Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

20 islamic political identity in turkeying from the state was emphasized while societal constraints on state behaviorwere downplayed.” 27The more nuanced and historically informed works of Lisa Anderson, RobertBianchi, and Alan Richards and John Waterbury examine changes in thepolitical landscape in terms of the internal and external economic and historicalconstraints in which state-society relations are embedded. Anderson, forexample, treats the existence of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East as oneof the imperatives of state- and nation-building. 28 Richards and Waterbury arguethat it is the powerful autonomous corporate state and its interventionist traditionthat shapes, even creates, socioeconomic classes through its policies. Theseclasses, in turn, inXuence and determine the state’s economic policies. Richardsand Waterbury, like Anderson, assert that this autonomous state is the result of“the politics of decolonization and development.” 29 They argue thatthe formulation of public policies shapes the allocation of resourceswithin societies and the political consequences that Xow therefrom.. . . As we shall show repeatedly, those authorities, the people whomake up the governments and staV the upper echelons of thebureaucracies and public enterprises, frequently constitute anautonomous set of actors and interests in their own right. 30While the contextualist approach is a great improvement over the previousessentialism, it has ignored the dynamic changes that have occurred in numerousIslamic movements over time and the constitutive and framing role of popularIslamic culture. In order to understand the rise of a new Islamic politicalconsciousness, we need a new framework that incorporates ideas and traditionswithin evolving social and political contexts.ConstructivismConstructivism assumes that any society is a human construction and subjectto multiple interpretations and inXuences. These constructions, such as SuWorders, states, nations, and religions, condition and inform new modes of understanding.Thus Islamic political identity only can be properly understood throughhermeneutical and mutually interactive causal techniques. This approach illustratesthe unending tension between human understanding and multiple, yetconditioned, constructions of reality. It stresses human agency as the primemover of history since individual subjectivity is formed reXexively by interactionsbetween individuals. For constructivism, individual actions are neithercaused by social structure nor the outcome of individual choices. 31 By focusingon the relationships between the individual and society (or between agency andstructures), one may be able to understand how social structures (e.g., Islamicframes of reference that inform rules and practices) are constituted in the individual(internalizing the external through socialization). One also can understandhow individuals build social structure through objectiWcation of political andcultural consciousness (externalizing the internal). Using the constructivistapproach, one can discern Islamic identity-based movements emerging along