The Failed Autocrat
Despite Erdogan’s Ruthlessness, Turkey’s Democracy Is Still on Track
Foreign Affairs (Published by the Council on Foreign Relations)
SNAPSHOT
May 22, 2014
By Daron Acemoglu
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once the darling of
the international community, but no more. He is still sometimes
praised for stewarding Turkey through impressive economic growth,
defanging a Turkish military establishment with a long history of
meddling in national politics, and initiating a promising peace
process with the country’s restive Kurdish population. But Erdogan’s
achievements are now shadowed by his undeniable lurch toward
autocracy. Over the last year, he has initiated a harsh crackdown
against peaceful protesters, political opponents, and independent
media outlets. (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at
one point, the number [1] of journalists jailed in Turkey even
exceeded the number in Iran and China.)
The worst developments of all began last December. That was when, in
order to quell a perceived threat from an erstwhile ally, the
U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, Erdogan fired thousands of
prosecutors, judges, and policemen, imposed bans on Twitter and
YouTube, intensified the government’s already stifling control over
the judiciary, and gave the intelligence services more latitude to
monitor Turkish citizens. That the Turkish electorate didn’t seem to
care much about the heavy-handed repression and the wholesale gutting
of judicial institutions added a degree of farce to the tragedy. The
Justice and Development Party (AKP), Erdogan’s party, won 43 percent
of the vote in the March 28 municipal election, exceeding the 39
percent it received in the previous municipal election, though falling
short of the almost 50 percent it won in the last national
elections. It all seemed to confirm that, contrary to what many
international observers once believed, Turkey was headed away from,
not toward, democracy and the rule of law.
But that that would be the wrong way to read this latest chapter of
Turkish history. Turkey is in the middle of a difficult process of
institutional rebalancing, in which key political and social
institutions have been shifting their allegiances away from the
military and the large urban-based economic interests that have long
dominated Turkish politics. In the absence of independent judicial
organizations and an organized civil society, the risk has always been
great that any politicians who took power during this turbulent time
would abuse it. In other words, Erdogan’s drift from democracy is a
lamentable, but almost predictable, stage of Turkey’s democratic
transition. If Turkey is to eventually become a democracy, there is no
way to avoid the occasionally painful process of making the country’s
institutions more inclusive — a process that the country has shown no
signs of abandoning.
FROM THE OTTOMANS TO ATATURK
To understand the need for institutional rebalancing, one needs to
first understand how the roots of Turkey’s present institutions began
in the Ottoman Empire. The reach of the Ottoman state was limited in
many ways, but the effective political power that did exist —
organized mainly around military conquest and expansion — was
concentrated in the hands of a narrow bureaucratic and military elite.
Apart from the elite stood the reaya, meaning `the flock.’ As economic
actors, these Ottoman subjects had few rights and even fewer options
for political participation. Limited private-property rights prevented
the emergence of economically independent landholders and
merchants. And social institutions were structured so as to minimize
constraints on the sultan’s and the central state’s power. Islamic law
is supposed to allow for a religious-legal establishment, the ulema,
that would constrain rulers. But the Ottoman Empire integrated the
ulema into the state bureaucracy. The sultan, then, was also the most
powerful representative of religious power.
Despite many attempts at reform during the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, Turkish rulers’ hold on the bureaucracy and the
judiciary never truly relaxed. The reason was simple: the reforms
weren’t intended to have that effect. The Ottoman reformers, hailing
mostly from the military, were interested not in sharing power with
non-elites but in strengthening the state’s existing institutions,
domestically and internationally, in the face of financial, economic,
and military crises. It is telling that the would-be reformers, from
the later infamous Committee for Union and Progress, who organized a
watershed uprising against the sultan in 1908, didn’t make a serious
attempt to co-opt an existing grassroots movement opposed to the
government, but instead relied on backers in the military. Once in
power, these `revolutionaries’ immediately turned against anyone who
they thought opposed them.
The Turkish Republic was officially founded in 1923, by another group
of young military officers, with Mustafa Kemal (later called Atatürk,
`the great Turk’) at the helm. The Turkish Republic marked a more
radical departure from the Ottoman Empire. The new rulers abolished
the monarchy, modernized state bureaucracy, regulated religion, which
they saw as an obstacle to their plans, and intended to industrialize
Turkey. But one aspect of the Ottoman order was never challenged:
state institutions and the bureaucracy remained under the command of
the ruling elite, now the upper cadre of Atatürk’s Republican People’s
Party (CHP). Once again, the elite felt that there was little need for
broad-based support. In fact, Atatürk’s reforms were intended to be
imposed forcefully on a population that was presumed, rightly, to be
opposed to many of them.
The military and political dominance of the CHP, and the party’s
willingness to use robust force if necessary, allowed the Kemalist
project to succeed under one-party rule until the end of World War
II. But cracks were appearing. In 1946, the Democratic Party (DP) was
founded by former members of the CHP, who hoped to benefit from public
discontent over the CHP’s heavy-handed rule. In 1950, when the DP
swept to power with a landslide election victory, many of its
deputies, and certainly its supporters, hailed from provincial cities
and rural areas and had backgrounds in small-scale commerce outside
the purview of the state. (This contrasted with the bureaucratic or
military background of the majority of the CHP deputies.)
THE AKP REVOLUTION
On May 27, 1960, Turkey woke up to the first of many military coups,
putting an end to its nascent experiment with democracy. The military
swiftly moved to hang Adnan Menderes, the leader of the DP.
The next 40 years brought many new political actors to the Turkish
scene, including a panoply of leftist groups bent on the overthrow of
the state. But the divide between the more statist CHP and the more
religious parties (which picked up the DP’s mantle) remained a
constant, even as the latter agreed to work with the military and
generally refrained from challenging the core precepts of the Kemalist
state (and, in some instances, forged even better ties with existing
business elites).
It was the AKP that most faithfully, and effectively, copied the DP’s
formula of religious populism mixed with free-market economics. When
the AKP emerged victorious in the 2002 parliamentary elections, the
battle lines with the Kemalist elite were already drawn. In April
2007, after the party gained control of the presidency, the military
— which had moved against three other elected governments between
1960 and 2002 — posted a memorandum on its website threatening a coup
against the AKP government. Ominously, the Constitutional Court
started proceedings to shut down the AKP, because its religious
outlook was allegedly in violation of Atatürk’s constitution.
But 2007 was not 1960. It wasn’t just that the AKP had deeper social
networks, especially in municipalities run by its predecessor, the
Welfare Party. It had also taken control of large parts of the
bureaucracy and the police. Meanwhile, the military’s status within
Turkish society was at an all-time low. This time, the Kemalists lost,
in part because the Turkish public refused to abide the generals’
meddling.Power had successfully shifted away from Kemalist elite to a
party with support from the majority of Turks, including much of the
population of provincial cities and the rural heartland.
But in terms of building a true democracy, it was never going to be
enough to simply loosen the Kemalist elite’s grip on existing state
institutions. The institutions themselves needed to become more
inclusive. Unfortunately, the AKP — in the absence of any concerted
pressure from Turkey’s still feeble civil society — concentrated
instead on building a political monopoly of its own. Rather than
strengthening independent institutions, AKP elites set out to seize
control of the state bureaucracy, the police, and the judiciary, and
then tried to use those institutions for the party’s own ends. This
mimicked the pattern of political development in many postcolonial
societies, where new political leaders swiftly seized decisive control
of the state after the colonial powers departed in a hurry. And, like
those predecessors, Erdogan has not shied from flaunting his power.
Far from trying to overcome the polarization of the Kemalist era,
Erdogan has cleverly decided to tap into it. He has declared that
Turkey is still in the midst of an existential struggle between Black
Turks (the disempowered, less educated, more conservative masses) and
White Turks (the Kemalist, educated, Westernized elites). `Your
brother Tayyip,’ he has declared, `belongs to the Black Turks.’
The problem with this rhetoric is that, because it is half true, it
resonates with the public and polarizes it further. This became quite
clear last summer, when Erdogan successfully masked his repression of
peaceful protests as a necessary step in the struggle of Black Turks
against White Turks, and then again during this year’s municipal
elections. In each instance, the strategy paid off for the AKP, not
only because it cemented Erdogan’s popularity among his core
supporters but also because the rhetoric became self-fulfilling. The
outcome is that Turkey’s state and civil institutions, caught in this
seemingly existential standoff, have failed to become any more
inclusive.
NO TURNING BACK
Despite creeping authoritarianism and polarization in Turkish
politics, one shouldn’t despair. From a democratic perspective, things
were worse under the Kemalist elite (especially after the 1980
military coup), when Turkish society was largely depoliticized. Facing
military rule allied with big business, most potential opposition
forces offered no resistance. The AKP is in the midst of a very
different situation today. Indeed, the party planted the seeds of its
own undoing when it mobilized Turkish civil society in its initial
rise to power. Even Erdogan, in his early years in government,
encouraged open dialogue in society, if only to obliterate some of the
red lines (on Kurds, minorities, the role of the military in society,
and religious freedom, at least for his Sunni supporters) previously
imposed by the Kemalist elite.
The AKP can try to mimic its Kemalist predecessors, but Turkish
society is unlikely to be as pliant as it was in earlier years. Not
only is the country’s urban youth more liberal, more independent, and
more informed than ever before — Turkey is among the top users of
both Facebook and Twitter — but also, the protests last summer made
clear, it is thirstier for political participation and democracy. The
judiciary, taking its cues from Turkey’s newly awakening civil
society, is also no longer content to be a pushover. The
Constitutional Court has struck down some of the AKP’s more repressive
laws and decrees. It is important to note that, in making these
interventions, the Constitutional Court has not been speaking on
behalf of the military-bureaucratic elite (as was its role under the
CHP), but for a broader segment of the population, and thus for the
rule of law and inclusive political institutions. Although Erdogan’s
support among the urban and rural poor and large segments of the
middle class seems solid today, it is predicated on continued economic
growth and the delivery of public services to the
underprivileged. Erdogan’s joy ride is over if the economy heads south
(and it could — Turkey’s growth over the past six years has depended
on unsustainable levels of domestic consumption and trade
deficits). In that case, the opposition is likely to broaden and,
having learned from experience with the AKP, will eventually begin to
demand institutions that fairly represent the country as a whole.
This is not to suggest that the recent slide in Turkish governance
should be viewed through rose-colored glasses. The AKP continues to
repress any opposition and will surely try to gag the Constitutional
Court. But the party’s efforts to monopolize power should not surprise
in historical context. More than 50 years on, the process of building
inclusive political institutions in many postcolonial societies is
still ongoing. And it took France more than 80 years to build the
Third Republic after the collapse of the monarchy in 1789.
Institutional rebalancing was never going to be a painless, easy
process. For the AKP to eventually fail in its attempts to monopolize
power, ordinary people and civil society will have to protest
loudly. Politics has long been an elite sport in Turkey, and the elite
— whether military, bureaucratic, big business, or the AKP — have
looked after their own interests, not the people’s. This will change
only when politics encompasses a broader segment of society. The
silver lining to the current trouble is that Turkey has already taken
some important steps toward doing just that.
Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of
Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.