Why Turkey is Authoritarian: Right-Wing Rule from Atatürk to Erdogan (Left Book Club)

Why Turkey is Authoritarian: Right-Wing Rule from Atatürk to Erdogan (Left Book Club)

For the last century, the Western world has regarded Turkey as a pivotal case of the 'clash of civilisations' between Islam and the West. Why Turkey is Authoritarian offers a radical challenge to this conventional narrative. Halil Karaveli highlights the danger in viewing events in Turkey as a war between a 'westernising' state and the popular masses defending their culture and religion, arguing instead for a class analysis that is largely ignored in the Turkish context.  This book goes beyond cultural categories that overshadow more complex realities when thinking about the 'Muslim world', while highlighting the ways in which these cultural prejudices have informed ideological positions. Karaveli argues that Turkey's culture and identity have disabled the Left, which has largely been unable to transcend these divisions.  This book asks the crucial question: why does democracy continue to elude Turkey? Ultimately, Karaveli argues that Turkish history is instructive for a left that faces the global challenge of a rising populist right, which succeeds in mobilising culture and identity to its own purposes. Published in partnership with the Left Book Club. “Informative, authoritative, and reliable, Karaveli's analysis of Turkish politics should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand Turkey's relentless retreat from democracy.”    -- Ronald Grigor Su, University of Michigan 'Wrests us out of the stale narratives of Islam vs. secularism, offering a new way of understanding one of the most important questions in Turkey today: why despite so much democratic promise, its fundamental political structure returns to authoritarianism again and again' 'Informative and authoritative Karaveli's analysis of Turkish politics should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand Turkey's relentless retreat from democracy' Halil Karaveli is a senior fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center, a US-Swedish think tank. Why Turkey is Authoritarian From Atatürk to Erdogan By Halil Karaveli Pluto Press Copyright © 2018 Halil Karaveli All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7453-3755-5 Contents Series Preface, ix, Timeline, xi, List of Illustrations, xv, Introduction, 1, 1 A Pattern of Violence, 9, 2 Kemalism and the Left, 35, 3 Capitalist Foundation, 70, 4 How the Right Won the People, 105, 5 Social Democratic Hope, 129, 6 Vengeance of the Right, 162, 7 The Rise of the Islamists, 188, Epilogue: Class, Identity and Democracy, 209, Afterword: Attacking the Kurds – The 'Return' of Kemalism, 213, Notes, 220, Bibliography, 226, Index, 228, CHAPTER 1 A Pattern of Violence 'This is a Bloodstained Square' The moment the first of the two bombs goes off is captured on a video clip: a group of young people are joined together in an embrace, performing a traditional Anatolian folk dance. Eerily, they are singing 'This is a bloodstained square'. They exude happiness, however, and the atmosphere is festive. Then, suddenly, there is a blast behind them. There are flames, and the blue, sunny sky is shrouded by a cloud of smoke that quickly expands. The dancers cast a quick glance backwards before diving for cover. The picture is blurred. On 10 October 2015, over one hundred leftist peace activists, Turks and Kurds, were blown up in Ankara. They were assembling on the square next to the train station in Ankara when the two suicide bombers struck. The activists had heeded the calls of several trade unions and of the pro-Kurdish and socialist Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) to protest against the war that the Turkish military was waging against Turkey's own Kurdish citizens in the south-east of the country, laying waste to entire towns. The massacre in Ankara is the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey to date. Yet it was anything but atypical in terms of what it stood for politically. The carnage fitted all too well into a pattern of mass killings since the late 1960s: the victims are invariably leftists, other democrats, or ethnic and religious minorities. The perpetrators are drawn from the country's deep, popular reservoir of ultra-conservatives and ultra-nationalists. Those who commission the massacres and the assassinations lurk in the shadows. The Ankara massacre followed on the killing of over 30 young socialists in a suicide bombing a few months earlier. On both occasions, the authorities identified the perpetrators as Turkish citizens who they claimed had acted on behalf of the so-called 'Islamic State'. The latter, however, did not claim responsibility for the Ankara massacre. Progressives and liberals felt they had good reason to suspect that the suicide bombers in Ankara had acted with the encouragement, or at very least the protection, of the Turkish state. To many, it seemed obvious that history was repeating itself, that elements of the infamous Turkish 'deep state' – the right-wing networks of conspirators and assas