conceptually and contextually, noting the gaps that are yet to be studied. It notes the importance of centralizing both identity and history when studying the ‘Turkish Model’. The rest of the chapter thus centralizes identity and history within its narrative of the formation of the Turkish state and the main influences, structures and traditions that the AKP have had to both manipulate and mitigate.
The second part of this chapter, 4.3 The Ottoman Empire, c.1299-1923, will explain how European ideas such as liberalism and nationalism infiltrated the Ottoman Empire. Part 4.3 will provide an explanation into how Mustafa Kemal's nation-building project emerged in the last days of the Young Turk period. It will also explain how the rise of ethnonationalism inspired Westphalian modelled revolts and ethnic conflict in the Empire’s remnants. The Balkan Wars and World War I led to an influx of Muslim refugees into Anatolia. The climate of trauma fostered ideas of a Turkish nation-state as a Empire disbanded and was replaced by the Republican regime of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk built a new Turkish nation-state on the territory of the Straits and Anatolia. He achieved this through Kemalism: “an eclectic framework of political, economic and social views to aid in the construction of a nation state on the remains of the Ottoman Empire.” (Aytürk 2011: 309) This 'founding ideology' of the Turkish Republic prompted an overhaul of the social and political body of the country.
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form of protection for those refugees who self-defined as Turkish. It was through this discourse that Turkish nationalism was born. Thus, the new nation-state polity politically reproduced through the ‘othering’ of non-Turks and conservative Islamists.
Section 4.4 The First Republic, then explains how republicanism, as a discursive and normative tool, mechanized the vertical political institutions which fostered democracy, such as the 1924 constitution. It also examines how the Kemalist populist project set out individual citizenship rights. Nonetheless, problems would arise for actors who did not ascribe to the
Kemalist vision of the ‘Turkish nation'26
. Lastly, part 4.4 explains how the Kemalists believed religion was to blame for lack of progress and development in the Ottoman period. Influenced by European positivism, the Kemalists pushed for a society founded in science, economic prosperity, knowledge and education.
This historical chapter is important as despite the double-security dilemma being to unique every ruler throughout history, much of Turkey’s security context is unchangeable. Its geopolitical location as the bridge between Europe and Asia, its Islamic past and the vibrant polity economy that has thus formed has continually shaped its security agenda. The ‘Turkish Model’
26
A legacy of ethnic-conflict had fostered a nationalist dogma, discriminatory against minorities. Internal stability and the institutionalization of Turkish nationalism were reinforced by the Western alliances Turkey had formed.
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emerged as a political response to the binaries created throughout Turkey’s history- modernism and conservatism, the West and the East. Thus, analysing the evolution of these concepts into modern Turkey’s is imperative.
4.2 Theoretical Literature on the ‘Turkish Model’
With regards to Turkey and the Middle East region, a wealth of theoretical literature has been published. A significant portion of the literature focuses on the changing nexus of international and domestic politics under the AKP (e.g. İşeri and Dilek 2012; Tuğal 2016; Waldman and Caliskan 2017). Ayşe Zarakol (2013) examines the connections between the recent political directions of Turkey and Thailand. She argues that global norms form the domestic power structures of each state. International norms have strongly influenced the identities of domestic groups. Concerning Turkey, the polarization between the secular strata and political Islamists, cannot be deduced to differences in culture or ideology. A class analysis of the economic differences between those with different ideologies is also insufficient in painting the full picture. Rather, Zarakol (2013: 160) states that, "The structural view gives us a better understanding of what is at stake in both Turkey ... by illuminating the degree to which... countries have been shaped by their earlier interactions with the modern international system, and the complicated—not to mention complicating—ways ‘‘modernizing’’ norms originating in Western centre of international society have diffused and continue to do so throughout the world."
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This shows how globalization, an "always" phenomenon, has been hegemonized by the West since modern times and the inception of modernism into peripheral states such as Turkey has greatly altered the power dynamics and identity of groups within its domesticity.
Mehmet Arda (2015) article explains how Turkey's activist foreign policy is linked to its domestic politics. Arda explains that the AKP ideological basis puts emphasis on empowering the weak and destitute. "Domestically this comprises traditional, conservative and religious groups. Internationally, it is certainly marginalised or vilified countries and Muslim or Turkic minorities that Turkey thinks are mistreated." (Arda 2015: 222) Arda's analysis of AKP ideology and political action denotes that for the AKP neither the domestic or international take priority but are simultaneously important in policy considerations. Arda states that the AKP see their constituents to be as much the orphans in Gaza as the miners in Suma.
İşeri and Dilek (2012) also explain that the stability of the Middle East region as a whole depends on the nexus between domestic and international politics within Turkey. İşeri and Dilek (2012) assert that Turkey's capacity to act on the international stage is directly correlated to the consolidation of democracy within the state. Within traditional IR, a state’s strength within the anarchic international system is based on its military and economic prowess. İşeri and Dilek explain that nothing is looked upon more favourably than democratic
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consolidation within both the national and international theatre of public opinion.
İşeri and Dilek expand their point into an analysis of the possible demonstrative effect of the 'Turkish Model' within the Arab region. They explain that as far as creating a domino-effect for the 'Turkish Model' in the Middle East, Turkey must ensure that the 'domestic political configuration functions to forbid undemocratic praxis.' İşeri and Dilek conclude quite pessimistically observing the current situation in Turkey as too authoritarian and not routed in constitutional democratic order. Therefore, the 'Turkish Model' will not have the desired effect of creating positive peace under the current political climate, as those outside the state will continue to have a cautious opinion of Turkish influence until Turkey's democracy is consolidated.
In Cihan Tuğal's (2016) study of the ‘Turkish Model’ his theoretical framework is centred around how the politics of mobilization reconstructed state-society relations in Turkey. He explains how the political instability of the Middle East region in the 1970s led to the fear of the dominoing of revolt into Turkey. Preventing a situation like that of revolutionary Iran in 1979 and suppressing Kurdish rebellion was the primary concern of the Turkish establishment. To combat these threats the army launched a coup in the early 1980s as they felt the government did not have the capacity to suppress the uprisings. Tuğal marks the political birth of the ‘Turkish Model’ at this point.
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The coup led to the political ascent of the subaltern Anatolian conservative strata as a form of appeasement. A key consequence of this was Turkish Islamism’s elevation as a viable political force (Tuğal 2016). It is the emergence of this strata of society into the traditional secular quasi- democratic institutions of the Turkish state which has characterized the 'Turkish Model'.
The argument developed is that Turkish Islamism’s inception into the state apparatus and political establishment is the root cause of the fall of the ‘Turkish Model’. This new political establishment sought to monopolize power. Gramscist political discourse describes this political process as 'passive revolution'. Tuğal (2016: 26) explains, "They boast a powerful business class, appropriated huge chunks of the bureaucracy and had built many civic institutions that surrounded the core of Turkish power. Circa 2010 they started to attack their benefactors." Thus, the political mobilization of this class of society and their absorption into state institutions has itself created more threats to the continuity and stability of the Turkish Republic, and its "democracy" (Tuğal 2016).
Here a political sociological theoretical framework has been applied to the study of the fall of the ‘Turkish Model’ whilst simultaneously incorporating the importance of historical change. Tuğal (2016: 23) takes the ontological approach that the “lines between state and society, the elite and the people, are drawn and redrawn continuously.” His research explains how, why and
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by whom these lines are being drawn and redrawn. Central to his study is the idea of political society: “a field of actors and organizations that have comprehensive social visions…” (2016: 23) Parties dominate the political scene in states in which democracy has been consolidated. Nevertheless,
“in more dynamic situations, the field is populated by socio-political organizations and groups that are difficult to classify and label. Political society frequently remakes the boundaries between the power bloc and the people.”
(2006: 23)
The failure of the ‘Turkish Model’ was compounded by the souring of geopolitics and domestic stability with the turn of the Arab Spring to winter in 2013, and the Gezi Park uprising within Turkey itself in 2013. The Gezi Park uprising was a political reaction to the Islamist monopolization of institutional structures.
A historical approach is central to Tuğal’s study as underlining the impact of past political changes on the region and the processes of change within it are the only way to navigate through the present. Studying the history of reactions to revolutions can lead to patterns emerging connecting events, society, and political institutions. The revolutionary change that swept the Middle East in 1789, 1968, 1979 and 2011 has sent shockwaves across the region as capitalism tries to protect itself by any means necessary (Tuğal 2016).
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Cihan Tuğal (2016) offers a wealth of theoretical contributions to the study of the 'Turkish Model' and its relation to both history and domestic and international politics. His explanation on how the sociology of political power and power blocs within passive revolution offers a fresh perspective that is rarely incorporated into either realist or constructivist IR. One of the most central themes of his book is how the 'Turkish Model' was constructed as a reaction to threats from rival groups both domestically and internationally and this theme will also be a central theme within this thesis. Nonetheless, this constructivist thesis will depart from his heavily institutional approach and focus more on security, identity, ideology and rhetoric.
The importance of religious identity or ideology is not dismissed by Tuğal. Yet, religious identity falls behind class analysis and economic interests within his research agenda. Although these factors are important in studying the 'Turkish Model', a constructivist methodology will elaborate more on how identity, rhetoric and discourse played a role in uniting the conservative Anatolian strata behind the AKP agenda no matter what the economic consequences might be.
Tuğal’s book will be referred to as a core text within this project. All the same, a theoretical departure from his study will be the engagement of this project with the main debates within IR. A recent trend in IR research that Tuğal does not touch upon is that of postinternationalism. A postinternationalist approach to IR sees the role of the state as being less and less important in
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world politics. James Rosenau, the pioneer of this approach, explains in his 1990 book on 'turbulence theory' how non-state actors have played a central role in both domestic and foreign policy formation and destabilization. Like Tuğal, he focuses on the importance of domestic politics, but he directly applies it to IR. Suitable for a constructivist research agenda, postinternationalism or 'turbulence theory' brings to focus the role of international norms and the dilemma of intra-state violence and terrorism that is plaguing this world (Ferguson and Mansbach 2007). This project will follow a postinternationalist paradigm.
A key approach within the postinternationalist paradigm is the 'polity' approach (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996). Another departure from Tuğal, who examines political society, a 'polity' approach encased with a postinternationalist dialectic can do more to bridge the gap between international and domestic politics, plus incorporate historical change. Using the political grammar of political society and institutionalism has its limits, and it does not consider the identity of various groups within political and civil society or how individuals within the groups identify with and become loyal to said group.
A constructivist research agenda framed through the political grammar of 'polities' can bridge these gaps (Weyland 2012). The polity approach applied to this research project frames the scope of political change as transient, rather than as clear-cut positivity. Ferguson and Mansbach explain that both
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individual polities and polity types rarely vanish entirely, rather, they linger as a section of the worlds ‘living museum’… “sometimes as a historical oddity that may go back on show or be reconstructed in the future.” (Ferguson and Mansbach 2004: 107) It is here where the role of history, culture and identity can also tie in, as a mix of Islamic and Ottoman ideas based on the polities of the past have reinforced loyalty to the current Turkish polity both within and outside Turkey’s borders.