2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli
and its subsequent globalization. 10 The result has been a proportional decrease
in the power of the secular business elites that are mainly centered in western
Turkey.
Yet, economic liberalization has not only translated into a growth of wealth
which has tilted the balance between center and periphery to the detriment of
the former; it has also given rise to income disparities and popular discontent
which in “normal” cases tend to furnish parties of the left with political
opportunities. The absence of a credible left, which was the result of the
havoc brought by the military dictatorship of the 1980s, has instead been
capitalized upon by the Islamic conservatives. The ascendancy of Islam as a
political force thus owes a great deal to the initial political encouragement of
the military, and to a double-edged economic liberalization, which has
strengthened the pious bourgeoisie while at the same time creating
conditions of social discontent which the Islamic conservatives have been
able to capitalize upon in the absence of a credible social democratic left.
Popular Secularism and Conservatism
Observers of Turkey in general tend to assume that the Islamic ascendancy
represents the irresistible reclaim by a supposedly essential popular culture,
of a terrain that had been occupied by an alien secularism imposed from
above by the state. Yet the perception of Turkey as a country in which a
staunchly secularist state is locked in confrontation with a religiousconservative
population is largely off-mark. It should not be presumed that
secularism is less rooted popularly than what religious conservatism is. The
line dividing Turkey over the issue of secularism and the role of religion does
not run between state and society, but rather through both. In fact, the
Turkish state has been much more accommodating towards religion than is
generally acknowledged.
The notion of an excessive and authoritarian secularism provoking a
religious reaction from a people deprived of its culture fails to take the
history of the Turkish republic fully into account. Rather than being
insensitive to religious feelings, successive secular governments have in fact
10 Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, New York: Farrar,
Strauss, Giroux, 2002, 57-87.