2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli
In large parts of conservative Anatolia, restaurants shut down completely
during the month of fasting, and alcohol is never served. The change is
palpable compared to the situation only a decade ago.
The 1980 Coup and the Growth of Islamic Conservatism
The origins of the concomitant evolutions of modernization and
Islamicization can be traced back to 1980, which represents the defining point
of recent Turkish history. That was the year in which the military seized
power after years marked by political violence between the extreme right and
the extreme left. The military dictatorship only lasted for three years, but it
inaugurated a new era in politics, economics and society which has come to
last for almost three decades.
First of all, the military intervention crushed the nascent democratic left.
The Turkish left had always been weak, but the 1970s had seen the
emergence of a force akin to European social democracy and with a
comparable electoral following. In the elections of 1977, the social democratic
Republican People’s Party received 42 percent of the vote. The party, which
had once been founded by Kemal Atatürk, was dissolved following the coup.
The Republican People’s party was to reappear in the 1990s, like the centerright
and far-right parties which had also been shut down. But the primary
target of the military had been the left; the organizational and intellectual
infrastructure of what in time could have possibly evolved into a European
type of social democracy was obliterated. Many leftists went into exile or
were depoliticized. A third group adjusted to the change of political climate
and converted to neo-liberalism.
Secondly, the military junta encouraged Islam as an alternative to the radical
left, which had turned into a major problem in the 1970s. While paying lipservice
to the legacy of Atatürk, the generals in practice did the opposite,
promoting a “Turkish-Islamic synthesis”, in an attempt to wed right-wing
nationalism and Islam. The coup leader and subsequent president General
Kenan Evren delivered public speeches with the Koran in one hand.
Education in the tenets of Sunni Islam was made compulsory at the
elementary level of the schools (it was already compulsory at the high school
level from 1974 onwards), and the decree was even written into the
constitution. The expansion of the clerical training schools, the imam hatip,