2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli
right tradition, what is lacking in the democratic equation of Turkey is a
center-left which can credibly aspire to govern.
The center-left alternative, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has, at
least temporarily, ideologically gone astray; as the Islamic conservatives
turned to Europe, bewildered social democrats abandoned the Westernoriented
tradition of which the CHP had been a promoter for nearly a
century. CHP sought refuge in a marriage of secularism and anti-Western
nationalism. In fact, the latter has limited appeal, as the election of 2007
proved. The urban middle class, the traditional electoral base of the centerleft,
is inherently pro-Western. There are signs that the ideological deviation
of the CHP from its traditional course may prove to have been momentary;
there is a growing realization among social democrats that the center-left has
to make peace with Europe, and that it has to find ways of reaching out to the
broader masses with innovative and viable social and economic policies. In
fact, the history of CHP is not unpromising for the future: the party adapted
itself to new circumstances, when it steered Turkey’s transition to
democracy in 1950, and again in the 1970s, when it tuned in with the
European social democracy, a liberal move at that juncture.
Civilian secularism remains an untapped resource for a potential, modern left
and/or liberalism of the European kind, indeed for Turkey’s democratization.
The ideological inclinations of the secular middle class, of which a majority
is opposed to military rule, refute the assumption that the embrace of the
Atatürk legacy is tantamount to opposition to democracy.
A possible reconciliation of the military and Islamic conservatism raises the
specter of a less liberal Turkey. In contrast, and viewed optimistically, the
aspiration of the Islamic conservatives to be ideologically all-embracing,
hence moderates, and the strengthening of civilian, anti-authoritarian
secularism would seem to converge to offer the prospect of democratic
reconciliation.
Yet, the record of the Islamic conservatives, their actual deeds so far is not
encouraging. It is, after all, to ask a little too much of Islamic conservatism to
expect it to become the safeguard of a secularism that confronts Islam itself
by relegating religion to the private sphere. It may be that AKP leader Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan really has changed, that he no longer thinks that “democracy