The Unstoppable Hegemony of the Moderate Islamists? State Restructuring and the Politics of Legitimation in Contemporary Turkey

Abstract

Have the moderate Islamists won the decisive battles against the Turkish Armed Forces? Recent developments (e.g. Ergenekon, Balyoz, constitutional amendments) point into this direction. In fact, the Justice and Development Party under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be the only political force that may credibly claim to attempt to reduce the position of the Military in state and society, while the rest of the country’s political parties still adhere the principle of military tutelage to reproduce Turkey’s Kemalist foundations. What made these transformations possible? The erosion of the ‘democratic’ political process in the 1990s, the financial crises of 2000 and 2001 have created political spaces for new articulations by the Islamist counter-elites who assumed pro-European, pro-capitalist and pro-democratic identities in order to enact liberalizing policies that seemed not to be viable in the earlier period. While the first wave of reforms in the fields of political institutions, economic governance and identity politics was highly appreciated by western observers, there occurred a new shift in the struggle for political and cultural hegemony since the post-2007 power consolidation of the ruling JDP. This shift has led to a renewed hardening of political identities and a supposedly bifurcated state of affairs between ‘Kemalist-Secularists’ and ‘Islamists’. Favorable measures toward its own socio-economic constituency (Anatolian tigers, Muslim Calvinists), non-democratic practices of JDP elites, the support of religious-traditional values, the most recent foreign and regional policy shifts and the observed ‘Islamization’ of the public sphere have captured the attention of scholars as to how to deal with the Turkish ‘post-Islamist’ turn. In this panel, we call for papers with theoretical interests in theories of the state, civil society, discourses, contentious politics, institutional theory, nationalism and political Islam to make sense of the most recent struggles for hegemony in Turkey. How is legitimacy/hegemony created? What made this bifurcation possible, what are the prospects for ‘Islamization’, and what may be the outcome of the contemporary episodes of contention? Which repertoires do ‘Kemalists’ and ‘Islamists’ rely upon to reproduce their competing visions of state-religion and state-society relations? What is the relation between nationalisms and Islamisms, and which role do transnational linkages play?

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