nach oben

Erschienen in:

2020 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

3. The European Union in the Rise to Power of the AKP

verfasst von : Mario Zucconi

Erschienen in: EU Influence Beyond Conditionality

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

The impasse reached by Turkey’s politics in the late 1990s (resulting in a harsh authoritarian state) is what measures the importance of the role played by the EU accession process, if temporarily, in the country’s democratic evolution. For, on the one hand, in a context of profound discredit of traditional political parties, the EU took up a role of substitute authority. “EU membership – according to a political observer – [came to be] perceived by the Turkish public as a paradigm shift that would open new avenues for economic development as well as better governance.” Then, on the other, the accession process afforded the AKP’s former Islamist leaders a non-sectarian platform, thus making possible for an important part of the population to be integrated into national parliamentary politics, while also leading the country past the impasse of polarized politics and into a new, “post-secularist” phase of its political evolution.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Vorheriges Kapitel Turkey’s Polarized Politics in the 1990s

Nächstes Kapitel The European Union as Guarantor in Turkey’s Democratic Evolution

For instance, Soli Ozel, “After the Tsunami,” Journal of Democracy, 14.2 (April 2003).

For the election of 2002 as origin of a “new politics” see Chapter 2, footnote 1.

For instance, Ali Carkoglu, “Turkey’s November 2002 Elections: A New Beginning?” Middle East Review of International Affairs, 6.2 (December 2002). In 2002, the 10 per cent threshold left 46 per cent of the votes without parliamentary representation, but in 2007, with AKP at 46.6 per cent, the number of unrepresented votes was down to 25 per cent, and in 2011, with AKP at 49.8 per cent, it was less than 5 per cent.

For instance, R. Quinn Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light: The Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly, 25.2 (2004).

Cem Baslevent et al., “Party Preferences and Economic Voting in Turkey (Now That the Crisis Is Over),” Party Politics, 15.3 (May 2009).

The junior partner in the post-1999 vote coalition was the Motherland Party (MP), the only really pro-EU one, with 13.3 per cent of the vote. How Ocalan’s capture relates to the 1999 parliamentary elections is discussed in M. Abramowitz (ed.), Turkey’s Transformation and American Policy (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2000). Also Nazif Mandaci, “Turkey’s Unfinished Transition to Democracy,” in M. Aknur (ed.), Democratic Consolidation in Turkey: State, Political Parties, Civil Society, Civil–Military Relations, Socio-Economic Development, EU, Rise of Political Islam and Separatist Kurdish Nationalism (Boca Raton, FL: Universal-Publishers, 2012), p. 99. Most of the literature fails to establish that relationship and looks at those changing electoral outcomes in terms of volatility of Turkey’s politics.

Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 253. Fazilet’s clashing with the military is recognized by Yavuz as a reason for its poor result. The judicial motion to ban Refah was introduced with the party still in power, in May 1997. Judicial action against Istanbul’s mayor Erdogan started in December 1997. See Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light,” cit., pp. 345–46.

Turkuler Isiksel, “Between Text and Context: Turkey’s Tradition of Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” International Journal of Constitutional Law, 11.3 (2013), p. 717.

Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., p. 246.

Yavuz’s assessment was that the “criminalization of the opposition became the politics of the Turkish state in the late 1990s.” Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., p. 249.

See Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light,” cit., p. 347. The same author, p. 348, explains the party’s 1999 poor result with the disappointing performance of the Erbakan government.

See Hakan Yavuz, Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 71.

Caglar Ismail, “The Welfare Party and the February 28 Process: A Historical Analysis of Turkish Conservatives’ Move to the Center,” Turkish Journal of Politics, 3.1 (Summer 2012), p. 33.

Meliha B. Altunisik, “The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 27.1 and 2 (Winter and Spring 2005), p. 50.

Data from “Doing It by the Book,” Economist, 23 October 2010.

For instance, Mustafa Kutlay, “Economy as the ‘Practical Hand’ of New Turkish Foreign Policy: A Political Economy Explanation,” Insight Turkey, 13.1 (2011), p. 71.

Marvin Howe, Turkey Today: A Nation Divided Over Islam’s Revival (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 276 cites a message of the Directorate of Religious Affairs read in 76,000 mosques that warned that “[n]o one should try to wear out the military by using the Aug. 17 earthquake as a pretext […] Doing damage to the army would be the biggest harm a person can do to this country.”

Umit Cizre, “Introduction: The Justice and Development Party: Making Choices, Revisions and Reversals Interactively,” in U. Cizre (ed.), Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 3.

See H. Lowenthal and E. Ertugal-Lowenthal, “Turkey’s Performance in Attracting Foreign Direct Investment: Implications of EU Enlargement,” European Network of Economic Policy Research Institutes, Working Paper No. 8 (November 2001).

From Mehmet Ugur, “Economic Mismanagement and Turkey’s Troubled Relations with the EU: Is There a Link?” in M. Ugur and N. Canefe (eds.), Turkey and European Integration: Accession Prospects and Issues (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 91.

Ugur, “Economic Mismanagement and Turkey’s Troubled Relations with the EU,” cit., pp. 90–91.

Ugur, “Economic Mismanagement and Turkey’s Troubled Relations with the EU,” cit., p. 78.

Quoted in Andrew Mango, The Turks Today (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2004), pp. 89–90.

See, for instance, Serap Atan, “Europeanization of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkey–EU Relations,” in Ugur and Canefe (eds.), Turkey and European Integration, cit.

Ugur, “Economic Mismanagement and Turkey’s Troubled Relations with the EU,” cit., p. 96. Similar conclusions are in Cizre, “Introduction: The Justice and Development Party,” cit.; Ali Carkoglu, “Societal Perceptions of Turkey’s EU Membership: Causes and Consequences of Support for EU Membership,” in Ugur and Canefe (eds.), Turkey and European Integration, cit.

Turkey’s 1987 application for membership was rejected by Brussels two years later.

Serap Atan, “Europeanization of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkey–EU Relations,” cit., p. 102. The CEEC had all applied for membership in the mid-1990s. Between December 1997 and December 1999 all those applicants (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Rumania) plus Malta and Cyprus were accepted for accession negotiations and all of them, except for Bulgaria and Rumania, will become members of the Union in May 2004. With some of those candidates in problematic economic and institutional conditions, the Helsinki Council speeded up the process based on political considerations (failure to control the situation in Kosovo earlier in the year and the painful experience of the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by NATO).

Such name, first suggested by the European Stability Initiative, well captured the rise of the new industrial enterprises deep in Anatolia from the early 1980s on.

See Atan, “Europeanization of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkey–EU Relations,” cit.

TOBB is the Union of the Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Maritime Commerce and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey; TISK is the Turkish Confederation of Employers’ Associations; TUSIAD is the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association.

Atan, “Europeanization of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkey–EU Relations,” cit., p. 103. States Atan, p. 113: “The JCC appeared to be a crucial EU-level platform that shaped the vision of Turkish [business] concerning concerted practices and industrial relations.”

Atan, “Europeanization of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkey–EU Relations,” cit.

See Fuat Keyman and Ziya Onis, “Helsinki, Copenhagen and Beyond: Challenges to the New Europe and the Turkish State,” in Ugur and Canefe (eds.), Turkey and European Integration, cit., p. 184.

See Carkoglu, “Societal Perceptions of Turkey’s EU Membership,” cit.

For the Copenhagen criteria, see Chapter 5, Sect. 1.

See Carkoglu, “Societal Perceptions of Turkey’s EU Membership,” cit.

Gamze Avci, “Turkish Political Parties and the EU Discourse in the Post-Helsinki Period: A Case of Europeanization,” in Ugur and Canefe (eds.), Turkey and European Integration, cit.

Carkoglu, “Societal Perceptions of Turkey’s EU Membership,” cit., p. 20.

Keyman and Onis, “Helsinki, Copenhagen and Beyond,” cit., p. 175.

That development “helped to provide a more congenial environment within which democratization reforms could proceed,” according to Keyman and Onis, “Helsinki, Copenhagen and Beyond,” cit., p. 182.

Among other authors, see Ali Resul Usul, “The Justice and Development Party and the European Union: From Euro-Skepticism to Euro-Enthusiasm and Euro-Fatigue,” in Cizre (ed.), Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey, cit., p. 177.

To Keyman and Onis, “Helsinki, Copenhagen and Beyond,” cit., p. 182—“the Helsinki decision was a crucial catalyst in Turkey’s democratization trajectory.” Also Serap Atan, “Europeanisation of Turkish Peak Business Organizations and Turkey–EU Relations,” cit., p. 110.

Ali Resul Usul, Democracy in Turkey: The Impact of EU Conditionality (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 77–80.

Usul, Democracy in Turkey, cit., Chapters 3 and 4. Before Helsinki, the irregularly-held meetings of the Association Council (envisioned by the 1963 Association Agreement) were where the Europeans expressed their criticism of the political situation in Turkey.

The SSCs, before one of which Ocalan was tried, were established by the 1982 Constitution. From 1998 on (first case of ECtHR Grand Chamber judgment, in Incal vs. Turkey), in all the cases brought before the ECtHR Turkey lost due to the presence of a military one among the three judges. On the SSC and successor institutions, see Dilek Kurban and Haldun Gulalp, “A Complicated Affair: Turkey’s Kurds and the European Court of Human Rights,” in D. Anagnostou and E. Psychogiopoulou (eds.), The European Court of Human Rights: Implementing Strasbourg’s Judgements on Domestic Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

In the appeal later brought by Ocalan’s lawyers, the Court found the substitution of the military judge during the proceedings to be an inadequate measure and found Turkey in violated of the right to fair trial. See Kurban and Gulalp, “A Complicated Affair,” cit., pp. 168–69.

The Council of Europe was allowed to monitor both Ocalan’s detention and trial.

Avci, “Turkish Political Parties and the EU Discourse in the Post-Helsinki Period,” cit., pp. 200–1.

At 60 per cent of GDP at the beginning of the 1980s, the debt will reach 118 per cent in 1992.

See Alberta Sbragia, “Italy Pays for Europe: Political Leadership, Political Choice, and Institutional Adaptation,” in M.G. Cowles et al. (eds.), Transforming Europe: Europeanization and Domestic Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Sbragia, “Italy Pays for Europe,” cit., p. 92.

Sbragia, “Italy Pays for Europe,” cit., p. 92. Emphasis added. Besides Italy, other countries as well (Portugal, Greece, and more) have found themselves in a sort of receivership. In Turkey, an international technocrat, Kemal Dervis, was also called to help fix the country’s finances and help a recovery that was coordinated with the IMF.

The correlation between the EU becoming a source of legitimation and the discredit before the public of the old political class is accepted, among others, by Ann Dismorr, Turkey Decoded (London: SAQI, 2008)—Swedish ambassador to Turkey during those years.

Among studies that specifically apply the inclusion/moderation hypothesis to Turkey see Mehmet Gurses, “Islamists, Democracy and Turkey: A Test of the Inclusion/Moderation Hypothesis,” Party Politics, 20 (2014); various chapters in M. Aknur, (ed.), Democratic Consolidation in Turkey, cit.; Ihsan Dagi, “Turkey’s AKP in Power,” Journal of Democracy, 19.3 (2008); Berna Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Sultan Tepe, “Religious Parties and Democracy: A Comparative Assessment of Israel and Turkey,” Democratization, 12 (2005). For a critical appraisal of that hypothesis and a related discussion of the Turkish case see Murat Somer, “Does It Take Democrats to Democratize? Lessons from Islamic and Secular Elites in Turkey,” Comparative Political Studies, 44 (2011); Sebnem Gumuscu, “Class, Status, and Party: The Changing Face of Political Islam in Turkey and Egypt,” Comparative Political Studies, 43.7 (July 2010).

Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light,” cit., p. 340, talks about “iterated periods of political learning.” For the “political learning” in post-authoritarian context as element facilitating the acceptance of democratic participation by individuals and groups see Carrie R. Wickham, “The Path to Moderation: Strategy and Learning in the Formation of Egypt’s Wasat Party,” Comparative Politics, 32 (2004).

See, among other authors, Jenny B. White, “The End of Islamism? Turkey’s Muslimhood Model,” in R.W. Hefner, (ed.), Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 109.

See Chapter 2.

Ali Balci and Nebi Mis, “Turkey’s Role in the Alliance of Civilizations: A New Perspective in Turkish Foreign Policy?” Turkish Studies, 9.3 (September 2008), pp. 387–88.

In late 1990, public opinion surveys still indicated an over 80 per cent trust of the armed forces against the 16 per cent trust of political institutions and politicians. PIAR Gallup Opinion Polls, in Milliyet, 8 November 1999.

Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light,” cit.

Martin Heper, “Civil–Military Relations in Turkey: Towards a Liberal Model?” Turkish Studies, 12 (2011), p. 241; Martin Heper and Aylin Guney, “The Military and Democracy in the Third Turkish Republic,” Armed Forces and Society, 22.4 (1996), p. 620.

Based on the analysis of the recent political developments in Egypt, Shadi Hamid, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in the New Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)—criticizes the frequent reliance on the inclusion/moderation hypothesis.

See, for instance, Holger Albrecht and Eva Wagner, “Autocrats and Islamists: Contenders and Containment in Egypt and Morocco,” The Journal of North African Studies, 11.2 (June 2006). The authors’ conclusion is that “authoritarian elites do not at all care about whether opposition forces are of an Islamist, leftist, nationalist, or whatever ideological background. Rather, they care about the extent to which any of those groups manages to grow into a strong opposition movement capable to challenge their rule” (p. 137).

For a similar position see Gumuscu, “Class, Status, and Party,” cit., p. 838.

“The Democratic Coup d’Etat,” Harvard International Law Journal, 53.2 (Summer 2012).

Lauren McLaren and Cop Burak, “The Failure of Democracy in Turkey: A Comparative Analysis,” Government and Opposition, 46.4 (2011). An often repeated argument is that, as in one author, “[c]ontrary to power-seeking military of Latin America, the ultimate goal of the Turkish military was not to stay in power but to bring order and Kemalist democracy to the country that ‘incompetent’ civilian governments could not achieve.” Nil S. Satana, “Transformation of the Turkish Military and the Path to Democracy,” Armed Forces and Society, 34.3 (April 2008); Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 8–13, classified Turkey in the 1990s as a “limited electoral democracy.”

The coup of 12 September 1980 was the bloodiest and harshest one in the history of republican Turkey. Based on data collected by Amnesty International close to one million people were arrested, thousand tortured, 50 people executed (of over 500 sentenced to death), 300 people died while in detention, and about 100,000 were tried in military tribunals.

For a similar assessment see Tanel Demirel, “Lessons of Military Regimes and Democracy: The Turkish Case in a Comparative Perspective,” Armed Forces and Society, 31.2 (Winter 2005). For the military’s support for “rational,” rather than liberal, democracy see Aylin Guney and Petek Karatekelioglu, “Turkey’s EU Candidacy and Civil–Military Relations: Challenges and Prospects,” Armed Forces and Society, 31.3 (2005). Regarding the use of the respect for the military as justification for its interventions in politics, Ahmet Kuru, “The Rise and Fall of Military Tutelage in Turkey: Fears of Islamism, Kurdism, and Communism,” Insight Turkey, 14.2 (Spring 2012)—rightly points out that such a trust is not specific to Turkey and, most importantly, “is generally contingent on security conditions [such as the fight against the PKK], rather than necessarily reflective of a nation’s culture.”

Varol, “The Democratic Coup d’Etat,” cit. Also, see Chapter 4.

Umit Cizre Sakallioglu, “The Anatomy of the Turkish Military’s Political Autonomy,” Comparative Politics, 29.2 (1997), pp. 153–54. Emphasis added.

Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light,” cit., p. 355. Similarly, a level of exceptionalism is suggested by other authors with regard to Turkey in the attempt to reconcile a tradition of military coups and of extraordinary powers of the military with an assessment of functioning democracy.

Polls cited in William Hale and Ergun Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey: The Case of the AKP (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 14.

Saban Taniyici, “The Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey: Islamist Welfare Party’s Pro-EU Turn,” Party Politics, 9.4 (2003), p. 470.

A detailed analysis in that regard is Taniyici’s, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit. Also Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., pp. 244–48. To some analyses, in post-1982 Turkey, the need to pass the 10 per cent threshold had a “moderating effect,” see Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Unsecular Politics and Religious Mobilization: Beyond Christian Democracy,” in T. Kselman and J. Buttigieg (eds.), European Christian Democracies (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

See Haldun Gulalp, “Globalization and Political Islam: The Social Bases of Turkey’s Welfare Party,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33.3 (August 2001). For a similar evolution of Egypt’s Morsi presidency in 2012–2013 see Hamid, Temptations of Power, cit.

See Jenny B. White, “The Islamist Movement in Turkey and Human Rights,” Human Rights Review, 3.1 (March 2001), cit., p. 19.

To Burhanettin Duran, “JDP and Foreign Policy as an Agent of Transformation,” in H.M. Yavuz (ed.), The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Party (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006), p. 287—that stand was part of a foreign policy based on “the conflictual and essential distinction between Islam and the West.” On the external affairs’ stands from Refah to AKP see Filiz Baskan, “Accommodating Political Islam in Turkish Democracy,” in Aknur (ed.), Democratic Consolidation in Turkey,” cit.

Quoted in Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 470. That position was also related to nationalism. Yusuf Sarfati, “The Rise of Religious Parties in Israel and Turkey: A Comparative Study,” PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University (2009).

Simon V. Mayall, Turkey: Thwarted Ambitions (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1997), Chapter 6.

Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., p. 15.

See Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 471. Refah considered itself as heir of the country’s past and stamped all other parties imitators of the West. See Sarfati, “The Rise of Religious Parties in Israel and Turkey,” cit.

See Philip Robins, “Turkish Foreign Policy Under Erbakan,” Survival, 39.2 (Summer 1997).

Whit Mason, “The Future of Political Islam in Turkey,” World Policy Journal, 17.2 (2000).

White, “The Islamist Movement in Turkey,” cit., p. 19.

White, “The Islamist Movement in Turkey,” cit., p. 21. The ban of the headscarf in state building was strictly enforced in 1982, under military regime. On the evolution from Refah to AKP on this issue see Baskan, “Accommodating Political Islam in Turkish Democracy,” cit., pp. 353ff.

The AKP leadership “realized the legitimating power of democracy,” says Ihsan Dagi in “The Justice and Development Party: Identity, Politics and Human Rights Discourse in the Search for Security and Legitimacy,” in Yavuz (ed.), The Emergence of a New Turkey,” cit., p. 96.

Cited in Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 477. Emphasis added.

See Ihsan Dagi, “Transformation of Islamic Political Identity in Turkey: Rethinking the West and Westernization,” Turkish Studies, 6.1 (March 2005), pp. 28–29.

See Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 478.

See Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 478. Gul declared to an interviewer: “We realize that without integration into Europe, democratic standards of human rights cannot be achieved in this country.” Quoted in Howe, Turkey Today, cit., p. 183.

Howe, Turkey Today, cit., p. 182.

Saban Taniyici, “Four Games and Political Party Behavior: The Case of a Religious Party in Turkey,” PhD Dissertation, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh (2003), Chapter 3. One of the limitations imposed by the Constitutional Court in the ban of Refah was that a successor party could not have more than half of its members coming from the outlawed one.

Jon C. Pevehouse, Democracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Chapter 2.

For a parallel analysis of the changed discourse of the Latin American left following the Pinochet coup in Chile see Brian Loveman, “The Political Left in Chile, 1973–1990,” in B. Carr and S. Ellner (eds.), The Latin America Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 32, 36, 37. For other similar cases see Taniyici “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 478.

The December 1999 Helsinki European Council accepted Turkey as candidate for accession. To Yavuz, the Turks’ interest in joining the EU was “the most persuasive mechanism for pressuring the Kemalist military-bureaucratic establishment toward reform.” Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., pp. 254–56.

See Umit Cizre and Menderes Cinar, “Turkey 2002: Kemalism, Islamism, and Politics in the Light of the February 28 Process,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102.2/3 (2003).

Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., p. 19.

For a parallel assessment see Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., pp. 20, 27.

Ihsan Dagi, “Rethinking Human Rights, Democracy and the West: Post-Islamist Intellectuals in Turkey,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 13.2 (Summer 2004), p. 142.

100

Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Revised Edition, 2008), p. 77. “We have taken off the National Outlook shirt,” Erdogan had said at the start of his premiership. Cihan Tugal, Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 52.

101

Cited in Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 479. Emphasis added. In those early years, government officials repeatedly renamed the Copenhagen criteria as “Ankara criteria.” See Nathalie Tocci, “Europeanization in Turkey: Trigger or Anchor for Reforms?” South European Society and Politics, 10.1 (April 2005), p. 80.

102

See, for instance, Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., pp. 25–26. That character of the party was confirmed by the AKP’s success in all regions of the country in 2007.

103

Taniyici, “Four Games and Political Party Behavior,” cit., p. 102. On the parties successor to Refah, White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, cit., p. 274, writes: “[T]he success of the Islamist parties in the 1990s rested less on their religious message than on their unique organizational ability to incorporate a wide variety of local voices and desires into the national political process on a continual basis. The reformists have taken this one step further and developed a new style of party.”

104

Polls cited by Dagi, “The Justice and Development Party,” cit., pp. 93–94.

105

Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., pp. 36ff.

106

Duygu Bazoglu Sezer, “The Electoral Victory of Reformist Islamists in Secular Turkey,” The International Spectator, 37.4 (2002), p. 11.

107

Turkish Daily News, 12 November 2004. Emphasis added. Erbakan had offered definitions of secularism like the one cited, but only in words. See Filiz Baskan, “Accommodating Political Islam in Turkish Democracy,” cit., pp. 354–55.

108

Internal balloting and limits to individual’s mandates were later introduced in the party. See White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, pp. 273–74.

109

Taniyici, “Four Games and Political Party Behavior,” cit., p. 214.

110

A parallel analysis of the voting block supporting AKP is Kinzer’s, in Crescent and Star, cit., Chapter 1.

111

Among other things, Erdogan had once stated: “Is democracy a means or an end? […] We say that democracy is a means, not an end.” Erdogan later dismissed those quotes as inaccurate. He had also likened democracy to a train which one takes to destination and then gets off of it. See Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light,” cit., p. 347.

112

Dagi, “The Justice and Development Party,” cit., p. 97.

113

See Dagi, “The Justice and Development Party,” cit.

114

Müstakil Sanayici ve İşadamları Derneği.

115

See Gumuscu “Class, Status, and Party,” cit.

116

Sarah Wilson Sokhey and Kadir Yildirim, “Economic Liberalization and Political Moderation: The Case of Anti-system Parties,” Party Politics, 19.2 (2013).

117

Same conclusion offered by Sokhey and Yildirim, “Economic Liberalization and Political Moderation,” cit., p. 235, notwithstanding those authors’ focus on “moderation.” In comparison, two successive waves of economic liberalization in Egypt, in the 1970s and 1980s, did not create any similar diffuse class of SME. With the state not renouncing its massive control of the economy, that liberalization benefited only a limited circle of big business people and state bourgeoisie. It follows that—also in the absence of new facilitating cognitive and organizational factors such as the EU factor in Turkey’s case—Egyptian political Islam had no itinerary to transformation and stuck to Islam as cognitive and organizational element of its oppositional stand. For the two cases see also Gumuscu, “Class, Status, and Party,” cit.

118

Dagi, “Turkey’s AKP in Power,” cit.

119

For a parallel assessment see Dagi, “Turkey’s AKP in Power,” cit.

120

See, for instance, the otherwise useful paper by Senem Aydin-Duzgit and E. Fuat Keyman, “EU–Turkey Relations and the Stagnation of Turkish Democracy,” IAI/IPC, Global Turkey in Europe, Working Paper 2 (2012), p. 4. See also Munevver Cebeci, “De-Europeanization and Counter-Conduct? Turkey’s Democratization and the EU,” and other articles in the special issue of South European Society and Politics, 21.1 (2016).

121

Data from polls in Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., p. 31. All surveys concerning shari’a in Turkey need be taken with caution as they are greatly influenced by the economic cycle.

122

For a similar assessment see Burhanettin Duran, “The Justice and Development Party’s ‘New Politics’,” in Cizre (ed.), Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey, cit., p. 87. For the commitment to EU membership as condition for support to AKP by big business, liberal circles and major media outlets see, for instance, Dagi, “The Justice and Development Party,” cit., pp. 101–2.

123

Ziya Onis and Fuat Keyman, “A New Path Emerges: Turkey at the Polls,” Journal of Democracy, 14.2 (April 2003), p. 95.

124

Onis and Keyman, “A New Path Emerges,” cit., p. 96.

125

See, on this, Heinz Kramer, A Changing Turkey: A Challenge to Europe and the US (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000).

126

Richard Curtiss, “Is Turkish Military Repeating Algerian Army’s Catastrophic Mistake?” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 30 September 1997. The reference to Algeria concerned the civil war—eventually costing over one hundred thousand deaths—that followed the coup by the military after the electoral victory of the Islamists in December 1991.

127

Bazoglu Sezer, “The Electoral Victory of Reformist Islamists,” cit., p. 12; Dagi, “Turkey’s AKP in Power,” cit.; Mustafa Kutlay, “Economy as the ‘Practical Hand’ of New Turkish Foreign Policy,” cit., p. 72, found that, after the 2001 financial crisis, Turkey moved from a capital accumulation strategy “based on rentier profits extracted from state apparatus” to one “based on internationalization and competition on a world scale.”

128

See Taniyici, “Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 475.

129

See Avci, “Turkish Political Parties and the EU Discourse in the Post-Helsinki Period,” cit., p. 198.

130

Keyman and Onis, “Helsinki, Copenhagen and Beyond,” cit., p. 184.

131

Even while emphasizing the facilitating role of the EU in the transformation of Turkish politics, Tarik Oguzlu, “Turkey and Europeanization of Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly, 125 (Winter 2010/2011)—argues that democratic reforms in Turkey could have been achieved also without the EU accession. For the EU as part of an “opportunity structure,” see for instance Taniyici, “The Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., pp. 478–79. Instead, for a parallel, overall assessment of the transformative impact of EU conditionality on Turkey’s domestic politics see Steven A. Cook, Ruling but Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria and Turkey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

132

For a similar assessment see Burhanettin Duran, “The Justice and Development Party’s ‘New Politics’,” in U. Cizre, (ed.), Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party (London: Routledge, 2008).

133

A parallel assessment is in Dagi, “Turkey’s AKP in Power,” cit.

Titel: The European Union in the Rise to Power of the AKP
verfasst von: Mario Zucconi
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: EU Influence Beyond Conditionality
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25559-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-25560-2

Copyright-Jahr: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25560-2_3