2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli
Internal as well as external dynamics underpin the power of the Islamic
conservatives. The broader Islamic movement – not least the religious
brotherhoods that constitute the societal base of religious conservatism –
wields significant power over education, media, and the economy, and is
entrenched in the state bureaucracy. Indeed, the AKP has come close to
realizing its goal of controlling the state. 2
The Islamic conservative government enjoys broad international support.
The attractiveness of the AKP, an Islamic-rooted party that embraces the
West – aiming for EU membership and nurturing close relations with the
United States – is understandable. It is an alternative that offers hope,
disclaiming, so it seems, the notion of the inevitability of a clash of
civilizations between the West and Islam.
A “Muslim democracy” is assumed to be in the making, replacing the old
republican, secularist model installed by Atatürk’s revolution in 1923. That
model is currently held in low esteem in political as well as intellectual
circles in the West. Kemalism, the ideology attributed to Kemal Atatürk but
often perverted by his successors, stands accused of being authoritarian, of
having inflicted a psychological trauma on the Turkish society by imposing
secularism and of having created a nation-state that has violated ethnic
diversity. 3 With the abandonment of the Kemalist model, by which greater,
societal room is made for religion and for multi-ethnicity, a process of
“psychological and cultural healing process” is assumed to have been ushered
in. 4
While the Islamic conservatives have adopted a pro-western discourse, the
traditionally Western-oriented secularists, notably the social democrats, have
confused and repelled observers in the United States and in Europe by their
recent conversion to a vehemently anti-western neo-nationalism. In fact, the
confusion and repulsion is reciprocal; the secularists have been disoriented by
the Western liberals’ support for Islamic conservatism.
2 “I aspire to rule the state”, Nihat Ergün, deputy chairman of the AKP’s parliamentary
group, told the authors in May 2008.
3 See for example Graham E. Fuller, The New Turkish republic, Washington: United
States Institute of Peace Press, 2007
4 Fuller, p. 17.