Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the securitization of islam and the triumph of the akp 255ing and publishing material in their mother tongue. For the Kurds, as for theIslamic groups, full support of Turkey’s entry into the EU is seen as a way toguarantee basic human rights. However, the military and the Turkish nationalistsperceive freedom of expression and the recognition of Kurdish culturalrights as the process of weakening the “unitary state” structure and the nation-buildingideology of Kemalism.Turkey’s political landscape increasingly is being restructured around newideas about Europe and the resulting political cleavages. For instance, after the1997 coup, the anti-EU military bureaucratic Kemalism divorced itself from thepro-EU Kemalism that deWned Kemalism as a process of joining the EU. In otherwords, nation-state–oriented Kemalism has been in conXict with the globalization-orienteddemocratic version of Kemalism. After 1997, the military Kemalismbegan to divorce itself from the West and its own Westernization project. Thisshift from viewing the West as a trendsetter to imitate to seeing it as a hostile“enemy” to Wght against has created an opposite eVect on the Islamic movements.As some Kemalists are redeWning the West as a negative force to beavoided, the Islamic groups are in the process of rediscovering Europe as apositive force and have been defending Turkey’s full integration into the EU.What this transformation means is that Kemalism has become an ideology toinsulate the state from democratic inroads. The major revolution in contemporaryTurkey has been the cognitive transformation of the image of the West andWesternization. In contemporary Turkey, the new sociopolitical cleavages areshaped by what position one adopts on the EU and the 1997 coup. Those whosupport the 1997 coup and reject the EU constitute a very small group of nationalistand hardcore Kemalist intellectuals. The majority of the populationsupports Turkey’s entry into the EU and rejects the 1997 coup.The AKP utilized the winds of democratization blowing from the EU andhelped to create hope for the implementation of democracy in Turkey. The goalof becoming a member of the EU and the obligations that came with it constrainedthe establishment’s campaign against Muslim-oriented sociopolitical movementsbecause oYcial Kemalism’s very raison d’être of Europeanizing Turkey had becomeintertwined with EU membership and its requirement of respecting humanrights and democratic norms. Furthermore, the EU’s critical reports about Turkey’sdomestic politics not only helped to pressure the elite but also informed the Turkishpublic about the serious shortcomings of Turkish semidemocracy and identiWedthe “dual-track government” as the obstacle blocking Turkey’s path to both genuinedemocratization and eventual EU membership.In the 1990s, overwhelming popular support for EU membership evenamong radical Islamic groups critical of the Kemalist legacy also is directly aresult of the popular perception that the “carrot” and “stick” of potential EUmembership was proving to be the most persuasive mechanism for pressuringthe Kemalist military-bureaucratic establishment toward reform. Especially criticalwas EU pressure to end the “dual-track government” system whereby theelected government must be subordinated to the prescribed Kemalist secularismand Turkish nationalism as deWned and enforced by the military-dominatedNSC. The AKP thus capitalized on EU pressure to curtail the “dual-track gov-