Introduction: Turkish Cultural Policies in a Global World—Circulations, Territories, and Actors

See cover of Newsweek’s international edition August 29, 2005: “Cool Istanbul. Europe’s hippest city might not need Europe after all”; “Istanbul rising”, Financial Times, Surveys ART1, p. 5, Saturday, February 27, 2010; “An art boom energizes Istanbul”, International Herald Tribune, Saturday, February 11, 2012, p. 18; “The Istanbul Art-Boom Bubble”, New York Times, p. MM 40, Sunday, February 12, 2012.

Workshop “The making of cultural policies in Turkey. Circulations, territories, actors”. French institute of Anatolian Studies and Galatasaray University, April 16 and 17, 2015. This workshop was held as part of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) “Matières à transfaire. Espaces-temps d’une globalisation (post-) ottoman” program (ANR-12-GLOB-003). It was jointly organized by the Department of Political Science at Galatasaray University and the French Institute of Anatolian Studies (Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes, IFEA).

In late spring 2013, Turkey found itself in the international media spotlight after protesters occupied Gezi Park and Taksim Square in Istanbul on May 28, 2013 to demonstrate against a municipal development plan. These protests were violently repressed by the police, sparking demonstrations nationwide.

Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim intellectual and preacher and the inspirational figure of the Gülen movement, also called the Hizmet movement (meaning “service”). He has set up a worldwide network of Turkish primary and secondary schools. Members of his movement are discreet and cultivate secrecy, and they have infiltrated the Turkish administration, particularly the police and judiciary. Gülen went into exile in the USA in 1999, and from 2002 to 2010 was an important ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. However, he suddenly started criticizing Erdoğan’s choices, in particular policies that were hostile to Israel and negotiations with Kurdish rebels. Relations became strained, and they were broken off in late 2013 in the wake of revelations about cases of corruption involving ministers and AKP officials. The Gülen movement was accused of being behind these revelations and of attempting to destabilize the government. It was declared to be a terrorist organization and the authorities embarked on severe repression of its members, seizing their financial assets and demanding that Fethullah Gülen be extradited from the USA. Gülen and his allies were said to be behind the attempted coup on July 15, 2016, justifying a new wave of arrests and dismissals of public-sector officials. http://​abonnes.​lemonde.​fr/​proche-orient/​article/​2017/​05/​12/​turquie-57-arrestations-au-cours-d-une-operation-contre-la-bourse-d-istanbul_​5126597_​3218.​html?​xtmc=​turquie_​arrestations&​xtcr=​3.

See the Siyah Bant (black band) website listing various individual instances of artistic censorship in Turkey (www.​siyahbant.​org).

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, “International Referendum Observation Mission. Republic of Turkey, Constitutional Referendum, 16 April 2017. Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions”. Available at: http://​www.​osce.​org/​odihr/​elections/​turkey/​303681.

However, it needs to be pointed out that certain states still do not have a national cultural policy, though this does not prevent them from playing a role by providing tax incentives for supporting artists or by enabling other local public actors to do so, as is the case in the USA (see Martel 2006). It was not until the 1990s that all the European states had a culture ministry.

See, for example, for the case of France, the Dictionnaire des politiques culturelles de la France depuis 1959 (de Waresquiel 2001).

In this collection, see Katoğlu (2009), Ada and İnce (2009), Ada and İnce (2011), Ünsal (2011), Ertürk (2011), and the Cultural Policy and Management Yearbook (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012–2013, and 2014–2015). The Anadolu Kültür foundation has also published a number of works about cultural action (http://​www.​anadolukultur.​org/).

See, for instance, http://​oui.​hypotheses.​org/​tag/​istanbul-2010 and https://​www.​ifea-istanbul.​net/​index.​php?​option=​com_​k2&​view=​item&​id=​896&​Itemid=​471&​lang=​fr.

These seminars received support from the French National Research Agency as part of the Matières à transfaire. Espaces-temps d’une globalisation (post-) ottoman research program (ANR-12-GLOB-003) [Trans-acting Matters: Areas and Eras of a (Post-)Ottoman Globalization]. http://​transfaire.​hypotheses.​org/​transacting. Accessed on June 1, 2017.

See Lascoumes and Le Galès (2007).

Arjun Appadurai defines locality in the following terms: “I view locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial. I see it as a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts” (Appadurai 1996: 178).