Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, Secularism, and Democratisation: Domestic and Global Dimensions

Promising until recently, why did Turkey’s democratization first stall and then begin to regress in recent years? This paper argues that domestic ideological-institutional weaknesses and global political-economic developments are intertwined producing this outcome. Domestically, the weakness of secular opposition parties in becoming electoral threats to the ruling Justice and Development Party AKP allowed the pragmatically Islamist AKP to become ideologically assertive and to begin to identify itself as an authoritarian state-party. Underlying all this is Turkey’s unresolved question of rigid, state-interventionist secularism. The AKP originally challenged the status-quo promising a more flexible and civil-populist secularism. Unable to rejoin with an alternative reform agenda of their own, secular parties became more defensively secularist. They narrowed their constituency by failing to offer viable alternatives on socio-economic platforms, thereby allowing the AKP to aggrandize its power and begin to use the institutions of state-interventionist secularism in the service of an Islamist social agenda. As for external factors, first, problems in Turkish-EU relations weakened the EU anchor, which was a major facilitator of democratization until 2007, and increased public nationalism and EU-skepticism. Domestic politics of secularism contributes to this outcome because the more the AKP becomes Islamist- authoritarian—as recent statements of the president and government oppression of secular protests show--the more Turkey moves away from the EU vis-à-vis values such as gender equality and freedom of expression. Second, similarities between democratization problems in Turkey and others such as Italy, Hungary and Poland suggest two implications. Turkey is affected by broader forces of globalization and political-economic and ideological trends that weaken democracy elsewhere in the world. And, the observation that authoritarian executives in various countries employ similar discursive and legal-political methods to weaken rule of law and checks-and-balances implies that they learn from each other and utilize similar global sociological and technological developments.