In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XLI, No.1, Fall 2017 Illusions of Democracy in Turkey: Civil Society as a Governing Discourse Kıvanç Ulusoy* Levent Kırval** Politics of Limited Participation: A Regime Analysis This article concentrates on the ideological dimensions of academic debate on civil society and democratization that developed after the 1980 coup in Turkey. It aims to provide keys for a genuine democratic transition rather than a simple civilianization of the regime that has always been the case after each military coup. ( I ) The Nature of the Kemalist Regime Civil society has been a key component of democratization as the procedural perspective is not sufficient. The classical account, focusing on political institutions, underestimates citizen’s involvement in decisionmaking after elections. 1 *Kıvanç Ulusoy is a Professor of Political Science at Istanbul University. He was previously a Fulbright Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School (2012-2013), His areas of research are regime change and democratization, Turkish politics and Turkey-EU relations. His most recent publications are: Democratic Deliberation in Deeply Divided Societies: from Conflict to Common Ground, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); “Elections and Regime Change in Turkey: Tenacious Rise of Political Islam”, Mahmoud Hamad and Khalil al-Anani (eds) Elections and Democratization in the Middle East: The Tenacious Search for Freedom, Justice and Dignity, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). **Levent Kırva is an Associate Professor at the Maritime Faculty of Istanbul Technical University (Ankara-Turkey). He received his PhD in Politcal Science from Ghent University (Belgium) in 2005, where he attended as a Jean Monnet Fellow of European Commission. Between 2006 and 2008, Dr. Kirval worked as Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Political Science Department and Centre for EU Studies of Ghent University (Belgium) as a MarieCurie Fellow (FP6/Intra-European Fellowship) of the European Commission. 2 When a democratic regime is defined not as an end but as a means of developing citizen involvement in decisions, deliberation and participation become crucial. In Turkey, democratization has generally been equated with procedures and institutions. Building the capacity of genuine participation has rarely been an issue. The Republic after the Ottoman Empire was consolidated as a single party regime based on Ataturk’s six principles: republicanism, nationalism, laicism, populism, reformism and étatism. The regime, rejecting social divisions, aimed to build an integral state to eliminate poverty by an ambitious program of ‘autarky’.1 Along with them, it emerged as a secular regime, recognizing only one form of identity, namely Turkish. The regime established by Mustafa Kemal consolidated through excluding Islamic culture from modern definitions of political identity. Therefore, civil society was conceptualized within the state in highly nationalist terms. This organic conception overlooks the diversification within society over the past decades through trade unions and political parties but also through Kurdish nationalism, Alevis' (a Shi’ite section within Islam) demands of recognition and varieties of Sunni Islam. Statist in essence, the regime promoted etatism in economy, absolute uniformity in national identity, positivism in science and superiority of the West in culture. Contrary to Ottoman reformers, searching for a compromise between traditions, the new regime insisted that modernity could only be accommodated through a massive negation of tradition. In this regard, Gentile’s study of ‘political religions’, referring to the sacralization of politics with the exclusion of traditional religious institutions, offers useful key to understanding the nature of Kemalism as a civic religion.2 Through elite fragmentation, Turkey introduced a multiparty system after the World War II. It was a test of regime’s adaptation to domestic and international pressures. The new system provided channels of participation , but, political parties were to carry out the consensus on its essentials defined by secularism and nationalism. From the 1950s onwards, political cleavages sharpened under ethnic and religious pluralism and the organized labor brought social pressures in the 1960s. The two major political parties—the Republican Peoples Party (RPP) and the Democratic Party (DP), the Justice Party (JP) after the coup of 1960—aimed to keep these pressures coming out of Turkey’s impressive transformation through 1 Feroz Ahmad, “The Political Economy of Kemalism”, Ali Kazancigil and Ergun Ozbudun (eds), Ataturk: Founder of a Modern State, (London...

pdf

Share