Insight Turkey / issues

Editor's Note | Fall 2015

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:53:00 GMT

2015 was the year of elections in Turkey with two parliamentary elections and months-long election campaigns that dominated the political agenda of the country. The parliamentary elections of June 7 brought an end to the AK Party’s 12-year long era of parliamentary majority and single-party government in Turkey. Nevertheless, the endeavors to form a coalition government could not be concluded successfully and another election appeared on the horizon. The country was ruled by an AK Party-led interim government and the elections were repeated five months later on November 1. While close in time, the two elections were quite distant with regard to the political contexts in which they were carried out, and in their respective results. The November elections witnessed a comeback for the AK Party, which increased its votes by over 9 points with the addition of five million new votes in the ballot box.

Civil-Military Relations in the Arab-Majority World: The Impacts on Democratization and Political Violence

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:40:00 GMT

How did unbalanced civil-military relations affect democratization and political violence trends in the Middle East and North Africa? This article analyses why the “Arab Spring” failed to develop democratic control of armed state institutions. It outlines the strategic repercussions of such failure on the rising trends of political violence in the region, committed by both state and non-state actors. The article draws lessons from empirical, comparative and historical experiences and concludes with policy implications.

Islamophobia in Europe: The Radical Right and the Mainstream

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:20:00 GMT

The surge of Islamophobia in Europe has been linked with the growing popularity and agenda-setting power of the radical right. However, attributing the rise of Islamophobia to the radical right-wing parties is all too comforting at a time when the dominant, ‘mainstream’ culture has increasingly embraced positions openly hostile and often discriminatory to Islam and Muslim communities. The fight against Islamophobia begins with the realization that Islamophobia is a ‘mainstream’ problem for European societies, which now need more than ever a positive vision for a diverse, inclusive, and open post-crisis Europe.

The Reasons Behind the AK Party’s November 1st Victory

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:10:00 GMT

In June 2015, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AK Party) lost its parliamentary majority after thirteen consecutive years in power. When a series of coalition talks proved inconclusive, however, it made a historic comeback in the repeat election by learning from mistakes, promoting dialogue and focusing on everyday issues.

The Refugee Crisis and Islamophobia

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:30:00 GMT

In the face of Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since WWII, many right wing and centrist politicians are using Islamophobia as a way to leverage policy-making in the West, to the detriment of human rights. The refugee crisis is just that –not an attempt by Muslims to ‘take over’ or ‘take down’ the West, but a crisis of people –of all religious and ethnic backgrounds– to flee from terror. At the same time, it reflects a crisis within Europe, which fights with itself how to define Europe in terms of openness and closeness to refugees knocking at the doors of Europe.

HDP Torn Between Violence and Politics

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:00:00 GMT

Although the Kurdish political movement has been participating in elections since 1991, never until June 2015 were they able to receive more than 7 percent of the vote. On June 7, the HDP nearly doubled its share of the vote. Although the election results indicated that the Kurdish voters wanted politicians to play a more prominent role within the movement, the PKK ended the two-year ceasefire to dig trenches, set up barricades and target the security forces in residential areas. The sharp decline in the HDP’s popularity suggests that the electorate would like to empower civilian leaders at the expense of violent groups.

Election Storm in Turkey: What do the Results of June and November 2015 Elections Tell Us?

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 16:57:00 GMT

This article analyzes the two general elections in 2015 that followed the local and presidential elections a year earlier. These elections illustrate how a predominant party builds its electoral base, loses, and then recovers votes to consolidate its support base. We demonstrate geographical patterns of voting across the country to illustrate how the electoral scene shifted in less than four months. We discuss the power and limitations of performance politics as a force that shapes electoral outcomes in contexts where security concerns override concerns about economic and social policy performance. We argue that lacking or diminished influence of performance politics is inherently harmful for Turkish democracy and given the divided nature of the electorate a consensus building approach to policy reform and constitution writing is more likely to succeed.

Putting Turkey’s June and November 2015 Election Outcomes in Perspective

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 16:00:00 GMT

The results of Turkey’s June and November 2015 parliamentary elections are put in perspective in light of economic voting literature and observed historical patterns. Usual and unusual factors that played roles in these elections are identified and their relative importance is assessed. It appears that a higher than usual number of strategic votes cast due to special circumstances were essentially behind the outcomes of both of these elections. The results also show that voters have consolidated in four camps more firmly than ever before and that the AK Party once more came close to a fifty percent vote share, which is the long run potential for conservative parties.

Identity Dynamics of the June and November 2015 Elections of Turkey: Kurds, Alevis and Conservative Nationalists

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:50:00 GMT

Identity politics was one of the major dynamics in shaping the results of both the June 7 and November 1, 2015 general elections in Turkey. The parties that were affiliated with Kurdish and Turkish ethno-nationalism, the HDP and the MHP, increased their votes significantly in the June 7 elections. The AK Party was able to pull some of those votes back in November elections. The HDP tried to transform itself from being a regional or ethnic Kurdish party into a national party relevant to all of Turkey. The PKK’s goal of becoming an influential regional actor in the Middle East hindered the HDP’s goal, thus leading to a decline of HDP votes in November elections. CHP remained as the favorite party of Alevi voters by a wide margin despite some challenge from HDP.

The Economic Context of Turkey’s June and November 2015 Elections

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:40:00 GMT

This article argues that the economic context of June 7th and November 1st general elections differed to a great extent. First, while the economy was central in the June elections, its prominence was shadowed in November by rising security concerns. Second, while Turkey’s macroeconomic indicators were pretty unpromising prior to the June elections, increasing growth figures before November, with the help of the AK Party’s presentation of it, revived the public’s optimism about the AK Party’s economic performance. Third, in the June elections, the opposition parties plied the electorate with positive economic messages. The AK Party avoided this trend in June but joined the populist camp after seeing the voters’ positive reactions to economic promises. These three differences between the economic contexts of the June and November elections made the AK Party more appealing to voters in November.

External Voting: Mapping Motivations of Emigrants and Concerns of Host Countries

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:30:00 GMT

The paper explores the understanding of external voting in the context of the 2014 Turkish presidential election in which migrants from Turkey were enabled to cast votes abroad. This first experience of external voting provided an opportunity for an inquiry into the motivations, expectations and concerns underlying emigrants’ electoral participation. Drawing from original fieldwork investigation in Germany, this exploratory study finds that citizens’ motivation for voting abroad was largely dictated by the symbolic dimension of citizenship, and desire to formally participate in Turkish politics. Also, evidences demonstrate that external voting led to growing concerns about public security as well as allegiance of immigrants in major hosting countries, particularly in Germany. Focusing on the case of Turkey’s external voting experience as a large sending country, this paper aims to provide a contribution to growing empirical research on the understanding of external voting and the effect of migrant electoral participation.

Turkey under the AK Party Rule: From Dominant Party Politics to Dominant Party System?

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:20:00 GMT

The Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) more than 13 years rule has ushered in a debate as to whether the AK Party has become a “dominant party” and if so, whether Turkey is experiencing a new type of party system, a dominant-party system. In this article, we first attempt to denote the terms ‘dominant party’ and ‘dominant-party system,’ and to shed light on the distinction between these two terms by drawing on the works of Duverger, Sartori, Pempel, and Greene. This article will then analyse Turkey’s experience under the AK Party to determine whether the AK Party can aptly be categorized as a “dominant party,” and Turkey as having a “dominant-party system.” Relying primarily on Greene’s conceptual framework, we contend that it is safe to denote the AK Party as a dominant party and to designate Turkey’s political system as a “dominant party system.”

The CHP in the June and November 2015 Elections: An Evaluation on Political Impasse

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:10:00 GMT

The electoral will reflected at the ballot box on November 1 confirmed the hegemony of the AK Party in Turkey’s party system and raised numerous questions about the future of its opposition parties. Having attempted an ideological and organizational restructuring, following the election of Kılıçdaroğlu as the chairman, the CHP did not garner enough “voting power” to meet its expectations at the ballot box on November 1, just as it failed to do so for the June 7 elections. CHP’s inability to increase its votes by even half a point with respect to the June 7 elections indicates that the party is facing a significant deadlock and has been unable to increase its votes. CHP’s election results reflect political stalemate despite the efforts of its leader in the last two elections and his statements, which appear to respond to the concerns and demands of the voters. This paper shall focus on the political impasse the CHP faced during the November 1, 2015 elections and the reasons for its continued weak electoral performance.

The MHP’s Lost Coalition Opportunity: Political Communication, Discourse and Strategies in the June and November 2015 Elections

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:00:00 GMT

The November 2015 snap elections mark a lost opportunity for Turkey to form a coalition government between the AK Party and other potential partners. The failure to form a coalition resulted from many factors. Primary among them, a significant resurgence in PKK terrorism, which led to increasing demands for stability, and the inability of the coalition partners themselves to come to an agreement. The MHP occupied a power position of sorts, following the June 7 elections, in which it won 16 percent of the vote. Its failure to capitalize on this power is due in part to its perception as a “Nay Sayer,” its static position on the Kurdish issue, which it views from a nationalist, security perspective, and its inability to win the hearts and minds of the Turkish constituency through its campaign messages.

A New Historiography on the Ottoman Arab and Eastern Provinces

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 17:17:00 GMT

Beginning in the early 1980s, a number of works were published on the Arab provinces. These works criticized nationalistic approaches that treated the Ottomans similarly to Western colonial powers and blamed them for much of the violence that took place in the 19th and 20th century. The main accomplishment of these writings was the reintegration of the Ottoman past into the history of the modern Middle East. Nationalist historiography of Middle Eastern countries places the end of the Ottoman period with the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt in 1798. According to this historiography, the local elites played a dominant role in the modern period, as founders of the modern Middle East nations such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Tunus, and Algeria, operating solely within a local “proto-nationalist” environment with no indication of influence from other events taking place within the Ottoman Empire as a whole.

Islam and the Foundations of Political Power

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 10:43:00 GMT

Ali Abdel Razeks short treatise al-Islam wa-‘usul al-hukm, originally published in Egypt, in 1925, contributed to a debate that still remains at the heart of political discourse in the Islamic world. The subject, essentially, the doctrinal status of politics in Islam, was all the more pertinent given the abolishment of the caliphate by Kemal Atatürk the preceding year; and with it an institution that had remained in existence since death of the Prophet, thirteen centuries previous. Given a new and contentious attempt to resurrect the caliphate in the Middle East, the work is especially relevant again today.

Lineages of Revolt Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 10:52:00 GMT

The Arab spring has wakened enormous interest in the political economy of the Middle East with analysis pouring from a wide spectrum of schools of thought; however, Hanieh disparages most of the analysis as being superficial and focusing on the surface appearance of poverty and inequality rather than engaging with the nature of capitalism as a systematic totality that penetrates every aspect of social life. Hanieh, therefore, feels compelled to throw his hat in the ring and provide us with his own analysis of the Arab spring through the lens of classic Marxist theory.

Foreigners, Minorities and Integration: The Muslim Immigrant Experience in Britain and Germany

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 10:57:00 GMT

In Foreigners, Minorities and Integration: The Muslim immigrant experience in Britain and Germany, Sarah Hackett focuses on Muslim immigrants’ experiences of migration and integration with an exclusive focus on employment, housing, and education at a local level. She focuses on Muslims of Newcastle and Bremen, yet she also examines the patterns of national histories of migration and integration of Germany and Britain in detail based on government archives and reports.

Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:04:00 GMT

Elisabetta Brighi’s book Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy, basically aspires to explain the question of how foreign policy interacts with domestic politics and international relations. Brighi depicts a theoretical framework to be applied to the field of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), namely, the “strategic-relational” approach based on critical realism at a dialectical level. Accordingly, the main assumption is that foreign policy is “reconceptualized” as a “product of dialectic interplay between actor and context, and discourses” as clearly illustrated in an empirical analysis of Italian foreign policy. (p. 37)

State Formation and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:06:00 GMT

Christie and Masad analyze the role of State Formation and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by bringing together an impressive compilation of papers presented at the 13th Mediterranean Research Meeting. This research focuses on the period after the Arab Spring, which has drawn attention to crucial elements in assessing the way states are formed, stay together, and react to the forces of globalization. Focusing on the particular contexts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, and Bahrain, the authors argue that states in the MENA region have had different implications and consequences, which stem from the politics of identity and the historical and political processes that they have faced in their development.

The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:11:00 GMT

As Jonathan Laurence observes in the preface to The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, calling attention to the extent of European governments’ efforts to institutionally incorporate Muslims might seem Pollyannaish in a time of rising Islamophobia across the continent. Events subsequent to the book’s publication, particularly the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France and the PEGIDA demonstrations in Germany would seem to encourage such objections. Nevertheless, as Laurence argues in his compelling and rigorous overview of European policies toward Islam, such instances of Islamophobia do not reflect any deeply rooted incompatibility of Islam with European liberal democracy. Instead, Islamophobia and restrictions on Islamic religious expression such as the Belgian burqa ban or the Swiss minaret referendum speak to anxieties about the growing incorporation and adaptation of Muslims in liberal European democracies.

When Greeks and Turks Meet: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Relationship since 1923

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:20:00 GMT

When Greeks and Turks Meet, a collection of essays compiled under the editorship of Vally Lytra, who pens also the historical and theoretical introductory essay of the volume, is the product of collaboration between the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London and the Turkish Studies programme at SOAS. The volume is a strong, successful move forward in de-mythologizing the dominant historiographical narratives of Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, whose intertwined histories have led the countries to see each other as natural enemies engaged in a perpetual state of conflict. The fourteen essays in the volume are divided into three parts, and the essays take up varying perspectives ranging from history and international relations to linguistics and literature.

NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:27:00 GMT

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are proliferating dramatically in number (3.3 million in India, 1.5 million in the US), and they are present in virtually in every country in the world. They are involved in diverse issues, and their increasing impact on national and international politics has generated a vast literature on NGOs.

The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 11:30:00 GMT

In five chapters Smith looks into the standard story of the development of religious freedom in America and proposes a revised version of it, which revolves around a “Kingdom of God in America.” (p. 12) Smith’s counter-narrative traces the intellectual roots of religious freedom farther back than the Enlightenment to predominantly Christian emphases on the freedom of the church and the liberty of conscience. With a re-interpretation of the First Amendment’s phrase “no establishment of religion” Smith heavily criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions and suggests that virtually all of America’s founders expected religion to play a major role in the nation’s governance.