(By Kerem Oktem)
. . . [Thomas Hobbbes’] Leviathan is about more than the rights of the sovereign. For it to be considered a commonwealth, it requires a covenant between the sovereign and the ruled, with the latter voluntarily giving up their right to govern themselves in exchange for legitimate rule. [Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip] Erdoğan and his advisers pay lip service to a majoritarian form of democracy, and claim to despise aristocracy (which in Turkish terms is embodied in the “guardian state” of [secular] Kemalist provenance); the type of commonwealth they seem to prefer is, rather, a sort of monarchy. Yet even for a monarchic path, the majority’s consent to the basic principles of the commonwealth is indispensable – both in Hobbesian and classic Islamic political theory. This raises the question to what extent conditions are favourable to such consent in a commonwealth governed by Sunni-Islamic principles and social conservatism.
The local elections in March give some insight. The ruling party treated them as a final stand against the forces of guardianship and the enemies of the national will, with the prime minister resorting to the full register of Islamist rhetoric and sectarian scorn. He decried his opponents as atheists and drunkards, appealed to the religious sentiment of Turkey’s majority Sunni Muslim community, and lambasted the opposition for treating the pious majority as ignorant and backward (which, it must be said, some unfailingly do). The followers of the charismatic Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, whose opaque Hizmet movement turned against the government after a decade of mutually beneficial power-sharing, faced the accusation of “being worse than Shi’a” and threatened with “being driven out of their dens”.
Erdoğan’s frustration at his former ally may be excusable, his Shi’a reference is not. He is, after all, incriminating the members of the second largest tradition within the ummah, Shi’ism, from which Turkey’s Alevi community and Syria’s Alawis descend. To compound the insult, the prime minister publicly humiliated the mother of Berkin Elvan, who died after 269 days in coma as a result of wounds inflicted by a teargas capsule shot at him by the Istanbul police. Berkin was one of six young Alevis who were killed during the Gezi [Park] events [of last summer] or in their aftermath. Turkey’s only substantial community that has escaped the prime minister’s wrath are the Kurds. Political expediency demands that the languishing peace process between the state and the Kurdish nationalist movement cannot be allowed to endanger Erdoğan’s survival.
These speeches and the fervent pre-election atmosphere suggest that the prime minister and his party are prepared to go to the bitter end in defence of power. Erdoğan trampled on every taboo of Turkish politics – especially the one on sectarianism – as he sought to unite the pious Sunni-Turkish mainstream behind him, while vying for additional support from the non-nationalist constituency of Turkey’s Kurds. This “scorched-earth” election strategy secured the AKP around 45% (and ensured several disputed results wins in hotly contested areas such as Ankara and Antalya, as well as in Kurdish towns along the Syrian border) In the capital, vote-rigging and government intervention in the counting process may even have been a game-changer.
Even in the prime-minister’s majoritarian understanding of democracy, this should not justify the belief that the elections represent a legitimate covenant of the “national will”. It may be premature to say – as have a number of respectable pollsters and political actors – that the AKP in its current form and with this most polarising strategy has reached (and overstepped) the zenith of its power. But the view can’t be dismissed, particularly since the elections took place under the relative comfort of a still growing economy.
Turkey’s societal diversity is another obstacle in the way of establishing consent. True, the opposition is divided and has missed every single opportunity to turn the AKP’s internal contradictions and weaknesses into political capital. Its main contender, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) has failed to move beyond its heartlands in Turkey’s western provinces and the Aegean coastal regions, where it also lost some municipalities to the nationalist right. Where it did pose a robust challenge to the incumbents, such as in Ankara and Istanbul, its candidates came from outside the party.
The fact remains, however, that around 55% of voters decided against the AKP. They include the country’s secularists, social democrats and the left, and followers of the nationalist right. Alevis, who make up 15%-20% of society, feel increasingly affronted by anti-Alevi sentiment and the government’s Sunni Muslim rhetoric. And despite strong approval for the AKP’s relatively pro-Kurdish policy, more than 35% of Kurds in the southeast cast their votes for the Kurdish national movement the Peace & Democracy Party (BDP), which won most of the region’s cities. The BDP’s support for Erdoğan is contingent on a resolution of the Kurdish issue along the lines of a federal arrangement and equal citizenship rights, which would be a formidable challenge even for a very strong government.
Several other constituencies are wary of Erdoğan’s rule, including a growing number of environmental movements that have flourished wherever new dams, hydroelectric power-plants and nuclear-reactors are threatening the livelihoods of locals. Thousands of these projects are now being planned and constructed, and local resistance has been robust even amid collusive attempts by private investors and security forces to suppress any form of dissent. The hundreds of thousands who protested at Gezi Park and many more beyond the vicinity of Istanbul’s Taksim Square went far beyond white-collar employees and students, and their recent politicisation adds yet another obstacle in the way of Erdoğan’s search for majority consent.
In comes Mammon
Both in Hobbes’s Leviathan and in Sunni state theory, consent to the sovereign is predicated upon provisions of just rule (including a measure of redistributive justice). In Turkey, the AKP government has overall been able to guarantee the latter, though it has also overseen growing income inequality and the emergence a fragile, debt-laden new middle class.
This mixed picture is becoming even more problematic for the sovereign. A stream of media leaks following the aborted corruption investigations of 17 December 2013 has revealed the AKP’s operational logic and exposed political-economic arrangements that are scarcely reconcilable with the principles of justice. The emerging picture in Turkey is of a narrow oligarchic network of power characterised by political cronyism, where a select circle of businessmen, media bosses and political advisers ensure that political power and economic opportunities created by public tenders mutually reinforce each other. Such deals between political and economic power-brokers are unexceptional under the conditions of neoliberalism, but they undermine the symbolical foundations of just rule.
Oligarchy, the “misliked” equivalent of aristocracy in Hobbes’s theory of the commonwealth, is probably the least stable arrangement of political power. More importantly, its presence hints at a grave flaw in the Islamist project: its vulnerability vis-à-vis the dynamics of the market – or the forces of Mammon – which, in the absence of strong institutions and the rule of law, tend to operate according by the logic of aggravated self-interest.
The last few years of Turkey’s political economy have indeed been a monument to the supremacy of avarice. From the privatisation of water resources, forests and coastal areas to rent-generating urban-development projects, the logic of rent-maximisation has ruled supreme. Infrastructure projects like the third bridge over the Bosphorus, the location of a third airport, and the city’s transformed skyline bear testimony to both the imperatives of oligarchic wealth-generation and the absence of the rule of law.
Neither Erdoğan’s social conservatism and his communitarian reflexes nor his resort to the national interest can conceal this colonisation of the Islamist project by crony capitalism. If one thing is certain in the world of capitalism, it is that after an impressive boom comes bust. Once the bubble of Turkey’s debt-fuelled property boom bursts, redistribution through social services will become impossible to finance. The cultural emptiness that has been created by the reduction of public space to the unholy trinity of shopping-centres, fancy new mosques, and disconnected residential areas, however, is likely to outlive the looming bust. The same is true for the AKP’s trial by capitalism. Political Islam seems for now to have surrendered its lure to mammon.
The limits of Leviathan
Among the three different types of commonwealth he considers, Hobbes prefers the monarchy, though he concedes that monarchy without consent translates into tyranny. Erdoğan, embattled by his former allies and growing public discontent, has entrusted his future, knowingly or unknowingly, to oligarchs in the economy and media and among his immediate circle of advisers. But in conditions of contestation, oligarchy is the least defendable power arrangement and will almost certainly have to incorporate elements of tyranny. Such are the decisions to ban Twitter and YouTube, the calls for a nationally controlled internet, the attempts to dominate the media and the judiciary. The project for an executive presidency, which Erdoğan and parts of his party are now seeking in anticipation of the presidential elections in August 2014, points in the same direction. These are signs not of strength but of a leader in dire sraits.
But tyranny too is not a stable form of government, at least not in the medium run. And it is not what Erdoğan and the Justice & Development Party initially set out to establish. They were earnest in their quest to atone for the injustices that the secular-nationalist Kemalist regime had inflicted upon Turkey’s pious Muslims, its Kurds, other non-Turkish ethnicities and its Christian communities. They embarked on a project inspired by political Islam that sought alternatives to western liberalism and its stepchildren, European and American colonialism and racism. In power, however, they have been carried away by premature illusions of grandeur and Ottomanist fantasies of regional leadership.
Those fantasies were welcome tools to lift the spirits of a people humiliated by its ontological insecurity vis-à-vis the west, of which Turkey’s perennial wait at the doors of the European Union is the most symbolic manifestation. Erdoğan and his party were confident that their Leviathan would be a just sovereign which the vast majority of the people of Turkey would endorse. Yet they failed to read the signals from a majority that may be less organised and committed as the AKP base, but which is unlikely to be cowed into consent, unless under conditions of unfettered tyranny (which in any case can impose only obedience, not consent).
In terms of this political project of sovereignty, Erdoğan and his party have failed, both at home and abroad. The success of the AKP growth-engine was made possible by the synthesis of political Islam with global capitalism, firm membership in the western security community, and commitment to the European Union. Unravelling this synthesis will require deepening authoritarianism, which in turn will undermine the foundations of economic advancement and alienate the many votes cast for stability and growth.
This does not mean that Erdoğan cannot be elected president or that the AKP may not stay in government for some time to come. It does mean, however, that political Islam in Turkey has failed to create a commonwealth based on the voluntary consent of a large majority of the ruled. The AKP could probably have created a new Islamic Leviathan had it stayed on a more democratic path. With the current aristocratic or monarchic option (i.e. oligarchy or autocracy), Erdoğan can only fail to acquire consent from many of Turkey’s constituent groups, which for existential or ideological reasons or out of self-interest stand against him, and without whom any social contract remains untenable.
Erdoğan may still think of himself as a just sovereign in the Sunni-Islamic tradition. But his commonwealth is a Hobbesian fantasy-world, in which even the minimal requirements for consent are not met, the threat of tyranny is ever-present, and where Leviathan – whether Islamic or not – has become a growth-machine for the oligarchy.
In the absence of consent and short of full tyranny, no form of government can be stable. With some stretch of the imagination, this proposition should hold true for other countries in Europe’s eastern borderlands, where the rule of law and liberal democracy appear to be in jeopardy. True, this is a victory neither for western liberalism nor for the European Union, both of which are badly worn; and in the case of Europe more generally, its time as the self-perceived lighthouse of enlightenment may have come to an end. But the foundation of consent is, nevertheless, a reason to believe in the future of democracy.
Kerem Oktem is an Open Society Fellow of the European Studies Centre at Oxford University, a senior associate of St.Antony’s College and currently Mercator IPC Fellow at Sabanci University Istanbul. He is co-author (with Timothy Garton Ash & Edward Mortimer) of Freedom in Diversity: Ten Lessons for Public Policy from Britain, Canada, France, Germany and the United States (Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, University of Oxford, 2013), and an associate of the Signals from the Majority project. He is also the author of Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989 (Zed Books, 2011) and co-editor (with Ayse Kadioglu and Mehmet Karli) of Another Empire? A Decade of Turkey’s Foreign Policy Under The Justice and Development Party (Bilgi University Press, 2012). His website is here
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
For the full essay, see Open Democracy
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