less than building a modern society. The critical point to note is that the change was state initiated and state led. Its intention was to strengthen the state to stand against the ‘infidels’. The masses were neither conceptualised as indispensable partners nor mobilised to assume an active role in this transformation. Rather, they were viewed as passive objects that the government wanted to change but often met with resistance. Being masters of administration but not politics, the state elites turned to the use of the coercive power of the state rather than persuasion which a politician might have preferred. This particular mode of modernisation rendered the degree of ‘modernisation’ as a major axis along which political cleavages in society developed. On the one side were the more educated, more urban, and economically somewhat better-off ‘moderns’, on the other side the less educated, more provincial, and economically less privileged ‘traditionals’.

The political consequences of state-led modernisation The division of society along cultural lines (if not always as clear-cut as the dichotomous taxonomy above might suggest and becoming milder over time) has not only rendered politics, to a considerable extent, a struggle between two irreconcilable weltanschauungen but it has also constituted one of the main axes of politics of polarisation, a commonly observed feature of Turkish politics.7 A major aspect of this legacy was the understanding that politics was the means of building a modern society rather than a way of reconciling competing interests among social groups.8 This modern society would comprise undifferentiated modern individuals; the function of the state elites was to build that society. Such an understanding of politics placed the military-bureaucratic ruling class in a commanding position over society and led them to believe that their right to rule was natural and therefore legitimate. It also opened the way to the establishment of a highly centralised and interventionist state, and created a proclivity among the state elite to use the instruments of the state to force change, rather than trying to make society a partner in the process. Resistance to change, in this framework, was perceived as being nothing more than manifestation of ignorance. After the transition to political competition, this legacy continually haunted democratic politics in a variety of ways. To begin with, the cadres of the single modernising party that had opened the system to political competition continued, nevertheless, to believe that they were in possession of a set of values which were so self-evidently superior to those of the masses that there was no need to persuade the latter to adopt them. Such an attitude produced a multiplicity of problems, all proving dysfunctional for the expansion and consolidation of democratic politics. The first significant problem was that, in response to the commanding attitude of the party of the modernising elites, the CHP, rival parties justified their right to rule on the basis that they had gained a plurality or the majority of the votes, producing what we 6 7 8

An excellent analysis of this process is offered in Berkes (1998). See Kalaycıog˘ lu (2005). This vision is elaborated in (Turan 1984, 169–190).

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may call the majoritarian pathology (Turan 2015).9 Just as the modernisers treated modernity as an indivisible and non-negotiable package, their challengers felt that winning elections gave them unlimited political power. The attractiveness of the majoritarian argument was enhanced by the fact that the state elites were inclined to keep the scope of politics, i.e. the domain within which elected politicians could operate, narrow. All nonCHP parties that have ruled Turkey (and that means most of the time after the introduction of competitive politics) have found limited government constricting and a reason for their inability to do more for their supporters. They, including the government at the time of this writing, were reluctant to accept that in democracies, there needed to be checks on those who rule society. A related problem to majoritarianism is a phenomenon that I have called in other writings asymmetric competition, meaning that the agenda of CHP has usually prioritised the preservation of the modern values and achievements of the republic, while other major parties have often focused on responding to the bread and butter needs and to some extent, the religious expectations of the voters (Turan 2014). The latter were generally more successful at elections. The CHP, on the other hand, was extremely slow in developing the skills to mobilise voter support. It seemed to be more adept at using state institutions such as courts, and the bureaucratic-military establishment, often to stop those in government from implementing their policies. Even today, the CHP as major appears to be behind the governing AKP in mobilising grassroots support. The party’s cadres, particularly after the courts and the military have become more open to the influence of the government, have come to realise, however, that state institutions no longer constitute the pillars of the modernising ideology, and that they need to win elections to achieve their political goals. Today, the agendas of government and opposition parties resemble each other more, and parties are more cognisant that politics is an area where concrete interests compete. The state elites, also reflecting the Turco-Ottoman ruling tradition out of which they were born, were suspicious of the evolution of independent sources of power in society (Turan 1996). While the Ottomans were concerned with keeping each group in its place and preserving the societal balance, the state elites of the republic favoured building a modern society through controlled change, which led to a weak civil society. One major instrument the republican state employed in keeping society under control was a kind of corporatism. Various professions were organised into quasi-official chambers and unions, bestowed with privileges and given functions that could well be discharged by state. Engineers, doctors, architects, industrialists, merchants, small shopkeepers, and farmers among others, were all organised in this fashion to harmonise their policies with government policies and expectations. The broader associational life, on the other hand, was meagre since not only were there few available resources available in society to support it but also the state was not favourably disposed toward independent associations. Import-substitution-oriented economic development that governments pursued, particularly after 1960, coupled with the prevalence of state economic enterprises in the economy, did not lead to a stronger society since business and labour unions depended on their ability to gain favour of the government for their prosperity.

Socio-economic change democratises society The legacy of state-led modernisation began to change after 1980 when the Demirel Government, then in power, decided to replace the autarchic import substitution model by one of export-led economic growth, thereby integrating the Turkish economy with the 9

See also (Kalaycıog˘ lu 2017, 10–15).

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international economy. Change advanced further under the premiership of Turgut Özal (1983–1989), helping society gain more autonomy vis-à-vis the state.10 Business and labour, as well as other groups, gradually acquired new means, ability, skills, and experience to influence the behaviour of government. Associational life in general gained momentum as well, benefiting from the augmented income of individuals, the growing willingness of corporations to extend funding to those serving broadly defined social purposes, and the expansion of the pool of professional people who offered their talents to manage associations (Turan 1998). The integration of Turkey with the international economy and its desire to move toward becoming a part of the European Union also helped create pressures on Turkish governments to adopt measures of democratisation. The desire to respond to European expectations became more pronounced after Turkey began to pursue a more active policy toward becoming a member of the European Union. Multiplication of the centres of power in society, the growing sophistication of the economy, and Turkey’s tighter integration with the world economic system were all parts of an environment in which Turkish democracy began to expand. Democratisation gained new impetus after Turkey was declared a candidate country for EU membership in 1999 and additional momentum when she was invited in 2004 to start accession negotiations. The death penalty was removed from the penal system, State Security Courts were closed, and the presence of the representatives of the military in non-military institutions was ended, while the powers of the military courts were rendered much more limited (Turan and Gürsoy 2014). The press became free of concerns that they would be punished for criticising the government and the institutions of the state. Associational life flourished as never before. The government even became more accommodating to the Kurdish terrorist movement, the PKK, and expressed that some sort of negotiated settlement would be possible if they suspended armed struggle, a strategy that seemed promising. Democratic advancement was also facilitated by a string of years in which the Turkish economy registered constant growth, if not always in leaps and bounds. People became more interested in questions of economic prosperity, and the political debate both in society and among parties moved into the area of economic growth and how each constituency could get a bigger share of the pie. Until after the first decade of this millennium, Turkey’s development was in the direction of more democracy. Many hoped that Turkish democracy was on its way to consolidation. Yet, some of the ailments bearing the imprint of the past had not fully disappeared. One problematical tendency that we have barely alluded to thus far is the tendency to render political issues into issues of security. By utilising this strategy, governments gain a free hand in moving problems that politics needs to tackle outside the political process (Turan 2015). Securitisation of problems is usually followed by emergency rule. Historically, emergency rule has been employed with great frequency in Turkey and more frequently in some parts of the country than in others. Majoritarianism and anti-pluralism has also continued to afflict the system. There are other pathologies as well. Turkish political parties, for example, are leader dominated and are lacking in intra-party democracy.11 This tendency may in part be a product of the Political Parties Law, which favours heavily centralised national organisation, and in part be rooted in the proclivity to majoritarianism. It makes leadership change difficult and promotes fragmentation as aspiring but frustrated aspirants leave their party to found rivals. Another difficulty derives from the fact that because there are too many privileges attached to being elected to national parliament and even more to being in 10 This transition is treated in detail in Krueger and Turan (1993). 11 For lack of intra-party democracy, see Turan (2011, 1–21)

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government, parties, and individuals may be prone to ignoring the rules of the democratic game to stay in power or to minimise losses. In the past, for example, deputies are known to . have changed parties and bring governments down or help form governments (Turan, Iba, and Zarakol 2005), in return of material rewards.

What went wrong: the rise of electoral authoritarianism Despite the various difficulties Turkey’s democracy encountered, Turkey’s democratic performance appeared to be improving until 2013. After 2014, Turkey has been entering with increasing speed into a period of electoral authoritarianism, i.e. a system of government in which most institutions of democratic governance exist, but they are used and manipulated in such ways that the end result is judged not to be democratic.12 We cannot predict at the moment whether this deteriorating democracy will make it possible for oppositions to win elections in the future. Retrospectively, the beginnings of its deterioration may be traced to 2007 when the opposition, by eliciting a questionable ruling by the Constitutional Court, prevented the candidate of the governing AKP, Abdullah Gül, from being elected president by the parliament because his wife covered her head. This gave the governing party the opportunity to amend the constitution, subject to ratification by referendum, to elect the president through a national election. Before the amendment was approved, the AKP won an overwhelming electoral victory and the parliament elected Mr. Gül. The constitutional referendum was, nevertheless, held and approved by a large margin. In this process, the voters were polarised even more than before into two camps conforming with the modernist–traditionalist divide. In 2014, as President Gül’s term was expiring, Prime Minister Erdog˘ an offered his candidacy and won by a narrow margin. His victory, nevertheless, gave him an opportunity to mobilise majoritarian arguments. Since a majority had elected him directly, he argued, the above party president with limited political powers failed to reflect the new political reality. Therefore, the constitution should be changed in favour of a president with partisan affiliation and substantial political power. A set of amendments prepared by an obedient cabinet and AKP parliamentary group, in collaboration with the MHP, was ratified on 16 April 2017 by a small margin in a referendum whose freeness and fairness are still being debated.13 The changes have given the president powers to appoint members of the Constitutional Court and other high judicial bodies, to issue decrees that have the status of laws and to declare a state of emergency. The powers of the parliament to oversee the executive, on the other hand, have been considerably reduced. For all practical purposes, the president has acquired a free hand in ruling the country without having to worry about the parliament. Another development paving the way to electoral authoritarianism was the trials of alleged coup conspirators in the military. Beginning toward the end of 2008, public prosecutors initiated a series of trials against a number of retired and on-duty officers, alleging that they had conspired to foment public disturbances with a view to affecting a coup. Evidence seemed to be circumstantial, sometimes manufactured, doctored, and obtained in questionable ways. The government, however, despite clear-cut indications of an unfair judicial 12 Electoral authoritarianism as a concept has been developed by Schedler (2017). 13 A blatant example is the ruling of the High Board of Elections that ballots in envelopes not bearing the stamp of the election committee in a polling station would also be counted, although this was specifically prohibited by law. See the statistical study by Klimek et al. (2017).

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process, insisted that this was a matter for the independent courts. Much later, when the same prosecutors and judges themselves became suspected of belonging to the Fethullah Gülen religious group14 that was intent on taking over the government, the trials were ruled to be mistrials; the commanders were released. Sadly, through this ordeal, the violations of the rule of law by the judiciary became common and no longer unusual. This erosion of judicial standards has continued since, eroding the citizens’ trust in the judiciary. Two developments have lent further support to the advancement of electoral authoritarianism. The first came at the end of 2013 as allegations from public prosecutors that four government ministers had accepted bribes in return for favours. The ministers resigned, but prime minister Erdog˘ an, without responding to the allegations, attacked the prosecutors as belonging to a conspiratorial religious group that was trying to take over the government. Naming them the Fethullah Terorrist Organisation (FETÖ), he said that these terrorists should be cleansed from public services. Efforts to deal with this FETÖ conspiracy continued during Mr. Erdog˘ an’s ascent to the presidency. Then on 15 July 2016 came an attempted military takeover by FETÖ that was repelled by the refusal of many officers to take part and the public in the cities rallying against the takeover. This development constituted the background against which the constitutional changes for a strong president without checks on his power were accepted, and the government was given emergency powers. The fight against FETÖ has been used to terminate the employment of thousands of public employees, expropriation of the property of businessmen, and finally, by linking all opposition to FETÖ, silencing varieties of opposition and restricting the freedom of the press.

Conclusion: quo vadis Turkish democracy? Just as it was viewed as a pioneering case of democratic transition and development after World War II, contemporary Turkey may constitute a case to study as regards whether a society that has experienced considerable democratic development and that has certainly surpassed any economic threshold, after which a reversion to an authoritarian system has been deemed impossible by modernisation theorists, can depart from the democratic path. Currently, authoritarianism is on the rise in Turkey, reaching a level where doubts are expressed as to whether it may continue to be called a democracy. Will this trend continue or will Turkey return to the democratic fold? An optimist might argue that the all segments of the population have now been integrated into national politics, the performance of the economy has become the criterion in determining the fate of elected governments, all institutions of democratic governance are in place though not functioning well at this time, Turkey’s international relations constrain what kind of a regime it may have, or in short, its democratic failures are temporary. As in the past, the pendulum will eventually swing in the democratic direction. A pessimist might point to the fact that institutions that constitute the pillars of a system of checks and balances have not only been weakened by law, but they are rapidly being deinstitutionalised and deprofessionalised, staffed by cadres with an unqualified dedication to a leader. Instruments of authoritarian rule stretching from developing special police forces and 14 Fethullah Gülen is a preacher who had developed a large following among small, provincial merchants as well as among educated young people with provincial or lower-class backgrounds, or both. The AKP incorporated members of this group into its coalition. Many members because of their educational backgrounds received public service employment, especially in the ministry of interior and in the judicial system, until the falling out in late 2013.

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suppression of the press to extending exceptional powers to the chief executive, including substantial decree-making powers, may well direct Turkey irreversibly in an authoritarian direction at a time when such tendencies are becoming manifest even in the world’s established democracies. In the past, Turkey’s political pendulum swung both toward more democracy and away from it. Whether the same pattern will hold and the tide will turn toward democracy may not be answered at this time. Turkey’s never-ending search for democracy continues.

References Berkes, Niyazi. 1998. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. London: C. Hurst. Çarkog˘ lu, Ali and Ersin Kalaycıog˘ lu. 2009. The Rising Tide of Conservatism in Turkey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Esmer, Yılmaz. 2002. ‘Is There an Islamic Civilization.’ In Human Values and Social Change: Findings from the Values Surveys, . edited by Ronald Inglehart, 35–68. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Haberler. 2017. ’I¸ste 15 Temmuz Darbe Giris¸imi Sırasında Saat Saat Yas¸ananlar [Here are the Time Watchers During the July 15 Coup Attempt].’ Haberler.com, July 15. Accessed 31 August 2017. https:// www.haberler.com/iste-15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi-sirasinda-saat-saat-9833738-haberi/ Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2005. Turkish Dynamics: Bridge across Troubled Lands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2017. ‘Turkish Democratization Falters Again.’ . In Regierungsysteme im Lichte vom ‘Checks and Balances’, edited by Arno Scherzberg, Osman Can, and Ilyas Dog˘ an, 10–15. Münster: LIT Verlag. Klimek, Peter, Ra´ul Jim´enez, Manuel Hidalgo, Abraham Hinteregger, and Stefan Thurner. 2017. ‘Election forensic analysis of the Turkish Constitutional Referendum 2017.’ ArXiv. July 3. https://arxiv. org/pdf/1706.09839.pdf. . Krueger, Anne O. and Ilter Turan. 1993. ‘The Politics and Economics of Turkish Policy Reforms in the 1980s.’ In Political and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform, edited by Robert H. Bates and Anne O. Krueger. Oxford: Blackwell. Leftwhich, Adrian. 1996. ‘On the Primacy of political Development.’ In Democracy and Development, edited by Adrian Leftwhich. Cambridge: Polity Press. Schedler, Andreas. 2007. ‘The Logic of Electoral Authoritarianism,’ In Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition, edited by Andreas Schedler. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. . Turan, Ilter. 1984. ‘Ataturk’s Reforms as a State and Nation Building Process.’ Southeastern Europe, 11(2): 169–190. . Turan, Ilter. 1995. ‘Religion and Political Culture in Turkey.’ In Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in Modern Turkey, edited by Richard L. Tapper. London: I.B. Tauris. . . Turan, Ilter. 1996. Türkiye’de Demokrasi Kültürü [Democracy Culture in Turkey]. Istanbul: Koç University Working Papers. . . . Turan, Ilter. 1998. ‘1972–1996 Döneminde life in Istanbul . Istanbul’da Derneksel Hayat [Associational . 1972–1996].’ In Tanzimat’tan Günümüze I.stanbul’da STK’lar [The NGOs in Istanbul . from Tanzimat Reform Era to. Present], edited by A.N. Yücekök, I. Turan, and M.Ö. Alkan, 202–260. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı. . Turan, Ilter, S¸eref Iba, and Ays¸e Zarakol. 2005. ‘Inter-party Mobility in the Turkish Grand National Assembly: Curse or Blessing?’ European Journal of Turkish Studies 3. ejts.revues.org/412. . Turan, Ilter. 2011. ‘Türk Siyasi Partilerinde Lider Oligars¸isi: Evrimi, Kurumsallas¸ması ve Sonuçları . [Leader Oligarchy in Turkish Political Parties: Evolution, Institutionalization and Consequences].’ I.Ü. Siyasal Bilgiler . Fakültesi Dergisi 45: 1–21. Turan, Ilter. 2014. ‘Two steps forward one step back: Turkey’s democratic transformation.’ In Turkey’s Democratization Process, edited by Carmen Rodriguez, Antonio Avalos, Hakan Yılmaz, and Ana I. Planet, . 43–66. Milton Park: Routledge. Turan, Ilter, and Yaprak Gürsoy. 2014. ‘The Role of the EU in Changing the Role of the Military in Turkish . Politics.’ European Review of International Studies 1(1): 132–140. Turan, Ilter. 2015. Turkey’s Difficult Journey to Democracy: Two Steps Forward One Step Back. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welch, Claude E. 1976. Civilian Control of the Military: Theory and Cases from Developing Countries. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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3 TURKISH SECULARISM Looking forward and beyond the West Murat Somer

Introduction Until recent years, Turkey was hailed in the world as a relatively secularised and dynamic society and as a flawed yet nevertheless laudable example – or even model – of secular democracy in a Muslim-majority country. Of course, there were many criticisms of Turkish secularism (laiklik). As I will elaborate later, a major and popular string of criticisms exclusively focused on laiklik’s undue restrictions of public and political religion, such as the limitations it imposed on the Islamic headscarf and Islamist political parties. Against this backdrop, the election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2002 reinforced Turkey’s positive image. It was an ‘unsecular party’ of political Islamist origin and a voice of religious-conservative constituencies (Kalyvas 2003), yet it claimed that it embraced constitutional secularism and aimed to promote a more ‘religion-friendly’ version of laiklik. Hence, the AKP raised hopes among many that it would liberalise, democratise, and strengthen secular democracy in Turkey (Nasr 2005; Yavuz, ed. 2006; Kuru 2009; Bayat 2013).1 These expectations seemed confirmed when, as recently as 2011, the party’s leader, then Prime Minister Erdog˘ an, publicly recommended a ‘secular state’ to Egyptians in the aftermath of Arab uprisings. By doing so, he received wide acclaim from pro-secular international audiences and sharp criticism from Islamists (Champion and Bradley 2011; Hundley 2011). While either commending or criticising laiklik in toto, few analyses explicitly distinguished between its interlinked yet different dimensions, such as legal, institutional, political, and social, or, for that matter, between secularism vs secularisation. However, the perception of the AKP, and the political and social classes the party represented as supporters and potential reformers of legal and political secularism, was not the only reason why many observers and scholars welcomed their ascent. Importantly for our purposes here, the AKP and its key constituencies were also recognised as products and agents of a social and cultural secularisation that was thought to have been occurring among the pious segments of society in a context of economic globalisation and development (Göle 1996; Gülalp 2003; Yavuz 2003; Gumuscu and Sert 2009; Bayat 2013). In recent years, however, the image of both Turkey and the AKP has changed drastically in popular and academic writings alike. The AKP has increasingly been criticised for 1

For a typical journalistic analysis, see Hundley (2011).

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Turkish secularism: looking forward

undermining secularism and secular democracy and for promoting Islamic authoritarianism and social and political Islamisation (Somer 2007, 2015, 2017; Kaya 2014; Bas¸kan 2015; Lüküslü 2016; Kuru 2017; Öktem and Akkoyunlu, eds 2017; Kirdis¸ 2018). Disconcertingly for current research, more or less the same social and political actors and even the same social-cultural processes that used to be described as reflections of social-cultural secularisation are now portrayed as manifestations of Islamisation. How can this happen? And what does all this say about our understanding, description, and explanation of laiklik? What insights can we derive from the ‘Turkish case’ that can improve our comprehension, categorisations, and causal accounts of secularism(s) in the world at large (Somer 2014b)? Social, political, and intellectual struggles over laiklik and laikles¸me – i.e. secularisation or more appropriately contemporanisation, as I will argue later – have been among the foci of Turkish politics and Turkey’s experience of modernisation since at least the late Ottoman times (Berkes 1998; Mardin 2000, 2005; Zürcher 2004; Findley 2010; Kerslake et al. 2010). Yet, major conceptual and inferential disagreements pervade scholarship on laiklik. There is scant agreement over how to define laiklik and causally explain its evolution and over the failures and accomplishments of the Turkish experience. Consequently, there is divergence among scholars concerning which key research questions need to be pursued. Further, research continues to present contradictory criticisms regarding the goals, principles, and practices of laiklik, or, for that matter, of cultural and political secularists (laikçiler or laiklik taraftarları). In particular, I have identified three areas where the question of Turkish secularism would benefit from being revisited, reposed, and reevaluated:   

Classifying laiklik. Explaining laiklik. Laiklik and the question of secularity beyond the West.

A first step would be to try to redefine laiklik by more properly situating it in the context of other experiences in the world, and in light of more comparative and general-theoretical insights. A second step can be taken by disaggregating laiklik into its interrelated components pertaining to secularisation, secularity, and (legal, institutional, social, and political) secularism. These different components require different empirical and theoretical questions, evidence, and methodologies. Finally, research would benefit from more careful periodisation and cross-temporal comparisons. Five periods seem to have been constitutive of laiklik: 1 2 3 4 5

Pre-Modern Period: social-cultural legacy. Modern Ottoman Period: modernisation/secularisation. Early Republican Period: radical legal-political secularism, social-cultural secularisation and nation-state building under single (secularist) party regime. Transition to Electoral and Illiberal Democracy: partial moderation of legal-political secularism under multi-party democracy. AKP Era: instrumentalisation and reconfiguration of laiklik under dominant religious nationalist party.

Empirically and analytically distinguishing between phenomena such as secularism and secularisation is not easy for a variety of reasons. The meanings of these terms are undoubtedly contested. Definitional problems also haunt general-theoretical studies of secularism, which induces major collected volumes to avoid ‘imposing’ any common definition on 38

Turkish secularism: looking forward

contributors (Zuckerman and Shook, eds 2017, 1–2). One should acknowledge that there are multiple secularisations, secularities, and secularisms as ideal, practised, and conceivable modes in the world (Bhargava, ed. 1998; Stepan 2010; Bhargava 2011; Bilgrami, ed. 2016). At the same time, however, one should keep in mind that different definitions and practices share common roots and normative bases. Thus, ‘secularisms are not so diverse that they defy description’ (Berlinerblau 2017, 93). Since I maintain that further research would benefit from carefully defining laiklik and disaggregating it into its various meanings and dimensions, such as secularity, secularisation, and social, legal, political, and institutional secularism, I will start by defining in what sense I employ these concepts. To keep this section as brief as possible and start my discussion of laiklik, I will only include summary definitions in the main narrative and discuss the rest in the footnotes. It is hoped that this will make the chapter an easier read for a variety of audiences, without reducing the importance of the full definitions for my arguments. Readers may find it useful to refer to these footnotes during the forthcoming analysis.

Secularisation Secularisation refers to certain political-institutional, social-cultural, intellectual-philosophical, and cognitive-psychological processes of change that alter people and societies (Casanova 1980; Bhargava, ed. 1998; Davie 2000; Norris and Inglehart 2004; Taylor 2007; Berger and Zijderveld 2009; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and Van Antwerpen, eds 2011; Zuckerman and Shook, eds 2017). These processes increase the extent to which the temporal and spiritual realms and the political and religious authorities are differentiated in people’s minds, in the organisation and functioning of societies and states, or in both. When it comes to religion, different actual cases of secularisation can produce one or a mix of three effects: (1) the differentiation of secular spheres from religious norms and institutions (2) declining religious or spiritual beliefs and practices, and/or (3) the privatisation of religion to people’s conscience and individual lives (Casanova 1980; Casanova 2001). Actual cases of secularisation (as in southern and northern Europe, the US, India or Turkey) differ based on how much they entail (1) through (3). Similarly, different descriptive, explanatory, and normative models of secularisation (as in ‘secularisation theories’ and liberal versus republican models and understandings of secularisation) highlight or prescribe different combinations of these three phenomena.2

2

Early secularisation theories and positivist understandings of secularisation focus on (2) and partly on (3). Northern European cases of secularisation, for example, stand out in how much they display these effects compared to the rest of the world where faith and religion often remain or become vivid and publicly assertive (Norris and Inglehart 2004; Toft, Philpott, and Shah 2011). Hence, revised secularisation theories and interpretivist understandings of secularisation emphasise (1). They stipulate the transformation but not necessarily the erosion and privatisation of religious ‘beliefs, belongings, and behaviour’. Laic and civic-republican models interpret and expect secularisation to entail a specific type of religious emancipation, which is anti-clerical and rationalist. Accordingly, secularisation is expected to produce a self-reflexive public, and the state is expected to keep a vigilant eye on the political, militant, and irrational potentials of religion. Laic and civic-republican models are supposed to produce these outcomes in two ways. First, they alter traditional religious hierarchies by empowering ordinary citizens (‘laymen’) and their political and bureaucratic representatives at the expense of the clergy and their established institutions. The former gains the upper hand in interpreting, reproducing, and enforcing religion and in producing social knowledge and ‘truth’. Second, they try to rationalise

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For achieving a better understanding the Turkish experience, it is important to recognise that secularisation may require — and historically drew upon – critical theological and philosophical debates and paradigm shifts. These pertain to such questions as the degree and purpose of divine involvement in the operations of nature, the universe, and human agency. The resulting intellectual legacies can have – as the Islamic and Turko-Iranian heritages had on Muslim Ottoman reformers – important influences on how people experience secularisation and how they interpret, imagine, and practise secularism at a political-institutional level. This can occur by means of the different ‘political theologies’ these ideational legacies help generate (Mardin 2000, 81–106).

Secularity What kind of a society does secularisation produce? Secularisation processes foster secularity, namely a cognitive, psychological or cultural condition or state. Secularity can exist at personal, social, and political levels (Zuckerman and Shook, eds 2017, 9–10). In majority WesternChristian societies, Charles Taylor argues and demonstrates that the outcome of secularisation was a type of secularity he calls the ‘secular age’ (Taylor 2007). Like Casanova, he maintains that different secularities may entail the privatisation (‘type I’) or decline (‘type II’) of religious beliefs and practices. However, he particularly highlights the importance of ‘type III’ for western secularity. This third type describes a cognitive, social, and legal-political situation where two sets of individual choices became accepted as possible and normal: the choice between belief and unbelief, and the choice between different beliefs. Hence, secularisation does not necessarily eviscerate faith. It does not necessarily alter what people believe but changes how people believe.3 Thus, secularisation is a dynamic and ongoing process. Therefore, its product, secularity at any point in time — and that includes Western secularity — cannot be the final stage of history and human development. This gives rise to discussions of ‘post-secularity,’ as well as ‘non-Western secularities,’ which I will discuss below.

Secularism Secularism (including its laic variety) refers to normative beliefs, philosophies, ideologies, institutional rules, and norms based on which secularists justify and promote secularisation. It can also denote the social-political movements and the social and political methods based on which secularists pursue their goals on individual, societal, and political-governmental levels. Secularisms can be anti-religious, religion-friendly, or agnostic. Some can put forward arguments about why religion is unnecessary or harmful. Others may explain why people should be moral and contribute to the public good regardless of their religious beliefs, without any prejudice against religion (Zuckerman and Shook, eds 2017, 4).

3

religion and to tame its militant potential from the outside, through the purposeful efforts of citizens and the state. By comparison, Anglo-Saxon and liberal models and practices understand secularisation as a more self-induced and less anti-clerical transformation. Hence, an important implication is that the impetus for differentiation may come from within religion and the pious segments of society. Further and significantly, Taylor maintains that Western secularisation did not result mainly or exclusively from scientific progress and ‘secular enlightenment’. It followed also from theologicalideational developments within religion (Christianity). This refers to internally induced religious enlightenment and freedom.

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Political secularism Political secularism can likewise have several meanings. In a narrow sense, it can mean ‘the doctrine that defends (secular states)’ (Bhargava 2011, 92). More generally, it can denote any political ideology prescribing how secularity should be promoted through political activity and agency, and by structuring the state–religion relationship in various ways. Hence, there can be varieties of political secularism in the same way that there are different versions of political religionism.4 A second and related meaning of political secularism captures legal-political principles, institutions and practices that differentiate religious from political and state authority, while defining the bases, limitations, and protections of religious and secular rights and freedoms. Hence, different versions of political secularism can differ based on who (namely, which authorities) should differentiate between religious and state affairs and safeguard religious and secular rights and freedoms, and how they should do so, namely through which institutions and practices and by using which principles. Accordingly, one way to categorise different models of political secularism is institutional. It is based on the degree of institutional mixing versus separation of religious and state institutions. Hence, integrationist versus separationist models can be distinguished (Philpott 2007; Fox 2008; Berlinerblau 2017). Separated or not, and to differing degrees, an ‘asymmetric relation of power’ prevails in all institutional models of political secularism between religious and state institutions in favour of the latter. ‘What varies is how (state institutions) exert control and whether they are as committed to freedom and equality as they are to maintaining order’ (Berlinerblau 2017, 94–95).5

Explaining political secularism(s) The vast literature explaining the rise of political secularisms highlights several major drivers. Historically, these drivers were the prerogatives and consequences of enlightenment/modernisation, nation-state building and interreligious peace (Bhargava, ed. 1998). Accordingly, crucial causal roles were played by the cultural-ideological, historical-institutional, and religious-demographic contexts in which modernisation and nation-state formation occurred in a society (Kalyvas 1996; Davie 2000).6 4

5

6

For example – keeping in mind the difficulties of conceptualisation, identification, and measurement – conservative versus reformist, authoritarian versus democratic, and radical versus moderate forms of political Islamism or Catholicism. Similarly, one can conceptualise authoritarian versus democratic, laicist versus Anglo-Saxon, civic-republican versus liberal, anti-religious versus religion-friendly, and radical versus moderate political secularisms. Hence, another way of categorising different political secularisms is by focusing on the extent and nature of the power asymmetry between religious and state institutions. One can do so by asking to what extent peace versus antagonism, conflict versus accommodation, and ‘twin tolerations’ versus twin prejudices underlie the relations of power between the religious and state institutions in each case (Stepan 2000). Hence, one can identify interventionist versus liberal, active versus passive, and authoritarian versus democratic political secularisms. Laic and state-dominated models are expected to flourish in societies with relatively homogenous populations and relatively independent, centralised, and powerful clerical institutions, such as many majority-Catholic societies. By comparison, liberal and separationist models are expected to develop in contexts of religious diversity, large and politically relevant religious minorities, and decentralised religious institutions. Ideologically, the mode of a society’s historical engagement with modernisation matters. This shapes how social and political elites interpret the ideal path of modernisation. Strong legacies of positivist-secular enlightenment and antagonism between secular and religious interests support laic,

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However, what ultimately determines the dominant mode of political secularism in a country may be politics, namely the nature of the political actors who hold the political power and the way they acquire and maintain that power.7

Secularity beyond the West and post-secularity Most of our extant knowledge on secularism is based on memories and research on ‘Western’ experiences. In response, a growing body of more recent research has been investigating which types of secularity, secularisation and secularism historically existed in ‘non-Western’ societies, and how these historical contexts and memories affect contemporary practices, ideas, and prospects (Bilgrami, ed. 2016; Künkler, Madeley, and Shankar, eds 2018). Against the backdrop of these works, one wonders to what extent we need to modify Nikki Keddie’s important insight that ‘non-Western and non-Christian’ secularisations have been ‘more influenced by government action than by autonomous societal changes’ (Keddie 1997, 22). Clearly, the formal models of secularism that prevail in contemporary non-Western cases were significantly influenced by colonisation, Western domination, and state-led modernisation experiences modelled on Western blueprints. However, we need to better understand how indigenous social dynamics and legacies of pre-modern contexts contribute to the shaping of these secularisms. This can also help propose legal-political models that may prove to be more viable for these societies.

Situating laiklik in the world and overcoming Turkish exceptionalism We now have a massive body of descriptive, interpretive, causal, and critical writing on laiklik (Berkes 1998; Toprak 1981; Göle 1996; Davison 1998; Mardin 2000; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Mardin 2006; Azak 2010; Özdalga 2012; Turam, ed. 2012). We also have a growing number of comparative analyses (Tepe 2008; Hurd 2008; Kuru 2009; Altinordu 2010; Tezcür 2010; Kuru and Stepan 2012b; Bas¸kan 2014; Akturk 2015; Elbasani and Somer 2015; Somer 2017a; Akan 2017; Fabbe, forthcoming). But many discussions still tend to treat laiklik as a unique or exceptional case, and mainly a product of pro-westernising political elites. For example, one recent review, in passing, made two claims that are also frequently encountered in other studies: (1) Turkey is a ‘unique exemplar … the only politically [emphasis mine] secular country with a Muslim majority population …’ and (2) ‘[but a country where] secularism has little social or historical basis’ (Sevinc, Hood Jr., and Coleman III 2017, 155). In response to the first claim, it should be highlighted that Turkey is not unique among Muslim-majority countries in having legal-political secularism. Surveying their constitutions reveals that, among the 50 Muslim-majority states in the world, 15 (including Turkey, as

7

republican, and anti-clerical models, as in France and other continental European cases. More balanced and cooperative legacies of religious and secular enlightenment foster more religion-friendly, liberal, and pluralist models, as in the United States and other Anglo-Saxon cases. It is also important to keep in mind that real cases are more mixed than ideal types. For example, liberal principles significantly influenced French laicism, while civic-republican ideals affected Anglo-Saxon secularisms. Hence, political rivalries, capabilities, conflicts, and outcomes are critical. It is critical which political groupings become dominant and set up the rules, design institutions, and construct official ideologies. It also matters greatly whether these dominant actors do so more democratically, such as through power-sharing with others, or autocratically, such as according to their own ideals and interests only. Some practices and principles of political secularism can emerge also because of their instrumental benefits to political actors’ dominating their rivals and by serving as bulwarks against challengers after these actors have established political supremacy.

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well as countries such as Mali, Senegal, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Bangladesh) have constitutional clauses of secularism. Furthermore, in addition to these countries with constitutional secularism or laicité, 8 other important majority-Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, have no constitutional secularism but do have other constitutional clauses that stipulate religious and secular freedoms and accommodative religion-state relations. Many scholars even consider these cases more ‘secular’ in a political-institutional sense than Turkey’s laiklik (Künkler and Stepan 2013). Political secularism, of course, cannot be limited to constitutional principles. But, however political secularism is defined, one would be hard pressed to argue that Turkey is unique. From Syria and Algeria to Azerbaijan and Tartarstan, political secularisms have long been major and influential components of the ruling ideologies and political, institutional, and ideological spheres of many Muslim-majority states. There may be other aspects of secularism that make Turkey and laiklik exceptional, as I will discuss below, but these aspects need to be carefully formulated and specified. Likewise, the second claim in the above statement, namely that secularism is without social and historical basis, also needs critical and comparative theoretical and empirical scrutiny. This assertion poses a simplistic juxtaposition of the secular state and religious society (Turam, ed. 2012). What’s more, secularism is understood as the exclusive product of ‘secular’ elites. In the words of one contribution: ‘[political secularism] was a project of the [secular] political elite, and not internal to the religious community’ (Gülalp 2005, 356). Empirical evidence must compel analysts to question the validity of these claims. First, during the last decade or so, Turkey has witnessed massive, mainly bottom-up, cross-class and prosecular social-political mobilisations. These included the 2007 Republican Rallies and the 2013 Gezi Protests, attended by millions and where ‘pro-secular political preferences’ and ‘defending laiklik’ were among the participants’ chief motivations (Somer 2007; Yörük and Yüksel 2014). Women’s movements offer further evidence. They include secular women viewing legal-political laiklik as an insurance of women’s freedoms and gender equality, as well pious women interpreting Islam in more gender-empowering, and, arguably, secularised ways (Kandiyoti 1991; Göle 1996; Arat 2000; White 2002; Arat 2007; Fisher and Müftüler-Baç 2011). Second, empirical studies find that self-identified notions of being ‘secular’ and ‘modern’ versus ‘pious’ and ‘religious-conservative’ are among the main determinants that shape socialpolitical values, relations, and preferences at mass as well as elite levels (Toprak et al.. 2008; Çakır and Bozan 2009; Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu 2009; Somer 2010; Konda 2017; Erdog˘ an and Semerci 2018). This is important even though categories such as ‘Islamic’ and ‘secular’ often operate as markers of other qualities or ‘empty signifiers’ (Kandiyoti 2012). Other works highlight how every-day and popular celebrations of Kemalist secularism have been spreading and transcending official rituals since the 1990s, among other reasons, in reaction to perceived social-political Islamisation (Özyürek 2006). Third, and perhaps most importantly, the second claim disregards the insights of a long trajectory of historiography on Ottoman Turkey. Ottoman state practices, as well as the political theologies of Ottoman thinkers, which were advanced through the legacy of siyasetname (advices to state rulers), differentiated functionally between political and religious authority and between (mainly secular) sultanic and religious law. They also distinguished 8

Six (Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, and Guinea Bissau) of the aforementioned 15 constitutions used the terms laïc or laïque in their French translations. These countries were former French colonies. The Turkish constitution, as already mentioned, uses the Turkish term laik in the original text but the term ‘secular’ in its English translation.

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between the roles of different social groupings in a self-regulating (namely, functioning apart . from divine intervention in practice if not in principle) and circular social order (Inalcık 1973; Karpat 2001; Mardin 2006). Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman communities developed social-cultural codes of inter-religious coexistence (Barkey 2008). Ottoman people were significantly secularised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through processes of socialcultural modernisation in such areas as trade, industry, arts, education, and sciences. These processes often resulted from local dynamics and the initiatives of local power holders (Karpat 2001; Yayciıog˘ lu 2016). Fourth, and finally, the ‘secularism without a social and historical basis’ claim overlooks long-standing movements of ‘Muslim reformers’ (Tezcür 2010; Fabbe, forthcoming). Seminal early works on laiklik adopted a more well-rounded approach. Berkes’ The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Berkes 1998) can still be called duly ‘the standard work on Turkish secularism … despite [its] lack of theoretical sophistication’ (Özdalga 2012, 214). His work, and such important and influential analyses as Mardin’s The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Mardin 2000; Mardin 2006) tackle long-durée processes of social-cultural secularisation and political secularism in (Ottoman and Republican) Turkey as interactive processes. These are analysed mainly as domestic and indigenous mobilisations initiated by elites at central and local levels and by pro-secular as well as religious intelligentsia. These elites saw westernisation as a means of saving the Ottoman state by competing with Western and semi-Western rivals such as Russia. They did not view it as an end in itself, while trying to develop indigenous theories of social-cultural and ‘cognitive’ modernisation.9 Even the concept of contemporanisation (çag˘das¸las¸ma or muasırlas¸ma) – the motto of Ataturk, the secularising as well as ‘westernising’ nation-builder – may be indicative here, when understood against this historical-intellectual legacy and as opposed to the concept of westernisation (batılılas¸ma). The meaning of the former concept could be interpreted as coming to live in the present, temporal world, namely a specific version – as I will elaborate in the Conclusions – of secularisation, rather than cultural westernisation as an end in itself. It is, of course, true that secularist interests often interact with other currents such as nationalism and statism. In the words of Yael Navaro-Yashin: The conflict over secularism was probably one of the most central issues that shaped public life in Turkey in the middle of the 1990s … a study of the culture of secularism in Turkey is also, necessarily, a study of militarism, authoritarianism, and the culture of the state. Statism (or reverence for the state) in Turkey’s public life is often represented in the garb and language of secularism. (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 6) But secularism has remained a central issue and vibrant social-political current throughout the early 2000s, when political religionists, namely the AKP and its constituencies, came to hold state power. During this time, Islamists and religious conservatives have increasingly identified themselves as the owners of the state and many secularists have found themselves as a target of state oppression (Somer 2017a). Presumably, then, secularism could not be an expression of statism in such a context. Hence, secularism has roots, drivers, and dynamics that are at least partially independent of other values and ideologies. 9

For example, for recent revisits of Ziya Gökalp’s thinking on cultural and civilisational change as an indigenous attempt to cope with modernity, see Dressler (2015); Nomer (2017). For Kemalism as intended ‘cognitive revolution’ see Heper (2009).

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One can conclude, therefore, that ‘secularism’ in Turkey, as a movement, condition, ideology, and identity, has significant social and historical bases, and is more than a derivative of other things. Just like piety and political Islamism, secularity and political secularism have many variations. These can be described in terms of typologies, such as liberal versus conservative, moderate versus radical, civil versus statist, and democratic versus authoritarian.

Classifying Laiklik Constitutionally, one of the four ‘unchangeable’10 articles of the Turkish Constitution, Article 2, establishes that the ‘Republic of Turkey is a democratic, secular (emphasis mine) and social state governed by rule of law.’ 11 In this respect, Turkey is not unique, as discussed above. But Turkey is also known for its top-down radical secularisation during the formation of the republic in the 1920s and 1930s, under the charismatic leadership of Kemal Atatürk and his secular-nationalist and modernist Republican People’s Party (CHP). Republican reforms targeted both the political-institutional and social-cultural spheres. They included for example total secularisation of the constitution and other laws, extensive gender equality in civil matters, and the change of the Arabic-based alphabet to a Latin-based one. Hence, in terms of scope and impact, they arguably surpassed comparable examples of secularisation in places such as Bourgiba’s Tunisia and Reza Shah Pahlavi’s Iran. Late Ottoman reforms had been based on ‘institutional layering’, whereby new and secularised institutions, such as secular schools or ‘Nizamiye courts’ enforcing laws modelled on European codes, were built parallel to ‘old ones’, such as Koran schools and Sharia courts (Fabbe, forthcoming).12 Kemalist republican secularisation built on Ottoman reforms, but Kemalist reforms were based on institutional replacement and innovation in two important ways. First, they scratched old institutions, as in the abolition of the monarchy (1922) and Caliphate (1924), replaced old institutions with new ones, as in the replacement of the Sharia-based Mecelle (itself a product of Ottoman modernisation) with a Swiss-based new civil code (1926), restructured old institutions with a new identity and role, as in the reinstitution of the Ministry of Sharia and Foundations as the Directorate of Religious Affairs Diyanet (1924), and established new ones, as in the principles of national sovereignty (1920, 1923, and 1924) and constitutional secularism (1937) (Berkes 1998; Gözaydın 2009; Özdalga 2012). Second, republican changes served both to make new and ‘secular’13 truth claims and to actively encourage the ‘forgetting’ of the old (traditional and religious) ones. Hence, for example, Ottoman reformers tried to modernise the perception of time and history by introducing a new Rumi calendar while leaving the old lunar calendar in use. Instead, Kemalist modernisers mandated the exclusive use of the new Gregorian calendar. It is arguably partly as a result of this and similar reforms that ‘public memory’ continues to be a highly sensitive and politicised issue in Turkey to this day (Özyürek, ed. 2007). 10 Most recently, new headscarf ruling. 11 Direct quotation from the English translation of the 1983 Constitution posted on the official website of the Turkish Parliament. The Turkish original uses the term laik, which is the Turkish equivalent of the French term laic. But both the practice and understanding of Turkish laiklik have had important differences from French laicism, as I will discuss below. 12 For the concepts of institutions and institutional change here, see (Mahoney and Thelen, eds 2010). 13 Some of these new codes such as the Gregorian calendar have (perhaps largely forgotten by ordinary people in modern times) religious historical roots, but they were arguably ‘secular’ for Muslim Turks in the sense of having no basis in Muslim religion.

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Kemalist reforms could also be classified as anti-clerical, especially vis-à-vis religious nonstate actors. Secularisation of the education and justice systems severely undermined the exOttoman official clergy (ulama) class. However, many of them were able to assume redefined positions in the judiciary, education, and Diyanet (Fabbe, forthcoming). By comparison, the banning of religious orders, such as tariqats, more gravely delegitimised, disenfranchised, and displaced the religious elites outside the state apparatus, with long-term psychological and political effects. Their descendants played key roles in the later mobilisation of anti-secular, unsecular and Islamist movements and parties (Yavuz 2003). Because of its radical secularisation in the early-Republican period, it might be tempting to group laiklik, or, for that matter, Kemalist Turkey, together with anti-religious regimes, such as ‘communist regimes’ (Taylor 2016b, 23). However, laiklik’s suspicion of religion outside the state’s purview never amounted to anti-religionism. On the contrary, aspects of religion and religiosity were promoted through active state support. The majority religion was officially viewed as being vital for state legitimacy and national identity, solidarity, and morals (Sakalliog˘ lu 1996; Turam, ed. 2012; Akan 2017). Moreover, political secularism moderated after the transition to multi-party electoral democracy in 1946–1950, diminishing laiklik’s anti-religious and (non-state) anti-clerical aspects and augmenting its promotion of the majority religion (Somer 2014a). In terms of the republican-laic versus liberal-secular dichotomy, laiklik resembles the former. In addition to laiklik’s aforementioned anti-clericalism, a major motivation for Kemalists was cynicism toward traditional, unreformed religion. Furthermore, liberating state affairs from religion by bureaucratising and controlling religion was a goal for both Republican and late-Ottoman modernising elites. Consistent with an important aspect of laicism as defined above, many late-Ottoman and Republican modernising elites were ‘laymen’. They came from the ranks of professions, bureaucracy, and military, even though they also included members of the official and unofficial ulama class. Finally, laiklik’s scepticism of political religion, self-anointed civilising mission, and drive to privatise selective aspects of religion resemble French laicité. After ensuring ‘freedom of conscience, religious belief and conviction’ for everyone in Article 24, the constitution bans the abuse of religion or religious feelings, or things held sacred by religion, in any manner whatsoever, for the purpose of personal or political interest or influence, or for even partially basing the fundamental, social, economic, political, and legal order of the State on religious tenets. However, other characteristics, such as religion-promoting state activities, sharply distinguish laiklik from French laicité. In sharp contrast to France, in practice, religious sentiments, ties, and arguments are used extensively in Turkish politics, as well as in social and economic relations, often with the state’s active endorsement and support (Turam 2012; Somer 2013). It could be argued that this could be explained away as an unintended outcome, or, from the point of view of the secularising elites, failure of secular reforms. But the public role of religion in Turkey cannot be seen as an entirely unintended outcome of laiklik. Unlike French laicité, Turkish secularisers in both Ottoman and republican periods purposefully engaged in reinterpreting and modernising religion and in promoting a rational and truthful version of Islam. The Turkish state is involved in religious affairs primarily, but not exclusively, through the colossal state agency Diyanet (Gözaydın 2009). The latter regulates, controls, and promotes 46

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state-endorsed interpretations of the majority Sunni-Muslim faith. By law, the Diyanet is tasked with ‘carrying out the affairs of the religion of Islam pertaining to faith, worship and moral principles, enlightening [emphasis mine] the society about religion and administering the places of worship’. Its responsibilities include ‘making decisions, issuing opinions, and answering questions on religious subjects, by considering the principal sources of knowledge and methodology of the religion of Islam, and contemporary demands and needs [emphasis mine]’.14 Thus, the Diyanet’s responsibilities and authorities include interpreting Islam in a theologically ‘rigorous’ fashion, and, if necessary, renewing the religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy in accordance with the changing times. Hence, many critics even argue that, rather than disestablishing Islam, laiklik re-established it ‘differently’ (Davison 2003). According to a recent contribution that analysed the discourse of the Diyanet-distributed sermons (hutbes) to mosques nation-wide: ‘the political domination of a secular state as an agency over religion has not suppressed, but transformed religion as a political tool for the same agency, to organize the polity and the society along its own ideological tenets’ (Korkut and Eslen-Ziya 2018, 1). Last but not least, laiklik’s promotion of a state-endorsed version of Sunni Islam discriminates against indigenous Muslim minorities such as the Alevis — even though many Alevis see laiklik as their ‘savior’ (Azak 2010) – and violates Muslim, non-Muslim, and secular freedoms (Dressler 2013; Somer 2013). All this gives rise to a level of government regulation of religion similar to the average in other Muslim-majority countries, but much higher than in Western secular countries, including France. In 2014, the average level of government regulation of religion measured in Muslim-majority states was 5.85 (on an increasing scale of 0 to 10), which qualified as ‘high’ (Somer 2017b; Pew Research 2016). This figure was nearly double the average for non-Muslim majority states, 3.11, which qualified as ‘moderate’. Hence, it is problematic to group laiklik together with French laicité, or, for that matter, consider it an example of ‘assertive secularism’ (Kuru 2009; Kuru and Stepan 2012a). In a nutshell, it is not easy to classify laiklik in terms of existing typologies and descriptive dimensions. Current descriptions make contradictory empirical and normative claims (Somer 2013) as in ‘highly differentiated and conflictual religion-state relation’ (Philpott 2007) versus ‘differently established Islam’ (Davison 2003). One possible solution is to use ‘mixed categorizations with adjectives’ as in ‘state-civil religionism and anticlericalism’ (Akan 2017) and ‘statist production of religion’ (Künkler and Madeley 2018, 4). Alternatively, research should focus on developing new categories through theoretical and conceptual development.

Explaining laiklik Why did laiklik develop as it did? And how and why has it been changing? Most of the extant explanations addressing these questions can be divided into two groups. The first group draws on ‘ideology’, namely the ex post facto presumed ideological goals and priorities of the social-political actors who influenced laiklik’s evolution. Examples of such explanations are those based on the ‘laicist’ ideology of Kemalists or the ‘passive secular’ ideology of the AKP (Yavuz 2009; Kuru and Stepan 2012a). The second group of explanations is focused on ‘socio-economy’, namely an ostensible and unmediated relationship between socio-economic development, on one hand, and political preferences and institutional outcomes, on the other. Examples are those explanations that are based on the effects of ‘globalist’ economic

14 Articles 1 and 5 of Law 633. Author’s translation from the Turkish original.

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policies on political preferences of religious-conservative constituencies (Gülalp 2001; Gumus¸çu and Sert 2009). The first approach runs into three immediate theoretical and empirical problems. First, it assumes that the ideological preferences of ruling groups — or, for that matter, constituencies — are homogenous and fixed over time. Second, it presumes that social-political actors have the power and capability necessary to translate their ideals into reality. Third, it cannot explain why ideologically dissimilar ruling actors, such as Ottoman ruling elites, Kemalists or the Democrat Party, implement similar policies, or why the same actor, say the AKP, adopts different policies over time. In turn, the second paragraph seems to draw on the revised secularisation theories discussed above, which expect modernisation to modify automatically – i.e. without the intervention of politics and other factors – how people believe. Thus, it suffers from the reductionist shortcomings of modernisation theories. Both approaches are challenged by the empirical developments taking place during the last two decades under AKP governments. Many studies anticipated AKP governments would reform, or at least work toward reforming, laiklik in a ‘post-Islamist’, liberal-separationist, and ‘passive secular’ direction (Bayat 2013; Kuru 2009; Bilgrami 2016). They did so based on the early discourse and program of the AKP, and the assumed secularisation of Turkish society, which scholars more or less associated with material development, without investigating the cognitive-intellectual components discussed above.15 As the argument goes, if secularist elites constructed laiklik with the goal of oppressing religion, then more religion-friendly governments should reduce interference with religion. However, actual developments have contradicted these predictions. Turkey’s score for (both supportive and restrictive) ‘government regulation of religion’ climbed from 7.52 in 2007 to 9.53 in 2014 (Somer 2017b).16 The AKP worked toward augmenting laiklik’s integrationism, bent on instrumentalising the institutions of the Diyanet, public education, and social policy for promoting MuslimTurkish nationalism and a reformist-modernist view of Islam (Somer 2007, 2014a, 2015; White 2014). Hence, in 2012, Erdog˘ an declared one of his government’s goals to be ‘raising a pious youth’ and, in 2018, he called on the Diyanet to ‘take a more active role in updating religious practices in line with current conditions’ (Lüküslü 2016; Hürriyet 2018). Adequate explanations should account for both continuities and variations across different periods and for comparable cases, such as former Ottoman nation-states and other Muslimmajority states. The latter, for example, include a pattern of nationalising and state managing ‘Islamic impulses within the framework of the central state authority’ (Fox 2008; Elbasani and Roy 2015; Elbasani 2017, 12). Hence, why do different nation-states and Muslim-majority societies display similar patterns of state–religion relationship? In this respect, one underutilised causal dimension is structural. For example, would laiklik have become more liberal and separationist if wars and political decisions in late Ottoman and early Republican periods had not significantly altered Turkey’s religious demography? These changes transformed Turkey from a Muslim-majority society with major non-Muslim minorities to one that is overwhelmingly Muslim with ‘negligible’ or ‘assimilable’ nonMuslim minorities. Explanatory roles may also be played by historical-institutional factors such as Turkish Sunni Islam’s internal organisation and state capacity to implement secularist policies (Yılmaz 2007). 15 Secularity assumes the prevalence of important cognitive, social, and political conditions (for example Taylor’s secularity III). 16 Calculated based on figures from (Pew Research 2016).

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A related and also underused perspective is political, i.e. based on political interests and checks and balances (Somer 2007, 2014a; Akan 2017; Fabbe, forthcoming). For instance, Akan analysed the parliamentary debates taking place at critical junctures, e.g. 1924, 1961, and 1980, and asked why, i.e. with which expressed intentions, the decisions were made to have state-salaried imams and religion courses on Sunni Islam. He argues that political elite goals of containing socialism and the exclusion of ‘religious minorities and the left’ from political decision-making were as causally influential as ideology (Akan 2017). Finally, the factors of dialogue and trust between religious and secular actors and external support for democratisation and freedoms are crucial (Grigoriadis 2009; Somer 2010).

Conclusions: reforming and democratising versus vilifying and scratching laiklik The English title of Niyazi Berkes’ seminal book on laiklik is The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Berkes 1998). Yet, the Turkish title of the book is different: it is Türkiye’de Çag˘da¸slas¸ma (Contemporanisation in Turkey). I think that this difference implies more than a mere translation preference. The concept of secularisation refers to the rise of the temporal as opposed to the spiritual realm in any time period. By comparison, çag˘das¸las¸ma refers to changes that reflect the dominant temporal realm of a particular time period, which we describe in our age in terms of concepts such as modernity. Hence, assumptions about falling behind and incongruity with what represents power and progress in the present age are implicit in the concept of çag˘das¸las¸ma. Whichever values, ways of thinking and institutions dominate a particular age, of course, vary over time. Accordingly, it seems to me that political secularism has been valued and understood in Turkey primarily as an instrument for development, modernisation and catching up with the West. This is different from other contexts in the world where political secularism has mainly been upheld in terms of goals such as interreligious peace and ‘enlightenment’, as I discussed above. This instrumental and utilitarian understanding may also imply that the philosophicalintellectual dimensions of secularisation might have received less than due attention by the defenders of laiklik. It is certainly true that, as part of an overall strategy of ‘catching up with the West,’ the defenders of various forms of laiklik, who included secular as well as religious actors (Piscatori 1986; Berkes 1998; Mardin 2006; Findley 2010), more than anything else, meant it to be the vehicle of a cultural and ‘cognitive revolution’ (Heper 2009). But to what extent did laiklik produce a ‘self-reflexive society’ and the freedoms of movement in terms of Taylor’s ‘I’ and ‘II’, discussed at the beginning of this chapter? (Somer 2017b). The answer to this crucial and underexplored question may well shape the future and quality of both secularism and democracy in Turkey. Like in India, criticisms of secularism in Turkey include arguments that laiklik is valuable but failed to achieve its goals (and therefore needs reforming) and assertions that it is a source of problems (Bhargava, ed. 1998; Bhargava, ed. 2011). Similarly, critiques of laiklik are made by those who argue that secularisation undermined democratisation (Gülalp 2005) and those maintaining that deficits of democratisation weakened secularisation and the consolidation of laiklik (Somer 2007). Similar to the criticisms of secularism in India and other non-Western contexts, many charges against laiklik amount to due criticisms of authoritarianism and nation-state (Taylor 2016a). Alternatively, they can be seen as criticisms of mono-cultural nation-states or of states that disallow or discourage the expression of multiple nationalities within their territories, as opposed to ‘state-nations’ (Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011). 49

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Further, while interrogating laiklik, due attention should be paid, in addition to the Diyanet, to key institutions such as the Council of Higher Education, which has draconian authority to regulate higher education, and the Ministry of Education. Their authority stifles pluralism, diversity and freedoms, and, perhaps most importantly, critical and independent thinking in the education system, which are crucial for religious as well as secular ‘enlightenment’. When all is said and done, I think Rajeev Bhargava’s and Jacques Berlinerblau’s (2017, 96) general commendations apply well to lessons of Turkey’s (at least) two-century-long modernisation/secularisation experiences with political secularism, and, especially, the last 15 years under the AKP governments: [We should see secularism] as a critical perspective not against religion but against religious homogenization and institutionalized religious domination … [different forms of which being] both more accommodating toward some aspects of religion and deeply critical of its other dimensions … [Interpreted in this way,] secularism remains our best bet to help us deal with ever-deepening religious diversity and the problems endemic to it. I argue that we need to rehabilitate, not forsake, secularism (Bhargava 2011, 92). When they work, political secularisms guarantee essential liberties – liberties that few other attempts through the ancient binary [of spiritual versus temporal rule] have been able to procure[.]

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4 POLITICAL ISLAM Kristin Fabbe and Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu

Introduction . . In Turkey, the terms Islâmcılık or siyasal Islâmcılık are used to describe the agenda and activities of political Islamists, whose primary objective has been to defend the religious sphere from various forms of encroachment. In this chapter, we trace the evolution of political Islamist currents in Turkish politics from the late Ottoman and early Republican period up until the present. We also link the broader historical narrative to recent social science debates and approaches to the study of political Islam in Turkey, especially as they relate to issues of mobilisation, moderation, inclusion, development, and democracy.

From Empire to Republic: religion and state building in the late Ottoman era Political Islam in contemporary Turkey cannot be understood without appreciation for what S¸erif Mardin calls the ‘long-range influence of an Islamic voice in Turkey’ (Mardin 2005, 146). The late Ottoman writer Ziya Gökalp observed that modernisa. tion (muas.ırlas¸mak.), Islamisation (I slamlas¸mak.), and Turkification (Türkles¸mek) emerged as dominant political trends in the Empire’s final years (Gökalp 1918; Safa 1958). Indeed, the interplay among these processes – and the ideologies behind them – provide a window into understanding the social dynamics and lineages of political Islam in modern Turkey, for they were not mutually exclusive (Berkes 1964; Kara 1986). As Brian Silverstein has documented, the cilmiye (Islamic scholarly hierarchy) became increasingly intertwined with the Ottoman state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and so too did the Empire’s Sufi religious orders, which also underwent bureaucratisation and eventually many sufis became bureaucrats themselves.1 Furthermore, Sultan ‘Abdulh.amı-d II (r. 1876–1909) simultaneously employed Islamism and Ottomanism as political discourses in an effort to strike a societal balance and ward-off the 1

Whereas the Bektas¸-ı order had gained ascendance as result of its ties with the Janissary corps, these two groups were abolished in 1826 and the Mevlevı- order subsequently enjoyed a period of Imperial sponsorship. The Mevlevi’s privileged role came to an end with the reign of ‘Abdulh.amı-d II (r. 1876–1909). See Silverstein (2009).

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impending dissolution of the Empire during his long one-man rule (Silverstein 2011, . . 77). Nonetheless, despite being associated with policies of pan-Islamism (Ittih.a-d-ı Isla-m), ‘Abdulh.amı-d II was also instrumental in diminishing the autonomous influence of medreses (religious schools), limiting their number and replacing them with reformed schooling systems for training civil servants, the military, and judicial functionaries (Somel 2001). The tensions that arose as a result of these policies – embracing Islamist rhetoric and certain segments of the religious class while diminishing the autonomy of key religious institutions – developed into one of the defining characteristics of the Hamidian era and significantly shaped processes of late Ottoman reform and state building. ‘Abdulh.amı-d II’s policies also produced divergent factions among the late Ottoman ulema and the religious orders, which are sometimes characterised as reform-minded vs. conservative. These groups were not always as cohesive, coherent or long lasting as such a dichotomy implies, however, for alliances shifted and the views of key figures morphed in unpredictable ways during the transition from Empire to Republic. Generally speaking, however, the reformists were those medrese scholars of the Second Constitutional era that supported the reforms initiated by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). They included figures like Mu-sa- Ka-z.ım (1858–1920) (Koca 2002) and Ürgüplü Mus.t.afa- Ḫayrı-2 (1867–1922), both of whom served as S¸eyḫülisla-m after the removal of ‘Abdulh.amı-d II. These scholars worked with the CUP and even provided religio-legal justifications for their social, political, and educational policies. Sebı-lü’r-res¸a-d, a journal that was published by Mehmed Âkif (1873–1936) and Es¸ref Edib (1882–1971), served as their primary media outlet.3 Senior Naqshbandı-s also embraced the constitutional movement and initially supported the CUP against the Sultan (Kara 2001). The other, so-called conservative ulema typically adopted a more royalist attitude and wanted the Sultan and his cabinet to remain as the primary locus of political authority (Bein 2011). Generally speaking, this second group criticised the accelerated modernisation agenda forged by the CUP and positioned themselves against certain social and intellectual aspects of Western society.4

Kemalist Turkey: religion becomes a bureaucratic apparatus Mustafa Kemal’s new Republic was, above all, a nation-state with a particular emphasis on modernisation and Turkification. As such, Kemal’s attitude toward Islam was shaped by these two discourses. Reform-minded figures’ understandings of Islam often went hand-in-hand with a rising Turkish nationalist discourse. History-writing from the early Republican era redefined Islam as a national, that is, more localised, religion. Over time, this came to stand in opposition to interpretations of Islam espoused by thinkers such as Mustafa Sabri (1869–1954) and Mehmed Âkif, which aspired toward a broader Islamic community (ümmet).5

2

3 4

5

Also see Is.la-h.a-t-ı Meda-ris Niz.a-mna-mesi prepared by the ¸seyhülislam Ürgüplü Mustafa Hayri Bey, who introduced not only physical education classes, but also foreign languages such as Russian and French along with mandatory classes on mechanics, physics and philosophy (Ürgüplü, ed. 2015). The journal disseminated reformist views early on and later supported Mustafa Kemal’s ‘national struggle’ (millî mücâdele) against the occupation of Anatolia by allied forces. See Bein (2011). The demarcation between conservative vs. reform-minded religious scholars has persisted in Turkey, such as that between the theologians Hayrettin Karaman (1934–) and Yas¸ar Nuri Öztürk (1951– 2016). . . See the chapters on Mehmed Âkif and Mustafa Sabri in Kara’s (1986) Türkiye’de Islâmcılık Düs¸üncesi: Metinler, Kis¸iler, volumes one and two, respectively.

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The changes that Mustafa Kemal instigated in the religious establishment were increasingly met with opposition from some self-identified Islamists, though their criticism was, according to Tanıl Bora, largely reactionary and misconceived (2017, 438– 439). Mustafa Kemal was often accused of working to abolish religion, but in actuality his early reforms merely sought to reposition the religious establishment as a weak and tightly controlled bureaucratic apparatus under the state hierarchy (Fabbe forthcoming). Laicism (lâiklik), one of the six founding ideological principles of the Kemalist Republic, was thus distinct from some conceptions of secularism in that it envisioned a separation of religion and state. As such, in 1924, with the abolition of the joint ministry of S¸eriyye and Evk.a-f, which had been in charge of the supervision of the judiciary as well as religious endowments, key institutions as well as a network of localised preachers and other religious .agents were transferred to the newly created Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyânet I¸sleri Reislig˘ i).6 In the name of state building, the legal and educational components of the previous seat of S¸eyḫülisla-m, now abolished, were subsumed under the separate ministries of Justice (Adliye) and Education (Maârif). In this way, the resources of the religious establishment were spread and distributed across the other components of the state, thereby diminishing its overall power.7 The Directorate of Religious Affairs was, and continues to be, employed as a tool to nationalise, regulate, supervise and instrumentalise many aspects of religion (Tarhanlı 1993). For example, some of Mustafa Kemal’s most controversial decisions, such as the translation and the recitation of the Qur’an in Turkish, were initiated and supported through the cadres and efforts of the Directorate. Numerous religiously educated ulema supported Mustafa Kemal’s early reforms and justified Kemalist changes by providing specific references to different aspects of classical Islam (Bora 2017, 419–421). Some ulema even wrote in favour of very controversial issues, including the abolition of the Caliphate8 and the translation and the recitation of the Qur’an in Turkish.9 One of the early supporters of the CUP, the religious scholar Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır (1878–1942), even prepared a modern exegesis and a Turkish translation of the Qur’an, a work that had initially been commissioned by Mehmed Âkif. In the Republican era, Islamist critics who remained outside the institutional framework of the Directorate were stigmatised as pro-Sharia (S¸eriâtçılık), backward, and/or reactionaries (mürteci or irticâ yanlısı) (Maydan 2017). Some were sanctioned by the state accordingly. In part for this reason, some early Islamists remained ambivalent when it came to openly acting against . Mustafa Kemal’s government. One telling example of this ambivalence is documented by Ismail Kara in his article ‘The Dream of a Shaykh’ (‘S¸eyhefendi’nin Rüyası’). The article depicts a group of sheikhs and their disciples who unite to curse Mustafa Kemal and his reforms, especially the abolition of Sufi orders. The group later reverses its decision, however, as a result of one of the shaykh’s dreams. In the dream, the Prophet Muhammad points at 6

7

8 9

See the document Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivi/Tarih: 7/3/1924/Fon: 51.0.0.0/Yer: 2.1…34. This document states that the Ministry of S¸erciyye and Evh.a-f was abolished, and instead, the Diya-net was established. From now on, all the cadres of preachers (va-’iz), chaplains (mü’ezzin), ima-ms, and ḫatı-bs would be officers working for the Diya-net. Several telegraphs about the future of the medrese buildings after the Ministry of Evk.a-f was reduced to a directorate are illustrative here: Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivi/Tarih: 1/2/1925/Fon: 30.10.0.0/Yer: 192.313.9/ Documents 1–6. Documents 4–6 announce that some of the dilapidated and abandoned medrese buildings should be transferred to the Ministry of Education. Here we see Kemalist’s early strategy of breaking down the overall structure of the Evk.a-f by conferring its property to other organs of the state (i.e. the Ministry of Education here). See Ayni (1943, 385–409). See Bayur (1958, 599–606).

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Turkey on a map and says that this portion of the Islamic landscape was given to Mustafa Kemal, albeit, with a heavy heart (Kara 2017).

The emergence of Islamist dissent It was not long after the Kemalists came to power, however, that certain religious communities began to collectively voice dissent. Early dissent was primarily polemic, providing a corpus of work from which later Islamic political activists would draw.10 The absence of widespread, religiously inspired social mobilisation can be attributed, in part, to the repressive nature of the Kemalist regime, which became increasingly intolerant of dissent and pushed any would-be activists underground. A case in point is Bediüzzaman Said Nursî (1877–1960), a Kurdish religious scholar associated with the Naqshbandi-Khalidi tradition who had supported Mustafa Kemal’s national struggle during the War of Independence. Nursî recited the Qur’an during the opening of the first Turkish Parliament, but after the abolition of the Caliphate and the subsequent Kurdish-Islamist rebellion of Sheikh Said in 1925, the Kemalist regime interrogated Nursî and banned him from all political and social activity. As a result, Nursî went underground for decades and continued his teaching, inspiring a large number of reading circles dedicated to the study of his multi-volume exegesis, Risâle-i Nûr. Whereas Kuru and Kuru have described Nursî’s work as ‘one of the most influential apolitical interpretations of Islam’ (Kuru and Kuru 2008, 100), others contested this view, especially as a result of recent political developments associated with another off-shoot of the Nurcu movement, the Hizmet (Service) movement of Fethullah Gülen (Kasaba 2014, 629). Eventually both the aforementioned Es¸ref Edib and Mehmed Âkif, who earlier had supported and published the views of reform-minded figures, grew increasingly disillusioned. As the Kemalist state grew increasingly autocratic, they transformed into some of the staunchest critics of Mustafa Kemal and his Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi, CHP). Sebı-lü’r-res¸a-d was published again in 1948, but only supported the regime reluctantly. Instead, Mehmed Âkif’s conception of Islamism congealed around the essentialist slogan that the Turkish people needed to return to the true essence of religion. Âkif’s disillusionment with the Turkish Republic and Mustafa Kemal’s reforms led him to imagine an idealised community of Islam (Bora 2017, 416–417). He was often criticised by later thinkers for ignoring Realpolitik and turning a blind eye to the religious values of common men during the early Republic (Bora 2017). Former Shaykh al-Isla-m Mustafa Sabri also developed into a staunch critic of Mustafa Kemal’s statist policies, including the abolition of the Caliphate and religious orders (tarikatlar) as well as his social, educational and legal reforms.11 Finally, and probably most consequentially, Mehmet Zahid Kotku (1897–1980), who had been initiated into the influential Kha-lidı- branch of the Naqshbandı- Order in 1918, took over. leadership of the cemaat in 1952 and became an influential, state-sponsored prayer leader at the Iskender Pas¸a mosque. Kotku became increasingly popular among student circles, growing a community of followers. In his sohbets (religious conversations) and teachings, Kotku encouraged his disciples to be active in worldly affairs, and he and his cemaat quickly emerged as the most influential informal leaders of Turkish political Islam. Kotku and his followers increasingly built political clout. Kotku . 10 One of the foundational texts of the conservative right in Turkey is Isyan Ahlâkı (Rebellious Morality or Conformisme et Révolte-Esquisse d’un Psychologie de la Croyance in its original French) by Nurettin Topçu (1909–75), published in 1934, which essentially provides a philosophical justification for advocating an Islamic polity based on ‘the Muslim will to revolt’ in concomitance with God’s power. 11 See again the chapters on Mehmed Âkif and Mustafa Sabri in Kara (1986), volumes one and two, respectively. See also Ünsal (2005, 72–89).

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did not shun the state entirely, nor did he ‘hold esteem for more radical Islamists’ (Mardin 2005, 158). Rather, he embraced a synthesis of Turkish nationalism and Islam and positioned his cemaat to help establish, support and promote political, economic, press activities (Mardin 2005, 153).

Islamists’ early attempts to engage in institutionalised politics In time, religiously based dissent found its way into the formal political arena, albeit in fits and starts. The Liberal Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası), which was first formed in 1930 with Mustafa Kemal’s approval, was quickly shut down when it attracted religious adherents. From this date on, the idea of ‘the religious reactionary’ (mürteci) became increasingly salient in Turkish poli. tics (Özipek 2005b). The first actual Islamic-leaning parties founded in Turkey were Islâm Koruma Partisi, which was closed by the government after two months in 1946, and Millî Kalkınma Partisi which was abrogated after its founder Nuri Demirag˘ ’s death in 1957. Es¸ref Edib pointed to a conservative Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) splinter group, the Millet Partisi (1948–53) as the most appropriate conservative-religious movement for Islamists to support; however, this party. too was soon closed. Yet another attempt to form an Islamist party in the early 1950s with Islâm Demokrat Partisi, also resulted in closure after the party was accused of mixing religion and politics. Expressions such as ‘dini siyâsete âlet etmek’ (using religion as a political tool) and ‘irticâyla mücadele’ (the struggle against reactionism) joined the lexicon of common rationales that Turkish governments and the army employed to shut down Islamic political formations (Özipek 2005a). The general evolution of individual twentieth-century Islamist ideologues in modern Turkey also reveals that several prominent religious orders occasionally overlapped, shared a common community, did not shy away from politics, and increasingly showed concerted forms of engagement with various political parties and the Turkish state. For example, by the 1960s, Naqshbandı--Kha-lidı- Shaykh Kotku’s sohbets began to take place in important institutions, including the State Planning Organisation (Devlet Planlama Tes¸kilatı), thereby signalling this cemaat’s willingness to participate in institutionalised politics. Pre-eminent figures that later came to dominate Islamist politics in Turkey, including Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011) and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an (1954–), participated in Kotku’s sohbets in the 1970s (Silverstein 2011, 102–103). Meanwhile, a new off-shoot of Said Nursî’s Nurcu movement called Hizmet emerged around the popular preacher Fethullah Gülen (1941–). Hizmet grew in popularity as a result of Gülen’s oratory skills and, within a decade, recordings of his preaching began circulating widely. A staunch anti-communist, Gülen established the Komünizmle Mücadele Derneg˘i (Association for the Fight Against Communism) in Erzurum in 1965 (Çakır 1990; Yavuz 2005). Another case in point is Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–83), who was initially known as a bohemian poet during his youth. At the age of thirty, he met the Naqshandı- sheikh Ahmed Arvâsî and thereafter dedicated his life to the cause of political Islam (Mardin 1994). He published the influential nationalist-Islamist journal Büyük Dog˘u (Great East). Necip Fazıl proved to be a controversial figure.12 Fazıl initially positioned himself as an avid supporter of Mustafa Kemal’s reforms but later, when Adnan Menderes’ Democrat Party came into power, he voiced severe critiques of early Republican reforms and political figures, often using Islamist discourse. He changed his political stance many times over the course of Büyük Dog˘u and never hid the fact that he received government funds to produce pro-Democrat Party and/or pro-Turkish-Islamist propaganda (Hür 2013). From time to time, the journal was supported by

12 Peyami Safa’s Türk Düs¸üncesi and Nurettin Topçu’s aforementioned Hareket were, however, probably the two most influential conservative-nationalist journals.

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the political right, including the Menderes government. The journal was also known for casting vicious ad hominem attacks against certain political figures, derogatorily labelling them as Jewish, Armenian or Free Masons. This blend of the religious and the national positioned . Fazıl as one of the key figures behind the emergent Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (Türk Islâm Sentezi), an idea later inherited in the late 1960s by Necmettin Erbakan’s National View (Millî Görüs¸) cadres and the subsequent National Order Party (Millî Nizam Partisi). Gradually then, many Islamists adapted to the repressive political environment, marked by party closures and the like, by developing an increasingly nationalist and pro-Turkish (and often exclusionary) rhetoric. Such rhetoric mirrored the rhetoric of the state, and thereby incentivised Islamists to find allies in the political establishment to shield them from accusations of disloyalty. Although formal political participation via party politics was still largely out of reach, Islamist movements evolved by intertwining themselves with the state in these other less visible, but no less significant ways. With time, these interactions reinforced that the particular evolution of political Islam in Turkey had turned into a ‘statist’ movement, one that worked with and through the organs of state power as opposed to exclusively outside of them.

The Turkish Islamic synthesis begins to find its voice(s) The ‘statist’ tendencies of political Islam grew more strident in the 1970s as Necip Fazıl had started to openly voice his calls for a Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. Although the Turkish Islamic Synthesis and newer manifestations of Turkish Islam are not always one and the same, as S¸en argues, the legacy of the Turkish Islamic Synthesis ‘set an ideological political framework that aimed at uniting two extreme wings of the Turkish right – Islamism and Turkish nationalism – around a common program in order to block the rise of the leftist movements’ (S¸en . 2010, 64). The concept had roots in Ahmed Arvâsî’s three-volume Türk-Islam Ülküsü (Turkish-Islamic Ideology) (Arvâsî 1979). It was .also being discussed among other conservative . nationalists. For example, the historian Ibrahim Kafesog˘ lu, known for his book Türk-Islâm Sentezi, founded a group called The Hearth of Intellectuals (Aydınlar Ocag˘ı), which held discussions about the possibility of establishing a national culture (Millî Kültür) reserved only for Muslim Turks starting in 1970 (Güvenç et al. 1991). In his book, Kafesog˘ lu examines Turkish contributions to the Muslim world, concluding with the thesis that Turkic systems of belief and codes of living were suitable for adapting Islam both as a religious and political identity (Kafesog˘ lu 1985). Though with different emphases and priorities (Kafesog˘ lu placing more weight on Turkishness and Arvâsî-Necip Fazıl on Islamism), these different versions of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis converged during the 1970s. It was also in the 1970s that the first umbrella party for Islamists was founded. The Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP) led by Süleyman Demirel, which claimed lineage to the banned DP, came to power alone in 1965 and 1969, receiving the largest vote share in both elections (52.8% and 46.5% respectively). On the heels of these victories, an Islamistleaning group within the party began criticising the leadership for failing to pursue a sufficiently conservative agenda. By this point, Necmettin Erbakan, the aforementioned political ideologue of the National View movement, had already spent a good part of the late 1960s increasing his sphere of influence in Odalar Birlig˘ i, an umbrella organisation for traders and industrialists. Building on this influence, and with Shaykh Kotku’s blessing and backing, he joined with a group that splintered from the AP to found the National Order Party in 1970. The government dissolved the MNP only a year later on the grounds that it violated Turkey’s constitutional commitment to laïcité after the second army intervention 60

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with the 1971 Turkish military memorandum (Celep 2014).13 Erbakan’s second attempt to form a party came a year later, with the National Salvation Party (Millî Selâmet Partisi, MSP), which was successful enough to form a temporary government in a very odd coalition together with Mustafa Kemal’s CHP under the leadership of Bülent Ecevit in 1974. Erbakan had succeeded in courting key segments of the Nurcu community to support these early political endeavours, but relations quickly soured. The Nurcu-affiliated Members of Parliament in the MSP ‘were uncomfortable with the way the party was being led by Erbakan and his close associates’ and ‘rejected the idea that the only way to serve Islam was to be under that particular party leadership … and were against the formation of a coalition government with the CHP since it was considered as representative of communists’ (Atacan 2005, 190). Generally speaking, Erbakan was a divisive figure, and his religio-political doctrine, Millî Görüs¸, was shaped by his antagonism against global capitalism as well as Western values, including secularism. Erbakan saw the common financial market as a Zionist and Christian project to dilute Islamic ideology and placed specific emphasis on the importance of nationalising Turkish industry as well as hastening overall development, economic independence and social morality based on his concept of a Just Order (Âdil Düzen) (Çakır 1994, 131–139). Rus¸en Çakır’s study of the rise of political Islam in Turkey from the 1960s onwards concludes that Erbakan’s Millî Görüs¸ movement – as well as his influential Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) of the 1990s – made no claims in favour of democracy or Sharia (Çakır 1994). Instead, Erbakan’s ideology was rooted in an alternative national identity based on OttomanIslamic history and a strong criticism of Kemalist reforms (Tepe 2008). The chaotic politics of the 1970s came to an abrupt halt with the 1980 military coup, which, while negative in the immediate short term, had favourable consequences for political Islam in the long term. The threat of communism and the Soviet influence, as well as the rise of leftist separatist Kurdish movements, led the new military government to actively pursue a nationalistIslamist approach to state identity. Such an approach was also in line with the US’s green belt (yes¸il kus¸ak) project, which aimed to empower and financially support local religious forces working against the threat of Russian influence (Çig˘ dem 2005, 31). Although Erbakan himself was banned from politics, other centre-right parties, together with the junta government, openly embraced the Turkish-Islamic synthesis and it became enshrined in culture and education policies (Eligür 2010), especially history text books (Özbaran 1992).14 Long-standing institutional . arrangements around religion, including the Diyânet, the Divinity Faculties (I lâhiyat Fakülteleri), . the Imam Hatip Schools, compulsory religious education in state schools, and official Qur’an courses, were expanded in ways that permanently enlarged the religious field, despite the ostensibly secular nature of the Turkish state.15 For example the 1982 military constitution strengthened the legal position of the Diyânet via Article 136, overtly tasking it with the goal of protecting ‘national solidarity and integrity’ (Gözaydın 2006). Article 24 reintroduced compulsory religious courses into the curriculum of state schools in what Kaplan has argued was an effort to homogenise conceptions of Islam and also securitise/militarise them (Kaplan 2006). In ‘the Islamic boom years’ of the 1980s about 1500 new mosques were constructed annually, reaching one mosque per 857 people by 1988 (White 2002, 113). Also, in the wake of the 1980 coup, with Erbakan temporarily sidelined, Fethullah Gülen began working directly with the Turkish junta government, demanding that the religious community 13 Since 1961 the Turkish state banned 27 political parties for violating the principle of secularism or threatening national unity/territorial integrity. 14 For the image of Islam in Turkish history textbooks, see Yetkin (1998). 15 See S¸en (2010) 59–84 and Fabbe (forthcoming).

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comply with military directives and even providing a religio-legal opinion in favour of the coup d’état (Çakır 1990; Yavuz 2005). The demise of Turkey’s statist economic policies in the 1980s also opened up space for Islamic civil society organisations. The Gülenists typically established individual foundations with no official link to one another, although they were all tacitly and ideologically connected to the religious leader’s teachings. In this manner, the Gülenists developed a formidable network of subsidised private educational institutions, preparatory schools, and dormitories, which filled widening gaps in the state’s developmental capabilities (White 2002, 207). Despite having alienated many Islamist groups, Erbakan’s political career was still far from over. The eighth president and the founder of the Motherland Party (Anavatan, ANAP) Turgut Özal (1927–93) transformed Turkey from a statist economy into a neoliberal one and was also known for his lenient and democratic policies towards the Kurds. After his sudden and suspicious death, a turbulent political climate characterised the 1990s as the Turkish state launched an aggressive policy against the Kurds and its fight with the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) grew more intense. A stint of weak, coalition governments with constantly changing partners and alliances dovetailed with an economic crisis and political instability that was punctuated by elections nearly once every two years. As a result, the two main centre-right parties, Tansu Çiller’s True Path (Dog˘ruyol Partisi, DYP) and Mesut Yılmaz’s ANAP became mired in endless allegations of corruption, losing prestige and public trust. As the centre-right fragmented, a window of opportunity opened for Erbakan’s recently formed RP. Political rising star. Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, who had climbed up the MSP and RP’s ranks, was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994. Then, in the 1995 parliamentary elections, the RP won the largest number of seats with 21% of the vote. Erbakan was only able to form a coalition in late summer of 1996 with Çiller’s DYP, an odd alliance given that the DYP declared itself to be western-friendly and secularist. Çiller needed the support of Erbakan’s RP in Parliament to avoid corruption charges (Akın 2012; Hürriyet 1998). The alliance did not last, however, as Erbakan was pushed out of power with the 1997 Turkish military memorandum (also known as the ‘soft coup’) and the RP was shut down in 1998 for posing a threat to laïcité, and that same year Erdog˘ an was sent to prison. In anticipation that the Constitutional Court would dissolve the RP, Erbakan had already pre-emptively created the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP), which spun its political agenda differently: more moderate, populist, pluralist, and environment friendly.16 Interestingly, the followers of the Gülen movement and many of the supporters of the RP/FP are documented as having ‘few kind words for one another.’ Each accused the other of secretive fanaticism (White 2002, 112).

Political Islam goes mainstream: the evolution of the AKP from ‘moderate Islam’ to ‘Erdog˘ anism’ Although the FP faced external threats from segments of the military and derision from the Gülen movement, the real threat came from within its own ranks. Indeed, as political Islam moved into the mainstream, not only did its statist tendencies grow more obvious, conflicts between and within various Islamist groups began to have an increasingly pronounced impact on domestic politics. These intra-Islamist tensions are often glossed over, no doubt because of many scholars’ insistence on analysing Turkish society through the prism of a Kemalist elite vs. Islamist outsiders. This tired, and oft-inaccurate dichotomy has distorted understandings of how Islamist politics have evolved. A major intra-Islamist break came after the 1999 elections, when a vocal group within the FP (sometimes referred to as the ‘innovators’) began to criticise Erbakan’s leadership. When 16 See Atacan (2005).

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the FP was shuttered in 2001, the innovators, which included Erdog˘ an, Abdullah Gül, and Bülent Arınç, capitalised on the opportunity and founded the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) instead of instead of joining the VP’s successor, the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi, SP). According to Altınordu, from its founding in 2001 until 2011, the AKP followed what he dubs an ‘incorporationist strategy’, which included symbolic gestures and policy positions that signalled a commitment to the founding values of the Republic. As he points out, it is worth remembering that: The press conference that announced the founding of the party in August 2001 took place against the background of a massive portrait of Atatürk, and the attendees were asked to observe a minute of silence in his memory. After the event, the founders of the party visited Anıtkabir to declare their commitment to his legacy. The first party program praised secularism as a ‘prerequisite of democracy’ and a ‘principle of freedom and social peace.’ […] the program stressed that it is unacceptable to make use of religion for political, economic and other interests, or to put pressure on people who think and live differently by using religion. (Altınordu 2016, 163) Early AKP discourse was notably pro-EU and supported liberal economic policies. As such it attracted not only Islamists,17 but socialist, new liberal intellectuals as well as the Gülenists, who played a substantial role in helping the AKP launch and succeed. The party also created an aura of pluralism, via both the ‘Alevi opening of 2007’ (Lord 2017) and initiating reforms for Turkey’s Kurdish citizens. Some scholars were sceptical of the genuineness of the AKP’s self-proclaimed political objectives from the start, while others championed the party’s ‘moderating’ moves, and the scholarly literature became deeply divided in its interpretations of the AKP’s intentions (Çınar 2011). Also, given the statist nature of political Islam in Turkey, these debates quickly carried over into analyses of Turkish foreign policy. Scholars began scrutinising the turn toward Islamism and ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ as a foreign policy tool, focusing especially on the tenure of Ahmet Davutog˘ lu as foreign minister (2009–14). Davutog˘ lu’s Neo-Ottoman/Pan-Islamic views shaped his geo-political worldview, which saw Turkey’s regional ambitions as encompassing its former Ottoman sphere of influence (Kıvanç 2015; Kiris¸ci 2018). It was also during Davutog˘ lu’s tenure that the Turkish media ran a vast number of pieces claiming that the AKP had begun establishing closer ties to other Islamic groups, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Islamic fundamentalists (Hürriyet 2013).18 In recent years, research documenting the ways in which the AKP has sought to undermine democracy have grown increasingly prominent. Some authors warned of a potential shift toward undemocratic tactics with the ‘Ergenekon trials’ (Fabbe 2011). The term Ergenekon referred to an alleged secret organisation with ultra-Kemalist leanings that was charged with inciting violence and plotting to overthrow the government. According to prosecutors at the time, members of Ergenekon planned to foment civil unrest through targeted assassinations and acts of terrorism designed to create chaos and instability, thereby setting the groundwork for an eventual military coup to oust the AKP from power. After the Ergenekon plot was ‘discovered’ in 2007, over 500 17 Tug˘ al (2011). . 18 A car accident outside Istanbul in February 2013 – sometimes dubbed ‘the second Susurluk’ – is said to have revealed these ties. Usame Kutub, a Turkish-Egyptian businessman, the son of Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Yassin Abdullah Qadi, a Saudi Arabian businessman previously charged with funding alQaeda, and one of Erdog˘ an’s bodyguards were reportedly all in the same car.

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people were detained and nearly 300 charged with committing some crime in connection with the organisation, including top-ranking military generals, university professors, mobsters, editors, writers, and journalists. The highly publicised trial deeply divided the public. Those in favour of the prosecution believed that the trial marked a long overdue clean-up of Turkish politics and a welcome end to the so-called ‘deep state’ or ‘state-tutelage’ that had ruled Turkey from behind the scenes, and with support from the military, for decades (Fabbe 2011).19 Critics of the trial argued (and some later demonstrated) that most of the charges were fabricated and that the AKP and its then-supporters in the Gülen movement were unjustly using the judiciary to silence opponents and cement party authority (Jenkins 2009). Erdog˘ an’s aggressive moves to silence the Gezi Park protests in the summer of 2013 only exacerbated concerns about the AKP’s democratic commitments. Although the AKP undoubtedly benefited from the silencing of these Kemalist voices with the Ergenekon trials, ironically it later alleged that it was Gülen-led groups in the judiciary and the security forces that started the Ergenekon (and Balyoz) trials. These allegations marked another moment in recent history in which intra-Islamic tensions have come to dominate domestic politics. The AKP has since pardoned many of the accused and split completely from the Gülenists. The reasons behind split between the Gülenists and the AKP are murky.20 What began in 2013 as a seemingly innocuous disagreement between AKP leadership and the Gülen movement over its preparatory schools (dershaneler), quickly transformed into a fierce struggle among various branches of the Turkish state that threatened the country’s stability. According to Ahmet ¸sık, the antipathy between the AKP and the Gülenists only started when the Gülenist group attempted to place cadres in the Turkish Intelligence Service (s¸ık 2013). Realising that the Gülenists had gained an uncontrollable degree of power within the state, Erdog˘ an broke his covenant with this movement (T24 2014). The Gülenists are said to have retaliated first by disclosing secret negotiations between the PKK and the Turkish government to the media, and then by revealing corruption involving a gas-for-gold deal between Iran and Turkey, which breached US’s sanctions against the Iranian regime.21 By 2014, observers were perhaps less concerned with the AKP’s religious objectives than with their purely political ones.22 Tas¸pınar wrote in 2014 that ‘the Turkish democratic model is not coming to an end because of a clash between Islam and secularism. Instead, the real conflict is between electoral democracy and liberalism’ (Tas¸pınar 2014). Adding a set of astute historical and institutional observations about the wider political arena to the discussion, Somer argues that ‘despite major achievements, democratisation remained ambiguous under the rule of moderate Islamists because they compromised and associated themselves with the semi-democratic centre, and secular-religious cooperation failed while some secular actors de-moderated’ (Somer 2014). Altınordu, also faults the old guard to a certain extent, arguing that ‘state elites failed to establish legitimate grounds for a political intervention, which in turn provided the party with the time and opportunity to remove the institutional barriers to its incorporation.’23 Academic scrutiny of the AKP’s turn toward authoritarianism has only intensified since the battle between the AKP government and the Gülenists culminated in a failed coup attempt that the 19 Interestingly, in a special issue of the Sociology of Islam from 2014 entitled ‘Perspectives on the Gulen Movement’ that includes seven articles, only a few mention the trials and none analyze them indepth. See Sociology of Islam 1(3/4), 2014. 20 For recent efforts to explain the split see Tas¸ (2017). 21 See Sloat (2017). 22 See, for example, Esen and Gümüs¸çü (2016). 23 See Altınordu (2016).

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government says was instigated by Gülen-affiliated army officers (New York Times 2017). After enacting the state of emergency law (Olag˘anüstü Hal or OHAL), the Erdog˘ an government started the biggest purge and witch-hunt ever in Turkish history. It has removed nearly half a million alleged Gülenists (along with others opponents) from the bureaucracy as well as government and state offices (Kirby 2016; Hansen 2017). Erdog˘ an has also overhauled the political system, changing it from a parliamentary democracy into a presidential system marked by the concentration of executive power in his own personal authority. Having alienated many former coalition partners, the AKP has increasingly cozied up to the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement . Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP), forming a coalition called the People’s Alliance (Cumhur Ittifakı) for the scheduled 2019 Presidential elections, which were brought forward with a snap election to 24 June 2018. Erdog˘ an even flashed the Bozkurt (Grey Wolves), historically a Turkish ultra-nationalist hand gesture (on top of his now-typical Muslim Brotherhood-inspired four-fingered Rabia) in a rally to signal his alliance with the MHP (Yeni S¸afak 2018).

Conclusions Generations of Sunni Muslim political Islamists in Turkey have made inroads in electoral politics, in part, by casting themselves as the victims of an illiberal and repressive secular state that has continually inhibited their freedom of expression. Although the repressive capacity of the Turkish state should not be underestimated – and that repressiveness was often bolstered by a general snobbery and prejudice within many secularist elites against their ‘backwards’ religious brothers – what often gets lost in this narrative is the fact that political Islam in Turkey developed largely as a statist phenomenon that engaged elements of the ‘secular elite’ in a multitude of ways. Many contemporary observers of Turkish politics thus have inadvertently got things backwards: it is not the rise of Islamist party politics that is reshaping the state; rather, the gradual and ever-closer intertwining of Islamist movements and the state has recently culminated in its ultimate political expression with the AKP. With this in mind, there is an opportunity to re-evaluate the past in a way that renounces the overly simplistic dichotomy of a ‘secular’ Turkish state pitted against its ‘religious’ adversaries. If scholars of political Islam in Turkey want to know why politics are what they are today, we need a more comprehensive appraisal of how various organs of the state and political elite have engaged religious actors, institutions, rhetoric, and attachments over the last century. It will be especially important to turn a careful eye to the changing role of official Islam under the guidance of Diyânet as well as the state’s evolving relationship with informal Islamic institutions and cemaats. The new AKP–MHP coalition represents a potent and popular blend of Islamism and statist-nationalism. With new police raids in July 2018 on the radical Islamist Kuytul Cemaatin (also known as Furkan Vakfı), a cemaat that openly criticised Erdog˘ an and his Islamism prior to the most recent elections, the evidence is growing that the AKP is making a concerted effort to crush all cemaats that challenge its statist authority (Çakır 2018a). Indeed, from these raids and the ongoing crackdown against the Gülenists to the more recent arrest of former financial supporter of Erdog˘ an (Çakır 2018b), televangelist Adnan Oktar, intra-Islamist tensions run high as the AKP’s consolidation of state authority marches on.

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5 THE POLITICS OF TURKISH NATIONALISM Continuity and change Durukan Kuzu

Introduction Nationalist movements respond to constantly altering political and social landscapes. Depending on domestic and international circumstances, nations rely on different resources to express their nationhood. ‘Particular definitions of national identity rise to prominence in particular historical situations where they serve to address specific political problems’ (Zimmer 2003, 182). Turkish nationalism presents no exception to this rule. It is not possible to single out one dominant feature that is capable of characterising which form of nationalism has been salient throughout Turkey’s history. The literature on Turkish nationalism embraces a conception of the Turkish nation that combines both political and ethnic elements as well as progressive and illiberal motivations (Kuzu 2018). As Canefe argued, ‘Turkish nationalism exhibits a highly hybrid character’ (Canefe 2002, 135). Neither ethnic groups nor the state in Turkey should be seen as monolithic and static entities (Tezcür 2009, 5). For this reason, a balanced analysis requires tracing this dynamic process by accounting for the multiple reference sources of Turkish nationalism, such as constitutional citizenship, ethnicity, religion, and secularism, and how they played out in the hands of various actors. This chapter discusses these prominent aspects of Turkish nationalism through different stages, analysing how the utilisation of some of those aspects (such as ethnicity and secularism) has changed since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, while other aspects (such as the use of religion) increasingly continued to influenced policy-making in Turkey.

The rise of Turkish nationalism: 1908–1945 The foundations of Turkish nationalism go back to as early as the 1900s. According to Akçura (1909), the transition of power from the rule of regnal monarchs to sovereign citizens in the West inevitably had consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were already engaged in nationalist movements and had started to claim independence while prominent politicians of the late Ottoman era were debating three political principles that could shape this transition in their homeland.

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The first was the one which sought to create an Ottoman Nation through assimilating and unifying the various nations subject to Ottoman rule. The second sought to unify politically all Muslims living under the governance of the Ottoman State because of the fact that the prerogative of the Caliphate was a part of the power of the Ottoman State (this was what the Europeans called Pan-Islamism). The third sought to organise a policy of Turkish nationalism (Türk Milliyet-i Siyasiyesi) based on ethnicity. (Akçura 1909) Of the three options the first one was ruled out without much consideration. Young Turks (Jön Türkler) – a powerful group of Ottoman army officers, politicians, civil servants, and students who sought to replace the Ottoman monarchy with a constitutional government – appealed to the idea of Turkish nationalism based on ethnicity strongly entwined with Islam. Ziya Gökalp, a Young Turk and also known as the father of Turkish nationalism, often referred to the combined principles of Islamism and Turkism as an alternative to Ottomanism in his writings (Berkes 1954). Young Turks, in fact, did not have any choice other than to embody Turkishness based on a combined ethnicity and Islam and thereby in opposition to Christianity or Judaism as being the primary ‘other’. This was mainly because the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was facilitated by the nationalisms of Christian subjects, the majority of whom had already demarcated themselves as the ‘other’ in the first place. As Canefe stated ‘it is only in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the massive loss of life and land these caused that Turkism began to appear as a viable alternative to the Ottomanist agenda’ (Canefe 2002, 143). But it was only in the early 1920s that modern Turkish nationalism, as we know it, started to emerge. Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, was an initial supporter of the Young Turks’ revolution. He also had a role during the 1908 coup and took part in the suppression of counter-revolutionary rebellions around the Empire. Still, when he realised that the Young Turks were gradually turning the constitutional monarchy into an aggressive oligarchy that, for example, would commit ruthless crimes against the Armenians, he withdrew his support for the Young Turks and focused on his military career. When Atatürk came to power in the 1920s and the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, the emphasis was on founding a constitutional citizenship regime. Although Turkishness was the cornerstone of this citizenship regime, the way in which the Turkish nation was defined by the new regime was different from the Young Turks’ focus on ethnicity. The official number of ethnic groups in Turkey during the early republican era was forty-nine (Andrews and Benninghaus 1989) whereas this number was actually claimed by some scholars to be around a hundred (Soysü 1992). Atatürk in his speeches made it clear that the inhabitants of modern Turkey, whom we call the Turks, and who of course are the Turks in the sense that they compose the modern Turkish nation, are really a people formed over many centuries out of a mixture of races such as pre-Hittites, Hittites, Phrygians, Celts, Jews, Macedonians, Romans, Armenians, Kurds and Mongols … [At some point] Turks from Asia added themselves to the stock. (Heper 2007, 84) It was clearly impossible for a newly founded state to operate with such a high number of languages in play, and the founders of the republic believed it was impractical to try to create a national consciousness and solidarity without establishing a uniform language and equal citizenship (Kuzu 2018; Saatci 2002). All ethnic differences in the country were overlooked 70

The politics of Turkish nationalism

by the ‘state that constitutionally consists only of “citizens of Turkey”’ (Barkey and Fuller 1997, 1). According to Article 66, paragraph 1 of the Constitution: ‘Everyone bound to the Turkish state through the bond of citizenship is a Turk’. The term ‘Turk’ was comprehensively explained in the 1924 Constitution stating; ‘The nation of Turkey with respect of citizenship is called Turk, irrespective of religion or ethnicity’. Although a constructivist-territorial approach was accepted by the 1924 constitution in making the Turkish nation, it can be argued that cultural components such as language and religion heavily determined the Turkish national image and those who were left out of this picture challenged the territorial foundations of Turkish nationalism in its early years. For example, Non-Muslim minorities have been either excluded from the body politic or deported from the country. ‘Christians made up 20 per cent of Turkey’s population; fifteen years later, in 1927, they had dropped to as few as 2.64 per cent’ (Çag˘ aptay 2006, 62). The population exchange between Turkey and Greece is also an important case in which this religious conceptualisation of the nation could be observed. In this exchange, non-Turkish-speaking Muslim groups were accepted into Turkey, while Turkish-speaking non-Muslims who resided in Anatolia for centuries were deported to Greece (Kuzu 2018). Moreover, works on primary immigration to Turkey disclose that non-Turkish-speaking ‘Bosnian Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian and Bulgarian Muslims, who faced extermination or repression in the newly independent Balkan states, fled to Anatolia’ (Çag˘ aptay 2006, 62). During his speech to the Turkish Parliament in 1920, Atatürk said ‘you the members of this dignified assembly, are not only Turks, or Circassians, or Kurds or Lazes, you are the Islamic element made up of all of these’ (Atatürk’s speeches and declarations, I–III, pp. 74– 75, also in Çag˘ aptay 2006, 69). Conclusively in the founding 1924 constitution of Turkey it was declared that ‘Islam is the religion of the state’ and this was not revoked until 1928 (Stirling 1958, 395–408). Although Islam was a big part of the societal culture and politics in Turkey, the ways in which it was used and controlled have radically changed in time. The power, assets, and authority that religious leaders enjoyed under the Ottoman Empire were now almost completely centrally controlled and transferred to the state. The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 was the first step in the de-institutionalization of religious involvement in politics. This was followed by the abolition, on the . same date, of the Office of the S¸eyh-ül Islam and the Ministry of Religious affairs and Pious Foundations (S¸eriye ve Evkaf Vekaleti). These three offices had provided an institutional base for the din-u devlet (Sharia or theocratic state) concept. (Toprak 1981, 46) To replace these institutions, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) was established as an official state institution in 1924. The abolition of the Caliphate did not mean that the new Turkish nationalism was going to eliminate religion from the cultural repertoire of the country. On the contrary, the aim was to keep it under state control in a system that could only be defined as semi-secular (Ulutas¸ 2010). The way in which Islam was reformed and controlled in modern Turkey through Diyanet, however, presented itself as a challenge to many of those citizens who practised Islam in ways that could not be associated with the modern secular Western nation state that Atatürk had imagined at the time. ‘Mohammedan fanaticism was outraged by Mustafa Kemal’s policy of secularisation’ (Heper 2007, 148) and formed a strong opposition to the idea of semi-secularism. 71

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In the 1920s, Turkey was ruled by Atatürk’s semi-secular party, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), and the armed forces acted as a heavy-handed guardian to maintain this regime’s secular authority by supressing any religious rebellions. The Sheikh Said rebellion is the best example to illuminate this. Said was a Kurdish hereditary chieftain of a local Naqshbandi order and strongly opposed to the abolition of the Caliphate and the closure of religious orders (Olson 1989). Indeed, the abolition of the Caliphate and religious orders was especially traumatic for Sunni Kurds because Mustafa Kemal had won their hearts and minds partly through appealing to their religious sentiments during the War of Liberation. Now with the abolition of this institutional bond between the various ethnic Muslim groups in Turkey, the primary tool employed in the nation-building process became nothing but the idea of sharing a territorial boundary within which the language of the state would only be Turkish (Kuzu 2018). Sheikh Said, in his effort to start a revolt, provoked other Kurdish Sheikhs with the following words: Earlier we had a common Caliphate, and this gave to our religious people a deep feeling of being a part of the community that the Turks also belonged to. Since the abolition of the Caliphate, the only thing we are left with is Turkish repression. (Bozarslan 2003, 180) Houston (2001, 99) stresses that ‘on the very day the Republic abolished the Caliphate [3rd March 1924] it also published a decree banning all Kurdish schools, associations and publications’. This was the very start of an assimilation policy that would facilitate the construction of the modern Turkish nation with a strong emphasis on territorial integrity (Kuzu 2018). This ideal was also evident in Atatürk‘s declaration that Neither Islamic union nor Turanism [a political movement that aimed at joining all Turkic peoples under one rule] can be … a logical policy for us to adopt. Henceforth our policy will be that of living independently and enjoying sovereignty within our national frontiers. (Heper 2007, 87) Although challenged and contested, Atatürk’s vision of Turkish nationalism and secularism was embraced by many groups in Turkey. For example, many Alevi Turks, who had previously suffered from decimation in the Sunni Ottoman Empire, and others who were now very much inclined to the Western way of living saw the foundation of a semi-secular regime and its constitutional emphasis on equal citizenship as a protective measure for their rights and freedoms. Therefore, they consistently supported this semi-secular vision of Turkish nationalism. Although Diyanet completely ignored Islamic creeds that did not belong to the Hanafi Sunni sect of Islam, most of those non-conformist groups usually saw a semi-secular Turkish nationalism as preferable to what could have otherwise been a fundamentalist Sunni fanaticism that had terrorised them in the past (Van Bruinessen 1996). Turkish nationalism clearly formed an oxymoronic relationship with religion since its early days. While consistently using religion as a pragmatic means of nation building and mass mobilisation through Diyanet, Turkish nationalism also heavily relied on a secular state centralism, which scraped away the arbitrary/feudal powers of other religious actors. Atatürk’s reforms, including a new Western code of dress and the introduction of Latin script, also helped to relegate the role of religion in society and politics in ways that offended most traditionalists. This oxymoronic approach eventually created a confusing dynamic in which the 72

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religious Sunni groups, who were initially encouraged and mobilised by the state to support the new republic and its principles, were later going to side with other conservative figures against the Republican aspirations for secularism. The political reflection of this societal diversion from the top-down secularism of the CHP manifested itself for the first time with the breakaway of 29 deputies who then established the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası, TCF) in 1924 under the leadership of Kazim Karabekir. The TCF’s social programme was based on ‘liberal’ conservatism, in contrast to the principles of secularism and the forced modernism of CHP, and it resonated with many citizens who insisted on holding on to their religious traditions instead of embracing the new secular reforms (Zürcher 1986). Turkish state nationalism under the one-party rule was also constantly challenged by Kurdish rebellions during the 1930s. Although they had religious motives, behind these rebellions also lay the forced assimilation of the Kurds that contributed to the emergence of some discontent, especially in the eastern parts of Turkey. The already discussed Sheikh Said Rebellion was not only about religion but was also about the ways in which Kurdish ethnicity was treated. Kurdish discontent with assimilationist policies also manifested itself through other such mutinies. Some important examples include the Koçkırı Rebellion, the Dersim Rebellion, and the Ararat rebellion, to name but a few (Yeg˘ en 1996). The Turkish army heavily repressed all Kurdish mutinies and evacuated most Kurdish villages and towns of discontent. The majority of Kurds in Turkey were living in Eastern Anatolia and Turkish nationalism and its assimilationist approach manifested itself in the resettlement laws of 1934, which relocated millions of Kurds to western parts of the country. Kurds were forced to assimilate as the use of their language in public offices was also banned. In the 1930s and 1940s, Kurds were represented as being of Turkish descent. ‘On the historiographical level this has been expressed by the Turkish Historical Thesis and the Sun Language Theory, according to which the Turkish language is the source for all existing languages in the world’ (Hirschler 2001, 145–166). According to this theory, the word ‘Kurd’ was a name given to the one of the 24 grandsons of Og˘ uz Khan, the mythological founder of the Turks, and so the Kurds could indeed be accounted for as Turks (Kuzu 2018). Overall, this early period in the history of Turkish Republic exhibited the first signs of an identity crisis for the many people of modern Turkey coming from different cultures who once lived side by side in the Ottoman Empire. Turkish nationalism in the early years of the Republic was clearly a constructivist attempt, an idealist plan of social engineering aimed at creating one people out of many, one prototype of Turkish citizens who would first and foremost be loyal to their own state. This nationalist attempt, however, created what Hutchinson (2005) would call a zone of conflict; a conflict over ownership of the state, a power struggle between the religious and secular, between the elites and commoners, between the Kurds and Turks, between Alevis and Sunnis that would haunt Turkey for the duration of its entire existence. The policies of assimilation and secularism introduced by the state to resolve Turkey’s existential conflicts succeeded in some respects and failed drastically in others making some of the issues mentioned in this part more prominent than others in defining the later stages of Turkish nationalism.

From state-nation to nation-state: Islam and Turkish nationalism (1950–2000) The policies of forced assimilation, the Turkification of Islamic elements such as the Kurds and the increased marginalisation of non-Muslims in this process did not change much until the late 1990s. However, other aspects of the top-down Turkish state nationalism altered slightly following World 73

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War II. This transformation included the gradual empowerment of conservative groups in politics, the normalisation of Islam in the society, and the relaxation of strict secularism that was introduced in the early years of the Republic. This meant that the constructivist approach used in shaping the Turkish nationalism along the lines of secularism started to lose ground in its battle with the more culturally and religiously oriented movements rising from the bottom up. The first sign of this transformation was the transition to a multi-party democracy in 1945 when the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) was established. This was a result of developments in both domestic and foreign politics of the time. By the end of World War II, the international system was polarised between two hegemonic blocs: on one side the United. States. and, on the other, the Soviet Union; Turkey had to make a choice between the two. Ismet Inönü, who became the second president of Turkey after Atatürk’s death in 1938, was an adamant Westerner who was also desperate for the economic aid offered by the West as his country was suffering from economic stagnation. Although not explicitly required, to become eligible for the Western economic aid, such as that on offer through the Marshall Plan, Turkey practically had to embrace multi-party democracy and liberalism in both the political and economic senses of the term (Karpat 2015). It was no surprise that the DP was soon widely supported both nationally and internationally. Many Turkish citizens supported the DP because they felt that the abrupt reforms of militant secularism in the earlier years of the Republic were too much of a disruption to their traditional and mostly religious ways of living. The DP naturally capitalised on this frustration and followed a populist approach to politics. Under the DP rule during the 1950s, religious education was made compulsory in secondary schools. In 1951 the DP government set up special secondary . schools (Imam Hatip schools) for the training of imams and preachers (Mardin 1973). The DP government also gained support in the West as their religious motives were compatible with the international camp of western liberalism against communism by which the Soviet Union had banned all references to religion in public or politics. A moderate Islam was much preferable to communism in the Cold War (Kalaycıog˘ lu 1999). While the promotion of Islam in Turkey was seen as a positive step by the West as part of their fight against communism, it in fact unleashed an aggressive Turkish nationalist movement. It was this Turkish nationalist movement that was responsible for the tragedy of 6–7 September Istanbul Pogrom in 1955 when non-Muslims were brutally attacked and hundreds of them were killed while the Western world remained completely oblivious to all of this in the context of the Cold War (Coufoudakis 2012). Although the DP was popular and won three elections in a row, the second and third DP governments’ supporters developed an increasingly intolerant and aggressive approach against its secular opponents as well as the non-Muslims. DP rule was eventually brought to an end by the Turkish military in 1960 with a coup. However, in the 1970s Islam made a comeback in politics because right-wing party leaders continued to use religion as a potential bulwark in their ideological battle with the left and secular leaders. This battle came to a radical point during a protest (Kudüs Mitingi) on 6 September 1980 where the supporters of the National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP) – a conservative Islamist party of Necmettin Erbakan – were calling for Sharia (Alam 2009). Not long after this gathering, another military coup on 12 September 1980 dissolved the civil government for the second time in the short history of the Turkish Republic.1 1

Between the 1960 and the 1980 coups ‘A group of military officers under the leadership of retired General. Cemal Madanog˘ lu also planned a leftist coup on 9 March 1971. The military was alarmed on the night of 8 March, but nothing actually happened as a result. As opposed to the 1960 and 1980 coups, the constitution was not suspended and Parliament and political parties continued to exist’ (Ekinci 2016).

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Turkish nationalism has been a zone of constant battle between the secularist military and the religious segments of the population. Every time the latter gained power in shaping the Turkish nation, the former intervened to reverse the process. The problem with this picture is that although the military was seen as a guardian of state secularism in Turkey, the Turkish state itself has actually never been secular in the real sense of the term. Following the 1980 coup, the military, although secular in principle, employed religion as an active means to counter socialist and communist ideas and thus legalised the establishment of many more . religious Imam Hatip high schools. As a result, Sunni Islam has gradually taken over Turkish nationalism within society. The level of Sunni fanaticism, normalised by the state’s policies, was alarming, so much so that when a group of Alevi intellectuals and secular writers were brutally murdered by a Sunni Islamist and nationalist mob in the city of Sivas in July 1993, the police’s attempts to save the victims were too little, too late and those who were responsible for the death of 35 people have never been punished. The overtly religious emphasis within Turkish nationalism to some extent helped the state to appease ethnic unrest. It was through the religious nature of Turkish nationalism that most Muslim Kurds integrated into society and could develop an amicable relationship with the state. ‘After 1950, within a year, 250,000 Quran and thousands of religious books, many of which aimed to lessen Kurdish nationalism, were sold in the region’ (Alis¸ 2009, 55). While the DP was concerned with undermining Kurdish nationalism, its policies simultaneously sought to bring about incorporation and inclusion and it achieved some successes in these regards. Like many other Kurdish figures from the eastern regions, Abdülmelik Fırat, who was Sheikh Said’s grandson, became a member of parliament between 1950 and 1960 (Akar 1996). However, it was a different story for those Kurdish nationalists whose ideology was akin to Marxism and the communist ideology for which they were continuously targeted by the state in the 1980s. Turkish nationalism gave birth to its nemesis – Kurdish nationalism – by marginalising many Kurds for their leftist political views in the following years. In the military coup of 1980, the army declared a state of emergency and suspended the civil government for two years. According to official statistics, police forces arrested 175,000 political activists and civilians in this period (Karasapan 1989). Most of the detainees were Marxists and leftists. The top-down political Turkish nationalism that the secularist elites envisaged in the earlier years of the Republic were constantly challenged and redefined by the masses from the bottom up in this period. This evidently led to an increasing prominence of cultural elements such as Islam in Turkish nationalism.

Political Islam and the ethnicisation of Turkish nationalism in the 2000s A vicious circle of the conservative and/or religious parties winning general elections in Turkey and ruling for a limited time before they were dissolved by a military coup repeated itself. After the MSP, known for its Islamic agenda, was closed down following the 1980 coup, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) of Necmettin Erbakan that succeeded the MSP was also banned by the 1997 post-modern coup, on the grounds that it politicised Islam and abused its position to downplay the principle of secularism written in the constitution. The religious majority strongly felt victimised every time the military intervened in politics. In the midst of this wider political chaos, in 2001, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve 75

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Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) was founded. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, came from an Islamic background but promised a new economic programme and a liberal future, and also to embrace all ethnicities and ideological factions in the country. Erdog˘ an proved to be hugely popular and, just like Adnan Menderes, his party enjoyed massive support in reaction to a stagnant economy and militant secularism. For the first time, Turkish nationalism was also liberated from its policies of forced assimilation and the negligence of ethnic diversity in the country. Erdog˘ an used a moderately religious rhetoric in his outreach to Kurds, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslim. Although various attempts to recognise the Kurdish question had been previously introduced during Turgut Özal’s Presidency in the 1990s, it was when Erdogan explicitly introduced a series of reforms through a ‘democratic opening’ that the Kurdish identity was for the first time interpreted as a cultural matter, not a security threat. The ‘liberals’ in Turkey as well as the supranational organisations such as the EU interpreted this approach as a progressive step in the history of Turkish nationalism. Having been able to create economic growth and introduce positive developments with regard to the accommodation of Kurds in the country, Erdog˘ an won the majority’s support in a historical referendum on 12 September 2010 to make it easier for his government to judge the military officers and therefore pre-emptively stop a potential coup in the future. The referendum also granted the parliament power to choose some members of the constitutional court. Soon after this referendum, the AKP morphed into a highly authoritarian and intolerant regime (Özbudun 2014; see also Turan, Chapter 2 in this volume). When the party was first founded, its leader Erdog˘ an had vowed to empower civil democracy as opposed to the militarised and centralised state institutions. However, having gained control of those historically suppressive and intrusive state institutions, such as the military and the judiciary, the AKP has begun to abuse its position of power to politicise religion as an indispensable part of Turkish nationalism and societal order. This was in striking contrast to those liberal promises that helped the AKP to win elections and constitutional referendums. The AKP’s Islamic and sectarian discourse both in domestic and foreign policy has become clearer as of 2011. For example, the top-down Sunni Islamisation of the Turkish nation was documented in 2017 by a study on the continuous disenfranchisement of the Alevi minority. Alevis still evidently ‘face formal and informal discrimination on a daily basis’ (Karakaya-Stump 2018) despite the so-called ‘Alevi opening’ that was supposedly aimed at improving religious freedoms in the country ten years ago (Lord 2017). The AKP’s explicitly sectarian discourse was also evident in their foreign policy when they came to support Sunni opposition movements against the predominantly Shia regime in Syria. This manifests itself in the AKP’s open door policy for the more than four million Syrians, who are predominantly Sunnis, wanting to settle in Turkey. The AKP’s sectarian foreign policy in the Syrian war has had its domestic implications for the Turkish nation and nationalism as well. It is argued that the resettlement of 25,000 Sunni Syrian refugees into a group of (non-Sunni) Alevi villages in the Turkish province of Kahramanmaras¸, for example, was also a tactile project of the AKP government to further ‘Sunnify’ the national demography of Turkey (Hintz and Feehan 2017). Although the AKP governments succeeded in strengthening the Islamic Sunni elements of Turkish nationalism to some extent, their religious agenda was also problematic. For example, Erdog˘ an’s increasing emphasis on Islam to reach out to the Kurds partially backfired. Although the majority of Kurds are conservative and Muslim, the Kurdish nationalists, including the guerrilla organisation the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) and the pro-Kurdish political parties, have resisted the political Islamist agenda of successive AKP governments. The continuation of ethnic terror and the increase in the number 76

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of casualties despite reforms provoked nationalistic sentiments among the majority community. ‘A poll showed 51 per cent of the population opposed to the Democratic Opening and … the AKP’s popularity plunged 7.1 per centage points between August and November 2009’ (Aydog˘ an 2011, 9). Many Turks, who long accepted Atatürk’s definition of a Turkish nationalism based on citizenship and territoriality, blamed Erdogan alongside Kurdish nationalists for creating false categories and fuelling warfare between ethnic groups. Having lost the support of nationalist Turks, the AKP drastically changed its policies towards the Kurdish question. The pro-Kurdish political party, the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP), was closed down, and its hawkish leaders were barred from politics for ten years. The politics of identity that the AKP government introduced unleashed the essentialisation of ethnic groups in Turkey as a result of which the Kurds have now become even more marginalised than before (Kuzu 2016). The ultra-nationalist political party, the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP), is now also working alongside with the AKP in all the important decisionmaking processes preparing Turkey for an ultra-Islamist and nationalist future.

Conclusion Turkish nationalism has always had its foundations built on Islam, ethnicity, and constitutionalism since the first days of the Republic of Turkey. Those constitutive elements of the Turkish nation, and their significance in politics have varied over time, depending on who was in power and which one of those elements served their interests. The tension between secular groups and the conservative Sunni population has always posed itself as a struggle between two ever-growing blocs of Turkish politics. The two blocs have ever since then disagreed with each other over what it means to be Turkish; whether Turkey should turn its face to the West or the East, whether religion should have a pivotal place in shaping the national policies or it should be controlled under the state authority so that it never replaces the constitutional principles of a democratic regime such as the separation of powers. Every time the former was suspected of working against those constitutional foundations that Atatürk introduced, the Turkish Army in the name of protecting the republican regime restored a militant narrative of secularism. This interventionist military narrative victimised and radicalised those who were repressed in the process. When the AKP was founded, the party not only signified a rejection of the militant national narrative, but also correspondingly purported to have departed from the exclusively Islamicconservative narrative. Today, the AKP is re-adopting the latter narrative, while also embracing the former one in order to sustain its power. The constitutionalist approach that once defined the boundaries of Turkish nationalism in the early days of Republic no longer plays a decisive role in the new Turkey where the executive president appoints judges and holds vast powers with no meaningful check and balance mechanisms. Turkishness, once described in the constitution as a category of citizenship and territorial belonging, is no longer reflecting the social reality and politics of Turkey either. Ethnic identities have emerged to play a more important role than ever during the 2000s and a persistent Kurdish ethno-nationalism has inevitably pushed the Turks to redefine their nationality in ethnic terms too. Overall, on the institutional level, while religion has steadily risen to become the backbone of Turkish nationalism, secularist aspirations have slowly faded away. Left-leaning political parties like the CHP, for example, have not become a majority government on their own since 1950 and the military has no power left to them to influence politics anymore; constitutionalism has almost vanished as of 2017 as the president has exceptional authority over the judiciary and the parliament. Ethnicity is on its way to becoming a defining feature of Turkish politics in the near future alongside Islam. 77

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As much as the historical dynamics and people’s values, ethnicity, religion, and traditions impact on politics from the bottom-up, the top-down state policies and institutions, such as education and the judiciary, also shape social change and define who the people are as a nation in the first place. This chapter explained how groups with competing visions of the Turkish nation have governed Turkey at different times, giving rise to the competing segments of the population who held conflicting values. Although conservative governments have consistently governed Turkey for almost 70 years, there is a significant group still holding on to the values of progressive secularism, liberalism, and constitutionalism projecting a different Turkish nation. It is, however, a different question whether their projection will ever endure or if it will be exiled to their imagination for one more century.

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The politics of Turkish nationalism Kuzu, Durukan. 2016. ‘The Politics of Identity, Recognition and Multiculturalism: The Kurds in Turkey.’ Nations and Nationalism 22(1): 123–142. Kuzu, Durukan. 2018. Multiculturalism in Turkey: The Kurds and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lord, Ceren. 2017. ‘Rethinking the Justice and Development Party’s “Alevi Openings”.’ Turkish Studies 18(2): 278–296. Mardin, S¸erif. 1973. ‘Center-periphery relations: A key to Turkish politics?’ Daedalus 1: 169–190. Olson, Robert. 1989. The Sheikh Said Rebellion and the Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism: 1880–1925. Austin: University of Texas Press. Özbudun, Ergun. 2014. ‘AKP at the crossroads: Erdog˘ an’s Majoritarian Drift.’ South European Society and Politics 19(2): 155–167. Saatci, Mustafa. 2002. ‘Nation-States and Ethnic Boundaries: Modern Turkish Identity and Turkish Kurdish Conflict.’ Nations and Nationalism 8(4): 549–564.. Soysü, Hâle. 1992. Kavimler Kapısı [The Gate of Ethnicities]. Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları. Stirling, Paul. 1958. ‘Religious Change in Republican Turkey.’ The Middle East Journal 2(4): 395–408. Tezcür, Günes¸ Murat. 2009. ‘Kurdish Nationalism and Identity in Turkey: A Conceptual Reinterpretation.’ European Journal of Turkish Studies 10: 1–18. Toprak, Binnaz. 1981. Islam and Political Development in Turkey. Leiden: Brill. Ulutas¸, Ufuk. 2010. ‘Religion and Secularism in Turkey: The Dilemma of the Directorate of Religious Affairs.’ Middle Eastern Studies 46(3): 389–399. Van Bruinessen, Martin. 1996. ‘Kurds, Turks and the Alevi Revival in Turkey.’ Middle East Report 200: 7– 10. Yeg˘ en, Mesut. 1996. ‘The Turkish State Discourse and the Exclusion of Kurdish Identity.’ Middle Eastern Studies 32(2): 216–229. Zimmer, Oliver. 2003. ‘Boundary Mechanisms and Symbolic Resources: Towards a Process Oriented Approach to National Identity.’ Nations and Nationalism 9(2): 173–193. Zürcher, Erik Jan. 1986. ‘Young Turk Memoirs as a Historical Source: Kazim Karabekir’s Istiklal Harbimiz.’ Middle Eastern Studies 22(4): 562–570.

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PART II

Politics and institutions

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6 ELECTIONS, PARTIES, AND THE PARTY SYSTEM Ersin Kalaycıog˘lu

Introduction Turkey belongs to a club of post-imperial states established by a nationalist war of liberation (1919–1922) from the occupation of the vanquished Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers of World War I. The Ottoman political system had a patrimonial structure which operated with a centre–periphery divide. This was a cultural divide pitting those who belonged to the gentile culture and lifestyle of the seat of power (Dersaadet), the centre, versus the heterogeneous mosaic of confessional, sectarian, and ethnic communities of the periphery (Mardin 1975, 7–19). The Republican Turkish political system, clearly embodying the legacy of the Ottomans in structure and culture, was deeply influenced by two major transformations that produced the current political forces, parties and organisations and governance. In chronological order, the first of these transformations was secularisation and political modernisation, especially of the military officialdom (Berkes 1964). Modernisation started in the eighteenth century to create a contemporary fighting force to cope with the challenges of European armies. The efforts of the Ottoman Sultans to modernise the military met with severe resistance from the traditional-minded political and religious elites of the Ottoman Empire. Those who wholeheartedly supported the progress through secular, scientific instruction of military science of the time came to be pitted against those who vehemently resisted untried and unorthodox ideas of learning in the military colleges of science and medicine. This led to the emergence of two contrasting, clashing, and irreconcilable Images of Good Society (IGS) in the Ottoman Empire. One was the IGS that upheld science and rational-secular thinking versus the other based on tradition and religious orthodoxy (Sunni Islam). This was more of a cultural cleavage that first divided the elites of the Ottoman society, but with the rise of mass society and politics after the Tanzimat Reforms of 1839–1876, it engulfed the whole body politic from the late nineteenth century onwards. The second transformative force that deeply influenced Ottoman politics was the challenge of nationalism. It also started to make an impact on the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. First it was the sons of Christian families, who attended schools of Europe in the early nineteenth century, who were exposed to nationalist ideas. Eventually an intellectual nationalism in the Balkan provinces of the Empire was created. With the advent of mass politics, Balkan nationalisms constituted an existential challenge for the multi-national and multiconfessional Ottoman state (Kushner 1977; Kalaycıog˘ lu 2005, 29–32). The innovative idea of 83

Elections, parties, and the party system

promoting ethno-linguistic identity as the sole basis of organising a community into a nation to be governed by its own state, the millet (Lewis 1993, 327–328; Mardin 1971, 1975) of the Ottoman Empire, was too radical to be tolerated. One outcome of this process was for the Turkish communities in that political geography to receive their political socialisation in ethnic nationalism the hard way, through wars, civil wars, and ethnic cleansing (Shaw and Shaw 1977, 108, 137; Karpat 1985, 72–74). Simultaneously, some Turkish-Sunni Muslim youth began to travel to various colleges of Europe at the same time and they were also exposed to similar socialisation into nationalist ideas (Kushner 1977, 9–11). Finally, it was the pogroms of Tsarist Russia that evicted Turkic nationalists from its own territory to the Ottoman lands, which paved the way for an intellectual Turkish racialethnic nationalism in the late nineteenth century to sprout (Turan 1969, 29–30). The former patrimonial, medieval, centralised, imperial political system was eventually replaced in the twentieth century by a centralised bureaucracy of a nation-state, with a contemporary multi-party system with a façade of democratic rule of law but traditional, fealty- and loyalty-based centralised neo-patrimonial rule. It was relatively easy to implant whole new structures as royal and national assemblies, public bureaus, and bureaucracies, secular courts, voluntary associations, political parties, and the like. However, the values, beliefs, attitudes, and the styles of conducting political business showed remarkable recalcitrance to modification.

Socio-cultural cleavages, elections, and the birth of political parties (1908–1950) The first Ottoman Constitution (1876) provided the opportunity to establish a royal assembly with two chambers, yet nothing that resembled genuine free and fair elections took place until the Second Constitutional period (1908–1918).1 Even then only one such election could take place. and by 1913 a coup established the hegemonic one-party rule of the Party of Union and Progress (Ittihat . ve Terakki Fırkası, ITF) (Kayalı 1995, 273). In that environment two political parties emerged, one . on the side of the secularised elites of the centre, the ITF, and on the other a party representing a peculiar combination of the.Islamist and liberal political platform of the elites and the periphery, the . Entente Liberal (Hürriyet ve Itilaf Fırkası, HIF).2 The same party system structure re-emerged with the establishment of Turkish Republic in 1923. The new centre was now occupied and represented by the Turkish nationalists who won the War of Liberation against not only the occupation forces but also the Sultan and his government. Their leader Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, quickly established the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) in 1923. The CHP represented the Turkish nationalist ideals, republicanism, popular will, and also the tenets of the Cultural Revolution carried out in the 1920s and the 1930s (revolutionism), secularism, and in the 1930s the state- managed economic growth (étatism). The CHP was also the party of the state and promoted centralism in governance, which it had inherited from the Ottomans. The opposition that emerged looked like the continuation of the Entente. First in 1924–1925 there was the Progressivist Republican 1

2

The first political organisations that seek public support and come to power in the name of the public to rule emerged in the Second Constitutional period (1908–1918), yet none managed to survive beyond the Ottoman Empire, that is, after 1922. Osmanlı Ahrar Fırkası (Ottoman Liberal Party) was probably the first political organisation . that emerged as a political party to contest the power of Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, ITC) in 1908 during the pre-Republican era in Turkish politics. Many other political parties sprouted in 1909 (see Tunaya 1952; Zürcher 2004, 95, 101; Kayalı 1995, 266). This has been interpreted as a single centre–periphery cleavage creating the basis of party politics at the beginning of the twentieth century of Ottoman and later Turkish politics (see Mardin 1975, 7–19).

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Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası, TCF), which was banned after the assassination attempt on the life of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Izmir in 1926 as it was considered to be involved in the conspiracy. Then came the introduction of the Liberal Party (Serbest Fırka, SF) in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression. That also helped the resurfacing of the same sentiments of the periphery as represented by the former Entente and the TCF. The two-party structure continued to rest upon the centre–periphery cleavage, with its underlying secular-modern versus traditional-religious and nationalist and Islamist divides. The damage of the war economy and changing international politics of the regions and the world in general prompted the need for a zeal to participate in the club of democracies among the CHP elite who ruled the country in 1945 (Karaömerliog˘ lu 2006, Yılmaz 1997). Thus, Turkish politics incorporated multi-party elections. New political parties emerged by 1945 and among them the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP), which was formed by some prominent former members of the CHP, became the most successful. Turkey had a single chamber Turkish Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, TBMM), and a winner-takes-all majoritarian election law when the country went for multi-party elections in 1946. The DP was not able to organise enough to field candidates in every electoral district. Nevertheless, the elections were rigged and the opposition declared them as illegitimate. When the DP began to show strong signs of boycotting the 1950 elections, the CHP leadership approached the DP leaders and negotiated guarantees for free and fair elections. The negotiations resulted in the judiciary functioning as an honest arbiter in the elections and a Supreme Election Council (Yüksek Seçim Kurulu, YSK) was established to organise and oversee that elections were held according to the laws.3 The first three elections after this modification were carried out under the majoritarian election law and resulted in huge majorities for the party winning the most votes in the TBMM (see Table 6.1). The relations between the government and the opposition became increasingly imbalanced even when the two parties differed at the polls only by small percentages of the national vote (see Tables 6.1, 6.2, and 6.4)4 (Özbudun 2013, 66–68). However, with democratisation and with elections managed fairly by the judiciary, politics began to change. First of all, the party of the centre, the CHP, began to be relegated to a position of opposition in the 1950s. Contrariwise, the DP was able to carry the various sectarian, ethnic and marginal communities to power, and capture strongholds of the centre.5 The good weather conditions and mechanisation of agriculture through Marshall Aid improved crop yields and enriched the position of farmers and peasants, which followed dire economic conditions under CHP rule during the Great Depression and World War II. Such an economic turnaround created a huge political boon for the DP at the polls. Secondly, even though by the 1940s the Nation Party (Millet Partisi, MP) with ultranationalist and conservative programme had emerged, it had failed to capture more 3

4

5

This principle held from 1950 until the referendum of 16 April 2017, when the opposition again began to question the legitimacy of the elections (referendum) and the decisions of the YSK as being biased, for it seemed to have ignored the law and in the eyes of the opposition failed to act as an honest arbiter. The CHP elite seemed to have assumed that they would be in charge and they wanted to have a safe margin of majority in the TBMM to rule comfortably. They came to regret their earlier recalcitrance in the 1940s when the DP obtained huge majorities in the TBMM in the 1950s; ironically the CHP started to call for a change in the election law to introduce proportional representation (PR) instead throughout the 1950s. It was in the aftermath of the 1960 coup and with the new 1961 Constitution and election law that such a change occurred; though it helped little to improve the performance of the CHP at the polls. Tachau (1984, 148–149) and Sunar (1990) discuss thoroughly how the populist patronage network the DP had established and ran was able to create alliances of rural and urban interests in different parts of the country.

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Elections, parties, and the party system

Table 6.1 National election results, majoritarian elections, 1946–1957

Year

Shares (%)

Political partiesa CHP

CMP

DP

HP

MP

Indep.b

1946

Votes Seats

? 85.4

– –

? 12.7

– –

– –

? 1.2

1950

Votes Seats

39.4 14.2

– –

52.7 85.2

– –

3.1 0.2

4.8 0.4

1954

Votes Seats

35.4 5.7

4.9 0.9

57.6 92.8

– –

– –

1.5 0.6

1957

Votes Seats

41.1 29.2

7.1 0.6

47.9 69.6

3.8 0.6

– –

0.1 0.1

Notes for Tables 6.1–6.3: ‘Votes’ refer to the percentage of the national vote obtained in the elections. ‘Seats’ refer to the percentage of the National Assembly seats received. ‘–’ refers to the non-existence of the corresponding party at the time of the elections. ‘?’ indicates missing values. There are no records of how many votes or what percentage of the national vote any of the political parties that participated in the race obtained in the 1946 national elections. a Only those political parties which have coalition or blackmail potential (Sartori 1976: 122 – 125) are included. b Column consists of the vote share of the nonparty or independent candidates. c The MÇP participated in the elections in alliance with the RP, and under the RP banner. d Kurdish nationalists participated in elections as independents but formed their parliamentary party group as soon as enough of them were elected. e Two legislative elections took place in 2015. The first occurred on 7 June 2015 (J) and the second on 1 November 2015 (N). Sources for Tables 6.1–6.3: Tuncer (2002) and Official Gazette (Resmi Gazete). 10 November 2002, no. 24932: 39. Official Gazette (Resmi Gazete), 4 July 2018, no. 30468. Repeated Issue (Mükerrer Sayı): Decision no. 953.

than a sliver of the national vote. However, it provided the early signs of fragmentation of Turkish nationalists between civic versus ethnic nationalists. Once the majoritarian electoral competition at the polls ceased to exist with the toppling of the DP by a military coup in 1960, the new Constitution of 1961 provided for a more liberal environment. This was married with d’Hondt’s proportional representation (PR) formula, which created more representative outcomes in national elections, and voters found the opportunity to vote for their niche parties without wasting votes (see Table 6.3). Consequently, the ideological .spectrum of .the party system broadened. The socialist Turkish Workers Party (Türkiye I¸sçi Partisi, TIP) was able to gain representation in the TBMM by the mid-1960s, which dramatically changed the substance of the political agenda in Turkey. Turkish foreign relations with the United States and NATO began to be scrutinised for the first time. Soon after the Islamist National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP) was formed by the early 1970s.6 The MP had changed its name to the Republicanist Peasant National Party (Cumhuriyetçi Köylü Milet Partisi, CKMP) by the 6

The Islamist parties began to be formed by the late 1960s and the first was the National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi, MNP), which was established in 1970, but it was banned by the Constitutional Court (Anayasa Mahkemesi, AYM) on the grounds that it was violating the secular principles of the Republic. It was banned by the AYM decision in May 1971 two months after the military coup by memorandum of 12 March 1971. By that time the major Islamist politicians fled the country to Europe. However, when Turkey again veered toward multi-party elections the National Salvation Party was formed to fill the vacuum of the MNP.

86

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

1983

1987

1991

1995

1999

2002

2007

2011

19.4 32.4

20.9 20.4

26.0 24.5

– –

– –

8.7 0.0

10.7 8.9

20.8 19.5

24.8 22.0

30.5 29.2

CHP

5.1 0.0

13.2 15.6

19.6 24.0

24.0 25.6

36.3 64.9

45.1 53.0

ANAP

10.8 1.6 14.6 13.8 22.2 24.7 1.2 0.0

– – – – – – – –

– – 0.3 0.0

– –

8.5 0.0

– –

– –

– –

– –

23.3 17.8

0.7 0.0

5.4 0.0

9.5 0.0

12.0 15.5

19.2 24.6

27.0 39.5

19.1 13.1

DYP

DSP

MDP

1.3 0.0

2.3 0.0

2.5 0.0

15.4 20.2

21.4 28.7

16.9 13.8

7.2 0.0

– –

SP

FP

SHP

DP

RP

HP

Table 6.2 National election results, majoritarian elections, 1983–2018

13.0 9.6

14.3 12.7

8.4 0.0

18.0 23.4

8.2 0.0

*** ***

2.9 0.0

– –

MHP

MÇP

c

– –

– –

– –

– –

– –

– –

– –

– –

. Iyi

49.8 59.3

46.6 62.0

34.3 66.0

– –

– –

– –

– –

– –

AKP

6.6 6.5

5.2 4.0

6.2 0.0

4.7 0.0

4.2 0.0

– –

– –

– –

DEHAP

HADEP

HDP

– –

0.0 0.0

7.3 0.0

– –

– –

– –

– –

– –

GP

(Continued)

–d –

–d –

1.0 1.6

0.9 0.6

0.5 0.0

0.1 0.0

0.4 0.0

1.1 0.0

Indep.b

Votes Seats

2018

25.0 24.0

25.3 24.4

22.7 24.3

– –

– –

HP

– –

For source and notes see Table 6.1.

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

2015(N)e

2015(J)

e

Table 6.2 (Cont.)

– –

– –

– –

– –

0.1 0.0

0.2 0.0

0.0 0.0

0.0 0.0

0.1 0.0

1.3 0.0

0.7 0.0

2.1 0.0

RP

11.1 8.2

11.9 7.3

16.3 14.5

9.96 7.2

– –

– –

42.6 49.2

49.5 57.6

40.9 46.9

11.7 11.2

10.8 10.7

13.1 14.5

HDP

– –

– –

– –

0.2 0.0

0.1 0.0

1.1 0.0

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

Votes Seats

1961

1965

1969

1973

1977

36.9 42.0

29.8 33.1

46.5 56.9

52.9 53.3

34.8 35.1

AP

41.4 47.3

33.3 41.1

27.4 31.8

28.7 29.8

36.7 38.5

CHP

Political partiesa

For source and notes see Table 6.1.

Share (%)

Year

6.3 6.9

– – – – 11.9 10.0 1.9 0.2

2.2 2.5 – – – – – –

– –

0.6 0.0

3.2 1.3

– –

– –

14.0 12.0

MP

DemP

CKMP

Table 6.3 National election results, PR elections, 1961–1977

1.9 0.7

5.3 2.9

6.6 3.3

– –

– –

CGP

GP

6.4 3.6

3.4 0.7

3.0 0.0

– –

– –

MHP

8.6 5.3

11.8 10.7

– –

– –

– –

MSP

0.1 0.0

– –

2.7 0.5

3.0 3.3

– –

. TIP

0.4 0.0

1.1 0.2

2.8 1.8

– –

– –

TBP

– –

– –

2.2 1.3

3.7 4.2

13.7 14.4

YTP

2.5 0.9

2.8 1.3

5.6 2.9

3.2 0.0

0.8 0.0

Indep.b

Elections, parties, and the party system Table 6.4 Voter volatility and fragmentation in Turkish politics (1961–2015)

Elections

Volatility

Fragmentation of votes

Fragmentation of seats

Effective number of parties

1950 1954 1957 1961 1965 1969 1973 1977 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2002 2007 2011 2015(J)a 2015(N)a 2018

– 10.7 17.6 – 24.5 11.4 28.4 18.3 – – 16.6 23.0 22.6 43.9 17.3 9.0 17.2 10.8 10.9

0.56 0.54 0.60 0.71 0.63 0.70 0.77 0.68 0.66 0.75 0.79 0.83 0.86 0.81 0.72 0.66 0.75 0.73 0.73

0.25 0.14 0.43 0.70 0.63 0.59 0.70 0.60 0.61 0.51 0.71 0.77 0.79 0.46 0.56 0.57 0.68 0.59 0.67

2.2 2.2 2.5 3.3 2.6 2.3 3.3 2.5 2.5 2.0 3.5 4.3 4.9 1.2 1.4 1.5 3.7b 2.9b 3.7b

Notes: a Two legislative elections took place in 2015. The first occurred on 7 June 2015 (J) and the second on 1 November 2015 (N). b Calculated by the author on the basis the vote shares of those political parties that scored more than 10 percent of the national threshold and thus obtained parliamentary seats on the basis of Laakso and Taagepera’s formula of effective number of political parties (Laakso and Taagepera 1979). Source: Özbudun (2013).

1960s and was eventually closed down by its own party convention and became the ultra-Turkish nationalist, and anti-Communist, Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP). From 1961 to 1965 a struggle among the right-of-centre parties occurred to occupy the strategic position vacated by the closure of the DP by the military junta of 1960. Two major contenders for the DP legacy were the newly established Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP) and the New Turkey Party (Yeni Türkiye Partisi, YTP).7 Eventually the AP emerged as the political party championing the interests of the Periphery in their plurality, from Sunni Islamism to ethnic Turkish nationalism, and from the rural/agricultural to emerging industrial interests of the periphery for another eight years (1965–1973). However, it was a 7

The AP was established under the leadership of a four-star general Ragıp Gümüs¸pala. Gümüs¸pala passed away in 1964 and a new, young leader, from very humble rural background but accomplished a lot in life as a civil engineer Mr. Süleyman Demirel won the support of the AP delegates at the party convention and became the leader of the AP that same year. The YTP was established by Ekrem Alican, a former member of the DP group in the TBMM from the East with immaculate conservative credentials but still represented a minority group background. The choice between the two leaders and their parties resulted in the majority supporting Demirel’s AP over Alican’s YTP as the new party of the periphery.

90

Elections, parties, and the party system Table 6.5 Turkish election laws and type of government

Elections

Election law

Type of government

1950 1954 1957 1961

Multi-member constituency, majority (plurality) Multi-member constituency, majority (plurality) Multi-member constituency, majority (plurality) Multi-member constituency, proportional representation (PR) (Largest average, d’Hondt with district level quota) Multi-member constituency (PR) (Largest average, d’Hondt with national remainder) Multi-member constituency (PR) (Largest average, classical d'Hondt) Multi-member constituency (PR) (Largest average, classical d'Hondt) Multi-member constituency (PR) (Largest average, classical d'Hondt) Multi-member constituency, plurality (PR with national quota largest average d'Hondt) Multi-member constituency, plurality (PR with national and district quota, largest average, d’Hondt) Multi-member constituency, plurality (PR with national and district quota, largest average (d’Hondt) with preferential vote) Multi-member constituency, plurality (PR with national quota, largest average, d’Hondt) Same as in 1995 Same as in 1995 Same as in 1995 Same as in 1995 Both same as in 1995 Multi-member constituency, plurality with party alliances (PR with national quota, largest average d’Hondt applied to both parties and party alliances)

Party Party Party Coalition

1965

1969 1973 1977 1983 1987

1991

1995

1999 2002 2007 2011 2015 (June/November) 2018 Presidential

Party

Party Coalition Coalition and minority Party Party

Coalition

Coalition and minority Coalition Party Party Party Party Party

Source: Author.

daunting task to manage the disparate rural/agricultural and urban/industrial interests under one roof with a PR electoral system. Indeed, the AP started to lose blood as and when a group of conservative politicians representing the emerging Anatolian economic interests split ranks with the AP to form their own Democratic Party (Demokratik Parti, DemP) in 1970. It was then that the CHP ushered a new ideological perspective by purporting to propound democratic left values. Although it was not clear what left and right stood for at first, eventually the left–right split seems to have become an ideological anchor for at least 85

91

Elections, parties, and the party system Table 6.6 Political parties with coalition or blackmail potential (1908–2017)

Period 1908–1918

Left . ITF

Centre

1923–1945 1945–1960 1961–1982

CHF/CHP vs. TCF (1924–1926) and SF (1930) CHP HP DP, MP . TIP CHP CGP AP DemP

1983–

HADEP, HEP, HDP

SHP and DSP later CHP

GP

Right . OAF, HIF

ANAP, DYP

YTP

CKMP, MHP, MSP RP, FP,. AKP, SP, MHP, Iyi, BBP

Notes: The ideological positions are approximations; more precise ideological positioning of the political parties in the eyes of the voters is presented only for the 21st century. Source: Author.

percent or more of the voters, who in national surveys when asked about where they stand on the left-right scale find the question meaningful, and could place themselves on the scale without much doubt and also place the main political parties with the same ease as well.8 This ideological cleavage seemed to have further complicated the eroding relevance of the centre–periphery divide in Turkish politics.9 However, the CHP’s rebranding message seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. Its vote share failed to rise throughout the 1960s (see Table 6.3). By 1972 the party went through a leadership change and declared that it was now an anti-establishment (düzen kars¸ıtı) party. CHP had a new leader, populist Bülent Ecevit (halkçı Ecevit),10 who could champion the rights of labour, landless peasants, small farmers, and the urban poor, whose numbers were swelling since the 1950s as Turkey was industrialising rapidly and the urban centres had been attracting millions of villagers from the Anatolian countryside (Akarca and Tansel 2015). Amazingly, the CHP also promoted a new policy of local administrations and of newly emerging metropolitan areas, running counter to its former strong centralist record, which resulted in several victories in local elections in the metropolitan cities in the 1970s. In short, democratisation and social mobilisation after 1945 produced major changes in the socio-cultural cleavages of the country, further downgrading the role of the centre-periphery divide, while creating a new ideological left–right division, and provided for the fragmentation of economic interests of the rural/agricultural interests and urban/industrial interests (Akarca and Bas¸levent 2010). Peasants had been a dominant voting bloc since the 1950 elections, but by the 1970s the workers, labour unions, small and medium business owners and employees, and the urban poor began to emerge as a new mass force to be reckoned Kalaycıog˘ lu (1999a); Çarkog˘ lu and Hinich (2006); Çarkog˘ lu (2007) and Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2007) present critical, theoretical, and empirical discussions on the meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in Turkish politics in the 1990s and the 2000s. 9 Kalaycıog˘ lu (2005, 137–188) and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2012) give a lengthy theoretical and empirical account how single centre–periphery cleavage has given way to many cultural fault lines that rendered it less and less relevant in Turkish politics of the 1990s and 2000s. 10 Bülent Ecevit had built his political image on his accomplishments as the Minister of Labour in the early 1960s, when he was instrumental in promulgation of a new labour law which provided labour to unionise with greater ease and effectiveness in the 1960s. Thus, it was not that difficult to brand his as the champion of labour rights and newly empowered unions. 8

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with in Turkish politics.11 The initial impact of these new social cleavages was increased fragmentation, polarisation, and volatility of the vote,12 which had been perceived as a malaise of the 1961 political regime. That perception provided an important motive of vast changes in the political system of the 1980s.

The post-1982 elections, political parties, and party system The coup of 12 September 1980 ended the liberal but unstable politics of the 1970s as the military junta annulled the pure PR elections in the hope of ending the reign of coalition governments, which were abhorred by a large swathe of the public (for the changes in the election laws and government types in Turkey see Table 6.5). In the eyes of the 1980 military junta, what failed in the 1961–1980 period was the effective response of the state to the challenges of left-wing civil society organisations, their protests, and violent reactions to the right-wing governments.13 Therefore, a new constitution (1982) sought to strengthen the state, which meant the erection of a strong and unaccountable executive. It installed rule by executive supremacy, monitored by the new office of the President, who would be elected by the TBMM for a single term but be neither politically nor legally responsible for his ex officio actions.14 The legislature was still elected by popular vote and the government was still defined as consisting of a Prime Minister (PM) and Council of Ministers, who were also accountable to the TBMM. An independent and impartial Constitutional Court still had the right of judicial review over the constitutionality of legislation of the TBMM and the decisions of the Council of Ministers.15 In 1983 the military junta announced multi-party elections but closely managed them to ensure that only two political parties ran for office. A new election law was promulgated in 1983 which continued to use the d’Hondt’s PR formula in multi-member seat districts, but introduced a punishing national threshold of 10 percent for any political party to qualify for a legislative seat (see Tables 6.1, 6.2, and 6.5). The aim seemed to be to keep what the military leaders considered to be extremists out of the TBMM and rule the country by large catch-all parties of the left and the right. Finally, they abolished all of the former political parties, including the CHP and instead formed two new parties, the Populist Party (Halkçı Parti, HP) on the left and the Nationalist Democracy Party (Milliyetçi Demokrasi Partisi, MDP) on the right. However, this design collapsed in the first election in 1983 (see Tables 6.1 and 6.2). It was former senior bureaucrat and politician Mr. Turgut Özal, who had served as the Minister in charge of the Economy during the military government of 1980–1983, who established a third party that could not be forestalled from entering the 1983 elections. He 11 Akarca and Tansel (2015), Özbudun (2013), and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2017a) also provide theoretical and empirical analyses that demonstrate the role of social mobilisation and social cleavages on voting behaviour in Turkish politics. 12 Özbudun (2013) provides thorough analyses of the fragmentation, polarisation, and volatilities as the three maladies of the Turkish party system. 13 However, the authority of the Constitutional Court was curtailed and the power of constitutional (judicial) review was also restricted. (See Kalaycıog˘ lu (2005) for a full description of the 1982 political regime and the status and role of the judiciary within that context.) 14 The President of the pristine form of the 1982 Constitution, which was amended on 16 April 2017, was able to contribute to the political decisions of the government, but for those decisions there will always be the Prime Minister and relevant Minister(s) inscribing their signatures as well. Legally speaking, the President would still not be responsible, but the countersigning PM and the Minister(s) would be legally responsible for the said decision jointly, instead of the President. 15 Kalaycıog˘ lu (2017b) provides how rule of law has eroded in Turkish politics in the last decade.

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had earlier been instrumental, as the undersecretary of PM Demirel, in the initiation of the 24 January 1980 governmental decree by the force of law that liberalised the Turkish economy, lifted price controls, and moved the country towards a market economy. The military junta then made the transition to market capitalism a success by suppressing the unions and all other civic associations that objected to that change. Many voters seemed to have given credit for the change in the economic regime of the country, which they also assumed to be more successful than the former mixed economy regime, to Mr. Özal. This precipitated the support of a plurality of the voters and produced the victory of Özal’s Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) in the non-free and unfair elections of 198316 (see Table 6.1). Özal’s ANAP ruled with comfortable, if not huge, majorities in the TBMM from 1983 until 1991 (see Tables 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4). However, the party system began to change with the entry of some of the older elites and new political parties by 1987. The older political elites gradually established new political parties.17 However, some had split with their former party comrades and decided to establish their own political parties separately. For example, in place of the former CHP emerged several political parties. Ecevit, through a proxy, formed the Democratic Left Party (Demokratik Sol Parti, DSP), while some of his former comrades formed the Social Democratic Party (Sosyal Demokrasi Partisi, SODEP), while others joined the HP in 1983. The SODEP and the HP merged in 1985 to form the Social Democratic People’s Party (Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti, SHP). Similarly, some of the former AP members and elites participated in ANAP, while others participated in the foundation of Süleyman Demirel’s new party, the True Path Party (Dog˘ru Yol Partisi, DYP). The old MSP cadres were able to establish the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP), and the former MHP founded the new Nationalist Toil Party (Milliyetçi Çalıs¸ma Partisi, MÇP). By 1987, six political parties with coalition or government potential had emerged to constitute the parliamentary party system in Turkey (for a listing of Turkish political parties see Table 6.6). By the 1990s Turkey was back at a fragmented party system of at least six relevant political parties. If we are to follow G. Sartori’s classification of political party systems (Sartori 1976, 131–201), Turkey might by then be considered as a multi-party system structure with polarised pluralist tendencies (see Tables 6.1 and 6.2) (Kalaycıog˘ lu 1999b). The military government’s crackdown of the leftists in the 1980s combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991 diminished the allure and effectiveness of the leftist parties. Instead, their essentially leftist but also secular policies and programmes were countered by the ethnic, confessional, and sectarian calls of the nationalists from different ethnic origins, and Sunni Muslim charities and parties, and their Alevi competitors by the 1990s.18 16 Kalaycıog˘ lu (2005, 132–138) provides a thorough analysis of the early years of the 1982 Constitution and its political regime. 17 The political elites of the former party system were banned from politics for up to ten years by the military junta in 1982. They could not officially form any political parties in 1983; however, their proxies could, so they started to form and run new political parties soon after the 1983 elections. This development expunged institutional background of all political parties and led to the operation of the political system with political parties with no or minimal institutionalisation (see Rubin and Heper 2002). 18 Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2009) explain theoretically and empirically how the 1980 military government’s promotion of anti-communist oppression of the left in the name of fighting with the Soviet conspiracy in Turkey in the 1980s increased the stakes of even becoming and voicing the views of the democratic left and social democracy in the country. When the Soviet Union collapsed and with the end of the Cold War, a new window of opportunity was opened for the political Islamists and ethnic nationalists to exploit, which they did immaculately. From 1991 onwards the compounded vote shares of political parties, such as RP, FP (Fazilet Partisi, Virtue Party), MHP, AKP, SP, BBP, that were akin

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A new competitive electoral game between contrasting images of lifestyles culminating in a cultural clash in the form of kulturkampf in the realm of education, culture, science, and arts emerged.19 Turkey seemed to have been developing several cultural fault lines that divided society sharply between secular Sunnis versus pious Sunnis, Alevis versus the pious Sunnis, Kurdish ethnic nationalists versus Turkish ethnic nationalists, or Turkish civic nationalists versus Turkish ethnic nationalists (Özbudun 2013; Kalaycıog˘ lu 2017a, 6–16) The rural and urban economic interests began to latch on to these divisions, without creating a separate cleavage themselves. The Kurdish ethnic nationalist arguments also emphasised the poverty of their folks, the outcome of discriminatory policies of the state against them.20 The economy became an aspect of political relations and social mobilisation, but not necessarily independent of cultural issues of ethnicity and religion. The Sunni Islamist movement and its organisations also made a similar argument that the pious were left behind in the recent economic boom because of who they are, but not for their lack of success in educational attainment, professional work habits and ethics, or any other matter. However, the sizes of these voting blocs are not equal, and they overlap. There were many Kurds who were both sympathetic to Kurdish ethnic nationalists and no less inclined to affiliate with the pious Sunni parties. Seculars could also be Sunnis or Alevis and sympathetic to Turkish nationalism as well. Such cross-cutting cleavages created the circumstances for voter volatility, and at the same time an opportunity for the political leaders with acumen to capitalise on these affinities and agglutinate their votes (see Table 6.4). The new 10 percent national threshold at the elections further helped those political leaders who could form a powerful political message that would mobilise different voting blocs simultaneously to support them. It was also possible for them to drive a wedge between various blocs to carve a critical mass of followers, who would ensure their political party a plurality or majority of seats in the TBMM. Hence, a centrifugal drive that kept the voters away from the centre of ideological divide, which produced a polarised party system in an environment of fragmented voter blocs that enjoyed a considerable amount of volatility, emerged in the 1990s and lasted until 2002 (Özbudun 2013; Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu 2009).

Turkish political parties, party system, and elections in the twenty-first century A financial crisis then suddenly erupted at a meeting of the National Security Council,21 which led to major economic and political changes as the moderate right- and left-wing to the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis point of view increased from 16 percent of the vote in 1991 to close to 30 percent in 1995 to around 40 percent in the 1999 and 2002 elections, and with the 2007 elections to around 50 percent and have now reached more than 60 percent in the current alliance of the AKP and the MHP in the 1 November 2015 elections (see Table 6.1). 19 Yalman (1973) and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2012) have argued that instead of the one overwhelming center– periphery divide in Turkish politics, there are now several ethnic identities, confession and sect-based cultural cleavages that sharply divide the body politic into voters with completely different lifestyles and a clash of them, which may best be described as kulturkampf. 20 See Çelik, Bilali, and Iqbal (2017). 21 At a meeting of the National Security Council on 28 February 2001 the PM Ecevit of the DSPMHP-ANAP coalition government met with strong criticisms from the President, who accused his government of disobeying the Constitution and threw a copy of the Constitution toward him. Known popularly as the flying constitution crisis, this incident precipitated an announcement by the PM after the meeting that the country was in a severe political crisis. His argument was not fully correct. There occurred no political crisis but the fragile economic circumstances of the banking system could not handle the declaration of the PM; 19 out of 86 banks in the country collapsed overnight and the country found itself in the throes of a financial crisis in 2001 (for more thorough analysis of the crisis and its aftermath see Kalaycıog˘ lu 2005, 177–184).

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parties witnessed the erosion of their voter support. There was a critical realignment of the Turkish electorate that took place in the early 1990s as the voters who had been placing themselves in the centre of the left–right spectrum began to place themselves on the right in the mid-1990s.22 The centre of the left–right spectrum used to attract a little more than half the electorate, which dropped down to about 40 percent by the 2000s, and further diminished to half of that by 2015. As the post-Cold War politics left increasingly less room for the left-of-centre ideological orientations in Turkish politics, the allegiances of the people drifted away from the centre to the right, and within the right to a specific religious (Sunni), conservative, ethnic nationalist position occupied mainly by the religious conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP)23 and much less so by the nationalist MHP. It was no surprise that the newly established AKP was to benefit the most out of this development in 2002 (see Table 6.2). In the 2002 elections it was anger with the parties of the left- and right-of-centre that became the key determining factor. The Kurdish PKK separatist challenges of the 1990s and the 1997, the Asian and Russian economic crises of 1999 and the 2001 Turkish financial crisis, seemed to motivate about one out of every four voters to vote for the rightwing, Sunni conservative AKP (Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu 2007). The rest of the voters split their vote between the CHP,24 and the former centre-left and right parties of the DSP, ANAP, DYP; and the other right-wing parties, MHP, SP, and the ethnic Turkish nationalists which split off the MHP, namely, the Grand Union Party (Büyük Birlik Partisi, BBP) (see Tables 6.1 and 6.2). Turkey had a two-party system between 2002 and 2007. Then from 2007 onwards each election produced a similar result with about 40–50 percent of the valid votes cast for the AKP, about 20–25 percent for the CHP, about 12–16 percent cast for the MHP, and eventually some seats won by independent candidates who had affiliation with the Kurdish ethnic nationalists winning no less than 30 seats until 2015. In 2015 the Kurdish ethnic nationalist Peoples’ Democracy Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) was able to go over the 10 percent threshold and win representation as a party group in the TBMM. We may validly argue that since 2015 the Turkish legislature therefore hosts four party groups that consist of the majority right wing, Sunni Islamist, conservative AKP, left-of-centre CHP, ethnic Turkish nationalist MHP, and an ethnic Kurdish nationalist party, HDP. However, with the 10 percent threshold the parliamentary party system failed to function as moderate pluralist multi-party system of three to five political parties because the front runner AKP tended to get a very large plurality of the vote and a 22 For the critical voter realignment of the early 1990s see Kalaycıog˘ lu (1999a)Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2009). 23 When the RP and FP were banned by the AYM for their anti-secular policies violating the Constitution, in their place emerged a party of the old guard of those parties, and another of the Young Turks. The former is the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi, SP) and the latter the AKP in the summer of 2001. The voters decided to support the Young Turks of the AKP, instead of the tired Old Guard of the FP at the polls in 2002. On voting behaviour in the 2002 elections see Çarkog˘ lu and Kalaycıog˘ lu (2007). 24 The CHP and the MHP were re-established after a constitutional amendment in 1993. Eventually the SHP of the 1980s and the CHP merged in the late 1990s, and the DSP and the re-established CHP emerged as the two left-of-centre parties in the late 1990s. However, the CHP had failed to attract the support of the voters in the 1999 elections and received only about 8 percent of the vote and was therefore unable to go over the 10 percent threshold to be represented in the TBMM from 1999 until 2002. However, as the voters voted against the DSP–ANAP–MHP coalition government, they voted to elect the outcasts of the 1999 elections, the CHP and the newly established AKP, which was the party of the Young Turks who emerged from the rubble of the banned political Islamist FP of the 1990s.

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disproportionately large percentage of the seats and form a party government to rule alone (see Tables 6.2 and 6.3). In 2017 Turkey went through a referendum which delivered a sliver of majority backing a comprehensive regime change in the country. The former semi-Presidential system of the country ushered in by the 21 October 2007 referendum, which had been put into practice after the 10 August 2014 Presidential elections was terminated when 51 percent of the voters supported a change toward a Presidential regime (Esen and Gümüs¸çü 2017).25 This Presidential regime trimmed the powers of the nationally elected single chamber legislature to render it relatively ineffective in holding the executive branch of the government accountable. The high court judge appointments were delegated to the President who, with the aid of an administrative body of judges and prosecutors (Hakimler Savcılar Kurulu, HSK), which operates under the shadow of the Justice Minister and his bureaucrats, controlled hiring and firing of judges and prosecutors. It looked as if the President would be ineffectively checked or balanced by either the legislature or the judiciary.26 A resolution on snap elections motioned in April 2018 in the National Assembly precipitated both the renewal of the legislature and the President of the country on 24 June 2018. The election laws had also been amended a month or so earlier. The 10 percent national threshold and the application of the d’Hondt’s largest average formula for the conversion of party list votes to parliamentary seats were kept in practice to be applied to those parties that received more votes than that threshold. However, a novel practice of establishment of official party alliances (ittifak) was introduced in the amended election laws. According to this new practice, those political parties that entered an alliance would automatically get their votes converted to parliamentary seats irrespective of their vote share, granted that the alliance jointly received more than 10 percent of the national vote. For the non-allied parties, the 10 percent threshold continued to be in effect. It looked as if that the electoral competition provided different standards for different political parties and continued to punish the non-allied parties that failed to receive 10 percent of the national vote. Nevertheless, however unfair the electoral contest turned out to be, the results of the 2018 elections indicated that the volatility, fragmentation, and the effective number of political parties did not change much (see Table 6.4). However, the legislative hegemony of the AKP seemed to have lessened slightly to a level that it fell five seats short of a majority in the National Assembly. However, the AKP’s leader and candidate for the Presidency won the election by 52.5 percent of the eligible vote in the first round of elections. The AKP continued to collaborate with its partner junior informal coalition partner MHP in and out of the National Assembly. The AKP also gave early signs of potentially concocting to. create an alternative coalition by a newly established political party, the Good Party (Iyi Parti) which participated in the elections as a member of a rival alliance. Following a democracy promoting agenda consisting of protecting civil liberties, mass media . freedom, and also the re-establishment of a parliamentary form of government, the I yi was established on 25 October 2017. The front-bench elites of the . Iyi had mainly split from the ethnic Turkish nationalist MHP, which had stopped opposing the AKP in 2015 and began to act more or less as a junior partner of an 25 See also Aytaç, Çarkog˘ lu and Yıldırım (2017). 26 For a comprehensive assessment of constitutional amendments of 16 April 2017. See Anayasa-Der (2017).

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. informally established coalition government with it. The Iyi had joined forces with the main opposition CHP, democratic Islamist Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi, SP), and a moderate right-wing Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) before the snap election and managed to participate in the 24 June 2018 elections. This move had made the 2018 general elections to look like a replay of the last year’s referendum where the same political elites had lined up to confront each other more or less in the same way and along the same autocratic versus democratic platforms. Therefore, the AKP may be. successfully exploiting the split between the two Turkish nationalist MHP and the Iyi to engage one or the other to promote its legislative agenda from now on. In short, Turkey seemed to have gone toward a form of legislative coalition politics after the 2018 elections in which not only those political elites in the National Assembly but also the President officially located outside of the legislature will also join in the game of informal coalition-building in a fragmented legislature. The hegemonic legislative role of the AKP seems to have been diminished but not terminated by the 2018 elections. The new political regime of Turkey provides the President of the country full and centralised control of the executive branch of the government and as the leader of the leading parliamentary party group he also enjoys preponderance over the legislative agenda. The Turkish party system and politics seem to be set to be ruled by a hegemonic party led by an ineffectively checked and balanced powerful President, which operates with ineffective opposition for another five years until 2023.

Conclusion: from one-party to multi-party and to hegemonic one-party rule The Turkish party system seemed to have been embedded in both majoritarian and pluralist political regimes (constitutions) from the 1920s until the 2010s. Therefore, Turkey experienced a variety of party systems which operated under the influence of several socio-cultural fault lines that sharply divided the population. Such a fragmented social fabric and concomitant cultural orientations have rendered Turkish party politics confrontational, polarised, and fragmented. Several voter realignments occurred under the influence of international, regional, and domestic developments, which interacted with changing rules of the game as constitutions and election laws were rewritten. With democratisation and increasing social mobility the conservative tendencies of the masses have increased to enable right-wing political parties to dominate the party and parliamentary systems of the country. The DP in the 1950s, AP in the 1960s and the 1970s, and ANAP in the 1980s were able to form party governments. In the twenty-first century the national elections were dominated by the Sunni conservative AKP, which won all of the 2002, 2007, 2011, the two 2015 and 2018 elections. Therefore, the Turkish party system technically has a predominant party system structure, but culturally evolving into a hegemonic one-party system now. If we are to follow the classification suggested by G. Sartori, the difference between a predominant party and a hegemonic one-party system is that in the former there are free and fair elections, and a competitive and democratic political regime in operation, where the opposition enjoys the credible expectation of becoming the government after the next elections (Sartori 1976, 192–201 and 230–238). However, the hegemonic one party does not have free and fair elections, whereby competition is not genuine, and the opposition does not enjoy the credible expectation of becoming the government after the next election. The 98

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developments since the 2010 referendum seemed to indicate that Turkey moved rapidly toward a highly centralised system, where the executive power of the government was increasingly augmented to the detriment of the legislature, which has experienced a diminishing impact on the control of the centralising executive. Simultaneously the constitutional changes brought the judiciary under the increasing control of the executive. From 2014 onwards, the government party and its leaders failed to follow the election regulations, and the democratic credibility of the elections began to erode rapidly (Kalaycıog˘ lu 2015). In the 16 April 2017 referendum, the judiciary failed to act as an independent and non-partisan arbiter, a standard that had been accepted since the 1950 elections. Consequently, all opposition parties negated the results and the main opposition party has carried their objections first to the high courts of Turkey and eventually to the ECHR, with no success. This last referendum was the first incident in which the opposition parties failed to accept the results of a popular vote as legitimate since 1946 and the post-coup elections of 1983. Finally, the snap 24 June 2018 elections helped to establish the Presidential regime, which now operates with extremely powerful, ineffectively checked and balanced executive fully and centrally controlled by the President. Turkey now has a political party system dominated by one political party and its leader, as the opposition loses any credible expectation of winning the next election, on the one hand, and the government party spokesmen and leader do everything in their power to declare all of their opponents as no more than terrorist conspirators. The modern democratic political party system was possible as the elites and the masses began to accept that opposition is not merely a conspiracy bent on mischief-making, but a respectful, credible alternative to the government. Turkey seems to have been hosting a government party that fails to accept such an image of political opposition. Therefore, opposition parties, interest groups, the media and the press, civil society associations, and the like are under constant suppression, whereby their members are arraigned and arrested by the authorities on charges with little or no evidence and treated as gun-toting terrorists. Hence, the predominance of the AKP at the polls and in the TBMM seem to be occurring in an environment of non-free and unfair elections, where competition is considerably restricted, there is lack of tolerance for opposition, whereby opposition fails to find equal opportunity to present itself to the electorate. Under the circumstances it is more warranted to conclude that the current Turkish party system agrees more with the hegemonic one-party than the predominant one-party system definition of G. Sartori (Sartori 1976). In conclusion, the Turkish party system started out with a majoritarian constitution in 1924, an almost two-party system in 1924–1926, and then evolved into an authoritarian oneparty (CHP) state in the 1920s through the 1940s, then toward a predominant one-party system in the 1950s under the DP rule, which took a distinct slant toward hegemonic oneparty system in the late 1950s. After a coup in 1960, the new election law and constitution enabled a multi-party system, but one that was fragmented, polarised, and volatile and that produced unstable coalition governments. Another coup in 1980 produced a less representative system that produced party government and later coalition governments in still fragmented, polarised, and volatile multi-partyism between 1983 and 2002. From 2002 through to 2018 the Turkish party system came under the hegemony of the AKP, which won every election and referendum in that period, which functioned as a predominant-party system until 2011, and then took a sharp turn away from free, fair elections, and pluralist democratic competition toward a one-party hegemonic rule by the AKP in the aftermath of the 2014 Presidential elections and more so after the 16 April 2017 referendum and the 24 June 2018 legislative and presidential snap elections. 99

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Tables Political party names in the tables are as follows: AKP (Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) ANAP (Motherland Party, Anavatan Partisi) AP (Justice Party, Adalet Partisi) BBP (Grand Union Party, Büyük Birlik Partisi) CGP (Republicanist Reliance Party, Cumhuriyetçi Güven Partisi) CHP (Republican People’s Party, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) CKMP (Republicanist Peasant Nation Party, Cumhuriyetçi Köylü Millet Partisi) CMP (Republicanist Nation Party, Cumhuriyetçi Millet Partisi) DEHAP (Democratic People’s Party, Demokratik Halk Partisi) DemP (Democratic Party, Demokratik Parti) DP (Democrat Party, Demokrat Parti) DSP (Democratic Left Party, Demokratik Sol Parti) DYP (True Path Party, Dog˘ru Yol Partisi) FP (Virtue Party, Fazilet Partisi, banned by the Constitutional Court in 2001, participated in the 1999 elections) GP (Young Party, Genç Parti) HADEP (People’s Democracy Party, Halkın Demokrasi Partisi, which participated in the 2002 elections in alliance with DEHAP) HDP (People’s Democratic Party, Halkların Demokratik Partisi) HEP . (People’s Labour Party, Halkın . Emek Partisi) HIF (Entente Liberal, Hürriyet ve Itilaf Fırkası) HP (Freedom Party, Hürriyet Partisi, 1955) HP (Populist Party, Halkçı Parti, 1983, which merged with a social democratic party to form the SHP by 1985) . . I.TF (Party of Union . and Progress, Ittihat ve Terakki Fırkası) Iyi (Good Party, Iyi Parti) MÇP (Nationalist Toil Party, Milliyetçi Çalıs¸ma Partisi, merged with MHP after it became legal again in 1995) MDP (Nationalist Democracy Party, Milliyetçi Demokrasi Partisi, merged with ANAP in 1986) MHP (Nationalist Action Party, Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi) MP (Nation Party, Millet Partisi) MSP (National Salvation Party, Milli Selamet Partisi) OAF (Ottoman Liberal Party, Osmanlı Ahrar Firkasi) RP (Welfare Party, Refah Partisi, banned by the Constitutional Court in 1998, participated in 1987, 1991, and 1995 elections) SF (Liberal Party, Serbest Fırka, 1930) SHP (Social Democratic Populist Party, Sosyal Demokrat Halkçı Parti, which merged with CHP after it became legal again in 1995) SP (Felicity Party, Saadet Partisi, participated in the 2002 elections) TBP (Turkish Union Party, Türkiye Birlik Partisi) TCF . (Progressivist Republican Party,. Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası, 1924–1926) TIP (Turkish Labour Party, Türkiye I¸sçi Partisi), which later became the CGP YTP (New Turkey Party, Yeni Türkiye Partisi)

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References Akarca, Ali T., and Cem Bas¸levent. 2010. . . ‘The Region-of-Origin Effect on Voting Behavior: The case of Turkey’s Internal Migrants.’ Iktisat, I¸sletme ve Finans 297: 9–36. Akarca, Ali T., and Aysit Tansel. 2015. ‘Impact of Internal Migration on Political Participation in Turkey.’ IZA Journal of Migration 4(1): 1–14. Anayasa-Der. 2017. ‘Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Anayasası’nda Deg˘ is¸iklik Yapılmasına Dair Kanun (Üzerine Teknik Bilimsel Rapor) [Law on the Amendment of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey (on Scientific Technical Report)].’ http://anayasader.org/turkiye-cumhuriyeti-anayasasinda-degisiklik-yap ilmasina-dair-kanun-teklifi/ Aytaç, S.Erdem, Ali Çarkog˘ lu, and Kerem Yıldırım. 2017. ‘Taking Sides: Determinants of Support for a Presidential System in Turkey.’ South European Society and Politics 22(1): 1–20. Berkes, Niyazi. 1964. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal: McGill University Press. Çarkog˘ lu, Ali. 2007. ‘The Nature of the Left-Right Ideological Self-Placement in the Turkish Context.’ Turkish Studies 8(2): 253–271. Çarkog˘ lu, Ali, and Melvin J. Hinich. 2006. ‘A Spatial Analysis of Turkish Party Preferences.’ Electoral Studies 25(2): 369–392. Çarkog˘ lu, Ali, and Ersin Kalaycıog˘ lu. 2007. Turkish Democracy Today: Elections, Protest and Stability in an Islamic Society. London: I.B. Tauris. Çarkog˘ lu, Ali, and Ersin Kalaycıog˘ lu. 2009. The Rising Tide of Conservatism in Turkey. New York: Palgrave–Macmillan. Çelik, Ays¸e Betül, Rezarta Bilali, and Yeshim Iqbal. 2017. ‘Patterns of “Othering” in Turkey: A Study of Ethnic, Ideological, and Sectarian Polarisation.’ South European Society and Politics 22(2): 217–238. Esen, Berk, and S¸ebnem Gümüs¸çü. 2017. ‘A Small Yes for Presidentialism: The Turkish Constitutional Referendum of April 2017.’ South European Society and Politics 22(3): 303–326. Kushner, David. 1977. The Rise of Turkish Nationalism 1876–1908. London: Frank Cass. Karaömerliog˘ lu, Asım. 2006. ‘Turkey’s “Return” To Multi-Party Politics: A Social Interpretation.’ East European Quarterly 40(1): 89–107. . Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 1999a. ‘Türkiye’de Siyaset (Politics in Turkey)’ In Sivil Toplum Için Kent, Yerel Siyaset ve Demokrasi Seminerleri [Seminars on Urban, Local and Democratic Politics for Civil Society], edited by Dünya Yerel Yönetim ve Demokrasi Akademisi [World Local Government and Democracy Academy], 29–45. Istanbul: WALD. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 1999b. ‘The Shaping of Party Preferences in Turkey: Coping with the Post-Cold War Era.’ New Perspectives on Turkey 20: 47–76. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2005. Turkish Dynamics: Bridge across Troubled Lands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2012. ‘Kulturkampf in Turkey: The Constitutional Referendum of 12 September 2010.’ South European Society and Politics 17(1): 1–22. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2015. ‘Popular Presidential Elections: Deepening Legitimacy Issue and Looming Regime Change.’ South European Society and Politics 20(2):161–165. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2017a. ‘Two Elections and a Political Regime in Crisis: Turkish Politics at the Crossroads.’ Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 18(1): 1–31. Kalaycıog˘ lu, Ersin. 2017b. ‘Turkish Democratization Falters Again.’ In Regierungssysteme im Lichte von [Checks and Balances], edited by Arno Scherzberg, Osman Can, and Ilyas Dogan, 9–46. Münster, Hamburg, Berlin: LIT Verlag. Karpat, Kemal. 1985. Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Kayalı, Hasan. 1995. ‘Elections and the Electoral Process in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1919.’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27(3): 265–286. Laakso, Markku, and Rein Taagepera. 1979. ‘“Effective” Number of Parties: a Measure with Application to West Europe.’ Comparative Political Studies 12(1): 3–27. Lewis, Bernard. 1993. Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing. Mardin, S¸erif. 1971. ‘Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution.’ Middle East Studies 2: 201–206. Mardin, S¸erif. 1975. ‘Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics.’ In Political Participation in Turkey: Historical Background and Present Problems, edited by Engin Deniz Akarlı and Gabriel Ben-Dor, 7– 19. Istanbul: Bog˘ aziçi University Press. Özbudun, Ergun. 2013. Party Politics and Social Cleavages in Turkey. Boulder, CO, London: Lynne Rienner.

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Elections, parties, and the party system Rubin, Barry, and Metin Heper, eds. 2002. Political Parties in Turkey. Oxford, New York: Routledge. Sartori, Giovanni. 1976. Parties and Party Systems: A framework for analysis. Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Stanford J., and Ezel Kural Shaw. 1977. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Volume II: Reform, Revolution and the Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975. Cambridge, London, New York, . Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Sunar, Ilkay. 1990. ‘Populism and Patronage: The Demokrat Party and its Legacy in Turkey.’ Il Politico 55: 745–757. Tachau, Frank. 1984. Turkey: The Politics of Authority, Democracy, and Development. New York, Philadelphia, Eastbourne, Toronto, Sydney, Hong Kong: Praeger. Tunaya, Tarık Zafer. 1952. Türkiye’de Siyasal Partiler [Political Parties in Turkey]. Istanbul: Dog˘ an Kardes¸ Matbaası. Tuncer, Erol. 2002. Osmanlı‘dan Günümüze Seçimler, 1877–1999 [Elections from the Ottoman Times until Today]. . Ankara: Toplumsal Ekonomik Siyasal Aras¸tırmalar Vakfı (TESAV) Yayınları. Turan, Ilter. 1969. Cumhuriyet Tarihimiz: Temeller, Kurulus¸, Milli Devrimler [Our Republican History: Foundatons, Establishment, National Revolutions]. Istanbul: Çag˘ layan Kitabevi. Yalman, Nur. 1973. ‘Some Observations on Secularism in Islam: The Cultural Revolution in Turkey.’ Daedalus 102(1): 139–168. Yılmaz, Hakan. 1997. ‘Democratization from Above in Response to the International Context: Turkey, 1945–1950.’ New Perspectives on Turkey 17: 1–37. Zürcher, Eric. 2004. Turkey: A Modern History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris.

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7 THE PRESIDENCY IN TURKISH POLITICS From independence to the AKP Menderes Çınar and Nalan Soyarık S¸entürk

Introduction: the rise and fall of parliamentarism in Turkey During Turkey’s Independence Struggle, the Parliament in Ankara, or the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA), was the primary locus of power. In 1921, the Ankara parliament accepted a Constitutional Act, which introduced the principle of national sovereignty and concentrated all powers in the parliament as the sole representative of the sovereign nation. Until the declaration of the Republic there was no head of state, or President. The Speaker of the Parliament was also the head of the ‘assembly government’, whose task was to perform the executive function on behalf of the parliament. The parliament could instruct the government, revoke its decisions, and appoint and remove its members individually. Until the liquidation of the opposition in 1925, the leader of the independence war and the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal, had to struggle with a parliament very keen on maintaining its absolute supremacy. During the revision of the Constitution in 1924, for example, the TGNA rejected proposals introducing a bicameral system or granting the President of the Republic, the powerful and prestigious Mustafa Kemal, powers to dissolve the parliament or veto its bills (Tanör 1998, 292). The executive continued to be a functional extension of parliament and responsible to it as the sole representative body of the sovereign nation. The President of the Republic under the 1924 Constitution was to be elected by the TGNA and his term was tied to the four-year-term of the parliament. Once elected, the president could not attend parliamentary sessions or vote in them. The president shared executive power with the government and could chair cabinet meetings, but his acts had to be countersigned by members of the politically responsible/accountable government. Despite the constitutional stipulations maintaining the absolute supremacy of parliament and compliance with parliamentary procedures, the President of the Republic during the single party period (1925–1946) exercised considerable executive power by way of controlling the party, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP). As the permanent chair of the CHP and the ‘chief of the nation’, Presidents during the single-party regime had the power to determine the deputy chair and the secretary general of the party. These three in turn would determine all the nominations and appointments to parliamentary and governmental posts (Koçak 2009). That is why rendering the president impartial was a 103

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key issue in the process of transition to the multi-party regime. In fact, the newly established Democrat Party (Demokrat. Parti, .DP) continued with its activities only after the second President of the Republic, Ismet Inönü, declared the legitimacy of the opposition and his equidistance to his own CHP and DP on 12 July 1947. During the rule of the DP (1950– 1960), Celal Bayar was elected as the President of the Republic thrice by DP dominated parliaments. Bayar was a lesser executive than his predecessors in the single-party era. He left the chairmanship of his party perhaps as a token of his non-partisanship and the prime minister started to assume a heightened profile relative to the president. Still, he did not act as a neutral president and effectively shared power with the government in a partisan position (Harris cited in Aslan-Akman and Akçalı 2017, 6). DP rule was terminated by a military coup, which initiated an institutional engineering to prevent Turkish democracy from degeneration through the authoritarian practices of elected governments, like that of the DP. Believing that the concentration of powers in parliament facilitated the DP’s authoritarian practices, the makers of the new constitution effectively introduced the liberal idea of limited government for the first time in Turkish political history. This entailed the expansion of rights and liberties as well as the establishment of check and balance mechanisms in a government system designed along the lines of parliamentarism.1 Embodying a distrust for politicians’ fidelity to republican values and excluding former DP politicians from the constitution-making process, both the motive and legitimacy of the otherwise liberal measures of the 1961 Constitution were in doubt. Moreover, the constitution operated in a post-coup context in which ‘the military factor’ had become a permanent feature of politics and functioned as an even more effective check on politics. Hence, the centre-right heirs to the DP rejected the legitimacy of the 1961 Constitution, did not feel bound by it and took its check and balance mechanisms as tutelary measures aiming at rendering politicians submissive to the state elite who lack popular support. It was in this context that the otherwise symbolic president, typically a retired general, in Turkey’s now truly parliamentarian system assumed a higher profile as a go-between the military and the governments (Cizre 2014). From the late 1960s onwards, Turkish politics was marred by an increasing tide of instability, polarisation, and violence, culminating in two military interventions in 1971 and 1980. A series of amendments to the constitution in the aftermath of the 1971 coup-bymemorandum curtailed the rights and liberties and strengthened the executive as a remedy to the crisis of governability. This illiberal logic peaked in the course of the 1980 Coup administration’s ‘restructuring’ of Turkish democracy. Until transferring power to a civilian government in 1983, the coup administration promulgated a new constitution and enacted over five hundred laws to redefine the rules of the game. What characterised these new rules was centralisation and concentration of powers by way of establishing new central authorities or strengthening existing ones. The executive branch was strengthened at the expense of the judiciary and legislature.

1

The 1961 Constitution has introduced a bicameral parliament and subjected it to judicial review by way of establishing a Constitutional Court. The executive body was still the Council of Ministers formed within the parliament and subject to its approval and removal, but the scope of judicial review over its actions was expanded and governmental discretion in some policy areas were restricted by establishing some autonomous institutions and by inscribing certain policy measures in the constitution. The president of the Republic was to be elected by the parliament for a non-renewable seven years to act as the symbolic head of the state.

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More critically, the status and role of the president was elevated to a level well beyond the symbolic presidency of a parliamentary system (Heper and Çınar 1996, 490). Equipped with significant powers pertaining to judicial, legislative and executive functions,2 the politically irresponsible president was expected to guard the ‘restructured’ political system from encroachments by allegedly self-interested and incompetent politicians. Moreover, the political class’s susceptibility to the standards of legitimacy set by the guardians of the regime was further increased by a depoliticisation drive which weakened their links with society as an alternative basis of legitimacy.

The 1990s: introducing a presidential system as effective government Perhaps because it was not true to the nature of democratic politics, the coup administration’s institutional engineering did not deliver the stability it promised. Electoral volatility, political polarisation, and governmental instability all continued in the 1990s. It was in this context that a shift to a presidential system entered the public debate as a possible remedy to the ills of Turkish democracy. In the early 1990s, President Turgut Özal called for the adoption of a presidential system based on the American model. For him a popularly elected executive president would, by definition, represent the ‘consensus’ of the people and govern effectively (Aslan-Akman and Akçalı 2017, 7). Özal took over the presidency from the coup leader, Kenan Evren, as ‘the first civilian President of the Republic’, assuming the office in order to avoid the dictate of his declining electoral popularity and to maintain his image as a reformist and visionary leader, which he gained as prime minister (1983–1989). Yet he could not fulfil his goals by playing the constitutionally stipulated guardianship roles. He therefore came up with the idea of a presidential system and exploited every opportunity to convert the presidency into the hub of the executive machine (Gönenç 2008, 507). The legacy of the presidentialism debate that Özal initiated, however, was a reinforcement of the already prevailing opinion that other systems of government than parliamentary are authoritarian (Heper and Çınar 1996, 490). Coming from a statist political tradition that defines its identity in largely negative terms (Cizre-Sakallıog˘ lu 1996), succeeding President Süleyman Demirel defined his presidency in anti-Özal terms. Consequently, for the large part of his presidency, Demirel aimed at fulfilling his constitutional guardianship duty, expressed in the constitution as ‘monitoring the effective functioning of the state.’ That duty became critical in the mid-1990s when the rise of Islamism turned into a crisis of the state and resulted in the ousting of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) led coalition government by way of a military-led campaign (Cizre and Çınar 2003). In the process, Demirel took the military’s position for granted and conveyed its wishes and demands to the RP-led government. This was not just because he considered the military as (the backbone of) the state, but also because he believed he lacked the constitutional capacity to take any initiative. He thereby followed the Turkish tradition by suggesting an institutional engineering that would empower the president. He identified the failure of elections to produce clear winners and thus strong governments as the main 2

The president had powers to appoint top members of the judiciary, including members of the constitutional court and the chief prosecutor, as well as the members of the Board of Higher Education and university rectors; give inaugural speeches at the beginning of legislative year, promulgate or return laws to the Assembly for reconsideration; submit proposed constitutional amendments to popular referenda; appeal to the Constitutional Court for the annulment of laws, preside over the meetings of the National Security Council, proclaim martial law or state of emergency in collaboration with the Council of Ministers (Özbudun 1988, 39).

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problem. To overcome, he first suggested, in 1994, equipping the president with a ‘stick’ to force political parties into coalitions, namely the capacity to dissolve parliament and call elections. This was not a call for an executive presidency, but for enhancing the powers of the president so that he could ‘monitor the effective functioning of the state’. But then, in 1997 he openly called for a presidential system in which the executive would be elected directly by the people for five years (Oder 2005, 47–48). Such a system, he believed, would result in the formation of stable and effective governments, and this in turn would hinder military interventions into the political realm.

The conquest and transformation of the presidency under the AKP By the early 2000s, the presidentialism debate seemed to have disappeared. A constitutional lawyer who found the constitutional powers of the president excessive and called for their curtailment, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, took over the presidency from Demirel in 2000. Soon the newly established Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), an outspan of the Islamist RP, initiated a period of strong single-party governments by winning the first of a series of overwhelming parliamentary majorities in 2002. Moreover, the AKP aimed at strengthening the parliamentary system by curtailing the constitutional powers of the president. Yet, these positions turned out to be expedient as usual. As the peak of Turkey’s secular establishment, which categorised the AKP as essentially anti-secular and anti-republican, President Sezer used his full powers to guard the regime from the AKP’s alleged attempts to undermine it. Consequently, Sezer has been considered as the most active of all presidents before him (Gönenç 2008, 513). The AKP’s position, on the other hand, carried the mark of its founders’ previous, and present, experience with the guardian presidents. The fact that the AKP has perpetuated the Turkish right’s traditional confusion of any check and balance mechanism with state tutelage over popularly elected governments has further complicated the situation. Henceforth, the AKP invoked the democratic principles of responsibility and accountability to the people to criticise the excessive powers of the non-popularly-elected and irresponsible President of the Republic. In the meantime, however, it has focused its efforts on conquering the seat of the presidency by installing a friendly figure when the term of the incumbent expired in 2007. The heightened importance of the presidency for both the secular establishment and the AKP turned the 2007 Presidential elections into a battle front. In an attempt to prevent the AKP from determining the next president unilaterally, for which it had the capacity by virtue of the parliamentary majority it commanded, the secular establishment, including the military, urged the AKP to seek consensus before nominating its candidate. The AKP considered that conceding to such pressure would mean both self-denial of its capacity to elect the president and an implicit acceptance of the claim that they were not a fully legitimate political force. Consequently, the AKP nominated one of its top founding members and its Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gül. Immediately after the first round of elections in the parliament to appoint the president, however, the military issued an e-memorandum on its website threatening intervention if the AKP insisted on proceeding, and the opposition filed a case with the Constitutional Court to void the first round of elections. The opposition’s case rested on the claim that parliament lacked the quorum of a two-thirds majority of its 550 seats to hold the first round of elections. Such a majority was necessary for the election of the president in the first two rounds, but the formal quorum specified in the constitution was 184. Still, the Court ruled in favour 106

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of the opposition and voided the first round of the vote, thereby rendering the AKP unable to proceed without the cooperation of the opposition. Declaring the Court’s decision unconstitutional and undemocratic, the AKP reacted by calling for early elections, which it won with an increased vote share, and then by re-nominating the same candidate. Although the AKP did not win enough seats to fulfil the new quorum requirement alone, Gül was elected in the third round of voting thanks to the attendance of deputies from a new parliamentary opposition party, the National Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP). More importantly, the AKP’s reaction also included amending the constitution through a referendum in October 2007 to redefine the election method of the president as direct elections by popular vote. Although such a change did not necessarily imply an inevitable shift to an executive presidency, it turned out to be an eventful one by providing the key democratic ground for justifying the later claims to executive presidency and calls for a presidential system. The AKP leader Erdog˘ an stated as early as 2003 that an American style presidency was the ideal system of government for him because it delivers stability and helps the struggle against ‘bureaucratic oligarchy’, which he used as a code for both state tutelage over politics and for democratic check and balance mechanisms. Yet by the time Erdog˘ an started pushing for a presidential system, Turkish politics was experiencing one of the longest periods of governmental stability thanks to the AKP’s electoral predominance. Moreover, the so-called bureaucratic oligarchy was already rendered subservient by the AKP, if less by way of democratising reforms then by taking over the positions previously occupied by secular actors. In the process, the power and prestige of secular actors, including the military, were undermined by a series of leaked scandals and show-trials. The judiciary too was rendered a friendly force through a series of constitutional amendments in 2010. This was followed by the AKP’s election victory in 2011. The AKP was perhaps the strongest of governments in terms of the amount of power it commanded and prestige it enjoyed. What then was the driving force behind the AKP’s push for a presidential system? Erdog˘ an declared that a shift to a presidential system was possible after the 2011 elections (Hürriyet 2010) and started calling for a public debate on a presidential system in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 elections. But the first clear reference to a presidential system in an official AKP document was made in late 2012, two years before the end of the incumbent’s term. Despite talk of a swap of positions between President Gül and Prime Minister Erdog˘ an and despite maintaining the clause for strengthening the parliamentary system in the party programme, the AKP put the presidential system onto the agenda in its Fourth Congress in September 2012. Its so-called 2023 Vision, adopted as the main policy document at the Congress, stated that ‘Turkey had been looking for a proper type of executive for 200 years’, and continued what government system and model will (be necessary to) shape Turkey’s future is an urgent issue to be debated. Presidentialism, semi-presidentialism and a partymember-presidency can be debated within this framework … The AKP believes that the problem with the Turkish political system is structural, so is the resolution. That is why one of these three systems must be chosen and applied. (AK Parti 2017, 16) The fact that the next president would be elected by popular vote, the Vision claimed, compelled a governmental system change anyway. This was to be done in such a way that would institutionalise the stability the AKP had achieved, discourage all sorts of tutelary and 107

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anti-democratic interventions into the political realm, prevent the development of political, social, and economic crises that these interventions may cause, facilitate bold and fast decision-making, and thereby help realise Turkey’s regional and global ambitions. The Fourth Congress in 2012 was critical for two more reasons. First, the AKP started defining its identity in terms of ‘our civilisation’ as opposed to the original conservative democracy. This was expressed more in Erdog˘ an’s speech to the Congress than in the Vision. While the substance of ‘our civilisation’ remained vague, the fact that it was defined in contradiction to Turkish Westernism/Westernisation indicated that, after consolidating its power position, the AKP would now focus on redefining Turkey as a ‘Muslim nation’ (White 2013; Saraçog˘ lu and Demirkol 2015). The AKP’s civilisational project, in other words, entailed remaking Turkish society rather than establishing a system to facilitate democratic organisation. But given the relative success of the two-hundred-year Westernisation process such a redefinition would be hard to achieve without a strong executive equipped with a constitutional capacity to act unilaterally. In this respect, it was not just the existing parliamentary system, with its alleged proneness to configurations that compel power-sharing, which constituted impediments to the AKP’s project, but also any democratic system with effective check and balance mechanisms that would empower those who do not subscribe or submit to the AKP’s vision. Second, in the AKP’s Fourth Congress, Erdog˘ an was re-elected as leader for the third and last time because of the three-term limit imposed by the party’s constitution. Of course, Erdog˘ an with his ‘strong leadership’ could get the party constitution amended to remove such a limit, but this would have also meant maintaining two possible hurdles to his ‘strong leadership’. First, without the three-term limit, some heavy-weight figures who did not owe their political career and position to Erdog˘ an would remain within the party, and the relative cost of their loyalty or marginalisation would be higher for Erdog˘ an. Second, extending the three-term limit to continue playing an executive role as the prime minister would mean having someone else occupy the seat of the guardian president, thus prolonging a configuration that would impede the much wanted ‘bold and fast’ decision-making capacities. What’s more, because s/he would now be elected by popular vote, the guardian president could pose a challenge to Erdog˘ an’s populist charismatic leadership and become an even more intrusive check on his powers. These also constituted the reasons why taking over the presidency without altering its non-executive status was not an option. Moreover, a nonexecutive position would open Erdog˘ an’s political legacy as the prime minister to debate, critique, and revision, and thereby inevitably damaging his charisma and prestige. Another ground for Erdog˘ an’s push for executive presidency was the presidentialisation process associated with his populist leadership, characterised by an anti-establishment image and an insatiable quest for power (Weyland 2001). This presidentialisation process included a sharp and quick backpedalling from initial promises of intra-party democracy to a gradual marginalisation of the cabinet from policy-making and decision-making (Poguntke and Webb 2005, 5–9). Erdog˘ an once explained the lack of knowledge of a fellow minister about a policy initiative by stating that ‘it is a project we prepared with our own work-mates. The leader gives the target and the subordinates carry out the necessary works’ (Haber Türk 2012). Needless to say, the direct plebiscitarian links he established with the electorate as well as his ability to deliver election victories enabled Erdog˘ an to act unilaterally at the expense of his party and cabinet. Also crucial was his ability to impose a very strong discipline by way of pursuing a policy of polarisation, monopolising the media outlets and concentrating powers to reward and punish in his hands, all of which decreased the possibilities of internal input, deliberation, debate and criticism (Çınar 2018, 136–143). Finally, the AKP’s use of foreign 108

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policy to redefine Turkey’s identity in terms of ‘our civilisation’ also served the presidentialisation of Erdog˘ an’s powers because foreign policy is a realm of leaders (Poguntke and Webb 2005, 13–14).

Erdog˘ an’s political craft Thus, at least from the 2012 Congress onwards, Erdog˘ an embarked on a project of transforming the Turkish presidency into the centre of the executive, if not by introducing some sort of a presidential system then by allowing the president to maintain control over his party (Milliyet 2012). In the aftermath of the 2011 elections, the establishment of the Parliamentary Constitutional Accord Committee, with the purpose of drafting a new constitution to finally replace the existing one promulgated by the coup administration, provided the opportunity for a campaign to familiarise the public with the idea of a presidential system. The Committee was dissolved in December 2013 upon the AKP’s proposal for a presidential system, which the other parties refused to discuss. The AKP’s proposed presidential system reflected a very narrow understanding of democracy, shaped by Erdog˘ an as being mandated by and accountable to the people only. It thereby downplayed other democratic principles, like freedom of expression and division of powers, necessary to institutionalise effective checks and balances to prevent arbitrary government. In fact, Erdog˘ an found the division of powers an unnecessary and undemocratic check on the popularly elected government and wanted, for example, the judiciary to abide by the national interest as defined by the government. If the people can take a government down, he once stated, then there is democracy (Taraf 2013). The presidential system that the AKP would, and did, propose, therefore upheld the popularly elected president as supreme. In 2014, Erdog˘ an became the first popularly elected President of the Republic, but without altering the constitutionally non-executive and non-partisan status of the president. This meant that he had to reinvent the presidency as a de facto executive position. Erdog˘ an laid some groundwork for this during the campaign trail by claiming the categorical impossibility of an impartial president and by promising to be active in fulfilling his constitutional role as the head of the executive. Devoid of constitutionally designated powers, Erdog˘ an’s capacity for de facto presidentialism was dependent upon maintaining his discipline over the AKP. He therefore did not allow any political vacuum to emerge that could be filled by others. This entailed timing the extraordinary Congress that would elect his successor in such a way that left Gül out of the frame, and being present at each and every stage of determination of his successor as Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutog˘ lu, so that he could not enjoy an independent basis of legitimacy. As president, he first reorganised his General Secretariat into a shadow cabinet to enhance his supervising and steering capacities. He then met with AKP deputies to complain about Davutog˘ lu’s failure to make necessary consultations (with himself) before taking an initiative. He showed that he still maintained the initiative and power by imposing some policies and blocking others, and doing so in public to prevent Davutog˘ lu from gaining political clout. To make up for the loss of opportunity to give speeches to the AKP’s Parliamentary Group, he invented a new platform, Meetings with Headmen (Muhtarlar Toplantısı) and thereby maintained his centrality to the public debate. Perhaps a more significant display of Erdog˘ an’s de facto presidency, and an open violation of his constitutionally non-partisan status, was his explicit and intense campaign for the AKP and presidential system in the run up to the June 2015 parliamentary elections. In so doing he not only turned the elections into a referendum 109

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for his executive presidency, but also made sure that the presidential system was firmly on the agenda of his formally former party. The electorate, however, clearly rejected Erdog˘ an’s presidential ambitions. For the first time since 2002, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and thus could only form a coalition government. Erdog˘ an took the election results as another opportunity to build his de facto executive presidency. This entailed refuting the election results. To regain its parliamentary majority and the single-party government by the AKP, essential for his de facto presidency, Erdog˘ an came up with the idea of repeat elections, a decision which was at the president’s discretion after 45 days of futile coalition talks. He used his constitutional powers and leverage over the AKP to discourage the formation of a coalition government, and declared 1 November to be the repeat election day. Meanwhile, he made sure that the AKP was firmly under control and that Davutog˘ lu was surrounded by his stalwarts. In the AKP’s September 2015 Congress, ‘none of the names Davutog˘ lu wanted and all of the names Davutog˘ lu did not want’ were elected to the executive bodies of the AKP, an undisclosed insider stated (Akyol 2015). Although Erdog˘ an campaigned less, the November elections resulted in a clear victory for the AKP and his de facto presidency. Erdog˘ an could still claim that the credit for the AKP’s victory was by and large his work. Moreover, it was Erdog˘ an who, by declaring the peace process with the Kurds over, shifted the ground of Turkish politics from issues of democracy, transparency, and corruption, to more favourable stability and security concerns. In the process, the pro-Kurdish socialist Peoples’ Democracy Party (Halkların Demokrasi Partisi, HDP), which became the fourth party to pass the 10% threshold and was identified by the AKP as the main culprit for the loss of its parliamentary majority was demonised and harassed. The CHP was also put in an awkward position, for a considerable portion of its constituency was against the peace process, and the MHP was stripped of its single instrument of opposition. Still, because Davutog˘ lu was at the forefront of the AKP’s campaign, who should claim the credit for the election victory and the message of the election results as far as the presidential system was concerned was a matter of division. Davutog˘ lu initially refrained from endorsing the presidential system, seemed to be unwilling to toe the line, and was eventually replaced, in May 2016, by Binali Yıldırım, a long-term loyalist who declared his motto to be ‘obey and find comfort’ (Birgün 2017). The aborted coup attempt on 15 July 2016, led by followers of Fethullah Gülen (a religious cleric in self-imposed exile in the US whose network in bureaucracy has been very functional in the above-mentioned show-trials that helped the AKP consolidate its power), provided an invaluable opportunity to Erdog˘ an to consolidate and constitutionalise his de facto executive presidency. First, the fact that many people took to the streets upon Erdog˘ an’s call and lost their lives in resisting the coup verified his plebiscitarian charismatic leadership, facilitated the exaggerated identification of the nation with his leadership, and provided a justifying ground for the allegedly endangered survival of the nation. This also meant that a defensive discourse replaced the positive future vision AKP initially offered to justify its push for a presidential system. Second, the State of Emergency, declared five days after the coup attempt for three months and repeatedly renewed, enabled rule by decree without any effective parliamentary or judicial review. This ‘formally temporary’ situation of ‘executive supremacy’ facilitated Erdog˘ an’s unilateralism at the expense of the parliament, judiciary, council of ministers, and his own party. It was in this context that the far-right MHP expressed support for the constitutionalisation of Erdog˘ an’s de facto executive presidency. 110

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Drafted by a very narrow group of parliamentarians from the AKP and the MHP, the constitutional amendments for a presidential system were approved in parliament without any real deliberation on its content, and then by the people in a referendum held on 16 April 2017 under the State of Emergency conditions. The referendum process was far from free and fair (OSCE 2017). The opposition’s access to resources and sphere of activities was so restricted that it was practically reduced to an accessory to the AKP’s campaign, which mobilised the resources of the state as well. Approved by a narrow margin (51.4%), the amendments amounted to an alla Turca presidential system that practically concentrated all powers in the hands of the president and allowed the president to rule by decree without any effective parliamentary or judicial review. Accordingly, effective from 2019 onwards, the Turkish president was now to be elected by the people as the sole executive for five years, renewable once. The amendments equipped the Turkish president with unilateral powers to appoint and dismiss vice-presidents and ministers, abolish and establish ministries, approve or veto legislation, deploy the Turkish military, declare a state of emergency, appoint the majority of the members of the Constitutional Court and Council of Judges and Prosecutors. The president also now enjoys unconditional powers to dissolve the parliament and call for elections, in which case his term will end as well because the president and parliament are to be elected simultaneously. One amendment that came into immediate effect enabled Erdog˘ an to reassume the leadership of his party and thereby accelerate the process of presidentialisation by, for example, taking over the control of national intelligence. However, the narrow margin of victory put Erdog˘ an’s constitutionally executive presidency in 2019 at risk. As a politician who cannot afford losing power, Erdog˘ an started working for 2019 elections immediately after the referendum. This did not mean deploying his immense power for bold and fast decisions to resolve Turkey’s many pressing problems, but furthering the repression of civil society and free speech and engaging in politicking to distract attention from real matters of policy. In this respect, Erdog˘ an’s positive remarks about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or his confession that he betrayed Istanbul (by treating the ancient city as a massive land development project to generate economic rents) can be considered as attempts to mend fences with those sectors of society he disqualified and dismissed from the legitimate sphere of politics. These did not involve any reconsideration and revision of the policy outlook, for that would damage the charisma and cult of his leadership. This is perhaps the curse of Erdog˘ an’s populist anti-establishment stance. Hence, Erdog˘ an’s attempts to renew the AKP focused on replacing the branch managers and even the mayors of key cities such as Istanbul and Ankara. While strengthening his discipline and control over the party, such steps show that even the elected authorities are treated as ‘party personnel’, a status that might alienate the electorate from the AKP.

Conclusion: the 2018 elections for the executive presidency The narrow margin of referendum victory also compelled the AKP to a very strong cooperation, verging on a coalition, with the MHP. This not only invalidated the AKP’s claim that the presidential system will bring an end to unstable coalition governments, but also limited Erdog˘ an’s capacity for ‘bold and fast’ decision-making, which was portrayed as a virtue of the presidential system, to the nationalist parameters set by the MHP. Enjoying the comfort of being disproportionately influential, and to avoid further defections to the newly established splinter Iyi, or Good, Party (IyiP), the MHP leader Bahçeli declared, as early as the very beginning of 2018, Erdog˘ an as their candidate in the next presidential elections 111

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scheduled for November 2019. Then, in mid-April, Bahçeli called for early elections by stating that ‘under current conditions Turkey cannot afford waiting until 2019’. Despite continuously rejecting the possibility of early elections, Erdog˘ an almost immediately acceded to Bahçeli’s call and, to catch the opposition unprepared, he made sure that the earliest possible date, 24 June 2018, was set as the election day. Early elections provided Erdog˘ an with an opportunity to assume the now constitutionally executive presidency he designed for himself and thereby overcome the legitimacy deficits of exercising de facto executive powers. As his exclusive focus and craft in seizing the opportunities for concentrating and monopolising power prevented him from putting forward a democratic and economic reform programme, thus a positive government performance, early elections also helped Erdog˘ an to avoid the inevitably negative impact of time on his chances of winning. Following the referendum, Erdog˘ an’s preparations for an early election entailed changing the rules and conditions of the game to the disadvantage of the opposition. The Election Law was amended to increase government involvement in the actual election process. Accordingly, government-appointed Ministers of Interior, Justice and Transport no longer had to resign from their posts to achieve impartiality during the election process and the ballot-box committees, responsible for administering the casting and tallying of ballots, were to be headed by government-appointed civil servants as opposed to one of the present political party representatives. Another amendment, introduced upon the request of the MHP, whose declining popularity indicated a very possible fall below the 10% threshold and thus further defections to the splinter IyiP, enabled political parties to form electoral alliances to get represented in the parliament even if they individually failed to pass the 10% threshold. Meanwhile, the top judiciary was rendered completely loyal through a series of new appointments, and the risk of a possibly independent mainstream media outlet was eliminated through the takeover of the largest media group by a crony businessman. All these took place under a continuously extended emergency rule and continuously expanded sphere of securitisation policies. Consequently, in the run up to the 24 June elections the playing field was rendered extremely uneven and unfair. Still, the AKP/Erdog˘ an could not craft an image of invincibility. The narrow margin of loss in the referendum, as well as the worsening economic conditions, resulted in a sense of self-confidence and optimism on the part of the opposition. The opposition showed some vitality in saving the fate of the IyiP from the hands of the Higher Election Board, which determines the eligibility of the political parties to compete in elections, by way of helping it to form a parliamentary group to automatically qualify for the elections. The opposition has also formed an electoral alliance for parliamentary elections to escape the risks of running individually against the 10% threshold. The opposition alliance consisted of four parties, each of which nominated their own candidate for presidential elections and promised cooperation in the second round. If the lack of a common political platform was one weakness of the opposition alliance, the other was its inability to challenge the AKP–MHP alliance’s nationalist paradigm, which disqualified and criminalised the pro-Kurdish socialist HDP. Consequently, the HDP was excluded from the opposition alliance. These weaknesses aside, the relatively energised opposition mobilised for participation in the elections and monitoring of the actual vote casting and tallying process. An illustration of the electorate’s continuing trust in the democratic processes, despite all the decay in them, this mobilisation eventually came to provide the AKP with a ground to claim the democratic legitimacy of the elections. At the outset of the campaign process, many of Erdog˘ an’s promises actually highlighted his numerous failures in the previous 16 years of his rule. In reality, Erdog˘ an’s campaign amounted to the claim that there was no alternative to the AKP anyway (when it came to 112

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delivering goods and solving problems). Judging by the election results, 52.5% for Erdog˘ an, who was duly elected the first executive president of the new system, and 53.6% for the AKP–MHP alliance in parliament, this claim resonated with a significant portion of the electorate. It seemed Erdog˘ an’s Minister of Energy and son-in-law was right in claiming that the electorate would believe Erdog˘ an even if he claimed that they were building highways from here to space. This electorate-cum-believers of Erdog˘ an are perhaps the real source and achievement of Erdog˘ an’s charisma. But, this has been an achievement that relied heavily on a policy of maintaining and deepening societal polarisation to foreclose the possibilities of hearing voices from the other side, repressing the civil liberties severely to inhibit free public debate and transparency, eroding democratic process and institutions to suppress rights claims, and monopolising almost all media outlets to prevent exposure to other sources of information and opinion than the AKP’s propaganda machine. In this respect, it could safely be suggested that the issues related to democracy and freedoms did not really resonate with the vast number of ‘the believers’. This perhaps is the real misfortune of the country in that it allows, and probably takes pride in, the perpetuation of a degenerative rule.

References AK Parti. 2017. ‘AK Parti 2023 Siyasi Vizyonu [AK Party 2023 Political Vision].’https://www.akparti.org. tr/english/akparti/2023-political-vision. Accessed 25 October. Akyol, Taha. 2015. ‘“Yeni” AKP [“New” AKP].’ Hürriyet, September 14. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ya zarlar/taha-akyol/yeni-akp-30066058 Aslan-Akman, Canan and Pınar Akçalı. 2017. ‘Changing the System Through Instrumentalizing Weak Political Institutions: The Quest for Presidential System in Turkey in Historical and Comparative Perspective.’ Turkish Studies 18(4): . 577–600. Birgün. 2017. ‘Binali Yıldırım: Itaat Et, Rahat Et [Binali Yıldırım: Obey and Find Comfort].’ January 9. https://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/binali-yildirim-itaat-et-rahat-et-142564.html Çınar, Menderes. 2018. ‘From Moderation to De-moderation: Democratic Backsliding of the AKP in Turkey.’ In The Politics of Islamism: Diverging Visions and Trajectories, edited by John L. Esposito, Lily Z. Rahim and Naser Ghobadzadeh, 127–157. . . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cizre, Ümit. 2014. AP-Ordu I lis ¸ kileri: Bir I kilemin Anatomisi [AP-Army Associations: Anatomy of a Duality]. . . Istanbul: Iletis¸im Yayınları. Cizre, Ümit and Menderes Çınar. 2003. ‘Turkey 2002: Kemalism, Islamism, and Politics in the Light of the February 28 Process.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 102(2/3): 309–332. Cizre-Sakallıog˘ lu, Ümit. 1996. ‘Liberalism, Democracy and the Turkish Center-Right: The Identity Crisis of the True Path Party.’ Middle Eastern Studies 32(2): 142–161. Gönenç, Levent. 2008. ‘Presidential Elements in Government: Turkey.’ European Constitutional Law Review 4: 488–523. Haber Türk. 2012. ‘Dört Partinin Uzlas¸ısıyla Çok Daha Güçlü Bir Anayasa Ortaya Çıkar [A Much Stronger Constitution Emerges with the Consensus of the Four Parties].’ 29 March. http://www. ha berturk.com/yazarlar/fatih-altayli-1001/728969–8-takim-birden-duserse-lig-bite Heper, Metin and Menderes Çınar. 1996. ‘Parliamentary Government with a Strong President: The Post1989 Turkish Experience.’ Political Science Quarterly 111(3): 483–503. Hürriyet. 2010. ‘Bas¸kanlık Sistemi Kafamda [Presidential System is in My Head].’ October 19. http:// www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/baskanlik-sistemi-kafamda-14461372 Koçak, Cemil. 2009. ‘Tek Parti Yönetimi, Kemalizm ve S¸eflik Sistemi. [Single-Party System, Kemalism, System of Leadership.]’ In Modern .Türkiye’de Siyasi. Düs¸ünce:. Kemalizm [Political Thought in Modern Turkey: Kemalism], edited by Ahmet Insel, 119–127. Istanbul: Iletis¸im Yayıncılık. Milliyet. 2012. ‘Cumhurbas¸kanı Vitrin Süsü Olmamalı [President Must Not Be Showcase Decor].’ June 8. http://www.milliyet.com.tr/erdogan-partili-cumhurbaskani-olmali-siyaset-1550454/ Oder, Bertil Emrah. 2005. ‘Türkiye’de Bas¸kanlık ve Yarı-Bas¸kanlık Rejimi Tartıs¸maları: 1991–2005 Yıları arasında Basına Yansıyan Öneri ve Tepkilerden Kesitler [Discussions on Presidency and Semi-

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The presidency in Turkish politics Presidency Regime in Turkey: Sections from Suggestions and Responses in the Media between 1991 and 2005] . ‘ In Bas¸kanlık Sistemi [Presidential System], edited by Teoman Ergül, 31–69. Ankara: Türkiye Barolar Birlig˘ i Yayınları. OSCE. 2017. Republic of Turkey Constitutional Referendum 16 April 2017: OSCE/ODIHR Limited Referendum Observation Mission Final Report. Accessed on 15 December 2017. http://www.osce.org/odihr/ elections/turkey/324816?download=true Özbudun, Ergun. 1988. ‘The Status of the President of the Republic under the Turkish Constitution of 1982: Presidentialism or Parliamentarism?’ In State, Democracy and the Military: Turkey in the 1980s, edited by Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin, 37–45. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Poguntke, Thomas, and Paul Webb. 2005. ‘The Presidentialization of Politics in Democratic Societies: A framework for Analysis.’ In Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies, edited by Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb, 1–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saraçog˘ lu, Cenk and Özhan Demirkol. 2015. ‘Nationalism and Foreign Policy Discourse in Turkey Under the AKP Rule: Geography, History and National Identity.’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42(3): 301–319. Tanör, Bülent. 1998. Osmanlı-Türk Anayasal Gelis¸meleri (1789–1980) [Ottoman-Turk Constitutional Develop. ments]. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları. Taraf. 2013. ‘Anti-demokratik Bir Uygulama Yaparsak Milletimiz Bizi Alas¸ag˘ ı Eder [If we make an antidemocratic implementation, our nation overthrow us].’4 June. Weyland, Kurt. 2001. ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.’ Comparative Politics 34(1): 1–22. White, Jenny. 2013. Muslim Nationalism and The New Turks. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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8 CIVIL–MILITARY RELATIONS Metin Heper

Introduction Until recent decades, the military, on the whole, played a special role both in the Ottoman and Republican polities. In circa 1299, a military force, at the time consisting of warlords, formed the Ottoman principality. Later, in the Empire, as in the Turkish Republic, the centre/state had a more elevated status vis-à-vis the community/civil society and, until recently, the military remained the backbone of that state. By the end of the nineteenth century, the military, along with the civil bureaucracy, became first the object and then the subject of modernisation. A large number of Westernising leaders came from the military ranks. In 1909, they helped depose Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) to bring about a more consultative regime and do away with the Sultan’s personal rule. During the next decade, the military involved itself in the day-to-day politics of the empire. The Ottoman staff officer, Adjutant-Major Atatürk1 disapprovingly depicted those later years as follows: ‘As long as members of the military remain in the [governing] Committee [of Union of Progress], neither shall we [be able to] set up an [effective political] party nor shall we [be able to] have a [subservient] military’ (Turfan 2000, 15).

Secondary role Following the transition from the Empire to the Republic (1923), Atatürk, now the President of the Republic, rendered the military subservient to the civil government. For a time, some generals, Atatürk’s close colleagues during the Turkish War of Independence (1919– 1922), retained their commands in the military while also serving in the National Assembly. Some among them did not support Atatürk’s wish to proclaim a republic and carry out some crucial reforms. Thereupon, Atatürk asked the pashas to make a choice between their commands and their seats in the Assembly. Many preferred their commands. However, to be on the safe side, Atatürk also saw that Law 385, enacted in 1924, stated that ‘a person is not permitted to be a Deputy and hold another post at the same time’. Later, Atatürk was to 1

In 1934, the Turks began to take secondary names, too. Atatürk was conferred the secondary name of ‘Atatürk’, by the Grand National Assembly.

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keep the military out of politics altogether. Article 148 of the Military Penal Code enacted in 1930, forbade military personnel to ‘assemble together for political objectives, join political parties, participate in political demonstrations, meetings, or elections, or in some other manner make statements with these objections in mind’ (Hale 2011, 195). Once officers ceased to pose a danger to the Republic, Atatürk perceived the military as the most reliable and effective guarantor of the new Republic. In 1931, he declared: the Turkish nation-state always perceived the officers … as the leaders of the movements to achieve lofty national ideals … When speaking of the army, I am speaking of the intelligentsia of the Turkish nation who are the true owners of this country. (Harris 1965, 56) Now the military had a leading role to play in the modernisation of the country. Thus, the military were partly turned into an instrument of education, nation-building, and social mobilisation. Young men, during their compulsory service in the army, began to learn reading and writing, discipline, cleanliness, a sense of time, improved methods for cultivating the land, and a feeling of responsibility for their countrymen. In later years, particularly in the relatively underdeveloped regions of the country, officers even prepared students for the entrance examinations of the institutions of higher learning. In the process, the military itself chose to act as the guardian of the Republic in general and that of laicism (separation of the state from religion) in particular.2 From the 1960s onwards, in their interventions in politics officers always made reference to the Article 35 of the Armed Forces Internal Service Law (1935, 1961): ‘The duty of the armed forces is to protect and defend the Turkish homeland and the Republic of Turkey, as determined in the Constitution’.

Activist posture In line with idealistic notions of democracy, and influenced by some French revolutionary thinkers, the military successfully intervened in politics five times, in 1960–1961, 1971–1973, 1980–1983, and 1997. More recently in 2016, a failed attempt was made. In the first five interventions, the military concluded that the government had drifted away from responsible governance and, consequently, the Westernising reforms the Republic had adopted faced grave threats. In 2016, a group of officers were tempted to bring to power a religiously oriented movement led by Fethullah Gülen.3 Having had an idealistic notion of democracy, the Turkish military took democracy as an end, not a means. They had been of the opinion that their version of democracy, namely rationalistic democracy, was indispensable for intelligent policy-making. When things ‘went wrong’ the guilty party was perceived to be politicians, not democracy itself.4 It was for this reason that the military in Turkey never toyed with the idea of staying in power indefinitely. After each intervention they returned to their barracks in a reasonable period of time and, more significantly, by their own volition. 2

3 4

In the literature, there is a tendency to use ‘laicism’ and ‘secularism’ interchangeably. I take ‘laicism’ as the separation of state from religion and ‘secularism’ as thinking and acting by not taking religion as one’s single guide. At the present writing, January 2018, the trials of the officers involved are continuing. See Heper (1992).

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Interventions 27 May 1960 intervention In 1950, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), which had been set up by Atatürk and his colleagues and had ruled the country from 1923 to 1950, lost the general elections and the Democratic Party (Demokratik Parti, DP) came to power. It was following this momentous political transition that officers, not trusting the country’s new set of politicians who had seemed close to religious groups, began to perceive themselves as the guardians of laicism. Indeed, the 1960 military intervention was undertaken because the military came to the conclusion that the DP governments had made undue concessions from laicism. The leading plotters of the coup comprised a few officers of the ranks from captain to colonel. Those officers had agreed on the intervention itself, but they had agreed about nothing else. This became apparent when, right after the intervention, all of the DP members of the Assembly were taken into custody but shortly afterwards some of those members were released, only to find themselves taken into custody once again before long. The second set of detentions came after a group of professors of law from Ankara and Istanbul Universities, summoned hastily to justify the intervention, reported that the coup had been carried out against a government that had lost all of its legitimacy (Ahmad 1977, 163). In order to legitimate their intervention further, the plotters brought a former general of the army to the head of their junta. However, they still did not enjoy the support of the rest of the military. That was because the junta had acted against the military’s most sacred norm – that of ‘hierarchy’. The plotters reciprocated by purging 90 per cent of the generals and close to 40 per cent of the colonels. Once it had solidified its position in the polity, the junta was divided on what to do next. A minority was, for the junta’s staying in power, long enough to make major reforms in the economy and politics. The majority did not agree, and successfully removed the minority from the junta. On the whole, the junta came to the conclusion that the reason for the ills of Turkish politics had been the fact that all powers were concentrated in one body, the Assembly. The 1960 junta set up a constituent assembly that prepared the 1961 Constitution. It created a Senate with powers to delay laws, a Constitutional Court to test the constitutionality of the laws, and proportional representation to assure the representation of the Atatürk’s principles. The Constitution also formed a National Security Committee (MGK). The latter comprised the president, prime minister, minister of defence, chief of the General Staff, army, navy, air force commanders, and the general commander of the gendarmerie. The MGK provided senior military commanders with an institutionalised channel to government and it was to provide ‘information’ to the government. The junta had all the DP members of the banned Assembly tried at court and given various prison sentences and, furthermore, it signed the commuted-for-age death sentence of former President Celal Bayar as well as the not-commuted death sentences of former Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, Minister of Foreign Affairs Fatih Rüs¸tü Zorlu, and Minister of Finance Hasan Polatkan.5 Those sentences were carried out. 5

On 22 February 1962 and 21 May 1963, too, Colonel Talat Aydemir and few other officers made coup attempts. Those were easily put down.

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12 March 1971 intervention The so-called 1971 ‘military intervention by communique’ was the end result of a deteriorating political situation due to continued armed conflict between leftist and rightist groups, to which weak and ineffective governments could not put an end. This second intervention started by the military penning a Memorandum to the effect that the country had been drawn into anarchy, fratricidal strife, and social and economic unrest and that a strong and credible government that would neutralise the current anarchical situation needed to be formed (Ahmad 1977, 205). The day the Memorandum became known, the government resigned. In contrast to the 1960 intervention, the 1971 coup was preceded by several meetings among a circle of top generals. Those meetings sought to develop a consensus within the military regarding the necessity and modality of intervention. Following the coup, the military increasingly chose to act alone. In their opinion, as far as the guardianship of the Republic was concerned, they did not have any allies among the political parties and the intelligentsia. Thus, they had to maintain their autonomy from civilian groups while maintaining their professionalism within the ranks. The National Security Council (MGK) could now present to the cabinet not only ‘information’ but, also make ‘recommendations’. The military hoped that through this legal and professional channel they would be able to keep recurring disturbances in society under control and prevent the strained relations between political parties from getting out of hand. The military also wished to see a cabinet of professionals, led by a technocratic prime minister, for effectively coping with the left-right terrorism. The Parliament readily passed a law along those lines. 12 September 1980 intervention In the late 1970s, the top brass once again came to the conclusion that the laicist state was under threat. In 1972, the religiously oriented National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP) formed a coalition government with the CHP. In 1975 and 1977, the MSP became a member of the so-called ‘Nationalist Front’ governments. Thereupon, the MSP’s impact on shaping educational and foreign policies was unacceptable to the military. This was exacerbated by the government’s failure to deal effectively with the long-ongoing Kurdish separatist agitation and violence in the south-east. Prior to the intervention in September 1980, the top echelons of the military took a long time to appraise the wisdom of yet another military intervention. When the coup was finally undertaken, the military did not want to ban the major political parties, but instead sought to cooperate with them to maintain national unity, public order, and the secular democratic order. However, when the political parties refused to cooperate, the military abolished them. The main aim of the generals was to reshape Turkey’s political dynamics by making a brand-new constitution as well as new election and political party laws. Thus, they wished to have a political system with effective governance while at the same time not restricting the electorate’s ability to express its opinions too freely. However, on the whole, the new political system turned out to be more authoritarian than the one enacted in 1961. The military was of the opinion that this time around the politicians were not to be left to their own devices. Consequently, the 1982 Constitution accorded the military establishment 118

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significant new powers. The new arrangements gave the president the authority to represent ‘the office of the commander-in-chief’ and the right to decide on the use of Turkey’s armed forces. S/he was accorded the prerogative to appoint the Chief of the General Staff on the proposal of the Council of Ministers and convene the MGK, as well as to proclaim martial law. Now, when the MGK submitted to the Council of Ministers its recommendations, that Council had to give priority to the recommendations that the MGK deemed necessary for the preservation of ‘the existence and independence of the state, the integrity and the indivisibility of the country, and the peace and security of the country’ (Heper and Güney 2000, 637). Not unlike the earlier interventions, this time, too, the military itself brought the intervention to an end. However, before the 1983 elections, after which the military returned to their barracks, in accordance with the new Constitution, General Kenan Evren, head of the 1980 coup and then Head of State, became the seventh president of Turkey. The military also kept the authority to play an effective role regarding candidates and political parties in the forthcoming 1983 elections. They did not want to take any chance of seeing a revanchist party come to power and challenge the handpicked candidates and the political party sponsored by the generals. Yet, in the elections, the Nationalist Democracy Party (Milliyetçi Demokrasi Partisi, MDP) openly favoured by Evren, ran a poor last, among the three political parties that had been allowed by the military. Instead, the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) led by Turgut Özal won. Initially Özal, as Prime Minister, shared with Evren responsibility only for law and order that ‘could not be handled without military participation’. However, as time passed, Özal took these powers into his own hands. The 28 February 1997 coup Seventeen years after the 1980 military intervention, the military intervened once more. This time the so-called ‘post-modern’ intervention comprised two phases, 28 February 1997 and 13 September 1997, showing that the years of the military intervention had not come to a definitive end. An escalation in April of the long-continuing Kurdish Worker’s Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) terrorist campaign once again led to concerns for national unity. Furthermore, both the military and the secular middle strata had begun to feel anxious about political Islam being a risk for Turkey. Yet, Tansu Çiller (chairperson of the centre-right secularist True Path Party (Dog˘ru Yol Partisi, DYP) formed a coalition government with Necmettin Erbakan’s religiously oriented Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP), overlooking the strong civil–military discordance at the time. Sure enough, the said tension ended up in the soft-coup on 28 February 1997 with the National Security Council issuing 18 measures against ‘the Islamic threat’ and, in the process, obliging the government to resign. The latter did so in June 1997.6

6

It should also be noted here that on 13 September 1997, Mesut Yılmaz, who had formed another coalition government when the Çiller–Erbakan coalition came to an end, asked the military twice to restrain its continuing ‘anti Islamist campaign’. First, the Secretary-General of the National Security Council, General Erol Özkasnak, responded to Yılmaz by saying, .‘from now on, do not intervene in our affairs’, and, secondly, the Chief of the General Staff, General Ismail Karadayı, indicated in a press statement that Islamism … would remain the primary concern of the military…’ (Narlı 2011).

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The 2007–2013 failed Ergenekon coup plot The ‘terrorist’ organisation Ergenekon, known as the ‘deep state’ since 1997, was alleged to be a clandestine secularist ultra-nationalist organisation, with ties to the military and security forces, that made plans to overthrow the government through illegal and violent means. The organisation was revealed in 2007 as a result of the detection of 27 hand grenades in a shanty house in the Ümraniye district of Istanbul, which were claimed to belong to a retired non-commissioned officer. The investigations were broadened in a way that implicated many public figures . including academics, deputies, journalists, lawyers, officers, and retired officers, including Ilker Bas¸bug˘ , Chief of General Staff. These people were indicted for provoking the public to revolt against the government of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). In 2013, the case was concluded, various punishments, including aggravated life imprisonment in the case of General Bas¸bug˘ , were handed out. However, the AKP government later declared that Ergenekon had been the handiwork of the Fethullah Gülen movement and everyone, including Bas¸bug˘ in March 2014, who had been handed various prison sentences, was acquitted.7 The 2016 failed coup Still another, but this time unsuccessful, coup was attempted on 15 July 2016. This failed coup differed significantly from the previous military interventions. The coup attempt was organised by the members of Fethullah Gülen’s terrorist organisation (Fetullahçı Terör Örgütü, FETÖ) and carried out by some middle-ranking officers (major to colonel) and a few generals, primarily against the President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, and secondarily against the AKP government. It was the worst terrorist attack against citizens (leaving behind 240 killed, 1,440 wounded, 104 coup forces killed) and entailed a disproportionate use of military power (the use of heavy armour, tanks, assault helicopters, and war planes) against public institutions, and extrajudicial execution attempts on elected civilian elites (Gürcan 2016). The attempt failed for two reasons: (1) the bulk of the upper command and other officers did not support it; (2) more significantly, while the rebel airplanes were flying above and bombing some strategic buildings such as Parliament, the President’s residence complex and the offices of Chief of the Staff, President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an called on the people directly and asked them to physically oppose the plotters! The latter did not hesitate in taking to the streets, facing rebels’ tanks, and preventing them from moving to their next targets. The failure of this coup attempt constituted a milestone in Turkish politics: whether they were aware of it or not, people themselves defended their laicist Republic and liberal democracy against a military coup basically organised by a religiously oriented movement. Following the failed coup, those military officers who were assumed to have taken part or actively supported the coup attempt were dismissed from the military. On 28 July 2016, under a state of emergency decree law, 1,684 ranking officers in total and 44 per cent of Land Force generals, 58 per cent of Naval Force admirals, and 42 per cent of Air Force generals were formally discharged (Gürcan and Gisclon 2016, 1). Initially, Gülen had given the impression that he was an adherent of pantheistic (mystic) Islam, that is having a moderate perspective on Islam, so much so that he was open to even ‘inter-faith and inter-civilizational dialogue’ (Sevindi 2008). After all, for some time Gülen had been considered to be an adherent of the Islamic practice Said Nursi (1876–1960) had advocated – shunning political ambition and focusing instead on a revival of personal faith 7

On Ergenekon, see (Aydınlı 2011; Bardakçı 2013).

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through study, self-reform, and service for others (Turner and Horkuc 2009). Consequently, for some time, there had developed smooth relations between the Gülen movement and the AKP government and even the military in general had not been seriously disturbed by the movement.8 However, at some point, Gülen’s communal mystic Islam seemed to be transformed into political Islam;9 and the movement successfully infiltrated the ranks of the military.10 In the process, some officers were persuaded to make a military intervention. In the week following the coup, several names on a government list of suspected members of the movement turned out to be none other than the names of officers circulated during the 15 July coup among the plotters. Later, several testimonies on the coup attempt have implicated the Gülenists, as well as Gülen himself, and brought into the open at least part of the mystery surrounding their secret network within Turkey (Gürcan and Gisclon 2016). As time passed by, more telling evidence kept coming out. For instance, on 16 December 2017, one of the two major Istanbul newspapers, Hürriyet, published the copy of a letter dated 19 April 2015, from Gülen to a judge of the criminal court of the first instance in Istanbul, in which Gülen asks the judge to let free two members of ‘their [FETÖ] organisation’. Civil–military relations and the military itself has not been adversely affected by the failed coup. The president and prime minister, on the one hand, and chief of the General Staff on the other, continue to have harmonious relations. In its turn, in early February 2018, the Turkish military started a major and effective cross-border operation against some terrorist groups in Syria.

Normalisation The military Despite the fact that successful or failed military interventions have a long history in Turkey, all along the military has not taken a stance against democracy. The very first communique issued on the morning of the 1980 coup stated: The aim of the operation is to safeguard the integrity of the country, to provide for the national unity and fraternity, to prevent the existence and the possibility of civil war and internecine struggle, to re-establish the existence and the authority of the state, and to eliminate the factors that hinder the smooth working of the democratic order. (Tachau and Heper 1983, 26) Following the coup, Evren and his co-intervenors perceived the founding a political party as necessary because of their concern that if the pre-intervention style of politics remerged, ‘Turkey could again drift into an authoritarian regime and it is possible that this time those who take power into their hands may not have faith in democracy’ (Evren 1990, 68).

8

It should be noted here that, on the whole, the military in Turkey seem to be religious at the level of the individual and/or communal Islam (piety), not at the level of political Islam (Islamism). 9 I take ‘political Islam’ here as Islam at the level of the government/state, not Islam at the level of community and/or individual. 10 One of the rebel officers was none other than the aide-de-camp of the then chief of the General Staff, . Ilker Bas¸bug˘ ,

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By the 2000s, three successive chiefs of the General Staff have agreed with Evren’s emphasis on the need for a democratic system of government in Turkey. General Hilmi Özkök (2002–2006) stated: [In Turkey], the duties and functions of the military have been designated by law and the Turkish Armed Forces are expected to conform to that legislation. Since those laws were enacted by the representatives of the people, the situation in Turkey does not deviate from the universally valid principle of “civilian control over military.” General Yas¸ar Büyükanıt (2006–2008) in turn remarked: ‘Nobody [including the military] is and may be against democratic values and the use of. democratic values [by the people or their representatives]’. Along the same lines, General Ilker Bas¸bug˘ remarked: ‘Democracy is the most important characteristic of the Republic. The Turkish Armed Forces has respect for democracy’ (Heper 2011, 242–244).11 One of the first things the 15 July 2016 coup plotters did was take hostage the then chief of the Staff, General Hulusi Akar, as well as several other top generals in the early hours of the coup. Holding General Akar at gunpoint, the plotters insisted that he read aloud the coup declaration on TV. Despite the threats to his life, Akar refused. Since then, Akar–government relations have taken a form not unlike the civil–military relations in advanced democracies. Presently, neither oversteps its area of responsibility. Akar himself later became Minister of Defence in 2018. Although since the early 1980s the top brass has come to have serious doubts about the wisdom of military interventions, might Turkey come face to face with another military intervention in the years to come? Compared to earlier times, the military once more taking power into its hands does not seem probable. This is because for a long time now the military in Turkey has been a professional organisation. It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as early as 1952. Among other things, Turkish officers attended various military schools in other NATO countries and participated in several military exercises. The officers have gone through a university level of education. Furthermore, in the navy, in 2017, 5.1 per cent of naval officers have Ph.D. degrees and 23.9 per cent Masters degrees (Gürcan 2015, 7). It is no wonder that the military in Turkey is considered highly effective and efficient and thus is viewed as the most prestigious and respectable institution in the country.12 For a long time, the military considered itself as the guardian of laicism. In a 2017 poll, 49.1 per cent of the officers thought laicism was not under threat, while 11.2 per cent did not respond to that question. On the other hand, in the same poll, 30.7 per cent of officers reported that during the holy month of Ramadan, they ‘partially’ fast, and 22.0 per cent indicated that they try to do so during the entire month of Ramadan (Müftüler-Baç 2005, 12–13). Under the circumstances the military would not be bothered by the fact that since 2002 Turkey has been governed by a religiously oriented political party. In any case, the party in question is led by politicians who are pious, not Islamic. While it is true that the 70.9 per cent of officers are not satisfied with the way democracy functions in Turkey (the same poll), the vast majority of officers (95 per cent) nevertheless think that democracy is the only legitimate system of government. 11 All three statements cited in Heper (2011). 12 See Müftüler-Baç (2005).

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During recent decades, while successive governments were clipping their wings in several ways in the hope that this would facilitate Turkey’s becoming a full member of the EU, the military brass did not oppose this because ‘doing so would have adversely affected their credibility and legitimacy in the polity’(Sarıgil 2017, 51). Finally, although it would have its impact only in the years to come, it is apt to indicate here that according to the above poll, the elitist view is decreasing among officers as the rank decreases, and the egalitarian view that society and the officer corps should be more equal is, in turn, increasing (Gürcan 2017, 51). It should also be noted here that the 2010 EU progress report with regard to Turkey becoming a full member mentioned positive developments in Turkish civil–military relations. Indeed, the Turkish military seems to have left behind the times of being frequently outspoken on issues it considered critical for the country. Retired General Halit Edip Bas¸er, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff, stated: Top generals within Turkish Armed Forces … had expressed their concerns … about the National Security Committee several times. Despite this, government pushed for reform. The military had two options: to comply with the reform or … do what is necessary [intervention]. The second option would damage the EU accession and the military would be blamed as an obstacle to further integration with the EU. The military felt itself obliged to choose the first option. (Gürcan 2017, 51) As noted earlier, for civil–military relations in Turkey, laicism has always been a critical issue. Taking this state of affairs into account, the AKP attempted to render laicism a non-issue. For this very purpose, from the very beginning, the party inserted into its party programme the following: Freedom of conscience is utmost importance … The state should not be able to impose its own dogma upon society. [Yet], religion is a common value system; nobody has a right to use it for partisan purposes and thus give rise to divisions in society and politics. (Heper 2006, 349) Since then, the AKP acted accordingly, trying to eradicate the possibility of using the pretext that laicism in Turkey is under threat as an excuse for another military intervention. For the same purpose, several reforms were made to enable civilians to exercise further supervision over the military. Those reforms included, among others, providing greater transparency in defence and policy-making, rendering parliamentary oversight over the military more effective, and bringing to an end the presence of military representatives in civilian institutions. More significantly, as part of these reform projects, the MGK, that earlier had been the main tool for shaping military policies, was, for all practical purposes, rendered functionless. The MGK became unable to play a role in the making of national security policy. It could no longer devise psychological operation plans and prepare plans concerning military mobilisation and war. Today, the MGK can undertake only those tasks that the Presidency has assigned it (Sarıgil 2017, 45–47). Also, from 28 July 2016 onwards, several rather significant reorganisations were decided upon in order to transfer the administration of some military-related institutions to civilian institutions. In this context, the Supreme Military Council was going to have deputy prime 123

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ministers and foreign, interior, and justice ministers as its members, while a number of military officers would be dismissed. The Land, Navy and Air Force commands were to be affiliated with the Defence Ministry and the Gendarmerie Command and Coast Guard Command were to be brought under the control of the Interior Ministry. Other such reforms with the same purpose included: (1) shutting down all the military schools and founding in their place a new National Defence University; (2) transferring the Ministry of Defence’s task of disciplining military judges in the military courts to civilian judges in civilian courts and soon doing away with the military justice system altogether; finally, (3) placing all military hospitals under the Ministry of Health, and bringing all shipyards, factories, and industrial establishments under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defence (Sarıgil 2017, 2–3).

Conclusion Republican Turkey inherited from the Ottoman Empire a community culturally divided into centre and periphery (Mardin 1974). That cultural division between the elite and the people continued in different ways and means until the 1980s. In the 1980s, Turgut Özal played an important role in bringing the people from the periphery to the centre, and during the first decade of the 2000s, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an helped those people to transform into an economic middle class, politically effective and laicist-pious (Heper 2013). Indeed, in recent years, the above-mentioned middle class has become the guardian of democracy as a reaction to the military frequently poking its nose into civilian issues (s¸atana 2011, 288). In a 2009 public opinion survey, 65 per cent of the respondents hoped that the military would no longer express its views on civilian matters (Sarıgil 2011, 176). For some time now, the military has, in fact, been withdrawing from the civilian sphere, albeit cautiously (S¸atana 2011, 288). One may suggest that, concerning their preferences on lifestyles and religion, the members of the middle classes also resemble respondents to a 2006 nationwide survey; 75.2 per cent of the latter stated that in leading a modern lifestyle the president of the republic should be a role-model for the people, while they were also of the opinion that the same president should be a practicing Muslim (Heper 2009, 416) There is a social-political propinquity between the members of this class and the members of the officer class. As noted above, more than 50 per cent of officers fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Indeed, the military in Turkey is defined as a ‘Prophet’s hearth’ (Narlı 2000, 118). It has been hinted that the increased propinquity between civilians and officers could facilitate the military’s adaptation to the changing social environment (Karaosmanog˘ lu 2011, 261). On the question of how the military can be rendered subordinate to civilians, Samuel P. Huntington has advised to keep the military away from civilians and render them professionals preoccupied with the military issues, while Morris Janowitz has placed emphasis on the internalisation by the military of civilian cultural norms and values (Huntington 1957; Janowitz 1971). In regard to the history of civil–military relations in Turkey, Gürcan and Gisclon (2016, 6–9) have arrived at a new paradigm: ‘Less Huntington, more Janowitz’. It makes sense.

References Ahmad, Feroz. 1977. The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 1950–1975. London: C. Hurst & Company. Aydınlı, Ersel. 2011. ‘Ergenekon, New Pacts, and the Decline of the Turkish “Inner State”.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 227–239.

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Civil–military relations Bardakçı, Mehmet. 2013. ‘Coup Plots and the Transformation of Civil-Military Relations in Turkey.’ Turkish Studies 14(3): 411–428. Evren, Kenan. 1990. Kenan Evren’in Anıları [The Memories of Kenan Evren]. Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları. Gürcan, Metin. 2016. ‘What Went Wrong with Turkey’s Whatsapp Coup.’ Al-Monitor, 19 July. Gürcan, Metin. 2017. ‘A Snapshot of the Blackbox: A 2015 Survey of the Turkish Officer Corps.’ Turkish Studies 19(1): 97–117. Gürcan, Metin, and Megan Gisclon. 2016. ‘What is Turkish Military’s Strategic Identity after July 15?’ Istanbul: Sabancı University-Stiftung Mercator Initiative. Hale, William. 2011. ‘The Turkish Republic and its Army, 1923–1960.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 191–201. Harris, George. 1965. ‘The Role of the Military in Turkish Politics.’ The Middle East Journal 19(1): 54–66. Heper, Metin. 1992. ‘Strong State as a Problem for the Consolidation of Democracy: Turkey and Germany Compared.’ Comparative Political Studies 25(2): 169–194. Heper, Metin. 2006. ‘A “Democratic-Conservative” Government by Pious People: The Justice and Development Party in Turkey.’ In The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought, edited by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi, 345–361. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Heper, Metin. 2009. ‘Does Secularism Face a Threat in Turkey?’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29(3): 413–422. Heper, Metin. 2011. ‘Civil-Military Relations in Turkey: Toward a Liberal Model.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 242–244. Heper, Metin. 2013. ‘Islam, Conservatism, and Democracy in Turkey: Comparing Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an.’ Insight in Turkey 15(2): 141–156. Heper, Metin and Aylin Güney. 2000. ‘The Military and the consolidation of Democracy: The Recent Turkish Experience.’ Armed Forces and Society 26(4): 635–657. Huntington, Samuel. 1957. The Soldiers and the State: The Theory and Politics of the Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Janowitz, Morris. 1971. The Professional Soldier. New York: The Free Press. Karaosmanog˘ lu, Ali. 2011. ‘Transformation of Turkey’s Civil-Military Relations, Culture, and Internatiomal Environment.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 253–264. Mardin, S¸erif. 1974. ‘Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics.’ Daedalus 102(1): 169–190. Müftüler-Baç, Meltem. 2005. ‘Turkey’s Political Reforms and the Impact of the EU.’ South European Society and Politics 10(1): 17–31. Narlı, Nilüfer. 2000. ‘Civil-Military Relations in Turkey.’ Turkish Studies 1(1): 107–127. Narlı, Nilüfer. 2011. ‘Concordance and Discordance in Turkish Civil-Military Relations, 1980–2002.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 215–225. Sarıgil, Zeki. 2011. ‘Civil-Military Relations Beyond Dichotomy: With Special Reference to Turkey.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 265–278. Sarıgil, Zeki. 2017. ‘Europeanization as Institutional Change: The Case of Turkey.’ Mediterranean Politics 12(1): 39–57. S¸atana, Nil. 2011. ‘Civil-Military Relations in Europe, the Middle East, and Turkey.’ Turkish Studies 12(2): 279–292. Sevindi, Nevval. 2008. Contemporary Islamic Conversations. M. Fethullah Gülen on Turkey, Islam, and the West. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tachau, Frank and Metin Heper. 1983. ‘The State, Politics, and the Military in Turkey.’ Comparative Politics 16(1): 17–33. Turfan, Naim. 2000. The Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military, and Ottoman Collapse. London and New York: I.B. Publishers. Turner, Colin and Hasan Horkuc. 2009. Said Nursi. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

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9 NGOS AND CIVIL SOCIETY Markus Ketola

Introduction Since the 1980s, civil society in Turkey has had many masters: the military junta in the early 1980s; the staunchly secular governments that followed; and finally the Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government since 2002. Throughout this time, highly influential external actors, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU), have further shaped Turkish civil society through policy agendas ranging from denationalisation and neoliberalism to Europeanisation and democratisation. Each approached the task of civil society development from a particular normative perspective as to what civil society ought to do, and the legacies of each can be seen in the lived experiences of Turkish civil society today. One commonality across all of these approaches has been a focus on the role of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). NGOs have risen to prominence over the last decades and, arguably, play the most important social and political role of all civil society actors in Turkey. Indeed, the exponential growth in the number of NGOs has led some to suggest that civil society in Turkey exists more in quantity than quality (S¸ims¸ek 2004; Kalaycıog˘ lu 2004), has been co-opted by a culture of completing short-term projects (Kuzmanovic 2012) and the increased opportunities for delivering contracted services, particularly in the field of welfare (Bug˘ ra 2014). In channelling funding and other resources to certain NGOs representing their normative vision of civil society, the internal and external actors have in effect supported the development of two parallel civil societies. In their contemporary incarnations, these two parallels roughly align with secular, rights-oriented, and externally funded NGOs on one side, and Islamic, service-oriented and government-funded NGOs on the other. Following a brief section on definitions of civil society and NGOs, this chapter sets off with a brief historical backdrop to the development of Turkish civil society. The sections that follow consider the more recent developments which are mapped around the ‘neo-Tocquevillean’ perspective that focuses on the role of NGOs in modernising and democratising Turkish society and politics by providing a counterpoint to the state, and the ‘Gramscian’ perspective that questions the neo-Tocquevillean assumption that sees NGOs as separate from the state. The final section looks at the road ahead and identifies three key issues to consider when thinking about future trajectories for civil society and NGOs in Turkey. 126

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Meanings of civil society There is little consistency in the way the concept of civil society is applied in the literature. Definitions draw upon different disciplinary influences such as anthropology, politics, sociology, and international relations, and also vary depending on the ‘level’ one has in mind (for example, community, national, international), leading often to competing understandings of what is meant by the term. Add to this the myriad acronyms for organisational types that populate civil society, and any conceptual clarity begins to quickly dissipate. Here, the term civil society is taken to mean the arena for collective action in a society which can be occupied by a wide-ranging mix of actors that includes individuals as well as both formal and informal groups. In other words, civil society refers to the space where citizens can come together around shared interests, concerns or values and take collective action (Ketola 2013). NGOs refer to a rather particular subset of professional organisations that are, for the most part, located within civil society. In the Turkish context, NGOs primarily consist of registered foundations (vakıf) and associations (dernek) that operate in the field of advocacy and service delivery. Currently in Turkey there are 112,363 registered associations (compared to 69,765 in 2004) (DDB 2018). Civil society organisations (CSOs), on the other hand, refer to a broader set of organisations that includes, for example, trade unions, churches, mosques, and mosque-building associations, as well as hometown associations (hems¸eri dernekleri). Whilst such differentiations may not always be fully accurate in how they map against actually existing organisations, it remains helpful to make these broad distinctions between organisational types. The focus in this chapter is largely on NGOs as actors within the civil society space, not least because of the significant changes that have happened in this area of civil society activism in the last 20 years.

The development of civil society and NGOs in Turkey The recent history of civil society offers a helpful compass for understanding the direction contemporary state–civil society relations have taken. While the history of civic traditions in Turkey is far older, stretching back into the Ottoman era where Ottoman foundations (vakıflar) played an important role in welfare delivery and poverty relief (Singer 2012), the focus here is on an overview of the more immediate history, particularly since the birth of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s. In the early years of the Republic, the logic of statecraft was largely focused on balancing the far-reaching secular reforms in the public sphere with continuing respect for Islamic traditions governing the private sphere. The uneasy synthesis that resulted in an awkward compromise, or paradox, between the two domains has been particularly significant for the development of civil society, as much of CSO activity is located precisely on top of these fault lines between public and private domains. This has meant that organisations are required to constantly negotiate these poorly defined boundaries between public/secular and the private/religious spheres (Kadıog˘ lu 1996; Yavuz 2003). As a result, civil society developed in a bifurcated manner, with a limited number of secular-nationalist organisations receiving explicit state support, while organisations expressing different motivations were actively discouraged (Seufert 2000). From the 1950s onwards, civil society became increasingly active in ongoing political and economic debates (Dodd 1992). The relative independence of civil society at this time (Sunar 2004) can be seen, for example, in the emergence of the first trade union confederations: 127

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. . Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türkiye I¸sçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, TÜRK-I.S¸) in 1952 and Confederation .of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (Türkiye Devrimci I¸sçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, DISK) in 1967 (Blind 2007). However, given the highly volatile political environment, it was the context of the three military coups d’état in 1960, 1971, and 1980 that framed the circumstances for most civil society activism at this time. It is therefore unsurprising that much of the visible civil society organisation was highly politicised in nature, or at least the most prominent groups tended to be heavily politicised. The 1980 military coup proved to be a significant milestone in the development of civil society in Turkey. A key objective for the military junta in the aftermath of the coup was to ensure civil society would no longer be able to play such an active political role as it has in the 1970s (Dodd 1992). Here the junta found an unlikely ally in moderate Islamic groups. A dual strategy of neutering the influence of Marxist and Fascist groups on the one hand and supporting a range of religious initiatives and groups as a counterbalance has been described as the policy of ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ (Kadıog˘ lu 1996).. This policy was evident, for example, in the establishment of religious vocational schools (Imam Hatip schools) and in the support offered to groups within civil society that took responsibility for managing such schools (Kubicek 1999). By the 1990s, new spaces within civil society were opening up that gave life not only to Islamic NGOs, but even more so to women’s organisations, youth organisations, and human rights organisations. Even Kurdish and gay activists were beginning to acquire operational space within civil society for their agendas (Göle 1994), although this space remained relatively limited. A common denominator across these groups concerned the adoption of the language and concepts of human rights as the bases of the socio-political claims being made. This was reflected in a notable expansion in the number of NGOs, that is, professional organisations registered as either dernek or vakıf during this time. The effects of the secular/Islamic paradox, the uneasy synthesis, and the highly politicised history of civil society activism have been insightfully described as the ‘contractions of a socio-cultural reflex’ (Seckinelgin 2004). This metaphorical reflex contracted in response to the secular system being threatened. Although one can observe the gradual opening up of civil societal space from the 1990s onwards, it would have been difficult to describe this as having a liberalising effect in the sense of opening up the debate to a plurality of voices (Göle 1994). Nationalism, and the deliberate fusing together of nation and the state has been one of the most effective delimiters of civil society activity, defining legitimate CSOs as those that support narrowly defined national interests (Seufert 2000). This is best illustrated through two snapshots of civil society activism that highlight these particular characteristics. 28 February process, 1997 The 28 February process, also dubbed as the ‘postmodern coup’, originated in the unprecedented electoral success of the Islamist Welfare Party in the December 1995 elections and the subsequent tug-of-war between the government and the military. In February 1996, the National Security Council (MGK) issued a statement, which, among several other recommendations, called for restrictions in religious activism and limiting the operational capacity . of Imam Hatip schools. The government refused to act upon these recommendations and was forced to resign. This process was underpinned by close interaction between the NSC and civil society. Trade unions, professional groups, and women’s NGOs all joined in what was coined as a ‘battle’ to save democracy and to protect the Turkish nation along with its Atatürkian heritage (Seufert 2000). What is more, the generals actively solicited this support. In 128

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other words, civil society actors were actively and consciously participating in processes that aimed to legitimise the authoritarian measures imposed by military. Spring 2007 demonstrations On Sunday, 13 May 2007, the third mass demonstration in six weeks was arranged, this time in the city of Izmir with 1.5 million participating. The series of demonstrations were being organised in protest against the AKP’s choice of Abdullah Gül as their nominee for the upcoming presidential election. With an overall majority in parliament, the AKP nominee was certain to win the parliamentary vote, which indeed happened, albeit only after a constitutional amendment that moved to a direct popular vote rather than parliamentary vote (see Aytaç, Carkog˘ lu, and Yıldırım 2017). The vociferous opposition stemmed from an objection to a person with an Islamist past being nominated for the post of president, a position whose incumbent has embodied the secular state since it was first occupied by Atatürk himself. As one commentator opined at the time: ‘[the] Turkish nation … will not give up pursuing the principles of Atatürk. Turkey is a whole and unity is its fundamental characteristic … the nation demands to claim secularism and democracy’ (Kilercioglu 2007). In other words, the demonstrators, the nation, secularism, democracy all blend together as one and the same. The extent to which civil society is representative of society more broadly is not problematised. This example illustrates the exclusivity of civil society, where only certain actors adhering to a particular ideological framework are recognised as part of the ‘official’ civil society. The secular and nationalistic bases for the state are being reproduced in civil society. In lieu of a military coup, other more legitimate and pluralist approaches were being appropriated for this purpose that involved civil society. Yet the examples demonstrate how certain dominant understandings of Turkishness determine what kinds of practices and arguments are tolerated within the civic space in Turkey.

A tale of two civil societies The debates and academic discussions in the Turkish context can be – albeit somewhat crudely – grouped around the two perspectives on the role and purpose of civil society and NGOs. However, structuring them as two separate sections is not intended to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, these two approaches provide a helpful conceptual framework for mapping the on-going contemporary debates and expose the most important fault lines that have developed in Turkish civil society over the past two decades. The European Union, democratisation, and NGOs The first of the perspectives is based on certain normative expectations as to what civil society and NGOs ought to be like. Drawing on the role of civil society in the democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America in particular, this approach sees NGOs largely as a countervailing force to an authoritarian state (Howell and Pearce 2001). This way of thinking about NGOs has been linked to the work of the French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville. His concern was particularly with the growth of despotism, which he saw as stemming from the waning interest of citizens in the running of local affairs. Associations, in de Tocqueville’s framework, present the necessary counterpoint to despotic government, bringing citizens

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together around shared interests and challenging government policy where necessary (de Tocqueville 1998). Interest in his work has been reignited by a number of neo-Tocquevillean scholars such as Robert Putnam, highlighting civil society as an organisational space that ‘inculcates democratic habits’ (Putnam et al. 1994, 90). The simple equation that emerges from this assumes that the level of civil society activism and the organisational density of civil society are important indicators of democratic development. The more NGOs there are, the more democratic a society is (Whitehead 1997). Formal organisations, NGOs in general, and rights-based organisations in particular, become the focal point in this way of thinking. This approach has been at the heart of EU civil society funding in Turkey. The EU has been by far the most significant external influence on the development of civil society in Turkey since the 1990s (Ketola 2013; Zihniog˘ lu 2013a), both as an external trigger (Tocci 2005) for key structural reforms, such as the redrafted Civil and Penal Codes (Ketola 2011) as well as an important source of resources. By insisting on the Copenhagen Criteria as a central pillar of Turkey’s EU pre-accession process, the EU helped to frame domestic democratisation debates and opened spaces for greater NGO involvement. Arguably, the most significant contribution of the EU to the development of civil society in Turkey has been the impact it has had on the development of rights-based advocacy NGOs. EU funding has been instrumental in supporting the work of NGOs focusing on women’s rights, youth rights, children’s rights, disability rights, consumer rights, and the rights of minorities, providing both resources as well as legitimacy for this kind of work, and professionalising their work in Turkey (Ketola 2013; Zihniog˘ lu 2013a). The presence of certain normative criteria about the role civil society ought to play is a consistent feature in the approach taken by EU in Turkey. At the beginning, the focus was firmly on strengthening NGOs as political actors exercising constructive and critical voice. Since 2005, following the start of the pre-accession negotiations, the focus of funding has been gradually realigned to match more closely with the new objectives around the facilitation of the policy harmonisation process that takes centre stage in the negotiations. This brought about a new funding initiative entitled ‘Civil Society Dialogue’ (CSD), the aim of which has been to facilitate the work undertaken within the various ‘chapters’ of the preaccession negotiations (European Commission 2011). So far, Turkish NGOs have received over 40 million euros from four different waves of funding under the CSD programme. The CSD programmes in particular exemplify how Turkish NGOs are visualised as neutral, nonpolitical actors that carry out projects based on pre-defined objectives. This has encouraged the growth of NGOs that are seen as professional outfits with niche expertise and capacity to deliver short-term projects based on scripts written by funders. Indeed, it is a rather small cadre of organisations with the capacity to deliver on the expectations of EU grants (Zihniog˘ lu 2013a, 2013b). This ‘deodorised’ civil society (White 1994) reshapes civil society and aligns its meaning with a world of projects where genuine (samimi) civil society activism becomes associated with funded projects (Kuzmanovic 2012). Around these kinds of funding practices one can see the development of neo-Tocquevillean narratives of NGOs as offering professional solutions and technical interventions to a range of policy problems, disconnected from the socio-political context in which they operate (Ketola 2013; Zihniog˘ lu 2013b). It also suggests that the world of NGOs represents a rather privileged and exclusive space where the democratic dialogue among multiple voices is limited to a relatively small number of elite actors inhabiting this space. Project-based funding has played a significant role in the recent development of civil society, and in the growth of the NGO sector in particular, but represents only one side of 130

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the coin. For example, women’s NGOs are often regarded as the most successful group of NGOs with significant influence on shaping government policy in Turkey. However, despite a veneer of consensual relationships around specific objectives, these groups often have highly complex and politicised relationships that map onto broader political and ideological struggles in Turkey around nationalism, religion, and identity (Ketola 2011; Doyle 2018). To better understand the politicisation of NGO activities we turn to an alternative conceptual framework explaining the dynamics of the state–civil society relationship. AKP, competing vision of a moral economy, and NGOs The work of Antonio Gramsci offers another useful entry point for articulating an alternative approach to understanding the way the state, civil society and NGOs interact in Turkey. As an Italian Marxist, Gramsci was particularly concerned with the failure of the Communist revolution in Italy, and came to explain this largely through the concept of hegemony. Rather than a democratic counterbalance to the state, civil society is better understood as being closely associated with the state (Gramsci 1995). Indeed, he suggested that to a large extent the state governs through civil society, by in effect employing the ‘organic intellectuals’ acting within the civil societal space to legitimate the state and enable it to rule, not by coercion, but by the production of consent in civil society (Gramsci 1995). Rather than being a neutral space for associationism and activism around shared interests, civil society becomes a highly politicised space and the location of hegemonic–counterhegemonic struggles over what constitutes legitimate ideas. The role of civil society is less to protect citizens from the state but rather to protect the state from its citizens (Ketola 2013; Tug˘ al 2016). Developments in the state–civil society relationship in Turkey can be well understood as a hegemonic struggle over state legitimacy in Turkey. The ‘traditional’ NGOs that were established in the 1980s or earlier, have been largely secular in outlook, which is also true for most the NGOs supported by EU funding. Some almost militantly so, of which the Association for Kemalist Thought (Atatürkçü Düs¸ünce Derneg˘i, ADD), the Association for the Support of Modern Life (Çag˘das¸ Yas¸amı Destekleme Derneg˘i, CYDD), and the Foundation for Kemalist Thought (Atatürkçü Düs¸ünce Vakfi, ADV) are but a few prominent examples (Erdog˘ an 2000). The role of civil society within the 28 February process and Seckinelgin’s metaphor of a socio-cultural reflex can be understood as Kemalist hegemonic responses against Islamic counterhegemonic threats. However, the neoliberal restructuring of the Turkish economy from the 1980s onwards prepared the ground for the rapid growth of faith-based NGOs from the mid-2000s onwards (Göçmen 2014; Kaya 2015). The gradual emergence of the AKP as a formidable political force accelerated this process, as did the neoliberal redesign of welfare services in Turkey, which has transferred much of the responsibility away from the state and onto a range of faith-based charitable organisations (Bug˘ ra and Candas 2011). The two mechanisms that came together to enable exponential growth in the number of faith-based CSOs, Göçmen (2014) suggests, were the social and economic networks that developed under the auspices of political Islam that created the resource base for this activity and the increasingly traditional welfare policies informed by conservative Islamic values. This ‘Gramscian perspective’ is particularly helpful in shedding light on the deeper dynamics of the state–civil society relationship. While the dominant neoliberal policy infrastructure perceives this relationship largely in neo-Tocquevillean terms informed by shared policy objectives based on free markets, choice, pluralism, and delegation of certain services to the NGO sector (Bug˘ ra 2012, 2014), in practice the outcome has been to support the 131

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growth of . Islamic faith-based NGOs as service providers (Kaya 2015). In similar fashion, Çelik and I¸seri (2016) identify a ‘high level of parallelism’ between the AKP and the policies adopted by Islamically oriented humanitarian NGOs working abroad, underlining the shared hegemonic practices between state and civil society. Indeed, many activists and NGO professionals in Turkey, at least anecdotally, now speak of (at least) two parallel civil societies. The first is the domain of secular rights-based and issue-based groups with financial support from the EU, with a more politics/advocacy-oriented organisational mission. The second consists of the faith-based groups upholding the values of family and community, focused on delivering certain welfare services. The latter of these groups has grown significantly in stature over the last ten years. These developments fit a Gramscian narrative of civil society as a struggle, where the competition takes place between competing interpretations of moral economy. What next: Gezi Park protests and their ‘legacy’ Further to above, the most significant contemporary developments of civil society relate to the growing authoritarianism of the AKP government and the influence this has on Turkish civil society. The events surrounding the 2013 protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park offer an insightful vantage point for assessing how the growing authoritarianism is shaping civil society. Much has been written about the causes of Gezi, with some seeing Gezi as a ‘symbol of repressed demands’, particularly around welfare, that ranged from housing to schooling, from democracy to social justice (Özen 2015, 534) or as a response to neoliberal authoritarianism (Keyder 2015; Yeg˘ enog˘ lu 2013). Others point to the ‘new decrees and moralizing discourses’ which aim to ‘reorganize public life to align with Islamic values’ (Göle 2013, 10). Though it began as a small, peaceful protest to protect a public park in Istanbul, the government’s heavy-handed suppression generated an unprecedented response from the public and the protests quickly gathered momentum. Burgeoning into a nationwide protest movement, an estimated 3.5 million citizens participated in almost 5,000 separate demonstrations. Four protestors and one policeman died and over 8,000 people were injured. The analysis of the Gezi park protests focuses on pointing out how the events were challenging existing modes of thinking about Turkish civil society through a Western social movement lens, or as a middle-class hobby. Intra-movement alliances also challenged the dichotomy of secular and Islamic civil society presented above (Gürcan and Peker 2015), as did the diverse reactions to the history of Taksim and Gezi as a site of heritage. These are characteristics that differentiate Gezi from earlier mass protests, such as those in 2007 (David and Toktamıs¸ 2015). The modes of organising were also a point of focus, as the occupation of a public space through highly pluralistic and egalitarian structures was completely unprecedented (Yörük and Yüksel 2014) as was the performative, improvised nature of the protests, focused on creative and humorous forms of protest to paralyse the government. The carnivalesque expression within the protests opened up new avenues for projecting a voice, and expressed a desire for ‘an expansion of democratic sensibilities’ (Yeg˘ enog˘ lu 2013). Although the experiences and outcomes were far more diverse and rich than can be summarised in one observation, it can be said that implicit in many of the immediate assessments was a suggestion that the protests demonstrated a degree of maturity about Turkish civil society and NGOs – that it had ‘come of age’. Perhaps more helpfully, Gürcan and Peker (2015) suggest that the protests at Gezi should be understood as having initiated a ‘critical juncture’ in Turkish society and politics that is 132

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likely to lead to new path dependencies.1 In other words, the protests were a watershed moment that will lead to long-term trajectories for key actors such as the government. The next section considers three such key trajectories.

Future trajectories: populism, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism Populism The populist tendencies of the AKP government have been much debated (Bozkurt 2013; Dinçs¸ahin 2012; Aytaç and Önis¸ 2014; Özden and Bekmen 2015). However, the implications for civil society and NGOs of the continuous dominance of populist politics has been less explored. Populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’ (Mudde 2004) draws on a simplified, usand-them separation between economic, political, and cultural elites and the ‘people’, and aims to create a direct ‘democratic’ link between the ‘people’ and the party, without middle men. ‘People’ in this context is understood as a simple majority (namely, anything over 50 per cent) and a culturally, socially, and politically homogenous entity. Populist political strategy hinges on crises that allow populists to ‘spectacularise failure’ of others and enact a public performance that propels a continuous sense of crisis (Moffitt 2015; Rooduijn 2014). From a civil society perspective, therefore, populism delegitimises and devalues the voice of certain NGOs, labelling them as the cultural and socio-economic elite, unrepresentative of the ‘people’. Whilst populist politics in and of itself is nothing new in the Turkish context, in its current form it presents a significant challenge to pluralist civil society representing a range of interests and identities. The claim that winning national elections gives the governing party a full mandate to determine policy is an argument frequently used by President Erdog˘ an to stifle discussion, debate, and criticism of government policy. Of particular relevance here is the propagation of policies and debates that set forth an agenda of conservative Islamic norms and values on issues ranging from alcohol to segregated dormitories, childbirth, divorce, and adultery. These are reinforced, for example, by the developments in family policy mentioned above. Neoliberalism Successfully negotiating a path within global neoliberal structures while adhering to populist Islamic norms and values accounts for much of the AKP’s success in recent years (Bozkurt 2013; Bug˘ ra 2012). The nature of Turkey’s neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics has been covered elsewhere, but what is of particular relevance to civil society is the consequences of the manner in which responsibility for government services is being incrementally handed over to NGOs. First of all, these services are delivered under specific contractual arrangements, which means that NGOs are required to deliver services in a highly particular way specified by the contract. The NGOs’ own mission and values become secondary to the contract obligations, with multiple consequences. Some begin to operate much like an arm of the state, fulfilling a predetermined role in delivering the service. This may take the form of copying the practices of the government agencies that they have come in to replace, known as ‘isomorphism’, or

1

Another such critical juncture was the failed military coup of 2016, which has in many ways concretised the impact of Gezi, as far as civil society and NGOs are concerned.

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they may become increasingly reticent in their critique of government due to fears of losing funding. In this way, the government finds its way into the capillaries of civil society. Secondly, one needs to consider who exactly is being contracted to deliver such services from among Turkey’s NGO sector. As has been previously alluded to, funding from the AKP government tends to be channelled to Islamic NGOs that share the same worldview. Ays¸e Bug˘ ra (2014) details the preferential treatment that has been given to Independent Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (MUSIAD) over Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (TUSIAD), engendering highly polarised business environment in the process. Neoliberal policies, the redistribution of welfare services to private actors, have also led to a massive redistribution of financial resources within civil society, creating something of an Islamic NGO powerhouse that now matches older, more mature secular counterparts in capacity and professionalism. Ultimately, as Bug˘ ra convincingly argues, we are witnessing the construction of new kinds of networks built on religion as the source of trust, the social glue binding civil society actors together. Authoritarianism Neither of the above themes should be interpreted in isolation from the growing authoritarianism and the consolidation of a presidential regime in Turkey, which is likely to hold the most significant impact on civil society and NGOs in Turkey. On the one hand it is possible to identify a long-term process of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (a system with democratic elections but with such degree of nepotistic appropriation of all resources by the incumbent party as to render opposition moot) (Esen and Gumuscu 2016). On the other hand, it is possible to identify two crucial pinch points that have nudged authoritarian tendencies to new levels. The first of this refers to the Gezi protests and the heightened efforts to undermine opponents of the regime that followed. The Gezi uprising brought about new fissures within the AKP power base, and marked the beginning of the end for the close relationship between AKP and the Gülen movement (Kaya 2015). Secondly, the authoritarian trajectory was reinforced by the failed July 2016 military coup, where a faction within the Turkish military associated with the Gülen movement attempted to overthrow the AKP government. Implicit forms of control over NGOs in Turkey had become commonplace during the AKP era, such as discriminatory use of audits to burden troublesome NGOs (Doyle 2017). Although a relatively benign intervention, this reinforces divisions within civil society as it leads to a loss of appetite among secular, liberal NGOs to seek funding from internal sources and supports the development of an Islamic, conservative civil society infrastructure to deliver welfare services. However, more recently these strategies have become more explicit in nature and taken a more sinister turn. Under the state of emergency following the failed coup, president Erdog˘ an has been able to pass laws without parliamentary scrutiny. So far, this has led to the closure of some 94 NGOs, while a further 370 CSOs have had their funding rescinded.2 At the same time, more than 250,000 people have lost their jobs and over 50,000 people have been arrested and jailed (Finn 2017). Academics and journalists are now routinely questioned over any critique of government policy in the southeast of the country, where Turkish security forces are using heavy-handed tactics to control the increasingly volatile situation. In the year 2015 alone, President Erdog˘ an filed 460 defamation lawsuits, up from a mere 38 in 2

See Yöney (2016); Aks¸am (2016).

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2011 (Esen and Gumuscu 2016). This simultaneous clamping down on public space and attacking independent media and academia creates an environment of fear, where these critical frameworks for independent civil society activism are being systematically dismantled.

Conclusion This chapter presented two contrasting views as to how one might perceive the role of civil society and NGOs in the Turkish context. Both are relevant to understanding particular aspects of the development of Turkish civil society: the neo-Tocquevillan frame illustrates the approach taken by external actors such as the EU in their engagement of civil society, while the Gramscian frame dovetails more closely with the approach of internal actors, such as the Turkish state. In the particular historical context of Turkey where civil society has been often appropriated to the service of the Kemalist state, the counterhegemonic challenge of the incumbent Islamically oriented government through CSOs is hardly unexpected. However, the AKP’s modus operandi is guided by neoliberal Islamic conservative values premised on a particular vision of a moral economy (Bug˘ ra 2012, 2014; Atasoy 2009), with significant implications for civil society and NGOs. This blend of Islamic conservatism and neoliberal policy is clearly illustrated in the area of family policy, where the responsibility for the delivery of services has transferred from the state to community-based structures for welfare provision. In practice this has translated to an extraordinary transfer of resources and responsibility onto the shoulders of Islamic NGOs (Göçmen 2014; Kaya 2015; Atalay 2017). This builds the capacity of the Islamic NGOs to serve, not only as vehicles delivering welfare, but as agents supporting a form of moral economy anchored in conservative forms of solidarity that rely heavily on the traditional family unit as the ultimate social safety net, based on patriarchal divisions of labour and gender hierarchies. Let’s juxtapose this for a moment with the parallel developments among another group of NGOs funded by external actors such as the EU. These NGOs have been funded in support of either rights-based causes linked to Turkey’s democratisation or EU accession-related causes based on the needs of the harmonisation process. The beneficiaries of the external funding have been, largely, secular NGOs representing a more liberal worldview. Although there are of course overlaps between the two groups, it is possible to see the development of Turkish civil society as being guided by the growth of two sets of NGOs representing what appear as irreconcilable worldviews. As a result, we are looking at the dual trajectories of two civil societies.

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10 THE MEDIA AND MEDIA POLICY Eylem Yanardag˘og˘lu

Introduction The media sector in Turkey boasts a diverse media environment with 14 national television channels, 172 national newspapers, 13 national radio channels, 61 per cent Internet penetration, and a dynamic online user community with 42 million users (Media Ownership Monitor Türkiye 2018). Despite its diversity and external pluralism, the influence of political parallelism, tutelage, and censorship on the media has been increasing over the last decade (Bayram 2010; Kaya and Çakmur 2010).1 The external pluralism of media diversified further in terms of thematic output and formats since the neo-liberal transformation of the 1980s. However, the concentration of ownership also increased along with .eight major media conglomerates (Dog˘ an,2 Dog˘ us¸, Demirören, Ciner, Albayrak, Kalyon, Ihlas Groups, and Ethem Sancak companies) which operate in sectors including construction, energy, mining, tourism,. telecommunications, banking, and finance. Some of them, such as the Albayrak, Kalyon, Ihlas, and Dog˘ us¸ Groups, have won major public tenders in the past few years, ranging from the third airport to metro construction and urban redevelopment projects on a neighbourhood scale (Media Ownership Monitor Türkiye 2018). The largest media outlets, owned by corporate holding companies that depend heavily on government procurement contracts, are vulnerable to government pressure (Freedom House 2015). The intricate relationship between politicians and media owners, which is based on favours and trade benefits, has impeded media freedom and editorial integrity in Turkey since the late 1980s (Tılıç 2001). In the last decade a pro-AKP partisan media owned by pro-AKP businessmen was warranted to act as a counter-power against established mainstream media groups. Until the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the increasing digitalisation of media had little impact, if any, on political parallelism seen in both print and broadcasting sectors (Tunç and Görgülü 2012). However, during the Gezi Park protests, wide-scale media censorship became apparent, which later had profound consequences for the mainstream media. In 1

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Kaya and Çakmur (2010, 522) explain political parallelism as the ‘degree and nature of the links between media and political parties or, more broadly the extent to which the media systems reflect major political cleavages in the society’. At time of writing, on the 22 March 2018, Demirören media group acquired Dog˘ an Media Holding.

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2014, Turkey’s press freedom record declined sharply and it dropped from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’ on the index of press freedom after 15 years. As pressure on mainstream and nonpartisan media increases, the tools of online journalism and the use of social media platforms have since begun to offer journalists alternative venues to reach out to readers.

Mass media in Turkey until 2000 The mass media in Turkey was seen as an agent of modernisation, with journalists as part of the modernising ‘bureaucratic elite’ since the 19th century (Zürcher 1998). When the Republic was established, radio was charged with the duty to defend and propagate the new regime. The Democratic Party (Demokratik Parti, DP) came to power in 1950 and popular mass journalism began in this period with the establishment of the Hürriyet and Milliyet newspapers. Military interventions have since shaped broadcasting policy and communication (Kejanlıog˘ lu 2004). The leaders of the DP were indicted for abusing radio for propaganda during their time in office. The government fell after the first military coup in 1960, and its leaders were executed. The Constitution of 1961 stipulated the organisation of radio and television stations as ‘autonomous’ public institutions. A new law for Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) (No. 359) came into effect on 1 May 1964 and founded TRT as a public service broadcaster. The so-called ‘TRT era’ has often been critiqued for being paternalistic, culturally elitist, and unable to connect with audiences’ needs (Mutlu 1999). After the second military intervention on 12 March 1971, the autonomy of TRT was repealed, replacing the notion of public service with a notion of ‘state broadcasting’. The third military coup of 12 September 1980 put limits on all forms of political and cultural expression and held print and broadcasting media under tight control. The military government that stayed in power until the 1983 elections designated what could be printed and transmitted via the media, proscribing taboo subjects including the Kurds, non-Muslim minorities and left-wing political ideologies. The use of Kurdish in broadcasting was also banned (Kejanlıog˘ lu 2001; Tılıç 2001). When Turgut Özal’s Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) came to power in 1983, it embarked on implementing economic liberalisation policies that had serious consequences for media structure in Turkey (Ahmad 2003). Print media outlets until then were mainly family enterprises. However, media ownership began to change hands due to economic pressures. New business elites, with investments in finance, tourism, construction, banking, steel, or the automotive industry acquired major print outlets in late 1980s. Economic liberalisation did not necessarily bring political liberalisation. From 1980 until 1990 there were more than 2,000 court cases against the press, in which 3,000 journalists were tried. There were 850 bans on publications. In the 1990s, Turkey had one of the worst records on media freedom due to the assassination and imprisonment of journalists from marginal left-wing groups and the oppositional Kurdish press, as well as of social democratic and Kemalist journalists (Tılıç 2001). An ‘open’ discussion of the problem and the use of taboo words such as ‘Kurds’ were still problematic because journalists and politicians faced the possible threat of being ‘stigmatised’ as separatists (Somer 2005). The press thus had to shift its focus and style of reporting from politics towards entertainment, culture, and lifestyle. Weekly magazines broadened their thematic output, covering issues that related to women, youth, and the environment. Islamic-leaning newspapers such as Zaman also emerged in this period (Ug˘ ur 2002). The state monopoly on broadcasting was broken on 1 March 1990 when the Magic Box company, which belonged to Rumeli Holdings (Uzan Group), began its transmissions from Germany to Turkey. For three years an illegal and chaotic situation ensued, with 250 local and national TV channels and 1,250 radio stations (Kejanlıog˘ lu 2004). Law No. 3984, 139

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‘Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and their Broadcasts’, was enacted in April 1993 and lifted TRT’s broadcasting monopoly. It allowed for the foundation of commercial radio and television channels and established the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) as the regulator for commercial TV and radio outlets (Çaplı 2005). The new commercial television stations were iconoclasts. They introduced new types of programmes, news and current affairs programmes, and live studio debates, which were absent from TRT screens. They challenged the taboos and official dogmas regarding national and cultural identity by offering visibility to figures such as Kurdish politicians and Islamic clerics who were previously excluded from the symbolic space of national television (Aksoy and Robins 1997; S¸ahin and Aksoy 1993). Between 1991 and 2002 there were several short-lived coalition governments as well as increased corruption and nepotism in politics (Akser and Baybars-Hawks 2012). During this period, media conglomerates established intricate ties with the world of politics. Media owners acquired some sort of ‘autonomy’ and an ability to use the power of their media outlets to intervene in important political decisions (Kaya and Çakmur 2010). In 1997, a short-lived coalition between the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) and True Path Party (Dog˘ru Yol Partisi, DYP) ended when the National Security Council declared political Islam to be more dangerous than Kurdish nationalism (Ahmad 2003). The so-called 28 February process was dubbed a ‘post-modern coup’ and was considered to be the result of secular resistance both from military and civic circles backed by the mainstream media, which supported the ‘discourse of secularism’ against the perceived threat of political Islam on their middle-class lifestyles (Özcan 2000, 56). Critics believed a catalyst for ending the legitimacy crisis and democratising issues around Islamist and Kurdish opposition in this period was to be found in Turkey’s ongoing bid for European Union membership (Kaya and Çakmur 2010). The EU Summit in Helsinki (1999) marked Turkey’s commitment to EU integration and ushered-in a reform period. As part of the accession process, Turkey had to comply with the Copenhagen political criteria and deliver short- and medium-term reforms that included strengthening freedom of expression and allowing the use of Turkish citizens’ mother tongue in TV/radio broadcasts (ABGS 2001). Between 2000 and 2006 a number of key reforms were introduced within a total of eight EU harmonisation packages that involved changes in existing legislation and the enactment of 89 new laws. The first obstacle to allowing ‘Kurdish broadcasting’ was in Article 28, which read ‘Publications shall not be made in any language prohibited by law’. This was deleted from the text of the Constitution (ABGS 2001, 5). The constitutional amendments were accepted by the parliament on 3 October 2001 as a part of the first harmonisation package. The third reform package in August 2002 lifted the ban on the use of non-Turkish mother tongues and it included amendments to Law No. 3984 in order to allow Turkish citizens to make broadcasts in the languages used in daily life (Yanardag˘ og˘ lu 2013).

European integration reforms and the AKP’s first term in power (2002–2007) The first directive on Kurdish broadcasting came into effect on 18 December 2002. It stipulated that the broadcasts in ‘different languages and dialects used traditionally by Turkish citizens in daily life’ would only be aired on TRT with programmes that included news, music, and cultural broadcasts for adults. TV broadcasts could not exceed 30 minutes per day and 2 hours in total in any given week. TV broadcasts also had to include subtitles, and radio 140

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programmes should be followed by an exact translation. The first directive was entangled in bureaucratic problems between TRT and RTÜK, which were caught up in a legal battle over their authority. As part of the sixth reform package in June 2003, a second directive was introduced allowing both public and private channels to make broadcasts in traditionally used languages. Authorities planned these broadcasts to begin on Monday 7 June on Radio 1 and on TRT-3 entitled ‘Our Cultural Richness’ respectively in Bosnian, Arabic, Kırmançi, Circassian, and the Zaza dialect of Kurdish (Hürriyet 2004).3 The most controversial mediumterm reforms were completed before the crucial EU summit in December 2004 where the EU Council decided that Turkey sufficiently fulfilled the political criteria and recommended the opening of accession negotiations in 2005. Internet regulation also began towards the end of the first term of the AKP government. The law, entitled ‘Regulating Materials Published on the Internet and Measures against Crimes Committed through Online Publications’ (Law No. 5651) also colloquially known as ‘the Internet law’, came into effect on the 4 May 2007. Prior to the enactment of the law in 2006, news about child pornography flooded the mainstream media, compelling calls for a ‘clean Internet’ by the government. The regulatory body for the telecom sector, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), was given the task of solving the problem. Prior to the enactment of new legislation, a division of the BTK, called the Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication (TIB), was established with a mandate of performing legal telephone tapping, which later evolved into observing and monitoring the internet and prevent harmful online content (Akgül and Kırlıdog˘ 2015). From May 2007 until December 2009, approximately 3,700 websites were blocked by authorities, including YouTube and many Google services (Article 19 2010).4

The second AKP government (2007–2011) and the consolidation of political tutelage on the media sector Despite securing a majority in the parliament with 47 per cent of the votes to win its second term after the early elections of 22 July in 2007, the AKP had not yet completed its political consolidation vis-à-vis the secular establishment. The rift between the AKP and state institutions heightened after new legislation controversially allowed the headscarf to be worn in educational institutions. The principal prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals appealed to the Constitutional Court to shut down the AKP on the grounds that it was a ‘centre for anti-secular activities’ (BBC 2008). The Constitutional Court did not ban the AKP but it did levy a heavy fine for anti-secular activity. Critics believed it was this decision that triggered the then Prime Minister Mr. Erdog˘ an’s anti-media stance (Bilefsky and Arsu 2012). Erdog˘ an subsequently encouraged certain businessmen sympathetic to the AKP to pool their resources and create media groups that backed the government. In the so-called postmodern coup of 1997, the mainstream media was criticised for being statist and remaining 3 4

A Kurdish language television station (TRT 6/TRT S¸es¸) was launched in late 2008, followed by an Arabic TV station run by TRT in 2010. During the AKP’s second term in government, a number of journalists were arrested via allegations made through the so-called on-going Balyoz and Ergenekon clandestine network trials. The evidence for arrests was gathered through phone tapping and internet surveillance technologies (Akser and Baybars-Hawks 2012). The case lasted for nine years and in 2013, officers, journalists, lawyers, generals, and academics were found guilty of being members of the said network and plotting to overthrow the AKP government. However, in 2016, an appeal court overturned the conviction of 275 people because the existence of such a network was unproven (BBC 2016).

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under the influence of the military. The creation of the Albayrak and Çalık media groups, which are close to the AKP, as countervailing media powers against the Dog˘ an and Ciner groups, was considered a continuation of the historically existing ‘old game of political parallelisms and tutelage’ in the politics–mass media relationship (Kaya and Çakmur 2010). The relationship between Erdog˘ an and the Dog˘ an media group, which was supportive of AKP policies in its first term, also deteriorated in 2007, especially in the wake of the presidential election. Just before this election Erdog˘ an challenged media organisations that did not support AKP policies and called on the public ‘not to read’ such newspapers. From 2007 onwards, the momentum of Europeanisation began to decline and the EU’s impact on the betterment of the legal framework was lost. For instance, despite a number of amendments during Europeanisation reforms, Article 301 of the Penal code, which addresses the offences committed in ‘insulting Turkishness’, was widely used to prosecute journalists and writers.5 Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, had also been used to block certain platforms on the Internet, most notably in the banning of YouTube for more than two years between 2008 and 2010 (Tunç and Görgülü 2012). YouTube was banned on grounds that it included videos insulting Atatürk and praising the Kurdish rebel group, PKK (Bianet 2009).

The third term of the AKP government (2011–2015) There has been a consistent downward curve in human rights and press freedom records in Turkey following the second term of the AKP government. After securing a third term in power on 12 June 2011, Erdog˘ an dropped all lawsuits against journalists who criticised him during the elections (Gazeteciler 2011). However, ‘periodic’ meetings with media owners and editors about how to cover the news agenda continued. A common theme in reports on media freedom in Turkey over the last three to four years point out that restrictions on freedoms do not come through existing laws, but rather through their implementation. In addition to judicial suppression, conglomerate pressure, surveillance, and limiting accreditation to journalists continues (Media Barometer 2014). The internet also emerged as a new area of limitation and censorship, where older frames of regulation turned into ‘control’ during 2007–2011, which intensified after the Gezi Park protests (Yes¸il, Sözeri, and Khazraee 2017). The protests that began at the end of May 2013 . in Istanbul proved to be a litmus test for the media. The news of police intervention on peaceful protestors on the 31 May spread on social media when the mainstream media ‘failed’ . to report in the first couple of days of the events (Inceog˘ lu 2013). The public watched the mainstream . news channels broadcasting documentaries about wildlife or history as events erupted in Istanbul and elsewhere. In search of information, most citizens quickly turned to online sites, alternative media, and social media platforms as they did in other previous events such as the Van earthquake and the Roboski/Uludere attacks, which were not covered in the mainstream media until editors received approval from the government. The blockage on mainstream media in this period encouraged the establishment of citizen journalism initiatives such as ‘140 journos’, taking its name from the number of characters that could be used in a single tweet at the time (Tüfekçi 2014, 11). 5

. Chief editor of the newspaper Armenian Agos, Hrant Dink, was shot dead in Istanbul in January 2007 in broad daylight in front of his newspaper offices by a 17-year-old teenager, apparently because he insulted ‘Turkishness’ in one of his essays in the newspaper (Economist 2007).

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Mostly as a reaction to media mainstream news censorship, protestors with mobile internet connections, smart phones, laptops, tablets, and 3G modems similarly created their own alternative media starting on the third day of the protests. In addition to journalists, citizen journalists and activists with large number of followers on social media mediated communication from inside the park with people outside the occupied space (Yanardag˘ og˘ lu 2017). The use of Twitter for alternative news provision and distribution by digitally literate citizens was exceptional (Tunç 2014). Limitations on media in all forms intensified after the Gezi protests. During the Gezi protests (between May and July 2013), 22 journalists were fired, 14 were forced to take a leave of absence, and 37 were forced to resign (T24 2013). By the time of Gezi’s first anniversary, reports noted that journalists were under increasing pressure from senior editors or media owners to apply self-censorship so as to avoid direct government interference in their affairs. Practices such as online intimidation on social media, indicating a journalist as a target, or asking editors to ‘take down’ news or asking editors to ‘fire’ journalists, were also observed (Media Barometer 2014). In 2014 the number of media workers who were laid off reached 319 (Akgül 2014). Polarisation in the media sector grew as media organisations that are considered to be ‘Kurdish’, ‘leftist’ or Gülenist lost their accreditation for AKP or state institutions’ press meetings (Önderog˘ lu 2015). The previously existing good relationship between the AKP and the Gülen movement ended during this period and a fight against the so called ‘parallel state’ began (Arslan 2014). Media outlets such as Zaman were raided and journalists detained in 2014 as part of an ongoing crackdown on supporters of exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen movement (Freedom House 2015). At the end of 2013, voice recordings of AKP politicians were leaked on the internet, revealing one of the largest corruption scandals. YouTube and other social media websites were blocked or throttled a few times during the events. The alleged corruption scandal also marked the beginning of the AKP implementing further measures to control possible threats coming from digital communication. In February 2014, amendments to the Internet Law No. 5651 were introduced. . The power of the TIB was expanded to include the ability to block websites without prior court approval. The new law also made it possible to block access to content based on URL, so indi6 vidual posts online could also be blocked. The law allowed websites that carried offensive . material to be taken down by the TIB if they were posted domestically (Freedom House, 2014). A newly formed Association for Access Providers was put in place to centrally enforce blocking orders. Access to both Twitter and YouTube were blocked prior to local elections held on 30 March 2014. The online restrictions introduced since 2014 not only comprised issues of national security as in the previous eras; they also included curbing the distribution of news that pertained to foreign policy issues, scandals or corruption, as well as new levels of control mechanisms such as surveillance and hacking (Yes¸il, Sözeri, and Khazraee 2017, 8–12). The years 2015 and 2016 were very turbulent in terms of politics as well as the daily lives of citizens. Beginning with a bomb attack on 20 July 2015 in Suruç, the country was shaken with eight consecutive major terrorist attacks and a failed coup attempt between July 2015 and 31 December 2016.7 During this 18-month period, restrictions and temporary bans on broadcast media coverage were implemented. There were also various bans on social media, 6 7

Although a court order was expected within 48 hours for a block to remain in place. After the 20 July 2015 Suruç bomb attack came the 10 October Ankara.bomb attack, 12 January 2016 . Istanbul . bomb attack, 13 March 2016 Ankara attack, 19 March 2016 Istanbul bomb . attack, 28 June 2016 Istanbul airport attack, 15 July 2016 coup attempt, and 31 December 2016 Istanbul night club bomb attack. .

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URL blockages, and throttling social media platforms, with the coup attempt being an exception. Other high-profile events in 2016 included raiding the office of Zaman, a daily newspaper that had been supportive of Gülen movement and operated as a pro-AKP media outlet until the tapes of the corruption scandal were leaked. Cumhuriyet’s editor, Can Dündar, was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for revealing state secrets. In the first half of 2016, Twitter received almost 2,500 requests from the Turkish authorities to remove content, by far the largest in the world. In June 2016 a new law enabled the government to suspend or block internet access in the case of war or national emergency (Freedom House 2015, 2016). In contrast with the bomb attacks in . various parts of Turkey, the internet connection during the failed coup was not cut. In Istanbul, when a group of soldiers attempted to take over the private CNNTurk TV station, this event was broadcast live to millions of viewers (Katırcı 2016). On that night, President Erdog˘ an addressed the nation on the CNNTurk editor’s IPhone, which she held against the camera with a microphone. Ironically, a licensee of CNN, CNNTurk at the time belonged to Dog˘ an Media Group on which Erdog˘ an had exerted drastic economic pressures via levying heavy tax fines since 2007 for being critical of AKP policies. The use of Facetime was labelled by CNNTurk as a ‘world-wide journalistic achievement’ and a ‘call of democracy’. In the aftermath of the failed coup, an emergency rule (OHAL) was declared on 20 July 2016, initially for three months but which remained in place until 19 July 2018. There was a severe crackdown on the media after the coup attempt. As Reporters Without Borders (2016) noted, Decree Order 668, issued on 27 July, ordered the shutting down of 45 newspapers, 16 TV channels, 23 radio stations, three news agencies, and 15 magazines (plus 29 publishing houses) on suspicion of ‘collaborating’ with the Gülen movement. The purge was not limited to pro-Gülen media outlets. On 29 September, another emergency rule ordered the closing down of 20 pro-Kurdish, leftist, and oppositional TV and radio channels, and banned access to their websites. Based on the three decree orders, within six months of the failed coup, a total of 178 media companies were shut down and the more than 700 journalists had their credentials revoked (Reporters Without Borders 2016).

Post-coup media environment In the post-coup milieu, the AKP’s control over internet governance grew tighter (Yes¸il, Sözeri, and Khazraee 2017). The Presidency TIB, which had the mandate of performing legal telephone tapping as well as internet monitoring, was shut down. However, a decree law was passed giving the BTK the power to take over any private digital telecommunications company in order to protect national security and public order. Another decree law gave the police’s cybercrime department the warrant to ‘intercept’ internet traffic and obtain personal information. Internet throttling to restrict certain content continued. In the postcoup environment, the first regional internet shut down was employed for ten cities in September 2016 in the South-eastern cities in an attempt to prevent civil unrest. Furthermore, prosecutions of individual social media users for committing crimes such as ‘animosity and agitation’ or ‘praising terrorism’ and so on, have escalated. In the first six months after the coup attempt, more than a thousand users were arrested and questioned (Yes¸il, Sözeri, and Khazraee 2017, 12–17). Despite increasing bans, blockages, and persecution, internet and new media technologies continue to offer alternative platforms and create new opportunities for journalists when mainstream media fails to deliver uncensored news. Online news sites such as T24, Diken, 144

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and Bianet have been attracting internet traffic through quality and long-form journalism. The site T24, one of the pioneers of independent online journalism operated on budgets as small as 25,000USD, which is the equivalent of a typical salary paid to prominent columnists or TV commentators on mainstream media (Gazeteciler 2013). Some of these online news sites are crowdfunded, while some of them rely on donations and support from businessmen or foreign grants. Turkey has one of the highest levels of social media use at 73 per cent in terms of news consumption. This is despite a general decline in traditional media readership. In order to reach out to the reading public, young enterprising citizen journalists, networks, and veteran journalists now utilise the opportunities offered by new platforms and new media tools. For instance, the experienced journalist Rus¸en Çakır has been broadcasting since August 2015 on Periscope on his Medyascope.tv, which became one of the prominent platforms for independent journalism. News verification platforms such as teyit.org also harnessed new media tools and emerged as new reference points for news in the highly polarised post-coup media setting.

Conclusion The media in modern Turkey always had an intricate relationship with politics since its inception. Turkey has a seemingly diverse media environment with more than a dozen national TV and radio channels, and more than 100 newspapers have emerged since the 1990s. The military interventions since the 1970s not only changed national politics, but they also shaped media policies. During the neo-liberal economic transformation that unfolded over the last three decades, mainstream media outlets transformed from family enterprises into conglomerate structures with international connections. However, the economic liberalisation in the media sector was not always reciprocated in being free of political bias and national political dynamics. Over the years, the major media conglomerates became vulnerable to government pressure through procurement of contracts. After the AKP came to power, the influence of a politics/economics nexus within the media sector widened and deepened. Starting from 2007 onwards, Turkish politics entered a new phase, where the republican secular political hegemony was replaced with the AKP’s ‘New’ Turkey, which reflected a new political consensus. In the last decade, the AKP consolidated its pro-Islamist single party rule and the momentum of Europeanisation significantly declined. Despite its claims for ‘democratisation’ and ‘normalisation’ of politics, suppressing critical views continued to be the unchanging objective of media regulation in Turkey. In trying to consolidate its political power, the AKP embarked on a campaign of creating a proAKP partisan media owned by pro-AKP businessmen to counter the established mainstream media groups which were seen to reflect the ‘old’ Turkey. Since the Gezi Park protests, online media seemed to become established as an alternative platform, despite wide-scale media censorship and political tutelage observed in the mainstream media. A number of independent online media ventures emerged in order to maintain pluralism and diversity in the media sector. However, despite these initiatives, since 2014, Turkey’s press freedom record has declined. In 2018, it was ranked 153rd out of 180 countries worldwide for press freedom. In light of the current developments, almost 90 per cent of media outlets are owned by pro-government businessmen. Only time will tell how election results may impact on the current state of media in Turkey, but one can only hope that

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the seeming diversity and external pluralism of media in Turkey can truly be achieved and dominance over the workings of the media can be discarded.

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The media and media policy Kejanlıog˘ lu, Beybin. 2001. ‘Turkish Broadcasting Policy in a Historical Context: Continuities and Dis. continuities in the 1990s.’ Kültür ve Iletis¸im [Culture and Communication] 4(2): 85–104. Kejanlıog ˘ lu, Beybin. 2004. Türkiye’de Medyanın Dönüs¸ümü [Transformation of Media in Turkey]. Ankara: . Imge. Media Barometer. 2014 A Home Grown Analysis of the Media Landscape in Turkey. Istanbul: Friedrich Ebert Stifung Turkey Office. Media Ownership Monitor Türkiye. 2018. ‘Dijital Medya [Digital Media].’ https://turkey.mom-rsf.org/ tr/medya/dijital-medya Mutlu, Erol. 1999. Televizyon ve Toplum [Television and Society]. Ankara: Türkiye Radyo Televizyon Kurumu. Önderog˘ lu, Erol. 2015. ‘Medyanın 3 Yılı: Grafik Özet[Three Years of Media: Graphic Summary].’ Bianet, 4 March. Accessed 1 December 2017. http://bianet.org/bianet/medya/162748-medya-kutupla stikca -haberde-otosansur-artiyor Özcan, Ahmet. 2000. ‘28 S¸ubat: Çözülüs¸ün Restorasyonu [28 February the Restoration of Disintegration].’ Birikim 131: 55–59. Reporters Without Borders. 2016. ‘RSF Urges Turkey to Rescind Draconian State of emergency Decrees.’ Accessed 28 September 2016. https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-urges-turkey-rescind-draconian-sta te-emergency-decrees S¸ahin, Haluk, and Asu Aksoy. 1993. ‘Global Media and Cultural Identity in Turkey.’ Journal of Communication 43(2): 31–41. Somer, Murat. 2005. ‘Resurgence and Remaking of Identity: Civil Beliefs, Domestic and Internal Dynamics, and the Turkish Mainstream Discourse on Kurds.’ Comparative Political Studies 38(6): 591–622. T24. 2013. ‘Gezi direnis¸inde kaç gazeteci kovuldu?[How Many Journalists Fired During the Gezi Park Resistance?].’ T24, 22 July. Accessed 8 February 2018. http://t24.com.tr/haber/gezi-direnisinde-kac-ga zeteci-kovuldu,234872 The Economist. 2007. ‘Turkish Nationalism: Waving Atatürk’s Flag.’ https://www.economist.com/europ e/2007/03/08/waving-ataturks-flag Tılıç, Dog˘ an. 2001. 2000'ler .Türkiye’sinde Gazetecilik ve Medyayı Anlamak [Understanding the Media and Journalism Turkey in 2000s]. Istanbul: Su Yayınları. Tüfekçi, Zeynep. 2014. ‘Social Movements and Governments in the Digital Age: Evaluating a Complex Lanscape.’ Journal of International Affairs 68(1): 1–19. Tunç, Aslı. 2014. ‘Can Pomegranates Replace Penguins? Social Media and the Rise of Citizen Journalism in Turkey.’ Accessed 12 January 2015. Freedom House Special Report: The Struggle for Turkey’s Internet, 13– 16. https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/struggle-turkeys-internet Tunç, Aslı, and Vehbi Görgülü. 2012. Mapping Digital Media: Turkey. Edited by Marius Dragomir, and . Mark Thompson, 1–81. Istanbul: Open Society.Foundation. Ug˘ ur, Aydın. 2002. Kültür Kıtası Atlası: Kültür, Iletis¸im, Demokrasi [Atlas of Culture Continent: Culture, . Communication, Democracy]. Istanbul:Yapı Kredi Yayınları. Yanardag˘ og˘ lu, Eylem. 2013. ‘Elusive Citizenship: Media, Minorities and Freedom of Communication in . Turkey in the last Decade.’ Iletis¸im 19: 87–104. Yanardag˘ og˘ lu, Eylem. 2017. ‘Citizenship, Media and Activism in Turkey during Gezi Park protests.’ Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 8(3): 133–150. Yes¸il, Bilge, Efe Kerem Sözeri, and Emad Khazraee. 2017. ‘Turkey’s Internet Policy after the Coup Attempt.’ Accessed 3 March 2018. http://globalnetpolicy.org/research/turkeys-internet-policy-afterthe-coup-attempt-the-emergence-of-a-distributed-network-of-online-suppression-and-surveillance/ Zürcher, Erik. 1998. Turkey: a Modern History. London: IB Tauris.

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PART III

The economy, environment, and development

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11 POLITICAL ECONOMY Ali Burak Güven

Introduction Turkish political economy is complex, but hardly exceptional. A middle-income country (MIC) unable to consolidate its fragile democracy for the past 70 years, Turkey has been shaped by much the same dynamics and constraints as its peers in the semi-periphery of global capitalism. Four continuously interacting forces have determined its evolutionary fortunes. First, different socio-political, cross-class coalitions have underpinned distinct economic policy regimes in different periods, with formative implications for distributive politics. Second, external market and policy forces have produced powerful constraints upon economic policy. These range from shifts in international prices to patterns of market integration, the preferences of foreign investors, the rules of the global economy, and direct policy constraints stemming from intergovernmental creditors. Third, the institutional context has proved crucial. Amongst the main items to list are the broad features of the political system such as democratic quality and bureaucratic capacity as well as arrangements governing specific sectors and policy domains. Fourth, economic performance, in particular frequent economic crises and downturns, have led to revisions in policy regimes and underlying coalitions, reconfigured international constraints, and inspired initiatives for institutional reform. Each of these four forces (policy regimes, external constraints, institutions, and crises) will figure abundantly in this chapter. The point is straightforward: despite occasional bouts of high performance, Turkey is yet to find a sustainable way of overcoming its deep-seated developmental challenges. In fact, over the past decade it has been travelling in the opposite direction, and is today ever more deeply ensnared in a middle-income trap coupled with growing macroeconomic instability that also complicates its escape from looming authoritarianism. The following section provides an overview of the trajectory of Turkey’s political economy from independence to the turn of the century. Next it analyses the post-2002 period under successive AKP governments, which was initially characterised by a reformist phase with promising outcomes but later degenerated into a combination of patronage politics, electoral populism, and low institutional quality typical in the global South. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of Turkey’s possible futures as an emerging power in a rapidly transforming global economy.

151

Political economy

From state-led development to reluctant neoliberalism Political economists have often considered Turkey an important case to study various dimensions of capitalist development in the semi-periphery (Trimberger 1978; Waterbury 1993; Waldner 1999). The absence of a potentially hindering colonial legacy, the consolidated power of modernising political elites, a relatively capacious public bureaucracy built on a long state tradition, and amicable relations with leading Western nations made the country a good candidate for successful development. Turkey did not wholly fulfil this potential, though it managed to build a respectable economic base by the end of the century. Turkish economic policy until the 1980s relied on a mixed-economy model that afforded the state a central role. The state not only fostered private capitalist development via trade protectionism and various subsidies, but it directly participated in economic life through large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in most sectors (banking, mining, agriculture, heavy industry from steel to chemicals, and even basic consumer goods). It is noteworthy that, on closer inspection, Turkey’s state-led developmentalism did not constitute a monolithic path but comprised three different policy phases (Önis¸ and S¸enses 2007). The etatism of the interwar period introduced central planning and large-scale public industrial investment. This was followed, in the 1950s, by a relatively liberal interlude during which successive Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) governments aimed to integrate Turkey into the world economy principally via agricultural exports. By contrast, the 1960s and 1970s saw a decisive return to planning and a concerted effort towards import substituting industrialisation (ISI). The period 1962–1976 marked the golden age of ISI, during which annual GDP growth averaged 6 per cent and living standards improved noticeably, especially in urban centres. State-led development had wide-ranging distributional, institutional, and international correlates. The transition to multiparty politics in 1946 rendered distributive politics an integral part of economic policymaking, as manifested in the DP’s successful effort in the early 1950s to bring together large landowners, small farmers, and a fledgling private sector on a broadly market-oriented platform. The classic phase of ISI (1960s and 1970s) required a more complex coalitional setting and balanced a wider range of collective interests, including the metropolitan industrial bourgeoisie that received tariff protection and various subsidies, organised labour that enjoyed rapidly rising wages, and a growing urban, secular middle class that formed the backbone of an expanding bureaucracy (Keyder 1987). Meanwhile rural producers, in particular the electorally significant peasantry, were compensated for via an agricultural subsidy regime put in the service of populist redistribution. Also noteworthy during this period was the rapid growth of Marmara-based large conglomerates in the form of family holdings, with considerable dependence on and connections with bureaucratic policymakers in Ankara. State-business relations increasingly mattered (Bug˘ ra 1994). Such a mixed economy entailed a stupendous state machinery, as exemplified in the large number of SOEs, and the complex web of state and parastate organisations mandated with allocating agricultural subsidies. Equally important were the emergence of an elite economic bureaucracy with some pockets of expertise, efficiency, and autonomy (mainly within the State Planning Organisation, the Central Bank, and the Ministry of Finance), and the steady construction of modern public services, from higher education to an expansive social security system by developing country standards. Internationally, meanwhile, Turkey’s interventionist model mirrored the accepted postwar Keynesian wisdom, and its policy path evolved in a context of close relations with international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF and the World Bank. By the 1970s Turkey was the archetypal semi-peripheral economy, having built some manufacturing capacity in consumer goods, but characterised by only moderate 152

Political economy

integration with the international economy, exporting mainly primary commodities, importing a bit more in capital goods (for example, machinery) and intermediate goods (for example, oil), and thereby often running modest current account deficits leading to chronic foreign exchange shortages. The collapse of inward-oriented, state-directed developmentalism was therefore conditioned as much by this external imbalance, further amplified during the oil price hikes and international turmoil of the 1970s, as by the inherent contradictions of the model (Barkey 1990). In turn the crisis of 1978–79 provided the catalyst for a radical change in policy. With the broad ISI coalition no longer sustainable and sovereign debt soaring, technocratic policymakers turned to the IMF and the World Bank, which had already begun to promote orthodox neoliberal ideas of policy reform via stringent policy conditionality in their clients. Turkey’s early phase of market transition, from 1980 roughly until 1987, rested on a straightforward template of fiscal stabilisation, deregulation, and trade as well as domestic financial liberalisation under successive IMF stabilisation and World Bank structural adjustment programmes. The principal policy aims during this phase, led after 1983 by Prime Minister Turgut Özal and his Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) governments, were to balance public finances, eliminate excessive subsidies and price distortions, foster private investment, and gradually steer the economy towards an outward-looking, export-oriented model, while avoiding politically difficult reform items such as privatisation. The result was relative macroeconomic stability and reasonably fast growth rates, although the transformative impact of these measures on the structure of the Turkish economy was debatable (Arıcanlı and Rodrik 1990). Crucially, the transition to a market-oriented policy regime took place in the semi-authoritarian political context that followed the 1980 coup, and was thus largely unburdened by the need to rely on a broad coalition of attendant collective interests. The revival of competitive politics by 1987 augmented the electoral salience of the distributive grievances of social segments left behind by the early phase of market reform (virtually all interests, bar big business). At the same time, capital account liberalisation in 1989 led to rapid integration with international financial markets, ushering in a flexible context for managing fiscal deficits. The combination of the two proved lethal as a succession of weak coalition governments throughout the 1990s relied on external capital flows through an under-regulated banking system to address intense redistributive demands from below with old-style populist side payments – generous agricultural subsidies and noticeably improved wages and salaries. In a context of poor macroeconomic management, this cycle led to a series of interconnected ailments, including high inflation, deteriorating public finances, a highly fragile financial system, and sluggish industrial development, together producing boom-and-bust cycles of foreign capital-dependent growth (Cizre-Sakallıog˘ lu and Yeldan 2000). The 1994 shock had already illustrated the perils of combining premature financial internationalisation with fiscal mismanagement and regulatory forbearance. Failed reform efforts in the rest of the decade and an ill-designed IMF programme in 1999 only accelerated Turkey’s downward spiral, culminating in a dual fiscal and banking crisis in 2001 with farreaching political-economic consequences (Akyüz and Boratav 2003; Önis¸ and Rubin 2003). Although Turkey’s first brush with ‘neoliberal globalism’ ended in crisis, in hindsight, neither was this record out of step with the experience of other large MICs, given the string of financial meltdowns from Argentina and Brazil to Russia and East Asia, nor did Turkey’s market reforms prove socially as devastating as the ‘lost decades’ of orthodox neoliberalism in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and most countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Note also that, at around 4 per cent per year, Turkish GDP growth in the retrospectively muchdemonised 1990s was not far behind its historical average and was even faster than in the 153

Political economy

decade immediately prior to our examination (2007–2016). Seen this way, Turkey’s most critical problem was its failure to adapt its economic governance and institutions to the exigencies of a liberalising policy regime and the emergent external constraints of global integration. This adaptive task would fall on the post-crisis policymakers and require a new round of intense engagement with the IFIs.

The political economy of the AKP era How did Turkish political economy evolve under AKP rule and what are its contemporary characteristics? These questions are addressed in the three sub-sections below, by first looking at the party’s reformist inaugural term in office (2002–2007), then examining the troublesome past decade, and finally by reflecting on some enduring structural challenges. The AKP’s first term: a reformist half-decade under dual external anchors By the time the AKP rose to power in late 2002, Turkey had already been implementing a comprehensive IMF and World Bank-designed recovery programme. Led by Kemal Dervis¸, a former World Bank vice-president called to duty by the preceding coalition government, the scope of this programme went well beyond the usual monetary and fiscal stabilisation measures, and included sweeping institutional reforms in domains ranging from banking regulation and debt management to fiscal transparency and anti-corruption. As such, Turkey’s post-crisis reforms reflected the post-Washington Consensus in mainstream development wisdom at the time, which complemented the market-orientation of the neoliberal paradigm with a wider reform agenda that focused on good governance, sound regulatory institutions, and social sustainability (Önis¸ and S¸enses 2005; Rodrik 2006). Two main characteristics of this period placed structural constraints upon policy despite the AKP’s unchallenged parliamentary majority. First, the externally-led reform process empowered the economic bureaucracy, in particular the Treasury and the Central Bank, which were now able to exert greater autonomy from everyday political interference. The rapid proliferation of independent regulatory agencies, in particular the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency but also others in various sectors from energy to agriculture, should also be regarded in this light. Second, Turkey’s IFI-led reforms coincided with an optimistic phase in its EU accession talks. In the run-up to and in the immediate aftermath of the start of its full membership negotiations in 2006, various efforts at political but also sectoral harmonisation with the EU created a supplementary layer of constraint. The IMF and the EU thereby operated as double external anchors for economic policy throughout the AKP’s first term in office (Önis¸ and Bakır 2007). In hindsight, these distinct policy limitations were beneficial for the party to cobble together a broad political coalition. The AKP’s organic support relied on the small and mediumsized conservative Anatolian entrepreneurs. During the 2002 elections it had also managed to invoke the frustrations of the crises-stricken urban and rural poor. To add to this wide political base, its inescapable toeing of the IMF–EU line on critical matters (from monetary policy, debt management, and regulatory reforms to the democratisation process) during its initial years in office helped the party garner the provisional, though active, support of . Istanbul-based big business as well as the acquiescence of secular, urban middle classes. What was less visible during this period of uncharacteristic political calm and optimism, though, was the AKP’s selective implementation of the IFI-led reforms. While banking, fiscal, and monetary reforms proceeded ahead and a major privatisation drive continued apace, the party 154

Political economy

sought to either dilute or reverse reformist initiatives in policy domains that would likely undermine the interests of its organic constituency. Crucial among these were the changes to the age-old agricultural subsidy regime and the anti-corruption, and especially public procurement, reforms (Güven 2012). The macro outcomes of this broadly reformist period were promising, with GDP growth hitting record levels in 2004–2006 (Table 11.1). Meanwhile foreign direct investment soared, fiscal balance improved significantly, and consumer inflation fell to single digits for the first time since the 1970s. Yet this half decade should also be placed in its proper comparative and analytic context. The period in question marked a high point in the global economy, with record increases in trade and financial flows and an uncharacteristically cheap US dollar providing a boost to most economies. Note especially that Turkey’s average GDP growth of just under 7 per cent per annum in 2002–2007 was indeed a tad slower than that of low-income countries (LICs) and MICs as a group – in comparative terms Turkey was not a high performer. More crucially, Turkey’s apparent macroeconomic success harboured key weaknesses: growth was still driven by high trade and current account deficits and was therefore dependent on a steady flow of foreign capital, whereas the rate of unemployment remained high at above 10 per cent throughout the period. Global crisis and reform fatigue: stagnation under institutional degeneration The global economic crisis of 2008–2009 was a watershed in Turkish political economy in terms of both bringing about shifts in policy trajectories and exposing its structural weaknesses. Turkey was hit hard by the crisis, recording a steep GDP decline in 2009, yet its response diverged significantly from other large MICs in that it was quite delayed and piecemeal. On the one hand, despite a favourable fiscal position, the Turkish government adopted a very weak stimulus package and stuck instead with fiscal conservatism, relying on a hodgepodge of limited measures announced late into the crisis. On the other hand, after extensive negotiations it rejected a new standby agreement with the IMF, emphasising policy independence (Önis¸ and Güven 2011). Indeed it is this tendency to insist on homegrown solutions without a cohesive, let alone transformative, vision that has characterised Turkish economic policy over the past decade. Rapid recovery in 2010–2011 amidst continuing problems in the North provided further justification for staying on this unadventurous path. On closer inspection, the Turkish economy faced mounting structural challenges. The swift post-crisis recovery was made possible only with soaring current account deficits, meaning recovery relied on the country’s conventional growth model characterised by import-driven, foreign capital-dependent domestic consumption. This ‘overheating’ ended in 2012–2013, after which growth rates dipped below Turkey’s long-term average (Table 11.1). In the meantime, per capita income remained stable around the US $10,000 mark that had been reached just before the crisis, and no noticeable improvement was recorded in either inflation or unemployment. In short, the half-decade that followed the recovery from the global crisis was for all practical purposes a period of economic stagnation marked by policy paralysis and reform fatigue that failed to overcome the country’s long-standing foreigncapital dependence (Güven 2016). While ‘revised’ GDP figures from the Turkish Statistical Institute indicate a mini growth spurt in 2016–2017, in actuality, economic fundamentals have deteriorated sharply in recent years, given especially the growing foreign debt of the private sector. Crucially, in a context 155

303 4,587

5.3 69.3 47.3 –2.5

1.2 –8.8 63.5

70.8

48.9

18.4 10.5

232.5 3,571

6.2 51.5 36.1 -0.3

0.9 -11.4 70.9

64.5

43.1

45.0 10.3

2003

9.4 10.3

64.1

75.7

2.0 –5.4 57.8

9.4 97.5 63.2 –3.7

392.2 5,856

2004

7.7 10.6

84.9

70.4

8.9 –1.2 52.2

8.4 116.8 73.5 –4.6

483 7,117

2005

9.7 10.2

120.8

71.6

19.2 –0.6 46.4

6.9 139.6 85.5 –6.1

530.9 7,727

2006

8.4 10.3

160.7

73.5

19.9 –1.6 40.4

4.7 170.1 107.3 –5.8

647.2 9,310

2007

10.1 11.0

188.5

78.3

17.3 –1.8 41.2

0.7 202.0 132.0 –5.5

730.3

2008

6.5 14.0

172.3

83.5

6.4 11.9

191.4

89.1

7.6 –3.6 44.4

9.2 185.5 113.9 –6.2

–4.8 140.9 102.1 –1.97 7.0 –5.5 47.7

731.2 8,624

2010

614.5 10,382

2009

10.4 9.8

200.1

94.3

13.8 –1.3 41.2

8.8 240.8 134.9 –9.7

774.8 10,112

2011

6.2 9.2

228.5

104.0

9.5 –2.0 38.8

2.1 236.5 152.5 –6.1

788.9 10,584

2012

7.4 9.7

268.7

115.9

9.3 –1.2 38.8

4.2 251.7 151.8 –7.9

823.3 10,646

2013

8.2 9.9

282.3

117.7

5.8 –1.3 35.9

2.9 242.2 157.6 –5.8

799.5 10,975

2014

7.7 10.3

281.9

113.1

12.5 –2.0 27.5

6.1 207.2 143.8 –3.7

859.4 10,530

2015

7.8 10.9

307.9

119.8

9.7 –2.5 28.1

3.2 198.6 142.5 –3.8

863.4 10,915

2016

Sources: Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey; IMF; TURKSTAT; World Bank. Note that in late 2016 the Turkish Statistical Institute announced a major update of its national accounts methodology, which led to a significant and highly contested upward revision of GDP figures from 2009 onwards. GDP-related data in this table retains the old series for 2002–2014, using new series only for 2015 and 2016.

GDP (US$ billions) GDP per capita (US$) 10,817 GDP growth (%) Imports (US$ billions) Exports (US$ billions) Current account balance (%GDP) FDI (US$ billions) Fiscal balance (%GDP) Total public debt (% GDP) Public foreign debt (US$ billions) Private foreign debt (US$ billions) Consumer inflation (%) Unemployment (%)

2002

Table 11.1 Turkey: selected economic indicators (2002–2016)

Political economy

of decreasing global appetite for financial flows to emerging countries on the one hand, and international political tensions stemming largely from the AKP’s questionable domestic and foreign policy preferences, on the other, Turkey’s unresolved structural problems ushered in a sizeable economic jolt in 2018. At the time of this writing (September 2018), Turkey appears to be on the brink of a devastating crisis, which so far has already seen a dramatic decline in the value of the lira that only magnifies the country’s foreign obligations, skyrocketing consumer inflation that for the first time since 2003 topped 20 per cent, a steep rise in unemployment threatening the most vulnerable, and an accelerating wave of bankruptcies wreaking havoc amongst retail and manufacturing firms alike. However the present storm may unfold (and many economists expect sustained recession in 2018–2019), there is little doubt that Turkey’s current economic model is broken beyond repair. In the background of that model are two major shifts that have defined Turkish political economy over the past decade. The first is the dynamic social and coalitional basis of economic policy, resting on a complex set of cross-class relations. The second is acute institutional degeneration, with potentially adverse long-term consequences. In terms of harnessing the support of the popular classes, the AKP has long adopted a well-calibrated, pragmatist strategy that combines active welfare policies, improvements in public services, and targeted populist redistribution without putting fiscal-financial stability too much at risk. Scholars have variously depicted this hybrid path as ‘neoliberal populism’ (Bozkurt 2013) and ‘social neoliberalism’ (Dorlach 2015). This strategy has ensured the steady support of wide segments of the urban and rural poor that are often already drawn to the AKP’s brand of social conservatism, although it has also come at the expense of significant ‘flexibilisation’ in labour markets and consolidation of an oppressive, anti-trade union labour regime. For a while, neoliberal populism looked to have empowered the poor economically, but it also led to political disempowerment and systemic vulnerability in an increasingly financialised setting marked by soaring household indebtedness. The party’s connections with elite interests have proved less stable. The government’s weak response to the global crisis in 2008–2009 as well as its declining reformist appetite, diminished endorsement of the EU process, and weakened commitment to . democratic consolidation gradually eroded the conditional support it once received from Istanbul-based . big business organised under the Turkish Business and Industry Association (TÜSIAD). In turn, the party sought to systematically favour smaller, often conservative, capital factions loyal to its cause via growing circles of patronage and nepotism. Some observers argue that this selective nurturing of alternative economic elites is bound to create a ‘new capitalism’ that places culture and loyalty at the centre of state-business relations (Bug˘ ra and Savas¸kan 2014). The wider implications of that dynamic are briefly discussed in the next section. Second, rampant institutional degeneration has accompanied the excessive politicisation of state-business relations and erosion of democratic checks and balances. Signs of institutional weakening were already present as the government, especially after the conclusion of the IMF constraint in 2008, moved to openly undermine the autonomy of independent regulatory agencies (Özel 2012). The multiple overlapping political crises of the past few years augmented these institutional strains dramatically. Problems here are numerous. Until recently Turkey was not considered a particularly corrupt polity in developing country standards. But that perception changed rapidly over the past few years as exemplified not only in the 17–25 December 2013 crisis which the government to date portrays as a Gülenist plot to implicate ministers, but in the forced resignations in late 2017 of the AKP-affiliated . mayors of Ankara and Istanbul over undisclosed abuses of office as well. More common and problematic perhaps is the emphasis on open political loyalty, or at least full acquiescence, as 157

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the price of doing business with the government, from winning public tenders to the issuance of basic permits. Compounding this picture is the increasingly opaque state of public finances. The conventional Court of Accounts monitoring of public spending is now a largely dysfunctional process, whereas the country’s newly instituted sovereign fund (Turkey Wealth Fund), which now holds the assets of many large state institutions, lacks any meaningful transparency and is controlled directly by the presidential office. To most critics this state of affairs is tightly linked to Erdog˘ an’s efforts to centralise power in the presidency and shape the civil service, both in structure and personnel, accordingly. This was made easier under the post-coup emergency rule that witnessed the dismissal of tens of thousands of civil servants and a severe erosion of the rule of law as well as any semblance of judicial independence. The rubberstamping of Erdog˘ an’s unchecked powers at the June 2018 elections and the ongoing state reorganisation that brought his son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, to the helm of the economy have only accelerated this process. The result is a generalised decline in not just bureaucratic autonomy but also capacity, which political economists typically consider key to effective policymaking and implementation. Since the global crisis, Turkish political economy ironically evolved on a trajectory very similar to its much-maligned character in the 1990s: staccato growth, political turbulence, reform paralysis, and now intense macroeconomic instability. The obvious difference is that there is no discernible political urgency and will to substantive change, especially under democratic backsliding. Consequently, Turkey’s fundamental developmental and policy challenges remain unresolved and aggravated, although they are now manifested under new guises and subject to new dynamics, as discussed below. Foreign capital-dependence, sectoral pathways, and mass politics The key developmental constraint for Turkey is its foreign capital-dependent, private consumption-oriented growth pattern. The Turkish economy is capable of attaining fast growth rates only via dramatic increases in import-led domestic consumption that have the side effect of producing unsustainably high current account deficits financed via foreign funds. In turn, periods of external rebalancing often coincide with a decline in aggregate demand and thus are marked by growth decelerations, washing away the gains of episodic high growth. In the meantime, foreign indebtedness steadily mounts: Turkey’s gross foreign debt stock (public and private) quadrupled since 2002, not so much during the global crisis but rather during growth spells (see Table 11.1). For many decades, governments of variegated political stripes have failed to overcome this constraint, for addressing the problem is a formidable task, which in essence requires upgrading the production profile of the Turkish economy. In effect, this means focusing systematically on the manufacturing of higher value-added goods that lie at the technological frontier and impart a strategic advantage in international trade. Yet the share of high-technology manufactures in Turkish exports are consistently under 3–4 per cent, with the economy facing the threat of ‘premature deindustrialisation’ (Bakır, Özçelik, Özmen, and Tas¸ıran 2017). Smaller economies may have other routes to prosperity, but no large economy has managed to move into the high-income range without openly adopting such a strategy of selective, concerted industrial upgrading. The problem is that the reasonably clear requirements of such a path pose economic risks and, more importantly perhaps, are utterly unpalatable in the current political juncture. Selective high-tech industrial upgrading in the Turkish context would depend on tackling the sluggish pace of productivity growth, radically strengthening the R&D infrastructure, and reducing the import-dependence of the main exporting sectors. But attaining these goals 158

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would entail redirection of resources towards business and social segments that have fallen outside the AKP’s electoral coalition, that is, the metropolitan bourgeoisie with established advantages in productivity and in access to foreign markets, and urban-secular middle classes as potentially the main human capital behind such a drive. Most development economists would also cite stringent institutional requisites, such as an independent and efficient judiciary and a meritocratic, autonomous bureaucracy to oversee a dynamic policy regime free from everyday political interference. Yet the political dynamics that have kept the AKP in power since the global crisis indicate a different combination of societal and institutional preferences as already discussed. To round off this examination, two closely interlinked points need to be underlined – one about sectoral imbalances and the other mass politics. On the sectoral side, banking and construction have been the main winners of Turkey’s foreign capital-dependent, consumption-based growth path. The net effect of the post-2001 regulatory reforms has been to consolidate the banking sector and reorient major private banks towards traditional retail banking, that is, deposit taking and credit allocation. In particular, rapid growth of high-interest consumer credit in the system from 2004 onwards led to a significant increase in bank profitability. Likewise, construction proved to be a highly prized sector, and has been supported actively through both public tenders towards large infrastructure projects and new regulations facilitating house-building, as in the ‘urban transformation’ initiative. Along with mining, this focus on construction has also allowed successive AKP governments to selectively allocate resources to government-friendly capital factions (Gürakar 2016), some of which have later moved into mass media with the principal aim of trumpeting the party line and controlling the news flow. This is not to say Turkish manufacturing, including the Marmara-based captains of industry, has done badly under the AKP, for capacity kept growing steadily thanks to both an expanding domestic market and the unfettered access to the massive European market thanks to the EU customs union. Even then, it is what economists term ‘non-tradable sectors’ that have benefited disproportionately from the growth pattern outlined. Finance and construction also play significant roles for sustaining the AKP’s electoral appeal. The expansion of credit markets has had formative consequences. It transformed living standards and practices, positively by facilitating accelerated home ownership and providing flexibility in the use of disposable income, but over time by also creating excessive dependence for wage earners (Karaçimen 2014). Likewise, most firms have grown dependent on a continuous stream of bank credit for everyday operations. These perils prompted government activism, first in perennial efforts to rein-in personal indebtedness around 2014– 2015, but more distinctly in the 2017 Credit Guarantee Fund initiative, a scheme that accorded partial public guarantees for private firms’ liabilities to banks, which helped prevent a much-feared wave of bankruptcies, especially amongst SMEs. Likewise, construction is a politically critical sector for the AKP as it leads to improvements in public services via largescale transportation projects, ensures continuous renewal and expansion of the housing stock often to the benefit of middle and lower-middle classes, provides sustained demand for unskilled and semi-skilled manual labour, and finally has strong backward and forward linkages to various other manufacturing sectors, with significant positive spillover effects across the economy. If targeted side-payments via an expanded welfare regime have been the visible face of the AKP’s ‘controlled populism’ (Önis¸ 2012; Aytaç 2014), ever expanding credit markets and various construction-related activity constitute its chief sectoral engines. Construction and banking have also initially received preferential policy attention during the current crisis, although the former at the time of writing is at a standstill, whereas it is too early to gauge the extent to which policymakers can shield the banking system from the fallout of the crisis. 159

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These sectoral and social manifestations of Turkey’s current growth pattern are so politically intertwined and institutionally entrenched that it is difficult to fathom a path for an alternative, genuinely developmental policy regime to emerge. Their main benefit has been to assist successive AKP governments in managing distributive and regional strains without undermining fiscal sustainability or financial stability amidst intensified political turbulence. Yet this capacity to contain distributive tensions, in part via ideology and crude identity politics, comes with a hefty price tag of also reinforcing a fragile economic model and, more crucially, enabling the country’s steady descent into authoritarianism.

Conclusion: pathways from the semi-periphery – Turkey as an emerging power It is useful to conclude the discussion by placing the evolution of Turkish political economy in its comparative-international context and pondering its possible futures from that vantage point. Its ongoing developmental challenges notwithstanding, Turkey today is classified as an emerging country – one of several large MICs whose increased share of the world economy is creating a fundamental shift in the balance of global economic power. This new status, it must be underlined, is not the result of some outstanding performance but, as in the case of most other economies in that category with the obvious exception of China, mainly reflected continued long-term differentials in rates of output and population growth with countries in the global North. This increased relative size has brought with it many advantages: a larger domestic market to attract international investors, greater opportunities for international trade, and membership of the Group of 20 (G20), the main intergovernmental platform of global economic governance. It has also prompted the AKP government to adopt an increasingly proactive stance in foreign economic policy, from seeking opportunities for regional economic and political leadership to nurturing stronger South–South trade relations and development cooperation and, where possible, displaying policy independence from Northern multilaterals such as the IMF (Önis¸ and Kutlay 2013). Such activism is consistent with the policy choices of other rising countries. What are the prospects for Turkey in this new global context? The benign though unlikely scenario is for Turkey to somehow find the political wherewithal to wean itself from its extant growth model, and reorient its production profile to maximise the gains from its comparative advantage in geography, human capital, and existing industrial infrastructure. Given the picture painted in the previous section, even a modest shift in that direction would require a new broad-based policy coalition to be negotiated democratically. It would also likely necessitate significant rebuilding of institutions, from reintroducing fiscal transparency to restoring the rule of law. Turkey’s current income and distribution dynamics allow for sufficient socioeconomic space for such a reorientation, and the international context, despite indicating a tighter global market, is ideationally as conducive as it has ever been in the age of neoliberal globalism for an emerging country to experiment with targeted industrial policy. Yet political realities on the ground appear to preclude such a bold escape. The likely yet darker scenario, almost solely on grounds of political feasibility, is the continuation of the pre-existing trajectory in one form or another. While the Turkish economy might yet navigate the current storm with minimal damage and resume muddling through as it did over the past decade, this is also a path fraught with perils. A distinct danger here is the institutionalisation of authoritarianism post-2019, which would not be out of step with the current global context of democratic recession and authoritarian resilience (Bermeo 2016). It has become fashionable for autocrats in emerging countries to shun Western norms of democratic 160

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governance as some elite-driven neo-colonial imposition. This vision is consistent with the AKP’s emergent brand of ‘authoritarian neoliberal populism’. However, such a model is bound to pose significant long-term risks to the economy – by scaring away FDI, accelerating the brain drain, further undermining bureaucratic capacity, and debilitating the business climate. A more imminent danger at the time of writing, and assuming the current downturn will not evolve into full-blown political crisis, is renewed overconfidence in the sustainability of foreign capital-dependence and subsequent policy lethargy that will only magnify existing blind spots. Despite steady growth for the past half century, Turkey continues to suffer from characteristic developing-country ailments, such as low rates of female labour force participation, extreme inter-regional inequality, massive environmental degradation, high inflation, and high youth unemployment. Unwillingness to resolve these shortcomings will exact longterm costs. Just as important are systemic problems in credit markets and risky demonstration projects particularly in infrastructure, to which makeshift solutions such as the recent guarantee fund or overly generous Treasury insurances cannot provide durable answers. These will continue to pose structural risks to firms as well as the banking system. Underestimating the scale of foreign capital dependence and irresponsibly ignoring the chorus of warnings about the fragility of the Turkish economy have already proved destructive. Insisting further on the present policy path will only lead to a long-term pattern with alternating episodes of persistent underperformance and periodic downturns, entrapping the Turkish economy deeper in a chase for the continuously moving goalposts of prosperity.

References Akyüz, Yılmaz and Korkut Boratav. 2003. ‘The Making of the Turkish Financial Crisis.’ World Development 31(9): 1549–1566. Arıcanlı, Tosun and Dani Rodrik, eds. 1990. The Political Economy of Turkey: Debt, Adjustment and Sustainability. London: Macmillan. Aytaç, S.Erdem. 2014. ‘Distributive Politics in a Multiparty System: The Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Turkey.’ Comparative Political Studies 47(9): 1211–1237. Bakır, Erdog˘ an, Emre Özçelik, Erdal Özmen and Ali Cevat Tas¸ıran. 2017. ‘Türkiye’de Erken Sanayisizles¸me [Early Deindustrialization in Turkey].’ In Geçmis¸ten Geleceg˘e Türkiye Ekonomisi [Economy of. Turkey from Past to Present], edited by Murat Koyuncu, Hakan Mıhcı and Erinç Yeldan, 157–192. Istanbul: . Iletis¸im. Barkey, Henri J. 1990. The State and Industrialization Crisis in Turkey. Boulder, CO: Westview. Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. ‘On Democratic Backsliding.’ Journal of Democracy 27(1): 5–19. Bozkurt, Umut. 2013. ‘Neoliberalism with a Human Face: Making Sense of the Justice and Developmental Party’s Neoliberal Populism in Turkey.’ Science & Society 77(3): 372–396. Bug˘ ra, Ays¸e. 1994. State and Business in Modern Turkey: A Comparative Study. New York: SUNY Press. Bug˘ ra, Ays¸e and Osman Savas¸kan. 2014. New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship between Politics, Religion and Business. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Cizre-Sakallıog˘ lu, Ümit and Erinç Yeldan. 2000. ‘Politics, Society and Financial Liberalization: Turkey in the 1990s.’ Development and Change 31(2): 481–508. Dorlach, Tim. 2015. ‘The Prospects of Egalitarian Capitalism in the Global South: Turkish Social Neoliberalism in Comparative Perspective.’ Economy and Society 44(4): 519–544. Gürakar, Esra Çeviker. 2016. Politics of Favoritism in Public Procurement in Turkey: Reconfigurations of Dependency Networks in the AKP Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Güven, Ali Burak. 2012. ‘The Feasibility of IFI-Led Institutional Reform: Four Turkish Experiments Compared.’ Development Policy Review 30(4): 425–449. Güven, Ali Burak. 2016. ‘Rethinking Development Space in Emerging Countries: Turkey’s Conservative Countermovement.’ Development and Change 47(5): 995–1024. Karaçimen, Elif. 2014. ‘Consumer Credit as an Aspect of Everyday Life of Workers in Developing Countries: Evidence from Turkey.’ Review of Radical Political Economics 48(2): 252–268. Keyder, Çag˘ lar. 1987. State and Class in Turkey. London: Verso.

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12 ENERGY SECURITY AND POLICY Between bandwagoning and hedging H. Akın Ünver

Introduction: a brief history of Turkey’s bid for energy security Turkey’s energy security policy in the last decade has been driven by three primary objectives: securing energy for an ever-increasing consumption portfolio driven by an average 5 per cent economic growth, reducing natural gas import dependence on Russia, and diversification both of energy sources and types in the national import portfolio (MENR 2014). Despite sustained campaigns to maximise domestic exploration and production, Turkey’s oil and gas production has remained low, leading to a complete dependence on external sources (IEA 2016). To remedy long-term energy import requirements and growing demand, Turkey gradually opened up its energy sector to private investment throughout the late-1980s and 1990s, followed by efforts at market liberalisation between 1999 and 2001. These were largely driven by Turkey’s EU candidacy status, which took on a stronger momentum with the Helsinki Summit of 1999, and were modelled after the EU’s 1996 electricity and natural gas reform. In 1999, the Turkish Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, TBMM) passed Law No. 4446 in order to radically improve trade and investment regulations. This was intended to hasten infrastructure projects such as power plants, pipeline networks, and refineries (Erdog˘ du 2007). In the same year, Article 47 of the Turkish Constitution was amended to lay down the basic parameters of privatisation, opening up a large swathe of state companies to foreign investment, as well as Article 155, which set the parameters of the country’s Council of State (Danıs¸tay) involvement in foreign contracts. The Turkish Pipeline Corporation (BOTAS¸) was the first to be privatised in 2001. The Electricity Market Law and Natural Gas Market Law of the same year, providing guidelines for a gradual reduction of state involvement in the electricity-generation and energy distribution market (Çanka Kılıç, and Kaya 2007) were also intended to complement this privatisation process, offering foreign and domestic companies a rapid decision-making body on licensing. was also intended to complement this privatisation process, offering foreign and domestic companies a rapid decision-making body on licensing. The resultant restructuring has led to three new modes of energy project financing and operation that have become the primary options for both foreign and domestic investors since 2001: ‘Build–Operate–Transfer’ (BOT), ‘Build–Own–Operate’ (BOO), and ‘Transfer 163

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of Operating Rights’ (TOR) (Çetin and Og˘ uz 2007). This was followed by the 2004 Electricity Strategy, 2005 Renewable Energy, and 2007 Energy Efficiency laws that further liberalised the national power generation and energy sectors. These reforms opened up the way for the realisation of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Natural Gas Pipeline Project, which was finalised in 2006 (M. Bilgin 2011). In 2007 a separate Law on the Construction and Operation of Nuclear Power Plants and Energy Sale (Law No. 5710) was promulgated, opening up to bids from foreign companies to BOO the country’s first nuclear power plant in Akkuyu. The Russian state company Atomstroyexport emerged as the victor and a 4800 MW plant was awarded to Moscow in 2010. The second bid, this time for a northern coastal nuclear plant in Sinop was awarded to a French (Areva)–Japanese (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries) consortium on a BOT basis in 2013. At the .time of writing this chapter (early 2018), a third power plant intended to be constructed in Ig˘ neada has still not been offered for bids (S¸irin 2010; Ertör-Akyazı et al. 2012; Aras 2013). The nexus of Turkey’s energy politics and foreign policy is largely driven by its import dependence on natural gas suppliers and its long-term bid to become the region’s energy transit hub – both in terms of pipelines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) (Roberts 2010; Winrow 2013). It is safe to argue that Turkey’s bid to become the region’s ‘energy hub’ intensified following the end of the domestic armed conflict with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). With the capture of the organisation’s leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999, Turkey was able to make the case that the country is safe for Central Asian and Caspian origin energy transit projects and utilise its cultural-linguistic advantage towards newly independent Turkic former Soviet Union countries (Larrabee 2010; Ünver 2016a). Once the insurgency briefly froze through 1999–2005, Turkey was able to provide reliable logistics and security for the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline. Once BTC was finalised in July 2006, Turkey not only was the Mediterranean LNG export point for a major international pipeline project, but it was demonstrating its ability to handle and maintain a large-scale pipeline network (Triantaphyllou and Fotiou 2010). This was one of the important drivers of the EU’s Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) Strategy, which was stipulated in the European Commission’s ‘Second Strategic Energy Review – An EU Energy Security and Solidarity Action Plan’ (COM/2008/781) in 2008. Since its inception, Turkey has taken the SGC very seriously, both in order to ease its dependence on Russian gas and to gain a bargaining chip in its EU negotiations, and has viewed it as an integral part of its foreign-energy policy nexus (Kardas¸ 2011). The first manifestation of the SGC was the Nabucco pipeline project. Intended to carry Caspian gas to Europe through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Austria (Baumgarten an der March), Nabucco was scrapped in favour of two smaller projects: the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) projects in June 2013. TAP would follow a different route after Turkey, via Greece and Albania, landing at Italy (Varol 2013). To hammer in its energy hub bid and to find a reliable supply for TANAP, Turkey had to bring in more gas than the modest amounts Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan offered. So, it looked south to Iran and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Both Turkey and Iran view themselves as energy hubs of different regional export systems: Turkey, of a Westbound energy framework, and Iran, of the East-bound (Ünver 2016b). In 2008, a 5.5 billion US-dollar-worth Turkish–Iranian agreement opened up the way for Ankara to invest in South Pars gas field in exchange for BOO rights for three offshore fields. However, suspicions by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps over Turkey’s motives for investment, coupled with sustained disagreements over the technicalities of the construction work, led to an impasse in the energy partnership (Flanagan 2013). This relationship further deteriorated after UN Security Council Resolutions 1803 and 1835, which imposed strict restrictions on 164

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foreign investment in Iranian infrastructure. To circumvent sanctions, Turkey relied on a gas-forgold trade regime, which ultimately led to a succession of events that culminated with the arrest of the Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab in the US (Pierson 2017). Although the onset of the Syrian Civil War rendered Ankara and Tehran strategic rivals, Turkey still views expensive and often-disrupted Iranian gas as an important ‘political’ addition to its import portfolio (Sinkaya 2012). In terms of Turkey’s bid to add potential KRG gas sources to its TANAP line, the record is mixed. Since the 2003 Iraq War, Turkey invested in the political, economic, and energy future of the KRG, often despite protestations from Baghdad. Utilising the revenue sharing agreement embedded in the 2005 Iraqi Constitution (negotiations for a new one failed in 2007), Turkey exported KRG oil through its Ceyhan terminal, despite Baghdad’s objections. A 2013 Kirkuk– Ceyhan oil pipeline established a long-term relationship between Ankara and Erbil, angering Baghdad further. Taking the risk of unilaterally supporting KRG’s energy independence, Turkey’s main play was to get a future preferential natural gas agreement with Erbil that would render TANAP a reliable supply option for Europe (Morelli and Pischedda 2014).

Main areas of scholarly policy research The bulk of the literature on Turkey’s energy security deals with five main challenges: energy production and consumption forecasting, energy economics modelling, energy as foreign-security policy, opportunities/pitfalls of nuclear energy, and the potential of renewables in Turkey’s energy mix. Many of the prominent examples of Turkey’s energy forecasting/modelling work focus on energy demand by fuel type, consumption/pricing projections, and efficiency maximisation scenario-building studies. In a seminal work, Ferda Halıcıog˘ lu (2009) uses time-series CO2 emissions data from 1960 to 2005, building up the most granular dataset of long-term energy consumption trends in Turkey. This trend in research on Turkish energy policy has been expanded with further research into the relationship between energy consumption and growth, forecasting models of CO2 emissions and their potential impact on economic performance in Turkey’s context (Öztürk and Acaravcı 2010; Soytas¸ and Sarı 2009; Say and Yücel 2006) (Ediger and Akar 2007) use ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) forecasting to come up with a model on future trends in national primary energy demand by fuel type, revealing that any potential decrease in energy consumption in Turkey would lead to disproportionate (higher than the global mean) impact on the country’s economic slowdown, urging both greater energy supply and larger volumes of storage capacity. Alper Ünler (2008) provides further depth to Ediger and Akar’s work by deploying a swarm intelligence model to forecast Turkey’s energy demand projections up to 2025, criticising previous forecasting studies on the grounds of overestimating demand. Instead, Ünler argues that Turkey’s demand will remain below the 2023 threshold of 175.4 Mtoe (Million Tonnes of Oil Equivalent). In terms of energy economics, some of the most prominent works are those by Altınay and Karagöl (2005) on electricity demand and economic growth models, Kumbarog˘ lu’s (2003) optimisation studies of electricity market taxation, and Lise and Van Montfort’s (2007) study of energy consumption by type and GDP relationship. Foreign and security policy research related to Turkey’s energy policy has grown significantly in the last decade, as supply and demand factors have come under the increasing shadow of regional politics. This line of research is clustered around how the AKP government has utilised energy as a factor in Turkey’s foreign policy, along with how energy relations have enabled the country to form mutually beneficial interest systems in its immediate region (Önis¸ and Yılmaz 2009; Altunıs¸ık and Martin 2011; Winrow 2004; Larrabee 2010; 165

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Aydın 2009; Han 2011; Hill and Taspinar 2006; Kardas¸ 2012; Tekin and Williams 2009; Tagliapietra 2014; Çelikpala 2014; Triantaphyllou 2007); the dynamics of the Turkish–Iranian energy relationship (Ünver 2016b; Larrabee and Nader 2013); the state of play in the Caspian–Turkish energy connection (Ediger and Durmaz 2016; Olson 2002); the potential of KRG’s addition into Turkey’s export portfolio (Morelli and Pischedda 2014; Özdemir and Raszewski 2016); and Ankara’s role in the newly emerging dynamics of the Eastern Mediterranean gas game, including its . impact on its relations with Israel (Winrow 2016; Ruble 2017; Arınç and Özgül 2015) I¸seri, Günay, and Almaz 2018; Jewell and Ates¸ 2015; Bilgin 2015; Melikog˘ lu 2016; Kaplan 2015). There is also a newly emerging line of research on how Turkey’s nuclear ambitions, renewables investment policy and energy efficiency will . impact its wider foreign policy agenda (I¸seri, Günay, and Almaz 2018; Jewell and Ates¸ 2015; Bilgin 2015; Melikog˘ lu 2016; Kaplan 2015). Energy as an integral component of Turkish foreign policy was outlined by Turkey’s then foreign minister Ahmet Davutog˘ lu (2008) favour of an ‘energy foreign policy’. The role of an energy–foreign policy nexus in Turkey’s security understanding was what Aras and Görener (2010) called a ‘national role conception’ around which Turkey had structured its post-2007 activism in its immediate environment. The role of energy was exceptionally underlined in Aras and Fidan’s (2009) piece on Turkish Eurasian geographic imagination and was further developed in Bilgin and Bilgiç’s (2011) work on Turkey’s long Eurasian game of using energy partnership as a way of drawing a wedge between Central Asian Turkic Republics and their Russian overlord. Indeed, as Tür (2013) emphasises, energy has been a key economic variable in Turkey’s ‘return’ back to its neighbourhood following decades of neglect. However, Müftüler-Baç and Gürsoy (2010) maintain that some of the main drivers of such a return are locked within the EU’s natural gas demand and Turkey’s role as a potential transit hub to satisfy that demand. The authors question Turkey’s multilateral energy diplomacy vocation in the absence of an EU that no longer has an immediate interest in emergency gas supply via Turkey. Turkey’s nuclear energy politics and infrastructure are conceptualised in Kibarog˘ lu (1997), and then Kaplan et al. (2017), along with consumer preferences modelling (Ertör-Akyazı et al. 2012; Öcal and Aslan 2013). Exploring the political and economic rationale of nuclear energy in Turkey, Tunç et al. (2006) explored how Turkey could optimise energy sources and import portfolio following the full functioning of one nuclear power plant. S¸irin’s (2010) comparative work on Turkish and South Korean experiences of nuclear transition and Aktürk’s (2014) work on a new Turkish–Russian axis of nuclear energy cooperation are also worth mentioning. In the field of renewables, some of the most important works are Kahraman et al.’s (2009) article on renewable energy demand modelling, Barıs¸ and Küçükali’s (2012) article on Turkish–EU legal and legislative foundations on renewables sector modernisation, Çeliktas¸ and Koçar’s (2010) Delphi forecasting models on Turkey’s renewables sector, demand, and production increase, along with ¸sirin and Ege’s (2012) comparative work on the Turkey–EU policy partnership and acquis communautaire harmonisation in the field of renewables. Two other major issues of contestation are the use of coal in thermal power plants and the projection of hydroelectric power plant capacity building in the country. In regards to coal, Baba’s (2002; 2003) works reveal the extent of contaminants and the environmental effects of the Yatag˘ an power plant. Studies by Erdem et al. (2009), Say (2006), and Sözen et al. (2010) Dursun and Gökçöl (2011) show shows how a combination of large and small hydropower networks might benefit the country’s energy diversification more than a few large-only plants. Balat (2007) on the other hand, demonstrates that it is actually small-only hydro plants that will both maximise energy diversification, while minimising their environmental impact. 166

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Key issues in energy security policy There are five closely interlinked main debates in Turkish energy security policy today, and the majority of them revolve around natural gas diversification. Renewed exploration policy As of 2015, domestic exploration accounted for around 7 per cent of Turkey’s oil consumption (Aburas and Demirbas¸ 2015). With proven oil reserves of 270 million barrels and 218 billion cubic feet (bcm) natural gas reserves, Turkey is widely known as a resource scarce country. Yet, with the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources 2015–2019 Strategic Plan, a new domestic exploration campaign was initiated. In addition to the existing exploration missions in the Trachea, Salt Lake, Sivas and Batman–Adıyaman basins, a new exploration mission began on the Gaziantep swathe of the Syrian border in 2015. In addition, the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) and Royal Dutch Shell are currently exploring a new shale formation (Dadas¸ block) in Diyarbakır. Yet, the country is increasingly looking at its offshore potential for new discoveries. Negotiating with international oil companies since the early 2000s for a Black Sea exploration consortium, the state-owned TPAO most recently negotiated with ExxonMobil, Magyar Olay and OMV to renew its exploration bid in the Black Sea coastal region. This was partly frozen due to the 2015 annexation of Crimea by Russia and the resultant exclusive economic zone (EEZ) contestation between Russia and Turkey in the Black Sea. A similar challenge exists in the Aegean, where potentially large basins are forecast, but with a substantive exploration mission unforthcoming due to longstanding territorial disputes between Turkey and Greece. This tension largely spills over into Turkey’s bid to carve itself a share in the Eastern Mediterranean gas game, played between Greece, Cyprus, and Israel. In April 2017, Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Berat Albayrak, announced the commencement of a new ‘aggressive exploration strategy’ in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean with the introduction of the Oruç Reis seismic exploration ship, implying that Turkey will be less deterred by EEZ contestation debates in both offshore blocks (Daily Sabah 2017). The extent to which this new policy will exacerbate bilateral tensions with Russia and Greece on the other hand, is so far unclear. Major push towards renewables In late-2016, Turkey initiated a major campaign to develop its indigenous renewables sectors, evidenced by more than 2 billion US dollars’ worth of investment (Wilson 2017). Outlined as part of the country’s macro-political manifesto ‘2023 Vision’, this push aims to build a globally competitive domestic renewables sector, which will allow Ankara to diversify away from natural gas. In October 2016, Turkey promulgated the Renewable Energy Resource Area Regulation, which is a strategic energy policy area overseen directly by the Ministry of Energy. According to the regulation, strategic land allocation (renewable energy zones – REZs) and project tendering . processes will be streamlined in the field of wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) initiatives (Inal and Akkus¸ 2017). One way Turkey seeks to go about this is to partner with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to help finance Turkey’s renewables shift, in line with EU–Turkish coordination to meet the goals set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement. However, at the existing 1 billion US dollar investment, EBRD could cover only a fraction of the total 60 billion required. Other alternatives include partnering with Qatar or Saudi Arabia, since both countries have recently 167

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unveiled ambitious and path-breaking strategic initiatives to invest heavily in the renewable sectors with an indication that they are willing to help other countries establish such infrastructure as well. Russia In the last decade, Turkey’s energy strategy has been to reduce its natural gas dependence on Russia by driving a Europe-bound energy strategy in its immediate environment and exploring energy options beyond hydrocarbons. As of 2018, Turkey is more dependent on Russia than it was a decade ago, with 56 per cent natural gas dependence, a nuclear power plant built by Atomstroyexport and a new pipeline project – TurkStream – that challenges the very geopolitical idea of the Southern Gas Corridor (IEA 2016). This increased dependence on Russia owes more to political and security-related external changes, rather than poor planning on Turkey’s part, given how much Ankara worked (politically, diplomatically, and infrastructure-wise) to row as hard as it could away from Moscow. Yet, inadequate longterm supply from the Caspian, unresolved problems with Iran, the underdevelopment of KRG’s gas export infrastructure, and the distant export-ready date of eastern Mediterranean gas fields of Leviathan and Aphrodite all strengthened Russia’s hand. Furthermore, growing Russian dominance in Syria and increased tensions between Ankara and Moscow, culminating with the shooting-down of the Russian SU24 jet in November 2015, eventually led to bandwagoning behaviour on Ankara’s part (Ünver 2015). Despite much foot-dragging, Turkey had to accept the TurkStream project and make the problems raised by the Akkuyu environmental impact report (EIR) ‘disappear’ during this bandwagoning period. The current debate on Turkish–Russian energy politics is: (a) for how long will Syria-related policy spill-overs affect Russia’s unilateralism in energy decisions, (b) can Turkey find sufficient supply and demand for TANAP given the emergence of a rival TurkStream, (c) what additional layers of dependencies will Russia’s handling of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) bring (electronics, communications, fuel recycling/waste management, training of engineers, and so on), and (d) can Turkey progress in renewables and energy efficiency investment to offset some demand away from Gazprom in a sustainable way? Iran and the Syrian civil war Turkey’s (and partly, the EU’s) hopes of connecting Iranian gas into the European grid were partly offset by the US-led sanctions that prevented investment into the development of Iranian export infrastructure. Some of these hurdles were lifted in April 2015 following the successful P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the UK, the US plus Germany) nuclear negotiations that eased part of the sanctions. This was a welcome development for both the EU and Turkey, although Iran’s domestic power politics prevented a quick outcome. At the core of this domestic tension is the rivalry between reformist factions and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-affiliated factions in the Iranian energy and infrastructure sector, with mostly opposite views on the country’s export direction. Factions affiliated with President Hassan Rouhani viewed Europe as one possible export destination, while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp’s contractor wing Khatam ul-Anbia only favoured an east-bound option to Pakistan and China (Ünver 2016b; Rafati 2017). Furthermore, Turkey sued Iran at the International Court of Arbitration in 2012 for overpricing its gas through 2011–2015 and the court had issued a 1.9 billion US dollar compensation to be paid to Turkey (Temizer 2018). Turkey’s Iran energy picture got more complicated as the Syrian Civil War intensified into an outright proxy war between multiple countries, in which Ankara and Tehran sat at two 168

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extreme ends of the battlefield. The ongoing rivalry over Sunni and Shiite militias has taken its toll on Turkey’s ability to invest in Iran’s gas infrastructure and lobby to convince Tehran to participate in the TANAP project. Russia’s entry into the Syrian civil war in mid-2015 and Turkey’s gradual bandwagoning with Russia’s security agenda there has also shifted the course of Turkish–Iranian relations through a mutual understanding of the necessity to combat the PKK. A direct outcome of this improvement in relations came in October 2017, when the two countries agreed to boost bilateral trade and use local currencies in energy transactions (Çetingüleç 2018). It is difficult to see a full recovery of this relationship as long as the war in Syria continues, since Ankara and Tehran have structurally exclusive strategic priorities there. Although slight recoveries in pricing and supply may be observed, it is hard to forecast substantial Iranian volume increases to be added into TANAP. EU and Southern Gas Corridor Different levels of natural gas dependence on Russia have largely prevented a common and uniform energy policy in the EU. This lack of focus has also generated a multitude of views towards the urgency of the SGC and the geopolitical importance of Turkey for European energy security. Gas and electricity have been the fundamental variables in EU–Turkey energy relations in the last decade, although renewables, energy efficiency, and nuclear energy will likely become new sources of cooperation in the following years. On the gas front, the Nabucco Project was replaced by the Azerbaijan-proposed TANAP and TAP in 2013, aiming to supply 6 bcma (billion cubic feet per annum) to Turkey and 10 bcma to Europe beginning in 2020 (Ediger and Durmaz 2016). The addition of TurkStream into the picture with its two 15.75 bcma strings – one supplying Turkey and one connecting to TAP – strengthens Turkey’s transit credentials slightly, although even at both pipelines’ maximum capacity Turkey will not supply more than 2.48 per cent of forecasted European demand for 2020 (1086 Mtoe) (Kim and Blank 2016). For pessimists, this volume is too low for Turkey to make a difference (Mišík and Nosko 2017). For optimists, on the other hand, 26 bcma and an alternative transit route may not be enough financially, but will be important politically, especially in terms of providing Europe with an alternative emergency supply route. This will, according to the optimists, prevent a major supply shock similar to the ones experienced in 2009 and 2013–2014, as emergency supply will flow from Turkey to compensate for a hypothetical disruption (Occhiali, Tagliapietra, and Hafner 2017). Pessimists however, argue that the EU and Turkey could very well cooperate on renewables and energy efficiency, as European financial support for both sectors might reduce some Turkish dependence on Russia and reduce overall demand for gas that could be transited to Europe in later years. Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan As one of the oldest global oil producers, Azerbaijan has significantly developed its natural resources sector following the collapse of the USSR. Since 1991, Azerbaijan was one of the main suppliers of gas to Turkey, with a current 6.5 bcma contract with BOTAS¸. The primary logic of the SGC, and thus TANAP, for Azerbaijan was to boost further its production in the Shah Deniz field, more than tripling its exports from 6.5 to 22.5 bcma. TANAP itself will gradually increase its maximum capacity from 16 bcma at its completion date of 2018, 23 bcma by 2023, and 31 bcma by 2031. Yet, for sceptics, this increase is too slow (Siddi 2014). One of the main concerns is whether Azerbaijan will be able to produce enough Shah Deniz gas to match TANAP’s capacity. At its current production growth rate, forecasts indicate a 169

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Shah Deniz production plateau by 2023 at 16 bcma, which will require additional input from adjacent producers (Pirani 2016). One nearby potential supplier is Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is in a political conundrum. With the sixth largest proven gas reserves in the world, the country exports only to China in limited volumes, despite wanting to export more to remedy its revenue decline. In October 2017, Turkmenistan proposed a gas swap deal where its gas would be transited to Iran from where it would connect into TANAP (Pannier 2017). This would remedy some of the EEZ disagreements between Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, and eliminate some of the legal impediments against the construction of a direct underwater pipeline. An East–West pipeline was constructed in 2015, connecting the Galkynysh block to the Caspian coast, which could have theoretically connected to Azerbaijan if maritime demarcation disputes had not prevented this cooperation. Given this geographical nuisance, Iran is the only possible connection that could connect Ashgabat to TANAP; yet the proposal was rejected by Iran due to gas pricing, debt-settlement and contract-related disputes between the two countries. Furthermore, Iran views Turkmen gas as a rival to Iranian gas, which could be pumped into TANAP at a time when sanctions are lifted if a price and volume agreement is reached with Turkey. Until then, both Azerbaijan and Iran close off Turkmenistan’s options into TANAP. Kurdistan Regional Government The KRG has grown into a strategic nuisance for Turkey’s main regional energy partners since the Iraq War in 2003. Much of this partnership was structured upon a hard-security understanding that the KRG would deny PKK militants access to footholds in the urban centres of Erbil, Duhok, Kirkuk, and Mosul (Özdemir and Raszewski 2016). Investing heavily in the KRG’s infrastructure, Turkish businesses established long-term profit networks there, driving a mutually beneficial partnership. In addition, around 300 Turkish energy companies took part in exploration, extraction, and transportation operations in the KRG, with an eye on the ultimate prize: a preferential agreement for the KRG’s gas fields to be included into TANAP. To that end, Turkey started to deal with Erbil and Baghdad separately, exporting KRG oil through its Ceyhan terminal in Adana, using a 17–83 per cent revenue sharing agreement based on the Iraqi Constitution of 2005 (Morelli and Pischedda 2014). Turkey would transfer the 17 per cent of the exported amount directly to the KRG and save Baghdad’s 83 per cent in the state-owned Halkbank until a hypothetical date when Iraq would stop boycotting this fait accompli and change its policy in exchange for the lucrative sum. In 2013, Turkey even helped the KRG finance a dedicated oil pipeline from Taq Taq through Kurmalaa and Fiskhabur, connecting into Turkey, strengthening the KRG’s energy autonomy. At the forefront of Turkey’s energy effort in KRG was Genel Energy, which, following a number of setbacks in inaccurate appraisals of some of its blocks had to restructure debt in early 2017 and seek international investors to continue working on the Miran and Bina Bawi fields (Thomas and Khan 2017). However, even before that, Turkey’s collapsed Kurdish peace process in mid-2015 started to incur greater political costs on its energy partnership with the KRG. Coupled with the spill-over effects of the Syrian Civil War, the Ankara–Erbil relationship came under increasing levels of stress through the resurgence of the PKK along with its offshoots in Syria, the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) and cohorts of the Syrian Democratic Forces (Quwwat Suriya al-Dimuqrat.iya, QSD). Yet perhaps the biggest blow to the relationship came on 25 September 2017 when the KRG held an unbinding independence referendum (Morris 2017). This was a red line for Turkey, as KRG independence would cause ripple effects across other Kurdish-majority areas including those 170

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in Turkey, and create wider instability in the region (Zucchino 2017). A week before the referendum was to be held, the Russian oil company Rosneft signed a 1 billion US dollar gas exploration and extraction deal with the KRG, including a dedicated gas pipeline that would be complete by 2019 and ready for export by 2020. With the Russian entry into an already crowded exploration and extraction scene, the PKK’s resurgence and the fallout of the referendum, Turkey’s ability to sustain its close energy partnership with KRG and add its gas sources to a Europe-bound pipeline remains an issue of contestation.

Conclusion If Turkey’s energy policy could be boiled down to a single macro strategy, it would be diversification and decreased dependence on Russian natural gas, while retaining affordable supply security in the face of ever-growing demand. This is done through multiple layers of interlinked policy networks. Domestically, Turkey has been liberalising its energy market since the late-1990s in a bid to ease foreign investment and to become an East-to-West energy hub, thereby seeking to create a network of interdependence in its neighbourhood. As of 2018, this macro strategy has yielded mixed results, as Turkey has aggressively expanded its domestic and offshore exploration efforts, yet is still dependent on Russian gas and nuclear energy. The short-to-medium term priorities of Turkey will remain energy type and source-country diversification. To that end there are several topics that need further exploration. The first of these issues is the future of shale gas in the country. The discovery of large shale basins in Turkey is still awaiting full appraisal studies. Given the difficulty and expense at which shale is extracted, it is currently not a financially viable option. However, projections indicate that with successful cooperation with international oil companies, around 163 trillion cubic feet of gas can enter the Turkish market. Modelling and forecasting studies need to explore both domestic demand and international dependency implications of different scenarios of Turkey’s shale future. Second, the newly unveiled ‘aggressive exploration’ seems to be geared towards settling some of the longest-standing Turkish urban legends. Domestic reserves aside, how much is Turkey willing to test neighbouring countries’ EEZ at the expense of ‘communicating resolve’? A new scholarly inquiry needs to be made into the political and security implications of aggressive exploration in terms of triggering alliance formations to counter-balance against Turkey’s unilateralism. This is especially true in terms of the Aegean (bilateral, against Greece) and eastern Mediterranean (multilateral, against Israel, Cyprus, and Greece) settings. Third, what is the future of Turkey’s transit hub bid? With Russia reasserting itself along the SGC route through TurkStream, gas demand in Europe declining, and European countries brokering separate deals with Russia, Turkey’s role as a transit country may not be as attractive as it was a decade ago. TANAP and TAP will eventually be complete and start exporting gas; but will this gas be politically and financially meaningful to merit long-term investment, or will these pipelines turn into zombie projects by 2023, due to declining demand? Finally, how do we geopolitically contextualise Turkey’s offshore energy partners? Both nearby Eastern Mediterranean fields of Aphrodite and Leviathan and the further new discovery of Tamar can theoretically be added to TANAP. However, political complications along the way, stemming from Turkey’s bad relations with Egypt and tensions in Cyprus, reduce their incentives to join TANAP. Furthermore, although Turkey–Israel relations have improved, governments in both countries are conflict-prone and may not remain cordial in the medium term. This brings Qatar – number one LNG and number four gas producer in the world – into the picture. A Qatar– Turkey gas pipeline was already at the proposal stage in 2009, with the hopes of connecting 171

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to then Nabucco. The Syrian conflict and regional instability prevented the materialisation of this project, although Turkey and Qatar significantly improved their partnership in the meantime. The shooting down of the Russian jet in November 2015 encouraged Turkey to sign an LNG import deal with Qatar in order to protect Turkey from some of the shocks of a potential Gazprom reduction. Military and security cooperation then spilled over into a November 2017 BOTAS¸–Qatargas deal worth 2 bcm LNG, along with a floating storage regasification unit. Although there are further variables, these four drivers will be the most important ones in predicting the future direction of Turkish energy policy and, specifically, the likelihood of Turkey’s diversification success.

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13 THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE Ümit S¸ahin

Introduction Environmental policies, legislation, and movements are undergoing a rapid transformation in Turkey. As environmentalism is seen as a greater threat, weakening environmental governance, avoiding effective legislation, and an increasing unwillingness to be an active part of international climate politics are related to soaring authoritarianism. Authoritarianism weakens democratic participation and destroys the rule of law, which are crucial for environmental governance. The ruling party considers power plants, mega projects, and the construction sector, which are among the main sources of environmental degradation, as the most important ways to sustain economic growth, which is needed to reproduce its power. Any objection to this policy set is considered to be an unacceptable threat to ‘serving the nation’. Energy- and pollution-intensive investments, mainly energy, mining, and roads, have always been a significant part of the governmental success of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) (As¸ıcı 2015), and this policy has become more decisive recently. As the new form of neoliberal development (that is, economic development by means of production of built environment and interventions in public space, such as gentrification, land grabbing, urban renewal, privatisation, etc. (Erensü 2016), accumulating capital stock through the construction sector and exploitation of natural resources, therefore building a new wealthy class around the ruling party) takes hold successfully, the environmental destruction caused by these policies continues to increase. This model focuses on natural resource exploitation and land rent while forming a new set of policies governed by regulatory state intervention and revoking rights-based social policies (Adaman, Arsel, and Akbulut 2017; Paker 2017; Türem 2017). This developmentalist rush had major consequences, from the worst mining disaster of the 21st century in Soma, where 301 miners were killed, to rapidly increasing carbon emissions. Environmental conflicts have precipitated local resistance movements and the Gezi protest, which was the largest social uprising in Turkey’s history. Turkey has always considered climate policies as a threat to its developmentalist enthusiasm. Although it signed the Paris Agreement on time – contrary to its 12-years-late 177

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accession to the Kyoto Protocol – ratification of the Agreement was made conditional on the acceptance of Turkey’s request to be fully eligible for international climate finance, especially for the Global Climate Fund (GCF) (Appun 2017; Climate Policy Observer 2017). In other words, implementation of its weak Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), which was submitted before the COP21 in Paris, became contingent on a condition that is contradictory to the Convention and heavily contested by developing countries. This created an impasse, and Turkey’s climate policies have been severed from the international process to a large extent. This chapter focuses on the recent policies and conflicts in Turkish environmental and climate politics against this backdrop.

A brief history of environmental and climate policies in Turkey Neoliberal change emerged in the 1970s; however, the historical turning point dates to the end of the decade (Harvey 2007). Turkey was associated with this global alignment quite early, starting with the introduction of a structural adjustment programme in January 1980 (Yeldan 2006). Early industrial developments created limited local impacts and environmental problems occupied only a tiny part of the agenda before 1980. Politicians and bureaucrats despised environmental challenges (Ural 2014), and ecologist ideas had not drawn the opposition’s or social movements’ attention, as the country was yet to be globally integrated while severe polarisation and conflicts dominated politics (S¸ahin 2015; Adem 2005). However, the new order came together with socially and environmentally controversial developmental policies, which were upgraded by their composition, penetration, and magnitude. Therefore, environmental policy and the environmental movements have been directly related to neoliberalism in Turkey since their early days. In the 1970s, Turkey witnessed the blossoming of the first few conservationist NGOs initiated by professionals, academics, and artists (Adem 2005); the first local anti-nuclear movements (S¸ahin 2011); and small initiatives related to urban issues, such as air pollution, urban poverty and squatter settlements as well as protection of natural and cultural heritage (S¸akar 2014, Batuman 2008). Meanwhile, left-wing activists introduced an antiimperialist, Third-Worldist environmental discourse into the framework of the opposition’s hegemonic socialist ideologies (S¸ahin 2015). The preliminary signs of environmental matters in government policy documents were seen in the wake of the Stockholm Conference in 1972, although with a defensive tone supporting Turkey’s much-needed economic development. The Environment Foundation of Turkey (TÇV), which was the leading NGO raising the topic of environmental legislation, was established in 1978 and successfully promoted the idea of the 56th article on environmental rights for the new constitution and the Environmental Law (Ural 2014). During the implementation of early neoliberal policies, new energy, tourism, and urban development projects instigated local environmental debates, particularly in cases where they were to be built on notable natural sites. A coal-fired power plant project in Gökova Bay, a famous tourist attraction, triggered the first popular national environmental debate in 1984. A five-star hotel project at the Dalyan beach, which is a celebrated nesting site of Caretta turtles, created a wave of protests including a popular hunger strike in 1987. These flagship protests and similar actions were led by the welleducated, left-wing urban elite; however, they were also supported or even led by local rural people in some cases, like in Gökova. The first Green Party (Yes¸iller Partisi) was 178

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established quite early in 1988 under the influence of this environmental boom and created a bridge between local problems and urban elite. National environmental organisations with such a capacity were few in those days, therefore, the Greens and some smaller ecologist and anarchist groups helped to sustain an activist discourse and increased the country-wide popularity of the issue. This era came to a close in May 1990 with the biggest environmental action in Turkey’s history against the Aliag˘ a coal power plant, which was organised by the Greens and environmentalists . in Izmir. Thousands of people created a human chain along the 60 km road between Izmir and Aliag˘ a at the end of an intensive campaign and successfully stopped the project (S¸ahin 2015). Although there is a consensus in the literature that community-based environmentalism first occurred in protest against the Bergama gold mine (Çoban 2004; Adaman and Arsel 2005), the court cases and actions in Bergama started in 1994, almost 10 years after the emergence of modern popular environmentalism in Turkey. The main difference is that the Bergama movement, as a protest aiming to protect subsistence economies, created long-lasting media attention with the prominence of rural people at the centre, unlike the Gökova case in which the urban environmentalists took centre stage soon after the protest began. Notably, the Bergama movement created a prototype for future rural and small town-centred environmental movements against mining and energy projects. While the Bergama case and the anti-nuclear movement characterised the 1990s, the new period of environmental activism in 2000s was dominated by campaigns against small hydropower plants, urban transformation, and megaprojects. This activism has had a more mixed character, with both a closer urban–rural connection and sometimes a widening discordance. The second Yes¸iller Partisi after 2008 tried once more to carry these issues to political attention, but the fast-changing political environment was even less receptive to these attempts (S¸ahin 2015). The implementation of climate policies emerged in 2004, after Turkey ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Turkey adopted a defensive position after being listed in Annex I and Annex II of the Convention in 1992 as an OECD country.1 Then, the only item demanded by the Turkish delegations at the negotiation table turned out to be its request to be removed from the annexes altogether. Finally, in 2001, Turkey was removed from Annex II but not from Annex I, although its ‘special circumstances’ among the Annex I countries were recognised in 2010. This long and fixated history of Turkey’s climate policy position stemmed from how the country saw itself as a developing nation as well as Turkey’s more recent coal-oriented energy policies. Since it was not party to the Convention yet in 1997, Turkey did not set an emissions reduction target in the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, Turkey only acceded to the protocol after persistent civil society campaigns as late as 2009, without pledging any commitment (Turhan et al. 2016; S¸ahin 2016). When the world fought over the most recent substantial climate agreement in 2015, Turkey was still trying to secure its ‘special circumstances’ to be exempt from any ambitious mitigation target. In the meantime, Turkey accomplished all the necessary steps related to climate policies with several internationally backed projects, including action plans, national reports, and so on. 1

In the UNFCCC architecture, Annex I Parties include the industrialised countries and countries with economies in transition in 1992. They are considered as having historical responsibility and priority to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Annex II Parties consist of the OECD members only who are required to provide financial resources to enable developing countries to undertake emissions reduction activities (see https://unfccc.int/parties-observers).

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Finally, Turkey declared its plans for a 21 per cent lower increase of the greenhouse gases according to its business as usual emissions pathway, before the COP21 in Paris. However, since it did not ratify the agreement, its submission remained intentional, and all its climate policies remained voluntary and internal. This background is perfectly consistent with Turkey’s overall approach to environmental policy.

Current debates and challenges to environmental politics Development bound to construction and megaprojects . The idea of building a human-made waterway in Istanbul parallel to the Bosphorus Strait that would link the Black Sea with the Marmara Sea was brought forward for the first time on the eve of the 2011 general elections. The government categorised the project as one of its ‘crazy projects’. Environmentalists opposed it, stating it would have a devastating . impact on the ecosystem like the other two related projects in the north of Istanbul, namely the third. Bosphorus Bridge and the new airport. The justifications provided for building Canal Istanbul, namely reducing shipping traffic on the Bosphorus Strait and . protecting Istanbul from maritime accidents, were not convincing and were found to be disproportionate to the size of the project (Paker 2017). As for the government and private companies, they responded to these objections with statements and practices that showed how determined they were regarding these policies and realising their investments. Some examples of this were President Erdog˘ an’s statements targeting environmentalists (Turhan and Gündog˘ an 2017), police intimidation, and efforts to prevent the activities of civil society initiatives such as those of the Northern Forests Defence (KOS) (Bis¸kin 2017). An even more interesting and highly unusual example took. place in May 2017 during the celebration of the 564th anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul by the Ottomans, when 1,453 earth-moving trucks – in reference to the year of the conquest – paraded at the third airport’s construction site (Sabah 2017). Environmentalists’ interpretation of this parade was that the government was camouflaging the environmental destruction with a quasi-military spectacle and defying the foreign countries that were ‘jealous and trying to prevent’ the megaprojects with an ‘army of steel’ (Akgün 2017). Environmental organisations and experts have expressed deep concerns that the megaprojects were in reality aimed at expanding the city to the north, arguing that this . would cause further overcrowding in Istanbul, whose population has already surpassed 15 million, as well as the devastation of the Northern Forests and the city’s water sources (Gülersoy et al. 2014). In early 2018, a newspaper article published documents . revealing that the real reason for building Canal Istanbul was very different from the official one. The article stated that the planning of numerous housing development . projects in the vicinity of the declared location of Canal Istanbul had already begun. Among them, thirty-three projects belonged to the Real Estate Housing Investment Trust, which is half owned by the state-run Housing Development Administration (Ocak 2018b). This news article was the first to provide proof for these allegations, aiding the cause of environmentalists. This case provides important insight into the political economy of the physical pressure on the environment. Turkey’s economy continued to grow after a short period of recession in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. During this period, the core of economic policies increasingly shifted towards energy-intensive and highly polluting sectors, construction, and extractivism (Acar and As¸ıcı 2017; Canefe 2016). The 180

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transformation of nature into a commodity and its use in speculative commodity trade while the number of common environmental problems stemming from urbanisation and industrialisation increases is another issue that is being highlighted by analysts (Erensü 2016). Urban transformation, including gated community housing and malls; roads, bridges, and airports; mining and even some of the small hydroelectric power plants are nothing more than direct construction and excavation projects. The relevance of roads and bridges to transportation, housing to accommodation, mining to raw material procurement, and hydropower plants (HPPs) to energy production is limited. The increase of new energy projects, including coal-fired power plants and HPPs, is striking.2 Bug˘ ra and Savas¸kan (2014), who analysed the transformation of the Turkish economy by studying ten enterprises that displayed great success during the AKP period, reported that all ten companies had also invested in the energy sector. Turkey is also considered to be the number-one country in using the Public–Private Partnership (PPP) method for infrastructure constructions (Emek 2015), and its financial burden is highly debated. For example, operators who used the PPP method were granted a minimum revenue guarantee based on a specific number of vehicles passing over the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge (the third Bosphorus . Bridge), Osmangazi Bridge on Izmit Bay, and Avrasya Tunnel in Istanbul. Since actual traffic is lower than predicted in the contract, these companies are receiving millions of dollars in . compensation from the state treasury (Sönmez 2017; Toker 2017; Ilvan 2017). Therefore, the Turkish economy is becoming locked-in to a model because it is deemed successful in regard to development and employment and provides political prestige. Additionally, even though urban movements strongly oppose .the devastating impacts of rapid urban transformation on the environment and culture, in Istanbul for example, there is an ongoing expansive transformation of the main square Taksim and its surroundings, where important pieces of urban identity are either demolished or disabled. The recent decline of environmental protection Developments that have shaped the current period of weakening environmental regulations can be summarised under three headings: manipulation and transformation of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) into mere formalities; the forcible transfer of private property to companies for development projects through urgent expropriation; and finally, changes made to the bidding regulations, which have led to rapid and unregulated constructions becoming the norm. The EIA Regulation entered into force in 1993 but has been rendered mostly ineffective in recent years through changes that shortened the process, allowed exemptions, and restricted the participation of the public (Çoban et al. 2015). The EIA processes are generally regarded as a formality (Paker et al. 2013). According to reports from the Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation (MoEU), in 2016, among the 3,562 EIAs in various sectors such as mining, energy, waste, industry, and housing, 3,157 ‘did not require EIAs’, while 405 were given affirmative EIAs. In the period between 1993 and 2016, only 46 projects’ EIAs were ruled to be negative (T.C. Çevre ve S¸ehircilik Bakanlıg˘ ı 2017). Even though the EIA process always ends up with ‘EIA positive,’ it still had the effect of slowing down investments. 2

There are still more than 50 coal-fired power plants of 40 GW total installed capacity in the pipeline. See End Coal, ‘Global Coal Plant Tracker, published by Coalswarm,’ accessed 12 Jan 2018, https:// endcoal.org/tracker/. As for HPPs, hundreds of projects with or without dams of approximately 16 GW are in the pipeline. See http://www.enerjiatlasi.com/hidroelektrik/, accessed 12 Apr 2018.

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The fact that EIA processes are becoming futile is making democratic participation difficult. The EIA process provides two important opportunities for local communities and environmentalists: the public participation meeting that is required by law to take place during the process and, given both the EIA report and the ‘EIA-exempt decision’ are administrative decisions, the opportunity to file lawsuits in administrative courts to prevent or delay the project through the judicial process. Local communities and environmentalists who oppose projects that are harmful to the environment have often used their right to protest during the public participation meetings, thereby attracting media attention and slowing down the process. However, lately the state has been taking precautions to avoid this too. The venue of the 2018 EIA public participation meeting for the Sinop nuclear power plant was filled hours before the meeting was scheduled to start with members of the AKP women’s branch. Anti-nuclear local residents and members of parliament from the opposition parties were prevented from attending the meeting on the grounds that the room was full, and independent journalists were not admitted and were told that they had not called the company ahead of time for accreditation (Ocak 2018a). Environmentalists indicate that the MoEU, which is legally responsible for the process, did not intervene and the meeting was conducted by the company anyway. Urgent expropriation decisions are being used to accelerate investments, particularly in energy and mining projects; however, this practice, which is also legally questionable, results in forcible seizure of the livelihood of rural people and the rapid and mass transformation of landownership. In recent years, the urgent expropriation method, which is based on a law dating back to 1956 and should only be applicable in wartime and extraordinary circumstances, has been used hundreds of times and become a routine method. Only 14 cases of urgent expropriation were upheld between 1978 and 2000, whereas the number of expropriation cases between 2004 and 2014 was 828. Two-thirds of these expropriation decisions were taken to advance the development of power plants, and the remaining were for other forms of energy, urban transformation, and road or airport construction. Additionally, the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) took 941 urgent expropriation decisions during the same period (Kaya 2016). Nature is being reduced to its financial value and the government is trying to legitimise the displacement and dispossession of rural people through the payment of forcible sale and ‘damage compensation’ (Erensü 2016). Although this is referred to as expropriation, what occurs in reality is the state offering private property to companies through ‘urgent’ marketisation or, in other words, opening private property to ‘accumulation through seizure’ (Kaya 2016). This situation is also important for the fact that it shows how widespread energy and mining projects are in Turkey. The state does not want to lose time with long expropriation processes, every single landowners’ resistance, or with administrative lawsuits, while thousands of investments are proceeding. The state has been ensuring investments through extraordinary expropriations in the same way that it ruled the country through the state of emergency decrees since 2016. Urgent expropriation affects the environmental movement because it creates an obstacle for people who joined the movement to protect their livelihood and land. State Procurement Law has been changed extensively in recent years – precisely 186 times in 16 years (Gökdemir 2018). With these changes, previous relatively strict legislation has become increasingly more flexible. Therefore the government accelerated a process that it has perceived as ‘futile’ through the rapid completion of tenders and limiting tender applications to favoured companies. Awarding contracts without tender has become a rule for many investment projects in Turkey. Thus, the private sector becomes 182

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almost the only decision-maker in the investments it wants to carry forth, while the state institutions’ role of control is minimal (Erensü 2016). Another version of this model occurred when, following an unsuccessful tender process, the state granted Turkey’s first nuclear power plant at Mersin Akkuyu to Russia through an international agreement. Similarly, Turkey and Japan signed an agreement for the second nuclear plant that Turkey hopes to build in Sinop on the Black Sea coast. This method, which makes nuclear power plants a topic of international relations, decreases the chances for the success of the anti-nuclear movement and erodes its previous successes, particularly in the 1990s, because the fact that both the international agreements cannot be challenged at the domestic courts, and they are subject to diplomacy rather than energy policies. The major challenges today The impacts of developmental policies have spread far beyond the centres of fossil fuelbased energy, industrial facilities, and large mines. There are indications that the environmentally insensitive investment approach has impacts that spread to the smallest local scale. For example, experts state that the decline of environmental protection efforts seen in recent years resulted in the increased loss of biodiversity. S¸ekercıog˘ lu et al. (2011) indicated that ecosystems such as the endemic-rich Mediterranean maquis, grasslands, coastal areas, wetlands, and rivers have been destroyed and are disappearing because of practices that have become widespread through policies they refer to as ‘developmentalist obsession’, including uncontrolled urbanisation, megaprojects, dam construction and river-type small HPPs, draining of wetlands, excessive irrigation, and large-scale migration from rural areas to the cities (S¸ekercıog˘ lu et al. 2011). Local anti-HPP protests, mostly in the Black Sea region, have come to dominate environmental movements not only because small HPPs are widespread but also because their social, economic, and ecologic consequences are abundant. Even if small HPPs are considered to be favourable from a climate protection point of view (Atılgan and Azapagic 2016), they face great opposition because of the numerous impacts that arise during their construction and operation, such as distortion of water flow caused by insufficient water discharge, the negative effects of high-voltage power lines, and related habitat deterioration (Bas¸kaya, Bas¸kaya, and Sarı 2009; Kentel and Alp 2013). The government set the target to use all of Turkey’s hydroelectric potential by 2023 despite knowing that it will not be sufficient to meet the increasing energy demand (Çelik and Kiris¸çi 2016; Islar 2012). This has set off the construction of numerous HPPs on the same watercourse and a competition to develop new projects with total disregard for their environmental and social impacts. The overexploitation of rivers is the main argument in EIA reports and project cancellation lawsuits filed by private citizens (Eren 2017). Meanwhile, streams are allocated to companies for the sake of small HPPs and, similar to urgent expropriation of land, the rights to water resources are being transferred to companies. For the people who use this water for their livelihood and daily needs, their right to water is being violated through water-grabbing (Islar 2012). Because of poor implementation and poor management, this supposedly climateneutral energy production method has become unsustainable (Kurdog˘ lu 2016). The rapid economic growth policies based on extractivism, which are directly related to neoliberal transformation (Kidd 2016), are themselves closely related to environmental problems. Turkey’s first gold mine in Bergama became an item on the public agenda after the mining sector was opened to private companies and foreign capital in the early 1990s (Konak 2008). The popular movement in Bergama, which increasingly gained traction in 1994, had 183

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an impact all across Turkey. The movement was formed in reaction to not only the environmental problems that the mine would cause but also in reaction to the decision-making mechanisms that were becoming less participatory and depoliticised – transforming people who had no previous involvement with environmental issues into eco-activists (Çoban 2004). The Bergama resistance as well as later movements have protested against the use of cyanide and heavy metals and the impact of other waste on the soil and water sources, economic losses, and dislocation. Anti-mining movements also include arguments such as ‘preventing foreign invasion of land’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ (Özen, H. and Özen, S¸. 2017). It can be asserted that this discourse continued the tradition of left-wing urban and environmental movements of the 1970s (S¸ahin 2015); however, the recent discourse included an additional critical approach to economic growth and development ideology. The construction economy has multiplied the number of mines and stone and marble quarries and has created, much like with small HPPs, numerous ecological conflicts that reached remote villages and became politicised. The 2017 murder of Ali Ulvi and Aysun Büyüknohutçu, a couple fighting against stone quarries in Antalya, was Turkey’s first environmentalist murder case. The fact that the murderer, allegedly hired by the company in question, was killed in jail before the trial ended indicates that the issue is gaining more and more importance (Watts 2017). Similarly, the state also intimidates scientists working on environmental pollution. What followed the findings of Onur Hamzaog˘ lu and his colleagues regarding the case of Dilovası, which is located in Turkey’s most industrially polluted Marmara region, is one such example. The findings showed that in the region air pollution exceeded the limit values, cancer-related deaths were increasing (Hamzaog˘ lu et al. 2011), and toxic heavy metals were found in breast milk (Hamzaog˘ lu et al. 2014). After presenting these findings, the researchers were charged by the state for ‘inflicting fear and panic’ and were suspended from their university. This is seen as an example of ‘the politics of denial against findings of scientists’ and of the ‘Turkish governments’ attitudes to environmental data and use of environmental data in policy-making’ (Orhan 2012, 11). Air pollution is increasing also in cities, due in part to traffic congestion. According to a report published by the Clean Air Right Platform (THHP), which was formed by environmental and medical NGOs, the 2015 average annual PM10 levels were above the World Health Organisation limit values in all 81 Turkish provinces except one (THHP 2016). Furthermore, eight of the ten most polluted European cities are located in Turkey (Mead 2017). The role played by the increasing number of coal-fired power plants in the public health issue of air pollution is also growing. Coal-based energy production caused 7,900 premature deaths in 2010 (Myllyvirta 2014). As the construction sector’s share in the economy increased, Turkey became Europe’s largest cement manufacturer (Alyüz and Alp 2014). The number of cement production facilities increased to 48 (Özkan and Ulutas 2017), and they have become an important source of air pollution, including dust, heavy metals, and carbon dioxide emissions (Mutlu, Atıcı, and Gülen 2013). Other reasons for the industrial air pollution in Turkey include the mineral, iron, and steel industry, chemicals, and pulp and paper production processes (Alyüz and Alp 2014). Turkey’s hesitant and defensive climate policies complement its environmental record. Climate-related legislation, action plans, as well as projects, awareness-raising, and capacitybuilding activities, are countless. However, Turkey’s emissions-reduction pledge is far from operational because it plans to double its emissions, and energy and other sectoral policies are not consistent with an emissions-reduction commitment. The basic assumption behind Turkey’s self-declared business-as-usual scenario is ambiguous, and the relevant official studies are confidential. Turkey still insists on its ‘special circumstances’, which lost their ‘speciality’ after the Paris Agreement. Although Turkey wished to develop an emissions-trading scheme (but 184

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not a carbon tax), it has been struggling to create a ‘cap and trade’ system without an actual ‘cap’. Despite its unambitious targets and existing access to multilateral funds, Turkey tried to secure several forms of climate finance including from the GCF, which is exclusive to nonAnnex countries. Developing countries refused to discuss Turkey’s access to GCF at the COP23 in Bonn and COP24 in Katowice. Since Turkey is one of the few countries that does not belong to any negotiation bloc in UNFCCC negotiations, namely it is a country without a consistent ally, any progress toward its demands is not foreseeable. On the other hand, Turkey’s energy policies are directed toward one basic aim: reducing its current account deficit related to its energy imports. This can be seen through Turkey’s growing appetite for domestic lignite resources. However, policies calling for more domestic coal, paradoxically, open the way for imported coal. This specific energy policy can be related to Turkey’s hesitance toward solidifying its climate policies (S¸ahin 2018). Turkey’s EU accession process served as an important anchor for its environmental and climate policies in the late 2000s. Even Turkey’s late accession to the Kyoto Protocol was partly related to the EU process. The environmental chapter of the EU acquis was opened for Turkey in 2009, and legislative harmonisation began. However, even this was sacrificed for the sake of Turkey’s mismanaged developmental policies. For example, almost all environmental organisations criticised one of the most important pieces of legislation for harmonisation with the acquis, namely the Law on Conservation of Nature and Biodiversity, and created a fierce discussion. Opponents of the legislation argued that the legislation threatened the existing conservation areas and participatory governance of protected sites (IUCN 2010; WWF 2013). After Turkey’s EU accession process entered a period of crisis in 2011, this possible anchor disappeared to a large extent.

Conclusion Large-scale energy, industry, and infrastructure investments threatening the moral economies and semantic world of local communities have been considered as the real reason behind the majority of environmental conflicts (Erensü 2016). This is why environmental movements are mostly represented today by local communities trying to protect their livelihoods, their small properties, and the natural and traditional features of their habitats (water resources, lifestyle, culture). Therefore, most of the ‘activists’ are not considered to be environmentalist in the conventional sense of the word. On the other hand, Arsel et al. (2015, 387 and 375) discuss the ‘environmentalism of malcontent’, which they describe as ‘a type of environmentally themed activism whose motivations are primarily – though of course not exclusively – animated by a political economic posture that is not informed by direct or immediate personal livelihood concerns’. This environmentalism is motivated by ‘long-lasting dissatisfaction with the broader processes underlying the development trajectory of the country, and resentment brought by their exclusion from shaping these processes’. The successful fight against the Gerze coal-fired power plant is an example of the environmentalism of malcontent in Turkey (Arsel, Akbulut, and Adaman 2015). Nevertheless, while environmentalism in Turkey arose later than in the West, it still developed around post-materialist values. Today, urban and middle-class environmental awareness, which is shaped by sensibilities regarding the quality of life, ethical values, and an aesthetic view of the environment and culture, stands side-by-side with the fight of local communities and ‘malcontents’ who stand against small HPPs, mines, or stone quarries. Therefore, one can say that different types of environmentalisms continue to co-exist by preserving their ties to the criticism of capitalism and a green political framework.

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Even though studies show that environmental awareness in Turkey is on the rise, environmental policies have never been an important part of the manifestos of big political parties and never an issue that could have an effect on election results (Çarkog˘ lu 2017). There have been three consecutive Green Parties since 1988, but none of them was able to partake in elections and they were never influential during their election partnerships (S¸ahin 2015). In a period during which green politics is ineffective and administrative solutions are gradually losing their significance, environmental awareness is concentrated around local movements and daily life practices as well as ethical and conscientious choices. Interest in environmental issues is limited to active, young, and educated people (Adaman et al. 2011), and citizens’ major environmental concerns are air pollution, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and depletion of natural resources (Çarkog˘ lu 2017). The awareness of GMOs and the need to consume healthy, nutritious food is recognised by citizens representing diverse worldviews such as those who identify as nationalists, religious, left-wing, etc. (Veltri and Suerdem 2013). While the rural population grows poor and small- and medium-scale farming is eliminated – leaving its place to industrial agriculture as the consequence of the neo-liberalisation of agriculture (Aydın 2010) – the demand for a healthy lifestyle and organic food from the environmentally aware urban population is on the rise. These segments of society feed each other through ecovillages, organic food markets, community-supported agriculture, alternative food, and seed-exchange networks. They strive to return back to rural; to promote permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and slow food; and to lead vegan lifestyles. They constitute the most visible part of the contemporary ecology scene – even if they are a small minority in the general population and production-consumption chain. The rights of nature and ecological constitution campaigns that rose from green political groups and the animal welfare and rights movements that are partly popular in cities can also be seen to be part of this trend. When the Gezi protest erupted in 2013, its anti-government tone and sentiment occupied the media and many political analyses. However, many authors acknowledged the fact that it was a ‘countrywide resistance movement against the hyper-developmentalist environmental and urban policies of the government’ and an ‘environmental policy has become the focus of popular dissent’. (Mert 2016). Although the movement was accurately about reclaiming the right to the city (Kuymulu 2013), it was righteous to find its roots in the several previous both urban and rural local protests and occupy actions in Turkey (Erensü and Karaman 2017) and to name it a struggle for democracy and ecology (S¸ahin 2013). The Gezi protest was unprecedented in its scale and scope, and many people expected that it would be a turning point for Turkey where environmental action became more mainstream. But it was also another turning point for the increasing authoritarian orientation of the state. Reclaiming urban and environmental rights induced a more aggressive and antagonistic developmental policy which deteriorated the rule of law and participatory democracy. Evidence shows that there is an indispensable need to integrate movements for the protection of the environment, climate, and democracy in Turkey.

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14 THE ECONOMIC ROLE OF CITIES Stephen Karam

The level of a civilization can be estimated by the size and growth of its cities, an inevitable consequence of the development of human society. Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimah, 1377

Introduction If Ibn Khaldun were living today he might well find in modern day Turkey living proof for his bold claim. For Turkey’s cities were the engines on which the Turkish Republic ascended to high-middle-income status, by which poverty was more than halved, and through which the emergence of a middle-class firmly took root. Evolving from an agrarian economy with low productivity and only 31 per cent of its population living in cities in 1960, the Turkish economy experienced a major structural transformation over the past forty years, fuelled by the influx of its rural population to cities that made industrialisation possible. Today, Turkey’s urban population is well over 70 per cent and its economy is ranked eighteenth in the world in Gross Domestic Product (Figure 14.1). How did it get there? What were some of the key challenges, pitfalls, and successful policy decisions? This chapter reviews Turkey’s evolution from a relatively poor, low-income economy from the early days of the Republic in the 1920s into today’s competitive modern economy largely due to the role played by its cities. It applies a spatial lens to reflect on the role of the State – both upper and lower tiers – and public policy choices that shaped the new republic and Turkish cities, as well as the shifting strategies as the nation and cities engaged with the global economy. After a brief review of Turkey’s place in the world from an urban perspective, the focus shifts to the historic roots of Turkey’s urban system, the modernisation efforts beginning with the new republic in the 1920s, and key developments over the course of the late 20th century, then to the modern period. The last section takes a forward-looking perspective, considering the challenges Turkish cities now face and the important decisions that policy-makers have before them in determining the future course of the nation.

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Figure 14.1 Turkey urban population (right-hand axis) and GDP in constant USD (left-hand axis), 1960– 2017. Source: World Development Indicators, World Bank.

The backdrop: Turkey in an urbanising world Urbanisation has been strongly correlated with reductions in poverty and inequality and improvements in access to services, and Turkey is a noteworthy illustration of this phenomenon (Ravallion et al. 2007; Spence 2009). While many developing countries have resisted urbanisation, Turkey embraced it. Over the past decade (2002–2011) extreme poverty in Turkey was reduced from 13 to 5 per cent, while moderate poverty was reduced from 44 to 22 per cent. 89 per cent of these declines were driven by growth and led to a remarkable 20 per cent increase in the size of the middle class. With over 92 per cent of Gross Value Added being contributed by urban areas today, one can hardly speak about Turkey’s notable economic performance and dramatic reduction of poverty without considering the role of cities (World Bank 2015; Azevedo and Atamanov 2014). While Turkey’s western cities with trade links to Europe and earlier industrial transitions account for the lion’s share of the country’s productive output, what is notable over the past decade are trends that indicate a system of cities emerging where secondary cities have begun to contribute more substantially, both demographically and economically. During the ten-year period from 2004 to 2014, eastern and central Anatolian cities like Gaziantep, Kayseri,. and Konya (among other . ‘Anatolian Tigers’) increased their shares of urban population while Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir experienced declines. These Anatolian Tigers . also outpaced their Aegean counterparts in GDP per capita growth during the same period (TÜIK, 2016; World Bank 2015). This can be explained in part by the development of new external trade partners and the movement of manufacturing firms out of higher-cost cities that have begun to specialise in knowledge economies and high-end services, while secondary cities have become more attractive for their lower land and labour costs. But urbanisation doesn’t happen without some pain. Massive urban migration took place with critical surges in the 1950s and 1980s that shifted Turkey’s demographics irrevocably from a rural-based society to the urban society that it is today. The introduction of mechanised agricultural technology in the 1950s fuelled this first wave of migration, as agricultural productivity improved but made agricultural workers redundant, forcing them to seek new job opportunities in cities. As cities grew, so did production and consumption markets that contributed to Turkey’s structural shift from an agrarian to an industrialised economy. Between 1960 and 2013, Turkey’s industrial share of the economy increased from 17.6 per cent to 26.4 per cent and services grew exponentially from 27 to nearly 64 per cent (World Bank 2015). Few cities, however, were ready for this influx of migrants, spawning the widespread phenomenon of gecekondu (shelters built overnight) at the periphery of cities. It is estimated 191

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that nearly 70 per cent of urban areas were informal by the late 1970s when gecekondu were a predominant feature of Turkish cities. With them, rural migrants brought different lifestyles, cultural traditions, ethnicities, and ways of socialising that made urban life a challenge for both old and new urban residents alike. Many became critical of urbanisation, not unlike residents of African cities or Asian cities today where policies have been adopted to stem the flow of migrants from rural areas. Some of these resentments linger today.

Early urban settlement patterns and the modernisation period Anatolian city roots trace back to the Selçuk Empire Urban historians attribute today’s economic footprint of Anatolian cities back to the efforts of the Selçuk Dynasty in the early 12th century, with its capital in Konya. The Byzantine cities of . Istanbul, Ephesus, and others along the Aegean coast were, of course, well-established by then, but the great expanse of eastern Anatolia was still very much rural and disconnected. No longer relying mainly on trade west with the rest of Byzantium, the Selçuks sought to establish and, in some cases, revitalise urban settlements and their rural periphery with transport networks linking to trade routes across eastern Anatolia, connecting them internally and with external trade partners in Central Asia. These settlements were also devoted to settling Türkomen groups to participate in a revitalised urban and rural life in eastern Anatolia. Longer-distance commerce required the construction of caravanserai and bridges, commercial buildings, and markets (khans) along eastern trade routes. The dominant regional and international trade routes of the Byzantine . Empire that prominently featured trade between Konya and Istanbul and Ephesus to the west prior to the 12th century were, over time, offset by investments in over 120 caravanserai and khans concentrated primarily on the eastern routes from Konya to Aksaray, Kayseri, and Sivas (Özcan 2010). This network of urban settlements and trade routes became the backbone on which the modern Republic connected eastern Anatolia with the western coastal cities. Some seven centuries after the Selçuk Empire, reflecting on Turkey’s modernisation project at the dawn of the new Republic in the early 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is reported to have said ‘Turkey’s true master is the peasant’. Whether Turkey’s new leader was using a rhetorical device to shift the attention of his followers eastward where his plans for ambitious development schemes were yet to take place, we cannot be sure. Yet Atatürk, and the modernisation period he initiated, is marked by a focus on a push toward industrialisation. Early leaders of the Republic recognised that for industry to take root, well-planned cities would be needed to foster economic agglomeration (creating deep production and consumption markets). Most every initiative they launched aimed to consolidate, structure, and connect modern urban economies in towns and other settlements across Anatolia’s broad plain. Efforts to connect Anatolian cities started with the launch of an efficient railways system in the early days of the Republic, which had not only the political objective of linking settlements to promote national cohesion, but also to improve connectivity that served as a foundation for Turkey’s nascent economy. In later years, investment and development of an extensive road network helped connect urban settlements from coastal regions across the hinterlands. Urban planning trends Turkey’s early investment in settlement planning, dating back to the establishment of the Republic, set an important foundation for the future of Anatolian cities. It was during the Republic Period (1923–1950) that a nation-wide industrialisation and urbanisation process 192

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. firmly took root beyond Istanbul. Ankara is a living example of this policy orientation: once a backwater town with a meagre population, since its establishment as the capital of the new Republic, Ankara has grown to a population of over 5. million, and generates the second largest GDP per capita of any other provincial city (TÜIK 2016). During this period, the State was also the dominant player in the economy. Across Anatolia, planners selected small Anatolian cities for the development of industrial enterprise. State manufacturing investments, public enterprises, and transport investments were designed and executed to expand development eastward. Twenty-three settlements were planned in the first decade of the Republic and cities in the Marmara Region, not unlike what we’re seeing today, experienced a decline in shares of urban population in favour of the Anatolian hinterland (Tekeli 2009). It wasn’t until the mid-1950s, following these early experiments, that urban planning was formally institutionalised with the passage of the Development and Zoning Law No. 6785 in 1956. Importantly, the Law devolved the planning function to municipalities for the first time. This was not unusual given that it coincided with the first major surge of urbanisation and a deepening of industrialisation and thus planning at the local level became a crucial need. However, the State clawed back some of these responsibilities, ostensibly because local governments were unable to effectively prepare and enforce urban plans, with the passage of a new Development Law in 1961. This was also the period when five-year national development plans were instituted under the State Planning Organisation (later referred to as the Ministry of Development). The ‘incremental planning approach’ By the 1980s, as rural migration to cities was peaking, urban planning responsibilities were once again devolved to local authorities under Development Law No. 3194, enacted in 1985. During this period, planning regulations were relaxed to accommodate rapid urbanisation and the resulting changes in land-use patterns. The emergence of the private sector during this period of economic liberalisation helped fuel this process, as cities came under new pressures from developers and business interests. Turkish urban historians note that development plans lost their dominant role at that time and also their linkage to national level planning. It was at this time, too, particularly in the early 1980s, that metropolitan cities turned to an ‘incremental planning’ approach (Tekeli 2009). Very little has changed in the planning hierarchies and regulations since that time. Cascading tiers of planning from national to regional to provincial and city plans remain the structure of the Turkish planning system to this day. However, amendment plans and other modifications designed to improve the flexibility of the planning system, in fact, over time, served to undermine it. A 2008 Council of Europe report indicates that in a single city as many as 250 amendment plans may be approved in a single year, as mayors push through revision plans to accommodate eager developers. This has given way in many cities to rampant urban sprawl, blatant disregard for and weak enforcement of existing plans, and uncoordinated infrastructure investments that undermine the development of Turkish cities. In addition to elaborating a new planning system that evolved with time, other key institutions were established during the Republican Period to support municipalities in delivering . services to urban residents. Il Bank, initially established as the Bank of Municipalities and later reconstituted as the Bank of Provinces, was founded in 1933. As a State bank, and in the absence of a strong private sector banking system, its purpose was to ensure that cities had access to financing for the increasing demand for municipal services, while also relieving the State of growing subsidies for municipal infrastructure. 193

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Administrative changes to the legal framework governing municipalities In parallel with the evolving planning system, changes were taking place in the administrative and legal framework governing municipalities. The real game-changer came in 1981 with the passage of the Metropolitan Municipality Law No. 6360, which recognised important differences between different tiers of municipalities in terms of size and administrative capability. The Law had the intent of aligning the administrative responsibilities of larger, more capable municipalities with their growing economic footprint and political power, and this development occurred at the same time as economic liberalisation policies were being adopted and where urbanisation was again trending upward. The Law recognised 14 new metropolitan municipalities, mainly concentrated in the western half of Turkey, and 27 Districts, and included as well a number of amendments to existing laws and decrees. It also came with increasing fiscal transfers from the State as a form of tax revenue sharing arrangement, recognising the increasing role and responsibility of cities in generating important tax revenues for the State and for their own locality in providing public services. As one can see from the foregoing, Turkey has gone through an extensive period of urban policy formulation and experimental institutional initiatives that shifted from the early days of the Republic until the present time. Influenced by global trends, periods of rapid urbanisation, and shifts in political orientation from State-led to liberalised, market-based economic policies, the role of the State has expanded and contracted, the role of municipalities has evolved, and the nation’s economy was structurally transformed, an arena in which cities played a major role. Turning to the present time, policy-makers and city officials have an extensive legacy of policy and institutional successes and failures to draw upon, finding out what works in Turkey and where differences in development stages and experience sometimes dictate unique solutions in comparison to other high-income and emerging market economies. While little has been said so far about the views and orientations of urban citizens, as much of the State initiatives have been top-down and largely technocratic in orientation to this point in time, this theme emerges as a critical policy agenda for Turkey’s national policy makers and city leaders today. Today the question becomes how to engage with urban citizens, enhance social inclusion, and build government accountability and voice into Turkey’s State and society relations at the city level.

Turkish cities today Driven by today’s global urban agenda, advanced industrial countries and emerging market countries alike have focused in recent years on promoting more sustainable cities. The UN’s HABITAT III Conference convened the largest urban gathering of policy-makers across the world in October 2016 to agree on an agenda that embraces urbanisation rather than trying to forestall it,1 elevates equity and social justice issues, fosters national urban planning, integrates sustainable urbanisation into the sustainable development goals, and promotes newly fashioned institutional arrangements to implement this agenda. Turkey’s urban agenda is largely in step with this global trend. Turkey’s HABITAT III Report, issued in December 2014, reviews the country’s efforts since 2009 in developing and implementing its urban agenda (Republic of Turkey Ministry of Environment and Urbanization 2014). Drawing upon the views of over 500 technocrats, 1

For instance, the World Bank (2015) references policies in several countries designed to undermine urbanisation.

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academics, and practitioners from 151 institutions, an Urbanisation Council was convened in 2009 to formulate Turkey’s national Integrated Urban Development Strategy and Action Plan (KENTGES) spanning the period 2010–2023 (Republic of Turkey Ministry of Public Works and Settlements 2010). It establishes strategies and actions for promoting balanced and liveable urban development, as well as some structural solutions for urbanisation. The strategy is oriented around three main thrusts – Restructuring of the Spatial Planning System, Improving the Quality of Space and Life in Settlements, and Strengthening the Economic and Social Structures of Settlements, which together capture important trends and new policy directions that Turkey needs to move in. While highlighting some of the country’s accomplishments in implementing the strategy, however, the report recognises that it had limited impact in helping to manage ongoing urbanisation, improving spatial planning at the formulation and implementation stages, and didn’t fully develop the synergies of Turkey’s system of cities with a mix of cities that are competitive and globally connected at one end of the spectrum, while others remain behind, failing to pull forward lagging regions mainly in the eastern and southern areas of the country. However, the report does highlight the country’s effort in taking a more focused look at urban transport and mobility, reflected in the Government’s issuance in 2014 of a national urban transport strategy – Creating a Sustainable Urban Transportation System, which, given the difficulties of Ankara and several other cities to plan and finance urban transport systems, was long overdue (Republic of Turkey 2014). The formulation of a national urban policy itself is an important first step, as noted by the OECD in its 2016 review of national urban policy formulation in OECD countries. Turkey’s current urban policies were assessed to be relatively strong in promoting economic development, spatial structure, and environmental sustainability, while human development and climate resilience were deemed to be less of a focus, generating findings of critical gaps, including development of effective urban governance systems (horizontal coordination and vertical alignment), promotion of effective municipal finance systems, and generation of robust and comparable urban scale data (OECD 2016). Unfortunately, implementation of KENTGES has been weak, not well-monitored or well-coordinated, ultimately resulting in some disappointment to date in carrying forward its important agenda. Fortunately, however, the torch is being carried forward in the country’s Tenth National Development Plan (2014–2018) where many of the same policy issues and themes are picked up, such as (Republic of Turkey Ministry of Development 2013): 



Improving quality of life and space: sustainable urban form and transport, integrating infrastructure investments into spatial planning, revitalising Central Business Districts and neighbourhoods; balancing the distribution of social services, preserving open space and cultural/historical areas, disaster risk management and building safety. Strengthening economic and social dynamics, including rural–urban migration (strengthening rural settlements), urban solidarity, integration and tolerance; disadvantaged services; citizen participation. By what standard should a city be measured – a glimpse at municipal services

One of the key functions of Turkey’s cities is the provision of piped water and sanitation services. Here, Turkish cities have a good track record. Access to a piped water supply is nearly universal, reflecting a concerted effort at the national and local level to meet high standards for a middle-income country over the last four decades. Access to sanitation 195

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services – sewage networks or septic systems – is also very high for a country of Turkey’s income level, standing at 84 per cent coverage nation-wide and 90 per cent for municipal populations. Customer surveys also show strong satisfaction among urban residents for water services (nearly 80 per cent satisfied) and sewage (about 72 per cent) (World Bank 2016; see also TÜIK satisfaction surveys on water and sewage service). Several factors contributed to this outcome. First, successive national development plans emphasised the need for connecting residential populations across Anatolia to piped water supply and sanitation. Appropriately, the national government assumed the role of setting policy and service standards, while leaving the delivery of services to local governments. . Second, ample financing was made available to municipalities through Il Bank, Turkey’s public Bank for Provinces, and through the State for lagging regions where borrowing was not. possible. Finally, in response to acute water shortages and sewage problems across the city of Istanbul in the early eighties due to rapid urbanisation and pressing demands for system expansion, water and sanitation services were spun off from the municipality in 1981 into Turkey’s first corporatised water utility. Prior to this time, water revenues were being used to cross-subsidise other municipal expenditures, leaving insufficient funding to invest in maintenance of the networks and their expansion. While the utility is fully under the control of the municipality as a public utility, it operates on a separate balance sheet and is able to take on large amounts of financing with a Treasury guarantee. . Following Istanbul’s successful transition in setting up a water utility, legislative changes required all metropolitan municipalities to form an independent water utility thereafter. Up until 2014, 16 such metropolitan municipalities operated under this structure, and the number of utilities expanded to 30 when 14 new metropolitan municipalities were added in the new Metropolitan Municipality Law issued in 31 March 2014. As of that year, 62 million people were receiving utility-provided water and sanitation services, roughly 77 per cent of the total population (World Bank 2016). Because of their independent financial status, water utilities are also under tight financial regulations regarding cost recovery, and Turkey stands out among comparator countries, as well as several high-income OECD countries, for charging combined water and sanitation service tariffs sufficient to cover costs and to deter wastage of water resources that subsidies can often encourage. This underscores strong fundamentals in the water sector attributable to effective institutional arrangements (World Bank 2014). Financing cities Turkish cities, in general, are well-financed. They enjoy generous fiscal transfers annually from central government, accounting for roughly 50 per cent of total revenues, and this allows them to maintain robust capital investment programmes. In aggregate, they also are showing strong net revenue surpluses, making them attractive for financing. But there are also some financially distressed municipalities that have not been able to keep pace and will continue to need support and capacity building. . Since its founding in 1933, Il Bank has served as the primary source of financing for Turkish cities. Its lending portfolio and business model has not evolved significantly over time, and may not need to in many respects, as it has found a basic formula that works. Rather than using modern . lending practices to assess cashflow and balance sheet capability for municipal borrowing, Il Bank relies on collateral-based lending, where loans are granted up to a State-sanctioned limit and securitised against Turkey’s robust fiscal transfers. This serves to minimise risks of default and thus drives the cost of lending and loan pricing to relatively 196

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low, below-market terms. However, it also follows a practice of shifting the currency exchange risk for foreign-denominated loans to municipalities, creating a mounting contingent liability during relatively long payback periods. These concerns are starting to materialise now with the dramatic decline of the Turkish lira and the likely burden this is placing on municipalities that service this debt with their only revenues coming from taxes and service fees .paid in Turkish lira. In this regard and with the intent of modernising municipal finances, Il Bank could be more proactive in helping municipalities to understand and hedge against currency exchange risks. There should also be an increased focus in helping municipalities that are striving to reach credit-worthiness on commercial market terms and, over time, being able to access financing from the market – both bonds and borrowing from . domestic banks in domestic currency should be a medium-term objective. This is because Il Bank’s capital base is relatively small in trying to serve the entire municipal sector and reliance on the central government to recapitalise it hasn’t yielded anywhere near the financing . needed by the municipal market. Other methods of mobilising financing, such as Il Bank’s reconstituting itself as a public stock .company, don’t seem to be making a dent in increasing its capital base either, meaning that Il Bank is slowly becoming a minor player in financing municipal investments. Disaster risk in Turkish cities Turkey is highly vulnerable to disaster risk – 95 per cent of the country lies in one of the most active earthquake and landslide regions of the world, due to three different major fault systems spanning across the Anatolian peninsula, placing 70 per cent of the population – mainly in cities – at risk. The Marmara earthquake in 1999 caused an estimated 18,000 deaths and $28 billion in economic losses while, more recently in 2011, the city of Van suffered losses of over 600 people and damages to over 11,000 buildings. Turkey’s focus in KENTGES on strengthening urban resilience to disaster risk is therefore highly appropriate. Following on its recommendations, the Turkish Government passed the Law on Urban Transformation of Disaster Risk Areas No. 6306 in May 2012 as one of the country’s responses to this policy priority of KENTGES. However, it is widely and understandably seen as a thinly veiled, State-sanctioned initiative to enable real-estate developers even more latitude in gentrifying older sections of Turkish cities with limited opportunities for local stakeholder consultations. Given that virtually any city in Turkey is vulnerable to seismic risk and that few buildings constructed before 2000 can meet current seismic risk building standards, it would seem that nearly any location can be justified for urban renewal and redevelopment under the new law. Analysis of the law and its regulations underlines four critical weaknesses. First, no criteria are established for what constitutes a ‘risky area’; this determination is made by a range of different central government agencies according to criteria that are undisclosed. Second, no method is prescribed for determining property values of affected owners and their appropriate compensation. Different cases have emerged where municipalities have used a flat rate method for calculating property values (the prevailing method), while others use a market valuation method. Third, as in other areas where urban governance is weak, public consultation is at a minimum. It is not until after the municipality prepares a new development plan that is approved by the central government that the development plans are required to be posted publicly for one month from the date of approval. This is giving rise to a large and growing number of court cases, where citizens have turned to the judicial system to resolve disputes because the policies and their administration do not provide sufficient clarity or voice to local communities. Finally, streamlined regulatory procedures and considerable subsidies 197

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provided by the State create an uneven playing field by which urban regeneration projects in ‘risky’ areas have a distinct advantage, thus undermining ‘conventional’ redevelopment projects in areas not declared to be risky (Candas¸ et al. 2016). A better approach would be to unbundle urban transformation projects from disaster risk justifications, shifting more of the initiative to the local level, including broad-based stakeholder consultations upfront, and using other policy instruments to help promote disaster risk resilience in cities, which is a noble and worthwhile goal. This would include a more concerted focus on developing a national building code that is disaster resilient and applied and enforced at the municipal level. Turkey’s central government can then help to ensure the code is being adhered to at the municipal approval level by playing an appropriate regulatory role in conducting spot reviews of building permit approvals to determine whether a given municipality is adhering to the new code. Disaster resilience also could be integrated as a formal element of existing municipal planning tools with dedicated dimensions focusing on identifying risky areas and making determinations as to what type of structures, if any, can be constructed in risky zones throughout the city. Guidelines for construction techniques and information on disaster resilient materials could be disseminated to municipalities, contractors and others in the real-estate industry to promote higher building quality standards and ensure the flow of new construction is not adding to the stock of disaster risk buildings. Gezi Park revisited . In the summer of 2013, Gezi Park, an historic green space located in Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square, brought to the forefront Turkey’s long-standing urban challenge of improving social inclusion and community consultations, following the Government’s attempt to uproot trees and replace them with a modern-style shopping centre. Generating over 54 million public tweets, the initiative quickly lost popular support and ignited a social movement of resistance that remains today. Several features of the crisis that erupted bear need for reflection. Turkish cities up to that point had been conducting urban regeneration in older districts for decades. While there is a mixture of good and bad practices, several such projects stand out both for their transformative value and their ability to build consensus around the initiative. By contrast, the redevelopment of Gezi Park was at odds with the Government’s own national urban strategy, which emphasised the need to valorise and preserve cultural and historic areas of its cities and to engage urban citizens more actively in shaping them. The urban planning and urban economics nexus In trying to understand the logic of the informal economy back in 2013, Ricardo Hausmann points to what well-trained economists can often miss – the spatial dimension. Using an average commute time of three hours for low-income formal sector workers to get to work in rapidly urbanising developing cities, Hausmann estimates a formal sector worker facing an effective tax rate of 45 per cent when accounting for income tax and time spent on the road. Ultimately, Hausmann points to failed urban planning systems that don’t factor in the need for the proximity of housing to jobs and good urban transport systems (Hausmann 2013). What we might call ‘Hausmann’s Dilemma’ is a very serious problem for many cities in the developing world, like Rio de Janiero, Manila, and Jakarta. Turkish cities face similar challenges and the situation has been worsening since the last major wave of urbanisation in the 1980s. Reliant in their earlier days on an entrepreneurial culture where service providers emerge nearly everywhere in response to a market need, Turkish cities have long benefited from an extensive private provider 198

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system of transport – the ubiquitous taxis and dolmus¸ (small group diesel buses named after ‘Dolma’ the famous Turkish stuffed vegetables) – when their populations were below 200,000. However, population growth has made mobility a serious challenge in many Turkish cities today that have underinvested in public transport systems. Increasing congestion will invariably put a crimp on productivity over the coming years given long and growing travel to work times. Several factors are at work here: most Turkish cities do not have transport master plans, nor is there sufficient provisioning for mobility in the existing planning tools that are available. The most acute case is that of Ankara, a city of over 5 million people with very limited public transport options. Urban transport in Ankara – the classic case of waiting too long Despite being the nation’s capital, Ankara’s urban transport system developed much like that of other Turkish cities in a largely piecemeal fashion. It wasn’t until 1972 when the city population reached well over one million residents that a comprehensive urban transport plan was prepared for the city. That plan was the first to call for a subway system, which is encouraging given the growing need for public transportation. However, the city was unable to implement the plan due to lack of resources, and the plan was shelved until the late 1980s. By 1987 a new comprehensive transport plan was prepared proposing 55 km of metro line. The first leg, linking the downtown with development to the north, began in 1993 and was completed in 1997, and was supplemented by an east–west light rail line in 1996. By 1994 a new transport masterplan was prepared calling for a comprehensive rail system for the city of over 130 km by 2015. Construction, however, didn’t begin until 2004, just before local elections, when three subway lines were initiated, and stopped midway due to the city again lacking sufficient financing. By 2011, the system was handed over to the central government to support planning and financing of the new metro lines, which have been only recently completed (Batuman 2013). In line with global trends, as Turkish cities have experienced economic growth, car ownership has grown exponentially, putting a lot more vehicles on the roads of Turkish cities. Motorisation rates (number of cars owned by 1,000 persons) typically grow at least twice as fast as economic growth rates when a country’s GDP per capita is between $4,000 and $8,000. Between 2001 and 2010 in Turkey, car ownership per capita grew much faster. than GDP per capita in most metropolitan areas, and almost twice as fast in Kayseri, Konya, Istanbul, and Gaziantep. In light of Ankara’s experience and nation-wide motorisation trends, the importance of urban mobility for Turkish cities today cannot be over-emphasised. Congestion and other negative externalities can threaten to undermine productivity and economic growth, and this is increasingly becoming the case in Turkish cities. Urban transport systems are complex in design, including multiple modalities; they need to be linked to high density residential and commercial districts, where it is costly and sometimes impossible to retrofit such systems; and they can be very expensive to finance both for construction and operation, as subsidies are invariably involved in early years to increase ridership and change the public culture regarding the use of public transport. For all of these reasons, Turkish cities need to make urban transport and mobility a major thrust of their development planning in the years to come and will need support and assistance from the central government in doing this.

Conclusions Turkish cities have benefited from a long legacy of policy and institutional reforms and varying degrees of engagement by the central government on the urban agenda. At times, central government had the tendency of crowding out local governments and their citizens in 199

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aspects of planning, financing, urban redevelopment, and delivery of municipal services, opting instead for top-down, technocratic solutions. At other times, when the State receded, the lack of regulatory oversight, particularly in urban planning and urban transport-system development, resulted in a decline in the use and enforcement of urban planning tools that are now needed more than ever as secondary cities grow in size and complexity. Prior experience in Turkey has shown in the water and sanitation sector, for instance, that establishing sound institutions, defining clear rules, and providing incentives for performance are an important policy mix that Turkey has experimented with and largely succeeded in doing in the past. State subsidies for lagging regions to expand water and sanitation-service coverage to near universal levels, such as the SUKAP Programme, have been quite effective. Legal requirements, allowing for sufficient timeframes, and providing urgently needed State subsidies for wastewater treatment, have also combined the right mix of rules, incentives and financing that has yielded tangible results in gradually bringing up the volumes of wastewater subjected to treatment. Going forward, Turkey will need to continue balancing and rebalancing the roles of central and local governments in its urban policy, finding the right mix of policy and implementation arrangements, while recognising that its prior tendency toward expediency has placed a serious wedge between the State and citizens in the ever-present need for consensus building. Relieving congestion in the court system by defining clear rules and administrative procedures and building public consultation in the formal framework for city urban planning and redevelopment initiatives will ultimately serve the country well in advancing beyond the middle income trap. Independent reviews of Turkey’s national urban policy (KENTGES) and Tenth National Development Plan have confirmed that policy-makers are aware of the shortcomings in the system. Appropriate emphasis has been placed on radically improving urban transport systems (both at the planning and implementation levels), strengthening spatial planning (without reverting back to rigid and unimplementable comprehensive development planning), valorising cultural heritage and historic dimensions of Turkey’s cities, and underpinning all of these measures with a renewed focus on social inclusion and public consultations. In going forward, policy-makers might benefit from the perspective of Jane Jacobs, an insightful urban observer if not an urban planner, who, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, states that ‘cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody’ (Jacobs 1992, 238).

References Azevedo, Joao Pedro, and Aziz Atamanov. 2014. Pathways to the Middle Class in Turkey: How Have Reducing Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity Helped?Washington, DC: World Bank. Batuman, Bülent. 2013. ‘City Profile: Ankara.’ Cities 31: 578–590. Candas¸, Ezgi, Johannes Flacke, and Tahsin Yomralıaog˘ lu. 2016. ‘Understanding Urban Regeneration in Turkey.’ International Archives of the Photogrammetry Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences 41. Hausmann, Ricardo. 2013. ‘The Logic of the Informal Economy.’ Project Syndicate, 19 June. https:// www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-logic-of-the-informal-economy-by-ricardo-hausmann?ba rrier=accesspaylog Jacobs, Jane. 1992. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York and Toronto: Vintage Books. OECD. 2016. National Urban Policy in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD Publishing. Özcan, Koray. 2010. ‘The Anatolian Seljuk City: An Analysis on Early Turkish Urban Models in Anatolia.’ Central Asiatic Journal 54(2): 273–290. Ravallion, Martin, Shaohua Chen, and Prem Sangraula. 2007. New Evidence on Urbanization of Global Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank. Republic of Turkey Ministry of Development. 2013. Tenth National Development Plan 2014–2018.

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The economic role of cities Republic of Turkey Ministry of Environment and Urbanization. 2014. ’Turkey HABITAT III National Report.’ Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, December. https://unhabitat.org/wp-content/up loads/2014/07/Turkey-national-report.pdf Republic of Turkey Ministry of Public Works and Settlements. 2010. KENTGES: Integrated Urban Development Strategy and Action Plan. Ankara: Ministry of Public Works and Settlements. Spence, Michael, Annez Patricia Clarke, and Robert Buckley. 2009. Urbanization and Growth: Commission on Growth and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank. . Tekeli, Ilhan. 2009. ‘Cities in Modern Turkey.’ LSE Cities, November. https://lsecities.net/media/obj ects/articles/cities-in-modern-turkey/en-gb/ . TÜIK. 2016. Gross Domestic Product by Provinces 2004–2014. 12 December. World Bank. 2014. ‘Turkey Transitions: Integration, Inclusion, Institutions.’ 1 December. http://www. worldbank.org/en/country/turkey/publication/turkeys-transitions-integration-inclusion-institutions World Bank. 2015. ‘Turkey Urbanization Review: Rise of the Anatolian Tigers.’ April. https://op enknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/22388/87180.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y World Bank. 2016. Republic of Turkey: Sustainable Urban Water Supply and Sanitation: Reaching Compliance with the European Union’s Water Framework Directive in a Sustainable Way – Challenges and Opportunities for Turkey’s Water and Sanitation Sector. November. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/ 136911483599565083/Updated-report

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15 GOVERNING TURKEY’S DIASPORA(S) AND THE LIMITS OF DIASPORA DIPLOMACY1 Bahar Bas¸er

Introduction Turkey has one of the largest diasporas in Europe as a result of various migration waves starting from the 1960s. According to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), currently the number of Turkish citizens living outside the country’s borders exceeds 6 million, with more than 5 million of those living in Europe. This number excludes 3 million returnees who now live in Turkey after spending a substantial part of their lives abroad (MFA 2018). It can be argued that the Turkish diaspora started with ‘guest workers’ who came to Europe as temporary workers as a result of labour migration.2 Temporary contracts then turned into permanent settlement and the number of ‘Turks abroad’ kept increasing due to family reunification and the arrival of the second and third generations. Other significant waves of migration followed, especially after political turmoil such as military coups and the low-intensity civil war between the Turkish state and the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Workers Party). Asylum applications from Turkey increased immensely, especially in the 1990s, changing the diaspora’s profile to a more multifaceted one: a combination of different ethnic and religious groups with different needs, agendas, and visions. Many of those who were referred to as ‘Turks Abroad’ were, for instance, actually Kurds who left their region due to economic needs as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes in Varto and Bingol and the Keban Dam Project (Sirkeci 2002, 13). Many others who migrated to Sweden after the 1970s were Assyrians from Mardin. A substantial number of Alevites also left due to oppression. Turkey’s policy towards its citizens living abroad has evolved throughout time, following global trends as well as the ideologies and visions of governing parties. One can observe a growing interest in diaspora governance decade by decade; however, a substantial diasporic turn happened under the AKP (Adalet Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) when 1 2

This chapter is part of a project funded by the Newton Mobility Grant (NMG2R2\100111) between March 2018 and March 2019. Authors such as Akgündüz (2017) demonstrate that mass migration from Turkey dates back to way earlier than the 1960s. However, in this chapter I only concentrate on the contemporary Turkish diaspora.

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it created the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB)3 along with the Public Diplomacy Coordinator under the Prime Ministry,4 and the Yunus Emre Institutes5 for enhancing cultural activities abroad. Old institutions have been restructured and new institutions have been created in order to generate a coherent diaspora engagement policy that is institutionalised in nature and assertive in its future visions and strategies, formulated by experts rather than grassroots migrant organisations. This chapter sheds light on the transformation of diaspora governance and asks the following questions: How did Turkey tackle its heterogeneous population outside its borders? In other words, how has Turkey engaged with its diaspora since the 1960s? How can we interpret Turkey’s diaspora governance policy in broader theoretical discussions?

Trajectories of Turkey’s diaspora policy Délano and Gamlen (2014, 43) found that ‘over half of all United Nations member states now maintain some type of formal government institution dedicated to their diaspora, which they conceive in various ways to include different groups of emigrants and their descendants’. Therefore, Turkey is not unique with regards to reforming emigration policies and transforming them in a way that translates into a state-driven diaspora-building exercise. From Armenia to Bosnia, from China to India, many countries are trying to formulate policies to use their diasporas for their homeland’s interests by engaging them with certain political processes such as lobbying or external voting. They often establish new institutions such as diaspora ministries or sub-committees, which operate under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (S¸ahin‐Mencütek and Bas¸er 2018). As Gamlen (2008, 4) states, ‘improving diaspora policies is in large part a matter of improving the coherence of what is already taking place in the area of state-diaspora relations, rather than doing something entirely new’. In parallel to this argument, it is safe to say that Turkey has always shown interest in Turkish citizens abroad since the beginning of the 1960s. However, the scope of its engagement took different shapes and forms throughout the years depending on the political conjuncture at home and abroad. I adopt Gamlen’s typology to explain the transformation of Turkey’s diaspora engagement policy throughout the last six decades (Table 15.1). Gamlen (2008) suggests that we can examine state-led initiatives towards their diaspora in two sub-headings: diaspora building and diaspora integration. Diaspora building refers to cultivating and recognising diaspora communities, while the diaspora integration refers to drawing diasporas into reciprocal ties with their homelands. Diaspora integration means extending extra-territorial citizenship rights such as allowing dual citizenship, external voting, portability of pensions, as well as consular activities. Diaspora building however, falls more on the symbolic realm. It refers to cultivating a diaspora by, for example, creating symbolic days and celebrations in order to strengthen diasporic attachments to the homeland, maintaining national culture abroad by creating civil society organisations to provide courses and activities or creating special awards for high-flying expatriates (Gamlen 2008, 843–846). Diaspora integration has to do with the bureaucratic side of the diaspora engagement policy, while diaspora building has more to do with the state’s national narrative and how it perceives diasporas. I find this distinction particularly important because, in complex cases such as Turkey where we 3 4 5

The YTB was founded in March 2010. For the law that regulates the scope of its activities see Official Gazette 27544, 5/49. https://www.ytb.gov.tr/uploads/resimler/mevzuat-pdf/5978.pdf. For more information on Turkey’s Public Diplomacy Coordinator see: https://kdk.gov.tr/. For more information on Yunus Emre Institutes see: http://www.yee.org.tr/en.

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Governing the diaspora(s) Table 15.1 Gamlen’s typology of diaspora engagement mechanisms (Gamlen 2008)

Mechanisms with a diaspora dimension (diaspora integration)

Yes No

Coordination mechanisms (diaspora building) Yes

No

Engaged Paper only

Incoherent Disengaged

can easily observe ethnic and religious tensions among its citizens, diaspora integration policies can encapsulate and benefit all citizens who live abroad. However, diasporabuilding policies may be multi-tiered and can benefit groups who are loyal to the state and supress other diasporans who are in the opposition. I argue that diaspora governance in general is a response to neo-liberal global politics; however, it is not free from domestic politics and it mirrors the dominant state ideology. Tailoring policies on how and when to engage certain diaspora groups with state-driven projects depends highly on the national narrative with regards to who is considered a ‘good citizen’ and who is considered a ‘bad citizen.’ Turkey’s new diaspora policy, in this regard, is a perfect example to observe how the national narrative diffuses to the transnational space via diaspora institutions. Below, by adopting Gamlen’s typology, I will demonstrate how Turkey moved from being a disengaged emigration state to one that is actively engaging with its diaspora using both diaspora building and integration effectively under successive AKP governments.

From negligence to proactive engagement Aksel (2014, 201) divides Turkey’s major emigration waves into five different groups: (a) emigration of non-Muslim communities from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, (b) mass labour and family migration to Europe and Australia from the 1960s to the 1970s, (c) political migration from the 1980s to the 1990s, (d) temporary labour migration to MENA from the 1980s to the 1990s, and the former Soviet countries since the 1990s, and (e) sporadic emigration including high-skilled workers and students to Europe, USA, Canada, and Australia. One can also add the recent mass flows due to the authoritarian shift in Turkey and the purges following the attempted coup of 15 July 2016, which created new communities in exile as well as voluntary migration of many who are concerned about the Islamisation of Turkey and the creeping economic crises (Bas¸er and Korkmaz 2018). Migration from Turkey to Europe started in the early 1960s in order to ‘relieve pressure on its own labour market’ (Aydın 2016, 175) and ‘to compensate the labour force deficit of the rapidly growing West European Countries’.6 Turkey signed Labour Recruitment Agreements with various European countries such as Germany (1961), Austria (1964), Belgium (1964), the Netherlands (1964), and France (1965). It also signed an agreement with Australia in 1967.7 These agreements were based on temporary contracts, with no assumption that the workers would stay in Europe longer than the terms of the bilateral agreements.

6 7

Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-expatriate-turkish-citizens.en.mfa Ibid.

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The expectation that the temporary migrants would shortly return, contributing to their homeland the skills that they acquired abroad, however, did not come to pass. Many Turkish immigrants opted to stay in their host countries, leading to a Turkish migrant community which today constitutes one of the largest diasporas in Europe. These years can be categorised as times when Turkey had neither a diaspora integration nor a diaspora building policy and it was completely disengaged as an emigration state. Until the 1970s, engagement with these communities was based solely on providing them with practical information about their migration status (Aksel 2014; Aydın 2014). The Turkish state labelled emigrants as ‘Turkish Nationals Working Abroad’ or ‘Workers Abroad’ and did not refer to them as diaspora (S¸ahin Mencütek and Bas¸er, 2018, 91). The emphasis was on their identity as ‘workers’ rather than ‘migrants’. A transformation in mentality began in the 1970s when the state, recognising the migration phenomenon to be longer-lasting than expected and with unintended consequences, aimed to prevent cultural assimilation. The Turkish state focused on providing guidance on pensions and took care of practical matters through social attachés who were responsible for improving the situations of Turkish migrants (Aydın 2014). The state started putting policies in place to facilitate migrants sending remittances back home and using savings to invest in Turkey. On the cultural and religious front, at the beginning of the 1970s, the formal religious institution in Turkey (Diyanet) started sending imams abroad to facilitate the religious education and practices of Turkish migrants. The main state office in charge was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Öztürk and Sözeri 2018; S¸ahin‐Mencütek and Bas¸er 2018, 91). The military intervention in 1980 changed the dynamics of migration flows from Turkey to Europe. A massive asylum seeker flow occurred as a result of political repression and the threat of torture and prison in Turkey. Many political organisations such as Kurdish or leftist movements went into exile, with over 100,000 asylum seekers fleeing abroad, especially to Germany (Sirkeci, 2002). Subsequently, a remarkable Kurdish diaspora started mobilizing in order to influence their host country’s policies in favour of promoting Kurdish rights in Turkey (Eccarius-Kelly 2002; Sirkeci 2003; Bas¸er 2017). In the 1980s, formulating diaspora integration policies continued as the state enhanced the role of consulates on matters related to the well-being of Turkish citizens abroad. However, initiatives related to diaspora building where the state was effectively trying to turn diasporas into an asset for its foreign policy aims were not observable (S¸ahin‐Mencütek and Bas¸er 2018). If anything, there were initiatives to demobilise diaspora organisations. What was seen after the 1980s was a Turkish state closely monitoring the activities of migrants in Europe, especially in Germany as the establishment of migrant organisations became extremely politicised. Some movements which were banned, oppressed, or stigmatised in Turkey diffused their activities to Europe and founded NGOs, civil society organisations, or underground groups operating under the title of migrant organisations (Bas¸er 2017). In those years, Turkey was under military tutelage and suppression of political Islam abroad became a top priority for Turkish officials. The state adopted a policy of longdistance Kemalism and tried to spread the dominant ideology of rule by secular and Kemalist principles (S¸enay 2012). Therefore, the policies formulated to manage the diaspora mirrored the leading state ideology of the 1980s and 1990s until the rise of the AKP to the Turkish political scene. For instance, Mügge (2012, 25) states that the ‘Turkish state created organizations in the Turkish community abroad to counter the spread of radical groups outlawed in Turkey’, including using the Diyanet to curb other Islamic movements such as the Milli Görüs¸ while simultaneously establishing organisations such as Türk Evleri as 205

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cultural organisations (Mügge 2012, 25). Turkey also demanded that Kurdish organisations should be banned in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and they should not receive funding from host countries. There were also diplomatic attempts to ban Kurdish radio and TV stations as well as publishing houses flourishing around Europe (Bas¸er 2012). The Turkish state was becoming cognisant of its incipient diasporas abroad and formulated policies which encouraged certain activities while discouraging others without being openly visible in the transnational space as an actor. It usually used conventional diplomatic methods to control and contain unwanted activities outside its borders. In 1987, the state passed a law to allow Turkish citizens who live abroad to be able to vote at customs two or three weeks before the elections (Mügge 2012, 25). The state also systematised sending teachers and imams to several countries to teach the Turkish curriculum and the Turkish interpretation of Islam under different arrangements through the Ministry of Education and the Directorate of Religious Affairs. They also began investing in other institutions such as the Higher Coordination Council for Workers, consisting of Social Affairs and Economic Affairs Committees (Aksel 2014). The economic mentality of the state emigration policy was slowly coupled with social, cultural, and political measures for integration abroad. During the 1990s, Turkey was actively lobbying the EU to become a full partner. At that time, the Turkish state began to perceive Turkish migrants in Europe as representatives of the Turkish population, initialising its diaspora-building efforts to integrate Turkish immigrants successfully into host societies in order to promote a positive image of Turkey (Mügge 2013) and enhance public diplomacy (Aydın 2014). To this end, Turkish policy-makers began to engage more actively with Turkish immigrants, for example paying attention to their integration and discrimination problems. The Turkish state also realised that demobilising dissident groups such as the Kurdish movement, turned out to be a futile effort (Bas¸er 2017). Diaspora movements which advocate for further rights and challenge state hegemony over their identity and status in Turkey became very active due to the opportunity structures they found in host countries. Therefore, as suggested by Aksel (2014, 210), there was an active transnationalisation of Turkey’s state mentality combined with active involvement of the Turkish state in diaspora spaces as well as a proactive institutionalisation process to govern the ‘Turkish diaspora’. In Gamlen’s (2008) typology, this would refer to the Turkish state moving from an incoherent to an engaged diaspora policy. Although these efforts were not systematised and were usually ad hoc in nature, which meant they remained limited in scope, institutional reforms in the 1990s gave a clear sign that Turkey acknowledged the presence of its diaspora and it wanted to find ways to better utilise its diaspora’s potential while at the same time manage it in a more assertive way according to its interests. For instance, advisory boards and special parliamentary commissions (1995) were formed to report on the needs of Turkish citizens abroad (S¸ahin‐Mencütek and Bas¸er 2018, 91). At the end of the 1990s, two institutional steps were taken to strengthen the link between Turkish emigrants and Turkey. In 1998, the Advisory Committee for Turkish Citizens Living Abroad (Yurtdıs¸ında Yas¸ayan Vatandas¸lar Danıs¸ma Kurulu) and the High Committee for Turkish Citizens Living Abroad (Yurtdıs¸ında Yas¸ayan Vatandas¸lar Üst Kurulu) were established under the Prime Ministry to monitor the problems faced by emigrants and report on them in the Turkish parliament. Since 1998, the numbers of representatives in these two committees have increased, and the geography of the number of countries represented has expanded (Aksel 2014). In 1998, the government set up the Consultation Commission for Citizens Living Abroad with the aim of promoting Turkish culture abroad. It was led by a state minister and included MPs as well as selected diaspora members in its

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committee.8 In the following section, I will explain how and why these commissions led to the establishment of the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB).

New Turkey’s diaspora policy under the AKP Under the AKP governments, Turkey’s diaspora management strategy included systematised diaspora integration and diaspora-building policies and it finally became what Gamlen (2008) calls an engaged diaspora policy. At the beginning of the AKP era, clear efforts to mobilise the diaspora with a holistic approach that simultaneously included social, economic, and political agendas were observable. Certainly, the AKP did not formulate a diaspora governance mechanism from scratch. On the contrary, it built on existing structures – policies and institutions – by reforming them and transforming the state mentality that perceived Turkish citizens abroad as a liability to one that perceived them as an asset (S¸ahin-Mencütek and Bas¸er 2018). There is a path-dependency with regards to how roles assigned to state institutions and policies formulated by certain commissions were accumulated throughout time and paved the way for YTB. However, one should also keep in mind that the real transformative motivation came from the AKP’s own vision and future outlook for the ‘New Turkey’ that they wanted to create, which had both domestic and foreign policy dimensions.9 In 2003, the AKP government formed and led a parliamentary commission to study the problems of the Turkish diaspora.10 The commission prepared a report where they suggested that Turkey needed to form a separate institution to deal with the needs of citizens’ abroad (Mügge 2012, 27). The YTB was then founded in 2010 and started fully functioning in 2011. The former Chairman of the YTB, Kemal Yurtnaç (2012, 4) stated that the Turkish state developed policies addressing the needs of the diaspora in order to ‘bolster Turkey’s public diplomacy efforts and soft power’.11 As Yurtnaç (2012, 4–6) explains, there are various sub-committees functioning under the auspices of the YTB while at the same time there is horizontal and hierarchical cooperation with other state bodies, ranging from the Ministry of . Foreign Affairs to the International Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA). The structure of the YTB reflects the vision of the AKP: outward and proactive.12 Moreover, it is not limited to Turkey’s own citizens but has elements that underline Islam and Turkishness, adopting a broad definition of ‘kin and relative communities’.13 With regards to diaspora integration activities, it can be said that under the AKP, there has been a significant reformation process. For instance, before the foundation of the YTB, Turkish citizens living abroad could only vote at ballot boxes set up at customs; they could not vote in their host country. The law changed in 2012 and diasporans cast their vote for the first time in their host countries in 2014 for the Presidential elections.14 The extension of 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

For more details on state institutions and committees that dealt with Turkish citizens abroad see Aksel (2014). Due to the scope of this chapter, it is not possible to give details on each and every parliamentary committee reports in detail. For a detailed analysis on the critical shifts in Turkish foreign policy see Kiris¸ci (2017). See the commission report at the Turkish Parliament’s official webpage: https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/ sirasayi/donem22/yil01/ss335.pdf. To better understand the AKP’s perception with regards to Turkey’s soft power strategies, read the article by the former Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister, Ibrahim Kalın (2011). For more information on AKP’s foreign policy vision see Keyman and Gümüs¸çü (2014). For the YTB’s vision on kin and related communities see: https://www.ytb.gov.tr/kardes-toplulukla r/genel-bilgi. For a detailed analysis of YTB’s activities see Öktem (2014). For more information on Turkey’s external voting experience see S¸ahin‐Mencütek and Erdog˘ an (2016).

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democratic rights abroad created a highly positive atmosphere in the Turkish diaspora and perpetuated the AKP’s positive image abroad.15 Moreover, the YTB invested its energy in ameliorating policies regarding portability of pensions, social security, health, and dual-citizenship-related matters.16 The YTB also prepares regular reports on the situation of Turkish citizens in various European countries and maps the needs of diasporans. It also organises capacity-building activities, which encourage integration without assimilation. In these meetings, it is observed that the diasporans are encouraged to participate in political life of host countries in order to maximise their chances of influencing political processes. Islamophobia is one of the main areas of research for the YTB. They also report attacks on Muslims in Europe and develop policies to address xenophobic behaviour against Turks abroad. The YTB was established for a variety of motivations. To start with, it is safe to argue that its scope is much more than embracing Turkish citizens abroad. By its nature, the YTB is political: it has agendas that promote state interests and it reflects the mentality of the ruling elite. The main activities of the YTB then include bringing diaspora representatives together with state officials and creating platforms for otherwise scattered communities to create leverage. For instance, in 2012, the Turks Abroad Advisory Committee was founded. It included 80 representatives from 19 different countries and regions and provided feedback on Turkey’s newly formed policies. The YTB also organised youth camps for diaspora youth and sought to generate an interest in visiting the homeland under the supervision of YTB personnel.17 These activities aimed at strengthening the ties of Turkish communities to Turkey (and to the ruling political party), mobilising them transnationally and thus ‘building a diaspora’ by state-led initiatives. This can be interpreted a perfect example of how diasporas can be ‘responsibilized to perform’ (Turner and Kleist 2013, 199) in the name of state interests. According to Eks¸i (2018, 355) it is possible to perceive the YTB as a Diaspora Ministry that aims to organise Turkish lobbying activities all around the world. He underlines that the ‘Turkish lobby’ was relatively weaker compared to the Armenian and Jewish lobbies and Turkey needed a stronger presence in that realm. For instance, he argues that Turkey needs a diaspora which can counter Armenian genocide recognition claims in other state’s parliaments (Eks¸i 2018, 357). Other studies also showed that there is a demand for this from within the Turkish diaspora itself (Bas¸er 2014). Therefore, it can be said that Turkey has understood that conventional diplomatic channels were not enough to counter other diaspora’s anti-Turkey lobbying and it wanted to respond to them by using ‘diaspora diplomacy’ as well. This is also a clear sign that Turkey is interested in building a diaspora that is loyal to the official narratives and willing to pursue the official line. While the whole institution is structured in a way to acknowledge Turkey’s diaspora and address their needs, at the same time the idea is to tap their capacities to advance the Turkish state’s interests. This also brings the following question to mind: Who is included in Turkey’s ‘diaspora’ and who is left out?

15 For other examples on diaspora integration policies see: https://www.ytb.gov.tr/yurtdisi-vatanda s-rehberi. 16 For instance, Turkish citizens who give up their Turkish citizenship to naturalise in another country can obtain a ‘Blue Card’ which gives them almost same rights as Turkish citizens without hindering their acquired citizenship in the host country (https://www.ytb.gov.tr/yurtdisi-vatandaslar/mavi-kart). Also see Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/mavi-kart-_eski-pembe-kart_-uygulama si-.tr.mfa. 17 For more information on the youth camps organized by the YTB see: https://www.ytb.gov.tr/gen clikkamplari/.

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The AKP’s commitment to reviving historical ties with former Ottoman territories as well as to strengthening relationships with Muslim communities abroad shaped the formation of the diaspora governance policy. The neo-Ottoman ideology that the political party pursued affected how they defined the ‘citizen’ who lives abroad and individuals who are ‘kin’ to ethnic Turks. Their discourse on the citizens and relatives abroad who are part of the great Turkish nation also translated into their diaspora-building and engagement mechanisms (Aydın 2014). In this regard, the sub-committee which works on kin and related communities aimed at enhancing historical, cultural, social, and economic ties with these communities.18 As Eks¸i (2018, 350) suggests, activities such as youth forums in the Balkans or seminars with the participation of NGOs from Albania to Macedonia are activities that signal that the YTB aims at utilising these kin communities as leverage for Turkey’s foreign policy aims. The YTB foresaw the foundation of various NGOs operating in Europe as well as in the MENA, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which have a similar role, namely promoting Turkish interests, lobbying host country governments and keeping diasporic ties. intact. For . instance, it is claimed that the Diyanet’s Germany branch, Diyanet I¸sleri Türk Islam Birlig˘i (DITIB) is considered as an umbrella NGO which has 896 organisations under its auspices (Eks¸i 2018, 350). However, as Öztürk (2016) has argued, the Diyanet is one of the most pliable state-apparatuses that Turkey uses to establish hegemony over Muslims from Turkey and beyond. Another NGO that is promoted by the YTB is called the UETD (Union of European Turkish Democrats). Although their claim is that they are independent from the Turkish state, their organic ties to the state apparatus and the AKP are extremely apparent if one looks at their webpages and activities, and the agenda promoted by their branches all around Europe. With regards to economic motivations for the foundation of the YTB, it can be argued that Turkey’s interest in developing a diaspora policy is not solely motivated by economic interests as in other cases such as India or Somalia (see Brinkerhoff 2012; Gamlen 2014). The remittances that . Turkey has been receiving have actually been declining for the last two decades (see Içduygu 2006a; Mügge 2013, 6–7). However, the new diaspora governance mechanisms certainly had an economic dimension. Aydın (2016, 176) argues that the idea is to build networks with Turkish diaspora entrepreneurs and increase economic relations between the diaspora and the homeland. In this regard, Turkey’s Foreign Economic Rela. tions Board (DEIK) is very active in terms of engaging the diaspora to Turkey’s economic . structure.19 For instance, the World Turkish Business Council, working under the DEIK,. is organised in over 200 cities worldwide. At a meeting in Cologne, The President of DEIK, Rifat Hisarcıklıog˘ lu said their goal is to match the effectiveness of Chinese and Jewish diasporas by the centennial anniversary of the Republic and to become one of . the top three diasporas in the world (TOBB 2014). Hisarcıklıog˘ lu also stated that the DEIK would establish a World Turkish Entrepreneurs Implementation and Research Centre, and it would focus on providing employment to the members of the Turkish diaspora as well as aiding Turkey’s domestic brands to enter the international market through the Diaspora Franchise Platform. The Centre, in line with a protocol signed with the National Franchise Association 18 Countries which are included in this category range from Bosnia to Mauritania, from Kyrgyzstan to Tunisia. Depending on the context, Islam, Ottoman heritage or Turkic ties are used to justify YTB’s interest in these communities. 19 http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/foreign-economic-relations-board-set-to-mobilize-6-mln-tur kish-diaspora-123476

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(UFRAD),. is supposed to give ‘the Turkish diaspora youth discounts for franchises’ (TOBB 2014). DEIK also prepared a detailed report on the diaspora strategies in the world and came up with policy recommendations for the AKP government to strengthen its diaspora diplomacy agenda.20 The report provides excellent examples from different success cases around diaspora engagement policies and points out the ways in which Turkey can improve its leverage in host countries. The Turkish case shows clear signs of neo-liberal trends in global diaspora management. Driven by political and economic motivations, paying attention to the homeland–diaspora nexus by strengthening cultural and religious ties, the YTB can be considered an institution just like any other diaspora ministry in the world. Therefore, Turkey is moving with the times under the AKP. What is interesting, however, is the diaspora-building side. Diasporabuilding represents the ideological side of diaspora governance. It demonstrates how a state imagines the ‘acceptable citizens’ and includes them in the diaspora narrative as part of the nation. YTB’s activities with regards to diaspora-building clearly gives signs about who is to be mobilised and who is to be demobilised in the transnational space. It is very much crafted in the image of the AKP and its mentality; and its definition of ‘enemies of the state’ and ‘friends of the nation’ are diffused to the diaspora discourse. For instance, Öktem (2014, 22) states that: the Presidency’s focus of activities have so far, in terms of both its political language as well of the remnants of nationalist ideas, created the impression among parts of the Turks abroad that it is mostly interested in cooperating with the conservative Sunni-Muslim core segment of Turkish organisations abroad. This may or may not be true, but it is a fact that most Kurdish, Alevi, and Armenian communities have at no point believed that they would be welcomed if they were to reach out to the Presidency. As the state mentality moved from a pragmatist to an ideological one (Kiris¸ci 2017), the role assigned to diaspora management institutions also changed character. Especially after the attempted coup of 15 July 2016, another politicised movement took its place in the diaspora: the Gülen Movement, which is accused of orchestrating the coup attempt.21 Now that the movement cannot survive within Turkish borders due to an active purge against them, it has to survive in exile. The YTB and the Diyanet targeted Gülenists abroad via social media as well as actions on the ground. It was inevitable that the political transformation in Turkey then had an impact on Turkey’s diaspora policy as well.22 Overall it can be seen that in the Turkish case the YTB is used as a transnational state apparatus to punish those who oppose the ruling party’s and President Erdog˘ an’s hegemony and reward others who are loyal to them. Combined with recent surveillance activities by the Turkish state on dissidents in the diaspora, it could be argued that this diaspora-building policy is multi-tiered and it can be used as a catalyst to boost diaspora mobilisation while at the same time it can serve as an extra-territorial authoritarian state apparatus to contain antiregime protests and activities (Turner and Kleist 2013, 200). Therefore, Turkey’s experience 20 http://www.kafiad.org/alt/deik.pdf 21 For a detailed analysis on the diasporization of the Gülen movement see Watmough and Öztürk (2018). 22 For more information on the Gülenist movement abroad see: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ turkey-crackdown-Gülenists-abroad-are-feeling-heat-2121435584.

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with diaspora management is a significant example of how states might reach out to their diasporas not only to turn them into agents of development but also to bring them under control.

Conclusion Turkey has been known as a country of emigration. For a long time, it has addressed the practical needs of its citizens abroad and did not perceive them as an asset for exercising soft power in host countries. Turkey started following the neo-liberal trend of managing diasporas and tapping their resources for the interests of the homeland. However, as Mügge (2013, 16) asserts, ‘the position of sending states cannot purely be explained by heightened globalisation or economic benefits and sending-state capacity alone’. Countries may approach their diasporas differently not only because they have a variety of motivations but also because they have distinctive ideologies of nationhood (Mügge 2013, 15). The transnationalisation of Turkey’s diaspora management mentality started in the 1990s partly due to Turkey’s efforts to become a member of the EU. However, a systematic and institutionalised diaspora governance policy only came to the fore under successive AKP governments starting in the early 2000s. The newly developed policy clearly embodies Turkey’s current ‘ideology of nationhood’, which is shaped and formed by the domestic and foreign outlook that the AKP foresees for ‘new Turkey’. A quick discourse analysis on its activities and narratives demonstrate that it has Sunni Islamic and at times Turkic connotations that are mostly inspired by the Ottoman heritage. The evolution of the diaspora policy is thus a great tool to analyse how the Turkish state changed hands from a Kemalist establishment to a religiousconservative one. Diaspora integration policies that are put forward by the YTB have been highly significant with regards to creating a positive image of the AKP abroad as they benefited many diasporans from Turkey by facilitating and systematising the needs of citizens abroad. Diasporabuilding policies, however, created an ideological discourse that at times is exclusionary against diaspora groups that are critical of the AKP. Especially after the attempted coup of 15 July 2016, Turkey’s policies towards dissenting diaspora members became much more aggressive. Embassies put declarations on their websites calling on emigrants to snitch on their neighbours who criticise the AKP and Erdog˘ an, diasporans who returned to Turkey for holidays have been detained at the airport for social media posts against the government, and European newspapers started reporting that the Diyanet’s imams were acting as spies.23 Turkey’s transnational election campaigns were banned in certain countries, causing diplomatic tensions. Host countries also became sceptical of Turkish state-led civil society organisations that mushroomed all around Europe during the AKP period.24 With the negative attention it receives, state-led diaspora diplomacy efforts do not seem to create the leverage that the AKP desired with the foundation of the YTB. On the contrary, the activities of the YTB have shed a negative light on Turkish diaspora organisations. As long as Turkey’s image deteriorates in Europe due to its recent authoritarian turn, the diaspora will also suffer from its

23 For an example of the discussions over imams spying on Turkish dissidents see: http://foreignpolicy. com/2010/07/02/the-war-over-germanys-imams/. 24 For instance, in the Netherlands Turkey’s diaspora engagement policy caused parliamentary discussions on the limits of home country intervention in diaspora affairs. See: http://gocvakfi.org/hollandadatur kiyediaspora/. .

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consequences. Its soft power leverage can be reinstalled again once Turkey’s internal tensions are over, or at least taken under control.

References Akgündüz, Ahmet. 2017. Labour Migration from Turkey to Western Europe, 1960–1974: A Multidisciplinary Analysis. Oxford: Routledge. Aksel, Damla B. 2014. ‘Kins, Distant Workers, Diasporas: Constructing Turkey’s Transnational Members Abroad.’ Turkish Studies 15(2): 195–219. Aydın, Yasar. 2016. ‘Turkish Diaspora Policy: Transnationalism or Long-Distance Nationalism?’ Chapter 8 in Turkish Migration Policy, edited by I. Sirkeci and B. Pusch. London: Transnational Press. Bas¸er, Bahar. 2012. Inherited Conflicts: Spaces of Contention Between Second-Generation Turkish and Kurdish Diasporas in Sweden and Germany. Doctoral dissertation, European University Institute. Bas¸er, Bahar. 2014. ‘The Awakening of a Latent Diaspora: The Political Mobilization of First and Second Generation Turkish Migrants in Sweden.’ Ethnopolitics 13(4): 355–376. Bas¸er, Bahar. 2017. ‘Tailoring Strategies According to Ever-Changing Dynamics: The Evolving Image of the Kurdish Diaspora in Germany.’ Terrorism and Political Violence 29(4): 674–691. Bas¸er, Bahar, and Emre Eren Korkmaz. 2018. ‘Is Turkey Really Facing an ‘Exodus’? It’s not that Simple.’ The Conversation, February 6. https://theconversation.com/is-turkey-really-facing-an-exodus-its-not-tha t-simple-90197. Brinkerhoff, Jennifer M. 2012. ‘Creating an Enabling Environment for Diasporas’ Participation in Homeland Development.’ International Migration 50(1): 75–95. Délano, Alexandra, and Alan Gamlen, 2014. ‘Comparing and Theorizing State–Diaspora Relations.’ Political Geography 41: 43–53. Eccarius-Kelly, Vera. 2002. ‘Political Movements and Leverage Points: Kurdish Activism in the European Diaspora.’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22(1): 91–118. Eks¸i, Muharrem. 2018. Kamu Diplomasisi ve AK Parti Dönemi Türk Dıs¸ Politikasi [Public diplomacy and Turkish foreign policy in AKP’s Era]. Ankara: Siyasal Kitabevi. Gamlen, Alan. 2008. Why Engage Diasporas? Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, WP-08–63. Gamlen, Alan. 2014. ‘Diaspora Institutions and. Diaspora Governance.’ International Migration Review 48(1). . Içduygu Ahmet. 2006b. Türkiye-Avrupa Birlig˘i Ilis¸kileri Bag˘lamında Uluslararası Göç Tartıs¸maları [Debates . over International Migration within the Context of Turkey–European Union Relations]. Istanbul: TÜSIAD . Yayınları. Içduygu, Ahmet. 2006a. ‘International Migrants’ Remittances in Turkey.’ CARIM AS 2006/2007. http:// cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/11687/CARIM_ASN_2006_07.pdf. . Kalın, Ibrahim. 2011. ‘Soft Power and Public Diplomacy in Turkey.’ Perceptions 16(3). Keyman, E. Fuat, and S¸ebnem Gümüs¸cü. 2014. ‘Turkey’s Proactive Foreign Policy under the AKP.’ Chapter 4 in Democracy, Identity, and Foreign Policy in Turkey. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kiris¸ci, Kemal. 2017. Turkey and the West: Fault Lines in a Troubled Alliance. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Mügge, Liza. 2012. ‘Managing Transnationalism: Continuity and Change in Turkish State policy.’ International Migration 50(1): 20–38. Mügge, Liza. 2013. ‘Ideologies of Nationhood in Sending-State Transnationalism: Comparing Surinam and Turkey.’ Ethnicities 13(3): 338–358. Öktem, Kerem. 2014. Turkey’s New Diaspora Policy: The Challenge of Inclusivity, Outreach and Capacity. Report prepared for Istanbul Policy Center in Sabanci University. Öztürk, Ahmet. E. 2016. ‘Turkey’s Diyanet under AKP Rule: From Protector to Imposer of State Ideology?’ Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16(4): 619–635. Öztürk, Ahmet. E., and Semiha Sözeri. 2018. ‘Diyanet as a Turkish Foreign Policy Tool: Evidence from the Netherlands and Bulgaria.’ Politics and Religion: 1–25. S¸ahin Mencütek, Zeynep, and M. M. Erdog˘ an. 2016. ‘The Implementation of Voting from Abroad: Evidence from the 2014 Turkish Presidential Election.’ International Migration 54(3): 173–186. S¸ahin Mencütek, Zeynep, and Bahar Bas¸er. 2018. ‘Mobilizing Diasporas: Insights from Turkey’s Attempts to Reach Turkish Citizens Abroad.’ Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 20(1): 86–105. S¸enay, Banu. 2012. ‘Trans-Kemalism: the Politics of the Turkish State in the Diaspora.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(9): 1615–1633.

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16 DISASTER MANAGEMENT POLICY AND GOVERNANCE Helena Hermansson and Naim Kapucu

Introduction Turkey is a disaster-prone country. The Turkish republic spans the North and Eastern Anatolian fault line and the Hellenic arc (Ganas and Parsons 2009). The crisscrossing fault lines make Turkey one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world and a large percentage of the Turkish population live under seismic threat (estimations vary but all supersede 70 per cent and some are as high as 98 per cent). The geological and seismological vulnerabilities combine with social circumstances like rapid urbanisation and uncontrolled economic development, which lead to concentrations of people in highly earthquake-prone areas (Çelik and Çorbacıog˘ lu 2013; Ganapati 2008; Karancı 2013; Platt and Durmaz Drinkwater 2016; UNDP-WMO 2011). The Turkish population is not only at risk from earthquakes, but also from other hazards such as landslides, floods, and avalanches (Oktay 2015). Earthquakes are, however, the most widespread risk and earthquakes cause more fatalities than other disasters in Turkey. Mitigating the impact of earthquakes is thus the focal point of most risk reduction activity in Turkey. Given this background, earthquake response will be the centrepiece of this chapter about Turkish disaster management. In Turkey, disaster regulations and legislation have traditionally been adopted in the wake of disasters, rather than adopting proactive measures before they occur. As earthquakes have been the most damaging and recurring events throughout Turkish history, and continue to be threats to this day,1 various risk-reducing strategies have traditionally focused on mitigating seismic risk. Turkey did not adopt its first proactive disaster law, ‘Measures to be put into effect before and after earthquakes’ (Law 4623), until 1944 after a series of earthquakes in the eastern part of the country. This law stipulated the development of relief programmes, the identification of seismic risk, and that new developing areas had to undergo geophysical examination (Kapucu 2012). In 1959, an important legal umbrella pertaining to all natural disasters was introduced (Law 7269). This law sparked the creation of institutions charged with providing state assistance to the population impacted by disasters (Karancı 2013). This 1

In recent decades, earthquakes have struck Erzincan (1992); Dinar/Afyon (1995), Ceyhan/Adana (1998); Marmara and Duzce (August and November 1999); and Ercis¸ and Van (October and November 2011).

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constitutes the foundation of today’s disaster management policy and governance system, albeit today’s system has evolved to take a different form. Yet, despite the long tradition of developing disaster management policies and legislation to reduce disaster risk, Turkish disaster mitigation, preparedness, and response have been perceived as ineffective. For example, disaster insurance programmes have low degrees of penetration and earthquake-proof building standards are not always strictly adhered to. It is one thing to adapt and adopt policies and another thing completely to implement them persistently. Turkey has further not been able to ward off the critiques that researchers and practitioners persistently direct towards the disaster management system in various assessments. The lack of coordination and cooperation, a predominant focus on response activities compared to preparedness and planning activities, and having an overly centralised structure that discourages grass roots and non-governmental organisations’ (NGO) participation (Ganapati 2008; MoPWS 2009) usually come to the fore. In 1999, the most devastating earthquakes in modern times struck the Marmara region. While the official figures claim that the two earthquakes took over 17,000 lives, unofficial numbers are nearly twice as high (Ganapati 2008; Jacoby and Özerdem 2008). Following the shortcomings of the state in managing these earthquakes, the critiques resounded again more forcefully than ever before. Because of the recent major earthquakes, the Turkish disaster management system was once again redesigned. This chapter will focus on the current gap between the disaster policies and effective implementation and good governance. Until recently, Turkey had to rely on international assistance to recover from disasters but thanks to rapid economic development and accumulated disaster experience, Turkey is nowadays a provider, and not merely a recipient, of disaster aid. Turkey also participates in the global community, focusing on disaster risk reduction, and it has further received international praise for some of its risk reduction strategies.

Disaster experiences and getting in line with formative ‘good practice’ The 1999 earthquakes not only shook the earth’s crust, they also stirred the mindsets of public officials. The flawed response to the 1999 earthquakes led to public uproar that questioned the state and its institutions (Gülkan 2009, Jalali 2002; Kubicek 2002; Özerdem and Jacoby 2005). These earthquakes became a turning point in the Turkish disaster management system and their occurrence prompted many changes in Turkish disaster policy. Improved collaboration and increased decentralisation was at the heart of the ensuing organisational and judicial disaster management reforms, much in line with the wider current collaborative and decentralised disaster risk reduction paradigm observable around the world that is manifested in the Hyogo Framework for Action and its successor, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.2 The overwhelming impact and destructive nature of disasters imply that they rarely affect one isolated societal sector or jurisdiction. Hence, to prepare for, respond to, and rebuild and recover after disasters ideally involves multiple actors with access to resources and expertise in many different sectors like waste management, city planning, finance, security, shelter, and building construction. Complex events, like natural disasters, are too overwhelming for any agency or jurisdiction to handle alone, which explains why actors involved in managing

2

This paradigm is widely accepted but all building blocks and propositions have not been fully scrutinised or supported in research yet.

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disasters have to collaborate (Agranoff and McGuire 2001; Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2015; O’Toole 1997; Weber and Khademian 2008). To achieve a ‘full recovery for the community’ in the wake of disasters (LaFeber and Lind 2008, 554), horizontal multiple sector collaboration is not sufficient. Vertical collaboration where many levels of government coordinate their activities is also fundamentally necessary. Considering once again the overwhelming nature of disasters, they typically leave local actors under resourced. Hence central government has to provide additional human, financial, and material resources. However, central level actors, as opposed to local actors, often lack access to various types of local knowledge that are crucial to achieving fruitful and sustainable response and recovery processes. As such, collaboration may assist in remedying the deficits on each part, whether they concern local knowledge or access to tents and food packages. The international disaster risk reduction community advocates decentralisation of disaster responsibilities as a possible way to raise local actors’ capacity, increase local actors’ authority, and give weight to these actors’ perspectives in disaster management issues (Scott and Tarazona 2011). Studies of managed disasters repeatedly convey that effective disaster management is more likely to be achieved in environments that are characterised by strong local actors and vibrant civil societies. Local actors and NGOs may offer valuable assistance to disaster authorities by providing critical local knowledge and access to various social capital that distant disaster and government authorities often lack. If accessed, such information often improves the effectiveness of disaster relief operations (Bae, Joo, and Won 2015; Bernier and Meinzen-Dick 2014; Miller and Douglass 2015; Jalali 2002; Simo and Bies 2007). The reforms initiated in the Turkish disaster management system after 1999 displayed an increased awareness of the necessity to include and collaborate with local actors and NGOs to become effective in disaster activities (Gülkan 2009). Even though the importance of civil society and citizen participation are still under-acknowledged in Turkey, the national disaster agency now considers NGOs to be ‘indispensable’ and they are placed in the category of ‘main solution partners’ alongside the military and various ministries (AFAD 2012). Various legislation, plans, and strategy documents increasingly acknowledge the important role that local actors and NGOs play in reducing disaster risks and mitigating the consequences of disasters. In this vein, Oktay (president of AFAD until 2016), Tetik, Gökçe, and Cebi (2013) underline that Turkish disaster legislation demands that all actors across all levels collaborate in managing disasters. Yet, achieving collaboration between these critical actors and the state remains a paramount challenge. There was also a realisation within the disaster management system after 1999 that the integration of actors, across ministries also had to be improved, hence the creation of AFAD, the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency. One example, provided by a provincial official, illustrates the previous system’s Achilles’ heel, namely fragmentation. Under that system, to make damage assessments in a disaster impacted area, the provincial governor had to contact the Directorate for Disaster Affairs through the Ministry of Public Works and Settlements. The General Directorate of Turkish Emergency Management and its ministry (the Prime Ministry) subsequently had to organise the logistics and transport of staff and equipment to the area. Now, in comparison, all functions are within one organisation, which has speeded up operations (Hermansson 2016a).The disaster management literature provides many valuable descriptions of communities’ and NGOs’ roles in disaster work, but few studies have taken an interest in investigating these actors’ involvement in collaboration and/or how they perform (Gazley 2013; Nolte and Boenigk 2011). The disaster management literature is also unclear when it comes to pointing out the conditions and structures that facilitate collaboration between different actors including state authorities, local actors, and NGOs and citizens (Kapucu and Garayev, 2014). 216

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While several studies convey that collaboration is the way to achieve effective disaster management (Kapucu, Hu, and Khosa 2014), many studies evaluating various processes related to disaster management3 also bear witness to various challenges involved in trying to achieve such collaboration (Boin and Bynander 2015; Boin and ‘t Hart 2010; Hermansson 2016a; Hermansson 2016b). The challenges can be procedural, institutional, cognitive, or relational, or a combination of some or all of them (Emerson and Nabatchi 2015). Research on collaborative disaster management builds on findings from more general collaboration research but disaster contexts are characterised by particular conditions (namely, a level of urgency and uncertainty) that set them apart from day-to-day public service delivery tasks, which has a bearing on how applicable and/or generalisable are the previous findings. Even though ‘collaboration has become all the rage in public administration and public policy research’ (Robinson and Gaddis 2012, 256), collaboration is ‘still an emergent field of scholarship’ within the disaster and emergency management literature (Gazley 2013, 89). Research on collaboration during disasters, however, shows that the levels of trust between actors and the level of familiarity between actors prior to a disaster have a bearing on the chances of achieving collaboration (Boin and Bynander 2015; Boin and ‘t Hart 2010; Hermansson 2016b). The level of interdependence between actors, the extent to which actors have to rely on each other to fulfil their tasks, also has an important role to play in fostering disaster management collaboration (Bodin and Nohrstedt 2016; Hermansson 2016b). One of the lessons from the 1999 earthquakes was that the coordination and collaboration between the actors involved in managing disasters needed to be improved. The General Directorate of Turkish Emergency Management (under the Prime Minister’s Office) was created to close the gap in top-level coordination (AFAD 2012). Yet, as this agency’s responsibilities overlapped with the responsibilities of the other agencies, this move worsened rather than remedied the situation (Ganapati 2008). In 2009, this newly created directorate and two more longstanding directorates with disaster responsibilities (the General Directorate for Civil Defence and the General Directorate for Disaster Affairs) were amalgamated into AFAD. Crisis management scholars however, seem doubtful that such a merger would greatly improve the situation: ‘Yes, troublesome information sharing and poor coordination lie at the heart of many crisis response pathologies. But these do not go away when organisations are chopped and changed, for instance by forcibly merging them into superagencies …’ (Boin and ‘t Hart 2010, 367). This is a ‘traditional public management’ solution: we had a problem, let’s create an organisation to solve it. However, for any change or reform to be successful, cultural issues, craft, and leadership also need to be considered in addition to structural changes. The post-1999 earthquakes’ reforms also sought to decentralise the system and make the local disaster management authorities, which have long been considered weak, more powerful (Ganapati 2008; Kapucu 2012; Unlu, Kapucu, and S¸ahin 2010). Provincial AFAD offices were, for example, set up in all 81 provinces and regional search and rescue (SAR) offices were established in 11 regions (AFAD 2016). The disaster management system also underwent partial decentralisation during 2004 and 2005 when various local authorities (municipalities and special provincial administrations)4 were charged with drafting locally adapted disaster and emergency plans aimed at reducing disaster losses (Balamir 2013; Keles¸ 3

4

Disaster management entails the organisation and management of resources and responsibilities for addressing all aspects of disasters, in particular preparedness, response, and initial recovery steps (UNISDR 2017). This organisational entity no longer exists in the Turkish administrative system.

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2013). The power and responsibilities of metropolitan municipalities also increased (Gül and Kiris¸ 2015, 48) as they became responsible for preparing disaster plans at the metropolitan level and for undertaking preventive measures like vacating and demolishing risky buildings (Balamir 2013).

Wider governance dynamics in Turkey in the early 2000s Clearly, not only earthquakes and disasters spur changes in policies. In 1999, the very year that the Marmara earthquakes struck, Turkey became a candidate country for membership in the European Union. This prompted a lot of constitutional and local government reforms to harmonise legislation with the EU (Göymen 2006). Following the AKP’s coming to power in 2002, a wave of reforms aiming to decentralise and democratise the administrative system was initiated. This reform package was, however, deemed to be incompatible with the constitution and it was vetoed by President Sezer in 2004 (Göymen 2006). Despite this development, then Prime Minister Erdog˘ an moved forward with some of the main principles of these reforms (Gül and Kiris¸ 2015). In these progressive times, Turkey was often referred to as role-model country of the Middle East as ‘one of most, if not the most, democratic, secular, and modernist country among the Muslim World’ (Gül and Kiris¸ 2015, 26), even in the face of its unflattering human and political rights record and internal tensions between various groups in society. According to Gül and Kiris¸ (2015), the local governance reforms have brought some decentralisation and improved the state of democracy through increased participation in policy-making but they also see gaps when it comes to implementation due to the difficulty of breaking out of old patterns of centralised and local bureaucracy and a lack of civic democratic culture and NGO participation. A more genuine or far-reaching implementation would require the acknowledgement of interdependencies between actors, the importance of each actor, and participation and negotiations among related actors (Gül and Kiris¸ 2015). As mentioned before, due to their characteristics, disasters give rise to situations that create such interdependence between actors. Ideally, or hopefully, disasters also instil a realisation that all actors are important and therefore need to participate in disaster preparation, disaster management, and disaster recovery work.

The new system and earthquakes: test of the new system In 2011, two earthquakes hit the city of Van and the town of Ercis¸ located in Turkey’s southeastern Van province. These were the first high-impact earthquakes since the disaster management system reforms were implemented. For some, these earthquakes were therefore seen as ‘tests’ of the newly reformed disaster management system. The 2011 earthquakes were less devastating than those in 1999 but still resulted in 644 deaths and more than 4000 injuries (WHO 2012). The system’s handling of the earthquakes also points to some challenges that lie ahead. Decentralisation Despite the move towards decentralisation, the aftermath of the 2011 earthquakes demonstrated that local resources and capacities were still lacking. This is partly to be expected considering the magnitude of the events. Yet, as researchers studying decentralisation have observed, central governments may stall decentralisation attempts by not allocating proper funding to local actors (Jesse, Agrawal, and Larson 2006). In this vein, the earthquakes in Van 218

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and Ercis¸ suggest that the development of local disaster management capacity in Turkey continues to be underdeveloped, despite decentralisation attempts. Part of the explanation lies in that while local actors’ responsibilities increased, the government did not increase their funding correspondingly (Hermansson 2018). Some district officials expressed frustration over being responsible for managing disasters without having the proper expertise, resources, or experience. In addition, some of the local officials also felt overwhelmed as they were also affected by the earthquakes and suffered from bereavement. This inexperience of local staff combined with the fact that a number of local officials were unable to come to work due to the consequences the earthquakes had on their personal lives, led to delays and ineffective aid distribution during the so-crucial first days after the earthquake. However, the situation improved as they became more experienced, but these lessons came at a high price. Shortly after the 2011 earthquakes, the disaster management system went through a number of recentralising procedures including the centralisation of budget and appointment procedures within AFAD. This is in line with the observation made by researchers studying decentralisation that central governments may also hinder decentralisation by instituting new systems of oversight (Jesse et al. 2006). The centralised budget procedures implied that the provincial governors lost some of their authority over AFAD’s provincial offices to AFAD’s headquarters in Ankara. The budget for AFAD’s provincial offices activities was no longer covered by the provincial governorate but is now covered by central AFAD instead. During one of the author’s field visits, interviewees working with disaster management in Turkey explained that the previous order allowed provincial governors to halt local disaster management capacity development projects suggested or initiated by AFAD in Ankara. These projects were meant to raise provincial AFAD offices’ disaster management capacity. While decentralisation initiatives often are lauded for their potential to increase local disaster capacity, the recent centralisation in this case may contribute to the same end, as provincial governors can no longer halt capacity building projects for the local AFAD offices. The appointment procedure for local AFAD staff was also changed. Before, the provincial governor appointed this staff but this is now the job of central AFAD. The changes made AFAD provincial managers lessen dependence and reliance on the provincial governors (who have a very strong position in the Turkish political-administrative system). According to an interviewee within AFAD in Ankara, this procedure will reduce the risk of economic or political conflicts between provincial governors and central AFAD. While it is too early to tell what implications these changes will have for disaster management, it could be said that some local pro-Kurdish actors found it very difficult to collaborate with the provincial governorate during the earthquakes due to political differences. The response operations thereby became short of these actors’ local knowledge and resources (Hermansson 2016b). When asked by one of the authors how they found collaboration with the provincial AFAD office, the answer was that these two are almost the same actor (given that provincial governor appoint the staff and has a large say in their daily activities). The actors who harbored these views wished that provincial AFAD offices would be more independent from the governors, then perhaps, they could collaborate with them in the future. The changes made in AFAD was a step in this direction but if it will improve collaboration remains to be seen. While it is difficult to know what was behind this counter push or re-centralisation of the disaster management system, a report from the Ministry of the Interior (Içis¸leri Bakanlıg˘ ı 2012) conveys that the status of AFAD’s provincial offices in relation to the provincial governors was perceived as problematic even before the earthquakes. Yet disasters and crises can open a ‘window of opportunity’ that policy changes can be pushed through, even if the policy changes are not based on experiences from the very disaster that opened the window 219

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(Kingdon 1995). One should also keep in mind that Turkey was still depending on international assistance to rebuild after the 1999 earthquakes when the decentralisation reforms were initiated. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both with a faiblesse for decentralisation, were involved in restructuring the disaster management system. Contributing to the latest re-centralisation may perhaps also be a lack of buy-in from Turkey at the time of restructuring and/or a too-shallow analysis of how decentralisation reforms would sit with the wider context in Turkey on behalf of the reformers. This discussion should not be understood as being an argument for lauding centralisation over decentralisation in the Turkish disaster management system. What can be gleaned from it, however, is that timing is of the essence. Decentralising disaster responsibilities prematurely, when local levels lack the capacity to carry them out, and without providing local authorities with the necessary resources to fulfil them, serves little purpose. In order for decentralisation reforms be able to improve the disaster management system’s readiness, local levels must be prepared and capable to assume their extended tasks. Such preparation may be difficult to attain without centralisation. Paradoxically, in these cases, centralisation may hence be a prerequisite for effective decentralisation (Hutchcroft 2001). Strengthening the local levels of the Turkish disaster management system is undoubtedly one of the biggest and most crucial challenges ahead, as it has been for many years (Unlu et al. 2010). If local capacity indeed is increased, another related challenge is to ascertain the level of centralisation/decentralisation in the system. Provided the nature of disasters, the system in place to manage them must be somewhat of a hybrid, containing elements of bottom-up disaster governance while certain functions remain centralised for reasons of maintaining expertise and cost-efficiency. Such hybridity and the ability to combine central and local elements of the disaster management system again points to the significance of collaboration. Collaboration for effective disaster response In addition to building local capacity, collaboration was also a central aspect of the disaster management reforms initiated after the 1999 earthquakes. The response operations following the 2011 earthquakes in Van and Ercis¸ showed some progress in this area. The actors involved in search and rescue (SAR) for example showed increased levels of collaboration compared to before. The state of collaboration between the authorities and NGOs during the Marmara earthquakes was at such a level that NGOs published a manifesto in all major daily newspapers asking the state to extend gratitude towards them instead of threatening them (Kubicek 2002). After the 2011 earthquakes, interviews with state and NGO representatives involved in SAR (both at the central and local level) made by one of the authors, conveyed that collaboration in this area was unprecedented. Actor interactions were characterised by trust and professionalism; furthermore, the SAR teams efficiently incorporated local knowledge into their operations. Interviewees mentioned that many of the SAR actors on site had developed relations ahead of the earthquakes during joint workshops and exercises and this made collaboration easier (Hermansson 2016b). For the state authorities, the experiences from the 1999 earthquakes probably also brought the realisation that their SAR resources alone were insufficient, which caused a certain dependence on NGOs conducting these activities. These observations can be compared to the situation during the 1999 earthquakes where NGOs jointly published a manifesto in all major newspapers calling for the state to extend gratitude to NGOs instead of threatening them (Kubicek 2002). To be fair, the state interfered with some NGOs after the Van and Ercis¸ earthquakes too, but it seems to have been on a smaller scale. After the 1999 earthquakes, it 220

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was also purported that ‘unless the political system changes in major ways, the state is unlikely to give public space to NGOs even in disaster-relief activities because it fears their criticism and popularity’ (Jalali 2002, 135). The aftermath of the 2011 earthquakes also saw instances of collaboration between state authorities at the provincial and district level on the one hand, and village and neighbourhood leaders on the other. Where the collaboration was functioning, it aided both the distribution of aid and the assessment of damaged buildings and houses (Hermansson 2016b). Local actors provided site-specific knowledge and information to which state authorities did not have access.5 Given the state’s dominating role in the Turkish disaster management (and public-administrative) system, state authorities are crucial in initiating collaboration with local actors. This is perhaps particularly important in areas experiencing, or with a history of, ethnic conflict. In Van province, about 70 per cent of the population is Kurdish (Jacoby 2005). Since fighting broke out between the Turkish government forces and the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) in 1984, relations between the two parties have been tense to say the least, and over 40,000 lives from both sides of the conflict have been lost in an off-and-on war.6 Clashes re-erupted recently following national elections in June 2015 and they marked the end of a stalled negotiation process that was initiated in 2013. This historical legacy naturally affects the outlook for actors to both collaborate and decentralise. Given this background, the existence of leaders that see the value of creating and maintaining relationships with local actors across political boundaries and who resist politicisation in the wake of disasters, becomes enormously important. In Van and Ercis¸, such previously formed relationships helped curb local protests against the state and its managing of the disaster that emerged shortly after the earthquakes. Interviewees that one of the authors talked to communicated that the crowds that gathered were dispersed thanks to local leaders with whom the protesters could identify. If the SAR activities managed to make efficient use of local knowledge, the planning of the new residential areas for earthquake survivors showed a different reality. In 2011, the law concerning earthquake reconstruction was modified, which implied a recentralisation of the previously decentralised housing and urban planning. In practice, the issues concerning urban renewal and land use planning were further centralised (EU 2012; Balamir 2013). Yet, including local actors in collaborative resettlement processes is crucial to avoid additional suffering (Tercan 2015; Birkmann et al. 2010). Yet, some interviewees involved in the disaster management system, both at local and national level, expressed their criticism, claiming that local actors were excluded. One interviewee expanded somewhat, saying that the experts that came to make decisions may have been experts on technical matters but they were unfamiliar with the cultural, social, and infrastructural particularities of the area. In a similar vein, other interviewees and researchers have observed that the newly built apartment houses were not adapted to traditional needs and that they were located far away from city centres, limiting residents’ access to social networks and work opportunities (Tercan 2015). While the local interviewees saw the implementation of these projects as far from ideal, an AFAD report considers the reconstruction of Van to be a ‘best practice’ that ought to serve as a model for other areas (AFAD 2015). The above examples indicate the importance of pre-established relationships for collaboration and provides a glimpse into why collaboration, both horizontal and vertical, is 5 6

In the Turkish system, provincial and district authorities are seldom from the areas they work in and they therefore often lack local knowledge. Yet far from all Kurds agree with the PKK’s policies.

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essential for disaster management systems’ readiness and effectiveness in response and recovery. Boin and ‘t Hart (2010, 365) elaborate upon this argument saying that ‘the breadth and depth of inter-organisational relations’ to a ‘very considerable extent’ determine societies’ response capacity. Inter-organisational relations not only affect societies’ disaster response capacities, but also societies’ capacities to prepare for and recover from disasters. Challenges facing Turkish disaster policy and governance The processes related to prevention and management of, and recovering from, disasters do not occur in a vacuum but take place in a political-administrative environment. This environment cannot be overlooked as it may enable and/or constrain various conditions for collaboration (Emerson and Nabatchi 2015). Similarly, the political-administrative environment may also hinder or facilitate decentralisation processes (Knill 1999; Hutchcroft 2001). Good disaster management practices pertaining to collaboration and decentralisation often originate from countries with a political and administrative setting that differ from the Turkish system. A general challenge for Turkey is thus how to adapt international good disaster management practice to their institutional set-up, which is one characterised by hierarchy and centralisation (Ganapati 2008; Kapucu 2012; Karancı 2013). This environment, by tradition, also lacks a collaborative culture (Freedom House 2008). Even though it is positive that various documents refer to and encourage collaboration across sectors and tiers in the system, it is another thing completely to turn such prescriptions into practice. Following the 2011 earthquakes, AFAD drafted new such policies, but when the actors meant to implement them are left out of the policy-making process, policies become ineffective at best. At worst, as was seen in the case of resettlement processes explained earlier, the policy’s target group, those who will resettle, thinks the policy is subpar while the central actors who developed it regard it as ‘best practice’. In fairness, attaining planning and policy processes that reflect the interests of a wider target audience than elite policy-makers is a challenge that not only Turkey struggles with. After the 2011 earthquakes, collaboration was more forthcoming in areas that were less taxing politically. For example, the state authorities had an easier time collaborating with NGOs and local actors in SAR operations than in, for example, aid distribution and resettlement processes. That these earthquakes took place in a predominantly Kurdish area probably made collaboration even more challenging as relations between central and local actors were strained to begin with. Such political factors and how a country’s leaders choose to govern and structure societies have a profound impact on the vulnerability of different groups to disasters. Not everyone is equally vulnerable. People that are vulnerable before disasters strike are also those that get hit worst during a disaster. The conflict in Turkey’s southeast entailed that many had to leave their homes in the villages and move to cities. Van was . one city that many settled in, a city that also has a high earthquake risk. A large part of Istanbul’s population has moved from their birthplaces in Turkey’s southeast to find better life conditions. Many cannot not afford other housing than squat . houses, ‘gecekondus’ (literally houses built overnight) that are far from earthquake proof. Istanbulites who are better off can choose to reside in the North and Asian parts that sit on hard rock and therefore can withstand earthquakes better. After the 2011 earthquakes in Van and Ercis¸, the Turkish government passed ‘the law on Transformation of the areas under disaster risk’ (6306). As the law concerns the demolition and rebuilding of unsafe houses and buildings in areas at risk of natural disasters, it could have been a vehicle for reducing disaster risk and mitigate the exposure to earthquakes. The law is, 222

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however, controversial as it empowers the Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation to appropriate all property, prepare plans, and construct new buildings. ‘The law further obstructs all possible forms of objections by citizens as well as contrary provisions of existing laws’ (Balamir 2013) and there is no strong monitoring mechanism to bar abuse in these projects. Concerns have also been raised that the law’s provisions will benefit certain groups economically as only strategic and attractive areas are being subjected to this process (Today’s Zaman 2014). Alien to contemporary understandings of governance, the central administration has acquired an overwhelming power over citizens, local administrations, and other legal entities that cannot be challenged (Balamir 2013). Such provisions provide huge challenges for finding collaborative and participatory solutions for decreasing disaster risk. Related to this is the major challenge to make room for key state representatives, so-called ‘boundary spanners’ in the network literature, that harbour the will and ability to forge links between the actors at local and central level and integrate NGOs and citizens alike in disaster management (Kapucu 2006). Hopefully, in the longer run, institutions may safeguard these processes and values instead of leaving them to the discretion of individual leaders. Achieving such a condition was a daunting task even before the attempted coup in 2016 and the ensuing purge of public servants that further increased the already increasing polarisation in Turkish society. The purge and the measures related to it affected all actors in society including, but not limited to, the police, gendarmerie, civil service, military, local authorities, and the media (EU 2016). These groups all have important roles to play in disaster management. Gürcan and Gisclon (2017) claim that the unjustified purges and hasty reforms following the attempted coup have left the security sector at a critical juncture. This is also the case for many other professional public administration programmes. The disaster management sector partly overlaps with the security sector but the post-coup developments’ impact on the disaster management sector remains to be assessed by future research. One observation is, however, that the state removed many elected representatives and municipal executives in Turkey’s southeast, in many cases on grounds of opaque terrorism charges, and appointed politically loyal officials to replace them. Apart from the possibility of putting the newly appointed officials’ political loyalty before qualification (Gürcan and Gisclon 2017), thus increasing politicisation, such reshuffling also renders local government officials upwards accountable, rather than downwards accountable towards the electorate. As elected representatives and municipal executives often come from the local area in question, they often have access to local social networks, resources, and knowledge that have proved to be highly valuable in disaster management. State-appointed officials on the other hand only rarely come from the areas to which they are appointed, which implies that such access and knowledge is circumscribed.

Conclusion The overwhelming impact and destructive nature of disasters call for collaboration between actors from a wide variety of sectors and jurisdictions to manage them effectively. Even though positive examples of collaborative progress have been observed since the 1999 earthquakes, a lot of room for improvement still exists, particularly between actors at the central and local levels of the disaster management system. Decentralisation of disaster responsibilities is seen as a means to raise local actors’ capacity, increase local actors’ authority, and give weight to these actors’ perspectives in disaster management issues. Had the decentralisation attempts, introduced after the 1999 earthquakes, been properly implemented, it could have had a positive bearing on central–local 223

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collaboration too. Yet, the nature of the political and administrative system in Turkey and the low levels of local capacity hamper not only decentralisation but also add to the collaborative challenge. Changes in Turkey’s disaster policy, mostly reactive, and administrative organisation for effective governance and implementation have been frequent, and in the process, a lot of expertise and experience have been lost. This was, for example, experienced in the process of the AFAD’s creation. Building expertise takes time and losing parts of it naturally reduces institutional memory and valuable experience gained over the years managing disasters and emergencies. This naturally hampers the disaster management system. The post-coup purge of public servants further intensified the long-standing challenge of attaining continuity in the Turkish disaster management system. Following a referendum in the Spring of 2017, the office of prime minister was eliminated, while a president with more executive authority and resources at the national level was installed, thus introducing even more centralisation in the system. The local- and provincial- level government still has a ‘two-headed system’: elected mayors and appointed governors/district governors. The division of labor between municipalities and appointed state actors is a major concern in terms of effective disaster response and recovery. Municipalities are responsible for disaster planning and preparedness, while the provincial and district governors (Valis and Kaymakams) are responsible for the aftermath of disasters. Unless the same actors are responsible both before and after, awareness, knowledge (the big picture) and accountability suffers. This division contributes to the paramount importance of attaining disaster policy and collaborative governance processes. While it is still too early to tell how the recent political developments have affected the Turkish disaster management policy and governance, their general effects, including increased polarisation and increased politicisation, do not serve society or disaster management well. On a more tangible note, the removal of municipal executives in the southeast and the appointment of substitutes affects access to local knowledge and social networks negatively. Both have time and again proven very important in disaster management. The gaps that occur following the purge of qualified public administrators in the civil service, national police, gendarmerie, military, and other sectors will have wide-ranging implications for the disaster management and public safety in the near future. It is unfortunately certain that the future holds more earthquakes for Turkey. In 2017, Turkey experienced the highest seismic activity in fifteen years and the quakes have been most intense in the western parts of the country. (Kızılkoyun 2017). The dreaded ‘big one’ is the earthquake expected to hit the megacity Istanbul, that sprawls across one of the most active fault lines in. the world. Analyses show that there is a 65 per cent risk of a 7.6earthquake hitting Istanbul before the year 2030 (Traynor 2006). When, not if, this earthquake hits, it will be of paramount importance that the actors involved in the response have made efforts to establish collaborative structures and pre-trained procedures. Such structures and procedures are necessary to achieve an effective coordination of response activities and to make the most of a wide range of actors’ knowledge and resources. Yet considering the expected magnitude of this earthquake, the success of the disaster risk reduction and mitigation strategies undertaken before the earthquake strikes is of even more crucial importance. For these and response activities to work, the central government, however, needs to acknowledge the interdependencies between actors and the importance of each actor. Moreover, the participation of and negotiation with all relevant actors must be a priority. In the current circumstances, such outlooks look bleak.

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PART IV

The Kurdish insurgency and security

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17 THE KURDISH QUESTION Zeynep N. Kaya and Matthew Whiting

Introduction Following the collapse of a half-hearted peace initiative in 2015, Kurdish .violence against the Turkish state escalated once again, with high profile attacks in Ankara and Istanbul as well as in the southeast of the country. The attacks were spearheaded by the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (Teyrêbazên Azadiya Kurdistan, TAK) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). Both groups are violent manifestations of Kurdish nationalism and serve as reminders of the Turkish state’s failure to deal with the Kurdish question. Although the TAK has always been seen as more ruthless than the PKK, from which it split in the early 2000s, the muted condemnation of a particularly violent TAK attack in 2016 from Cemil Bayık, co-founder and co-leader of the PKK, highlighted the shared interpretation and acceptance of the need for violence by both groups. After the attacks, Bayık stated ‘Kurdish cities are burned – destroyed. Civilians are dead. Their culture is being trampled upon. Thousands are forced to flee their homes. If the TAK take action in these conditions the people will be sympathetic’ (BBC News 2016). The Turkish state’s response to the attacks was to block media reporting on the issue, to reinforce its military pursuit of Kurdish radicals in southeast Turkey and Syria, and to engage further in the suppression and persecution of all Kurdish politics, whether this was peacefully expressed or not. The number of political figures, journalists, and activists (often spuriously) imprisoned for supporting Kurdish terrorism jumped significantly following 2015, while the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) saw electoral gains for its tough response to terrorism (Çiçek 2018). One of the particularly interesting aspects of this escalation in violence, and the state’s response to it, was the backdrop against which they occurred. The violence was the fallout of the collapse of two peace initiatives with the PKK over the previous decade. While recent attacks were condemned by Western governments, the fighters of the YPG (People’s Protection Units), a Syrian Kurdish military organisation closely linked to the PKK, were being praised, supported and equipped by British and US forces for their role in the fight against ISIS.1 Western countries 1

Britain denies ever having equipped the YPG or given it any weapons but it does provide air and other forms of support. A recent UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee report shows that the FCO holds an incoherent position given it claims to reject the PKK but has not fully examined the links between the YPG and PKK. See House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2018).

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accept the PKK’s designation as a terrorist group, but when the YPG (and there is a large degree of cross and dual membership between the YPG and the PKK, see Kaya and Lowe 2017) fight in Syria against ISIS, they are lauded. This position becomes even more incoherent when it is noted that for Kurds, there is no difference in their motivation whether they are fighting in Turkey or Syria. In both instances, they see their role as protecting Kurdish communities from suppression and attempting to advance their desired political system of democratic confederalism within the host country. It is little wonder then that the Turkish state is left frustrated by the West’s response to what it sees as terrorists undermining its authority from both within its borders and from neighbouring Syria. This, in turn, incentivised the AKP and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, to seek alliances with Russia in an effort to shape the future of Syria, rather than relying on its relationship with the US and Europe. From this snapshot it is evident that the Kurdish question in Turkey is highly intractable, having proved stubbornly resilient in the face of half-hearted peace initiatives and full-blooded violent confrontation with Turkey’s Armed Forces. It has domestic, regional, and international dimensions which further complicate the picture. Kurdish nationalists seek to carve out a space in Turkish politics that recognises what they claim are its distinctive culture, language, and political preferences – a distinctiveness the Turkish state has historically denied until recently. In its radical manifestation, Kurdish ethno-nationalism has used rebellions and violent conflict as part of this political struggle ever since the foundation of the Turkish republic and also during Ottoman times. As such, the Kurdish question has deep historical roots and the very foundation of the Turkish state and its political institutionalisation laid the ground for a conflict between a dominant Turkishness and a peripheral Kurdishness. At its heart, the Kurdish question is a political issue – for Kurds it is about demanding respect for their human and cultural rights, a quest for self-determination (initially in the form of secession but now seeking increased power for local administrations) and political recognition. However, for the state it is simply a violent challenge to its authority and its territorial integrity and a challenge to the majority will of Turks. Therefore, traditional Turkish state responses to the Kurdish challenge have been non-recognition and violent and non-violent suppression. Identifying the number of Kurds within Turkey is a difficult task given that since the 1930s and until very recently, Turkey has denied that the Kurds existed as a distinct minority and therefore did not count them separately. Population estimates vary widely: the CIA Factbook (2017) estimates Kurds to be 19 per cent of the population (approximately 15 million), compared to Kurdish groups’ estimates of closer to 20 million.2 Originally located in the east and southeast of the country, these have historically been the most deprived and underdeveloped regions of Turkey, with the relative economic and social position of the Kurds being further disadvantaged by the historically nomadic and then farming lifestyle of the Kurds (White 2000, 93). Industrialisation and economic liberalisation generated fewer gains for Kurdish populated regions of Turkey compared to the rest of the country, adding further grievances to Kurdish nationalism. Although the state has embarked on some limited initiatives to tackle this, economic underdevelopment and Kurdish violence have formed somewhat of a negative reinforcing cycle that further complicates the picture. In this chapter we trace the origins of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey – a rather euphemistic phrase for a deeply troubling and violent cleavage that strips the issue of its intensity (much akin to the use of the phrase ‘The Troubles’ to describe the conflict in 2

Over 22.5 million Kurds live in Turkey, new Turkish statistics reveal, EKurd Daily, 20 September 2012, https://ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/9/turkey4166.htm

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Northern Ireland for 30 years). We examine how it emerged, how to characterise the nature of the confrontation and the basis of different perspectives on the issue, how it evolved since Ottoman times through to the foundation of the Republic until the present day, and the future prospects for the Kurdish question in Turkey. Throughout we wish to make two modest but important points: (1) the Kurdish question needs to be placed in its historical context for any adequate understanding; and, (2) at its core is a political contestation whose form and shape is defined by the political response of the state as well as its own internal political dynamics.

Change and continuity in the Kurdish question in Turkey We can broadly define the Kurdish question as referring to the political demands of the Kurdish community, originally located in the east and southeast of the country, for greater recognition. These demands have changed over time from seeking territorial and tribal power, to demanding a separate state, to decentralisation within the established Turkish state. In other words, it has always had a territorial dimension, but whether that territory is independent or accommodated within the Turkish state has shifted. The other important dimension is how the state should respond to the very questioning by Kurdish nationalists of its legitimacy. This has been largely consistent for most of the duration of the Turkish republic – namely denial of the distinctiveness of Kurds and instead emphasising shared identities (labelling Kurds ‘mountain Turks’ or focusing on the shared Sunni Muslim roots of Turks and Kurds), suppressing political challengers and increasingly securitising the issue in the name of protecting Turkey. More recently, this changed somewhat under the AKP when they explored basic cultural recognition and a possible peace initiative, but this did not last and today it appears to be a return to business as usual. As such, we can see some change but primarily continuity on both sides.

Kurdish revolts in the Ottoman Empire Kurdish nationalist historiography typically lauds revolts led by Kurdish tribal leaders in the late Ottoman period. This is not only because their violent resistance against a more powerful state is admired, but it is primarily done in an effort to ‘prove’ the existence of a distinct Kurdish nationalist consciousness and Kurdish ethnic self-identification going back centuries (Hassanpour 2003, 148). In reality, the nature of these revolts is deeply contested as to whether they were nationalistic or whether they were simply reactions to the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire’s centralisation policies (Olson 1991). The 19th century Ottoman Empire witnessed several Kurdish tribal revolts. Most notable among these were revolts led by Kör Muhammad Pasha, Bedirhan Pasha, and Sheikh Ubeydullah.3 The centralisation policies of the Ottoman Empire provided the main political context for these revolts. The Ottoman Empire’s foreign influence and internal control was in decline throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and, therefore, under Sultan Mahmud II and later Abdulmecid,4 the Ottomans began to implement several reforms, including centralisation policies that sought to revive the power and strength of the Empire. Centralisation in these reforms sought to eliminate the authority of increasingly powerful ayans (local lords). 3 4

Interestingly, in all three of these cases the leaders of the revolts were later appeased by the Ottoman Empire with positions and appointments within the Empire, which were readily accepted. Sultan Mahmud reigned from 1808 to 1839, while Abdulmecid reigned from 1839 to 1861.

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Many scholars and present-day Kurdish nationalists consider these as the first Kurdish nationalist rebellions that occurred in reaction to the destruction of emirates and principalities by the Ottomans (Jwaideh 2006). Yet other scholars argue that although these tribal leaders claimed that their aim was to ‘liberate Kurdistan’, essentially their revolts were aimed at regaining the status they lost as a result of the process of centralisation (Tahiri 2007). These revolts must be understood in the context of complex centre–periphery relations between local rulers and the Ottoman state. This relationship was based on the assumption that the rebels perceived resistance as a means of bargaining and negotiation between the centre and periphery (Mardin 2008). Therefore, Kurdish revolts in the 19th century can also be understood as attempts to force the state into a new deal in order to regain their loss of status and authority (Bozarslan 2003). Another important factor that led to reactions by Kurdish tribal leaders was the increasing recognition of non-Muslim communities as part of the reforms Ottomans initiated in early nineteenth century. For instance, Sheikh Ubeydullah was concerned about possible Armenian control in Kurdistan, especially because of Article 71 of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which promised Armenians certain ‘improvements and reforms’ and guaranteed their ‘security against Circassians and Kurds’ (Jwaideh 2006, 83). All these developments, together with increased Christian missionary activity, led Kurdish tribal leaders to feel threatened and incentivised revolution against the state. Whether these revolts were undertaken in the name of Kurdish nationalism, however, is more debatable. Rather it seems that when there was an advantage in doing so, Kurdish tribal leaders were happy to make deals with the Ottoman state. Nonetheless, this early period of Kurdish revolts set a precedent for the subsequent development and crystallisation of Kurdish nationalism. When it became clear that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was inevitable and that Ottomanism was no longer feasible, Kurdish nationalism began to emerge as a distinct movement separate from pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism (Klein 2007). Of course, we need to be cautious in asserting that this era represented the emergence of a homogenous Kurdish nationalism and that all Kurds now aspired for their own state. Rather the picture was much more mixed, with some Kurdish leaders seeking autonomy within the Empire while others sought an independent state. Indeed, two of the founding members of the Committee of Union and Progress5 were Kurdish; they saw the place of the Kurds as being within a reformed Empire or a future Turkey. However, what is clear is that these early revolts gave an impetus to separatist Kurdish nationalism, which was then emerging in line with the political opportunities of the time and the rise of the principle of self-determination in the post-World War I era. When the Treaty of Lausanne was ratified in 1923, which led to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, it was clear that self-determination would not extend to the Kurds. Instead Kurds were to sit inside a new Turkish state, setting the scene for future conflict.

Kurdish politics in the early years of the Republic . Along with secularism, Turkishness was adopted as the identity of the new Republic. Ismet . Inönü, second prime minister of Turkey, declared in 1925: ‘as Turks are in the majority, other groups do not have any power. Our mission is to Turkify non-Turkish groups in the Turkish vatan [homeland]. We are going to extirpate groups who oppose Turks and 5

The Committee for Union and Progress was an umbrella group of many diverse views that came to be associated with the Young Turk movement. It was a secret society later turned political party that called for reform of the Empire but which sought to hold the territory under its control together, albeit there was disagreement within the movement on what direction this should take.

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Turkishness’ (quoted in Özkan 2012). In other words, the only way Kurds could gain full political recognition and participation was by being Turks and giving up on any pretence of being Kurds. The new Republic was also intent on modernising its creaking foundations and therefore the underdeveloped, poorly educated, and ‘backwards’ southeast was a problem for Ankara who sought to bring it more tightly under its control. Ankara expropriated landholdings in the region and distributed them to Turks, not local Kurds, and further compounded this by placing restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language (Barkey 2017). These factors alienated the politically minded and religious Kurdish elite from the new state, setting a hostile relationship and one that was to be characterised by further violent revolt. In fact, Kurdish groups revolted against the state 28 times between 1923 and 1938 (Bas¸aran 2017, 17). The response of the state set the tone that would be followed over the coming decades. The first large-scale Kurdish rebellion of the new Republican era was the 1925 Sheikh Said Revolt. The organisation behind the revolt was Azadi (meaning ‘freedom’), a secret organisation of Kurdish officers and tribal leaders founded in Erzurum in 1923. Sheikh Said, a well-known Sunni sheikh, was selected to be the leader of the revolt in the hope that a revolt with a religious character would make mobilisation easier at a time when Kurdish nationalism was weak among the masses (Tahiri 2007). The weakness of the idea of Kurdish nationalism is evident from the fact that the revolt drew support mainly from Zaza-speaking Sunni Kurds, while Alevi Kurds from Dersim as well as some Sunni Kurds and tribes in Van, Diyarbakır, and Elazıg˘ refused to support him and joined in the suppression of the revolt. The revolt was easily defeated and Sheikh Said and other Kurdish leaders were executed for the crime of attempting to establish an independent Kurdish state. For Barkey and Fuller (1998), the state’s response represented a shift from ignoring the Kurdish issue to adopting a policy of violence towards the Kurds. The execution of Said and the ease and severity with which the revolution was put down, did not prevent further attempts at revolution over the next decade. This period of tribal and local revolt was to end with the violent suppression of the Dersim revolt in 1938. At the time, Turkish government policies, particularly land confiscations and deportations, were sources of discontent among Kurdish tribal leaders and sheikhs. A religious leader, Sayyid Reza, led the Dersim revolt from 1937 to 1938 but it too was ultimately easily defeated by the more powerful Turkish forces, and it exposed divisions within Kurds as much as between Kurds and Turks. The state’s response was exceptionally heavy handed with thousands of Kurds killed and many more displaced, while Dersim was renamed Tunceli (a more acceptable Turkish name) in the process. The response to Kurdish revolts in this first decade confirmed the new state’s direction of the assimilation of the Kurds into the Turkish state, including by force where necessary. Additionally, the state embarked on a programme of the repression of Kurdish nationalist culture and language. Kurds were forcibly exiled to different parts of the country and the official state media stopped referring to them as ‘Kurds’. Yet alongside this, if Kurds accepted a Turkish identity and participated in the system as Turkish citizens, a full range of political, economic, and social opportunities were available to them.

Kurds in the early multiparty era – the calm before the storm Kurds were mostly politically inactive in the 1940s and 1950s. After the Dersim revolt, there was a lack of localised rebellion or Kurdish leadership to lead any future revolts. The Turkish state largely maintained its position of suppressing a distinct Kurdish identity, but the arrival of multiparty politics and the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) diffused tensions somewhat. The DP, which was electorally very successful in the east and southeast, agreed to ease 235

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some cultural restrictions and to reduce oppressive local policing (Barkey and Fuller 1998, 14). As such, the 1960s was a period of relative peace, and the Kurdish question fell into the background, eclipsed by other more pressing political developments. By the 1970s, politically active Kurds were joining leftist movements during a period of wider left-wing mobilisation throughout the country as a whole. From the left’s perspective, Kurdish groups were natural allies given the high levels of relative socio-economic underdevelopment in southeast Turkey, while Kurds hoped that the left’s confrontation with the state could also be used to advance their position within the country. However, over time Kurdish nationalists who threw their lot in with the left became frustrated with the lack of progress on Kurdish issues and seeming levels of apathy amongst mainstream leftists, eventually leading to the distinct emergence of Kurdish movements with leftist inclinations. It was out of one such leftist movement that the PKK emerged in 1974 and adopted the aim of liberating Kurdistan and establishing an independent, united, and socialist Kurdish state. At this time there were also the first electoral breakthroughs for Kurdish nationalists running as independents but clearly affiliated with the PKK position. In the 1977 local elections, Medhi Zana was elected mayor in Batman, while Orhan Alpaslan in Ag˘ rı and Edip Solmaz in Diyarbakır repeated the feat the following year (Natali 2005, 106).

Coup politics and the violent radicalisation of the Kurdish question From the 1980s onwards the Kurdish question was to become synonymous with a conflict between the Turkish military and the PKK. This enabled the Turkish military, as guardians of the secular and modern Republic, to take further control of the state’s Kurdish policy, something it had largely been doing anyway since the 1971 coup at least. The 1980 coup proved to be a seminal event for defining the trajectory of the Kurdish question, following which there was increasing violence from both sides and the securitisation of the Kurdish question was further entrenched. Although the coup was ostensibly aimed at protecting the state from leftist radicals, the Kurdish movement was also targeted. During the period of the military rule (12 September 1980 to 6 November 1983), many Kurdish activists were imprisoned and tortured. Additional oppressive measures were imposed, including further restrictions on Kurdish language and culture. This had the effect of bonding the Kurdish movement around a shared notion of resistance, further reinforced by the use of myth (Günes¸ 2017). When this was combined with the PKK’s ability to use local politics and local conditions on the ground to its advantage (Romano 2006), a radical Kurdish movement was able to emerge on a stronger and more coherent level than had been previously seen in Turkey. The PKK’s goal was to overthrow Turkish rule (economically as well as politically, given its Marxist inclinations) and to unify Kurds and secure a separate state. Their guerrilla campaign began in 1984 and, in the mountainous terrain of southeast Turkey combined with porous borders with Iraq and support from Syria, was to prove remarkably resilient. Drawing on local resources as well as support from the Kurdish diaspora and Kurds in neighbouring countries, the number of PKK recruits and levels of violence increased steadily throughout the 1980s and reached a high in the 1990s (Tezcür 2014; Romano, Chapter 18 in this volume). Nonetheless, the Turkish state was clearly never going to be defeated or forced into a position to concede to the demands of the PKK and instead it responded with a scorchedearth policy. Villages were razed, whole towns became securitised, people were forcibly relocated, and arrests, detention, and torture continued. This had the consequence of increasing the popularity of the PKK within Kurdish communities. 236

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Although this was the predominant picture for the 1980s and 1990s, the Kurdish issue was not completely static. For example, Turgut Özal, prime minster for much of the 1980s and president from 1989 to 1993 for the Motherland Party, attempted to move beyond a purely security-based response to the Kurds. He criticised an exclusively military approach and advocated pursuing cultural, economic, social, and political measures too, representing the first time a Turkish government saw the issue as a political one and not just a security issue (Efegil 2011). In part as a result of Özal’s initiative, the PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire in 1993 (albeit it did not last for more than a few months). Abdullah Öcalan, leader and cofounder of the PKK, was subsequently captured and arrested in Kenya with US help after being forced to leave his safe-haven . in Syria following Turkish pressure on the Assad regime, and he remains imprisoned on Imralı island to this day. Soon after Öcalan’s imprisonment, the PKK declared that the movement was no longer striving for full independence but now sought recognition and autonomy within the Turkish state, and called on the government to engage in negotiations. The call went unheeded and the military clearly won out over Özal’s suggested change in direction. Attempts to advance Kurdish goals through the electoral arena also became more prominent in the 1990s. The first openly Kurdish political parties emerged to compete in elections. The People’s Democracy Party (Halkın Demokrasi Partisi, HADEP) performed relatively well in the southeast in the 1995 general election, but only secured just over 4 per cent of the national vote share, falling short of the required 10 per cent threshold needed to gain seats in the Grand National Assembly. Successive Kurdish parties and loose electoral alliances polled at somewhere between 4 and 6 per cent in general elections in 1999 and 2002. Although these parties failed to gain any representation, they did raise the profile of Kurdish politics. However, the state made it clear that the political route was no more of a viable route for Kurdish aspirations than a military one. Kurdish parties were typically met with party bans and harassment to which Kurdish groups responded by reinventing themselves or running as independents (Öktem 2011). In this way, a kind of cat-and-mouse game played out. From the state’s perspective, Kurdish political parties were best seen as extensions of the PKK that aimed to bolster its campaign and goals and therefore an equal threat to the state. However, the suppressive response served to further restrict the scope for the Kurdish political movement, further entrenching their claims that a military campaign was necessary and justified.

The AKP and the Kurdish question – from fresh thinking to more of the same The AKP in office appeared initially to offer something different to their governing predecessors that gave them an advantage in their relationship with the Kurdish population. As a mildly Islamist party that emerged out of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP), its leadership and members also had a history of being politically suppressed and harassed by the state. What is more, the pious and socially conservative dimension to the party had a natural resonance with the Kurdish southeast.6 The AKP positioned itself as a party that would represent those who were left behind in Turkey’s recent economic modernisation, and this resonated as much with the economically under-developed southeast as it did with the conservative electorate of Konya. Alongside this sat the EU accession process, which saw the 6

This was to prove a hindrance to peace a few years later when it became clear to the AKP that the southeast was a key electoral battleground they needed to win and therefore needed to restrict Kurdish parties from succeeding.

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treatment of the Kurds as a human rights issue that needed to be tackled if Turkey was to advance its membership aspirations. Therefore, there were significant incentives for the AKP to explore ways to ameliorate the position of Turkey’s Kurds and initially there was a break with the traditional approach to managing the issue. During its first term in government, the AKP granted limited rights to broadcast in Kurdish and for Kurdish pupils to receive their education in their mother tongue. Alongside this, other EU-incentivised measures also meant that the new government’s policy significantly differed from what came before. In a speech in 2005, Erdog˘ an even went so far as to state that the ‘state has made mistakes about the Kurdish issue’ (Özkan 2011) and to claim that Kurdishness should be recognised as a sub-identity of Turkishness. The abolition of the death penalty, the release of former Kurdish MPs from prison, and the end of emergency rule in the southeast alleviated local tensions. Needless to say, the opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP, essentially the modern-day inheritors of Atatürk’s legacy), the Turkish-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP), and many senior military figures, opposed any change in the traditional policy towards managing the Kurdish question. Nonetheless, the new direction led to an electoral boost for the AKP in southeast Turkey in the 2007 election, and optimists asserted this might imply that moderate Kurds were peeling away from the PKK and its affiliated parties in return for cultural concessions from the state. Changes in policy from the AKP were also mirrored by important developments from those at the forefront of the Kurdish movement. As already noted, the capture of Öcalan in 1999 had resulted in a ceasefire from the PKK, which reduced immediate tensions on the ground. Many Kurds put their hopes behind the EU accession process as a way of advancing their position in Turkey. At this time, the first of two peace initiatives began in 2005, culminating in covert talks between Turkish intelligence, government representatives and members of the PKK in 2008. While these collapsed in 2011 due to a lack of will on both sides, additional talks were undertaken, directly and more openly, between representatives of the AKP government and Abdullah Öcalan and members of the Kurdish political parties. These were held between 2013 and 2015, after which they collapsed amidst tensions over the Syrian war and a lack of general progress (for full details, see Çandar, Chapter 19 in this volume). In the course of these talks the parameters of the Kurdish question as it plays out today can be seen. Whilst largely still driven by a desire for greater political recognition, it now also requires a war-to-peace transition. Öcalan has repeatedly indicated that the PKK is ready to negotiate a solution with the Turkish government that involves decentralisation for the Kurds within the existing boundaries of Turkey, a system he labels ‘democratic confederalism’ (Öcalan 2011). Singing from largely the same hymn sheet, Selahattin Demirtas¸, the leader of the People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), has also called for a reorganisation of the administrative structure of Turkey based on the principle of decentralisation.7 Yet it became clear that limited cultural recognition was as far as the AKP was willing to go, and both sides were anxious about retaining the support base they had built in the southeast, which limited their desire to make any further concessions. External factors, which were previously so propitious, today incentivise the AKP to return to a security-based response. An EU accession process no longer looks viable for Turkey in the immediate future; the Syrian war and increased independence of the Kurdistan Region of 7

Interview with Selahattin Demirtas¸ by Nes¸e Düzel (2012). .

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Iraq have set worrying/encouraging (depending on your perspective) precedents for Kurdish autonomy; increasing centralisation of power in the hands of an authoritarian Erdog˘ an prohibits any decentralisation or power division; and, electoral dynamics bring the AKP and Turkish-nationalist MHP together, as well as incentivising the AKP to restrict the increasing electoral popularity of the HDP. These factors have all pushed the government towards a traditional militant policy to manage the Kurdish question. Therefore, since the collapse of the second peace initiative, and especially following the coup attempt in July 2016 and the ensuing period of emergency rule, the AKP has relentlessly embarked upon criminalising Kurdish activism and securitising the issue once again. At the same time, radical Kurdish nationalism has escalated its violence amidst the wider regional dynamics. The AKP’s change of tactic from talks and pursuing a Kurdish opening to instead securitising the issue is also the outcome of the HDP’s electoral success since the presidential elections in 2014. The HDP’s co-leader, Demirtas¸ received 9.8 per cent of the vote share, indicating the possibility that the party could pass the 10 per cent threshold needed to gain representation in the legislature. This was something the party duly achieved in the 2015 June general election. The party’s strategy to become a political party of all Turkey and focus on improving the situation of all marginalised communities including the Kurds, while maintaining its leftist welfare distribution policies, appealed to the liberal-minded Turkish electorate as well as Kurds who do not support the PKK. The HDP’s breakthrough in the June 2015 elections meant that Kurdish MPs entered the Parliament as a party for the first time, and prevented the AKP from securing a majority. Erdog˘ an’s response was to hold a snap election just five months later, going back to the traditional securitised response to the Kurdish question, criminalising Kurdish MPs, stripping 50 of their 59 MPs of their parliamentary immunity, and imprisoning many of them. Demirtas¸ has been detained in prison since November 2016, from where he ran his election campaign for presidential elections in June 2018. In the meantime, clashes between the Turkish army and the PKK increased during which the PKK used urban warfare tactics, which led to a highly severe response by Turkish security forces and the displacement of large numbers of people from cities and towns in the southeast. Additionally, the Turkish army started its cross-border military campaign in Afrin in Syria, which was under de facto Kurdish control, and took the city. All this served to boost the electoral fortunes of the AKP and entrench the traditional dynamic on both sides. The Kurdish question, the PKK’s tactics, and the state’s response were all back to business as usual, it would seem.

Conclusion The failure to resolve the Kurdish question has had deep costs, for Turks, Kurds, and the state, in both blood and treasure. Given the pessimistic history of the Kurdish question, is there any reason to be optimistic for a change in the future? The answer in the immediate future is certainly not. Radical groups tend to moderate when internal political reappraisals are met with political opportunities for inclusion from the state (Whiting 2018). However, in the case of Kurdish radicalism, there is little hope for an internal reappraisal when Kurdish leaders fear a decline in violence may threaten their survival and influence (Tezcür 2010). What is more, there is no sign of the state reopening any opportunities for dialogue any time soon (see Çandar, Chapter 19 in this volume). Regional dynamics in the form of the Syrian war also restricts future prospects for a resolution in two ways. Firstly, fears that an autonomous Kurdish region (Rojava or Western Kurdistan) will emerge on its border restricts the opportunities the Turkish state is willing to extend to its Kurdish population and its 239

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willingness to engage the PKK in dialogue. Secondly, the Syrian war increased divisions between different Kurdish groups in the region and the resulting intra-group dynamic restricts the concessions Turkey’s Kurds are willing to consider (Kaya and Whiting 2017). The medium to long term looks no better. Given the historical nature of the Kurdish issue, fundamental structural changes in the state’s approach are necessary, but at no stage in the history of the Republic has there been any sign of such a change becoming embedded policy. Furthermore, the political nature of the Kurdish question, with both sides squeezing the room for manoeuvre of the other while also using the actions of each other to justify escalations, gives further cause for pessimism. All conflicts can appear intractable until they are resolved and cases like the FARC and the IRA show that deeply militaristic movements can change direction. But again, this brings us back to the need for a reappraisal on both sides in order to achieve a breakthrough. With no sign of defeat or victory forthcoming for either side, a negotiated settlement looks highly necessary but also highly unlikely.

References Barkey, Henri. 2017. ‘The Transformation of Turkey’s Kurdish Question.’ In The Kurdish Question Revisited, edited by Gareth Stansfield and Muhammad Shareef, 211–224. London: Hurst. Barkey, Henri, and G. E. Fuller. 1998. Turkey’s Kurdish Question. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Bas¸aran, Ezgi. 2017. Frontline Turkey. The Conflict at the Heart of the Middle East. London: IB Tauris. BBC News. 2016. Cemil Bayık. An Interview with Turkey’s Most wanted Man. 25 April. https://www.bbc.co. uk/news/av/world-europe-36081182/cemil-bayik-an-interview-with-turkey-s-most-wanted-man Bozarslan, Hamit. 2003. ‘Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey: From Tacit Contract to Rebellion.’ In Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, edited by Abbas Vali, 163–190. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda. CIA. 2017. The World Factbook. Turkey. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ geos/tu.html, last accessed August 2018. Çiçek, Cuma. 2018. . ‘Süreç’: . Kürt Çatıs¸ması ve Çözüm Arayıs¸ları [‘The Process’: Kurdish Conflict and the Search for a Solution]. Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Düzel, Nes¸e. 2012. ‘Türkiyenin güney sınırları resmen kürdistan olacak.’ Taraf, 10 April. Accessed 26 April 2012. http://www.taraf.com.tr/nese-duzel/makale-selahattin-demirtas-turkiye-nin-siniri-kurdistan.htm Efegil, Ertan. 2011. ‘Analysis of the AKP Government’s Policy Toward the Kurdish Issue.’ Turkish Studies 12(1): 27–40. Günes¸, Cengiz. 2017. ‘Mobilization of Kurds in Turkey during the 1980s and 1990s.’ In The Kurdish Question Revisited. edited by Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef, 187–198. London: Hurst. Hassanpour, Amir. 2003. ‘The Making of Kurdish identity: Pre-20th Century Historical and Literary Sources.’ In Essays on the Origins of Kurdish Nationalism, edited by Abbas Vali, 106–162. California: Mazda. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. 2018. Kurdish Aspirations and the Interests of the UK. http s://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmfaff/518/518.pdf Jwaideh, Wadie. 2006. Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development, New York: Syracuse University Press. Kaya, Zeynep N. and Robert Lowe. 2017. ‘The Curious Question of the PYD-PKK relationship.’ In The Kurdish Question Revisited, edited by Gareth Stansfield and Mohammed Shareef, 275–287. London: Hurst. Kaya, Zeynep N. and Matthew Whiting. 2017. ‘Sowing Division: Kurds in the Syrian War.’ Middle East Policy 24(1): 79–91. Klein, Janet. 2007. ‘Kurdish Nationalists and Non-nationalist Kurdists: Rethinking Minority Nationalism and the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1909.’ Nations and Nationalism 13(1): 135–153. Mardin, ¸serif. 2008. Türk Modernles¸mesi Hakkında Makaleler 4 [Articles on Turkish Modernisation 4]. Ankara: . Iletis¸im Yayınları. Natali, Denise. 2005. The Kurds and the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey and Iran. New York: Syracuse University Press. Öcalan, Abdullah. 2011. Democratic Confederalism. Translated by International Initiative. London: Transmedia Publishing.

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The Kurdish question Öktem, Kerem. 2011. Angry Nation. Turkey Since 1989. London: Zed Books. Olson, Robert. 1991. ‘Five Stages of Kurdish Nationalism, 1880–1980.’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 12(2): 391–409. Özkan, Behlül. 2011. ‘Kurds Could Revolt if Grievances Aren’t Fixed.’ Al Jazeera, 9 July. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/06/201169131053712220.html Özkan, Behlül. 2012. From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan. The Making of National Homeland in Turkey. New Haven: Yale University Press. Romano, David. 2006. The Kurdish Nationalist Movement. Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tahiri, Hussein. 2007. Structure of Kurdish Society and the Struggle for a Kurdish state. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Tezcür, Gunes¸ M. 2010. ‘When Democratization Radicalizes: The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in Turkey.’ Journal of Peace Research 47(6): 775–789. Tezcür, Gunes¸ M. 2014. ‘The Ebb and Flow of Armed Conflict in Turkey: An Elusive Peace.’ In Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East. Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, edited by David Romano and Mehmet Gurses, 171–188. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. White, Paul. 2000. Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey. London: Zed Books. Whiting, Matthew. 2018. ‘Moderation without Change: The Strategic Transformation of Sinn Féin and the IRA in Northern Ireland.’ Government and Opposition 53(2): 288–311.

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18 THE KURDISH INSURGENCY David Romano

Introduction The place of ethnic Kurds in Turkey, who account for some 20 per cent of the country’s population,1 has bedevilled Ankara since the founding of the Turkish Republic. After the Republic’s founding in 1923, state officials attempted to pursue a paradoxical policy of basing the new state’s identity upon Turkish language, culture, and ethnic symbols while also proclaiming that anyone who resided within the state’s borders upon its founding – irrespective of their mother tongue, ethnic identity, religion, or other factors – was a Turk. The first part of the policy sought to establish a social glue to bind the population together within one identity group (a ‘Turkish’ identity designed to replace failed ‘Ottomanism’), while the second part of the policy sought to make this identity civic and non-discriminatory to non-ethnic Turks and/or Muslims. Basing a state-sanctioned identity entirely upon the ethnic markers (language, culture, historical symbols and so forth) of one group and then promptly declaring that identity ‘civic’ and inclusive of every citizen of the new state was bound to run into problems, however. While some citizens of the new state might be content to publicly adopt the new civic identity and leave their own particular and different identities within the private sphere, others came to demand equal rights for their mother tongue, public recognition for their culture and history, and other things that could be classified as ‘ethnic political demands.’ These ‘counter-cultural’ demands became more vociferous in the face of official Turkish policy that many perceived as chauvinist and intolerant of other ethnic identities (and particularly the Kurdish ethnic identity, given that Kurds formed the largest non-Turkish group within the new republic).2

1

2

Lack of census date and the politically sensitive nature of the issue make all estimates of the Kurdish population in Turkey difficult. The CIA World Factbook lists the Kurdish proportion of Turkey’s . population as 19% (CIA n.d.), while Icduygu, Romano, and Sirkeci (1999, 1002) cite data showing that some 15% of Turkey’s population speaks Kurdish – a figure which leaves out the considerable number of Kurds that have been assimilated to some extent and do not as a result speak Kurdish but may still self-identify as Kurds. The process described here is a good deal more complicated, of course. For a more detailed examination of ‘denial of Kurdish identity’ and the resultant ‘Kurdish resistance’ and crystallisation of a distinctly Kurdish, modern, and politicised national identity, see Vali (1998). For a counter-narrative from the Turkish state’s point of view, see Heper (2008).

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The historical context – past Kurdish insurgencies in Turkey As a result, a number of significant insurgencies with an important Kurdish component to them arose in Turkey after 1923 (similar state policies in neighbouring Iran, Iraq, and Syria, countries with their own large Kurdish minorities, played a role in sparking multiple Kurdish insurgencies in those states as well). Leaving aside Kurdish insurgencies in neighbouring countries, the major Kurdish revolts in Turkey immediately after the republic’s founding included the 1925 Sheikh Said uprising, the 1927–1930 Mount Ararat uprising, and the 1937–1938 Dersim revolt. Turkish state discourse invariably characterised these uprisings as anything but Kurdish. All the relevant displays in the War of Independence Museum in Ankara, for instance, describe these uprisings as ‘tribal,’ ‘feudal’, and ‘reactionary,’ painting a picture of conservative religious elites in the east of Turkey (where the majority Kurdish regions lie and where the revolts took place) resisting modernisation, democracy, and civilisation and instead leading their blind followers in revolt. As in all large collective undertakings, however, the revolts took place for a multitude of reasons. Conservative Muslim leaders aghast at the new republic’s abolishment of the Ottoman Sultanate (1923) and the Caliphate (1924) certainly took a prominent role in the uprisings of 1925 and 1927–30. Kurdish tribal elites, resentful of encroachments on their fiefdoms by the new republic’s central government authorities, likewise played a role in all three uprisings. All three revolts also made clear demands for specifically Kurdish rights as well, including recognition of the Kurds, autonomy for Kurdistan and even a Kurdish state (McDowall 2009). For many people whose mother tongue and culture were Kurdish, a new modern secular state based on Turkish language and culture predictably held little appeal. While Kurds, the large majority of whom are Sunni Muslim, were equal citizens of the Ottoman Empire, in the new Turkish republic many saw little to look forward to. Indeed, forceful assimilation efforts began almost immediately under the new order, with authorities in Ankara banning the Kurdish language and soon insisting that there were no Kurds in Turkey (given that everyone in the country was an equal civic Turk). At the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, the revolts of 1925, 1927–30 and 1937– 38 were brutally suppressed by the new state authorities. Kurdish place names such as ‘Dersim’ (the site of the 1937–38 revolt) were replaced with Turkish names (‘Tunceli’ in the aforementioned case) and parents were forbidden from giving their children Kurdish names as well. The use of terms such as ‘Kurdistan’ quickly became taboo and liable to land the speaker in jail on charges of sedition. While rural villagers and Kurdish households privately continued to interact in Kurdish amongst themselves much as they had before, Kurds and their language were quickly erased from the official landscape and public discourse. The 1940s and 50s in Turkey appeared quiet, leading many to believe that the Kurds in the country were being successfully assimilated. Kurdish political agitation soon resumed, however. During the 1960s and 70s large numbers of disaffected Kurds engaged in a plethora of activities that the state viewed as subversive, although these either consisted of joining leftist revolutionary groups that lacked a specifically Kurdish character3 or, in the case of specifically Kurdish groups, were too small-scale to qualify as fully fledged insurgencies. 3

These revolutionary leftist groups nonetheless generally recognised the Kurds or even saw Kurdistan as an oppressed internal colony of the Turkish bourgeoisie.

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The PKK – a new kind of Kurdish insurgency in modern Turkey The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê in Kurdish) emerged out of Turkey’s leftist political movements of the 1960s and 70s. Abdullah Öcalan, a political science student in Ankara who had been active in Turkish leftist groups and who came from Turkey’s poorer Kurdish southeast, founded the group with some colleagues in 1978. Öcalan and his co-founders soon left Ankara for rural Kurdistan and went on to build a mass movement that has challenged the Turkish state for the last three decades. Organising itself clandestinely in both rural areas and cities of Turkey’s impoverished Kurdish regions, the PKK built a new network of guerrilla fighters rather than relying on pre-existing Kurdish tribal forces (as previous Kurdish revolts had done). This helped avoid many of the divisions that came with the fusion of tribal loyalties into nationalist politics. Although some Kurdish clans and tribes in Turkey, such as the Bucaks around Severek, overwhelmingly sided with the government and others largely supported the PKK, the movement was not dependent on tribes and could more easily recruit a mass base from both the rural peasantry and impoverished urban classes. Non-tribal guerrillas also proved more difficult for government authorities to identify and isolate, as they were not associated with particular regions or communities and did not need to defend or return to these areas after fighting, the way tribal-based fighters typically do. The PKK’s initial goals called for an independent Kurdistan that united all the Kurdish regions (including those in Iran, Iraq, and Syria), a post-capitalist society based on gender equality, and an end to exploitation in all its forms.4 In a state wherein Kurdish culture, language, and pride had been systematically suppressed, the group sought to restore these elements of Kurdish ethnicity, reawaken Kurds to their ethnic identity, and demonstrate that the powerful Turkish state was far from omnipotent. The young PKK sent its cadres all across rural Turkish Kurdistan to provide people with an alternative Kurdish-centred education and narrative. The organisation took popular Kurdish traditions, such as the Newroz spring equinox New Year celebrations, and reinterpreted them and adapted them to a Kurdish nationalist outlook (modifying the original Newroz legends to focus more on a mythical blacksmith’s struggle to free his people from a tyrannical king, for instance).5 The PKK’s initial military strategy centred on eliminating its leftist and Kurdish rivals in eastern Turkey first, as well as attacking unpopular feudal Kurdish landlords there. This served to establish the PKK as the only viable avenue for dissent in the region as well as popularising the group in the eyes of its core constituency: impoverished rural and urban Kurds in southeastern Turkey (or what the Kurds refer to as ‘Northern Kurdistan’).6 The PKK only began attacks on Turkish security forces in 1984, following many years of Maoist-style preparation and consolidation. While the group initially sought to establish an independent Kurdish state, this changed around 1993, by which time the PKK moderated its goals to some form of local self-government, minority rights, and increasing democracy within Turkey. After around 2001, the organisation further shifted its ideology from its original Marxist-Leninism to a more anarchist, communitybased sort of direct democracy, known as ‘democratic autonomy,’ which eschewed nationalism and the creation of more states in favour of local autonomous communities.7 4

5 6 7

For a more detailed examination of the PKK’s ideology, from the movement’s outset up until a major paradigm shift after 1999, see Jongerden (2017). For a discussion of Kurdish grievances in Turkey from a socialist viewpoint that sees Kurdistan as a colony of Turkey, see Bes¸ikci (1991). For more on this, see Günes¸ (2012). . For a detailed discussion of PKK organisation, tactics, and strategy at this time, see Imset (1992). For more on this, see Jongerden (2017).

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The Turkish state’s denial of Kurdish identity, repressive assimilation policies, the impoverishment of the Kurdish regions of the country,8 the 1980 military coup, and three years of authoritarian military rule provided the PKK’s principle rhetorical justifications for taking up arms against the Turkish state. Violence played a central part in the PKK’s strategy from the outset. A PKK sympathiser describes a crucial difference between the PKK and its local competitors at the time, such as Ala Rizgari: In the early 1980s, the uneducated, poor peasants or townspeople would go to cadres of other ‘revolutionary’ organizations and complain about a local official or gendarmes commander who abused them or enforced laws onto them too assiduously. The cadres would say, “Yes, let’s discuss these. The officials are part of the government and class system that oppresses us, and we must unify against them.” When the same villagers approached PKK representatives about such a matter, however, the response was most often: “You have a problem with this official? O. K., he will be gone by next week”.9 This kind of action-oriented response quickly earned the PKK a great deal of credibility with the local populace. The Turkish state had long ago learned how to co-opt or repress and deport Kurdish tribal leaders who rose up against it, but a more amorphous Maoist-style guerrilla movement proved much more complicated to deal with. The state, busy with other problems between 1978 and 1984 (a time of intense polarisation between the Turkish left and right, culminating in the 1980 military coup in Turkey) largely ignored the PKK and its activities at first. So long as the organisation targeted competing Kurdish and leftist groups and Kurdish tribal and feudal landlords, authorities in Ankara focused on other priorities. This allowed the PKK to rapidly expand its network and base up until the moment it was ready to begin targeting Turkish state forces in 1984. Initially dismissed by both Turks and Kurds as just another small band of radical revolutionaries, the PKK quickly gained fame (from its new supporters) and notoriety (from its enemies) as its armed campaign expanded to include Turkish military and police targets. A series of successful attacks on isolated Turkish army posts and patrols in the mid-1980s immediately provided the group with an upsurge in credibility and demonstrated to alienated Kurds in Turkey that the state was not invincible. In 1987, Ankara responded by imposing a state of emergency on most of the country’s majority-Kurdish provinces. The state also recruited Kurdish tribes and villages into a ‘village guard’ system to counter the PKK, to which the PKK responded by targeting the village guards and, for a time, their families as well (most of the civilian casualties at the hands of the PKK occurred in this way). In what soon became a protracted guerrilla war in eastern Turkey, the PKK benefited greatly from the rugged mountainous terrain of the area. It also established key sanctuaries in neighbouring Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, including training camps for new recruits who were smuggled out of Turkey. PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, with the acquiescence of the Syrian government, took up residence in Damascus until 1997 (when Turkish military threats forced the Syrian government to ask him to leave). If one defines ‘terrorism’ as politically motivated, intentional targeting of civilians with violence or the threat of violence,10 then the PKK’s terrorism reached its height in the 1980s . 8 For more data on the relative poverty of Kurdish regions of Turkey, see Icduygu et al. (1999). 9 Author’s interview with a PKK sympathiser from Mardin, Toronto, Canada, 22 May 2001. 10 This is the definition recommended by a special task force formed by the UN Secretary General in 2004. See ‘Defining Terrorism,’ in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, Nov. 2004, 51–52.

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and early 1990s. To try and prevent the loss of whole Kurdish villages and tribes to the state, the PKK targeted village guards and their families (at the same time as the state targeted villages and tribes that refused to join the village guard system). The PKK likewise hunted down suspected state informants and collaborators, tried, and executed them. The PKK frequently targeted Turkish government officials and even teachers in the Kurdish regions during this period as well (the PKK viewed teachers as tools of the state’s forced assimilation programme, given that they forbade their students from speaking Kurdish and indoctrinated them with the state’s ideology).11 From the late 1990s onwards, the PKK made more efforts to avoid targeting civilians, with its attacks focused on actual village guards (as opposed to their families) and Turkish military and police targets.12 By the early 1990s the PKK appeared to be on the verge of establishing ‘liberated zones’ on a significant scale in Turkey. The group fielded some 15,000 fighters at any one time and supporters numbered in the several hundred thousand to several million. Although the Kurdish population in Turkey remained divided regarding the PKK, with some supportive and others very much opposed to the group, the PKK did by the 1990s establish itself as the hegemonic Kurdish organisation in Turkey. By this time the PKK became the only political vehicle available for Kurds who wished to challenge the Turkish state from a perspective of their own politicised Kurdish identity. In what by most accounts turned out to be a nasty, brutal conflict, the PKK was listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US, and the EU, while the Turkish government stood accused of gross human rights violations and ‘state terrorism’ (Medico International et al., 1996). The Kurdish diaspora in Europe (especially Germany) also became a key resource for the PKK during the 1990s. The Kurdish diaspora provided the group with funds (collected willingly or unwillingly mainly through donations and the PKK’s ‘taxes’ on Kurdish-owned businesses in Europe) as well as many recruits (who would travel from Europe to PKK bases in Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon). Elements of the Kurdish diaspora also pursued various initiatives supportive of the struggle at home. These included satellite television stations broadcasting to the Middle East in Kurdish (a revolutionary step given the suppression of the Kurdish language throughout the Middle East), whose cultural programming strove to reawaken Kurdish identity and whose news reports were sympathetic to the PKK.13 Various Kurdish cultural organisations aligned with the PKK were also established in Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere, and these cultural centres frequently held events to which they would invite local non-Kurdish politicians to help raise awareness of the Kurds’ plight in Turkey. Such initiatives eventually built significant levels of support for the PKK’s framing of the Kurdish issue in Turkey throughout Europe, especially amongst various European Green parties and other leftist parties and groups. At the same time, Ankara attempted to combat these developments with its own lobbying in especially European states, providing countries like the UK, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany with intelligence on PKK activists and initiatives and demanding arrests and extraditions. Because many of the activists lacked any formal ties to the PKK and their activities were usually quite legal in Europe (if not Turkey), little usually came from Turkish diplomatic efforts beyond the 2002

11 For a discussion of the rationality or strategic utility of violence by both the PKK and the Turkish state during this period, see Romano (2006, Chapter 3). 12 PKK leaders claim never to intentionally target civilians, while pro-Turkish state sources continue to accuse the PKK of attacking civilians, kidnappings, drug trafficking, and recruiting child soldiers. For more on the issue of targeting civilians, see Massullo and O’Connor (2017). 13 For more on this, see Romano (2002).

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European listing of the PKK as a terrorist group, closure of occasional Kurdish TV studios in Europe, and temporary detention and questioning of Kurdish activists. By the mid-1990s, increased deliveries of American military hardware to Turkey, a shift to special forces-based commando tactics, a counter-insurgency campaign that included the state’s forced evacuation and destruction of some 3,500 Kurdish villages, and PKK-leader Abdullah Öcalan’s capture in 1998 eventually turned the tide against the PKK.14 Beginning just before Öcalan’s capture in 1998 and perhaps as a result of battlefield losses, the PKK in the late 1990s briefly flirted with a strategy of suicide bombings as well (Ergil 2000). Until 2015, the PKK was the only Kurdish group to resort to such a strategy, sending some 15 suicide bombers (most of whom were female militants) against Turkish police and military targets.15 Although the PKK still glorifies the suicide bombers it sent,16 it refrained from further suicide attacks after 2001.17 Between August 1984 and March 2009, the estimates of casualties from the conflict nonetheless ran as high as 41,828 (Tezcür 2014, 173). In 2013, the first substantive peace talks between imprisoned PKK leader Öcalan (captured in Kenya in 1999) and elements of the Turkish state led to a PKK ceasefire and promise to withdraw armed militants from Turkey. In the past the Turkish state always refused dialogue with the PKK and never reciprocated PKK ceasefires. In the state’s framing of the issue, the PKK was no more than ‘a terrorist organisation’ and one cannot negotiate with terrorists. State authorities also tried to highlight that they had no problems with Turkey’s ‘citizens of Kurdish origin’ but rather their problem was with ‘PKK terrorism’ (Hürriyet 2016). The 2013 talks, although unofficial and conducted by Turkish intelligence agents with the imprisoned Öcalan, were thus groundbreaking. The talks ultimately led nowhere, however. In July 2015, armed conflict between Ankara and the PKK resumed (with each side predictably blaming the other for the resumption of the conflict – although it should be noted that Ankara took the first step of large-scale military action, which was preceded by the PKK’s killing of two Turkish police officers it accused of collaborating with Islamic State suicide bombers targeting Kurds).18 In this latest wave of conflict the PKK adopted new tactics from nearby conflict zones in Iraq and elsewhere – roadside improvised explosive devices followed by small arms fire – as well as a new strategy that included mass urban insurrection in Kurdish cities. Whole cities such as Cizre and Diyarbakır (‘Amed’ in Kurdish) in southeastern Turkey became war zones as Turkish security forces laid siege to armed PKK-affiliated youth groups that dug trenches in the streets and fought house to house.19 Large towns and cities were placed under curfew for weeks on end and whole neighbourhoods were levelled as Turkish security forces put down the urban uprisings. 14 For more details and casualty data about this, see Tezcür (2014). 15 Beginning in 2015 a splinter group from the PKK, calling themselves the ‘Kurdistan Freedom Falcons’ (Teyrebazen Azadiya Kurdistan, TAK), targeted Turkish security forces and civilians with suicide bombings. While the PKK claimed to have no control or links to TAK, the PKK’s critics claimed that TAK was really a branch of the PKK created to carry out more unsavory attacks. 16 Zeynep Kınacı, whose nom de guerre was Zilan, became the PKK’s first suicide bomber in June 1997 when she killed eight Turkish soldiers along with herself. She is widely revered in the movement, with songs and commemorations in her honour still occurring. 17 On 2 August 2015, however, an individual that Turkish authorities claim was a PKK militant drove a bomb-laden tractor into a military outpost in Dog˘ ubeyazıt, eastern Turkey, killing two soldiers and wounding thirty-one (The Guardian 2015). 18 For more on this, see Romano (2015). 19 A lengthier account of a particularly violent episode in this latest iteration of the conflict is available from the BBC (2015).

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The effects of the PKK insurgency in Turkey Whatever one’s opinion of the PKK in Turkey – whether they are viewed as ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom fighters’ – one effect of the group’s insurgency appears indisputable: the PKK brought the Kurdish issue in Turkey out from the rug it languished under during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s and into the open. Most Kurds in Turkey – either grudgingly or admiringly depending on their view of the group – credit the PKK with restoring Kurds’ awareness and pride in their ethnic identity and making it impossible for Ankara to go on claiming that ‘there are no Kurds in Turkey’. It was in this context that Turkey ended its total ban on the Kurdish language in 1991 and admitted the existence of Kurds in the country. Although mainstream Turkish political discourse still insists that there is no Kurdish ethnic problem in the country (they say the problem is rather one of poverty, lack of education, underdevelopment, and ‘foreign interference’), the Kurds in the country can no longer be ignored as they were in the past. The broader PKK-aligned movement also spawned a number of political parties, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), youth groups, and media outlets (mostly in Europe). Most of these were banned in Turkey but often continue to operate either in the shadows or under periodic new names until they are banned again. Pro-Kurdish political parties sympathetic to the PKK (or the PKK’s version of Sinn Féin according to Turkish state officials) in particular followed this pattern of legal founding, banning by authorities, and reincarnation under a new name.20 The first significant Kurdish electoral foray occurred in 1977, when Kurdish candidates sympathetic to the PKK’s views won municipal elections in the provinces of Batman (Edip Solmaz) and Diyarbakır (Mehdi Zana). Solmaz was murdered in 1979 (most likely by statealigned actors) and Zana was arrested and imprisoned until 1990. It was not until the 1990s that Kurdish legal political efforts bore fruit again. These political parties and the PKK engaged in a dual-track approach to pursuing Kurdish goals in Turkey, a sort of symbiotic relationship between the nonviolent movement and its violent counterpart (Yanarocak 2014, 139). At times the parallel demands of both the PKK and legal Kurdish political parties coincided so closely that the relationship did appear akin to that of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army, while at other times a bit more daylight seemed to emerge between the armed Kurdish movement and the legal parties. The People’s Labour Party (Halkın Emek Partisi, HEP) was the first Kurdish political party to contest elections in Turkey in 1990. The party was composed of Kurdish politicians who had broken off from the Social Democratic Party (Sosyal Demokrat Halkçı Parti, SHP) to found a party more sensitive to minority issues (mainly of the Kurds). The HEP tried to avoid language that would certainly invite state repression, such as the use of the word ‘Kurdistan,’ yet nonetheless adopted a programme of ‘solving the Kurdish problem through peaceful and democratic methods in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and the statutes of the Helsinki Final Document’ (Yanarocak 2014, 142). HEP ended up being the first of a long series of primarily Kurdish parties closed down by the Turkish Constitutional Court for violating Constitutional articles forbidding ‘ethnic based parties’ or any actions (intentional or unintentional) that threatened the ‘territorial and national unity’ of the country. After the HEP’s ban in 1993, the following parties were founded and then banned by Ankara: the Freedom and Democracy Party (Özgürlük ve Demokrasi Partisi, ÖZDEP, closed in 20 For an in-depth examination of this, see Watts (2010).

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1993 as well), the Democracy Party (Demokrasi Partisi, DEP, banned in 1994 after the parliamentary immunity of several of its deputies, including the first female Kurdish deputy, Leyla Zana, was lifted and the deputies were arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned), the People’s Democracy Party (Halkın Demokrasi Partisi, HADEP, which won 37 municipalities in the 1999 municipal elections but was banned in 2003), the Democratic People’s Party (Demokratik Halk Partisi, DEHAP), which won around 7 per cent of the national vote in 2002 but could not enter parliament due to a 10 per cent electoral threshold – the highest in the world – and was in the process of being investigated by the Constitutional Court before it disbanded to form a new party, the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP), which elected 22 parliamentarians by running them as independents to avoid the 10 per cent threshold rule and winning 100 municipalities in 2009, but was banned a few months later. Given that the DTP’s closure by the Constitutional Court was widely expected, Kurdish politicians founded the next party – the Peace and Democracy Party (Barıs¸ ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP) – in 2008, even before its closure. In 2014, the BDP merged with a Turkish national-level grouping of far-left, non-Kurdish parties to form the People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), although for local elections in the predominantly Kurdish regions the BDP still runs as its own party. Between 2015 and 2018, most of the HDP’s deputies and the BDP’s municipal level mayors have had their parliamentary immunity removed and been arrested and imprisoned. Because legal (for a time) pro-Kurdish political parties generally adopted the same political demands as the PKK (mother-tongue education rights, democratic autonomy, and recognition of Kurdish and other minority identities) and frequently acted to relay messages between the Turkish state and the PKK, much of the Turkish public regarded the BDP and previous pro-Kurdish parties as a nonviolent branch of the armed rebel movement (Yanarocak 2014, 139). As mentioned earlier, by the mid-1990s both the PKK and these pro-Kurdish political parties avoided demanding secession and the establishment of a Kurdish state. Instead, they pushed for mother-tongue education rights, greater decentralisation of government throughout Turkey, autonomy for the Kurds and similar groups, and recognition of Kurdish and other minority identities. Turkish mainstream political thinking generally viewed these demands as simply a deception, a sort of ‘the tip of the iceberg’, actually intended to garner the PKK and its aligned groups the power and breathing space to go back to their original goal of secession and Kurdish statehood. Although Turkey briefly permitted private Kurdish language education and media as part of its efforts to accede to the EU in the early 2000s, these rights faced back-and-forth curtailments and permissions at the time of writing. For instance, in September 2016, Ankara closed down even private Kurdish-language children’s television stations it had allowed to open only a few years prior (such as Zarok TV, which broadcasted shows such as SpongeBob SquarePants dubbed into the threatened Zazaki dialect of Kurdish), as part of the reaction to the July 2016 attempted coup in Turkey. Ankara soon reversed some of these closures, however: ‘Seriously concerned’ about the September closure of Zarok TV and 14 other Kurdish TV stations, 59 lawmakers at the European Parliament (EP) called on Turkey to reopen the channels in mid-October. The EP condemned Turkish authorities who ‘were misusing’ law to appoint trustees to private media organisations in the aftermath of the failed coup (Khalidi 2016). Mother-tongue education rights (i.e. the right for Kurdish children to receive public education in Kurdish) remains a non-starter for Turkish officials, however. Although the easing of restrictions targeting Kurdish culture and language were necessary under the terms of Turkey’s accession process to the European Union, the Turkish state’s decision to allow any media broadcasting in Kurdish, however tenuous, may have 249

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nonetheless also represented an attempt to deal with some of the Kurdish grievances that fuelled the PKK’s insurgency in the first place. Had such liberal trends been sustained with a stronger political will, the conflict in Turkey might not have resumed with such force. Instead, attempts to resolve the PKK insurgency and bring the rebels down from the mountains fell victim to contrary political imperatives and interests.

Conclusion: societal polarisation and democracy under siege – future prospects for insurgency Kurdish insurgency in Turkey and most recently the PKK insurgency greatly polarised society. Although many Kurds credit the PKK with reawakening the Kurdish identity in the country and sometimes legal pro-Kurdish parties push hard for democratisation in Turkey, the insurgencies have also hampered democratisation in Turkey. Broad support amongst the majority-Turkish population for security measures to deal with the insurgencies and laws to contain Kurdish ‘minority’ ambitions in the country do not sit well with democratic and civil rights. All the states with a politically significant Kurdish minority (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria) face a similar problem, in fact. Laws and security mechanisms intended to inoculate the state against Kurdish demands21 get easily repurposed to protect government elites and ruling parties against the demands of any dissidents and critics. Emergency courts, compromised judges and prosecutors, unaccountable intelligence agencies, para-state militias, censored media, overly broad laws restricting civil liberties, and the like typically become equally useful against both Kurdish and non-Kurdish oppositions. Economic resources devoted to fighting Kurdish insurgents create vested interests in the conflict and take away from funds available to develop the poorest parts of the country (which in turn adds to Kurdish grievances, given that theirs are the poorest parts of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and until recently, Iraq). Security threats posed by demonised Kurdish enemies likewise distract popular attention away from the government’s failings and transgressions. This dynamic may unfortunately continue for some time in Turkey as the government in Ankara finds political utility in casting itself as the ‘state and people’s protector’ against the ‘Kurdish other’. If Kurdish unrest in Turkey results largely from policies repressing Kurdish identity there, and such policies are in turn justified by Kurdish unrest and potentially secessionist ambitions, then a vicious circle forms from which it can be difficult to extricate oneself. Modernisation and democratisation in Turkey then suffer from the conflict, replaced by efforts to contain alienated Kurds within the country. Without a leadership in Turkey willing to prepare the population for a significant reappraisal of the state’s past treatment of Kurds and their present place (as a group) in the country, conflict may simmer on for a deal longer. If the Turkish state continues to refuse direct peace talks with the PKK, for instance, the principle motor of insurgency in Turkey will have little incentive to end its ‘armed struggle’. Given that Ankara failed to find a ‘military solution’ to the PKK since 1984, it seems hard to envision alternatives to real peace talks and compromise on both sides.

21 While the details of Kurdish demands in each state with a significant Kurdish minority may vary, in general these centre on more democratic and civil rights (including what amounts to minority rights, although Kurds usually reject the label of ‘minority’), recognition of Kurdish language and culture, and increased decentralisation of what have historically been extremely centralised governments in the region.

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Real peace talks require effort and the spending of political capital to convince the population of the need for compromises. The Kurdish issue is also not the only problem polarising society in Turkey, however. With other problems such as the secular–religious divide, contests between the ruling party and opposition groups, the Fethullah Gülen movement and more, the temptation of any Turkish government will be to avoid much spending of political capital to resolve the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Despite Ankara’s inability to decisively end the PKK insurgency militarily, the Turkish electorate appears to still support a fairly hard-line approach to politicised Kurdish movements and the PKK. The PKK and its supporters, in turn, remain unable to defeat the Turkish state but also seem unlikely to just surrender after some 35 years of fighting. The conflict between the state and the PKK will thus likely continue for some time. As long as most of the violence is confined to the eastern majority Kurdish parts of the country, the current status quo will also likely remain acceptable to Ankara and most of the Turkish electorate.

References BBC. 2015. ‘Turkey Kurds: Many dead in Cizre violence as MPs’ march blocked.’ 10 September. Accessed . 21 September. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34206924 Bes¸ikci, Ismail. 1991. Kurdistan and Turkish Colonialism. London: Kurdistan Solidarity Committee and Kurdistan Information Centre. CIA. n.d. ‘CIA World Factbook: Turkey.’ Accessed5 January 2018. https://www.cia.gov/library/publica tions/the-world-factbook/geos/print_tu.html Ergil, Dog˘ u. 2000. ‘Suicide Terrorism in Turkey.’ Civil Wars 3(1): 37–54. Günes¸, Cengiz. 2012. The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance. New York: Routledge. Heper, Metin. 2008. The State and Kurds in Turkey: The Question of Assimilation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hürriyet. 2016. ‘There is no Kurdish Problem, Just a PKK Terror Problem: Turkish PM.’ 3 October. Accessed 9 January 2018. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/there-is-no-kurdish-problem-just-a . -pkk-terror-problem-turkish-pm-104543 Içduygu, Ahmet, David Romano, and Ibrahim Sirkeci. 1999. ‘The Environment of Insecurity and the Question in Turkey.’ Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(6): 991–1010. . Kurdish . Imset, I.G. 1992. The PKK. Ankara: Turkish Daily News Publications. Jongerden, Joost. 2017. ‘Gender Equality and Radical Democracy: Contradictions and Conflict in Relation to the ‘New Paradigm’ Within the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).’ In Les Kurdes: puissance montante au Moyen-Orient?, edited by Hamit Bozarslan, 233–256. Accessed 7 January. https://www.aca demia.edu/34868973/Gender_Equality_and_Radical_Democracy_Contractions_and_conflicts_in_rela tion_to_the_new_paradigm_within_the_Kurdistan_Workers_Party_PKK_ Khalidi, Ari. 2016. ‘Closed Kurdish kids’ Channel in Turkey Relaunches.’ K24 News, 9 December. Massullo, Juan and Francis O’Connor. 2017. ‘PKK Violence Against Civilians: Beyond the Individual, Understanding Collective Targeting.’ Terrorism and Political Violence, 2 August. Online article. Accessed 5 January 2018. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546553.2017.1347874?scroll=top& needAcce ss=true McDowall, David. 2009. A Modern History of the Kurds. New York: I.B. Taurus. Medico International et al.1996. ‘The Destruction of Villages in South-East Turkey.’ London: Medico International Germany and the Kurdish Human Rights Project. Romano, David. 2002. ‘Modern Communications Technology in Ethnic Nationalist Hands: The Case of the Kurds.’ Canadian Journal of Political Science 35(1): 127–149. Romano, David. 2006. The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity. London: Cambridge University Press. Romano, David. 2015. ‘The Arab Spring’s Effect on Kurdish Political Fortunes.’ Insight Turkey 17(3): 53–63. Tezcür, Günes M. 2014. ‘The Ebb and Flow of Armed Conflict in Turkey: An Elusive Peace.’ In Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, edited by David Romano and Mehmet Gurses, 171–188. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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19 THE PERENNIAL KURDISH QUESTION AND FAILED PEACE PROCESSES Cengiz Çandar

Introduction Many Turkey experts and scholars, Turkish and non-Turkish alike, have concluded that unless a just and lasting resolution is introduced to the Kurdish question, the survival of the Turkish state as it was founded in the wake of World War I is at stake, as well as its territorial integrity. Previously I have argued that: ‘In the Middle East, history has begun to move very fast. Turkey in order to comply with the speed of history will either resolve the Kurdish question or the Kurdish question will dissolve Turkey’ (Çandar 2012, 620). The prognosis was that a country that was founded as a nation-state almost a century ago when the new borders of the Middle East were drawn would be unable to survive with its foundational dogma. It would either shrink or expand. It would not be able to remain as it used to be. As long as the Kurdish question remained unresolved, the inner societal fabric of Turkey would wear thin until it was broken, with very fragile security and an economy chronically in crisis exacerbating political upheavals. That would indicate a quasi-permanent state of instability that would weaken the country within an already turbulent neighbourhood with an uncertain future. The initiatives that have been taken over the last two decades and that have been called ‘Peace Processes’ have tacitly acknowledged this danger. Despite the long-standing roots of the Kurdish question, which date back to the foundation of the Republic, and the cardinal problem facing Turkey over whether it actually has the potential to determine its destiny, endeavours to resolve the Kurdish question through peace processes did actually materialise during the first two decades of the 21st century. In the new international and regional dynamics after the end of the Cold war and in the 21st century, Turkey found itself as a candidate member of the EU with the prospect of accession. That helped to create a period where the conditions ostensibly matured to seek a political settlement to a conflict that looked intractable, with its protagonists engaged in a zero-sum game.

A deadly conflict The Kurdish question has been accompanied by a very deadly conflict with high casualties, primarily among Kurdish citizens of Turkey and Turkish security forces. Many innocent lives have been lost due to the violence prevalent since 1984. Alongside the huge human losses, tens 253

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of thousands of people have been uprooted from their homes in the overwhelmingly Kurdishinhabited southeast of Turkey. Since 1993, the PKK (Partiya Karkarên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Workers’ Party) which started an armed struggle in 1984, has declared occasional short-lived, unilateral ceasefires. There also have been undeclared cessations of hostilities observed by the belligerents and a lull in fighting between 1999 and 2004 following the capture and the imprisonment of the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan. Nevertheless, the casualty figures kept surging, providing a further impulse for the initiation of the peace process that began in the first decade of the 2000s. The highest casualty figures belong to the period 1984–1999. Relatively speaking, the number of people killed in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict is among the highest in the global scale. According to the Turkish Ministry of Defence and military and police sources ‘between 1984 and 1999, 5,828 Turkish security officials, 5,390 civilians and 19,786 PKK guerrillas were killed’ (Bas¸aran 2017, 31). These numbers can vary. In a different source, although the civilian casualties and that of security forces shown are very close to aforementioned figures, the number of PKK deaths, for the same period, is around 26,000 (Bas¸aran 2017, 56). By the time of the initiation of the peace process, casualty figures had climbed to over 35,000.1 The failure of two successive peace processes and with them the breakdown of the ceasefire, first in 2011 and then in 2015, revived the high casualty figures, revealing the cataclysmic nature of the conflict while the prospects for a political settlement faded away. The violence cycle that started with the breakdown of the two-and-a-half-year ceasefire in July 2015 took at least 2,981 lives within a year-and-a half, which is three times more than during the July 2011–December 2012 escalation for which the International Crisis Group counted almost 1,000 deaths. Among the deaths confirmed through the Crisis Group’s open-source data collection, nearly half were PKK militants (1,378) followed by state security force members (976) and civilians (408). The remainder (219) were youths of unknown affiliation (Özpek 2018, 27). The government claims to have killed 11,000 PKK militants since the resumption of violence in July 2015 (International Crisis Group 2017). Comparing the violence to the Northern Ireland conflict that claimed 3,596 lives between 1969 and 2010,2 the death toll resulting from Turkey’s Kurdish question between 2011 and 2017, is, proportionally, even higher than Northern Ireland’s toll after 41 years of conflict. The failure of the peace processes, the first in July 2011 and the second, for years later, in July 2015 is lamentable in terms of missing enormous opportunities for the resolution of the Kurdish question that may never come again.

A decade of peace processes During the relatively long history of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, there are two phases that deserve to be called peace processes that within a decade (2005–2015) were initiated, proceeded, and ended in failure. Both involved certain indispensable essential elements, the sine qua non in order to achieve a successful result that the multiple experiences of conflict resolution in the international arena indicate. The negotiating table that was set up in Oslo in 2008, following exploratory contacts in 2005 that constituted the preliminary phase of the peace process, was dismantled in July 1

2

A useful resource for the number of deaths in the confict since the breakdown of the casefire in July 2015 is the International Crisis Group’s webpage, ‘Turkey’s PKK Conflict: The Rising Toll’. http:// www.crisisgroup.be/interactives/turkey/, last accessed 10 August 2018. See CAIN (2018).

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2011, in the aftermath of the stunning electoral success of Turkey’s ruling AKP which had garnered the support of almost 50 per cent of the electorate in the June elections. An armed clash with PKK fighters in Silvan in the countryside around Diyarbakır took the lives of 13 soldiers. The government interpreted the incident, which took place on 14 July, as the resumption of fighting and blamed the PKK by turning the negotiating table upside down. Thereby, the Oslo Process that had proceeded in secrecy between 2008 and 2011 was terminated. Preparatory phase The first peace process that had been underway by 2005 and culminated in negotiations between the PKK delegation and Turkish intelligence officials in 2008 was prompted mainly by two important developments: 1 2

The PKK had resumed its armed struggle on 1 June 2004. There had been in a lull since February 1999, the date of the capture and arrest of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan. At the European Union Summit in Brussels, December 2004, the EU had decided to start accession negotiations with Turkey for full membership by October 2005.

The international community had been encouraging the AKP government to undertake reforms. In this respect, addressing the Kurdish question had primary importance and it would also further delegitimise the Turkish military’s meddling in politics, thereby enhancing democratic-civilian rule. A number of international institutions with the endorsement of Western governments and with expertise on conflict resolution, as well as eminent political personalities, personally engaged with the belligerents of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict with the objective of bringing them into dialogue and negotiation. International mediators, Turkish intelligence officials, PKK representatives The initial endeavours to initiate a peace process for the political settlement of the Kurdish question goes back to the year 2005. A former prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Norway, Kjell Magne Bondavik, had the honour of taking the initial steps. At an international meeting in Europe, he contacted then Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an and told him the intention of his country to take the initiative to start the peace talks between the belligerent sides of Turkey’s Kurdish issue. Bondavik received a positive response from Erdog˘ an who assigned Turkey’s national intelligence chief Emre Taner to undertake the mission for further contacts, and Bondavik met with PKK officials in Europe. Moreover, some Norwegian mediators went to the PKK’s headquarters in the Qandil mountains on the Iraqi Kurdistan’s border with Iran to meet with the PKK leadership.3 The Norwegian shuttle between the Turkish authorities and the PKK leadership continued during 2005. At the end of that year, a second channel opened in the mediation efforts between the Turkish state and the PKK. An institution based in Geneva, with considerable experience and expertise in conflict resolution worldwide and that functions with the support of influential Western capitals, entered into the peace process track. In December 2005, it contacted the PKK’s European officials, informed them that it had met with the 3

Information based on author’s own research material and interviews with personnel that took part in the preparatory phase of the Oslo talks. See also Dicle (2017).

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Turkish officials, and expressed its intention to go to Qandil to meet the PKK leadership in order to launch a process for the peaceful political settlement of Turkey’s Kurdish question. This unveils the most obscure period of secret talks between the PKK and Turkey’s officials. The secret contacts, talks, and negotiations that continued for nearly a decade were brought to light in August 2017 thanks to Amed Dicle’s book, 2005–2015 Türkiye-PKK Görüs¸meleri (2005–2015 Turkey-PKK Talks) (Dicle 2017). Despite being written from a proPKK angle, he concedes, he relied on the documents, minutes, and voice recordings of the talks provided to him by the PKK and the interviews he undertook with those PKK personalities that took part in Oslo and its preparatory phase. Thus Dicle, nonetheless, uncovered a secretive period of peacemaking regarding Turkey’s Kurdish issue. In addition to Amed Dicle’s book, the findings of research I conducted between 2016 and 2018 at SUITS (Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies) show that, even before mutually going to Oslo, Turkey and the PKK ventured into indirect and face-to-face talks from 2005 to 2008 in different locations, including Brussels, Geneva, Ankara, and Suleimaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In 2006, there were several contacts in Ankara between the PKK official Sabri Ok, the pro-Kurdish DTP co-chairs Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tug˘ luk, and Turkish Intelligence Head, Emre Taner, that focused on embarking on a process to . reach political settlement. During this period, the latter also went to the prison island of Imralı to engage with the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. In the meantime, Ok and the DTP co-chairs were coordinating with the PKK leadership on Mt. Qandil (Dicle 2017).4 The then president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, who was of Kurdish origin, was actively involved during this period, especially during 2006–2008. Parallel to Talabani’s efforts, the president of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democrat Party (Türkiye Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, T-KDP) took some part in the efforts for settlement in 2006 and 2007.5 Turkey’s officials and a PKK delegation, for the first time met face-to-face in Brussels on 1 November 2007. The meeting was arranged by Bondavik and another prominent Norwegian statesman, also a former prime minister, and chairman of Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Secretary-General of Council of Europe, Thørbjörn Jagland.6 Prior to Oslo, the Turkish and PKK sides came together face-to-face once again in Geneva in 2008 to lay the ground for the Oslo talks. Secret talks in Oslo The Oslo Process started on 3–4 September 2008 and brought Turkish officials and a PKK delegation around the negotiating table 11 times. The two belligerents met four times during 2009, three times in 2010, three times in 2011 in Oslo, and once in 2010 in Brussels. Hakan Fidan, who in 2010 became the notorious head of Turkish intelligence, was delegated to hold talks with Abdullah Öcalan. In his capacity as the Deputy-Undersecretary of the Prime Ministry but also on behalf of Tayyip Erdog˘ an himself, Fidan participated in the talks beginning with Oslo-5 on 13–14 September 2009. Despite its eventual failure, the Oslo Process has been as significant an endeavour as the last peace process that took place from 2012 until 2015. In Oslo, both parties, besides their 4 5 6

Author’s own research Dicle (2017). Author’s research material. Information derived from interviews conducted by author in Brussels and Oslo with participants who have established contacts with prominent international statesmen, mediators and Turkish officials.

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formal meetings, shared the same location and ate breakfast together, as well as lunch and dinner, for a total of 22 days. Each of the two sides was represented by five people. The PKK delegation consisted of two leading figures that had come all the way from Mt. Qandil and three leading PKK figures in Europe. Until the sixth meeting in Oslo on 2–3 May 2010, Mustafa Karasu, a PKK founder and a member of executive committee, chaired the PKK delegation. By mid-2010, the PKK began to lose hope for the success of the talks and lowered the level of representation. Karasu no longer attended the Oslo talks. According to the PKK, for the five consecutive meetings, the Turkish side did not present any road map despite earlier promises to do so. Moreover, the Turkish side in the Oslo talks was lacking the political mandate necessary for a deal. All this added to the misgivings that the PKK already had about Turkish commitments for a political settlement. . The Turkish delegation consisted of five MIT (National Intelligence Organisation) operatives and was chaired by Afet Günes¸, a deputy-undersecretary of the organisation who was in charge of its PKK desk for many years. Later, Hakan Fidan, in his new capacity as the Head of Turkish National Intelligence, chaired the Turkish delegation and continued to do so until the end of the process (Dicle 2017, 80–155). The Oslo talks met many of the prerequisites for reaching a political settlement indicated by worldwide practices of conflict resolution, like a fairly reasonable preparatory phase during which both sides observed the necessary confidentiality, involvement of a credible third party – albeit not a sine qua non for reaching a successful negotiation – for mediation or facilitation, a supportive international political climate, and a series of meetings of the two sides to the conflict in a tranquil location without being under any pressure from any element that could seek to undermine the peace process. The assumption that ‘it [Oslo] was poorly designed, rushed and dirty’ is totally false.7

The failure The major shortcoming of the Oslo talks that prevented a successful end was the lack of real commitment on both sides for a political settlement. The Turkish side was, ideologically, unprepared and thereby unwilling for a comprehensive political settlement of the Kurdish question. It did not even work on a road map to be presented during the different stages of the Oslo talks that extended for quite a long period from 2005 to 2011. The Kurdish side, from the outset, was not fully committed to a political settlement, unable to overcome its disbelief in its Turkish counterpart. In retrospect, it is evident that sufficient groundwork in terms of confidence-building measures was not accomplished prior to, or during, the Oslo talks. The ‘third party’ present in Oslo, other than the Turkish officials and PKK’s representatives, did not reveal its position or make any judgment on this issue, in order to preserve its role for any future undertakings in the quest for a peaceful resolution of the problem. It did not act as a mediator or an arbiter. Rather, its main function was as a facilitator, an important function, but short of playing a decisive role in preventing the failure of the talks. Those representing the centre in Geneva with international experience on conflict resolution attended only the opening and closing moments of the sessions and formulated the texts about the minutes and proceedings of the meetings. Such was the limited function of the ‘third party’. Those texts on the proceedings could be validated only after being mutually 7

For the view it was badly designed, rushed, and dirty, see the quote by Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group in Bas¸aran (2017, 76).

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accepted by the Kurdish and Turkish delegations that took part in deliberations, and then were handed over to Turkish intelligence officials and PKK representatives to be kept in the archives of all the parties present in Oslo. The Turkish side and PKK also kept voice recordings of the Oslo sessions in which they participated in their archives (Dicle 2017; International Crisis Group 2014). Why Turkey went to Oslo Emre Taner, former Head of Turkish Intelligence (2005–2010) who is considered to be the main protagonist for engaging with the PKK on behalf of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdog˘ an and with the endorsement of President Abdullah Gül revealed the aim of the Turkish side. Speaking on 9 November 2016 to a parliamentary panel, he said: We [Turkey] were in the Oslo process in order to prevent foreigners from abusing the Kurdish problem. When we’ve focused at it [the Kurdish issue], we’ve seen that very many foreign intelligence services were in close contact with the PKK and treating the issue as they like, as befitting their interests; while poor Turkey was watching as a bystander. [Hence] I persuaded the prime minister and other officials that we need to intervene, to remain face-to-face with that group [PKK], because resolving the problem is incumbent upon us, we should not leave it to the others. Their [foreigners’] intention was different. They wanted to carry the [Kurdish] issue to a multilateral international conference for its resolution. What they wanted was to resolve it against our interests. That is the reason why we have been to Oslo. Oslo was not a betrayal, at all. Oslo was an undertaking in order to stop the [spilling of] blood. Secret services enter into a minefield to clean it. That is the raison d’etre of secret services. They open the road for politics to take over. [In Oslo] there was never a protocol agreed upon, neither a signed agreement, nor any contract. It was not more than an experiment for creating a ground on which we could discuss the confidence building measures. (TBMM 2016) Taner, who managed to conduct his engagement with PKK between 2005 and 2010 in complete secrecy, in his first and only statement about the matter conceded that a major shortcoming on their part that led to Oslo’s failure had been the lack of a road map that could lead to a resolution. ‘We could not present a comprehensive road map to them [PKK]’, he added. As a matter of fact, Taner’s explanation revealed another major and aforementioned defect of the Oslo talks: the Turkish participants had no political mandate for an ultimate resolution. They were bureaucrats who were in charge of security, anti-terrorism, and espionage. For an issue that by its nature is political, the experiences of Northern Ireland and South Africa instruct. Security officials or intelligence operatives can undertake a mission at the beginning of a peace process, but they cannot carry on peace talks for a political settlement. Turkey’s persistent disregard of the basic character of the Kurdish question has been a major factor in the eventual failure of Oslo talks. Why the PKK went to Oslo For its part, the PKK went to Oslo with a deep distrust of the Turkish side. Such a misgiving, which was never overcome but in fact was even consolidated during the talks, was not a hopeful sign for Oslo to reach a successful outcome.

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The PKK’s participation in Oslo was kept secret from its own organisation. Only 12 people in PKK’s executive body had information about the talks. The inauguration of Oslo coincided with the tenth congress of the organisation held on Mt. Qandil. Two leading figures, one of them Mustafa Karasu, one of the PKK’s founders and a member of its executive, left the congress sessions and travelled all the way to Oslo via Erbil and Vienna with travel documents provided to them by a European government (Dicle 2017, 75). Prior to going to Oslo in 2008, at their last meeting with representatives of the Geneva centre, PKK leaders disclosed their belief that they did not think the Turkish state had any intention to come to a political settlement. Nevertheless, they decided to be in Oslo, not because of any expectation they had from the Turkish side, but as an opportunity to present themselves to international circles and show that they were ready for a political settlement of the Kurdish issue. They were keen to dispel the perception that the PKK was a terrorist organisation. They believed that the Oslo process has a character that goes much beyond Turkey and the region [Kurdistan and the Middle East], because the intermediary for these talks, the center in Geneva, has the support of the United Nations, United States, the EU and Britain. Therefore, all these Powers were aware of the talks and endorsed the process. (Dicle 2017, 73) A similar assessment was given to the author by those who took part in Oslo on behalf of the PKK. In hindsight, despite meeting many of the prerequisites for a successful peace process, the failure would have been inevitable due to many pitfalls that befell the Oslo Process. Yet its end in July 2011 came abruptly and quite unexpectedly only one month after the dazzling Turkish election success of the ruling AKP. Emboldened with his 12 June election victory, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdog˘ an ended the Oslo Process on a flimsy pretext citing the loss of lives of 13 soldiers in a skirmish with the PKK. Not a single investigation on the clash that took place in Diyarbakır countryside indicated that it was a premeditated military move of the PKK in order to turn the peace negotiation table upside down, as asserted by the Turkish government. A firm commitment to a negotiated political settlement of the conflict had to overcome the damage the clash caused. The peace process could have been preserved despite the military showdown. Instead, the war reignited. Violence escalated once again.

The road to the peace process II The escalation of violence in Turkey coincided with the deteriorating military situation on the Syrian battlefield where the PKK’s Syrian affiliate PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party) and its armed wing YPG (Yêkineyên Parastina Gel, People’s Protection Units) emerged as a significant political and military player. Following the withdrawal of the Syrian army in July 2012 from the Kurdish-inhabited regions of Syria along the 911 km frontier with Turkey, Kurdish self-rule began to be exercised in three cantons extending northeast to northwest on the Syrian side of the border. Turkey viewed the achievement of the PKK’s Syrian affiliates so close to Turkey’s southeast as the PKK gaining a strategic hinterland. Moreover, hundreds of PKK prisoners started hunger strikes in Turkish jails across . the country that only their leader Abdullah Öcalan, who was serving a life sentence in the Imralı prison island, could stop. In addition to an increasing 259

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death toll in the southeast, hunger strikes of Kurdish prisoners and the developments in the Syrian theatre in the year 2012, electoral calculations had a role in convincing Erdog˘ an to resume the Kurdish peace process. The country was moving towards three fateful scheduled elections (the March 2014 local elections, August 2014 presidential elections, and June 2015 general elections). In a spiral of violence and tension, the situation seemed untenable for Tayyip Erdog˘ an entering into the election cycle. Campaigning in some parts of Turkey would be impossible under the circumstances. However, tying peace processes to electoral calculations usually do not work to their benefit. ‘Peace processes can be frustrated when leaders become distracted by electoral goals, but equally if leaders embark on peace processes for purely electoral motives the outcome can be disastrous’ (Powell 2015, 127). Turkey’s second Kurdish peace process experience, following the failure of the previous one that ended in 2011, attested to this aphorism. After an intermission of one-year-and-a-half since July 2011, the time to resume the peace process had arrived. Turkey knocked on the door of the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani. His good offices were needed. He met with Turkey’s intelligence chief Hakan Fidan in Berlin in August 2013 and, at their request, contacted the PKK’s leadership on Mt. Qandil. However, contrary to the first peace process where prominent international figures, institutions, and foreign governments played significant roles, the second peace process was mostly a domestic process within Turkish parameters. Different than Oslo Without absorbing the lessons of failure of the previous peace process, Erdog˘ an embarked on a new peace process. Contrary to the Oslo Process, it initially seemed very promising. Unlike the secrecy of the previous peace process, the new one was unleashed with public information. Tayyip Erdog˘ an announced the undertaking during a television interview in the closing days of 2012. He disclosed that a new Kurdish peace process . was about to begin, this time by starting a dialogue with Abdullah Öcalan at his prison on Imralı island. A process with Öcalan as chief negotiator Elevating Öcalan to de facto negotiator status met the most important precondition of the PKK to engage with the Turkish state. For many years, the PKK leadership at Mt. Qandil had insisted that Öcalan should be recognised as their chief negotiator. One aspect of that insistence, without any doubt, had to do with the personality cult the PKK had built around its leader, but it also meant to raise Öcalan to a role that would legitimise him and enable his ultimate release from prison. Nelson Mandela and the experience of South Africa set the precedent for this. Nelson Mandela had served an 18-year prison term on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, then was moved to a Cape Town prison with much better conditions. During this period, he started to negotiate with the White government of South Africa to end Apartheid. He continued until his release in 1990. When he was arrested for conspiring to overthrow the state, condemned to life imprisonment and sent to Robben Island prison, he was 44 years old. Öcalan was 50 years old when under similar charges and sent to serve life . he was condemned . imprisonment on Imralı Island near Istanbul. The parallels between Mandela and Öcalan were already in the minds of PKK cadres. In this they were also influenced by the ANC (African National Congress), with which the PKK had enjoyed close relations for quite a long period. 260

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Pro-Kurdish party in the process The new Kurdish peace process started with the visit of two members of parliament of the . pro-Kurdish BDP (Barıs¸ ve Demokrasi Partisi, Peace and Democracy Party) to Imralı Island. A veteran and highly respected Kurdish politician, Ahmet Türk, accompanied by Ayla Akat visited Öcalan on 3 January 2013. The new process was constructed directly on Abdullah Öcalan, implicitly recognising him as the PKK’s chief negotiator. Unprecedented steps were taken in a short period of time with new elements unthinkable throughout the history of the Kurdish question: a public, personal endorsement of the Kurdish peace process by the prime minister, acknowledgment of the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan as a peacemaker, a man who until then had been demonised as a vicious terrorist and a murderer; inclusion of elected representatives of the Kurdish people in the process, thereby empowering them with having a role in peacemaking. Members of parliament from the proKurdish BDP functioned as intermediaries between Öcalan and the PKK leadership at Mt. Qandil and between Mt. Qandil and government officials. Previously, travelling to and meeting with PKK officials at its mountain redoubt had been considered a criminal act of ‘encouraging terrorism’. Now it had become an essential part of peacemaking. A hopeful beginning The new peace process was crowned by a message from Abdullah Öcalan that was read in Turkish and Kurdish to an ecstatic crowd, estimated to be around two million, in Diyarbakır on 21 March, or Nowruz, celebrated as the beginning of the Kurdish New Year. In his message, Öcalan pledged Kurdish–Turkish Unity in the future, signalled an end to the armed Kurdish insurgency and instructed Kurdish fighters to evacuate the territories of Turkey. The withdrawal was implemented by a reluctant PKK leadership by May. A honeymoon-like climate prevailed concerning Turkey’s Kurdish question and hopes were high to resolve the issue once and for all within a short period of time. An accurate prognosis of the failure The euphoria of all those days eclipsed the rare but nevertheless prudent analysis warning against too optimistic expectations about the success of the process. Tezcür was among those very few cautious, but astute observers of the Kurdish Peace Process. He wrote: It is unrealistic to expect a peaceful resolution of the armed conflict in the foreseeable future for three reasons. First, the cost of fighting remains tolerable for both sides. Hence, the conflict has not yet reached a mutually hurting stalemate that would generate strong incentives to reach a deal … Second, huge differences separate what the AK Party is willing to concede to make the insurgency lay down its arms and what the insurgency demands to disarm itself. It is very unlikely that the negotiations would enable them to overcome their differences. Finally, the AK Party’s strategy to seek a solution through Öcalan is unlikely to produce a breakthrough. Öcalan may call on the insurgency to end its operations, but it is very uncertain if the insurgent leadership would actually follow his lead despite their rhetorical commitments to his leadership … An overambitious initiative generating unfounded expectations may result in more bloodshed in the long run. (Tezcür 2013) 261

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His observations and conclusion proved to be accurate. By September 2013, the withdrawal of PKK fighters was interrupted following the allegations that the Turkish side was not fulfilling its pledges. The process stalled in September 2013, existing only in name until its final collapse in July 2015. The collapse In the 7 June 2015 general elections, the pro-Kurdish HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, Peoples’ Democracy Party), which replaced the BDP, shattered the electoral 10 per cent threshold imposed by the constitution mainly in order to prevent Kurdish political representation in Turkey’s parliament. Parliament gained 80 staunchly pro-Kurdish legislators and the ruling AKP lost its majority in the parliament for the first time since 2002. Almost a month later the violence was back again, reminiscent of the ending to the Oslo Process in 2011. After a long interval, Turkish fighter planes again began to pound PKK bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. The war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish insurgency was reignited. The most hopeful Kurdish peace process in Turkish history came to an end. The AKP’s share in the failure The AKP’s, or rather Tayyip Erdog˘ an’s, share in the failure of the peace process was brought to light by Selahattin Demirtas¸, the imprisoned former leader of the HDP who made groundbreaking revelations at his trial in Ankara on 13–16 February 2018. After spending 460 days in a solitary cell, Demirtas¸, in his first public appearance in a court room, made a uniquely important defence, as it shed light on how and why the recent Kurdish peace process in Turkey failed and Erdog˘ an’s unmistakable part in that. The most striking part of Demirtas¸’s defence, who had taken an active role in the initial stages of the peace process as the popular and influential chairman of the HDP, was about the feud initiated by Erdog˘ an against him. Accordingly, Demirtas¸, who ran against Erdog˘ an in 2014, was asked to withdraw from the elections for president by Erdog˘ an, who sent envoys for that purpose. He was told that Erdog˘ an was very irritated by his candidacy. The envoys, who were in the delegation that once conducted negotiations with the PKK on behalf of the government, told Demirtas¸, ‘Erdog˘ an asks, while the [Kurdish] peace process is underway, why is Demirtas¸ running for presidency against me?’ Demirtas¸’s response was, ‘We are not his [Erdog˘ an’s] slaves. We are engaged in the [peace] process to enhance democratic politics. We are trying to decommission the PKK, but to disband the HDP is not our objective. Why is he irritated by our getting stronger within the context of democracy?’ Demirtas¸ also revealed that he was approached by Erdog˘ an to refrain from participating in the June 2015 elections as a candidate on the HDP party list, but asked to run as an independent candidate. Another interesting anecdote Demirtas¸ mentioned in his defence was that two officials — allegedly then-Interior Minister Bes¸ir Atalay and national intelligence chief Hakan Fidan — brought him a handwritten letter from Abdullah Öcalan, to force him to coordinate with Erdog˘ an.8 AKP’s ideological shortcoming and Turkey’s democratic deficit Debates over what went wrong in the failed Kurdish peace processes, usually, find it difficult to explain. They generally refer to the fact that Tayyip Erdog˘ an and the AKP were to be commended for taking bolder steps toward the resolution of the issue than any predecessor. An observer noted,

8

Full text of Demirtas¸’s defence was provided to the author by the press office of the HDP [translation by the author].

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Arguably the most significant element of the AKP’s liberalizing reforms was its repeated attempts to address the question of Kurdish rights. The reluctance of successive Turkish governments to address the concerns of the Kurdish population has plagued the Republic since its founding … The AKP at one time saw itself as well positioned to revise that record through promoting a shared Muslim identity between Turks and Kurds. (Eissenstat 2017) The essence of the failure of the two (and only) Kurdish peace processes that were undertaken under AKP rule lies precisely in the ideological stand of the AKP. The AKP was illequipped ideologically to resolve the Kurdish question: [It] never seemed to envision a ‘Kurdish opening’ that went beyond ‘cultural rights.’ The AKP leadership never abandoned the Kemalists’ focus on retaining the central government’s absolute control. In Turkey, ‘federalism’ of any sort is often seen as the first step towards the disintegration of the Republic. This view, rooted in memories of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a passionate rejection of any suggestion of regional autonomy. While the AKP clearly hoped to end the Kurdish conflict, it never questioned the basic Kemalist assumption of a unified centralised state. The easiest response to Kurdish concerns – greater regional autonomy and stronger local governance – remained anathema to Erdog˘ an and his party. (Eissenstat 2017) The failure should also be attributed to Turkey’s democratic deficit: The literature underscores the fact that institutional mechanisms capable of supporting democracy are necessary conditions for durability of peace deals concluded between the warring parties of the internal conflict … The weakness of democratic institutions paved the way for the negotiating elites on both sides to arbitrarily terminate the ‘peace process’. In other words, non-state actors did not have sufficient power to prevent the AKP and the PKK from ending the ‘peace process’ just because their strategic interests diverged. (Özpek 2018, 59–60)

Conclusion:unpromising prospects Exhausting many invaluable and necessary mechanisms in order to achieve a political settlement of the Kurdish question may have been the worst result of the failed peace processes. The failure of the peace processes was so spectacular, the sense of betrayal so great, and the subsequent violence so horrific that it may well be a generation before peace will once again be sought at the negotiating table. The mistrust between the antagonists became deeper and wider than ever. In addition to such strong traumatic consequences of the failure, the subsequent developments that have taken place that are fundamentally different and that have set in motion new dynamics following the 7 June 2015 elections, further diminish the chances of a political settlement of the Kurdish issue. In their aftermath, Tayyip Erdog˘ an, who, previously, had 263

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been hailed as the Turkish president that offered far more to the cause of peace with the Kurds than any of his predecessors, with a drastic volte face, formed a new power bloc with most ultra-nationalist anti-Kurdish elements within the state and the Turkish spectrum. Additionally, after the alleged and failed coup attempt on 15 July 2016, another era of Turkey, under the firm rule of Erdog˘ an, designated as ‘New Turkey’, has risen. Indeed, ‘the roots of Erdog˘ an’s ‘New Turkey’ go further back: they can be found in the decades that preceded the foundation of the Turkish republic. The ultranationalist Young Turks – the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) – that ruled the Ottoman Empire during its final years with catastrophic consequences, have extended their tentacles into the ‘New Turkey’. It is with their latter-day incarnations – the neo-nationalists – that President Erdog˘ an has teamed up in recent years. Since 2015, Turkey has been governed by a nationalist coalition that is an amalgam of neo-unionists, traditional ethnic Turkish right-wing nationalists and Islamist nationalists’ (Çandar 2017). For that coalition, which is structurally and contextually hostile to the idea of a political settlement of the Kurdish question, a peace process, evidently, is an anathema. Re-demonisation of the PKK as a terrorist organisation and treatment of its Syrian affiliates, the PYD and YPG, in the same manner stymied any effort that could revive the peace process. The PKK is no longer perceived as a party for the quest to resolve the Kurdish question, but as an enemy to be fought relentlessly and annihilated. The suppression of the pro-Kurdish HDP in the aftermath of the July 2016 coup is another potent indicator of the unwillingness of Tayyip Erdog˘ an and the nationalists that share the power with him for the political settlement of the Kurdish question. The HDP, which had enjoyed the support of over 6 million people in the parliamentary elections and represented the non-violent expression of Kurdish resentment in Turkey, was subjected to the efforts of the government to delegitimise it. Its charismatic leader Selahattin Demirtas¸, . along with 10 MPs is imprisoned. Idris Baluken, the party’s parliamentary group leader who took a very active part in the peace process, was condemned to 16 years’ imprisonment in January 2018. Meanwhile, during 2017, in the southeast, the government took control in 89 municipalities won by the HDP’s sister party in the region, the Democratic Regions Party (DBP), and suspended their democratically elected co-mayors under suspicion of terrorism offenses, with at least 70 jailed. (Human Rights Watch 2018) Thousands of party workers were put under detention or arrested, which incapacitated both the HDP and the DBP to a large extent. Kamuran Yüksek, the young and promising chairman of the BDP, condemned to 8 years’ imprisonment in absentia and is in self-imposed exile, outside of Turkey. All such repressive measures taken by the neo-nationalist regime aiming at prohibiting legitimate Kurdish representation in Turkish body politic points to the impossibility of resuming any meaningful peace process. The international climate that encouraged the reconciliation between Turkey and its Kurdish adversaries at the turn of the 21st century is non-existent during its second decade. The Helsinki process, by recognising Turkey as a candidate member of the EU with the prospect of full accession opened the doors to a democratic country able to produce a domestic political solution to the Kurdish question. Today’s Turkey, with a centralised-nationalist regime trying to consolidate it, is at odds with the West. It has no expectations of EU membership and, consequently, it is not 264

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motivated whatsoever to resolve the Kurdish question, compromising on certain national rights to Kurds, including a modicum of self-rule. Losing the democratic anchor that had been manifested by Turkey’s quest for EU accession, the incentive for the resolution of the Kurdish question within democratic parameters is also lost. Turkey is back to a zero-sum game and the enthusiasm for a political settlement of the Kurdish question is dimmed. In terms of its ultimate resolution, perhaps, a gradual but an unmistakable change in the nature of the Kurdish question occurred. That change made it even more cantankerous and complex. Turkey’s and Syria’s Kurdish questions are intertwined. They are like concentric circles. To a large extent, it is the outcome of Turkey’s belligerency visá-vis the PYD and the YPG, the major political party and the fighting force of Syrian Kurds, and also considered the incarnation of the PKK in Syria. In its turn, the PKK prioritised the Syrian theatre for implementing its policies. The destiny of Syria and the duration of its conflict with international magnitudes became a major determinant in the trajectory of the Kurdish question. Under such circumstances, a peaceful political settlement of the Kurdish issue and reviving the peace process is a pipe-dream. Therefore, as long as the main protagonists of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict are in place and unless an unpredictable game-changer materialises that could affect a paradigm shift, the question will continue to corrode Turkey.

References Bas¸aran, Ezgi. 2017. Frontline Turkey: The Conflict at the Heart of the Middle East. London: IB Tauris. CAIN. 2018. ‘Sutton Index of Deaths.’ http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/ . . Çandar, Cengiz. 2012. Mezopotamya Ekspresi. Istanbul: Iletis¸im Yayınları. Çandar, Cengiz. 2017. ‘New Turkey: Neo-Nationalist or the Reincarnation of the ‘Old’’ The Turkey Analyst, 20 December. https://www.turkeyanalyst.org/publications/turkey-analyst-articles/item/ 592-new-turkey-neo-nationalist-or-the-reincarnation-of-the-old?.html Dicle, Amed. 2017. 2005–2015 Türkiye-PKK GörüS¸meleri [2005–2015 Turkey-PKK Talks]. NordrheinWestfalen: Mezopotamya Yayınları. Eissenstat, Howard. 2017. ‘Erdog˘ an as Autocrat: A Very Turkish Tragedy. Project on Middle East Democracy.’ Project on Middle East Democracy, 12 April. https://pomed.org/pomed-report-erdogan-as-a utocrat-a-very-turkish-tragedy/ Human Rights Watch. 2018. ‘Turkey.’ In World Report 2018. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/ country-chapters/turkey International Crisis Group. 2014. ‘Turkey and the PKK: Saving the Peace Process.’ https://www.crisisgroup. org/europe-centralasia/westerneuropemediterranean/turkey/turke y-and-pkk-saving-peace-process. International Crisis Group. 2017. ‘Managing Turkey’s PKK Conflict: The Case of Nusaybin.’ https:// www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/western-europemediterranean/turkey/243-managing-tur keys-pkk-conflict-case-nusaybin Özpek, Burak Bilgehan. 2018. The Peace Process Between Turkey and the Kurds: Anatomy of a Failure. London: Routledge. Powell, Jonathan. 2015. Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts. New York: Random House. TBMM [Grand National Assembly of Turkey]. 2016. ‘Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Fethullahçı Terör . Örgütünün (Fetö/Pdy) 15 Temmuz 2016 Tarihli Darbe Giris¸imi Ile Bu Terör Örgütünün Faaliyetlerinin Tüm Yönleriyle Aras¸tırılarak Alınması Gereken Önlemlerin Belirlenmesi Amacıyla Kurulan Meclis Ara¸stırma Komisyonu [Turkish Parliamentary Commission on the Probe of the Coup Attempt of 15 July 2016].’ https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/komisyon_tutanaklari.goruntule?pTutanakId=1775 Tezcür, Günes¸ Murat. 2013. ‘Another Kurdish Initiative in Turkey: Is Peace Finally Achievable?’ Informed Consent, February. https://www.juancole.com/2013/02/another-initiative-achievable.html

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20 TERRORISM, COUNTERINSURGENCY, AND SOCIETAL RELATIONS Gareth Jenkins

Introduction Turkey’s internal security landscape has long been characterised by shifting patterns of continuity and change. In terms of their ideologies, the groups which are seen as threats to the security of the state today still fall into the same categories as in the late 1970s, namely leftist, Islamist,1 and Kurdish nationalist. However, the extent of the danger and disruption they have caused and their impact on Turkish society have varied over time and between different geographical regions of the country. Official narratives have consistently tried to portray the organisations in all three categories as being catalysed from outside Turkey by nefarious foreign powers desperate to prevent the country’s otherwise inexorable rise to regional pre-eminence. In reality, the main factors fuelling militant activity in the country have always been indigenous, particularly a sense of social alienation and exclusion on the grounds of identity. For Kurdish nationalist and Islamist organisations, this has been in reaction to a hegemonic identity officially imposed by the state, namely Turkishness and the official interpretation of secularism respectively. Recruitment to the most influential leftist organisation, what is known today as the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (Devrimci Halk Kurtulus¸ Partisi-Cephesi, DHKP-C), has been boosted by the subordination of the heterodox Alevi minority to a hegemonic Sunni Muslim identity, which both manifests itself in social attitudes and shapes state policy, albeit without being explicitly inculcated through official discourses. The state’s response to militant leftist organisations has remained essentially unchanged and been heavily securitised, often making little distinction between the practitioners of violence and those who peacefully advocate similar long-term ideological goals. The Kurdish nationalist cause, whether advocated peacefully or by violent groups such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), has also tended to be heavily securitised. However, there have been variations over time. For example, restrictions on the expression of a Kurdish political and cultural identity were eased from 2004 and then tightened again from 2015. In 1

The word Islamism is used here in its broadest sense, namely seeking to reshape – whether violently or non-violently – society and/or the political sphere in accordance with Islamic precepts.

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addition, the Turkish state has intermittently engaged in covert and overt dialogues with the PKK – something it has never tried with militant leftist groups. Militant Islamist groups have always been treated differently, not least because their methods and goals are seen as distortions of an ideology – namely Islam – which has been regarded by the state as a force for social cohesion. Before the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) won the general election in November 2002, having an Islamist agenda was seen as a threat to the interpretation of secularism espoused by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the main driving force behind the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Since the AKP took office, and particularly since 2008 when it saw off the last threat from the country’s then secular establishment,2 it has made a greater effort to differentiate between practitioners of violence in the name of Islam and those who merely advocate adherence to a similarly hard-line interpretation of Islamic precepts. Though not always immune, Islamist extremists detained by the Turkish security forces are also at much less risk of physical abuse than their leftist or Kurdish nationalist counterparts. Although the activities of indigenous leftist and Islamist militant organisations – and the state’s responses to them – have affected social relations, their impact has been dwarfed by the social changes produced by the war with the PKK, whether as a consequence of the violence itself or as a result of the PKK’s attempts to reshape Kurdish society in line with the teachings of its founder Abdullah Öcalan.

Historical background After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the new government in Ankara faced a series of armed rebellions, most of which occurred in rural areas in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country. However, although an incipient sense of Kurdish nationalism played a role in some of the revolts, it was largely subordinated to other grievances – such as conservative Sunni Muslim opposition to the government’s secularising reforms in the Sheikh Said Revolt of early 1925 and Zaza Alevi resistance to the government’s attempts at cultural homogenisation and mass resettlement in what has become known as the Dersim3 Uprising of 1937–38. Rather than Kurdish nationalism, the main factor that all of the revolts had in common was resentment at the attempts of an increasingly assertive political centre to impose its authority over the periphery, including through taxation and the erosion of the influence of local potentates. When organised anti-state violence re-emerged as a serious security threat in the late 1960s, it did so in the ideological context of the Cold War and was initially primarily an urban phenomenon. A fissiparous plethora of hard-line Marxist groups emerged from the student movement of the 1960s, some of which formed military wings and began to engage in violence (Lipovsky 1992, 119–120). This violence was soon matched by the response from right-wing organisations such as the Association for the Struggle Against Communism (Komünizmle Mücadele Derneg˘i, KMD) and the National Turkish Student Union (Milli Türk Talebe Birlig˘i, MTTB). The youth branch of the Turkish ultranationalist Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) also formed what was effectively an armed wing, whose 2

3

Namely, the closure case against the AKP brought by hard-line Kemalists in the judiciary, which was initiated just under a year after the Turkish military had tried to intimidate the government into abandoning its plans to appoint the then foreign minister Abdullah Gül to the presidency. In 1935 the government changed the name of the province of Dersim, which is 90 per cent Alevi, to Tunceli.

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members became known as Bozkurtlar or ‘Grey Wolves’. By the late 1970s, the fighting between leftist and rightist militants had reduced Turkey to a state of near civil war. The factionalism extended well beyond the active militants themselves, creating fissures both within the civil service and in large sections of society as a whole. Some urban areas even fragmented into a mosaic of neighbourhoods that were controlled by, or sympathetic to, leftists or rightists. It was also during the late 1970s that the two ideologies that were later to dominate the security landscape first began to emerge. On the left, Kurdish activists began to establish organisations that combined Marxist ideology with a strong sense of a distinct Kurdish identity, most notably with the foundation of the PKK in 1978. Similarly, for some of the rightists, the Turkish nationalist cause became absorbed into a desire to regulate society according to Islamic mores. Nearly all of the Islamist activists who came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s first became involved in politics through the KMD or MTTB. By the time the military coup of 12 September 1980 put an end to the factional fighting, the result was a pool of radicalised Islamist activists who had yet to coalesce into distinct organisations. Most subsequently joined mainstream political parties, such as the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) and its successors the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP) and the AKP. But others went on to form the first violent Islamist groups. The military junta that seized power in 1980 not only brutally suppressed the perceived threat from existing leftist organisations but coopted Islam as an ideological bulwark to prevent leftist ideas from gaining traction with future generations. In southeast Turkey, it sought to use religion as a force for national cohesion against the allure of Kurdish separatism. Although militant leftist violence reappeared in the late 1980s, it was on a considerably smaller scale than before the coup. The most active organisation was the Revolutionary Left (Devrimci Sol, Dev Sol), which primarily targeted serving and retired members of the Turkish security forces. In 1991, Dev Sol also attacked US and UK targets in protest at their involvement in the first Gulf War Iraq, assassinating two US citizens and one UK national and bombing more than 20 premises in Istanbul, albeit without causing any serious injuries. By September 1992, when a power struggle within Dev Sol resulted in a split into two factions, the organisation had killed more than 100 people over the previous three years. In 1994, the larger faction, under the leadership of Dursun Karatas¸ (1952–2008), was reconstituted as the DHKP-C. The smaller faction adopted the name of the Turkish Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (Türkiye Halk Kurtulus¸ Partisi/Cephesi, THKP-C) but rapidly dwindled in size and has been effectively moribund since 1999. However, starting in 1995, the DHKP-C launched the first of a series of hunger strikes in an attempt to pressure the Turkish authorities into improving the prison conditions of its jailed members. By 2001, around 100 DHKP-C members and sympathisers had starved themselves to death and several hundred more had become permanently disabled. The result was the depletion of the DHKP-C’s operational capabilities, while the organisation’s attempts to publicise the hunger strikes helped the Turkish intelligence services to identify possible targets for recruitment. Although it continued to stage further attacks – including individual suicide bombings – the DHKP-C had now become so heavily penetrated by informers that most attempts were thwarted before they could be completed. By the early 1990s, the perceived threat from militant leftist groups had been eclipsed by the PKK, which initially advocated the creation of an independent Marxist Kurdish state. Öcalan had fled to Syria shortly before the 1980 coup and spent years moulding the first generation of PKK volunteers into an effective fighting force. Nevertheless, when it launched its rural insurgency in August 1984, the Turkish state was taken by surprise. By the early 268

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1990s, the PKK had around 8,000 militants under arms, mostly operating in units 30–40 strong, and effectively controlled large swathes of southeast Turkey after dark. Starting in 1993–1994, the Turkish military adopted new tactics, making greater use of aggressive patrolling and employing newly purchased Cobra helicopter gunships. It also launched a scorched-earth policy to deny the PKK logistical support, including the burning and forced evacuation of an estimated 3,500 villages. By the late 1990s, the Turkish military had regained the initiative, confining the PKK to sporadic attacks in more inaccessible mountainous areas. In 1998, the government turned its attention to Syria, forcing it to expel Öcalan. He was eventually captured in Kenya in February 1999, brought to Turkey, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment.4 In August 1999, Öcalan announced an indefinite cessation of all military operations and committed the PKK to pursuing its goals by political means. However, in May 2004, frustrated by the government’s failure to make concessions to his demands, Öcalan ordered the PKK to resume violence from the beginning of June 2004. During its second insurgency, the PKK adopted a two-front strategy in an attempt to force the Turkish government to the negotiating table rather than achieve a military victory: combining a rural guerrilla campaign, albeit with much smaller units averaging 8–10 militants, in southeast Turkey with an urban bombing campaign in the west of the country. Instead of calling for an independent state, Öcalan now advocated what he described as ‘democratic autonomy’, a concept heavily influenced by the writings of the US communalist Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) and which envisaged the replacement of conventional state structures with a pyramidical system of committees and assemblies culminating in a supranational parliament encompassing the entire Middle East. Even though the PKK was militarily weaker than during its first insurgency, the Turkish state’s inability to eradicate it produced a series of increasingly public initiatives to negotiate an end to the violence, culminating in what became known as the ‘solution process’, which resulted in the PKK announcing a ceasefire that lasted from March 2013 until July 2015. The emergence of the PKK as the main domestic security threat to the state had coincided with the first acts of Islamist violence. Despite their sectarian differences, the success of the 1979 Shia Islamic Revolution was an inspiration to hard-line Sunni Islamists in Turkey. As a result, virtually all of what was effectively the first generation of Islamist violence in Turkey was connected in some way to Iran.5 Some violent Islamists, such as a small group known as the Kudüs Savas¸cıları, or Jerusalem Warriors, effectively served as proxies for elements in the Iranian intelligence apparatus, targeting Iranian dissidents who had fled to Turkey and diplomats from countries considered by Teheran to . . be hostile. Others, such as the Islamic Movement Organisation (Islami Hareket Örgütü, IHÖ), received weapons and training from the Iranian intelligence services, which they then used to assassinate prominent Turkish secularists (Jenkins 2008, 195–200). Even the most powerful of the violent indigenous organisations, the Kurdish Hizbullah, received assistance from Teheran in its formative years. Its founder Hüseyin Veliog˘ lu (c.1952–2000) maintained contacts with elements in Iranian intelligence and travelled several times to Iran for training. However, Veliog˘ lu advocated the creation of an Islamic state in 4 5

An original death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when Turkey abolished the death penalty. . The main exception was the . idiosyncratic Islamic Raiders .of the Great East – Front (Islami Büyük Dog˘u Akıncılar – Cephesi, or IBDA-C), whose founder Salih Izzet Erdis¸ (born 1950), who also uses the nom de guerre of Salih Mirzabeyog˘ lu, combines Ottoman nostalgia with fierce anti-Shia prejudice.

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southeast Turkey based on the model of the al-nizam al-islami or ‘Islamic order’ of the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the clerical theocracy in Tehran. Hizbullah had emerged from one of the Islamic study groups that proliferated across southeast Turkey in the 1980s. A poor speaker with limitations as a theologian, Veliog˘ lu was nevertheless a gifted and energetic organiser. He used the space created by the state’s tolerance of Islamist activism to expand Hizbullah’s influence across much of southeast Turkey, mostly in towns and cities. This brought the organisation into confrontation with the PKK, which at the time was itself trying to establish an organised presence in urban areas. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the two organisations fought a brutal low-level war which cost at least 600 lives6 and ended with a Hizbullah victory which forced the PKK to scale back its urban activities. While Hizbullah was fighting the PKK, the Turkish security forces made no attempt to curb its growing influence – and sometimes even cooperated with it. However, through the second half of the 1990s, as Hizbullah followed up its victory over the PKK by targeting rival Islamist groups, the Turkish security forces began to regard it as a threat in its own right. In 1999 Veliog˘ lu fled the southeast for Istanbul, where he was killed on 17 January 2000 during a police raid on a Hizbullah safe house. The police also recovered the organisation’s computer archives. More than 3,000 alleged Hizbullah members were subsequently arrested and imprisoned. The death of Veliog˘ lu and the capture of its archives had a devastating impact on Hizbullah. However, its surviving members gradually rebuilt the organisation – this time using NGOs and educational, publishing, and media activities to try to broaden its support base and create the social foundations for what it hoped would be the eventual establishment of an Islamic state.

The current situation By the early 2010s, the DHKP-C appeared to be in inexorable decline. But it was re-invigorated by what have become known as the Gezi Park Protests7 that swept Turkey in summer 2013. The overwhelming majority of the estimated three million people who took to the streets were peaceful and drawn from the country’s urban educated youth. But they contained a disproportionately large number of Alevis. All of the militant leftist groups active in Turkey joined in the demonstrations and, even though they accounted for only a tiny proportion of the protestors, were responsible for nearly all of the violence directed at the police.8 Participation in the protests also helped these groups to create new mythologies, which were then used for propaganda purposes to increase recruitment. The DHKP-C had always recruited mainly from Alevis, and traces of Alevi culture had informed many of its propaganda activities. After the Gezi Park Protests the association became more explicit – to the point where the DHKP-C began to portray itself as the guardian of the Alevi community. This was most strikingly demonstrated on 31 March 2015, when two DHKP-C militants raided the Palace of Justice in Istanbul and took a public 6 7

8

In comparison, around 30,000 PKK militants have been killed by the Turkish security forces since 1984. In May 2013, anger at a police crackdown against a handful of environmentalists protesting the government’s plans to build a shopping mall on Gezi Park in central Istanbul triggered a nationwide protest movement. Some PKK supporters also joined the protests but the organisation itself remained aloof. Author’s observations during the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul, June 2013.

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prosecutor, Mehmet Selim Kiraz, hostage.9 Kiraz had been overseeing the investigation into the death of Berkin Elvan, an Alevi teenager who was killed by the police during the Gezi Park Protests.10 In terms of the Alevi community as a whole, support for the DHKP-C remains limited.11 But its more explicit repositioning as a pro-Alevi organisation has given it a broader recruitment base than other militant leftist organisations – and means that it has a strong presence in areas where there are sectarian divisions, such as the divided neighbourhood of Okmeydanı in Istanbul. For other militant leftist organisations, the momentum provided by the Gezi Park Protests now appears to have faded. Some still have . armed wings. For example,. the Turkish Worker’s-Peasant’s Liberation Army (Türkiye I¸sçi-Köylü Kurtulus¸ Ordusu, TIKKO), the military wing of the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (Türkiye Komünist Partisi/MarksistLeninist, TKP/ML), which was very active in the factional fighting of the 1970s, still has a handful of militants under arms in rural areas in the eastern province of Tunceli. The People’s Liberation Army (Halk Kurtulus¸ Ordusu, HKO), the military wing of the Maoist Communist Party (Maoist Komünist Partisi, MKP), which broke away from the TKP/ML in 2003, has an even smaller number of militants under arms. However, in March 2016, in collaboration with seven other militant leftist organisations, the TKP/ML and the MKP joined with the PKK to form the Peoples’ United Revolution Movement (Halkların Birles¸ik Devrim Hareketi, HBDH), which has fought alongside the PKK in northern Syria. Syria, particularly the de facto autonomous Kurdish region in the north of the country known as Rojava, has also now become the main focus of the PKK – not least because it is regarded as the prototype for the implementation of Öcalan’s concept of democratic autonomy. Although the PKK is organisationally distinct from the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD) and its military wing the People’s Defence Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG), all follow Öcalan’s teachings. In addition, the YPG has recruited extensively from PKK veterans, who fill most of its command positions – which has in turn restricted the number of militants available to the PKK for its insurgency in Turkey. But the PKK appears to calculate that, in the longer term, the cost of a temporary reduction in its operational capabilities in its war against the Turkish state will be more than offset by the practical demonstration in Rojava of the workability and practical benefits of Öcalan’s teachings – not least in their potential for inspiring young Kurds to agitate for the introduction of a similar system in southeast Turkey. When the PKK returned to violence in July 2015 after the collapse of the ‘solution process’ it sought to compensate for its limited number of deployable trained militants by concentrating primarily on the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – including, for the first time, the extensive use of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) driven by volunteer suicide bombers – and only occasionally staged hit-and-run attacks against military outposts. The PKK also sought to bring what had previously been a mainly rural insurgency into the cities by staging a series of urban uprisings in southeast Turkey and creating no-go areas administered according to Öcalan’s teachings, calculating that these would form the foundations for the implementation of his concept of democratic autonomy throughout the region. It was a strategic error, effectively creating fixed targets against which 9

Kiraz and the two militants were all killed when the police raided the room in which he was being held. 10 Elvan was 14 when he was shot in the face with a police tear-gas canister on 16 June 2013. He died on 11 March 2014 at the age of 15. 11 Alevis are estimated to account for 10–20 per cent of Turkey’s population of 82 million.

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the Turkish security forces could concentrate their overwhelming military superiority, including by deploying tanks and artillery.12 The locations of the urban uprisings were all chosen by the PKK as areas where it enjoyed widespread public support. The ruthlessness of the military operations to crush the uprisings led to hundreds of non-combatant fatalities and the displacement of at least 300,000 people. Such suffering caused considerable damage to the PKK’s standing amongst its core constituency – albeit short of turning the local population against the organisation, not least because there was even greater anger at the methods used by the Turkish security forces. Nor did the Turkish government follow up its military victory with a hearts-andminds programme to try to exploit the damage to the PKK’s reputation. On the contrary, it launched a crackdown on expressions of both Kurdish nationalism – whether violent or nonviolent – and Kurdish language and culture. This was intensified under the State of Emergency introduced after the failed coup of 15 July 2016, which was used to fire thousands of Kurds from the civil service and close down dozens of Kurdish NGOs and media organisations. In addition, the State of Emergency has been used to appoint administrators to run 94 of the 102 local authorities that had been won by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Regions’ Party (Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi, or DBP) in the last local elections in March 2014.13 The elected DBP officials were not only dismissed but, in most cases, also arrested and imprisoned. It is too early to assess what impact the removal of elected DBP officials – which has been accompanied by the arrest of thousands of party workers – will have on the inculcation of Öcalan’s ideas. Some had already begun to be implemented on a local level in PKK strongholds, such as through the informal creation of committees and representative assemblies which then forwarded requests, complaints and suggestions to the local DBP-controlled municipalities. Similarly, although some of Öcalan’s more abstruse teachings have yet to gain social traction, others have already had an impact on daily life. Most striking has been the change brought about by his precepts on gender equality, which has led to a marked increase in female participation in social life in areas where PKK support is traditionally strong.14 The main responsibility for countering urban leftist organisations such as the DHKP-C has always rested with the Counter Terrorism Department of the national police,15 while the military and gendarmerie used to be the main forces deployed against the PKK for operations in rural areas and checkpoints on major roads. However, in recent years, the government has increasingly deployed police paramilitaries – such as ‘Special Operations’ units and members of what are known as ‘Flexible Forces’, which are used for crowd control – at checkpoints and for security. As a result, for the population of the southeast, the ‘face’ of the state is increasingly that of the police rather than the military. However, Turkey’s professional gendarmerie commando brigades and members of the regular military are still the main units used for combat operations in rural areas. After the death of its founder Veliog˘ lu in January 2000, Hizbullah was largely quiescent16 and the focus of Islamist violence in Turkey shifted to transnational organisations. Turkish jihadists first started travelling abroad to fight for Islamist causes in the early 1990s. Although their movements were known to the Turkish intelligence services, little attempt was made to 12 Author’s observations during the fighting in the southeastern cities of Diyarbakır, Nusaybin, Cizre, and S¸ırnak, January 2016 and September 2016. 13 The local authorities were won by candidates from the Peace and Democracy Party (Barıs ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), which was reorganised on the municipal level as the DBP in June 2014. 14 Author’s observations. Southeast Turkey, 1990–2017. 15 Under Turkish law, responsibility for law enforcement rests with the national police in urban areas and the gendarmerie in the countryside. 16 An exception was the assassination in Diyarbakır on 24 January 2001 of Gaffar Okkan, the police chief who had led many of the raids that forced Veliog˘ lu to flee the southeast in 1999.

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intercept them on the grounds that they were participating in conflicts outside the country. This changed with the wave of suicide bombings in Istanbul in November 2003 – against two synagogues on 15 November 2003 and the British Consulate General and the Turkish offices of the HSBC bank on 20 November. The attacks were organised by Turks who had received training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and prompted a crackdown on the organisation’s networks and sympathisers inside Turkey. However, after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, rather than planning attacks inside Turkey, Turkish would-be jihadists again began to travel outside the country, this time to join the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. For the new leadership of Hizbullah, who were trying to concentrate on building a social support base, the fighting in Iraq served as a pressure release for young jihadists on the fringes of the organisation. In December 2012, the Hizbullah leadership established its own political party,17 known as the Free Cause Party (Hür Dava Partisi, Hüda-Par), and fielded candidates in the local elections in March 2014. Even by the low expectations of the organisation’s leaders,18 the local elections were not a success, with Hüda-Par winning just 92,000 votes nationwide. Although Hüda-Par remains active, it decided not to participate in the general elections in June and November 2015. After Veliog˘ lu’s death, Hizbullah had reduced but never completely disbanded its military wing. In October 2014, Kurdish nationalists took to the streets of southeast Turkey to protest what they regarded as the Turkish government’s complicity in what appeared to be the imminent fall of the Syrian city of Kobani to the Islamic State.19 Some PKK supporters took the opportunity to target NGOs associated with Hizbullah. More than 50 people were killed in the resultant clashes. The Hizbullah leadership subsequently began to rearm and expand its military wing, initially for defence, although it has refused to rule out an eventual return to violence in pursuit of its ideological goals. During the early years of the Syrian Civil War, the AKP’s desperation to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meant that Islamist extremists were able to use Turkey to source supplies and as a conduit for foreign volunteers. It was only when the Islamic State launched what became a series of attacks inside Turkey – starting in 2015 but particularly in 2016 – that the Turkish authorities finally began to see it as a threat to the country’s security.

Conclusion:future trajectories Significantly, both of the main organisations to have emerged from the student leftist movement of the 1970s – namely the DHKP-C and the PKK – now combine a leftist political agenda with a specific social identity, namely membership of the Alevi community and Kurdishness respectively. Even if they have retained the ability to conduct occasional small-scale attacks, none of the militant organisations with a solely leftist agenda appears likely to attract sufficient support to pose a major future threat either to the Turkish state or to public order. Indeed, the DHKP-C still enjoys only limited support amongst Turkey’s Alevis and its networks remain heavily penetrated by the Turkish security forces. As a result, in the medium term, its adoption of a more explicitly Alevi identity appears likely to delay rather than prevent its eventual demise.

17 Hizbullah was initially reluctant to join the political process but was under pressure from its grassroots to establish a ‘truly Islamic party’. Author interviews with Hizbullah leaders. Southeast Turkey, April 2012. 18 Author interview with Hizbullah leaders. Southeast Turkey, March 2014. 19 Despite the fears, the Islamic State siege of Kobani was lifted in January 2015.

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Despite its focus on northern Syria and the resentment caused by the urban uprisings of 2015– 2016, the PKK retains a strong level of support amongst Turkey’s Kurds. Unlike in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the organisation’s leadership believed in the possibility of a military victory, the PKK is now engaged in what amounts to a war of psychological attrition, using violence – and the Turkey’s state’s own failure to defeat it militarily – to try to force the government back to the negotiating table. There is currently no indication that the government is preparing to launch a new dialogue to resolve the Kurdish issue. Unless it does so, another escalation in violence in southeast Turkey appears almost inevitable – although its timing is likely to be closely linked to developments in Rojava. The situation is exacerbated by the relatively young demographic in southeast Turkey. Younger Kurdish nationalists are considerably more hard-line than their parents. Many have also been appalled by what they see as the indifference of the rest of Turkey to the policies pursued by the Turkish state since 2015, including both the brutal suppression of the urban uprisings and the subsequent attempts to extinguish non-violent expressions of Kurdishness. The result has been a discernible increase in the number of young Kurds who see their future in the some form of separation from the rest of the country, whether autonomy or full independence.20 This is also a challenge for the PKK. Unless the government takes the initiative in starting a dialogue on the future status of predominantly Kurdish areas, the PKK is going to face the choice between trying to force it to do so or risk losing its support base. Despite Hüda-Par’s poor performance in the March 2014 local elections, Hizbullah continues to exert considerable social influence in its strongholds in southeast Turkey. In terms of its ability to use violence, Hizbullah punches considerably above its numerical weight and remains feared by the PKK and its supporters. It is currently unclear whether the organisation will persist with participation in the political process with Hüda-Par. Much will depend on the policies adopted by the Erdog˘ an regime and the future influence of the PKK. Even if his efforts fall far short of Hizbullah’s own interpretation of Islamic precepts, in recent years Erdog˘ an has increasingly sought to reshape Turkish society along religious lines – with the result that Hizbullah’s reservations about his policies have tended to be about their pace and ultimate goal rather than their general direction. In the period 2013 to 2015 in particular, there was considerable unease in Hizbullah at the way in which Kurdish nationalists were using the ‘solution process’ to try to reshape the southeast in accordance with Öcalan’s teachings. If there is a resumption of talks between the government and the PKK, the risk of Hizbullah returning to violence will rise. Critically, the Turkish state’s belated targeting of the Islamic State has been primarily directed at the practitioners and facilitators of militant Islamist violence rather than those who advocate a similarly hard-line agenda, whether indigenous organisations such as Hizbullah or propagandists for militant transnational organisations. There are currently no comprehensive de-radicalisation programmes in Turkey. As a result, regardless of the fate of the existing organisations, there is a risk of the creation of a large pool of radicalised young Turks ready to be recruited by militant groups in the future.

References Lipovsky, I. P. 1992. The Socialist Movement in Turkey 1960–1980. Leiden: Brill. Jenkins, Gareth. 2008. Running West, Heading East? Political Islam in Turkey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

20 Author visits to southeast Turkey, 2015–2017.

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21 THE VILLAGE GUARD SYSTEM Counter-insurgency and local collaboration1 Evren Balta

Introduction After the end of the peace process in 2015, the Kurdish issue has once again been securitised and the renewed violence in the southeast and east of the country shows no sign of easing. The Turkish government announced that it would hire an additional 5,000 village guards to be deployed to 22 provinces in the region (Erözden 2015). The village guard units were originally set up and funded by the Turkish state in the mid-1980s as local security guards to protect southeastern Turkish towns and villages from attacks and reprisals by the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê). The first goal of the system was to post village guards in their own villages to prevent the infiltration of the PKK. However, the Turkish government soon realised that the village guards could be used more effectively in the armed struggle, and the village guard system expanded far beyond its stipulations in the law (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013). In insurgencies in which challengers avoid direct military confrontation, have no permanent supply or communications lines, and are often indistinguishable from civilians, the control of the broader social and material environment becomes an essential part of the conflict (Kilcullen 2009). Under these conditions, collaborating with locals is seen as one of the primary strategies of counter-insurgency (US Army/Marine Corps 2007). From a counter-insurgency perspective, local collaboration is an information-gathering mechanism. When insurgencies are taking place in regions where the terrain is rough and unfamiliar, locals provide the counter-insurgents with crucial information about geography and paramilitary enclaves (Fearon and Laitin 2003, 75–76). Local collaborators are also crucial in providing intelligence information about the identity of rebels and their supporters (Kalyvas 2006; Lyall 2010), which not only enables the counter-insurgents to identify and capture the insurgents, but also to distinguish rebels from civilians and to employ force and distribute rewards based on the loyalty to the state (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hoffman 2004; Fishel and Manwaring 1

This chapter is based on data collected in three different periods. The initial research was conducted by the author in 2003 and. was followed by another research project sponsored by Bog˘ aziçi University with the collaboration of Ismet Akça and Biriz Berksoy. In 2015, another project was carried out by Evren Balta, Murat Yüksel, and. Yasemin Acar, which was run by Süreç Analiz and sponsored by the Open Society Foundation and Istanbul Policy Centre.

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2006; Lopez 2007; Manwaring 2001). In other words, as Lyall (2010) observes, the ‘coethnicity advantage’ means being enmeshed in dense intra-ethnic networks, and this enables counter-insurgents to identify insurgents within the population and to issue credible threats against civilians for non-cooperation. Second, local collaboration also enables militaries to adopt more quickly to the mobile, flexible small-arms dominated world of counter-insurgency (Branch and Wood 2010). As Lyall and Wilson (2009) show, while the majority of nineteenth-century wars were decided in favour of the incumbents, beginning from the early twentieth century, states found it increasingly difficult to win counter-insurgencies. The reason for this shift, according to them, is the increased reliance of states on mechanised forces as the cornerstone of their militaries after World War I. Local collaboration then temporarily improves the battlefield performance of the armies that are trained and equipped to fight against other armies. The Turkish village guard system is a classic strategy of counter-insurgency. The Turkish government regarded having local allies as essential to win over the PKK, both militarily and politically. Military and political elites believed that, through local collaboration, they could not only increase the tactical performance of the army but also resolve information problems to issue credible threats based on non-cooperation and distribute rewards based on cooperation (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013). Through the village guard system, the Turkish government also tried to transform the relative costs and benefits of supporting the government against the PKK. In time, the village guard system has become a channel to transform the one-dimensional space of ethnic identity (Turk/Kurd) into a two-dimensional political space (ethnicity plus loyalism to the state) (Kalyvas 2008, 1050). The system, however, did not remain stable throughout the conflict. The responsibilities of the village guards, the specific purposes they serve, the recruitment mechanisms to the system and guards’ relationship with the state have transformed in parallel with the transformation of the conflict. This chapter identifies three periods of conflict that coincide with different responsibilities, recruitment mechanisms, and changing interests of the guards. It shows how a temporary security solution has become a permanent part of the security architecture of the Turkish state. It also demonstrates how pro-government militias have come to consider themselves as ordinary civil servants who deserve the same rights as any government employee. Post-conflict peace-building perspectives focus on the importance of dismantling the militia systems that have perpetuated throughout the conflict and warns against the possible institutionalisation of such systems (Alden et. al 2011). The case of Turkey confirms the pattern of institutionalisation in the lack of peace-building structures that promote a sustainable peace.

The 1980s: negotiation and reward The legal basis of the current village guard system was established through an amendment to Article 74 of the 1924 Law of Temporary Village Guards. The 1924 law was a response to the lack of state security forces, especially in rural areas right after the independence war, which enabled local villagers to become voluntary security providers in their own villages (BaltaPaker and Akça 2013). The amendment was approved by the Turkish parliament on 26 March 1985 right after the first clashes between the PKK and the Turkish state that occurred in 1984. As Gürcan (2015) argues, the amendments allowed village guards to become ‘temporary public employees’ paid by the government within a legal framework that de facto accepts them into the security structure of the Turkish state. In addition to the paid village guards, the government also revitalised the voluntary village guard system. While the 276

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employed village guards were registered as security sector employees with the right to bear arms and a designated monthly salary, the voluntary village guards were not on the payroll of the state but still retained the right to bear arms (Gürcan 2015, 1). Immediately after the revitalisation of the system, Interior Minister Yıldırım Akbulut stated that a total of 3,679 weapons had been distributed to the 7,933 village guards (Özar, Uçarlar, and Aytar 2013). The initial premise of the revitalised village guard system was not very different from the 1924 system: self-protection of remote villages not under the routine surveillance of state security forces. However, the practice was different than had been envisaged by the law. Village guards did not solely protect their home village but they soon found themselves employed as active forces serving as scouts for soldiers. They were even dispatched with the Turkish army’s cross-border operations in northern Iraq, given their familiarity with PKK trails along the border (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013; Gürcan 2015). They also become crucial actors in collecting intelligence information about the identity of insurgents and their supporters. Given that the region is dominated by large families, recruiting even one person from a single family could have given the state enormously important information on the identities of those joining the PKK (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013). The village guard system thus offered to the government the benefits of localisation – access to information about rebels’ identity and enhanced ability to react quickly to local intelligence. Between 1985 and 1990, the primary method of recruitment into the village guard system was negotiation with tribal chieftains. The first recruits belonged to tribes in the districts just north of the Iraqi–Turkish border, especially in Hakkari and S¸ırnak, regions where the PKK had carried out its first military actions. The region provided socially suitable conditions for negotiation between the state and local powers, especially because those border regions were comprised of predominantly large estate holders (aghas). Government officials offered valuable rewards to the powerful aghas in return for their service to the state as ‘guard tribes’. The most important reward was greater autonomy for local elites in internal affairs (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013). Autonomy came with implied immunity for crimes (such as killings and rape) committed during the conflict. It was not unusual to find an earlier blood feud between a guard’s and a victim’s family as the motivation behind the identification and execution of a ‘terrorist’. The right of guards to bear arms has come into play even in minor interpersonal, disputes: quarrels between children, fights at a soccer game, and altercations over business (ibid.). The authority granted to village guards has also provided an indirect means for the accumulation of wealth. Immunity thus became a crucial factor in guards’ increased involvement in cross-border smuggling (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013). In fact, as Van Bruinessen (2002) argues, several of the first guard units came from known smuggler tribes. They know well how and where the border can be crossed, and use the military services they render to the state as a front to continue smuggling. In addition to less restrictive cross-border smuggling, guards seized land and confiscated animals and enjoyed the informal right to monopolise trade between local towns and outlying villages, due to government-sanctioned limitations on the amount of goods ordinary peasants are allowed to bring back to their villages (Balta-Paker 2010). The economic rewards are not only informal. Guards are state employees, and as such receive a monthly salary from the government. In many cases, however, the salaries of individual guards were collected by the aghas, a practice that constituted an enormous transfer of government wealth to local elites.

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The 1990s: transformation of the village guard system Reflecting the growing intensity of the conflict, starting in 1990 the government decided that the village guard system was insufficient and that there was a need to transform the army’s structure. According to high-ranking military officers and civilian security bureaucrats, by 1990 the PKK had already become a second authority – a rival state-like organisation – in the region, claiming to fulfil judicial, extractive, and coercive functions (Cemal 2003). One of the leading generals of the Turkish army in the region, Osman Pamukog˘ lu, states this fact in his war memoirs: ‘all the army commanders were asking themselves, “what has been left to us in this region”, everybody knew that the answer was “a big nothing”’ (Pamukog˘ lu 2003, 18). Thus, the first three years of the 1990s were marked by a reorganisation of military forces. By 1994, approximately one third of Turkey’s armed forces were permanently deployed in the area, and the army’s structure shifted to a corps–brigade–battalion structure and mobile counter-insurgency units were formed (Kıs¸lalı 1996, 164, 184– 185, 237). The Jandarma’s Special Teams (Özel Tim), which rely on guerrilla tactics and unconventional methods, became a major part of the counter-insurgency package (Hen-Tov 2004). Most importantly, however, the security forces changed their rural strategy. Prior to 1992, Turkish forces had remained in central bases and strongholds, moving into the mountains only in response to a PKK attack. To regain control of the region, the concept of area control was adopted in 1993 (Gürcan 2015). The main element of the concept was to evacuate the villages suspected of supporting the PKK or those vulnerable to PKK attacks. Accordingly, security forces began to depopulate mountainous, rural areas, and pushed the villagers into urban centres (Human Rights Watch 2002). In this period, the village guard system was transformed into a mechanism of rural pacification, and the number of the guards rose significantly (Balta-Paker 2010). According to Kiris¸ci and Winrow (1997), the number of village guards increased from 18,000 to 63,000 between 1990 and August 1994. As a part of the area control strategy, the village guard system began to be used as a mechanism to identify which villages and/or individuals were pro-state. Soldiers offered villagers a choice: either they should become village guards or they should evacuate their homes. Refusal to participate in the system was taken as an indication of support – either active or passive – for the insurgency (Balta-Paker and Akça 2013). Often, once such a determination was made and villagers decided not to become guards, the evacuation and complete or partial destruction of the village ensued. Thus, by changing the relative costs and benefits of supporting counter-insurgency through local collaboration mechanisms, security forces tried to make non-participation (which was seen as a support to the PKK) extremely costly for the ordinary locals. In fact, according to the information provided in a statement from the Ministry of the Interior (dated 20 June 2003), 820 villages and 2,345 hamlets were evacuated, and 378,335 people were forced to migrate. However, many human rights organisations estimate the number of forced migrants to be around 2–4 million (Çelik 2005, 140). After the conflict eased at the beginning of the 2000s, the continuing presence of village guards in the village or in neighbouring villages became one of the most important obstacles for villagers who wanted to return (Jongerden 2007; Kurban et al. 2006). All these processes had an irreversible and long-lasting impact on the social structure of the region that continued to inform social and economic relations in the 2000s. 278

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The 2000s: from militias to civil servants During the 1999–2004 unilateral ceasefire declared by the PKK, southeastern Turkey enjoyed a relatively violence-free period. Some of the displaced villagers were slowly permitted to return to their lands, though they faced numerous obstacles. The state of emergency, which was originally declared in 1987 in eight southeastern provinces and was gradually expanded to cover thirteen, was lifted in the last remaining two provinces in November 2002 (Balta-Paker 2005). The conciliatory tone toward the Kurdish question writ large persisted within statements by the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). The AKP government passed EU-inspired reform packages granting cultural, educational, and language rights for minority groups, in particular for the Kurds, albeit to a very limited extent (Balta-Paker 2005). In 2009, the AKP announced its so-called ‘Kurdish opening’, although the tide of peace and optimism soon met rampant nationalism, and the AKP immediately brought the opening to an end (Çag˘ aptay 2009). Four years after the first round of talks, in 2013 the AKP government relaunched negotiations with the PKK, although the second round also fell apart after the July 2015 elections (Balta 2016). In short, the period of the 2000s was full of ups and downs with regard to the political solution of the Kurdish conflict. Indeed, Turkey experienced a relatively peaceful period between 1999 and 2015. This period of relative peace also witnessed the transformation of the village guard system. Although the abolition of the system had been suggested as an important step for the political solution of the Kurdish conflict, especially by Kurdish political actors, no steps were taken toward its abolition in this relatively peaceful period. Instead it was normalised and routinised within the security architecture of Turkey (Gürcan 2015; Balta 2015). In 2000, the Council of Minsters announced that the government would not recruit temporary village guards so as to allow a slow dismantling of the system (Kurban 2009). However, this important decision would be indirectly annulled when, in 2007, the AKP government amended article 74 of the 1924 Law of Temporary Village Guards and stated that the number of temporary village guards should not exceed 40,000 in a given period of time. Moreover, in cases of necessity, the amendment envisaged that the ceiling could be extended by up to 50% at any one time. Although this revision appeared to give an upper limit to the number of village guards, what it actually did was prepare a legal basis for resuming the recruitment of village guards (Kurban 2009). And, in fact, beginning from 2009, the AKP government began to recruit additional guards. Furthermore, this upper limit only included village guards on the payroll of the government, and not voluntary guards. According to a note of the Interior Ministry (20 June 2003, No. BO50TIBOOOOO001/285), the number of village guards was 70,790 but only 12,779 of them were voluntary. However, according to the figures given by the Interior Ministry, in March 2009, there were 71,000 village guards on duty of whom 23,000 were volunteers. So the decline in the number of village guards due to the Council Minister’s decision of not recruiting additional village guards was by-passed through recruiting voluntary village guards. The total number seemed to be fixed at 70,000 throughout the 2000s. As of 2014, there were still 72,800 village guards of whom 25,000 were voluntary (Sabah Gazetesi 2016). The 2000s also witnessed a radical transformation of the village guard system in terms of the rights and interests of the guards. During this period, the role was elevated into a kind of a ‘tenure’ position based on an official application and examination process, much like any other ordinary public service job (Balta et al. 2016). At the same time, the tasks of the village guards began to change. While in the 1990s, village guards had been part of operations, in the 2000s, guards began to work as security personnel in dams, official buildings, and other 279

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government offices. There were weekly schedules, timetables, and standardised job descriptions (Balta et al. 2016). During the 1990s, the village guard system was criticised on the grounds that they lacked the discipline and vocational training that every security officer should normally get. Not only reflecting on these criticisms, but also using the opportunity of the relative peace in the region, the government began to give vocational training to the guards. Over approximately four weeks’ training, they learned how to use a weapon as well as their rights and responsibilities as guards (Balta et al. 2016). As what had initially been thought of as temporary recruitment became a more permanent part of the security architecture of the Turkish state, the guards themselves raised concerns about the social welfare benefits they received. Until 2005, village guards were not under the umbrella of the Turkish social welfare system covering state employees. But since they were granted a salary by the state, they also did not qualify as recipients of a ‘green card’, which is normally given to people earning below a certain income. This left village guards without social protection. In 2005, however, village guards and their spouses, parents, and children, who did not have any social security, were given the right to hold a green card and to receive care at public hospitals and, in emergencies, private hospitals (Köy Kanunu, amendment dated 28/12/2005). In 2007, village guards who were over 55 years of age and had been working at least 15 years were given the right to receive a monthly pension from the Social Security Administration (Köy Kanunu, amendment dated 2/6/2007). Another change related to how salaries were paid. In the 1990s, the tribal leader or head of the village guard unit would receive the full salary for a number of guards all at once and he was free to distribute these salaries to the guards at his own discretion. This situation changed when salaries began to be deposited into village guards’ bank accounts as of 2001. Thus, guards began to receive individualised salary payments (Köy Kanunu, amendment dated 2/6/2007). Combined, these changes represented the standardisation and individualisation of the village guard system and granted village guards quasi-civil servant status. The government – rather than abolishing the village guard system – tried to absorb it within the institutional structure of its security architecture. In the process, village guards’ institutional status shifted from temporary to permanent. By doing this, the government sought to maintain its direct relationship with the (loyal) citizens of the region and prevent problems that would have been caused by the abolition of the system among citizens who had served the state as guards in the past. Moreover, standardisation and individualisation also aimed to eliminate major criticisms directed towards the village guard system, such as criticisms of their lack of discipline, lack of education, weakness of co-ordination, and the unintended consequences of strengthening of local networks (Balta-Paker 2010; Balta-Paker and Akça 2013; Gürcan 2015). Parallel to the standardisation that occurred in the 2000s, village guards also became vocal defenders of their rights and organised professional associations. The ‘Village Guards Aid and Solidarity Association’, founded in Diyarbakır in 2001, saw its membership reach 1,400 in less than a year. In 2006, a number within this organisation came together under the umbrella of ‘The Protection of Rights, Aid, and Solidarity of Temporary Village Guards Association’. Today, there are over 90 associations and five federations in 22 provinces under the umbrella of the Anatolian Village Guards and Families of Martyrs Confederation (Balta et al. 2016). Since the day the village guard system was established as a part of the Turkish government’s counter-insurgency effort in 1984, it has proved to be a controversial, divisive, and damaging system. It has had an everlasting impact on social cleavages, transforming local identities, interests and patterns of conflict significantly. Protective niches that tribes and local 280

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strongmen carve out for themselves because of the village guard system continue to be an important problem despite the government’s attempts at individualisation. Becoming a guard and/or denouncing the village guard system is still decided communally, since the decision itself inevitably entails harsh social penalties. The system has assigned political labels – such as ‘pro-government’, ‘agent’, ‘traitor’ – that have become part of everyday life among civilians, with grave consequences for social cohesion. To this day, extreme polarisation – village guards (and their families) at one end, the non-guard Kurdish population at the other – continues to inform the basic rhythms of social life, from marriages to trade. Deemed traitors, most guards (and their families) confront severe social exclusion from the non-guard community (Balta et al. 2016). These penalties are applied even to those among the young who openly decry the family decision to enlist. Overall the village guard system is failing both to meet the expectations of its members and to provide a clear mechanism for control. A minority among the ranks can leverage arms and status for personal gain, while the many are simply there for the salary. This majority now finds itself with no clear exit strategy, trapped between the demands of the armed forces and its dependence on the state for its livelihood (ibid.). Inherently polarising and corrosive of social cohesion, the system cannot even guarantee members’ loyalty to the state, which has long been a key vector in the everyday conflict. Many guard tribes have now publicly switched allegiance to swing behind pro-Kurdish political parties (Tas¸tekin 2015). This array of factors notwithstanding, it is fair to say that the system retains a degree of clout. The institutionalised interests of local strongmen and the state’s self-perceived vulnerability in the region make a sharp retreat unlikely.

Conclusion From the perspective of the incumbents, counter-insurgency is essentially about control. To maintain it, counter-insurgents bargain with various groups and individuals at multiple levels, a process requiring different and often contradictory policies for different groups. The village guard system in Turkey has simultaneously been a path of bargaining with local Kurdish groups/villagers and a strategy of control. Through the system, the Turkish state has transformed the relative costs and benefits of non-cooperation. The system, however, has shifted in line with the particular purposes the conflict has been serving in each period. What was initially thought to be a temporary security supplement and a way to negotiate with the local aghas in the 1980s was transformed into a system of identification in the 1990s. However, since the 2000s the system has almost become permanent, as successive AKP governments have made several amendments to include and legalise the status of village guards as public employees within the Turkish security architecture. Preserving and even routinising a practice that has been seen as an integral part of the long conflict has overshadowed the sincerity of the government in solving the Kurdish question during periods when a political solution was still on the table. In fact, after the 15 July 2016 coup attempt one of the first decrees of the government was to change the official name from the ‘temporary village guard’ system to the ‘security guards’ in a final attempt to institutionalise the permanent status of the system (KHK No. 676). In subsequent government decrees (known as KHKs), the role of security guards as public servants has been strengthened through further regulation of guards’ welfare benefits and by fixing their salaries at the lowest public employee salary level (KHK No. 678 and No. 690). Furthermore, they have also been granted three lawyers who will be involved in investigations and prosecutions for any crimes alleged to have arisen during a guard’s duty (KHK No. 694). In 2017, the AKP government announced that 25,000 new village guards would be recruited. 281

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As one of the most comprehensive and legalised militia systems, the discussion of the village guards requires further contextualisation in the emerging literature on pro-government paramilitary forces (Carey, Mitchell, and Lowe 2013; Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015; Carey and Mitchell 2017). The system, first (and maybe foremost), is a prime example of how a temporary paramilitary system can be absorbed in to permanent security architecture. As such, decisions surrounding village guard systems not only contribute to debates over militia formation and disarmament in the context of civil wars, but also on the transformation more generally of militaries as a response to changing security environments. Furthermore, it should also be debated as a case of ethnic defection, which allows one to question analytically the relationship between ethnic identity and civil war recruitment.

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22 THE 15 JULY 2016 FAILED COUP AND THE SECURITY SECTOR Yaprak Gürsoy

Introduction Since the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) came to power in 2002, reforms of the security sector, and especially civil–military relations, have been a priority for the government. In this period of more than a decade, the powers, autonomy, and functions of key institutions in the security sector have been redefined with legal amendments. Some of the reforms in the area of civil–military relations brought the Turkish legal structure close to a democratic framework. The reforms, along with major observable changes in the behavioural patterns of military officers, gave the impression that the armed forces were out of politics and subjugated to civilian powerholders. Yet, the events of the night of 15 July 2016, when Turkey experienced an unanticipated coup attempt against the elected government, defied the conclusion that the military was out of politics. The attempt, in many respects, was the first of its kind in Turkish history. The plotters detained their commanders, including the chief of the general staff, fought against their own comrades with firearms, shot and killed unarmed civilians, and bombed the national parliament, police headquarters, and the offices of the intelligence agency. The putschists surrendered to government forces within approximately 13 hours, but inflicted unprecedented damage before doing so. How can we explain these extraordinary events in light of the security sector reforms that were made in order to prevent the history of coups in Turkey from repeating itself? To answer this question this chapter analyses the changing security frameworks of the decade prior to the coup. Through the examination of developments in civil–military relations, intelligence and police services, it shows that the government created forces loyal to itself and the regime. It was the existence of these forces that ultimately led to the coup’s failure. In that sense, the changes of the past decade prevented a successful coup from taking place. However, it was also the events of the prior decade that sowed the seeds of the putsch by disturbing the existing balance of power between different groups and security institutions. In other words, the whole coup picture can be seen only by looking at the changes that have taken place in the security sector. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section discusses developments from 2007 onwards, which influenced the legal framework of the security sector and the behaviour of the actors. The aim of this section is to show how these changes unintentionally 284

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paved the way for the failed coup. The second section provides an overview of the coup itself and outlines how events unfolded during the 13 hours that Turkey was on tenterhooks. In the third section, the amendments that were introduced in the military and the intelligence agency immediately after the coup are examined. The chapter concludes with a brief summary.

The context leading up to the failed coup The set of events that led to the failed putsch can be traced back to 2007, a turning point in Turkish politics in many respects. This is the year that the AKP won the general elections for a second time and effectively defeated the secularist resistance in the military, judiciary, and civil society. This is also the year after which the Islamist movement led by Fethullah Gülen became publicly visible in matters involving the security sector. This section outlines how relations between the Gülen movement and the AKP government (first as allies, then as lethal .antagonists) has shaped . and reshaped the military, the National Intelligence Agency (Milli Istihbarat Tes¸kilatı, MIT), and the police. The coup plots and their consequences for the military One of the first operations that changed the Turkish security sector was the Ergenekon investigations, which began in 2007 and accused hundreds of military personnel and civilians of forming a terrorist organisation and planning to stage a coup against the government (Kırkeser 2013). In 2010, another case sought to link more than 300 military officers with a coup plan called Balyoz (Sledgehammer) (Hürriyet 2012). The final investigation was the case of ‘military espionage’, accusing around 350 suspects with blackmailing, prostitution, and sharing secret information with foreign services (Karatas¸ 2013). In 2012 and 2013, the Specially Authorised Courts that tried the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases found around 600 military and civilian suspects guilty and condemned them to prison sentences of various lengths. Among those that received life sentences were a former chief of the general staff and commanders of the armed forces (Usta and Erçiçek 2012; BBC Türkçe 2013). Later events, however, demonstrated that the coup investigations were carried out by public prosecutors and police officers who were alleged to be part of the Gülen movement. At first the AKP government gave its blessing to the cases despite reported irregularities. In its alliance with the Gülenists, the government aimed to curb the remaining political powers and prestige of the secular military. But after the December 2013 showdown between the AKP and the Gülen movement, the AKP changed its opinion and altered the fate of the investigations. In April 2015, all Balyoz suspects were retried and acquitted (Hürriyet 2015). In March 2014, the Constitutional Court ruled that the rights of a number of Ergenekon suspects were violated and released all suspects from prison. The Court of Appeals overturned the previous court decision, the cases began to be retried in June 2017 and formally closed in June 2018 (TRT Haber 2017; Saymaz 2018). Finally, all suspects were acquitted in the espionage case in February 2016 (Hürriyet 2016a). Despite the reversal of the decisions, the Turkish political system was modified in unprecedented ways through these investigations. First, the government switched sides on the cases in just a matter of a few years, politicising a court matter, and thus damaging the basic principles of the rule of law and democracy. Second, in the overall domestic power structure, the military was rendered a mere shadow of its former self. In the post-1980 coup era, the armed forces had become a unified, secular, right-wing guardian of the Republic, supported by 285

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other secular citizens and institutions, such as the judiciary.1 By 2016, however, it was neither influential nor prestigious. It was also too timid to intervene in politics, not necessarily because of principles of democracy but also because of possible coup accusations. The final overall effect of the trials was to disturb the unity of the armed forces and its promotional patterns. The High Military Council (Yüksek Askeri S¸ura, YAS¸) meetings, which decide on personnel appointments and promotions, began to be controlled by the government after August 2010, when the chief of the staff resigned due to a dispute over the court cases (Hürriyet 2016b). From this YAS¸ meeting onwards, positions that were vacated as a result of purges in the military following the coup investigations were filled by alleged Gülen affiliates, who played critical roles on the night of 15 July. According to one calculation, for instance, among the 46 names that were promoted from colonel to brigadier admiral in the navy between 2010 and 2015, 23 of them were implicated in the putsch. In other words, half of those who were promoted in the middle ranks are now either under arrest or are fugitives. This outcome occurred in a context where around 140 navy colonels were bypassed because they were suspects especially in the Balyoz and espionage cases (Ergin 2016a). A similar situation also occurred in the air force. An overview of the 2012 promotions, for instance, shows that only two of the nine colonels who were promoted to brigadier general were not later implicated in the 15 July attempt (Ergin 2016b). Based on these numbers, arguably the cases cleared the path for some Gülenist officers in the middle ranks by phasing out possible secularist officers. The evidence also indicates that the dominance of the secularists in the upper and middle ranks of the armed forces was broken. In short, the trials changed the military in fundamental ways preparing the path for the coup outcome. New laws on intelligence, the gendarmerie, and the police . The conflict between the Gülen movement and the AKP also had consequences for the MIT and the police. Indeed, the struggle between the former allies became public in events that involved these security forces. On 17 December 2013, alleged Gülen prosecutors began a corruption investigation that implicated government ministers. The following month, the prosecutor’s office stopped trucks supposedly carrying arms to the Syrian rebels. . The gendarmerie forces and the prosecutor’s office wanted to search the trucks, but MIT agents did not allow it (Hamsici 2017). . The involvement of MIT in the January truck raid proved that the intelligence agency had become a loyal security service of the AKP government in. general and of then Prime Minister Erdog˘ an in particular. It was reported that the Chief of MIT, Hakan Fidan, who was previously Erdog˘ an’s private advisor, was taking independent action in the Middle East following the Arab uprisings and continuing to function as Erdog˘ an’s primary aide in foreign policy (Entous and Parkinson 2013; Ignatius 2013). At home, the activities of Fidan . drew attention, when in September 2011, voice records were revealed of Fidan and another MIT official attending a meeting with the leaders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) in Oslo two years earlier. Subsequently, in February 2012 the prosecutor responsible for investigating the activities of the alleged urban wing of the PKK,. the Kurdistan Communities Union (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, KCK), called Fidan and other MIT members to testify in the case (Ceyhan 2012). The AKP government initially dodged the bullet by removing the Gülenist prosecutor from his position and dismissing or sending to remote parts of the country thousands of police officers. Within 10 days of the prosecutor’s attempt to investigate Fidan, the law on 1

For an overview of the Turkish military in politics, see (Hale 1994).

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. MIT was also changed by. the parliament, requiring the approval of the prime minister to prosecute the chief of MIT. The new article was applied retrospectively to all continuing investigations, freeing Fidan from any possible trial .(TBMM 2012). The quick reaction of the government demonstrated the special place that MIT had been accorded in Turkish domestic and foreign policy. . In April 2014, a new law concerning MIT, envisioning more comprehensive changes in the agency’s functions, was approved by parliament in order to prevent similar incidents occurring in the future. However, certain provisions of the law were criticised by opposition parties, human rights groups and other observers for creating an ‘intelligence state’ and . giving extraordinary powers to the agency (Hürriyet Daily News 2014). The duties of MIT were expanded so that the agency would be responsible for matters involving national defence, the fight against terrorism and national security. In these matters, the agency was given the right to secretly collect, analyse, and record data from any individual or institution, including tapping . phone calls. In addition, anyone who published leaked information regarding MIT officials and the agency’s . activities could receive prison sentences up to 10 years (TBMM 2014). The MIT was not the only security sector institution that came under the spotlight following the AKP’s altercation with the Gülen movement. In March 2015, the parliament passed an internal security package, with the intention of strengthening the hands of law enforcement agencies (TBMM 2015). The gendarmerie, which functions as a police force in rural areas, came under the authority of the ministry of interior more than the military. Although this might be seen as a positive development from the perspective of civil–military relations, the fact that governors would be able to oversee and determine the promotion and appointment of gendarmerie personnel suggested that the forces might be used to repress the opposition. It was also argued that one of the main purposes of the package was to prevent the gendarmerie being used by the judiciary in a possible attack against the interests of the . government, as happened during the search of the MIT trucks in 2014 (Toker 2015). Another set of articles in the internal security package changed laws related to the duties and authorities of the police. The articles raised serious concerns over basic democratic rights, such as taking part in peaceful organisations and freedom of speech. Some of the controversial articles in the law included the extensive discretion granted to the police in searching people and vehicles without a warrant, in using firearms and in the detention of individuals, as well as the possibility of prosecuting citizens for participation in public demonstrations and rallies (BBC Türkçe 2015; Human Rights Watch 2014). The government also tried to cleanse the institution from opposition forces. Following the 2013 graft probe, 3,785 police officers were dismissed from their posts (Bulur and Çakmak 2016). Overall, in the period following 2013 and up until 2016, the AKP government was in an all-out war against its previous ally, the Gülen movement. The government tried to cleanse . the police of Gülen sympathisers while it held the MIT close, and attempted to control the gendarmerie and to advance individuals loyal to the regime in all security sector institutions. The final plan of action before the 15 July coup attempt was to purge Gülenist officers from the armed forces in the upcoming YAS¸ meeting scheduled for August.

The coup As one of the most critical turning points in Turkish history, the 15 July attempt was carried out because secularists in the military lost their dominance and the unity of the armed forces was damaged through the promotions of Gülenists, especially to prominent middle ranks. . But segments of the military top brass, as well as the MIT and the majority of the police 287

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services, had become pro-government through these changes and it was their anti-coup stance that ultimately caused the attempt to fail. The putsch started at around 22:00 on 15 July when jets started to fly low in Ankara and the passages from the Anatolian to the European sides of Istanbul’s two bridges were blocked by tanks. The coup officially came to an end at 11:00 the next morning when the First Army Commander Ümit Dündar, who had been appointed during the night as the standing Chief of Staff, declared that the coup was repelled.2 Critical moments during this 13-hour period were observed by anyone who witnessed the events from their homes around Turkey. The first acknowledgment that a coup was taking place came from Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, when he called TV channels approximately one hour after the first incidents started. This was followed by the reading of the putschists’ manifesto on the state-run TV channel at around midnight. Although at that moment the coup-plotters seemed to have the upper hand, things began to change after President Erdog˘ an appeared in a live broadcast on CNNTurk through FaceTime and called on citizens to go out on the streets to defend democracy. Following his appearance, prayers began to be heard from mosques all around the country, continuing throughout the night and the next morning. Meanwhile, opposition party leaders declared their disapproval of the coup and the national assembly met at 01:40 to show its unified stance against the coup. This led to the bombing of the parliament several times during the night, causing parliamentarians from various parties to go the shelter of the parliament and broadcast live from there. At 03:20, President Erdog˘ an’s plane landed at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport, which was being taken back from the putschists by thousands of citizens who had replied to his earlier call. President Erdog˘ an held a press briefing at the airport signalling the failure of the coup. Gradually putschist soldiers began surrendering everywhere and for most observers the coup came to an end when the symbolic Bog˘ aziçi Bridge was taken over by citizens at 06:42. The narration of the coup plot beyond these critical events that everyone was able to observe is difficult (Tas¸ 2018). Questions regarding who gave the order for the coup and who was its military leader are still controversial. Shortly after the events began to unfold, government officials declared that the putsch was organised by the Gülen movement. This scenario became the most dominant account of the coup, and public opinion has converged on the view that Gülenists, now designated a terrorist organisation by the Turkish state (Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü, FETÖ), were the only culprits. One of the most concrete pieces of evidence that connects the coup with the Gülenists is the capturing of five civilians and their security camera videos from the night of the coup at the Akıncı Air Base, which functioned as the headquarters of the putsch. Background information on these individuals ties them to the Gülen movement and it is alleged they visited Gülen personally several times in Pennsylvania, including a few days before the coup.3 A visit that took place in January 2016 by one of the suspects was verified with the information the US Department of Homeland Security shared with the Turkish law enforcement agencies in September 2017 (Ergin 2017d). Gülen himself has rejected his movement’s association with the coup (Gülen 2017). His denial, as well as the increasingly heavy-handed and authoritarian manner in which the government is handling matters, convinces some that the Gülenists were not behind the 2 3

Most of the chronology of the events is based on the author’s personal notes. For alternatives, see (Hürriyet Daily News 2016; 15 Temmuz Dosyası 2018). For an overview of the evidence based on the indictments, see the series of 21 editorials written by Sedat Ergin, with the name ‘15 Temmuz ve Akıncı Üssü’ in Hürriyet. The first editorial was published by Ergin (2017b) and the last one by Ergin (2017c).

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attempt. From this perspective, evidence could have been planted or confessions of some of the suspects might have been extracted through threats or torture. The AKP government is also in a tight spot because of its track record with previous coup plots, such as the Balyoz case, and the damage that has been caused to the rule of law in the last decade. Although public opinion in Turkey in the aftermath of the coup was persuaded that FETÖ carried out this heinous act in a last-ditch effort to prevent its affiliates from being dismissed from the armed forces, Turkey’s NATO allies, such the USA and European powers, are not convinced (Rettman 2017; Aydıntas¸bas¸ 2017). There are also other controversies regarding the coup plot involving the security sector actors. According to the indictment, at 14:20 on 15 July, a major, who confessed . being a former Gülenist and serving. at the army aviation command post, informed MIT of the upcoming coup. In turn, MIT reported the tip-off to the general staff and Hakan Fidan held a private meeting with the Chief of the General Staff Hulusi Akar. The only concrete action that came out of this meeting seems to be Akar’s order for Land Forces Commander Salih Zeki Çolak to inspect the command post. Akar also closed Turkish air space to military flights for the day. Both orders of the chief of staff were obviously futile in preventing the coup, but they were still significant in alarming the plotters to take action in the early hours of the night, rather than at 3:00 as scheduled (CNNTurk 2017). This rearrangement caused major weaknesses for the pustchists and is one of the . reasons why the plot failed. However, there is controversy over whether MI T could have done more to prevent the . coup. It is also unclear why MIT, which was supposed to be the most loyal security institution, did not inform the government of the impending danger, leaving the prime minister and president to narrowly escape. Based on this, there are suspicions that there might be more behind the official story. The main opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhurriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) has, for instance, suggested that this was ‘a controlled coup’, known by the government beforehand but allowed to play out in order to reveal and repress the Gülenists (Birgün 2017; Cumhuriyet 2017). Notwithstanding this alternative scenario, it is clear that the coup ultimately failed because of the actions of anti-coup forces within the armed forces. The chief of staff and commanders were apprehended by the coup-plotters, but the Commander of the First Army took over and announced on TV that the coup was illegal and would fail. These declarations of a top general, along with the announcements of Prime Minister Yıldırım, President Erdog˘ an and leaders of the opposition parties, prevented potential officers from joining the coup.4 In many military units throughout the country, battles were also fought between various anti-coup and pro-coup individuals and groups. Similar conflicts were experienced in the air, with the Eskis¸ehir combined air operations centre being the key bastion of the anti-coup officers (Ergin 2017e, 2017f). Coup-plotters targeted their own colleagues during . these battles on the ground and in the air, while also opening fire on and bombing MIT and police headquarters in Ankara, despite the presence of civilians. The balance sheet of these battles was severe: 249 people were killed and 2,196 people were wounded that night. Most casualties were civilians, while 63 of those who died were policemen, and three were military personnel fighting against the putschists (Posta 2017). Additional causalities were also experienced on the side of the coup-plotters. According to Prime Minister Yıldırım’s declaration a month after. the incident, 36 putschists were killed and 49 coup-plotters were apprehended wounded (IHA 2016).

4

For the importance of such signalling, see (Singh 2014).

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These battles of the night show that security sector institutions had indeed become the frontlines of political conflict as a legacy of the developments that took place over the previous decade. Counterfactual exercises lead to the conclusion that if Gülenists were not promoted and secular officers were not dismissed through Balyoz and other trials, the 15 July . coup attempt would not have been staged. If the MIT had not informed the general staff of the possibility of a coup, the putschists would not have started their plans in the early hours of the night when millions of citizens were out in the busy centres of Istanbul and Ankara, and able to be mobilised. If thousands of Gülenists were still in the police forces, perhaps they would have also joined the coup, shifting the balance in favour of the putschists. Likewise, if the majority of the armed forces, including the general staff, were not loyal to the regime, the entire force of the military might have been used against the government. In short, if the security sector changes of the previous decade had not been made, politics in Turkey would be very different today.

The aftermath of the coup and lessons unlearned One of the first reactions of the government after the coup attempt was to declare a state of emergency (Olag˘anüstü Hal, OHAL) on 20 July 2016. OHAL was extended seven times until being suspended in July 2018. Most government decisions, as well as purges from public institutions after July 2016 were carried out by presidential decrees based on OHAL rules. In one year, 50,510 people were arrested, including 8,815 police officers, 169 generals/admirals, and 7,098 military personnel from the rank of colonel down. Significant expulsions have also been carried out to dismiss people from public sector jobs, reaching almost 145,000 officials and 5,000 academics in one year (Hürriyet 2017). Not surprisingly, one of the institutions that has been affected the most by purges is the military. In one year, 150 generals/admirals and nearly 4,300 officers were dismissed out of total of around 7,600 military personnel that lost their posts (Diken 2017). These numbers are in accord with the official numbers of military personnel that participated in the coup and that was provided by the General Staff shortly after 15 July. 8,651 soldiers were suspected of having taken part in the attempt, which made up 1.5 percent of the armed forces. Included in these numbers were 2,885 (33 percent) conscripts and students, who were probably only following orders and unaware that they were participating in a coup (BBC Türkçe 2016). Involvement levels were highest among middle-ranking officers, which gives credibility to the idea that the Balyoz and espionage trials were used to infiltrate these ranks. Among the 220 brigadier generals, for instance, around 33 percent were accused of taking part in the coup whereas among the 70 major generals, only 14 percent conspired in the putsch (Gürcan 2016a). The air force, which makes up 8 percent of the Turkish Armed Forces, constituted 23 percent of those who were purged (Diken 2017). This is also in line with the fact that the air force was involved in the coup more than the other services. There is no doubt that the purges will have long-term effects on the military. It was reported that there was a shortage of generals and pilots (Gürcan 2016b; Es¸ 2017), resulting in the readmission of a number of officers who were purged with the previous trials (Hürriyet 2016c), and the mandatory recall of retired pilots (Gürcan 2017a). In the aftermath of the 2017 YAS¸ meeting, it also became clear that the government would be more involved with senior level military advancements (Selvi 2017), facilitated also by a new decree that allows for faster promotions (Gürcan 2017a). Overall, these decisions indicate that recruitment and promotion patterns will continue to be disrupted within the military and problems will continue in the unity of the armed forces. 290

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Another issue with the purges is that, among the public, all of those who were dismissed are being treated as FETÖ members. However, a direct link between a number of accused officers and the Gülen movement was not clearly established. This has led some commentators to argue that officers who had personal reasons or other ideological affiliations, such as secularists and Kemalists, also joined the coup along with the Gülenists (Gürcan 2016a; Cizre 2016). The overgeneralisation of all suspects as FETÖ members repeats the mistake of previous coup trials. Everybody is tarred with the same brush, potentially leading to grievances that can be carried into the future among active service personnel. Aside from the purges, the government has also continued to introduce modifications to the security sector though three important sets of decrees. The first set of decrees (numbers 668 and 669) were announced shortly after the coup with the aim of overhauling the military (Resmi Gazete 2016a, 2016b). Military high schools were closed down and substituted with civilian high schools. This allowed for graduates of regular and religious high schools to progress into a military career. War colleges were replaced by the National Defence University, which was then subsumed under the authority of the ministry of national defence. The land, navy, and air forces were made responsible to the minister of defence, while the general staff came under the direction of the president. This amendment weakened the general staff in terms of its authority over the commanders and allowed for the president and the prime minister to give direct orders to the heads of the forces. The autonomy of military hospitals was also cancelled, bringing them under the control of the ministry of health. Finally, some of the remaining responsibilities of the general staff regarding the gendarmerie and the coast guard were abolished and the ministry of interior’s authority over the services was increased (Hürriyet 2016d). The second set of changes was introduced in. August 2017 with decree number 694 (Resmi Gazete 2017). With the new decree, MIT was brought under the control of the president, with the president absorbing all the. powers of the prime minister that were introduced in 2012 and 2014. In this way, MIT continued to be responsible to Erdog˘ an himself, first as the prime minister and now as president. The decree also established that the National Intelligence Coordination Board, which oversees the activities of ministries and state institutions on intelligence . matters, is chaired by the president. Following. the coup attempt, the general staff and MIT blamed each other for the intelligence gap. MIT cited its inability to enter military units as a reason, while the general staff argued that it had no control over its personnel once . they left their stations (Ergin 2017a). The new decree resolved the matter in favour of MIT and the agency was given unequivocal authority to carry out intelligence activities within the armed forces. The autonomy of the military in the judiciary was eradicated as well. All military courts were abolished, except for magistrates dealing with discipline crimes during war times. A final provision of the decree dealing with the security sector was the creation of around 30,000 new posts in the police services (Gürcan 2017a). The third set of decrees was announced in July 2018 after the general elections and shortly before OHAL was suspended (Cumhuriyet 2018). The decrees changed the composition of YAS¸, increased the number of civilian government officials in the meetings and brought it under the control of the president. The general staff also came under the ministry of defence, but the president received the power to give direct orders to the general staff and commanders, who are now obligated to follow the orders immediately. It was also reiterated that the commanders and the general staff were separately responsible to the minister of defence. Although bringing the military under the ministry of defence is a requirement of any civilian regime, the current minister is the former chief of the general staff during the coup, Hulusi Akar. This is the first military officer in the position since the 1960 coup and after 32 civilian 291

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ministers (Gazetevatan 2018). The changes that have taken place in the security sector since the coup attempt resemble the amendments that were made since 2008. As naturally expected, large-scale purges and trials are taking place in the military, and the autonomy of the armed forces in several areas is being curbed further. At the same time, there is a chance for senior level promotions to be based on political . criteria. The same pattern is expected to be followed in the police services, as well as MIT, which has also been anchored to the presidency with more internal security duties. Similar strategies of civilianising the security sector by bringing it under the monopoly of the government did not prevent the 15 July coup attempt. Rather than keeping the security sector on a short leash, a longer-term coup-proofing strategy should entail the creation of a liberal democratic legal framework, where not only the presidency, but also the parliament, civil society organisations, and an independent judiciary would have oversight and control functions.5 Despite the horrors of the coup experience, this unfortunately seems to be a lesson that has not yet been learned.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the security sector has been on the agenda of the Turkish government since it first won the elections in 2002. Since 2007, this has been the main area of contestation between the secularists, the AKP government, and the Gülen movement. The costs of this conflict have been dire for the entire country and for many who were killed, for hundreds of individuals who have been wrongly accused of plotting coups in the last decade and imprisoned, and thousands who have been purged from their duties. It is clear that the policies that have been followed in the armed forces, the intelligence agency, and police have not increased the security of the citizens, the government, or the president. It is also clear that the security sector will continue to take centre stage and will continue to hold the key to the future of Turkey’s domestic and foreign policy.

References 15 Temmuz Dosyası. 2018. ‘Kronoloji [Chronology].’ https://15temmuzdosyasi.com/kronoloji/ Aydıntas¸bas¸, Aslı. 2017. ‘15 Temmuz Muhasebesi [15 July Accounting].’ EUObserver, 17 January. https:// euobserver.com/foreign/136568 BBC Türkçe. 2013.’Ergenekon Davasında Generallere Müebbet [Life Imprisonment for Generals in Ergenekon Case].’ 5 August. https://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler/2013/08/130805_ergenekon_kararlar . BBC Türkçe. 2015. ‘Iç Güvenlik Paketi’nde Öne Çıkan Maddeler [Prominent in Internal Security Package].’ 3 February. http://www.bbc.co.uk/turkce/haberler/2015/02/150203_tasari_basliklar BBC Türkçe 2016. ‘TSK: Darbe Giris¸imine 8,651 asker Katıldı, 35 uçak, 37 helikopter kullanıldı [TSK: 8,651 Soldiers Participated in Putsch Attempt, 35 Aircraft, 37 Helicopter Used].’ 27 July. http://www. bbc.com/turkce/haberler-turkiye-36904517 . Bulur, Sertaç, and Fatih Çakmak. 2016. ‘Içis¸leri Bakanı Ala: 17–25 Aralık Sonrası 3 bin 785 Kis¸i Görevden Alındı [Interior Minister Ala: After 17–25 December 3.785 People Have Been Dismissed.’ Anadolu Agency, 25 August. https://www.sabah.com.tr/gundem/2016/08/25/17–25-aralik-sonrasi-3-bin-785kisiyi-gorevden-alindi Birgün. 2017. ‘Kılıçdarog˘ lu: Hükümet darbeyi biliyordu, çocuk kandırmasınlar [Kılıçdarog˘ lu: Government Knew the Coup, Children do not Deceive].’ 14 January. https://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/kilicda roglu-hukumet-darbeyi-biliyordu-cocuk-kandirmasinlar-143086.html

5

For the difference between ‘civilianisation through monopolisation’ and ‘civilianisation through democratisation,’ see (Gürcan 2017b).

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The 15 July 2016 failed coup . Ceyhan, Bülent. 2012. ‘KCK, MIT’in Gözetiminde Olus¸tu! [KCK Was Formed Under the Supvervision of MIT].’ HaberTürk, 9 February. http://www.haberturk.com/gundem/haber/714093-kck-mitin-go zetiminde-olustu Cizre, Ümit. 2016. ‘Turkey in a Tailspin.’ Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), 10 August. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero081016 . CNNTurk. 2017. ‘I¸ste Hulusi Akar’ın darbe komisyonuna gönderdig˘ i yanıtlar [Here Are the Responses which Were Sent to Putsch Commission by Hulusi Akar].’ 30 May. https://www.cnnturk.com/tur kiye/iste-hulusi-akarin-darbe-komisyonuna-gonderdigi-yanitlar Cumhuriyet. 2017. ‘Kılıçdarog˘ lu’ndan Çarpıcı ‘Kontrollü Darbe’ ve Adil Öksüz Açıklaması: Yıl 2014 [Stunning Statement by Kılıçdarog˘ lu; ‘Controlled Putsch’ and Adil Öksüz in 2014].’ 5 April. http:// www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/siyaset/714685/Kilicdaroglu_ndan_carpici__kontrollu_darbe__ve_ Adil_Oksuz_aciklamasi__Yil_2014….html Cumhuriyet. 2018. ‘7 Yeni Cumhurbas¸kanlıg˘ ı Kararnamesi Yayımlandı: Berat Albayrak YAS¸ Üyesi Oldu [7 New Presidential Decrees Were Published: Berat Albayrak Has Become a Member of YAS¸].’ 15 July. http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/siyaset/1027010/7_yeni_Cumhurbaskanligi_Kararnamesi_yayim landi__Berat_Albayrak_YAS_uyesi_oldu.html . Diken. 2017. ‘Bir Yıllık Bilanço: 15 Temmuz’un Ardından TSK’dan 7 bin 655 Personel Ihraç Edildi [One Year Balance Sheet: 7,655 Personnel Were Excluded from TSK].’ 12 July. http://www.diken.com.tr/ bir-yillik-bilanco-15-temmuzun-ardindan-tskdan-7-bin-655-personel-ihrac-edildi/ Entous, Adam, and Joe Parkinson. 2013. ‘Turkey’s Spymaster Plots Own Course on Syria.’ The Wall Street Journal, 10 October. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303643304579107373585228330 Ergin, Sedat. 2016a. ‘O Albaylar Gitti Darbeciler Geldi [Those Colonels Went Putchists Came].’ Hürriyet, 22 July. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/o-albaylar-gitti-darbeciler-geldi-40164262 Ergin, Sedat. 2016b. ‘15 Temmuz ve Hava Kuvvetleri (1) – Bir Hava Kuvveti Nasıl Ele Geçirilir [July 15 and Air Force (1) – How to Handle an Air Force].’ Hürriyet, 21 September. http://www.hurriyet.com. tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/bir-hava-kuvveti-nasil-ele-gecirilir-40585466 . . Ergin, Sedat. 2017a. ‘15 Temmuz ve Istihbarat 5: Darbe Istihbaratında Gri Alana Girmek [July 15 and Intelligence 5: Entering a Grey Space in Impact Intelligence].’ Hürriyet, 1 July. http://www.hurriyet. com.tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/15-temmuz-ve-istihbarat-5-darbe-istihbaratinda-gri-alana-girm ek-40505862 Ergin, Sedat. 2017b. ‘15 Temmuz ve Akıncı Üssü (1): Bir Hava Üssünde Olag˘ an S¸üpheliler [15 July and Akıncı Base (1): Ordinary Suspects at an Air Force Base].’ Hürriyet, 11 July. http://www.hurriyet.com. tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/akinci-ussu-ve-15-temmuz-1-bir-hava-ussunde-olagan-supheliler-40515992 Ergin, Sedat. 2017c. ‘15 Temmuz ve Akıncı Üssü (21): Darbe için Kes¸if Uçag˘ ı Kaldırmak [15 July and Akıncı Base (21): An Expedition Air Craft Taking off for Putsch].’ Hürriyet, 19 August. http://www. hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/15-temmuz-ve-akinci-ussu-21-darbe-icin-kesif-ucagi-kaldirma k-40545482 Ergin, Sedat. 2017d. ‘Kemal Batmaz Pensilvanya’da Fethullah Gülen’in Yanında Kalmıs¸ [Kemal Batmaz Stayed with Fethullah Gülen in Pennsylvania].’ The Washington Post, 15 May. https://www.washing tonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-turkey-i-no-longer-know/2017/05/15/bda 71c62-397c-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?utm_term=.50b125ec18bb Ergin, Sedat. 2017e. ‘15 Temmuz ve Hava Savas¸ları (3): Hava Sahasında KöS¸e Kapmaca Nasıl Oynanır? [July 15 and Air Wars (3): How to Play Puss-in-the-Corner in Airspace?]’ Hürriyet, 22 August. http:// www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/15-temmuz-ve-hava-savaslari-3-hava-sahasinda-kose-kapma ca-nasil-oynanir-40557466 Ergin, Sedat. 2017ef. ‘15 Temmuz ve Hava Savas¸ları (8): Darbenin Havadaki Birinci Kırılma Noktası [July 15 and Air Wars (8): First Breakpoint of Putsch in the Air].’ Hürriyet, 29 August. http://www.hurriyet. com.tr/yazarlar/sedat-ergin/15-temmuz-ve-hava-savaslari-8-darbenin-havadaki-birinci-kirilma-nokta si-40564285 Es¸, Sertaç. 2017. ‘Fiilen “Tug˘ bay” Rütbesi [“Brigadier” Rank Virtually].’ Cumhuriyet, 10 July. http:// www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/turkiye/777788/Fiilen__T ugbay__rutbesi.html Gazetevatan. 2018. ‘“Savunma” ya 58 Yıl Sonra Asker Bakan [Soldier Minister to “Defence” after 58 Years].’ 11 July.http://www.gazetevatan.com/-savunma-ya-58-yil-sonra-asker-bakan-1181740-gundem/ Gülen, Fethullah. 2017. ‘The Turkey I No Longer Know.’ The Washington Post, 15 May. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-turkey-i-no-longer-know/2017/05/15/ bda71c62–397c-11e7–8854–21f35918 3e8c_story.html?utm_te rm=.50b125ec18bb

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The 15 July 2016 failed coup Gürcan, Metin. 2016a. ‘Bir Darbe Giris¸iminin Anatomisi [Anatomy of Putsch Attempt].’ T24, 17 July. http://t24.com.tr/yazarlar/metin-gurcan/bir-darbe-girisiminin-anatomisi,15059 Gürcan, Metin. 2016b. ‘How Post-Coup Purges Depleted Turkey’s Military.’ Al-Monitor, 16 September. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/09/turkey-military-needs-two-year-fill-ranks-emp tied-by-purge.html Gürcan, Metin. 2017a. ‘Erdogan Hastens Executive Presidency with New Decree.’ Al-Monitor, 30 August. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/08/turkey-emergency-decree-redesigns-vital-intsti tutions.html Gürcan, Metin. 2017b. ‘Never Again! But How? State and the Military in Turkey after July 15.’ Istanbul Policy Center, April. http://ipc.sabanciuniv.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Never-Again_MetinGurcan.pdf Hale, William. 1994. Turkish .Politics and the Military. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge. Hamsici, Mahmut. 2017. ‘MIT Tırları Davası [The Case of MIT Trucks].’ BBC Türkçe, 15 July. http:// www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler-turkiye-40275619 Human Rights Watch. 2014. ‘Turkey: Security Bill Undermines Rights Parliament Should Rethink Hasty Measures to Increase Police Powers.’ 11 December. http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/12/11/turkeysecurity-bill-undermines-rights Hürriyet. 2012. ‘Balyoz Davası Nedir? [What is Sledgehammer Case?]’ 21 September. http://www.hur riyet.com.tr/gundem/balyoz-davasi-nedir-21514407 Hürriyet. 2015. ‘Balyoz’a 40 Dakikada Beraat [Acquittal to Sledgehammer in 40 Minutes].’ 1 April. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/balyoz-a-40-dakikada-beraat-28612036 Hürriyet. 2016a. ‘Askeri Casusluk Davasında Beraat Kararı [Military Espionage Decision on Acquittal].’ 26 February. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/askeri-casusluk-davasinda-beraat-karari-40060707 . Hürriyet. 2016b. ‘Is¸ık Kos¸aner Neden Istifa Ettig˘ ini Açıkladı [Is¸ık Kos¸aner Explained Why He Resigned].’ 26 October. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/isik-kosaner-takip-ediyorsun-ama -yapacak-bir-sey-yok-40259804 Hürriyet. 2016c. ‘Mag˘ dur Oldular, Cezaevinde Yattılar, Beraat Ettiler ve Göreve Dönüyorlar [They Became Victims, Imprisoned, Acquitted and They are Returning to Their Mission].’ 22 July. http:// www.hurriyet.com.tr/magdur-oldular-cezaevinde-yattilar-beraat-ettiler-ve-yeniden-atandilar-40163342 Hürriyet. 2016d. ‘Kuvvet Komutanlıkları MSB’ye Bag˘ landı [Force Commands Linked to MSB].’ 31 July. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/kuvvet-komutanliklari-msbye-baglandi-40176771 . Hürriyet. 2017. ‘Darbelere Geçit Yok! Ilelebet Demokrasi [No Permission to Coups! Forever Democracy].’ 15 July. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/darbelere-gecit-yok-ilelebet-demokrasi-40520690 Hürriyet Daily . News. 2014. ‘Turkey’s Spy Agency Granted Extraordinary Powers, as President Gül Approves MIT Law.’ 25 April. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ turkeys-spy-agency-granted-extra ordinary-powers-as-president-gul-approves-mit-law-.aspx?pageID=238&nid=65584 Hürriyet Daily News. 2016. ‘Timeline of Turkey’s Failed Coup Attempt.’ 17 July. http://www.hurriyetda ilynews.com/timeline-of-turkeys-failed-coup-attempt-101711 Ignatius, David. 2013. ‘Turkey Blows Israel’s Cover for Iranian Spy Ring.’ Washington Post, 17 October. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-turkey-blows-israels-cover-for-iranian-sp . y-ring/2013/10/16/7d9c1eb2-3686-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html IHA. 2016. ‘Bas¸bakan . Açıkladı: Kaç Darbeci Öldürüldü? [Prime Minister Announces: How Many Putschists Killed?].’ Ihlas Haber Ajansı, 17 August. http://www.iha.com.tr/haber-basbakan-acikladi-kac-da rbeci-olduruldu-580952/ Kırkeser, Serpil. 2013. ‘Ergenekon Davasında 5 Yılın Özeti [Ergenekon Case Summary of 5 Years]. Radikal, 25 July. http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/ergenekon-davasinda-5-yilin-ozeti-1143366/ . . Karatas¸, Bahri. 2013. ‘Askeri Casusluk Iddianamesinde Ilginç Detaylar [Interesting Details in Military Espionage Indictment]. Hürriyet, 23 January. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/askeri-casusluk-iddianam esinde-ilginc-detaylar-22416209 . . Posta. 2017. ‘Isim Isim 15 Temmuz S¸ehitleri [15 July Martyrs’ Name List].’ 15 July. http://mservice.posta. com.tr/isim-isim-15-temmuz-sehitleri-haberi-1315115 Rettman, Andrew. 2017. ‘Gulen Did Not Order Turkey Coup, EU Spies Say.’ EUObserver, 17 January. https://euobserver.com/foreign/136568 Resmi Gazete. 2016a. ‘Olag˘ anüstü Hal Kapsamında Alınması Gereken Tedbirler ile Bazı Kurum ve Kurulus¸lara Dair Düzenleme Yapılması Hakkında Kanun Hükmünde Kararname [Decree Law on the Measures to be Taken in the Context of the State of Emergency and Regulation on the Implementation Regulations

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The 15 July 2016 failed coup of Some Institutions and Organizations].’ 27 July. http://www.resmigazete.gov.tr/eskiler/2016/07/ 20160727M2.htm Resmi Gazete. 2016b. ‘Olag˘ anüstü Hal Kapsamında Bazı Tedbirler Alınması ve Milli Savunma Üniversitesi Kurulması ile Bazı Kanunlarda Deg˘ is¸iklik Yapılmasına Dair Kanun Hükmünde Kararname [Decree on the Law on the Taking of Some Measures in the Context of the State of Emergency and the Amendment of the Law of the National Defense University and Some Laws].’ 31 July. http://www.resmiga zete.gov.tr/eskiler/2016/07/20160731–160735.htm Resmi Gazete. 2017. ‘Olag˘ anüstü Hal Kapsamında Bazı Düzenlemeler Yapılması Hakkında Kanun Hükmünde Kararname [Decree on the Implementation of Some Regulations Under the State of Emergency].’ . 25 August. http://www.resmigazete.gov.tr/eskiler/2017/08/20170825–170813.pdf Saymaz, Ismail. 2018. ‘Ergenekon Sorus¸turması 11 Yıl Sonra Kapandı.’ Hürriyet, 28 June.http://www.hur riyet.com.tr/gundem/ergenekon-sorusturmasi-11-yil-sonra-kapandi-40879547 Singh, Naunihal. 2014. Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Selvi, Abdulkadir. 2017. ‘Yüksek Askeri S¸ûra’nın Perde Arkası [Behind the Scenes of the Supreme Military Council].’ Hürriyet, 3 August. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/abdulkadir-selvi/yuksek-askeri-s-ra nin-perde-arkasi-40538807 Tas¸, Hakkı. 2018. ‘The 15 July Abortive Coup and Post-Truth Politics in Turkey.’ Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18(1). . https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2018.1452374 . TBMM. 2012. ‘Devlet Istihbarat Hizmetleri ve Milli Istihbarat Tes¸kilatı Kanununda Deg˘ is¸iklik Yapılmasına Dair Kanun [Law on the Amendment of the Law on the State Intelligence Services and the National Intelligence Organization].’ Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, 17 February. http://www.tbmm. gov.tr/kanunlar/k6278.html . . TBMM. 2014. ‘Devlet Istihbarat Hizmetleri ve Milli Istihbarat Tes¸kilatı Kanununda Deg˘ is¸iklik Yapılmasına Dair Kanun [Law on the Amendment of the Law on the State Intelligence Services and the National Intelligence Organization].’Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, 14 April. http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/ kanunlar/k6532.html TBMM. 2015. ‘Polis Vazife ve Salâhiyet Kanunu, Jandarma Tes¸kilat, Görev ve Yetkileri Kanunu ile Bazı Kanunlarda Deg˘ is¸iklik Yapılmasına Dair Kanun [Law on Police Duty and Ability Law, Gendarmerie Organization, Duties and Authorities Law and Amendments to Some Laws].’ Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, 27 March. http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/kanunlar/k6638.html . Toker, Çig˘ dem. 2015. ‘Iç Güvenlik Paketi ve ‘Jandarma’ Rahatsızlıg˘ ı [Internal Security Package and ‘Gendarmerie’ Discomfort].’ Cumhuriyet, 11 February. http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/koseyazisi/ 211263/ic_Guvenlik_Paketi_ve__Jandarma__Rahatsizligi.html TRT Haber. 2017. ‘Ergenekon Davası Yeniden Bas¸ladı [Ergenekon Case Resumed].’ 21 June. http:// www.trthaber.com/haber/gundem/ergenekon-davasi-yeniden-basladi-320860.html Usta, Ays¸egül, and Seyit Erçiçek. 2012. ‘Balyoz Davasında Kararlar Açıklandı [Sledgehammer Case Announced].’ Hürriyet, 21 September. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/balyoz-davasinda-kararla r-aciklandi-21514988

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PART V

State, society, and rights

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23 HUMAN RIGHTS1 Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat

Introduction Turkey has been a participant in the UN-led global human rights regime as a founding member of the UN and became a party to several UN human rights treaties. It has also been involved in the European human rights regime by joining the Council of Europe in 1949, but more so upon recognising the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1987 and starting to actively pursue EU membership in the late 1990s. This chapter presents an overview of human rights developments in Turkey and offers some inferential observations. First, the progress of human rights in Turkey has not been linear. In addition to vacillations over time, within the same time period, some rights advanced while others deteriorated. Second, political commitment and will have been weak, treating the promotion of human rights as instrumental, intended to serve other goals. Third, groups that can be loosely labelled human rights advocates have been fragmented, working on different rights without establishing connections among rights or broad coalitions. Finally, as observed all around the world, a range of other political goals, such as national security, have trumped human rights, and strong conservative ideologies, their followers, and institutional supporters hindered the development and implementation of substantial human rights reforms.

The formation of the republic and transition to democracy (1923–1960) The hegemonic rule of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), which was established in the 1920s and continued until 1945, was preoccupied by goals of nationbuilding, secularisation, and modernisation. Trying to create a nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, nationalist leadership viewed freedoms and pluralism with scepticism and carried out policies that were repressive, violent, and assimilationist. Kurds, religious orders, and left-wing thinkers and groups were considered dangerous and were often repressed violently. While several Kurdish uprisings that took place in the 1920s and 1930s were crushed through military strikes and forced migration, other groups were 1

An earlier and longer version was published in Z. Arat (2016).

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subdued through a predisposed judicial system (Kiris¸ci and Winrow 1997). Uprisings, such as the one led by Sheik Said, led to banning all religious orders and dervish lodges in 1925 (Berkes 1998). The Penal Code, legislated in 1926 and amended in 1936, included the notorious and long-lasting articles of 141–142 and 163 that criminalised pro-labour and religious politics as attempts to establish communist and Sharia systems, respectively. They enabled stifling freedoms of expression and association, closing down several political parties, and prosecuting and imprisoning thousands of journalists, intellectuals, and human rights advocates for the decades to come. The efforts to reform and control Islamic institutions and interpretations involved creating . . the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyânet I¸sleri Reislig˘i/Bas¸kanlıg˘ı, DIB) in 1924 to ensure the ‘proper’ teaching and practice of Islam. As Turkish nationalism (Türkçülük) gained grounds as a defining state ideology, Islam also became a descriptive element of being a Turk. Consequently, while non-Muslim citizens were treated as ‘foreigners’ (Sandal 2013), all people who had Muslim heritage were homogenised as ‘Muslims’, regardless of their actual faith, and instructed in ‘modern understandings’ of the Hanefi teachings of Sunnite Islam. Given its missions of ‘managing the affairs related to Islamic Religion’s principle beliefs, observances and morals, enlightening the public. on the subject of religion, and administering places of worship’ (emphasis added), the DIB’s budget has been completely devoted to Muslims’ religious education and worship; all other religious groups have been expected to raise their own private funds. Alevis were not only denied funding but were also forced into learning and practising state-defined Sunnite Islam (Hurd 2014). In accordance with the Lausanne Peace Treaty of 1923, Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish citizens were recognised as religious minorities and granted some autonomy and freedoms in regard to their religion, education, and language. These minority rights, however, were neither granted to other religious or language groups nor fully implemented for the three ‘recognised’ minority groups (Oran 2007). Forced resettlement and assimilation policies that targeted Kurds were also used against non-Muslims, who were additionally subject to discriminatory taxation (Toktas¸ 2005). The CHP’s one-party rule also included some reforms that advanced human rights. The first constitutions paved the way for the recognition of political rights by defining sovereignty as resting with the nation and the political system as based on the principle of people’s active selfdetermination. Although not recognised as a right, free and mandatory primary education was adopted as a policy for both sexes in 1923 and incorporated into the 1924 Constitution. The 1924 Constitution also listed several rights that were later recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and subsequent international treaties. Several initiatives advanced women’s rights. In addition to increased educational opportunities (Z. Arat 1994a), there was an effort to end the segregation of sexes and increase women’s participation in public life. Women demanded the rights to vote and run for office and acquired them in the 1930s. The Civil Law, enacted in 1926, abolished polygamy, imposed a minimum age for marriage, recognised women as legal equals of men in certain areas such as inheriting property, removed the husband’s ability to end a marriage by repudiation, and granted women the right to choose their spouses, initiate divorce, and maintain some maternal rights upon divorce. Yet, still highly discriminatory, the law identified the man as the head, representative and provider of the family, granted him the right to choose the family residence, allowed him to require or prevent his wife’s engagement in gainful employment, and expected the wife to use the husband’s family name and take care of the house (Z. Arat 1994b).

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The transition to multi-party politics in 1945 led to improvements in freedom of the press and association and enabled the termination of CHP rule by the 1950 elections. The Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP), which came to power and ruled for a decade after successive electoral victories, was originally supportive of freedom of the press (Bulunmaz 2012) and eager to undo the secularist policies of the CHP. However, the DP’s permissive attitude toward Islam stemmed more from a desire to attract conservative votes than a commitment to freedom of religion, since it invoked Article 163 of the Penal Code to close down an opposition party, Millet Partisi. It also toughened Article 141 by incorporating capital punishment. The ‘law on offences against Atatürk,’ legislated in 1951 (Tunç 2013), engendered a tradition of criminalising critical approaches to history. Successive DP governments continued with Turkish nationalist and assimilationist policies. The discriminatory attitude of government officials provoked public outbursts that targeted non-Muslims (for example, the 6–7 September 1955 destruction and looting of shops owned by Greek Orthodox citizens). A consequence of these discriminatory policies has been the dwindling size of the non-Muslim population (Prodromos 2007; Toktas¸ 2005). As their policies, especially the handling of the economy, started to garner criticisms, the DP governments turned against the news outlets and journalists. In addition to passing draconian laws regulating the press, numerous journalists, editors, and unions representing journalists were subjected to prosecution and imprisonment; attempts were made to silence the ‘unfavourable press’ by restricting their access to raw paper and public advertisements (Bulunmaz 2012).

The implementation of the 1961 Constitution (1961–1980) The DP was forced out of power by a military coup, the punitive policies of which included not only closing down the party but also prosecution of its leaders and execution of three cabinet members, including the prime minister. The repression and persecutions also included academics, journalists, and others not necessarily affiliated with the party. A long-term impact of the coup was the development of a mentality that viewed civilians as incompetent and predisposed to corruption, and thus needing to be kept under military tutelage. Some measures to that end were incorporated into the new constitution that was prepared in transition to civilian rule and adopted in 1961 following a public referendum.2 The coup violated human rights by ousting a democratically elected government, and the military rule was repressive by all means. However, the scholars who were charged with the task of devising a new constitution managed to produce one that included extensive human rights provisions. The preamble of the 1961 Constitution stated the goal as the establishment of the democratic state and rule of law, with all their legal and social foundations, that would enable the realisation and protection of human rights and freedoms, national solidarity, social justice, and the peace and welfare of both the individual and society.

2

The constitution created the National Security Council (MGK), which consisted of top generals, the prime minister, and select cabinet members. It also created an elitist upper chamber (Senate) in the parliament, including some non-elected ‘Natural Senators’ with life terms, 24 of whom were military officers from the leadership committee of the coup.

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The second article defined the Republic as a democratic, secular, social (welfare) state that was based on rule of law and human rights. A long section, entitled ‘Fundamental Rights and Duties’, affirmed the universalism of human rights and the principle of equality, and assigned the state a range of responsibilities to ensure the enjoyment of rights. Including all rights articulated in the UDHR, it asserted that no restrictions could violate the essence of rights and freedoms. Upholding the separation of powers, the constitution also introduced institutional mechanisms, such as the Constitutional Court, that would help protect human rights and freedoms. As the freedoms and rights granted by the constitution enabled the proliferation of associations, unions, publishing houses, and an overall increase in activism by different ideological groups and in demands for social justice, many right-wing politicians and groups started to complain. Süleyman Demirel, the leader of the pro-business and conservative Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP), which defined its mission as ‘anti-communist’ and governed for most of the 1960s and 1970s, often criticised the constitution for granting too many liberties, being a few sizes ‘too big’ for Turkey.3 The 1971 military intervention, which replaced the elected government with a handpicked civilian government, curtailed some of those ‘luxuries’ by amending the constitution and placing a good portion of the country under martial law. State repression and terrorism targeted the left, but its chilling effect was widespread. Even after the country returned to electoral politics and civilian rule in 1973, martial law was enforced frequently and the martial law courts remained operative as the State Security Courts. The participation of the ultranationalist National Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) and the religious National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP) in two AP-led coalition governments in the late 1970s emboldened their militant affiliates to assail leftists, Alevis, and union activists. During these Cold War years, human rights discourse and practice in Turkey moved in opposite directions. On the one hand, human freedoms and rights, including social and economic rights, were recognised and protected by the constitution and actively demanded by unions, students, and civil society organisations. On the other hand, powerful politicians and military officers continued to view demands for rights and freedoms as an existential threat to state security and the country’s economic regime, which was defined as ‘liberal capitalism’ by the martial law courts. The implementation of the IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies, starting in January 1980, entrenched the neoliberal economic paradigm.

The military rule and transition to the reform period (1980–2002) The military coup carried out on 12 September 1980 commenced a harsher military rule. The military government suspended the parliament and initiated a systematic depoliticisation process. All political parties, other legitimate political organisations, and labour unions were closed down; their leaders were imprisoned or forced to live in exile. During the three years of military rule, the number of arrests reached nearly one million, 517 people were sentenced to death, and 50 were executed. Thousands of people were dismissed from their jobs, lost their citizenship, and became refugees. Nearly 300 died in custody, and 171 died due to torture. Numerous films were banned, associations suspended, and journalists imprisoned.4

3 4

See the 1969 and 1974 programmes of the party and the government programmes of successive Demirel governments (TBMM 2018). For details, see (T24 2015; Birgün 2015).

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In preparation for transition to civilian rule, the military government devised a new constitution. The 1982 Constitution included individual freedoms and rights but also provided copious conditions allowing for their circumscription. The generals also ensured the continuation of military control by installing the coup leader, General Kenan Evren, as the President of the Republic, albeit through a referendum. The constitution also enhanced the power of the President, transformed the function of the MGK from consultation to that of a de facto supra-cabinet, and curbed the autonomy of universities by instituting the Council of Higher Education (YÖK). Despite its secularist stance, perceiving Islam as a counterweight to socialist ideologies, the military regime made religion courses mandatory in primary and secondary schools and increased the support for religious (vocational) schools. Soon before the parliamentary elections, it reinstituted the State Security Courts. Despite these repressive measures, or perhaps in reaction to widespread torture and repression, Turkey witnessed a revival of activism for justice and human rights as soon as civilian rule was restored (Can 2016). In addition to organisations that proclaimed human rights in their name and mission, such as the Human Rights Association and the Human Rights Foundation (Çalı 2007),5 different civil society organisations emerged in advocacy of Kurdish rights, religious freedoms, women’s rights, environmental protection and rights, and other rights (Z. Arat 2007). The late 1980s and 1990s constituted a particularly paradoxical period in terms of human rights. Economic liberalisation, which was marked by free trade, privatisation, and labour flexibility, concurred with political liberalisation, especially since the European Parliament clearly communicated in 1985 that the normalisation of relations with Turkey depended on certain conditions: abolishing the death penalty, prohibiting torture, ending collective trials, recognising individuals’ right to apply to the ECHR, and eliminating all laws restricting freedom of thought (Türkmen 2007, 254–55). In 1987, Turkey recognised the jurisdiction of the ECHR, which ultimately stimulated legal amendments and pro-human rights reforms carried out in the late 1990s and 2000s (Çalı 2010; Oran 2007; Smith 2007). Parallel to efforts to integrate the Turkish economy into the global markets, there was an intensity in the ratification of European and UN human rights treaties (Arat and Smith 2014, Appendixes). A parliamentary Commission on Human Rights was set up in 1990, and a year later, a cabinet post, the State Ministry Responsible of Human Rights, was created. In 1997, the Coordinating High Commission of Human Rights was established under the Office of the Prime Ministry to coordinate human rights efforts by different ministries and agencies. Ending the state monopoly on radio and television broadcasting in the 1990s led to a mushrooming of media outlets and the free flow of information. These traditional media sources, later combined with the development of the Internet and new media, had a stimulating impact on human rights activism (Çatalbas¸ 2007; Finkel 2000). Increased activism by women set in motion a new women’s movement in the early 1980s, including groups with diverse missions and ideologies (Y. Arat 1994; Baykan 1994). They used Turkey’s ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1985 and every other leverage, domestic or international, to pressure governments to make changes in favour of women, and drew media attention to honour killings and other forms of violence against women (Ecevit 2007; 5

These secularist and left-wing organisations that originally focused on political rights and torture issues were later joined by others, including the Mazlum-Der (Association for the Oppressed), which had a religious identity and prioritised religious freedoms, and the Turkish Human Rights Institution, which highlighted social and economic rights.

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Ertürk and Kardam 1999; Z. Arat 1998). The political establishment responded by instituting a directorate to monitor the implementation of the CEDAW and other reforms, creating a cabinet post focused on women and family, and adopting constitutional amendments and new laws geared toward gender equality (Z. Arat, 2009). However, women’s economic opportunities and rights deteriorated, as privatisation and deregulation of the economy and other structural adjustment policies resulted in increased unemployment, growth of the informal economy with low paying and unsafe jobs, devaluation of the currency, and frequent economic crises that culminated in further distortion of an already skewed income distribution (UNDP 1998, 43). Deunionisation and weak unions became a part of the same trend (Weisband and Öner 2007; Taymaz and Özler 2005). The negative impact of privatisation on workers’ rights and unions was most pronounced in the news industry. As major newspapers and cable channels were taken over by business conglomerations, news outlets started to serve business interests and their bosses’ political affiliates (Christensen 2007; Çatalbas¸ 2007; Finkel 2000). The rise of Islamist politics in the 1980s put freedom of religion on the public agenda, especially through the protests of headscarf bans in universities and government offices (Cindog˘ lu and Zencirci 2008; Y. Arat 2005). Although successive religious parties were closed down by the Constitutional Court for supporting or working toward a theocratic state, the movement ultimately brought the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) to power in 2002 (Cizre 2008). Another consequential development in this period was the rise of Kurdish nationalism (Kiris¸ci and Winrow 1997). When the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partia Karkarên Kürdistanê, PKK) launched an armed struggle against the Turkish state, the south-eastern provinces were turned into a war zone, costing 30,000–40,000 lives and hundreds of thousands of Kurdish citizens to be internally displaced (Özerdem and Jacoby 2007). Both the military and the PKK intimidated the population of the region and penalised those whom they deemed collaborators of the other side. Ten provinces were placed under the state of emergency, and the state-paid village guards and an Islamist armed group, the Hizbullah Kurdish Revolutionary Party, were used against the PKK militia. The anti-terrorism law enacted in 1991 and other laws were loosely interpreted to arrest, imprison, torture, and abuse Kurdish nationalists and thousands of individuals who were critical of government policies. For most of the 1990s, Turkey ranked as the country with the highest number of journalists in prison (Collings 2001, 82). The repression of Kurdish identity was also escalated. Kurds were not allowed to use their own language to study or publish. They were barred from giving Kurdish names to their children. Villages, rivers, mountains, and other sites that had Kurdish names were reassigned Turkish ones (O’Neill 2007). Due process rights were frequently violated, and abuse in detention or prison, including torture and sexual assaults, became endemic (Amnesty International 1988, 2003; Human Rights Watch 1997). Although all governments spoke against torture, no official acknowledged its systematic use, except for Sema Pis¸kinsüt, who chaired the Human Rights Investigation Committee of the parliament (1998–2000) and drew attention to widespread ill-treatment and torture in prisons (Pis¸kinsüt 2001). Isolation and solitary confinement were employed more frequently against those who were incarcerated under the anti-terrorism law. Thus, when the government introduced Ftype prisons as an improvement over the dormitory-type cells, which had been criticised for overcrowding, violating privacy rights, and permitting inter-prisoner abuse, human rights advocates and detainees opposed this ‘prison reform’ for enabling isolation and abuse (Z. Arat 304

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2007). Some prisoners and their supporters launched protests against F-type prisons, including hunger strikes, but to no avail (Bargu 2014; Amnesty International 2002). In addition to the persistent violations of civil and political rights, there was little or no effort to improve social, economic, and cultural rights. Both access to and quality of health care remained limited (Bug˘ ra and Keyder 2006). Poor quality of housing and the state’s negligence were painfully demonstrated by the 1999 Marmara earthquake, which caused 17,127 deaths, 43,953 injuries, 300,000–600,000 persons to be displaced, and 31 per cent job losses (Z. Arat 2007, 10). Education opportunities were enjoyed unevenly, with wide regional, ethnic, gender, class, and urban–rural gaps. Stagnant or shrinking education budgets resulted in overcrowded classes, inadequate facilities, and poor-quality teaching (Duman 2008; Gök and Ilgaz 2007). Armed conflicts and the rise of Islamist politics not only reinforced the power of the military but also engendered a political environment in which the advocacy of human rights could be perceived or framed as a threat to the territorial integrity and secular identity of the state. Such perceptions not only discouraged participation in human rights advocacy but also turned both the state and some nationalists against human rights activism and organisations (Bozarslan 2001). Nevertheless, determined advocates pushed the boundaries and tried to pressure or establish alliances with governments and political parties. The decision to actively pursue EU membership led the country to enter a reform era in the late 1990s (Rumford 2001; Hicks 2001). In addition to the abolishment of capital punishment, some steps were taken to improve due process rights and to prevent torture and abuse in custody. Equality and antidiscrimination principles were reinforced through constitutional amendments. Soon after the EU Council of Ministers’ adoption of the Accession Partnership in 2000, the Ecevit government unveiled its National Programme for Adoption of the Acquis Communautaire in March 2001. A new civil law that stressed gender equality was legislated in 2001, as a part of legislative reforms intended to harmonise Turkey’s laws with the EU ones. Taking note of the UN’s designation of 1995–2004 as the UN Decade for Human Rights Education, Turkey devised its National Plan of Action in 1999, and several human rights education programmes were launched in schools and incorporated into the professional training of the judiciary and law enforcement personnel (Çayır 2007). Despite their limitations, these programmes increased human rights awareness, put the improvement of human rights on the political agenda, and led the country to enter the new millennium with an overall more pro-human rights attitude.

The rule of the AKP (since 2002) The November 2002 elections brought the AKP into power. Being the ‘reformist’ split from the religious Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP), which had been closed down by the Constitutional Court in 2001, the AKP leaders distanced themselves from the FP’s conservative outlook (Cizre 2008). Claiming that they left their radical and militant past behind in favour of secularism, they emphasised a non-religious rhetoric, preferred to be branded as ‘Conservative Democrats,’ and assumed a pro-human rights and pro-EU party platform.6 The AKP’s human rights record, however, has been mixed, revealing an opportunistic and instrumentalist approach.

6

See the first and second AKP government programmes (TBMM 2018).

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As the Acquis Communautaire required revamping the country’s laws to align them with EU law, creating mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement, and reducing the political role of the military, parliament continued to adopt successive ‘harmonisation packages’ under the AKP leadership (Payne 2010).7 The reform process, however, started to dwindle in 2007. As leaders of several EU countries expressed their objection to Turkey’s membership and the AKP consolidated its power following landslide victories in the 2007 and 2011 parliamentary elections, AKP governments diverted from the reform path and became increasingly authoritarian (especially after the 2016 coup attempt). During the first few years of AKP rule, there was progress in freedom of press, nonMuslim minority rights, cultural expression, and language rights (Kılınç 2014; Arat and Smith 2014). The ban on the use of Kurdish language and names was gradually removed in law and in practice. Limited radio and television broadcasts in minority languages were legalised in 2002, and the state broadcaster, TRT, started to air news and cultural programming in Kurdish, Arabic, Circassian, and Bosnian for a few hours a week. Then, it launched a 24hour Kurdish-language channel in 2009. Restrictions on private Kurdish language instruction were lifted, but demands for school instructions in mother tongue were ignored. As a step toward reducing the political role of the military, the military-led State Security Courts (SSCs) were abolished in 2004. Their replacement, Special Felony Courts, however, continued to function similarly, relying on extraordinary powers and sub-standard rules of evidence, only missing military personnel on the bench. The notorious Antiterrorism Law of 1991 was finally replaced by the Law on the Changes in the Antiterrorism Law in 2006. Although an improvement, the new law’s broad definition of terrorism and restrictions imposed on the freedom of expression triggered protest by human rights advocates and journalists. Validating their concerns, the law was eventually used to prosecute Kurds, journalists, human rights defenders, and other critical voices, as well as military officers (Amnesty International 2011). In 2004, an amendment to the constitution recognised the supremacy of the ratified international human rights treaties over national laws in case of a conflict between them (Art. 90). A new Penal Code, also adopted in 2004, marked progress on a number of issues, including women’s rights. The law eliminated many of the sexually discriminatory provisions of the previous criminal law, such as devising penalties according to the virgin or marital status of the victim; suspending sentences in rape cases if the rapist agreed to marry his victim, and permitting leniency in sentencing for perpetrators of ‘honour killings’. It also recognised marital rape, strengthened penalties for sexual crimes, and categorised sexual crimes as crimes against individuals, not against society or morality (as it was in the previous law). The Law on the Protection of Family (1998) and its relatively improved replacement, Law on the Protection of Family and Prevention of Violence against Women (2012), attended to domestic violence and introduced protective measures.8 However, these laws brought about little improvement in women’s status and opportunities (Bug˘ ra and Yakut-Çakar 2010). In fact, Turkey’s global ranking on the UN-developed Gender-Related Development Index (later replaced by the Gender Inequality Index) and Gender Empowerment Index dropped significantly during the AKP years.9 Although a 7

8 9

While the overall impact of these is considered positive, institutionalisation of human rights advocacy, along with developments in digital technology, is believed to increase government surveillance, bureaucratisation, and depoliticisation of advocacy work (Babül 2015; Bahçecik 2015; Mühlenhoff 2014; Ugent 2009). On the limitations of these laws, see (Çarkog˘ lu, Kafesciog˘ lu, and Mitrani 2012). See UNDP (1998) for various years.

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parliamentary committee was established to investigate honour killings, domestic violence, and gender-based violence, its work led to no specific policies or enforcement mechanisms. Thus, violence against women remains rampant (Human Rights Watch 2011, 2017). This can be attributed to the AKP’s deeper commitment to traditional values (Çitak and Tür 2008; Marshall 2008).. Progressive legislation concurred with the AKP-led municipal governments and the DIB holding ‘marriage’ workshops or issuing booklets that encourage keeping women at home and dependent on men (Z. Arat 2012; Cos¸ar and Yeg˘ enog˘ lu 2011). Erdog˘ an forcefully opposed parliamentary quotas (Ayata and Tütüncü 2008). Displaying a less ambiguous attitude toward women’s role and rights since 2008, Erdog˘ an has been employing a pro-natalist discourse, urging young women to have three to five children, equating abortion with ‘murder’, and attempting to restrict women’s access to abortion and caesarean birth (Z. Arat 2017). Homosexuality has never been criminalised in Turkey, but both the public and the law enforcement and judicial systems tended to treat deviation from heterosexual normativity with derision and disdain (Arat and Nuñez 2017). The pro-human rights developments of the 1990s encouraged LGBT people to organise and demand their rights (Görkemli 2014), but they were typically ignored by successive governments. AKP officials, however, employed a deliberately hostile political discourse. The Minister for Women and Family described homosexuality as ‘a biological disorder, an illness … something to be cured’ (Bildirici 2010). She and other AKP officials appeared at ‘scientific’ conferences – held by their one-time partner Gülenist organisations – that characterised homosexuality as a perilous . threat. Similarly, the DIB issued circulars, labelling homosexuality ‘a behavior disorder’ that is ‘unacceptable’, that has been ‘spreading in a scary way’, and should be corrected (Arat and Nuñez 2017, 13). The 2004 Penal Code fails to recognise hate crimes. It also includes provisions that are frequently used to repress a range of freedoms. It still criminalises various expressions of opposition to the government or criticisms of the military. Articles 216 and 301, for example, maintain penalties for insulting the state or denigrating ‘Turkishness’ that can be broadly defined by prosecutors. A 2012 amendment to Article 288, introduced after the Ergenekon trials (see below), allows charging anyone who comments on a court case with the offence of ‘trying to influence the judiciary’. Successive AKP governments have used the restrictive clauses of laws to block hundreds of websites or search engines such as YouTube (Tunç 2013). The government’s attack and restrictions on social media outlets intensified after the 2013 Gezi Park protests, which started . as a small environmentalist group’s effort to save a small park in central Istanbul from Erdog˘ an’s demolition plans but quickly turned into a country-wide protest movement against the government’s increasing authoritarianism, intrusion into lifestyle choices, and commercialisation of the urban public space. These protests were notable for their spontaneity and the use of Twitter and other social media, marking unusual solidarity among ideologically and culturally diverse participants, and mobilising a segment of the youth not engaged in politics and activism before (Özkırımlı 2014). The government response was disproportional use of force, resulting in several casualties and injuries and the prosecution of participants for terrorism. After the 2016 coup attempt, the Gezi movement was branded as an uprising aimed at the ‘annihilation of the Republic of Turkey and its government and obstructing government administration’ and ‘involved terrorist organisations’ such as Gülenists, the PKK, and the Marxist DHKP/C and MLKP, ‘as active participants or supporters’.10 10 See charges against the philanthropist business leader Osman Kavala (TGRTHaber 2017).

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The constitutional amendments, adopted by a referendum in September 2010, included provisions that increased executive control over the judiciary. This enabled the prosecution of scores of opposition or critical writers, journalists, academics, publishers, broadcasters, and cartoonists (Tunç 2013). With ‘49 journalists behind bars’, Turkey was as having the highest number in prison and labelled ‘the world’s worst jailer’ in the 2012 report of the Committee to Protect Journalists.11 Due process rights, which have never been secure, continue to be violated. The most spectacular abuses, however, emerged in relation to the investigation and prosecution of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases. ‘Ergenekon’ was the name that prosecutors gave to a supposed clandestine organisation of some secularist Turkish nationalists who conspired to destabilise the country and topple the AKP government. The allegations and investigations that started in 2007 led to the indictment of over 500 people within a year. The Ergenekon trials, along with the case of Operation Sledgehammer (Balyoz Harekâtı), which involved similar charges, were originally supported by the liberal press and some left-wing intellectuals for attempting to curb the political influence of the military (Ersoy and Üstüner 2016)12 but quickly turned into a witch hunt (Rodrik 2010). Hundreds of people – military officers (including top generals), judges, journalists, media executives, trade unionists, academics, university presidents, television personalities, and others – were detained and held for extended periods without charge. Indictments were issued by using what would later be proven ‘fabricated’ events and evidence. Although the retrial of these cases resulted in acquittals, frequent fallacious arrests or years-long detentions without charges have become a common practice, targeting Kurdish politicians and elected officials, intellectuals, human rights activists, and university students who demonstrate against the government or simply demand free education. The AKP governments’ response to Kurdish nationalist demands has been complicated. Although they did not hesitate to harass and arrest Kurdish politicians, journalists, and activists, starting in 2009, they also launched various ‘peace’ initiatives and engaged in negotiations with the PKK leadership. The latest peace initiative was abandoned by Erdog˘ an before the June 2015 elections, in an effort to prevent the pro-Kurdish party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) from acquiring too many seats, which would deny the AKP the majority needed to change the constitution to install a presidential regime with a strong executive. The subsequent November elections allowed the AKP to form a majority government, but the government’s attacks on the HDP and its supporters led some young Kurds to rebel and block Turkish security forces’ entry to Kurdish majority districts in some Eastern cities. The government responded with heavy artillery, turning these areas into war zones and putting their residents under siege. Between July 2015 and December 2016, government security operations affected more than 30 towns and neighbourhoods and displaced 335,000–500,000 people (United Nations 2017). In January 2016, a group of academics (2,212 form Turkey and 355 international), calling themselves ‘Academics for Peace’, signed a statement, demanding that the government stop attacking and blockading Kurdish towns and return to the peace negotiations. Portrayed as PKK supporters, traitors, and terrorists by the government, petitioners became subject to investigation, interrogation, prosecution, dismissal from their jobs, and detention – all at an escalated rate after the July 2016 coup attempt. According to the government officials, the failed coup was organised by Gülenists, the followers of the Muslim cleric Fetullah Gülen. The claim appears plausible, since Gülenists had 11 See CPJ (2012). 12 The Criminal Procedure Code was changed in 2010 to allow military officials to be prosecuted in civilian courts.

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infiltrated the military in large numbers (S¸ık 2000), along with some other state agencies such as the judiciary, police force, and the Ministry of Education. The Gülen network – an opaque organisation the modus operandi of which resembles a combination of cult, missionary service, and mafia – was an ally of the AKP since the inception of the party (Tas¸ 2017).13 However, the partnership broke down in December 2013, when Gülenist prosecutors charged some cabinet members and their sons with corruption and implicated Erdog˘ an, who then declared the network a ‘terrorist’ organisation. Referring to it as a ‘blessing from God,’ Erdog˘ an capitalised on the 2016 coup attempt and launched a massive ‘clean-up’ effort to uproot Gülenists from the civil and military bureaucracy, close down their media outlets, schools, and dormitories, and take over Gülenists companies. Thousands of people were labelled as Gülenists, thus deemed terrorists, on the basis of measly evidence such as enrolling their children at a Gülenist school or having an account at a Gülenist bank. The ‘Gülenist’ charge (along with those of ‘PKK supporter’ and traitor) has been casually employed for critics of Erdog˘ an’s policies. Immediately after the coup attempt, the government declared a state of emergency (OHAL) and kept renewing it every three months. OHAL allows the government to rule by decrees that have the power of law and are not subject to parliamentary or judiciary oversight. A report by the main opposition party, CHP, which offers an account of human rights violations that occurred under OHAL by the end of 2016, states the number of arrests, investigations, prosecutions, and dismissals from civil service, military, and academic posts in thousands and the number of closed-down media outlets, other companies, and detained journalists in the hundreds (CHP 2017). Turkey once again became the country with the highest number of journalists in prison.14 As of January 2017, the number of elected public servants still in custody included 89 mayors (mostly Kurdish) and 12 parliamentarians – 11 HDP and one CHP (CHP 2017). OHAL allows a person to be detained for 30 days without a court hearing and without access to a lawyer for 5 days, but even these long periods are extended. Many human rights principles and procedures, such as presuming innocence and due process, are undermined. Since there is no judicial independence and the rule of law is precarious at best, people who are charged with terrorism are not subject to fair trials and they lack the venues of appeal. The battered images of detainees indicate that ill treatment and torture – which had been already on the rise since 2007 but executed discretely (US Department of State 2011; Can 2016) – are now carried out more casually. Arguably, the whole country was turned into a prison, as passports have been revoked for at least 140,000 people (CHP 2017). These extraordinary numbers of arrests, detentions, imprisonments, job dismissals, and confiscation of property, violate not only people’s civil and political rights but also cut off their sources of income and fringe benefits, and thus effectively violate theirs and their families’ social and economic rights. In fact, the AKP’s record on social and economic rights has never been good, despite the fact that the first decade of its rule witnessed economic growth and some reduction in income inequality.15 However, various economic and socialrights-related indicators – such as unemployment rates, job security, industrial accidents, unionisation rates, food deprivation and malnourishment, and the size of informal sector – 13 Gülenist police, prosecutors, and judges persecuted and prosecuted Kurds and secularist groups that were critical of the AKP rule, including those in Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases, by employing fabricated evidence with the blessing of Erdog˘ an and other AKP leaders. 14 See Weise (2017); RSF (2016). 15 See GINI coefficients in successive UNDP Human Development Reports.

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point to a poor performance (Arat and Smith 2014). Turkey’s ranking on the UN’s poverty and human development indices displays an overall declining (worsening) trend during the AKP years.16 Despite its rhetoric of social justice and pledge to pursue a humane political economy that would restore integrity to the market and treat workers with dignity (Keyman and Önis¸ 2003), the AKP has embraced and internalised the IMF- and EU-imposed neoliberal economic policies. Thus, social assistance has been left to private philanthropy (Morvaridi 2013) or provided as a device of social control (Yörük 2012). Low government investments resulted in overcrowding and poor education at public schools, leading better-off families to choose private schools. This vicious circle has created a class-based, two-tier educational system that effectively denies low-income or rural children the right to education (Duman 2008; Gök and Ilgaz 2007). The long-awaited reforms in health insurance and social security systems arrived in 2007 amid protests, since the increased enrolments came with some lost grounds on eligibility for pensions and health care benefits, especially for women (Z. Arat 2012; Bug˘ ra and Candas¸ 2011).

Conclusion The history of human rights in Turkey has been a complicated one that yields no neat patterns. Periods that marked significant improvements in some areas were overwhelmed by gross violations in others. Advancements in education and women’s rights in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, concurred with heavy-handed repression of Kurdish identity and rights. Authoritarian, nationalist, militaristic, patriarchal, and assimilationist values prevalent in the political culture, the tendency to uphold state security above human rights, and the fear of communism, Sharia rule, and secessionism have prevented comprehensive human rights reforms and enabled violations. Even during the most active reform period (1998–2007), laws were not comprehensive or consistent. While the limited and unstable progress in practice can be partially attributed to bureaucratic and cultural resistance, the human rights approach and commitments of political leaders have been shallow and largely impelled by the desire to join the EU. Neoliberal economic policies, endorsed and demanded by both the IMF and the EU and embraced by the AKP, undermined social and economic rights. While public desire for social justice and democracy has been continuous, it seldom led to collective action and was not articulated in human rights language until recently. Even the human rights movement that emerged after 1983 subscribed to a classical liberal conceptualisation of human rights that emphasises freedom from state repression (Z. Arat 2007). Focusing on the violation of freedoms and physical integrity rights by the state, it failed to speak to the needs of a large majority, allowing some to misconstrue human rights advocacy as a threat (Bozarslan 2001). Human rights associations, women’s groups, labour unions, and environmental activists, while active in their own domains and effecting some change, largely remained fragmented. They were unable to capitalise on the common thread of human rights in their overlapping goals and establish broad coalitions that would promote human rights as an indivisible whole. The mobilisation and solidarity that emerged among different groups during the 2013 Gezi Park protests ended up being short-lived, partially due to these groups’ deliberate efforts to avoid forming an organisation with the fear of being co-opted by existing political parties and other organisations.

16 See S¸eker and Dayıog˘ lu (2015) and successive UNDP Human Development Reports.

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Improving human rights required the replacement of the 1982 Constitution. Human rights advocates aspired to have a new constitution that would be devised through a participant process, would uphold human rights and freedoms in their broadest definitions, and would prepare the foundation for a lasting peace (Gunter 2012). The AKP government, however, single-handedly issued one that transferred practically all power to the office of Presidency (held by its leader Erdog˘ an) and rushed for its adoption through a referendum carried out under a state of emergency on 16 April 2017. Determined citizens managed to mobilise the public for ‘No’ vote, but the AKP won the referendum by a slight margin, albeit tainted by numerous allegations of irregularities and violations. Individuals’ and opposition parties’ legal challenges went nowhere, as the High Council of Elections and courts had ceased to work as agencies independent from the executive office. Thus, at the time of writing (January 2018), with no effective institutional mechanism in place to protect people against state terrorism, human rights conditions in Turkey have reached an all-time low. The state of emergency became the interminable government form subject to the will of President Erdog˘ an, who, operating with a sense of revenge, insecurity, and defiance and enflaming public support to reinstate death penalty, maintains a reign of terror.

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Human rights Ayata, Ays¸e Günes¸, and Fatma Tütüncü. 2008. ‘Critical Acts Without a Critical Mass: The Substantive Representation of Women in the Turkish Parliament.’ Parliamentary Affairs 61(3): 461–475. Babül, Elif M. 2015. ‘The Paradox of Protection: Human Rights, the Masculinist State, and the Moral Economy of Gratitude in Turkey.’ American Ethnologist 42(1): 116–130. Bahçecik, S¸erif Onur. 2015. ‘The Power Effects of Human Rights Reforms in Turkey: Enhanced Surveillance and Depoliticisation.’ Third World Quarterly 36(6): 1222–1236. Bargu, Banu. 2014. Starve and Immolate: Politics of Human Weapons. New York: Columbia. Baykan, Ays¸egül C. 1994. ‘The Turkish Woman: An Adventure in Feminist Historiography.’ Gender and History 6(1): 101–116. Berkes, Niyazi. 1998. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. New York: Routledge. Bildirici, Faruk. 2010. ‘Es¸cinsellik hastalık, tedavi edilmeli [Homosexuality is Sickness, it Should be Treated].’ Hürriyet, 7 March. Accessed 20 November 2010. http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/goster/Show New.aspx?id=14031207 Birgün. 2015. ‘12 Eylül Darbesinin Korkunç Bilançosu [The Horrible Balance Sheet of 12th September Coup].’ 5 October. Accessed 17 October 2017. https://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/12-eylul-darbesi nin-korkunc-bilancosu-78576.html Bozarslan, Hamit. 2001. ‘Human Rights and the Kurdish Issue in Turkey: 1984–1999.’ Human Rights Review 3(1): 45–54. Bug˘ ra, Ays¸e, and Ays¸en Candas¸. 2011. ‘Change and Continuity under an Eclectic Social Security Regime: The Case of Turkey.’ Middle Eastern Studies 47(3): 515–528. Bug˘ ra, Ays¸e, and Burcu Yakut-Çakar. 2010. ‘Structural Change, the Social Policy Environment and Female Employment in Turkey.’ Development and Change 41(3): 517–538. Bug˘ ra, Ays¸e, and Çag˘ lar Keyder. 2006. ‘The Turkish Welfare Regime in Transformation.’ Journal of European Social Policy 16(3): 211–228. . Bulunmaz, Barıs¸. 2012. ‘Türk Basın Tarihi Içerisinde Demokrat Parti Dönemi ve Sansür Uygulamaları.’ Öneri 10(37): 203–214. Çalı, Bas¸ak. 2007. ‘Human Rights Discourse in Turkey: A Study of the Domestic Human Rights NGOs.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 217–232. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Çalı, Bas¸ak. 2010. ‘The Logics of Supranational Human Rights Litigation, Official Acknowledgment, and Human Rights Reform: The Southeast Turkey Cases before the European Court of Human Rights, 1996–2006.’ Law & Social Inquiry 35(2): 311–337. Can, Bas¸ak. 2016. ‘Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and State Violence: Medical Documentation of Torture in Turkey.’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly 30(3): 342–358. . CHP. 2017. ‘OHAL Bilançosu Hak Ihlalleri Raporu.’ Accessed 25 March 2017. http://chp.org.tr/Public/ 0/Folder//66594.pdf Christensen, Christian. 2007. ‘Concentration of Ownership, the Fall of Unions and Government Legislation in Turkey.’ Global Media and Communication 3(2): 179–199. Cindog˘ lu, Dilek, and Gizem, Zencirci. 2008. ‘The Headscarf in Turkey in the Public and State Spheres.’ Middle Eastern Studies 44(5): 791–806. Çitak, Zana, and Özlem Tür. 2008. ‘Women Between Tradition and Change: The Justice and Development Party Experience in Turkey.’ Middle Eastern Studies 44(3): 455–469. Cizre, Ümit. 2008. Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party. New York: Routledge. Collings, Anthony C. 2001. Words of Fire: Independent Journalists who Challenge Dictators, Drug Lords, and Other Enemies of a Free Press. New York: NYU Press. Cos¸ar, Simten, and Metin Yeg˘ enog˘ lu. 2011. ‘New Grounds for Patriarchy in Turkey? Gender Policy in the Age of AKP.’ South European Society and Politics 16(4): 555–573. Çarkog˘ lu, Aslı, Nilüfer Kafesciog˘ lu, and Aslı Akdas¸ Mitrani. 2012. ‘Review of Explicit Family Policies in Turkey from a Systemic Perspective.’ Journal of Child and Family Studies 21(1): 42–52. Çatalbas¸, Dilruba. 2007. ‘Freedom of Press and Broadcasting.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 19–34. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Çayır, Kenan. 2007. ‘Tensions and Dilemmas in Human Rights Education.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 233–245. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. CPJ. 2012. ‘Number of Jailed Journalists Sets Global Record.’ Committee to Protect Journalists, 11 December. Accessed4 May 2013. https://cpj.org/reports/2012/12/imprisoned-journalists-world-record.php

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Human rights Duman, Anıl. 2008. ‘Education and Income Inequality in Turkey: Does Schooling Matter?’ Financial Theory and Practice 32(3): 369–385. Ecevit, Yıldız. 2007. ‘Women’s Rights, Women’s Organizations and the State.’ In Human Rights in Turkey: Policies and Prospects, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 197–201. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ersoy, Duygu, and Fahriye Üstüner. 2016. ‘“Liberal Intellectuals”: Narration of Justice and Democracy Party in Turkey.’ Turkish Studies Journal 17(3): 406–428. Ertürk, Yakın, and Nüket Kardam. 1999. ‘Expanding Gender Accountability? Women’s Organizations and the State in Turkey.’ International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior 2: 167–197. Finkel, Andrew. 2000. ‘Who Guards the Press? A Perspective on Press Corruption in Turkey.’ Journal of International Affairs 54(1): 147–166. Gök, Fatma, and Deniz Ilgaz. 2007. ‘The Right to Education: The Turkish Case.’ in Human Rights in Turkey: Policies and Prospects, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 123–136. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Görkemli, Serkan. 2014. Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey. New York: State University of New York Press. Gunter, Michael M. 2012. ‘Turkey: The Politics of a New Democratic Constitution.’ Middle East Policy 19(1): 119–125. Hicks, Neil. 2001. ‘Legislative Reform in Turkey and European Human Rights Mechanism.’ Human Rights Review 3(1): 78–85. Human Rights Watch. 1997. Turkey: Torture and Mistreatment in Pre-Trial Detention by Anti-Terror Police. New York. Human Rights Watch. 2011. ‘He Loves You, He Beats You’: Family Violence in Turkey and Access to Protection. New York. Human Rights Watch, 2017. Turkey: Events of 2016. 2017. Accessed15 October 2017. https://www. hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/turkey Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman. 2014. ‘Alevis Under Law: The Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey.’ The Journal of Law and Religion 29(3): 416–435. Keyman, Fuat, and Ziya Önis¸. 2003. ‘Turkey’s Delayed Encounter with Global Third Way Politics: The AKP and the Possibility of Democratization.’ Journal of Democracy 14(2): 95–107. Kılınç, Ramazan. 2014. ‘International Pressure, Domestic Politics, and the Dynamics of Religious Freedom: Evidence from Turkey.’ Comparative Politics 46(2): 127–145. Kiris¸ci, Kemal, and Gareth Winrow. 1997. The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of a Trans-State Ethnic Conflict. London: Frank Cass. Marshall, Gül Aldıkaçtı. 2008. ‘A Question of Compatibility: Feminism and Islam in Turkey.’ Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 17(3): 223–238. Morvaridi, Behrooz. 2013. ‘The Politics of Philanthropy and Welfare Governance: The Case of Turkey.’ The European Journal of Development Research 25(2): 305–321. Mühlenhoff, Hanna. 2014. ‘Funding Democracy, Funding Social Services? The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights in the Context of Competing Narratives in Turkey.’ Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 16(1): 102–118. O’Neill, Mary Lou. 2007. ‘Linguistic Human Rights and the Rights of Kurds in Turkey.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 72–86. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Oran, Baskın. 2007. ‘The Minority Concept and Rights in Turkey: The Lausanne Peace Treaty and Current Issues’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 35–56. Özerdem, Alpaslan, and Tim Jacoby. 2007. ‘Conflict Induced Internal Displacement in Turkey.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 159–169. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Özkırımlı, Umut, ed. 2014. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi. New York: Palgrave Pivot. Payne, Donald M. 2010. ‘Turkey’s Path to Europe: Defense of Human Rights and Respect for International Obligations.’ Mediterranean Quarterly 21(3): .8–15. Pis¸kinsüt, Sema. 2001. Filistin Askısından Fezlekeye: IS¸kencenin Kitabı. Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi. Prodromos, Yannas. 2007. ‘The Human Rights Condition of the Rum Orthodox.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 57–71. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Human rights Rodrik, Dani. 2010. ‘Erdog˘ an’s Choice.’ Project Syndicate, 18 September. Accessed 19 May 2011. http:// www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rodrik48/English RSF. 2016. ‘Turkey – World Leader in Imprisoned Journalists.’ Reporters Without Borders, 10 August. Accessed7 October 2017. https://rsf.org/en/news/turkey-world-leader-imprisoned-journalists Rumford, Chris. 2001. ‘Human Rights and Democratization in Turkey in the Context of EU Candidature.’ Journal of European Area Studies 9(1): 93–105. Sandal, Nukhet A. 2013. ‘Public Theologies of Human Rights and Citizenship: The Case of Turkey’s Christians.’ Human Rights Quarterly 35(3): 631–650. S¸eker, Sırma Demir, and Meltem Dayıog˘ lu. 2015. ‘Poverty Dynamics in Turkey.’ Review of Income and Wealth 61(3): 477–493. . . S¸ık, Ahmet. 2000. Imamın Ordusu [The Imam’s Army]. Istanbul: Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi. Smith, Thomas W. 2007. ‘Leveraging Norms: The ECHR and Turkey’s Human Rights Reforms.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 262–274. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania . Press. T24. 2015. ‘I¸ste 12 Eylül darbesinin kanlı bilançosu [Here is the Bloody Balance-Sheet of the September 12 Coup].’ 10 May. Accessed 25 November 2017. http://t24.com.tr/haber/iste-12-eylul-darbesinin-ka nli-bilancosu,296166 Tas¸, Hakkı. 2017. ‘A History of Turkey’s AKP-Gülen Conflict.’ Mediterranean Politics, 16 May. Accessed September 2017. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13629395.2017.1328766?journa lCode=fmed20 Taymaz, Erol, and S¸ule Özler. 2005. ‘Labor Market Policies and EU Accession: Problems and Prospects for Turkey.’ In Turkey: Economic Reform & Accession to the European Union, edited by Bernard M. Hoekman and Sübidey Tog˘ an, 223–260. Washington, DC: World Bank and The Centre for Economic Policy Research. TBMM. 2018. https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/kutuphane/e_kaynaklar_kutuphane_hukumetler.html Toktas¸, S¸ule. 2005. ‘Citizenship and Minorities: A Historical Overview of Turkey’s Jewish Minority.’ Journal of Historical Sociology 18(4): 394–429. TGRTHaber. 2017. ‘Osman Kavala Hakkındaki Suçmalamalar Belli Oldu [Charges Against Osman Kavala Have Been declared].’ 1 December. http://www.tgrthaber.com.tr/gundem/osman-kavala-hakkinda ki-suclamalar-belli-oldu-206259 Tunç, Aslı. 2013. ‘Freedom of Expression Debates in Turkey: Acute Problems and New Hopes.’ International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 9(2): 153–163. Türkmen, Füsun. 2007. ‘Turkey’s Participation in Global and Regional Human Rights Regimes.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 249–261. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ugent, Marlies Casier. 2009. ‘Contesting the ‘Truth’ of Turkey’s Human Rights Situation: State-Association Interactions in and Outside the Southeast.’ European Journal of Turkish Studies 10: 1–19. United Nations. 2017. Report on the Human Rights Situation in South-East Turkey. The Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. Accessed 25 March 2017. http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Coun tries/TR/OHCHR_South East_TurkeyReport_10March2017.pdf UNDP. 1998. Human Development Report, Turkey. Ankara: United Nations Development Programme. US Department of State. 2011. Human Rights Report: Turkey. Washington, DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Accessed 17 May 2011. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/eur/ 154455.htm Weisband, Edward, and Sera Öner. 2007. ‘So Near, Yet So Far: Freedom of Association and Workers’ Rights.’ In Human Rights in Turkey, edited by Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, 105–122. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Weise, Ziya. 2017. ‘Turkey Jails More Journalists than any Other Nation. Those in Detention are All Terrorists, Erdog˘ an Says.’ PRI, 28 June. Accessed 7 October 2017. https://www.pri.org/stories/ 2017-06-28/turkey-jails-more-journalists-any-other-nation-those-detention-are-all-terrorists Yörük, Erdem. 2012. ‘Welfare Provision as Political Containment: The Politics of Social Assistance and the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey.’ Politics & Society 40(4): 517–547.

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24 GENDER POLITICS AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT Sevgi Adak

Introduction: women in the Turkish political scene The political debate around gender roles and the limits of women’s rights and liberties, in particular, has been at the centre stage of Turkish politics since the establishment of the republic. The foundations of the state and its ideological underpinnings were shaped by a gender regime radically redefined to meet the necessities of a modern nation-state, where women would participate in public life as equal citizen-subjects. In other words, envisioning a modern Turkish woman was at the heart of the Kemalist ideology, which was reflected in numerous reforms, policies, and discourses of the early republican period.1 The most notable achievements of women with respect to gender equality in this era were the adoption of a secular civil code in 1926 and the acquisition of political rights in 1934 (1930 for local elections). These advances in the social status of women had been made possible by the atmosphere created by the modernist approach of the republican regime. That being said, these issues had long been on the agenda of the women’s movement, which flourished in the late Ottoman Empire and became institutionalised after the establishment of the new nation-state in the Women’s Union in 1924.2 This independent women’s movement, characterised as first-wave feminism in Turkey in the literature,3 was not tolerated by the Kemalist singleparty state, which positioned itself not only as the sole initiator of women’s rights but also as their ultimate guardian. This troublesome history gave rise to a problematic relationship between the state and women’s activism, and put the state, and particularly its ideological manifestation, Kemalism, at the centre of the feminist critique and scholarly inquiry. With the advent of feminist scholarship in the early 1980s, gender scholars began to unearth the Ottoman and early 1

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The Kemalist vision of ideal Turkish woman and the gender policies of the republican regime have been analysed by numerous scholars. Notable examples in this rich literature include Arat (1997); Kandiyoti (1997); Arat (1998); Saktanber (2001). For Ottoman women’s movement, see Demirdirek (1993); Çakır (1994); van Os (2013). See also Ekmekçiog˘ lu and Bilal (2006); Ekmekçiog˘ lu (2016). For Women’s Union, see Zihniog˘ lu (2003). See also Baykan and Ötüs¸-Baskett (1999); Davaz (2014). For a comparative analysis of the first and second wave women’s movement in Turkey, which has now become a classic, see Tekeli (1998). For another classic account on the history of feminism in Turkey, see Sirman (1989). See also Berktay (2001).

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republican women’s activism and document the problematic aspects of the Kemalist discourse regarding women’s emancipation. They also highlighted how it had the paradoxical effect of impeding the development of a feminist agenda of women’s liberation. This feminist analysis mainly focused on three points: the class bias of the republican reforms, benefiting mainly urban middle-class women (Kandiyoti 1987, 1989), control over women’s bodies and female sexuality (Kandiyoti 1997; Arat 1997; Saktanber 2001), and the characterisation of the Kemalist approach to women’s rights as ‘state feminism’ (Tekeli 1986). This state feminism, according to feminist scholars, contained the women’s rights struggle and resulted in decades of silence in terms of independent women’s activism, from the 1940s until the late 1970s. Recent scholarship has taken a more nuanced approach. It has drawn attention to the complexities of the Kemalist experience for women (Aks¸it 2005; Adak 2014; Çag˘ atay, 2018). It has also examined women’s associational life in the 1950s and 1960s and pointed out the significance of this ‘subtle’ activism in maintaining links with international women’s organisations (Azak and de Smaele 2016). While the discourse on family and women’s chastity intensified when the Democrat Party attained power, a development that Sancar (2012) characterises as a transition to ‘conservative modernisation’, various women’s associations, mainly Kemalist in ideological orientation, such as the Association for Protecting Women (Kadınları Koruma Derneg˘i) and Association for Women’s Solidarity (Kadınlar Dayanıs¸ma Derneg˘i), were established during the 1950s and 1960s. The nucleus of a new and independent women’s movement, however, would appear in the late 1970s, first within the leftist movement4 and then, eventually, mainly among feminist academics and writers who began to organise around small consciousness-raising groups. The second-wave feminism that emerged out of these initially modest women’s circles at the beginning of the 1980s began to become a mass movement in the second half of the decade, altering the agenda and dynamics of Turkish politics. This rise of feminism forms the basis for the centrality of gender in contemporary Turkish politics today.

Feminist interventions in Turkish politics: the radical turn since the 1980s . The women’s march that was organised to protest against domestic violence in Istanbul in May 1987, known as the Solidarity March against Battering (Dayag˘a Kars¸ı Dayanıs¸ma Yürüyüs¸ü), is now widely recognised as a turning point for the women’s rights struggle and the symbolic beginning of second-wave feminism in Turkey. As Sirman (1989, 1) argues, this march and the movement that became politically visible following it, signalled ‘a new form in which the position of women in Turkish society [was] being articulated within the political terrain of Turkey’. The emergence of small but influential feminist groups in major cities, a series of public meetings, protests, and creative campaigns aiming at drawing attention to women’s problems, and a wave of feminist publications followed this symbolic beginning. The establishment of the first feminist publishing house, the Women’s Circle (Kadın Çevresi) and particularly the publications of a radical feminist journal, Feminist, and a socialist feminist journal, Kaktüs (Cactus), were major developments in the 1980s as they started a tradition of feminist journal publishing in Turkey which would continue in the 4

. The most important of these associations was the Progressive Women’s Association (Ilerici Kadınlar Derneg˘i), which was founded in 1975 as the women’s organisation of the then clandestine Turkish Communist Party and reached an organisational capacity of over ten thousand members until it was closed down in 1979. See Akal (2011) and Pervan (2013).

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following decades. The radical feminist journal, Pazartesi (Monday), first published in 1995, would be the most important one carrying on the legacy of the journals published in the 1980s and expanding the scope of feminist discussions until the early 2000s.5 The 1990s were characterised by the institutionalisation of the women’s movement in Turkey, with the emergence of numerous women’s rights organisations and associations focusing on different issues. The first major organisation whose establishment marked the beginning of an era of institutionalisation was the Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation (Mor Çatı Kadın Sıg˘ınag˘ı Vakfı). Formed in 1990, Mor Çatı became the central organisation for the struggle against violence against women in Turkey, providing consultations, organising shelters, and increasing awareness of the issue through its network of volunteers. The Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation (1990), Women’s Solidarity Foundation (1993), Flying Broom Foundation (Uçan Süpürge 1996), and the Association for Support of Women Candidates (Kadın Adayları Destekleme Derneg˘i – KA-DER 1997) were among the most important and long-lasting organisations that emerged in this era of institution and network building. Parallel to the emergence of second-wave feminism and the proliferation of various types of women’s organisations and activism, the post-1980s period also marked the beginning of the formation of what can be seen as an institutional-legal setting for the articulation of issues related to women’s rights in formal politics. One of the significant developments in this period was Turkey’s ratification in 1985 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This turned the issue of achieving gender equality into a general state policy requiring a series of legal changes as well as periodic checks and reporting on the status of women, ranging from their participation in the workforce to educational opportunities.6 In 1987, an advisory board on policies regarding women’s issues was formed as part of the State Planning Organisation and, in 1990, the General Directorate on the Status and Problems of Women (Kadının Statüsü ve Sorunları Genel Müdürlüg˘ü) was established with the aim of creating a national mechanism to track the situation regarding women’s social and political status and to initiate necessary reforms in parliament.7 In addition to a separate Ministry of State responsible for women’s and family affairs in the cabinet, women’s sections were established throughout the 1990s in various ministries, bureaucratic units and municipalities, not only contributing to the collection of data and policy and project development regarding women’s status, but also expanding the means and mechanisms of cooperation between governmental and non-governmental organisations in the field of gender equality policy. Along with more conventional issues such as combatting violence against women, which have formed the main axes of gender activism in Turkey since the 1980s and continue to be the key issues on the agenda of the women’s movement, this period also succeeded in 5

6

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The initial format of Pazartesi was a tabloid newspaper, defining itself as a ‘newspaper for women’ referring to the famous women’s journal Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (Ladies’ Own Gazette) published in the late Ottoman Empire between 1895–1908 and creating a link between the two waves of feminist struggle in Turkey. For the archive of the feminist journals of the 1980s and 1990s, Feminist, Kaktüs and Pazartesi, see http://www.pazartesidergisi.com/. For a more detailed analysis of feminism in 1990s Turkey, see Bora and Günal (2002). Turkey signed the Additional Protocol to CEDAW in 2000 and the Optional Protocol of CEDAW in 2002. The latter approved the right of individual petition to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the body of international experts formed to monitor the implementation of CEDAW. The directorate remained under the Office of the Prime Minister until it was restructured and brought under the newly created Ministry of Family and Social Policies in 2011.

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bringing the ‘personal’ into the public debate and created a space for discussing issues like body politics, sexuality, and intimacy. In other words, one mark that this period left was an unprecedented diversification of the various components of gender-based activism as well as of the topics and issues that dominated gender politics. With this diversification came the emergence of two dynamics that have not only created divisions in gender politics but also formed two main areas of research and inquiry for scholarship on gender. First, debates around the Kurdish issue resonated with the women’s movement in the 1990s, with Kurdish women getting organised around their own magazines such as Rosa (1996), Jujîn (1996) and Jin û Jiyan (1998). In addition to these relatively small Kurdish feminist groups that were particularly critical of the patriarchal discourse and practices within the Kurdish movement,8 a broader Kurdish women’s movement also began to emerge with the increasing public visibility and active participation of women within Kurdish politics, especially in the Kurdish political parties. The gender activism of Kurdish women significantly transformed Kurdish politics from within by making gender equality a central agenda. Kurdish gender activists maintained close interaction with their Turkish counterparts and the feminist movement over the years, particularly in advocating a women’s perspective on the peaceful resolution of the . Kurdish issue. The Women’s Initiative for Peace (Barıs¸ için Kadın Giris¸imi – BIKG), which was founded in 2009, continues to be one important platform for such collaboration. While the scholarship on gender has focused on understanding the changing dynamics of Kurdish women’s activism,9 it has also continued to problematise the issues of contention between the Kurdish and Turkish women’s movements.10 The insistence of the Kurdish women’s movement on jineology as a women’s liberation ideology alternative to feminism, and, particularly, the limits the differences between the two movements pose to the creation of a common agenda for gender politics have also become an important area of scholarly exploration.11 The second issue that emerged in the same period, and has proved to be even more divisive for gender politics, was the headscarf issue or, more generally, the broader debate on Islam and women’s rights. This debate surfaced after the rise of political Islam and parallel to the increasing visibility of pious Muslim women as active agents both in public life and in Turkish politics. Characterised mostly as Islamic or Islamist women, their identity, the form of piety and Islamic way of living they advocated, the meanings they attributed to the headscarf as a modern type of veiling, and the implications of their struggle for the removal of the headscarf ban in universities, have constituted the main topics of scholarly research since the 1990s.12 This scholarship has developed as part of, and in dialogue with, the growing literature in gender studies on the new Islamic veiling, women’s participation in the piety movements, as well as on Islamic feminism, situating Turkey as an important case together with cases like Egypt and Iran.13 Seen by some scholars as a movement, Islamic 8

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It should be noted that despite the feminist content of these magazines, they did not openly characterise themselves as feminist. One Kurdish women’s organisation that openly defined itself as feminist (and independent from the Kurdish political movement) was KAMER (Women’s Centre), which was founded in 1996 in Diyarbakır. See, for example, Yüksel (2006); Çag˘ layan (2007); Gökalp (2010); Çag˘ layan (2012); Açık (2013); Schäfers (2018). See, for example, Diner and Toktas¸ (2010); Al-Ali and Tas¸ (2017). For example, see Dirik (2015); Düzgün (2016). . For example, see Ilyasog˘ lu (1994); Göle (1996); Özdalga (1998); Arat (2011); Saktanber (2002); Arat (2005); Aslan-Akman (2011). See, for example, Badran (2001); Badran (2005).

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women’s activism and public visibility has evolved into a heterogeneous formation, ranging from independent women’s rights organisations, such as the Capital City Women’s Platform (Bas¸kent Kadın Platformu), that are in a critical dialogue with their secularly oriented feminist counterparts, to groups, associations, and journals that could be seen more as Islamist in political terms and more hesitant when it comes to gender activism despite the fact that they are concerned with women’s rights. As such, the room for collaboration notwithstanding, the so-called Islamist–secularist divide has been an important dynamic impeding the formation of a common frame of reference for gender activism (Arat 2005; Cos¸ar and Onbas¸ı 2008). One can argue that these dynamics continue to divide the women’s movement in Turkey since religious, ethnic, and class lines remain at the heart of gender politics. Having said that, the women’s movement has developed a remarkable ability to work together on issue-specific campaigns. The most significant legal achievement in this period, the adoption of the New Civil Code in November 2001, was the victory of a massive networking and campaign effort of various women’s organisations and feminist groups, proving not only the maturity of the women’s movement in Turkey but also its capacity to go beyond the lines of political differences. This was also an important moment for women’s rights struggle as the new code corrected most of the remaining patriarchal elements in the old code adopted in 1926, such as the supremacy of men as head of the family or discriminatory clauses against women in terms of marital property and child custody. It was thus a reflection of the progress that had been achieved by the women’s movement until then. In a way, this could also be seen as a feminist ‘correction’ to the Kemalist vision of women’s roles and position in the society, which has been one of the most important issues of debate among women scholars and activists as mentioned in the previous section. The momentum that the New Civil Code campaign brought led to further improvements and achievements in the 2000s facilitated by other important changes in Turkish politics occurring with the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in 2002. However, the shift in Turkish politics towards right-wing authoritarianism under the AKP forced various components of the women’s movement to align themselves accordingly and to transform the nature of the struggle in order to cope with an increasingly aggressive Islamic conservativism that began to threaten the rights and liberties women achieved.

Standing against the stream? Gender politics under the AKP government After having emerged as the new hub of the centre-right in 2001, the AKP was able to convince large segments of the electorate with its new ‘conservative democrat’ political programme. The main appeal of this programme was its synthesising the classical elements of the agenda of the right in Turkey, such as Turkish nationalism and socio-cultural conservatism, with the necessities of a liberal market economy and a discourse of democratisation. As Cos¸ar and Özman (2004) argued, the liberal tones of the AKP’s initial political agenda were particularly apparent in its support for Turkey’s EU membership and its relations with civil society in the domestic political sphere.14 These liberal tones consequently helped to maintain the space for gender activism during the AKP’s first two terms in power (2002–2007; 2007– 2011), which had already become institutionalised through various women’s rights organisations and feminist groups in the preceding two decades. 14 On the initial phase of the AKP era, see also Cizre (2008).

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A number of laws and regulations regarding gender equality were introduced during the early years of the AKP government as part of Turkey’s integration with the EU after the country’s acceptance as an official candidate in 1999, and especially after the initiation of accession negotiations in 2005. These included a series of amendments to the Constitution to ensure gender equality, such as the 2004 amendment of Article 10 on equality before the law, which explicitly states that men and women have equal rights and that the state is responsible for taking the necessary measures to guarantee this equality. In 2010, another clause, which states that any measure taken for the purpose of ensuring equality of men and women should not be interpreted as contrary to the principle of equality, was added to Article 10.15 Legal changes also included important revisions to the Penal Code, the Labour Law, and the Family Protection Law in order to prevent discrimination against women in key policy areas and to ensure a more effective struggle against violence against women. In 2009, a law requiring the establishment in parliament of an Equal Opportunities Commission, the purpose of which was to monitor the compliance of all proposed legal changes to the principle of gender equality, significantly strengthened the legal and institutional basis of gender equality. Consequently, the legal framework has actually improved remarkably in the last two decades, having acquired the potential to foster gender equality. One of the most important developments in this line of legal improvements was Turkey’s ratification of the Council of Europe’s 2011 Convention . on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention, in 2012.16 Another positive development in the 2000s was the increase in women’s representation in formal politics. Although it is still lower than the OECD and the world average (27.7% and 22.5%, respectively), the share of seats held by women in parliament rose considerably, reaching 17.5% in the most recent elections in June 2018 (see Figure 24.1 below). This improvement came as a reflection of the growing visibility of women as political actors in almost all political parties and movements in the last two decades and as a result of the constant struggle of the women’s rights movement to permeate formal politics in order to raise awareness about women’s underrepresentation. Particularly influential in this rise was the strength of women in proKurdish parties in the 2000s, which consistently had the highest rate of female representation among their parliamentarians. In the elections of 7 June 2015, when the percentage of women MPs in the Turkish parliament reached its historic peak, 40% of the parliamentary group of the pro-Kurdish left-wing party People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) was composed of women, while women constituted only 15.8% and 15.9% of the parliamentary groups of the AKP and Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), respectively.17 15 See https://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf. Although this last amendment in 2010 was interpreted as a step towards the inclusion of the principle of positive discrimination for women, actual policies have fallen far short of this goal and the AKP has kept insisting on the inappropriateness of policy mechanisms that would in fact lead to improvements in practice, such as the quota regulations to ensure women’s equal participation in politics. 16 Turkey was among the first 13 countries to sign the convention and the first country to ratify it. The Istanbul Convention entered into force in August 2014. Following the convention, an international expert body, the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), was established to monitor the compliance of the signatory countries. Women’s Rights Organisations in Turkey platform, the Istanbul Convention . formed their own domestic . Turkey Monitoring Platform (Istanbul Sözles¸mesi Türkiye Izleme Platformu), to monitor Turkey’s compliance with the convention and published its shadow report as a response to the official report submitted to GREVIO by Turkey in July 2017. For Turkey’s official report, see GREVIO (2017). For the shadow report, see Kuyucu (2017). 17 All statistics are taken from the official website of the Supreme Election Council (YSK 2018). Data presented in Figure 24.1 is taken from the statistics provided by the YSK and in KA-DER website.

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Gender politics and the women’s movement 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Figure 24.1 Percentage of female MPs in the Turkish Grand National Assembly.

The increase in women’s representation in formal politics and the progress at the legal level, however, has proven to be insufficient to create anticipated improvements for women in practice. Most notably, violence against women has increased systematically and reached alarming levels. A website that tracks and maps femicides across the country based on various media sources, reported in 2017 that nearly 2000 women had been killed since 2010, husbands and boyfriends being the most common perpetuators.18 As various women’s rights organisations and platforms established to watch and fight against gender-based violence have insistently argued, this is due not only to systematic shortcomings in the implementation processes but also due to the overwhelming impact of the ideological reshaping of gender relations along the lines of a neoconservative agenda under the AKP.19 Similarly, towards the end of the 2000s, scholarship on the conservatism and policies of the AKP, particularly in women’s issues, began to point to a new version of patriarchy that had started to crystallise by the end of the party’s second term in power. Cos¸ar and Yeg˘ enog˘ lu (2011, 557) argued, for example, that the AKP’s version of patriarchal politics exemplified a synthesis of neoliberal, nationalist, and religious politics, which was characterised by the ‘gradual retreat of women from the economic sphere, the mainstreaming of conservative discourse on women’s rights and distaste towards feminist demands’ while oddly maintaining, on the surface, a vision of improvement of women’s rights and status at the legal level. Hence, gender scholars and women’s rights organisations turned their attention to recording and analysing the main transformations occurring in the gender regime in Turkey, particularly focusing on the consequences of the AKP’s neoliberal economic agenda on women’s social and economic status.20 The impact 18 See the website of the Map of Femicides in Turkey project, http://kadincinayetleri.org/. See also news agency Bianet’s bulletins on male violence in Turkey, http://bianet.org/kadin/bianet/ 133354-bianet-siddet-taciz-tecavuz-cetelesi-tutuyor. 19 For more on the link between the AKP’s neoconservative agenda and ‘normalisation of violence’, see Kandiyoti (2016). . 20 For example, see Bug˘ ra and Yakut-Çakar (2010); Ilkkaracan (2012); Yazıcı (2012); Acar and Altunok (2013); Göksel (2013); Bug˘ ra (2013).

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of the structural changes in the welfare regime on women’s labour and employment has especially become an issue of concern, as women’s labour force participation continues to remain low (30.4% in 2015)21 and significantly below the OECD and world average (51.1% and 49.6% in 2015, respectively).22 The rate of unemployment among women has been climbing, having reached 13.6% in 2016 (compared to 9.2% in 2007).23 According to the women’s labour report prepared and published by the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DISK) in March 2018, more than 40% of the working women in Turkey work within the informal sector and without any social security (43% in 2017).24 Identifying employment as one of the key areas in which discrimination against women is the most prevalent, the Women’s Labour and Employ. ment Initiative (Kadın Emeg˘i ve Istihdamı Giris¸imi, KEIG), a network of women’s organisations and women academics founded in 2007, can be seen as a reflection of the shared concern of gender activists and scholars for Turkey’s deteriorating performance in terms of women’s economic rights and status.25 With the darkening tone of AKP’s conservatism along more Islamic lines from the beginning of its third term in power (2011–2015), the emphasis in scholarship on gender politics and in women’s right activism also shifted to an analysis of the dynamics of this transformation. In other words, the focus of both scholarly analysis and gender activism has become the merger of the neoliberal economic agenda with an increasingly religious neoconservatism, which found its clearest manifestation in the consolidation of an ideology of familialism, both at the discursive and policy level.26 One of the most symbolic manifestations of this turn towards a policy of familialism was the replacement of the Ministry of State responsible for Women and Family Affairs with a separate ministry, the Ministry of Family and Social Policies, in 2011. This renaming of the ministry to exclude the term ‘women’ had the effect of relegating issues related to women to the category of ‘family’. This change reflected the ideological perspective of the AKP, which essentially viewed the family as the main unit within which women’s problems should be addressed and solved. While the official discourse has continued to emphasise, initially, the idea of the protection of family and then, eventually, strengthening it, the actual agenda of the ministry, as Yılmaz (2015) argues, is the transformation of gender relations so as to restore a conservative family structure. The Ministry of Family can thus be seen as performing the role of coordinator of an institutional network (extending from the components of the state bureaucracy to the newly created progovernment civil society organisations), ensuring what Kandiyoti (2016) calls ‘the marriage of convenience’ between the neoliberal welfare and employment regime and the biopolitics of neoconservative familialism. A less explored aspect of the AKP’s familialism is its manifestations in the religious sphere, . particularly through the increasing role of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet I¸sleri Bas¸kanlıg˘ı, hereafter the Diyanet) in reshaping family and gender codes along more Islamic lines. This active role of the Diyanet became possible with its expanded institutional capacity under the AKP, which equipped it with strategic channels for the dissemination of neoconservative norms, particularly among women. In fact, these institutional channels, mainly the employment of female preachers for the aim of reaching more women through religious 21 22 23 24 25 26

See UNDP (2016). See UNDP (2016, 217). See OECD (2017). DISK (2018, 6). For the activities and reports of KEIG, see its website, http://www.keig.org/?lang=en. For example, see Dedeog˘ lu and Elveren (2012); Acar and Altunok (2013); Yılmaz (2015); Kandiyoti (2016); Korkman (2016); Atalay (2017); Günes¸-Ataya and Dog˘ angün (2017); Elveren (2018).

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practices and the establishment of Family Guidance Bureaus to support the AKP’s strengthening the family policies through religious counselling, have become the focus of scholarly attention primarily as reflections of the feminisation of the religious sphere.27 However, the Diyanet’s female preachers and family bureaus can also be seen as indications of an expansion of the religious sphere into the private sphere28 and thus manifestations of a process of desecularisation, primarily on the societal level.29 Another area where the process of desecularisation can indeed be followed quite clearly is education policies. In line with the aim of raising ‘pious generations’, openly declared by President Erdog˘ an in 2012, the education system has been restructured at all levels, resulting in the dramatic increase in the number of religious schools as well as in the transformation of the content of school textbooks along religious conservative norms (Lüküslü 2016; Kandiyoti and Emanet 2017). This restructuring of the education system, like the Diyanet’s activities to penetrate the private sphere, has critical implications for gender norms and relations.30 Analysing these implications will to be one of the main aims of future research on gender scholarship in Turkey. The scope of gender scholarship and activism since the beginning of the 2000s cannot be limited to analysing the impact of the AKP experience and standing against the strong stream of neoliberal conservatism it launched in gender roles and relations, however. In other words, despite the strength of the push back, which occasionally led the agents and components of gender activism in Turkey to take defensive positions, especially in recent years, the women’s and feminist movement, as well as the LGBTI movement, continued to grow, proliferate, and diversify.31 The radical voice of the feminist movement carried out through new groups, organisations, and publications, such as the Amargi Women’s Cooperation (2001) and their journal Amargi, the Filmmor Women’s Cooperative (2003), and the Socialist Feminist Collective (2008) and their journal Feminist Politics. While the trend towards institutionalisation that emerged in the 1990s persisted and resulted in numerous projects funded by national and international agencies, many ideas and action points of the movement that were initially seen as ‘radical’ disseminated in different forms into key debates of Turkish politics, adding feminism and gender equality into the regular vocabulary of public debates. In 2012, a massive struggle launched by a platform of more than 40 women’s and feminist organisations against anti-abortion legislation, which followed President Erdog˘ an’s declaration against abortion and caesarean sections, managed to secure the government’s backdown, confirming the strength of women’s activism. The most apparent manifestation of this strength, however, came during the Gezi Movement of 2013, when feminist and women’s organisations and LGBTI groups not only formed one of the backbones of the protests, but, as Ellialtı (2014) suggests, also radically ‘transformed the language of the resistance, and greatly shaped the inner dynamics of Gezi, increasing political productivity and popularity of the uprising’. 27 See, for example, Hassan (2011); Hassan (2012); Maritato (2015); Maritato (2016). 28 This is reinforced particularly by means of the religious counselling of the Diyanet in practice. The Family Bureaus, for example, usually provide guidance on non-religious issues as well, despite the fact that they are supposed to forward issues outside of the scope of their expertise to other relevant public offices. See Sancar (2016). 29 See Adak (2017). For a study on how the Diyanet advocates patriarchal gender roles quite deliberately also through Friday sermons by placing women within the family and under the protection of the men, see Korkut and Eslen-Ziya (2016). 30 For an innovative ethnographical study that looks at these implications in the case of primary education, see Emanet (2016). 31 For a more detailed analysis on gender activism in Turkey in the 2000s, see Bora (2015).

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Conclusion The politics of gender has now become a central component of the Turkish political and cultural scene thanks to years of steady activism as well as a rich heritage of academic research. Women’s and gender studies have become an established field in Turkish academia, with numerous research centres and graduate programmes contributing to the enrichment of scholarly research and debates. Parallel to the global trends in the field, an important and innovative body of literature has emerged on issues as diverse as body politics, masculinity, sexuality, and gendered dimensions of urban transformation, militarism, and immigration, attesting to an unprecedented depth of analysis likely to expand further. Likewise, women’s movements and gender activists have now both the political maturity and the institutional capacity to respond to the changing trends in women’s socio-economic status and gender inequality. It is true that in the current political climate in Turkey, under an authoritarian system headed by a president determined to maintain his power, and with already fragile elements of the democratic system seriously damaged through a process of de-institutionalisation at almost every level of the political and legal structure, women face very difficult challenges. The dynamics of gender politics in contemporary Turkey, especially in the last seven to eight years, have been characterised by the struggle of a resilient gender activism trying to counter the pushback fuelled by the AKP’s neoliberal conservative political agenda. It should be noted, however, that although almost all other forces of the democratic opposition have been repressed and silenced, the women’s movement, with all its colours and components, has still managed to hold the gate open thus far and has kept the severely restricted space for street politics alive. Thousands of women gathered on 8 March 2018 for the traditional Feminist Night March, which has been .organised by the . feminist movement since 2002 to mark International Women’s Day on Istanbul’s famous Istiklâl Street. Thousands of others joined them in parallel protests and marches in several other cities despite the threat of police intervention, the banning of protests by local authorities, and even detention of some members of women’s groups. The picture of thousands of women amassed behind the main banner of the march in Taksim Square, ‘Our Life, Our Rebellion, Our Struggle: Feminism’, testified, once again, that the resilience of the women’s and feminist movements is perhaps the strongest basis for any hope of democratisation in Turkish politics.32

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Gender politics and the women’s movement Korkman, Zeynep Kurtulus¸. 2016. ‘Politics of Intimacy in Turkey: A Distraction from ‘Real’ Politics?’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12(1): 112–121. Korkut, Umut, and Hande Eslen-Ziya. 2016. ‘The Discursive Governance of Population Politics: The Evolution of the Pro-birth Regime in Turkey.’ Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 23(4): 555–575.. Kuyucu, Nisan. 2017. ‘BIANET (Independent Communication Network) Shadow Report.’ Bianet, July 3. http://bianet.org/system/uploads/1/files/attachments/000/001/944/original/BI%CC%87ANET_Sha dow_Report___GREVIO_Eng.pdf?1499264804 Lüküslü, Demet. 2016. ‘Creating a Pious Generation: Youth and Education Policies of the AKP in Turkey.’ Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16(4): 637–649. Maritato, Chiara. 2015. ‘Performing Irs¸ad: Female Preachers (vaizeler) in View of the Turkish State’s Moral Support.’ Turkish Studies 16(3): 433–447. Maritato, Chiara. 2016. ‘Reassessing Women, Religion and the Turkish Secular State in the Light of the Professionalisation of Female Preachers (Vaizeler).’ Religion, State and Society 44(3): 258–275. OECD. 2017. ‘OECD Labour Force Statistics 2007–2016.’ https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/ oecd-labour-force-statistics-2017_oecd_lfs-2017-en#page1 Özdalga, Elisabeth. 1998. The Veiling Issue, Official Secularism and Popular Islam in Modern Turkey. Oxon: Routledge Curzon. . Pervan, Muazzez. 2013. Ilerici Kadınlar Derneg˘i (1975–1980): ‘Kırmızı Çatkılı Kadınlar’ın . Tarihi [Progressive Women’s Association (1975–1980): The History of ‘the Women with Read Headband’]. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları. Saktanber, Ays¸e. 2001. ‘Kemalist Kadın Hakları Söylemi [Kemalist Women’s Rights Discourse].’ In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî Düs¸ünce, Vol. [Political Thought in Modern Turkey, Vol. II, Kemalism], edited . . II, Kemalizm . by Ahmet Insel, 323–333. Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Saktanber, Ays¸e. 2002. Living Islam: Women, Religion and Politicization of Culture in Turkey, London: I.B. Tauris. Sancar, Serpil. 2012. Türk Modernles¸mesinin Cinsiyeti: Erkekler Devlet Kadınlar Aile Kurar [Gender of Turkish . . Modernization: Men Establish State, Women Establish Family]. Istanbul: Iletis¸im. . Sancar, Serpil. 2016. ‘Diyanet’in ‘Kadınlas¸ması’: Diyanet I¸sleri Bas¸kanlıg˘ ı’nın Yeni Kadın ve Aile Politikası [Feminization of the Diyanet: New Women and Family Policy of the Directorate of Religious Affairs].’ In Kadın Odaklı: Koç-Kam Aras¸tırmaları Dizisi 1 [Woman-Focused: Koç-Kam Research Series 1], edited by Çig . ˘ dem Kag˘ ıtçıbas¸ı, Hülya S¸imga, Dilek Barlas, Murat Önok, and Zeynep Gülen Göker, 203–240. Istanbul: Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları. Schäfers, Marlene. 2018. ‘“It Used to be Forbidden”: Kurdish Women and the Limits of Gaining Voice.’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 14(1): 3–24. Sirman, Nükhet. 1989. ‘Feminism in Turkey: A Short History,’ New Perspectives on Turkey 3: 1–34. Tekeli, S¸irin. 1986. ‘Emergence of the New Feminist Movement in Turkey.’ In The New Women’s Movement, edited by Drude Dahlerup, 179–199. Beverly Hills: Sage. . . Tekeli, S¸irin. 1998. ‘Birinci ve Ikinci Dalga Feminist Hareketlerin Kars¸ılas¸tırmalı Incelemesi Üzerine Bir Deneme [An Essay on the Comparative Study of First and Second Wave Feminist Movements].’ In 75 Yılda Kadınlar ve Erkekler [Women and Men in 75 Years], edited by Ays¸e Berktay Hacımirzaog˘lu, 337–347. . Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları. UNDP. 2016. Human Development Report 2016. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2016_human_ development_report.pdf Van Os, Nicole A.N.M. 2013. ‘Feminism, Philanthropy and Patriotism: Female Associational Life in the Ottoman Empire.’ Unpublished PhD diss., Leiden University. Yazıcı, Berna. 2012. ‘The Return to the Family: Welfare, State and Politics of Family in Turkey.’ Anthropological Quarterly 85(1): 103–140. Yılmaz, Zafer. 2015. ‘‘Strengthening the Family’ Policies in Turkey: Managing the Social Question and Armoring Conservative-Neoliberal Populism.’ Turkish Studies 16(3): 371–390. YSK. 2018. ‘Milletvekili Genel Seçim Ars¸ivi [General Parliamentary Election Archive].’ http://www.ysk. gov.tr/tr/milletvekili-genel-secim-arsivi/2644 Yüksel, Metin. 2006. ‘The Encounter of Kurdish Women with Nationalism in Turkey.’ Middle Eastern Studies 42(5): 777–802. . Zihniog˘ lu, Yaprak. 2003. Kadınsız Inkılap: Nezihe Muhittin, Kadınlar Halk Fırkası, Kadın Birlig˘i [Revolution . without Women: Nezihe Muhittin, Women’s People’s Party, Women’s Union]. Istanbul: Metis.

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25 RELIGIOUS MINORITIES Samim Akgönül

Introduction Nations are constructed social bodies based on the combination of several criteria. Nevertheless, due to the historical and political considerations, these ‘social organisations’ (Blom 1998) privilege one of these criteria as the condition sine qua non of belonging to that given nation. In the building process of the majority of ‘nations’ resulting from the Ottoman Empire, the main criterion of belonging has been religion, due to the ‘millet system’. The millet 1 system is a dynamic mechanism of management of identities in the Ottoman Empire. Established in 1454, right after the conquest/collapse of Constantinople, the mechanism, until 1856, kept the social peace in the huge territories of the Empire by creating a sort of non-territorial autonomy based on religious belonging. Even if the millet system was ethnicised during the 19th century because of the ‘new’ idea of nation, and officially supressed in 1856 in order to build an ‘Ottoman nation’, during four centuries all populations of the Ottoman Empire perceived others and themselves according to their religious belonging. Therefore, in the nations built on territoriality, minorities are perceived as those coming from outside, in the nations based on ethnicity, minorities are ethnic, and in the nations resulting from the Ottoman Empire, minorities are naturally religious. In other words, in the Post-Ottoman area, ‘religious minority’ is a pleonasm. Naturally, besides the common understanding, there are several minorities in Turkey, including ‘Muslim minorities’ who do not fit in the mainstream Muslimness, namely in the Turkish context, Sunni and Hanafi. Indeed, there is no commonly accepted definition of ‘minority’, either in a legal framework or in sociology. Generally, in the sociology of minorities, groups that are ‘different’ in some way from the surrounding society, with a strong awareness of this difference and that are not dominant, are considered to be minorities. According to this general understanding, many groups, including religious ones, may be seen as ‘minorities’ in Turkish society. In international law, things are a bit more precise. Based on Francesco Capotorti’s (1979) now famous report, a minority must be different ethnically, 1

Millet, meaning simply ‘nation’ in today’s Turkish, comes from the Arabic word mellah, meaning ‘word’ in the Koran. The word then began to mean ‘a community of individuals adopting a word or a holy book’ and came to being used to refer to religious communities that were accepted as such by the Ottoman administration (De Planhol 1997, 413).

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religiously, and/or linguistically from the majority, must be fewer in number, and its members must be citizens of the State where they reside (Akgönül 2013). No doubt, if these two frameworks, sociological and legal, are compulsory to study minorities, in a nation state sovereignty area, there must be a third framework, the political one, because even if groups fulfil these criteria, without the recognition of the state, a minority is still not a minority. This brings us to the main question of this chapter. What are the minorities recognised by the Turkish state? The minority regime of Turkey is still based on the Lausanne Treaty of 24 July 1923 where under the Western powers2 Turkey accepted articles 37–44 under the third section entitled ‘Protection of minorities’. Not only do these articles provide rights of equality to members of the minorities as citizens of Turkey but also some specific rights are provided to non-Muslims and non-Turkish speakers. Thus, we have to insist on two points that have never been accepted in Turkish public opinion or in the political arena. The Treaty of Lausanne mentions four different statutes in its body: all inhabitants of Turkey, all Turkish citizens, non-Muslims of Turkey, and non-Turkish speakers. Secondly, in this ‘sanctified’ document, there is no one single specific minority named openly. Therefore, if the Treaty of Lausanne was correctly applied, at least, on the one hand, other religious minorities than Greek Orthodox, Armenian Gregorian, and Jews, should benefit from its dispositions and, on the other hand, at least Kurds, as a linguistic minority should also be included in the minority regime. However, the application of this treaty has been, until today, partial and biased. Thus, only non-Muslim minorities could be included in the ‘minority regime’ (and not those. who are considered as ‘Muslims’ such as Alevis). In addition, only those concentrated in Istanbul have been the object of this regime (and not Anatolian non-Muslims such as Syriacs and Chaldeans concentrated in South-Eastern Turkey in days of yore). Furthermore, as a minority, non-Muslims of former traditional millets of the Ottoman Empire could have been included rather than Catholics or Protestants. Therefore, against technical and ethical dispositions of Lausanne, minorities in Turkey are, in the head of Turkish officials and in the perception of the public opinion, Greek Orthodox, Gregorian Armenians, and Jews. In this chapter, I will explore, briefly, the situation of several religious minorities in Turkey. The chapter will first focus on ‘traditional’ religious minorities but then examine groups that are not recognised by Ankara according to the Turkish interpretation of the Treaty of Lausanne, such as Alevis. At the end of the chapter, it will also mention some (historically and numerically) marginal non-Muslim minorities that are still present in the country.

Limited ‘Lausanne’: Greeks, Armenians, and Jews In Turkey, the third chapter of the Treaty of Lausanne titled ‘Protection . of Minorities’ is partially applied only to non-Muslim minorities, concentrated mainly in Istanbul. The Treaty does not specify a group by name. Only the term ‘non-Muslim’ is used . in some articles. De facto, the rights were provided to three groups who, being locals of Istanbul, were visible in the public eye: Orthodox Greeks, Gregorian Armenians, and Jews.

2

The Treaty of Lausanne that is considered in Turkey as the founding document of the Republic of Turkey (even if the Republic was declared on 29 October 1923, three months later), was signed by the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and the Slovenes, and the ‘Government Grand National Assembly of Turkey’.

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The Orthodox Greek minority The Orthodox Greek minority of Turkey, although very limited in number, is formed today by three . different identity groups. Istanbul Greeks – this group was exempted from the compulsory exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, decided in January 1923. Initially, the Turkish delegation had openly stated its desire to include the Greek Patriarchate of Phanar in the exchange. According to Turkish officials, the Patriarchate represented an alien institution that did not fit the definition of ‘Turkishness’, and threatened to betray Turkey.3 The efforts of the Greek and British delegations compelled Turkey to concede to the Patriarchate remaining in Turkey, but on one condition: the influence area . of the Patriarchate would be limited to the religious affairs of the Greek community in Istanbul, effectively making the Patriarchate a parish. This meant that the Patriarchate would lose its status as the leader of the millet in the Ottoman Empire, and would no longer be a political leader. In order for the Patriarchate to manage the religious affairs of a community, a community that required its services had to . exist in the first place. The Orthodox Greek population of Istanbul was excluded from the population exchange to provide this community. According to the Patriarchate, the title of this institution is the ‘Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople’. Turkish authorities name the same institution the ‘Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Phanar’, Phanar being the name of the district.4 The Greek Orthodox minority in Turkey had a population of 150,000 immediately after the Treaty of Lausanne. Around 15,000 of them remained in Turkey as Hellenic citizens, with resident permits, the rest being Turkish citizens. Many families had members from both citizenships. During the Cyprus crisis, this community served as tool of pressure by Turkish authorities. As a part of an organised riot, in September 1955, Greeks’ properties were attacked by Turkish mobs in order to show Turkish sensibilities on the Cyprus issue to . international public opinion. Moreover, in 1964, around 12,000 Greeks of Istanbul with Hellenic citizenship were expelled from Turkey, along with their families and . relatives, who were Turkish citizens. After 1964, the number of Greek inhabitants of Istanbul declined constantly, especially with the rise of a nationalist and . Islamist discourse. Today, their number is estimated around 3,000, with most Greeks from Istanbul now living in Athens and abroad (Örs 2009). Since the 2000s, there is a slow revival of the community within the process of reconciliation between Greece and Turkey but also the economic crises in Greece compared to the economic dynamism in Turkey. Orthodox Greeks of Imvros and Tenedos (their names have been changed by Turkish authorities and are now Gökçeada and Bozcaada) – this community could stay in Turkey according to the treaty of Lausanne. In 1923, their population was exclusively Greek Orthodox but these two islands remained under Turkey’s sovereignty to guarantee the security of the Dardanelle Strait. According to article 14 of the Treaty of Lausanne: The islands of Imbros and Tenedos, remaining under Turkish sovereignty, shall enjoy a special administrative organisation composed of local elements and furnishing every guarantee for the native non-Moslem population in so far as concerns local administration and the protection of persons and property.

3 4

For the image of the Patriarchate and its evolution over time Akgönül (2002). On this subject, see Akgönül (2005).

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Needless to say, this autonomy has never been provided to the Islands. Since 1964, this small island community with some specific sociological characteristics, declined. dramatically, especially after the closure of the Greek school. If very few migrated in Istanbul, many left Turkey. Today, local Greeks living abroad reunite every year in Imvros on 15 August for the Panaghia festival. The Arabic-speaking Orthodox of Antioch is a specific community of south-eastern Turkey. They remained in Antioch during the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey because this city did not become part of the Turkish Republic . until 1939. Since the 1990s, there has been a constant emigration of Arab Orthodox to Istanbul. As the state and public perception is based on religious belonging in Turkey, they are considered as ‘Greeks’ (Rum), creating a tension within the remaining Greek community (Neyzi 2004). Their . number in Istanbul, Mersin, and Antioch is estimated to be 8,000. . The Greek minority of Turkey (now all concentrated in Istanbul except a couple of thousand in Mersin and Antioch) suffered, from the 1950s to the 2000s, as scapegoats in the Cyprus issue and from the negative interpretation of the reciprocity principle between Greece and Turkey. With each crisis between Greece and Turkey, the Greek minority of Turkey has been punished. The most notable examples are, in 1955, the 6–7 September attacks; in 1964, the expulsion of Greek citizens followed by their families; and in 1974, the expropriation of properties of Greek foundations. As for the use of ‘reciprocity’, it takes its roots from article 45 of the Treaty of Lausanne, providing the same rights to the Muslim minority of Greece. Both countries have read this article as a ‘right to punish’ their own citizens. Since 1923, each time that one country violated minority rights, the other one did the . same. Even today, opening the Orthodox Theological School of Chalki (Heybeliada) in Istanbul, closed since 1971, is not permitted by Turkish authorities simply because the Athens’ Mosque is not constructed. The Armenian minority As an ancient autochthone community, Armenians are one of the main identity groups of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian millet was seen as millet-i sadıka (the loyal nation) during the last century of the Empire until the insane nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress led to the genocide of 1915. The Armenian minority in Turkey suffers from a complex international environment. This minority of approximately 70,000 members, mostly . living in Istanbul, carries the memory of the massacres of 1915, officially recognised as genocide by Western countries. At every Turkish-European crisis due to this classification, the minority feels trapped because the Turkish political leaders show them as targets. Additionally, non-existent relations between Turkey and Armenia complicate links between the Armenians of Turkey and the Armenians of Armenia. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia also continues to poison relations. But, through a newspaper published in Turkish, Agos, and its figurehead, Hrant Dink, Turkish mainstream public opinion has been informed of the existential and practical problems of this minority. Many Turkish intellectuals rallied to the cause of this minority, through the dynamism created by Agos. During the 2000s, Hrant Dink became one of the most followed and prominent intellectual figures of contemporary Turkey, until his assassination in January 2007. This murder, followed by a spectacular funeral, can be seen as an electric shock for Turkish public opinion. Since his murder and thanks to Dink’s courageous position, the Armenians of Turkey can express themselves more openly.

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A small number of Armenians of Turkey are Catholics or Protestants. Furthermore, Turkey has been receiving illegal immigrants from Armenia since 1991. Immigration rose sharply after the devastating earthquake of 1998. Although the exact number of illegal Armenian immigrants living and working in Turkey is unknown, estimates vary between 40,000 and 100,000; 90% of all Armenian immigrants are illegal and almost all are women and children (Özinian 2009). The presence of Armenian illegal immigrants is known and purposely ‘overlooked’ by the administration in Turkey. This community was almost used as a hostage in unexpected developments in the relations between Turkey and Armenia. Following the signing of two protocols on establishing diplomatic relations and opening borders in October 2009, expectations were high for both parties, but when the two governments failed to ratify the protocols, Turkey used the illegal immigrants in Turkey as a trump card. In October 2000, when the US Congress brought up the Armenian Genocide issue once again, Tansu Çiller, the opposition leader in Turkey at the time and the leader of the True Path Party (Dog˘ ru Yol Partisi, DYP), suggested the deportation of Armenian citizens in Turkey as retaliation.5 When France adopted the label genocide in October . 2006, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) Istanbul deputy S¸ükrü Elekdag˘ made the same suggestion (EREN 2006). Another threat of deporting illegal Armenian immigrants in retaliation was made in March 2010. Speaking on how Armenia did not follow through with the requirements of the signed protocols, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdog˘ an said to the BBC: There are 170,000 Armenians in my country. 70,000 of them are my citizens. But the rest, we turn a blind eye. But it turns out that I may tell them ‘Off you go,’ sooner or later. Why will I do this? They are not my citizens. I don’t have to keep them in my country. We approach them with understanding, but they keep pushing us with this attitude and they don’t know it. (BBC 2010) This is reminiscent of how the Greek citizens were used as a tool of pressure on the Cyprus issue in 1964, and eventually deported (Demir and Akar 2004). The Jewish minority Jews were welcomed in the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century while escaping from the Spanish inquisition. Thus, these mostly Sephardic Jews speaking in Ladino (today, a ‘Jewish dialect’ of Spanish) have settled by the central power in several cities of the Empire . especially in Salonika, Sarajevo, Edirne, and of course I stanbul in the Balkan territories, but . . also in Bursa, Amasya, and later Izmir in the Anatolian part of the Empire (Inalcık 2002). Today, almost 90% of Jews in Turkey are Sephardic. The remaining 10% consist of Marans (Jews with Portuguese origins descending from Italian culture), Ashkenazi (Jews descending from German culture, having sought refuge in Eastern Europe), and Karaites (Hellenised Turks who joined a Jewish denomination born in Iraq in the ninth century). The small Jewish community in Antakya descends from the Arabic culture. There is a very small number of autochthon or local Jews, who are the Romaniots from the Byzantine Galatia.

5

Hürriyet, 2 October 2000.

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Unlike the other identity groups of the Ottoman Empire (especially Greeks and Armenians), in the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews did not develop a strong nationalist and/or Zionist movement. On the contrary, many Jewish intellectuals, such as Moiz Kohen (Munis Tekinalp) participated in the Turkish nationalist movement. Nevertheless, during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, an important part of the Ottoman Jews found themselves outside of the borders, in the Balkans and in the Middle East. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the first census shows approximately 80,000 Jewish citizens of the new Turkey. However, anti-Semitic (and in general anti-non-Muslim) policies of 1930s and 1940s, such as, ‘Citizen, speak in Turkish’ campaigns in 1930s, the forced exile of Jews of Eastern Thrace in 1934,6 the forced unarmed military service for men from 20 to 40 years old in 1941, the ‘tax on capital’ applied unequally to Muslims and non-Muslims, especially Jews in 1942, and finally the Islamisation of the political discourse after 1950 with the Democrat Party, pushed Turkish Jews to migrate too, mostly to Israel after 1948 but also to the USA and Western Europe. Today, according to estimates, there are still 30,000 Jewish Turkish citizens, mainly . in Istanbul. Since the 2010s there has been a paradoxical development on the situation of Turkish Jews. On the one hand, religiously speaking, there are some improvements precisely because the regime is an Islamist one, seeing Jews as Dhimmis, a tolerated and protected group under the Muslim domination. For example, on 13 December 2015, for the first time in the Turkish Republic, the . Jewish Hanukkah feast was publicly celebrated with an event held in Ortaköy Square in Istanbul. From the same perspective, in March 2015, the Synagogue of Edirne has been restored and reopened with official participation. The reopening of the Synagogue in a city where there are no longer any Jews has been presented as a symbol of ‘tolerance’ (AA 2015). On the other hand, since 2009, when the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an created a diplomatic scandal in Davos in front of Shimon Peres in order to attract the sympathy of the Muslim world and to become the leader of the Middle East, anti-Semitic discourse became ‘normal’ in Turkey. Since then, at each crisis between Turkey and Israel, Turkish Jews feel targeted by the power, but also in their everyday life. For example, in 2010, during the crisis of Mavi Marmara7 or in 2017 after Washington’s decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Jews of Turkey felt targeted by anti-Semitic discourse. One should mention another subgroup indirectly related to the Jews of Turkey, and often the target of the general anti-Semitic atmosphere: the dönmes or the Sabbateans, the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, who first declared himself as Messiah in 1665, and then converted to Islam under the Sultan’s threat in 1666 bringing with him his followers, especially in Salonica (S¸is¸man 2015). The group is still considered to comprise ‘fake Muslims’, especially by political Islamic discourse that associates them with the Turkish Kemalist elite that betrayed the Islamic way of life during the foundation of the Republic (Baer. 2008). It is clear that these three minorities, mostly concentrated in Istanbul and the main objects of the minority regime, have been seen since the foundation of the Republic, and are seen still today, as allogeneic. They are treated not as equal citizens but are always considered as a problem in relation to the third countries and/or topics in foreign policy: Greece and Cyprus 6 7

Until the 1930s, there was a considerable population of provincial Jews in Eastern Thrace. This . community migrated to Istanbul in the aftermath of the events of 1934 (Bali 2008). In 2010 a humanitarian fleet led by the ship Mavi Marmara attempted to reach Gaza but was attacked by Israeli soldiers, see Aytürk (2011).

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for Greeks of Turkey; Armenia and the genocide issue for Armenians of Turkey; Israel and the Palestinian issue for Jews of Turkey. In short, minorities, ‘aliens’, and those who are ‘not one of us’ can very easily be sacrificed for other interests. It is almost impossible for them to be viewed as individuals.

Alevis: an unrecognised minority Alevism is hard to define. The general understanding is to call Alevism ‘heterodox Islam’. But the definition of the internal and external actors varies according to time, to context, and to the interlocutors. Some see in Alevism a branch of Islam, others, such as Irène Melikoff, an original syncretic religion (Melikoff 2001), while many Alevis consider it a philosophy and a way of life. Elise Massicard suggests that because of these many different definitions it is an ‘identity movement without an identity’ (Massicard 2012). Precisely, we may see in Alevism a ‘movement’, especially since the 1960s when it became an urban phenomenon, with the needs of conceptualisation and self-definition brought by urbanity. There is no doubt that the Alevis, with a population of 15–20 million, are both sociologically and demographically a minority. However, this qualification has two inherent structural problems. First, the Alevis have collaborated with the founding elite of the country, supported the elite in bringing Sunni Islam under control, and have become somewhat ‘dominant’ in this respect, even if they could never obtain an equal social status. When secular westernised Kemalists obtained power, they have been seen as second class because they were Alevis and rural, and when Islamist Sunnis obtained power they have been treated as heretic urbanised deviants. Nevertheless, on the structures of Turkish society they are still not seen as allogeneic as non-Muslims. On the contrary, the attempt to keep Sunnis under control led to the state and state authorities becoming Sunni via the Office of Religious Affairs, resulting in complexities with regard to compulsory religion courses in schools and the funding of religious practices. Migration to large cities and emigration to Europe, starting in the 1960s, created an urban Alevi identity, with recognition demands being made on a political level. Notwithstanding, Alevism had long been regarded a way of life or a philosophy until then. This new definition (despite the old one still being in circulation) made the recognition of the Alevi faith a key demand for Alevis (Soner and Toktas¸ 2011). One must emphasise that until the 1990s there were no such demands. In the 1990s, the Alevis born in urban centres developed a religious identity in opposition to the rise of political Islam. The same political Islam, especially in 2007–2010, tried to satisfy Alevis by an ‘opening’ where the recognition of Alevism as a religion, but also the official recognition of Cemevis, worship places, including the integration of dedes and babas in the very Sunni administration for religious affairs, was discussed (Soner and Toktas¸ 2011). While Alevi institutions such as Cem Foundation participated in this process and aimed to be integrated in the state administration, other Alevi organisations such as Pir Sultan Abdal Foundation have been strongly against it. All in all, when Political Sunni Islam obtained full domination in the state apparatus, these debates ended simply because the Sunni basis of the AKP government could not give a status to those it sees as heretics. When it comes to ‘minority rights’ for Alevis, one touches the second structural problem. The Alevis strongly reject a minority ‘status’. The status of being a minority in Turkey is tainted to such a level that the largest religious and ethnic minorities of the country, the Alevis and the Kurds, respectively, neither demand nor accept this positioning. The reason for this denial may be discovered in the founding structures of the Turkish Republic where, following the millet system, non-Muslims have been considered ‘minorities’ and, in addition, 334

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oppressed during the entire history of the Republic. Therefore, in the eyes of Alevi and Kurdish ‘minorities’, being a minority is equivalent to being second-class citizens.

Other de facto religious minorities Assyro-Chaldean Christians have been concentrated in South-Eastern Turkey, especially the region of Mardin. It is one of the oldest communities in Mesopotamia, concentrated around Tur Abdin (mountain of the servants of God) in the Midyat region and the Monastery of Mor Gabriel, considered to be the oldest Orthodox Syriac monastery still in function. Since the 1960s, especially because of the Kurdish conflict in the region but . also because of the lack of minority protection, Assyro-Chaldeans emigrated massively to Istanbul, but also to Western Europe and especially Scandinavian countries. Today, . the number of Assyro-Chaldeans in Turkey is about 20,000, with 15,000 of them living in Istanbul. Since the 1990s, AssyroChaldeans have entered into a process of recognition and . claimed to be a part of Lausanne regime, especially trough Sabro, a monthly published in Istanbul. One must notice that since the end of the 2000s, these claims have been partially satisfied thanks to the evolution in the ‘General Directorate of Foundations’, a central state institution managing the entire network of Pious foundations of Turkey. Within this directorate, there is a special bureau in charge of non-Muslim religious foundations. In 2008, a businessman from the Greek community, Laki Vingas, was elected to represent specifically non-Muslim foundations. Between 2008 and 2014, seven non-Muslim communities and their religious foundations could be included in the regime: Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Bulgarian Orthodox, and Georgians. In addition, there has been a continuing violation of minority rights since 1974 when the Turkish state started to seize properties of non-Muslim foundations, pretexting a declaration dating back to 1936. After a decision of the European Court of Human Rights in 2007, where Turkey was condemned because of the illegal seizure of properties of the Foundation of Phanar Greek School for Boys,8 Turkey had to change its law to allow non-Muslim foundations to register their confiscated properties; 116 non-Muslim foundations claimed the registration of 1,560 properties. The General Directorate of Foundations accepted 332 registrations and asked the payment of indemnities for 21 of them. Therefore, in 2017, only 22% of confiscated properties could be given back to the religious minorities, including Syriac ones, especially the Mor Gabriel monastery (Oran 2018). The Roman Catholic Church has existed in Anatolia since. Byzantium. . The number. of its followers is estimated at 20,000 with the majority living in Istanbul, Izmir, Antakya, Iskenderun, Diyarbakır, Trabzon, Tarsus, and Adana. The community consists of the descendants of Ottoman Levantines and Westerners living in Turkey. Similar to Protestants, Catholics in the country are under a suspicious eye. Attacks against Catholic clergymen are on the rise lately. On 5 February 2006, the Italian Catholic Priest Andrea Santoro was shot dead at the Church of Santa Maria in Trabzon, where the Vatican had appointed him. Committed by a 16-year-old student, this murder occurred at a time of crisis regarding the cartoons of Mohammad published in Denmark. This was also a time when the media was frequently reporting an increase in missionary activities in Trabzon, the abundance of apartment-churches in the city, and the claims that priests were paying 100 dollars per person to attract them to the church.

8

Apostolides and others vs. Turkey, 27/03/2007, no. 45628/99.

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On 1 July 2006, the French priest of the Roman Catholic Church in Samsun, Pierre Brunissen, was stabbed in the hip. The assailant was reported to be a diagnosed schizophrenic who had previously filed a complaint against Brunissen for spreading Christian propaganda. On . 17 December 2007, Father Adriano Francini of the Church of Saint Antoine in Bayraklı, I. zmir was stabbed by a 19-year-old assailant. The assailant was reported to have come to Izmir from Balıkesir to learn more about Christianity,. and to have assaulted the priest in a sudden flash of fury after the mass he attended. The Iskenderun-based Catholic clergyman Luigi Padovese was stabbed to death in his home on 3 June 2010. His driver, also reported to be a Catholic, was arrested on suspicion of carrying out the attack. There are a number of Protestant churches in Turkey. These are scattered around the country and represent a very small percentage of the total population. These communities consist of ‘new’ Christians – Muslims who have converted – or foreigners settled in Turkey. The activities of Protestant churches in Turkey were always regarded with suspicion and closely followed. Starting with the 1990s, society was convinced that these churches have intent of proselytism. As a consequence of this atmosphere, the Malatya branch of the . Istanbul-based Zirve Publishing House, a Protestant religious publisher, was attacked on 18 April 2007. A German national, Tilnman Geske, and a Turkish national, Necati Aydın, died in the attack, and Ug˘ ur Yüksel died of injuries in hospital. Upon arriving at the scene, the police arrested five suspects attempting to flee by jumping out of a third-floor window, while the prosecutor focused more on ‘missionary activities’ than the murder itself.

Conclusion: extermination, assimilation, folklorisation Anatolia and Eastern Thrace that form the territory of Turkey today are one of the most religiously mixed regions in the world. Indeed, this territory has been not only at the centre of multiple multi-religious Empires from the Roman Empire until the Ottoman Empire but also it is located at the crossroads of three Abrahamic religions and also pre-Abrahamic religions and their branches and twigs. Therefore, it is not surprising to still see the silts of this multi-religious past in Turkey. Nevertheless, between the 18th and 20th centuries, competing nationalisms entered in a harsh process of ‘population unmixing’ (Weiner and Teitelbaum 2001). Starting at the beginning of the 20th century, the first step was extermination; namely the erasure of the non-Muslim indigenous populations from Anatolia and Thrace. Two breaking momenta of this long process are 1909–1915 (for Armenians), and 1920–1930 (for Greeks). But this process was set to continue during the entire republican era especially between the 1930s and 1960s. The result is an unappealing situation: in 2017, the population of Turkey is around 80 million and the number of non-Muslims does not exceed 200,000 (0.25%). At the same time, non-Turkish Muslims have been the object of strong and coercive assimilation policies, especially through the repressive apparatus (laws and decrees banning ‘non-Turkish behaviours’) and ideological apparatus (national education, cultural policies, etc) of the Turkish state. The assimilation process in question targeted mainly three types of population: 

Non-Turkish speaking Muslims who immigrated to Anatolia during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, especially from the Balkans and the Caucasus. This policy is a complete success insofar as Bosnians, Albanians, Cretans or Circassians, Dagestanees, Laz living in Turkey are successfully assimilated, becoming, for some, committed Turkish nationalists.

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Alevis who have been object of discrimination, sunnification policies and from time-totime victims of violent attacks, as in 1978 in Malatya or 1997 in Sivas. For Turkishspeaking Alevis, their assimilation to the Sunnisme is a failure, for Kurdish-speaking Alevis, especially concentrated in Dersim, their assimilation to Turkishness is a failure too. Kurds who were forced to assimilate from the 1930s until the 1990s. On the contrary, some developed a reactionary Kurdish identity, entering into a violent resistance, including terrorist attacks. .That being said, there is a significant number of Kurds living . in western cities such as Istanbul or Izmir who have been successfully assimilated to Turkishness.

Extermination and assimilation being partially successful, the remaining identity differences have been folklorised and transformed into regional harmless touristic curiosities, such as accents, food and drinks, outfits, or music. First the folklorisation process concerned the Muslim populations of Anatolia. Then, after the 1990s, non-Muslim minorities have been also folklorised, especially by the bourgeois portion of the country, regretting the multireligious past of the cities. This folklorisation forms the basis of today’s craze for Greek, Armenian, or Jewish culture, music, and culinary specialities. Turkish society has always been a deeply religious and conservative one, especially because of the heritage of the millet system described above. However, this religiosity has never been used as the main tool of politics until the arrival of political nationalist Islam as the single dominant power. Generations born under the AKP rule are and probably will be, much more religious and much more nationalist. In such a context, the future of minorities, namely non-Sunnis, appears uncertain and paradoxical. On the one hand, the remaining non-minorities such as Greek orthodox, Jews, and Armenians are more and more considered as Dhimmis, under the domination of Sunni power and are, in certain ways, better protected as religious communities without the possibility for their members to become equal individual citizens. On the other hand, the general ultranationalist and ultra-Sunni discourse will transform these communities into constant targets during crisis moments. As for Alevis, the situation is getting worse: because they are seen as ‘Muslims’ they cannot reach a recognition, but at the same time they are categorised as suspected Turks and, thus, will always be on a knife edge.

References Akgönül, Samim. 2002. ‘Les activités du Patriarcat ‘oeucuménique’ du Phanar dans les années 1990 et l’opinion publique turque [The Activities of the Phanar ‘Ecumenical Patriarchate’ in the 1990s and Turkish Public Opinion].’ CEMOTI 33: 195–216. Akgönül, Samim. 2005. Le patriarcat orthodoxe de Constantinople: de l’isolement à l’internationalisation [The Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople: From isolation to internationalization]. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Akgönül, Samim. 2013. The Minority Concept in the Turkish Context: Practices and Perceptions in Turkey, Greece and France. Leiden: Brill. . AA. 2015. ‘Vakıflar ‘Hos¸görüyü’ Yeniden Ins¸a Etti [Foundations Rebuilt the ‘Tolerance’]. Anadolu Agency, 24 March.https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/yasam/vakiflar-hosgoruyu-yeniden-insa-etti/64186 . Aytürk, Ilker. 2011. ‘The Coming of an Ice Age? Turkish–Israeli Relations Since 2002.’ Turkish Studies 12(4): 675–687. Baer, Marc David. 2008. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Stanford: Stanford University Press. . Bali, Rıfat. 2008. 1934 Trakya Olayları [Trakya Cases]. Istanbul: Kitabevi Yayınları.

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26 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Bekir S. Gür

Introduction . The number of Imam-Hatip schools has always been a controversial topic in Turkey (Bozan . 2007; Gökaçtı 2005; Öcal 2007). The drastic rise in the number of Imam-Hatip schools in the last several years, the discourse on raising a pious generation by Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, the leader of ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), and the new elective courses on religious education in 2012 attracted huge domestic and international attention. These developments have been depicted as signs of the Islamisation of Turkey’s secular education system (Gür 2016). To understand the growing demand for and . revival of Imam-Hatip schools since 2002, it is necessary to examine the role assigned to religion in the strictly secular education system of Turkey since 1923 and the rise and fall of . Imam-Hatip schools before and after . the military intervention on 28 February 1997. Moreover, to contextualise its policy on Imam-Hatip schools, one should also examine the broader educational policies of AKP rule. This chapter starts with a brief history of the education system and. religion in modern Turkey, with an emphasis on the establishment, growth, and decline of Imam-Hatip schools. . It then discusses the AKP’s . policy on religious education by focusing on the revival of ImamHatips. It argues that Imam-Hatip schools cannot be considered as a threat to secular democracy as they are strictly controlled by the state. The chapter ends with a discussion of the current challenges and some possible future trajectories. It contends that while there has . been a revival of Imam-Hatips, the glory days are long gone. It also calls . for a further pluralisation of the education system in Turkey. For the sake of simplicity, I mam-Hatips are used . to refer to both Imam-Hatip middle schools and high schools.

The education system and religion in modern Turkey Since the last years of the Ottoman state, Turkish state officials have been required to supervise and control all school systems (Kaplan 2006). The Law of the Unification of Education was authorised by the newly established Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1924. With this law, other than those established by foreign citizens, all private or state schools were transferred to the Ministry of Education. Although it was not included in the law, 339

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madrasas, namely traditional education institutions providing religious education, were immediately closed down (Öcal 2007, 2011). The eradication of all madrasas was directly related to the conviction of the founders of the Republic that a religious mind-set was one of the factors leading to the decline of . the Ottoman state (Gökaçtı 2005). Instead, a theology college was established at the then Istanbul University (Darulfünun). Moreover, to train imams (religious leaders, including those who lead prayer) and hatips (preachers/orators), the first . I. mam-Hatip schools were established in many cities in 1924. However, all except two Imam-Hatip schools were closed down by 1926, the remaining two were closed down in 1930. Religious courses were removed from the curriculum of all high schools in 1924, from all middle .schools in 1927, and from all primary schools in 1929. In 1933, the theology college at Istanbul University was closed down on the basis that there was an insufficient number of students (Öcal 2007). In 1945, Turkey moved from a single-party era of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) to a multi-party era and allowed the establishment of new political parties. This development had huge implications for religious education in Turkey. The CHP made some changes to meet with the demands of people. A new theology college was established at Ankara University in 1949. An elective course for elementary schools was introduced in 1949 and for middle schools in 1956 (Öcal 2007). In short, the transition to multi-party democracy triggered an unstoppable struggle for the establishment and growth of . Imam-Hatips.

. The establishment and growth of Imam-Hatip schools (1951) After the 1950 general election, the new . . government led by the Democrat Party opened Imam-Hatip schools in Ankara, Adana, I stanbul, Isparta, Maras¸, Konya, and Kayseri in 1951. . The aim of establishing Imam-Hatip schools was to train enlightened and well-educated imams and preachers (Öcal 2007). A notion of reconciliation between ‘the traditional’ and . ‘the modern’ in Turkey plays at the foundation of Imam-Hatip schools (As¸lamacı . and Kaymakcan 2017). In comparison to traditional madrasas in the Ottoman state, Imam-Hatip schools were considered as an innovative and modern form of religious education in Turkey (Gökaçtı 2005). . The establishment of Imam-Hatip schools created an ongoing dispute (Öcal 2007). On the one hand, conservative citizens considered them as schools where their children could . study both secular as well as religious/moral courses. Most of the Imam-Hatip schools were built by donations from the general public and they were financially and morally supported by religious and conservative families. Moreover, conservative families were more com. fortable with the idea of sending their daughters to attend Imam-Hatips as they have a high confidence in such schools (Bozan, 2007). On the other hand, some perceived. the mushrooming of these schools as a threat to the secular state. They argued that Imam-Hatip schools educate fundamentalist individuals and accordingly are a potential threat to the secular . principles of the Republic (Cos¸kun and S¸entürk 2012). Thus, since the earlier days of Imam-Hatips, they have insisted that these schools should be viewed as vocational schools that .only train religious personnel (Öcal 2007). Also, while one of the effective functions of Imam-Hatips has been to increase the schooling rates of girls, secularists have maintained that girls should not be allowed to attend these schools as they cannot work as imams or hatips (Gökaçtı 2005). . The first Higher Islamic Institution was. established in Istanbul in 1959 to meet with the demand of soon-to-be graduates of Imam-Hatip schools to continue their higher 340

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education (Gökaçtı 2005). The number of Higher Islamic Institutions increased over. time with increasing demand and thus new schools were opened in Konya, Kayseri, Izmir, Erzurum, Bursa, Samsun, and Yozgat between . 1962 and 1979. While the establishment of these institutions allowed the graduates of Imam-Hatip schools to continue their .higher education, the move to establish such a route for them meant that the graduates of ImamHatips could continue their education only in Islamic studies and thus implicitly . acknowledged that the graduates of Imam-Hatip schools could not study at universities. As a matter of fact, they could not continue their education even in colleges of theology at universities. Following the 1973 election, socially conservative and religious leader Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP) .became a partner of the coalition government. This government changed the legal status. of Imam-Hatips from ‘schools’ (okul) to ‘high schools’ (lise) to make sure that the graduates of Imam-Hatips could freely continue their studies . in universities without discrimination. The number of Imam-Hatips flourished in the second half of the 1970s as Erbakan’s party became a coalition partner in the National Front Governments from 1975 to 1978 (Çag˘ lar 2013). With the appearance of pro-Islamic and more conservative . parties in the 1970s, students and graduates of Imam-Hatip schools became a grassroots element of these parties (Cos¸kun and . S¸entürk 2012). After the military coups and interventions in 1971 and 1980, the opening of Imam-Hatip schools was halted and some were even closed. Nonetheless, the number of these schools continued to increase from seven in 1951 to 19 in 1960; by 1970 it reached 72, and by 1980 there were 374 such schools (Öcal 2007).

The military coup of 1980 The Turkish parliament was dissolved, the cabinet was deposed, and party leaders were arrested after the military coup on 12 September 1980. The armed forces, led by the National Security Council, took over political power; the council and its appointed regional and local commanders ‘were put in charge of education, the press, chambers of commerce and trade unions’ (Zürcher 2004, 279). The military junta of .1980 held a contradictory attitude toward religious education. While the opening of new Imam-Hatips was forbidden by the junta after the coup . in an effort to contain the perceived danger of religious reaction (Öcal 2007), existing Imam-Hatips were supported by the military against the perceived danger of communism (Çag˘ lar 2013). Moreover, while wearing headscarves was banned at universities during the 1980s, the 1982 Constitution mandated that religious culture and ethics (morality) courses become mandatory for all students. In short, state policy-makers successfully promoted a religious version of nationalism in the school system and thus the 1982 Constitution affirms the central role of the state in educating and controlling the youth population (Kaplan 2006). With the law on higher education and the establishment of the Board of Higher Education (YÖK), all of the Higher Islamic Institutes were standardised following the model of the college of divinity at Ankara University and transformed into colleges of divinity under different universities in their regions in 1982. The number of colleges of divinity continued to rise in order to meet with demand and reached 22 by the mid-1990s (Gökaçtı 2005).

. The golden age of Imam-Hatips . Some Imam-Hatip high schools became selective schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s, meaning that they chose their students via centralised/national or local exams because there 341

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was more demand than available places. A famous report published in 1990 by the Associa. tion of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen (TÜSIAD) called for the reinstatement .of the Law of the Unification of Education. Contrary to how parents may have perceived ImamHatip high schools and their students, the report strictly covered them as vocational schools/ students.. It paid special attention to the rising number of students as well as the bright graduates of Imam-Hatips who got into popular programmes such. as law, medicine, and political science at top Turkish universities. Thus, it suggested that . Imam-Hatips should strictly be treated as vocational schools, there should be only a few I mam-Hatips to train imams/hatips, . and the graduates of Imam-Hatips should not be allowed to go into any programme except theology for higher education (Balog˘ lu 1990). While the report received harsh criticism from then President Turgut Özal as well as from conservative and liberal segments of Turkish society, by the early 1990s it was very clear that secularists wanted to stop the rise and success . of Imam-Hatips. . The success of graduates of Imam-Hatips even in secular subjects at university entrance examinations . fanned the flames of secularist concerns. Mustafa Kıyıklık, a graduate of Kartal Anatolian Imam-Hatip High School, received the highest score in the highly competitive national . university entrance exam (ÖYS) in 1994. The following year another student from the same Imam-Hatip, Selçuk S¸ims¸ek, got . the second highest score in the national university entrance exam (Bozan, 2007). Thus, Imam-Hatips were living their golden age and their status had never been so high. Everything came to an abrupt end with the 28 February 1997 Process.

The 28 February Process After the general election of December 1995, a coalition government was formed, but it lasted for only six months. Afterwards, pro-Islamic Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP) and Tansu Çiller’s True Path Party (Dog˘ru Yol Partisi, DYP) formed a new coalition government and Erbakan became the Prime Minister. The Turkish military issued a . memorandum on 28 February 1997. The memorandum ordered, among others, Imam-Hatip middle schools to be shut down, despite popular demand for these schools. Not only Erbakan’s party but also all of the other institutions of the conservative movement (including many non-governmental organisations, media institutions, universities, and bureaucratic institutions) were targeted by the military (Çag˘ lar 2013). The military saw the growth of the . Imam-Hatip schools ‘as both [a] symptom and cause of Turkey’s drift away from Ataturk’s secular vision’ (Makovsky 2015, 6). The . coalition government formed after the resignation of Erbakan in June 1997 .shut some 600 Imam-Hatip middle schools (Bozan 2007). Moreover, to stop the growth of Imam-Hatips, the Board of Higher Education introduced a new points system for college entrance and thus victimised the graduates of vocational schools, including . . Imam-Hatips (Gür 2016). As a result, it became almost impossible for Imam-Hatip graduates to enter into selective college programmes, . including law, political science, medicine, or engineering. Thus, the total number of Imam-Hatip students dropped sharply after the military memorandum, from 193,000 in 1998 to 65,000 in 2002 when the AKP came into power (see Table 26.1).

The AKP’s policy on religious education (2002–2017) Soon after and a direct consequence of the 28 February 1997 military intervention, the RP was shut down by the Constitutional Court on 16 January 1998 for being a centre/ focal point against the secular system. The Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP), which was 342

Religious education . Table 26.1 The number of Imam-Hatip high schools and of their students, as well as the percentage of . Imam-Hatip students in all high schools (1995–2016) . . Year Number of Imam-Hatip Number of students in Percentage of Imam. high schools Imam-Hatip high schools Hatip students in all high schools

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

479 601 604 612 604 600 558 536 552 445 453 455 456 458 465 493 537 708 854 1,017 1,149 1,452

186,688 192,727 178,046 192,786 134,224 91,620 71,742 64,534 84,898 73,563 108,064 120,668 129,274 143,637 198,581 235,639 268,245 380,771 474,096 546,443 555,870 506,516

10.9% 9.3% 8.6% 9.6% 6.6% 4.3% 3.1% 2.6% 2.4% 2.4% 3.3% 3.6% 4.0% 3.7% 4.7% 5.0% 5.6% 7.6% 8.7% 9.6% 9.6% 8.7%

Source: The Ministry of National Education statistics and the author’s calculations.

established in place of the RP, was also shut down by the Constitutional Court on 22 June 2001. Two political groups emerged from the FP. Following the lead of Erbakan, the more ‘traditionalists’ continued their political life under the umbrella of the Saadet Party (Saadet Partisi, SP). Following the lead of Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an and Abdullah Gül, the more ‘progressivists’ and younger generation founded the AKP on 14 August 2001. According to Turkish historian Kemal Karpat (2013, 246–247), the AKP had ‘the most liberal party programme’ among the major political parties in Turkey and defined secularism ‘in line with the realities of Turkey’. The AKP distanced itself from the more ‘Islamist’ ideology of the RP, defined itself with terms in line with Western liberal democracy, respected the religious diversity within Turkish society, and adopted a pro-EU and multilateral foreign policy perspective. The AKP won a landslide victory in the 2002 general election. As opposed to the nationalistic outlook of its predecessors, the AKP had a reformist and internationalist outlook in its education policy (Çelik and Gür 2013; Gür 2016). While many saluted the AKP’s success in increasing access and the finance available to education (World Bank 2013), the role of religion in the education system has always been controversial in relation to the alleged threats to secularism during AKP rule. 343

Religious education . Table 26.2 The number of Imam-Hatip middle schools and of their students, as well as the percentage of . Imam-Hatip students in all middle schools (2012–2016) . . . Year Number of ImamNumber of Imam-Hatip Percentage of Imam-Hatip students Hatip middle schools middle school students in all middle schools

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

1,099 1,361 1,597 1,961 2,777

94,467 240,015 385,830 524,295 657,020

1.7% 4.4% 7.3% 10.1% 11.9%

Source: The Ministry of National Education statistics and the author’s calculations.

. The revival of Imam-Hatip schools As . I have mentioned before, following the military’s 1997 intervention in Turkish politics, Imam-Hatip . middle schools were shut down and the college admission system was changed to make Imam-Hatip schools less attractive for those who would like to pursue higher. education in a programme other than theology. These punitive moves . to stop the rise of ImamHatip schools proved to be very effective, and the percentage of Imam-Hatip students, from 10.9% in 1995, dropped sharply after 1997 to almost 2.6% in 2002 (Table 26.1). When the AKP came to power in 2002, among the most pressing demands of conservatives and liberals were two highly delicate issues in education: . (1) changing the admission system so that graduates of vocational schools, including Imam-Hatips, could freely pursue higher education without discrimination, and (2) lifting the ban on wearing headscarves at college campuses, which had been harshly implemented since 28 February. 1997. . During the AKP’s rule, Imam-Hatips started to attract more students, and the share of ImamHatip high school students within all high schools rose from 2.6% in 2002 to 9.6% in 2014 and dropped slightly to 8.7% as of 2016, albeit the current percentage is lower than pre-1997 levels (Table. 26.1) (Gür 2016). Moreover, for the first time during the AKP’s rule, the total number of Imam-Hatip high school students started to drop in 2016. The ban on wearing headscarves on college campuses was also lifted by the Board of Higher Education in 2008. . After the reopening of Imam-Hatip middle schools in 2012, the number of their students rapidly increased . from 94,467 in 2012 to 657,020 in 2016 (Table 26.2). In just five years, the proportion of Imam-Hatip. students to the total number of middle school students rose to 11.9% and the number of Imam-Hatip middle schools rose to 2,777.

4+4+4 and raising a pious generation . The secularist community in Turkey has long regarded Imam-Hatips as a threat to Turkey’s secularist system (As¸lamacı and Kaymakcan 2017). . But in recent years, to the Turkish secularists, AKP’s efforts to increase the number of Imam-Hatip schools have been regarded as part of the aim ‘of eroding Turkey’s secular structure, loosening its ties with the West, and ultimately threatening secular lifestyles, not to mention securing the AKP’s political dominance’ (Makovsky 2015, 1). As of 2011, the AKP had yet to meet the educational demands of its own conservative constituency. Major changes in the Turkish education system had long been designed not by democratically elected governments but by bureaucratic institutions, such as the military, the Constitutional Court, and the Board of Higher Education (Gür 2011). Therefore, it came as 344

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little surprise that Erdog˘ an placed special emphasis on education and youth policies after the inauguration of the third term of the AKP government in 2011. His vision of education should be viewed as part of his aim to restore the Turkish education system, which had long been regarded as highly centralised under the tutelage of the military and accordingly insensitive to the demands of Turkish people. Once the government sufficiently took control of the military, it passed a new law in 2012 to change earlier leg. islation closing Imam-Hatip middle schools (Makovsky 2015). The law, which was dubbed as 4+4+4, restructured eight years of primary schooling into . elementary (four years) and middle schooling (four years), allowed the reopening of Imam-Hatip middle schools, allowed for elective courses on the Qur’an and the Life of Prophet Muhammed at middle and high schools, and extended the mandatory schooling age from eight to 12 years (Çelik et al. 2013). The same law also ended the points system in the university entrance examination that impoverished the graduates of all vocational schools, including . Imam-Hatip schools, since 1998. Before 4+4+4 was enacted at the Turkish parliament at the end of March 2012, Erdog˘ an unapologetically stated his vision of raising a pious generation (dindar nesil) in February 2012: ‘We want to raise a religious youth’ (Cameron-Moore 2012, para. 27). Erdog˘ an, the leader of a political party that officially defined itself as conservative democratic, expressed his vision of raising a pious generation within the context of remedying of what was done by the military intervention of 1997: ‘Those who made the February 28 changes to prevent Turkish youth from receiving religious education have greatly harmed Turkish students’ (Cameron-Moore 2012, para. 32). Erdog˘ an’s statements on a pious generation fuelled debates over an alleged ‘hidden agenda’ to . Islamise secular Turkey (Ozerkan 2012). The conversion of general high schools into Imam-Hatips and vocational high schools also triggered debates related to Islamisation and raising a pious generation (Ackerman and Calisir 2015; Gürsel 2014; Letsch 2015). There are some .problems with arguments that are based on an alleged. association between the rise of Imam-Hatips and the fall of secularism in Turkey. First, Imam-Hatips are strictly controlled by the secular state. Accordingly, the centralised education system in Turkey mandates ‘a fixed and unified four-year curriculum which integrates religion classes into a broader secular curriculum’ (Ozgur 2012, 187). Second, there has always been a kind of ‘Islamic secularism’ in Turkey and a centralised education system that aims to produce secular citizens (Kaplan 2006; Pak 2004). Turkish parents still cannot educate their children based on their own philosophical and religious beliefs due to the restrictions imposed by the highly centralised education system. Unlike most Western secular educational systems, current legal regulations in Turkey restrict the opening of private religious schools (Çelik, Gümüs¸, and Gür 2017). Due to school conversions as well as technical problems brought about by the new and complex high school placement system based on exam scores in 2013 (Çelik et al. 2017; Gür 2016), some parents and experts have expressed concerns about making . Imam-Hatip .schools more accessible to more students in their . close neighbourhood, especially in Istanbul (Williams 2014). The AKP clearly made Imam-Hatip schools more accessible, especially after 2011; however, it did not promote Islamism in the educational . system (Makovsky 2015). Based on her ethnographic study on I mam-Hatips and in-depth . interviews with the larger I mam-Hatip community in Turkey, Iren Ozgur (2012, 65) . found that Imam-Hatips ‘do not overtly promote political opposition or religious revivalism.’

345

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Current challenges and possible future trajectories . Apart from the debate on the rise in the number of Imam-Hatips under AKP rule, there has been also a persistent dispute concerning the content of the mandatory course on religious culture and ethics. The Turkish Constitution of 1982 dictates that all children have to take a course on religious culture and ethics. Some Alevi families complained that it was based exclusively on the Sunni understanding of Islam and took the issue to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). They argued that the course was not taught in an objective, critical, and pluralist manner. The government, on the other hand, argued that the course had been devised in an objective, critical, and pluralist manner and that topics relating to the AleviBektashi faith had been incorporated into the course content. In September 2014, the ECHR (2014, 23) ruled in favour of the Alevi families: [T]he Court notes that the Turkish education system offers no appropriate options for the children of parents who have a religious or philosophical conviction other than that of Sunni Islam, and that the very limited procedure for exemption is likely to subject pupils’ parents to a heavy burden and to the necessity of disclosing their religious or philosophical convictions in order to have their children exempted from the lessons in religion. The Court noted that the Turkish education system offered very limited scope for exemption. Until now, there has been no move by the Ministry of National Education toward providing an exemption from religion and ethics classes. For now, the most probable move by the Ministry seems to be revising the syllabuses/textbooks and allocating more spaces to Alevi-Bektashi faith (Çelik et al. 2017). In Turkey’s highly centralised and monocultural education system, not only minority Alevis but also majority Sunni Turks as well as Kurds have been unsuccessful when attempting to get their demands represented in formal schooling over the years (Çelik et al. 2017). Sunni Turks have been demanding more religious education; Kurds have long been demanding schools and courses in Kurdish. Now, there are elective courses on religious education as well as Kurdish. The AKP’s rule, with all shortcomings, can be described as a period toward more pluralisation of the education system in Turkey. All these moves have been radical steps in meeting with the demands of Kurdish and conservative people. The Sunni Muslim majority in Turkey has now more options (namely, religious schools as well as elective courses on religion) regarding religious courses, since 2012 in particular. However, considering the demands from some Alevi families and the aforementioned ECHR ruling, the Ministry of National Education has yet to offer an exemption for the course on religious culture and ethics and/or changing the course content to make it compatible with a more comprehensive and pluralist perspective. . The AKP considers the expansion of Imam-Hatip schools ‘as the righting of a historical wrong: the near-evisceration of those schools following the. military’s 1997 intervention in domestic politics’ (Makovsky 2015, 1). Thus, the revival of Imam-Hatips after the rule of the AKP in late 2000s and early 2010s is a simple reaction to the repression by the military of popular demands for these. schools in late 1990s. After the decade-long rule of the AKP in . Turkey, the enrolment of Imam-Hatips dramatically increased. This clearly shows that ImamHatips have been revived by the AKP. However, it is now also clear that the glory days of . Imam-Hatips are long gone. Unlike late 1980s and early 1990s, the state gives more resources to them but it is very hard to argue that they are successful in national university entrance . examinations. The top Imam-Hatip high schools cannot attract the brightest kids based on 346

Religious education

. national placement exam for high schools. Many Imam-Hatips along with vocational schools are the least selective schools according to placement exam results in recent years (Çelik et al. 2017). Moreover, the OECD’s PISA 2015 results show that the average reading score of . Imam-Hatip high schools is below the national average of Turkey (Tas¸ et al., 2016). Similar to . many other controversies in Turkey, the issue surrounding the increasing number of Imam-Hatip schools in the last decade is directly related to the role of religion in Turkish society and politics (Makovsky 2015). This never-ending struggle over religious education and secularism is inherently related to the fact that the Turkish education system is highly centralised. Accordingly, almost all major decisions regarding curricula, personnel, and finance are taken by the Ministry of National Education. Schools’ autonomy over curricula, assessment, and resource allocation in Turkey is very low compared to other OECD (2013) countries. Hence, it is no surprise that systematic state intervention in the curricula has driven competing politically motivated groups ‘to lobby their differences through the highly centralised educational system’ (Kaplan 2006: xvi). Thus, it is very important to meet with the demands of various social groups in Turkey; all such demands show that Turkey needs further pluralisation of its education system (Çelik et al. 2017).

Acknowledgements This chapter is based in part on a report titled ‘What Erdog˘ an really wants for education in Turkey: Islamization or pluralization?’, published by Al Jazeera Center for Studies in March 2016.

References Ackerman, Xanthe, and Ekin Calisir. 2015. ‘Erdog˘ an’s Assault on Education: The Closure of Secular Schools.’ Accessed 17 February 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/turkey/2015-12-23/ erdogans-assault-education . As¸lamacı, Ibrahim, and Recep Kaymakcan. 2017. ‘A Model for Islamic education from Turkey: The . Imam-Hatip schools.’ British Journal of Religious Education 39(3): 279–292. Balog˘ lu, Zekai. 1990. Türkiye’de eg˘itim: Sorunlar ve deg˘.is¸ime yapısal uyum önerileri [Education in Turkey: Pro. blems .and Structural Adaptation Proposals for Change]. Istanbul: TÜSI AD. . . Bozan, Irfan. 2007. Devlet ile toplum arasında (Bir okul: Imam Hatip Liseleri. Bir kurum: Diyanet IS¸leri Bas¸kanlıg˘ı) [Between the State and . the Society (a School: imam Hatip High Schools. An institution: Directorate of Religious . Affairs)]. Karaköy. Istanbul: TESEV Yayınları. . Çag˘ lar, Ismail. 2013. From Symbolic Exile to Physical Exile: Turkey’s Imam Hatip Schools, the Emergence of a Conservative Counter-Elite, and its Knowledge Migration to Europe. Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press. Cameron-Moore, Simon. 2012. ‘Turkish School Reforms Raise Debate on Islamism.’ Reuters, 20 March. https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-turkey-education/feature-turkish-school-reforms-raise-debate-o n-islamism-idUKBRE82J0GB20120320 Çelik, Zafer, and Bekir. S. Gür 2013. ‘Turkey’s Education Policy During the AK Party Era (2002–2013).’ Insight Turkey 15(4): 151–176. Çelik, Zafer, Neyfel Boz, Sedat Gümüs¸, and Fatih Tas¸tan. 2013. 4+4+4 eg˘itim reformu izleme raporu [Monitoring Report of the 4 + 4 + 4 Education Reform]. Ankara: Eg˘ itimciler Birlig˘ i Sendikası. Çelik, Zafer, NevfelBoz, ZeynepArkan, and Dilruba Toklucu. 2017. TEOG yerles¸tirme sistemi: Güçlükler ve öneriler [TEOG Placement System: Difficulties and Recommendations]. Ankara: SETA Vakfı. Çelik, Zafer, SedatGümüs¸, and B. S. Gür. 2017. ‘Moving Beyond a Monotype Education in Turkey: Major Reforms in the Last Decade and Challenges Ahead.’ In Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives, edited by Yun-Kyung Cha, Jagdish Gundara, Seung-Hwan Ham, Moosung Lee, 103–119. Singapore: Springer Nature. Cos¸kun, Mustafa K.,. and Burcu S¸entürk. 2012. ‘The Growth of Islamic education in Turkey: The AKP’s Policies. Toward Imam-Hatip schools.’ In Neoliberal Transformation of Education in Turkey, edited by Kemal Inal and Guliz Akkaymak, 165–177. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Religious education ECHR. 2014. ‘Case of Mansur Yalçın and Others v. Turkey.’ Second section. Application No. 21163/11. European Court of Human Rights. http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001–146487 . Gökaçtı, M.Ali. 2005. . . Türkiye’de din eg˘itimi ve Imam Hatipler. [Religious Education and imam Hatips in Turkey]. Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Gür, Bekir S. 2011. . ‘Önsöz.’ In 2000’li yıllar: Türkiye’de eg˘itim [2000s: Education in Turkey], edited by Bekir S. Gür, 5–16. Istanbul: Meydan. Gür, Bekir S. 2016. What Erdog˘an Really Wants for Education in Turkey: Islamization or Pluralisation? Al Jazeera Centre for Studies. http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/ reports/2016/03/160317094912447.html Gürsel, Kadri. 2014. ‘Erdogan Islamizes Education System to Raise ‘Devout Youth’.’ Accessed 20 July 2018. http://kadrigursel.com/Erdogan-Islamizes-education-system-to-raise-devout-youth/967. Kaplan, Sam. 2006. The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics OF National Culture in Post-1980 Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Karpat, Kemal H. 2013. Kısa Türkiye tarihi: 1800–2012 [Brief History of Turkey: 1800–2012]. 6th ed. . Istanbul: Timas¸ Yayınları. Letsch, Constanze. 2015. ‘Turkish Parents Complain of Push Towards Religious Schools.’ The Guardian. February 12. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/12/t urkish-parents-steere d-religious-schools-secular-imam-hatip Makovsky, Alan. 2015. Re-educating Turkey: AKP Efforts to Promote Religious Values in Turkish Schools. Washington, DC: The Center for American Progress. . Öcal, Mustafa. 2007. ‘From the Past to the Present: Imam and Preacher Schools in Turkey — An Ongoing Quarrel.’ Religious Education 102(2): 191–205. . Öcal, Mustafa. 2011. Osmanlı’dan günümüze Türkiye’de din eg˘itimi: Mukaddime kitap. Istanbul: Düs¸ünce Kitabevi. OECD. 2013. PISA 2012 results: What Makes Schools Successful (Vol. IV). Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Ozerkan, Fulya. 2012. ‘Turkey PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan Sparks Furor by Saying He Wants to “Raise a Religious Youth”.’ National Post, 9 February. http://nationalpost.com/news/turkey-pm-recep-tayyip -erdogan-sparks-furor-by-saying-he-wants-to-raise-a-religious-youth Ozgur, Iren. 2012. Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey: Faith, Politics, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . Pak, Soon-Yong. 2004. ‘Articulating the boundary Between Secularism and Islamism: The Imam-Hatip Schools of Turkey.’ Anthropology & Education Quarterly 35(3): 324–344. Tas¸, Umut E., Özge Arıcı, Hatun B. Özarkan, and Barıs¸ Özgürlük. 2016. PISA 2015 ulusal raporu. Ankara: Milli Eg˘ itim Bakanlıg˘ ı. Williams, Lauren. 2014. ‘Turkey Education Reforms Fuel Controversy.’ Al Jazeera, 29 October. http:// www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/10/turkey-education-reforms-fuel-con troversy-20141013103317146282.html World Bank. 2013. Promoting Excellence in Turkey’s Schools. 77722: 1–45. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Zürcher, Eric. J. 2004. Turkey: A Modern History. 3rd ed. London: I.B.Tauris.

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27 THE TRANSFORMATION OF HEALTH AND HEALTHCARE Transitioning from consuming healthcare to producing and maintaining health1 Enis Barıs¸

Introduction During the first decade of the 21st century, the healthcare system in Turkey has undergone an impressive transformation from being an underachiever relative to its level of income and socio-economic development to one that is often quoted in international healthcare fora as an example of what other countries should be aspiring to achieve. Yet health outcomes in Turkey could improve even further with equally steadfast focus on quality of care and investment in health promotion and disease prevention. This chapter provides an overview of this remarkable transformation; documents its achievements, and the drivers behind it; and proposes a policy agenda to tackle outstanding issues and options to bring health outcomes in Turkey on a par with those of the high-income countries that it aspires to catch up with in the next five years by the turn of the centennial of the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 2023.

Theoretical considerations in assessing health(care) system performance Measuring and assessing the performance of health systems2 is an inexact science. There are many goals and conceptual frameworks against which one could assess health and healthcare system performance.3 Yet they often boil down to what has been referred to as the triple aims of improving health(care) outcomes, patient experience/satisfaction with 1 2 3

Unless otherwise stated, all data presented herein come from three sources, namely Ministry of Health (2016, 2017) OECD (2017b), and WHO European Health for All database. In this chapter, we refer to health systems as encompassing both healthcare and public health while acknowledging that most of the data and discussion revolves around healthcare. The Commonwealth Fund, for instance, uses in its 11-country annual assessment of healthcare system performance, 72 indicators spanning across five domains, namely care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity, and healthcare outcomes (see Schneider et al. 2017).

349

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the care process, and reducing the costs of healthcare (OECD 2017a), which are defined, conceptualised, nuanced, measured, and interpreted in a myriad of ways. No wonder then that no health system is exceptionally good, or significantly better than its comparators in all dimensions; rather it may fare better in some metrics and worse in others. For instance, in one recent performance assessment of 11 high-income countries, the UK leads in equity in access to care, yet lags behind all, except the US, in health outcomes.4 Assessing health system performance is all the more challenging in the Turkish context where political ideology and ever-growing mistrust between the secular and the conservative halves of the society undermines any genuine attempt to evidence-based and impartial debate on the breadth and depth of the progress hitherto made, but perhaps more importantly, attributing the stock and flow thereof. Indeed, there still is, albeit less convincingly, debate as to whether there has been progress at all, as argued by its discontents (see for instance, Atun et al. 2013; Aksakog˘ lu 2014; Attaran 2014; Civaner 2014). Where does the Turkish health system stand relative to other high-middle-income countries that it is often compared against, or to high-income OECD countries, the elite economic club it is a member of, and how has its performance evolved over time?

The health system before the Health Transformation Programme (HTP) The evolution of the Turkish health system during the Republic era (1923 onwards) could be divided into four distinct phases (Akdag˘ 2009): 







4

The early inception phase (1923–1945) was characterised by the institutionalisation of the Ministry of Health as the legitimate state authority in charge of health system governance, financing, and service delivery; passage of the first health laws; the launch of various disease-specific programmes such as malaria and tuberculosis; and initial investments in infrastructure and human resource development. The fragmented expansion phase (1946–1960) saw the first attempt at making a ten-year health-sector development plan and the establishment of the Social Security Institute, both in 1946, to provide health insurance to public- and private-sector blue-collar workers. Collaboration with UN agencies on disease-specific and maternal and child health programmes also began during this phase, characterised by further expansion of mostly inpatient facilities and medical faculties across the territory, and the passage of laws on the organisation of health professions. The planned ‘socialisation’ phase (1961–1982) was characterised by quinquennial sectoral development plans; the passage of the law on the socialisation of health services, a major step towards equitable access to primary healthcare (PHC) services as an integral part of a hierarchical four-level model of service delivery; adoption of the first law on family planning; repeated, mostly legislative, albeit failed attempts to introduce universal health insurance (UHI); and the law banning part-time private medical practice by public sector physicians. In the reformation phase (1983–2002), following the 1980 military coup and the new constitution which asserted that citizens had a right to health, abolishment of the law on full-time practice in the public sector furthering the development of the private healthcare delivery was most noteworthy. The basic law on health services was passed but could only be partially implemented. A national health policy with explicit health targets Idem.

350

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was adopted, and the first master plan of the health sector was developed jointly by the then State Planning Organisation and the Ministry of Health. There was a second wave of failed attempts to introduce UHI, except for the passage of laws giving low-income groups access to inpatient care free of charge (the so-called Green Card scheme) and establishing a separate health insurance scheme for the self-employed (Bag˘-Kur). While significant progress was made in expanding access to healthcare and towards the containment of major diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, all in all the prevailing sentiment among both national health policy constituency and international experts was that Turkish health system was an underperformer relative to country’s overall socioeconomic development at the time (Box 27.1).

Box 27.1 Scorecard of the pre-HTP era as of 2002 

    

 

 

 

Significant progress in raising life expectancy (from less than 50 years in 1960 to close to 70 years in 2000) and reducing infant, maternal, and cause-specific mortality due to communicable diseases, albeit still below of what could be expected at the then level of socioeconomic development. Wide inequities in health, partly due to socio-structural and geographic disparities in access to care. A paternalistic care delivery system unresponsive to the sociocultural needs and preferences. Low productivity and technical quality of care, especially in primary care. Low outpatient and inpatient utilisation rates, as a result of low perceived quality and inability/unwillingness to pay. Lack of comprehensiveness and continuity of care with unnecessary referrals to outpatient specialist services in polyclinics of inpatient facilities and university teaching hospitals, despite the existence of a four-tier integrated model for health service delivery. Mixture of public and private roles and responsibilities by public sector healthcare providers, and widespread informal payments for preferential access to higherquality technical care and better attendance to nonmedical needs. High and highly regressive out-of-pocket expenses, impoverishing the poor and the rural, amounting to about 40 per cent of total health expenditures in 2000 as a result of various user fees, deductibles, co-payments, payments at point of service to private providers, and informal payments to public providers. Non-universal and inequitable health coverage. Insufficient numbers of doctors and nurses accentuated by skewed distribution in favour of large cities; low-paid and demotivated staff as a result of absence or poor enforcement of fair and transparent payment and non-financial incentive schemes in the public sector, marred by favouritism and patronage. Highly fragmented financing with multiple insurance/pooling schemes on the basis of statutory entitlements (that is: civil servants, retirees, self-employed, Green Card for the poor, private insurance, etc.). Weak and highly fragmented governance and stewardship in healtha with split responsibilities for policy and planning, regulation, financing, and service delivery across several ministries and other government agencies, resulting in a major

351

Transformation of health and healthcare credibility gap due to ineffectual and incomplete pursuit of mostly aspirational policy goals such as universal health coverage. a

Between 1920 and 2002, Turkey had 58 Ministers of Health with an average time in office of about 16 months. Sources: World Bank (2003); OECD and World Bank (2008).

The HTP era (2003–2011): goals and accomplishments As of 2003, Turkey had a vertically segmented health system, characterised by statutory entitlements to three different health insurance schemes for the formally employed blue-collar workers and civil servants and for pensioners, each having its own governance and financing mechanisms and benefits and entitlements schemes, and a national health service, run by the Ministry of Health, for the rest of the population. Overall, about 65 per cent of the population was covered, one way or another, albeit with varying benefit packages and co-payments. Despite the broad consensus that the health system needed a major overhaul, a lack of leadership and political will hindered all efforts to reform the Turkish health system. This stemmed from the political instability at the time, characterised by a succession of ineffectual coalition governments after the return to civilian rule and a fragile economy during the preceding two decades. Regardless, several high-level policy events, reports, and sectoral studies, often in collaboration with development banks and UN agencies, paved the groundwork for a broad consensus on the need to introduce universal health coverage for financial protection, family-based organisation, and delivery of primary care, and the strengthening of preventive services and public health (Savas¸ 2002). In 2003, with the arrival of the AKP in power, a new majority government was able to combine leadership and political will while taking stock of the past policy experience to launch the HTP with the following policy objectives (Ministry of Health 2003):

i ii iii iv v vi

To redefine the roles and responsibilities of the Ministry of Health towards ‘more steering and less rowing’. To establish UHI to ensure equity in access to health services regardless of ability to pay. To separate the accountability for financing from provision of healthcare to achieve more efficient resource allocation and use. To augment the financial and administrative autonomy of public hospitals to improve technical efficiency and strengthen management. To introduce family medicine to integrate and streamline the delivery of primary healthcare with inpatient care and ensure comprehensiveness and continuity in healthcare. To reduce maternal and child mortality.

Five years on, the health system in Turkey was transformed, with both health outcomes and population satisfaction having improved to a level almost unheard of in middle-income countries. Table 27.1 summarises this remarkable transformation across three distinctive periods. Most noteworthy are major increases in health coverage, reduction in out-of-pocket private expenditures, patient satisfaction and the geographic distribution of the health workforce. 352

Table 27.1 Transformation of health and healthcare in Turkey, 2000–2015a

2000

2008

a

Life expectancy at birth (both sexes, in years) Infant mortality (1,000 live births) Under 5 mortality (1,000 live births) Maternal mortality ratio (100,000 live births) Measles incidence (100,000 population) Responsiveness (public sector only)

70

73

78

32.1 39.6 79

18.9 22.2 32

7.6 9.7 14.7

25

0.004

0.011

Patient satisfaction, overall (%) In primary care (%) With Ministry of Health hospitals (%)

39.5 41 39.4

66.5 70.6 66.6

72.3 74.1

Acute care hospital beds per 100,000 Doctors per 100,000 General practitioners per 100,000 Ministry of Health doctors working private part time (%) Geographical distribution (ratio of best to worst endowed provinces): Specialists General practitioners Nurses Medical technology (no. of units)

202 133 43 89

225 158 53 25

259 179 53 0

13.7:1 8.3:1 7.9:1

3.5:1 2.8:1 3.6:1

5.8:1 2.4:1 3.1:1

Computed tomography Magnetic resonance imaging Intensive care beds Ambulances Neonatal intensive care beds No. of separate examination rooms for doctors Ministry of Health hospitals

121 18 869 618 665

329 562 6633 2029 2918

1119 794 31525 5018 10398

6643

18 807

Primary care Financial protection

6308

16 055

21696

Households with catastrophic health expenditures (%) Households impoverished due to health expenditures (%) Service delivery

0.81

0.36

0.29

0.43

0.17

0.10

Health insurance coverage (%) Full vaccination coverage (%)

66 78

87 96

98.1 97

Health system goals and functions

Latest available

Health improvement

Healthcare resources

(Continued)

Transformation of health and healthcare

Table 27.1 (Cont.) Health system goals and functions

2000

2008

a

Pregnant women delivering in hospital (%) Average no. of visits to physicians per capita/year Acute inpatient care admissions/100/ year Emergency medical service calls/year

78

92

99

2.8

6.7

8.4

7.9

13.5

16.6

350 000

1.5 million

Latest available

Source: Author.

Figure 27.1 depicts the evolution of health spending in Turkey, the main driver behind the transformation, especially the gradual increase in the ratio of government health spending to out-of-pocket expenditures, along with a major increase in per capita health expenditures. Such a rapid and impressive transformation in health, a declaration of intent boldly chosen over many other less ambitious expressions of intent by the incoming government in 2003, has, understandably, drawn scepticism5 once the first publication appeared in the international peer-reviewed literature (Barıs¸, 2011). Yet several reports commissioned thereafter by international agencies and journals validated the results of the transformation, with more detailed analyses (WHO 2012a; WHO 2012b; World Bank 2013; Atun et al. 2013; World Bank 2014; OECD 2014). Three interrelated factors stand out as the main reasons behind the success in health transformation. First is the remarkable shift in the government’s stance that the state should be at the service of its citizens, rather than the other way around, which had been the paradigm in Turkey for most of the Republic era, therefore squarely putting the citizen at the centre. The Urgent Action Plan adopted by the government right after the 2002 elections declared ‘Health for All’ and UHI as key objectives, and the HTP explicitly mentioned responsiveness to citizens’ needs and preferences (Ministry of Health 2003). Terms such as health as a social right and user-friendly services have not only become part of the health policy lexicon, but have also become criteria for defining subsequent financial and other incentives for proper professional behaviour and performance. Second is the political commitment, making health a priority for the government both in political discourse and allocation of public resources. The beginning of a period of stability and continuity in policy and governance after the 2002 elections with the arrival of a majority government certainly helped, enabling the HTP to be designed and implemented without major political setbacks.6 So did the government’s realisation that universal and equitable access to care was a major concern for the citizenry and its foresight of the potential political windfalls for making it a reality – while being genuinely committed to mitigating the social, political, and economic impact of increasing inequalities in Turkish society.7 As a result of the resumption of rapid economic growth after the 2001 financial crisis, GDP grew by about 60 per cent by 2007 and public debt stock as a proportion of 5 6 7

See for instance Horton (2013). For the first time in Turkish multi-party electoral history the same Minister of Health stayed in office for ten consecutive years. Many people believed that high priority given to health by the government was less about their genuine interest in ensuring equitable access to healthcare for all, but rather a shrewd political decision

354

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

Percent

PPP constant 2005 US$

Transformation of health and healthcare

Per capita health expenditure, US$ PPP Per capita OOP payments, US$ PPP Government health expenditure (% of THE) OOP payments (% of THE) Total health expenditure (% of GDP)

Figure 27.1 Evolution of health spending in Turkey, 1999–2015.

GDP came down from 76 per cent in 2000 to less than 40 per cent, opening up a new fiscal space for the government to increase investment and recurrent spending for health, from about from 9.8 per cent in 2000 to 11.8 per cent in 2007, stabilising subsequently just over 10 per cent since then. Between 1997 and 2013, Turkey had 9.7 per cent average annual real per capita growth in health spending, the highest among the OECD countries, and slightly less than four percentage points above the OECD average of 5.8 per cent. Third, the Ministry of Health, hitherto one of the weakest and most ineffectual government agencies, assumed more assertive leadership in the health sector. Between 1969 and 1998, at least five attempts to pass a law on UHI failed at different stages of the legislative process. Other laws that were passed were either overturned by the constitutional court or could not be implemented owing to a lack of further regulation and enforcement, not only because of concerns over fiscal sustainability but also as a result of fragmentation in policy and planning, financing, and service delivery across several governmental entities. Turkey had both tax-based and premium-based financing of healthcare for different population segments, each with its own bureaucratic apparatus, benefits and entitlements, and organisation and delivery of healthcare services (Savas¸ 2002). Today, the lines of accountability are more clear cut, with the Ministry of Health assuming authority over all health matters, and asserting its position as the steward of the health system, in charge of policy-making, planning, regulation, and oversight, not only within the government, but also vis à vis the professional associations, while the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), under the political authority of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MoLSS), is entrusted with the pooling of funds and purchasing of services from both public and private service providers. This effectively split financing and provision under two to solidify and expand their popular support among the electorate to stay in power, more indicative of the prevailing elitist attitude of the time.

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different lines of accountability.8 As for the private sector, this meant levelling the playing field in service provision through making contractual purchasing agreements with the NHIF, similarly to any other public service provider.

Unfinished agenda and emerging new challenges The challenges that the Turkish health system faces today are no different than those faced by other members of the OECD club, revolving mainly around ensuring fiscal sustainability, increasing efficiency or getting better value for money, and improving quality of care. At first glance, there should not be cause for concern over longer-term fiscal sustainability. Total health spending in Turkey has been increasing at an annualised rate of 6.6 per cent, in line with its GDP growth rate, over the last two decades. In 2015, Turkey spent about US$1,040 PPP or 5.3 per cent of its GDP, mainly through public financing (78.4 per cent public; 3.5 per cent prepaid private; 18 per cent out-ofpocket). By 2040, Turkey is forecasted to spend about $2,400 PPP per capita, or 6 per cent of its GDP with an annualised rate of increase of 3.1 per cent, well within the expected GDP growth rate projections and with no expected major change in the composition of its GDP (Global Burden of Disease Health Financing Collaborator Network, 2017a). Yet, upon a closer look, Turkey spends about 20 per cent less than what is predicted at its stage of development, mainly as a result of the low level of out-of-pocket payments (Global Burden of Disease Health Financing Collaborator Network, 2017b).9 There are two plausible explanations. One is that the benefit package in Turkey appears to be more generous than those in other comparable countries, resulting in less out-of-pocket payment. Second, despite the higher than expected public outlays, the less than predicted spending at its level of development is mainly due to stringent cost containment through price control. The overall trend of allowing private providers to increase mark-up of their prices above and beyond the agreed reimbursement rates with the NHIF is likely to make up for the difference in out-of-pocket payments in the longer run, albeit with potential consequences on equitable access to care and an increase in total health spending as the population ages.10 While inefficiency plagues all health systems, Turkey seems to have more room for improvement than many others. Its healthcare efficiency score is about half that of Europe or about 40 per cent of the EU average (International Monetary Fund 2015). Healthy life expectancy at birth is 65 years, or about five years lower than what one would expect of a country that spends $1,000 (PPP) per capita. About 46 per cent of the non-communicable diseases deaths in males occur before the age of 70, in contrast to only 23 per cent in Italy, the best in Europe, or 29 per cent in the United Kingdom.11 8

This being said, operating costs of all public hospitals are still under the authority of Ministry of Health. 9 Out-of-pocket spending is 61 per cent of what is predicted vs. 115.7 per cent of that predicted for the public sector and 130.9 per cent of that predicted for prepaid private. 10 By 2050, the Turkish population is expected to get close to 100 million with about one-fifth becoming over the age of 65 compared to 79 million in 2017 and only 8.3 per cent being over 65 years old. 11 Interestingly, Turkey still remains one high-middle-income country with no information on avoidable mortality to compare its own performance against other OECD countries, except for EuroStat estimates of 2013 where age and sex standardised mortality rates in Turkey due to causes amenable to

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There are again three major reasons behind inefficiency in healthcare, which, all together, result in a delivery system more attuned to consuming healthcare rather than producing health.12,13 First is the enduring preoccupation with ensuring full access to care with the most generous benefit package to safeguard popular support rather than fine-tuning its scope and depth to modulate demand and curtail unnecessary or inappropriate use, particularly in the hospital sector.14,15 Additionally, driven by the desire to be seen by a specialist instead of a family physician, and to avoid user fees, patients prefer to enter the system through the emergency department, often by using free-of-charge ambulance services.16 Second is the ever-increasing availability of new and modern health facilities, medical equipment, and health professionals, which increasingly induce demand for healthcare (see Box 27.2). Turkey has the highest number MRI exams, one of the highest numbers of CT exams, and a higher average hospital discharge rate per 1,000 population within the OECD despite having a younger population. And shockingly, it has the highest caesarean section rate.17

Box 27.2 City hospitals: assets or liabilities? The ongoing debate concerning city hospitals – known as public–private partnerships (PPPs) in health – is perhaps the most controversial in the health sector in Turkey. Inspired by the British private finance initiative (PFI) experience of the 1990s, the Turkish government, through an amendment in 2005 to the Basic Law in Health Services (Law No. 3359), paved the way for the private sector to finance capital investment to design, build, and operate healthcare facilities. PPPs are deemed to improve value for money through

12

13 14

15

16

17

optimal quality medical intervention stands at 170 per 100,000 population, higher than the EU28 average of 119 per 100,000, and much higher than all the countries of Western Europe (73–118 per 100,000). Please see OECD (2017b) for details. Turkey has one of the highest number of visits per person per year among the OECD countries at 8.6, higher than the OECD average of 6.9 despite having one of the youngest populations. Equally importantly, the rate has increased from less than three visits per capita per year in 2000, the highest rate of increase in the OECD. Please see Evans and Stoddart (1990). For instance, age and sex standardised rates of hospital admission in Turkey for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and for diabetes, two medical conditions that could easily be managed and controlled at the primary care level, stands at 414 and 212 per 100,000 population, respectively, rates much higher than the OECD averages of 236 and 137 per 100,000, and way higher than almost all of the high-income countries. Similarly, many of the medical interventions such as cataract eye surgery or tonsillectomy, which lend themselves well to day surgery are still provided on an inpatient basis in about 50 per cent and 80 per cent of the cases, relative to the OECD averages of 86 per cent and 34 per cent, respectively. While the number of consultations with physicians increased considerably from 3.1 visits per person per year in 2002 to 8.6 in 2016, secondary and tertiary care saw a three-fold increase from 2 to 5.9 visits over the same period, compared to 1.1 to 2.7 visits in primary care. By one estimate there were close to 110 million visits to emergency departments in 2017, or 1.4 visits per person per year, a large majority of which would be due to minor ailments, compared to the 0.3 OECD average visits, 0.4 visits in England where a large proportion such visits are made by people over 80 years of age, or 0.7 in Portugal, the highest in the OECD, except for Turkey. Turkey has one of the highest caesarean section rates in the world, jumping from less than 40 per cent in 2007 to 51.1 per cent of live births, significantly higher than the OECD average of 27.5 per cent or about 15 per cent in Nordic countries. Only 16 per cent deemed to have justifiable medical indication and 69 per cent of ‘patients’ reported that it was their doctor’s preference.

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Transformation of health and healthcare risk sharing in investment and operation of public healthcare facilities and bringing in new technology and innovation. The initiative had the dual purpose of both increasing the number of beds in the public sector, as well as replacing old facilities deemed either too costly to renovate, or too inconvenient to expand and operate given their location mostly at the centre of big cities. Through an innovative financing scheme, bringing in both domestic investors and international finance institutions the government was able to raise capital of about US$2.6 billion to launch in 2010 a $20 billion PFI operation for the construction of 32 brand new healthcare facilities with a total of 42,000 beds to replace 26,000 beds in the hospitals that will be decommissioned, and add another 16,000 beds. ˘ an, the first city hospital with 475 Labelled as ‘My Dream Project’ by President Erdog beds opened its doors in Yozgat in January 2017, to replace the old 300-bed facility, followed soon after with the opening of five more over the course of the year. By 2023, it is estimated that 27 city hospitals in 24 cities with a total of about 40,000 beds will become fully operational. The adopted build–lease–transfer (BLT) model assigns responsibility for the construction, operation, and maintenance of the facility to the private investor who, after a concessionary period of up to 28 years – three years for construction and 25 years for operations – would transfer full ownership to the Ministry of Health. Proponents of this PFI, the largest of its kind in the world, and perhaps the most innovative one with many investors and use of novel financing instruments, claim that these investments were long overdue given rapid population growth, ageing, and urbanisation, and rising expectations of the increasingly high-middleincome citizens for quality healthcare in modern public facilities on a par with the private sector. Providing care in large, state-of-the art facilities in large suburban locations is deemed worthy of Turkey as the country gears up to the centennial of the foundation of the Republic in 1923. Gone will be the old Soviet-style wards with six patients and common bathrooms, they say, with no privacy for humane care. Opponents claim that this is yet another example of a grandiose construction project, similar to bridges, tunnels, and highways also financed through PPPs with financial guarantees by the Treasury that have been set based on unrealistic utilisation thresholds. They fear that it will end up becoming a major fiscal burden on the government, and on tax payers because of the lack of thorough due process in needs assessment and costing, and forecasting of future demand for inpatient care. Many claim that it is yet another ploy for the government to sell highly coveted and expensive publicly owned space in cities through decommissioning of old hospitals, and ensuring very large return to investors close to the government through long-term leasing contracts. There are two main reasons behind the posturing on the merit of the PFI in health sector in Turkey. First, the issue has become highly politicised because of lack of trust in government by some segments of the population and polity, including representatives of health professionals, who see a ‘hidden agenda’ behind all government initiatives, instead of assessing each investment based on its own merits and demerits. Second, there has been little public debate and consultation on the rationale behind an investment of such large scale, resulting in unsubstantiated assumptions and

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Transformation of health and healthcare accusations. Claims abound about assurances given to the investors for 70 per cent bed occupancy rate, which, if not reached, would compromise payment to health professionals out of the revolving funds, since payment obligations to the investors would have to be met first. Although there are volume guarantees for some medical interventions, the government claims that they do not pose financial risk as they are based on past utilisation trends. They also refute claims of impositions of user fees and copayments in new facilities. The ‘truth’ lies somewhere in between. Turkey should be commended for a bold and ambitious scheme to modernise healthcare infrastructure in line with its overall socio-economic development. In 2011, Turkey had the second lowest number of beds per 1,000 population among the OECD countries. However, such a large investment scheme with considerable operating and recurrent cost burdens and financial risks should be firmly grounded on rigorous needs assessment and forecasting of demand and supply concurrent with rapidly changing technology, service delivery models, and interface between primary, inpatient, extended, and home-based care. Risks could be mitigated through smaller, more modest pathfinder projects before scaling up, to learn lessons pertaining to project design and development, and construction and operational phases, given the large and complex nature of many facilities, some with up to 4,000 beds, the largest of their kind in Europe. It is still too early to assess the ‘value for money’ of the PFI in health sector in Turkey. Undoubtedly, mistakes will be made and corrected. Early feedback is encouraging; project constructions are completed in a timely manner, not surprising, since investors would rather not dip into the operating phase of their lease period. While preliminary data from Yozgat Hospital shows that bed occupancy rates reach 60 per cent, and an average of 2,500 patients are seen as outpatients, there is no doubt that the transition from old to new hospitals will be challenging before the latter become fully functional. Turkey had already reached 2.68 beds per 1,000 population in 2015, before the opening of city hospitals, a ratio higher than that in the UK, Canada, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden, all with significantly older populations, and actually in the process of reducing their bed ratio. The trends are similar in countries such as France, Germany, and Switzerland with much higher bed ratios, perhaps as a result of having insurance-based health financing, as in Turkey, and more prone to privileging inpatient care. Turkey would be advised to monitor the PPP experience and make timely and proactive fine-tuning as the population ages, technology evolves, the need for integrated and long-term care increases, and medical tourism reaches its peak.

Third is the unfinished agenda of making family medicine the bedrock of the healthcare system and solidifying its gate-keeping role for primary care and population health as the population ages, become more middle class and urban, and their health and healthcare needs and expectations evolve. The current family-medicine-based primary care, although a real success story in terms of its rapid expansion and the formidable increase in service utilisation at the outset, from 1.1 visits per person per year to 3.2 in 2012, especially in maternal and child healthcare and utilisation, has, since then, witnessed a gradual decrease to 2.7 visits per person per year at the expense of secondary and tertiary 359

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care. They often operate, in practice, as a step for either referral to specialised outpatient care in hospitals, or for prescription refills, instead of prevention and management of non-communicable diseases.18 Literacy in Turkey, let alone health literacy, is yet to be universal, with important gender gaps in health and healthcare-seeking behaviour, particularly among the least educated, and the newly urbanised and disenfranchised segments of the population who are increasingly left behind for targeted health promotion and disease prevention. Particularly worrisome trends include an increasing rate of road accidents, ambient air pollution, the highest in Europe, and smoking prevalence, one of the highest in the OECD, especially among males, which, after a promising downward trend as a result of comprehensive legislation, effective taxation, and law enforcement of a smoking ban in public places, once hailed internationally as the best example, has begun to creep up again due to let-up of the latter two. Also of concern is a very steep increase in obesity in adults, especially women, the leading cause of healthy life years lost in Turkey.19 All in all, more than 50 per cent of adults aged 15 and above are exposed to a combination of three or more risk factors that include smoking, raised blood pressure, obesity, lack of physical activity, and unhealthy diet. While the suicide rate is one of the lowest in the OECD, albeit rapidly increasing, self-reported depression is one of the highest, especially among women, pointing to an unmet need for qualified mental healthcare services.

What is next: the way forward The HTP has been very successful in ensuring equitable access to healthcare for all, resulting in notable improvements in health outcomes, financial protection, and population satisfaction. The healthcare system has matured to a point where it is now facing a different albeit highly interrelated set of issues for which the policy options are dauntingly more complex. A first set of issues relate to overall system governance and stewardship to accommodate pluralism by managing expectations through a more inclusive and consultative due process in policy development and implementation. Strong leadership and centralised decision-making, key drivers behind fast and effective policy design and implementation during the HTP era, may, in a more mature system with many stakeholders and higher stakes, prove to become an impediment for fine-tuning system improvement. For instance, there is now a well-established and competitive private healthcare delivery network with major domestic and international investment whose profitability and indeed survival depends on the next generation of financing and payment reforms.20 There also exists considerable discord between the Social Security Institution that is responsible for managing the NHIF and the Ministry of Health on entitlements, benefits, pricing and relevant regulatory frameworks pertaining to the responsibilities of each in 18 Only about 42 per cent of adults with high blood pressure are on medication. Turkey now has the second highest diabetes rate in OECD at 13 per cent of the adult population. Only one in ten adults over the age of 50, six of ten women over the age of 40, and 50 per cent of women over the age of 30 ever had a colonoscopy, mammography, or cervical smear test, respectively, for cancer screening. Only 9 per cent of adults over the age of 65 are vaccinated against influenza. 19 From less than 20 per cent in 1990 to 30 per cent overall in 2015 (21.2 per cent in men and 38.4 per cent women), including youth obesity (11–18 years) reaching 16 per cent. 20 For instance, despite a gradual increase in mark-up in private hospitals from 30 to 200 per cent over and beyond the price set by the NHIF, they are not allowed to do so for emergency care, intensive care, cancer treatment and transplantation.

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system governance.21 There also remains a lingering lack of trust between provider associations (the Turkish Medical Association, the Turkish Association of Family Physicians, the Association of Private Hospitals and Health Institutions, university-affiliated teaching hospitals), the pharmaceutical industry and the Ministry of Health, dating back to the HTP’s design and implementation, mostly pertaining to performance-based payment, full-time practice and the pricing of pharmaceuticals.22 Finally, the recent decision to abolish the tripartite governance structure (Health Directorate, Public Health Institution, and Association of Public Hospitals) at the provincial level by merging three separate entities under the overall authority of the Provincial Health Directorate may be perceived by some as further centralisation and consolidation of power and authority in a system which, by virtue of its increased complexity, could benefit from a more decentralised delivery model tailored to diverse local needs across a vast geography. A second set of issues pertain to a shift from a culture of cost containment through price control while striving to deliver a rather generous package of services to the whole population to finding the right balance between which package would be appropriate to be paid for out of the public purse and which one should better be left to individual discretion, through either out-of-pocket or prepayment by voluntary complementary or supplementary insurance. The health insurance scheme in Turkey has one of the most generous packages of services in the OECD, and possibly the most among high-middle-income countries, including all emergency care, intensive care, cancer care, and transplantation, to name a few, at no cost to the patient even when the services are rendered in a private facility. For all other services, the private sector could mark up prices by up to 200 per cent of the reimbursement rate set by the NHIF, the patient paying for the difference. As a result, Turkey has one of the lowest rates of private spending in healthcare, both out-of-pocket and prepayment, resulting in three untoward consequences for efficiency and sustainability. First is provider-induced demand, especially in the private sector, for all other services for which price mark-ups are allowed, bringing about perverse incentives for ‘cherry picking’ and inappropriate care. Second, is patient behaviour using loopholes to use emergency care services to avoid user fees in accessing specialised care while increasing the aggregate costs for all, the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ phenomenon. This is all the more worrisome, considering the fact that 3.2 million Syrian refugees who by definition do not pay any income tax, or health insurance premium, have free and unhindered access to healthcare. And third, the NHIF is trying to contain spending by strict control on the reimbursement rates rather than focussing on allocative and technical efficiency solutions. A revision of the reimbursement rates with a view to increased appropriateness and quality of care and patient outcomes at the right level with a view to privileging and incentivising primary care through gate-keeping and a revised performance-based payment mechanism applicable to both primary and secondary care, albeit gauged against a set of outcome indicators, is needed. A concomitant revision of the benefit package leaving room for voluntary 21 There have been eight different Ministers of Labour and Social Security since 2002, vs. only three in Health. Moreover, there have been eight different directors of the Social Security Institution under the MOLSS which has overseen the NHIF since 2008. 22 As of 2016, more than 90 per cent of pharmaceuticals sold in Turkey are reimbursable. Generics constitute about 60 per cent of volume – compared with 80 per cent or above in UK and Germany, two countries with well-developed research-based pharmaceutical sectors – and 35 per cent in costs. While there was a 190 per cent increase in the volume of pharmaceuticals sold between 2002 and 2016, the rate of increase in public spending for drugs remained flat at 0 per cent due to very stringent pricing control.

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insurance based on international best practices is likely to reduce the fiscal burden on the public purse, close loopholes, and allow for a burgeoning of the health insurance sector. A third set of issues pertains to a shift from a culture of productivity to one of performance, or in other words, gradually steering away from a preoccupation with quantity to one embracing quality in healthcare and patient outcomes. Granted, the Turkish healthcare system made laudable strides in improving quality in ‘input’, namely modern infrastructure and medical equipment, and accreditation of almost all public and most of private hospitals. There has been a remarkable increase both in absolute numbers and in the distribution of healthcare facilities at all levels, intensive care units, haemodialysis centres, and modern medical equipment.23 Not surprisingly, such a sudden increase in supply led to an explosive increase in the use of health services, the largest of its kind among the OECD countries. While it is difficult to attribute it to previously unmet healthcare needs being met as a result of removal of financial barriers, there certainly is an element of ‘supplier-induced demand’ and therefore inappropriate use given the concomitant changes in physician compensation, which is now more aligned with productivity both in primary care and in hospitals.24 A shift towards quality of care, more in terms of providing appropriate care, namely the right mix and intensity of care provided by health professionals with the right skills at the right level of care, rather than mere technical quality, would require in the shorter run better intelligence, namely a more sophisticated information system focusing on patient outcomes. The recent adoption of the OECD healthcare quality indicators framework focusing on quality and outcomes of care through a set of indicators pertaining to avoidable admissions, prescribing in primary care, surgical and hospital mortality, and survival and mortality for most prevalent cancers, is a step in the right direction which would need to be followed by the adoption of the patient reported outcome (PROM) and experience (PREM) measures (OECD 2017a). In the medium run, fine tuning of the activity pricing and of mark-ups allowed in the private sector, and physician compensation modalities in the public sector would be needed for a shift towards performance. In the longer run, enforcement of gate-keeping and empowerment of family practitioners through better graduate and in-service training in the management of chronic diseases would be required. Indeed, the time has come for introduction of a set of measures for licensing, continuous medical education for its renewal, and legislation for both patient and provider safety and security.

Conclusion The Turkish health system today is considered to be fundamentally transformed from what it was 15 years ago, rapidly catching up with OECD countries in terms of universal coverage, population satisfaction with health services and life expectancy at birth.25 The emphasis 23 Between 2002 and 2016 there was a 32 per cent increase in the number of beds, but more importantly a six-fold increase in the number of ‘qualified’ beds in fully equipped rooms with less than two beds, 73 per cent in the public sector (Ministry of Health and university hospitals combined). At 27.3 per 10,000 population, Turkey has now more beds than in the UK, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden. The number of ICU beds went up from 2,200 to 33,000 over the same period, again 57 per cent in the public sector. Similarly, there has been a 3.4-fold increase in the number of haemodialysis units, 14-fold in MRI and 3.4-fold in CT equipment. 24 While family practitioners are paid on a capitation basis, part of their income is derived from providing full maternal and child healthcare services for which they are paid additionally, subject to deduction if service criteria are not met. As for inpatient care, income of specialists is directly proportional to the volume of activities paid of out of the hospital revolving funds. 25 A recent review of the progress made in both access to and quality of care by 195 countries between 1990 and 2015 noted that Turkey, in addition to South Korea, Peru, China, and the Maldives,

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placed on equitable access to healthcare regardless of the ability to pay has inevitably resulted in increased demand for healthcare, only to be matched by a major increase in supply due both to increased human and physical resources, and productivity thanks to major investment. Yet, the healthcare system alone can only do so much to improve health. The challenge now is a renewed commitment to health promotion and primary and secondary prevention of non-communicable diseases at the primary care level through increased health literacy, community-based outreach programmes, and care integration between primary and secondary levels. It is also about time to begin investing in longer-term care in anticipation of ageing and multi-morbidity in the older population. In short, it is about time for a second transformation in health!

Disclaimer The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this chapter are entirely those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organisations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Acknowledgement The author gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Ms Alessia Thibaud to the compilation of data in the tables and figures.

References Akdag˘ , Recep. 2009. Health Transformation Program in Turkey, Progress Report. Ankara: Ministry of Health. Aksakog˘ lu, Gazanfer. 2014. ‘Health-Care Reform in Turkey: Far from Perfect.’ The Lancet 383(9911): 26–27. Attaran, A.O., Kayihan Pala, and Beyazit Ilhan. 2014. ‘Health-Care Reform in Turkey: Far from Perfect.’ The Lancet 383(9911): 25–26. Atun, Rifat, Sabahattin Aydın, Sarbani Chakraborty, Safir Sümer, Meltem Aran., Ipek Gürol, and Serpil Nazlıog˘ lu. et al. 2013. ‘Universal Health Coverage in Turkey: Enhancement of Equity.’ The Lancet 382 (9886): 65–99. Barıs¸, Enis. 2011. ‘Healthcare in Turkey: from Laggard to Leader.’ British Medical Journal 342: 579–582. Civaner, M. M. 2014. ‘Health-Care Reform in Turkey: Far from Perfect.’ The Lancet 383(9911): 26. Evans, R. G. and G. L. Stoddart. 1990. ‘Producing Health, Consuming Healthcare.’ Social Science and Medicine 31(12): 1347–1363. GBD 2015 Healthcare Access and Quality Collaborators. 2017. ‘Healthcare Access and Quality Index Based on Mortality from Causes Amenable to Personal Health Care in 195 Countries and Territories, 1990–2015: a Novel Analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015.’ The Lancet 390(10091): 231–266. Global Burden of Disease Health Financing Collaborator Network. 2017a. ‘Future and Potential Spending on Health 2015–2040: Development Assistance for Health, and Government, Prepaid Private, and Out-of-Pocket Health Spending in 184 countries.’ The Lancet 389(10083): 2005–2030. Global Burden of Disease Health Financing Collaborator Network. 2017b. ‘Evolution and Patterns of Global Health Financing 1995–2014: Development Assistance for Health, and Government, Prepaid Private, and Out-of-Pocket Health Spending in 184 countries.’ The Lancet 389(10083): 1981–2004. Horton, Richard. 2013. ‘Offline: Testing Turkey’s European ‘Transformation’’. The Lancet 381(9862): 188. recorded the highest improvement gains over the last 25 years, measured on the Healthcare Access and Quality Index (HAQ) scale (GBD 2015 Healthcare Access and Quality Collaborators 2017). .

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Transformation of health and healthcare International Monetary Fund. 2015. Regional Economic Issues: Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe; Reconciling Fiscal Consolidation and Growth. Washington, DC. Maeda, Akiko, Cheryl Cashin, Joseph Harris, Naoki Ikegami, and M. R. Reich. 2014. Universal Health Coverage for Inclusive and Sustainable Development; a Synthesis of 11 Country Case Studies. Washington, DC: World Bank. Menon, Rekha, Salih Mollahaliloglu, and Iryna Postolovska. 2013. Toward Universal Coverage: Turkey’s Green Card Program for the Poor. UNICO Case Studies no. 18. Washington, DC: World Bank Ministry of Health. 2003. Transformation in Health. Ankara. Ministry of Health. 2016. Health Statistics Yearbook, 2015. Ankara. Ministry of Health. 2017. Health Statistics Yearbook, 2016. Ankara. OECD. 2014. OECD Reviews of Health Care Quality; Turkey 2014; Raising Standards. OECD Reviews of Health Care Quality. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. 2017a. Caring for Quality in Health: Lessons Learned from 15 Reviews of Health Care Quality. OECD Reviews of Health Care Quality. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. 2017b. Health at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD and World Bank. 2008. OECD Reviews of Health Systems: Turkey. Paris: OECD Publishing. Savas¸, B. S., Oemer Karahan, R. O. Saka. 2002. Health Care Systems in Transition: Turkey. Copenhagen: European Observatory of Health Systems 4(4). Schneider, Eric C., Dana O. Sarnak, David Squires, Arnav Shah, and Michelle M. Doty. 2017. Mirror, Mirror 2017: International Comparison Reflects Flaws and Opportunities for Better U.S. Health Care. Commonwealth Fund. https://interactives.commonwealthfund.org/2017/july/mirror-mirror/ WHO Regional Office for Europe. 2012a. Successful Health System Reforms: The Case of Turkey. Copenhagen. WHO Regional Office for Europe. 2012b. Turkey Health System Performance Assessment 2011. Copenhagen. World Bank. 2003. Turkey: Reforming the Health Sector for Improved Access and Efficiency. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2013. Toward Universal Coverage: Turkey’s Green Card Program for the Poor. UNICO Case Studies No. 18. Washington, DC. World Bank. 2014. Universal Health Coverage for Inclusive and Sustainable Development; A Synthesis of 11 Country Case Studies. Washington, DC.

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PART VI

External relations

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28 FOREIGN POLICY, 1923–2018 Mustafa Aydın

Introduction Turkey is a country full of contradictions. Its foreign policy seems, at the first glance, a hodgepodge of reactions to external events rather than part of a long-term design. A closer look, however, provides outlines of a general framework, conditioned by its geography and history, the international system, and the desires of the ruling group. Even a rudimentary analysis presents a complex mixture of factors affecting its foreign policy and the multilayered approach it has to adopt in practice. This chapter will look at the long-term dynamics of Turkish foreign policy to better understand its underlying structures and current, as well as past, travails. It will first look at the fundamental parameters that have informed policy-makers over the course of the last hundred years. Then, manifestations of the country’s choices in its international relations during the Cold War and early post-Cold War era will be analysed. Finally, it will probe the contemporary adaptation to the changing structural realities inside and outside the country, which challenge basic parameters of hitherto long-term certainties.

Foundations and geopolitical realities Although Turkey has, in the past ten or so years, been increasingly categorised as a Middle Eastern country, it was difficult to place it into any category during most of the 20th century. Not only did it not fit any single geopolitical sub-region, but it also did not fit any one cultural, political, or economic category either (Aydın 2004a, 1). The conflicting characteristics of the country reflected wider uncertainties about its place in international affairs. The Ottoman discussion over the ‘eastern ideal’ and the ‘western ideal’ regarding the exact nature of the country during the 19th century seems as acute today, and the country is divided over any significant issue (Aydin et al. 2018). Yet, in its foreign policy, until recently there existed well-delineated near-consensus positions. What accounted for this was the hard-learned lessons and tradition that created a set of relatively inflexible principles. Looking from a distance, one can discern, with simplification, the interplay of several variables that shaped the Turkish foreign policy during most of the 20th century (Aydın 1999). Its geography, historical experience, and cultural inclinations (or 367

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structural variables), as well as its economic needs, changes in international system, domestic political alterations, and the personalities of decision-makers (or conjunctural variables) determined Turkey’s foreign policy (Aydın 1999, 2000, 2004a). Until the late 17th century, the foreign relations of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of Turkey, were characterised by its military-offensive approach (Karaosmanog˘ lu 2000, 200). When the Empire started to crumble, its main policy line became the preservation of the status quo by playing dominant powers against each other, aiming to slow down the loss of territory (Karaosmanog˘ lu 2000, 201). The unavoidable decline of the Empire, and its weaker position vis-à-vis greater powers, made the concept of ‘balance of power’ an indispensable component of its strategic behaviour, which was inherited by Turkey (Aydın 2003). Turkey has undergone profound changes since the 1920s, but the strategic value of its location has not changed much, even if its relative importance to other states has varied over time. With the location comes diverse threats to the country’s security and unity, leading to Sèvresphobia, a fear that the ‘external world and their internal collaborators are [continuously] trying to weaken and divide Turkey’ (Mufti 1998, 43). As a result, Turkey’s foreign policy is influenced by the public perception that, although the international arena remains hostile and foreign countries, including Turkey’s allies, continue to threaten Turkey, it needs to stand alone rather than joining with other countries (Aydın et al. 2018). Though Turkish imperial history ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, and the Turkish Republic bore little resemblance to its forerunner, it was established not only in the heart of the Empire’s geopolitical setting, but also retained most of its ruling elite with their top-down reform approach. As they carried out radical reforms to transform the country into a secular state, they also provided the basis for one of the fundamental features of Turkish foreign policy during most of the 20th century, namely its western orientation (Aydın 2004a; Sander 1984). Turkey also inherited complications from its Ottoman past that still affect contemporary Turkish foreign policy. Apart from the scepticism of Turks towards their international connections, the challenges Turkey is facing in its neighbourhood, such as civil wars in Iraq and Syria, a divided Cyprus, dissonance with Armenians, an inability to reconcile with the Kurds, and opposition by some EU countries to Turkey’s full membership, are all products of longterm historical existence in this geography. Many of Turkey’s current disputes with its neighbours could be traced back to the Ottoman centuries. In fact, some of Turkey’s contemporary relations, such as its convoluted relationship with Greece or its competitive cooperation with Russia, can only be explained with reference to history. Moreover, a sense of greatness, based on belonging to a nation that created a world empire, is a point of reference for most Turks. The imperial grandeur and the regional influence is something that ordinary Turks still respond to and take pride in. Thus it is frustrating for them to see other powers meddling in the affairs of their neighbourhood, which explains in large part both the conviction of their superiority and their sensitivity towards international involvement in their neighbourhood. Turkey, thanks to its geo-strategic location, has been able to play a larger role in world politics than its size, population, economic strength, and military power would indicate (Aydın 2004a). It is historically located on one of the most coveted pieces of territory that controls major routes between the economically developed lands of Europe and the energyrich lands of the Middle East and the Caspian Basin. This particular geography, branding Turkey as a Balkan, Mediterranean, Eurasian, and Middle Eastern country all at the same time, also makes it susceptible to changes in its neighbourhood. The strategic position of the Anatolian peninsula with the possession of the Straits conveys political and military 368

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advantages as well as major security concerns (Váli 1971, 46). Thus, while Turkey’s multidimensional geography could be utilised for political and economic benefit, it could also become a source of weakness with the number and combination of its neighbours. While controlling the only sea-way linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, thus the lifeline of the country situated at the northern shores of the Black Sea, provided a resource for the Ottoman Empire and Turkey that could not be duplicated in manpower (Legg and Morrison 1971, 101), it has also brought both states into constant conflict with the Russians since the 17th century. While the historic hostility between the Russians and the Turks has been at the heart of Turkish–Soviet relations for many years, having a superpower neighbour also had its effects on Turkish foreign policy. It was the Soviet’s refusal to extend the 1925 Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality in March 1945 that pushed Turkey to seek protection from the emerging Western alliance. Apart from the significance of geography and historical experiences, it was the impact of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic, on the governing elite that shaped the ideology of Turkish foreign policy for most of the 20th century. His foreign policy, like his political views, represented a break with the past. His renunciation of the three grand ideas of the Ottoman Empire (namely, Pan-Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, and Pan-Turanism) with principles of Republicanism, Secularism, and Nationalism respectively also had foreign policy implications (Aydın 1999, 171–176). In this sense, his foreign policy was an extension of his domestic policies, recognising the vital connection between the two (Váli 1971, 55) and the fact that steady international relations were needed for internal stability and the domestic reforms he was planning to carry out. Thus, his famous motto: ‘Peace at home, peace in the world’.

Conjunctural determinants of Turkish foreign policy While Turkey was rebuilding its nation-state in 1930s, the world was moving towards World War II, which caught Turkey in the middle of economic reconstruction and still recovering from the damage of continuous warfare between 1912 and 1923. As a result, Turkey’s main concern during the war was to weather the storm without damage to its national sovereignty or territorial integrity. To ensure that Turkey emerged from the war without being invaded and with minimum damage, it played the warring parties against each other and avoided commitments that could drag it into war, as it was clear that it did not have the capacity and means to ensure its integrity if it became involved. At the same time, Turkish leaders were convinced that Turkey’s long-term security could only be ensured by the Allied countries and they pursued policies to bring the country closer to them. While Italian or German threats were felt at times, the main source of apprehension after June 1941 was not the possibility of German occupation but rather ‘the possibility of being liberated from occupation by the USSR’ (Aydın 2010). This explains why Turkey diligently sought Allied guarantees that would ensure its safety at the end of the war. World War II was an important watershed for Turkey’s foreign and security policies as well as its domestic development. Although its political and economic alignment with the West after the war could be seen as a natural outcome of its modernisation (which at the time meant westernisation) desire, its dependence on the West went too far, indicating a clear reversal from its earlier policies. While pre-war Turkey under Atatürk’s leadership had adopted the institutions and the values of the West to accelerate modernisation, this did not imply dependency on the West either militarily or economically. The tilt in post-war years was very pronounced. 369

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As the international system rapidly evolved to a bipolar structure, it forced Turkey to choose a side, since ‘a policy of neutrality was not very realistic or possible for a country like Turkey, a middle-range power situated in such a geopolitically important area’ (Aron 1973, 125–127). Moreover, while the Soviet Union emerged as one of the superpowers, ‘meeting the Soviet threat’ became a priority for Turkish decision-makers (Armaog˘ lu 1958, 163). Turkey’s move towards a multi-party system at the end of the war also contributed to its willingness to seek closer links with Western democracies (Rustow 1979, 87; Karpat 1959, 188–192). Finally, the fact that the US was the only country in the post-war world capable of lending money limited Turkey’s choices for economic aid (Ülman and Sander 1972, 6). The implications of Turkey’s economic and military dependency on the West became clear immediately after it joined NATO in 1952, such as its active role in creating the Balkan (1953) and Baghdad (1955) pacts, which provided no additional security after its NATO membership; its awkward position at the Bandung Conference (1955); its opposition to the Algerian independence movement between 1954 and 1962; and siding with the UK and France during the Suez crisis (1956). Moreover, when the world entered into a period of limited détente, Turkish leaders did not believe that a peaceful coexistence would be possible between the two blocks and remained western-oriented (Ülman and Sander 1972, 7–8). The Cold War, while encouraging Turkey’s dependency on the West, also sustained unquestioning western military, political, and economic support. So long as Turkey felt the Soviet threat, and the US was committed to its defence and economic development, there was no reason to question its dependency. However, as the 1960s saw a softening of interbloc tensions and the aid received from the US started to decline, Turkey felt the need for a more complex and multidimensional configuration for its foreign policy. Moreover, rising economic consciousness of the Global South introduced new actors to the world stage, such as the ‘Group of 77’ and ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, which opened up new avenues to smaller members of the alliance systems to explore. At the same time, domestically, Turkey was feeling the effects of the 1960 coup. The relatively free political atmosphere created by the 1961 Constitution had a significant impact on Turkish domestic and foreign policy. While foreign policy-making remained in the hands of a small elite group and public criticism of national foreign policy was generally considered as unpatriotic until 1960s, it became acceptable afterwards as a new electoral system allowed smaller parties to enter the parliament and air their views. As hitherto supressed or marginalised parties (such as Turkish Worker’s Party, Republican Peasant-Nation Party, and National Order Party) became part of the debate, their foreign policy line increasingly advocated a reassessment of Turkey’s ties with the West. But, what finally generated impetus for a revaluation was the events surrounding the Cyprus problem, which forced Turkish leaders to recognise that their strict adherence to western alignment while the international system changed had left Turkey isolated in the world. Thus, Cyprus became the catalyst for Turkey to re-examine its whole foreign policy . orientation. Particularly, a letter from the US President Lyndon B. Johnson to President Inönü on 5 June 1964, informing him that Turkey’s allies ‘might not be able to protect it against the Soviet Union if Turkey takes a step which results in Soviet intervention without the full consent of its NATO Allies’, forced Turkey’s hand (Bölükbas¸ı 1988). Moreover, a US missile deal with the Soviet Union during the Cuban crisis of 1962 over the removal of Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey without consulting it, created concerns as Turkish leaders started to realise that, while Turkey’s national interests do not correspond to those of the US all the time, Turkey might become a target for a Soviet nuclear attack because of US bases on its soil. 370

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One of the major changes in Turkish foreign policy in the late 1960s was the rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The thaw that started after 1964 was undoubtedly influenced by US behaviour during the Cuban and Cyprus crises, but the desire for Soviet economic assistance in view of declining American aid also contributed to the rapprochement. Concomitant with this, Turkey also moved to improve its relations with the non-aligned countries to garner support for its Cyprus position in the UN, and one of the first indications of its new ‘multi-faceted foreign policy concept’ was the position it took during the 1967 Arab– Israeli war when Turkey, mindful of the importance of the 13 Arab votes in the UN, voted for a resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal (Ülman and Dekmejian 1967, 124–131). While Turkey’s new approach was gradually expanding in the international arena, it came to loggerheads with the US first over its opium cultivation (Bölükbas¸ı 1988, 174) and then because of its ‘Peace Operation’ in Cyprus, which resulted in a US arms embargo on Turkey in February 1975. As the Turkish public was outraged at Congress’s eagerness to adopt coercive measures against a loyal ally, the government immediately suspended all US activities in Turkey, except those related to NATO. A combination of these economic, social, political, and international changes prompted Turkey to reconsider its foreign policy alignments repeatedly during the inter-coup period (1960–1980). In the end, Turkey’s foreign policy, while still resting upon the principles of identification and alliance with the West, came to be marked by a trend of stressing more of its national interests and greater independence in decision-making. However, its weak coalition governments and increasingly hostile domestic political environment prevented Turkey at this time dealing with its outstanding foreign policy issues such as Cyprus, the Aegean, and relations with the US. Thus, while little or no progress was made on its existing external problems, Turkey decidedly moved to develop better political and economic relations with the nonaligned states and the Eastern Bloc countries. Thus, when the world was moving towards the end of the Cold War, the stage was set in Turkey for a new orientational search for its foreign policy.

Turkish foreign policy at the end of the Cold War The end of the Cold War propelled Turkey, a NATO flank country, into the centre stage with an intention to guide a vast region extending from eastern Europe to western China. This was due to longer-term changes that took place within and around Turkey during the 1980s. First of all, it had experienced major transformations in its political, economic, social, and cultural life, fundamentally affecting its foreign policy. Turkey of the 1990s was a largely altered country and the impetus for change was still visible. On the political level, being less than a full democracy starting with the military coup of 1980 (military government until 1983, quasi-democracy during the rest of the 1980s, and democratising country since then) created tensions for Turkey where it mattered most, namely Europe. Trying to ‘reconcile the divergent objectives of moving towards integration with Europe while defending the rationale of being less than a full democratic regime’ (Sezer 1989, 66) strained Turkish foreign policy. Additionally, the influence of the military in politics, together with a civilian tendency to suppress certain ideas and freedoms, became impediments for Turkey in its relations with Europe in general. As Turkey became increasingly isolated from Europe during the 1980s as a result of the latter’s intense criticism of the country’s domestic political environment, Turkey’s increasing reliance on Middle Eastern states and its desire to use them as a balance against Europe became apparent. Cooling relations with Europe, together with economic necessities prompted by an export-led growth strategy, led Turkey’s new drive toward the Middle East. 371

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On the economic side, as Turkey made the switch towards a liberal economy, the requirements for incessant foreign currency inflows and ever-increasing exports forced it to prioritise its economic needs in its external relations. As the Turkish economy increasingly integrated with the global economy, the Foreign Ministry became progressively concerned with obtaining foreign loans, opening up new markets for Turkish goods, and striking deals with foreign governments to bring investment into the country. While Turkey’s need for new markets grew, so did its political efforts to find openings in the wider Middle East and Eurasia. At the same time, the huge sums needed by the Turkish economy required the sustenance of its western links. Socially, repression of the liberal and left-of-centre intelligentsia during the 1980s and the military’s attempt to utilise mainstream religion as an antidote to extremism opened the way for a growing visibility of Islam in Turkish society. Moreover, with the onset of globalisation during the 1990s, Turkey started to experience an increased role of hyper-identities in politics, namely religious, historical, and ethnic bonds. As a result, successive Turkish governments of the 1990s felt the need to balance ethnic, religious, and historical sentiments when faced with conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Bosnia-Herzegovina. While official responses to these crises were restrained, the Turkish public was critical of what it perceived as passivity in international responses. While Turkey avoided military interventions in these conflicts, the religious and historical bonds became vital in public view. When coupled with the continuous rejection of Turkey by the EU, these sentiments again led to a reassessment of its western connections by a vast majority of the Turks, creating pressures for revision in foreign policy. Furthermore, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent transformation of Eurasia had an enormous impact on Turkish foreign and security policies. While Turkey’s geo-strategic value during the Cold War was limited by its place within NATO’s southern flank, it found an expanded role by the end of the Cold War in a vast territory inhabited by some 150 million fellow Muslim Turkic-speakers. At the same time, as the century-old Soviet/Russian threat disappeared, the vacuum created by its departure in the Caucasus and Central Asia became a breeding ground for new zones of conflict on Turkey’s borders. Nevertheless, an atmosphere of euphoria reigned in Turkey as its historical, cultural, linguistic, and/or religious similarities with the newly independent Eurasian countries were increasingly noticed within and outside Turkey. While pan-Turkist ideas were circulated freely, it was not long before Turkey faced the reality that its economic, political, and social means were too limited to meet the immense needs of these newly independent countries. Thus, disillusionment gradually replaced optimism and Turkey realised that the opportunities of 1990s came with potential risks and complex challenges (Aydın 2004b). Having structured its foreign and security policies during the Cold War around its Allies, it was disconcerting for Turkey to face a discussion on the relevance of NATO in the ‘new world order’, which led to the realisation that its security needs were diverging from its NATO partners in the post-Cold War era. This shook the foundations of Turkish security thinking (Aydın 2004b). The emergence of Turkic states was a welcome break at this juncture, leading to a growing sense of ethnicity among Turkish decision-makers and thus sparking more activist foreign policy and a quest for influence. At the same time, a greater Turkish role in the Caucasus and Central Asia was also favoured by the West and accepted reluctantly by Russia as a counter-weight against Iran and the possible emergence of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. As a result, Turkey was promoted as a model in its wider neighbourhood. Eventually, Turkey was able to add new components – namely, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Balkans – to the substance of its foreign policy while keeping its western pillar intact. 372

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Revisionism of the AKP Many characteristics of Turkish foreign policy had been developed under the intense pressures of the Cold War and constant turmoil in its neighbourhood, and were followed closely during the changing regional context and time of geopolitical realignments of 1990s. They were, however, questioned substantially with differing principles during the relative tranquillity and economic prosperity of the 2000s. When Turkey was confronted with the next instability in its neighbourhood, namely the so-called Arab Spring uprisings since 2011, it had to face a decision whether to continue with its new line and thus force further changes to its regional and global positioning or try to revert to some of its older certainties. Terror attacks on the US in September 2001 and Arab uprisings in 2011 were important watershed events, ten years apart, in global and regional politics that impacted Turkey immensely through their effects on international systems. As they unleashed forces of change and transformation, they also opened the way to questioning old certainties. With the pressures of globalisation and a sudden increase in communication, most of the borders/limitations became less certain and disputed. While the end of the Cold War left the US as the overarching superpower with ambition to remodel the world, prompting worldwide resistance and conflicts, the Arab uprisings opened the floodgates in Turkey’s neighbourhood. While these were taking place internationally, Turkey was going through another immense change domestically, rivalling its transformations in the 1920s–30s and 1980s, which led to a redefinition of its neighbourhood from a new Turkey-centred regional perspective. As the end of the Cold War opened up its eyes to its environs and enabled it to look beyond its immediate borders, Turkey, wishing to benefit from these changes, started to flex its muscles and devise and/or suggest new cooperation schemes such as the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organisation, Caucasus Stability Pact, Levant Quartet, and so on. Moreover, the expanding economic capabilities of the country through its deeper integration with global economy and the EU-area enabled it to implement new policy lines, instead of just imagining them. While Turkey’s focus was Central Asia and the Caucasus during the 1990s, the Balkans and the Black Sea were added during the 2000s, and its main focus finally came to rest on the Middle East during the 2010s. There were both security/strategic reasons and ideological/political choices for this move. An increasing threat perception from the region as a result of various US interventions and the continued PKK threat were coloured with the ideological preferences, cultural affinities, and personal connections of the AKP as it gradually consolidated its domination over Turkish politics during the 2000s. While Turkey’s geopolitics was changing, providing it with opportunities in Eurasia and the wider Middle East, its history was reinterpreted by combined efforts of neo-liberals, neo-Ottomanists, and political Islamists. As a result, its Ottoman past, instead of a nuisance, became a cultural determinant and a justification for a hegemonic drive in Turkey’s neighbourhood. With the processes of reconciliation with, and redefinition of, history, the Ottoman Empire ceased to be depicted as a distant past and became an important linkage to Turkey’s neighbourhood. With an attempt to dig into positive aspects of imperial unity, especially in the Middle East, Turkey’s surroundings were imagined as areas of influence. While its geography and history were thus getting new looks, Turkey’s long-held governing philosophy, namely Kemalism, was also facing a reassessment and challenge. As the older divisions of East and West were left behind and the world increasingly faced rising influences of neo-conservatism, neo-liberalism, and neo-fundamentalism, Turkey witnessed 373

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the growing influence of its formerly underprivileged classes from Anatolia (urban immigrants, villagers, veiled women, small businesses) in the 1990s and 2000s with their more conservative culture, identificational uncertainties, and local/regional visions. Eventually, their political and economic preferences came to dominate the Turkish politics. In international relations, they supported Turkey’s openings to new regions and creating inroads in the wider Middle East. This focus on the Middle East was accompanied by Turkey’s new policy initiatives such as abolishing visas, creating free trade zones, high-level cooperation councils, joint cabinet meetings, and with extensive political, economic, and social openings to the region. All these were embedded within various principles developed by the former Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister, and later Foreign Minister and Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutog˘ lu, such as ‘zero problems with neighbours’, ‘rhythmic diplomacy’, ‘strategic depth’, and ‘regionbased foreign policy’. These were presented in contrast to the traditional way of foreign policy making in Turkey, and were thus seen as challenging the older convictions of its international relations. Priorities at this time were improving Turkey’s image globally, solving its longstanding international problems such as Cyprus, playing a mediator role in various international troubles, and in general trying to carve out an influence area around Turkey with its soft power assets. Along the way, in contrast to its traditional foreign policy-making, rhetoric and domestic political considerations came to dominate the action and foreign policy priorities. Traditions were dismissed as shackles slowing Turkey, and were replaced by an action-oriented approach rather than result-oriented processes. As a result, activity in foreign relations was imagined as effectiveness, and Turkey became increasingly involved in conflicts within its neighbourhood either as a mediator or one of the players, thus breaking one of the cardinal rules of traditional Turkish foreign policy – non-intervention in neighbouring countries. As all these were put through a severe test with the emergence of the Arab uprisings, the ‘zero problems with neighbours’ motto and its related principles were rather abruptly replaced by the emergence of ‘order building’ rhetoric with an emphasis on Turkey’s hard power instruments. When Turkey failed in implementing its new policy line, and its near and far connections were hurt as a result, ‘precious loneliness’ became the defining appellation of its international standing. Turkey’s foreign policy decision-making structure also changed considerably. It was traditionally left to the strict control of the bureaucracy within the foreign ministry with inputs from the military, presidency, and prime ministers. The last 20 years, however, have seen diminishing roles for the foreign ministry bureaucracy and the military, while the role of foreign ministers at first, then the prime minister, and finally the president, came to dominate with growing input from the wider security bureaucracy including the National Intelligence Organisation. Moreover, foreign ministry traditions on recruitment, employment, and promotion discontinued and the various roles and duties customarily reserved for, and jealously guarded by, the Ministry were passed on to new/old institutions. Finally, the recent move to a presidential system with the June 2018 elections consolidated the decision-making powers in the Presidency. The accompanying bureaucratic changes include abolition of the position of the undersecretary, the long-time guardian of bureaucratic unity and tradition in the Ministry, and allowing political appointments not only at ambassadorial posts outside Turkey but also to the heads of directorates and mid-level career positions from other state bureaucracy and the private sector. The impact of these changes would be substantial, though it is still early to assess their effect. 374

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In the meantime, while the Arab Spring raged on and pulled Turkey into increasingly untenable positions, especially in Syria-related problems, the resignation of Ahmet Davutog˘ lu from the Premiership and the establishment of a new AKP government in May 2016 allowed a recognition of some of the problems in foreign policy and led to a partial restoration, which has accelerated since the failed coup attempt on 15 July 2016. In the meantime, the utilisation of military force and the intelligence apparatus instead of, or in addition to, diplomacy has acquired importance and Turkey has established several permanent, semi-permanent, and temporary military bases and installations in its near abroad. While these have expanded Turkey’s territorial reach, the separation between domestic and international has largely disappeared. Finally, the combined effects of the emergence of a semi-permanent war zone alongside its southern border, together with regionalisation and internationalisation of the Kurdish issue, a now permanent Russian presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant in addition to its overwhelming position in the Black Sea, and indications regarding the emergence of a new antiTurkey axis between Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE in the Middle East are felt on Turkey’s regional policy-making and are increasingly forcing Turkey towards difficult policy choices.

Conclusion For a correct evaluation of Turkey’s foreign policy, it is important to distinguish between its fundamental goals and short-term objectives. Although its policies have undergone considerable changes through the years, the fundamentals have not radically altered until recently. Due to structural determinants and their strong influence, Turkey’s foreign policy had been marked by ‘a remarkable degree of continuity’ (Rustow 1989, 84) for a long time, often in contrast with frequent domestic political changes. . The interwar period (1923–1939) under the leadership of Atatürk and Inönü saw a Turkey which was western in its inclination but jealously guarding against any indication that its independence, either economically or politically, might be jeopardised. The 1945–1960 period was marked by Turkey’s western dependence, which led to disillusionment and soul searching in the 1960s. The 1970s witnessed a gradual alienation from the West, a general loneliness in the international arena, and efforts to widen its connections. Although its policies were partly conditioned by the re-emergence of the Cold War in the 1980s, the end of the Cold War and Turkey’s increasing economic capabilities allowed it to widen its horizons and open up to regions around itself during the 1990s. As the desire to become influential in its neighbourhood dominated its external relations during the 1990s and 2000s, Turkey revisited most of its traditional foreign policy parameters and tried to dispose of its limitations. Nevertheless, older restrictions, such as its geography, history, and politics, as well as economic and military capabilities, continued to dominate its foreign policy. The nature of the political regime in Turkey and its democratic credentials will continue to be influential in its relations, especially with European countries. In this context, Kurdish nationalism will remain explosive and could play an important role in shaping Turkey’s future. It is obvious that containment of the issue will remain one of the preoccupations of its foreign policy. Therefore, in near future, Turkey will continue to try to separate the domestic and international aspects of the Kurdish issue, while at the same time striving to forestall developments in northern Iraq and/or northern Syria from reaching a stage where an independent Kurdish state becomes possible. As long as Turkey is not in full control of its domestic situation, its freedom of movement in external relations will be subjected to and limited by the requirements of the Kurdish issue. The problem also clouds Turkey’s further democratisation, which in turn threatens to jeopardise relations with the EU. 375

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As Turkey is situated at the very centre of the most insecure areas of the post-Cold War era, security issues should be expected to dominate its foreign policy formulations during the coming years. In this context, Turkey will continue to hold on to NATO, though at the same time seeking to create other security connections with neighbouring countries, especially the Russian Federation. This would inevitably cause further strains on its NATO and US connections, and might in the longer run jeopardise efforts to modernise its military. Moreover, tensions related to Syria’s future, after-effects of the Gülen affair, and enhanced US sanctions on Iran will continue to be felt in Turkish–American relations in the short-to-mid term. Economic factors may still be expected to loosely shape Turkish foreign policy in the coming years. Turkey’s desire to become an economically developed country has not changed since the early days of the Republic, and economic development is not only a social need but also a source to strengthen its power. Thus procurement of international credits and developing new markets for Turkey’s growing exports are likely to occupy Turkish diplomacy in the middle-to-long term. Finally, Turkish foreign policy in the near future will continue to focus on its neighbourhood. While Turkey has traditionally avoided involvement in regional politics, those days are now in the distant past and it is almost inevitable that Turkey will continue to be involved more with regional developments.

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29 RESETTING TURKISH FOREIGN POLICY IN A TIME OF GLOBAL TURMOIL E. Fuat Keyman

Introduction Our globalising world is currently in a state of what Zbigniew Brzezinski (2012) has suggested is ‘global turmoil’. From economic crises to security challenges, from climate change to increasing inequality and poverty, and from violence and terror to the refugee problem, to name just a few, globalisation is confronted by not one, but multiple crises, occurring simultaneously and with devastating and severe consequences. While uncertainty about the future and the ontological insecurity of our lives and living conditions increase, trust is being replaced by suspicion and doubt, leading German social theorist Ulrich Beck (2005) to coin the term ‘world risk society’ – an apt description of the present. Risk, uncertainty, and insecurity are the terms that we use to describe the present – that is, the multiple crises of globalisation – giving rise to the global turmoil that is gaining an enduring quality and shaping global/regional/national/local affairs and developments. While felt everywhere in the world, it is the Middle East in general, and Syria and Iraq in particular, where the meaning and the implications of the global turmoil and multiple crises have recently coalesced. No society, including those of the hegemon and great powers, is immune from the global crisis; Turkey does not constitute an exception. Since the 1980s, Turkey’s political, economic, and cultural modernity has been shaped and reshaped by globalisation; its domestic and foreign affairs have mutually constituted each other within a global context; and global challenges and processes have been impacting significantly the way in which the terms, strategies, and actors of domestic political affairs and competitions are framed. In this chapter I will suggest that not only is Turkey not immune from the unprecedented challenges generated by the global turmoil, but it is in fact at the epicentre of the global turmoil, affected immensely by the multiple crises of globalisation, and also regarded as one of the pivotal actors with the potential to play a key role for the possibility of regional and global stability. In what follows, I will substantiate this suggestion by providing a critical analysis of how Turkish foreign policy has evolved since the beginning of the 2000s in terms of its modus vivendi, its identity, and its transformative capacity; and, how this process has been overdetermined by globalisation. More specifically, I will show how Turkish foreign policy was proactive through regional and global engagements at the beginning of the 2000s, then faced 378

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an impasse with the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2010 and needed to be reset, and finally how Turkey has become a sceptic of globalisation, paving the way for the increasing power of the nation state through realism and security thinking.

Global turmoil and regional instability Two decades ago in his influential work The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski (1997: 124–35) suggested: [Two] adjoining major nation-states, each with a historically imperial, cultural, religious, and economic interest in the region – namely, Turkey and Iran – are themselves volatile in their geopolitical orientation and are internally potentially vulnerable. Were these two states to become destabilized, it is quite likely that the entire region would be plunged into massive disorder, with the ongoing ethnic and territorial conflicts spinning out of control and the region’s already delicate balance of power severely disrupted. Accordingly, Turkey and Iran are not only important geostrategic players but are also geopolitical pivots, whose own internal condition is of critical importance to the fate of the region. Since Brzezinski penned this description of Turkey in 1997, significant changes and transformations in world politics have occurred – from global terror to Arab uprisings, from the tragic refugee problem to failed states, from a global economic crisis to global climate change – giving rise to global turmoil and multiple crises of globalisation, as well as generating important impacts on foreign policy. Yet Brzezinski’s diagnostic statement about Turkey, emphasising both its regional power identity and the importance of domestic stability for the sustainability of this role, has remained true. Turkey has become a ‘geopolitical pivot’ and ‘regional power’ in our globalising world. It has been initiating a proactive, multidimensional, and constructive foreign policy in many areas, ranging from contributing to peace and stability in the Middle East to playing an active role in countering terrorism and extremism, to becoming a new ‘energy hub’. While acting as an effective humanitarian state aiming at managing the recent refugee crisis, it has been making a significant contribution to the enhancement and betterment of the human condition where development assistance is needed. Moreover, since 2015, Turkey has also been confronted with a set of significant and unprecedented security risks generating crucial ‘existential challenges’ to its national and territorial sovereignty. Escalating conflict and instability in the region within the deepening global turmoil made it necessary, if not imperative, to adjust Turkish foreign policy. These unprecedented challenges produced existential threats to the national security of Turkey and the security in the region, including: 1 2

3

Refugee crisis: the profound refugee influx and crisis, whose numbers have exceeded six million regionally. Fight against ISIS: an ongoing war against ISIS, which can be defined as ‘more than a terror organisation, less than a state’ – a brutal and inhumane terror organisation on the one hand, and a self-proclaimed Islamic state on the other. Failed-state problem: the ‘failed-state’ problem in Syria and Iraq and its widening throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

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4

5 6 7

Regional power games: the intensified geopolitical power games staged by great powers to strengthen their hegemonic positions, to exert their influence and to maximise their interests. Lack of global/regional leadership: the lack of global or regional leadership destabilises the region. Rise of sectarianism: the increasing power of sectarian identity claims widening and deepening the devastating human tragedy to an unimaginable degree. Lack of inclusive institutions/civil society: the lack of inclusive institutions, rule-based constitutional government, and the idea of equal citizenship in the region undermines the prospects of creating the conditions for stability, at least normality.

These factors have together made the region a space of instability and insecurity, where multiple crises-ridden challenges intersect (Figure 29.1). As the hopes of the Arab Spring withered in the aftermath of the brutal coup in Egypt, as well as the devastating civil wars first in Libya and then in Syria, the main focus of the world risk society/global turmoil has become the MENA region and the two interrelated yet distinct challenges of the refugee problem and the war against ISIS (Table 29.1). Moreover, these two challenges have evolved from being a serious problem to a crisis in terms of their scale and implications for the region and globe. These two crises have become the main stakes in global, regional, and national politics, the main focus of academic and public debate, and the main topic of policy debate and strategising (Keyman 2016). With its long borders with Syria and Iraq, its pivotal position, and its hegemonic power capabilities, Turkey is situated at the heart of these challenges. In particular, the refugee crisis, ISIS, and the failed-state problem affect Turkey and its security directly. According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) April 2018 Information Note, Turkey is hosting more than 3.5 million Syrians.1 Regarding the figures for the year 2016, Turkey has been the country that has hosted the largest number of refugees in the world for the last three years. According to UNHCR’s mid-year report in 2016, six out of every ten Syrian refugees live in Turkey (UNHCR 2016). In brief, 54% of

Refugee Crisis

TURKEY

ISIS Crisis

Failed State

Figure 29.1 Three crises confronting Turkey.

1

As of May 2018, Turkey hosts 3,586,679 Syrians, according to UNHCR (2018).

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Resetting Turkish foreign policy Table 29.1 Points of comparison illustrating unique, individual aspects of the twin crises

The refugee crisis

The war against ISIS

Euro-centred Drivers: humanitarian concerns Implications for economy and security Primary actors: EU, non-EU European States, Turkey Bears serious economic and security repercussions for principal actors Kurds not part of the equation, no active role in diffusing the problem

Regional and global scope Drivers: geopolitical power games Purely security-oriented Primary actors: US, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, and Israel Primary actors not affected by the burdens, host zero refugees Kurds viewed as a necessary actor, partner in the stability and security of the region

Source: Author.

Syrians living outside Syria are in Turkey. While applying unconditional hospitality to refugees, Turkey needs to provide humanitarian-based governance policies, varying from educational and economic needs to establishing necessary safety and security mechanisms. In addition, the Turkish army has been the most effective and active force among the coalition forces fighting ISIS on Turkey’s southern border as well as in Syria. Not only is Turkey in need of securing its borders against ISIS, it also has fought against it to contribute to regional stability. Yet the human and social cost of this fight has been very high, with many innocent lives lost, as well as widening fear and ontological insecurity as a result of ISIS’s brutal terrorist attacks in Turkey. As Figure 29.1 suggests, it should be noted that both the refugee and the ISIS crisis have been triggered by the failed-state problem in Syria and Iraq. By definition, failed states lack adequate government and capacity to rule over and control affairs and developments under their territorial jurisdictions. They no longer have functional economies or deliver public services that a state is typically assumed to provide. They also lack the ability to secure their borders. Worse, the failed-state situation constitutes a suitable environment for asymmetric threats from non-state actors. The lack of key security services, necessary rules, and regulations in failed states make them especially attractive for violent non-state actors and terrorist organisations to gain political, intellectual, and financial capital. Syria and Iraq have certainly turned into failed states that have been unable to control either the movement of refugees or the expansion of ISIS and its sphere of influence. Neither state governs its territory fully and effectively. Their borders are porous, both letting in and letting out foreign fighters that not only destabilise their territories but also the sovereign lands of neighbouring countries. The emergence of ISIS, as well as other factional militias, and the operational support they accumulate through the failed states pose direct security risks for Turkey and make the latter susceptible to terrorist attacks from these regions. For Turkey, the impacts of twin crises and the failed-state problem have multiplied and been complicated by two critical domestic challenges, namely the PKK and the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016. Their combined impact has been to destabilise Turkey, to challenge the capacity of the AKP to govern and provide security for Turkish citizens, and to delimit Turkey’s foreign policy engagements and involvement, especially in the Middle East. Over the last three years, Turkey has witnessed the end of the peace process to disarm the PKK and a window of possibility for a democratic solution to the Kurdish

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problem and, more gravely, the fast and deadly escalation of terror and conflict. Turkey has been the target of terror attacks not only by ISIS but also by the PKK and its offshoot, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (Teyrebazen Azadiya Kurdistan, TAK). As the debates on these attacks have indicated, it is the possibility of constructing a state in Syria and Iraq that has constituted the PKK’s primary motive, not the cultural identity rights of the Kurds in Turkey. The failed-state problem is one of the main factors contributing to the possibility of an independent Kurdish state. It is in this context that the escalation of conflict in Turkey since 2015 is directly related to Syria and Iraq. On the night of 15 July 2016, Turkey was shocked by an abrupt, outrageous, and bloody coup attempt organised by the Gülenist Terror Organisation (Fetullahçı Terör Örgütü, FETÖ) (Gürcan and Keyman 2017). This was an attack not only on President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an and the AKP government but also on the Grand National Assembly and Turkish citizens. It was a shocking attack on Turkey, its sovereign nation state, its parliamentary democracy, its people in diversity, and its secular modernity. Ultimately, the coup attempt failed; however, an estimated 248 civilians were killed and 1,440 civilians were wounded (Gemici and Bulur 2017). Regardless of ethnic, religious, cultural, class, and lifestyle differences, Turkish citizens were united against the coup. From political parties to economic actors, from media to civil society organisations, Turks stood strong. The unity displayed by Turkish citizens should be welcomed and celebrated in the name of protecting democracy over military rule, living together rather than polarisation, and opening a window of opportunity for a new constitution based on equal citizenship and inclusive institutions. Nevertheless, post-coup Turkey is at a crossroads in terms of democracy. With what has come to be called ‘the post-coup massive purge’ and the declaration of a state of emergency framing governance today, there is increasing scepticism on the future of democracy in Turkey. Turning back to the regional and global challenges, another important destabilising factor is the lack of leadership in the region. In the post-9/11 world, the heavy toll the Afghanistan and Iraq wars took on the United States has stripped Washington of its credibility and vision vis-à-vis its Middle East policies. While its global leadership has come under a much bigger threat from a rising China in Asia, US commitment to pursuing leadership in the Middle East does not appear likely in the short and medium terms. The US foreign policy pivot is now towards Asia-Pacific, which surpasses its Middle East priorities. Similarly, challenged by its own financial, societal, and now humanitarian problems, the EU is not expected to play a leadership role in this region or its immediate neighbourhood any time soon. This leaves the Gulf States and Iran, and to a certain extent Russia, to contest for regional leadership. However, the recent sectarian strife and the subsequent proxy wars illustrate that neither the Saudi-led Gulf coalition nor Iran can exert a comprehensive vision for the region. The lack of inclusive institutions, rule-based constitutional government, and the idea of equal citizenship in the region, as well as the development of sectarianism, undermines the prospects of creating the conditions for stability or normality. The existence of rentier states, opaque and unaccountable authoritarian and corrupt governments, on the one hand, and the dominance of religious, ethnic, and tribal identities over the idea of citizenship based on rights, freedoms, and responsibilities, on the other, not only constituted one of the main reasons why the Arab uprisings failed but also enabled the increasing power and influence of non-state actors, as well as growing sectarian divisions, in the region. It should be acknowledged that the establishment of inclusive institutions, sustainable human development, and the constitutionally recognised idea of equal citizenship among diverse identities are the key to winning the war against ISIS and sectarianism, as well as the creation of lasting, effective, and fair governance and order in the region. 382

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Europe has also been directly affected by these challenges. From the massive refugee influx to increasing security risks, which will continue to confront Europe and Turkey, these actors have no luxury to remain in a stalemate state with a profound trust problem; instead, they need to cooperate and work together. As a country going through full accession negotiations with the EU, despite the stalemate and trust crisis, Turkey is still one of the pivots of Europe in our increasingly hyper-connected and risky globalising world. Yet, the West’s current instrumentalist and functionalist approach to Turkey as a buffer state designed to contain these two crises in the MENA does not offer an effective and sustainable solution to these crises, much less provide the stability and order that is direly needed in regional and global affairs (Keyman 2016).

Turkish foreign policy in turbulent times: from proactivism to moral realism A crucial strategic choice was made in 2015 to respond to existential security risks, giving rise to a new, proactive foreign policy organised around a set of fresh parameters in terms of capacity and strategy. The 2002–2010/15 era, with its emphasis on strategic depth, finally ended in 2014/15, and a new foreign policy has begun to emerge that has been shaped by proactive moral realism (Keyman 2017). As a pivotal state/regional power, Turkey’s foreign policy has been dynamic, transforming, and modifying based on its environment (Keyman 2016). With its long borders to Syria and Iraq and its position as a geographical bridge between East and West, it has been affected by the global turmoil. Yet at the same time, it has been seen as a pivot whose role is crucial to tackling such challenges effectively. Significant turning points in this crisis-ridden environment impacted Turkish foreign policy. The terror attacks of 11 September 2001, the 2008 global economic crisis, the beginning of the Arab uprisings in 2010, and the increasing power of ISIS in Syria and Iraq since 2014 have produced unprecedented security challenges, forcing Turkish foreign policy to reset itself. From 2002, it is possible to analyse and categorise Turkish foreign policy within three periods. The first period starts in 2002 and continues until 2010, in which the environment was framed by the 11 September attacks and American neoconservative global war on terror. Turkish foreign policy was shaped by soft power and active globalisation. In this period, the environment was suitable for Turkey’s proactivity – insofar as its ability to balance Islam, democracy, and secularism had given rise to an upsurge of interest both regionally and globally. In this period, Ahmet Davutog˘ lu’s concept of ‘strategic depth’ and his civilisational, realist thinking of regional and global relations, coupled with the EU anchor, defined basic parameters of the foreign policy (Davutog˘ lu 2001). In this period, active globalisation was defined as engaging in global problems and debates, and responding in a proactive and committed fashion to strengthen its place and position vis-à-vis ‘global turmoil’. From security to the economy, from identity to modernity, from energy to water, in the broader spectrum, Turkish foreign policy has paid special attention to the construction of regional and global communities of shared interests, and to regional and global multilateralism. In so doing, Turkey has attempted to employ ‘soft power’. It has also gone beyond the state-centric space of foreign policy by opening it to societal actors, ranging from think-tanks and civil society organisations to economic institutional actors, representing the interests and demands of the new economic classes, and economic actors emerging from the rapid urban transformation of many Anatolian cities (Keyman 2009). 383

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Proactive Turkish foreign policy should not be reduced to a rational choice made by the AKP. This ‘choice’ was a long, historically contingent one; but, without any doubt, it became crystallised and consolidated during the 2000s with the AKP majority party government. Proactivism also symbolises Turkey’s expected role in the new global imagination – the conviction that only through multilateralism, based on enhanced strategic partnerships, and by forging a more just, humane, and interdependent world vision, can the challenge of global turmoil can be met. Proactive and multidimensional Turkish foreign policy is, in fact, a rational choice made to strengthen Turkey vis-à-vis global turmoil through enhanced strategic partnerships with various actors in various areas of the world in those years. The rational choice to enlarge Turkey’s strategic depth in globalisation through global interdependence; to employ soft power to complement Turkey’s geopolitical power; to initiate regional engagement through diplomatic activism; and to link economic dynamism, cultural affinities and geopolitical security in a way that increased Turkey’s sphere of influence regionally, as well as globally, is a choice made in a suitable environment, and, in this sense, pro-activism and multidimensionality characterised Turkish foreign policy before 2010. However suitable the environment is, successful pro-activism and multidimensionality in foreign policy require capacity with various policy actors, to carry out their regional diplomatic engagements in a way that cultivates and enhances strategic partnerships with global actors, increases global cooperation, and contributes to regional stability. During this period, Turkish foreign policy has aimed not only to contribute to the resolution of particular regional and global problems but also to increase the possibility of creating better and more just global democratic governance. Turkish foreign policy has been opened to, and fed by, civil society organisations, think-tanks, and the media. Moreover, economic actors, namely those of business organisations, commerce chambers, and regional or city-based industrial and commerce organisations (mainly in Anatolia), have become increasingly engaged in foreign policy activities and debates. Table 29.2 shows the areas in which Turkey has been active during this period. The global academic and public debates on Turkey reveal that a number of ‘identity-based perceptions of Turkey’ had fostered regional and global attitudes on the importance of Turkey’s proactive foreign policy. These identity-based perceptions can be outlined in the following way:2 1

2

2

As a modern nation-state formation with a secular and democratic constitutional governance and a largely Muslim population, a dynamic economic development, and a highly mobile, young, and entrepreneurial population, Turkey was a ‘model country’ or ‘an aspiration’ for the future of democracy, stability, and peace in the Middle East in particular and the Muslim world in general. With its ability to sustain and even deepen its secular democracy in a peaceful manner, along with its ‘dual identity as both a Middle Eastern and European country’, Turkey’s governance by the AKP and its electoral victories and proactive foreign policy engagements contributed strongly in the 2000s to its image as a ‘pivotal state/regional power’ in an uncertain, insecure, and risky globalising world. This part is based on my research, in ‘Cultural Globalizing World: Actors, Discourses, Strategies’ (Keyman and Ozbudun 2002), which has focused on the different perceptions of Turkey in the post9/11 world. The research is based on discourse and content analyses of books, articles, newspaper columns, and reports written about Turkey since 2002. The content analysis aims to discover how Turkey has been perceived and what kind of identity-based perceptions have been attributed to Turkish foreign policy in global academic and public discourses..

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Resetting Turkish foreign policy Table 29.2 Turkish foreign policy challenges and proactivism, 2002–2010/15

Security

Economy/fair globalisation

Diplomacy/meditation/cultural dialogue

The Arab Spring in general, the regime change or regime restoration problems in Syria and Libya The future of Iraq after the withdrawal of US armed forces, and the increasing risk of state collapse or disintegration

Global economic crisis and G20

Open border policies with neighbouring countries

European debt crisis, enhanced economic interactions, and the Customs Union

The Kurdish question in relation to Northern Iraq, Syria, and Iran

Enhancing global and regional economic relations in new areas like Africa, Latin America, and South Asia

The Iran problem and the future of the Middle East

Global energy politics

The Israel–Palestinian question

Regional economic engagements in the Balkans and the Caucasus

The UN Alliance of Civilisations Initiative initiated by Turkey and Spain as a response to Huntington’s clash of civilisation thesis and related discourses in global politics Enhanced humanitarian and development efforts particularly in Afghanistan and Somalia, and in Africa, the Caucasus, and the Middle East Contributing to global democratic governance in general and the role of Europe as a global actor in it A proactive response to the problem of Islamophobia and the crisis of multiculturalism in Europe Contributing to the initiatives to construct a Mediterranean identity and enhancing cultural and economic dialogue in the Mediterranean geography Membership of the Security Council of the United Nations

The Afghanistan–Pakistan security zone

The Armenian question and Azerbaijan and Armenian conflict

The UN–Turkey initiative for least developed countries and their economic and cultural development and welfare Using popular culture as a means of soft power Source: www.unaoc.org

3

4

With its successful economic performance, a young and economically dynamic population, capacity to adapt to globalisation and Europeanisation, and increasing regional and global economic engagements, Turkey’s active globalisation and proactive foreign policy ushered its transformation into a ‘trading state’ (Kiris¸ci 2009). In the deepening of Turkey–EU relations and the beginning of full accession negotiations, there was an increasing perception, especially among economic and foreign policy actors, that Turkey was a ‘unique case in the process of European integration’ with the 385

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5

6

ability to help Europe become a multicultural and cosmopolitan model for deeper regional integration. With its soft power, while emerging as a proactive actor in foreign policy, Turkey has also been a regional and global force in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. It has become one of the key ‘global humanitarian actors of world politics’ (Bayer and Keyman 2012). Turkey has increasingly been involved in humanitarian assistance in different regions of the world, and in doing so it is not only contributing to global security but has also strengthened new ‘human-based’ norms of democratic global governance (Keyman and Sazak 2014; Murphy and Sazak 2012). Even though Turkey does not produce oil or natural gas, it has demonstrated serious potential and resolve to become an ‘energy hub’ for the transmission of natural gas between the Middle East, the post-Soviet Republics, and Europe (MFA 2018).

All of these identity-based perceptions of Turkey were the legitimate drivers of its increased capacity to play a leading and constructive role in regional and global politics. In this respect, Turkey for much of the 2000s emerged as a regional power and pivotal state, widening its sphere of influence through its soft power and contributing to the broadening and deepening of global consent to enhance global cooperation as a way of responding to the challenge of global turmoil (Kadıog˘ lu, Öktem, and Karlı 2012). This period ended with the beginning of the Arab Spring, namely the Arab Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2010, where a strong societal demand arose for regime change in the MENA region. Starting in Tunisia and moving rapidly to Egypt, the ordinary people of these countries organised from the bottom up an effective protest movement demanding the replacement of the existing authoritarian regimes and rentier states with a more democratic, accountable, transparent, incorrupt, and economic system of governance based on inclusive institutions and equal citizenship. The Arab Uprisings, while initially bringing hope to the region, have instead paved the way for internal wars, human tragedy, and despair (Aras and Keyman 2015). The military coup in Egypt and the internal war in Syria ended the possibility of transformation in the region. Instead, the region was taken hostage by power games and self-interest. In this period, globalisation was confronted by multiple crises, risks, and challenges – from economic crises to climate change, from wars to violence, from poverty to inequality. The Arab Uprisings transformed into internal wars and geopolitical power games at a time of global turmoil and the multiple crises of globalisation. Turkey was not immune from this radical change, creating a negative environment for its foreign policy. The main principle of the 2002–2010 period – zero problems with neighbours – ended in 2015 and has been replaced by the policy of regaining friends. The government made efforts to improve relations with the Gulf region starting with Saudi Arabia and, most recently, with the Trump administration. The bilateral relationship with Russia seems to have gained momentum in 2017, which has contributed immensely to the success of Turkey’s fight against ISIS and its effort to prevent cantonal state-like development in Syria. There was also a shift from ‘civilisationalist realism’ in the 2002–2010 period, whose basic principles can be found in strategic depth, to ‘moral realism’ in the use of hard power. This new foreign policy and its proactivity are much more security-oriented, prioritising security concerns over the economy and culture. Turkey’s engagement with Syria and Iraq concurs with the traditional realist of international relations, suggesting that in an anarchic environment, states become sceptical of other states’ behaviour, thus attempting to increase their hard power in order to secure their own survival. Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield is an illustrative example of such realist strategic thinking. 386

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Since 2015, we have seen the increasing presence of realism in foreign policy-making in terms of both discourse and strategy (see Table 29.3). However, it differs from traditional realism in that it pays scant attention to humanitarian norms and operates by articulating realism with humanitarianism. Moral realism places a strong emphasis on security and is shaped by realist strategic thinking, by which it becomes proactive and assertive in its regional engagements, with special emphasis placed on morality and the importance of humanitarian norms. This policy locates itself outside the geopolitical power games played by great and regional powers and legitimises its proactivity with reference to its efforts to manage the refugee crisis and stop the human tragedy in the region. There is a significant shift from the ‘general activism’ of the 2002–2010 period to ‘priority setting’ to make strategic choices in terms of making regional engagements more realistic and effective. Turkish foreign policy in the post-2015 era is and will be more about priorities and less about general activism (see Table 29.4). Moral realism and the use of hard power goes hand-in-hand with priority setting, both of which constitute the growing importance of strategy and making the right strategic choices to achieve the desired outcomes. Turkey has increasingly been involved in humanitarian assistance in different regions of the world, and in doing so it has not only contributed to global security but also strengthened new human-based norms of democratic global governance. Turkey’s civilian humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, its involvement in Afghanistan, and its recent engagement in Somalia and Sudan are just some examples of peacekeeping contributions

Table 29.3 Continuities and ruptures in Turkish foreign policy in the post-2015 era

Continuities

Ruptures/losses

Proactivism Humanitarianism Energy hub Pivotal state capability/perception

Zero problems with neighbours Mediation/bridge/dual talks Trading state Multilateralism/active globalism Soft power

Source: Author.

Table 29.4 Turkish foreign policy in the Davutog˘ lu and post-Davutog˘ lu eras

Foreign policy in Davutog˘lu era (2002–2010/15)

Foreign policy in post-Davutog˘lu era (2015–present)

Proactivism/regional–global engagements Zero problem with neighbours Idealism/realism/civilisational realism Soft power Trading state/humanitarian assistance Mediation/conflict resolution Active globalisation/multilateralism

Proactivism/selective engagements Reconciling friendships Moral/traditional realism Hard power Humanitarian state Post-conflict reconstruction Strategic alliances

Source: Author.

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in different parts of the world. Turkey’s humanitarian role has increased since 2014/15 as it has provided unconditional hospitality and welcomed innocent civilians who have been forced to leave their homes as the subjects of forced displacement. Turkey is a significant humanitarian actor dealing effectively with the refugee crisis. Furthermore, although Turkey does not produce oil or natural gas, it has recently begun to act as an energy hub for the transmission of natural gas between the Middle East, the post-Soviet Republics, and Europe. An increasing interest in the role of Turkey in global energy politics has emerged. As indicated, since 2002, energy has been integral to Turkey’s proactive foreign policy and its regional and global engagements. A country with significant energy dependency on Russia and Iran, it has begun to act as a strategic hub in the arena of energy politics. Moreover, as energy politics and its role in globalisation has increased, this energy hub identity has begun to generate significant impacts on Turkish foreign policy, especially with respect to Turkey–EU, Turkey–Russia, and Turkey–US relations. These parameters influence capacity and strategy, delineate continuities and ruptures, as well as highlighting where Turkish foreign policy in the post-2015 era gains novelty and specificity. They also give meaning to Turkey’s pivotal state/regional power foreign policy identity. In light of these facts, it is possible to define foreign policy in the post-2015 era as an emerging reality shaping Turkey’s pivotal state/regional power identity through a set of new capacity and strategy-based parameters, namely those of selective proactivity, hard power, regaining friends, moral realism, priority setting, shaping a humanitarian state and being an energy hub. All of these parameters seem to have been chosen rationally in order to strengthen Turkey’s responses to serious regional security risks and unprecedented global challenges. As the environment has become more and more negative, risky and uncertain, Turkey has been compelled to adjust its foreign policy and its proactivity. It is true that the deepening of global turmoil and multiple crises of globalisation together have generated a negative environment that makes it very difficult to carry these parameters and maintain a soft power capacity. Nevertheless, to revitalise or regain these capacities should be one of the priorities of moral realism. Without such capacity, prioritising security in foreign policy making might risk sustainability. Decision-makers and influencers in Turkey should bear in mind that soft power capacity is of the utmost importance not only in making proactive moral realism sustainable but also in bringing back the positive regional and global image of Turkey. Unless this is done, there is a risk that Turkey could turn into a buffer state, with its foreign policy shaped purely by security concerns, whose main role is to contain ISIS, refugees, and Iran.

Conclusion: what next? The challenges put forth by the global turmoil and world risk society in our wider region cannot be defused solely at the global level by primary actors such as the US or on the regional level by emerging powerhouses like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. Only a delicate balance of the global–regional partnership will implement stability and a peace process, in which Turkey’s role is absolutely crucial. An enduring success in the middle and long terms can only be achieved through the reconstruction of state and order in the region, the fostering and enhancement of inclusive institutions, the idea of equal citizenship, and sustainable economic development. Any vision that seeks to accomplish these goals must include Turkey. Turkey is an indispensable partner for peace and prosperity in the region, but not in the way the West sees it today. That is, the US and EU relegation of Turkey’s virtues and capacities to a buffer zone will undermine Turkey’s soft power and capabilities to facilitate a sustainable peace and security in its region. 388

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The transatlantic actors must move away from their compartmentalised postulations on Turkey – in which security, democratisation, and economic development are treated as separate, isolated spheres – and accept the holistic view that Turkey’s advancement in all these areas is necessary to tackle effectively the two crises amidst the overarching global turmoil and the world risk society. Turkey, too, must make a conscious decision to return to its proactive foreign policy, which played a significant role in its consolidation and wielding of soft power over its region and distant geographies like Africa and Central Asia. Bringing sustainable and inclusive economic growth, humanitarian diplomacy, and best practices in fair government, as well as constitutionbased and rules-based equal and participatory citizenship to the fore of foreign policy, Turkey would not only repeat its success in 2004–2010 but also reinitiate its full membership negotiations with the EU. Reinstating its EU candidacy as a key pillar of Turkey’s foreign policy is crucial, also as an important resource of Turkey’s soft power and influence over its region. Principled pragmatism can constitute a point of convergence in Turkey–EU relations and could contribute to the critical revitalisation of these relations by establishing a common discourse, a strategic choice, for a collaborative response to unprecedented challenges in the era of global turmoil. Yet, the full realisation of this potential requires Turkey to move beyond election fatigue, strengthen its democracy, and in line with that, undertake the necessary reforms that will place the Turkish economy on solid ground at home. This would help Turkey to overcome its current middle-income trap which is accompanied by what we refer to as ‘a middle-democracy trap’ where Turkish democracy remains unconsolidated. This entails substantial political, economic, and institutional reform on the Turkish side and will provide the backbone of the sustainability of its regional and global value in the outside world. Turkey is a pivotal actor, but its current stalemate and trust problems with Washington, Berlin, and Brussels threaten its regional influence and effectiveness. History, and in particular the Atatürk era, suggests that Turkey is a country that is able to maintain a strong anchor with the West (EU, US, NATO), and establish flexible regional and global alliances (Russia, Iran, Africa, Asia, Latin America). This rests less on the actual power that it possesses, but more on its regional and global influence, and it relies heavily on the presence of the strong anchorage of Europe and the United States. In today’s world, where rising levels of connectivity have the potential to increase prosperity, an alternative path that is sought in isolation on both sides can only exacerbate poverty and suffering in the region and across the globe. This is the key lens that both Turkish and international policy-makers should adopt in viewing and shaping the future of Turkey’s role in international politics. A democratic, economically dynamic, culturally plural, and moral-humanitarian Turkey, inside and outside, is not only possible, but also necessary for regional and global stability.

References Aras, Bülent, and Keyman, Fuat. 2015. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue Turkey, the Arab Spring and Beyond.’ Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 3(17): 249–251. Bayer, Res¸at, and Fuat Keyman. 2012. ‘Turkey: An Emerging Hub of Globalization and Internationalist Humanitarian Actor.’ Globalization 9(1): 73–90. Beck, Ulrich. 2005. World Risk Society. London: Polity Press. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 1997. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 2012. Strategic Vision. New York: Basic Books. Davutog˘ lu, Ahmet. .2001. Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu [Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position]. Istanbul: Küre Yayınları. Gemici, Orhan Onur, and Sertaç Bulur. 2017. ‘15 Temmuz’da 248 Polis Gazi Oldu [248 Police Officers Became Veteran(Ghazi) on July 15th].’ Anadolu Agency, 25 February. https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/ 15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi/15-temmuzda-248-polis-gazi-oldu/758919

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Resetting Turkish foreign policy Gürcan, Metin, and Fuat Keyman. 2017. 15 Temmuz’dan On Bes¸ Ay Sonra: Ordunun . Reformu, Devletin Dönü¸sümü [Fifteen Months After July 15: Reforming the Military, Transforming the State]. Istanbul Policy Center. Kadıog˘ lu, Ays¸e, Kerem Öktem and Mehmet Karlı, eds. .2012. Another Empire: a Decade of Turkey’s Foreign . Policy under the Justice and Development Party. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press. Keyman, Fuat. 2009. ‘Turkey in Globalization.’ New Perspectives 40: 7–27. Keyman, Fuat. 2016. ‘Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post-Arab Spring Era: From Proactive to Buffer State.’ Third World Quarterly, 12(37): 2274–2287. Keyman, Fuat. 2017. ‘A New Turkish Foreign Policy: Towards Proactive “Moral Realism”.’ Insight Turkey 1(19): 55–69. Keyman, Fuat and Ergun Ozbudun. 2002. ‘Cultural Globalizing World: Actors, Discourses, Strategies.’ In Many Globalizations. Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, edited by Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, 296–319. New York: Oxford University Press. Keyman, Fuat, and Onur Sazak. 2014. ‘Turkey as a “Humanitarian State”.’ POMEAS Paper 2: 1–13. Kiris¸ci, Kemal. 2009. ‘The Transformation of Turkish Foreign Policy: The Rise of the Trading State.’ New Perspectives on Turkey 40: 29–57. MFA 2018. ‘Turkey’s Energy Strategy.’ Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. http://www.mfa.gov.tr/tur keysenergy-strategy.en.mfa . Murphy, Teri, and Onur Sazak. 2012. Turkey’s Civilian Capacity in Post-Conflict Reconstruction. Istanbul Policy Center, Sabancı University. Toner, Mark C. 2016. ‘Daily Press Briefing.’ US Department of State. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dp b/2016/02/252582.htm#TURKEY United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. 2016. ‘Mid-Year Trends 2016.’ http://www.unhcr. org/statistics/unhcrstats/58aa8f247/mid-year-trends-june-2016.html United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. 2018. ‘Syrian Regional Refugee Response: Interagency Information Sharing Portal.’ http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

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30 TURKEY AND ITS NEIGHBOURS IN THE MIDDLE EAST Iran, Iraq, and Syria Behlül Özkan

Introduction The most serious charge which Islamists have levelled against Turkey of the early Republican period is that its foreign policy severed its organic ties to the Middle East and the Muslim world. In this sense, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) – which has run the country without significant interruption since 2002 – spells the end of this 90-year entr’acte. Turkey under the AKP, so the argument goes, is frantically making up for its ‘lost century’ by renewing its commitment to the Middle East and taking on a leadership role in the region. In the eyes of AKP foreign policy elites and decision-makers, this is nothing less than a duty imposed on Turkey by the broader Muslim world. With the 2011 Arab Uprisings, the AKP thought that the time was ripe to make Turkey the leader of the Muslim world and embarked on a highly adventurist foreign policy. The result, seven years down the road, is the greatest foreign policy crisis in the history of modern Turkey. Turkey’s strategy of arming the Syrian opposition (in coordination with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the US) in order to overthrow the Assad regime has been an utter failure. The architect of this strategy, Ahmet Davutog˘ lu (who as foreign minister and then prime minister was at the helm of Turkish foreign policy throughout the Arab Uprisings), resigned his position in May 2016. The power vacuum in northern Syria resulting from a weakened Assad regime has been filled by the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD), the Syrian branch of the very same Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) with which Turkey has been at war since the 1980s. Thus, for the first time in its history, the PKK now controls a piece of territory the size of Switzerland, a PKK-administered area flying PKK flags and guarded by PKK forces (Tok and Temizer 2017). Even more poignantly for Ankara, although the PKK is designated as a terror organisation by the US, the EU, and of course Turkey itself, the PYD is now recognised by Western countries and Russia as a legitimate political actor in Syria. At the same time, ISIS militants still represent a serious national security threat, having carried out the largest-scale terror attacks in Turkey’s history over the past three years. In light of the drift towards the independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq following its September 2017 referendum, it 391

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looks increasingly likely that Turkey will become cut off from the Arab regions of Iraq. Iran, which the AKP views as its Middle Eastern rival, has become more influential in both Iraq and Syria. In short, Turkey’s influence in the Middle East has been sharply curtailed since 2011 compared to the pre-2002 era.

Historical background From 1919 to 1922, during Turkey’s War of Independence, the Kemalists had close ties to groups in Iraq and Syria which opposed the English and French occupations. The Kemalists, who themselves had no designs on any of Iraq or Syria’s Arab-majority regions, thought that by supporting these anti-colonial Arab revolts they could gain the upper hand in their own struggles against Britain and France. And indeed, following the establishment of the Republic in 1923, Iraq and Syria (with the exception of Mosul and Alexandretta) became of secondary interest in Turkish foreign policy. As early as 1921, in a speech in Parliament, Atatürk started by remarking that ‘the welfare and happiness of all the people of Islam, of all the Muslim world, are as vital as our own welfare and happiness. We take a great interest in these matters’, only to vow, immediately afterwards, that this interest would never lead to a pan-Islamist foreign policy: ‘The idea of this society [the Muslim world] being guided and administered from a single place as a great empire, an actual, physical empire – this is a mere fantasy’ (Sevim, Öztoprak, and Tural 2006, 266–267). While the Kemalists’ victories against the Western powers were seen everywhere from Palestine to India as signs of the victory of Islam, this good will towards Turkey dissipated with the abolition of the sultanate and the caliphate. The Kemalist reforms drew swift condemnation from religious groups and religious leaders in the Muslim world. And yet it was also around this time that Iran – which sought to emulate Turkey’s reforms – and progressive factions in Iraq and Syria began to take a greater interest in their Anatolian neighbour. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Turkey effectively had as its southern neighbours Italy – which controlled the 12 Aegean islands collectively known as the Dodecanese – and France and Britain, which respectively ruled Syria and Iraq by mandate. Noting that the same Western colonialist states from which they had won their independence were now amassed on their southern border, the Kemalists decided, for the sake of Turkey’s sovereignty, to behave circumspectly towards these countries. Moreover, Ankara’s territorial claims over Mosul and the Alexandretta region were a source of tension between Turkey and the Arab nationalists who sought to emulate the Kemalists. Alexandretta became part of Turkey in 1939, as part of a treaty with the French Mandate; a 1925 resolution by the League of Nations resulted in Mosul remaining under Iraqi sovereignty. Such dynamics would colour Turkey’s relations with Iraq and Syria throughout its modern history. The newly established Republic of Turkey also faced border disputes with Iran, just as it did with Iraq and Syria. But unlike the latter two countries, which had been administered for centuries by the Ottoman state, the border between Iran and the Ottoman Empire had been fixed, more or less, as early as the 17th century. There could be no question of Turkey making any claim to Iranian territory. Any border disputes between the two nations were solved in 1932 and a number of land swaps were agreed upon. At that point, Turkish–Iranian relations entered a golden age. Turkey was the first country visited by the Shah of Iran, who adopted reforms similar to those of Atatürk. The Kemalists, for their part, viewed Iran quite differently from Iraq, regarding it as crucial that the Iranians shake off the influence of Britain and shore up their own independence (Richard 2007).

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After 1945, Turkey experienced a far-reaching shift in its Middle East policy, as it gradually became part of the Western camp and – as a member of the ‘free world’ – transitioned to a multi-party system. Until then, the prevailing wisdom concerning foreign policy had been contained in the three prescriptions which Atatürk, in his day, had given to the general secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the highest-ranking bureaucrat in the Ministry): ‘Do not get involved in the Arab world; do not appear to be backing the imperialist, colonialist states; do not provoke the Russians’ (Dinç 1998, 40). But after the Second World War, and especially under the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) in the 1950s, Turkey’s foreign policy saw a marked departure from these three principles. Effectively taking on the role of the West’s policeman in the region, Ankara supported Britain in Egypt and France in Algeria (Kürkçüog˘ lu 2010, 45–51). Thanks to the efforts of Prime Minister Menderes, Turkey also became a signatory (along with Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Britain) to the Baghdad Pact in 1955. Thus, from 1945 onwards, Turkey’s foreign policy was based on the fundamental principle of unconditional support for the West against the Soviet Union, while it also aimed at uniting the Arab countries under its own leadership in a Middle Eastern anti-Communist pact. However, given that the USSR had no history of colonialism in the Middle East, the Arab countries did not see it as a threat but rather as a counter-weight to the West. None of them, with the exception of Iraq, agreed to join the Baghdad Pact. Syria – over Ankara’s objections – preferred to cultivate closer ties with the USSR rather than join the Baghdad Pact; Turkey responded with a troop build-up on its border with Syria in 1957. It is no coincidence that the 1957 Turkish–Syrian crisis coincided with the October 1957 elections in Turkey. Increasingly beleaguered politically and facing serious economic woes, Menderes saw the Syrian crisis as a two-fold opportunity. He hoped to use it both to consolidate electoral support for himself, and also – by positioning Turkey as an ally which was checking the USSR’s Middle Eastern ambitions – to obtain more financial aid from the US. The severity of the USSR’s response, however, prevented Menderes from obtaining the wished-for outcome. Then, in 1958, a coup in Iraq overthrew the pro-Western monarchy; with the loss of its sole Arab member, the Baghdad Pact was transformed into the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). In short, Turkey’s policies towards Iraq and Syria during the 1950s were just as vigorous, and ultimately just as unsuccessful, as its response to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. It was in the 1960s that Turkey began to explore new approaches in foreign policy. Disappointed at its failure to secure the support it had been counting on from the West on the Cyprus issue, Ankara sought to repair its relations with the Arab countries and improve what had been an overall negative view of Turkey in the Middle East. During the 1960s it also became more and more difficult to ignore the Kurdish question, a dynamic which has shaped Ankara’s stance towards the Middle East for the past half century. Turkey closely observed developments such as the Iraqi Kurdish rebellion as well as the Iranian Shah’s support for Kurdish groups in Iraq. Immediately after the 27 May coup, severe measures also began to be implemented against Kurdish tribes in Turkey, with 55 tribal chieftains (ag˘as) and religious leaders (S¸eyhs) exiled to provinces in Western Anatolia (Milliyet, 3 December 1960; Milliyet, 12 December 1960). Ankara, for its part, was closely monitoring Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi government and was concerned that it might have an effect upon Kurds living in Turkey. Moreover, starting in 1979, Syria became another variable in the Kurdish equation. That year, PKK leader Öcalan relocated to Syria and, with the backing of Damascus, set up training camps in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. At that point, the PKK effectively became Damascus’s trump card against Turkey. The Assad government did not hesitate to make use of the PKK in retaliation for what it considered to be Turkey’s 393

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unfair use of water from the Euphrates river and for its allowing the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to sneak into Syria via the Turkish border (Defense Intelligence Agency 1982). In the 1970s, the Shah of Iran – buoyed by steadily increasing petrol revenues and possessing great regional clout thanks to his close ties to the US – sought a leadership position in the Middle East. At the same time, the US imposed an arms embargo on Turkey – which was already limping from economic crises – due to its intervention in Cyprus. All of this was a clear indication of how much the balance of power had changed in the northernmost states of the Middle East. But the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran reversed this course of events, causing the US to favour Turkey in its Middle Eastern policy. During the Iran–Iraq War, Ankara pursued an impartial foreign policy towards both sides; in fact, profiting from the conflict, Turkey increased its exports to both countries.

Post-cold war and AKP era Iran In the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian–Turkish relations throughout the 1980s and 1990s were shaped by the diametrically opposed political character of the two regimes. The powers that be in Turkey, and in particular the country’s military and judicial bureaucracy, viewed Iran’s Islamic regime as a potential threat to Turkey’s secular republic. Accordingly, Ankara periodically accused Iran of attempting to undermine secularism in Turkey. In the 1990s, a number of outspoken, secular intellectuals, such as Ug˘ ur Mumcu, Muammer Aksoy, and Çetin Emeç, were assassinated; Tehran was accused of involvement, but sufficient proof was lacking. While the military and judicial bureaucracy, which viewed itself as the guarantor of secularism in Turkey, was invariably suspicious of Iran, Necmettin Erbakan, a prominent name in Turkish political Islam, established close ties with that country in the 1990s, thus departing from the Saudi line to which he had closely adhered since the mid-1960s. After coming to power in 2002, the AKP stressed that it had ‘taken off the shirt of the Milli Görüs¸ [the “National View” espoused by Erbakan]’. Until 2011, it scrupulously avoided taking any steps in its relations with Iran that might give the US cause for concern. Islamists in Turkey took heart when, in 2011, the AKP earned its third single-party mandate in an overwhelming electoral victory. Shoring up its power at home, the AKP calculated that it no longer needed Western support against its domestic political rivals; in foreign policy, too, it began to act more independently from the West, most notably with regards to Iran. When Iran’s nuclear programme led to a rapid deterioration of relations with the US, Ankara resolved to act as an intermediary in talks between the Islamic Republic and the West. Reasoning that it was important to remain impartial towards Iran in the process, the AKP government insisted on taking a line that was independent from the West, thus heightening tensions with Washington. Ankara caved in to heavy pressure from the US and allowed the building of a radar base on Turkish soil, at Kürecik, to be used against Iran (Ayman 2014, 20). Significantly, in 2013 Western newspapers reported the . allegation that Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT), had given classified Israeli intelligence to Iran (Entous and Parkinson 2013). Another source of serious tension with the US had to do with the Turkey–Iran gold trade. Due to increased US sanctions on Iran, Tehran was no longer able to transfer revenues for its petrol exports back to Iran in the form of foreign currency. The following solution was found: Halkbank, one of Turkey’s most well-known state banks, collected Iran’s petrol revenues as foreign currency which it subsequently converted into gold to be sent back to Iran. 394

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These transactions in the order of billions of dollars drew swift condemnation from the US. Then, in December 2013, policemen and prosecutors connected to the Gülen Movement began a case against four government ministers alleged to have been earning a commission from these transactions, as well as Iranian-born businessman Reza Zarrab, said to be in charge of the entire operation. At present, judicial proceedings against the four ministers have been precluded by the AKP; Zarrab himself was arrested in the US and is currently on trial. These financial ties between Iran and the AKP resulted in a major diplomatic squabble between Turkey and the US. Yet during the same period, the AKP government’s policies fell out of step with Iran’s as the two countries vied for influence in Iraq and Syria. Even as the AKP approved the circumventing of the US embargo on Iran, it partnered with the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to try to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, Iran’s staunchest ally in the Middle East. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries were uneasy to see Shiite Arabs rise to power in Iraq after the toppling of the Saddam regime; Turkey, too, shared similar concerns. Accordingly, Turkey and its Gulf partners pursued a two-pronged strategy of arming the opposition in Syria, while also accusing Iraq’s Shiite Arabs (who constituted the majority of the population and enjoyed the backing of Tehran) of sectarian policies against the Sunni Arab minority. The Kurdish question has been a major catalyst in Turkey’s relations with Iran during the AKP era, just as it was during the Republican era. Ankara and Tehran’s recent rapprochement owes much to the creation of a PYD-controlled region in northern Syria and to the September 2017 independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan. Both Turkey and Iran are worried that an independent Kurdish state, whether in Syria or Iraq, might serve as an inspiration to Kurds living within their own borders. For Turkey, which has fought against the PKK for 40 years, an independent Kurdish state is perceived as an existential threat. Accordingly, Turkey and Iran have put aside their differences for the moment and are searching for a way to cooperate on the Kurdish issue. Iraq Following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, President Turgut Özal was a proponent of Turkey’s participation in the subsequent US-led military operation. Yet this decision of Özal’s would greatly muddy the waters of Turkish politics. Predicting that the map of the Middle East was due for a change, Özal held that under the terms of the Misak-ı Milli (National Pact), by which the last Ottoman Parliament announced the national borders in 1920, Turkey could make a rightful claim to part of northern Iraq. But Özal’s insistence on this point met with disfavour in the eyes of the establishment. Moreover, Özal’s openness to the idea of a federation with the Iraqi Kurds met with opposition from Turkey’s military and state bureaucrats, on the grounds that this project would permanently entangle Turkey in the problems of the Middle East. In recent years, the AKP government, in a manner recalling Özal, has employed a much more unabashedly irredentist discourse concerning northern Iraq. President Erdog˘ an continually issues statements about Mosul, such as: ‘Kirkuk and Mosul belonged to us in the past. Take a look at history’ (Milliyet, 22 October 2016). Not surprisingly, these sorts of utterances have not been well-received either by the central government in Baghdad or on the Arab street. People can be seen protesting in front of Turkey’s embassy in Baghdad with placards reading, ‘The Ottoman occupation is over!’ (Birgün, 18 October 2016). The AKP’s irredentist attitude has profoundly impacted Arab public opinion and done irremediable damage to Turkey’s Iraq and Middle Eastern policy. 395

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A fundamental determinant of Ankara’s Iraq policy was the Saddam regime’s loss of control over the north of the country from the 1990s onwards, an area heavily populated by Kurds. Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by Baghdad’s withdrawal from northern Iraq, the PKK set up numerous camps in the region and ramped up its attacks in Turkey. From that point on, Turkey carried out its fight against the PKK not only within its own borders, but via air strikes and ground operations in northern Iraq. In all of this, Ankara could count on the support of the US. However, in the 2000s, relationships between all four parties – Turkey, the US, Iraq, and the Iraqi Kurds – became far more complex. The Turkish parliament’s denial of the US request, on the eve of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, to carry out operations from Turkish territory had two effects. It increased Ankara’s prestige among the societies of the Middle East, earning it a reputation as a power that could say ‘no’ to the US; at the same time, this refusal led to a loss of Turkish influence over northern Iraq. In July of 2003, the headquarters of the Turkish Special Forces in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, were raided by American soldiers and Turkish soldiers there were arrested after having hoods placed over their heads. The incident was perceived in Turkey as Washington’s retaliation for Ankara’s denial of the US’s request. However, when things did not go as planned for the US after the overthrow of the Baath regime, and the Sunni Arab resistance became increasingly fierce, US–Turkish relations charted a new course in Iraq. The Sunni Arabs had been in power in Iraq since the Ottoman period. When they lost their positions of privilege following the 2003 US occupation, and began to resort to armed resistance, the US thought it could integrate them into the newly established political system with the aid of its ally Turkey, which they reckoned would have influence over the Sunnis. And indeed, following 2005, Ankara made efforts to strengthen the central government in Baghdad, and preserve Iraq’s territorial integrity, by forging close ties with both Sunni and Shiite Arabs. This was a continuation of the policy traditionally followed by Ankara, which had become very apprehensive about the gains made by the Kurdish political movement in northern Iraq over the years. The AKP was now striving to prevent the Kirkuk region, with its considerable oil reserves, from falling under the control of a Kurdish administration. But the increasing sectarian polarisation of Iraq as well as Turkey’s taking sides in that conflict led to a highly problematic relationship with the (now Shiite-controlled) central government in Baghdad. This situation was exacerbated in 2012 when Vice President Tariq Hashimi, a prominent Sunni Arab politician, took refuge in Turkey after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Moreover, in a dramatic shift from its previous policy towards the Iraqi Kurds, Ankara began to support Erbil against Baghdad. When the Kurdish government began using Turkey as a transit point to sell oil from the provinces it controlled, relations between Baghdad and Ankara reached a new low. Investments in the Kurdistan region by many Turkish construction and energy companies with close ties to the AKP have no doubt played a part in Ankara’s favouritism towards Erbil. Moreover, Masoud Barzani’s November 2013 visit to Diyarbakır, during which he addressed the people together with Erdog˘ an, increased the AKP’s prestige among the Kurdish electorate. That Turkey’s Iraq policy had reached an impasse was clear from ISIS’s growing control over Iraq and Syria in 2014 and its capture of Mosul in June of that year, following which it took 49 Turkish diplomats and civilians’ hostage. Even today, it is unclear why the Turkish consulate in Mosul was not evacuated before ISIS entered the city, in spite of all the warnings it had received, or to what extent Ankara’s faith in its influence over the Sunni Arabs might have played a role in this failure to evacuate. In any event, the creation of a broadbased military coalition against ISIS, a group which has considerable sway over Sunni Arabs in Iraq, stymied Turkey’s efforts to win over Sunni hearts and minds. As to the question of 396

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who would fill the power vacuum created by the gradual withdrawal of ISIS from Iraq from 2016 onwards, Ankara at first favoured the Kurdish government. There ensued a series of acrimonious public disputes between President Erdog˘ an and Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi concerning Baghdad’s opposition to Turkey’s military presence in northern Iraq. In October 2016, responding to Abadi’s accusations that Turkey had intervened in Iraq’s internal affairs, Erdog˘ an stated, ‘You should know that we will do as we please. Who is this? The prime minister of Iraq. First know your place!’ (Sabah, 11 October 2016). One year later, however, following the independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey’s Iraq policy once more did a U-turn, forming an alliance with the central government in Baghdad against the Barzani government. Having told Abadi, just one year previously, that Abadi was ‘not of his caliber’ and ‘not his equal’, Erdog˘ an now felt no awkwardness in addressing the prime minister as his ‘dear brother’ during the latter’s visit to Ankara (Cumhuriyet, 25 October 2017). Syria From the 1980s onwards, relations between Damascus and Ankara became increasingly strained for a number of different reasons. One bone of contention was Turkey’s use of water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which have their sources in Turkey, pass through Syria, and empty out into the Persian Gulf in Iraq. Another issue was Syria’s support for the PKK (which was carrying out more and more attacks in Turkey in the first half of the 1990s), as well as the presence of PKK leader Öcalan in Syria. Syria’s support for the PKK ceased in 1998, when the two countries signed the Adana Accords; Öcalan fled Syria and was later caught in Kenya, whereupon he was brought back to Turkey. Afterwards, Turkish–Syrian relations improved swiftly. Upon the death of Syrian president Hafez Assad in June 2000, his funeral was attended by none less than President Sezer of Turkey, a clear message to Damascus that Ankara was ready to let bygones be bygones. Thus, on the eve of the AKP’s coming to power in 2002, relations had already been mended in large part. The period from 2002 up to the Arab Uprisings might be somewhat facetiously titled the ‘Turkish–Syrian Spring.’ In 2002 there were 149,810 annual visitors between the two countries; by 2010, that figure had climbed to 1,764,482. The same period saw an increase in the volume of trade from $773 million to $2.5 billion (Yes¸ilyurt 2013, 422). Among the many signs of an improvement in ties were visa-free travel between the two countries starting in 2009, steps taken to solve the water dispute, and the start of train service between Aleppo (Syria’s largest city by population) and Gaziantep. Turkey took on the role of intermediary between Israel and Syria, arranging indirect talks between the two countries in 2008. However, Turkey’s mediation proved fruitless when Israel’s December 2008 military operation against Gaza resulted in Syria pulling out of the talks. Remarkably, Prime Minister Erdog˘ an and Syrian President Bashar Assad were on close terms prior to the Arab Uprisings. In addition to numerous bilateral talks, the two leaders vacationed together with their families in the Turkish tourist hub of Bodrum; Erdog˘ an referred to Assad as his ‘brother’ (Anter 2008; Sabah, 23 December 2009). But the AKP’s Syria policy was reversed following the Arab Uprisings; Erdog˘ an now began referring to his erstwhile ‘brother’ as a ‘dictator’ and a ‘tyrant’. After 2011, the AKP’s first priority in terms of Syria was to see the Assad regime overthrown. Following the outbreak of mass protests in Syria, the country’s opposition, hosted by Turkey, gathered in June 2011 in the city of Antalya, with the express aim of removing Assad from power. Members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood – to which the AKP felt an ideological kinship – were well-represented among the participants, showing that Ankara was 397

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preparing to install a sympathetic Islamic regime in Syria following al-Assad’s departure (Ayhan and Orhan 2011). Turkey’s support for the Syrian opposition did not stop there, however. In the months and years that followed, the opposition was provided with military training at camps in Turkey close to the Syrian border, while Ankara, in cooperation with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the US, approved massive shipments of arms through Turkish territory. The AKP’s pan-Islamist foreign policy for the Middle East, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, sought to bring Muslim Brotherhood parties to power everywhere from Tunisia to Syria, with Turkey as the natural leader of this future ‘Muslim Brotherhood belt’; a Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy in Syria would be the linchpin of this project (Karagül 2012). As of 2018, however, the AKP’s vision for Syria and the Middle East has come to nothing. There are a few reasons why this was a foreseeable outcome. First of all, the AKP sought to legitimise the discourse of overthrowing the Assad regime through references to democracy and free elections. But the fact that Turkey undertook this task in partnership with Saudi Arabia and Qatar – countries ruled by autocratic monarchies – meant that its discourse of democracy was unconvincing from the start. Furthermore, Turkey’s favourite in Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, had been declared a ‘terror organisation’ under Hafez Assad and had essentially ceased to exist in Syria after 1982. Therefore, when the Arab Uprisings broke out, the Brotherhood had very little influence inside the country. Tensions between Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also been detrimental to the former’s Syria policy. The Saudi monarchy felt acutely threatened when the Muslim Brotherhood gained real political power through elections in Tunisia and Egypt. Fearing that its own society might see the emergence of Islamist parties calling for elections, the Saudi regime hoped to clip the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy. It therefore supported the coup by General Sisi against Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and newly elected president of Egypt. In Syria, the Saudis supported Salafist groups against the Turkeybacked Muslim Brotherhood, thus hastening the opposition’s transformation from moderates to fundamentalists. In addition, the flourishing of organisations like ISIS and the Nusra Front (al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch) ensured that the AKP’s project for Syria – namely, a moderately Islamic Muslim Brotherhood government – was doomed to fail. If there is a single individual who bears responsibility for this foreign policy catastrophe – the worst in the history of the Republic – it is surely Turkey’s erstwhile foreign minister and prime minister, Ahmet Davutog˘ lu. As the author of the book Stratejik Derinlik (Strategic Depth), Davutog˘ lu was the theoretician of the AKP’s post-2011 Syria policy; as foreign minister, he was the one to put it into practice (Özkan 2014). The failure of Davutog˘ lu’s Syria policy undoubtedly played a role in his forced resignation as prime minister in 2016. In August of that year, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus¸ admitted that many of the problems currently afflicting Turkey were the result of the situation in Syria and Turkey’s Syria policy (Yetkin 2016). This policy, which Davutog˘ lu laid out in detail in his magnum opus, was followed to the letter by the AKP both before and after 2011. First Turkey established good relations with the Assad regime and attempted to achieve a position of influence in Syria; in 2011, reckoning that the long-awaited wave of change had come, it sided with the opposition, assuming Assad’s days were numbered. However, Davutog˘ lu greatly overestimated Turkey’s power to alter the course of events. In particular, in attempting regime change in Syria, the AKP had not considered that Russia and Iran would stand behind Damascus. Moreover, in assuming that the Assad government could only rely on a narrow sectarian base, the AKP failed to see that the regime could muster the support of key segments of society by appealing to Arab nationalism. Davutog˘ lu had been far too late in grasping that Riyadh felt threatened by a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Middle East; by 398

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the end of 2014, he had admitted that this was an insurmountable obstacle for the AKP’s foreign policy (Falk 2014). There was another outcome too, which was not foreseen by Davutog˘ lu’s Syria policy, namely that a weakened Assad government in northern and eastern Syria would create a power vacuum that would be filled by the PYD and ISIS. Becoming steadily more powerful in Syria, ISIS carried out the largest terror attacks in Turkish history in Istanbul and Ankara starting in 2015. Following Davutog˘ lu’s forced departure from the prime ministry, Turkey came to an agreement with Russia and Iran and carried out Operation Euphrates Shield in order to prevent a significant portion of the Syrian border from falling into the hands of the PYD. It also took control of a 2,000-square-kilometre area held by ISIS, lying between the PYD-controlled regions of Kobane and Afrin, and turned this into a buffer zone (Star Gazetesi, 18 December 2017). Turkey succeeded in its objective of harrying the PYD, but in the process, it has been forced to work with Russia – which controls Syrian air space – in order to ensure the security of Turkish soldiers in Syrian territory. The most immediate result of this was that Turkey – under pressure from Moscow – had to withdraw its support for the opposition fighters in Aleppo; soon afterwards, the city was retaken in its entirety by the Syrian army. Given that Turkey has expended great effort towards overthrowing the Assad regime – which was backed by Russia from the start; given that it shot down a Russian fighter jet near the Syrian border in October 2015, becoming the first NATO country to do so since the Korean War; and given that President Putin, in a September 2015 talk to the UN, stated that he viewed the ‘Kurdish militias’ in Syria as a legitimate political actor, it is clear that the Russian–Turkish rapprochement is not built on solid foundations, but is essentially provisional in nature (Amos 2015).

Conclusion As of 2018, Turkey’s relations with its Middle Eastern neighbours Iran, Iraq, and Syria are at a severe impasse. An independence referendum has been held by the government of Iraqi Kurdistan. The PYD has taken control of a large area in northern Syria and has attained legitimacy on the international stage. The US has provided nearly a thousand truckloads of arms to the PYD in its fight against ISIS. In light of all these developments, which are of the utmost relevance to Turkey’s relations with its own Kurdish population, it is evident that the AKP’s foreign policy is undergoing an existential crisis. More than anything else, the outcome of the Kurdish question in Turkey and in the Middle East will determine the nature of Turkey’s relations with Iran, Iraq, and Syria. There is a marked difference between the path taken by the AKP at the outset of the Arab Uprisings, when it sought to be the ‘owner and leader’ of the Middle East, and the point it has reached today (Milliyet, 26 April 2012). After the Muslim Brotherhood, the AKP’s ally, lost much of its power and geographical influence in the region, Ankara began to feel isolated. It has sought to overcome this isolation through a short-term, pragmatic rapprochement with Russia and Iran – but it is unclear how sustainable its partnership is with these countries: with Russia, because Turkey is a member of NATO; with Iran, because Saudi Arabia has imposed heavy economic sanctions on that country. Moreover, Russia – which has fought against fundamentalist groups in Chechnya – is just as unlikely to trust the politically Islamist AKP government as Iran is to trust a leader like Erdog˘ an, with his on-record statements condemning ‘Persian expansionism’ (Hurriyet Daily News, 16 June 2017).

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The Turkey of 2018 looks unrecognisable from a pre-Arab Uprising vantage point. In place of the Turkey of 2011 – a country with a flourishing economy, regarded as a model of change throughout the Middle East – there is now the increasingly authoritarian Erdog˘ an government, which is at odds with nearly all its neighbours. From this point forward, Turkish foreign policy must be understood not as a means of achieving the security and welfare of all of society, but as a tool to serve the interests of the Erdog˘ an government. Turkey’s future policies towards Iran, Iraq, and Syria will also be shaped by the nature of its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Historically speaking, Islamists in Turkey have had close ties to Saudi Arabia since the 1960s. Military and economic relations have grown under the AKP government, and Saudi Arabia has achieved a position of considerable influence within Turkey during this period. Given that the Erdog˘ an government, which is experiencing unprecedented crises with the US and the EU, needs Gulf capital in order to deal with its economic woes, Riyadh may well outpace Brussels in importance as far as Ankara is concerned.

References Amos, Howard. 2015. ‘Putin’s UN Speech Fails to Surprise.’ Moscow Times, 28 September. Accessed 21 November 2017. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/putins-un-speech-fails-to-surprise-49898 Anter, Yas¸ar. 2008. ‘Hem tatil hem siyaset için Bodrum’da [For Vacation and Politics in Bodrum].’ Hürriyet, 5 August. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/hem-tatil-hem-siyaset-icin-bodrumda-9588900 Ayhan, Veysel, and Oytun Orhan. 2011. ‘Suriye Muhalefeti’nin Antalya Toplantısı [The Syrian Opposition’s Antalya Meeting].’ Ortadog˘u Analiz 31–32(3): 8–16. Ayman, S.Gülden. 2014. ‘Turkey and Iran: Between Friendly Competition and Fierce Rivalry.’ Arab Studies Quarterly 36(1): 6–26. Defense Intelligence Agency. 1982. ‘Syria: Muslim Brotherhood Pressure Intensifies.’ Accessed 16 November 2017. https://syria360.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/dia-syria-muslimbrotherhoodpressur eintensifies-2.pdf . . Dinç, Nihat. 1998. Gönüllü Diplomat [Voluntary Diplomat]. Istanbul: Ithaki. Entous, Adam, and Joe Parkinson. 2013. ‘Turkey’s Spymaster Plots Own Course on Syria.’ Wall Street Journal, 10 October. https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey8217s-spymaster-plots-own-course-onsyria-1381373295. Falk, Richard. 2014. ‘Turkish PM in Conversation, Part 4: The Arab Spring and Turkey’s Future.’ Open Democracy, 17 December. Accessed 14 November 2017. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ahmet-da vutog˘ lu-richard-falk/turkish-pm-in-conversation-part-4-arab-spring-and-turkey’s-future . Karagül, Ibrahim. 2012. ‘Müslüman Kardes¸ler Dünyası Kuruluyor [Establishing the World of Muslim Brotherhood (al-ikhwan al-muslimu-n)].’ Yenis¸afak, 19 June. https://www.yenisafak.com/yazarlar/ibra himkaragul/musluman-kardeler-dunyasi-kuruluyor-32883 Kürkçüog˘ lu, Ömer. 2010. Türkiye’nin Arap Ortadog˘u’suna Kars¸ı Politikası [Turkish Policy against Arab Middle East]. Ankara: Barıs¸ Kitap. Özkan, Behlül. 2014. ‘Turkey, Davutog . ˘ lu and the Idea of Pan-Islamism.’ Survival . 56(4): 119–140. Richard, Yann. 2007. ‘Kemalizm ve I ran [Kemalism and Iran].’ In Kemalizm ve I slam Dünyası [Kemalism and . . Islamic World], edited by Iskender Gökalp and François Georgeon, 79–97. Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları. . Sevim, Ali, Izzet Öztoprak, and Mehmet Akif Tural. 2006. Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri (Bugünkü Dille) [Atatürk’s Speeches and Statements (with Modern Language)]. Ankara: Divan Yayıncılık. Tok, Levent, and Selen Temizer. 2017. ‘Over 60 Pct of Syrian Soil Controlled by Terrorists.’ Anadolu Agency, 31 March. http://aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/over-60-pct-of-syrian-soil-controlled-by-terrorists/785379 . Yes¸ilyurt, Nuri. 2013. ‘Ortadog˘ u’yla Ilis¸kiler [Relations with East]. In Türk Dıs¸ Politikası . the Middle . [Turkish Foreign Policy], edited by Baskın Oran, 401–462. Istanbul: Iletis¸im. Yetkin, Murat. 2016. ‘Numan Kurtulmus¸: Bas¸ımıza Gelen Birçok S¸ey Suriye Politikası Sonucu [Numan Kurtulmus¸: Many Things that Happened to Us are the Result of Syrian Policy].’ Hürriyet, 18 August. Accessed 12 November 2017. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/numan-kurtulmus-basimiza-gelen-bircoksey-suriye-politikasi-sonucu-40200349

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31 US–TURKISH RELATIONS IN TURMOIL Kemal Kiris¸ci

Introduction As the end of the second decade of the 21st century approaches, US–Turkish relations are in a state of turmoil unlike any since both sides became allies in the aftermath of World War II. US–Turkish relations have never been without problems, with the possible exception of its first decade, once described as a ‘honeymoon’ period (Kuniholm 1983, 424).1 Instead, the relationship has known numerous crises and difficulties. Yet, both sides always managed to salvage the relationship. Today, there are serious doubts about the future viability of the alliance as calls to overhaul, if not end, it mounts on both sides. This chapter argues that this state of affairs is because in the course of the last couple of years both Turkey and the US have domestically been changing. Growing nationalism and Islamism under Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an’s leadership is pushing Turkey to seek an alternative strategic vocation to the Western one. This is in stark contrast to the initial years of his leadership at the helm of Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and has eroded the initial enthusiasm that President Barrack Obama expressed for a ‘model partnership’ based on shared values during his address to the Turkish parliament in April 2009 (White House Office 2009). The disillusionment resulted in Obama’s engagement with Turkey weakening and was accompanied by increasing aloofness to addressing geopolitical challenges in Turkey’s neighbourhood. This in turn engendered Turkey to find alternative interlocutors such as Iran and Russia. The Trump administration’s abandonment of the US’s traditional leadership role in defending the liberal world order in favour of an ‘America First’ policy has worsened this picture. These structural changes generate conflicts and tensions across a set of issue-areas between the two countries, provoking a tug-of-war between those in each country with a stake and commitment to protecting the relationship and those preferring to see both sides go their own way. Additionally, geopolitical and structural realities also put a brake on the aspirations of those in Turkey and the US who would like to break away from each other.

1

Nasuh Uslu (2003) calls it ‘a perfect honeymoon period’.

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An enduring but tumultuous relationship: 1946–2018 The end of World War II was a defining point for Turkey: strategically and institutionally. Soviet territorial demands on Turkey and the US decision to dispatch the USS Missouri in 1946 to Istanbul marked the beginning of this alliance (Harris 1972, 15–20). However, the alliance was not motivated just by a common defence against the Soviet Union. It had a strategic aspect of incorporating Turkey into a ‘security community’ characterised by the institutions of a US-led world order that increasingly espoused democratisation, liberal markets, and free trade.2 Turkey was admitted to NATO in 1952. This was accompanied by Turkey joining practically all Western regional and international institutions, ranging from the IMF, World Bank, and GATT to the Council of Europe. Internally, there was a transition from a one-party system to democracy, and the economy saw some degree of liberalisation. Considerable convergence occurred between the US and Turkey during this first decade. The enthusiasm of the then prime minister Adnan Menderes for the relationship led him to acquire a reputation for being ‘more Dullesianthan-Dulles’ and Turkey for being an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ and a ‘bulwark’ against the Soviet Union (Harris 1972, 56; Larrabee 2009, 1). However, this ‘honeymoon’ period with the US ended after the military coup in Turkey in 1960. The return to democracy brought the rise of leftist radicalism and growing objections to the US and the West writ large. A series of US policies fed into these objections. Two such examples are the decision to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of a bargain to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba without consultations with Ankara, and the ‘Johnson letter’ threatening the Turkish side that if an intervention in Cyprus provoked a Soviet response, the US would not feel bound by its commitment to defend Turkey (Harris 1972, 116–117). They became sources of mistrust and anti-Americanism that have persisted to this day. US–Turkish relations entered a particularly difficult period when Turkey’s military intervention in Cyprus in 1974 precipitated a US arms embargo imposed by the Congress. Deteriorating relations with Greece, a NATO ally, and Turkish efforts to develop closer relations with the Soviet Union as well as attempts to court the Arab world and the non-aligned movement further strained relations between the two sides. However, Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and the spiralling arms race in the context of the Cold War helped both sides to patch up their differences (Hale 2012, 118). Military and defence cooperation increased significantly. The 1980s also saw major economic reforms and efforts led by the then prime minister Turgut Özal to adjust Turkey’s economy to the ‘Washington Consensus’ with considerable support from the IMF and World Bank (Önis¸ 1995). As the 1980s came to a close, US–Turkish relations were in a positive state and, with the end of the Cold War, Turkey was on the winning side. In the new geopolitical context, Turkey was ‘upgraded’ from serving as a ‘flank’ state to acting in the capacity of a ‘front’ line one3 tasked with helping to manage the instability resulting from the 13 out of 16 conflict zones of immediate concern and interest to NATO that happened to be in Turkey’s vicinity (Üzgel 2013, 315). A completely new era of both cooperation as well as conflict opened. In that regard, Turkey in the 1990s played a constructive role in close cooperation with the US to oust Iraq from Kuwait, end the war in the former Yugoslavia, stabilise the Balkans, and support the Arab–Israeli peace process in the Middle East. Turkish–Greek relations also saw an improvement in this period. Most significantly, Turkey, once again in close coordination with the US, helped launch the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline as a part of the

2 3

For the concept of ‘security community’ see Deutsch (1957). This was noted, for example, in The Economist (1991).

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broader project that aimed at creating an ‘East–West energy corridor’ and granting former Soviet republics in the region greater economic independence (Morningstar 2003). As the rest of the world entered a ‘unipolar moment’ (Krauthammer 1990) and seemed to converge towards an international liberal order spearheaded by the US, the US increasingly envisaged Turkey as a partner that could help expand the international liberal order into the region (Çakır 2016; Mango 1993). Turkey would continue to serve in this capacity throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, when the AKP supported modest democracy promotion projects, including the US-led ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’, and encouraged regional economic integration (Kiris¸ci 2011; Straubhaar 2011). US efforts to anchor Turkey in the international liberal order also included supporting Turkey’s EU membership aspirations. Washington played a particularly prominent role in the lead-up to the signing of the customs union agreement between Turkey and the EU in 1995; it also actively championed the extension of candidate status to Turkey in 1999, and pulled its weight to ensure the start of the accession negotiations in 2005 (Tocci 2011). In hindsight, this engagement with the EU, undergirded by the US, shaped Turkey into the closest form it would get to a liberal democracy in its history. In the 1990s, especially during the Clinton administration, there were also direct efforts to encourage the growth of Turkish civil society and seek improvements to minority rights, especially those of Turkey’s Kurdish community. Bill Clinton delivered a speech at the Turkish parliament in which he underlined the need for further democratic reforms. The US also played a critical role in the apprehension of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) that had long been waging a secessionist war against Turkey. Öcalan’s arrest and return to Turkey lent Clinton considerable leverage in the country and increased his popularity (Gerstenzang 1999). US support was also functional in stabilising Turkey and reforming its economy after the country’s financial meltdown in 2001 (Hale 2012). Once the AKP came to power in 2002 it not only adopted these economic reforms but also pursued a foreign policy very much in tandem with the US. The party came to address and seek solutions to many of Turkey’s bilateral conflicts, including lending support for the UN plan to unify Cyprus and encouraging regional economic integration – policies very much in line with those advocated by the US. Turkish foreign policy earned the label ‘zero problems with neighbours’ and came to be touted for its ‘soft power’ (Aras 2009). The exuberant welcome extended to Erdog˘ an on an official visit to Cairo in September 2011, and his advocacy in support of the virtues of a democratic and secular form of government was very much in line with Western preferences (Abouzeid 2011). Turkey under the AKP was increasingly seen as an ‘engine of convergence’ that could help bring its neighbourhood into the fold of a US-led international liberal order (Kiris¸ci 2011). However, the US and Turkey also struggled through a set of persistent problems and series of crises in the post-Cold War era. It is difficult to understand the current state of bilateral relations without grasping the lasting damage caused by the developments in the 1990s. In the aftermath of the 1991 Kurdish refugee crisis, a safe zone was established in northern Iraq, where the PKK operated with some degree of impunity, which they used as a launching pad to mount attacks on civilian and military targets in Turkey. This strengthened the long-held conviction in Turkey that the US supported Kurdish aspirations for an independent state. Then the emergence of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) after the US intervention in Iraq in 2003, where the PKK continues to find sanctuary, as part of the new federal Iraq aggravated these convictions. Some of these convictions were dissipated when the US began to share ‘actionable intelligence’ on the PKK with their Turkish counterparts starting in late 2007. This climate lasted as long as progress could be made in Turkey towards a resolution of the Kurdish problem. 403

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Once Turkey’s ‘peace process’ with the PKK collapsed in the summer of 2015 and violence escalated, these fears returned. This was also a time when Turkey’s involvement with the opposition in Syria to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad reached its peak. Reports that this support extended to radical extremist groups led to accusations that the government was allowing Turkey to become a ‘jihadi highway’ benefiting ISIS (Arango and Schmitt 2015). In the meantime, this picture prompted a Russian military intervention to defend Assad while the US further intensified its cooperation with the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD) and People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG). The latter exacerbated US–Turkish relations, paving the way for a Turkish military intervention against these groups in the northwestern corner of Syria in January 2018 and bringing both sides close to a militarised confrontation (Gall 2018). Retrospectively, the crisis that inflicted the gravest damage on US–Turkish relations and aggravated anti-Americanism was the detention of members of a Turkish Special Forces unit based in Sulaymaniyah in July 2003 by the US Occupying Forces. Relations had already become tense following the US intervention in Iraq and Ankara’s refusal to allow the US military to use Turkish territory and facilities. However, the fact that Turkish soldiers were hooded and treated as prisoners of war by a NATO ally became a source of humiliation and agitation in Turkey. Since then, ‘just about every politician and media outlet (secular and religious)’ struck an anti-American tone going ‘farther than anything found in most of the Arab world’s state-controlled press’ (Pollock 2005). There was an easing of tensions after the 2008 US elections and the arrival of Obama to office, but this also did not persist.4 US meddling and presence in the region soon became associated with the chronic instability in Iraq, the accompanying security challenges – which to a large extent benefited the PKK and facilitated the rise of ISIS – as well as undermining Turkish exports to the region. Secular ultra-nationalist circles in Turkey have had their own grievances. They have accused the US and the EU of having supported the AKP’s rise to power, so that they could refashion Turkey into an ‘exemplary’ state for the Middle East that reconciled Islam with democracy (Üzgel 2013, 269).5 Bush’s remarks that ‘Turkey as a strong, secular democracy, a majority Muslim society … stands as a model to others’ (Bush 2004), and Washington’s willingness to fold Turkey into the ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’ efforts, were marshalled as evidence of US intentions to erode secularism and Atatürk’s values (Gürpınar 2014, 167–170; Guida 2008, 47–48).6 Proponents of this vision also oppose Turkey’s Western vocation. Instead, they advocate that Turkey seek an alliance with Eurasian countries, echoing the sentiments of their predecessors from the 1960s and 1970s that opposed NATO membership (Ers¸en 2013; Akçalı and Perinçek 2009). Ironically, once AKP’s relations with the EU and the US started to turn sour, especially after the Gezi Park protests and the coup attempt of July 2016, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism have increasingly brought these nationalists and Erdog˘ an closer (Tol and Tas¸pınar 2016; Gürbüz 2017). One recent manifestation of this has come in the form of advocacy for closer relations with Russia, Iran, and China together with Erdog . ˘ an’s interest in joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in place of the EU (Idiz 2016). 4

5 6

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, Turkish ‘confidence in the US President’, doing the right thing regarding world affairs increased with Obama to 33% but then fell steadily until it surprisingly bounced backed to 45% in 2015, before falling to 11% under Trump. See Pew Research Center (2018). See Üzgel (2013). This conviction actually made its way into the indictment advocating the closure of the governing AKP in 2008. Also see White (2014). For details of these arguments see Gürpınar (2014); Guida (2008).

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Another important problem is connected to the issue of technology transfers, especially in the defence sector. The crisis over Turkey’s decision to purchase S-400 missiles from Russia – which raised concerns over Turkey’s commitment to NATO – is closely related to this problem. The US decision in the 1980s to start producing F-16s in Turkey was a major success and a turning point in the relationship. However, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and offensive ballistic missiles exposed the weak state of Turkey’s armament infrastructure during the First Gulf War in 1990, then later during the Iraq War in 2003, as well as during the early stages of the Syrian crisis in 2012, when a Turkish warplane was shot down. The initial reluctance of some NATO allies to provide Patriot missiles to prop up Turkish defences raised questions in Turkey (Üstün and Kanat 2012, 233). However, pricing issues and especially US unwillingness to transfer technology to support Turkey’s own production capacity reinforced the belief that Turkish national security concerns were not being taken seriously (Kibarog˘ lu and Sazak 2016).7 Faced with this predicament, the AKP sought the procurement of Chinese missiles. However, stiff resistance from NATO and the US eventually led Turkey to drop its plans to purchase the Chinese system. Nonetheless, the episode provided another example for the argument that Turkey was drifting away from its NATO allies. This argument was further strengthened when Erdog˘ an turned to Russia and did eventually manage to reach a deal to purchase a battery of S-400s. The deal raised the prospects of sanctions from the US Congress as well as ‘more headaches’ for Turkey in its relations with the US and NATO allies (Tol and Gören 2017). The mood in Congress worsened and calls for sanctioning mounted when Erdog˘ an’s security details beat up protestors during his visit to Washington DC in May 2017, and the policy of holding American citizens hostage in return for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen provoked public uproar.8 These developments, unprecedented in Turkish diplomacy, occurred against the background of the coup attempt in July 2016 against Erdog˘ an that many in Turkey believe was perpetrated by individuals and military officers who belonged to a religious movement led by Gülen, a permanent resident of the US (Kilford 2018). The US’s hesitation to lend its support against the coup attempt as precipitously and categorically as Vladimir Putin fuelled allegations of US involvement in government circles. This was exploited to fan anti-Americanism in Turkey, in turn provoking considerable bitterness and pushback as well as public resentment towards Turkey and especially Erdog˘ an (Toosi 2016). The election of Donald Trump raised Turkish hopes that he might be more forthcoming on the extradition of Gülen and in reversing the previous administration’s policy of working closely with Syrian Kurds. These hopes were reinforced by Trump’s repeated praise and affinity for Erdog˘ an (Delk 2017). However, the measures that Trump introduced against nationals of ‘Muslim majority countries’, his decision to continue working with the PYD and YPG in Syria, the talk about listing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, .and his forceful stand on Iran indeed were developments that undermined this optimism (Idiz 2017a). The resentment felt towards these disillusionments was exacerbated when Steve Bannon, a former ally of Trump, declared, ‘Turkey was more dangerous than Iran’ and it was defined as a betrayal of a strategic partnership by an analyst close to the government (Kardas¸ 2017). However, the coup de grace came when Trump went ahead with his promise to move the US embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018. It provoked a huge rift between the 7 8

Kibarog˘ lu and Sazak (2016). Author’s interview with official from Roketsan, March 2016, Istanbul. For a discussion of Turkey’s ‘hostage diplomacy’ and its impact on US–Turkish relations, see Sloat (2018).

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two sides on a topic of paramount importance, both domestically and externally, for Erdog˘ an and his government. Claiming the leadership of the Islamic ummah, the Muslim world, had become a touchstone of AKP’s foreign policy with the eruption of the Arab Spring. The failure to see through regime change in Syria and the collapse of Turkey’s prestige as well as relations with many Arab countries has severely undermined this claim.9 Trump’s move gave an opportunity to revive it while also demonstrating how far the US and Turkey had grown apart.

Implications These transformations affect the US–Turkey relationship in a number of critical areas with profound implications for both sides. Most significant is geostrategic. Traditional vocations on both sides have shifted. The US under the Trump administration’s ‘America First’ policy is no longer committed to defending the US-led international liberal order, let alone Turkey’s place in the transatlantic community. In turn, Turkey under Erdog˘ an, at least since the Gezi Park protests of 2013, no longer espouses a Western vocation with a strong commitment to NATO membership and an aspiration to join the EU. Furthermore, Washington and Ankara no longer pursue similar objectives; in fact, their priorities have arguably shifted so far apart that even an armed confrontation appeared within the realm of possibility after Turkey intervened against Kurdish armed groups supported by the US. A prominent American journalist argued that the crisis brought the relationship to the brink of a breaking point, while a retired two-star Turkish general opined that Turkey should simply leave NATO and align itself with Russia to confront the existential threat inflicted upon the country by groups supported by the US (Ignatius 2018; Özbey 2018). If indeed Turkey and the US ended their alliance, this would throw into turmoil the geostrategic order from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. It would also undermine, or even effectively spell the end of, the defence of liberal democracy, market economies, and national security in the former Soviet space. Protecting the territorial integrity of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, together with supporting their aspirations to join the EU and NATO, would become extremely complicated. Military cooperation – traditionally the pillar of the US–Turkish relationship – has also come under severe strain. Conflicting views on the US role in Iraq and Syria has eroded good will on both sides and overshadowed continuing military intelligence cooperation in other theatres of war, such as Afghanistan. Turkey’s slow response to reining-in the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and radicalised ISIS foot soldiers into Europe, its refusal to join the coalition against ISIS until July 2015, as well as its efforts to acquire Chinese or Russian ballistic missiles systems raised doubts over Turkey’s commitment to NATO. Turkey’s persistence to acquire S-400s is increasing Congressional calls to bring sanctions on Turkey, including calls to prevent the sale of F-35 fighter planes (Detsch 2018). On the Turkish side, pro-government advocates regularly accuse the US and NATO of being involved in the coup attempt of July 2016 and calls for abandoning the alliance exacerbate this tension.10 These accusations and the rampant anti-American public discourse coupled with a docile media is creating a curious situation where the US in public opinion polls is now seen as a greater threat to Turkey’s national security than Russia and Iran.11 The fact, as two Turkish 9 For a discussion of the rise and fall of this claim see Kiris¸ci (2017) and Tas¸pınar (2014). 10 One AKP deputy even went as far as advocating that NATO is a terrorist organisation. See Hürriyet Daily News (2017). 11 Of those surveyed, 66.5% identified the US as a ‘threat to Turkey’ in 2017, an increase from 44.1% in 2016; the results for Russia and Iran for 2017 were 18.5% and 12.5%, respectively. See slide 12 in a PowerPoint slide deck available from Kadir Has University (2017).

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defence analysts note, that military-to-military ties are fraught with a lack of trust and that, in both countries, diplomats that long managed the relationship between the two countries have lost their traditional weight in policymaking, further complicates matters (Kasapog˘ lu and Ülgen 2018). The absence of a US strategy on the future of Syria has created a situation where there is no dialogue between Turkey and the US to stabilise Syria and to find a viable resolution to the conflict (Editorial Board 2018).12 Instead, in the words of a former undersecretary of the ministry of foreign affairs, Turkey has found itself in a ‘predicament’ having to work with its traditional rivals Russia and Iran that support the Assad regime while trying to advance its own agenda (Tuygan 2018). US willingness to cooperate closely with Syrian Kurdish groups at a tactical level is fuelling Turkish fears of a federal Syria with a Kurdish autonomous region along its border. It is provoking considerable confusion in AKP circles and making the government waver between the idea of having to work with the Assad regime and remaining . steadfast against it (Idiz 2017b, 2018). It is also leading Turkey to cooperate with a Russia that nevertheless maintains close relations with Syrian Kurds and, unlike the US, does not recognise the PKK as a terrorist organisation (Çandar 2017). Furthermore, the Trump administration’s stand on immigration has left Turkey without the US tradition of accepting refugees from Turkey for resettlement, leaving Turkey to fend for more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees on its own.13 Military and strategic matters have tended to dominate US–Turkish relations, leaving economic ones somewhat in their shadow. However, since the Turgut Özal administration in the 1980s, when Turkey transformed its economy from an import-substitution to an export-oriented one, successive Turkish administrations have sought closer trade relations and greater market access to the US. However, it was not until Obama’s visit to Turkey in 2009 that a concerted effort was launched to deepen these relations.14 Once negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and US began, there even emerged a discussion of how to mitigate the potential adverse effects of the TTIP on Turkey and explore possibilities to liberalise as well as expand trade between the US and Turkey. However, these efforts did not produce any substantial outcome, primarily because of the diverging priorities on both parties. In any event, TTIP negotiations were halted in 2017 after Trump came into power. The US was more focused on getting Turkey to adjust its legislation on government procurement, cross-border data flows, intellectual property protection, and genetically modified organisms aligned with US standards, while Turkey placed a larger premium on plain market access for its goods and services in the US (Bülbül 2016). The last decade saw some modest growth in trade (US Census Bureau 2018). However, this volume of trade remains relatively small compared to the volume of Turkey’s trade with EU partners and that of the US with, for example, Vietnam and South Korea, two countries with roughly similar levels of population and geographical distances to the US.15 It is unlikely there will be any improvements in the near future. The US ambassador, during a conference on US–Turkish relations in 2015, complained that ‘the trend line on trade policy in Turkey has not improved and many would say has turned negative’, and specifically referred to the absence 12 For a broader critical discussion of the Western policy, including that of the US, see Dam (2017). 13 While the US received 4,267 and 7,169 Syrian refugees from Turkey in 2014 and 2015, respectively, this number dropped down to 1,768 in 2016 and to 90 in 2017. See UNHCR (n.d.). 14 See White House Office (2013). 15 Turkey’s trade with the EU in 2017 was $159 billion, compared to $19 billion with the US (Turkish Statistical Institute, Foreign Trade Statistics database). US trade with Vietnam and South Korea in 2017 was $53 billion and $120 billion, respectively (US Census Bureau (2018).

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of a level ‘free trade’ playing field. He also noted that American ‘companies reported that Turkish authorities have unpredictably raised tariffs, imposed redundant testing requirements, or rejected shipments without notice – often faster than businesses could reasonably react’ (Bass 2015). A combination of factors ranging from Trump’s protectionist and anti-globalisation agenda, as well as Erdog˘ an’s growing hostility towards liberal market policies, are unlikely to improve the situation.16 Finally, one area where traditionally US–Turkish relations have been strong is education. Large numbers of Turkish students have pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at US institutions. During a luncheon hosted in Erdog˘ an’s honour in May 2013, the then US Vice President Joe Biden lavishly praised him and considered the fact that his children had received their graduate education in the US as a sign of the strength of bilateral relations. At the same luncheon, the US Secretary of State John Kerry also highlighted how Turkey sent ‘more students to America’s colleges and universities than any other European nation’ (Kerry 2013). Yet, this area of cooperation, too, has become strained. Trump’s ‘Muslim ban,’ the visa crisis between the two countries, and the ‘travel warnings’ for US nationals planning to visit Turkey have caused a sharp decline in the number of students travelling in both directions. The number of American students coming to Turkey as part of student exchange programmes has dropped dramatically.17 Even the Fulbright Program had to suspend its scholarship programme in Turkey (Hartocollis 2016). The educational bond between the two countries took an additional strain when Erdog˘ an called on parents not to send their kids to the West for education, lest they become ‘their agents’ (Cumhuriyet 2017). He also went on to attack Bog˘ aziçi University, one of the few universities in Turkey internationally recognised for its high academic performance, for not being ‘national and native’ (Kiris¸ci 2018). The fact that this university is the continuation of the first American college outside of the US, once known as Robert College, is indicative of the state of affairs between the two countries, but also the degree of Erdog˘ an’s animosity towards the West.

Conclusion US–Turkish relations have always had their vicissitudes with the possible exception of the 1950s. At the time of writing, US–Turkish relations are in a particularly difficult period. This chapter has argued that this is, at least partly, because both countries have undergone internal transformations in the last few years in the hands of new elites. These elites have fundamentally different strategic priorities compared to their predecessors, who were deeply committed to the transatlantic community and Turkey’s place in it. This common strategic goal and the bonds built around it had always helped overcome, work through or set aside even the strongest disagreements. A study conducted in 2004 concluded that ‘at every turn, [Turkish–American] relations have managed to come out stronger and more resilient with new areas of convergence’ (Aydın and Erhan 2004, 250). This thesis no longer applies. Instead, two veteran observers of Turkish foreign policy and US–Turkish relations observed that the two countries are further away from each other then they have ever been and that they have become foes (Kohen 2017; Ergin 2018). 16 For the weakening of the rule of law and its impact on the Turkish economy see Aydemir (2017). For a wider discussion of Erdog˘ an’s recent economic policies in contrast to when he first came to power see Bozkurt (2016). 17 According to a study by the Institute of International Education, 1,889 American students studied abroad in Turkey in 2014/2015 school year; this number dropped a dramatic 62.7% to 705 in the following school year. See Institute of International Education (2017).

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In the course of the last couple of years, Erdog˘ an and his Islamist–nationalist coalition has charted a strategic course away from the West. Yet, Turkey’s new strategic orientation remains unclear. It appears caught between developing closer association with Russia on the one hand and a lingering aspiration of leading the ummah in the Middle East on the other. In the meantime, Turkey’s democratic credentials and its economic dynamism, once put into place by Erdog˘ an and his AKP, is no more the envy of the world. Instead, it has become a reference point for populist leaders in Europe and elsewhere, who do not find any value in liberal democracy and its institutions. Trump is one such leader, who has expressed an admiration for his Turkish counterpart as well as other authoritarian leaders, including Putin (Rucker 2017). Guided by his ‘America First’ policy, he has very little interest in defending the international liberal order or promoting shared values with former allies. Some in the administration have tried their best to correct the course but, as strikingly summarised in an essay, ‘normal is over’ (Stelzenmüller 2018). Under these circumstances, it is difficult to envisage the US–Turkish relationship as a friendship based on shared values and strategic importance, as the then deputy secretary Strobe Talbott had observed two decades earlier (Talbott 1998). One close observer of this relationship noted that the ‘longer trajectory of US–Turkish relations is alarming’ and predicted that the relationship would bounce ‘from crisis to crisis’ (Cornell 2018). Yet, it is really difficult to see how, once the priorities of the current elite in both countries are stripped of their emotional and ideological baggage, a collapse of this alliance that has endured since 1946 could benefit either side. In this regard, the categorical observation by retired US Ambassador James F. Jeffrey is revealing and remains valid:18 We could not have won the Cold War had Turkey gone under or even better [remained] neutral – it’s that simple. And Turkey could not have remained a sovereign, independent state, had we not supported it in the beginning of the 1940s. And in the post–Cold War mess … we could not have done the things we did had Turkey been uncooperative or opposed to it – it’s that simple. The same vision and mentality should also guide Turkey’s attitudes vis-à-vis the US. It is difficult to see how Turkey can ensure its national security, maintain a dynamic market economy, and enjoy stable politics outside the West and without close relations with the US. Those leaders of Turkey that engaged the US in the aftermath of World War II and gave Turkey a Western vocation had made the right choice. It was this choice, even if after a long journey with lots of vicissitudes, that brought the democracy, economic dynamism, and prestige that Turkey basked in until less than a decade ago. It is this choice that Turkey needs to return to, while the US, together with the EU, needs to adopt a strategy that re-engages Turkey for the long haul. Until then, the two sides will be far from achieving the ‘security community’ they once aspired to put into place.

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32 TURKEY AND RUSSIA1 Pavel K. Baev

Introduction Turkey’s current relations with Russia are of great importance for its international positions and are also profoundly unstable and deeply controversial. The two leaders – President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an and President Vladimir Putin – are trying again to demonstrate friendliness, but the bitter quarrel caused by the intercept of a Russian bomber by a Turkish fighter in November 2015 destroyed personal trust and proved that economic ties were not strong enough to prevent political estrangement. Turkey is trying to stay clear of the evolving confrontation between Russia and the West, but it remains a member-state of NATO and plays a key role in the Alliance’s strategy of containment of Russian military activities, particularly in the Black Sea theatre. Syria has been and is set to remain the main focus of Turkish–Russian interactions, and their cooperation in the management of this mutating civil war aggravated by multiple interventions cannot resolve disagreements about the future of the al-Assad regime and the self-determination of Syrian Kurds. Similarities in the authoritarian nature of Erdog˘ an’s and Putin’s control over their respective societies do not necessarily bring them closer, but translate into the progressively stifled character of political debates as experts and academics become wary of criticising non-transparent decisionmaking. Given this backdrop, it is timely to assess the hidden drivers of both accord and discord between Turkey and Russia and then seek to produce recommendations that would remain relevant beyond the next zigzag in the inherently oscillating relationship.

Historical background Turkey and Russia cherish their respective glorious past, so the historic experiences continue to inform present-day policies and attitudes. The track record of interactions between two major European empires – Ottoman and Russian – is remarkably rich in conflict and poor in cultural exchanges. Russia remained in the far margins of Europe during the spectacular rise of the Ottoman Empire, but with the absorption of Ukraine in the second half of the 17th century, the interface became direct and the Ottoman defeat at Vienna (1683) prompted 1

This chapter draws on the research presented in Baev and Kiris¸ci (2017).

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Moscow to join the Holy League and to embark on the expansion southwards. Peter the Great was far less successful in his southern wars than against mighty Sweden, but he made sure that the confrontation with the Ottoman Empire became a key part of Russia’s newly gained European identity (Poe 2003). The conquest of Crimea during the reign of Catherine the Great in the last quarter of the 18th century was a chapter that has now acquired an even greater geopolitical importance than it had at the time. That culmination of the series of defeats convinced the Istanbul court of the need to modernise along the European patterns. The reorientation produced an unusual turn in European affairs when Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire allied to defeat Russia in the Crimean war (1853–1856), which delivered a powerful boost to Russian nationalism and reforms, but also induced an irreversible Ottoman decline. World War I signified the last clash between the two empires, and they both suffered devastating defeats, which put them at the receiving end of the victor’s incoherent efforts to establish a new European order (Reynolds 2011). Kemalist Turkey and Soviet Russia were alienated from that peace-making process and made a start in building friendly relations with the Treaty of Kars (1922). Cross-border relations briefly blossomed, but the rejection by Ankara of Soviet objections to the Montreux Convention (1936), regulating the status of the Turkish Straits, resulted in a new estrangement. Turkey remained neutral in World War II, which was a crucial test for the USSR and elevated it to the position of a super-power, but Moscow’s attempts to abuse this status to put pressure on Ankara were counter-productive. The Truman Doctrine (1947) provided US security guarantees for Turkey, which then opted to join NATO in 1952 together with Greece. During the Cold War period, carefully managed bilateral relations continued without significant interruptions, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989) caused a deep division. The collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 altered drastically the key parameters of Russia–Turkey interactions as the two states suddenly stopped being neighbours but became connected by closer economic ties, which helped Russia to overcome the severe crisis in the first half of the 1990s. Overall, there is remarkably little in the history of relations between these two major Eurasian powers – often interpreted in superficial and simplistic ways – that could underpin good-neighbourly relations and the desire to build a strategic partnership.

Reconceptualising the new reality In the unfamiliar geopolitical realities of the 1990s aggravated by violent conflicts in the Caucasus and in the Balkans, Turkey and Russia achieved an unprecedented level of mutual political, social, and cultural exposure – but were slow in constructing a new balance of benefits and risks. The profound reconfiguration of political and social structures in the area, covered by the overlapping Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions, rendered many traditional perspectives irrelevant and demanded new policy-relevant ideas. As many new state, quasistate, and non-state actors pursued their parochial political agendas, Russia and Turkey had to develop new thinking about their interests in this turbulent space and about the new postCold War character of mutual interactions. In Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to advance New Political Thinking were smallmindedly rejected by the new leadership of Boris Yeltsin, but attempts to formulate an innovative foreign policy concept remained incoherent and confused.2 Pretensions towards leadership among the post-Soviet states, gathered in the loose Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), were undermined by the lack of attention to fast-moving political processes 2

See Council on Foreign and Defence Policy (1992).

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in these new neighbours and by a shockingly deep economic crisis. As far as Turkey was concerned, the desire to make a new start in good-neighbour relations was mixed with concerns about competition for influence in the post-Soviet space. This ambivalence was aggravated by the impulsive character and poor competence of decision-making, as Yeltsin’s court had little time for careful assessments of consequences. With the sharp decline in demand for expertise, the traditional academic centres of knowledge, like the Institute of Oriental Studies, found themselves not only underfunded but also irrelevant. In Turkey, the sudden opening of new horizons produced a far-fetched vision of the Turkic world stretching ‘from the Adriatic to the Chinese wall’ (Landau 1995, 194), which inspired an expansion of political ties with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan under the slogan of ‘one nation, six states’ (Uslu 2004, 79–81). Among Turkish elites, the concept of Euraisanism became popular in the 1990s (and even more in 2010s) as an alternative to the traditional and increasingly fruitless course of integration with the EU; while different from the Russian concept of the same name, it did not envisage an escalation of competition with Russia in the former Soviet South and argued for a greater rapprochement with Moscow (Aktürk 2015). Turkey indeed adopted a cautious approach to armed conflicts in the Caucasus and in Tajikistan, which were triggered by the generally strikingly peaceful collapse of the USSR. Russia took on the main role in managing these conflicts and improvised, without much strategic planning but with remarkable success, a number of initiatives and peace operations. Its limited but sustained interventions enforced a cessation of violence but failed to deliver satisfactory solutions (Baev 1994). The only conflict where Turkey found it necessary to indicate a possibility of interference was Nagorno Karabakh, where a successful Armenian offensive in May 1992 brought Azerbaijan’s forces into complete disarray. Moscow was so disconcerted with the prospect of Turkish intervention that a threat of nuclear escalation was invoked by the top military commander (Allison 2013, 124). This one-off statement never developed into an official position, but a Russian plan for a peace operation in Nagorno Karabakh was effectively derailed by Ankara and Baku. With the start of the First Chechen War in late 1994, Russia’s capacity for projecting power became severely limited, but Turkey maintained a cautious distance from this disastrous conflict, despite discontent in its Chechen community. Another area where Russia and Turkey engaged in indirect but intense interactions in the 1990s was the Balkans, where Moscow from the very start of the Bosnian war contributed to UN peace efforts. Public opinion in Russia was shifting increasingly in favour of Serbia, yet the Kremlin opted to cooperate with NATO in executing the IFOR/SFOR (Implementation/Stabilisation Force) operations (Bechev 2017). It was the 1999 Kosovo war that signified a breakdown of that cooperation and generated profound mistrust in, and alienation from, NATO in Russia (Cross 2002). Turkey pursued a careful course in the Bosnian conflict, but took a firm stance on Kosovo, and Moscow took notice of the fact that Ankara contributed 18 fighters to the NATO air war against former Yugoslavia (Petrovich and Relijc 2011). Generally, despite the significant and emotionally charged involvement of both Turkey and Russia in the Balkan conflicts, the impact of this clash of agendas on bilateral relations was less damaging than could have been expected. Russia’s foreign policy started to acquire an assertive and anti-Western character since 2000, with Putin’s arrival to the Kremlin. Soon after, the Erdog˘ an ‘era’ dawned on Turkey, making a combination of political Islam and shrewd opportunism a dominant feature of its foreign policy. The gradual consolidation of two authoritarian regimes did not make them instant friends, and the August 2008 Russian–Georgian war presented a test to their relations. Ankara, which had cultivated military ties with Georgia, was shocked by the determined 415

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application of military force by Moscow, and abstained from any counter-measures or even protestations. Erdog˘ an’s foreign advisers produced a feeble initiative on building the Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform but showed no regret about its failure (Balcı 2014). Russia interpreted Turkey’s position as consent for its newly established dominance in the Caucasus and proceeded with reforming the armed forces, seeking to make them a versatile and efficient instrument of policy (Asmus 2010). Overall, multiple potential sources of tensions and even conflict in Russia–Turkey relations in the first two decades of their post-Soviet relations were successfully mitigated, but the political elites remained wary about the true intentions of their counterparts, despite the fast growth of economic ties.

Intricacy of the insincere partnership It was the explosion of protests and riots across the Middle East in 2011, optimistically called the ‘Arab spring’, that provided the background for the new phase in the evolving rapprochement between Russia and Turkey. What is striking about that context is that the two leaders held strictly opposing views on that political upheaval and yet still embarked on the course of building a partnership. There was an economic foundation for that course and there is a certain parallelism in the maturing of the two ‘sultanistic’ authoritarian regimes, but there is also a great volume of disagreements and conflict between the two states, one of which remains a member of NATO, and the other proceeds with engaging in a dangerous confrontation with the West. Politics of trade and gas business The fast expansion of trade and investment flows between Russia and Turkey in the 2000s has reached a plateau, and one distinct shift in the character of these economic ties in the course of 2010s is greater state control. As Russia opened for Turkish business in the mid1990s, shuttle trade flourished and many companies took advantage of new opportunities, not only bringing consumer goods and food products to the Russian market, but also expanding in the construction business. This flow of exports and investment into Russia was balanced with an increase of Russian gas imports into Turkey, facilitated by the opening of the Blue Stream pipeline in 2003. At the start of the new decade, Erdog˘ an initiated a new expansion of economic ties with Russia, and Putin was glad to reciprocate, so the High Level Cooperation Council directed the activities of state-affiliated big companies toward the symbolic goal of 100 billion USD in the volume of trade. Following visa liberalisation in 2011, Turkey became one of the top destinations for Russian travellers; more than 4 million tourists from various regions of Russia visited Turkey in 2014 (against 950,000 in 2002), contributing almost 3.5 billion USD to the Turkish economy (Baev and Kiris¸ci 2017). Economic cooperation was not free of controversies, most notably in the gas business. While covering about a half of its gas consumption with imports from Russia, Turkey cherished the ambition of becoming a ‘gas hub’ for South-Eastern Europe, but Moscow harboured deep reservations. Disagreements centred on the politically charged competition between the two gas pipeline projects: the EU-supported Nabucco and Russia-designed South Stream, neither of which had a sound economic rationale (Baev and Øverland 2010). The predictable collapse of the former project did not discourage Ankara, and Erdog˘ an used his ‘brotherly’ relations with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev to advance the alternative TANAP project, which aimed at the Italian market (Biondani and Sisti 2017). When the 416

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South Stream project expired in late 2014, Moscow invested great political effort in ensuring the progress of the alternative TurkStream pipeline project, which is planned to deliver 15.75 billion cubic metres of gas to Turkey by 2020, and the same amount to the markets of South-Eastern Europe, reducing Russia’s dependence upon the gas transit through Ukraine (Rapoza 2017). A hard test for Russia–Turkey economic relations came in late 2015, following an air-fight at the Syrian border, which enraged the Russian leadership so much that harsh sanctions on Turkish imports and tourism were enforced, the cost of which amounted to at least 10 billion USD in lost revenues (The Economist 2017). Following a political reconciliation in the mid2016, sanctions were gradually lifted, but that sharp spasm of crisis proved the economic foundation of capricious partnership to be fragile, leading many Turkish businesses to curtail their activities in Russia. It became clear that the EU is a far more important and reliable trade partner for Turkey, and the prime source of investments in the Turkish economy, notwithstanding Erdog˘ an’s bitter quarrels with Germany and renewed pledges of friendship with Russia. While Moscow made no attempt to use gas exports as a ‘weapon’ against Turkish energy policy, under Erdog˘ an there is a new emphasis in Ankara on diversification and achieving the ‘gas hub’ goal, guided by Erdog˘ an’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak, who was appointed minister of energy in November 2015 (Stein 2017). Russian tourists have returned to the beaches of Antalya, but political perceptions of economic ties as a stabilising factor in Russian–Turkish relations are damaged and business expectations are lowered, particularly as the impact of Western sanctions (even if Turkey is not a part of this regime) keeps accumulating. Strategic limbo on the Southern flank The degeneration of tensions between Russia and the West into a fast-evolving confrontation had a strong impact on Russia–Turkish relations, even if the two parties kept trying to minimise it. The annexation of Crimea by Russia in Spring 2014 took Ankara as much by surprise as any other Western capital, combined with an additional complication of the harsh treatment by Moscow of the movement of Crimean Tatars (Chulkovskaya 2017). Still, Turkey opted not to join the sanctions regime and maintained an indifferent attitude toward Russia’s re-militarisation of Crimea, which altered the geo-strategic situation on NATO’s Southern flank. This indefinite stance was challenged in late 2015, as Russia slapped sanctions on Turkey and threatened other punishments in response to the downing of a Russian bomber near the border with Syria. Turkey appealed to NATO for protection and received firm reassurances of support; yet, Ankara was dissuaded from referring to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and its request for deploying more MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries was turned down (Moran 2016). This unsatisfactory support convinced Erdog˘ an to seek reconciliation with Putin and, by the end of 2016, the crisis was essentially resolved. In order to consolidate this rapprochement, Ankara signed a 2.5 billion USD deal with Moscow to purchase the most modern S-400 surface-to-air missiles, much to consternation of its NATO allies (Schultz 2018). Russia was eager to provide a generous loan for this arms sale to a member of a hostile military alliance, but ambivalent about technology transfer, so the deal may yet fall apart, but it has added complications to Turkey’s uneasy relations with the EU, NATO, and the USA (RFE/RL News 2018). NATO gives priority attention to building effective containment capabilities in the Baltic theatre, but the Black Sea theatre is also demanding an allocation of additional resources. The 417

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deployment of a powerful grouping of Russian forces, particularly the Air-Space Forces in the Crimea, has significantly altered the security balance, and NATO member-states such as Bulgaria and Romania depend in their strategic planning upon a significant contribution from Turkey to the common defence (Toucas 2017). Ankara, however, remains reluctant to commit fully to NATO preparations in this region, and takes a particularly cautious line toward Russia’s exercise of power in the Caucasus. Turkey cultivates close ties with Azerbaijan but takes a cautious stance toward the conflict in Nagorno Karabakh, in which frequent violations of the ceasefire, negotiated by Russia back in the mid-1994, involve a high risk of escalation to a full-blown regional war.3 Turkey was watchful as Russia opted for minimal interference in the April 2018 peaceful revolution in Armenia, but the risk of a new escalation of tensions has risen yet higher (de Waal 2018). The deployment of a Russian naval squadron in the Eastern Mediterranean in support of its intervention in Syria has made this region an extension of the Black Sea theatre, at least from the strategic perspective of Russia. The grouping in Syria has been supplied by sea, primarily through the Turkish Straits, and this has put the Russian Navy, and particularly the Black Sea fleet under sustained stress (Baev 2017). Turkey’s interests in the Eastern Mediterranean are focused on Northern Cyprus, and it is particularly concerned about being excluded from plans for developing the gas resources on the sea shelf between Egypt, Israel, and Cyprus (Gürel, Tzimitras, and Faustmann 2014). Russia tried to exploit the refugee problem for advancing its agenda, and was even accused of ‘weaponising’ this issue, but it is Turkey that exercises control over the flow of refugees and puts pressure on the EU regarding the implementation of the deal reached in the mid-2016 (Dempsey 2017). The main intersection of significantly diverging Russian and Turkish strategic interests is set to remain in Syria. Ambivalent partners in Syrian war management The Russian intervention in Syria launched in late September 2015 not only took Turkey by surprise but also clashed with the course set by Ankara in this complex and protracted civil war. From the outbreak of the Syrian war in mid-2011, Erdog˘ an took a firm stance that the al-Assad regime had to be terminated, so material support was provided to various opposition groups, while some 3 million Syrian refugees were hosted in Turkey. By 2015, the rebels of various persuasions had gained much ground, so Erdog˘ an and his influential foreign minister, Ahmet Davutog˘ lu, expected that they would soon be able to pray in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (Demir 2017, 57). The Russian intervention destroyed those expectations and Russian airstrikes targeted some rebel groups close to the border with Turkey. The short air fight on 24 November 2015, in which the Russian Su-24M bomber was intercepted and shot down by a Turkish F-16 fighter, was not an isolated incident but a culmination of building tensions. Moscow responded not only with sanctions, but also with a significant increase of its grouping in Syria, so that the deployment of S-400 surface-to-air missiles constituted a direct threat to Turkish control over its airspace (Kurtdarcan and Kayaog˘ lu 2017) Erdog˘ an offered an elliptic apology, but then opted for a change of course in Syria, abandoning his demand for removal of the al-Assad regime, so . that Davutog˘ lu, who had been promoted to prime minister, had to resign in May 2016 (Idiz 2017). The capture of Aleppo by al-Assad forces in December 2016 convinced Erdog˘ an to join the Russia-led 3

See International Crisis Group (2017).

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peace process in the so-called ‘Astana format’, in which Iran was the third major partner. This position was briefly reversed when Turkey expressed full support for the US missile strike on the Syrian Shayrat airbase on 7 April 2017, but frustrated with the muddle in the US policy, Ankara had to return to the Russian plan for isolating the rebels in the ‘de-escalation zones’ (Gürcan 2017). The situation was replayed with the US airstrike on 14 April 2018, condemned by Russia and welcomed by Turkey, which still felt obliged to return to the Astana talks, despite their obvious unproductiveness (Subbotin 2018). The main problem for Turkey in the half-baked plan for pacifying Syria under al-Assad’s control is Moscow’s readiness to accept the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) and even the US-supported coalition of Syrian Democratic Forces (Quwwat Suriya al-Dimuqrat.iya, QSD) as legitimate parties to the peace process. In Spring 2017, Russia effectively stopped the operation of Turkish forces in Northern Syria (even delivering an airstrike on Turkish troops ‘by mistake’), so that Erdog˘ an had to announce the successful completion of the Turkish operation despite failing to capture the key city of Manbij (Çandar 2017). At the trilateral summit in November 2017 with Putin and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, Erdog˘ an reiterated his objections against negotiating with the QSD/YPG, effectively derailing the Russian proposition for holding in Sochi a meeting of the so-called ‘Congress of the Peoples of Syria’, as an alternative to the deadlocked UNsupervised Geneva process (Al-Makahlen and Dubovikova 2017). Moscow acknowledged the need to compromise and consented to a Turkish military offensive against the Afrin enclave held by Kurdish forces in January–February 2018 (al-Monitor 2018). The Kremlin expected that a further Turkish offensive against the YPG forces would result in an open conflict with USA, but Ankara stopped its operations and resumed talks with Washington, clearly prioritising those over the dialogue with Moscow. The key role claimed by Iran in the new phase of the Syrian conflict, opened with the defeat of ISIS with the capture of Raqqa by the QSD/YPG and the breaking of the siege of Deir ez-Zor by the Syrian army, also constituted a serious problem. Israel escalated air-strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah forces, disregarding the ceasefire around the ‘de-escalation zones’ and dismissed Russian protestations (Turak 2018). The Trump administration as of mid-2018 is adamant in confronting Iran, so the options for transforming the anti-ISIS coalition into an anti-Iranian coalition were explored in Washington, Riyadh, and Jerusalem (Edelman and Wald 2018). Turkey is open to such ideas, while Russia is resolutely against because its military presence in Syria depends upon sustaining close cooperation with Iran. The trilateral Erdog˘ an–Putin–Rouhani summit in Ankara in April 2018 did nothing in bridging these differences (Smagin 2018). Overall, the Syrian war produced one of the worst crises in Russia–Turkey relations, but also set a new framework for their cooperation. The incompatibility between Turkish and Russian goals in Syria may be hidden, but it involves the fundamental security interests of the former and unsustainable geopolitical ambitions of the latter. Authoritarian politics is personal The unstable and incoherent pattern of Russian–Turkish relations reflects the intense personal relations between their leaders, who cultivated these ties for many years, before engaging in a bitter quarrel in late 2015. Putin and Erdog˘ an preside over increasingly authoritarian regimes, which bring many similarities in the character of decision-making but do not necessarily make them natural allies (Bryza 2016). What momentarily brought them closer was Putin’s instant and unreserved support for Erdog˘ an after the coup attempt in Turkey on 419

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15 July 2016, as well as his refusal to engage in criticisms of the harsh repressions against every kind of political opposition unleashed by the Turkish government in the following months. Yet the demonstrative cordiality of the renewed ‘friendly’ relations did not quite hide the deep-seated mutual mistrust. The ‘stab-in-the-back’ quarrel caused by the air fight in November 2015 was made very personal from the Russian side, with vicious propaganda attacks on Erdog˘ an’s family, but it revealed the depth of resentment within the Russian leadership toward the political Islam advanced by Erdog˘ an’s party. Putin spelled out this issue very clearly: ‘We see, and not only we, but people all around the world see that Turkey’s current government has been following a domestic policy of quite conscious Islamicisation throughout the country for a number of years now’ (Putin 2015). This ideological difference determined the diametrically opposing positions toward the explosion of discontent in the Arab world since 2011. Putin decried the ‘Arab spring’ as an advance of political chaos instigated by the USA and positioned himself as the champion of counter-revolution cause, for which Syria became a decisive battle-ground (Malashenko 2013). Erdog˘ an embraced the popular uprisings as a ‘grand restoration’ of Islamic civilisation and Davutog˘ lu predicted the formation of a ‘Muslim Brotherhood belt’ including Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria (Özkan 2014). The aspirations for establishing Turkey’s leadership in this turbulent geopolitical space were destroyed by the July 2013 coup in Egypt, which Moscow embraced without reservation (Davutog˘ lu 2013). There are many other divisive issues in the Putin–Erdog˘ an personal relations, including the ability to command respect – and the lack of thereof – in their respective military elites, and the ability to mobilise support within the professional state bureaucracy. Putin, initially overjoyed about the arrival of the Trump administration, is embroiled in a deepening antagonism with it, while Erdog˘ an cultivates dialogue with the US President. Both leaders are deeply involved in running the energy business, and their corrupt interests are not quite compatible. Putin has invested much effort in advancing the TurkStream project and found it opportune to call Erdog˘ an from the ship that was laying pipes on the bottom of the Black Sea (Kolesnikov 2017). Erdog˘ an has granted approval for this pipeline, but he remains committed to the ‘gas hub’ proposition and pursues the plan for building the Trans-Caspian pipeline, against Russian objections (Daily Sabah 2018). Overall, the intense but precarious relations between the two leaders add unpredictability to the unstable pattern of Russia–Turkey relations, which rest on a far from solid foundation of economic ties, are affected by the confrontation between Russia and NATO, and increasingly depend upon the fluid interactions in the Syrian war.

Implications and possible deviations The instability inherent in the complex relations between Russia and Turkey has strong impacts on the security situation in the EU Southern neighbourhood, in NATO’s Southern flank, and in particular in the Syria/Iraq war zone. Presently, attention and concerns are focused on the consequences of the uneven rapprochement between the two partners in the Syrian conflict management in the post-ISIS phase. The Russian plan for fixing the outcome of the military ‘victory’ does not address the Turkish preoccupation with the Kurdish problem, so the conflict is set to acquire new dynamics testing this partnership. The EU is worried about the deterioration of the political climate in Turkey and has reason to assume that partnership with Russia encourages the Ankara government to reject ‘interference’ from Brussels and to resort to blackmailing the EU with cancelling the deal on Syrian refugees (Kiris¸ci 2017). NATO is uneasy about the implementation of the contract for purchasing the 420

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S-400 surface-to-air missiles and troubled with Turkey’s ambivalent stance regarding its commitment to collective defence in the Black Sea theatre. Many in Europe, including environmental NGOs, are worried about the execution of the 20 billion USD project of constructing the Akkuyu nuclear plant, which was awarded to Rosatom and proceeds at full speed after an interruption caused by the quarrel in late 2015 (Diggins 2017). While a further maturing of the Russia–Turkey strategic partnership indeed involves many worrisome consequences, far greater risks could emerge from a new and entirely possible breakdown of this complicated ‘friendship’. In many local conflicts and disputes in their mutual neighbourhood – from Kosovo to Abkhazia and from Cyprus to Nagorno Karabakh – Russia and Turkey support different parties and pursue clashing agendas. It is the latter conflict that has the highest risk of military escalation and, while Moscow seeks to maintain unilateral control over it, Azerbaijan can count on Ankara’s support in any attempt to win back some of the lost territory (Giragosyan 2017). Ukraine remains the focal point of the evolving confrontation between Russia and the West, and the ceasefire in the Donbass war zone is broken daily by artillery duels, so a sudden eruption of high-intensity fighting is a possibility, for which many parties to this confrontation have to plan. There are pragmatic reasons for Moscow to give up on the de facto occupation of the parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions; sustaining the deadlock established by the Minsk agreements makes little political sense for Russia and much economic burden (Sasse 2018). Nevertheless, the Russian leadership might see a need in a new ‘patriotic’ mobilisation around a long-prepared war and launch a new offensive into Eastern Ukraine, aiming perhaps at establishing a land connection with Crimea (Pifer 2017). This would result in a further aggravation of tensions between Russia and the West, and Turkey would be hard pressed to contribute to NATO’s collective efforts in the Black Sea theatre, abandoning its Russia-friendly ‘neutrality’. The war in Syria, which produced a sharp crisis in Russia–Turkey relations, continues to be a hugely complex geopolitical contestation and humanitarian disaster, which could generate another clash between poorly compatible agendas pursued by Moscow and Ankara. The Turkish leadership might very well find it opportune to engage closer with US policy in the Iraq/Syria war zone, which would (providing it acquires a coherent shape) most probably have a pronounced anti-Iranian character. This could push Turkey and Russia into opposing sides of a multi-party conflict, with a high risk of accidental or deliberate military incidents, resulting in a new political quarrel. Overall, while both Russia and Turkey proceed with building progressively more authoritarian regimes, their domestic situations are so tense and economic trends so prone to downward zigzags that it is impossible to expect any stability in the trajectory of their historically turbulent relations.

Conclusion: challenges for further research The high level of instability in Russia–Turkey relations demands sustained research attention to many impacts from their oscillations. Perhaps the most demanding problem concerns the interplay between the internal evolution of the two autocratic regimes and the pattern of their interaction. Authoritarian regimes tend to be far less stable than they often appear, and the two leaders are increasingly obsessed with preserving their respective leadership. Their survival strategies include the mobilisation of support bases against external enemies, which can be best achieved by pro-active steps supported by aggressive propaganda. The effective reach of both states is in fact quite limited, which means that such steps are most probable in 421

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their common neighbourhood. The character of decision-making in Moscow and Ankara is extremely closed, which increases the probability of bad miscalculations, and the baggage of past mistakes weighs heavily on the current and future Russia–Turkey relations. Shifts in these relations cannot be confidently predicted, but the impact of domestic political factors needs to be carefully monitored and the underlying factors of instability require informed analysis. Swings in Russia–Turkey relations are in many ways a function of their troubled relations with the West, and this connection constitutes another demanding problem for research. Russia seeks to juxtapose its political and even ‘civilisational’ model with the norms and values upheld by the allegedly declining and divided West. In a paradoxical way, however, its desire to distance itself from ‘hostile’ Europe determines a high concentration of political attention and military resources in the Western theatre. Turkey formally remains an applicant to joining the EU, but its ties with the key European states, particularly Germany, have deteriorated severely. It also remains a NATO member-state, but its readiness to deliver on the commitments to collective defence is ambivalent. The gravitational pull of the EU on Turkish policy versus other competing pulls needs accurate measurement in order to better understand zigzags in every direction of Turkish policy, including the relations with its great irreversibly declining and trouble-making neighbour.

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Turkey and Russia Cross, Sharyl. 2002. ‘Russia and NATO Toward the Twenty-First Century: Conflicts and Peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.’ Journal of Slavic Military Studies 15(2): 1–58. Daily Sabah. 2018. ‘Poised to Boost Europe’s Supply Security, TANAP to Start First Gas Delivery on June 12.’ 11 May. https://www.dailysabah.com/energy/2018/05/11/poised-to-boost-europes-supply-secur ity-tanap-to-start-first-gas-delivery-june-12 Davutog˘ lu, Ahmet. 2013. ‘The Three Major Earthquakes in the International System and Turkey.’ International Spectator 48(2): 1–11. Demir, Imran. 2017. Overconfidence and Risk Taking in Foreign Policy Decision Making: The Case of Turkey’s Syria Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dempsey, Judy. 2017. ‘Is the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal on the Ropes?’ Strategic Europe, 26 July. http://ca rnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/72634. De Waal, Thomas 2018. ‘Armenia’s Revolution and the Legacy of 1988.’ Commentary, Carnegie Moscow Center, 7 May. https://carnegie.ru/commentary/76269. Diggins, Charles. 2017. ‘Rosatom Vague Plans Could Create Radwaste Crisis in Turkey.’ Bellona, 24 May. http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2017-05-rosatoms-vague-plans-could-create-radwaste-crisi s-in-turkey-environmentalists-fear Edelman, Eric, and Charles Wald. 2017. ‘Countering Iranian Expansion in Syria.’ JINSA Report, 20 November. http://www.jinsa.org/publications/countering-iranian-expansion-syria Giragosyan, Richard. 2017. ‘Nagorno Karabakh Conflict Moves from Frozen to Kinetic.’ Emerging Europe, 15 August. http://emerging-europe.com/voices/voices-regions/nagorno-karabakh-conflictmoves-from-frozen-to-kinetic/ Gürcan, Metin. 2017. ‘How Turkey’s ‘Hasty’ Support for US Missile Strike Could Backfire.’ AlMonitor, 10 April. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/04/turkey-united-states-anka ra-hastily-approves-missile-attack.html Gürel, Ayla, Harry Tzimitras, and Hubert Faustmann. 2014. ‘Eastern Mediterranean Hydrocarbons: Geopolitical Perspectives, Markets, and Regional Cooperation.’ PRIO Cyprus Centre Report. https://cyprus. . prio.org/Publications/Publication/?x=4203 Idiz, Semih. 2017. ‘How AKP Supporters Learn to Live with Assad’, Al-Monitor, 29 Augusthttps://www.al-m onitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/08/turkey-syria-akp-supporters-now-favor-dialogue-with-assad.html Kiris¸ci, Kemal. 2017. Turkey and the West: Fault Lines in a Troubled Alliance. Washington, DC: Brookings. Kolesnikov, Andrei. 2017. ‘How Vladimir Putin Put a Pipe into the Sea.’ Kommersant (in Russian), 24 June. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3335481 Kurtdarcan, Bleda, and Barin Kayaog˘ lu. 2017. ‘Will Turkey Build its A2/AD Capabilities to Counter Russia’s Growing A2/AD Assets in the Black Sea and Syria?’ National Interest, 5 March. http://nationa linterest.org/feature/russia-turkey-the-black-sea-a2-ad-arms-race-19673 Landau, Jacob M. 1995. Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation. London: Hurst. Malashenko, Alexei. 2013. ‘Russia and the Arab Spring.’ Carnegie Moscow Center Report, October. http://ca rnegieendowment.org/files/russia_arab_spring2013.pdf Moran, Michael. 2016. ‘Turkey’s Article 5 Argument Finds no Takers.’ Carnegie Viewpoints, 24 February. https://www.carnegie.org/news/articles/turkeys-article-5-argument-finds-no-takers/ International Crisis Group. 2017. ‘Nagorno Karabakh’s Gathering War Clouds.’ International Crisis Group Report No. 244, 1 June. https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/caucasus/nagorno-karabakh-a zerbaijan/244-nagorno-karabakhs-gathering-war-clouds Özkan, Behlül. 2014. ‘Turkey, Davutoglu, and the Idea of Pan-Islamism.’ Survival 56(4): 119–140. Petrovich, Zarko, and Dusan Relijc. 2011. ‘Turkish Interests and Involvement in the Western Balkan.’ Insight Turkey 13(3): 159–172. Pifer, Steven. 2017. ‘The Growing Russian Military Threat in Europe: Assessing and Addressing the Challenge: The Case of Ukraine.’ Brookings Testimony, 17 May. https://www.brookings.edu/testim onies/the-growing-russian-military-threat-in-europe/ Poe, Marshall T. 2003. The Russian Moment in the World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Putin, Vladimir. 2015. Official translation of speech. Kremlin website. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/presi dent/news/ 50777 Rapoza, Kenneth. 2017. ‘Fearing Global Sanctions, Russia Speeds up Turkish Stream Gas Pipeline.’ Forbes, 20 July. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/07/20/fearing-global-sanctions-russia-speeds-up-tur kish-stream-gas-pipeline/#27fb61b758c5 Reynolds, Michael A. 2011. Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Turkey and Russia RFE/RL News. 2018. ‘Turkey Dismisses US Warning Against Buying Russian Missile System.’ 28 April. https://www.rferl.org/a/turkey-cavusoglu-dismisses-us-warning-against-buying-russian-2-400-missilesystem-pompeo-done-deal/29197261.html Sasse, Gwendolyn. 2018. ‘What Does Russia’s Presidential Election Mean for Ukraine?’ Strategic Europe, 26 March. http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/?fa=75891 Schultz, Teri. 2018. ‘Turkish-Russian Missile Deal Puts NATO on Edge.’ Deutsche Welle, 14 February. http://www.dw.com/en/turkish-russian-missile-deal-puts-nato-on-edge/a-42572965 Smagin, Nikita. 2018. ‘Trilateral Cooperation in Syria: Security Foundation or a Source of New Problems?’ Russian Council (in Russian), 12 April. http://russiancouncil.ru/analytics-and-comments/ana lytics/trekhstoronnee-vzaimodeystvie-v-sirii-osnova-bezopasnosti-ili-istochnik-novykh-problem/?sphra se_id=11860301 Stein, Aaron. 2017. ‘An Independent Actor: Turkish Foreign Energy Policy Toward Russia, Iran, and Iraq.’ Atlantic Council Report, 8 June. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/publications/reports/an-independent-actor Council on Foreign and Defence Policy. 1992. ‘Strategy for Russia.’ Nezavisimaya gazeta (in Russian), 19 August. http://svop.ru/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82%D1% 8B/strategyforrussia/24735/ Subbotin, Igor. 2018. ‘Tehran is Seen as Undesirable in the Astana Troika.’ Nezavisimaya gazeta (in Russian), 15 May. http://www.ng.ru/world/2018-05-15/6_7225_tegeran.html The Economist. 2017. ‘Turkey’s Snuggling Up to Russia Is Likely to Hurt It.’ 16 February. https://www. economist.com/news/europe/21717080-putin-and-Erdog˘ an-expect-different-and-contradictor y-things-their-relationship-turkeys Toucas, Boris. 2017. ‘NATO and Russia in the Black Sea: A New Confrontation?’ CSIS Commentary, 6 March. https://www.csis.org/analysis/nato-and-russia-black-sea-new-confrontation Turak, Natasha. 2018. ‘Could Israel and Iran Go to War in Syria?’ CNBC, 11 May. https://www.cnbc. com/2018/05/11/could-israel-and-iran-go-to-war-in-syria.html Uslu, Nasuh. 2004. Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Period. New York: Nova Science Publishers.

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33 ‘WILL YOU MARRY ME? WHO PROPOSES?’ FORGOTTEN PROMISES AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR REVIVING RELATIONS BETWEEN TURKEY AND THE EU Füsun Özerdem

Introduction After World War II, Turkey, which did not want to be alone in an era of fast-changing geopolitical conditions, sought to take part in the development of peace-oriented movements and made an application for partnership with the young European Economic Community (EEC) in 1959. The first step of this collaboration took place in 1963, within the framework of a ‘Partnership Agreement’, also known as the Ankara Agreement. Acting like a marriage proposal, its main purpose was to turn Turkey into a full member of the Community. Under the framework of the Ankara Agreement, a Customs Union between Turkey and EU member states was finally established in January 1996. Following this, another significant departure point in Turkey’s engagement with the EEC, which had become the EU by this time, was the initiation of membership negotiations in December 2004. However, after nearly 60 years of such a protracted engagement period, Turkey’s aspirations for a fully fledged marriage with the EU still seem to be a distant goal that may perhaps never be achieved. Therefore, in this chapter, the current context of relationships between Turkey and the EU, which provides the necessary conditions for living together, but not giving an inch to the marriage, will be discussed. Such a stalemate in EU– Turkey relations, which I label ‘strategic patience’, is the result of significant security, sociopolitical, and cultural challenges on the one hand, but at the same time, recognition by both parties that they are far too important for each other to lose as a partner indefinitely, on the other. The patience that the parties show may increase or diminish according to how much each party perceives a need for the other. In the case of Turkey–EU relations, the existence of mutual rational benefits will be assessed and it will be suggested that mutually beneficial outcomes will be

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obtained as long as the patience that the parties show for each other is managed in a strategic manner.

Historical background In 1923, with the proclamation of the Republic, Turkey started to construct a modern and secular nation-state. With its focus on Westernisation, the new Republic also became a member of important institutions such as the UN, NATO, the OECD, and the Council of Europe. With this vision of close partnership with the West, Turkey applied to join the EEC on 31 July 1959, driven by the then Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and the Foreign Minister Fatih Rüs¸tü Zorlu. The EEC agreed on Turkey’s partnership application and signed the Ankara Agreement on 12 September 1963.1 The delay between application and signing was due to the disruption caused by the military coup on 27 May 1960. Turkey became an ‘associate member’ of EEC through this agreement, and the ultimate goal of the Ankara Agreement, which took effect on 1 December 1964, was full membership (Paksoy 2003, 104). The Ankara Agreement foresaw three periods for the partnership: preparation period, transition period, and final period. The preparation period passed with Turkey’s harmonisation with the European acquis, and the aim was to prepare Turkey for the conditions of transition and final periods with support and aid from the EEC. The duration of the preparation period was 5 years with the possibility of an extension to 12 years. However, Turkey requested to proceed to the transitional period directly, without requesting any extension period (Aydog˘ an 2003, 177), and transitional period negotiations concluded with the Additional Protocol, signed on 23 November 1970. The Additional Protocol sought to create the requisite conditions for a Customs Union to be formed over time, including the free movement of goods; the removal of quotas between contracting parties; the circulation of people and services; the creation of a compatible economy; and eliminating internal taxation. According to the Additional Protocol, the duration for the removal of customs duties on certain goods was 12 years, while for others it was 22 years. In this way, the official coming into force of the Customs Union was designed to be 22 years (Karluk, 1998). Moreover, a Supplementary Protocol to the Association Agreement between the EEC and Turkey as a consequence of the accession of new member states to the Community including the UK, Ireland, and Denmark was signed on 30 June 1973. However, Turkey announced that it had permanently suspended the obligations resulting from Additional Protocol on 9 October 1978 because of the economic distress seen in the second half of 1970s. However, the new government led by Süleyman Demirel reversed that decision in 1979. Nevertheless, there were a number of setbacks on their way, as on 9 July 1980 the Federal Republic of Germany announced2 to the European Council General Secretary that it had suspended the ‘European Agreement on Regulations Governing the Movement of Persons between Member States of the Council of Europe’ which was signed in 1957 to waive the need 1 2

The full name is ‘Agreement Establishing an Association Between the European Economic Community and Turkey’. The visa decision was justified by the following statement: ‘This measure was seen as necessary for public order. Abusing the right of asylum, the number of Turkish people who went through the border of the Federal Republic of Germany with the intention of disrupting related regulations about the right of habitation and establishment, showed a sharp increase in the first months of 1980. For this reason, it is inevitable to have more strict controls over the entrance into the lands of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany will reconsider the visa issues for Turkish citizens after a span of three years’ Karaca (2013).

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for visas3 for Turkish citizens (Council of Europe 1957). Furthermore, the European Parliament recommended suspending financial cooperation and relations immediately as a result of the military coup in Turkey on 12 September 1980. Bilateral relations started to recover after the first steps towards a return to multiparty politics with the general elections of 1983. Turkey applied for full membership on 14 April 1987. The published ‘opinion’ (avis) of the European Commission declared that Turkey was eligible for membership, but it also stated that it would be more appropriate to wait for the right moment (Tocci 2011, 24), emphasising the EEC’s need to complete its internal market process. Meanwhile, on 31 December 1995, in accordance with the Ankara Agreement, the transitional period was completed and on 1 January 1996, the Customs Union entered into force. This signified an important step forward in EU–Turkey relations. Nonetheless, only two years later at the 1997 Luxembourg Summit, the EU’s eastward enlargement failed to include Turkey. The ‘European Strategy for Turkey’ was discussed as a separate issue, and in this strategy document it was stated that Turkey had yet to fulfil the required political and economic conditions for the accession negotiations (S¸en 2006, 62–63). In the strategy established by the Commission, further cooperation in 14 sub-areas, including industrial agriculture, Customs Union, science, research, and macro-economic dialogue, were foreseen. The aim was to facilitate harmonisation for the EU acquis. After the 1998 Cardiff Summit, on 4 November 1998, the Commission published the first ‘regular report’ on Turkey’s progress towards accession. It should be noted that Cyprus was not initially included in these eastward expansion plans, but Greece threatened the EU with a potential veto of the process unless concrete steps were taken for Cyprus. The Turkish Foreign Minister at the time, Murat Karayalçın, objected to this decision and declared that the membership application was only for the southern part, and not for the whole island. He criticised the decision, pointing out that the problems on the island had to be solved first. As such, he argued, a membership application was against the 1959 Zürich and London Agreements along with the 1960 Cyprus Treaty, as Cyprus should not become a member of a Union if the three guarantor states of the UK, Greece, and Turkey were not all included. Almost to compensate for this injustice, on 10–11 December 1999 at the EU Summit in Helsinki, Turkey was recognised as a candidate country to the EU and was included in the accession process created for Central and Eastern Europe. On 8 March 2001, an 11-page Accession Partnership Document for Turkey was issued which set short and medium priorities in the context of compliance with the Copenhagen Criteria.4 Also known as the 2003 Accession Partnership, this document covered a wide range of democratisation, rule of law, and good governance issues, including the implementation of measures to combat human rights abuses; the fight against torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement officials; the proper functioning of courts; the improvement of detention conditions; provision of access to the right of the European Court of Human Rights to render a final retrial; freedom of religion and conscience; encouragement of civil society development; freedom of expression ensuring cultural diversity and ensuring access to radio/TV broadcasts and training in languages other than Turkish; strengthening 3 4

This agreement only covered visits of not more than three months’ duration. The accession criteria, or Copenhagen criteria are political, economic, and administrative and institutional criteria. Political criteria are stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities; economic criteria are a functioning market economy and the capacity to cope with competition and market forces; administrative and institutional capacity is to effectively implement the acquis and ability to take on the obligations of membership.

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judicial independence; and improving the situation in the Southeastern part of Turkey and reducing regional differences. How Turkey intended to deal with these demands, an extensive Turkish National Programme (a total of 510 pages), was submitted to the Council of Ministers.5 This was in fact, the strongest sign to show how seriously Turkey took the EU membership process. Having dealt with a substantial part of those requirements through a marathon of constitutional and legislative changes in a very short period of time, such as the abolition of State Security Courts, the strict implementation of ‘zero tolerance’ policy against torture, and the abolition of the death penalty, it was confirmed during the EU Brussels Summit of 16–17 December 2004 that Turkey fulfilled the political criteria sufficiently and the full membership negotiation process could be launched on 3 October 2005. However, the EU also put forward a number of conditions demanding the extension of the scope of the Ankara Agreement to the new members of the EU, including Cyprus, as a prerequisite for the start of Turkey’s full membership negotiations.

Given–forgotten–now reawoken promises The Supplementary Protocol about the extension of the Customs Union, including new EU members and the adaptation of Ankara Agreement into this expansion, was signed by Turkey on 29 July 2005. However, it was delivered to the then Presidency of the Council of the EU (the UK) with a declaration claiming that the agreement did not mean the recognition6 of the ‘Southern Greek Region of Cyprus’ cited in Supplementary Protocol (Karluk 2006, 17– 18). Meanwhile, the Annan Plan, which was developed as a political resolution to the Cyprus conflict, was put to a referendum on 24 April 2004, in which 64.9 per cent of Turkish Cypriots approved of the plan, while 75.8 per cent of Greek Cypriots rejected the plan. This essentially sank any short-term possibility for resolution between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus because majority support from both parts of the island was required to implement the plan. The European Commissioner for Enlargement, Guenter Verheugen, expressed his disappointment strongly, claiming to be deceived by Greek Cypriots.7 Nevertheless, despite this overall negative political context, the first step of the membership negotiations for Turkey, a ‘Screening Process’, was completed on 13 October 2006. Amongst 35 Chapters, ‘Chapter 25: Science and Research’ was opened and closed temporarily as Turkey met all the requirements. However, this was only a brief glimpse of hope in the negotiations process and soon after, according to the EU General Affairs and External Relations Council Decision of 11 December 2006, the fulfilment of Turkey’s commitments under the Supplementary Protocol had become an opening benchmark8 for eight chapters9 5

6 7 8

9

These national programmes are designed to fulfil the objectives set out in the Accession Partnership and to facilitate compliance with the adoption of the EU acquis. It is expected to prepare a National Programme for each Accession Partnership prepared by the Commission, although it is not binding. Because of the political issues on the island, Turkey does not recognise Cyprus under the name of Cyprus and it prefers to call it the Southern Greek Region, the term also used by UN. Wright (2004). Opening benchmarks are related to requests for the adoption of strategies and action plans, meeting the contractual obligations towards the EU, primarily the implementation of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, requests for the adoption of laws and by-laws, etc. These chapters are: Chapter 1: Free Movement of Goods; Chapter 3: Right of Establishment and Freedom to Provide Service; Chapter 9: Financial Services; Chapter 11: Agriculture and Rural Development; Chapter 13: Fisheries; Chapter 14: Transport Policy; Chapter 29: Customs Union; and Chapter 30: External Relations.

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and a closing benchmark10 for all chapters (Council of the European Union 2006). Moreover, on 26 June 2007, France, under the Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, declared that they would block five further chapters11 scheduled to be opened up for negotiations on the grounds that these chapters were directly related to membership. As if such setbacks were not enough, Cyprus unilaterally blocked six of 35 chapters on 8 December 2009 because of Ankara’s refusal to recognise the whole island as an independent country and refusal to allow Cypriot ships and airplanes to use its ports and airports.12 Moreover, when Cyprus took over the EU Presidency on 1 July 2012, Turkey had to carry out all its membership process work through the Cyprus Presidency Term according to the EU rules. However, as Cyprus is not recognised by Turkey, this could not be done and that would have meant that there would have been a de facto freezing of EU–Turkey relations for six months. To avoid this, Turkey’s then Minister for European Union Affairs, Egemen Bag˘ ıs¸, and European Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy, Štefan Füle, officially launched an alternative process called ‘the Positive Agenda’ at the kickoff meeting on 17 May 2012. This development was very significant as, for the first time, a candidate country was involved in a direct relationship with the Commission, bypassing the Presidency. Also, for the first time, a candidate country did not like the Progress Report prepared by the Presidency country and published its own Progress Report. Furthermore, 16 December 2013 was another turning point for Turkey–EU relations, since a significant step was taken to lift the ban imposed after the 1980 coup on Turkish citizens’ visa-free travel to the EU. To start with, Schengen13 visa application for Turkish citizens was unlawful and discriminatory anyway, and becoming a political issue for the EU day by day due to a number of critical decisions by the Court of Justice demanding the recognition of Turkish citizens’ right to move freely in the EU. Therefore, there was no other option for the EU except the negotiation table in such an environment, and as a result of the EU–Turkey Readmission Agreement and EU–Turkey Visa Liberalisation Dialogue,14 a Joint Declaration was agreed. The Declaration included the start of an acceleration of accession negotiations and preparations for new chapters by the Committee; empowerment of high-level dialogue between Turkey and the EU on various platforms; the acceleration of visa liberalisation dialogue and abrogation of visa-free travel for Turkish citizens to the Schengen Area in October 2016 instead of 2017; the implementation of a Joint Migration 10 A candidate country has achieved in the particular chapter a sufficient level of alignment with the EU acquis and that further negotiations on that chapter were not necessary. In which case, the chapter will be temporarily closed. In most cases, the EU will conclude that the level of alignment does not allow that chapters be temporarily closed and that the EU will determine the closing benchmarks that the candidate country will have to fulfil before the chapter may be closed. 11 Chapter 11: Agriculture and Rural Development; Chapter 17: Economic and Monetary Policy; Chapter 22: Regional Policy and Coordination of Structural Instruments; Chapter 33: Financial and Budgetary Provisions; Chapter 35: Institutions. 12 These chapters are: Chapter 2: Free Movement of Workers; Chapter 15: Energy; Chapter 23: Judiciary and Fundamental Rights; Chapter 24: Justice, Freedom and Security; Chapter 26: Education and Culture; Chapter 31: Foreign, Security and Defence Policy. 13 The border-free Schengen Area guarantees free movement to more than 400 million EU citizens, as well as to many non-EU nationals, businessmen, tourists, or other persons legally present on the EU territory. A Schengen visa is a short-stay visa allowing its holder to circulate in the Schengen Area. The Schengen Area covers 26 countries (‘Schengen States’) without border controls between them. These countries are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. 14 See European Commission (2013).

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Action Plan; and allowance for a Refugee Financial Opportunity for Turkey and updating of the Customs Union. It should be noted that some of the above-mentioned changes in the EU–Turkey relations were due to a number of Syria-related developments. First, a number of security matters, especially ‘border security’, ‘migration flow’, and the EU’s approach to the PKK- and PYDrelated security matters have become the forefront issues affecting relations both negatively and positively. On the one hand, EU officials argued that Turkey could not provide enough control on its Syrian border (Özcan 2017, 8). In particular, foreign fighters who are European citizens and using Turkey to enter Syria have created a major problem in Turkey–EU relations. On the other hand, with the civil war in Syria, millions of civilians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq. Especially in the period after 2014, there has been a tremendous increase in migration rates with refugees attempting to flee to Europe through the Aegean Sea and Greek islands. Subsequently, the media within EU member states and some EU leaders, describing refugees as ‘security threats’, ‘financial burdens’, ‘Islamist terrorists’, and ‘threats to EU identity’, have voiced opposition to migration into Europe on this unprecedented level.15 Second, not having a common migration policy, the EU has begun to build its own preventive policies concerning migration, focused on better controlling migration flows. Finally, in this context, acting as a partner with Turkey on immigration has been one of the EU’s priorities. For example, after the deepening of the migration crisis, the EU began to ask Turkey to stop the passage of immigrants in return for financial aid (Özalp 2015). Hosting over 3.4 million Syrians, Turkey’s main expectation was an increase in international cooperation against the refugee crisis and, with this new rapprochement period, Turkey has begun to increase measures to stop the flow of migration into the EU and begun to collaborate on the readmission of outgoing immigrants. In return, the EU has committed to support the visa liberalisation process for Turkish citizens and promised €6 billion for aid programmes for Syrian refugees in Turkey.16 However, during the 2016–2017 period, the EU provided only €1.378 billion of the €3 billion of the promised funding. During 2016 and 2017, it also financed 45 humanitarian projects in Turkey with 19 UN and NGO partners (Avrupa Komisyonu 2018). However, the problems with the visa liberalisation process and subsequent delays are still negating EU–Turkey cooperation over the Syrian refugee crisis. The EU Committee offered the EU Council and European Parliament an amendment of EU regulation 539/2001 on the abrogation of Schengen visa restrictions for Turkish citizens on 4 May 2016 and stated that there were seven obligations17 left out of 72. One of these obligations focused on the renewal of legislation and applications on combating terrorism in accordance with European standards, especially the restriction of the scope of terrorism definition and a better conformance with the definition of terrorism cited in the modified Framework Decisions (EURLex 2015) numbered EU 2002/475/JHA and 2008/919/JHA. However, a consensus on the 15 ‘Viktor Orban in Hungary, who built a wall against refugees and triggered a collapse on the Balkans’ borders, Miro Cerar in Slovenia who said that his country will only accept Christian refugees and that Europe is going to drown, Norbert Hofer, the far-right leader in Austria that promised he will protect Austrian borders against the refugees’ (Postelnicescu 2016). 16 More than €2.65 billion has been contracted under the EU Facility for Refugees in Turkey on humanitarian and non-humanitarian actions, out of which some €1.7 billion has been disbursed. 17 The 72 requirements listed in the Road Map are organised in five thematic groups: Group 1, Document Security; Group 2, Migration Management; Group 3, Public Order and Security; Group 4, Fundamental Rights; Group 5, Readmission of Illegal Migrants.

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definition of terrorism could not be formed. According to Turkey’s position on this matter, while heavily needing to combat terrorism in its own territory and neighbouring countries, Turkey is anxious about the EU’s demand on the change of terrorism definition. Moreover, although the EU recognises the PKK as a terrorist organisation, the permission granted to the PKK to pitch a tent for its radio and TV broadcasts next to the European Parliament has been heavily criticised by the Turkish government. On the other hand, it should also be remembered that despite the fact that Turkey has not fulfilled all the criteria yet, the Committee has taken a major political risk by offering a visa liberalisation deal, since it has to cope with highly sceptical public opinion in the EU countries against Turkish membership (Nas and Özer 2017, 97). A good example of this is that EU Foreign Ministers, meeting in the EU General Affairs Council on 13 December 2016, had not reached a consensus on the ‘Development and Stability and Association Process’, since the obligations in visa-liberalisation dialogues were not fulfilled because of Austria’s anti-Turkey attitude, but instead published as a text. Unfortunately, the text included the statement: ‘Opening a new chapter for discussions is not considered under the prevailing circumstances at the moment’ (The Local/AFP 2016). More worryingly, due to its increasing democratic deficiencies and 13 years after originally completing the process, Turkey was included in the ‘screening process’ again by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on 25 April 2017. A climate of ever-increasing authoritarianism in Turkey and withdrawal from EU values, as claimed by the EU, can be regarded as the reasons for this new state of relations. However, it should also be noted that due to worsening relations over the years, this has meant that the EU had little soft power to use to respond to such challenges to democracy in Turkey. Also, the rejection of a possible Constitutional Treaty within the EU structures, and then the financial crisis experienced in some member states leading to a reorganisation of the Eurozone, resulted in an introvert EU moving with more protective reflexes. The power consolidation of the extreme-right in some EU countries also started to tie the EU’s hands in responding to sensitive and complex issues, including Turkey’s membership process. Overall, there are five chapters which are not subjected to any obstruction upon the negotiations at the moment, and among these chapters, ‘Chapter 34: Institutions’ and ‘Chapter 35: Other Issues’ are only envisioned for discussion at the end of all other negotiations. In this case, there are only three chapters left for which Turkey can start a negotiation process: ‘Chapter 5: Public Procurement’, ‘Chapter 8: Competition Policy’, and ‘Chapter 19: Social Policy and Employment’. However, if there is a solution to the Cyprus conflict, 14 other chapters can be opened up for negotiation and relations can quickly reaccelerate. However, any attempt to secure full membership for Turkey within the EU will face a number of significant issues that could test the ‘strategic patience’ on both sides. To give just a few examples, first, if the EU, applying a multi-speed Europe in any case, imagines that Turkey would use the euro when it becomes a member, then this would mean a total misinterpretation of the current societal and political dynamics in Turkey, as there is an increasing sense of political and economic independence in all segments of society and the state. Second, the EU’s disengagement from the refugee issues, which after all played a critical role in the way that the UK decided to end its membership, could also create challenges with Turkey. So far, the EU’s approach to this issue has been less than satisfactory for Turkey, particularly around the EU’s promised financial assistance. Third, due to its large population, Turkey would have a significant share in EU institutions including the Council, Parliament, and Commission according to the current EU governance rules based on a 431

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population/representation ratio. Hence, such representation rules are expected to be amended in the case of Turkey’s full membership, causing a strong sense of injustice for Turkey. Fourth, it is considered that there will also need to be cooperation with Turkey during the application of Permanent Structured Cooperation for Security (PESCO), which was developed by France and Germany. Fifth, after the Brexit decision the EU is likely to be much less willing to accept large countries like Turkey as members, as it seems to prefer to move forward towards a more political integration, making sure that the chances of future divorces from the Union would be less likely. Finally, bilateral relations between the EU and Turkey are too significant to be subjected to different interpretations of EU institutions and political wrangling. What would make these political discussions more meaningful though, is to have a sound financial framework. However, the EU continues to act by ignoring Turkey as a party to the Customs Union in its free trade agreements signed with third countries. The Customs Union, dating back to 1996, needs to be updated under this condition and some precautions should be taken to allow Turkey to enter into the Common Commercial Policy. However, developing closer financial relations. would not be enough to accelerate the membership process on their own (Türkiye Istatistik Kurumu 2017). The authoritative atmosphere within the domestic policy of Turkey should also be changed. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, touched on this subject in his speech in European Court of Human Rights, expressing his views on Turkey’s future in the EU: I am firmly convinced that the fate of Russia or Turkey will not be improved by turning their backs on Europe, since these two great nations are anchored in Europe, since their history, their geography, their literature and their political consciousness have developed through close contact with Europe. We should therefore call these countries out on each occasion, by criticising without engaging in a closed-door policy; we should not exclude them from everything, nor, furthermore, allow them to exclude themselves from everything, but should rather engage in an intense, difficult, sometimes thankless dialogue, paved with small victories, and also sometimes with small defeats. We must hold the line, because their peoples deserve it, because their fellow citizens are Europeans, because the nationals of all these countries, no matter the choice of their leaders, deserve that we fight for them, deserve access to this right, to the protection of their rights. (Macron 2017)

Conclusion and future trajectories Turkey continues its EU membership negotiations and remains a candidate country, but this seems to be only on paper in the current context of EU–Turkey relations. In order for relations to gain momentum, a number of predictions that are closely related with ‘strategic patience’ could be put forward. The first scenario, which depends on the changing political situation in Turkey and the EU, is the realisation of the goal of full membership. This would require somehow the continuation of the negotiation process, which has recently come to a complete halt. This situation could only be realised by believing in the reciprocal benefits, and in return, such a vision could only be achieved through making rational and pragmatic choices. The main obstacle in this prediction though, will be whether or not there could be a settlement of the Cyprus issue in the near future. The second scenario is the realisation of a ‘half-membership’ status which is often referred to as a ‘privileged partnership’ by the EU. This would be more than the partnership relationship created by Ankara Agreement, but would certainly fall short of Turkey’s full membership aspirations. However, such a 432

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privileged membership might start to appear as a good option for Turkey after all, though the Turkish government appears to be rejecting this option at the moment. The third scenario is based on a complete exclusion of Turkey from the full membership path on the basis of strengthening a common EU identity, culture, and historical norms, and this might even lead to the downgrading of the existing Ankara Agreement to a standard partnership type of relationship between the EU and third countries. The common point of all three scenarios is that they would all have negative political and economic consequences for both parties at a significant level, and subsequently, a mutual transformation based on ‘strategic patience’ is a must for EU–Turkey relations. However, whether this would lead to a happy marriage or breaking the protracted engagement fully is yet to be seen.

References . Avrupa Komisyonu [European Commission]. ‘Avrupa Sivil Koruma ve Insani Yardım [European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid.’ 10 January 2018. http://ec.europa.eu/echo/files/aid/countries/fa ctsheets/turkey_ syrian_crisis_tr.pdf Aydog˘ an, Metin. 2003. Avrupa Birlig˘i’nin Neresindeyiz? Tanzimattan. Gümrük Birlig˘i’ne [Where are we in the European Union? From Tanzimat Reform Era To Customs Union]. Istanbul: Kum Saati Yayınları. Council of Europe. 1957. ‘European Agreement on Regulations governing the Movement of Persons between Member States of the Council of Europe.’ 12 December. https://www.coe.int/en/web/con ventions/full-list/-/conventions/treaty/025 Council of the European Union. 2006. ‘Press Release, Affairs and External Relations, General Affairs.’ 11 December. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_PRES-06-352_en.htm?locale=enCoERMPublicComm on SearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=0900001680064588 European Commission. 2013. ‘Roadmap Towards a Visa-Free Regime with Turkey.’ https://ec.europa. eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-is-new/news/news/docs/20131216-roadmap_towards_ the_visa-free_regime_with_turkey_en.pdf EUR-Lex. 2015. ‘EU Rules on Terrorist Offences and Related Penalties.’ http://eur-lex.europa.eu/lega l-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV%3Al33168 Karaca, Kayhan. 2013. ‘Türkiye’nin ‘Vizesiz Avrupa’ Serüveni [Turkey’s ‘Visa-Free Europe’ Adventure].’ Deutsche Welle, 9 December. http://www.dw.com/tr/türkiyenin-vizesiz-avrupa-serüveni/a-17280737 . Karluk, Rıdvan. 1998. Avrupa Birlig˘i ve Türkiye [European Union and Turkey]. Istanbul: Beta Yayıncılık. Karluk, Rıdvan. 2006. ‘AB’nin Türkiye, Türkiye’nin AB Politikası [EU’s Turkey Policy, Turkey’s EU . Policy].’ In Türkiye-Avrupa Birlig˘i Ilis¸kileri Üzerine Ekonomi-Politik Tezler [Political Economy Analyses on . . Turkey- European Union Relations], edited by Irfan Kalaycı. Istanbul: Beta Yayıncılık. Macron, Emmanuel. 2017. ‘Speech by Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, at the European Court of Human Rights on 31 October.’ http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Speech_ 20171031_Macron_ENG.pdf Nas, Çig˘ dem and Yonca Özer. 2017. Turkey and EU Integration: Achievements and Obstacles. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Özalp, Güven. 2015. ‘AB ile Kıran Kırana Pazarlık.’ Hürriyet, October. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/a b-ile-kiran-kirana-pazarlik-30323399 . . Özcan, Mesut. 2017. Türkiye-AB Ilis¸kileri ve Suriye Kriz [Turkey-EU Relations and Syrian Crisis]. Istanbul: . Insani ve Sosyal Aras¸tırmalar Merkezi. . Paksoy, Mustafa. 2003. ‘Avrupa Birlig˘ i-Türkiye Ilis¸kilerinin Gelis¸imi [Evolution of the European UnionTurkey Relations].’ In Avrupa Birlig˘i Ortak Politikalar ve. Türkiye [Common Policies of the European Union and Turkey], edited by Muhsin Kar and Harun Arıkan. Istanbul: Beta Yayıncılık. Postelnicescu, Claudia. 2016. ‘Europe’s New Identity: The Refugee Crisis and the Rise of Nationalism.’ Europe’s Journal of Psychology 12(2): 203–209. . S¸en, Faruk. 2006. ‘Türkiye-AB Ilis¸kilerinin Bes¸ Temeli ve Bu Çerçevede Türkiye’nin Tam Üyelig˘ inin AB’ye Olası Etkilerinin Tahmini [The Five Basics of Turkey-EU Relations and Estimating . the Potential Impact of EU Full Membership of Turkey in This Context].’ In Türkiye-Avrupa Birlig˘i Ilis¸kileri Üzerine . Ekonomi-Politik Tezler [Political Economy Analyses on Turkey- European Union Relations], edited by Irfan . Kalaycı. Istanbul: Beta Yayıncılık.

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Reviving Turkey–EU relations The Local/AFP. 2016. ‘Austria Reinforces Barrier to Turkish EU Membership.’ 13 December. https:// www.thelocal.at/20161213/austria-reinforces-barrier-to-turkish-eu-membership . . Tocci, Nathalie. 2011. Türkiye’nin Avrupa’daki Geleceg˘i [Turkey’s Future in Europe]. Istanbul: Inkılap Kitapevi. . . Türkiye Istatistik Kurumu [Turkish Statistical Institute]. 2017. Dıs¸ Ticaret Istatistikleri Ocak [Foreign Trade Statistics Ocak]. January 2017. http://www.tuik.gov.tr/PreHaberBultenleri.do?id=24822. June 2017. http://www.tuik.gov.tr/HbPrint.do?id=24827 Wright, George. 2004. ‘Greek Cypriot Leaders Reject Annan Plan.’ 22 April. https://www.theguardian. com/world/2004/apr/22/eu.cyprus

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34 TURKEY’S CYPRUS POLICY IN TRANSITION Birol A. Yes¸ilada

Introduction Cyprus has been a serious policy challenge for Turkey and the Western alliance since the mid-1950s. Although it is a small island republic in the eastern Mediterranean (3,572 square miles and a population of less than 1 million), Cyprus has been a focus of NATO’s attention because of its potential danger for causing a war between Greece and Turkey. During British control between 1878 and 1960, Cyprus did not occupy a top priority in Turkey’s foreign affairs until the Greek Cypriot rebellion against British rule in the1950s. When Greek Cypriots established their underground terrorist organisation EOKA (National Organisation of the Cypriot Fighters) in 1955 and began an armed campaign for union with Greece (Enosis), Turkey responded by organising the Turkish Cypriot underground resistance organisation VOLKAN (later renamed as the Turkish Resistance Movement, the TMT) to prevent Enosis. By the late 1950s, Britain realised that efforts aimed at controlling EOKA were futile while civil unrest increased within both the Greek and Turkish communities. As violence between these organisations threatened to erupt into war between Greece and Turkey, Britain and the UN brokered a compromise by getting an agreement to establish an independent Cypriot republic. Furthermore, to ensure the survival of this new state, Britain, Greece, and Turkey became the guarantor powers of Cyprus. Ironically, leaders of the two Cypriot underground movements who led their communities’ respective nationalist campaigns became the elected officials of the new Cyprus republic.1 It should suffice to say that the Cyprus republic was a stillborn child. From the beginning, the communities viewed each other with suspicion and of harbouring secret aspirations. Turkish Cypriots believed that the Greeks would launch their Enosis campaign when opportunity presented itself and secretly continued to organise their resistance with support from Turkey. On the other side, the Greek Cypriots viewed the constitutional framework as unworkable and desired to make changes that would give them majority control of state’s institutions and governance. They also prepared a secret plan, known as the Akritas Plan, for 1

Archbishop Makarios, who became president of Cyprus, was the founder of EOKA. His aides included General (then Colonel) Grivas and Georkadjis. The TMT, on the other hand, included Dr Küçük, who became vice-president of Cyprus, and Rauf Denktas¸, who later became the leader of the Turkish Cypriots.

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a military solution if their demands were not met. In line with this scheme, President Makarios gave a ‘Thirteen Point’ proposal to the Turkish Cypriot Vice-President Küçük, on 30 November 1963 for revisions or amendments of the constitution. The idea behind these proposals was quite simple: to change the consociational democratic system to a unitary state where the Turkish Cypriots would no longer possess veto powers over the decisions of the Greek Cypriot majority. The Turkish side rejected these proposals and civil war broke out on 23 December 1963. Quickly, the Greek Cypriots took control of most of the island and forced one-third of the Turkish Cypriots to become refugees in small enclaves (see Figure 34.1). This situation characterised the state of affairs between the two communities until the summer of 1974 when an Athens-led coup against Makarios prompted Turkey’s intervention and the subsequent division of Cyprus, a partition which remains to the present time. During 1963–1974, Turkey twice intervened to protect the Turkish Cypriots against . Greek Cypriot attacks. First was during the summer of 1964 when Prime Minister Ismet . Inönü ordered the Turkish air force to bomb the Greek Cypriot positions in order to prevent the slaughter of Turkish Cypriots in the enclave of Erenköy/Kokkina. Then in 1967, when two Turkish Cypriot villages on the Limassol–Nicosia highway were overrun by Greek mainland troops commanded by former EOKA leader General Grivas, Süleyman Demirel’s government threatened to invade the Island. On both occasions, Turkey cited her guarantor status to protect ethnic kin in Cyprus. The immediate shuttle diplomacy of the US Undersecretary of State, Cyrus Vance, secured a ceasefire, the withdrawal of General Grivas and some 10,000 Greek forces from Cyprus, and freedom of movement for the Turkish Cypriots without being subject to search by the Greek Cypriot security forces. Until 1974, there was a relative peace on Cyprus but the intercommunal negotiations did not result in any solution to the problem. Finally, in July 1974, following a coup by the

Figure 34.1 Turkish Cypriot enclaves following intercommunal clashes: 1963–1974. Source: Adapted from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyprus_1973_ethnic_neutral.svg

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nationalist Greek Cypriot forces against president Makarios, Turkey intervened by military force to protect Turkish Cypriots and to prevent the unification of Cyprus with Greece. At the time, Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit’s coalition government believed that failure to act would have resulted in the annihilation of Turkish Cypriots. Following this war, the two sides forced the exchange of populations and the de facto division of Cyprus became a reality (see Figure 34.2).

Figure 34.2 Territorial division after the 1974 war. Source: based on United Nations map of Cyprus.

Since 1974, the leaders of the two sides have met at different times under the auspices of the UN and the US to find a newpolitical solution for Cyprus. During most of this period, Turkey’s position on Cyprus was one of high national security (Milli Dava) that was shaped by nationalist views. However, with the rise of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) to power in 2002, Ankara gradually moved to a more conciliatory position that favoured an EU-based resolution of the Cyprus problem coupled with Turkey’s membership of the EU. It seemed that with the AKP at the helm, a paradigm shift took place in Turkey’s Cyprus policy. Soon after, prospects for a settlement looked quite promising as Turkey endorsed the UN peace plan, known as the Annan Plan. This peace effort was crucial in that it was designed to reunite the island before Cyprus joined the EU in May 2004. All international actors (EU, UN, US, and guarantor powers) worked diligently to make sure that the Annan Plan and its political framework for a federal Cyprus did not violate EU law. On the Turkish Cypriot side, a dramatic shift in power from nationalist leader Rauf Denktas¸ to pro-EU Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Talat raised the prospects for acceptance of the peace agreement by the Turkish side. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred on the Greek Cypriot side. An old guard of the Enosis movement, Tassos Papadodopoulos, won the presidential elections 437

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and actively campaigned against the Annan Plan. Despite serious efforts by most parties, hopes were dashed when the Greek Cypriots rejected the plan in a referendum on 24 April 2004. Following the collapse of the Annan Plan, three separate UN-led negotiations proved unsuccessful in bringing the two sides to an agreement. The most recent of these was the failed UN-sponsored negotiations at Crans-Montana, Switzerland in July 2017. Negotiations took place between Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot President Mustafa Akıncı. Both leaders initially gave pro-reunification signals and raised everyone’s hopes for a final settlement. However, key issues stood in the way of a compromise: power sharing in the federal government, territorial concessions by the Turkish Cypriots, the status of Turkish settlers, and property rights. In addition, the initial derogations from EU law that restricted the residency of non-natives in each component state remained an uncertainty as both the Greek Cypriot side and EU no longer accepted this as a permanent solution.2 To further complicate matters, the Greek Cypriots began their campaigns for the presidential elections of 2018. Under these circumstances, President Anastasiades became more rigid and nationalistic in his position. When the Cypriot parties were joined by representatives of guarantor powers and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, it looked hopeful that a final deal could be made. Unfortunately, Anastasiades rejected the proposals and walked out of the talks, effectively killing any chance of finding a settlement in the near future. Since then, Turkey’s foreign policy towards Cyprus has taken a new turn that is far less concerned about the linkage between settling the Cyprus problem and Turkey’s EU membership and more focused on finding an alternative option for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

What has been said about the Cyprus problem? Over the years, much has been written about the rise and fall of the Cyprus republic and Turkey’s interests in this subject.3 Most scholarly works can be categorised into the following areas of focus. The first group of studies examine the causes of the Cyprus problem within the context of the Cold War politics and the subset of the Greek–Turkish conflict. The second set of works focus on the post-Cold War period and increased efforts to find a solution prior to membership in the EU. The richest discussion in the latter group revolves around the Annan Plan and consequences of its failure and what needs to be done to find a just and lasting solution for Cyprus. The most recent works examine bicommunal negotiations, how EU membership became a significant factor in the Cyprus dispute, and the consequences of the failed peace talks on Turkey’s policy preferences. In his analysis of Turkey’s foreign policy, William Hale concluded that realism and pragmatism was the dominant strategy in Turkey’s foreign policy during the Cold War but probably with one exception – Cyprus (Hale 2001). This is partially correct as the Cold War foreign and security policies of Turkey were linked to overall NATO strategies in the East–West bipolar competition between the US and Soviet Union. However, excluding Turkey’s Cyprus policy as an aberration or an exception may be premature. Turkey’s Cyprus policy, whether diplomatic or military, seems to have followed calculated decision-making throughout the Cold War and beyond, right

2

3

The Annan Plan included a clause that no more than one-third of the residents of each component state (Greek Cypriot State and Turkish Cypriot State) shall be of individuals whose mother tongue was not the local dialect of that State. This would guarantee a majority of Greek Cypriots in the south and a majority of Turkish Cypriots in the north indefinitely. Works on Cyprus often fall into the category of being pro-Greek or pro-Turkish. Objective works are rare and difficult to come by. Some of the objective works include Bahcheli (1990); Couloumbis (1993); Loizos (1981); Markides (1977); Solsten (1993); Stearns (1992); Anastasiou (2008).

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until the AKP’s rise to power in Turkey in 2002. Since then, whether the AKP’s Cyprus policy can be viewed to be realist or pragmatist or some other perspective is open to debate. Works on the causes and consequences of the Cyprus problem and Turkey’s policy towards it are often examined with the biases of Greek or Turkish analysts and contribute little to systematic examination of the issues. For example, works reflecting the Greek Cypriot perspective see Cyprus as a problem that originated with Turkey’s intervention in 1974 that led to the military occupation of one-third of the island coupled with the forced exodus of Greek Cypriots from their homes and the transformation of the occupied territory into a Turkish province.4 They ignore the events of pre-1974 and argue that military invasion was successive Turkish governments’ consistent foreign policy objective in Cyprus. Their main justification dates back to the 1950s when Nihat Erim, who was Prime Minister Adnan Menderes’s special advisor on the Cyprus issue, argued that Turkey’s minimum goal should be taksim (partition) and that Turkey’s maximum policy goal ought to be the annexation or strategic control of the entire island (Fouskas 2001). Interestingly, this line of argument also presents Turkey’s 1974 intervention as an American conspiracy to bring about an age-long Turkish idea of dividing the island between Greeks and Turks. To support their position, these scholars argue that Cold War dynamics required the US to support Turkey (Fouskas 2001; O’Malley and Craig 1999; Constandinos 2009). Among these authors, Athanasios Strigas, who was a former NATO consultant, claims that it was the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who planned to topple Makarios and subsequently support Turkey’s partition of Cyprus (Constandinos 2009, 44). In contrast, works that support the Turkish perspective collectively identify the main cause of the problem as nothing less than the Greek nationalist aim of Enosis as part of the Megali Idea (Great Plan) aimed at resurrecting Byzantium.5 There is practically no reference to a conspiracy as part of the Cold War preference of American policy-makers. These works’ collective argument is that whereas the Greek Cypriot and Greek leaderships agreed to create the Cyprus Republic, they never abandoned the idea of Enosis. For these scholars, Turkey’s Cyprus policy was simply aimed at protecting the lives of Turkish Cypriots and preventing Greece from encircling Turkey through Enosis. For example, Frank Tachau and Ali Karaosmanog˘ lu outline how Cyprus forced Turkish political leaders to address the conflict between the official surrender of claims on former Ottoman territories and popular pressure to reclaim certain of those territories. Furthermore, the proximity of the island to Turkey’s southern coast, and its command of the approaches to Iskenderun and Mersin ports, persuaded the Turkish government to depart from its own ideology and to take an active part in the Cyprus controversy and establish the Turkish Cypriot resistance movement TMT.6 Furthermore, this position became a national policy (Milli Dava) following Greek Cypriots’ aggression against the Turkish minority during 1963–1974 and further solidified Turkey’s determination to prevent Enosis at all costs, even if that meant risking relations with the US (Stearns 1992; Bahcheli 2014; Göktepe 2005; Aydın 2000; Güney 2007). The infamous Johnson letter. of 1964 and the 1974 military intervention are examples of this strategy (Johnson and Inönü 1966). According to Harun Ayanog˘ lu, ‘the Johnson letter was not [an] ordinary letter which discuss[ed] the problem between two counterparts, but also [a] ‘mile stone’ of Turkish foreign policy transformation’ (Ayanog˘ lu 2017).

4 5 6

For a sample of the Greek Cypriot perspective, see Attalides (1979); Coufoudakis (1976); Ioannides (1991); Mallinson (2010); Hierodiakonou (1971). For example, see Denktas¸ (1982); Oberling (1982); Necatigil (1989). For example, see Tachau (1959); Karaosmanog˘ lu (1983); Deg˘ erli (2012).

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. The exchange between President Johnson and Prime Minister Inönü convinced Turkish officials that NATO might not defend Turkey against the Soviet Union and convinced the Turkish government to pursue other options, including improving relations with the Soviet Union and Third World countries. Turkey also withdrew its military force from the Multi-Lateral Force and did not support US policy in Vietnam at the United Nations.7 Turkish–American relations took another nosedive when Congress imposed an arms embargo on Turkey following the 1974 war. Even though the US administration did not oppose Turkey’s military intervention in Cyprus, the powerful Greek–American lobby persuaded Congress that Turkey violated the terms of American military assistance by using US-supplied arms in its military operation. The embargo lasted for three years and contributed to a further transformation in Turkish foreign and security policies, relying less on the NATO umbrella, and led to the formation of the Aegean Army as a separate force from the integrated NATO command.8 From this time forward, Turkish governments pursued a policy of complete support of the Turkish Cypriots’ position and insisted on a bilateral, bizonal federation (closer to a confederal system) as the basis of any future settlement for Cyprus. Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey’s foreign policy orientation has entered into a new phase characterised by less reliance on NATO priorities and more on pursuit of Turkey’s diverse interests on several fronts. Initially, this change did not translate into better relations with Cyprus and Greece as tensions rose in the Aegean over disputed islands. The trend worsened in December 1996, when the Greek Cypriots announced their intention to purchase Russian-made S-300 ground-to-air missiles as part of their armament programme. Furthermore, the EU’s decision to exclude Turkey from the list of candidate countries infuriated Turkish leaders and hardened their position on Cyprus. It took massive diplomatic efforts by the US to resolve these crises and bring . all parties back to the negotiating table. Post-1999, Marmara earthquake diplomacy between Ismail Cem and George Papandreou further improved relations between Greece and Turkey in a step-by-step approach in policy cooperation similar to post-World War II rapprochement between France and West Germany. This period is viewed by scholars as the time when a paradigm shift occurred in Turkey’s Cyprus policy and more generally, Greek–Turkish relations (Müftüler-Bac 2005; Özkeçeci-Taner 2005; Bahcheli 1990; Milne 2003; Yes¸ilada and Sözen 2002; Brey 1999). Several scholars argue that this period was the beginning of a wider paradigm shift in Turkey’s foreign policy that culminated in the rise of the AKP to power in 2002. Such works look at Turkey’s foreign policy toward Cyprus within the context of the EU’s eastern enlargement and the new AKP leadership’s desire to have no problems with Turkey’s neighbours.9 Important developments included AKP reforms in the domestic and foreign policies of Turkey and subsequent developments leading to the Annan Plan.10 It is generally viewed that this was a period of ‘Europeanisation’ in Turkey’s foreign policy, not only towards Cyprus but also in its overall orientation. But was it a shift from traditional realist Cyprus that emphasised state interests? The answer is probably yes. However, it is possible to argue that the AKP position was still embedded in realist and rational parameters that focused on maximising its own interests. For example, by replacing nationalist figures like Denktas¸ and supporting pro-EU and pro-reunification leaders among the Turkish Cypriot community, AKP leaders received overwhelming praise and 7 8 9 10

See Bölükbas¸ı (1993); Landau (1979). For detailed discussion see Dodd (2000); Campany (1986). This policy orientation was promoted by Davutog˘ lu (2001); Uslu (2004). It should be noted that the works reviewed pertain to Turkey’s foreign policy towards Cyprus and do not include rich literature on how to resolve the Cyprus problem. These works fall into three separate time periods. For example, see Sözen (2004); Tocci (2011–12); Ulusoy (2008); Tarık (2010); Kınacıog˘ lu and Oktay (2006); Fırat (2009); Eryılmaz (2007); Rasaba and Larrabee (2008).

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support from the international community. For the first time since 1960, the Ankara government was on the same page with the UN, EU, and US for a comprehensive peace plan for Cyprus. Unfortunately, the plan was rejected by the Greek Cypriots, who subsequently joined the EU, representing all of Cyprus. The last set of works evaluate the implications of the failed Annan plan on Turkey’s foreign policy towards Cyprus and outline the complexity of the ongoing blame-game between the two sides.11 These works are in agreement that mutual accusations by the EU and Turkey are not contributing to solving the Cyprus problem. EU leaders accused Turkey of not fulfilling its obligations under the Customs Union agreement by refusing to extend it to Cyprus. Meanwhile Turkish officials blamed the EU for failing to reward the Turkish Cypriots for their acceptance of the Annan Plan and for being two-faced about the whole deal. Another important shift in Turkey’s Cyprus policy occurred after the collapse of recent peace talks at Crans-Montana in July 2017. Soon after, President Erdog˘ an and his advisors started to hint at alternative solutions to the Cyprus problem that might include integration of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) with Turkey.12 Thus, high hopes for better relations with the EU and a reunified Cyprus are once again replaced with a grim picture of uncertainties full of dangers.

Prospects for future study The previous section provided a selected survey of the literature and key debates around major issues surrounding Turkey’s foreign policy towards Cyprus. In light of this discussion, this section focuses on the following question: what is Turkey’s policy towards Cyprus likely to be in the coming years? In order to answer this question, one needs to consider domestic political dynamics in Turkey and identify key policy issues that political leaders hold as relevant for its national security interest. One important topic that has not been thoroughly examined is Turkey’s settlement policy in the TRNC. Since 1974, Turkish migrants have been moving into Northern Cyprus and obtaining permanent residency and citizenship in the TRNC. This issue has been a point of serious contention between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders during peace talks since 1979 (Jensehau. gen 2016; Ilter 2014). Most recently, the subject was identified as one of the key obstacles in the Crans-Montana talks and a key reason why the Greek Cypriots rejected the previous Annan Plan. The topic is far more serious than a single item of contention between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots regarding how many of these settlers are to be permitted to stay in Cyprus following reunification. It also goes to the socio-cultural dynamics of the Turkish Cypriot population and efforts of the current government in Turkey to advance its Islamisation policy on the island. It is no secret that the religious practices of Turkish Cypriots significantly differ from the conservative Sunni practices in Turkey. Nazim Beratlı’s work demonstrates the historical causes of these differences and shows the Alevi-Bektas¸i roots of Turkish Cypriot Islam (Beratlı 1997, 2008a, 2008b). Very little historical analysis exists in documenting differences in the religiosity of Turkish Cypriots and Turks. My research in Cyprus for the World Values Survey (2005–2011) took the first step in scientific analysis to map differences in religious practices between Cypriots (Greek and Turkish), settlers from Turkey, and Greeks and Turks in their respective mainlands.13 More needs to be done in this field as political demography and policy-making studies are closely linked. Since the AKP came to power, there has been a calculated policy to expand Islamic education formally and 11 For example, see Hughes (2007); Yes¸ilada (2013). 12 As reported in mainstream Turkish media, August–October 2017. 13 For example, see Yes¸ilada, Noordijk, and Webster (2009); Yes¸ilada (2009).

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informally in the TRNC. Whereas these efforts received support from a large segment of the Turkish settlers and politicians who support AKP policies, many Turkish Cypriots are concerned about the ‘social engineering and cultural imperialism’ of the Erdog˘ an government. In an interview with in-cyprus, Ahmet Sözen views the AKP’s efforts in North Cyprus as preparations for possible assimilation and integration into Turkey and states that: Only a federal solution would enable Turkish Cypriots to protect their identity … The failure of the process means further demographic, economic, political, religious, social, and cultural alteration of the north. The Turkification and Islamisation of north Cyprus will – before long – be complete. (Sözen 2017) Therefore, it is timely to ask if Erdog˘ an holds an ulterior motive for Cyprus; one that aims at culturally transforming North Cyprus and an eventual annexation. The consequences of annexation would be the end of Turkey’s EU membership and would signal a step away from the Atlantic Alliance with unpredictable results. International Relations and decision-making analysis scholars have an opportunity to test their respective theories though a case study of this topic. Another important topic of recent interest is how discovery of natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean contributed to Turkey’s security interests and policy towards Cyprus. This subject is far more complex than is represented in the current media. It links Turkey’s Cyprus policy to relations with Israel and the EU. Economic zones claimed by Cyprus and Turkey overlap in several areas (Figure 34.3) and are further complicated by Turkey’s argument that the government of Greek Cypriots ignores the rights of the TRNC by unilateral exploration in the region (Tanrıverdi 2013; Arınç and Özgül 2017). To show its resolve, Turkey has repeatedly sent warships into the disputed areas to warn the Greek Cypriots and their business partners. According to Thomas Barnett, this matter is intertwined with Turkey’s interests in Northern Cyprus and is unlikely to be settled without a resolution of the Cyprus problem (Barnett 2011). One final suggestion for research centres upon how Turkey’s changing policy towards Cyprus would affect any regional power transition. This would be a multilevel analysis that incorporates regional, state, and stakeholder (agent) levels of observations. For example, how Turkey positions itself on Cyprus would undoubtedly affect EU–Turkey relations as well as the EU–NATO partnership. If, for example, the Cyprus problem were to be settled to Turkey’s satisfaction, that would enable NATO and the EU to complete their partnership in a tit-for-tat between the EU and Turkey: Turkey’s accession talks move forward and the EU gets to remove the Turkish veto in NATO. At the same time, Turkey’s membership in the EU would bring about a regional power transition that favours the Western alliance. On the other hand, if Turkey were to move away from the Western Alliance, results would be very different not only for Cyprus but for regional dynamics with systemic consequences (Yes¸ilada, Efird, and Noordijk 2006; Yes¸ilada and Tanrıkulu 2016). In conclusion, whereas Cyprus is a small player in regional and global politics, it has always maintained a significant position in Turkey’s foreign policy agenda. This reality, in turn, carries important policy implications for regional and global dynamics in a way that is like the butterfly effect in mathematics.14 It has been and remains an important subject for future research. 14 The butterfly proposal originally comes from Edward Lorenz’s findings that even a tiny disturbance by a single butterfly might be enough to alter the patterns of weather all over the world. This phenomenon exemplifies the notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in a dynamic system. In other words, small changes of the original condition may produce unpredictably large variations in the long-term outcome.

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Figure 34.3 Cyprus gas and regional politics. Source: Reprinted with permission of Hans Doeleman, Yesiltepe (Alsancak), Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus/KKTC.

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35 TURKEY–NATO RELATIONS Strategic imperatives, identity-building, and predicaments Müge Kınacıog˘lu

Introduction Turkey joined NATO in 1952. For the most part, Ankara viewed its membership in the Alliance as a win–win relationship during the Cold War, whereby NATO provided a nuclear umbrella and thus enhanced Turkey’s security, and in return, Turkey contributed to the Alliance by defending its southern flank as well as protecting its interests. Nevertheless, the significance of Turkey’s NATO membership went well beyond fulfilment of its defence needs. To the extent that the collective defence envisaged by the creation of the Alliance not only included defence commitment, but also signified an attempt to build a transatlantic security community, joining NATO was by and large considered a means of institutionalising Turkey’s long-aspired goal of Westernisation, articulated by the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk, in relation to Turkish domestic and foreign policies. With the termination of the Soviet military threat, NATO sought to delineate its new role with more emphasis on broader political aims and new security objectives by assuming crisis management operations beyond its borders. As a result, ironically, an alliance like NATO, which endured the Cold War military challenge without firing a single shot, has increasingly assumed collective security responsibilities and engaged in military operations outside of what are traditionally NATO areas, in all of which Turkey has participated actively and contributed significantly. Despite this seemingly smooth functional and identity-based relationship, Turkey–NATO relations are also marked by a number of crises and strains, both during and after the Cold War. In this respect, it is noteworthy that Turkey’s difficulties with NATO have been mostly contingent on Turkey’s bilateral relations with several allies, particularly with the US. This chapter aims to survey Turkey–NATO relations since Turkey became a member and explain the mutually constitutive role of Turkey–NATO relations in building their respective identities from the angle of strategic imperatives and security concerns, and in the context of NATO’s defined roles of collective defence and collective security. It also seeks to pinpoint the moments of contention that adversely affect mutual relations. Within this framework, this chapter argues that although pre-given strategic concerns have shaped Turkey–NATO relations, the security interests of both parties are by no means merely determined by rational calculations 446

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of objective material necessities, but in essence constructed through their interactions, which in turn have defined their respective security identities. Building on rhetoric, intersubjective understandings, and the following policies, a central focus in this chapter is therefore the formation of interests and identities.

The origins of Turkey–NATO relations Strategic imperatives and security concerns In the immediate post-war period, the US was alarmed by the Soviet refusal to withdraw from Northern Iran in direct contravention of earlier agreements, and events such as the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin crisis. Moreover, a number of factors, namely the economic and political weakness of West European states, the rise of communism in France and Italy, and the realisation that the US’s nuclear monopoly would not last long, further reinforced US concerns (Calvocoressi 1971, 19). Consequently, US strategic thinking was largely defined on the basis of the fear of Soviet ambitions to extend influence and pursue domination in Europe, which in turn led to the articulation of the US’s renowned policy of containment. Within this context, NATO was created in 1949 as a military alliance that established an integrated defence with the primary aim of deterring the perceived Soviet threat as well as containing Soviet expansion to other regions. Thus, NATO’s identity as a transatlantic community was primarily shaped by ideological conflict. Central to NATO’s raison d’être was the notion of collective defence as formulated in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (also known as the Washington Treaty), according to which the 12 members pledged that a military attack against one or more of the parties would be regarded as an attack against all, and all would take action when attacked as they deem necessary, including use of force, ‘in exercise of the right of individual or collective selfdefence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations’ (North Atlantic Treaty 1949). As such, NATO was essentially formed as a defensive alliance, in that defence and deterrence formed the main pillars of its strategy. Fears similar to those of the US dominated the post-war Turkish security assessment as well, since the Soviets did not renew the 1925 Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality, claimed Eastern Anatolian territory, and demanded re-examination of the Montreux convention governing the Turkish straits – the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus.1 Following Turkey’s quest for support from the US, Washington sent a note to the Soviet Union affirming its backing of Turkey and the current status of the straits, namely Turkish control of the straits. In addition, both the US and the UK intensified their naval movements in the Black Sea (Harris 1972, 22). Nevertheless, the Soviets repeatedly expressed demands regarding the straits and territorial claims. Consequently, against such daunting Soviet threats, Turkey benefited from the Truman doctrine and the Marshall plan, under which it received US military and economic assistance with a view to contain the Soviet Union.2,3 Thus, the period between the immediate post-war and 1952 was largely marked by Turkey’s search for security through institutionalising closer ties with the West in general and Washington in particular. At first, the US anticipated benefiting from Turkey’s geostrategic position without committing to broad security guarantees and thus, together with the UK, turned down Turkey’s 1 2 3

See Gürün (1991). On containment policy see Gaddis (1982). For Turkish–American relations during and after World War II see Ülman (1961).

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application to join NATO in 1950. Nonetheless, Turkey’s relations with the West, particularly with the US, moved closer after Turkey’s dispatch of large numbers of troops following the UN Security Council’s call for support to South Korea in 1950. Turkish participation in the Korean War served to demonstrate not only Turkey’s commitment to collective security, but also its reliability and efficacy as a potential ally of the West. Consequently, Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952 primarily due to the Cold War security parameters, as well as its threat perception and security concerns. From the US point of view, given the renewed strategic significance of conventional arms as a result of nuclear balance with the Soviet Union, the 22 divisions that Turkey possessed, especially at a time the European armies were considerably weakened, were also seen as a valuable asset to the Alliance, and American security and strategic interests. After Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and throughout the Cold War, Turkey’s defence strategy was to remain under the American security guarantees in particular and NATO in general, so as to meet its defence and security needs in relation to the elimination of Soviet threat. During the Cold War years, located in NATO’s southern flank and having borders with the Soviet Union, Turkey contributed extensively to the Alliance’s solidarity in deterrence and defence by providing military bases and facilities in this strategic region. NATO for its part, in line with its main purpose and identity as a ‘Western’ alliance, was not only instrumental in the prevention of a military confrontation with the Soviet Union but also in producing unprecedented peace-time political cooperation and unity among its members to resist subversive Soviet attempts. On the other hand, Turkey’s participation in the Korean War in 1950 and its consequent membership to NATO were instrumental in constituting the West and strengthening Western solidarity as well. In this sense, Turkey made the security of ‘Western identity’ possible, ‘through its security policies during the Cold War’ (Bilgin 2003, 348). Ideational factors The element of collective defence was not the only defining aspect of the Alliance, albeit the most important. The conception of the Alliance also embodied the military aspect of a broader scheme of creating a security community among transatlantic states. Such an extensive objective was manifest in Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which required the signatories to contribute to ‘the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions … and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being’. Hence, the Alliance’s defence guarantee is supplemented by a wider goal of security based on the idea of common principles, norms and values that unite the members of this security community that constituted the ‘West’. NATO’s aspiration to consolidate a Western identity along with a defence pact can also be inferred from allies’ statements that expressed their common commitment to pursue positive political goals in Europe, such as ‘to live in peace with all governments and all peoples’, ‘to seek solutions by peaceful means’, and to support ‘peaceful change’ (NATO Information Service 1975). Furthermore, in the preamble of the North Atlantic Treaty, the parties stress their determination ‘to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’ and ‘to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area’ (North Atlantic Treaty 1949). For Turkey, therefore, NATO membership represented admission into the civilised West, which in turn would effectively render Turkey one of the defenders of ‘Western way of life’ and ‘free world’ as a member of that particular security community. 448

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Turkey–NATO: mutual identity construction in the post-Cold War As the Cold War was consigned to history, NATO’s original purpose withered away and its relevance was increasingly questioned. Against the backdrop of arguments that it was outdated, NATO gradually developed a vision of a collective security organisation with more weight on political aims and the protection of values NATO represents. As early as 1990, change in the Alliance was suggested in the London Declaration, whereby the Allies reaffirmed ‘that security and stability do not lie solely in the military dimension, and we intend to enhance the political component of our Alliance as provided for by Article 2 of our Treaty’ (North Atlantic Council 1990, para. 2). Article 2 revealed NATO’s post-Cold War self-image of a Western alliance based upon shared political and economic values. Moreover, the support for international security beyond the territorial defence of the Allies has not only been a rhetorical kind, but also comprised a range of NATO programmes such as the Partnership for Peace (PFP) exercises and other activities to improve inter-operability between the Alliance and Partner forces; the adoption of Combat Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) for crisis management and peacekeeping; and, most importantly, its ‘non-Article 5 missions’, or ‘outof-area’ in NATO jargon, namely military operations with actual combat forces in support of collective security such as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya.4 Parallel to NATO’s soul-searching immediately after the Cold War, Turkey was also confounded by its position and role in the new international milieu. In particular, the simultaneous tendencies of fragmentation and integration at the end of the Cold War, together with the questions concerning the relevance of NATO, left Turkey with a sense of loss of its ‘Westernness’ insofar as the role it played in the European security system through NATO membership constituted the basis on which ‘Turkish policy-makers articulated and defined Turkey’s “Western” identity’ (Bilgin 2004, 42). The aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union therefore was followed by a pursuit of new options of regional integration and cooperation, best demonstrated by Turkey’s endeavours for enhancing economic, political, and cultural ties with the newly independent states of Central Asia and strategic cooperation with Israel.

Building a collective security identity Rhetoric In the post-Cold War era, the Alliance adopted three strategic concepts in 1991, in 1999 and in 2010 respectively, all of which included new roles and new tasks. Despite the elimination of a potential Soviet threat, the emphasis on Article 5 in all strategic concepts revealed NATO’s ongoing commitment to collective defence. However, in addition to possible traditional (military) threats, the strategic concepts also highlighted multi-directional and diverse risks that are difficult to anticipate. In line with this threat assessment, crisis management and crisis operations in the post-Cold War have emerged as primary tasks of the Alliance, along with the fundamental purpose of collective self-defence. Another common theme relevant for identity-construction is the consistent emphasis on ‘common values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law’ (NATO 1991, para. 15; 4

NATO’s area of responsibility is specified under Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty, according to which NATO is assigned liability in Europe, North America, and the North Atlantic. Thus, the geographical boundaries of Article 5 commitments imply that military ‘out-of-area’ operations are excluded.

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NATO 1999, para. 6; NATO 2010, para. 2) as the foundation of the Alliance. In other words, the future role NATO aspired included the defence of both the security of the Allies and their common values. For example, the ‘Resolution on Recasting Euro-Atlantic Security’, adopted by the North Atlantic Assembly in November 1998 urged member states of the North Atlantic Alliance: to affirm that the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence, also enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter, must include defence of common interests and values, including when the latter are threatened by humanitarian catastrophes, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. (NATO 1998) On the other hand, post-Cold War Turkish security discourse was defined mainly by regional security dynamics. The Turkish White Paper identified new threats and security risks within this critical location in the centre of the Balkans, Caucasus, and the Middle East, as regional and ethnic conflicts, political and economic instabilities, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, religious fundamentalism, smuggling of drugs and weapons, and international terrorism. To counter such threats, the Turkish White Paper envisaged an active and assertive policy, which included strategies of deterrence, military contribution to crisis management and intervention in crises, forward defence, and collective security (Defence White Paper of Turkey 2007). Thus, similar to NATO’s post-Cold War strategic concepts, there was an increasing recognition in the Turkish security conception that the main security risks are non-military, transnational with a strong propensity to have serious repercussions beyond borders in which they originate, and have a mixed military–civilian character. In addition, Turkey continued to attach utmost significance to its NATO membership increasingly from an identity perspective. For example, the Turkish Foreign Ministry contended that NATO membership contributed to Turkey’s ‘integration with the Euro-Atlantic region’ and that Turkey ‘assumed its responsibilities in defending the common values of the Alliance’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs n.d.). The role NATO played for Turkey’s embrace of Western values was also once stated by the then Chief of Staff, Hilmi Özkök as: ‘We have learnt Western values. NATO was like a door opening up to the West’. Turkish diplomats have also expressed the view that NATO is not only a military alliance, but also a ‘normative union that defends universal values’, and as a NATO member, Turkey is actively ‘promoting and protecting those universal values’.5

Practices NATO developed its post-Cold War identity through a process of alignment of the discourse emphasising the values of liberal democracy with crisis management operations. Seeking to consolidate its Western/European identity in the post-bipolar world, Turkey provided significant support to all NATO’s operations involving use of force against states, all of which were Muslim. Being the only Muslim ally, its cultural and historical links to all target states helped increase the legitimacy and success of these operations. In its first actual use of force in the post-Cold War era (1995), NATO defined its military involvement in former Yugoslavia in terms of safeguarding common values. For 5

Non-for-attribution interview with a high-ranking Turkish diplomat, Ankara, Turkey, 25 January 2012.

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example, the then NATO Secretary General Willy Claes asserted that NATO had a historical obligation to assist Bosnians to achieve a community with values of democracy, liberty, pluralism, and the rule of law, and that it was a window of opportunity to build a European security order ‘not on a fragile balance of power but on democratic values and durable cooperation’ (Claes 1995). Turkey worked intensely to raise awareness regarding the Bosnian conflict and later was actively involved in the NATO operation in Bosnia (Kınacıog˘ lu and Gürzel 2013, 597–598). In a similar vein, NATO justified its intervention in Kosovo (1999) on humanitarian purposes and common values.6 When NATO took the decision for military action, Turkey provided NATO’s Operation Allied Force with eighteen F-16s (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri 2001, 28). Invoking the Article 5 defence guarantee for the first time in its history, NATO also took command of the UN-authorised International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (United Nations 2003). For many, the NATO-led ISAF in Afghanistan was seen as especially significant for the viability of the Alliance.7 More specifically, this military action became a test case for the continuing transformation of NATO in the post 9/11 threat environment beyond narrowly defined Euro-Atlantic focus, for it was the first mission outside Europe and comprised the largest operational deployment. From the outset, Turkey contributed actively to ISAF (Turkish Daily News 2002). It took command of ISAF between June 2002 and February 2003. Turkey assumed command of ISAF once again between February and August 2005. In addition, Turkey led the Kabul Regional Command (RCC), one of the six regional commands of ISAF operation, twice, namely from April to December 2007, and from November 2009 to November 2010. Upon the request of NATO member states, Turkey assumed this role for a third time until November 2011. After the termination of ISAF in 2014, NATO launched a non-combat mission in Afghanistan, the Resolute Support Mission (RSM), ‘to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces and institutions’ in January 2015, to which Turkey contributed 558 troops (NATO 2017). Many observers have argued that Turkey’s historical, religious, and cultural ties with the region constituted an essential asset for NATO’s success in its complex mission in Afghanistan. Being a secular democracy with a Muslim population, Turkey is well-positioned ‘to overcome cultural obstacles to the Euro-Atlantic alliance operation outside Europe’ (Vamvakas 2009, 59), especially given NATO’s overriding concern with avoiding the portrayal of its operations as a Western attack against Islam. Finally, NATO’s operation in Libya in 2011, Operation Unified Protector, with a UN mandate, is another example whereby Turkey contributed by providing four frigates, one replenishment tank force, and one submarine (Bosphorus Naval News 2011). Further, the . NATO air base in Izmir was provided as one of the operational centres for the NATO mission (Ayın Tarihi 2011). As NATO’s sole Muslim-majority member and a key regional player, Turkey’s calls for democracy was once again a significant factor in legitimising NATO’s initially undeclared objective of changing the regime in Libya. Turkey’s enthusiastic participation in NATO’s crisis management operations and its significant role in upholding NATO’s values were praised by NATO officials. The retired NATO Supreme Allied Commander, James Stavridis, for example asserted that Turkey has participated

6 7

See Solana (1999, 114). See Vamvakas (2009).

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in virtually every NATO operation with significant impact: training Afghan Security Forces and leading coalition efforts in the central district, including Kabul; sending ships and aircraft to Libya; participating in counterpiracy operations; maintaining a steady presence in the security and peacekeeping force in the Balkans (Stavridis 2015). Hence, in the post-Cold War period, Turkey’s strategic significance not only acquired a regional element, but also its contribution to NATO’s military operations against the states helped NATO build a legitimate identity as a leading collective security actor, which in turn enabled the organisation to keep its relevance in the aftermath of the Cold War. At the same time, Turkey’s active role in NATO’s military operations helped Turkey to keep its sense of prominence in the protection of the values of the ‘civilised’ world and thus, helped to solidify Turkey’s ‘Western’ credentials and reinforced its self-perception as part of the Western world ideologically.

Divergences, strains, and crises From the outset, Turkey–NATO relations have been by and large an extension of Turkish relations with the US, since Turkey’s NATO membership was very much formed under US hegemony of the time and given US dominance in the Alliance to this date. Accordingly, during the Cold War, Turkey–NATO relations suffered in parallel to crises in Turkish– American relations. Among early Cold War crises, the status and use of US and NATO military bases as well as the legal rights of foreign (US) military personnel in Turkey stand out as causing tension in Turkey–NATO relations insofar as they raised anti-Americanism as well as anti-NATO feelings in the late 1950s and 1960s. The use of military bases at times in disregard of the limitations of the North Atlantic Treaty raised concerns in the Turkish public regarding the latent aims of the US/NATO.8 Another issue which shook the credibility of NATO’s commitment to Turkish defence in the eyes of Turkish political and military elites as well as the public was the ‘Jupiter affair’. In the context of the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, the Kennedy administration secretly agreed with the Soviet Union to remove Jupiter missiles deployed in Turkey with no prior consultation with Turkey. Since for Turkey these missiles represented its main security guarantee, this secret agreement caused vast disappointment and led to the rise of anti-Americanism within the public.9 Arguably, the incident that hurt Turkish confidence in NATO’s security guarantees the most is the Cyprus issue. When Turkey indicated its intention to intervene in Cyprus on the basis of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, US President Johnson warned Turkey that neither NATO nor the US would defend Turkey if the Soviets attacked Turkey as a result of possible intervention in Cyprus. In his letter, Johnson also stated that no American-supplied military equipment could be used in such an intervention. The infamous Johnson letter represented a breaking point in the Turkish psyche regarding the reliability of the US and NATO as allies. The arms embargo imposed on Turkey by the US Congress following the

8

9

For example, the US carried out its military intervention in Lebanon in 1958 from Incirlik air base (officially named Adana air base then), which was to be used only for NATO’s defence. See Bölme (2012). See Criss (1997).

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1974 Turkish intervention in Cyprus further strengthened anti-NATO forces in Turkey. In response, Ankara suspended the use of American military bases in Turkey.10 In addition to the bilateral difficulties that influenced Turkey–NATO relations, the change of NATO’s strategy from massive retaliation to flexible response in 1967 upon the insistence of the Kennedy administration distressed Turkey along with the European allies. Massive retaliation, NATO’s defence strategy from the 1950s onwards, entailed responding to a Warsaw Pact attack by strategic nuclear weapons regardless of the type of aggression; while flexible response depended on conventional, tactical nuclear and strategic nuclear weapons to deter and counter an attack. Under the terms of this strategy, therefore, the use of nuclear weapons in response to a Soviet bloc attack would be the last resort. The shift to flexible response created uncertainty in regards to Turkey’s defence. As a flank country which would suffer most from a conventional attack, the reliability of NATO in case of a Soviet attack was gradually questioned more. Consequently, the new NATO strategy raised considerable mistrust of NATO in Turkey, caused a re-evaluation of its relations with the US and led to a more multi-dimensional foreign policy in the following years (Erhan 2001, 573). At the end of the bipolar politics and during the 1990s, Turkey once again found itself in uneasy relations both with the US and Europe. Frustrated by its stalled EU membership bid, Turkey felt bitter, particularly about NATO’s efforts to formulate a European Security and Defence ‘identity’ which would carry out European-led peace operations using NATO’s assets and capabilities. As a non-EU NATO member, Turkey was nervous that such an arrangement, which largely overlooked third-party concerns, would eventually lead to a solid European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) that could challenge the primacy of the Alliance in European security and transatlantic relations.11 This perception was in part the driver for intense military cooperation with Israel based on a military agreement signed in 1996. Perhaps at the top of Turkey’s post-Cold War disillusionment with NATO was its frustration with the reluctance of the Allies to demonstrate solidarity with Turkey in its fight against the PKK. In particular, Turkey has been wary of the direct and indirect support to PKK separatism from some European countries who allowed Kurdish radical organisations and activities on their territories, despite the fact that the PKK is on both the EU and US terrorist organisations list.12 Following 9/11, Turkey hoped for a deeper understanding and appreciation of its struggle with terrorism by the Allies. Nonetheless, the stalled negotiations for EU membership, together with European allies’ ambivalent attitude to Turkish sensitivities, have remained a major source of distrust to this day. In a similar vein, US interventions in Iraq in 1990 and 2003 further strained the relationship, as in both cases the Allies’ lukewarm response to Turkey’s concerns about possible Iraqi strikes raised doubts with regards to NATO’s resolve to defend Turkey in accordance with Article 5.13 The belated support messages from NATO in the aftermath of the coup attempt on 15 July 201614 once again deteriorated relations, which were already shaky due to disagreements regarding the Syrian crisis, the refugee issue, countering PKK terrorism, and fighting against the Islamic State (IS). Although in its August 2016 statement, NATO affirmed that ‘Turkey is a valued ally’ (NATO 2016a), Ankara considered NATO’s response far from satisfactory (Gürcan 2016). On the other hand, in response to harsh measures taken by the Turkish 10 11 12 13 14

On For See See See

the Cyprus issue in Turkish–American relations see Uslu (2000). a detailed discussion, see Missiroli (2002). Hürriyet (2005); Aks¸am (2015); Hürriyet (2016). Freedman and Karsh (1993, 353–355); Terzuolo (2006, 119). BBC News (2016).

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government following the failed coup, US Secretary of State John Kerry stated that undermining democracy could cost Turkey its NATO membership (Hudson 2016). Most recently, the certainties of reciprocal commitment were further eroded when Turkey signed an agreement with Russia in September 2017 to purchase S-400 anti-aircraft missiles. The Alliance responded sceptically to the decision, stating that the Russian S-400s would not be interoperable with NATO defence systems. Turkey’s rationalisation of the deal was in relation to its disappointment with the NATO allies for failing to provide Patriot batteries for its immediate defence along its 911 km Syrian border. Although Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the US provided air defence batteries in 2013, most of them were withdrawn in 2015, in spite of Ankara’s continued concerns regarding the security of its borders (Uras 2017). Moreover, from the Turkish point of view, by acquiring such an anti-missile defence system, Turkey would be rid of the constraints imposed by the Alliance regarding the location of deployment of NATO defence systems and could decide for itself where to install such systems on its territory, which could possibly include the Armenian border, the Greek border, and/or the Aegean coast (Woody 2017). The expected boost of the defence industry and the diversification of arms suppliers were further incentives for brokering the S-400s deal, particularly at a time when Turkey’s relations with the US had soured considerably due to the latter’s firm backing of, and military support for, the Kurdish forces in Syria, namely the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) of the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD). Turkey considers the YPG to be the Syrian extension of the outlawed PKK, while Washington views the YPG as its chief ally in the fight against IS in Syria.15 Lastly, the latest incident, which caused a diplomatic row with the Allies was the portrayal of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, as the enemy during a joint NATO military exercise in Norway in November 2017. Despite Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s apology and statement that ‘it was a result of an individual’s action and does not reflect NATO’s view’, Erdog˘ an harshly condemned the incident and stated that ‘there can be no such pact, no such alliance’ (Sharman 2017). The Turkish press recalled two particularly similar incidents. One was a map incident in the NATO Defence Training Centre in Rome in 2006, when a US lieutenant used a map showing 18 cities in Turkey marked as ‘Kurdistan’ during his speech (Hürriyet 2006), which reinforced the Turkish perception of Allies’ support for Kurdish separatism. The other was an early post-Cold War event, when a US warship accidentally fired two missiles and hit the Turkish destroyer Muavenet during a NATO exercise in the Aegean Sea, killing five Turkish sailors and injuring 22 (Schmitt 1992). To this day, it is widely believed in Turkey that the incident was not an accident, since military experts have consistently confirmed that activation of such missiles had to go through six different stages to avoid such accidental use and required the approval of the vessel commander. In addition, experts have stated that SeaSparrow missile is not a ‘fire and forget’ type, rather to hit its target the missile needed further guidance. This event was mainly considered to be a covert American warning in response to Turkey’s . cautious attitude to Operation Provide Comfort forces,16 deployed in Incirlik in 1991 (Ertürk 2015). 15 For the Turkey–US rift over this issue see Chulov and Hawramy (2017); Karadeniz and Gümrükçü (2017). 16 The US-led coalition forces undertook Operation Provide Comfort in 1991, in response to Saddam Hussein’s plan to take military action against the Kurds in northern Iraq.

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In recent years, in parallel to Turkish frustrations and disappointments with the US in particular, the approval of NATO membership in Turkish society has dropped considerably. . According to a survey conducted by Istanbul Economics Research, 67 per cent of Turkish citizens are of the opinion that Turkey does not need NATO membership for its main security needs. Another survey carried out in January 2017 also found that support for Turkey’s membership of NATO dropped seriously in the last two years, from 76.2 per cent in 2014 to 69.5 per cent in 2015 and 58 per cent in 2016 (Daily Sabah 2017).

Conclusion The Turkish desire for an alliance with the West primarily stemmed from security concerns and perceptions in the aftermath of World War II. It was also encouraged by the need for economic assistance. However, without the acknowledgement of the role of ideational factors, namely the identity aspect, the analysis of Turkey’s enthusiasm to join the Alliance would be incomplete. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO’s transformation entailed a shift from a military alliance designed to deter and defeat a defined threat, that is collective defence, to one aimed to provide security and manage crises in response to new asymmetric threats, that is collective security, both within and outside Europe. While instances of the use of force for democratic values in the post-Cold War era have provided NATO a means to acquire a broader security identity, contributing to such actions facilitated the construction of Turkey’s self as a Western state taking an important role in protecting the norms and values identified with the West. Arguably, without Turkey’s participation in NATO’s collective security operations, all of which were against predominantly Muslim states, its broad conceptualisation of security would have been lost to the idea of a particularistic implementation of a ‘Western’ club’s interests, thereby reinforcing the precarious conflict analysis in terms of ‘clash of civilisations’. Since Turkey has a distinctive position regarding the sensitivities of Islamic societies in relation to Western military interventions, Turkey’s presence in NATO’s crisis management operations increased NATO’s legitimacy and diffused resistance in the Muslim world. In short, Turkey–NATO relations cannot be divorced from this context of normative meaning which largely shaped who they are and the possible policies available to them. Nonetheless, since the period of AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) rule, Turkey has increasingly conceived itself as a country with multiple regional identities.17 As a consequence of the AKP’s aspiration for regional leadership with a focus on Turkey’s Muslim identity, and a search for independence in foreign and security policy, Turkey–NATO relations steadily dropped to their lowest ebb. The 2016 NATO annual report, for example, revealed that Turkey participated in four of the 18 NATO exercises held in 2016. Moreover, Ankara’s involvement in NATO’s operations and missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo declined to 7 per cent. In addition, the report also maintains that several joint cooperation and training programmes are suspended (NATO 2016b). Despite these alarming developments, Turkey continues to view NATO as the fundamental political and military structure of transatlantic relations. Although Turkey’s suspicious approach to NATO can be expected to continue in the current political context, as Ankara’s sole institutional link to the West NATO provides a formidable platform where Turkey can take part in the formulation of Western security and defence policy. Contrary to the arguments that Turkey is on a quest for an alternative to NATO, one can contend that increased relations with NATO’s 17 Arkan and Kınacıog˘ lu (2016).

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principal rivals has been prompted mainly by regional dynamics. Recent close relations with Russia, for example, are largely transactional, stemming mainly from the regional necessities in relation to the future of Syria, but also from Turkey’s wish to diversify its suppliers of military hardware. From NATO’s viewpoint, on the other hand, the possible loss of Turkey would amount to a loss of a significant member of the Muslim community, which would in turn erode NATO’s credibility, for NATO would become an . all-Christian alliance. In addition, NATO would lose a major military capability, the use of Incirlik air base, and access to the Black Sea, and thus would be less capable of countering the security challenges coming from the Middle East. In this respect, the statement of Colonel John Dorrian, spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve, is noteworthy. He asserted that ‘the entire world has been made safer by . operations conducted from Incirlik’ (Çınar 2017). Given the complex dynamics of Turkey’s neighbourhood, Turkey and NATO can be expected to have disagreements every now and then regarding their respective priorities. Nonetheless, the historical experience of such incidents demonstrates that Turkey–NATO relations eventually survive given the mutual security interests and identity-driven needs. Hence, especially at a time when NATO’s strategic and political focus is shifting to the East and the South, the NATO–Turkey relationship is not, and will not be, just a military one.

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36 TURKEY AND UN PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS Haluk Karadag˘

Introduction Turkey has been participating in peacekeeping operations since the 1950s. The Korean War was the first international military action of the Republic of Turkey to support international peace and security and to fight against Communism. This move was highly consistent with its foreign policy motto of ‘peace at home, peace in the world’, which was first expressed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, in 1931 (Erog˘ lu 1985, 439). Governments after him have followed the same path to contribute to, and maintain, global peace and stability through membership of international organisations. After World War II, Turkey joined the Western alliance, NATO, due to an increased Soviet threat, and Turkey decided to participate in peacekeeping operations to support humanitarian values together with the Western Bloc. The term peacekeeping was coined in the 1950s after World War II, immediately after the establishment of the United Nations (UN) (Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin 2004, 1). Peacekeeping activities have sustained global peace and security all around the world and the logic behind this idea was simple; preventing mass casualties (Özerdem 2013, 62). Peacekeeping as a concept is generally defined in Westphalian and post-Westphalian terms. Those who see peacekeeping in Westphalian terms explain its role in international politics as an interstate phenomenon. According to them, disputes and conflicts between the states can only be resolved by states. However, the post-Westphalian conception of peacekeeping, which is simply based on liberal democratic theory, requires intervening in internal conflict situations as well as interstate conflicts. This can be achieved by creating liberal democratic and social entities as a solution to violent conflicts that contribute to the peace process within states (Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin 2004, 2). In international politics, while some states such as Russia, China, and some other lately independent states support the Westphalian peacekeeping operations, Western states including the US, Great Britain, France, Canada, and Turkey1 are in favour of the post-Westphalian conception of peacekeeping (Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin 2004, 3).

1

‘Turkey’ added by author to the group.

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In addition to the Westphalian and post-Westphalian conceptual thinking on peacekeeping, in the process of building peace and security environments, a legal basis was necessary for peacekeeping forces to operate. The UN Charter, Chapter 1, Article 1, developed a solution to the legality issue by explaining the purposes of UN as: ‘to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace’ (United Nations 1945). However, in the Charter, there was nothing specific about the concept of a peacekeeping issue, which led to the start of the initial idea about collective preventive and enforcement action. To accomplish this mission, all members of the United Nations give assistance in any action to the organisation in accordance with the Charter (Hill and Malik 1996, 7). There is an array of actors who deal with the peacekeeping issue in an international environment. However, the answer to the question ‘who are the peacekeepers?' is complicated. In their study, Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin classify them into three categories. First, they may be individual or pivotal states with a certain power to intervene in the specific situations during inter-state or intra-state conflicts. These states, sometimes alone or sometimes as a leader of a coalition, can play an important role in response to a particular problem. International organisations and alliances are the second types of peacekeeping forces. NATO, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and the EU are the most prominent examples. The UN is the last and the primary source of peacekeeping efforts as the main actor in the international community (Bellamy, Williams, and Griffin 2004, 34). Due to its legitimacy, it has been widely accepted that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the main actor responsible for the use of force to support international peace and security (Morris and Wheeler 2007, 214). The blue helmets operations can be defined as a new kind of secondgeneration peacekeeping process that have been increasing their impact during recent years under post-Westphalian terms. Together with classical peacekeeping efforts, this new concept has also included protection and the delivery of humanitarian assistance, as was the case in Bosnia Herzegovina, Somalia, the preparation and execution of elections in Cambodia, and so on (United Nations 1996, 3). While there is much written on the topic of peacekeeping in the literature, this chapter specifically aims to identify the support of Turkey, one of the defenders of post-Westphalian peacekeeping operations, as part of UN peacekeeping operations and other peace operations that take place in accordance with UNSC resolutions. It will also provide brief information on other types of peacekeeping operations that have been conducted under the category of international organisations and alliances.

Historical and political background As mentioned earlier, Turkey has been participating in peacekeeping operations since the 1950s. The Korean War was the first international military action of the Republic of Turkey following the UNSC call with Resolution 84 (1950) and 85 (1950). Sixteen UN members, including Turkey,2 sent troops to Korea to fight under US command (Harp Akademileri Komutanlıg˘ ı 1994, 183). Turkey participated with a brigade level of 4,500 troops. Considering the fact that the UN Force in Korea was under national (US) command rather than UN 2

United States, Turkey, Great Britain, France, Greece, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Philippines, Canada, Colombia, South Africa, and Ethiopia sent troops to Korea.

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command, it was not regarded as a peacekeeping force (Whittaker 1995, 37). However, this humanitarian operation paved the way for Turkey’s future peacekeeping operations. According to the records of Turkish Armed Forces General Staff, there have been 17 international peace operations and nine observer missions supported by Turkish troops to date (Turkish Armed Forces General Staff 2018). The Korean War was a major paradigm shift in Turkey’s participation in international peacekeeping efforts since 1923. Turkey became a NATO member in return for its participation on the side of US-led coalition forces in the Korean peninsula against Communism in 1952. The Soviet or Communist threat was the primary reason for Turkey being actively part of the Western bloc. However, there were few engagements by Turkey in peacekeeping processes during the Cold War period. The bipolar international political system did not allow states in general to put direct efforts on peace processes during internal conflicts. In that period, Turkey became one of the non-permanent members of UN Security Council three times to play constructive and conciliatory roles for the issues on the UN agenda between 1951 and 1961 (MFA 2018a). However, this growing international enthusiasm faded and fell into a deep sleep in the years between 1960 and 1990. The end of the Cold War was a wake-up call for almost all of the nations in the world, including Turkey. With the help of successful economic development strategies by successive Turkish governments, it started to play a significant role in intergovernmental organisations. In UN peacekeeping and NATO missions especially, Turkey became a significant contributor. We can see two major contributions to UN peacekeeping missions by Turkey when we look at Figure 36.1 (UN Peacekeeping 2018). The main reason for the first peak in 1994 was due to contributions to the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia Herzegovina. During the dissolution period of Yugoslavia and due to increased ethnic and violent tensions upon Bosnia’s declaration of independence, Turkey decided to dispatch to the region an Armoured Mechanised Infantry Regiment to work under UN command with Resolution 743 on 4 August 1993. Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) contributed 1400 personnel to UNPROFOR and they were deployed in Zenica and Kakanj in central Bosnia until 31 December 1995 (Çakmak 2012, 193). This was the highest

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

0

Figure 36.1 The number of Turkish personnel supporting UN peacekeeping missions (1990–2017).

461

Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions

contribution of TAF to an international conflict under a UN mandate in the UN’s peacekeeping history. The importance of Bosnia lies in the near history of Turkey. As a Balkan state this country was part of old Ottoman territory, forming the biggest Muslim community in the Balkans, with Turks looking to Bosnia as a cultural heritage of the Ottomans. The second peak in 2007 was the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Lebanon is also another Ottoman heritage and sensitive issue for Turkish governments, and Lebanon’s stability and security concerns have always been important to Turkey (MFA 2018b). With its complex cultural, religious, and ethnic structure, Lebanon has faced several conflicts in its territory. First civil war broke out, then counter-attacks between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel Defence Forces (IDF) took place, beginning in 1975. Finally, Israel invaded South Lebanon as far as the Litani River and occupied the territory. In reaction, Hezbollah of Lebanon started to fight with the IDF. In 2000, the UN identified the ‘Line of Withdrawal’ (Blue Line) between Lebanon and Israel and deployed UN forces behind the line. Following UNSC Resolution 1701 (2006), the Turkish government sent troops and ships for military burden-sharing to support peace in Lebanon. Turkey has been supporting UNIFIL’s Maritime Task Force with one frigate and providing support with two staff officers since October 2006 (BBC 2006). In addition, the Turkish Army deployed one Army Engineer Construction Company with a personnel strength of 310 to support military and local official buildings and other infrastructures in Lebanon. The engineering company completed its mission and returned home to Turkey in 2013 (Issacharoff and Staff 2013). Turkey not only supported UN peacekeeping missions for the sake of a common good, but it also contributed to NATO missions based on UNSC resolutions. The geopolitical breakdown which occurred with the collapse of Soviet Union caused severe damage to the newly independent states of Balkans. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York in 2001 opened a new phase for these operations. After US military intervention against terrorist organisations in Afghanistan, NATO updated its mission statement and extended its area of responsibility to the middle of the Asian continent. In accordance with the new job description, Turkey increased its troop contribution in these regions. However, national restrictions have prevented the military from being deployed outside the area of its responsibility or to conduct counter-terrorism operations (Turkish Armed Forces General Staff 2018). These restrictions or national caveats do not allow the Turkish military to use arms against outer threats offensively except for self-defence, during peacekeeping missions.

Turkey’s peacekeeping diplomacy Turkey has initiated a new diplomatic campaign on the international stage after four decades of silence. Since the 1960s, Turkey has not been in the international arena, either as a UNSC temporary member or as a partner in peacekeeping missions. However, with the beginning of the 21st century, Turkey gave higher priority to being a regional and responsible power. Turkey declared its candidacy for UNSC membership, it took a role in peacekeeping missions abroad, and it organised and participated in international military exercises. As part of its diplomatic efforts it started to contribute actively to international peace and security. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey describes the country’s positive approach to peacekeeping operations as follows: ‘one of the main objectives of Turkish foreign policy is to contribute to establishing and maintaining peace and stability in its region and beyond. Peacekeeping Operations are the legitimate means to realize this objective’ (MFA 2018c). Based on its foreign policy principles mentioned above, the TAF contributed to 26 international peace operations, including observer missions. Turkey declared its candidacy for non-permanent 462

Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions

membership of the UNSC and was elected for the term 2009–2010 (Oran 2013, 811). Turkey has also made a financial contribution, contributing just over 1 per cent of the total UN’s regular budget for the 2016–2018 term (MFA, 2018d). Economic indicators are also getting better for Turkey. Turkey’s GDP was around $863 billion in 2016, while it was $13 billion in 1960s, and it has a stable and growing economy which ranks 17th in the world according to total gross domestic product in 2016 (World Bank 2016, 2017). As a democratic and secular country, Turkey is a bridge between the civilisations, religions, and cultures. With its strategic geopolitical position, it is a key actor in fighting against transnational terrorism and has become an energy hub of regional oil and natural gas resources. In addition, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency with 60 programme coordination offices in 58 countries spent 800 million Turkish liras for humanitarian . aid on the developing countries for the years 2015–2017 (TIKA 2017, 18–41). Last but not least, Turkey today has a military power which is the eighth in the world military strength ranking, supporting NATO and the Organization for Security and Co-operation for Europe (OSCE), in addition to the UN (Global Firepower Index 2017). The above can be explained by Turkey’s desire to be recognised as an absolute regional power. Her hard power asset, the TAF, has been serving as an influential actor in peace operations. Due to the complexity of separating the peacekeeping efforts according to the time periods here in this study it is going to be scrutinised by ‘nature’ of missions, which is identified under the title of peace operations and observation missions of the TAF.

Peace operations of the Turkish Armed Forces Peace support operations in which the TAF participated can be grouped into two categories. While the first category involved direct UN-commanded peacekeeping operations, the second includes peace operations supported by other organisations such as NATO and the EU in accordance with UNSC resolutions. However, most of them took place in the geographies which belong to old Ottoman territories. So, it can be argued that cultural and historical ties motivated Turkey to be in hot spots such as Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, Lebanon, and Libya. The rest of the missions have been conducted in geopolitically connected zones like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan. Article 92 of the Constitution (1982) of Turkey allows governments to dispatch military troops abroad upon ratification of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. In the text it says: the power to authorize the declaration of a state of war in cases deemed legitimate by international law and except where required by international treaties to which Turkey is a party or by the rules of international courtesy to send the TAF to foreign countries and to allow foreign armed forces to be stationed in Turkey, is vested in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. (TBMM 1982, 39) This article is the main pillar providing a national legal basis for sending Turkish troops abroad. Immediately after the Cold War, Turkey started to participate in international peacekeeping missions again by dispatching personnel to the Iran–Iraq border as an observer mission under the command of United Nations. The Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG) was the very first mission under a UN flag following the collapse of the bipolar world order in 1990. After that year, Turkey joined numerous peace support operations; some of them were under direct UN command, some were under NATO command. The operations under NATO command were also based on UNSC Resolutions. 463

Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions

The greatest and longest contribution of the Turkish military to an international crisis is its contribution to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The ISAF mission started with the leadership of the UK on 16 January 2002, and came to an end on 31 December 2014. Turkey participated in ISAF operations from the very beginning, with a significant number of troops. Turkey successfully commanded ISAF troops between June 2002 and February 2003 (during the term of ISAF-II) with a personnel contribution of 1300 troops. During the term of ISAF-VII, Turkey commanded 8000 troops from 30 countries, including an additional 1450 Turkish military personnel, between the periods of February to August 2005. The command, control, and security of Kabul International Airport was also under the responsibility of Turkish troops during that period. A critical component of the NATO Force structure, the Rapid Deployable Turkish . Force-Third Corps Command in Istanbul, supported the ISAF headquarters in Kabul between August 2008 and February 2009. During that period, a Turkish General assumed Command of Chief of Staff of ISAF HQ with the additional support of 100 officers. Turkey took the responsibility of Kabul Regional Command on 1 November 2009, and fulfilled its mission until the operation of ISAF ended on 31 December 2014. Thorough Provisional Regional Construction Teams, Turkey supported the Afghan people in the regions of Jowzjan and Wardak between 2006 and 2013. In addition to Turkish troops and staff officers, there were also Turkish advisors to the Afghan Military High School and National Military Academy. In accordance with UNSC Resolution 2189 (2014), the Resolute Support Mission (RSM) replaced the ISAF on 1 January 2015 (Turkish Armed Forces General Staff 2018). Table 36.1 provides brief information regarding peacekeeping operations in which the Turkish military participated. However, there are some other international peace operations in support with TAF not listed in Table 36.1. For instance, the NATO Training Mission in Iraq (NTIM-I) was established in 2004 in accordance with the UNSC Resolution 1546 and . NATO Istanbul Summit ‘Iraq Declaration’. TAF provided personnel support to Iraq between 2004 and 2011. Besides, Turkey provided air and naval support for the UNPROFOR, IFOR, and SFOR (Turkish Armed Forces General Staff 2018). Operation Sharp Guard was one of the operations at the beginning of the conflict. This operation was carried out by Standing Naval Force Mediterranean, between 15 July 1993 and 2 October 1996, on the Adriatic Sea in response to UN Security Council Resolutions 713 and 757 to prevent military support to warring parties in Yugoslavia (Gade and Hilde 2016, 118). Turkey supported this operation with 18 frigates, two submarines, four gas carriers, and several anti-mine ships along with 5000 troops (Çakmak 2004, 195). Operation Deny Flight was one of the operations to establish a no-fly zone over Bosnia and to provide close air support to UN peacekeepers on the ground, and it began on 12 April 1993 and was completed on 21 December 1995 in response to UNSC Resolution number 781 (NATO 2017). The Turkish Air Force participated in this operation on 25 April 1993, with eight F-16 fighter jets from the Combined Air Operations Centre at Vicenza, Italy, and executed more than 2000 sorties until the end of the mission. Operation Deliberate Force was another burden sharing operation organised by some NATO members to eliminate Serbian military targets with air assaults. Deliberate Force was NATO’s first extended air operation and took place between 30 August to 19 September 1995 (Dittmer and Dawkins 1998, 1). Even though it seemed less risky compared to NATO’s Deny Flight operation, all force members except Turkey reduced their commitment to this mission. Turkey participated with eight F-16 airplanes from an airbase in Italy (Cimbala and Forster 2010, 130–131). 464

Table 36.1 International peace operations of Turkey

Mission

Country

Time period

Troops

Unified Task Force/ United Nations Operation in Somalia II (UNITAF/UNOSOM II)

Somalia

1992–1994

300

United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Implementation Force/ Stabilisation Force (IFOR/SFOR) Alba

Somalia

2013–2018

1

Bosnia Herzegovina Bosnia Herzegovina

1994–1995

1462

1996–2004

327

Albania

753

European Union Force (EUFOR, Althea) United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Kosovo Force (KFOR)

Bosnia Herzegovina Kosovo

1997 (Apr.– Aug.) 2004–2018

246

1999–2018

16

Kosovo

1999–2018

369

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)

Lebanon

2006–2018

310

Afghanistan

2012–2015

1

Afghanistan

2002–2014

1450

Resolute Support Mission (RSM)

Afghanistan

2015–2018

712

Detailed list Three mechanised infantry platoons, one fire support platoon, one quartermaster platoon, one transport and maintenance platoon, sections of a signal, medical and engineer division, one landing ship tank (Ertug˘rul), one logistics ship (Derya), one destroyer (Fatih) Military advisor

One armoured mechanised infantry regiment One brigade downsized to one battalion Two amphibious ships, two frigates One manoeuvre company, five liaison/observation teams Staff officers

One manoeuvre company, six liaison/observation teams One army engineer construction company, one frigate Military advisor

Kabul regional command, command, control, and security of Kabul International Airport, provisional regional construction teams in Wardak and Jowzjan, advisers to Afghan Military High School and National Military Academy and institutions Train, Assist, and Advise Command Capital (TAAC-C), command, control, and security of Kabul International Airport, advisers to Afghan Military High School and National Military Academy and institutions

(Continued)

Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions

Table 36.1 (Cont.) Mission

Country

Time period

Troops

Detailed list

Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) United Nations Mission in the Sudan (UNMIS) United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) Operation Unified Protector (OUP)

Democratic Republic of Congo Sudan

2006

5

One C-130 cargo airplane

2005–2010

2

Staff officers

Sudan/ Darfur

2006–2011

5

One C-160 cargo airplane

Libya

2011

Several

Operation Ocean Shield/ Combined Task Force 151 (OOS/CTF 151)

Gulf of Aden

2008–2017

Several

Four frigates, one submarine, one logistic support ship, six F-16 fighter Jets, two KC-135 tanker aircrafts, ship-based helicopters, one special forces unit, one underwater demolition team, one amphibious team One frigate

Source: Turkish Armed Forces General Staff (2018).

Observer missions of Turkish Armed Forces Observer missions under the UN flag have been performed by the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO). UNTSO is the oldest peacekeeping organisation of the UN, established in 1948 (UNTSO 2018). The TAF participated in nine military observer missions throughout the UN’s history. The first observation mission was at the borderline between Iran and Iraq. Turkish military observers joined UNIIMOG to control the implementation of the cease-fire agreement and monitor the withdrawal of forces between August 1988 and May 1991. The last one was in the neighbouring country of Georgia and Turkish military observers served in the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) until 2009 (Turkish Armed Forces General Staff 2018). In addition, the OSCE undertook the responsibility to monitor the flow of refugees during an operation of the Russian Federation with Chechnya on the Georgia–Chechnya border. Turkey deployed military observers for monitoring the situation between parties. Seven other observer missions are listed in Table 36.2 (Turkish Armed Forces General Staff 2018). It is evident from the tables above that Turkey’s peace operations are on the rise after the end of Cold War. This raises two crucial questions: what is Turkey’s main motivation for participating in these operations and what kind of benefits does it get from its participation? Before answering these critical questions, we need to specify two main documents determining Turkey’s official UN peacekeeping policy. As mentioned earlier, Article 92 of the 1982 Constitution authorises governments to support UNSC resolutions, including sending military troops abroad. The second one is the Concept on Turkey’s Contribution to Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Operations, signed by the Prime Minister in 2005. This document states the organising principles to guide Turkish decision-making on peacekeeping. For example, it requires international legitimacy (authorisation from UNSC) for Turkey using military forces in the international conflicts (Satana

466

Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions Table 36.2 Observer missions of Turkey

Observer mission

Country/region

Time period

Mission objective

Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) United Nations Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG) United Nations Iraq– Kuwait Military Observation Mission (UNIKOM) United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH)

Hebron (West Bank)

1997–2008

Observe, report, and monitor the developments in the city

Iran-Iraq border

1988–1991

Iraq-Kuwait border

1991–2003

Control the implementation of the cease-fire agreement and monitor the withdrawal of forces Monitor the demilitarised zone and deter border violations and report hostile acts

Georgia

1994–2009

Supervise the cease-fire agreement between Georgia and Abkhazia

East Timor

2000–2004

Ensure peace, security, and stability

Bosnia Herzegovina

2001–2002

Kosovo

1999

Georgia

2000–2004 2006–2009

Democratic Republic of Congo

2006–2007

Coordinate UN activities such as humanitarian relief, human rights, refugees, demining issues, reconstruction issues Verify compliance by all parties in Kosovo Monitor the flow of refugees during operation of Russian Federation with Chechnya on the Georgia–Chechnya border Provide advice and assistance for security sector reform in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission OSCE Border Monitoring Operation in Georgia

EUPOL Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Source: Turkish Armed Forces General Staff (2018).

2013, 361). So, these two documents not only provide legitimacy for Turkish security forces taking part in peace operations but also help to develop strategy. The end of the Cold War and elimination of the Soviet threat reduced Turkey’s geostrategic importance in the international environment. However, conflictual situations in Balkans, especially in former Yugoslavia, paved the way for Turkey to become a visible actor again in the international realm. Its Muslim identity and aspiration to help Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo were two sensitive issues for Turkey at that time. Security-seeking behaviour is also another reason for its desire to be part of these operations. The threat of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) and other terrorist organisations motivates Turkey to be part of stabilising operations for the sake of international peace and security. By doing so, Turkey can build considerable international support in her struggle with terrorism. In short, the primary motive of Turkey’s participation in peace operations lies under the reality of ‘visibility’ and ‘security-seeking’ behaviour. In addition to that, during the 1990s, mostly Turkish military elites rather than civilian authorities were involved in the decision–making 467

Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions

process on peacekeeping issues. However, civilians took control over the military and become the sole decision-maker on peacekeeping concerns after 2005. The new arrangement of peace operations has aimed at promoting national interests and following cost–benefit-oriented policies compared to the former ones. There are some cases where the Turkish government possibly pursues peace operations in return for advancing economic interests with African countries. Turkey’s participation in peace operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a notable example of increasing economic engagement with African countries (Satana 2012). Besides economic benefits, pursuing peacekeeping operations will be a positive factor in the EU membership process. Where participation of this kind improves relationships with other states, it also nurtures democratic norms.

Conclusion The number of Turkish personnel supporting UN peacekeeping missions has been in decline in the last few years. The reason for the decrease in numbers indicates that Turkey is no longer giving higher priority to UN-led peace operations, instead focusing heavily on the more professional NATO-led missions. There are some possible explanations for this attitude change. Turkey does not request subventions or funding for the troops working under UN command from the UN regular budget, but rather Turkey pays for its personnel from the national budget and would like to use that budget more effectively on NATO missions (Satana 2012). However, Turkey as a responsible regional power has participated in both large and small peacekeeping missions without hesitation and contributes to the Peacebuilding Fund in significant amounts. Since the establishment of this fund (2006), Turkey has spent 2.5 million US dollars for the peacebuilding budget (UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office 2018). The contribution of Turkish Armed Forces to 26 peacekeeping missions since the Korean War is the proof of Turkey’s will to be in the ‘ivy league’ of developed countries. Turkey seems to follow a more comprehensive peacekeeping policy in remote areas of the world. The primary purpose of this is to support international peace and security and enhance Turkey’s role in the world. Turkey has been providing support to the post-Westphalian conception of peacekeeping operations and is expected to participate in these burden-sharing, humanitarian missions in the future. But low-intensity domestic conflicts, especially the one with the PKK, keeps Turkish military forces busy with operations in and outside of the country. However, it is possible that if the internal conflicts and tensions decrease, more Turkish troops would be on the international stage for peace operations. Consequently, powerful motivations lay behind Turkey’s participation in peace operations, namely fundamental security concerns, increasing its visibility, and a desire to be a responsible power in the international arena.

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Turkey and UN peacekeeping missions Dittmer, L. David, and Stephen P. Dawkins. 1998. Deliberate Force: NATO’s First Extended Air Operation: The View from AFSOUTH. Alexandria, Arlington: Center for Naval Analyses. Erog˘ lu, Hamza. 1985. ‘Yurtta Sulh, Cihanda Sulh [Peace in the Country, Peace in the World].’ Atatürk Aras¸tırmaları Dergisi [Journal of Atatürk Research] 1(2): 435–449. Gade, Jo George, and Paal Sigurd Hilde. 2016. ‘NATO and the Maritime Domain.’ In International Order at Sea: How It is Challenged, How It is Maintained, edited by Jo Inge Bekkevold and Geoffrey Till, 115– 139. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Global Firepower Index. 2017. ‘Military Strength Ranking.’ https://www.globalfirepower.com/coun tries-listing.asp . Harp Akademileri Komutanlıg˘ ı. 1994. Barıs¸ı Destekleme Harekatı [Operation to Support Peace]. Istanbul: Harp Akademileri Basımevi. Hill, Stephen M, and Shahin P. Malik. 1996. Peacekeeping and the United Nations. London: Dartmouth Publishing. Issacharoff, Avi, and Toi Staff. 2013. ‘Turkey to Withdraw Troops from UNIFIL in South Lebanon.’ The Times of Israel, 10 August. https://www.timesofisrael.com/turkey-withdraws-troops-from-unifil-in-south-lebanon/ MFA. 2018a. ‘Relations Between Turkey and South Korea.’ Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs. http://www.mfa.gov.tr/turkiye-guney-kore-siyasi-iliskileri.tr.mfa MFA. 2018b. ‘Relations Between Turkey and Lebanon.’. Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs. http://www.mfa.gov.tr/relations-between-turkey-and-lebanon.en.mfa MFA. 2018c. ‘The UN Organization and Turkey.’ Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs. http://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-united-nations-organization-and-turkey.en.mfa MFA. 2018d. ‘Turkey’s Approach and Contributions to the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations.’ Republic of Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs. http://www.mfa.gov.tr/tu rkey_s-approach-and-con tributions-to-the-united-nations-peacekeeping-operations.en.mfa Morris, Justin, and Nicholas J. Wheeler. 2007. ‘The Security Council’s Crisis of Legitimacy and the Use of Force.’ International Politics 2–3(44): 214–231. NATO. 2017. ‘NATO’s Operations: 1949 – Present.’ http://www.shape.nato.int/resources/21/nato% 20operations,%201949-present.pdf . . Oran, Baskın (ed.). 2013. Türk Dıs . ¸ Politikası III [Turkish Foreign Policy III]. Istanbul: Iletisim. Özerdem, Alpaslan. 2013. Barıs¸ Ins¸ası Kuram ve Uygulamaları [Peace Construction Theory and Practices]. Ankara: Nobel Publishing. Satana, S. Nil. 2012.’ Peacekeeping Contributor Profile: Turkey.’ 31 August. http://www.providingforpea cekeeping.org/2014/04/03/contributor-profile-turkey/ Satana, S. Nil. 2013. ‘Turkey.’ In Providing Peacekeepers: The Politics, Challenges, and Future of United Nations Peacekeeping Contributions, edited by Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, 355–376. Oxford: Oxford University Press. TBMM. 1982. ‘The Constitution of Turkey.’ Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi [Grand National Assembly of . Turkey]. https://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf TIKA. 2017. Faaliyet Raporu 2017 [Activity Report 2017]. Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency. . http://www.tika.gov.tr/upload/2018/2017%20Faaliyet%20Raporu/TI KA%20Faaliyet%20Raporu% 202017.pdf Turkish Armed Forces General Staff. 2018. ‘Contribution of the Turkish Armed Forces to Peace Support Operations.’ http://www.tsk.tr/InternationalRelations/ContributionToTafToPeace United Nations. 1945. ‘Purposes and Principles.’ Charter of the United Nations. http://www.un.org/en/sec tions/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html United Nations. 1996. The Blue Helmets: A Review of United Nations Peacekeeping. New York: UN Department of Public Information. UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office. 2018. ‘The Peacebuilding Fund.’ http://mptf.undp.org/factsheet/ fund/PB000 UN Peacekeeping 2018. ‘Troop and Police Contributions.’ https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-p olice-contributors UNTSO. 2018. ‘Background.’ United Nations Truce Supervision Organization. https://untso.unmissions. org/background Whittaker, David J. 1995. United Nations in Action. Armonk, NY: UCL Publishing. World Bank. 2016. ‘Gross Domestic Product 2016.’ https://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/ GDP.pdf World Bank. 2017. ‘GDP in Current USD.’ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD? locations=TR

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37 TURKEY AS AN EMERGING GLOBAL HUMANITARIAN AND PEACEBUILDING ACTOR1 Alpaslan Özerdem

Introduction Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey has increasingly become an active humanitarian and peacebuilding actor across the world. This development is probably not surprising because it occupies a critical geopolitical position between Europe, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. It is the 17th largest economy in the world, and member of a wide range of international organisations from NATO to the OECD, the Islamic Conference, and the G20. Turkey has at times played an important peace-broker role in regional conflicts too, and it is often a leading country for peacekeeping operations around the world. This policy has become particularly apparent over the last 15 years under the governing AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party), and Turkey has become an important country in international humanitarian and development efforts as a generous donor. Turkey dedicated over $7.9 billion of development assistance in 2016, nearly 85 per cent of which was generated by the state. It is important to note that the country overwhelmingly opted to provide its Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) via bilateral means (96 per cent) and 94 per cent of this was for official humanitarian aid ($5.87 billion). Moreover, Turkey counts its assistance to nearly four million Syrian refugees in its own territory as part of this ODA and that, in fact, constitutes the lion’s share at $5.85 billion . (TIKA 2018). From this perspective, by simply looking at the amount of ODA provided by Turkey and to whom, the country may not seem to be potentially one of the most important peacebuilding actors globally. However, a number of other facts should also be borne in mind to understand Turkey’s emerging presence in the aid world and particularly around peacebuilding activities. Only a decade ago, Turkey’s ODA was less than $1 billion; in fact, in 2002 it was only $85 million. In 2016, in comparison to OECD/DAC member countries, Turkey was the sixth most generous country after the United States, Germany, UK, Japan, and France. In terms of net ODA/GNI (Gross National Income) rates, .its 0.76% ratio meant it rose to fourth position after Norway, Luxembourg, and Sweden (TIKA 2018). In terms of solely humanitarian 1

An earlier version of this chapter was published as Özerdem (2016).

470

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assistance contributions, Turkey was number two in the world after the US, but number one in terms of percentage of GNI (Development Initiatives 2018). These figures initially tell us a number of things. Firstly, that Turkey has been an increasingly generous donor of humanitarian assistance but not necessarily the type of ODA that would be used for peacebuilding activities. Secondly, there is a question of whether Turkey will sustain such a high level of assistance once the Syrian refugee crisis is over. As for the latter, only time will tell whether this will be the case. For the former, it is important to pay more careful attention to the way that Turkey provides its ODA and what impact it seems to be having for peacebuilding and development. Finally, in the bigger picture of international politics, Turkey’s increasing humanitarian aid engagement globally, particularly in the context of Africa, has also been coupled with the promotion of its trade links and diplomatic missions. Within this overall context, this chapter questions what drives Turkey’s interest in becoming an active humanitarian actor and whether it brings anything unique and different in responding to such challenges. Does Turkey’s response to humanitarian crises and to the needs of peacebuilding and development differ from other more traditional aid actors from the West/ North? It will also question whether the AKP has a wider interest in such humanitarian engagements, as they are often used to drum up the rhetoric of a globally strong country for domestic political gains in terms of votes. Moreover, to what extent do, for instance, the Islamic position and regional aspirations of the AKP government play a role in Turkey’s humanitarian policies and activities? To do this, Somalia, which was one of Turkey’s most significant humanitarian and peacebuilding engagements in recent years, will be used as a particular case of focus. However, before such an investigation, the chapter will start its discussions with an overview of Turkey’s global aid role since the end of the Cold War.

Turkey as an aid actor within wider national and international politics In the post-Cold War context and subsequent global changes with the bipolar power struggles between the US and Russia, Turkey wanted to exert a more active influence in international affairs. Until the 1990s, Turkey used to be one of the most important countries of the Western and NATO alliances against the Soviet Russia, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall, its strategic and military significance seemed to be lessening at the time. Therefore, from the early 1990s, Turkey started to play an active role in peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations not only in its immediate regional context such as the Balkans, but also in far-away contexts such as the 1993 UN Operations in Somalia. Starting with the humanitarian crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid1990s and then particularly in Kosovo in the aftermath of the 1999 NATO military intervention, not only humanitarian operations but wider state-building and post-conflict reconstruction efforts received substantial inputs from Turkish actors (Turkish Foreign Ministry 2014a). This was mainly through the deployment of the Turkish army in the UN- or NATO-led peacekeeping operations and aid efforts by the Turkish Red Crescent. Similarly, after the 2002 Bonn Agreement that set the scene for international peacebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, Turkey worked with the international community in key areas such as security sector reform. It headed the NATO-led international security forces in the country (ISAF) a number of times (Kaya 2013). The critical turning point for increasing Turkish aid efforts and engagement came with the 2002 general elections, which was a major shift in Turkish politics. It brought the AKP to power, and consequently paved the way for a Turkish foreign policy that was prepared to tackle some of the most intractable conflicts in the Middle East. Under the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, Turkey’s profile as a mediator and trustworthy partner in responding to emergencies and humanitarian crises rose quickly in the early days of the AKP rule. The Turkish government 471

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at the time could talk to the Assad regime in Syria and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as having strong economic, political, and diplomatic relationships with Israel. With the ‘zero problem with neighbours’ doctrine of Ahmet Davutog˘ lu, who became Foreign Minister in 2004 and then Prime Minister, a new era in Turkish foreign policy began. While the country was making significant progress with its EU membership negotiations at the time, it was also talking to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon to create a free economic area in the Middle East and was exploring the possibility of introducing visa-free movement system for citizens. In the second part of the decade, these countries were even holding joint cabinet meetings in order to harmonise their relationships in a number of key economic and governance areas. During this period, Turkey also struck many deals with the oil- and gasrich countries of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East to act as an ‘energy bridge’ linking to markets in Europe (Larrabee 2007; Gavin 2012). In 2010, in cooperation with Brazil, Turkey managed to convince Iran to sign a nuclear-fuel swap deal, which was a major breakthrough that was, however, rejected by international powers for being weak (BBC 2010). One of the most significant characteristics of the Davutog˘ lu era for Turkey’s aid policies was the conceptualisation of a ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ idea. Moving beyond the binaries of realist versus idealist or hard power versus soft power, Davutog˘ lu claimed that his foreign policy would be human-centred and Turkey being both a benevolent and powerful state, it would be ‘conscience’ that guided the decisions of diplomacy (Davutog˘ lu 2013). Overall, such a change in Turkish foreign policy with much wider and more active engagement in international affairs came as a surprise to many. It is often coined as ‘neoOttomanism’ – a term which describes the country’s ambitions to expand and revitalise its political influence in large territories once controlled by the Ottoman Empire. With the neoOttomanism argument, Turkey, a long-time loyal ally of the West in international affairs from the 1950s to the late 1990s, was considered to be a ‘rising power’ trying to put its own stamp on international affairs by pursuing its own foreign policy priorities. The reference to the Ottoman Empire was to indicate that Turkey, with its increasing economic power and geopolitical advantages, would no longer be the side-kick of Western interests in the Middle East or elsewhere (Tas¸pınar 2008). Rather it wanted to sit with the major powers at the same table when critical decisions were being made for global peace and security. Turkey pursued an active campaign to be elected as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council and served from 2009 to 2010; however, it lost its bid for the 2015–2016 period (Turkish Foreign Ministry 2014b). In addition to its key strengths – an expanding economy, strong military, geopolitical position, and a relatively well-educated young population – the influence of Turkey’s soft power has also been used to strengthen the ‘neo-Ottomanism’ argument. Attracting nearly 40 million tourists every year, most of whom are from neighbouring countries and Europe, and with the increasing popularity of Turkish soap operas in countries from Albania to Afghanistan, Turkey has painted a picture of a soft power that has to be recognised as a new player in international affairs (Öner 2013). Within the ‘neo-Ottomanism’ argument, one of the key theses has been that Erdog˘ an aspires to become the leader of the Islamic world. As the AKP is an Islamist-rooted party, it has often been argued that the Islamic position was one of the main drivers of the country’s new foreign policy and its approach to the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. Erdog˘ an’s clash with the Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at a Davos meeting in January 2009 is a case in point. This was dubbed the ‘one-minute crisis’ as Erdog˘ an reacted to Peres’s defence of Israel’s actions in Gaza, accusing the debate’s moderator of not allowing him to speak and storming off, saying that he would not return to Davos again. It suddenly made him one of the most popular and 472

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respected politicians in the Middle East, especially with the Palestinians (BBC 2009). After the ‘one-minute crisis’, Turkey–Israeli relations have worsened gradually due to various diplomatic crises. They hit rock bottom with the Blue Marmara flotilla crisis, when a Turkish humanitarian aid ship was intercepted by Israeli forces while trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, killing nine Turkish nationals (Booth 2010). During such a rise of Turkish foreign policy, Africa is one of the primary examples of the way that Turkey’s humanitarian aid policies have changed in line with the expansion of its foreign policy engagements. Back in 2009, Turkey had 12 embassies in the entire continent. Today there are 35 and more to be opened soon. Similarly, while there were 10 African Embassies in Ankara a decade ago, there are now 28. Turkey hosted the ‘Turkey–Africa Cooperation Summit’ in Istanbul in August 2008, and subsequently the African Union declared Turkey a ‘Strategic Partner’. In May 2010, Istanbul was the venue for the Fourth UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) (Turkish Foreign Ministry 2014c). Compared to a number of other actors, such as Western European powers, the US, and China, Turkey is relatively new in African politics and trade circles. However, it has already expanded its area of influence in the continent by linking its soft power tools of transportation links, trade and education closely to its foreign policy. In a wide range of African countries this foreign policy strategy has proved to be successful, with fast-growing partnerships in the economic and political spheres. Some of these measures may be fairly traditional means for bilateral relations for other countries too, but what Turkey does differently from many other countries is that it joins up its efforts in the realms of diplomacy, economics, trade, culture, and education with humanitarian aid and peacebuilding. Meanwhile, with the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ removing many authoritarian regimes in countries from Egypt and Tunisia to Libya, Erdog˘ an positioned himself as the politician of people in the streets. He claimed to stand for human rights, democracy, and rule of law, increasing his popularity further in the Middle East and North Africa. Turkey was then considered as a possible model country for emerging regimes in the region (Tol 2012). Until the Gezi protests of 2013, Erdog˘ an was the rising star of international politics and was respected across the world. However, the heavy-handed response of the security forces to the protests and accusations over Erdog˘ an’s increasingly authoritarian and uncompromising rule have diminished his international standing considerably (Letsch 2014). Moreover, the AKP’s disastrous foreign policy in response to the Syrian civil war since 2011 has created further security and socio-economic challenges for the country, including a very large population of refugees. On the one hand, Turkey has been very generous by hosting nearly four million Syrians with a total cost of over $40 billion, but on the other hand, as there does not seem to be an end to the Syrian civil war at any time soon, Turkey will also need to bear the socio-economic brunt of the local integration of a large number of Syrian refugees.

Turkish humanitarian crisis response and peacebuilding in Somalia When Erdog˘ an visited Somalia, accompanied by a large entourage of 200 people, including his family, ministers, aid organisation representatives, business people, and celebrities, in August 2011, the country was completely away from the world’s attention. Therefore, the visit received high media coverage and for Turkey’s internal politics this meant strong public support for the Somalia aid campaign and, in return, popularity for the governing party. In 2011, the Turkish government donated $49 million to Somalia, but its successful mobilisation of private donations resulted in another sum of $365 million (Harte 2012). Turkish aid organisations such as Turkish Red Crescent and the Turkish bilateral development agency 473

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. TIKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency) have been highly active in a wide range of infrastructure, welfare, and service sector programmes in the capital city of Mogadishu, such as providing clean water, building hospitals and running camps for internally displaced people, and waste collection. In 2012, over 1,200 Somali students received full scholarships to study in Turkey, worth a total of nearly $70 million. Until very recently the Turkish Embassy, which was reopened in November 2011, was the only foreign representation in the capital. Turkish Airlines still provides the only international gateway for Mogadishu. Prior to and after the visit, there have also been a number of Somalia peace talk initiatives organised by Turkey acting as an independent third party respected by almost all conflicting sides in Somalia. For example, Turkey .co-hosted two international conferences on Somalia in . May 2010 and 2012 (Istanbul I and Istanbul II). The latter included a Somali civil society gathering and was attended by all organised Somali political groupings, business leaders and even delegates from self-declared independent regions like Somaliland (Akpınar 2012). Sucuog˘ lu and Sazak (2016) describe Turkey’s peacebuilding approach as having four main characteristics – non-conditionality, bilateralism, direct delivery on the ground, and a multistakeholder approach. All of these characteristics could be directly observed in Turkey’s engagement in Somalia (Özerdem 2016). Why do these characteristics matter? First of all, Turkey seems to be approaching its local partners from a ‘solidarity’ perspective, and the principle of non-conditionality creates a strong basis of trust with recipient governments, as has been the case in Somalia. From the way Erdog˘ an came with his family and interacted with Somalis in the camps for internally displaced people to the decision not to use the UN Security Mission – AMISOM – for the provision of protection during his visit, he made a huge public relations impact, especially in terms of building trust and confidence. For Somalis, his visit showed that he cared for them and he was different than other world leaders. Also, as the preceding review of Turkish ODA statistics shows, Turkey acts as a bilateral actor and primarily works with governments. The main advantage of such an approach is that although in comparison to OECD/DAC countries, Turkey’s development and peacebuilding assistance is very modest, it tends to get much more visibility. Such a bilateral approach also creates better opportunities to link its humanitarian assistance with development priorities. In fact, it is these linkages, and the way that they are operationalised through the remaining two characteristics, that make Turkish assistance distinctive. Whether in Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Somalia, one particular trait of the Turkish response is its direct, hands-on nature and focus on working with conflict affected communities on a day-to-day basis. Even when other agencies were running their programmes through remote management from Nairobi due to security challenges in Somalia, Turkey ran its own programmes and continued its presence in the country. Another major contrast is that while most foreign organisations in Mogadishu are concentrated in the AMISOM base, Turkish officials and aid workers live and work in the city. Turkish aid actors, whether official or civil society, tend to be on the ground in the most challenging environments, winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of local people with such a visible presence of solidarity. Apart from its direct engagement approach, Turkish assistance has also concentrated on prioritising the tangible needs of local people. In fact, nearly 90 per cent of Turkish ODA assistance globally in 2016 was dedicated to socio-economic infrastructure . and services such as education, health, water and sanitation, transport, and communications (TIKA 2018). With these characteristics in mind, one of the main advantages of the Turkish response is the way it enables assistance to be delivered in relatively more efficient ways, as it directly engages with beneficiaries. What is more, rather than creating parallel systems in the provision of services such as health and education, the Turkish approach is more likely to support existing institutional structures within the development realm. It is through such an approach 474

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that specific assistance for peacebuilding efforts could be better targeted, and in contexts as Afghanistan and Somalia, Turkey has channelled its efforts more towards security sector reform initiatives. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that Turkey’s peacebuilding efforts are more in the realm of state-building. The restructuring of national armies, training of soldiers and police, and modernisation of civil service capabilities are often key areas of engagement for Turkey in war-torn countries. Through its multi-stakeholder approach, Turkey’s peacebuilding strategy seems to be adopting more appropriate partnerships for the local context, as there tends to be stronger institutional matches, whether they are between municipal, religious, security, or private sector actors. Subsequently, such decentralisation in the overall Turkish aid response and less emphasis on conditionality often mean more meaningful accountability pathways as they are likely to promote greater local ownership. In addition to its ODA, Turkey seems adept at mobilising its diplomatic means, private sector companies, aid agencies, religious charities, and municipalities in such efforts. For example, in 2016, Turkish NGOs provided more than $655 million in assistance globally, while the Turkish ODA for development was only around $820 million. Meanwhile, the Turkish private sector invested nearly $600 million in developing countries in the same year . (TIKA 2018). Such a multi-track and multi-stakeholder approach is probably one of the most visible characteristics of the Turkish response, bringing with it greater opportunities for wider and more effective impact. Moreover, when it came to a context like Somalia, Turkish aid providers entered an arena where other international aid actors seemed to have a tainted image in the eyes of local populations. As a new actor, Turkey had the advantage of getting involved in a country with which it had no significant historical baggage, such as colonial rule by the UK in Somaliland or military interventions undertaken by the US. In terms of the provision of humanitarian aid, actors such as the UN and EU have been working in Somalia for decades, and it seems that some of these organisations have damaged their reputation badly. Seeing that Turkish organisations could deliver large-scale relief aid and reconstruction programmes with a very modest personnel presence has further strengthened Somali’s beliefs about the waste of funds by the international community (Ali 2013). In relation to the tainted reputation of the international community in Somalia and the lack of trust that the Somali population seems to have for the motivations and benefits of other international aid actors, the Turkish presence has managed to be perceived as independent and neutral. Their involvement in tangible aid programmes has built an overall image and perception that the Turks are in Somalia for helping Somalis, not for geopolitical interests or exploitation of recently discovered off-shore oil and gas resources, which seem to be considered as the main drivers for a number of Western powers. This has meant that Turkish aid has been provided without any significant coordination with other international actors. According to Turkish aid agencies, being seen to be working with other international actors would have hugely damaged their image of neutrality in the country. For some Turkish agencies with strong Islamic roots, the reason for not coordinating or cooperating with Western actors might also have been ideological around the faith-based nature of most Turkish NGOs working in Somalia. However, at a more prudential and tactical level, although cooperation could have meant more funding opportunities and expansion of their programmes Turkish actors seem to have made a deliberate effort to keep their distinctiveness from other international actors. In fact, it is important to note that Turkish aid agencies have kept their distance from other Muslim aid actors, mainly from the Gulf countries too. Therefore, as will be explored further in the last part of this chapter, the lack of interest from 475

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Turkish agencies in coordination with other aid actors should not necessarily be seen from the binary of a Muslim versus Western perspective. It is important to recognise that the special socio-political aid context of Somalia brought about a certain set of parameters that played a significant role in determining both the way that Turkish aid was perceived and the behaviour of Turkish aid actors. Overall, the analysis of the Turkish aid experience in Somalia shows that Turkey has gained a new level of confidence in international relations. It is steadily showing its presence in the aid sector and its growing proclivity for developing its relations with African countries in commerce, trade, education, and culture. However, what should be the main cornerstones of its approach to humanitarian crises so that it can avoid the mistakes made by other external actors? Additionally, considering that Turkey claims its increasing interest and influence in Africa have nothing to do with the exploitation of the rich natural resources, why does it respond to the needs of conflict and disaster-affected people well beyond its own immediate regional boundaries?

Why does Turkey help? It is clear that over the last 15 years there have been major changes in Turkey’s engagement in the aid world. However, Turkey’s increasing involvement in peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and humanitarian crisis responses across the world, but particularly in Muslim countries, have also raised questions of Erdog˘ an’s motivations in relation to the AKP’s Islamic roots. In parallel to this, it is also important to recognise the implications of such engagements for the domestic political context (Çevik and Seib 2015). To .investigate such claims, it is necessary to focus . on Turkey’s main international aid agency, TIKA, and its geographic areas of work. TIKA was founded in 1992 and its primary focus was the provision of development assistance in the Central Asian countries in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Socialist Republics. It was modelled as an agency to prevent the political influence of Russia and Iran in newly independent countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and . Uzbekistan. Therefore, from the beginning, TIKA as the main conduit of Turkey’s ODA has always been a tool for Turkey, but starting from 2002 its areas of work have expanded exponentially, and today it has programmes in over 110 countries around the world. Its budget was only $85 million in 2002, which increased to $1.3 billion in 2011. It has programmes not only in Muslim majority countries, but also in a wide range of non-Muslim countries from Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, and Georgia to Ukraine and Sri Lanka. Therefore, at least with official Turkish development aid in mind, it would be hard to argue that there is a preference for Muslim populations. In fact, to do this would ignore recent Turkish foreign policy trajectories. Given Turkey has been bidding to become a global player, focusing on an Islamic agenda in its aid policies would narrow down its options drastically. On the contrary, although it might have Islamic roots, the AKP has overall been very pragmatic in responding to a wide range of domestic and international political matters. Therefore, reducing the reasons of why and how successful the AKP governments have been using development aid as a foreign policy tool to the point of a narrow Islamic agenda would risk ignoring many other significant factors in this complex picture. It is also important to point out that the public in Turkey seems to enjoy the so-called ‘strong leadership’ profile presented by Erdog˘ an in global peace and conflict matters. From a neo-Ottomanism perspective this could be explained as the public’s longing for Turkey’s Ottoman past during which the Empire ruled large geographies, and for a long time was one of the ‘superpowers’ of the world. With the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 from 476

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the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and since then, being a low-middle-income country with no significant presence in international affairs, what the AKP and Erdog˘ an claimed to have managed is to bring to the public a regained confidence during the last decade. This has been a much needed remedy for the wounds of the Turkish public, whose pride has been badly bruised by the never ending EU membership negotiations. Running an active foreign policy and reaching out to populations across the world, Muslim or not, has been a great catalyst to increase the political popularity of Erdog˘ an and the AKP domestically. Erdog˘ an frequently uses Turkey’s aid presence across the world as an example of how strong and benevolent the country has become across the world and how Turks should be proud of such regained strength and confidence. Meanwhile, when it comes to aid funding through private donations, two main characteristics should be noted. First, there has been an increasing trend for the public to provide donations in response to humanitarian crises in recent years. For the refugee influx from Syria to Turkey, and in recent humanitarian aid campaigns for Somalia and the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the Turkish public has been a generous donor. This has been partly because Turkey today is a relatively richer country than a decade ago. Also, with the increasingly active engagement of Turkish foreign policy in different parts of the world, there is now more awareness in Turkey around global challenges than before. The Turkish public has donated for major humanitarian crises before, such as the 2004 Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, but it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the aid campaign for Somalia has made humanitarianism a household issue. People from all walks of life have responded generously to the campaign. Such an outpouring of interest for a country like Somalia, with which Turkey did not have any significant historical or cultural connections, was a major turning point. It is also important to bear in mind that since the Marmara earthquake of August 1999, there has been an increasing trend for the involvement of Turkish NGOs in the provision of humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Turkey and beyond (Deniz 2011; Turkish Foreign Ministry 2014d). Second, Muslim brotherhoods in Turkey, which are very active in the socio-political and cultural life of the country, tend to take the lead in running aid campaigns, especially for crises in Muslim countries. They are active in collecting donations and most of them are linked with a number of Turkish NGOs with strong Islamic roots and vision. For example in the case of Somalia, the most active Turkish NGOs could be categorised in this group. Although they use their own private donations for aid programmes, their strong affiliation with the AKP over Islamic values seems to have helped them to become more active in the international arena, albeit as noted earlier this does not imply that Turkish aid is driven by a desire to advance an Islamic agenda. Turkey’s engagement in Somalia was considered political opportunism by some, but analysts from a realist perspective would likely consider Turkey’s engagement in Somalia more . in terms of legitimising its own strategic interests in the region. Considering that TIKA openly accepts being an intermediary of Turkish foreign policy, the influence of geopolitical interests over aid programmes cannot be ignored. As is the case for other rising powers such as India, China, and Brazil, Turkey recognises that Africa is a continent where it could have new opportunities of trade, investment, and political influence. From the natural resource needs of these rising powers, to their desire for new economic opportunities, to the possibility of exerting influence on African aid recipient countries at times where international support is needed (such as voting for the UN Security Council non-permanent membership or selecting a city for hosting the Olympics), there are many reasons to build stronger links.

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This is perhaps not that surprising, considering that traditional aid donors from the West have been doing this for decades. In other words, statements that raise Turkey’s geopolitical interests in the Horn of Africa for the protection of sea transportation routes or investment and trade opportunities for its private sector should be considered together with the geopolitical interests of other states and key actors. These would include the US’s security agenda vis-à-vis al-Shabab and Jihadist terrorism in the region, and the UK’s interest in exploiting off-shore oil and gas reserves. Rising powers like Turkey engage in Africa in a similar way to traditional aid actors. To some extent this engagement might be for altruistic reasons, but geopolitics and economic interests are significant drivers too. While the traditional development agenda from the West tends to have a strong conditionality, rising powers seem to be much less interested in this. Hence, for many African leaders working with rising powers has become an attractive alternative. Not having any colonial past with African countries is also a major advantage for rising powers, which can establish relationships on the basis of forming more equal partnerships.

Conclusion Turkey is a relatively new actor within the spheres of humanitarian aid, peacebuilding, and post-conflict reconstruction, but has increasingly been playing an even more active role, particularly in Africa. Its aid budget, both official and through private donations, has risen significantly and it now has more funding than ever to respond to challenges across the world. However, as has been seen in the case of Somalia, the uniqueness of what Turkey could offer is not necessarily in the size of its funding. In fact, in comparison to traditional donor countries and organisations, the scale of its funding is quite modest. However, the way it has been delivered in contexts like Somalia has provided alternatives and perhaps a more effective means of assisting war-torn societies. Working with populations directly and keeping a close proximity to them, and bearing the challenges and difficulties of such environments alongside local people, has played a significant role in gaining their trust, confidence, and respect. This, in return, has allowed the Turkish aid presence to deliver their programmes more effectively and efficiently. Therefore, Turkish aid in Somalia has underlined the importance of building constructive and enabling relationships with local populations. The basics of being able to work with communities and making efforts towards this goal rather than just opting for easier alternatives of remote management of aid provision clearly need to be debated further. The Turkish presence in Somalia has shown that this is possible. Whether Turkey’s geopolitical interests or Erdog˘ an’s religious and/or political motives have played a role in the engagement in Somalia has been an important aspect of the debate around Turkey as an emerging actor in humanitarian crises. It is hard to conclude definitively one way or another, but there are a number of indicators that such politics of humanitarian aid have been in action and they have been a contributing factor for explaining why Turkey has been an active donor in Africa. The demands of Turkish foreign policy seem to incentivise using relief and development aid as tools to some extent, but it would going too far to claim that such involvement has been purely for religious or political interests and humanitarianism has been no factor at all. It is also important to remember that Turkey’s cohesive response in Somalia has already placed Turkey in a unique position in responding to a complex set of peace and development related challenges. However, this could only be sustained and transformed as part of a long-term strategy for peacebuilding in Africa and elsewhere. Turkey needs to come up with effective strategies, and the way Turkish aid agencies have shown their ability to listen to war-torn societies and work with them directly should be the main cornerstone of such 478

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strategies that would enable local populations to build their own peace. It seems that Turkey has a unique opportunity to come up with viable alternatives to what western-centric conflict responses often fail to achieve.

References Akpınar, Pınar. 2012. ‘Turkey’s Peacebuilding in Somalia: The Limits of Humanitarian Diplomacy.’ Turkish Studies 14(4): 735–757. Ali, Ahmed. 2013. ‘Turkish Aid in Somalia: the Irresistible Appeal of Boots on the Ground.’ The Guardian, 30 September. Accessed 18 August 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-profes sionals-network/2013/sep/30/turkey-aid-somalia-aid-effectiveness BBC. 2009. ‘Turkish PM Storms Off in Gaza Row.’ 29 January. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/da vos/7859417.stm BBC. 2010. ‘Iran Signs Nuclear Fuel-Swap Deal with Turkey.’ 17 May.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/8685846.stm Booth, Robert. 2010. ‘Israeli Attack on Gaza Flotilla Sparks International Outrage.’ The Guardian, 31 May. Accessed 4 September 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/ may/31/israeli-atta cks-gaza-flotilla-activists Çevik, Bahar Senem, and Seib, Philip. 2015. Turkey’s Public Diplomacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deniz, Derya. 2013. ‘Top Development Aid Agencies in Turkey: A primer.’ DEVEX, 5 April. Accessed 12 September. https://www.devex.com/news/top-development-aid-agencies-in-turkey-a-primer-73930 Davutog˘ lu, A. 2013. ‘Turkey’s Humanitarian Diplomacy: Objectives, Challenges and Prospects.’ Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41(6): 865–870. Development Initiatives. 2018. Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2017. http://devinit.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/06/GHA-Report-2017-Full-report.pdf Gavin, James. 2012. ‘Policy in Turkey Drives Trade with Middle East.’ MEED, 2 July. Accessed 15 August 2014. http://www.meed.com/supplements/2012/turkey-and-the-middle-east/policy-in-turkey-drives-tra de-with-middle-east/3143297.article Harte, Julia. 2012 ‘Turkey Shocks Africa.’ World Policy Institute, 12 June. Accessed 10 June 2014. www. worldpolicy.org/journal/winter2012/turkey-shocks-africa Kaya, Karen. 2013. ‘Turkey’s Role in Afghanistan and Afghan Stabilization.’ Military Review, July-August. Accessed 10 September 2014. http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/Milita ryReview_20130831_art007.pdf Larrabee, Stephan. 2007. ‘Turkey Rediscovers the Middle East.’ Foreign Affairs, July-August. Accessed 20 September 2014. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62649/f-stephen-larrabee/turkey-rediscov ers-the-middle-east Letsch, Constanze. 2014. ‘A Year After the Protests, Gezi Park Nurtures the Seeds of a New Turkey.’ The Guardian, 29 May. Accessed 10 July 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/29/gezi-pa rk-year-after-protests-seeds-new-turkey Öner, Selcen. 2013. ‘Soft Power in Turkish Foreign Policy: New Instruments and Challenges.’ Euxeino, 29 May. Accessed 11 September 2014. http://www.gce.unisg.ch/~/media/internet/content/dateien/ instituteundcenters/gce/euxeinos%20folder/oener_euxeinos%2010_2013.pdf Özerdem, Alpaslan. 2016. ‘Turkey as a Rising Power: An Emerging Global Humanitarian Actor’ In The New Humanitarians in International Practice: Emerging Actors and Contested Principles, edited by Zeynep Sezgin and Dennis Dijkzeul. London: Routledge. Sucuog˘ lu, Gizem, and Sazak Onur. 2016. ‘The New Kid on the Block: Turkey’s Shifting Approaches to Peacebuilding.’ Rising Powers Quarterly 2(1): 69–91. Tas¸pınar, Ömer. 2008. ‘Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism.’ Carnegie, 7 October. Accessed 17 July 2014. http://carnegieendo ment.org/2008/10/07/turkey-s-middle-east-poli . cies-between-neo-ottomanism-and-kemalism TIKA. 2018. Turkish Development Assistance 2016. http://www.tika.gov.tr/upload/2018/Turkish% 20Development%20Assistance%20Report%202016/Turkish%20Development%20Assistance%20Report %202016.pdf Tol, Gönül. 2012. ‘The ‘Turkish Model’ in the Middle East.’ Middle East Institute, 14 December. Accessed 19 August 2014. http://www.mei.edu/content/’turkish-model’-middle-east-0 Turkish Foreign Ministry. 2014a. http://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-united-nations-organization-and-turkey.en.mfa

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38 CONCLUSION Alpaslan Özerdem and Matthew Whiting

Whenever Turkish politics are discussed, whether this is by scholars, the media, politicians or civil society actors across the world, there is often a tendency to frame them in a simplistic, reductionist, and orientalist manner. Such a tendency is simplistic because it often fails to contextualise Turkish politics in a long-term perspective without fully appreciating conjunctions between different political actors, dynamics, processes, and issues. For example, trying to explain the Kurdish crisis from a solely security perspective or seeing AKP policies and what they mean for different societal groups in a historical vacuum could only provide a very limited understanding. It is reductionist because such discussions are often based on convenient binaries of Kurds vs. Turks, Sunnis vs. Alevis, Secularists vs. Islamists, and the East vs. the West. Although such socio-political fault lines are important to recognise, they include constellations of different interests and agendas based on much wider socio-economic, political, and demographic characteristics. Finally, it is orientalist, because for many commentators in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world, Turkey represents ‘the Other’ for cultural, religious, and historical reasons. Discussions over Turkey, Turkish people, and Turkish culture are often coupled with strong orientalist stereotypes; for example, foreign policy commentators reporting after a general election in the country often bring their conclusions to the tired question of whether Turkey would need to make a strategic choice between the Western world and its Islamic heritage. However, an effective understanding of Turkish politics requires more than a mere bird’s-eye view and therefore, we decided to prepare this Handbook. With such challenges in mind we tasked our contributors to focus on their particular topics from a much wider historical and contextual perspective in their respective chapters. Knowing how difficult this would be within the word limits of a Handbook chapter, we think that our contributors have done a great job and therefore rather than repeating what they have already written on each issue in a concise and in-depth manner, we will only be presenting some of the recurring themes from them in this Conclusion. In addition, as each contributor was also asked to come up with some future trajectories on their respective topics, we also summarise these in terms of the six main parts that form this Handbook.

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History matters AKP rule over the last 16 years might be a convenient entry point in order to understand contemporary Turkish politics, but as all contributors have done in this Handbook, such contemporary issues can only be understood by tracing their roots through a historical perspective. Some of our chapters needed to take this tracing to as early as the Ottoman Empire, because some issues concerned with the overall characteristics of Turkish political system, such as justice, economy, rights framework and foreign policy, are deeply rooted in the pre-Republican era systems and dynamics. In other words, to understand today’s politics in the country, whether they are over energy, the environment or women’s rights, a careful tracing starting from the founding of the Republic in 1923 to the present needed to be undertaken, incorporating such important milestones and critical periods as the start of multi-party life in the 1950s, the Cold War years, the impact of a number of coup d’états, the post-1980 economic liberalisation period, the EU membership process, and the arrival of mildly Islamic AKP rule in 2002. Therefore, any attempt to understand what is happening in Turkey today could only become meaningful and effective if connected with what has happened and why. Each chapter pointed out that current political trends have not occurred in a vacuum and, needless to say, to change them would require to deal with such deep-rooted socio-political and cultural realities and consequences of such historical developments. Put simply, for example, Turkey’s contemporary democratic deficiencies are not solely created by the AKP. A dominant party rule of nearly two decades obviously should take its share of responsibility in such a reality, but what Turkey is today, is a result of a long history.

Turkey cannot be reduced to any one single dynamic Whenever Turkish politicians face criticism over a domestic or foreign policy issue, they often resort to the excuse of how complex such issues are in the context of Turkey, which is often expressed by the well-trotted response of ‘Turkey is not a Scandinavian country’! Whether political issues are simple in any country is obviously debatable, but there is some truth to this too. As the chapters in this Handbook have shown, any attempts to make single-dynamic-based causal relationships or create overly simplified binaries to explain Turkish politics remain as futile exercises. There are so many internal and external dynamics that often happen in a rapid fluidity in Turkey that a well-grounded understanding of them requires the adaptation of a comprehensive approach. A wide range of complexities with security, governance, economic and societal challenges faced by contemporary Turkey means that when analysing Turkish politics, divisions in the realms of religion, ethnicity, class, and political views should be reinforced and interacted with each other to explain the changing outcomes we see today. For example, let’s take a single issue such as Turkey’s relations with its neighbour, Syria. To do this effectively, a number of different dynamics such as internal security concerns over the spread of Islamic radicalisation from the Syrian war, the possible emergence of a Kurdish state in Northern Syria in relation to Turkey’s own Kurdish insurgency, and political implications over hosting nearly 4 million Syrian refugees and how the EU deals with such a crisis vis-à-vis the country’s membership aspirations should all be addressed. Turkey and Turkish politics are indeed complex and therefore, there is a need for looking at Turkish politics in the framework of constellations rather than binaries. 482

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Turkey is not a model and needs no model Another emerging theme from this Handbook is in regard to the uniqueness of Turkey in terms of its geopolitics, history, socio-economic characteristics, and cultural heritage. Therefore, any attempt to develop a particular modality for other countries based on lessons learned from the Turkish experience would likely fail, because whether it is Turkey’s state–civil society, state–private sector or civil–military relations, the politics of Turkey are shaped by Turkey’s very own realities. After a long-lasting imperial experience, Turkey has been dealing with the legacy of its own past. It may have been founded on the basis of Atatürk’s famous motto of ‘Peace at home, Peace in the world’, but on both fronts the country has been struggling. From the baseline of a totally devastated post-World War I country of the 1920s, what Turkey has achieved has in fact been hugely remarkable in relative terms. Despite its many shortcomings in governance and development, even the way the country always takes rich Western countries as its main comparators is a significant indicator of what Turkey would like to become. However, as our chapters strongly pointed out, Turkey needs to come up with its own tailor-made responses to such challenges. In fact, Turkey does well whenever it adopts such home-grown strategies or adopts socio-economic and political modalities according its own realities. To do this though, Turkish politics need a democratic environment. Whenever Turkey improved its democracy in the past, as the chapters underlined, there were also significant improvements in its human security and development environment. However, in an almost cyclical way every 10–15 years, its democracy faces a period of regression, eradicating to some extent the benefits of such newly gained improvements. The last 16 years of AKP rule have already experienced both trends, and almost all chapters agreed that with the current political dynamics in mind, the next Spring for democracy might be a while yet.

Turkey is not ‘changing’ but ‘changed’ Over the last couple of decades, much has been written on political, economic, and sociocultural changes in Turkey. In the Turkish context, the process of change has in fact, seemed to be the only constant reality throughout its 95-year history as a Republic. However, what has happened under the AKP government in the last 17 years particularly would have no comparison with the changes experienced in the previous 60 years. The 1920s and 1930s of Turkey under the revolutionary changes introduced by Atatürk is probably the only period during which the country experienced such tectonic changes. Since 2002, from the EU membership and related governance reforms perspective, a changing Turkey was perceived positively, which was hoped to push the country to become more democratic and prosperous. On the other hand, from the perspective of the failed peace process and Kurdish crisis, that process of change has not heralded a peaceful future. Meanwhile, from the perspective of the post-Gezi context and the increasingly authoritarian rule of the AKP, there have been many concerns over where that process of change is leading the country’s governance, rule of law, secularism, and economic system. However, as the Handbook has underlined, rather than considering Turkey as ‘changing’ it would perhaps be more appropriate now to accept that today’s Turkey is a significantly different place than that which was founded in the early 1920s. Turkey has changed quite drastically under the rule of Erdog˘ an, so much so that the AKPs recent slogan of ‘New Turkey’ is in fact, a well-deserved one. Whether that ‘new’ Turkey is a better place to live for all of its different population groups is certainly debatable, as the majority of our chapters raised significant concerns over Turkey’s future security, political and socio-economic trajectories. Under the presidential system that has become fully 483

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operational with the elections of 24 June 2018, Erdog˘ an has now been given so much power without any proper means of checks and balances that it is almost impossible to predict where the country would be going next in terms of its domestic politics and foreign policy priorities. The chapters were particularly concerned with the way that Turkey has been changing or changed so rapidly without any proper due diligence that control over how Turkey would need to change in the future may have already been lost, even by those who are in power. Next, this chapter will highlight some of the main trajectories put forward by our contributors using the six main parts of this book as the overall structure.

History and the making of contemporary Turkey Identity-based politics in Turkey, like Foucault’s pendulum, keeps coming back, as Samim Akgönül and Baskın Oran pointed out in Chapter 1 (‘Turkish Politics: Structures and Dynamics’) and overall, the chapter states that the experience seems to be no more than the legitimisation of the Muslim Turk. Furthermore, they predict that identity will continue to form the main axis of Turkish politics in the foreseeable future. . For the question of where that pendulum will be for democracy in the near future, Ilter Turan in Chapter 2 (‘Turkey’s Never-Ending Search for Democracy’) presented two possible scenarios. The optimistic one is based on factors such as all segments of society becoming part of national politics, economic performance being a key issue in making a choice at the ballot box, and despite their shortcomings, all those institutions expected in a democracy being in place in Turkey, and therefore, the pendulum will likely swing in a democratic direction. However, according to Turan’s pessimistic scenario, the current authoritarian environment is such that without any meaningful checks and balances, the negative changes in democracy will be irreversible. With that the search for democracy will continue, and he questions whether the pendulum of democracy will, in fact, continue to swing any more. In Chapter 3 (‘Turkish Secularism: Looking Forward and Beyond the West’), Murat Somer sees the continuation of a highly sensitive and polarising debate over secularism in Turkey. On the one hand, the vilification of secularism in contemporary Turkish politics is likely to remain one of the cornerstones of AKP rule, but on the other hand, he recommends that this debate should be more on its reform and democratisation aspects and pay more attention to what it means intellectually and spiritually. In relation to secularism, on a wide range of political Islam-related issues such as the Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs) and cemaats (Islamic brotherhoods), Kristin Fabbe and Efe Murat Balıkçıog˘ lu in Chapter 4 (‘Political Islam’) pointed out how political Islam has developed as a statist phenomenon in the country with close-woven relations with the political elite including secularists. With the contemporary emergency of a new blend of Islamism and statist-nationalism, they expect that there will be further consolidation of state authority vis-à-vis cemaats, and how the Diyanet will be shaped further in this context and become even more active as a state organ in domestic politics and foreign policy should be closely monitored. As is the case with identity, democracy, secularism, and political Islam, nationalism has always been an integral part of the debate in the making of contemporary Turkey too. Durukan Kuzu in Chapter 5 (‘The Politics of Turkish Nationalism: Continuity and Change’) sees religion becoming even more dominant in the discourse and policy-making of nationalism, while those who would like it to be based on other values such as progressive secularism, constitutionalism, and liberalism might need to wait for a long time. 484

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Politics and institutions In Chapter 6 (‘Elections, Parties, and the Party System’), Ersin Kalaycıog˘ lu drew a rather pessimistic view over the future of the Turkish party system. From its foundations in the 1920s to the present, the country’s political regime experienced both majoritarian and pluralist systems, but the current political trends are such that the predominant party system that has been very much the case from the 1950s onwards is now moving towards a hegemonic one-party system in which free and fair elections will not exist and the opposition will not have a credible expectation to come to power. With such a wider political framework in mind, according to Çınar and S¸entürk in Chapter 7 (‘The Presidency in Turkish Politics: From Independence to the AKP’), the recent introduction of the Presidential system with widespread executive powers means that the game changer will be all about a balance of power that would produce that extra margin over 50 per cent to win the elections, no matter how small that margin might be. This will likely inform the way party politics are carried out in the future, and rather than producing ‘bold and fast’ decisions for the mounting problems of the country, as promised by Erdog˘ an, winning the Presidency might be held hostage by smaller parties with more radical agendas. As well as the judiciary, another significant institution in the Turkish politics has always been the military, at least until recent times. As explained by Metin Heper in Chapter 8 (‘Civil–Military Relations’), one of the main drivers of Erdog˘ an’s democratisation openings in the early years of his power was all about bringing the military under civilian control, which was very much coupled with EU membership related reforms at the time. To a large extent, this seemed to be happening until the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016, but with the purge that has been taking place in its aftermath it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the military is now truly subordinate to the civilian actor. However, it is also debatable that being under political party control does not necessarily mean being under civilian control, and therefore, as Heper reminds us, the military may now perhaps start to internalise civilian norms and values as well as being under the civilian control. When it comes to NGOs in civil society, Markus Ketola in Chapter 9 (‘NGOs and Civil Society’) expects an increasing engagement of Islamic NGOs in the delivery of services and welfare programmes in areas such as family policy. In line with the AKP’s modus operandi along neoliberal Islamic conservative values, Islamic NGOs are not only likely to continue their engagement in the delivery of such programmes, but also to become agents supporting a moral economy based on patriarchal views of labour divisions and gender hierarchies. Finally, in Chapter 10 (‘The Media and Media Policy’), Eylem Yanardag˘ og˘ lu underlined the sad reality of the way that Turkey’s press freedom record has gradually declined under AKP rule, particularly since 2014. Future trends are very much in line with the current media environment in which a pro-AKP partisan media owned by pro-AKP business people act as agents to suppress the political opposition in the country.

The economy, environment, and development On the economy front, Ali Burak Güven in Chapter 11 (‘Political Economy’) presented a number of risks that the Turkish economy is likely to face in the near future. Although Turkey has already been considered as one of the most fragile emerging countries for a while now, he sees the likeliness of a financial crisis of the old sort as low, as this is the case for most emerging economies. However, unless characteristic structural risks for developing countries are tackled and the AKP’s ‘authoritarian neoliberal populism’ brand is drastically revised, then 485

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the best Turkey can expect, he points out, is persistent underperformance in which periodic downturns become the norm. To deal with such a prospect, he recommends a new broad-based policy coalition to be negotiated democratically, but in the current political environment under AKP rule that is certainly not a common currency! Meanwhile, energy being one of the main drivers of economy, Turkey’s future prospects in this area are based on the quest for diversification of its energy resources and reducing its dependence on Russian natural gas, according to Akın Ünver. In Chapter 12 (‘Energy Security and Policy’), he explored a number of possibilities on how Turkey could achieve this from the exploitation of its own shale gas sources to the adoption of an ‘aggressive exploration’ of oil in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. However, all of these options are likely to face significant financial challenges and could create serious security problems with neighbouring countries. A potential Qatar–Turkey gas pipeline would need to wait for the end of the war in Syria, and the aspirations of becoming a transit hub for natural gas pipelines from the east to Europe can be further dampened by Russia. When it comes to the environment, on the other hand, Ümit S¸ahin in Chapter 13 (‘The Politics of Environment and Climate Change’) explained that environmental action might have caused the Gezi protests of 2013 with widespread political ramifications, but environmental policies are not real game changers for political parties in Turkey. Environmental awareness is on the rise, especially when it comes to air pollution, GMOs, and the depletion of natural resources. However, such an awareness could be channelled as a conduit for political change if there was an integration of movements for the protection of the environment and democracy in the future. Many of these themes recurred in Stephen Karam’s contribution in Chapter 14 (‘The Economic Role of Cities’), which argued that promoting sustainable cities is a real challenge for middleincome countries like Turkey. He discusses some of the challenges facing policy-makers today when it comes to urbanisation and managing large cities and the domestic and global policy environment in which these challenges must be addressed. From a developmental perspective, Bahar Bas¸er in Chapter 15 (‘Governing the Diaspora(s) and the Limits of Diaspora Diplomacy’) pointed out that the transnationalisation of Turkey’s diaspora management has changed quite drastically under the AKP, as the diasporas are increasingly seen as an asset for exercising soft power in host countries and tapping their economic resources for the interests of the homeland. However, in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt such a diaspora policy has already become highly aggressive on a number of fronts, creating uncomfortable political realities for host countries. Considering the worsening trends of relations between Turkey and the EU, Turkey will urgently need to revise its diaspora management approach or otherwise, face damaging consequences for its diasporas. Like the diaspora management, disaster management is another cross-cutting issue that includes the realms of the economy, environment, and development, and in Chapter 16 (‘Disaster Management Policy and Governance’) Helena Hermansson and Naim Kapucu highlighted a number of shortcomings in Turkey’s disaster management system such as problems over the decentralisation of roles and responsibilities, and effective coordination of different stakeholders. The participation of civil society in disaster management is paramount, but in the current authoritarian political environment, this is increasingly difficult. Furthermore, in addition to an increasingly polarised and politicised disaster management context, the impact of the post-coup purge which included a high number of civil servants and qualified public administrators working in disaster management is certainly another . area of concern for the future. Considering that the likeliness of a 7.6 earthquake hitting Istanbul by 2030 is 65 per cent, such disaster management shortcomings are particularly worrying for the country. 486

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The Kurdish insurgency and security In Turkish politics, the Kurdish question is one of the most intractable issues, and in Chapter 17 (‘The Kurdish Question’), Zeynep Kaya and Matthew Whiting did not see an optimistic change in its resolution in the near future. With no sign of defeat or victory forthcoming for either side, and while PKK leaders fear that a decline in violence may be a direct threat to their very survival and influence, Turkey will likely experience more violence over its Kurdish insurgency in the mid-to-long term too. This is particularly evident considering that the likelihood of the state initiating any opportunity of dialogue within the regional context of the Syrian civil war is highly slim. Supporting this view, David Romano in Chapter 18 (‘The Kurdish Insurgency’) pointed out that one of the main impacts of the Kurdish insurgency has been its negative impact on the democratisation process of the country. The conflict has been used by the political elite as an excuse to crush any dissent, it has created a strong war economy, and serves the purpose of distracting popular attention away from the government’s transgressions and ineffectiveness. Hence, the conflict is likely to continue in the foreseeable future as long as it can be contained within the southeast part of the country dominated by the Kurdish minority. Cengiz Çandar explored the Kurdish insurgency question from the country’s failed peace processes perspective in Chapter 19 (‘The Perennial Kurdish Question and Failed Peace Processes’) and very much in line with the previous two chapters’ findings, he presented a rather bleak picture for its future. Political resolution will be almost impossible if there is not a major change with the main protagonists and a major paradigm shift that could only be caused by the arrival of an unpredicted game changer. Whether it is from the PKK, or a number of leftist or Islamist militant groups, Turkey faces a serious radicalisation and terrorism problem. However, the analysis of Gareth Jenkins in Chapter 20 (‘Terrorism, Counter-Insurgency, and Societal Relations’) showed that such security challenges will be worsening in the future, deepening the existing societal wounds further. One of the most critical actors in this context is the village guards employed by the state in the fight against the PKK with widespread socio-economic and political ramifications. Evren Balta in Chapter 21 (‘The Village Guard System: Counter-Insurgency and Local Collaboration’) presented the way that such a temporary paramilitary group has now become a permanent feature of the country’s security architecture. In fact, after the coup attempt of July 2016, one of the first things the AKP government did was to change their name from ‘temporary village guards’ to ‘security guards’, indicating that they are here to stay in forthcoming years too. Finally, as many contributors to this Handbook commented, the 15 July 2016 coup attempt has been one of the most significant turning points in Turkish politics, and Yaprak Gürsoy in Chapter 22 (‘The 15 July 2016 Failed Coup and the Security Sector’) investigated its impact on Turkey’s security sector. In fact, particularly since 2007, the security sector has been the main area of contestation between the AKP government, secularists, and Gülenists, and it seems that it will continue to occupy centre stage in both domestic politics and foreign policy.

State, society, and rights Between the human rights framework and the prevalent values of the Turkish political culture such as nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, and patriarchalism, Zehra Arat in Chapter 23 (‘Human Rights’) drew our attention to the shortcomings of the classical conceptualisation of human rights that places its emphasis on freedom from state repression. Such an approach fails to be fully meaningful for the majority as, to a large extent, it does not speak to their needs, resulting in the misinterpretation of human rights as a threat. This is probably one of the main obstacles for the protection and improvement of human rights in 487

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Turkey, as it seems to be failing to gain the ownership of the public in general. With the recent political changes and security context in mind, it will be even more difficult to reach out to the public for human rights improvements in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, it is also important to recognise that gender politics today occupy a central place within the Turkish political and cultural scene, according to Sevgi Adak in Chapter 24 (‘Gender Politics and the Women’s Movement’). This does not mean that women in Turkey do not still face significant socioeconomic, political and cultural challenges, and they have particular human rights vulnerabilities. On the other hand, as Adak pointed out, despite the repression of all other democratic forces under the current authoritarian environment, women’s movements continue to remain strong, indicating that for the future of Turkey, women are perhaps the only real hope left for the democratisation of Turkish politics. Due to extermination, assimilation, and folklorisation policies, Samim Akgönül in Chapter 25 (‘Religious Minorities’) identified the challenges faced by Turkey’s religious minorities from a historical perspective. For the future, he singled out the use of religiosity within Turkish society as a political tool by the AKP as the most significant threat for democracy. Although the religious minorities seem to be better treated today, the contemporary ultranationalist and ultra-Sunni discourses are likely to make them a target in times of crises. Meanwhile, for Alevis, the future will be more in terms of suspected Turks at best. In relation to the wider rights framework, another significant issue is education and religious education is one of the most contentious matters in this context, revealing itself on the two main fronts, as explained by Bekir Gür in Chapter 26 (‘Religious Education’): first, the rise in the . number of Imam-Hatip schools, particularly under AKP rule, and second, the content of what is taught in the mandatory course on religion and ethics at schools. On the latter, the European Court of Human Rights already ruled in 2014 that such a course offers no appropriate options for the children of parents who are not Sunni Muslims. However, no real move for exemption . from these classes has been made by the government. On the former issue, Imam-Hatip schools have been revived and their numbers continue to expand, despite the fact that they are not able to fill their full capacity. For such a contentious issue to be resolved effectively in the future would require an approach that meets the demands of different social groups. However, that will depend on Turkey’s future democratic credentials. On the health front, Enis Barıs¸ in Chapter 27 (‘Transformation of Health and Healthcare’) explained that the Turkish system is very much in the process of catching up with OECD countries. The equitable access to healthcare has also had a number of positive consequences for the population at large. In other words, Turkey seems to have been successful in transforming its healthcare for the better, according to Barıs¸, but it is also important to question the way that the pro-AKP business has been heavily investing in the healthcare system because of high profit margins provided by the government.

External relations Since the foundation of the Republic in 1923, Turkish foreign policy has not seen any remarkable changes until recent times, and these changes under the AKP have been informed by the country’s geopolitics, history, economy, and military capabilities, as explained by Mustafa Aydın in Chapter 28 (‘Foreign Policy, 1923–2018’). Aydın perceives the Kurdish issue to be one of the most influential issues for future foreign policy in the wider security framework, Turkey’s relations with NATO and Russia will need to be carefully balanced. Overall, he predicts that Turkey’s foreign policy will be dominated by its neighbourhood. For a turbulent global environment, Fuat Keyman in Chapter 29 (‘Resetting Turkish Foreign Policy in a Time of Global Turmoil’) investigated foreign policy’s future trajectories further. He pointed out that for global peace and stability, there is a need for a delicate global–regional 488

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partnership balance, and for its own region Turkey should be considered more than just a buffer zone by the US and the EU, as the country’s soft power could be very influential in responding to regional security concerns. A revitalisation of the EU membership process would likely act as an important enabling factor in such a process, and he underlines the need for Turkey to improve its democratic credentials and economy, and the need to anchor itself strongly with the US and the EU to be an influential actor globally. Focusing on such regional security and foreign policy issues further, Behlül Özkan investigated neighbourhood relationships in the context of the Middle East in Chapter 30 (‘Turkey and its Neighbours in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, and Syria’), underlining the reality of a severe impasse. Playing a significant role in the creation of such an impasse, as also pointed out in the previous two chapters, the Kurdish issue was considered to be a determining factor in the nature of Turkey’s relations with its Middle Eastern neighbours in the future. These neighbourhood relations will be informed by relations with other actors such as Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in the region, and vice versa. In terms of Turkey’s relations with global powers, our Handbook first focused on the US in Chapter 31 (‘US–Turkish Relations in Turmoil’) by Kemal Kiris¸ci. US–Turkish relations are currently going through a particularly difficult period and, if anything, both countries have never been so far from each other when it comes to global and regional security matters. Under the leadership of populist leaders like Trump and Erdog˘ an, it is hard to envisage how the relationship will be brought back to its traditional common security interests axis but Kiris¸ci points out that the collapse of such a partnership will be hugely damaging for both parties. To avoid this, as also pointed out by Keyman, the US and the EU will need to re-engage Turkey for the long term. Meanwhile, when it comes to relations with the other powerful actor, Russia, Pavel Baev pointed out in Chapter 32 (‘Turkey and Russia’) that their breakdown would lead to the escalation of a number of frozen conflicts in the region such as Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Kosovo. However, there are a number of fault lines that could negate Turkish–Russian relations such as Ukraine, the NATO policies in the Black Sea theatre, and Syria. In all of these, Turkey will need to have a careful balancing act vis-à-vis Russia and a number of other regional and global actors. In addition to the US and Russia, Turkey’s relations with the EU will no doubt continue to dominate the country’s foreign policy agenda in the future, as explained by Füsun Özerdem in Chapter 33 (‘Forgotten Promises and the Possibilities for Reviving Relations Between Turkey and the EU’). Both sides believing in the reciprocal benefits in membership will be the key factor in terms how this will progress. The currently halted membership process could be revived, but the successful resolution of the Cyprus problem or not will likely act as a key stimulus in this. The ‘privileged partnership’ option, which was initially rejected by Turkey, has now started to appear as a good option. Alternatively, while a full membership is currently a dream, depending on Turkey’s domestic politics trajectories, the total exclusion of the country from the EU’s partnership framework is also a possibility. Within these wider highly sensitive foreign policy constellations, Turkey’s protracted Cyprus problem, which was investigated by Birol Yes¸ilada in Chapter 34 (‘Turkey’s Cyprus Policy in Transition’), will continue to be one of the most significant issues in future Turkish foreign policy, because of its implications over EU–Turkey and EU–NATO relations in general. Amongst many, Yes¸ilada points out two particular issues that will likely to dominate Turkey’s Cyprus foreign policy as the future of Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus and the discovery and exploitation of recently discovered natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. As shown by current dynamics in the region, the latter is likely to have significant implications over relationships with Israel, Greece and Egypt too. Whether it is with the US, the EU or Russia, relations with NATO carry a particular significance for Turkey, and as explained by Müge Kınacıog˘ lu in Chapter 35 (‘Turkey–NATO Relations: Strategic Imperatives, Identity-Building, and Predicaments’), Turkey’s Muslim identity is critical for NATO’s collective security vision. However, at the same time, Turkey’s regional 489

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leadership aspirations with a focus on its Muslim identity have also had a significant negative impact on relations between these two actors. Moreover, Turkey’s relations with Russia will also likely continue to be a contentious issue for NATO, but Kınacıog˘ lu sees this as a more transactional issue. Considering that without Turkey, NATO would . turn into an all-Christian alliance and Turkey will remain an imperative partner because of its Incirlik base and for the organisation’s presence in the Black Sea vis-à-vis Russia, relations between NATO and Turkey are likely to be more comprehensive in the future. One of those areas will be the partnership framework around peacekeeping operations, and as presented by Haluk Karadag˘ in Chapter 36 (‘Turkey and UN Peacekeeping Missions’), Turkey has always been an active actor in the maintenance of global security. One of the main trends in the peacekeeping framework, Turkey has been opting for NATO-led missions rather than the ones led by the UN. Furthermore, in line with Turkey’s aspirations to become a global actor, peacekeeping operations will continue to occupy an important place in Turkey’s foreign policy agenda. Finally, another significant area that has been dominating the Turkish foreign policy agenda has been Turkey’s increasing engagement in the humanitarian and peacebuilding sectors globally, as explained by Alpaslan Özerdem in Chapter 37 (‘Turkey as an Emerging Global Humanitarian and Peacebuilding Actor’). Although, it is a relatively new actor in these sectors, Turkey has already created significant shockwaves in terms its generosity by hosting nearly 4 million Syrian refugees and comprehensive aid responses in faraway contexts like Somalia. What makes Turkey’s aid response distinctive is not necessarily the amount of funding provided but the way it is provided, which is much more tangible, hands-on, and visible on the ground. With its positive ramifications on domestic politics, Turkey under Erdog˘ an’s rule will likely to continue to extend its hand of assistance globally. With these trajectories identified by our contributors in this Handbook, the short- to mid-term future of Turkey seems rather bleak. On many fronts from politics to foreign policy, economy and societal relations, ‘New Turkey’ does not promise to become a land of democracy, security, equality, equity, and prosperity at any time soon. It is particularly paradoxical that those aspirations are very much the rhetoric of the political agenda used by President Erdog˘ an over the last 17 years, and despite significant failures in almost all of these realms, he still manages to win elections in Turkey. Since Atatürk, no political leader in Turkey has been so significant to run an overhaul change process single-handedly. Like most populist leaders, he has created such deep political and societal divisions in the country that his own ‘50 per cent’ of the population believes him no matter what he does – right or wrong. In the current Presidential system, he holds so much power without any significant checks and balances that he could act as he wishes and, very worryingly, even the electoral system would not be able to remove him from power now. Reading these lines, an average Erdog˘ an supporter would likely claim that all that has been written here is no more than a conspiracy against Turkey by external actors. In the current environment of Turkish politics, any criticism would be interpreted as a direct threat by those who are afraid of Turkey regaining its past greatness of the Ottoman era. For example, at the time of writing these conclusions, the currency rate of US dollar against Turkish Lira is at a historic high, and according to Erdog˘ an and his AKP-supporting media, this is simply an act of the international financial markets to punish him and Turkey for wanting to be ‘great’ again. This is hugely worrying! With its mounting socio-economic and political challenges, a context like this in Turkey is not likely to produce comprehensive, inclusive and innovative policy responses. With such a contemporary political context, Turkey will, unfortunately, continue to fail in its aspirations of greatness. As a last word of reminder, Turkey is in fact already a great country with its history, geography, cultures, peoples, and the dynamism of its young people, but what it needs is a visionary political leadership that believes in it becoming an advanced democracy.

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Please note that references to Notes are indicated by the letter ‘n’ followed by the Note number. References to Tables are in bold. Abdülh.amid II, Sultan 74, 115 ‘Academics for Peace’ 308 Accession Partnership (2003) 305, 427 Acquis Communautaire 305–306 Adak, S. 488 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi see Justice and Development Party (AKP) Advisory Committee for Turkish Citizens Living Abroad 206, 208 AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency) 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 224 Afghanistan: Afghan Military High School 464; International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 464; and NATO 451, 455; Soviet aggression 402 Africa 192, 468, 471, 473, 476–478; Horn of Africa 478; North Africa 473; Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 460; South Africa 258, 260, 460n2 African National Congress 260 air strikes 396, 418, 419 Akan, M. 49 Akar, H. 122, 289 Akar, S. 165 Akarca, A. T. 93 Akbulut, Y. 277 Akçura, Y. 70 Âkif, M. 56–58 Akıncı, M. 438 Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) 168 AKP governments 48, 50, 76, 107, 121; and democracy 32, 34; and media 141–144; NGOs and civil society 126, 132–134; see also Justice and Development Party (AKP) Akritas Plan 435

Aksel, D. B. 204 Aksoy, M. 394 Aktürk, S. 166 Akyol, M. 110 Albayrak, B. 167, 417 Albayrak media group 142 Alevis/Alevism (religious minority group) 23, 26, 47, 95, 235, 267, 346, 481, 488; human rights 300, 302; identity 273, 334; lack of recognition 334–335; and religious minorities 329, 334, 337; terrorism and societal relations 267, 270, 271n11, 273; and Turkish nationalism 73, 76 Aliyev, I. 416 Alpaslan, O. 236 alphabet, Arabic-based 45 Altınay, G. 165 Altınordu, A. 64 Amargi Women’s Corporation 323 AMISOM (UN Security Mission) 474 ANAP see Motherland Party (ANAP) Anarchy 20 Anastasiades, N. 438 Anatolia 15, 18, 56n3, 154; Anatolian Tigers 191; city roots 192; eastern 73, 192, 214, 447; elections and party system 91, 92; Marmara Region 193, 197; northern 214; Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) 164, 165, 168–171, 416; and Turkish nationalism 71, 73; urban planning trends 193 Anatolian Village Guards and Families of Martyrs Confederation 280 Anavatan see Motherland Party (ANAP) Ankara, city of 289, 402, 441; AFAD headquarters 219; African Embassies in 473;

491

Index Ankara-Erbil relationship 170; attacks on 143n7, 231, 289, 399; bomb attack of 2016 143n7; foreign policy 21, 394; Great National Assembly 13; and Iraq 396; and Istanbul 111, 290, 399; Kurds in 235, 242, 245, 246, 249–251, 256, 397; mayors 157; and Middle East 393; and Montreux Convention 414; NATO membership 446, 453–455; Parliament 103; Partnership Agreement (Ankara Agreement), 1963 425–429, 432, 433; and PKK 247, 248, 391; policy-makers 152; population 193; rebellions 267, 288; relations with US and the West 393, 396, 404, 406, 419; and Russia 414, 415–419, 421, 422; and Syria 397–398; and Tehran 395; territorial claims 392; Third Republic 21, 23; transport 199; University 117, 340, 341; War of Independence Museum 243 Annan Plan 438, 440 Antakya Jewish community 332 anti-imperialism 184 anti-Islamic measures 17 anti-Semitism 333 Anti-Terror Law (1991) 258, 304 apprivoisement (domestication of the Islamic religion) 17 arabesk (urban underclass music) 20n8 Arabic-speaking Orthodox Greek community of Antioch 331 Arab nationalism 398; see also Kurdish nationalism; nationalism/nation Arab Spring (2011) 7, 8, 383, 406, 473; and Egypt 380, 386; and foreign policy 373, 375, 379, 380, 385, 386; and Russia 416, 420 Arab states see Iran; Iraq; Lebanon; Saudi Arabia; Syria Aras, B. 166 armed forces 72, 278, 281, 341, 416, 463; autonomy of 292; civil-military relations 116, 119; failed military coup (2016) 289–292; village-guard system 284–287 Armed Forces Internal Service Law (1935) 116 Armenian minority 16, 70, 234, 331–332 Arsel, M. 185 Arvâsî, A. 59 Ashkenazi Jews 332 Assad, Bashar al- 273, 397 Assad, H. 397 assimilation of religious minorities 17, 300; Alevis 337; Cyprus 442; forced 73, 76, 246; Kurds 235, 242n1, 243, 337; non-Turkish speaking Muslims 336; resistance against 16, 73; see also Kurds/Kurdish people (Iranian ethnic group); religious minorities Association for Kemalist Thought (ADD) 131 Association for Protecting Women 316 Association for Support of Women Candidates 317 Association for the Fight Against Communism 59

Association for the Struggle Against Communism (KMD) 267 Association for the Support of Modern Life (CYDD) 131 Association for Women’s Solidarity 316 Association of Turkish. Industrialists and Businessmen (TÜSIAD) 342 asylum seekers 205; see also refugees, Syria asymmetric competition 32 Atalay, B. 262 Atatürk, M.K. 1–3, 5, 13–15, 19, 44, 142, 192, 238, 267, 288, 301, 342, 375, 389, 393, 404, 459, 483, 490; civil-military relations 115–117; death (1938) 74; and elections/party system 84, 85; and foreign policy 369; and NATO 454; NGOs and civil society 128, 129; peace motto 369, 459, 483; and Political Islam 56, 63; and presidency 103, 111; principles 117, 129; reforms 19n7, 45, 46, 56–59, 61, 72, 115, 392; and Turkish nationalism 70–72, 74, 77; and Turkish relationship with NATO 446, 454 Atlantic Alliance 442 Atomstroyexport (Russian energy company) 164 Austria 164, 204, 429n13, 430n15, 431 authoritarianism 64, 134, 177; electoral, rise of 34–35; NGOs and civil society 134–135; Russian-Turkish relations 415, 419–420 autochthonous people 16, 332 autonomy 33, 56, 118, 140, 154, 274, 277; armed forces 292; bureaucratic 158; democratic 244, 249, 269, 271; energy 170; hospitals 291, 352; and human rights 300; Kurds 234, 237, 239, 243, 249; Orthodox Greek minority 331; regional 263; regulatory agencies 157; schools 347; territorial 328; TRT 139; universities 303 Autoregressive-Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) 165 Aydin, N. 336 Aydin, Y. 209 Azerbaijan 169–170 Baba, A. 166 Baghdad Pact (1955) 370, 393 Bag˘ ıs¸, E. 429 Bahçeli, D. 111, 112 Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Natural Gas Pipeline Project 164, 402–403 Balat, H. 166 Bali, R. 333n6 Balibar, Etienne 18 Balkan Pact (1953) 370 Balkan Wars (1912–13) 70 ballistic missiles 405, 406 . Baluken, I 264 Bandung Conference (1955) 370 Barıs¸, K. 166

492

Index Barıs¸ ve Demokrasi Partisi see Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Barnett, T. 442 Barzani, M. 393, 396 Bas¸bug˘ , I. 120, 122 Bas¸er, B. 486 Bas¸er, H. E. 122 Batuman, B. 178, 199 Bayar, C. 19, 104, 117 Bayık, C 231 BDP see Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Beck, U. 378 Bellamy, A. J. 460 Bergama gold mine/movement 179, 183–184 Berkes, N., The Development of Socialism in Turkey 44, 49 Berlinerblau, J. 50 Berlin Wall, fall of 471 Bhargava, R. 50 Bilgiç, A. 166 Bilgin, P. 166 Bingöl earthquake (2003) 202 Blue Stream pipeline 416 Board of Higher Education (YÖK) 303, 341, 342, 344; see also universities Bonn Agreement (2002) 471 Bookchin, M. 269 Bora, T. 57 Bosnia-Herzegovina: humanitarian crisis 471; UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) 461 bourgeoisie: conservative 5; contradictory 21; industrial 152; metropolitan 159; new 21; secular 21; Turkish 243n3 Bourgiba, H. B. A. 45 Bozarslan, H. 18, 72, 234, 305, 310 Bozkurt, U. 157, 408n16 bribery 35 broadcasting 139, 140, 303; see also media Brunissen, P. 336 Brussels Summit (2004) 255, 428 Brzezinski, Z. 378; Grand Chessboard 379 Bug˘ ra, A. 134 Build–Operate–Transfer (BOT) 163 Build–Own–Operate (BOO) 163 bureaucracy: bureaucratic autonomy 158; bureaucratic oligarchy 107; foreign policy 374; military-bureaucratic ruling class 31, 32; religion as a bureaucratic apparatus 56–58 Büynohutçu, A. 184 Büyükanıt, Y. 122 Büyük Dog˘u (Great East). 59 çag˘ das¸las¸ma (changes affecting temporal realm) 49 Çakır, R. 61, 145 calendar 45 Çalik media group 142

Caliphate, abolition (1924) 17, 45, 243, 392; and Political Islam 57, 58; and Turkish nationalism 70–72 Canal Istanbul 180 Çandar, C. 487 Canefe, N. 69, 70 capital: bank capital base 197; capital goods 153; capital investment programmes 196; external 153; financial 21, 357, 381; foreign-capital dependence 153, 155, 158, 159, 161; Gulf 400; human 159, 160; liberal 5; ‘Muslim’ 5; political 22, 251; raising 358; social 216; stock 177; tax on 333; Western 417 capital account liberalisation 153 Capital City Women’s Platform 319 capitalism 13, 25, 185; global 61, 151; liberal 4, 5, 302; market 94; new 158 capital punishment 301, 305 Capotorti, F. 328 Çarkog˘ lu, A. 94 Çelik, N. 132 Çeliktas¸, M. 166 Cemaatı , K. (Furkan Vakfi) 65 Cem Foundation 334 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) 30, 153, 427 Central Asian Turkic Republics 166 Central Bank 152, 154 centralisation policies 219, 220 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) 393 Charter of the United Nations 447, 450, 460 CHP see Republican People’s Party (CHP) Christianity 40, 61, 83, 234, 336, 430n15; Assyro-Chaldean Christians 335; NATO as all-Christian alliance 456, 490; Ottoman Empire 69; propaganda 336; and Turkish nationalism 69–71 Çiller, T. 62, 119, 332, 342 cities: administrative changes to legal framework 194; Anatolian city roots 192; in current period 194–199; Development and Zoning Law No. 6785 193; Development Law No. 3194 193; disaster risk 197–198; early settlement patterns and modernisation period 192–194; economic role 190–201; financing of 196–197; gecekondus (slums) 191–192; and Gezi Park protests (2013), Istanbul 198; incremental planning 193; Integrated Urban Development Strategy and Action Plan (KENTGES) 195, 197, 200; Metropolitan Municipality Law No. 6360 194, 196; municipal services 195–196; Tenth National Development Plan (2014–2018) 195, 200; transport, in Ankara 199; Turkey and urbanisation 191–192; urban economics and urban planning nexus 198–199; urban planning trends 192–193; urban transformation initiative 159; see also industrialisation; urbanisation

493

Index citizenship 71, 286, 345; diaspora policy 204, 206, 208; good and bad citizens 204; Hellenic citizens 330; see also diaspora policy; refugees, Syria Civil Code, and Penal Code 130 civilians 75, 123, 124, 245, 396, 430, 468; and failed coup of 2016 284, 285, 288, 289; fatalities 254, 382; forced displacement 388; human rights 301; targeting 245, 246; and village-guards 275, 276, 281 civil-military relations 7, 115–125; activism 116; normalisation 121–124; reforms 284; secondary role 115–116; see also military, the; military coups d’état; military interventions; military juntas civil society 5, 15, 20, 28, 111, 115, 134, 216, 285; activism 127, 128, 130, 135; actors 129, 481; campaigns 179; ‘Civil Society Dialogue’ 130; conservative infrastructure 134; defining 127; ‘deodorised’ 130; development 126, 127–129, 427; disaster management 486; funding 130; independence 127; initiatives 180; Islamist groups 1, 62, 132; ‘official’ 129; pluralist 133; secularism 132; state–civil society relations 127, 131, 132, 483; Turkish 126, 128–130, 132, 135, 319, 403; weak 32; see also civil society organisations (CSOs); NGOs and civil society civil society organisations (CSOs) 99, 127, 128, 292, 322, 382–384; diaspora policy 203, 205, 211; human rights 302, 303; left-wing 93 Claes, W. 451 Clean Air Right Platform (THHP) 184 climate change and environment 177–189; anti-mining movements 179, 183–184; construction and megaprojects, development bound to 180–181; current debates and challenges 180–185; emissions trading 185; Global Climate Fund (GCF) 178; Green Party 178–179; Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) 178; Kyoto Protocol 178, 179, 185; Law on Conservation of Nature and Biodiversity 185; Paris Agreement 177, 184; recent decline of environmental protection 181–183; State Procurement Law 182–183; Turkish policies, history 178–180; UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratification by Turkey 179 Clinton, B. 403 coalitions 24, 35, 140, 264, 302, 381, 419, 437, 452, 460, 486; AKP–MHP 65, 111; anti-Iranian 419; broad-based 160, 299, 310, 486; civil-military relations 118, 119; coalition or blackmail potential 86, 92; elections and party system 93, 94, 96–98; electoral 159; Erbakan, involvement of 28, 61; military 396, 406; nationalist 264, 409; political economy 151–154, 159, 160; and presidency 105, 106, 110; religious education 341, 342; unstable or weak 62, 99, 111, 352, 371; US-led 454, 461

Çolak, S. Z. 289 Cold War 74, 267, 302, 414, 461, 482; and Cyprus 438, 439; end of 8, 94, 253, 367, 371–372, 375, 440, 446, 449, 463, 466, 467, 470, 471; foreign policy 367, 370, 371–372, 373, 440; and NATO 446, 448, 452; Turkish relations with US 402, 409; see also post-Cold War era collective defence/security 446, 449–450, 455 Combat Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) 449 Commission on Human Rights 303 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 19, 56, 84n1, 234, 264, 331 Commonwealth Fund 349n3 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 414 communism 13, 61, 74, 310, 341, 447, 461; Association for the Fight Against Communism 59; Association for the Struggle Against Communism (KMD) 267; peacekeeping operations 459, 461 Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) 271 Confederation. of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK) 19, 128, 322 Confederation . of Turkish Trade Unions (TÜRK-I¸s) 128 conflict resolution 254, 255, 257 conservatism, Islamic 5, 76, 485; of AKP 96, 98; fiscal 155; gender politics 316, 319, 322; modernisation 316; NGOs and civil society 133, 135; Sunni Islam 96, 98, 210, 267, 441 Constantinople: conquest of (1453 onwards) 328; ‘Ecumenical Patriarchate’ 330 Constitution, Iraqi 165, 170 Constitution, Turkish 28, 71, 140, 163, 346; of 1924 30, 71, 103, 300; of 1961 28, 85, 86, 97, 104, 139, 301–302, 370; of 1982 45, 93, 94, 118–119, 303, 311, 341, 346, 463, 466; amendments see constitutional amendments; articles 45, 71, 163; elections and party system 84, 95, 96; implementation of 1961 Constitution 301–302; Ottoman Empire 84; preamble to 1961 Constitution 301; and secularism 43n8, 45 constitutional amendments 23, 97, 140, 320, 436; and human rights 304, 305, 308; and Presidency 104, 105, 111 Constitutional Court 28, 34, 62, 93, 117, 141, 248; and presidency 104, 106, 111; and religious education 343, 344 Consultation Commission for Citizens Living Abroad 206 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 303, 304; ratification by Turkey 317 Copenhagen Criteria 427

494

Index corruption 25, 286; anti-corruption measures 154, 155; and human rights 301, 309; and Political Islam 62, 64; scandals 143, 144 Cos¸ar, S. 319 Council of Europe 193, 299, 320 Council of Judges and Prosecutors 111 Council of Ministers 93, 119, 279, 428; Accession Partnership, adoption of 305 Council of State 163 Council on National Security 28 Counter Terrorism Department, national police 272 coups d’état see military coups d’état Court of Accounts 158 Credit Guarantee Fund 159 Crimea, annexation by Russia (2014) 417 Crimean War (1853–1856) 414 critical junctures 132–133 Croats 329n2 CSOs see civil society organisations (CSOs) Cuban Missile crisis (1962) 402, 452 cultural difference 16 Cumhuriyetçi Köylü Milet Partisi see Republicanist Peasant National party (CKMP) Cumhurriyet Halk Partisi see Republican People’s Party (CHP) customs union, EU 159 Cyprus 370, 427, 428, 438–442, 440n10, 489; Annan Plan 438, 440; Enosis, Greek nationalist aim of 435, 439; Greek Cypriots 435, 436, 440, 442; Northern Cyprus 418, 438, 441, 442; Treaty (1960) 427; Turkish Cypriots 437, 438, 439, 440; Turkish policy in transition 435–445; Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) 441, 442 Davison, A. 47 Davutog˘ lu, A. (Foreign Minister) 63, 166, 440n9, 472; foreign policy 374, 375, 387; and presidency 109, 110; resignation 375; Strategic Depth 398; Turkish relationship with Middle Eastern neighbours 391, 398, 399; Turkish relationship with Russia 418, 420; ‘zero problem with neighbours’ doctrine 472 death penalty 301, 305 decentralisation 218–220, 223 Délano, A. 203 Demirel, B. 20n8 Demirel, S. 60, 94, 105, 302, 436 Demirtas¸, S. 238, 262, 264 democracy, Turkish 35–36; democratic autonomy 244, 249, 269, 271; democratic deficit of Turkey 262–263; freedom of association 28; freedom of expression 29; freedom of religion 301, 304, 427; impediments to the well-functioning and consolidation of 30; intra-party 33; and Islam 22, 404; limited role of courts in preservation of

individual liberties 30; multi-party 46, 74, 85, 94, 104; narrow scope of democratic liberties 28–29; pendular, variable geometry democracy in Turkey 27–30, 36; principles 106, 109, 285, 286, 448; rationalistic 116; secularism 37, 38, 49, 63, 129, 339, 384; socio-economic change democratising society 32–34; state-led modernisation 30–32; tendency to limit scope of politics 29; undermining by AKP 63–64; see also Democratic Left Party (DSP); Democratic Society Party (DTP); Democrat Party (DP); People’s Democracy Party (HDP) Democratic Left Party (DSP) 94 Democratic Party (DP) 15, 27, 48, 104, 117, 139, 152, 235, 301, 316, 333, 340, 393; elections and party system 85, 98; and Kurdish question 235–236; and Political Islam 59, 74 Democratic Republic of Congo 468 Democratic Society Party (DTP) 77, 249 Demokratik Toplum Partisi see Democratic Society Party (DTP) Demokrat Parti see Democrat Party (DP) Dersim massacres (1937–1938) 17, 73, 235, 243, 267 Dervis¸ K. 154 Devrimci Halk Kurtulus¸ Partisi-Cephesi see Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP–C) Devrimci Sol see Revolutionary Left (Dev Sol) Dhimmis (protected group) 333, 337 DHKP–C see Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP–C) Diaspora Franchise Platform 209 diaspora policy 202–213, 486; entrepreneurs 209; and foreign policy 205, 207; Kurdish 236, 246–247; new, under the AKP 207–211; proactive engagement 204–207; trajectories 203–204 diaspora politics 6 Dicle, A. 256 Dink, Hrant 331 Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) 17–18, 25, 300, 484; diaspora policy 205, 206, 209–211; gender politics 322, 323; Ministry of Sharia and Foundations as 45; and Political Islam 65; and political Islam 57, 61; and secularism 45–48, 50; and Turkish nationalism 71, 72 disaster management 214–227; AFAD (Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency) 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 224; centralisation policy 219, 220; challenges 222–223; collaboration for effective response 220–222; decentralisation policy 218–220, 223; earthquakes 197, 202, 214, 215, 217–223; experiences of disaster and formative ‘good practice’ 215–218; fault lines 214; governance dynamics in early 2000s 218; Hyogo Framework for Action 215;

495

Index international risk reduction community 216; Law on Urban Transformation of Disaster Risk Areas, No. 6306 (2012) 197; managed disasters 216; regulations and legislation 214–215; risk in Turkish cities 197–198; search and rescue (SAR) 217, 220, 221; Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 215 Dıs¸ Mihraklar (foreign evil forces) 17 Diyanet see Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) Diyarbakır 167, 236, 247, 248, 255, 259, 261, 272n16; Barzani’s visit to (2013) 396; Village Guards Aid and Solidarity Association founded in 280; Women’s Centre founded in 318n8 Dog˘ an Media Group 144 Dog˘ruyol Partisi see True Path Party (DYP) Dorrian, J. 456 Early Republican Period 38 earthquakes 197, 202, 214, 215, 220–223, 224; Bingöl earthquake (2003) 202; decentralisation policy 218–219, 223; Ercis¸ earthquake (2011) 219, 220, 222; and new disaster management system 218–223; reforms 217–218; Van earthquake (2011) 218–219, 220, 221, 222; Varto earthquake (1966) 202; see also disaster management Eastern Europe 332, 371; Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) 30, 129, 153, 427; South-Eastern Europe 416, 417 Eastern Thrace, Jewish community of 333 Ecevit, B. 22, 61, 92, 94, 95n21, 305, 437 economy, Turkish 94, 181, 190, 372, 389, 408n16, 485; economic elites 133, 157; economic policy regimes 151; energy 416; EU trade 417; growth 33, 155, 158, 160; integrating with global economy 32–33, 303, 372; liberalisation 9, 139; middle-income trap 151; neoliberal restructuring 131; and political economy 160, 161; risks 485; and rule of law 408; semi-peripheral 160–161; structure 153, 155 Edib, E. 56, 58, 59 Ediger, V. 165 education/schools: education system and religion, modern Turkey 339–340; gender politics 323; Law of the Unification of Education (1924) 339; NGOs and civil society 128; promotion of Islam 61, 64, 270, 341, 345, 441; secularism 45, 46, 339, 340, 345, 347; and Turkish . nationalism 74; see also Imam Hatip Schools; religious education; universities Egypt 318, 473, 489; and Arab Spring 380, 386; coup in 380, 386, 420; elections 398; Muslim Brotherhood in 63; and Turkey 171 Eissenstat, H. 263 Eks¸i, M. 208, 209

elections and party system 83–102; centre–periphery divide 92; classification of political party systems 94; Election Law 112; elections of 2018 for executive presidency 111–113; electoral authoritarianism 34; multi-party system 46, 74, 85, 94, 104; national results (1946–1957) 86; national results (1961–1977) 89; national results (1983–2018) 87; one-party rule 73, 98, 99; post-1982 93–95; repeat elections 110; socio-cultural cleavages and parties 84–93; see also specific political parties Electricity Market Law 163 elites 44, 73, 99; business 139; civilian 120; cultural 133; economic 133, 157; foreign policy 391; government 250; Kemalist 20–21, 62; Kurdish 235, 243; local 277; military 420, 452, 467; modernising 31, 46; negotiating 263; new 139, 408; Ottoman society 83; political 4, 20, 41n6, 42, 94, 97, 98, 133, 152, 276, 416; political economy 157; religious 46, 83, 243; Republican People’s Party (CHP) 85; ruling 48; secular 20–21, 43, 46, 48, 65, 75, 84; state 31, 32, 64; statist 20–21; tribal 243; Turkish 415; voting blocs 95 Emeç, Ç 394 emergency decrees/powers 120, 182; State of Emergency (2016) 65, 111, 144, 272, 309 empires: Byzantine 192; Ottoman see Ottoman Empire; Roman 336; Russian 413; Selçuk 192 employment 35n14, 181, 209, 300; female participation 161, 322–323; unemployment 155, 157, 161, 304, 309 Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) 182 energy policy 163–176, 179, 183, 185, 417; aspiration of Turkey to be region’s energy transit hub 164, 171, 379, 388; autonomy 170; Azerbaijan 169–170; Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Natural Gas Pipeline Project 164, 402–403; challenges 165; climate change and environment 177, 179–181, 183, 184; consumption 165; demand and supply 165; diversification 166; ‘East–West’ energy corridor 403; economics modelling 165; efficiency 164, 166, 168, 169; electricity market/Electricity Market Law 163, 165; Electricity Strategy (2004) 164; Energy Efficiency (2007) 164; energy sector 163, 164, 181; EU and Southern Gas Corridor 169; and European Union 169; foreign–energy policy nexus 164, 166; Iran and Syrian civil war 168–169; key issues in security policy 167; Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) 165, 170–171; Law on the Construction and Operation of Nuclear Power Plants and Energy Sale 164; liquefied natural gas (LNG) 164; markets 171; Minister of Energy and Natural Resources 167; Nabucco pipeline project 164,

496

Index 172; Natural Gas Market Law 163; nuclear energy 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 421; oil price 153; partnerships 164, 166, 170, 171; pipelines 164, 165, 168, 169, 171–172; production 165, 181, 183, 184; project financing 163; projects 163–164, 179, 181; renewable see renewable energy; Renewable Energy (2005) 164; renewables, push for 167–168; renewed exploration 167–168; and Russia 168–169; scholarly research 165–166; ‘Second Strategic Energy Review’ (European Commission) 164; security see energy security; Transfer of Operating Rights (TOR) 163–164; Turkmenistan 169–170 energy security, Turkey’s bid for 163–165 Entente Libérale (HIF) 84 entrepreneurs 154, 198, 209 Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) 181, 182, 183 environmental politics see climate change and environment Environment Foundation of Turkey (TCV) 178 Equal Opportunities Commission 320 Erbakan, N. 23, 28, 119, 394; and Political Islam 59–62; and religious education 342, 343; and Turkish nationalism 74, 75; see also Welfare Party (RP) Ercis¸ earthquake (2011) 219, 220, 222 Erdem, H. H. 166 Erdog˘ an, R.T. (Turkish Prime Minister) 25, 37, 76, 77, 120, 211, 323, 358, 405, 476, 489; and democracy 34, 35, 485; and disaster management 218; failed military coup (2016) 288; and humanitarianism 471, 476, 478; and human rights 309, 311; and Kurdish question 232, 239; and media 141, 144; and NATO 454; NGOs and civil society 133, 134–135; and peace process 259, 260, 262, 264; political craft 109–111; and political economy 158; and Political Islam 59, 62–65; popularity 477; and presidency 107, 108, 109–111; and religious education 339, 343, 345; and religious minorities 332, 333; ‘strong leadership’ profile 476; and Third Republic 22–25; and Turkish relationship with Russia 413, 415, 418; and Turkish relationship with US 401, 405, 408, 409; see also Justice and Development Party (AKP) Ergenekon (terrorist organisation) 120, 285; ‘Ergenekon trials’ 63–64, 308 Erim, N. 439 Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and their Broadcasts, Law No. 3984 (1993) 139–140 establishment of Turkish Republic see foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923) ethnicity: ethnic/ethno-religious identity 15n3, 77, 95n19, 242, 244, 248, 276, 282;

ethnicisation of Turkish nationalism in the 2000s 75–77; ethno-nationalism 77, 84, 90, 95, 232; and Turkish nationalism 70; see also identity; minorities Euraisanism 415 European Agreement on Regulations Governing the Movement of Persons between Member States of the Council of Europe (1957) 426–427 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 167 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 248 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 299, 303, 335, 346, 347, 427, 432, 488 European Economic Community (EEC) 425, 426; see also European Union (EU); EU-Turkish relationship Europeanisation 126, 145, 385, 440; reform 22, 142 European Parliament 427 European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) 453 European Union (EU) 126, 129–131; Brussels Summit (2004) 255, 428; Foreign Ministers 431; General Affairs and External Relations Council 428; relationship with Turkey see EU-Turkish relationship; see also Council of Ministers; European Parliament EU–Turkish relationship: Accession Partnership (2003) 305, 427; Additional Protocol (1970) 426; butterfly proposal 442n14; Customs Union 425–428; EU–Turkey Readmission Agreement 429; EU–Turkey Visa Liberalisation Dialogue 429; freedom of movement 429; Joint Migration Action Plan 429–430; promises reawoken 428–432; Turkish accession/membership 33, 140, 185, 218, 238, 249, 319, 442 Evren, K. 105, 119, 121, 122 extermination policy 16, 336 failed military coup (2016): aftermath/lessons 290–292; and AKP 284, 286–287, 289; background 382; Balyoz (coup plan) 285, 286; civilians 284, 285, 288, 289; civil-military relations 120–121; context 285–287; details of coup 287–290; failed-state problem 381; foreign policy 375; and human rights 309; media . 143; National Intelligence Agency (MIT) 285–287, 289; new laws on intelligence, gendarmerie and police 286–287; NGOs and civil society 133n1, 134; and Political Islam 64–65; and security sector 284–295; see also military coups d’état failed-state problem 379, 381 Family Guidance Bureaus 323 Family Protection Law 320 fanaticism 71, 72, 75

497

Index Fazıl, N. 59, 60 Felicity Party (Saadet Parisi) 63, 96n23, 98, 343 female labor-force participation 161, 322–323 feminism 316–319; see also women Feminist Night March 324 FETÖ see Gülenist Terror Organisation (FETÖ) Fetullahçı Terör Örgütü see Gülenist Terror Organisation (FETÖ) Fidan see Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) Fidan, H. 260, 286 Filmmor Women’s Cooperative 323 financial capital 21, 357, 381 Fırat, A. 75 First Republic (1920s–1960s) 13–18; divisions 15–17; Islam 17–18 fiscal policy see taxation Flying Broom Foundation 317 folklorisation 337 foreign-capital dependence 153, 155, 158, 159, 161 . Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEIK) 209, 210 foreign policy 3, 8, 15, 63, 76, 109, 143, 157, 333, 414, 481, 482, 484; of 1923 to 2018 367–369, 373, 376; in 1960s 371; activist 372; adventurist 391; aims 205, 209, 462; of AKP 7, 8, 76, 108–109, 373–375, 399; alignments 371; Ankara 21, 394; and Arab Spring (2011) 373, 375, 379, 380, 385, 386; conjunctural determinants 369–371; crisis 391; and Cyprus 438–442, 440n10; of Davutog˘ lu 387; decision-making 374; diaspora policy 205, 207; elites 391; at end of Cold War 371–372, 440; energy policy 164–166; evolution 378; failed military coup (2016) 286, 287, 292; foreign–energy policy nexus 164, 166; foundations and geopolitical realities 367–369; future 488–490; global turmoil 378–390; humanitarian assistance 472, 473, 476–478; identity 388; impartial 394; Justice and Development Party (AKP) 7, 8; ‘multi-faceted concept’ 371, 453; multilateral perspective 343; new 386; Ottoman Empire 368, 369; peace motto 369, 459, 483; post-2015 387; principles 367, 369, 371, 373, 374, 386, 393, 462–463; proactivism and moral realism 383–388; region-based 374; relations with Middle East neighbours 391–400; relations with US and the West 403, 408; resetting 378–390, 392; revisionism of the AKP 373–375; and Russia 19, 415; soft power 383, 384, 386, 388, 389; traditional 374, 375; Turkey and Middle East neighbours 393, 400; ‘zero problem with neighbours’ doctrine 374, 472 Foucault, M. (pendulum) 25, 484 Foundation for Kemalist Thought (ADV) 131 Foundation of Phanar Greek School for Boys 335

foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923) 6, 13, 19, 69, 84, 127, 139, 315, 333, 392, 488; health and healthcare, transforming 349, 358; human rights 299–301; and Kurdish question 232–234, 253, 264; terrorism and societal relations 267, 268; see also Turkish Republic Fourth Congress (2012) 107–109 Francini, Father A. 336 Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par) 273 freedom of association 28 freedom of expression 29 freedom of religion 301, 304, 427 French Revolution (1789) 83, 116 F-type prisons 304–305 Fuat Keyman, E. 8, 488 Fulbright Program 408 Füle, S¸ 429 fundamentalism see Islamic fundamentalism Gamlen, A. 203, 206 gecekondus (slums) 20n8, 191–192 Gender Empowerment Index 306 Gender Inequality Index 306 gender politics 315–327; under AKP government 319–323; anti-discrimination measures 320; equality legislation 320; feminism 316–319; radical turn 316–319; women in Turkish politics 315–316; see also women; women’s movements Gender-Related Development Index 306 Genel Energy 170 General Directorate for Disaster Affairs 217 General Directorate of Foundations 335 General Directorate of Turkish Emergency Management 216, 217 General Directorate on the Status and Problems of Women 317 Geske, T. 336 Gezi Park protests (2013), Istanbul 43, 64, 270n7, 404; legacy 132–133; and media 138, 143, 145; and urbanisation 198 Gisclon, M. 223 global capitalism 61, 151 Global Climate Fund (GCF) 178 global financial crisis (2008) 180, 383 globalisation 5, 8, 211, 372, 373, 378, 379, 383–386, 388; active 383, 385; anti-globalisation agenda 408; economic 37; neoliberal 153, 160 global turmoil: regional instability 379–383; and Turkish foreign policy 378–390 Göçmen, I. 131 Gökalp, Z. 44, 55, 70 Göle, N. 128, 132 “good-neighbour” diplomacy 414, 415 Gorbachev, M. 414 Görener, A. 166 Gramsci, A. 131, 135

498

Index Grand National Assembly (TBMM) see Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) Greek Cypriots 435, 436, 440, 442 Green Party 178–179 Gregorian calendar 45 ‘Grey Wolves’ 268 Griffin, S. 460 ground-to-air missiles 440 Group of 20 (G20) 160 Group of 77 370 Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO) 320n16 guerrilla tactics 278 Gül, A. (President) 34, 63, 106, 107, 109, 129, 218, 258, 267n2, 343 Gül, H. 218 Gülen, Fethullah/Gülenists 110, 210, 309, 405; civil-military relations 120, 121; failed military coup (2016) 285, 286, 288–289; and media 143, 144; and Political Islam 58, 59, 61–62, 64–65 Gülenist Terror Organisation (FETÖ) 35, 120, 121, 382; failed military coup (2016) 288, 289 Günes, A. 257 Gür, B. 488 Gürcan, M. 123, 132–133, 223, 276 Gürsoy, Y. 487 Guterres, A. 438 Güven, A. B. 139 HABITAT III Conference and Report, UN 194–195 Halıcıog˘ lu, F. 165 Halkbank 394 Halkçı Parti see Populist Party (HP) Halkın Emek Partisi see People’s Labour Party (HEP) Halkların Demokratik Partisi see People’s Democracy Party (HDP) Hamzaog˘ lu, O. 184 hard power 374, 386, 387, 463, 472; and moral realism 386, 387 Harris, G. 116 Hausmann, R. 198 HDP see People’s Democracy Party (HDP) headscarf, Islamic 37, 45n10, 141, 304, 318 health and healthcare, transforming 349–364; assessment of system performance, theoretical considerations 349–350; city hospitals 357–359; and founding of Turkish Republic 349, 358; fragmented expansion phase (1946–1960) 350; future developments 360–362; goals and accomplishments of HTP era (2003–2011) 352, 353–354, 355–356, 360; ‘Health for All’ objective 354; Health Transformation Programme (HTP), health

system prior to 350–352; inception phase (1923–1945) 350; Ministry of Health 349n1, 351, 355, 360; patient reported experience (PREM) 361; patient reported outcome (PROM) 361; planned ‘socialisation’ phase (1961–1982) 350; reformation phase (1983–2002) 350–351; scorecard of pre-HTP era 351–352; and taxation 355; unfinished agenda 356–357; universal health insurance (UHI) 350–352, 354, 355; Urgent Action Plan 354 Hearth of Intellectuals, The 60 hegemony 209; of AKP 3, 4, 23n13, 24, 97–99; concept 131; of Erdog˘ an 210; identity 266; Kemalist 131; legislative 97; nationalistic 5; secular political 145; state 206; of United States 452 Helsinki process 264 Helsinki Summit (1999) 163, 427 HEP see People’s Labour Party (HEP) Heper, M. 70, 72, 121, 123, 485 Hezbollah 270, 272, 419, 462, 472; Kurdish Revolutionary Party 304 High Board of Elections 34 High Committee for Turkish Citizens Living Abroad 206 High Council of Elections 311 Higher Coordination Council for Workers 206 Higher Islamic Institution 340–341 high-income countries 196, 349, 350 High Military Council 286 Hisarcıkhog˘ lu, R. 209 Historical Thesis, Turkish 73 history: importance of 482; and making of contemporary Turkey 484 Hizbullah see Hezbollah Hizmet (Service) movement 58, 59 homogeneity 41n6, 234; myth of 48, 133 homosexuality 307 honour killings 306 Hüda-Par 273, 274 human capital 159, 160 humanitarian assistance: ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ 472; national and international politics, Turkish involvement 471–473; from NATO 451; NGOs 132; non-humanitarian actions 430n16; and peacekeeping 459–461, 463, 468; reasons for aid from Turkey 476–478; Somalia 473–476; Turkey as aid actor within wider politics 471–473; Turkey as global humanitarian actor 379, 381, 386, 387–388, 389, 430, 470–479, 490 humanitarian crises, Somalia, Turkish response and peacebuilding in 473–476 human rights 248, 299–314; civil and political rights violations 305; due process rights 304; formation of Republic 299–301; homosexuality 307; and implementation of 1961 Constitution (1961–1980) 301–302;

499

Index military rule and reform period (1980–2002) 302–305; National Plan of Action (1999) 305; reforms 299, 300, 303, 304, 310; rule of AKP (since 2002) 305–310; social, economic and cultural rights 305; transition to democracy (1923–1960) 299–301; violation of minority rights 335; of women 303–304; see also religious minorities Human Rights Association, Turkish 303 Human Rights Foundation 303 hunger strikes 200, 259, 260, 268, 305 Huntington, S. P. 124 Hürriyet 139 Hutchinson, J. 73 hydropower plants (HPPs) 181, 183 Hyogo Framework for Action 215 identity 45, 133, 446; of AKP 108; Alevism 273, 334; autochthonous people 16; categories 18; civic 242; collective defence/security 446, 449–450, 455; crisis 73; cultural 140, 266, 382; diaspora policy 206; divisions 25–26; dual 384; ethnic/ethno-religious 15n3, 77, 95n19, 242, 244, 248, 276, 282; European 350, 430; exclusion 266; female 318; foreign policy 388; groups 328, 330–333; hegemonic 266; hyper-identities 372; identity-based perceptions 384, 386; identity engineering 14, 17, 18; infra-identities 15n3; Kurdish 16, 76; linguistic 84; local 280; minority 249; Muslim 263, 266, 455, 489, 490; mutual identity construction (Turkey–NATO) 449; Ottoman Empire 331–333; political 25, 60, 77, 105, 160, 266, 277, 372; post-Cold War era 450; rebels 275, 277; regional/regional power 16, 379, 388, 455; religious 263, 266, 303n5, 334, 455, 489, 490; sectarian 380; security 447, 449–450, 455; shared 233; social 273; Sunni Islam 266; supra-identity 15n3; tribal 382; Turkish/Turkish Republic 109, 234, 235, 238, 242, 384; urban 181; Western 448, 449; . ‘worker’ 205; see also ethnicity; minorities Il Bank (later Bank of Municipalities/Bank of Provinces) 193, 197 image: of AKP 37–38, 208, 210, 211; anti-establishment 108; international aid actors 475; of Islam 61; lifestyle 95; neutrality 475; political opposition 99; of Turkey 37, 71, 206, 211, 374, 384, 388 Images of Good Society (IGS) 83 . Imam Hatip Schools 61, 74, 128, 339, 488; accessibility 345; establishment and growth 340–341; golden age of 341–342; and Higher Islamic Institution 340–341; high schools 339, 346–347; middle schools 339, 345; revival of 344; 28 February process 342; see also education/schools; religious education

import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) 152, 153 imprisonment 304–305 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) 271 incremental planning 193 Independent Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (MUSIAD) 134 industrialisation 92, 181, 190–193, 232; deindustrialisation 158; import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) 152; and modernisation period 192; see also urbanisation inflation: consumer 155, 157; high 153, 161; hyperinflation 19n6 Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) 141 infra-identities 15n3 innovators . . 63 Inönü (Ismet Pasha) 15, 19, 74, 104, 436, 439–440 instability 5, 62, 63, 104, 402; Arab Spring (2011) 373; and global turmoil 379–383; governmental 105; in Iraq 404; macroeconomic 151, 158; political 352; regional 171, 172, 379–383; Russia, relations with 420–422 institutional layering 45 Integrated Urban Development Strategy and Action Plan (KENTGES) 195, 197, 200 integrity 119, 121; editorial 138; physical 310; restoring 310; and solidarity 61; territorial 61n13, 72, 232, 253, 305, 369, 396, 406 Intelligence Service, Turkish 64 Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) 178 International Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) 207, 473–474, 476 international financial institutions (IFIs) 152 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 126, 152, 220, 402; neoliberal economic policies 310; political economy 152–155, 157, 160; structural alignment policies 302 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 451, 464 international security forces (ISAF) 471 International Women’s Day 324 Iran 45, 243, 244, 250, 379, 382, 388, 393, 399–401, 405–407, 419; and AKP 395, 398; gas trade 64, 165, 168–170; infrastructure 165, 168, 169; intelligence 269; Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps 164, 168; Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG) 463; and Iraq 392, 394; Islamic Revolution (1979) 269, 394; nuclear energy 394, 472; post-Cold War era 394–395; relationship with Turkey 40, 64, 164, 166, 169, 392, 394; and Syrian civil war 168–169; territory 392; US sanctions 64, 376 Iraq 7, 236, 243–247, 250, 368, 378, 382; Baghdad Pact (1955) 370, 393; borders 255, 277, 380, 383, 463; Constitution 165, 170;

500

Index failed-state problem 379, 381; Gulf War 1991 268, 395; Gulf War 2003 165, 170, 273, 403–406; instability in 404; and Iran 392, 394; Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG) 463; and ISIS 383, 397; Kurdish issues 393, 395, 396; Kurdistan region 256, 262, 395, 397; Kurdistan Regional Government 164, 165, 170–171, 391; NATO Training Mission in Iraq (NTIM-I) 464; northern 277, 375, 395–397, 403; relationship with Turkey 386, 392, 393, 396, 397, 399; sovereignty 392; Sunni Islam 273, 396; withdrawal of ISIS from (2016 onwards) 397; see also Iran; Lebanon; Saudi Arabia; Syria; . Syrian war I¸seri, E. 132 ISIS see Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Islamic activities 23, 24 Islamic agenda, humanitarian assistance 476, 477 Islamic authoritarianism 38 Islamic civil society/CSOs 62, 132 Islamic conservatism see conservatism, Islamic Islamic education/studies 61, 64, 270, 341, 441 Islamic feminism/women 318 Islamic fundamentalism 63, 372 Islamic groups/movements 1, 62, 132, 205 Islamic heritage 40, 481 Islamic institutions 65, 300, 341; Higher 340–341 Islamicisation 420 Islamic mores 268 . Islamic Movement Organisation (IHÖ) 269 Islamic NGOs 128, 131–132, 134, 135, 485 Islamic norms/values 131, 132, 133, 477, 485 Islamic politics 58, 59 Islamic precepts 266, 267, 274 Islamic radicalisation 482 Islamic religion 300 Islamic secularism 345 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 231, 269–270, 273, 274, 453; fight against 379, 380, 381, 399; militants 391; suicide bombers 247; withdrawal from Iraq (2016 onwards) 397 Islamic world 472 Islamisation 24, 55; Northern Cyprus 442; political 38, 43, 333; religious education 339, 345; Sunni 76; of Turkey 204, 333, 441 Islam/Islamism 2, 15, 17–18, 207, 301, 333, 372, 383, 392, 394; Alevism 334; communal 121n8; and democracy 22, 404; domination of 24; fear of 18; First Republic (1920s–1960s) 17–18; ideology 61, 267, 303; image 61; interpreting 43, 47, 56, 58, 206; and Kurdish issues 22–24; and laiklik (Turkish secularism) 47, 57; moderate 74; nation-state and statist-nationalism 17, 65, 71, 73, 337, 484; normalisation of 74; and Ottomanism 55, 63, 70; Pan-Islamism 56, 70, 234, 369; pantheistic (mystic) Islam 120, 121;

popular Islam 17, 18; promotion in education 61, 64, 270, 341, 345, 441; promotion in Turkey 74; radicalisation 482; reformist-modernist view of 48; rise of 105; and secularism 64, 116n2, 345; teaching and practising 300; terminology 266n1; and terrorism 268; Third Republic issues 22–24; Turkish-Cypriot 441; and Turkish nationalism (1950–2000) 73–75; violence in name of 267; and the West 451; women’s rights 318; Young Turks see Young Turks; ; see also anti-Islamic measures; conservatism, Islamic; headscarf, Islamic; Islamic activities; Islamic agenda; Islamic authoritarianism; Islamic civil society/CSOs; Islamic feminism/women; Islamic fundamentalism; Islamic groups/movements; Islamic heritage; Islamic institutions; Islamicisation; Islamic issues; Islamic mores; Islamic NGOs; Islamic norms/values; Islamic politics; Islamic precepts; Islamic radicalisation; Islamic religion; Islamic secularism; Islamic State (IS); Islamic world; Muslims; Political Islam; . Shiite Muslims; Sunni Islam Islâm Koruma Partisi 59 ismorphism 133–134 Israel 333n7; forces 371, 473; Gaza blockade 473; peace process 402; relations with Turkey 473; Six-Day War (1967) 371 Israel Defence Forces (IDF) 462 Istanbul 13, 21n11, 23, 111, 268, 402; Airport 288; and Ankara 111, 290, 399; bridges 288; Convention 320n16; courts 121, 414; Fourth UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) hosted in (2010) 473; Gezi Park protests (2013) 43, 64, 132–133, 270n7; Greek community 330; newspapers 121; Okmeydam district 271; Palace of Justice 270; pogrom (1955) 74; population 222; suicide bombers 273; Turkey–Africa Cooperation Summit (2008) 473; Umraniye district 120; University 117, 340 Istanbul Convention (2012) 320 . Ittihat ve Terakki . Fırkası see Party of Union and Progress (ITF) Jacobs, J., The Death and Life of Great American Cities 200 Jandarma’s Special Teams 278 Janovitz, M. 124 Jenkins, G. 487 Jerusalem Warriors 269 Jewish community 16, 60, 208, 209, 300, 329, 332–334, 337; Turkish Jews 333, 334 Johnson, L. 439–440, 452 Judaism 70; see also Jewish community Jupiter missiles 370, 402, 452 justice, secularisation 46

501

Index Justice and Development Party (AKP) 1–8, 26, 65, 123, 129; abuse of power 76; alliance with MHP 111–113; authoritarianism 76; campaigns 110, 111; climate change and environment 177; coming to power/electoral victories 1, 2, 4, 5, 18n5, 22–24, 34, 37, 76, 96–97, 99, 106, 107, 110, 218, 284, 304; conservativism 96, 98; criticism of 37–38, 77; democracy, undermining 63–64; diaspora policy 207–211; discourse 63, 76; ‘Erdog˘ anism’ 62–65; executive bodies 110; failed military coup (2016) 286–287, 289; and failed peace process 262; first term of government (2002–2007) 140–141, 154–155; foreign policy 7, 8, 76, 108–109, 373–375, 399; foundation of (2001) 24, 63, 75–76, 77; Fourth Congress (2012) 107–109; gender politics 319–323; governments see AKP governments; and Gülen movement 121; and health system 352; hegemony of 3, 4, 23n13, 24, 97–99; human rights 305, 306, 309n13; identity 108; ideology/ideological shortcoming 47, 262–263; image of 37–38, 208, 210, 211; and importance of history 482; and Iran 395, 398; Islamo-nationalism 25, 26; and Kurds/ Kurdish question 23, 24n14, 77, 110, 237–239; lack of alternatives to 112–113; leadership 64, 97, 107, 263, 306, 440; modernisation 2, 5, 7, 22; and NATO 455; ‘New Turkey’ see ‘New Turkey’ (AKP); and NGOs 131–132; objectives 63, 64; open door policy 76; Parliamentary Group 109; political economy 154–160; Political Islam 62–65; populism of 133; power base 134; presidency under 106–110; programmes 48; propaganda 113; reforms 255, 440; religious education 342–343; revisionism 373–375; rule 1, 154, 263, 305–310, 309n13, 337, 339, 343, 346, 471, 482–486, 488; second term of government (2007–2011) 141–142; and secularism 37–38, 44; secularism of 305, 343; Sunni Islam 334; and Syria 395; third term of government (2011–2015) 142–144; 2023 Vision 107, 167; and village-guards 279; see also Erdog˘ an, R.T. (Turkish Prime Minister) Justice Party (AP) 60, 90, 91 Just Order 61 K[i]sakürek,. N.F. (1904–1983) 59 Kafesog˘ lu, I. 60 Kahraman, C. 166 Kahramanmaras¸ province 76 Kalaycıog˘ lu, E. 92, 93, 94, 95, 485 Kandiyoti, D. 322 Kaplan, Y. A. 166 Karabekir, K. 19 Karagöl, E. 165

Karaites (Hellenised Turks) 332 Karaosmanog˘ lu, A. 439 Karatas¸, D. 268 Karayalçın, M. 427 Karpat, K. 343 Kaya, Z. 487 Kaz.im, M. 56 Keban Dam project 202 Kemal, M. see Atatürk, M.K. Kemalism 44n9, 205, 373; elite 20–21, 62; gender politics 315, 316, 319; hegemony 131; ideology 35; journalists 139; Kemalist regime/state 58, 211, 215, 263; principles 15, 57, 205; reforms 19n7, 45–46, 57–59, 61, 72, 115, 392; religion as a bureaucratic apparatus, in Turkey 56–58; secularisation 45, 71; secularism 43, 45, 267 Kennedy administration 452, 453 KENTGES (Integrated Urban Development Strategy and Action Plan) 195, 197, 200 Kerry, J. 408, 454 Ketola, M. 485 Keyder, C. 152 Keyman, F. 488, 489 Khaldun, Ibn 190 Khan, O. 73 KHKs (government decrees) 281 Kibarog˘ lu, M. 166 Kınacı , Z. 247 Kiris¸, H. M. 218 Kiris¸ci, K. 278, 489 Kısakürek, N. F. 59 Kıyıklık, M. 342 Koçar, G. 166 Kohen, M. 333 Koran 45, 57, 58, 328n1, 345 Korean War 460, 461, 468 Kotku, M. Z. 58–59, 60 KRG see Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Küçük, F. 436 Küçükali, S. 166 Kulturkampf 95 Kumbarog˘ lu, G. 165 Kurdish insurgency, revolts or rebellions 6, 58, 73, 234, 242–252, 393, 482, 487; future prospects 250–251; historical context 243; and PKK see Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); village-guard system 245, 246 Kurdish nationalism 75, 140, 267, 375; early years of Republic 235; elections and party system 86, 96; ethno-nationalism 77, 95, 96, 232; human rights 304, 308; and Kurdish question 231, 232–236, 239; Ottoman Empire 234; and Political Islam 140; terrorism and societal relations 272; village-guard system 279 Kurdish politics 235, 236; in early years of Turkish Republic 234–235; political responses to Kurds 20, 237

502

Index Kurdish question 17, 22, 23, 76–77, 231–241, 487; and AKP 237–239; change and continuity 233; in early multi-party era 235–236; historiography 233; revolts in Ottoman Empire 233–234; violent radicalisation of and coup politics 236–237 Kurdistan 234, 236, 396, 454; autonomy 243; Northern 244; and PKK 244; regional government see Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG); Region of Iraq 238–239, 255, 256, 262, 395, 397, 399; rural 244; terminology 248; Western 239; see also Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); Kurds/ Kurdish people (Iranian ethnic group) Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) 166, 286 Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) 231, 247n15, 382 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) 164, 165, 170–171, 391, 403 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) 16, 119, 164, 254, 286, 304, 391, 403, 467; and Ankara 247, 248, 391; effects of insurgency in Turkey 248–250; elections and party system 96; and human rights 304; and Kurdish insurgency/ question 221n6, 231, 236, 239, 244–248, 250, 274; military repression of 22; as new kind of Kurdish insurgency in modern Turkey 244–247; peace processes 255–256, 258–259, 384, 404, 466; and Political Islam 62; terrorism 245–246, 248, 266, 382, 391, 407; and Turkish nationalism 76; and village-guards 275–278; see also Öcalan, A. Kurds/Kurdish people (Iranian ethnic group) 20, 22–23, 24n14, 26, 62, 139, 202, 264, 368; and AKP 23, 24n14, 77, 110; Alevi 235; in Ankara 235, 242, 245, 246, 249–251, 256, 397; assimilation of see under assimilation of religious minorities; autonomy 234, 237, 239, 243, 249; broadcasting 139, 140; concentrations in specific areas 170–171, 222, 232; conservatism 76; dialect/language 141, 235, 249; diaspora policy 205, 236, 246–247; in early multi-party era 235–236; elites 235, 243; exile of 235; fighting force 232, 265; identity 16, 76; jailing of 19; Kurdish problem 30; Kurdish question see Kurdish question; language 248, 249, 306; lifestyle 232; marginalisation and violence towards 16, 62, 235, 237–238, 239, 247, 250, 304, 306, 309n13; militants 22; minority group, identification as 232, 233, 242, 244, 248, 250n21, 334; moderate 238; movements 205, 206; Muslim 25, 76; names 304; nationalism see Kurdish nationalism; organisation 206; and PKK 96, 221n6, 236, 239, 245, 246, 248, 250, 274; place in Turkey 73, 232n2, 235, 242, 337, 382; political activity see Kurdish politics; populations 221, 232, 232n2, 242, 396;

radicalism 231; recognition 235, 243, 248; reforms affecting 63, 279; resistance 242n2; revolts, Ottoman Empire 233–234; rights of 2, 238, 265, 346, 382; separatism 118, 454; suicide bombers 247; and Sunni Islam 72, 76, 235, 243, 346; and Syria 265, 271; terrorist movement 33; Third Republic issues 22–24; tribes/tribal leaders 16, 233–235; and Turkish nationalism 73, 75–77; urban 244; young 271, 274, 308; see also Democratic Society Party (DTP); Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Kurtulmus, N. 398 Kyoto Protocol 178, 179, 185 Labour Law 320 Labour Recruitment Agreements 204 laïcité, French 60, 62, 123; secularism 42, 43, 46, 47 Laik Hanefi Sunni Muslim Turks (LAHASÜMÜT) 18n5 laiklik (Turkish secularism) 17, 37, 38; and Alevism 47; anti-religious aspects 46; classifying 45–47; consolidation of 49; critique 49; early works 44; explaining 47–49; integrationism 48; and Islam 47, 57; vs. laicité 46; and reform/ democratisation 49–50; situating in the real world and overcoming Turkish exceptionalism 42–45; see also secularism Latin America 129 Lausanne Treaty (1923) see Treaty of Lausanne (1923) Law 385 (1924) 115 Law of the Unification of Education (1924) 339 Law on Conservation of Nature and Biodiversity 185 Law on the Changes in the Antiterrorism Law 306 Law on the Construction and Operation of Nuclear Power Plants and Energy Sale 164 Law on the Protection of Family 306 Law on Urban Transformation of Disaster Risk Areas, No. 6306 (2012) 197 leadership: of AKP 64, 97, 107, 263, 306, 440; lack of global/regional leadership 380; Political Islam 58; secularism 74; ‘strong leadership’ profile of Erdog˘ an 476; tribal leaders 16, 233–235 Lebanon 245, 246, 393, 452n8; Hezbollah in 462, 472; South 462; UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) 462 Leviathan 168, 171 LGBTI movement 307, 323 liberal capital/capitalism 4, 5, 302 liberalism 7–8, 64, 74, 484; see also neo-liberalism Liberal Republican Party (SF) 59, 85 liquefied natural gas (LNG) 164 Lise, W. 165 literacy 360

503

Index London Declaration (1990) 449 lunar calendar 45 Lyall, J. 276 Macedonia 209 Macron, E. 432 Magic Box company 139 Mahmud II, Sultan 233 majoritarianism/majoritarian pathology 32, 33 Makarios, President M. C. (of Cyprus) 436 Maoist Community Party (MKP) 271 Mardin, S¸erif, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought 44 Marmara earthquake (1999) 197, 220, 223 Marmara Region 193, 197 martial law 105n2, 119, 302 Marxism 75, 244, 268 Mavi Marmara crisis (2010) 333 media 138–147; Albayrak group 142; Association for Access Providers 143; Çalik group 142; CNNTurk TV station 144; conglomerates 138, 140; diversity, in Turkey 138; Dog˘ an Media Group 144; Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and their Broadcasts, Law No. 3984 (1993) 139–140; European integration reforms 140–141; first term of AKP government (2002–2007) 140–141; Gezi Park protests (2013), Istanbul 138, 143, 145; Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) 141; mass media until 2000 139–140; Medyascope.tv 145; ownership 138, 139; post-coup environment 144–145; Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication (TIB) 141, 143, 144; press freedom 139, 485; Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) 140, 141; Regulating Materials Published on the Internet and Measures against Crimes Committed through Online Publications, Law No. 5651 (Internet Law, 2007) 141, 143; second term of AKP government (2007–2011) 141–142; state broadcasting 139; third term of AKP government (2011–2015) 142–144; Turkish Radio and Television, (TRT) Law No. 359 (1964) 139, 140, 141; Twitter 143; YouTube 142, 143 medrese (religious schools) see religious education Medyascope.tv 145 Memorandum (military) of 1971 61, 86n6, 118, 128, 341 Menderes, A. 19, 59, 60, 76, 117, 393, 402, 426, 439 Metropolitan Municipality Law No. 6360 194, 196 MGK see National Security Council (MGK)

MHP (Nationalist Action Party) see Nationalist Action Party (MHP) middle-classes 124, 140, 152, 154, 159, 185, 190, 191, 316, 359; see also social class middle-income countries (MICs) 151, 160 migration: and Alevis 334; to Europe 205, 430; family 204; flows 430; forced 299; illegal immigrants 332; Joint Migration Action Plan 429–430; labour 202, 204; political 204; rates of 430; rural to urban 183, 191, 193, 195; status 205; waves of 191, 202; see also diaspora policy military, the: alliances 417, 447, 450, 455; Armed Forces Internal Service Law (1935) 116; armed resistance 396; capabilities 8, 375, 488; civil-military relations 7, 115–125; colleges of science and medicine 83; constitution of 1982 61; cooperation 406; coups d’état see military coups d’état; courts 20, 33, 124, 291; directives 62; espionage 285; force/violence by 19, 416, 436; and founding of Turkish state 19; juntas see military juntas; military-bureaucratic ruling class 31, 32; Military Code 116; military-to-military ties 407; officers 19, 64, 74n1, 76, 83, 120, 124, 278, 284, 285, 301n2, 302, 306, 308, 405; policy 438; political role 28, 30; power 1, 19, 24, 368, 463; prisons 20; ‘Prophet’s hearth,’ military in Turkey defined as 124; repression of the PKK 22; role 116; secular 2, 75, 285; structure 20; Supreme Military Council 123–124; top command 28; tutelage 19, 20; Western interventions 455, 475; see also military elites; military hospitals; military interventions military coups d’état 2, 63, 74n1, 104, 128, 202, 284, 301, 341, 386; of 1960 15, 19, 86, 117, 128, 139, 426; of 1971 (indirect coup) 61, 86n6, 118, 128, 341; of 1980 18, 20, 61, 74, 75, 118–119, 128, 139, 245, 268, 302, 341, 350, 402, 427; of 1997 (28 February process) 128–129, 131, 140, 342; of 2007 to 2013 (failed Ergenekon coup plot) 120; of 2016 (failed) see failed military coup (2016); coup plots, consequences for the military 285–286; indirect, of 1997 23, 119; post-coup massive purge 382; post-modern coup, 28 February process as 128–129, 131, 140; see also military juntas military elites 4, 23, 420, 452, 467–468 military hospitals 291 military interventions 14, 19, 20, 29, 77, 104, 120–122, 372, 455, 475; direct and indirect 28; and media 139, 145 military juntas 18, 20, 126; of 1960 90, 117; of 1980 25, 93, 94, 128, 268, 341; see also military, the; military coups d’état Millet Partisi see National Party (MP)

504

Index millets (Ottoman non-Muslim communities) 16, 328, 329, 334, 337 Milli Görüs . ¸ (National Vision) movement 23 Milli Istihbarat Tes . ¸kilatı see National Intelligence Agency (MIT) Millî Kalkınma Partisi 59 Milliyetçi Çalıs¸ma Partisi see Nationalist Toil Party (MCP) Milliyetçi Demokrasi Partisi see Nationalist Democracy Party (MDP) Minister for Women and Family 307 Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, Strategic Plan (2015–2019) 167 Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation (MoEU) 181, 223 Ministry of Finance 152 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) 202, 203, 205 Ministry of Health 349n1, 351, 355, 360 Ministry of National Education 346, 347 minorities: Armenians 16; ethnic 16, 334; Muslim 47; non-Muslim 15–16, 18, 48, 71, 139, 334, 337; recognition 7, 329; religious 7, 16, 41n6, 49, 300, 328–338; rights of 130; see also Alevis/ Alevism (religious minority group); Kurds missiles: anti-missile defence system 454; ballistic 405, 406; Chinese 405; ground-to-air 440; Jupiter 370, 402, 452; long-range 450; Patriot 405; S-400 air 405, 454; surface-to-air 417, 418, 421 MNP see National Order Party (MNP) modernisation 55, 190, 299; AKP agenda 5; civil service 475; ‘cognitive’ 44; ‘conservative’ 316; CUP agenda 56; and democratisation 250; economic 237; historical engagement with 41; incremental planning 193; mass media 139; and military 116; modernisation period and early urban settlement patterns 192–194; municipalities, administrative changes to legal framework 194; object and subject 115; Ottoman 45; political 83; political consequences of state-led modernisation 31–32; renewables sector 166; resisting 243; and secularism 38, 41, 42, 50; social-cultural 44; state-led 30–32; theory/theorists 30, 35, 48; Turkish foreign policy 369; urban planning trends 192–193 modernising elites 31, 46 modernism/modernity 73 Modern Ottoman Period 38 monarchy: abolition 45; constitutional 70; Ottoman 14, 70; pro-Western 393; Saudi 398 monetary policies 154 Montreux Convention (1936) 414, 447 moral realism 383, 386–388; and hard power 386, 387 Motherland Party (ANAP) 62, 94, 98, 119, 139

MSP (National Salvation Party) see National Salvation Party (MSP) Muhammad (Prophet) 57–58, 345 multi-party system 46, 74, 104; elections and party system 85, 94; Kurds 235–236 Mummcu, U. 394 Muslim Brotherhood 65, 270; belt 398, 420; in Egypt 63; in Syria 394, 397, 398; terrorism of 398–399, 405; in Turkey 477 Muslims: capital 5; identity 263, 266, 455, 489, 490; Kurds 25, 76; Muslim Turks 24, 72; non-Turkish 16; population 337, 476; see also Islam/Islamism Nabucco pipeline project 164, 172 Nagorno Karabakh conflict 415, 418 Naqshbandi-Khalidi tradition 58, 59 Naqshbandı Order 72; Kha-lidı- branch 58 National Assembly see Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) National Franchise Association (UFRAD) 209–210 National Front Governments 341 National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) 355, 360, 361 . National Intelligence Agency (MIT) 285–287, 289, 394 nationalism/nation 3, 4, 7, 8, 13, 16, 17, 18n5, 21, 25, 116, 128, 129, 209, 300, 319, 336, 341, 369, 401; rise of (1908–1945) 69–73; and Islam (1950–2000) 73–75; Arabic nationalism 398; Armenian minority 331; Balkan 83; Christians 70; defining 77; and democratic autonomy 244; elections and party system 90, 95; ethnicisation of Turkish nationalism in the 2000s 75–77, 90; ethno/ethnic-nationalism 77, 84, 90, 95, 232; hegemony 5; hybrid character 69; intellectual 83; literature 69; nation-state and statist-nationalism 17, 65, 71, 73, 337, 484; one-party rule 73, 98, 99; Ottoman nation 328; and Political Islam 59, 60, 73–75; politics of Turkish nationalism 69–79; racial-ethnic nationalism 84; Russian 41; and secularism 44, 48; top-down nationalism 73–74, 75; Turkish state nationalism 73–74; see also nation-state; Turkish Republic Nationalist Action Party (MHP) see Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Nationalist Democracy Party (MDP) 119 Nationalist Front governments 118 Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) 1, 34, 65, 77, 267, 302; alliance with AKP 111–113; elections and party system 90, 94, 95n18, 96–98; and Kurdish question 238, 239; and presidency 107, 110–112 Nationalist Toil Party (MCP) 94 National Order Party (MNP) 60, 86n6, 370

505

Index National Organisation of the Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) 435 National Parliament, Turkish 33, 284; supranational Parliament 269 National Party (MP) 85–86 National Programme for Adoption of the Acquis Communautaire 305, 428 National Salvation Party (MSP) 94, 118, 302, 341; establishment 86; and Political Islam 61, 62; and Turkish nationalism 74, 75 National Security Committee (MGK) 117 National Security Council (MGK) 28, 95, 105n2, 128, 140, 301n2, 341; civil-military relations 118, 119, 123; see also United Nations Security Council (UNSC) National Turkish Student Union (MTTB) 267 National View movement 60 National Vision (Milli Görüs¸) movement 23 nation-state: bureaucracy 84; core ideology 15; criticisms 49; failed-state problem 379, 381; formation 41, 384; modern 315, 384; national state distinguished 15n3; nation-building 16, 38, 41, 72, 116, 299, 369; Ottoman Empire 48; power 379; sacralisation 14; secular 426; sovereignty 329, 382; Turkish Republic 56, 71, 116, 253 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Natural Gas Market Law 163 Navaro-Yashin, Y. 44 neoliberalism: economic policies, IMF 310; globalisation 153, 160; neoliberal globalism 153; neoliberal populsim 157, 161, 485; and NGOs 133; orthodox 153; and state-led development 152–154 neo-Ottomanism 63, 472, 476 New Civil Code campaign 319 newspapers 20, 121, 138, 142, 145, 211, 220, 304; Agos 331; Hürriyet 139; Milliyet 139; Pazartesi (tabloid) 317n5; Western 394; Zaman 139, 144 ‘New Turkey’ (AKP) 77, 145, 264, 333, 373, 483, 490; diaspora policy 207–211 New Turkey Party (YTP) 90 NGOs and civil society 5, 126–137, 485; demonstrations of spring 2007 129; development in Turkey 127–129, 134, 427, 475, 477; EU and democratisation 129–131; see also civil society; non-governmental organisations (NGOs) NHIF (National Health Insurance Fund) 355, 360, 361 9/11 terrorist attacks 383, 462 Non-Aligned Movement 370 non-governmental organisations (NGOs): advocacy 130; and AKP 131–132; conservationist 178; control over 134; defining

127; disaster management 215, 216, 220, 221; environmental 421; external funding 126, 135; faith-based 131–132; founding of 205; funding 131; government funding 126; humanitarian assistance 132; Islamic 128, 131–132, 134, 135, 485; and Kurds 272; liberal 134; medical 184; and neo-liberalism 133; participation 209; and PKK insurgency 248; and populism 133; professionalism 130; registered associations, in Turkey 127; rise of 126; secular 126, 131, 134, 135; targeting 273; and terrorism 270; trade union confederations 127–128; traditional 131; Turkish 130; women’s 128, 131; see also NGOs and civil society non-Muslims 15–16, 18, 18n5, 22, 25, 48, 71, 73, 139, 333, 334, 336, 337; and Alevis 334; attacks on 74; discrimination against 300, 301; Ottoman Empire 329 normalisation: civil-military relations 121–124; Islam 74; media 145 North Atlantic Alliance 450 North Atlantic Assembly 450 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 449, 459, 460, 490; and Afghanistan 451, 455; as an all-Christian alliance 456, 490; allies 289, 402, 404, 405, 417, 452–454; and Ankara 446, 453–455; and Bosnia 451; creation (1949) 447; crisis management 455; defence system 454; Defence Training Centre 454; exercises 454, 455; flexible response strategy 453; Force structure 464; humanitarian assistance from 451; massive retaliation strategy 453; membership/member-states 370, 404, 406, 413, 416, 418, 451, 452, 454, 455, 461; military bases 452; military intervention 471; missions 461, 462, 468; Operation Allied Force 451; partnerships 372; peacekeeping operations 460, 471; relevance to ‘new world order’ 372; resistance from 405; and Russia/ Russian-Turkish relations 415, 417–418, 488, 489; security forces 471; Southern flank 417–418, 420, 448; and Soviet Union 447; Training Mission in Iraq (NTIM-I) 464; Turkey–NATO relations 446–458; Turkish accession to (1952) 122, 370, 402, 414; Turkish commitment to 405, 406 Northern Cyprus 418, 438, 441, 442 Northern Forests Defence (KOS) 180 nuclear energy 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 421 Nurcu movement 58, 59, 61 Nursî, B. S. 58, 59, 120 Obama, B. 401, 404 observer missions of Turkish Armed Forces 466–468 Öcalan, A. 244, 245, 254–256, 259–262, 267, 268; capture, arrest and imprisonment 164,

506

Index 237, 238, 244, 245, 247, 254, 259, 403; chief negotiator 260–261; democratic autonomy 269, 271; in Syria 393, 397; teachings 271, 272, 274; see also Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 179, 195, 320, 322, 347, 355–357, 359–361, 362, 470, 474, 488; high-income countries 196, 350; PISA 2015 results 347 OHAL (state of emergency) 65, 111, 144, 272, 309 oil price 153 Öktem, K. 210, 237 Operation Deliberate Force 464 Operation Deny Flight 464 Operation Euphrates Shield 386 Operation Inherent Resolve 456 Operation Provide Comfort 454 Operation Sharp Guard 464 Operation Sledgehammer (coup plan) 285, 308, 309n13 Organisation for Security and Cooperation for Europe (OSCE) 463 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 460 Orthodox Theological School of Chalki 331 Oslo process 255, 256–257 Ottoman Empire 6, 25, 30, 69, 71–73, 84, 115, 124, 299, 413, 482; centralisation policies 233; Christians in 69; collapse/dissolution 15, 17, 56, 70, 234, 263, 333, 368; and democracy 32; divisions inherited by Turkish Republic 124; elites 83; foreign policy 368, 369; historiography 43–44; identity groups 331–333; importance 373, 414; Islamism and Ottomanism 55, 63, 70; Jewish community 333; Kurdish revolts 233–234; and Kurds/ Kurdish revolts 233–234, 243; Modern Ottoman Period 38; monarchy 14, 70; multi-religious 336; ‘nations’ resulting from 328; neo-Ottomanism 63, 472, 476; non-Muslims 329; Ottoman nation 328; Patriarchate 330; and Peter the Great 414; populations 328; reforms 45, 233, 234; remains/ruins of 25, 477; territories ruled by 328, 472, 476; women’s movement 315; see also empires Ottomanism 55, 70, 234, 242; neo-Ottomanism 63, 472, 476; Pan-Ottomanism 369 Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) 470, 474, 475 Özal, T. (Kurdish Prime Minister and President) 33, 62, 76, 105, 237, 342, 395; civil-military relations 119, 124; elections and party system 93–94; relationship with US 402, 407 Özbudun, E. 93 Özerdem, F. 489

Ozgur, I. 345 Özkan, B. 489 Özkök, H. 122, 450 Özman, A. 319 Pahlavi, R. P. 45 Pamuk, O. 278; A Strangeness in My Mind 21n11 Pamukog˘ lu, O. 278 Pan-Islamism 56, 70, 234, 369 pantheistic (mystic) Islam 120, 121 Paris Agreement 177, 184 parliamentarianism 103–105 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) 431 Parliamentary Constitutional Accord Committee 109 Partnership for Peace (PFP) 449 . Party of Union and Progress (ITF) 84 Pasha, Bedirhan . . 233 Pasha, Ismet (Inönü) 15, 19, 74, 104, 436, 439–440 Pasha, Kör Muhammad 233 Patriot missiles 405 Pazartesi (radical feminist journal) 317 Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) 249, 261, 272 peace processes: AKP’s share in failure 262; Concept on Turkey’s Contribution to Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Operations 466; decade of 254–257; failure 257–259, 261–263; historical and political background 460–462; intelligence officials 255–256; international mediators 255–256; and Kurdish question 253–265; observer missions of Turkish Armed Forces 466–468; Oslo process 255, 256–257, 258; Peacebuilding Fund 468; with PKK 255–256, 381, 404; post-Westphalian conception of peacekeeping 459, 460; preparatory phase 255–256; reasons for PKK’s attendance at Oslo 258–259; reasons for Turkish attendance at Oslo 258; second attempt 259–263; Turkey’s peacekeeping diplomacy 462–463; Turkish Armed Forced, peace operations 463–464, 465–466; UN peacekeeping missions 459–469 peasants 85, 92, 152, 192, 244, 245, 277 Peker, N. 132–133 Penal Code 142, 320; and Civil Code 130; human rights 300, 301, 306, 307; Military 116; NGOs and civil society 130 pendular democracy 27–28, 36 People’s Democracy Party (HDP) 1, 96, 110, 238, 249, 262, 320 People’s Labour Party (HEP) 248 People’s Liberation Army (HKO) 271 People’s Protection Units (YPG) 231, 232, 271, 404, 419, 454

507

Index People’s United Revolution Movement (HBDH) 271 Peres, S. 333, 472 Permanent Structured Cooperation for Security (PESCO) 432 Peter the Great 414 physical violence 19–20 pipelines: energy policy 164, 165, 168, 169, 171–172; Russian-Turkish relations 416, 417; Turkey–US relationship 402–403 Pir Sultan Abdal Foundation (Alevi organisation) 334 Pis¸kinsüt, S. 304 PKK see Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) planning: central 152; disaster management 215, 221, 224; evolving system 193, 194; housing development projects 180; incremental 193; land use 221; municipal 198; at national level 193; regulation 193; residential areas 221; settlements 192; spatial 195, 200; strategic 418; of terrorist attacks 273; tools 198, 199, 200; and urban economy nexus 198–199; urban planning and urban economics nexus 198–199; urban trends 192–193, 199, 200 pluralism 63, 299, 360; anti-pluralism 33; external, of media 138, 146; limited tolerance of 29–30, 33; media 5, 138, 145, 146 pogroms 16, 84; Istanbul (1955) 74 Polatkan, H. 19, 117 political capital 22, 251 political economy 151–162; of AKP era 154–160; dual external anchors 154–155; foreign-capital dependence 158–160; global crisis 155, 156, 157–158; institutional degeneration 155, 156, 157–158; mass politics 158–160; sectoral pathways 158–160; state-led development and reluctant neoliberalism 152–154; Turkey as emerging power 160–161 political elites 20, 133, 152, 276, 416; elections and party system 94, 97, 98; and secularism 41n6, 42 Political Islam 4, 13, 23, 25, 55–68, 131, 140, 318, 334, 484; and AKP 62–65; attempts to engage in institutionalised politics 59–60; civil-military relations 119, 121; and classical Islam 57; diaspora policy 205–206; early attempts to engage in institutionalised politics 59–60; and ethnicisation of Turkish nationalism in the 2000s 75–77; Islamist dissent 58–59; Kemalist Turkey 56–58; and Kurdish nationalism 140; leaders 58; and nation/state 56; and secularism 41n4, 45; secularism 64; statist nature of 63; Sunni Islam 65, 334; Turkish Islamic synthesis 18, 60–62, 95n18, 128; and Turkish nationalism 73–77; and US–Turkish relations 415, 420; see also Islam; Muslims political parties see elections and party system

political spectrum, in Turkey 14 populations 8, 16, 199, 330, 478; exchange of 437; homogeneity 41n6; indigenous 336; Kurdish 221, 232, 232n2, 242, 396; local 475, 478, 479; municipal 196; Muslim 337, 476; Ottoman Empire 328; residential 196; rural 21; younger and older 357n12, 359 populism 3, 5, 21, 135; controlled 159; electoral 151; neoliberal 157, 161, 485; and NGOs 133; ‘thin-centred ideology’ 133 Populist Party (HP) 93 post-Cold War era 96, 394–399, 403, 409, 414, 438, 452, 454, 455, 471; foreign policy 367, 372, 376; see also Cold War power: asymmetric relation of 41; hard see hard power; military 1, 19, 24, 368, 463; regional see regionalism/regional power; soft see soft power; Pre-Modern Period 38 pre-modern politics 38, 42 Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) 203, 207, 210 Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication (TIB) 141, 143, 144 presidential system 103–114; ADP, presidency under 106–109; elections of 2018 111–113; and Erdog˘ an 109–111; introducing in the 1990s as effective government 105–106; parliamentarianism, rise and fall 103–105 press freedom 139 Prime Minister 93 principles: anti-discrimination 305; of Atatürk 117, 129; constitutional 43, 77; decision-making 466; democratic 106, 109, 285, 286, 448; foreign policy 367, 369, 371, 373, 374, 386, 393, 462; ideological 57; of Islamism/Turkism 70; Kemalist 15, 57, 205; liberal 42; moral 47; of national sovereignty 45; political/legal-political 41, 69; rule of law 285, 448; secularism 42, 73, 86, 340; Turkish Republic 73 Principles of Atatürk 129 Progressive Republican Party (TCF) 73, 84–85 propaganda 59, 139, 270, 420, 421; of AKP 113; Christian 336 Provisional Regional Construction Teams 464 Public Diplomacy Coordinator 203 public–private partnerships (PPPs) 355, 358 Putin, V. 405, 409, 413, 415 Putnam, R. 130 Qatar 171–172 Qur’an see Koran radicalisation 236–237, 482 Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) 140, 141 Ramadan 122, 124

508

Index Rapid Deployable Turkish Force-Third Corps Command 464 rationalisation 454 rationalistic democracy 116 Refah Partisi see Welfare Party (RP) referenda 1, 23, 34, 99, 109–110, 112, 170, 303; of 2004 428, 437; of 2007 107; of 2010 24, 76, 308; of 2017 25, 85, 97–99, 111, 224, 311, 395, 397, 399; constitutional 23, 34, 76; public 301 reforms 2, 76, 77, 141, 164, 223, 389; of AKP 255, 440; of Atatürk/Kemalist 19n7, 45, 46, 57–59, 61, 72, 115, 392; civil-military relations 284; controlled change 32; decentralisation 220; democratising 49–50, 107, 129–131, 250, 403; disaster management 154, 215–218; domestic 369; economic and political 117, 402, 403; educational 58; Europeanisation 22, 142; human rights 299, 300, 303, 304, 310; IFI-led 154; institutional 154, 199, 206; integration 140; Kemalist 19n7, 45–46, 57–59, 61, 72, 115, 392; Kurds, affecting 63, 279; legal 58; legislative 305; liberal 15, 263; local governance 218; market 153; medium-term 140; military 123; monetary 154; Ottoman 45, 233, 234; payment 360; and Political Islam 56–63; post-crisis 154; public procurement 155; radical 22, 368; reform fatigue 155, 156, 157–158; regulatory 154, 159; Republican 45, 59, 316; resistance to 22, 31; secular 46, 73, 74, 127, 267; security sector 284; socio-economic change 32–34; structural 130; Tanzimat (1839–1876) 83; Turkey not ‘changing’ but ‘changed’ 483–484; Westernizing 15, 19n7, 22, 116; women, affecting 315, 317; see also modernisation refugees: crisis 379, 381; Syria 76, 361, 380, 407, 418, 420, 430, 470, 473, 482, 490; see also asylum seekers; UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 380 regime change 97, 386, 398, 406 regionalism/regional power: autonomy 263; identity 16, 379, 388, 455; instability 171, 172, 379–383; Kurdistan Regional Government 164, 165, 170–171, 391, 403; power games 380 Regulating Materials Published on the Internet and Measures against Crimes Committed through Online Publications, Law No. 5651 (Internet Law, 2007) 141, 143 religio-legal opinion 62 religious education 339–348; AKP policy 342–343; current challenges 346–347; education system and religion, modern. Turkey 339–340; future trajectories 346–347; Imam . Hatip Schools see Imam Hatip Schools; Islamisation 339, 345; law of 4+4+4 344–345; and military coup of 1980 341; pious generation, raising 339, 345

religious elites 83, 243 religious minorities 7, 16, 41n6, 49, 328–338; Armenians 329, 331–332; assimilation policy 336; communities 337; de facto 335–336; extermination policy 336; millets (Ottoman non-Muslim communities) 16, 328, 329, 334, 337; Orthodox Greeks 329, 330–331; violation of minority rights 335; see also Alevis/ Alevism (religious minority group); ethnicity; human rights; Jewish community religious orders 46, 55, 56, 58, 59, 72, 300 religious schools 7, 56, 323, 345, 346 renewable energy 166; push for renewables 167–168; Renewable Energy Resource Area Regulation 167; renewable energy zones (REZs) 167 Reporters Without Borders 144 repressive policies 16, 17, 22 republicanism 3, 369 Republicanist Peasant National party (CKMP) 86, 90 Republican People’s Party (CHP) 1, 58, 238, 340; civil-military relations 117, 118; and democracy 27, 31, 32; elections and party system 84, 85, 91–94, 96, 98, 99; elite 85; establishment 84; failed military coup (2016) 289; founding of (1923) 14–15; human rights 299, 301, 309; and Political Islam 61; and Presidency 103, 104, 110; and secularism 45; and Turkish nationalism 72, 73, 77 Republican Rallies (2007) 43 resistance 16, 83, 267, 310, 323, 373, 396, 405, 455; climate change and environment 186, 198; Cyprus 435; Kurdish question/insurgency 234, 236, 242n2; to reform 22, 31; secular 140, 285; Turkish Resistance Movement 435, 439; violent 233, 337 Resolute Support Mission (RSM) 464 Revolutionary Left (Dev Sol) 268 Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP–C) 266, 268, 270, 272, 273 revolutionism 84 Rizgari, A. 245 Rodrik, D. 308 Roman Catholicism 335, 336 Romaniots (local Jews) 332 Romano, D. 487 Rouhani, H. 168 Royal Dutch Shell 167 RP see Welfare Party (RP) rule of law 285, 408, 448 Rumi calendar 45 Russia: and Ankara 414, 422; collapse of Soviet Union 94; Crimea, annexation (2014) 417; Crimean War (1853–1856) 414; energy policy 168–169; First Chechen War (1994) 415; foreign policy 19, 415; instability in Turkish

509

Index relations with 420–422; nationalism 41; and NATO 415, 488, 489; natural gas 486; New Political Thinking 414; pogroms 84; Russian–Georgian war (2008) 415–416; Tsarist 84; and the Ukraine 421; see also Putin, V.; Russian-Turkish relations; Soviet Union Russian-Turkish relations 413–424; authoritarianism 419–420; economic cooperation 416–417; historical background 413–414; implications 420–421; insincere partnership 416; new reality 414–416; research challenges 421–422; sanctions imposed by Russia 417; Southern flank, limbo on 417–418, 420, 448; and Syria 417, 418–419; trade and gas business 416–417; Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality (1945) 369, 447 S-400 anti-aircraft missiles 405, 454 Saadet Parisi see Felicity Party (Saadet Parisi) Sabri, M. 56, 58 Safa, P. 59 Santoro, A. 335 Sartori, G. 94, 98 Sasak, O. 474 Saudi Arabia 382, 386, 388, 391, 394, 395, 398–400, 489 Say, N. 166 Schengen Area 429 schools see education/schools search and rescue (SAR), disaster management 217, 220, 221 Seckinelgin, H. 131 Second Republic (1960s–1990s) 18–21; physical violence 19–20; symbolic violence 20–21 ‘Second Strategic Energy Review’ (European Commission) 164 second-wave feminism 316 sectarianism 380 secular age 40 secularisation 39–40, 42, 83; civic-republican models 39; concept 49; cultural 37, 44; defining 39; and democratisation 49; of education 46; interpretivist understanding 39; of justice 46; Kemalist 45, 71; laic models 39; positivist understanding 39; processes 40; radical 45, 46; vs. secularism 37, 38; theories 39, 48; total 45; Turkish society 48 secularism 44, 383; actors 49, 64, 107; of AKP 305, 343; anti-secularist activities 96n23, 106, 141; assertive 47; authority 72; bourgeoisie 21; citizens 286, 345; civil society 132; coercive 15, 25; constitutional 37, 43, 45; criticisms of, in Turkey 49; defining 40; democracy 37, 38, 49, 63, 129, 339, 384; education/schools 45, 339, 340, 345, 347; elites 20–21, 43, 46, 48, 65, 75, 84; enlightenment 40n3, 42n6, 50; establishment 106, 141, 267; governments 403;

groups 77, 132; hegemony 145; in India 49; institutional 43; interpreting 266, 343; and Islam 64, 116n2, 345; and Kemalism 43, 45, 267; and laiklik (Turkish secularism) 116n2; law 43; leadership 74; middle-classes 152, 154, 159; militant 76, 77; the military 2, 75, 285; and modernisation 38, 41, 42, 50; NGOs 126, 131, 134, 135; passive secular ideology 47, 48; policies/programmes 94; and Political Islam 61; and political Islam 57, 63–65; political/ legal-political 37–54; principles 42, 73, 86, 340; progressive 78, 484; pro-secular intelligentsia 44; pro-secular political preferences 43; reforms 46, 73, 74, 127, 267; resistance 140, 285; rights and freedoms 41, 43, 47; secular age 40; vs. secularisation 37, 38; secular-nationalist organisations 127; secular-religious cooperation 64; secular state 4, 37, 41, 43, 47, 65, 71, 72, 129, 243, 305, 340, 345, 368; semi-secularism 71, 72; and statism 44; studies 38–39; Sunnis 23, 95; of Turkey/Turkish Republic 4, 37, 38, 44, 45, 49, 61, 73–75, 106, 236, 342, 344, 345, 394, 404, 463; and Turkishness 234, 266; undermining 38, 394; and women 43, 315; see also laiklik (Turkish secularism) secularity 40, 45; non-Western 42; post-secularity 42 securitisation 33 Security Council, UN see United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Selçuk empire 192 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 215 Sephardic Jews 332 ‘Sèvres Syndrome’ 15 Sezer, A.N. 106, 218, 371, 397 Sharia law 45, 57, 74, 300, 310 Shaykh al-Islam 57 Sheikh Said Kurdish-Islamist rebellion (1925) 16, 58, 72, 73, 235, 267, 300 Shiite Muslims 76, 169, 395, 396; see also Sunni Islam Silverstein, B. 55 Sirman, N. 316 Six-Day War (1967) 371 social class 29, 30, 37; middle-classes and secularism 152, 154, 159; and ruling class 31 Social Democratic Party (SODEP) 94 Social Democratic People’s Party (SHP) 94, 248 Socialist Feminist Collective 323 sociology 127, 328 soft power 374, 403, 431, 472, 473, 486, 489; diaspora policy 207, 211, 212; foreign policy 383, 384, 386, 388, 389; see also hard power Solidarity March against Battering (1987) 316 Solmaz, E. 236

510

Index Somalia, Turkish response and peacebuilding in 473–476 Sosyal Demokrasi Partisi see Social Democratic Party (SODEP) Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti see Social Democratic People’s Party (SHP) South-Eastern Europe 416, 417 Southern Gas Corridor (SGG) strategy, EU 164, 168 sovereign lands/nation 103, 381 sovereignty 16, 45, 329, 382; Iraq 392 Soviet Union: aggression in Afghanistan 402; collapse of 94, 414, 455; and Cuban crisis 402, 452; and Kemalist Turkey 414; and NATO 447; as a superpower 370; see also Cold War; Russia; Russian-Turkish relations Sözen, A. 166, 442 state see nationalism/nation; nation-state; state-led modernisation; statism state feminism 316 state-led modernisation: legacy 30–31, 32; political consequences 31–32 State Ministry Responsible of Human Rights 303 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) 152 State Planning Organisation 59, 152, 193, 317, 351 State Procurement Law 182–183 State Security Courts (SSCs) 33, 428; human rights 302, 303, 306 state security forces 7, 254, 276, 277, 310 statism 13, 21, 105, 141; elites 20–21; and Political Islam 59, 60, 62, 63, 65; and secularism 44, 45, 47; statist-nationalism 65, 484; see also Islam/Islamism; nationalism statistics 75, 320n17, 343, 344, 474 Stavridis, J. 451–452 Stoltenberg, J. 454 strategic depth 374, 383, 384, 386 Strategic Depth (Davutog˘ lu) 398 strikes, hunger 20, 259, 260, 268, 305 Sub-Saharan Africa 153 Sucuog˘ lu, G. 474 Suez Crisis (1956) 370 Sufism 55, 57 suicide bombers 247, 271, 273 Sultan–Caliph 56, 84 Sun Language Theory 73 Sunni Islam 1, 26, 29, 47–49, 233, 300, 488; AKP governments 334; and Alevis 334; conservatism 96, 98, 210, 267, 441; diaspora policy 210, 211; elections and party system 83, 90, 95, 96, 98; fanaticism 72, 75; Hanafi sect 72; hard-line 269; identity 266; Iraq 273, 396; Kurds 72, 76, 235, 243, 346; militias 169; Political Islamism 65, 334; religious education 346; religious groups 73; and religious minorities 328, 334, 337; secularism 23, 95;

and Turkish nationalism 75–77; and Turkish relationship with Middle Eastern neighbours 395, 396; Turkish youth 84; see also Islam/ Islamism; Shiite Muslims supra-identity 15n3 supranationalism 76, 269 Supreme Election Council (YSK) 85 Supreme Military Council 123–124 surface-to-air missiles 417, 418, 421 Süsoy, Y. 20n8 symbolic violence 20–21 Synagogue of Edirne 333 Syria 7, 236, 237, 250, 264, 392; and AKP 395; and Ankara 397–398; borders 167, 232, 259, 380, 383, 393, 398, 399, 417, 430, 454; failed-state problem 379, 381; and ISIS 383; and Kurds 265, 271; Muslim Brotherhood in 394, 397; northern 271, 274, 375, 391, 395, 399, 419, 482; Öcalan in 393, 397; and PKK 231, 259, 265, 274; radicals 231; refugees 76, 361, 380, 407, 418, 420, 430, 470, 473, 482, 490; relationship with Turkey 386, 392, 393, 397–398; Shia regime 76; territory 399; theatre 260, 265; US strategy, absence of 407; war in see Syrian war; see also Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Syrian Democratic Forces coalition (QSD) 419 Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) 271, 391, 404, 405, 454 Syrian war 6, 8, 76, 169, 172, 232, 238, 239, 240, 265, 386, 420, 421, 430, 482, 486; civil war 165, 168–169, 170, 273, 380, 413, 418, 430, 436, 473, 487; and peace process 259; Russian-Turkish relations 418–419; Syrian army 170, 259 Tachau, F. 121, 439 TAF see Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) Talabani, J. 256, 260 Taner, E. 258 Tansel, A. 93 Tanzimat reform era (1839–1876) 83; see also modernisation; reforms tarikat (brotherhood) 18 taxation 246, 267; on capital 333; discriminatory 300; electricity market 165; fines 144; healthcare financing 355; income 198, 361; internal 426; rates 198; revenue 194, 197 Taylor, C. 40 TBMM see Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) Tenth National Development Plan (2014–2018) 195, 200 Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası see Progressive Republican Party (TCF) territorial integrity 61n13, 72, 232, 253, 305, 369, 396, 406

511

Index territory 84, 233, 234n5, 336, 350, 368, 372, 381, 391, 392, 396, 398, 431, 454; Eastern Anatolian 447; EU 429; Iranian 392; lost 421; occupied 439; Ottoman 462; Syrian 399; Turkish 396, 398, 404, 447, 470; and Turkish nationalism 71 terrorism: current situation 270–273; future trajectories 273–274; Gülenist Terror Organisation (FETÖ) 35, 120, 121, 288, 289, 382; historical background 267–270; and Islam 268; isolation and solitary confinement for suspects 304–305; Kurdish 231, 245–246; Law on the Changes in the Antiterrorism Law 306; Muslim Brotherhood 398–399, 405; and NGOs 270; 9/11 terrorist attacks 383, 462; of PKK 245–246, 248, 266, 382, 391, 407; war on terror 383; see also Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Tezcür, G. M. 261 Third Republic (1990s to the present day) 21–25; authority 24–25; Kurdish and Islam issues 22–24 Third-Worldism 178, 440 THKP–C see Turkish Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (THKP–C) TIB see Presidency of Telecommunication and Communication (TIB) TIKA see Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) TIP see Worker’s Party of Turkey (TIP) Tocqueville, A. de 129–130 Topçu, N. 59 Toprak, B. 71 trade union confederations 127–128 ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ phenomenon 361 Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) 164, 171 Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) 164, 165, 168–171, 416 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) 407 Transfer of Operating Rights (TOR) 163–164 transport, in Ankara 199 Treaty of Cyprus (1960) 427 Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality (1945) 369, 447 Treaty of Kars (1922) 414 Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 13, 15, 234, 300, 335; limitations in respect of religious minorities 329–331 Treaty of Sèvres (1920) 15 True Path Party (DYP) 62, 94, 119, 140, 332, 342 Truman Doctrine (1947) 414, 447 Trump, D. 386, 401, 405, 406, 408, 409, 489 Tsunami. disaster, East Asia (2004) 477 Turan, I 20 Turanism 72

Türk, A. 261 Turkey–Africa Cooperation Summit (2008) 473 Turkey–NATO relations 446–458; collective defence/security 446, 449–450, 455; difficulties 452–455; ideational factors 448; mutual identity construction 449; origins 447–448; practices 450–452; rhetoric 449–450; strategic imperatives and security concerns 447–448; see also North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Turkification 56 Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) 17, 19, 77, 232, 277, 278; General Staff 461; observer missions 466–468; peace operations 462, 463–464, 465–466, 468 Turkish Business and Industry Association (TUSIAD) 157 Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) 207, 463, 473–474, 476 Turkish Cypriots 437, 438, 439, 440 Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) 13, 103, 115n1, 163, 237, 339, 382, 463; elections and party system 85, 86, 90, 93, 95–98; female MPs in 321 Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (TUSIAD) 134 Turkish–Islamic synthesis 18, 60–62, 95n18, 128 Turkish nation/Turkish nationalism see under nationalism/nation ‘Turkishness’ 4, 17, 60, 129, 142, 207, 232, 234, 235, 238, 266, 307, 330, 337; and Turkish nationalism 70, 77 Turkish Penal Code see Penal Code Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) 167 Turkish Pipeline Corporation (BOTAs¸) 163 Turkish Radio and Television, (TRT) Law No. 359 (1964) 139, 140, 141 Turkish Red Crescent 471, 473 Turkish Republic: First Republic (1920s–1960s) 13–18, 70, 77, 84, 190, 192–193, 299–301; Second Republic (1960s–1990s) 18–21; fault lines 214; foundation see foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923); Kurdish politics in early years 234–235; political system 83; principles 73; Third Republic (1990s to the present day) 21–25 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) 441, 442 Turkish Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/ Front (THKP–C) 268 Turkish Statistical Institute in Ankara (TurkStat) 155, 407n15 . Turkish Workers Party (TIP) 86 Turkish Worker’s Peasant’s Liberation Army (TIKKO) 271 Turkism/pan-Turkism 70, 234 Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi see Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM)

512

Index . Türkiye Devrimci I¸sçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu see Confederation . of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey . (DISK) Türkiye . I¸sçi Partisi see Turkish Workers Party (TIP). Türkiye I¸sçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu see Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions . (TÜRK-I¸s) Turkmenistan 169–170 “Turks abroad” 202, 210; Advisory Committee 206, 208; Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) 203, 207, 210 TurkStream pipeline project 168, 169, 417 28 February process 128–129, 131, 140, 342 Ubeydullah, Sheikh 233, 234 Ukraine 421 ulema (Muslim scholars) 56, 57 Ulvi, A. 184 UN Decade for Human Rights Education 305 unemployment 155, 157, 161, 304, 309 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 185; ratification by Turkey 179 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 380 UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) 462 Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD) 209 uniqueness of Turkey 483 United Kingdom, health outcomes 350 United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) 466 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 460, 461, 463, 477; Resolutions 713 and 757 464; Resolutions 1803 and 1835 164 United States: ‘America First’ policy 406, 409; coalitions led by 454, 461; Congress 405, 440, 452–453; ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’ 403; health outcomes 350; hegemony of 452; intervention in Iraq (2003) 165, 170, 273, 403–406; relationship with Turkey see US relationship with Turkey; sanctions against Iran 64, 376; Truman Doctrine (1947) 414, 447; see also Cold War Universal Declaration of Human Rights 248, 300 universities 122, 184, 318; Ankara 117, 340, 341; autonomy 303; and human rights 304, 308; Istanbul 117, 340; national university entrance exam (ÖYS) 342, 345, 346; teaching hospitals 351, 361, 362n23; in United States 408; see also Board of Higher Education (YÖK) Ünler, A. 165 UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) 461 UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) 466 Unver, A. 486

urbanisation 2, 5, 6, 181, 183, 191–196, 198, 358, 486; early settlement patterns and modernisation period 192–194; rapid 193, 194, 196, 214; resisting 191; sustainable 194; and Turkey 191–192; urban planning trends 192–193; urban population of Turkey 190; see also cities; industrialisation Urbanisation Council 195 US relationship with Turkey 401–412; from 1946 to 2018 402–406; anti-Americanism in Turkey 402, 404, 405, 452; and Cyprus 440; detention of Turkish Special Forces unit members (2003) 404; Fulbright Program 408; ‘honeymoon’ period 401, 402; implications 406–408; sanctions 440; and Syria 454; see also United States USSR see Soviet Union Van Bruinessen, M. 277 Vance, C. 436 Van earthquake (2011) 218–219, 220, 221, 222 Van Montfort, K. 165 Varto earthquake (1966) 202 Vatican 335 vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) 271 Veliog˘ lu, H. 269–270, 272, 273 Village Guards Aid and Solidarity Association 280 village-guard system 7, 275–283, 304, 487; in 1980s 276–277; in 1990s 278; in 2000s 279–281; and Kurdish insurgency 245, 246; Law of Temporary Village Guards (1924) 276, 279; negotiation and reward 276–277; transformation 278 violence 18, 20, 267; against civilians 254, 382; Kurds 16, 62, 235, 237–238, 239, 247, 250, 304, 306, 309n13; by military 19, 416, 436; physical 19–20; religious minorities 335–336; Second Republic (1960s–1990s) 19–20; structural 17; symbolic 20–21; against women 321; see also terrorism Virtue Party 62, 94n18, 268, 305, 342–343 VOLKAN 435 War of Independence (1919–1922) 13, 58, 72, 84, 115, 392 War of Independence Museum, Ankara 243 WASP 25n15 Watts, N. 248n20 Welfare Party (RP) 23, 28, 61, 75, 94, 105, 119, 128, 140, 237, 268, 342; see also Erbakan, N. Western Europe 30, 333, 335, 357n11, 450, 473 Westernizing reforms 15, 19n7, 22 Whiting, M. 487 Williams, P. D. 460 Winrow, G. M. 278

513

Index women: activism of and the state 315–316; Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 303, 304, 317; feminist interventions 316–319; gender politics and women’s movement 315–327; headscarf issue 37, 45n10, 141, 304, 308; NGOs 128, 131; reforms affecting 315, 317; rights of 300, 318; and secularism 43, 315; in Turkish politics 315–316; violence against 321; see also gender politics; women’s movements Women’s Initiative for Peace 318 Women’s Labour and Employment Initiative (KEIG) 322 Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation 317 women’s movements: and gender-based violence 321; and gender politics 315–327; and Kemalism 315, 316, 319; and secularism 43; see also gender politics; women Women’s Solidarity Foundation 317 Women’s Union 315 Worker’s Party of Turkey (TIP) 19 World Bank 152, 194n1, 220, 343, 363, 402; and political economy 152–154; recovery programmes 154; structural adjustment programmes 153

world risk society 378 World Turkish Business Council 209 World Turkish Entrepreneurs Implementation and Research Centre 209 Yalman, N. 95 Yanardag˘ og˘ lu, E. 485 Yazır, E. H. 57 Yeltsin, B. 414 Yeni Türkiye Partisi see New Turkey Party (YTP) Yıldırım, B. 110, 288, 289 Yılmaz, M. 62, 119n6, 322 Yılmaz, Z. 322 Young Turks 70, 96n23, 96n24, 234n5, 264, 274 YPG see People’s Protection Units (YPG) YTB see Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) Yugoslavia, dissolution of 461 Yüksel, U. 336 Yunus Emre Institutes 203 Zana, L. 249 Zana, M. 236 Zarrab, R. 165, 395 Zevi, S. 333 Zorlu, F.R. 19, 117, 426

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