The New Sultan: Erdogan and The Crisis of Modern Turkey by Soner Cagaptay (review)

The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey provides a road map of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's electoral successes and increasing political power.¹ It is an extensive study that investigates the main factors and challenges in Turkish politics that have contributed to shaping Erdogan's political road map. As a historian by training, the author opens the layers of Turkish modern history starting from the 1920s until early 2017 while sharing Erdogan's story with the readers.

The book is organized around giving an introduction about major developments in Turkish history, and explaining how these developments had affected Erdogan's life. It looks at Erdogan's story, and Turkish modern history, in periodic order starting from his childhood years, in Kasimpasa, a district in Istanbul, and in Rize, where he was originally from, to be elected as mayor of Istanbul, and finally into his presidency. The author displayed, for instance, how growing up in Kasimpasa, a "rough-hewn, conservative area" (p. 16), has shaped Erdogan's perception of the "other," which is the Westernized, Kemalist, and secular side of Turkey. The author did not only reveal political developments in Turkish history but also provided glimpses of economic and social developments that had left a mark on Erdogan. It traces Erdogan's life story along with major events in Turkish history from the state's attempts to stamp out grassroot movements of Islam in the 1920s, through a street fight between militant leftist and rightist groups in the 1970s, the military's frequent intervention into politics through coup d'états and memorandums, and the Turkish economy's experience with neoliberal policies, and finally into the emergence of Erdogan's "conservative democracy."

The author provides major turning points that have deeply affected not only Erdogan's political success and Turkish modern history but also Turkish foreign policy. One of the major points was political Islam coming to Turkey in the 1970s as a possible pillar against rising communism within the Cold War context, and the marginalization of Imam Hatip graduates, state-created religious schools used by governments as an instrument to control the religion in the public sphere. While religion has been an important element in Erdogan's personality, with the injection of Islam into politics by the 1980 junta, it has become a crucial factor in Turkish politics as well. Other turning points that shaped Erdogan's political life and modern history stated in the book include dissolution of the Turkish right in the 1990s along with the ten percent threshold that was put into effect after the 1980 coup d'état, 1997 soft coup, 2001 financial crisis, and the European Union (EU) accession process. The author explains, for instance, how the ten percent threshold, implemented to block Kurdish nationalist parties from gaining access to parliament, had backfired so unexpectedly and rather acted as an impediment for center-right and center-left parties entering the parliament in the 2002 elections, which resulted in the AKP's getting the majority of the parliamentary seats and the beginning of the AKP governance.

Another interesting theme in the book is comparisons of Ataturk's modernization project and Erdogan's "New Turkey" project. The author emphasizes that "the irony is that while claiming to revive the pre-Ataturk empire, Erdogan is actually reviving the caricature of the Ottomans that he was taught by the Kemalists" (pp. 196–97). He explains that Kemalism no longer serves as a glue that brings together different ethnic and religious groups in Turkish society, as Erdogan relies on religion and the pre-Ataturk past to bind his electorates. Apart from Erdogan's story, the book involves details about other political leaders of center-right and Islamist parties such as former prime minister and leader of the Democrat Party (1946–61), Adnan Menderes, former president of Turkey, Suleyman Demirel, and founder of the Islamist National Order Party (1970–71) Necmettin Erbakan, who...