Preface: Turkey and the Age of Autocrats

In February 2017, a wide range of academics whose careers have focused on studying developments in the Republic of Turkey came together for the conference "Turkey at Critical Crossroads: Dynamic Trajectories for Society, Politics, and Culture." Hosted by the Orient Institute of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and cosponsored by the Pratt Institute at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Brooklyn, New York, the three-day conference addressed many important, some would say perilous, issues confronting the modern eastern Mediterranean region: specifically, the growing authoritarian rule of Turkey under current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). One of the results of the conference is this special issue of the Mediterranean Quarterly: "Critical Crossroads: Erdogan and the Transformation of Turkey."

The condition of Turkey's democracy has major implications, not only for the country's domestic constituency, but also for the region and, indeed, the world. Since its founding in 1923 and its subsequent path through the Cold War and through the early years of the twenty-first century, Turkey has been a more or less democratic, secular, parliamentary republic anchored to the West by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since becoming prime minister in 2003 and succeeding to the presidency in 2014, however, Erdogan has been at the vanguard of reshaping modern Turkish political life.

The essays in this special issue of the Mediterranean Quarterly address various political, economic, social, and cultural issues and demonstrate the evolution of Turkey's political life, centering on Erdogan and his growing cult of personality. This slow march of deliberate changes over the past fifteen years, which will culminate in late 2018, following the June snap elections when Erdogan's presidential system comes into effect, has seen the erosion of trust in certain segments of the Turkish public. The Gezi Park protests during the summer of 2013 and the attempted military coup of July 2016 failed to dislodge Erdogan or deflect him from his plan to consolidate his personal political power and reengage Turkey with its Muslim roots. Whether Erdogan will be able to complete his transformation of Turkey remains to be seen.

Beyond Turkey, these essays illuminate important issues that should be considered with respect to the growth of authoritarianism in other countries around the world. Erdogan is in the process of successfully transforming Turkish political society into one that conforms with his personal vision through the destruction of Turkey's relatively independent media, the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, the steady deterioration of an impartial judicial system, and the neutralization of the army's traditional role of preserving the secular state. Other strongmen such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and, some might argue, even Donald Trump in the United States have similarly manipulated their democratic and quasi-democratic systems to secure and/or enhance their personal political power.

If we are indeed in a new "Age of Autocrats" supplanting the liberal international "New World Order" that was declared by President George H. W. Bush at the end of the Cold War, Erdogan and his transformation of Turkey certainly require close and careful scrutiny. We at the Mediterranean Quarterly are pleased that this special issue on Erdogan and the AKP adds to our understanding of an increasingly important, yet disturbing, trend in today's global environment.