Ruling Ideologies in Modern Turkey

This chapter examines the continuities and ruptures in Turkey’s ruling ideologies. Rather than engaging in a detailed study of each of the major ideological traditions—Ittihadism, Kemalism, Turkism, center-right politics, and political Islam, which merit dedicated studies of their own evolution—this essay seeks to understand the logics of power and statecraft, which are common to these ideologies that came to power in different periods of modern Turkish history. The ascent to power of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and its political conduct only reinforces this chapter’s core argument that groups in power have acted in comparable, if not similar, ways to organize and maintain power in society, despite their ideological differences. The control and instrumentalization of the state apparatus is central to the pursuit of the maintenance of power. This pursuit has reflected the Janus-faced nature of the Turkish state both as authoritarian (and, with reference to its illicit operations, as “deep state,” derin devlet) and paternalistic, providing an all-embracing “father state” (devlet baba). On the one hand, it entails an amalgam of coercive and often destructive policies to oppress dissent. On the other, it involves more integrative policies of a service state. Some of these conceptual building blocks of modern Turkey and its ruling ideologies began to lose their prevalence during the exceptional reform period in the late 1990s and early 2000s induced by the prospect of EU membership, but have since been restored as power has been consolidated in the hands of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.