This dissertation problematizes the populism – national identity relationship looking at contemporary Turkey, where populism was combined with an increasingly Islamic, conservative nationalism under the rule (2002-present) of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its personalistic leader R. T. Erdoğan. It demonstrates how populism can play a strategic role in the elite-led promotion of alternate conceptions of national identities. The underlying premise is that the issues of populism, its effects and implications on political institutions and competition, when and how populism becomes successful cannot be understood independently of nationalism as a sociological and political phenomenon and of the specific ideas populism serves.
Combining data collected on the field through elite interviews and participant observation with other sources, I show that populist (people-worshipping and anti-establishment) leadership and mobilization have been primary agents in the AKP’s construction of a competitive-authoritarian political landscape in Turkey and in the government-sponsored imposition of a religiously-colored nationalism. With inter-temporal and within-case comparisons and process-tracing, I first put AKP dominance in Turkey in historical perspective, and then identify a central causal mechanism that accounts for the pace and intensity of Turkey’s authoritarian drift since the party’s second term. I situate AKP’s abandonment of initial promises of European Union-oriented pluralist reforms in (two) major power struggles that significantly heightened the costs of losing power while diminishing incentives for genuinely democratizing reform. I demonstrate that mutual distrust between Turkey’s secular state elite and Islamist political elite spiraled into an acute political confrontation starting in 2007, wherein the incumbents de-legitimized and pacified opponents with a combination of legal and extra-legal methods, and a populist meta-narrative that framed this struggle in terms of Turkey’s democratization and prosperity versus the privileges of a narrow elite alien to the values of the heartland.
I then evaluate critical implications, like how the incumbents and their partners crossed a critical threshold for state-capture and top-down Islamization by 2011, subsequently attaining a proto-hegemonic orientation (i.e. towards the replacement of the existing pluralistic democracy) and cartel party status (i.e. privileged access to state-regulated channels of communication). I explain that the particular ways in which this new elite achieved their supremacy and their arbitrary transformation of society led to cross-class civic opposition, erupting in 2013 at the Gezi Park protests (and more recently culminating in a grassroots appreciation of secularism). Third, I discuss the impact of the intra-Islamist conflict that also surfaced in 2013, after the colluding parties started fighting over the spoils of state-capture. In the face of such crises and souring relations with the West, the AKP leadership employed a strategic narrative combining populist antagonism and polarization with suspicious-minded, anti-Western nationalist perspectives which frame pro-democracy opposition as foreign-orchestrated initiatives aiming to suppress the national will, foment instability, and derail AKP’s quest to end Western domination over Turkey. Late-stage populist rule, in this case, is characterized by the equation of party survival to national survival and the manufacturing of consent for authoritarianism through nationalism. The findings advance the limited literature on populism in power, showing that the disappearance of an establishment to rally against does not mean that populism withers away and that populism can remain potent thereafter via attachment to various ideologies, and that we are better off seeing populism as something that actors do (as opposed to what they are); e.g. to differentiate themselves from alternatives, to win or securitize elections, to rationalize the reorganization of power relations, to avoid accountability, to keep party ranks unified, and critically, to promote new identities. / 2023-10-25T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45269 |
| Date | 26 October 2022 |
| Creators | Tekinirk, Metehan |
| Contributors | Greenfeld, Liah, Schmidt, Vivien |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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