Bringing back hierarchy
Is Turkey's ruling regime "far-right?" Does it matter?
In the book, I tell a story of transformation from what we call “Old Turkey” to “New Turkey.” There’s some conceptual analysis to this, but also a lot of narrative. I’m glad that someone like Nate, who has been following Turkey professionally for a long time, has found it to be worthwhile. If I may toot my own horn a bit:
There’s a number of mini-profiles of people who are quite famous in Turkey (Kadir Mısıroğlu, Hakan Fidan, İbrahim Karagül, Burhanettin Duran) but who don’t normally get treated with this degree of thoughtfulness and personal observation. Selim is more interested in trying to understand these individuals’ perspectives on their own terms and in their own words than he is in trying to poke holes in their arguments, and that makes his analysis extremely worthwhile.
This is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted for this book. I don’t have a favorable view of Islamism, but I wanted to describe it accurately, in terms that Islamists themselves might agree with.
But let’s get to the disagreement that Nate has with the book, and it’s not a minor one. As the title of the book suggests, I argue that the Erdoğan movement, as well as the regime that it has built, is “far-right” in character. Nate writes that he isn’t convinced by that characterization.
To me, the far right is premised on a revolutionary commitment to the restoration of supposedly natural hierarchies of gender, race, and nationality, and it demands the pursuit of those through violent action as well as rhetoric. I think that the ruling class in Turkey in its current form has elements of this for sure–there is a lot of talk of revolution and of restoration, some emphasis on hierarchy, and not infrequent violence, especially against minorities. Most persuasively, as Selim argues, it is all grounded in a deep well of Nietzschean ressentiment against liberalism and the West.
But the term still sits uneasily with me when used for Turkey. I am not persuaded that the direction of travel is towards institutionalization of a genuine far-right project in Turkey, which would seek to (re)impose hierarchies on society based on the values of the majority and would allocate resources towards that project above others.
I don’t think this is just a semantic quibble. You can read the whole argument in his piece, but the way I understand it, Nate is making a distinction between reactionary nationalism and “far-right” projects. They’re both on the same spectrum of reacting to liberalism in its various forms, but for a movement to really be “far-right,” it has to be less dependent on the man at its core, and more about the greater cause of restoring a “natural” hierarchy that (left-)liberalism is attacking. To use Turkish vocabulary, it would have to be a bit less “reis” and a bit more “dava.”
I absolutely think that Erdoğan’s project fits this description. My purpose in beginning the book with a long historical chapter was actually to argue that Turkish Islamism falls into the European pattern of romantic nationalism. Nationalism is actually an equalizing force, but many of the movements, specifically in Germany, were also reacting to the egalitarianism and “flattening” effect of the French Revolution. Turkish Islamism, despite the name, isn’t really about systematizing Islamic doctrine into law, but rather an effort to re-establish imperial order. I profiled Necip Fazıl Kısakürek and Kadir Mısıroğlu, two of the most important figures of Turkish Islamism, who are also explicitly anti-egalitarian. Both believe that the Republic was a mistake, that the Caliphate shouldn’t have been abolished, and the rule of the Sunni-Turkish “masters” should be restored in some way, implying that this group was epistemically superior to other inhabitants of the post-Ottoman space. Like their counterparts in the West, they sold the idea that the epistemic “masters” were in chains, as the country was being shrunk into smaller and more dysfunctional versions of itself.
I have long thought that some version of this movement would have seized power even without Erdoğan. The man is important because he harnessed the reactionary forces of his time extremely effectively, but if he had died in a car accident as a 10-year-old, someone else would probably have harnessed those forces in his place. It’s just in the nature of this type of politics that power and experience accrues in the person of a single leader. This is why I often write of the “Islamist movement,” “Erdoğan generation,” or “Erdoğan regime.” You can’t really take the man out of the movement, but you have to recognize that he’s channeling a historical force that extends far beyond him.
The fact that this kind of regime change came about not just in Turkey, but many other countries across the world reinforces my deterministic reading. Turkey was more sensitive to the causes due to its political, economic, and cultural environment, which is why it went through it before most others in the West, but its transformation is not as unique as it once seemed.
But let’s get into Nate’s argument: is the Erdoğan project serious about destroying the institutional infrastructure that aims to engender greater equality (the republic) and re-build society based on a more explicitly hierarchical system? Yes. Absolutely. This is why in my second chapter, I write that the institutional realignment in Turkey amounts to a regime of “Sunni-Turkish supremacy.” I admit that sometimes I doubt that phrase, thinking it’s too far, only to be reassured by recent events that this is most definitely the direction of travel we’re on. A huge bit of supporting evidence is precisely the thing that Nate uses to argue against this motion:
When I look now at the process with the PKK, in which Erdoğan has returned to a semi-Ottoman argument about the intrinsic coherence of the Islamic ummah as something that unites Turks, Arabs, and Kurds in one polity, I don’t see him pursuing a far-right agenda. Though one could probably construct an argument for that, I see him pursuing a method for staying in power and continuing to define the state around himself.
The pursuit of the Islamic ummah is by definition an attack on the republican structure that still exists today – if only in name. Erdoğan’s project implies exactly what the Islamist movement has been asking for all along: that people in Turkey don’t live together as citizens equal before the law, but subjects whose relationship to the state is mediated through their ethnic and confessional groups. That is how social hierarchies work. It’s precisely what I’ve argued in my post last week.
Devlet Bahçeli recently proposed that in the new system they want to create, there should be two VPs, one being Kurdish, the other Alevi. If you read this without being informed of the nature of these political movements, you might think that these people want to “empower minorities” or some such liberal nonsense.
But if you read Bahçeli’s statement against the backdrop of the actual history of the Turkish far-right, you’ll note that he is assuming here that the president will be a Sunni Turk. Under this order, the only purpose of appointing non-Sunni-Turkish officials will be to preempt hostile foreign powers who might build up minorities as fifth columns.
This is coherent with the beliefs Erdoğan has professed throughout his life. He has always framed politics as a struggle between the Kemalist elite as a minority, and the Sunni-Muslim majority (a highly dubious claim). In his darkest moments, Erdoğan has quoted Ali ‘Imran 139, which is often translated into Turkish as “do not falter or grieve, for if you believe, you are superior.” The very drive of Turkish Islamism is throwing off Islam’s recent history and rekindling that assertion of superiority over non-Muslims. It is at once a slave revolt and the assertion of master status.
Now, Nate is right in saying that the far right in the United States is a lot more specific in its claims than it is in places like Turkey. There has recently been a lot of coverage of figures like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Steven Bannon, who seem to have more positive visions, meaning that they have an idea of the kind of order that they want to pursue. Trump himself is a bit more vague on this point, but that doesn’t really matter. He’s merely an “imperfect instrument” as Bannon famously put it.
I think that gap in articulation is largely due to the conditions in which the Islamists emerged. The 1990s and 2000s were dangerous times to be an Islamist. You really learned to hide your light, to really be careful about what people in Washington and Brussels thought about you. It was a very audacious thing to suggest that liberalism was ending. A Turkish Islamist who was a bit too explicit about his vision for the country could find that the military elite was on top of him, and the AK Party got very close to being banned in 2008. That has changed a bit, but not really as much as one might think. Yes, Erdoğan has bested the generals, but if he wants to unite Syria and build a base of Islamist power there, he needs to reduce threat perceptions among the Israeli, American, and European elite.
This is why, whatever new constitutional framing they came up with, it’s bound to be preliminary, and only a stepping stone towards the imperial goal. Still, Erdoğan is very clear that the new order will aim to unite “Turks, Kurds, and Arabs” a phrase he repeated sixteen times in a recent speech.
I should also say that the term “far-right” is relational. It implies that there is a center ground around which legitimate politics occurs. To call a group “far-right” suggests that it seeks to tug that center towards, well, the far right, and possibly beyond, into radically new territory, around which a new political normal can take shape. The more successful the movement is, and the farther along the country is in that process, the more difficult it is to call the movement “far right.” In Russia, it already seems silly to call Putin a “far-right” leader. In Turkey, it still works somewhat because the CHP, the republic’s founding party, is still active, and though it is under heavy siege, it has considerable electoral strength. In Europe and the United States, “far-right” still sounds appropriate for many movements because the post-war liberal center, though sclerotic, is still alive, especially in the media, higher education, and to some extent in the corporate world.
I hadn’t planned foregrounding “far-right” as a term as much as this while writing the book. Towards the end, someone who had read my first chapter suggested it might be a good idea, and I went with it. And I’m glad I did. This is exactly the kind of discussion that I wanted to engage in with this book.