President Inönü of Turkey, confers with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Cairo, December 1943. Wikicommons/United States Library of Congress. Some rights reserved.At a time when loud, angry and divisive men (and a few women) dominate politics and defy established norms of public discourse and diplomacy, it is no surprise that popular attention becomes fixated on the character traits, appearances and speeches (or tweets) of these individuals. Yet shaped by the modern celebrity culture, 24-hour reality shows and image-driven social media platforms, this obsession with personalities can fuel the very passions and tensions that such individuals feed on, and obscure the underlying factors that explain their rise in the first place. For scholars who both live in and aim to understand these unsettled times, the challenge is to deconstruct the larger-than-life portrayals of these individuals and place the period under scrutiny in its proper comparative, historical and geopolitical context.
This is a particularly difficult – albeit no less urgent – task for scholars who try to make sense of Turkey’s fast-paced decline into authoritarianism, at a time when critical thinkers in general and academics in particular are directly targeted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. But despite Erdoğan’s tightening grip over the country’s politics and institutions, we cannot explain Turkey’s dramatic exit from democracy by pointing to one man’s hubris and single-minded pursuit for power. The larger fact is that, with its geopolitical centrality, resource-poor economy, fragile and contested institutions, and layers of entrenched societal tensions, Turkey has been exceptionally exposed to – and in turn, embodied – the fluctuating currents of global change throughout its modern history; and the present current is a particularly low one. Turkey is a country forged out of the genocidal destruction of multicultural empires in the age of modernisation and nation building, and carries in its social and institutional fabric the scars.
Turkey is a country forged out of the genocidal destruction of multicultural empires in the age of modernisation and nation building, and carries in its social and institutional fabric the scars, the traumas and the insecurities of this formative period. It has been part of all three major waves, and subsequent counter-waves, of democratisation in the modern era: the constitutional reform movements of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century gave way, via a decade of warfare and ethnic cleansing, to the consolidation of secular nationalist dictatorship in the interwar era. Its transformation to multiparty democracy in the post-WWII period was truncated by the emergence of military tutelage in the 1960s. And some of its most remarkable democratic reform initiatives, which came at the height of the European Union’s normative influence in the early-to-mid 2000s, are being reversed just as liberal democracies everywhere face existential crises.
